Fire Mountain

by Vickie McKeehan

  “Is it okay to leave the dogs with you?”

  “Sure. Rufus is a hero now. He can run up and down the halls anytime he wants.”

  Around nine-thirty that evening, Dale and Jimmy brought in Darby Berwick for three counts of first-degree murder, arms-trafficking, plus a host of other charges.

  Lando intended to throw the book at him, but he wanted all his Ts crossed. Getting his ducks in a row was essential before conducting an interview.

  He sent Dale to pick up the lab analysis on the tire tracks found near Talia’s vehicle that had been left at the side of the road. He also wanted to compare them to the tracks left near the foothills where Claudia’s body had been dumped.

  He was convinced he’d have to get Tiffany or Brandt to roll on Berwick. Because he still didn’t completely understand why Woodson had been blown out of his plane.

  It seemed to take forever until Dale got back from the lab. He tossed the report on Lando’s desk.

  “The tech is one-hundred percent sure both sets of tire tracks match to Berwick’s Ford truck. But get this, Payce and Jimmy found an explosive type residue in Berwick’s garage. If the NTSB can verify what type of material was used to bring down the Cessna, we’ve got Berwick dead to rights for Woodson’s murder.”

  “Now you’re talking. That’s exactly what I needed to know. Keep digging at his house, even if it takes all night.”

  “Ah, so the mayor approved our overtime?”

  Lando chuckled. “Amazing isn’t it. I didn’t even have to argue the point or raise my voice.”

  “I like having Gemma in charge,” Dale said with a grin. “She’s a lot better looking than Fleet and brings a whole different perspective to City Hall. Will you interview Berwick tonight? I need to know because Jacob and Chad have been standing guard. They want to know if they can head home or get relieved before midnight?”

  “I’m waiting for Zeb to get back from the hospital. Jacob and Chad should be able to go home when he gets here. And yeah, I plan to interview Berwick tonight, but I want him to sweat a bit before I do.”

  “It’s working. Although I don’t know about sweating. He is steaming mad that we’re in his house. I’ll text you if we find anything else during the search. County says they won’t be able to pick up Lewis and Ringgold until nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “Damn. That messes things up. Considerably. I don’t want those two talking to each other. We need to keep them apart.”

  “Well, Tiffany is in a cell and Brandt is still cooling his jets in the other interview room. I could lock him in one of the offices.”

  “Bad move. He’d have access to…stuff. Maybe we could send them out to the Rez with Cody and Jacob. Zeb’s containment area is state of the art, concrete walls, no way for either of them to talk to each other.”

  Dale looped his fingers in his belt. “Pitiful that our facilities are lacking.”

  “Hey, we’re lucky to have the budget we have.”

  “Are you sure you don’t need me here on standby?”

  “I need you there at Berwick’s finding me some evidence that I can use in court when the time comes.”

  “Got it. See you later.”

  Lando could sense Dale’s reluctance, knew that he was probably the most dedicated officer he had. He’d have to think about promoting Dale soon, else he could lose him to the county. Those vultures were always looking to steal the best recruits around.

  Zeb finally arrived back at the station to sit in on the interview and met Lando in the hallway to compare notes on how they wanted to handle the situation. But because things had been hectic with Leia, Zeb looked exhausted and still upset.

  “How’s Leia doing?” Lando wanted to know.

  “You were right about the concussion. Headache from hell. They’ll keep her overnight. If she does well, she’ll go home tomorrow. That was brilliant to use the dog.”

  “According to Brandt local law enforcement here is nothing but a bunch of country bumpkins.”

  Zeb grinned. “Yeah, tell his ass that sitting in a jail cell.”

  “It did take us five years to catch on,” Lando reasoned. “I’m not sure how to feel about that going forward. I’ve always thought that I kept a sharp eye out for people like Berwick and Woodson. Turns out, I was fooling myself.”

  “We all fool ourselves at one time or another. Last year I busted an elder I’d known my whole life for growing marijuana on the Rez. The guy had this massive grow farm he’d been running since 1998. Talk about slow to catch on.”

  “I didn’t think I was that trusting.”

  “Maybe we’ve been distracted what with…you know…getting hitched.”

  “I like that excuse. But the thing is, it’s still an excuse. I might’ve been preoccupied with Gemma since last spring. It doesn’t excuse the four previous years.”

  “You're really hard on yourself.”

  “Somebody has to. My guys take their lead from me. I must be setting a bad example.”

  “Criminal enterprises can run under the radar for years until the bad guys make a mistake. They have an air of respectability behind them that cloaks what they’re doing. Lewis, Woodson, Berwick, and Tiffany are no different. They’re just slicker than some of the stupid ones who get caught right away. Besides, they used Coyote Wells as their point of entry and exit. Until they committed murder, you had no reason to suspect they were up to no good.”

  “Thanks. I needed a pep talk before I sat down with this guy. You ready?”

  “Yeah. You may have to pull me off this jerk if he starts bragging about how his minions kidnapped Leia.”

  “That makes two of us,” Lando said. He finally opened the door to the interview room and pushed the button on a recorder. “Mr. Berwick. Or is it Mr. Doroski from Moscow.”

  “It’s Borya Doroski.”

  “Are you sure you want to stick with that story? Because I know for a fact that the closest you ever got to Moscow was Idaho. The story you’ve been telling your cohorts isn’t exactly lining up.”

  Doroski looked pissed. “My grandfather came from the old Soviet Union. I’m Russian to the core.”

  “If you say so,” Lando said just to needle the guy. “But you were born in Iowa, right? Des Moines it says on the background check. So is it Darby or Borya?”

  “I go by Darby. It’s a nickname.”

  “I know why you murdered Talia. She found out about the counterfeiting. But why kill Woodson?”

  “I didn’t kill anybody. You’ve got the wrong guy. I want out of here.”

  “Okay. But Brandt Lewis tells us that you’re the one who killed Talia because Tiffany wanted it done, wanted the liability gone. The risk was too great that Talia would start talking about your past, his past, even Tiffany’s. She wanted Brandt out of her life, out of her house. To do that, she’d go to any lengths to expose your operation. You killed Woodson because he got in the way of expanding that operation. It’s what you wanted to do, isn’t it? You killed Claudia for the same reason. She’d threatened to go back to France and tell her father he should pull the plug on this whole thing, finally pull his support because of the murders. Your backer couldn’t take the risk it would all come back on him. You and Claudia argued about it, and things got out of control. I figure the reason she was nude was that the two of you had sex before you strangled her.”

  Zeb nodded as if he and Lando were having a private conversation and Berwick wasn’t even in the room. “Then Darby had to get her clothes back on, get her out of his bedroom, out of his house, and dump her somewhere she wouldn’t be found.”

  Lando picked up the thread. “But if someone did find Claudia, the stupid cops would assume that her death didn’t have anything to do with Talia’s murder or Woodson’s. You’ve got to hand it to Darby, he did a good job at killing three people, who on the surface didn’t appear to be linked to each other at all.”

  “Yeah. Smart. But criminals always screw up, don’t they? If only it hadn’t rained the night befor
e Talia’s murder.”

  “And Claudia’s,” Lando added. “The rain made it possible to get clear impressions from the deep tire tracks left behind at both crime scenes.”

  “Tracks that are a perfect match to Darby’s pickup truck.”

  “Doesn’t mean I was driving it,” Darby blurted out, breaking his silence. “Someone could’ve stolen my pickup.”

  Lando kept his focus on the discussion with Zeb, ignoring Darby’s comment. With his voice low, he maintained an even keel, moving on to other more damaging evidence. “Now we didn’t have much to tie him to Woodson’s murder. That is until we searched his house tonight. It seems the same residue used to blow up the plane was also found in Darby’s garage, right there on his workbench.”

  Their tactic paid off. Darby’s body began to jerk, a nervous tic that morphed into a noticeable jimmy leg. The man couldn’t sit still without twitching. He looked like a crackhead withdrawing from meth. “Talia had a mouth on her. She could say some really mean crap. She threatened to make the call to the cops and tell you everything about what we’d been doing, expose the entire operation. It was Brandt’s fault for leaving his laptop open and unsecured. One night, she started nosing around in his files because she felt like Brandt had been cheating on her. That was the last straw, or so she said. Talia discovered pictures of Tiffany and went ballistic. Then she found some emails and put two and two together about Brandt’s past, all of it, the first wife dying, the link to the counterfeiting, the fact that we were smuggling knockoffs and passing them off as genuine. She felt like she had a perfect storm lined up for divorce proceedings and finally a chance to get Brandt out of her house.”

  “Did Brandt ask you to kill his wife?”

  “Yep, he sent Tiffany to tell me that Talia was now a major liability.”

  “Talia never packed up her car and left the house that night, did she?”

  “She packed up that night. She did a lot of yelling. At first, she planned to go to a hotel until Brandt could gather up his things and get out.” Darby sucked in a breath. “But when she finally left the house, Talia didn’t do it under her own power.”

  “Was it your idea for Brandt to give himself an alibi so he wouldn’t be anywhere near the house when you killed her?”

  “What? No. Brandt was there the whole time I did it. He was cowering downstairs in his office, pretending he couldn’t hear her pleas for help.”

  Lando and Zeb traded looks.

  “Brandt helped me carry the body out to the garage and stuff the body into her own car. We sent out a few texts using her phone in response to the last messages that Talia had received, making it look like she was still alive at the time. She was dead by nine o’clock that night, so it was just to mess with you guys. I guess the whole ruse fooled you.”

  “So, Brandt is the one who drove Talia’s car out to Inez LeMond’s property and left it there with the body propped behind the wheel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you pulled over in your pickup to wait for him to dump the car, leaving your tire tracks on the side of the road?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I dropped Brandt back at the house. He began to work on his story about how they’d had an argument and Talia left the house in her own car.”

  “And then you set your sights on getting rid of Woodson.”

  “Woodson and I were tight for years. The two of us had the best working relationship. He taught me the ropes from the ground up. But the night Brandt and I killed Talia was the night he called me stupid. He wanted out of Coyote Wells. He said he wanted to move on before the authorities could connect Talia’s murder to our enterprise.”

  “Why not just let him go?” Zeb asked calmly.

  “Because the whole of our business depended on each other staying here under the radar. I couldn’t let Woodson fly off to set up another base somewhere else.”

  Lando frowned. “Why not? Wouldn’t that have meant expansion? Wouldn’t that have been something good for your business?”

  “No. No. You don’t get it,” Darby protested. “With Woodson somewhere else I couldn’t completely trust him to keep things going like they had been. He ran like a scared chicken. It’s almost like he had a dark secret he was trying to protect. This wasn’t the first time he went crazy whenever it looked like trouble was ahead.”

  “What do you mean?” Lando queried.

  “The guy was super secretive. I mean, I didn’t even know he wasn’t a real ATF agent until a couple of days after he died. Rumors. Small towns. Word spread.”

  Zeb shifted in his chair, not buying the line. “Why would someone like you trust an ex-ATF agent in the first place? Why would you hook up with a former government agent like that?”

  “Because he said he wanted to eat away at its core. He handed me a line about getting shafted with his pension. Now I know the story was a load of crap, but back then, Woodson was convincing. He made me believe that we could thumb our noses at the Feds and make a lot of money doing it.”

  “And did you? Make a lot of money?”

  “Oh, yeah. Those fake gold coins were a hit overseas. So were the casino chips until they weren’t. But the real money was in smuggling goods, cheap knockoffs, and unloading them to buyers in the Bay Area and the LA markets.”

  “I still don’t understand why you jeopardized your entire operation by turning to murder-for-hire. If you’d just dealt with Talia in some other way. If you’d let Woodson fly to wherever he wanted to go to start over. If you’d allowed Claudia to fly back to France. Was protecting your smuggling operation worth three lives?”

  For the first time, Darby grinned. “Killing Talia was a dual purpose. I got her out of Brandt’s hair and mine. Killing Woodson was just good business sense. I didn’t intend for the bomb to go off when it did. It was supposed to detonate once Woodson was out over the ocean, leaving less evidence behind. But it blew prematurely. If things had gone as planned, we might not be having this conversation.”

  “And killing Claudia?”

  Darby leaned back in his chair and smiled broadly. “Ah, that was personal and maybe the most satisfying. She was a real tiger in the sack, but God could she nag sometimes.”

  “Man’s a psychopath,” Lando told Gemma as he got undressed for bed. “There’s just nothing behind his dead eyes. No emotion. No soul.”

  “Sounds like after killing Talia, Berwick got a taste for it.”

  “He’s the delusional sort, a man impressed with his own self-importance. The thing I can’t put behind me is how he managed to slip under my radar like he did. Those dead eyes. I never picked up on those dead eyes. His house was four blocks from us. And yet, I probably crossed paths with him no more than half a dozen times in five years. How is that possible?”

  “For one thing, I bet he did everything he could to avoid you. Berwick ran in different circles. His watering hole was the pub. His friends were tight. There’s no way you could’ve known what these men were doing. That’s like wondering why I didn’t pick up on their criminal nature. The fact is, the limited number of times I was around Berwick—he came into the shop a couple of times—he seemed completely normal. I never even knew Woodson because I had no reason to cross paths with him. And Brandt Lewis hadn’t been in town long enough for me to give him the time of day. Maybe the most you could say about any of them was that we all should’ve listened to Leia when she sounded the alarm about Talia marrying the guy. Even then, it’s not against the law to marry someone you barely know that you found on the Internet, although I’d strongly advise against doing it. Stop beating yourself up. Look at me, I was wrong about Brandt Lewis, but I’ve learned over these past few months, I’m not always going to get it right. I’ve learned to do old-fashioned investigating, take the failures in stride and try to improve. That’s all I can do.”

  He picked up the gemstone necklace. “Does this carnelian stone have a special power to it? One I don’t know about ye
t?”

  “Are you serious? It’s all about the red, hot passion,” she teased, dragging him down on the bed with her. “If you aren’t too tired…”

  “I’m not that tired.”

  Raking a painted fingernail down his bare chest, she leaned in, to whisper, “That’s good. Because it’s high time, I gave you a little taste of its power.”

  23

  Gemma spent her morning with Jim Dutton, the structural engineer, trying to convince the Planning Commission to move forward on repairs to Wolf Creek Bridge. But with such a small populated area, she learned Coyote Wells didn’t qualify for the major funding.

  Learning the harsh reality was a setback, but she wasn’t about to give up. “I can understand we’d need two hundred thousand people in the area to qualify for most of the state’s money set aside for this purpose, but surely that bridge should be retrofitted based on safety issues.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dutton assured her. “I expected this. There are other ways to obtain appropriations for a town this size. We just need to think outside the box. One way to go is the historical route, give that bridge its historical significance, a marker using the National Historic Preservation Act. That would qualify for eighty percent of the funding from the Federal government, which would leave twenty percent coming from the state. I also didn’t realize until I did some research with the county that this bridge is one of the major arteries in and out of the Indian Reservation. Both those appropriation methods will work in our favor.”

  “Are you certain this time? Because I don’t want to promise something that’s never going to happen. Anyone in their right mind can see that bridge is unsafe the way it is now. If we don’t do something about it soon, we might as well close it off from traffic before Mother Nature leaves the decision out of our hands.”

  “You have a right to be skeptical, but this angle will work. It’s the best way. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

  Gemma patted his arm. “It’s okay, just get the paperwork moving. I want to be able to walk around town with my head held high. I need to let people know that I’m working on a solution, one that makes sense. I want them to know their mayor isn’t a doofus, stumbling around like a glad-handing, baby-kissing, do-nothing stooge.”