Blue Heaven

by C. J. Box

  He thought of the man he’d had breakfast with, Villatoro. Jess could tell Villatoro had connections, knew people in law enforcement on the outside. Maybe even their home telephone numbers. Perhaps the ex-detective could put him in contact with a friendly FBI agent who could circumvent a call to the sheriff? Jess dug the card out of his pocket again, called the motel, and again got voice mail. Jess cursed to himself, and left a message asking Villatoro to call him whenever he got back to his room.

  Who else could help? Buddy?

  He looked up the deputy’s number and called. The phone was busy. Probably off the hook, Jess thought, while the man slept.

  Jess paced his kitchen, washed and dried the dishes, stared at his watch and the telephone that didn’t ring.

  Maybe, he thought, Sheriff Carey would believe him if he could talk to the man without the ex-cops around. Maybe. He would need to try, and he couldn’t chance waiting until morning. By that time, the ex-cops might be coming back to his house or the FBI might be in contact with them. It would need to be tonight.

  And as he looked again at the Taylor children sprawled on his couch, he thought: Don’t let them down. You’ve already overseen the destruction of one family, your own. Don’t let it happen again.

  They needed to reunite with their mother, and she needed to know they were all right. Those kids trusted him to protect them. He would do his best, or die trying. He had nothing to lose.

  “I’M GOING to be gone for a while,” he told them, after muting the volume on the television so he could get their complete attention. “I need to go to town.”

  “Tonight?” Annie asked. “Are you going to leave us here?”

  He nodded. “I have to.”

  “What if that man comes back?”

  Jess paused. “Annie, I’m going to show you how to operate a shot-gun. If anybody besides me comes into this house tonight, I want you to know how to use it.”

  Annie nodded slightly. William looked at her with obvious jealousy.

  Jess opened his gun cabinet, withdrew his twenty-gauge over and under, and broke it open. “I taught my son how to hunt with this gun,” he said. “Just remember it’s not a toy. Come here, and I’ll show you how it works….”

  BEFORE HE LEFT, Jess went back to the gun cabinet. He looked at each weapon, doing a quick checklist of pluses and minuses associated with each. He quickly dismissed his scoped hunting rifles. They were good at long range, of course, but were unwieldy if the target was close or moving fast. The bolt actions made them slow to reload, and he’d be limited to three or four cartridges. The shotguns were devastating at close range and didn’t require perfect aim, which is why he showed Annie how to fire one. But beyond fifty yards they lost stopping power. He needed a weapon that would fill both needs, long and short, and most important, something he was comfortable with.

  Jess withdrew the .25-35 Winchester. It had been his grandfather’s gun, a tough little open-sight saddle carbine that held seven cartridges. High-velocity, small-bore, simple, and reliable. He had shot his first deer with it when he was a boy, and had kept it for J.J., who had never showed interest. As he held the weapon, it felt like an old friend, with a tie to the past.

  He loaded it as the children watched. “Remember what we talked about,” he said, shoving in cartridge after cartridge. “If somebody besides me comes into this house, point the shotgun at the thickest part of his body and pull the trigger. Don’t forget about flipping off the safety first. Whether you hit him or not, I want you two running and out of here the second after you fire. Annie, where will I find you if you have to run and hide?”

  “The old corral up in the trees behind the house,” she repeated.

  “Good. Are you up for this, William?”

  William nodded. Jess had the impression William was looking forward to it and would be disappointed if Gonzalez didn’t come back.

  “Okay, then,” Jess said. “Keep the doors and windows locked, and the curtains pulled. If anybody comes, don’t look out at them.”

  Annie and William said they understood.

  Jess winked at them. “I won’t be long,” he said.

  The Winchester would not leave his side until this thing was done.

  Sunday, 5:30 P.M

  WHAT IN the hell do you think you’re doing?” Swann asked Monica sharply.

  She was packing, throwing clothes into a small suitcase on her bed. Her clothes, Annie’s clothes, William’s clothes. They would surely need a change of clothing. She was startled, hadn’t realized Swann was in the hallway watching her.

  “I’ve got to get out.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m smothering to death in this house. I feel like your prisoner. Why can’t I leave?”

  “What if they call?” Swann asked, sputtering. He had the same panicked reaction Newkirk had shown earlier when she told him she wanted to leave. That told her all she needed to know.

  “What if who calls, Oscar? I thought you were all convinced Tom took them? Since when is Tom a they?”

  Swann hesitated. She could see him biting his lip.

  “Maybe I’ll talk to the reporters down at the county building, make a plea for my children.” She said it to test him.

  Her destination, she had decided, was outside of town. But she didn’t want to tell him of her suspicion. That confirmed in her mind that the situation had changed. Swann, she thought, is not here to help me.

  “Monica, sit the fuck down.”

  His command froze her. She could tell by his face that, if necessary, he would cross the room and make her stay.

  “This is for the best,” he said. “You have to trust me on this.”

  She weighed his words against the crazy look in his eye, the set of his shoulders, his clenched fists.

  “I don’t trust you at all,” she said.

  He raised one of his fists, opened his hand. Her car keys were in them.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” he said.

  Sunday, 5:49 P.M.

  THE HOME of Anthony and Julie Rodale was magnificent, Villatoro thought. A huge new log home built with a southern exposure and lots of windows, soft underground lights marking the driveway and pathway, thick Indian throw rugs on the hardwood floor, and a cathedral ceiling in the great room that made him feel insignificant. The heads of mounted mule deer and elk flanked the stone fireplace, a half dozen colorful lacquered fish—he guessed steelhead, although he had never seen one—glowed in the light from the chandelier.

  Julie Rodale had been watching 60 Minutes on television when he arrived, sitting in an overstuffed chair just a few feet in front of the wide screen, eating a large bowl of macaroni and cheese. She still dug into it unself-consciously as they spoke, sometimes making him wait for an answer while she chewed.

  Julie Rodale was tall and blond, with a round face and full cheeks. By the way her clothes strained at their buttons, he guessed she was either newly heavy or had simply refused to admit that she needed a new, more matronly style of dress. She was not hesitant to talk with him.

  “You said you were a detective?” she asked. “I thought you were with the sheriff’s office when you drove up. I’m waiting to hear something on my husband, Tony.”

  Villatoro took notes on a small pad he’d found in his motel, mainly to be doing something. It was his experience that people tended to talk more and say more when the questioner appeared to be hanging on every word and taking notes. She didn’t seem to care that he wasn’t with the local police or was retired, only that he was interested in what she had to say.

  “You said he went steelhead fishing.”

  “Yeah.” She rolled her eyes toward the mounted fish on the wall. “He lives for it. Every weekend, at least. All winter he buys equipment and reads fishing magazines, and all spring, summer, and fall he goes fishing. I tried it with him a couple of times, even took a book to read, but I thought it was boring, boring, boring.”

  “Does he often go alone?”

>   She shoveled in a mouthful of macaroni while nodding. “Not all the time. Sometimes he convinces a buddy to go with him. Jim Newkirk goes along sometimes, but you know, he’s got kids at home, and he just can’t get away as much as Tony. Nobody can, it’s ridiculous.”

  Villatoro noted Newkirk’s name.

  He tried to keep his tone soft and conversational. “He was supposed to be back this morning?”

  “If not last night,” she said, chewing. “He said he had something to do on Monday, so I would have expected him back by now. I’m starting to get pretty pissed off.”

  “Are you worried about him?”

  “Not really,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s a tough guy. He always takes his service weapon with him. That’s not what I’m worried about. I just think he got his truck stuck somewhere, or he got lost, or he hit the bottle. I tell him to take his cell phone, but he always claims he goes too far away to get a signal.

  “A woman gets lonely being a fishing widow,” she said. “That’s what I call myself, a fishing widow. See all those fish on the wall? That’s nothing. You should see our basement. You want to see it?”

  “That’s okay,” Villatoro said. “I don’t want to take too much of your time.”

  “Do I look busy?” She laughed.

  “So you’ve been here four years?” he asked.

  “You mean in the house or in Idaho?”

  “Both.”

  “Yeah, four years. We moved up here just after Tony took early retirement from the force. I would have moved anywhere, after all of those years of wondering if he was going to get shot, or beat up, or something. It was such a relief, you know?”

  “My wife knows that feeling.”

  She scooped in a large forkful. “I didn’t think you looked like you were from around here.”

  He smiled. “So several of you, I mean several retired officers, all came out here at the same time. Is Tony friends with the others? You mentioned Newkirk.”

  For the first time, Julie hesitated for a moment. “Why are you asking me about his friends?”

  “I’m curious. I heard several of them were helping your county sheriff with the Taylor case. But obviously, Tony isn’t involved in that.”

  She laughed. “Believe me, if he wasn’t fishing, he’d be with them. Tony likes hanging out with all of his old cop buddies. You’d think he’d be sick of them after all of those years, but that’s not the case.”

  Villatoro shifted in his chair. “Aren’t they all involved in some kind of charity together?”

  “Yeah, something. I don’t know much about it. They have meetings every once in a while. Tony don’t say much about it, though. You mean Lieutenant Singer and Sergeant Gonzalez, right?”

  “Do they get along okay? Are they friends?” Villatoro was hoping that Rodale was estranged from the other ex-cops, that being the reason why he had not volunteered with them. If he was having trouble with them, Villatoro reasoned, perhaps he would be easier to talk to than the others.

  “I think so,” she said, without conviction.

  “Was he a little angry with them recently?”

  She blew out a long stream of breath to clear a strand of hair from her face. “I’d say he’s been irritable lately. He wouldn’t really say why. But come to think of it, he’s been pissy since their last meeting a couple of weeks ago. Maybe something was said, I don’t know. Tony doesn’t talk about that stuff.”

  “Right. Have you called them to see if they know anything about where Tony went?”

  “Sure I did. Yesterday. But all they knew is that he said he was going fishing.”

  “So they all knew that? They weren’t surprised when you called?”

  She paused, fork in midair: “No, why should they be? They all sounded concerned. Lieutenant Singer especially. He said he didn’t think it was ever a good idea to go fishing or hunting by yourself. I said, ‘Amen, Brother Singer.’ Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” he said, and quickly changed the subject. “This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Villatoro said. “I bet it would cost a few million back home.”

  “More than that,” she said, grinning. “Tony did well with his pension. He also did really well with investments. All those years, I had no idea he was buying stocks and stuff. But when he told me he wanted to take early retirement, he said he’s been building up this …fortune … in the stock market. He said he got out before the bubble burst, and we could afford a home like this.”

  Villatoro watched her carefully. She spoke without guile. She obviously believed her husband came into their wealth through legitimate means.

  “He did well,” Villatoro said, looking around. “My wife Donna would kill for a home like this.”

  She smiled in a proprietary way. “The man shocked me. Really shocked me. I didn’t know he had any interest at all in stocks or anything. I didn’t even know about this fishing thing until we moved up here. That just goes to show you that you can live with somebody for twenty years and not really know them, you know?”

  She sat back and sighed. “I have to admit, though, I sometimes miss the old neighborhood. There was nothing special about it, just a street with a lot of forty-year-old houses on it. But I miss hearing kids out on the street, and the block parties we would sometimes have in the summer. It was chaos, but I miss being a part of it. I guess I miss neighbors. All I ever hear up here is birds. That gets a little boring at times. I’d like to have a reason to charge out of the house to see what’s going on, you know?”

  Villatoro stood up and closed his pad. He felt sorry for her, with her big house and big body and big bowl of macaroni and cheese. She seemed like a nice, normal woman, someone his wife would be friends with.

  “I know what you mean,” he said, and thanked her and said he would let himself out.

  “Stick around,” she said. “You can watch me pound that guy when he finally gets home. I’ll glue a damned cell phone on his forehead for the next time.”

  THE SKY FLASHED and there was a rumble of thunder as Villatoro approached his car in the driveway. The storm clouds had shut a curtain over the dusk sun, making it darker than it should be. The air was moist, and he expected rain any minute.

  Tony Rodale, who had been working security at Santa Anita with Jim Newkirk on the day of the robbery, who sought early retirement, who was the treasurer for the SoCal Retired Peace Officers Foundation and therefore in charge of making cash deposits into their account, was missing. If he showed up, Villatoro wanted to meet him. There had to be a reason why only four of the five ex-cops had volunteered to help the sheriff together, and the fifth went his own way. Maybe an argument between them, maybe dissension. Maybe, Villatoro conceded, Rodale just wanted to go fishing.

  There was a flash of lightning and a thunderclap that seemed to sway the treetops with its power, and sheets of heavy rain lashed through the trees. There was no buildup to the rain, it just came, furiously. He switched his wipers to high and turned on his headlights.

  He was so consumed with his thoughts and the driving rain as he drove that when his headlights swept over a parked car nearly blocking the road to Rodale’s home near the two-lane, he reacted late and almost sideswiped it, missing the car by inches. He braked a few feet beyond it and glanced up into his rearview mirror.

  The driver’s door opened on the car he had almost hit, and the dome light came on. Newkirk got out. The ex-cop was lit in the red glow of Villatoro’s taillights, and he walked out of the view of the mirror and tapped on the passenger-side window.

  After searching for the window switch in the rental car, Villatoro found it, pressed it, and the window whirred down. Newkirk leaned in. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me in the parking lot. I think we need to talk.”

  “Do you want to meet somewhere?” Villatoro could smell the whiskey on Newkirk’s breath.

  Newkirk shook his head. “No place is safe. I don’t want us to be seen together.”

  Villatoro found himself gri
pping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white. Slowly, he let go and relaxed them.

  “Too many people know my car,” Newkirk said. “Let’s go in yours.”

  “The car is not very big.”

  Newkirk looked down. The passenger seat was covered with maps, files, paper. “Clean that off and I’ll get in.”

  “I’m not sure …”

  “Do you want to talk or not? Make up your mind. I don’t like standing out here where someone could drive by and see me. Besides, I’m getting soaked.”

  Villatoro realized what an opportunity this could be. It could crack the case. But he was scared. There was another lightning flash and a low-throated roar of thunder. He gathered up the papers and tossed them over the headrest into the tiny backseat, and Newkirk swung in heavily and closed the door. Steam rose from his clothing.

  “Where are we going?” Villatoro asked.

  “Just drive,” Newkirk said.

  Villatoro put the car into gear, and they slid out onto the state highway. Large raindrops hit the windshield like balls of spit.

  “I’m going to show you where the bodies are buried,” Newkirk said, “so to speak.”

  Sunday, 6:25 P.M.

  JESS ENTERED Kootenai Bay under a strobing pyrotechnic display of lightning, and the rain fell hard and steady, creating a jungle drumbeat within the pickup. A close flash of lightning lit the cab, leaving the afterimage of his Winchester, muzzle down, on the seat next to him.

  Sheriff Ed Carey lived in a modest ranch house in an older neighborhood not far from downtown. Streetlamps on the corners lit up the falling rain in the orbs of their halos and created blue lightning bolts on the wet streets. Carey’s county Blazer was parked in his driveway. A white SUV Jess didn’t recognize was also in front of the house. A white SUV? Like the one Annie and William had seen?

  Behind Carey’s Blazer was a small yellow pickup. Jess frowned, familiar with it from his daily encounters. What in the hell was Fiona Pritzle doing at the sheriff’s home at this time of night?