by Bart Paul
“Too grim,” Sarah said. “So … this leaves us at square one about Dad.”
“It means he could still be alive,” Fuchs said.
“If they killed Hoyt the first night—right after he discovered what they were up to—I’ve got to face facts,” she said. She was still a minute. “Did Hoyt have any next of kin?”
“A son in Oregon,” Fuchs said.
We ate quiet for a minute to let Sarah process things.
“We got our next sign from your husband about an hour ago,” Fuchs said. “His Ram truck was found burning out near Monte Cristo Summit. On the Marine airstrip.”
“Was anyone—”
“There was no one in it,” Fuchs said. “A rancher driving by saw a small plane taking off in the sagebrush while the truck was still burning.” He described the plane.
“That sounds like the one we saw fly overhead when we were leaving False Spring,” Sarah said. “Kip had a bodybuilding friend who was a pilot.” She gave him Delroy’s name.
“The other sign from her husband would be that little detail of blowing the crap out of the Marine housing where my mother lives.”
“I was getting to that, Sergeant,” Fuchs said. “Do you think you were the target?”
“Me or Mom. When I saw him three days ago, Jedediah knew Mom was living there, and that I’d been staying there with her.”
“You knew him a long time?” Fuchs said.
“My whole life. Anyway, Hoyt finding the pot farm and us finding Hoyt probably cost Jed a million or two. Kip too if he was a part of it.”
“I don’t disagree with you on his involvement,” Fuchs said, “but so far I’ve got nothing concrete—just indicators in that direction.” He took out his iPad and showed it to Sarah. “This is from Santa Barbara County. Your husband was a drug dealer from down there who’d dropped off the grid. He progressed from selling marijuana out of his high school locker to violent nutcase surfer, conman, drug dealer, sadist, you name it.”
“Can you guys not call him my husband anymore?” Sarah said.
“Fair enough. The guy you call Kip did local time when he was only sixteen. A nonfatal hit-and-run on someplace called Indio Muerto Street. Victim was a boy on the swim team—a romantic rival. The cops thought it was intentional—that Kip tried to run the kid over deliberately with his Corvette.”
“What kind of Corvette?”
Sarah hit me on the arm.
“A few years later he was a suspect in the disappearance of some high school beach babe who supposedly burned him on a drug deal,” Fuchs said. “He was never charged on that one because they never found the body. The girl vanished without a trace, but Santa Barbara PD still has him as the person of interest.”
“From when?” Sarah said.
“Years ago,” Fuchs said. “Like maybe eight or ten.”
“Girl’s name wasn’t Wendy Hammond, was it?”
Fuchs gave me a funny look. “How the hell do you know that?”
I told him about the cross with that name on it at False Spring.
“I guess we’ll be digging that one up,” he said. “Leaving that name definitely ties Kip to the pot farm site.”
We finished our food and Fuchs walked us to the elevator.
“The good thing is, Kip’s associate Boone is dead,” Fuchs said, “and Kip’s on the run. It makes him more dangerous, but maybe more predictable. Can I ask you something Tommy?”
I nodded.
“You could’ve killed Boone, but from what Burt Kelly told the agent who debriefed him at the Marine base this morning, you intentionally did not,” he said. “Was it because you and Jedediah were old friends?”
“Nope. I’d a shot him when we were eighteen if I thought I coulda got away with it. Jed went out just the way he always imagined he would—guns blazing. But I figured alive he could tell us more about Kip and the pot business, the water deal, and what they were planning next besides setting fire to pickups.”
“And you thought he’d tell us the truth with no fear of reprisal from Kip?” Fuchs said.
“I did. One thing you got to know—Jed wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody on this earth. Second thing, he always told the truth. Always.”
“Strange for a career criminal,” Fuchs said.
“He figured out pretty young that the absolutely scariest thing he could do to somebody was tell them what he was thinking.”
Fuchs said he’d be in touch in the morning with more lab results, including anything from the burned-out Ram and airplane tire tracks on the airstrip. Sarah and I drove back south. It seemed like forever before we pulled in to Dave’s yard and saw a white Marine Corps pickup parked under the trees.
Burt and a tall lieutenant were waiting on the porch steps of the doublewide. It was late afternoon and the sun was already close to the mountain crest. They sat there talking until we got out of Sarah’s truck. I let the pup out of his run, and Burt introduced us all around. The lieutenant’s name was Gustafson. He was from the base Provost Marshal’s Office and said he had been sent to get some clue as to what the hell had just happened, specifically if the housing unit might be a repeat target. We went up the steps into Sarah and Kip’s living room and I rustled up some coffee while the guy questioned Sarah about the Kip–Jedediah Boone connection. With a heads-up from Fuchs, they’d ID-ed Kip as a discharged Marine and were hoping he wasn’t organizing some rampage against the Corps. Boone had a prison sheet but no military record, so Sarah’s story of him working for Kip as some sort of drug partner eased the lieutenant’s mind a bit, although it shouldn’t have.
“Jedediah knew Tommy was staying with his Mom at Sergeant Kelly’s,” Sarah said. “The FBI and my department think the propane explosion was to kill Sergeant Smith here.”
“We never considered off-base housing as needing much in the way of security,” the lieutenant said. “It’s safe to say that because of this mess, we’ll have to restrict access in the future. A guard shack, check-in protocols, and so forth.” Lieutenant Gustafson finished his coffee and stood up. “Pretty big repercussions,” he said, “for what seems to be a domestic spat gone viral. I imagine this Kevin Ingles is to hell and gone by now.”
I’d been playing with the pup and studying the photographs on the wall behind where they all sat, only half-listening until he said that. Burt stood up then. He was wearing the glasses with one lens missing. That, plus being pissed, made him look semi-deranged. I kind of thought that old Burt was capable of giving a superior officer a right to the jaw—even one who was bigger than he was, and I thought I just might get to see it right there in the living room.
“Actually, Lieutenant, Isringhausen or Ingles or whatever you want to call him was standing right where you’re standing now just a couple of hours ago.” I pointed at the wall of photos. Two of them were missing. “Old Sam Elliott and Buck Brannaman have left the building.”
Sarah got up and looked at the wall.
“Oh god,” she said. “He came back. He was just here.”
Kip poking around the ranch while the country was crawling with law looking for him spooked her all over again. The lieutenant listened to her explain about Kip and his pictures and his goofy celebrity thing, and looked kind of bored. Then he said his good-byes and left fast. Sarah asked Burt not to go.
“You think he took those photos just to mess with us?” she said.
“Yeah, but mostly I think he just wants to be the star-struck punk in those pictures and couldn’t bear to leave ’em.”
“Maybe he can hang them in his cell at San Quentin,” Burt said.
“What it does mean is that he’s done with all this. The whole life-on-the-ranch business. He’s taken his souvenirs and moved on.”
Sarah looked at me. She was quiet. She knew she was the last souvenir.
Chapter Fifteen
Sarah turned to Burt. “You look thrashed,” she said. “Where are you going to stay?”
“They got a place for me at the base,” he said. “I
t’s awful small, though, and probably not the best for Debbie to recuperate in.”
“If it’s okay with the Corps, you two can stay here in the doublewide as long as you like,” Sarah said. “It’ll be months before your apartment’s livable. And I’m never going to spend another night in this place.”
Burt looked over to me to see what I’d say.
“The more of us here, the less chance that bastard will risk coming around. What d’you think, Burt?”
“Well, thanks then,” he said.
“Good,” Sarah said. She got up and just stood there looking at the empty places on the wall where the pictures had been. Then she went to the kitchen and brought back ice and glasses and built us some drinks with the Maker’s Mark. “Let’s kill us some of the bastard’s whiskey.”
We sat there quiet for a while, just too numb to talk and letting the bourbon numb us more.
She and I were back around the table at the sheriff’s office the next morning, but without Fuchs.
“I don’t buy the Fed’s idea that a guy would set his own fifty K truck on fire,” Mitch said. “Guys don’t work that hard for a nice truck just to walk away from it.”
“He didn’t work hard for nothing,” Jack Harney said. “He just made stuff up about being this great entrepreneur, and we all believed him because he had money and picked up the tab. I’ll miss lunches with him at the JT, and that’s a fact.”
Sarah handed Mitch a sheet she’d printed out.
“There used to be a Kip Isringhausen from Kingsburg outside of Fresno,” she said. “He was a saddle bronc rider in the forties and a rodeo pal of Slim Pickens. He was in the Fifth Marine Regiment and died at Inchon. A place called Red Beach.”
“When the hell was that?” Mitch said.
“1950.” I took the sheet from Mitch and studied it quick. “This guy was everything the fake Kip wanted to be. Good cowboy, Marine war hero, local celeb.”
“Fresno Rotary had a little tribute display case of Isringhausen’s stuff at a Kingsburg Swedish bakery,” Sarah said. “It was broken into a couple of years ago and a lot of things were taken, including posthumous medals and the wallet with his driver’s license and Social Security card that was sent to his folks after he died. That’s the Social that Kip uses now.”
Fuchs came in then, wearing a suit like he’d been parlaying with his bosses. He stood there a minute and watched Mitch talk.
“Okay, then,” Mitch said, “why would a guy work so hard to become somebody else, then throw that new life away?” He looked Sarah up and down. “Kip had a sweet deal going.”
“Even if he had big income from the pot farm, that water money of Dave’s woulda been real tempting.”
“I see where Tommy’s going with this,” Jack said. “Major fraud. Steal a big chunk of cash all at once.”
“But he knew it’d have to be one quick strike—ruin Dave’s life, then vamoose. So he was already set to leave the ranch life behind way before things went south for him.”
“The wild card was Sarah,” Fuchs said. “You moving out set him off. Then your dad bailing on the water sale because you moved out made him nuts.”
“And then the old boyfriend here showed up,” Mitch said.
“You called it the perfect storm,” Sarah said to Fuchs.
“The perfect shit-storm, pard,” Jack said. He laughed and gave me a whack on the shoulder.
“So don’t go looking at this as somebody who risks his nice normal life. Normal life ain’t what this guy wants.”
“Well, you’d be the big expert on that normal life stuff, huh, Tommy,” Mitch said.
Fuchs sat down then and talked about DNA testing on the goop we’d found at False Spring being a match for Hoyt, not Dave, so the only evidence of Dave at the pot farm was his burned truck. I saw Sarah looking at Fuchs the way women sometimes look at a guy in a nice suit.
Fuchs told us how armor-piercing incendiary tracer rounds could penetrate and ignite a propane tank, and Jack said where a guy like Jedediah might have secured some. Fuchs said his FBI cyber team was going over Kip’s jobs-for-veterans website and told Mitch that there was now an official link between the Dave and Hoyt cases, but not the attack on the housing unit, though his department was trying to tie it all together for him. He said Reno and Sacramento TV stations had been given information and photos of Kip to warn the public. All this talk took time. After a while, even the most gruesome stuff gets boring.
“Whether you got concrete evidence against Kip or not, which you sure don’t yet,” Mitch said, “that old boy could be in LA or San Fran by now.”
“Maybe,” Fuchs said. “But he doesn’t seem in any hurry to vanish.”
Then Sarah told Fuchs that Kip had been in the doublewide the morning before while the Marine housing was still burning.
“Did you know he was here just a couple of hours ago?” Fuchs said.
“Where?” Sarah said.
“Here—Piute Meadows. He was buying ammo in the sporting goods store just a block from where we’re sitting.” He checked his notes. “The store owner’s niece, Conchetta de la Huerta, sold him two boxes of twelve gauge shells and one box of nine millimeters about eight fifteen this morning.”
“Nickel-jacketed rounds, I suppose.”
“Yeah, Tommy,” he said. “Nickel-jacketed. Exactly.”
“This is nuts,” Mitch said. “Missing pictures and snarky notes aren’t evidence, and it’s just crazy that Kip would want to harm Dave. They were pals. I bet if we get word to him he’ll come in and clear all this up.”
“He’s way past that. He’s thrown away the scabbard for sure, now.”
“What the hell does that mean, Tommy?” Mitch said.
“Means he plans to fight to the death.”
“Whose death?” he said.
“Everybody’s.”
I drove us out to Becky and Dan’s when we were done. They were cooking dinner for us.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” Sarah said. “We go on, day after day, doing our best to get back to normal life, to heal little bit by little bit, and every time we do this psycho pops up to taunt us? Is this how we’re going to live?”
We pulled into Becky’s yard. Harvey was walking up from the barn wearing irrigating boots and splattered with mud. He waved at us, and I pulled up and parked by the kitchen door.
“Maybe we’re going about this catching Kip business all wrong.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” Sarah said.
We walked up around the house following Harvey. Dan was barbequing tri-tip in a brick pit over chunks of oak. Becky had ice and Jack Daniel’s on a table under the aspen and beer and soda iced in a bucket. We sat and talked while Dan cooked. Becky was old-school, so we ate inside on good plates with good wine in the old dining room. She tried to keep it light, asking about Dave’s desert permit—when it needed to be gathered and if Sarah and I would need their help. I noticed Sarah smile a bit bashful when Becky lumped her and me together like that.
“Haven’t given it a thought for the last week,” Sarah said.
“Well, no reason you should, hon,” Becky said. “How’s the beef? My dad used to bring oak logs up from around Sonora in his horse trailer because my mom loved that old California barbeque taste. Can you tell the difference?”
I’d been gone from these folks so long I purely forgot that once upon a time this was exactly how I wanted to live my life.
I walked outside with Harvey after dinner to shoot the breeze while he had a smoke. We sat on the kitchen steps enjoying the evening. He fired up a Winston and I checked my phone. I saw I had a text from Captain Cruz that said, Trouble, Lover? Been a bad boy? The whole base is talking, check it out. Then she pointed me to Kip’s jobs-for-vets website. Harvey stared off across the barnyard talking about his early days as a packer. I stared at my phone saying, “Yeah” or “Wow” or “Uh-huh” while he told about leading a string of mules across a glacier. I was skimming a sort of tirade from Kip that was all about
me. It was rambley and crazy. I couldn’t stand to finish it, but I got pretty close.
Kip posted about how I got my best friend Lester killed two years before because I was too worried about what folks would think of me. How I’d taken advantage of Sarah’s sadness to get her in the sack. How I felt I could just shoot anybody who crossed me. And how acting on my damned pride had made Lester a target for some pretty bad characters. There was a lot of stuff Kip could have only heard from Sarah, and in its way it all had some truth. He ended with a crazy story saying he was in Oregon on business and was just as sorry as could be that Dave had vanished. He said he would contact the authorities when he got back south, and, OJ-style, he’d help solve that tragic mystery. He said the only person who had something to gain from tearing his marriage and Dave’s family apart was a guy named Tommy Smith. Then he said that in a just world someone would put a bullet in my brain, as combat had made me too violent to live among decent folks. I guess I actually read more than I wanted to. Anybody checking on that site to see about employment for veterans would be surprised as hell.
“You look shook,” Harvey said.
“Lotta crazy people in the world.”
“Think I oughtta get myself one of them smart phones?”
“Go for it, Harv.”
“You’re shittin’ me, youngster,” he said. “I know you.”
I saw I had another text—this one from Fuchs. He told me to check out the same website and get back to him. I told Sarah about it as we drove out Becky’s lane. Sarah read it, and I thought she was going to cry. I reached over and took her hand.
“Becky’s right.”
“About what?” she said.
“You should go out to your permit. Gather your cows and calves before the deadline.”
“I can get an extension,” she said. “I know folks who have.” I could tell it was the last thing she wanted to talk about, much less do. We hit the Reno Highway at the edge of town, and I turned right, not left toward the ranch.