Snake in the Glass

by Sarah Atwell

  “We’ll see. You go get some good work done.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I headed for the studio; it felt as though I hadn’t been there in weeks, rather than only two days. Blessed peace, at last. I turned on one of the glory holes and went over to the cabinet to contemplate my frit and wait for inspiration. What color was today? A lot brighter than yesterday, no question. What would Cam have seen, under the influence? Maybe he could help me recreate his visions in glass—plenty of swirls and pretty colors. That could work. I picked up a warmed blowpipe and opened the furnace for my first gather. I had been experimenting with a new technique that involved fusing individual rods of different colors into a single long one, then using segments of the rod to blow out into individual pieces. The end result—when it worked—was a wonderful swirl of rainbow colors. Perfect for Cam’s recent psychedelic experience.

  Three hours later I closed the annealer door on a nice clutch of glassworks. I realized that I’d missed lunch, and I was starving. I could see Nessa in the shop and assumed that Allison was at lunch.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked as I closed the studio door behind me.

  “I have, and Allison’s getting her own lunch now. I’d have brought you a sandwich, but I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

  “That’s fine. I was finally back in my rhythm, and I got a lot done. I’ll run out now and get something.”

  Fifteen minutes later I returned to the shop with a bulging plastic bag filled with tasty stuff. Allison hadn’t returned yet, and Nessa had busied herself by the register while a lone customer browsed the shelves. “I’m back,” I said, stating the obvious. “I think I’ll go into the office and eat.”

  “Oh, Em, before you go,” Nessa said, beckoning to me from behind the counter.

  Curious, I walked around the counter and put my head close to hers. “What’s up?” I said in a low voice.

  “I’m not really sure,” she replied in the same tone. She indicated the customer with the tiniest of nods. “The lady came in a few minutes ago, and she’s been kind of drifting around since, looking, but I don’t think she’s really interested in the glass, if you know what I mean.”

  I tried to check out the woman without being obvious. Middle height, close to my age, long dark hair, casually but nicely dressed in pants and a pressed shirt. Something about her said “not a tourist,” but that was about all I could tell. Except that she seemed nervous: she kept looking around the room, now and then casting a sidelong glance toward us. I had to admit we looked a bit suspicious ourselves, huddled behind the counter, whispering.

  I agreed with Nessa’s feeling she hadn’t come here to buy art. Was she casing the joint? But that was absurd, because it wasn’t easy to walk out with a batch of glass items—they’re both heavy and fragile. We never had much money in the register, and most of our buyers paid by credit card anyway. There were plenty of other stores around here that had better pickings for a burglary. So what was she doing here?

  I crossed the room toward her. “Hi, I’m Em Dowell, the glassmaker. Did you have questions about any piece in particular?”

  “Oh, no, no. I’m just looking. You have some lovely work here.”

  “Thank you. Do you own any glass pieces?”

  “Not art pieces, no. But I’ve walked by your shop before, and I was in the neighborhood and had a few moments to spare, so I thought I’d stop in and take a look.”

  She seemed sincere enough, and I’d learned over time that some people don’t like to be crowded when they look at art. “Then I’ll let you enjoy the pieces at your own speed. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  “Thank you,” she replied politely, moving away as quickly as courtesy permitted. Definitely a nervous lady.

  She must have sensed my eyes on her, because after a few more minutes she grabbed a piece off the shelf, almost at random, then approached the register. “I’ll take this,” she said curtly.

  It was a medium-size bowl in one of my favorite techniques—a swirl of multiple colors, with a line of aventurine glass that added a subtle sparkle. “Oh, I’m glad you like that—it’s an interesting pattern, don’t you think?”

  “Yes. Nice.” She handed me a credit card, and I processed the sale while Nessa carefully swathed the piece in bubbled plastic. She put the wrapped object in a box, and the box in a bag, just as I handed the woman her credit card and charge slip. Out of habit, I looked at the name on the credit card: Beverly Harrison. That didn’t ring any bells. When her hands were free, I handed her the bag.

  “I hope you enjoy it. And please come back again.”

  The woman left without a further word, and I turned to Nessa. “What was going on with her?”

  “She seemed so fidgety. I was surprised when she actually bought something.”

  Before I could snag my lunch and disappear to my hidey-hole to eat it, Matt and Cam came around the corner and let themselves in.

  “Hi, guys,” I greeted them. “Everything go all right?”

  “As well as could be expected, all things considered,” Matt said. “Unfortunately Cam couldn’t contribute very much, which didn’t make anyone happy.”

  “I’m sorry, Matt,” Cam protested. “How many times do I have to tell you that? I just can’t remember.”

  “And how many times do I have to tell you that I understand? It’s just frustrating that you’re the best lead we’ve got at the moment, but there still isn’t much to work with. It’s not your fault, Cam, and thanks for your help. Em, I’ll talk to you later. Oh, hang on—we need to switch cars again.”

  We exchanged keys, and Matt left. I gave Cam a nudge. “Cam, you have any plans?”

  He looked at his watch. “I suppose I should go talk to the people at SDE and explain what’s been going on—at least, as much as I know. Then I’ve got to start looking for a place to live.”

  “Where’s SDE based?”

  “They’ve got a building on the south side of town. Maybe I’ll just drive around that end of town and see what the neighborhoods look like.”

  “Small problem—your car’s still at the police lot, isn’t it? But you can take mine.” I crossed the room and gave him yet another hug. “Be careful, will you? The last time you went anywhere, you disappeared for a week,” I said into his chest. “You will be back for dinner, right?”

  “Unless I get kidnapped again,” he said, struggling to maintain a straight face.

  I swatted him. “Don’t even joke about that.” I handed him my car keys. “Now, drive safely, and carry a clean hanky.”

  “Thanks, Em. See you later.”

  “I should hope so.”

  Chapter 27

  The Romans wore rings set with stones on every finger and changed them with the seasons.

  After yet another slow day, we closed up the shop at six. Nessa and Allison followed me upstairs, and while they gushed over the dogs, I ordered several assorted pizzas.

  Cam was next to arrive.

  “Did you sort everything out at work?” I asked. “Were they worried when you didn’t show up?”

  “Not really. It’s a pretty informal group.”

  “Well, they’re keeping you humble if they didn’t even miss you. I’ve ordered pizza. Can you run out and get some beer and whatever anyone else wants to drink?”

  “No problem. Allison, you want to come?”

  “I do,” she replied promptly, holding out her hand. Cam held it all the way to the door and probably would have kept on holding it except that it was a little difficult to go down the stairs that way.

  They passed Frank on his way in. He looked pleased with himself and the world, but then, he usually did. He brightened noticeably when he saw Nessa. “Nessa, my dear, I wondered where you’d hidden yourself.”

  “I haven’t gone far, Frank,” she replied placidly.

  “Frank, you want to stick around for dinner?” I asked. “Because I’m hoping we can pool the bits and pieces of information we have and see where we are.”
r />   “Delighted, and I may have a few nuggets of my own to share.”

  Matt appeared next, unannounced but somehow not unexpected. “Hi,” I greeted him. “Pull up a chair. Dinner’s on its way. Oh, before I offer you a beer, I should ask, is this business?”

  “Sort of. Let me get business out of the way, and then I’ll think about that beer. Is Cam here?”

  “He was—he will be. I sent him out to get the aforesaid beer. Allison went along.”

  “How’s he doing?” Matt asked.

  “Seems fine to me. I think Allison agrees.”

  “Good. I’ve got some stuff I want him to look at.”

  Cam, Allison, and the pizza all arrived together, and we busied ourselves for a few minutes with distributing and ingesting food and drink. Once everyone had managed to consume a slice or two, I judged we were ready to get down to business.

  “Okay, everybody,” I began. “Looking at the brain-power around this table, we should be able to work out who drugged Cam and who killed Alex in no time, right? Matt, why don’t you start? You said you wanted Cam to look at something?”

  Matt carefully wiped the pizza grease off his hands with a paper napkin while I moved used plates and glasses out of the way. He picked up a large manila envelope he had brought with him and pulled out a stack of papers. “We had no problem with Alex’s disk— it wasn’t protected. And we didn’t find much interesting stuff on it. Mostly property records, deeds, expense reports, that kind of thing. It’s probably as innocent as it looks—Alex thought Denis should have a full copy of all the business information, all on one disk, but I don’t think it was because he expected to die. So no great Sherlock Holmes surprise.”

  “What is it you want from me?” Cam asked. “I don’t know much about the business side of what Alex and Denis were doing.”

  “It’s not that. There are some pictures of rock formations that were included, and I thought I’d run them by you to see if they look like what you saw on the property where the RV was parked. I’d like to know if the RV was parked at the site the stones came from, or if they’re from somewhere else. These were the only landscape shots on the disk, so Alex must have thought they were important. Frank, you can take a look too—you’ve been out there.”

  “Happy to help, Matt,” Frank replied.

  Cam held out a hand for the photos, and Matt passed them to him. “You know I’m not a geologist,” he said absently as he studied each image.

  “Did you walk the property?” Matt asked.

  “Yes, a few times, mostly early in the morning. That RV could get a little claustrophobic, not to mention hot, even at this time of year, and I needed air now and then. It was kind of fun, trying to match up what I was seeing to the data I had. Not easy. Hang on . . .” Cam was staring at one of the photos. “Who’s this?”

  Matt peered at the picture. “I don’t know. Do you recognize him?”

  I leaned closer and saw a man standing off to one side in the picture. It looked as though he didn’t realize he was being photographed, and only part of his face was visible.

  Cam said hesitantly, “I think he’s the one who picked me up at the RV.”

  “Do you recognize the rocks there?”

  “I think so. It’s a distinctive formation about a mile west of the RV, where I thought there’s a good chance there are gems. See that sort of double hump?” He pointed to a rock formation.

  “Frank, will you take a look?” Matt pushed the picture across the table toward him.

  “Sure, mate.” Frank reached for the picture and spun it around to look. “You’ve got a good eye, Cam. That formation looks right to me.”

  “Wait a minute,” I interrupted, dragging the photo back to my side of the table. “Frank, isn’t that the guy from the casino? And the Gem Show?”

  Frank took the photo back. “Good on you too, Em—I think you’re right.”

  Matt swiveled between us. “Fill me in. You know this guy?”

  “No,” I said, “but we’ve seen him twice now—once at the Gem Show, at a booth talking with the guys who run the reservation peridot business, and again at the casino near the reservation. I think he’s a bartender at the casino.”

  “You wouldn’t have a name, would you?” Matt asked us. He directed the same question to Cam, who shook his head ruefully.

  “We didn’t actually talk to him either time,” I responded, “but you can find him easily enough, right?”

  “Sure,” Matt said absently. Then he straightened up. “But let’s go with what we know, for the moment. I think we can assume that Alex knew the guy. This is part of a series of pictures, and they look like they were taken openly, carefully framed and all that, like he was documenting the rock formations. So as a working assumption, he could be Alex’s behind-the-scenes buyer. I’ll have to run the photo by Denis and see if he recognizes him.”

  “Well, that’s progress,” I said. “We’ve confirmed that there’s somebody else involved, and we’ve got most of a face for Cam’s kidnapper, and we know you can identify him and probably track him down.” When Matt didn’t volunteer any additional information, I addressed the rest of the group. “Anybody else have any ideas?”

  Frank looked as though he had swallowed a particularly tasty canary. “I might.” He paused until all eyes at the table turned to him. “A couple of things. First, I did some nosing around, talking to gem people I know, asking what the word on the street was and whether anybody was talking about something new coming along. Started with Miranda and Stewart, and they asked a friend, and so on. They came up with a name this morning, and then I had to find the guy. He admitted that he had a line on something new, but he thought it might not pan out ’cause he hadn’t heard from the seller. He’s headed back to Madagascar as soon as the show ends.”

  “You have his name, and where we can find him?” Matt asked.

  “I do. He’s got no problem with talking to you, as long as he makes his plane. He saw a business opportunity, but he’s got a lot of irons in the fire and he won’t be too upset if this particular deal falls through. And you may not want to hear it, but he’s got himself a pretty good alibi. He was out taking a look at the desert and tangled with a tarantula—he was sick as a dog for a couple of days and has the medical bills to prove it.”

  “Where’d he find a tarantula at this time of year?” Even I knew they weren’t active in February.

  “Asked a friend to show him one. Anyway, it seems kind of unlikely that this bloke was running around threatening anybody, much less killing someone.”

  Damn—there went one of our favorite scenarios, the unknown buyer of the peridot as bad guy. “You said you had found out more than one thing, Frank?”

  “Little thing, maybe. I’ve told you before about how peridot is mined, where you find it, and all that. But there’s more. Only members of that particular Apache tribe, and a few individual families that are descendants, are allowed to mine on the reservation.” Frank reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I got you a list of those people.”

  “Let me see if I understand this,” I said. “The San Carlos Apaches have a pretty tight hold on the flow of peridot, right? That guy we talked to at the Gem Show said as much, although he put a positive spin on it. Are you thinking that one of the people or families on the list thought that maybe Alex and Denis could be a threat if they came up with a significant source of gems off reservation?”

  “It’s possible,” Frank replied.

  “Well, it is far-fetched, but it could be a motive, right, Matt? And oh . . .”

  Matt sighed. “What, Em?”

  “The use of mescaline would fit, wouldn’t it?”

  “Good thought, although I’d really rather not go there. But, yes, right here in our little home town there’s the Peyote Way Church of God, which worships peyote, and one of the founders’ father came from the San Carlos Reservation. So you could say there’s a link, although there are plenty of non-Indians who use peyote, n
ot quite legally.” He slumped in his chair. “Oh hell—you know how complicated it would be to get at someone down on the reservation, much less arrest or prosecute him? Where do you want me to start?”

  I broke in before he could launch into a lecture on the history of Arizona. “Matt, let’s take the simplest case. Supposed someone from the reservation killed Alex to protect the Indian peridot industry and dumped his body in Pima County, and we have reasonable proof. What happens then?”

  “Depends on how friendly the San Carlos Apache tribal police and court are feeling. Best case? The Pima County sheriff could arrest him and the case would end up in the federal court system, since murder or man-slaughter is a major crime. But if the tribe wanted to protect the guy, they could close ranks and we’d have a heck of a time prying him loose.”

  We all fell silent, trying to work through the twists and turns of this new information.

  I was startled by the sound of Nessa’s voice. Seated next to Frank, she had been scanning the list he had laid on the table. “Em, look at this.” She pointed to one name.

  I pulled the list toward me and looked. “What? Oh, I see. Oh hell.”

  “I don’t want to ask,” Matt groaned.

  “Well, if you thought this was complicated before . . . There was a woman in the shop today. Nessa and I both thought she looked kind of nervous. In the end, she bought a bowl and left. She charged it, and I saw the name on the card—Beverly Harrison. Which is also on this list. Good catch, Nessa.”

  “Describe her,” Cam said abruptly.

  “Medium height, dark hair, nicely dressed but not fancy,” I said. “Kind of twitchy. Why?”

  “Could she have been Apache?” Matt asked.

  I thought. “Maybe. I wouldn’t say no.”

  “I can probably pull up her driver’s license and run it by Cam. You said there was a woman involved, right?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Cam said slowly. “But I won’t promise I’d recognize her, especially not from a DMV photo. If there were some way of meeting her face-to-face, maybe. But why would she come by the shop? That doesn’t make sense.”