“Hello? This is Walling, can I help you?”
“Rachel, it’s me. Jack.”
Now it was her turn to be caught in silence.
“How are you doing?”
“Why are you calling me, Jack? We agreed that it would be better that we not talk.”
“I know… but I need your help. I’m in trouble, Rachel.”
“And you’re expecting me to help you? What kind of trouble?”
A passing car blew past me going a hundred, at least, and making me feel like I was standing still.
“It’s sort of a long story. I’m in Nevada. In the desert. I’m chasing a story and there’s a killer out there nobody knows about. I need somebody to believe me and to help me.”
“Jack, I’m the wrong person and you know it. I can’t help you. And I’m in the middle of something here. I have to go.”
“Rachel, don’t hang up! Please…”
She didn’t answer at first, but she didn’t hang up. I waited.
“Jack… you sound frazzled. What is going on with you?”
“I don’t know. Somebody’s messing with me. My phone, my e-mail, my bank accounts—I’m driving through the middle of the desert and I don’t even have a credit card that works.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Ely, to talk to somebody.”
“The prison?”
“That’s right.”
“What, somebody called you up and said he was innocent and you come running, hoping to prove the real cops are wrong again?”
“No, nothing like that. Look, Rachel, this guy is strangling women and stuffing them into the trunks of cars. He does horrible things to them and he’s been getting away with it for at least two years.”
“Jack, I’ve read your stories about the girl in the trunk. It was a gangbanger and he confessed.”
I got an unexpected thrill from knowing she was reading my stories. But it wasn’t helping me to convince her.
“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper, Rachel. I’m getting to the truth now and I need someone—somebody in authority—to step in and—”
“You know I’m not in Behavioral anymore. Why call me?”
“Because I can trust you.”
That brought a long moment of silence. I refused to break first.
“How can you say that?” she finally said. “We haven’t seen each other in a long, long time.”
“Doesn’t matter. After what we went through back then, I’ll always trust you, Rachel. And I know you could help me now… and maybe make up for some things yourself.”
She scoffed at that.
“What are you talking about? No—wait, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter. Please don’t call me again, Jack. The bottom line is, I can’t help you. So good luck and be careful. Be safe.”
She hung up the phone.
I held it to my ear for nearly a minute after she was gone. I guess I was hoping that she’d change her mind, pick up the phone and call me back. But that didn’t happen and after a while I dropped the phone into the cup holder between the seats. I had no more calls to make.
Up ahead the car that had passed me disappeared over the next ridgeline. I felt like I had been left all alone on the surface of the moon.
As with most people who pass through the gates of Ely State Prison, my luck did not change for the better upon arrival at my destination. I was allowed in through the attorney/investigator entrance. I clutched the introduction letter William Schifino had written for me and showed it to the watch captain. I was placed in a holding room and waited for twenty minutes for Brian Oglevy to be delivered to me. But when the door opened, it was the watch captain who entered. No Brian Oglevy.
“Mr. McEvoy,” the captain said, pronouncing my name wrong. “I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to do this today.”
I suddenly thought that I had been exposed as a fraud. That they knew I was a reporter working on a story and not an investigator for a defense attorney.
“What do you mean? It was all set up. I have the letter from the lawyer. You saw it. He also faxed you a letter saying I was coming.”
“Yeah, we got the fax and I was prepared to carry through but the man you want to see is unavailable at this time. You come back tomorrow and you can have your visit.”
I shook my head angrily. All of the problems of the day were about to boil over and this prison captain was going to get burned.
“Look, I just drove four hours from Vegas to do this interview. You’re telling me to turn around and go back and then do the whole thing again tomorrow? I’m not go—”
“I’m not telling you to go back to Vegas. I was you, I’d just go into town and stay at the Hotel Nevada. It ain’t a bad place. They got a gaming hall and a hoppin’ bar on most nights. You put up there and get back in here tomorrow morning and I’ll have your man all ready for you. I can promise you that.”
I shook my head, feeling impotent about everything. I had no choice here.
“Nine o’clock,” I said. “And you’ll be here?”
“I’ll be here to personally set it up.”
“Can you tell me why I can’t see him today?”
“No, I can’t. It’s a security issue.”
I shook my head in frustration one final time.
“Thank you, Captain. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“We’ll be here.”
After getting back to my rental, I plugged the Hotel Nevada in Ely into the GPS and followed instructions until I got there in thirty minutes. I pulled the car into the parking lot and emptied my pockets before deciding to go in. I had $248 in cash. I knew I had to budget at least $75 for gas to get back to the airport in Vegas. I could eat cheap until I got home but would need another $40 for the cab ride from the airport to my house. So I calculated I had about a hundred bucks for the hotel. Looking up at its tired six floors, I figured that wasn’t going to be a problem. I got out, grabbed my carry-on bag and went inside.
I took a forty-five-dollar-a-night room on the fourth floor. The room was neat and clean and the bed was reasonably comfortable. It was only four P.M., too early to put the remainder of my fortune toward alcohol. So I pulled out my throwaway phone and started eating into my minutes. I first called Angela Cook, trying both her cell and desk line and getting no answer on either. I left the same message twice, then swallowed my pride and called Alan Prendergast back. I apologized for my outburst earlier and my use of foul language. I tried to calmly explain what was happening and the pressure I was feeling. He responded monosyllabically and said he had a meeting to go to. I told him I would get him a budget line for the revised story if I could get online and he told me not to rush.
“Prendo, we’ve got to get this into Friday’s paper or everybody else will have it.”
“Look, I talked about this in the news meeting. We want to move cautiously. We’ve got you running around in the desert. We haven’t even heard from Angela and, frankly, we’re getting worried. She should have checked in. So what I want you to do is get back here as soon as you can and then we will all sit down and see what we’ve got.”
I could have gotten angry all over again about the way I was being treated but something more pressing had come through from him. Angela.
“You’ve gotten no message from her all day?”
“Not a one. I sent a reporter to her apartment to see if she was there but there was no answer. We don’t know where she is.”
“This ever happen with her before?”
“She’s called in sick a few times very late in the day. Probably hung over or something. But at least she called in. Not this time, though.”
“Well, listen. If anybody hears from her, let me know, okay?”
“You got it, Jack.”
“Okay, Prendo. We’ll talk when I get back.”
“Got dimes?” Prendergast asked by way of a peace offering.
“A few,” I said. “I’ll see you when I see you.”
> I closed the phone and thought about Angela being missing in action. I started wondering if everything was connected. My credit cards, nobody hearing from Angela. It seemed like a stretch because I couldn’t see where anything linked up.
I looked around my forty-five-dollar room. There was a little pamphlet on the side table that said the hotel was more than seventy-five years old and at one time was the tallest building in all of Nevada. That was back when copper mining had made Ely a boomtown and nobody had ever heard of Las Vegas. Those days were long past.
I booted up my laptop and used the hotel’s free WiFi to try to sign into my e-mail account. But my password was not accepted after three tries and I was locked out. No doubt whoever had canceled my credit cards and my cellular phone service had also changed my password.
“This is crazy,” I said out loud.
Unable to make outside contact, I concentrated on the internal. I opened a file on the laptop and pulled out my hard-copy notes. I started writing a narrative summarizing the moves of the day. It took me well over an hour to complete the project but when I was done I had thirty solid inches of story. And it was good story. Maybe my best in years.
After reading it over and making some editing improvements, I realized that the work had made me hungry. So I counted my money once again and left the room, making sure the door was locked behind me. I walked through the gaming hall and into a bar by the dollar slots. I ordered a beer and a steak sandwich and sat at a corner table with an open view of the mechanical money takers.
Looking around, I saw that the place had an aura of second-rate desperation, and the idea of another twelve hours there depressed me. But I wasn’t looking at a lot of choices. I was stuck and was going to stay stuck until the morning.
I checked my cash stash again and decided I had enough for another beer and a roll of quarters for the cheap slots. I set up in a row near the lobby entrance and started feeding my money into an electronic poker machine. I lost my first seven hands before hitting on a full house. I followed that with a flush and a straight. Pretty soon I was thinking about being able to afford a third beer.
Another gambler took a seat two machines over from me. I barely noticed him until he decided he liked the comfort of conversation while he lost his money.
“You here for the pussy?” he asked cheerily.
I looked over at him. He was about thirty and had large muttonchop sideburns. He wore a dusty cowboy hat over dirty blond hair, leather driving gloves and mirrored sunglasses, even though we were inside.
“Excuse me?”
“Supposed to be a couple brothels outside of town. I was wondering which one’s got the best-looking pussy. I just blew in on a stretch from Salt Lake.”
“I wouldn’t know, man.”
I went back to my machine and tried to concentrate on what to hold and what to drop. I had the ace, three, four and nine of spades along with the ace of hearts. Do I go for the flush or stay conservative, take the pair and hope for a third ace or another pair?
“Birds in hand, man,” said Sideburns.
I looked over at him and he nodded as if to say no charge for the sage advice. I could see the reflection of my screen in his mirrored glasses. All I needed was somebody coaching me on quarter poker. I held the spades, dropped the ace of hearts and hit the draw button. The machine god delivered. I got the jack of spades and a seven-to-one payoff on the flush. Too bad I was only betting quarters.
I hit the cash-out button and listened as a whopping fourteen dollars in quarters dropped into the tin tray. I scooped it into a plastic change cup and got up, leaving Sideburns behind.
I took my quarters to the cage and asked to cash out. I no longer had an appetite for gambling with small change. I was going to invest my winnings in two more beers and take them back to my room. There was more writing I could be doing, as well as preparing for the next morning’s interview. I was going to talk to a man who’d been in prison for more than a year for a murder I was convinced he hadn’t committed. It was going to be a wonderful day, the goddamn start of every journalist’s dream to free an innocent man from an unjust imprisonment.
While waiting for the elevator in the lobby I carried the bottles down by my side in case I was breaking some sort of house rule. I stepped in, pushed the button and moved to the back corner. The doors started to come together but then a gloved hand poked in and hit the infrared beam and the doors reopened.
My pal Sideburns stepped in. He raised a finger to push a button but then pulled it back.
“Hey, we’ve got the same floor,” he said.
“Wonderful,” I said.
He went to the opposite corner. I knew he was going to say something and there was no place for me to go. I just waited for it and I wasn’t disappointed.
“Hey, buddy, I didn’t mean to mess up your mojo down there. My ex-wife used to say I talked too much. Maybe that’s why she’s my ex-wife.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I have to get some work done anyway.”
“So you’re here on work, huh? What kind of business would take you to this godforsaken part of the world?”
Here we go again, I thought. The elevator was moving so slowly that it would’ve been faster taking the stairs.
“I have an appointment tomorrow at the prison.”
“Gotcha. You a lawyer for one of them guys?”
“No. Journalist.”
“Hmm, a writer, huh? Well, good luck. At least you’ll get to go home after, not like them other fellas in there.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
I moved toward the door as we reached the fourth floor, a clear signal that I was finished with the conversation and wanted to get to my room. The elevator stopped moving and it seemed an interminable amount of time before the doors finally began to open.
“Have a good night,” I said.
I stepped quickly out of the elevator and to the left. My room was the third door down.
“You, too, partner,” Sideburns called after me.
I had to switch the two beer bottles to my other hand to get my room key out. As I stood in front of the door, pulling it out of my pocket, I saw Sideburns coming down the hallway toward me. I turned and looked to my right. There were only three more rooms going down and then the exit to the stairwell. I had a bad feeling that this guy would eventually come knocking on my door during the night, wanting to go down for a beer or out to get some pussy. The first thing I planned to do was pack up, call the desk and change my room. He didn’t know my name and wouldn’t be able to find me.
I finally got the key into the lock and pushed the door open. I looked back at Sideburns and gave him a final nod. His face broke into a strange smile as he got closer.
“Hi, Jack,” a voice said from inside my room.
I abruptly turned to see a woman getting up from the chair by the window in my room. And I immediately recognized her as Rachel Walling. She had an all-business look on her face. I felt the presence of Sideburns go by my back on his way to his room.
“Rachel?” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Why don’t you come in and close the door?”
Still stunned by the surprise, I did as instructed. I closed the door behind me. From out in the hallway I heard another door close loudly. Sideburns had entered his room.
Cautiously, I stepped farther into my room.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Just sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Twelve years earlier I’d had a short, intense and, some would say, improper relationship with Rachel Walling. While I had seen photos of her in the papers a few years ago when she helped the LAPD run down and kill a wanted man in Echo Park, I had not been in her presence since we had sat in a hearing room nearly a decade earlier. Still, not many days went by in those ten years that I didn’t think about her. She was one reason—perhaps the biggest reason—that I have always considered that time the high point of my life.
She
showed little wear and tear from the years that had passed, even though I knew it had been a tough time. She paid for her relationship with me with a five-year stint in a one-person office in South Dakota. She went from profiling and chasing serial killers to investigating bar stabbings on Indian reservations.
But she had climbed out of that pit and had been posted in L.A. for the past five years, working for some sort of a secretive intelligence unit. I had called her when I’d found out, gotten through to her but been rebuffed. Since then I had kept tabs on her, when I could, from afar. And now she was standing in front of me in my hotel room in the middle of nowhere. It was strange, sometimes, how life worked out.
My surprise over her appearance aside, I couldn’t stop staring and smiling at her. She maintained the professional front, but I could see her eyes holding on me. It wasn’t very often you got to be this close to a former lover of so long ago.
“Who was that you were with?” she asked. “Are you with a photographer on this story?”
I turned and looked back at the doorway.
“No, I’m by myself. And I don’t know who that was. Just some guy who’d been talking to me downstairs in the gambling hall. He went to his room.”
She abruptly walked past me, opened the door and looked both ways in the hall before coming back into the room and closing the door.
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really talking to him.”
“Which room is he in?”
“I don’t know that either. What’s going on? How come you’re in my room?”
I pointed to the bed. My laptop was open and my printouts of notes, the copies of the case files I had gotten from Schifino and Meyer as well as the printouts from Angela Cook’s online search were fanned across it. The only thing missing from the spread was the transcript of the Winslow interrogation, and that was only because it had been too heavy to take with me.
I hadn’t left it all on the bed like that.
“And were you going through my stuff? Rachel, I asked you for help. I didn’t ask you to break into my room and—”
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