Shadow Canyon

by Vickie McKeehan

  “It certainly wasn’t me.”

  “So you’re saying Louise never hired you to defend Mallory? Not ever?”

  “That’s right. She took her business out of town to Humboldt.”

  Gemma took a seat. “Okay. So there’s no attorney-client privilege at play here?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Then tell me everything you’ve heard or suspected about those two women that doesn’t add up.”

  They stopped to compare notes at the end of the day sitting around the conference table at the police station. It was a room CWPD used sparingly because they rarely had a reason to hold formal meetings. Business was usually conducted in one of two small interview rooms or lockup, which consisted of two eight by eight jail cells, or Lando’s office.

  When it came time for food, everyone dived for the burgers and chicken sandwiches Lydia had dropped off for dinner.

  Eager to share what she’d discovered, Gemma sat on her news until after everyone had finished eating. “Since Alex Kedderson is the only lawyer in town, I wanted his opinion on how Louise handled Mallory’s legal issues. He told me that whenever Mallory got into trouble, which was often, Louise would always hire a lawyer out of town, specifically she’d head to Humboldt to have a guy named Talmadge represent Mallory. Not once did she ever pay Kedderson a retainer fee to do anything for her daughter.”

  “Which means what?” Lando asked.

  “It might mean that there was something Louise didn’t want the local attorney to know about, something she wanted to stay in the background and not for local consumption. Kedderson also said Mallory had been in trouble so much that Louise’s legal fees had to be in the neighborhood of around $250,000 due to the pricey attorney she hired. According to Alex, Talmadge doesn’t come cheap. My point is, where does your dispatcher, who makes no more than fifty-five grand a year, come by that kind of money?”

  “Not from the Coyote Wells Police Department,” Jimmy grunted.

  “Which is my point. Something’s not right here, Lando. It’s not adding up. Instead of speculating about it, we have confirmation that Louise could afford a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees. Do you know what that kind of legal trouble would do to anyone else in this town? They’d go bankrupt. Does Louise look broke to you?”

  Lianne interrupted, “Since her sister and her daughter carry pricey Fendi bags around, it’s a valid question. Where did Louise come by that kind of money?”

  Gemma went on, “Another question. Why did Louise opt to sit behind a desk instead of continuing her stellar career as a patrol officer?”

  “Opt? That’s a funny choice of wording. Reiner demoted her three years before I came on board. The story goes that she messed up some arrest and Reiner relegated her to a desk. Instead of it being temporary, he stuck her on dispatch permanently.”

  Payce seemed to know more. “It was the obvious place to put her. Louise could do less damage working dispatch than any other area in the department.”

  Lando nodded. “And since I can’t locate her personnel file, there’s no way of knowing the whole story.”

  “What not just ask Reiner directly?”

  Lando rolled his eyes. “I tried that a week ago when I couldn’t find the file. I’m not exactly Reiner’s favorite person right now because of the Montalvo case. I am still actively trying to nail him for obstructing justice when he let Sandy’s murder slide.”

  Zeb dug into the apple pie Leia had baked that morning. “Need I remind you guys that the clock is ticking. Whatever we do, we need to do it fast. I discovered a contact who knows someone in Children’s Services in Arizona. She’s looking into putting me in touch with the person in charge of the Borelli kids. If we’re lucky maybe we can find a family or two that fostered the girls.”

  “Well, I’ve decided to go through Gram’s journals and pick up where I left off. I want to see what she has to say about the entire year of 1984 and not what happened during the summer months. Unfortunately, I haven’t even finished half of them yet. None are in what I’d call chronological order. It might be time consuming, but I think it’s worth a shot, especially if I can find anything in there about the heist. On any given day Gram could be pretty detailed. I could get lucky and she could describe something that didn’t appear in the news reports.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Luke said, eyeing the pie. “Old-timers would be the best source of information during that time.”

  Lydia playfully swatted the back of her son’s head. “Watch who you call an old-timer. What I remember the most about the robbery is how the town swarmed with FBI agents. They hovered around here like sand flies convinced that the guilty parties came from the Rez. Of course, they had no proof of that whatsoever, but it didn’t keep them from making silly accusations. After three months not one of them cracked the case. They finally packed up and left sometime in the fall.”

  “But no matter how the sand flies tried, they couldn’t pin it on anyone on the Rez,” Leia pointed out. “Major point for us.”

  Lydia nodded toward her daughter. “It wasn’t for lack of tunnel vision. They must’ve interviewed four hundred people out there, even going so far as roughing some up. It was disappointing that all those federal agents went home without finding a suspect or the money.”

  “Because they were looking in the wrong place,” Gemma offered.

  Jimmy picked up his Styrofoam trash and stood up. “All the more reason to think the killers high-tailed it out of town. Think about it. Why would they stick around a place as small as Coyote Wells? Wouldn’t they stick out like a sore thumb?”

  Gemma’s eyes widened as she reached for Lando’s hand. “Not if the thieves had established themselves here months before the heist took place.”

  Lando kicked back in his chair. “Like Louise and Aaron Barkley. Zeb, look up the general time frame when Aaron first made his presence known in town.”

  Zeb opened his laptop back up and began hitting keys. A few moments went by before he announced, “January 1984 Aaron rents an apartment above the coffee shop on Water Street with Lindsay Bishop on the lease. He turns on utilities that same month in his name and the couple get married three months later.”

  “And by August she’s dead,” Luke added. “When exactly does Louise show up?”

  Zeb’s keystrokes increased as he hit the same websites as before. “Same month. Same year. Different apartment building on Harbor View. She opted for the ocean view.”

  “That’s Dale’s complex,” Jimmy uttered.

  Lando ran a hand through his hair. “The important thing here is Aaron, Lindsay, and Louise all decide to move to Coyote Wells at the same time. They arrive in town and immediately become part of the scene.”

  “Louise made ends meet by doing odd jobs around town,” Lydia provided. “So did Bishop and Barkley.”

  “You remember that?” Lando asked.

  “It was before Louise joined the force. In 1984 Coyote Wells was just a little wide spot in the road with barely a thousand people living here. Newcomers stood out. Same with Lindsay and Aaron Barkley. Rima’s the one who jogged my memory. Thirty-four years is a long time. I do recall something odd about Aaron, though. One day he showed up driving a brand-new pickup truck---a shiny red one. For a man who toiled at low-paying jobs since coming here, it was clear he’d come into some money. Rumors said it was due to a win at the casino.”

  “But you don’t think so?” Luke proffered.

  “No. At the time they hung out with a lot of shady characters who came in and out of town from Nevada. Their cars had Nevada plates.”

  Lando and Gemma traded looks. “Maybe that’s where we need to start digging deeper and work forward. If Louise spent time in Reno maybe the others did, too.”

  While the others worked the Reno angle, Gemma headed to Paloma’s house where she spent two hours picking her grandmother’s brain for anything that happened out of the ordinary during the summer of 1984.

  Drinking a cup of hibisc
us tea she didn’t need or really want, she sat at Paloma’s kitchen table prodding and poking her way through the weeks leading up to the heist.

  “Oh, I remember the robbery very vividly,” Paloma said. “But what hurt the most was how it scarred the community for months afterward. The FBI agents left after a few weeks, but the residents were the ones who suffered. The aftermath was almost as bad as the event itself. Trust became an issue. Neighbors wondered if it was one of our own. Several talked about moving away. That’s how scared and mistrusting we were of each other. But the timeframe was more like September rather than the middle of summer. Because in the fall, that’s when things started to unravel for real and get even stranger than before.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t during those final days of August that things got weird?”

  “Positive. I was mayor back then and I can tell you for certain Reiner Caulfield had his hands full. It seemed every other week someone died and not in the usual manner. He investigated a string of inexplicable deaths that occurred that fall and into spring.”

  “And these were in addition to the car accidents over the summer and the death of the young girl found dead on the beach?”

  Paloma nodded. “Hank’s car accident seemed to set everything in motion. We just didn’t know it at the time. But by that fall, Reiner’s office was still struggling to keep up. Like the drowning he worked around Labor Day, and the next month, the construction worker who was electrocuted on the job. Then there was a woman down the street killed in a house fire. And then another resident was hit by a train and dragged hundreds of feet to his death. There for a while it got so bad I started to think we were the unluckiest small town in the county. Even Marissa and Jean-Luc started to hint about moving down to L.A. to live near a cousin.”

  “What stopped them?”

  “I imagine it was their stubborn streak. They had one, you know. Those two were determined to stick it out no matter what. And when Michael died a year later, it was your grandmother who got me through those darkest days. So you see, I’m forever grateful she didn’t decide to pick up and leave.”

  Later, Gemma took Paloma’s information, her general dates and times of the baffling deaths, and headed back to the library for confirmation. She arrived just as Elnora was about to lock up for the night. Instead of leaving without answers, Gemma decided to test the librarian’s memory.

  While walking Elnora to her car, Gemma nudged the woman into a conversation about the year of the heist.

  “I was glad to put that year behind us,” Elnora admitted. “People kept dying. We were all on edge, probably because none of us knew who might be next. Plus, we weren’t sure who was responsible for the armored car deaths. Was it our neighbor who shopped at the market with us or was it someone who sat across us in church? You see how easily it was to suspect one another if we let our imaginations run wild with possibilities.”

  “I do. But was there anything that stood out that made you question anyone specifically?”

  “Well, there was that thing that happened out at Shadow Canyon the weekend after the robbery.”

  “What thing?”

  “My first husband, Dan, was quite the ornithologist. That’s the study of birds, you know. Anyway, we used to go birdwatching every weekend up on the ridge above Shadow Canyon. You could find red-tailed hawk there, or study the black-headed Grosbeak, or watch California quail in their natural habitat. I loved Dan, I did, but sometimes that man could be such a blowhard when it came to his birds.”

  To get her back on track, Gemma had to push her to get to the point. “What did you see that caused you to think someone you knew could be involved in the heist?”

  “Oh, that. The Saturday after the robbery, we were camping out near that fork in the river. It was our favorite spot. But that morning, through our binoculars, we saw two people, a man and a woman, dragging bags out of the bed of a red pickup truck and hauling them into that nearby cave. You know the one, where all the bats are.”

  “I’m familiar with it, yes.”

  “Well, Dan became livid that they were disturbing the entire colony, so much that he wanted to charge down there and confront them. I talked him out of it.”

  “Did you report what you saw?”

  “Of course. We packed up that very morning and drove back into town. We went straight to Reiner Caulfield and told him what we’d seen.”

  “But nothing happened?”

  “He took our report and said he’d check it out. A couple of days later Reiner showed up at the library and told me that the people at the cave had been from the U.S. Forest Service. They were there studying the bats. I told him, then and there, they didn’t look like any Forest Service personnel I’d ever seen.”

  “How did he take that?”

  “He assured me I was wrong and told me he had more important things to worry about, so I left it at that.”

  “Figures,” Gemma muttered. “It’s a wonder anything ever got done with Caulfield at the helm.”

  22

  “That’s the second time someone mentioned a red pickup,” Gemma pointed out to Lando as they got ready for bed. “Your mother mentioned Aaron Barkley drove a shiny red one.”

  But Lando was focused on Reiner’s role in not reporting the incident to the federal agents. “I wonder if Reiner got paid off to look the other way? Could I somehow tie him to this whole thing after all? Maybe this is the very thing that could take him down.”

  “I know you want Reiner, but you’re overlooking an important part of what Elnora said. She saw a man and a woman at the cave. What if one of the masked assailants was a female? What if they were not all men?”

  They batted that theory around until the wee hours of the night.

  Sleep had come in spurts for them both, so Gemma got up as quietly as possible only to look over and see that Lando was wide awake.

  “Seriously, you can’t sleep either?”

  “I keep wondering how they pulled it off without anyone spilling what they knew over the years.”

  She sat down on his side of the bed. “A million bucks is a lot of incentive for remaining quiet.”

  “Unless they found that permanent silence was a much better option.”

  “You think they murdered their co-conspirators?”

  “Why not? It would definitely make the most sense. Anyone who might feel guilty down the road would never be able to come clean if they were dead. Where were you going just now?”

  “Out to the solarium. I thought I might do a little late-night reading.” She scooted closer. “I just want this over with. If it means another sleepless night, then that’s what I’ll do. Remind me again where everyone slept tonight.”

  “Jimmy and Payce went home to their respective partners. I believe Zeb and Leia left the station somewhere around eleven to fall into their own beds, followed by Luke and Lianne, who headed to her house where they no doubt fell into bed as exhausted as everyone else.”

  “Nothing worse than grunt work to beat down your volunteers. So we’re probably the only ones wide awake at three in the morning.”

  “Other than Rufus. The dog seems as restless as we are.” He pulled her closer, nibbling her neck. “You know what would get my mind off all this?”

  She angled her body closer to give him better access. “I can’t imagine.”

  He ran his hands down her body, beginning to show her, covering her mouth.

  “I’m suddenly getting this erotic vision.”

  “Then I must be doing something right.”

  “Oh, yeah. Keep that up. Right there. Don’t stop.”

  They didn’t stop, and after making love, Lando fell into a deep sleep. But the adrenaline had given her a second wind.

  She grabbed a robe and went out to gather up her grandmother’s journals.

  That’s where Lando found her at seven-thirty, slumped in a comfy leather chair, sound asleep. He decided to leave her there. But when he turned around to tiptoe out, the old floor creaked.
r />   Stirring from the sound, she yawned and stretched and lifted her head. “Tiptoeing isn’t exactly your strong suit.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m so light on my feet I could be Fred Astaire.”

  She yawned again and swung her legs to the floor. “Then I could use some coffee, Fred.”

  “I was about to let Rufus out and put the coffee on.”

  She followed him out to the kitchen. “You won’t believe what I found. I had to go through a dozen or so of Marissa’s journals, mostly skimming for dates, but I found an entry from December 31st, 1984 where she listed all the people in town who’d died that year. She even included the two Wells Fargo guards who were killed in the heist. Two we already knew about, Hank and Lindsay. But two more jumped out at me. One was a Wells Fargo employee named Dave Gilbert, a driver assigned to their armored car division, who drowned over Labor Day weekend in a boating accident on Spirit Lake. The other was a man by the name of Arnie Gafford. The week before Christmas Arnie got hit by a train south of town.”

  Lando stopped his momentum. “That sounds like what Paloma remembers.”

  “Exactly. But Marissa wrote down details. It’s all coming together, Lando. Maybe it’s like you said, they got rid of everybody else who was involved so they wouldn’t talk.”

  “Tidy up all the loose lips. This Arnie Gafford, could he be related to Billy?”

  “Finding out is your job. But the age is right. If only I could see the rest of that vision, see faces, I could get to the bottom of this really fast.”

  “That’d be great, but old-time police work is the key here, not waiting around for Aponivi to magically show you what you need to see.”

  “Maybe not,” she muttered. “There might be a shortcut, a way to jumpstart the connection.”

  Gemma begged off returning to the police station right away with an excuse that she had an errand to run. That little task turned out to be a visit to see Callie Lightfeather. Begging for a little help, a little guidance might be considered the biggest chore of all. That’s why Gemma left her pride at the door.