Defiled: The Sequel to Nailed Featuring John Tall Wolf (A Ron Ketchum Mystery Book 2)

by Joseph Flynn

  “No, you can’t. What I can do, though, is ask you and everyone else to keep your eyes open and let us cops know if you see anything we should act on. We’ll come in a hurry, I promise. Spread the word, okay?”

  “Sure,” Jake said.

  But he went back to staring at the lake, as if it might be the last time he’d ever see it.

  Chapter 13

  “I finally remember who it was I saw,” Walt Ketchum told Clay Steadman.

  The two of them were sitting in Clay’s living room. The night in the mountains had grown chilly and flames danced in the fireplace. Clay was sipping cognac. Walt made do with nonalcoholic apple cider.

  “The bad guy?” Clay asked.

  Walt had told Clay of the disturbing episode on the street that day. After the patrol officers had dropped him off at the mayor’s home, he had to lie down, thinking a nap might help him regain his wits. Waking up, he’d felt the need to speak with Esther Gadwell, the nurse who’d seen him at his worst after he suffered his stroke.

  She’d thought, at first, that Walt was calling just to brag about how good he had it living in a movie star’s house up in the mountains, how she had made a mistake not coming with him. She was just about to give Walt an earful when he told her, “I think my mind is going, Esther. Not from another stroke, I don’t think. It’s just getting soft. Like some old mush-head alky.”

  Esther’s response was terse. “You call your doctor right now or I’ll send an ambulance for you.”

  Walt did as he was told, but called Esther back while waiting for the doctor to arrive.

  They still made house calls if you had enough money.

  Clay Steadman had more than enough.

  “If the doc doesn’t find anything he can help with, Esther, what am I going to do?”

  In a quiet voice, she told him, “You live the best you can as long as you can. You went up there to help with a movie based on your life, didn’t you? Get that done. Live to see that movie. I’ll let you take me to the premiere.”

  Walt laughed. “Wouldn’t that beat all?”

  Then he said he’d do just that. He thanked Esther for talking to him.

  The doctor came and went, finding no evidence of another stroke.

  Recommended that Walt take it easy. But there wasn’t time for lollygagging.

  He and Clay had worked all day.

  Doing that helped jog Walt’s memory.

  “Yeah, the bad guy I saw,” Walt told Clay. “His name was Nikos Sideris.”

  “Was?” Clay asked.

  “Yeah, that’s the funny part. The guy Paul Martin and I arrested got shanked in L.A. County Jail and died of his injuries.”

  The good thing was, Walt had remembered his old partner’s name.

  The bad thing was, Nikos Sideris had been dead thirty years.

  So how had Walt seen him driving by in Goldstrike?

  Clay said, “Maybe you saw a relative, a son or a nephew. Do you know if this Sideris guy had any family?”

  Another test of memory, but Walt was up to it this time.

  He shook his head. “There was no next of kin listed on his arrest report. I remember that.”

  “You said the guy you saw today was good-looking. Was Nikos, too? Was he a ladies’ man?”

  Walt smiled. “Yeah, yeah. He had quite a reputation that way.”

  “So maybe he had a kid or ten out of wedlock.”

  Walt nodded.

  “Sure, he could have. The guy I saw could have been his bastard.”

  “Maybe. So what did this Nikos Sideris do?”

  Walt said, “He killed people, for money.”

  Sonny Sideris felt like killing somebody. To relieve his frustration, if nothing else. He popped someone, he always felt better about things. Like life was going the way it was meant to.

  He’d spent most of that day wearing his ass out, sitting in his rental car in front of a neat little house in Truckee, California. What a burg that place was. Damn town looked like it got built back in the cowboy days and was happy to stay that way.

  It amazed him they’d bothered to put electricity in.

  Yeah, it had mountains and ski runs nearby, hiking trails, streams where you could fish and do all that other outdoors crap. So what? Sonny’s idea of a good time was a casino where you could test your luck and find Keno girls who were happy to do more than bring you a drink. He called Las Vegas home and found most other places paled in comparison.

  In Truckee, the big deal was they had a train depot.

  Amtrak actually made stops there.

  If that wasn’t enough to make your heart race, they had a street named after the Donner Party. Sonny remembered reading about them in school. Bunch of yahoos left Springfield, Illinois in 1846 and headed west to find their fortunes in California. Getting a jump on the gold rush of 1849 would have been a great idea except the nimrods got caught in a blizzard in the Sierra and wound up so desperate for food they ate their dead.

  Sonny had always wondered about that. Had those starving people eaten only the men and women who’d already croaked? Seemed like there wouldn’t have been much meat on those bones and what there was already would have been frozen hard. You wanted a good meal, seemed like you’d go for someone who was still warm and had a little fat on him.

  Of course, you’d have to kill him.

  Put him in the soup pot before he flash froze.

  But what the hell? Things got that tough, you did what you had to.

  What Sonny needed to do was find goddamn Herbert Wilkins. He’d rung his doorbell and banged on both the front and back doors of his house a dozen times. Then he’d gone back to his car and ran up and down the radio dial. Couldn’t find a decent jazz station to save his life. Last goddamn time he ever rented a car without Sirius. Left to his own devices, his mind turned to thoughts of … cannibalism.

  And other useless shit.

  When his bladder got too full to bear, he went to a place called The Blue Coyote.

  He took a five-minute pee and had a steak and a beer. Pissed again before leaving and walked through “downtown” looking for anyone who might be an Indian. Found one, too. But the guy said he was a Paiute by the name of Bryce Logsden. He’d heard the name Herbert Wilkins but didn’t know the man personally. If he was Native American, he must be Washoe.

  Guy said Washoe like, “Not my tribe, brother.”

  Wouldn’t let one of them mow my grass.

  No point in asking any other questions.

  Sonny cursed to himself. Made one last run past Wilkins’ house without success and drove back to Goldstrike before it got too dark to see clearly on the mountain roads. Most of the damn things didn’t have any guard rails. Last thing he needed would be to drive over the edge, wind up a charred smudge at the bottom of a cliff.

  After a day in Truckee, Goldstrike seemed like … well, no, not Vegas but at least a step in the right direction. Sonny stopped into a club called the New York Shock Exchange. He liked the name. Place had some good looking women in it, too.

  But he limited himself to looking over a couple of Scotch and sodas.

  He had a few more chores to do that night.

  The assistant manager at the Goldstrike Hilton gestured to Special Agent Abra Benjamin as she stepped into the hotel lobby. Not a big wave that might have been seen by just anyone, but a discreet lift of her hand that went with the look she directed at Abra. The special agent walked over to the check-in counter.

  “Something I can do for you?” she asked.

  “I have a message for you,” the assistant manager said, “if you’re Ms. Benjamin.”

  Abra nodded, but she’d never met this woman before.

  “Someone described me to you?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Chief of Police Ketchum. He left a message for you just a moment ago. I called your room, but that must have been right when you stepped out.”

  “And the message is?”

  “Right here,” the assistant manager said, handing
Abra a sealed envelope.

  Goldstrike PD stationery. Office of the chief. Unlikely to be trifled with by civilians.

  “Thank you,” Abra said.

  She took the envelope to a sofa in a quiet corner and opened it.

  Special Agent Benjamin: If you’re thinking of taking a boat out on Lake Adeline tonight, please check in with my department first and let Sergeant Winslow know. He’ll advise the officers patrolling the lake. For the time being, town residents have been urged not to use the lake after sunset. I wouldn’t want any unfortunate case of mistaken identity or exchange of friendly fire to occur. Thank you. Chief Ronald Ketchum.

  Abra Benjamin grinned.

  Yeah, local cops shooting an FBI special agent would be unfortunate.

  So would the reverse.

  The chief wasn’t presumptuous — foolish — enough to try to tell her to stay the hell off his lake. He merely let her know what the situation was, expressed a desire that nobody should get hurt. Even said please and thank you. The epitome of a reasonable man.

  Who could argue with him?

  Not her, not tonight. She hadn’t planned to go out on the lake. She’d called and made an appointment to talk with Roger and Brant Sutherland. They’d told her they would be happy to help in any way they could. Young Brant thought it was cool that he’d be able to talk with a special agent from the FBI, though he hadn’t known a woman could be one.

  “For a long time now,” she’d heard Roger tell his son.

  Brant had said that was cool, too.

  Wait until the kid saw the vehicle ID app she had on her iPad.

  Abra felt optimistic they’d be able to get a close fix on the SUV that Brant had seen the morning he and his dad had gone out on their fishing trip. Narrow the vehicle down to maybe two or three makes and models. Find out who, if anyone, owned such vehicles in town. Talk to the owners.

  If she got lucky, maybe that’d be enough to catch the bomber.

  If not, maybe the SUV owner had seen something helpful.

  If nobody in town or, say, a radius of fifty miles owned such a vehicle, she’d have to go back to square one. She had the feeling whoever had left the bomb in the boat had some personal connection to Lake Adeline, the way a local or nearby resident would. It didn’t make sense to her that some asshole with an agenda had seen a tourist brochure for Goldstrike and decided to fly in from New England.

  Might be that way, of course.

  But the call Chief Ketchum had told her about, the one saying there would be another attack that wouldn’t fail, strongly suggested the doer lived in the area.

  The Sutherlands struck her as an affluent version of the all-American family. Brant shook her hand and asked to see her badge. After helping her narrow the SUV he’d seen down to either a Chevy Tahoe or a GMC Terrain of a recent model year, Brant had asked if he could be in a picture with her. His dad, he said, was a great photographer.

  Brant wanted to show it to his school friends in the fall.

  You know, in case he had write one of those papers.

  How I spent my summer vacation.

  Abra displayed her badge for the picture, and wore a serious expression.

  Roger Sutherland said he’d send her a copy.

  In parting, Jessica Sutherland gave her a fudge brownie in a plastic bag.

  The special agent couldn’t remember conducting a more pleasant interview. She ate the brownie on the way back to her hotel. Terrific. Had to be homemade. Feeling a bit of a sugar buzz, she decided to take a slow cruise through the center of town before going back to her hotel. Get familiar with the locale a little.

  In the glow of the town’s bright street lights, she liked what she saw. Goldstrike, no doubt as a matter of local ordinance, eschewed electric signage on all of its commercial establishments. Stylish understatement and lots of sparkling clean glass, smooth masonry and meticulously tuck-pointed brickwork were the elements of local design.

  That was why the red arrow painted on the tan brick of a shop that sold mountain bikes had such dissonant stopping power. Abra pulled her rental over to the curb. She looked at the arrow from behind the wheel. It didn’t seem to be a graffito. It was too unembellished. But the placement was wrong for it to be a directional arrow put up either by the shop owner or the town.

  The FBI agent got out of her car and looked around. The hour was now late enough that there were no pedestrians in sight on this particular block. She scanned the few parked cars nearby, saw nobody in any of them. Her hand went to her duty weapon nevertheless.

  The red arrow gave her a very uneasy feeling.

  The closer she got, the less she liked it. Damn thing looked like it had been painted with —

  She leaned in and sniffed. Sure enough. Somebody had used blood to paint the arrow.

  Didn’t smell like it came from a cow or a pig either. What it reminded her of was a crime scene with a lot of blood spatter. She’d seen more than a few of those.

  Then there was that rich guy, Tibbot, whom she’d heard was down half-a-tank of his personal corpuscles when he was discovered dead.

  Now somebody was painting the town red with Tibbot’s Special Reserve?

  Courteous cop that he was, Ron Ketchum had given her his business card. She called his office. They forwarded the call to his home. He answered on the second ring.

  “Chief, this is Special Agent Benjamin. I’ve found something you’d better see.”

  Walt Ketchum asked Clay Steadman, “Would I be out of line if I asked for one more little consideration for the help I’m giving you?”

  The fire was down to its embers by now. Both men had emptied their glasses. Each had been content to watch the glow in the fireplace until it disappeared altogether.

  “What do you have in mind?” Clay asked.

  “Well, if this movie we’re working on ever gets made —”

  “It will,” Clay told him.

  “Okay, when it gets made, can I have two tickets to the premiere?”

  The movie icon smiled with unaccustomed warmth. “That’s all? Sure. I was going to provide you with ten or twenty, but if two are all you want —”

  “No, no. I’d like whatever you can give me.”

  “You got it. Who are you planning to take?”

  For a moment, Walt seemed embarrassed. Then he told Clay about what Esther had said to him, and how he’d agreed to the idea. The old copper said, “I don’t care if it seems silly, the idea tickles me.”

  “Me, too,” Clay told him. “I’ll make sure you and Esther have your own limo. A tux for you and an evening gown for her.”

  Walt grinned. “Yeah, now that you mention it, jeans and T-shirts wouldn’t do.”

  “Not at all. You’re a lucky man to have someone who cares for you that much.”

  Walt looked like he had something he wanted to say, but he kept the thought to himself.

  Clay sensed what he wanted to know and answered the unasked question.

  “No, I don’t have anyone who cares about me that much, not a woman anyway. And don’t think that’s strange just because I’m rich and famous. Most of the women I know, they’d like to get close to me because they want to be rich and famous.”

  “Well, hell,” Walt said, “you take your comfort where you can find it.”

  Clay laughed.

  Walt continued, “I mean, it’s a lot of trouble giving yourself a stroke and finding just the right nurse to see you through.”

  Clay laughed harder and said, “Damn, I wish we’d met sooner, and there is one woman, in town at this very moment, I know has her own designs on me.”

  “Is she worth the trouble?”

  “I think I’m going to find out. Neither of us is going to live forever.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?”

  Clay got to his feet.

  “I’m going to find a bottle. Of what, I can’t say. Are you up for a real drink?”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Walt said.

  Chapter 14


  Ron looked at the red arrow on the wall of Payton’s Trail Bikes and turned to Officer Benny Marx, whom he’d summoned en route to the scene.

  “This looks pretty fresh to me, Benny. You think you can get a useful DNA sample off this wall? I know John Payton and the mayor, for that matter, are going to want that arrow cleaned off by morning.”

  Officer Marx stepped close to the arrow, raised his eyeglasses to the top of his head and gave the wall a squint.

  He said, “There are parts of this thing that are still wet. I think I should be able to blot up some samples.” Benny turned to the chief. “Just to be careful though, how about we put some kind of plant or something up in front of the arrow before we wash it off? You know, in case I have to come back and take another crack at getting a sample.”

  Ron nodded. “Okay. I’ll smooth it over with John and the mayor. You going to take your pictures before you start blotting?”

  Officer Marx nodded. “Gotta be quick, though. Don’t want that blood to dry out.”

  The chief nodded. He and Abra Benjamin got out of Benny’s way.

  “Is your man up to this?” she asked quietly after they’d stepped away.

  “Chief,” Benny called out.

  Ron and Abra looked at him. Benny was now peering at the arrow through a magnifying glass. He didn’t have a deerstalker hat on but his posture was Holmesian. Highly theatrical. Special Agent Benjamin had to repress a smile.

  “Yeah, Benny,” Ron said.

  “Just found something. Take a look at this.” He extended the magnifying glass to the chief. “I was wondering why the blood didn’t run, leave little uneven trails, you know. The rendering of this thing is just too neat.”

  Ron hadn’t thought about that. Abra hadn’t either.

  Ron took the magnifying glass and peered at the wall.

  Benny said, “Look at the edges of the arrow. You see the slight darkening of the brickwork there? My guess is that’s spray adhesive of some sort. The guy who put the arrow on the wall must have put the glue down first and then sprayed the blood on.”

  Abra frowned and said, “Will the adhesive screw up the lab work on the blood?”