Morgan studied the monitor, but his low-tech brain was playing out scenarios. Grady, again, was way ahead of him, already prying into Horus’s e-mail.
“And lookie here, dude, he’s meeting somebody named Klassen from QuikSilver.com, I dunno, someplace in Denver today. He rented an I-Haul truck online. And here’s like his flight schedule. Dude’s going to Mexico City tonight. United 4767. Leaves 8:27 p.m. Arrives … whoa, at 3:50 a.m. Cool.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Um, let’s see,” Grady said, squinting. “He’s not. One-way.”
To Morgan, Grady was a true wizard, in a frightening way. Horus, by comparison, was a newbie, but who was he?
The kid paged back through the TittiesofDeath.com site, skipping the dirty pictures and scrolling the administrative pages nobody ever sees. Then he stopped.
Without saying a word, he just put his finger on a name — plus numbers and passwords for his credit-cards, Social Security, banks and his mother’s maiden name — that appeared in a registration page for the server.
Morgan leaned closer. His blood ran cold as he read the name.
Carter McWayne.
On the phone, Morgan explained it all to Trey Kerrigan. The sheriff wondered out loud how Morgan could know such details, but there wasn’t time for an interrogation.
“I’ll tell you everything on the way,” Morgan promised.
“On the way where?”
“To Denver.”
“You ain’t goin’ to Denver, no way, no how, good buddy,” Kerrigan snarled. “This is police business, and your nose is stuck in it too far already. You’re still a goddam suspect!”
“You need me, Trey, and you haven’t got time to bitch about it. I’ve got his addresses, names, flight times, everything.”
Kerrigan cursed. “Meet me at the truck stop in fifteen minutes,” he growled. “If you ain’t there, tough shit.”
Then he hung up.
Shortly after one p.m., armed with Morgan’s intelligence, Kerrigan phoned the Division of Criminal Investigation’s headquarters in Cheyenne for help. He summarized the problem, but Director Jim Talbott was unenthusiastic.
“Oh, so now you need our help, huh?” Talbot asked snidely.
“That’s what you do, Jim,” Kerrigan responded. “We have a potential witness on the lam. We’re on the way, but your guys are closer. We just need to talk to this guy.”
“You’ve got jurisdiction issues,” Talbot warned.
“Fuck that. Make a couple calls. I don’t care if we get a little help from the Denver cops, or not. But we gotta get our hands on this guy.”
“I want Halstead and Pickard on this. This is our investigation and we get credit for any bust. And I don’t want any more shit from you, Kerrigan. Got it?”
Kerrigan hated bureaucrats and he especially hated the DCI’s cop bureaucrats, but there wasn’t time to make a deal, only a threat.
“If your guys aren’t there and this guy flies, there’s gonna be a storm of shit, my friend,” Kerrigan said, and hung up.
McWayne had some questions to answer.
About the porn site.
About the e-mail.
About the meth lab.
About his rush to get out of Winchester.
About a murder.
Long before midsummer, drought had sucked most of the moisture from the Colorado plains, and the South Platte River had all but evaporated. What remained in the river bottom was a slow-moving, greenish-brown liquid that was too thick to drink and too thin to plow. Its muddy banks reeked with rot, and in the heat of high noon, it hung in the claustrophobic air like a putrid vapor.
While Carter McWayne waited behind the abandoned warehouse on Denver’s South Lipan Street, the river’s stink embraced him. He inhaled the aroma of motel soap on his pale skin to distract himself from the earthy stench of the desiccated river. It might have seemed odd to anyone else, but not to Carter McWayne, that he’d find the odor of a sick river worse than the odor of a decomposing corpse.
But McWayne’s senses were on high alert. His old life was over. In a way, he’d died. He was suspended between Heaven and Hell, and the last thing he wanted was to be exposed, for any price.
A rented black Buick eased slowly through the front gate of the old warehouse and parked outside a side door. A man in a dark suit stepped from the air-conditioned comfort of his sedan into the stifling, fetid air of the warehouse district. Carter waited in the shade.
“Mr. McWayne?” the man said.
Old habits are hard to break. The mortician sized him up immediately — slight of build, bony, maybe in his forties, not at all the international man of mystery he’d imagined. McWayne smiled his perfunctory funeral-director smile, stuck his hand out and just nodded.
“I’m Klassen from QuikSilver,” the broker said. “Ready to do our little deal?”
“Truck’s inside.”
“Good. Let’s get started and get you on your way.”
Inside, Klassen set up his laptop on an overturned box, while McWayne opened the back of his rented truck and, with considerable effort, hefted his ample body inside.
He peeled back an Army surplus canvas tarp and exposed his cargo: three large wooden crates, sealed with padlocked latches.
Inside, the start of his new life.
One hundred silver bars. Nearly a half million dollars worth of ancient silver. Each bar weighed about eighty-five pounds and was the size of a VCR. The truck had nearly cratered after all four tons of it were loaded, just over the rental company’s maximum load limits, but McWayne took it slow.
It came from Laddie’s crypt, where it had been hidden within the stone crypt and the coffin itself.
The rest, two hundred more bars worth a million dollars at today’s prices, remained safely hidden in sixteen paupers’ graves at Pine Lawn Cemetery in Winchester, all buried at night under simple metal markers with the names of old outlaws like Ben Kilpatrick, Bill Carver, Harry Tracy and Harvey Logan. And all were in that part of the graveyard where nobody ever lingers long. Better than a Swiss bank, except for the interest, and the security guards were ghosts. It had been Laddie’s idea.
In life, Laddie Granbouche always feared the silver’s existence would solve the mystery she tended so diligently. She wanted to be the woman who might be Etta Place, because she knew it was better to leave something to the imagination.
In death, she didn’t care anymore. The silver was meaningless to a corpse, but she didn’t see why anybody else should have it either. It would become just another mystery associated with Butch and Sundance, which was far more valuable to her than money.
And McWayne’s father, old Derealous, became her co-conspirator, too moral to reveal Laddie’s story after she died. He didn’t know if Laddie’s legend was authentic, but he buried her silver — every ounce — in seventeen different graves. After all, he’d buried people for more than forty years and all went to their final judgments wearing the diamond rings, gold watches and other precious items. He never took anything from a corpse except its vital fluids. He was too honest.
But Carter wasn’t.
Klassen climbed in and helped McWayne open the crates of silver. For an hour, he inventoried the contents on his clipboard, closely examining hallmarks on random bars taken from deep in the boxes. It didn’t much matter where it came from, only that it was pure silver and he’d soon draw a fair commission for the trouble of flying to Denver from Los Angeles.
When he finished, they locked everything up, and Klassen went back to his laptop. Connecting to the Internet through a wireless network, he dialed into the server at an offshore bank in Latvia and logged on. With a few keystrokes, he transferred $416,700 into one special account, and his ten percent commission of $46,300 to another, his own.
“Here’s your totally anonymous debit card. It’s just a number,” Klassen said, handing McWayne what first looked like a common credit card with a shiny silver design, and then several pages to seal the deal. “And he
re are your receipt, passwords and instructions for accessing your account. Okay, now you’re rich, my friend. Go ahead and check.”
McWayne looked long at the papers, tapped out a few codes on his Palm Pilot and, sure enough, he was indeed rich. At least, he was rich somewhere out there in the ionosphere.
“Latvia is safe?” he asked. “I mean, I hear the Russian mob is involved.”
Klassen smiled.
“It’s like the Wild West, my friend,” the broker said as he packed his gear. “Where there are few laws and a lot of people willing to take risks, there are profits. Rest assured, they’re very discreet.”
Then Klassen handed McWayne the keys to the Buick.
“Just go to the nearest ATM and see for yourself,” he said. “Try not to spend it all in one place, Mr. McWayne.”
Klassen shook his hand, then clambered into the rental truck’s cab and it roared to life. Fat and low to the ground under its load, the truck pulled out into the unblinking sun, following the potholed pavement back to the interstate. Its belly nearly scraped the asphalt.
McWayne walked down to the stinking river bank. He waded through muddy beer bottles and dead weeds to an eroded ledge. He reached in his trousers and withdrew a gold pocketwatch on a tarnished chain.
He flicked open the bezel and studied the hands frozen in another time. He wound it a little and listened, but it no longer worked.
So he closed it and wrapped the fob tightly around it, then tossed it into the river. It plunked into the muddy water and was gone.
Bit by bit, Carter McWayne was exorcising Laddie’s ghost, which had haunted him for too long.
With half of a day to kill before his flight, he stood alone beside a reeking river, sweaty and rich.
And less haunted.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Morgan hadn’t eaten since the day before, and the smell of fat, juicy hot dogs twirling on heated rollers at Motortown Truck Stop’s convenience store drew him like a siren’s song.
The lunch rush, such as it is at a truck stop, had passed. The dogs were a little forlorn and wrinkled, but Morgan was hungry. With a pair of greasy tongs, he plucked the plumpest bratwurst and laid it across a crumpled bun. He slathered it in mustard, ketchup and relish, the way he ate ballpark dogs.
The Tolbert girl, Robin, was working the day shift at the counter. Today she was reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell, but when she looked up, her dark eyes flickered with recognition.
“Oh hi,” she said to Morgan, far friendlier than the night Cowper had flirted with her. She smiled and was even prettier than she’d seemed that night. “You’re the newspaper guy, right? I hear you and your friend got into some bad business the other night. Is he okay?”
“He’s gonna make it, but he’s not too good right now.”
Robin sagged a little.
“Oh.”
“But I’m sure he’d be pleased to know you asked about him.”
“Well, maybe I could visit sometime?”
Morgan marveled at the complexities of women.
“Sure,” he said. “Shawn would like that.”
“Shawn,” she said, rolling it around in her mouth for a delicious moment. “I didn’t know his name. That’s nice.”
She rang up his hot dog and slid the change across the well-worn glass counter. Morgan headed outside to wait for Trey Kerrigan, and was nearly to the door when Robin called after him.
“Oh, and how’s your mom?”
Morgan turned to say something but didn’t know exactly what to say.
“I mean, I heard she was sick or something. Somebody was asking me about her a few days ago. Wanted to know what nursing home she was in. I didn’t know.”
Morgan came back to the counter.
“She’s, um, missing. Who asked?”
Robin closed her eyes, as if the darkness might help her remember.
“Gosh, it was … sorry, I don’t recall. Nobody local, or I’d know right off.”
“When did this person ask?”
“I haven’t worked since, oh, the graveyard shift Monday night, so it was sometime overnight Monday.”
Morgan froze. His mother was stolen from Laurel Gardens on Tuesday.
“It’s important. Are you sure you don’t know who asked?”
She shrugged and looked a little sad. “No. Sorry.”
Morgan pulled a business card from his wallet and left it on the counter, in case she remembered. He thanked her and turned toward the door again.
But he didn’t even get past the little chocolate donut rack when Robin hooted.
“Oh, it was the preacher. The guy in the RV. He was hanging around here one night, talking about Jesus and sinning and all that, but not like he really believed it deep down, you know? Wondered if I knew anything about your mom and where she lived. Said he wanted to visit her and pray. Freaky guy. Kind went off the deep end, considering …”
“Considering what?”
“Oh, I thought he was just horny, you know? He just doesn’t seem like a real preacher. Lots of guys, they … well, he said he used to be a cop or something.”
Morgan left his hot dog on the counter and sprinted out the front door.
The preacher was taking a dump out back.
Or rather, a flexible hose drained the Reverend Pridrick Leighton’s unholy excrement from his gaudy Winnebago’s septic tank into the truck stop’s waste hole. His RV’s internal pump purred with relief.
Morgan came up behind him, out of breath.
“Rev, we need to talk.”
Leighton looked up at Morgan through his mirrored sunglasses. Sweat had seeped through the band around his crumpled Cubs cap.
“Hey there, son,” he said, as at ease in the heat and odor as only a Texan could be. “Kinda caught me in a little bit of a sacrilegious position here, but I s’pose the Lord had something wise in mind when He created the crapper.”
Morgan cut to the chase, literally.
“The clerk inside says you were asking about my mom the night before she disappeared. What was that about?”
“Disappeared? Son, I … “
“Do I know you? How would you know anything about my mother?”
“Hold on a second, son. Lots of folks know you around here. I got ears. I was just asking, that’s all. I don’t know nothin’ about your mama bein’ disappeared.”
“Why did you care at all?”
“It’s just my job.”
Morgan wasn’t in the habit of calling preachers liars, but he was perilously close.
“Were you ever a cop?”
Leighton drained the last swallows from a diet soda can and crushed the can beneath a black shoe. He said nothing.
“You ever shoot at somebody, Rev?” Morgan persisted.
Leighton looked up.
“I done a lot I ain’t gonna confess to you, son. Not here. Not anywhere. Now, I’m sure your mama is somewhere in the Lord’s view, and He’ll keep an eye on her. She’s safe. And if I was you, I’d let the cops do their work, and I’d keep my nose out of that, too. That’s their job, and you already done enough. Now, I hope you find whatever or whoever you’re lookin’ for, son, but it ain’t me.”
Morgan’s jaw tightened. Leighton knew more than he was letting on.
“You ever heard of the Fourth Sign, Rev?”
Leighton looked Morgan in the eye for a long moment before he spoke. His sun-baked face was taut and unforgiving.
“Heard of ‘em.”
“A bunch of radical religious nuts, you know?” Morgan said. “Got their hands in a lot of bad stuff. Drug deals, gun-running, terrorism. Got people all over. Scouts, mules, runners. Watchers.”
Leighton’s septic pump ran clear, but he ignored it. Instead, he stopped close enough to Morgan to whisper. His breath was day-old coffee and sour creamer.
“You’ve got your hot head up your ass, son.”
Trey Kerrigan’s Bronco, trailing a slight blue haze, glided around the corner of the truck stop
’s café and rolled to a stop beside Morgan and Leighton. The sheriff leaned out his window.
“You comin’ or are you just breathin’ hard? Let’s hit the road. McWayne ain’t gonna wait at the gate for us to give him a farewell party.”
Morgan stared hard at Leighton, but all he saw was his own reflection. The preacher’s eyes remained hidden, inaccessible, behind his mirrored lenses.
“‘The terror you inspire and the pride of your heart have deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks, who occupy the heights of the hill. Though you build your nest as high as the eagle’s, from there I will bring you down,’” the Reverend Pridrick Leighton quoted the Bible softly, ominously.
Morgan recognized the words from the Book of Jeremiah. The serial killer P.D. Comeaux had written them in a letter to Morgan after Comeaux was condemned to die more than ten years earlier. They still chilled Morgan.
Reverend Leighton smiled and waved as Morgan backed away slowly.
“Y’all travel safe now, y’hear?” the preacher smirked. “The Lord is watchin’ over ya.”
Speed limits are irrelevant to Wyoming highways. No place is close, and going faster only makes the driver feel he is winning some esoteric battle against time and distance. It’s an illusion.
Even in a speeding police vehicle, the journey from Winchester to Denver is long. Six hours, give or take the ten or twelve minutes gained by hurtling fifteen miles over the speed limit through blustering headwinds on narrow, decaying, deer-infested state roads.
On the way, Morgan laid it all out for the sheriff. What if McWayne was boldly cooking methamphetamine and shipping it — not to mention running an online necrophilia salon — from a place that nobody cared to linger, a mortuary? What if he had tried to kill Morgan and Cowper to cover up the discovery of the meth operation? What if he had abducted Rachel Morgan as a bargaining chip? And what if, like nothing less than a common grave-robber, he had likely stolen a million-dollar cache of silver from a casket? And what if he replaced it with the headless corpse of a federal agent, who was investigating McWayne’s crank lab? And what if Morgan and Cowper had accidentally exposed McWayne, and he was now running?
The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 19