Fire Mountain

by Vickie McKeehan

  “I didn’t know Denny Thackery had access to a plane,” Gemma remarked as she studied the names.

  “Me either. It seems Peg is loaded, though. She and Denny take turns flying across the country to these nightclub and bar conventions. The last one was held in Las Vegas. According to O’Dell’s logs, Denny went to that one with a female guest. O’Dell didn’t bother to jot down who it was, and he didn’t recognize her. But he says the Thackerys usually hire a pilot to fly their Beechcraft Bonanza to wherever these events take place.”

  “But did Denny have a connection to Woodson other than serving him drinks?”

  Lando shook his head. “Nothing that’s popped up yet. Something to look into, though. What surprised me was seeing Lucien on the list. He doesn’t fly, but he does use an air service that packs up his catch in ice and flies it to a restaurant in Missoula.”

  Gemma frowned. “That isn’t exactly strange unless Lucien is smuggling fake coins and casino chips in with his Pacific cod.”

  “Hey, it’s possible.”

  “No argument there. We should circulate the dead woman’s photo around town and see if anyone recognizes her.”

  “Jimmy and Dale are already on it. The thing is, I never realized until today that so many people used that airstrip. It might look like it’s nothing special, but in reality, it serves a huge purpose in this county, a place where pilots come and go at all hours of the day and night. Doing what? That’s the question. If only Zeb were back from the cabin. We could kick around the possibilities.”

  “Thanks a lot. Aren’t you the lucky one since Zeb and Leia are due back in at five? You’ll get to run all your theories by him instead of me.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “We could ask them over for dinner. I am curious about how their weekend went.”

  “We should. If not for the rain, I could fire up the grill.”

  “I’ll manage. Text Leia.”

  “You do it. She’s more likely to accept.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Hand me the phone.”

  15

  Gemma took it as a good sign when Leia and Zeb showed up at the front door arm in arm.

  “How was your weekend?”

  “Fantastic. We slept late both mornings. Zeb even fed me breakfast in bed. How great is that?”

  It all seemed too good to be true, Gemma thought as she led them into the living room. “Lando has been itching to go over his new list of suspects with Zeb. Take a seat, unless Leia finds it too boring and wants to join me in the kitchen.”

  She smiled at Leia. “I promise I won’t put you to work. I made a pot of soup, super easy chopping vegetables and tossing in beef chunks.”

  “Amateur,” Leia said with a grin. “Just kidding. It sounds perfect for a night like tonight.” She kissed Zeb’s cheek. “I’m out of here. I don’t mind helping with dinner.”

  Gemma led the way while the dogs trailed after her. Rufus and Rolo nudged their way through the doggie door, disappearing for a quick trip outside.

  “Want some wine?” Gemma asked.

  “I could use a glass of red if you have it.”

  “Fortunately, Vince keeps me supplied with a variety of his new blends just like he did with Marissa.” She took down glasses from the cupboard. “So, is everything okay?”

  Leia pulled out a barstool from underneath the counter and hopped onto it. “With Zeb? Absolutely. We’re fine, better than. I woke up Saturday morning and worked up my courage to tell him about Taylor. He told me about some woman in college and admitted he went out with her around Thanksgiving that same year. I should’ve listened to you in the first place. After we hashed it out, we realized that it was all ancient history and meant nothing. Neither of us cared about anything that happened back in high school. Honestly, I’m not sure why I freaked the way I did. It has to be wedding jitters, right?”

  Gemma still wasn’t convinced as she filled up two wine glasses with Wind River’s tastiest merlot. “You told him about the blackmail?”

  “I had to tell him all of it, clear the air. I feel so much better coming clean. Now I just feel silly for letting Tiffany get to me. So, what happened here while we were playing in the woods?”

  Gemma caught her up on the day’s events, telling her about the body found that morning. She also unloaded on everything else. “Turns out, you weren’t the only one who tried to keep Talia from marrying the gold-digging Brandt. Both Shaun and O’Dell did their best, but your friend refused to listen.”

  Leia shook her head. “Talia thought she was so lucky and so clever, landing a man like Brandt. It makes me sick to think she was so easily fooled.”

  As Gemma got out the makings for a salad, she shared a theory. “The sad thing is, Tiffany and Brandt may have been together for a longer time than we thought, going all the way back to when Brandt’s first wife died.”

  Leia stared at her. “But you were convinced he didn’t do anything to Talia.”

  “That feeling doesn’t extend to Tiffany. If she’s not above blackmail, murder isn’t that much of a leap. And I’m sensing she has a very dark side.”

  “You think she and Brandt were into the counterfeiting ring, too?”

  “Why else would they set up shop in a town like Coyote Wells? Unless something else brought them here.” In between slicing little cherry tomatoes in half, Gemma paused with her paring knife in the air. “Or Tiffany followed someone here, a man perhaps. She might even be two-timing Brandt.”

  Lando caught that last part as he came into the kitchen for a beer. “I wouldn’t put it past old Tiff. Whoever has the biggest wad of cash would get her loyalty. But aside from that, you know who Zeb found out has access to a plane?”

  Zeb followed him into the room and made a beeline for Leia, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Just tell them already.”

  Lando twisted the top off a beer and grinned. “Kenny Painter. The casino routinely sends Kenny out to the airstrip to ferry high rollers back and forth from their fancy little jets to the hotel. Limo rides with alcohol flowing freely. If we could get our hands on the passenger list…”

  “The casino is not gonna share that kind of information with law enforcement unless we have a warrant,” Zeb pointed out. “And so far, there’s no probable cause. We haven’t even tied Olson’s murder back to Kenny Painter, let alone to the casino.”

  Gemma turned from the counter. “Try focusing on solving Talia’s murder, and the rest will fall into place. Someone killed her because of what she had discovered. Then they moved on to Olson. They wanted him dead bad enough to put a bomb on board his plane. Maybe the latest victim—that woman this morning on the side of Fire Mountain—maybe she stumbled onto information she shouldn’t have, and she had to go, too.”

  “Three murders might mean the killer is getting sloppy,” Leia offered. “Tiffany might come off like a real hardass, but something tells me she’s all talk. Which means she’d put someone up to do the killing because she wouldn’t do it herself.”

  Gemma nodded. “Good point. You need to find the person she works for, the person pulling the strings.”

  “And how do we do that?” Lando asked, handing off a beer to Zeb.

  “Follow her. Keep tabs on where she goes. Not to mention the fact that very soon Brandt will be getting the money from Talia’s life insurance. What will he do once he gets that fat check? Will he hang around here or pack up and leave for greener pastures? Sadie mentioned he’d put the house up for sale. Sounds to me like he’s planning on taking off as soon as the check clears.”

  “Looking for his next victim,” Leia tossed out. “I bet he’s already on it.”

  “Online,” Gemma murmured. “I bet he’s actively looking online. If so, I could pretend to be someone else and lure him into a trap.”

  “We both could,” Leia added.

  “No,” Lando stated. “Before both of you get wired, we already know his history with fooling women. Unless that’s directly related to Talia’s mu
rder, our focus should be on proving he either killed his wife or hired someone else to do it.”

  “I agree,” Zeb said. “Then find the connection from Talia to Olson and maybe move on to the woman found this morning. There’s bound to be one.”

  Gemma threw together a vinaigrette dressing and tossed the salad. “And the woman in the trunk? What about her? Did she know too much and that’s why she died five years ago? We all need to go back to Olson faking his own death and turning into Woodson. Find out what happened in Salt Lake City and why?”

  Zeb took a slug of his beer. “She’s not wrong. Instead of trying to build a case from the present, we need to go back to the past, Olson’s past.”

  Lando shook his head. “It isn’t for lack of trying. I’ve looked at Olson, ran a background. Nothing much stands out. All I know after a week is that Olson worked at a trucking company as a long-haul truck driver.”

  “Long-haul truckers have been known to smuggle things,” Gemma offered. “Was he a smuggler back then and got in over his head with the wrong crowd? Why else would he need to disappear as someone else?”

  Zeb leaned an elbow on the counter. “That’s not a bad theory. If you figure Olson turned into a major counterfeiter down the line, he could’ve been running a criminal enterprise for a long time before settling here.”

  Gemma lifted the lid on the pot of beef soup she’d put together, enjoying the aroma. “Do you have any idea how Olson got that titanium rod in his leg?”

  “Dale could not find a reason for it. And the hospital it was traced to shuttered down ten years ago. We haven’t been able to locate Olson’s medical records.”

  “Could’ve been a car accident,” Zeb tossed out. “Someone might’ve been chasing him and sent him flying at a high rate of speed. Might’ve been high or drunk.”

  Gemma’s hand flew to the gemstones around her neck. There was a brief pause as the swift vision moved in and then faded like early fog. She turned back to the oven to slide the rolls in to brown. “I’m sensing our Mr. Olson had run-ins with the law as far back as fifteen. Wonder how he got to Salt Lake City?”

  “Wasn’t he from there?” Lando asked.

  Gemma chewed her lip before answering. “No. He was originally from somewhere in the midwest, Colorado, Nebraska, or maybe even Kansas, someplace like that, a small town for sure, I think.”

  “Was that a vision?” Leia wondered. “Did you just get a vibe?”

  Gemma waved off the question. When the bell dinged on the timer to signal the soup had simmered long enough, she moved the pot off the burner and went on, “Olson might’ve ended up in Salt Lake City as part of his job on one of his cross-country trips. Maybe he thought staging his death there would look more like a tragic accident, and therefore, more believable.”

  Leia got to her feet to help. “How do you suppose he pulled it off? It can’t be easy to fake your own death. You’d need a body.”

  “Olson got creative,” Gemma stated, matter-of-factly. “He used a transient he came across at a truck stop just outside Bluffdale, Utah. Before hitting the interchange where I-80 and I-15 connect, and the 215 loops around the city, Olson pulled off the road. The homeless man he’d picked up was around his own age. Olson murdered him on the side of the I-15, in a field, hit him over the head with a tire iron, then dragged him back to the cab of the truck. He had to stage the semi to veer off the roadway in such a way it would go up in flames, then burn hot enough to incinerate a body. For that, he used gasoline to make sure it did. The location was off the beaten path, and it was very dark, after midnight. There were no witnesses. His victim, a nameless soul who had no family to speak of, was just a vagrant hitching from one town to the next, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. You’d have to say Olson lucked out, though, since his plan worked like a charm. That is until that plane blew up over our very own Fire Mountain.”

  Astonished at the precise details in the story, Lando exchanged looks with his sister and Zeb before going over to Gemma. “That was certainly a delayed reaction. You knew details about Salt Lake City. Why the information dump now?”

  She lifted a shoulder and picked up her glass of red. “I don’t know…that’s the way it goes sometimes. It just…comes to me, usually when I’m relaxed and least expecting it. When my mind’s clear. It used to happen a lot while I was making chocolate. Now, I get my wires crossed sitting behind a desk.”

  Leia raised her wineglass and bumped it with Gemma’s. “The strongest visions come to you when you’re not trying so hard. Makes sense if you think about it.”

  “Thinking about it is what messes me up. The best results just flash in my head at unexpected times.” After ladling out the soup into individual bowls, Gemma took the bread out of the oven. She motioned for everyone to get comfortable around the table. “Get it while it’s hot.”

  Tender beef chunks and plenty of homegrown vegetables blended together to offer a cozy meal on a rainy night. Halfway through, Gemma seemed to be preoccupied.

  “What’s wrong?” Leia prompted.

  “I was just thinking. If Olson murdered once, he could certainly have killed the woman in the steamer trunk if she was about to expose his past.”

  Picking up his beer, Lando took a sip. “We figured she probably didn’t die a natural death. But Tuttle doesn’t seem to be able to tell how she died, which is a problem.”

  “A downright shame Olson got away with murdering the homeless man,” complained Zeb. “And now, if we fail to prove he murdered the woman he kept in the shed…”

  Gemma emptied the bottle of wine into her glass and got up to uncork another. “She must’ve been special to him. Why else would he keep her around like that?”

  “That’s the same thing I said,” Lando began, “when there are two dozen places outside of town that he could’ve buried her at any time during the past five years. To keep her there, that close to him means he didn’t want to risk someone finding her bones out in the woods.”

  “And making the connection,” Gemma finished the thought. “Olson certainly went to extraordinary measures to hide his past.”

  “Not just anyone can pretend to be an ATF agent,” Zeb pointed out. “It took some acting chops on his part. Comes natural to con men.”

  Lando leaned his chair back. “I don’t think so. Tully mentioned that whenever Woodson’s drinking buddies brought it up, the guy would change the subject. Which means he couldn’t fake his way through a conversation about law enforcement.”

  “Just as well,” Zeb noted. “As he got older, he’d lost his touch, his edge. It happens to master criminals when they reach old age.”

  “He never had the knack for it,” Gemma concluded. “Not even from the start. It begs to reason, why did he try to pass himself off as a government agent?” After some thought, it came to her. “The fake badge got him into places he couldn’t get into otherwise.”

  “Duh,” Leia drawled. “But where around her does that kind of thing get you special treatment?”

  “The casinos,” Zeb provided. “It got him into offices and behind the cages.”

  They’d hid themselves inside for the night. Bad weather made it ripe for someone like him who had other ideas. The cops were bumbling idiots. Lando Bonner and Zeb Longhorn were no different than any of their kind he’d encountered over the years. Thought they were so damn smart, didn’t they? They’d never figure out his angle or who he worked for, not if he spotted them a clue. And he didn’t intend to help them figure things out.

  He had stuff to do, schedules to keep, and the best time to continue his tasks was in bad weather, like tonight. People usually paid no mind to the docks, loading and unloading, scuttling about in the rain. When a shipment had to go out, there was no slacking off. His partner in crime kept complaining—too slippery, too wet, too tired. But he cracked the whip as always and got down to business.

  “We’ll be done by midnight.”

  “Don’t you worry we’ll get caught?”

  “Nope. We�
�ve been doing this for five years now without so much as a care for things that go bump in the night. Why would we worry now?”

  “Because we never killed anyone before, that’s why. Bonner’s no dummy.”

  “Sure, he is. Five years. We’ve been in business here that long and not one time have the goons suspected anything. If not for Talia snooping around the way she did and Woodson playing scaredy-cat, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  “But…”

  “Shut up and keep loading. We aren’t being paid to think outside the box.”

  “Don’t tell me to shut up. I can express my anger once in a while when I feel like it.”

  “Once in a while is getting a lot more often, like morning, noon, and night. Just get all these boxes up off the pier before they get soaking wet and do like you’re told.”

  “Sometimes I really don’t like you very much.”

  “Who’s asking you to? Shut your trap and do the job. That’s all I’ve ever asked. The sooner we get done, the sooner we can get something hot in our bellies.”

  “I could use a stiff drink and a hot meal.”

  “Then move your ass so we can get out of here.”

  16

  The rain had hung on until just before dawn. The thunderstorm had kept Gemma awake most of the night, but now, she flipped sides, rolling over to get more comfortable, and tried to go back to sleep. She thought she heard pounding but ignored it. When the noise didn’t go away, she nudged Lando awake.

  “What is that?” he muttered.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care.”

  Reluctant to move, he finally sat up and swung his feet to the floor. Grabbing his jeans, he pulled a T-shirt over his head and stumbled into the hallway. Half-dressed and rubbing his eyes, he noticed Rufus and Rolo were pointed at the front door, barking.

  Through the peephole, he saw it was Joe Don Bowden. Surprised at the sight of the hot dog vendor, he saw panic on the guy’s face. “What do you want this early, Joe Don?”