Cripple Creek Part 14

"I'll miss you."

Leaning against me there in the moonlight, she asked, "Do I really need to say anything about that?"

No.

She stood. "I'm going to spend the last few days at the house shutting it down. Who knows, maybe someday I'll actually complete the restoration."

I saw her to the Volvo and returned to my vigil on the porch, soon became aware of a presence close by. The screen door banged gently shut behind her as J. T. stepped out.

"She told you, huh?"

"A heads-up would have been good."

"Val asked me not to say anything. I don't think she was sure, herself, right up till now. Amazing moon." She had a bottle of Corona and pa.s.sed it to me. I took a swig. "Talked to my lieutenant today."

Hardly a surprise. The department was calling daily in its effort to lure her back. Demands had given way to entreaty, appeals to her loyalty, barely disguised bribes, promises of promotion.

"Be leaving soon, then?"

"Not exactly." She finished the beer and set the bottle on the floorboards. "You didn't want the sheriff's position, right?"

"Lonnie's job? No way."

"Good. Because I met with Mayor Sims today, and I took it."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.

OBVIOUSLY IT WAS MY TIME for surprises. And for mixed feelings. Wounded at the thought of Val's departure, nonetheless I was pleased that she'd be doing what she most loved. The two emotions rode a teeter-totter, one rising, the other touching feet to eartha"before they reversed.

And J. T.? As my boss? Well . . .

I gave some thought to how she, city-bred and a city-trained officer, would fit in here. But then I remembered the way she and Moira had sat together up in the hills and decided she'd do okay. It goes without saying how pleased I was that she'd be around.

I was considerably less pleased when Miss Emily chewed a hole in the screen above the sink and took her brood out through it.

Because I considered it a betrayal? Because it was yet another loss? Or simply because I would miss them?

I was standing in the kitchen, staring at the hole in the screen, when J. T. swung by to see if I wanted to grab some dinner. She had moved into a house on Mulberry, or, more precisely, into one room. The house had been empty a long time, and the rest would take a while. But the price was right. Her monthly rent was about what a couple in the city might spend on a good dinner out.

"They're wild animals, Dad, not pets. What, you expected her to leave a note?"

"You think she moved in just to be sure her offspring would be safe? Knowing all along she'd leave afterwards?"

"Somehow I doubt possums very often overplan things."

"I thought . . ." Shaking myself out of it: "I don't know what I thought."

"So. Dinner?"

"Not tonight. You mind?"

"Of course not."

Some time after she left, second bourbon slammed down and coffee brewing, the perfect response came to me: But we slept together, you know, Miss Emily and I.

Rooting through stacks of CDs and tapes on shelves in the front room, I found what I was looking for.

It had been one of those drawling, seemingly endless Sunday afternoons in May. We'd grilled chicken and burgers earlier and were dipping liberally, ad lib as Val kept insisting, into the cooler for beers, bolstering such excursions with chips, dip, carrot sticks, and potato salad scooped finger-style from the bowl. Eldon sprang open the case on his Gibson, Val went inside to get the Whyte Laydie, and they started playing. I'd recently had the ca.s.sette recorder out for something or another and set it up on the windowsill in the kitchen. Just about where Miss Emily and crew went through.

"Keep on the Sunny Side," "White House Blues," "Frankie and Albert." No matter that lyrics got scrambled, faked, or lost completely, the music kept its power.

"We should do this more often," Val said as they took a break. I'd left the recorder running.

"We should do this all the time." Eldon held up his jelly gla.s.s, half cranberry juice, half club soda, in salute. Only Val and I were dipping into the cooler.

Soon enough they were back at it.

"Banks of the Ohio," "Soldier's Joy," "It Wasn't G.o.d Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."

I left the tape going and went back out onto the porch. Just days ago I'd been thinking how full the house was. Now suddenly everyone was gone. Even Miss Emily. Val and Eldon shifted into "Home on the Range," Eldon, playing slide on standard guitar, doing the best he could to approximate Bob Kaai's Hawaiian steel.

"What the h.e.l.l is that you're listening to?" a voice said. "No wonder someone wants you dead, you pitiful f.u.c.k."

Diving forward, I kicked the legs out from under the chair and he, positioned behind with the steel-wire garrote not quite in place yet, went along, splayed across the chair's back. An awkward position. Before he had the chance to correct it, I pivoted over and had an arm locked around his neck, alert to any further sound or signs of intrusion. The garrote, piano wire with tape-wound wood handles, sat at porch's edge looking like a garden implement.

"Simple asphyxiation," Doc Oldham said an hour later.

I do remember pulling the arm in hard, asking if he was alone, getting no answer and asking again. Was he contract? Who sent him? No response to those questions either. Then the awareness of his body limp beneath me.

"Man obviously didn't care to carry on a conversation with you," Doc Oldham said, grabbing hold of the windowsill to pull himself erect with difficulty, tottering all the way up and tottering still once there. '"S that coffee I smell?"

"Used to be, anyway. Near dead as this guy by now's my guess."

"Hey, it's late at night and I'm a doctor. You think I'm so old I forgot my intern days? Bad burned coffee's diesel fuel for usa" what I love most. Next to a healthy slug of bourbon."

Meanwhile J. T. waited, coming to the realization that further black-and-whites would not be barreling up, that there were no fingerprint people or crime lab investigators to call in, no watch commander to pa.s.s things off to. It was all on her.

She sat at the kitchen table. Doc nodded to her and said "Asphyxiation," poured his coffee and took the gla.s.s of bourbon I handed him.

"Tough first day," I said.

"Technically I haven't even started."

"Hope you had a good dinner at least."

"Smothered chicken special."

"Guess homemaking only goes so far."

"Give me a break, I'm still trying to find the kitchen. Speaking of which, this coffee really sucks."

"Don't pay her any mind, Turner," Doc Oldham said, helping himself to a second cup. "It's delicious."

"I'm a.s.suming there's no identification," J. T. said.

"These guys don't exactly carry pa.s.sports. There's better than a thousand dollars in a money clip in his left pants pocket, another thousand under a false insole in his shoe. A driver's license that looks like it was made yesterday."

"Which it probably was. So, we have no way to track where he might have been staying because there isn't any place to stay. And with no bus terminals or airportsa""

"No airports? What about Stanley Munic.i.p.al? Crop duster to the stars."

"a"there's no paper trail." She sipped coffee and made a face. "Nothing I know is of any help here."

"What you know is rarely important. The rest is what mattersa" all those hours of working the job, interviews, people you've met, the instincts nurtured by all of it. That's what you use."

"Something you learned in psychology cla.s.ses?"

"From Eldon, actually. Spend hours practicing scales and learning songs, he said, then you get up there to play and none of it matters. Where you begin and where you wind up have little to do with one another. Meanwhile we," I said, pa.s.sing it over, "do have this."

I gave her a moment.

"Thing you have to ask is, this is a pro, right? First to last he covers his tracks. That's what he does, how he lives. No wallet, false ID if any at all, he's a ghost, a glimmer. So why does a stub from an airline ticket show up in his inside coat pocket?"

"Carelessness?"

"Possible, sure. But how likely?"

I was, after all, patently an alarmist, possibly paranoid, a man known to have accused a possum of overplanning.

It was only the torn-off stub of a boarding pa.s.s and easily enough could have been overlooked. You glance at aisle and seat number, stick it in your pocket just in case, find it there the next time you wear that coat.

But I wasn't running scales, I was up there on stage, playing. And judging from the light in J. T.'s eyes, she was too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

HIS NAME, or at least one of his names, was Marc Bruhn, and he'd come in on the redeye, nonstop, from Newark to Little Rock. Ticket paid in cash, round trip, no flags, whistles, or bells. These guys play everything close to the vest. Extrapolating arrival to service-desk time, despite false identification and despite Oxford, Mississippi, having been given as destination, J. T. was able to track a car rental.

"That's the ringer, what got me onto him. Who the h.e.l.l, if he's heading for Oxford, would fly into Little Rock rather than Memphis?"

"Hey, he's from New Jersey, remember?"

We'd found the car under a copse of trees across the lake. There was a half-depleted six-pack of bottled water on the floorboard, an untouched carton of Little Debbie cakes on the pa.s.senger seat, and a self-improvement tape in the player.

June was able to pull out previous transactions in the name of Marc Bruhn, Mark Brown, Matt Browen, and other likely cognates. Newark International, JFK, and La Guardia; Gary, Indiana, and nearby Detroit; Oklahoma City, Dallas, Phoenix; Seattle, St. Louis, L.A.

"That's it, that's as far as my reach goes."

But good as J. T. and June proved to be, Isaiah Stillman was better.

"You told me you managed a conservatorship via the Internet," I said on a visit that evening. "And that's how you put all this together."

"Yes, sir." I'd asked him to stop the sir business, but it did no good. "I grew up limping, one leg snared forever in a modem. The Internet's the other place I live."

I told him about Bruhn, about the killings. We were dancing in place, I said, painting by numbers, since we were pretty sure who sent him. But we hadn't been able to get past a handful of basic facts and suspicions.

"We take the individual's right to privacy and autonomy very seriously, Mr. Turner."

"I know."

"On the other hand, we're in your debt. And however we insist upon holding ourselves apart from it, this community is one we've chosen to live in, which implies certain responsibilities."

Our eyes held, then his went to the trees about us: the rough ladder, the treehouse built for children to come.

"Excuse me."

Entering one of the lean-tos, he emerged with a laptop.

"Moira tells me Miss Emily left," he said.

"And Val."

"Val will be back. Miss Emily won't. Marc, right? With a c or a k? B-R-U-H-N?" Fingers rippling on keys. "Commercial historya"which you have already. List of Bruhns by geographical distribution, including alternate spellings . . . Here it is, narrowed down to the New Jersey-New York area. . . . You want copies of any of this, let me know."

"I don't see a printer."

"No problem, I can just zap it to your office, right?"

Could he? I had no idea.

"Now for the real fun. I'm putting in the name . . . commercial transactions we know about . . . the Jersey-New York list . . . and a bunch of question marks. Like fishhooks." His fingers stopped. "Let's see what we catch."

Lines of what I a.s.sumed to be code snaked steadily down the screen. Nothing I could make any sense of.