“Uh-huh.”
“Was her understanding in an intellectual or personal sense?”
“She didn’t say, but I have the impression it was more personal than intellectual, like she really got it, like maybe she would like to vamp out once in a while, have guys check her out. I think she was a little envious, that I was able to go out and do that.”
Made sense, sort of. I could see Jeri doing that, or wishing she could but reining the impulse in. She was all business the day we met. She’d given off a pit bull vibe. Holiday might be giving her a vicarious thrill, something she couldn’t do herself, at least on anything like a regular, intentional basis. But there were hints. Early August in Myrtle Beach we were caught in a drenching downpour from Tropical Storm Beryl. Jeri’s blouse and bra went see-through. Very. She didn’t try to hide herself. She told me not to look if it bothered me. I told her it didn’t bother me in the least and she said, “So we’re all okay here?” Or words to that effect. Casual. No big deal. No further discussion. Given that, I could imagine her in a low-cut dress, guys checking her out, as long as that’s all it was. I was going to have to dump that and everything that had happened in the past two days into the magic vat in my skull that ferments information into useful knowledge and maybe learn something. Maybe. Sometimes that doesn’t work.
“So then,” Sarah said, “I told her about you wearing clothes to bed and reciting the Boy Scout oath—”
“Which I don’t remember doing.”
“—then you grabbed the phone, which was unforgivably rude, and when I finally got it back she said if I liked not wearing a lot of clothes around you, you would enjoy it and it wouldn’t bother her. That was that girl talk you said sounded underhanded—which it sort of was. Earlier, before you came back, I’d told her I like, you know, being looked at, nothing more than that, and I mean nothing more. She laughed and said it would get your engine goin’ or revved up and it was okay with her as long as it didn’t get out of hand.”
“She said that? And laughed?”
“Uh-huh.”
“My engine?”
“That’s what she called it.”
“I’m gonna have to have a long talk with that woman.”
Sarah shrugged. “Whatever. I’m just telling you what she said. And for the record I really like being able to wear whatever I want when I’m around you.”
“Or not wear.”
“Well, yeah, that’s kind of the point. And . . .” “And? Don’t tell me there’s more.”
“And not having to worry about it getting out of control. She said you’re like that, trustworthy as a Buddhist monk, something of a super Boy Scout.”
“Aw, shit, no. A Boy Scout maybe, but not a monk.”
“Anyway, I like the way things have been the last two days. I wouldn’t have told you any of this except you’re starting to get a little weird.”
“Me weird?”
“Uh-huh. I’m okay with it. Turns out Jeri is, too. You’re the one who’s getting his knickers in a twist.”
“Knickers?”
“That’s British. It’s like getting your panties in a wad, but—”
“—I don’t wear panties, kiddo.”
“Which I think is a good thing, just so you know. I prefer guys who are guys.”
Something still didn’t feel right, like there was a piece of this puzzle I still wasn’t getting. And I was going to have to quash that monk thing. Where’d Jeri get that? But women are like that—they toy with us because they’re more subtle and because they can.
“How long have you known Jeri?” I asked.
“Known her? I’ve never met her.”
Huh. In theory I was a PI, but sometimes theory and practice reside on opposite ends of the universe. Something was going on, something in the background, and I didn’t know what it was.
I looked at Sarah and she looked back at me.
“What?” she said.
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
She pooched her lips out in what looked like indignation. The indignation could’ve been real, but didn’t feel like it. “About what?” she asked.
“You. Jeri.”
“Hey, we’re television buddies, that’s all.”
“Television buddies?”
“She saw me on TV yesterday and today—we’re all over the place, Mort—and I saw her on TV back when you two killed those two crazy women last month. So she knows what I look like and I know what she looks like, and that’s how we know each other.”
“Television buddies.”
“Yup.”
Sonofabitch. I could feel something slippery puttering around in the shadows, but it was pure gossamer. I could’ve been wrong, since that’s my MO when it comes to anything female. But I don’t even know myself, much less anyone else on the planet, much less my fiancée who I haven’t known two months. How the hell would I know if she’d like to put on one of Holiday’s tops—not Sarah’s—then go out and make guys sit up and take notice? If so, she damn sure wouldn’t be the first.
I went back inside the convenience store and bought a map of Washoe County and a map of the western United States.
“What’d you get?” Sarah asked when I came out and crammed myself in behind the wheel.
I handed her the maps.
“What’re these for?”
I fired up the engine. “So we don’t get lost. Sometimes when you don’t know where the road’s going, you get lost.”
I headed back to Gerlach, five miles away. Holiday-Sarah was silent beside me. As we passed the Texaco station, she said, “Was that like a metaphor or a simile or whatever?”
“What?”
“That road thing.”
“I don’t know. We don’t use metaphors in the IRS, kiddo. We use handcuffs and prison time.”
She didn’t say anything to that. I pulled in at the casino and said, “Let’s take your car.” I got out.
She hopped out on the other side. “Where’re we goin’?”
“North.”
I walked over to her car and she trailed along. “North where?”
“Whatever’s up there. I don’t know, some little towns, I guess. Gimme your keys. I’ll drive, you navigate.”
She handed me her keys, and I got behind the wheel. She got in as I glanced at the fuel gauge—three-quarters full, good enough. I backed out and drove through town, which took forty seconds, then we went past a few trailers sitting on hardscrabble desert dirt and into the kind of emptiness for which Nevada is world famous.
Maybe this Holiday thing was a test.
But no. Jeri wouldn’t do that. Didn’t think so anyway.
I don’t own you, Mort.
Nor did I own her, didn’t want to. She was free to do whatever she wanted. Making demands of someone is like saying you own them—a part of them anyway. Maybe this was exactly what Jeri said it was. Not a test, just the freedom to be who I was—whatever that was, and if something were to happen between Holiday-Sarah and me, Jeri and I would figure out what that meant, just like she’d said. Which wasn’t going to be necessary.
“If I’m navigating, where am I navigating to?” Sarah asked, interrupting the nonsense spinning webs in my head.
“What’s up north of here?”
A map rustled. “There’s Cedarville and Alturas in California. Lakeview in Oregon. Cedarville and Alturas are both kinda far, and there isn’t much else up that way unless you go quite a bit farther.”
“How far to Alturas?”
She studied the map for a while. “About a hundred miles.”
“How far from there to Lakeview?”
“Another forty, give or take. Why?”
“I’m sure I saw a dark Mercedes SUV coming in from the north two nights ago, two or three hours after people said they saw it leaving Gerlach, headed south.”
She studied the map. “If it went south from Gerlach, it couldn’t have come in from the north later. Not without going back through Gerla
ch. Not in only two or three hours.”
“That’s the working theory.”
She looked up. “Yeah? You have a theory?”
“Not even a ghost of one.”
“Great. Maybe it wasn’t the same SUV.”
“Which is what Waldo said.”
She frowned. “So what’re we doing?”
“Burning gas. Looking around. Basic investigative technique.”
“Sounds basic all right.”
“You have no idea.”
We drove in silence for a while. The road was almost empty. Every fifteen or twenty minutes a vehicle of some kind would pass by, going in the opposite direction. Finally Sarah said, “I never took a dime from any of those guys, Mort.”
“Huh? What guys?”
“All those guys who thought I was a hooker.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I never let anyone buy me more than one drink, either. Most of the time I didn’t take more than a couple of sips. What I did was, I let them look at me and I asked about Candy.”
“Candy?”
“That’s what Allie called herself when she was hooking. She told me she never used her real name. She called herself Candy, so that’s who I asked about.” She was quiet for a minute, then, “She said she chose that name for a reason. She had this thing she would do. She would tell the guys her name was Candy, then, after a while, she would say, ‘Would you like some Candy?’ She said it was a way to proposition guys without getting caught. She even kept a few Snickers bars in her purse just in case. If anyone tried to bust her she’d get out a couple of bars and ask what the hell was illegal about offering someone some candy. No one could say she was soliciting, but it got the conversation headed that way.”
“Smart.”
“In a way. But not really. It was prostitution, selling herself. How smart is that?”
Other than agreeing, I had no answer to that.
“You were something else, though,” she said.
“How so?”
“You wouldn’t buy me a drink. Gave me that story about your stupid howling mirror. Pretty much chased me away, actually.”
“That’s the IRS in me. Antisocial stuff gets ingrained. Useful on the job, but it’s hard to turn off.”
She laughed. “Pissed me off. But later, when I thought about it, it was kind of refreshing. Anyway, it told me you wouldn’t know anything about Allie . . . Candy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So here we are, headed for Alturas.”
“Or farther. I want to see if anyone up this way has seen a Mercedes SUV lately. I think Gerlach’s about played out.”
Sarah thought about that. “Why would Allie be up this way at all? I mean, what on earth for? This doesn’t feel right. It’s like we’re chasing a really wild goose here.”
“Might be. But Allie said she was phoning from Gerlach and no one in Gerlach saw her outside the car. She didn’t go into the casino or the motel, so she and the woman were passing through. And they were headed south, which means they came in from the north. So, passing through from where?”
That stopped her.
Finally, she sighed. “Yeah. I can’t explain that. Anyway, you’re the investigator.”
“That’s right,” I said, even though she was wrong. Jeri was the investigator. I was a half-assed trainee and it was taking a lot of getting used to. I was back to square one in life, as if I’d come right out of high school. With the IRS I knew what I was doing. I was raking in the dough so politicians could pork-barrel it and get re-elected, waste it, maybe send it to Iran so Ayatollahs could build nukes. Here, cruising through the desert, I was just following a thread. Less than a thread. The only part of this PI thing that was still on track was Sarah beside me, filling out her nerd shirt.
“Warm out here,” she said. “Indian summer. We could put the top down. I could get some sun.”
I pulled to the side of the road, which wasn’t necessary since there wasn’t anything on the road for miles ahead and behind. We were forty miles north of Gerlach in the middle of the Smoke Creek Desert. We snugged the top into its well, then kept going.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WE PASSED THROUGH Eagleville. At sixty miles an hour it would have taken twenty seconds, but signs suggested I knock it down to twenty-five. Next up was Cedarville, which was bigger. Stops at Chevron and Arco stations didn’t produce a single Mercedes SUV sighting.
We rolled into Alturas at two twenty that afternoon. Three minutes later, at the first gas station we came to, I caught a whiff of that Mercedes. A woman in her fifties said she’d seen it about four days ago when a woman stopped for gas in a green Mercedes SUV.
“How old was the woman?”
“Thirties. Coulda been forty I guess. I didn’t ask.”
Sounded familiar. “Was anyone with her?”
“Like who?” She read the pi joke on Holiday’s shirt, shook her head a little, then looked back at me.
“Like anyone.”
“I didn’t see anyone, but it was night so there coulda been.”
“She got gas, huh?”
She smiled. “That’s pretty much what they do in this place. I had to close the bowling alley in the service bay.”
Sharp. Caustic, too.
“Which way did she go when she left?”
“Up north, hon.”
I like it when ladies call me “hon”—gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling, but the north thing didn’t give us anything useful since there was a big junction a few miles north. From there, cars could keep going north or head south to Gerlach.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yeah. I could use a car like that Mercedes. Not the payments though.”
“You and me both.”
I left her with my number, told her to call if she saw the SUV again, said it was worth a hundred dollars. If she got the license it was worth two hundred. My standard deal.
Back on the road, we headed north to Lakeview, Oregon.
“Got a decent maybe back there,” I said.
“Uh-huh. Be even better if we knew what it meant.”
We got no hits at gas stations in Lakeview. I gave that some thought and decided it made sense. Alturas was less than fifty miles away. There wouldn’t be any reason to gas up at both places.
“How about Bend?” I said. “We could go check out the FedEx place where Reinhart’s hand was shipped.”
“What does that have to do with Allie?”
“Nothing, except it’s likely that SUV was somewhere up here, and we’re already this far north, and that package was sent to me. When Jeri gets back, she’ll probably want to come up and have a look at the place, maybe bump into a few FBI guys while she’s at it. I’d like to beat her to it.”
“Bumping into FBI guys?”
“It’s fun, trust me.”
“Bend isn’t all that close, Mort. It’s nearly two hundred miles from here.”
“One eighty-eight, according to a sign just before we got to Lakeview.”
“One eighty-eight rounds up to two hundred.”
“Fuckin’ engineers.”
She smiled. “If we go, we’ll probably have to stay the night. It’d be a long drive back to Gerlach if we didn’t.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Either way, we’ll have to find a motel.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, okay, then. You’re fun to travel with, and it’s still a nice day for a drive.”
“If you insist, but you should know I haven’t had my arm twisted like that in a long time.”
She rolled her eyes. “You gonna drive or just talk?”
The road to Bend would’ve been faster if we hadn’t gotten behind one eighteen-wheeler after another, and a few RVs whose owners didn’t know the summer tourist season was over. When I retire I’m going to buy a beat-up RV and tour the country at forty-five miles an hour, too. It looks like fun, wallowing along in a gas guzzler. You can see so much more that way, and if you happe
n to run off the road while rubbernecking, the damage would be minimal—pocket change—unless you’re near the Grand Canyon at the time, in which case the damage wouldn’t even be your problem.
Twenty minutes out of Lakeview we hit alkali flats. Sarah said, “I’m getting way behind in my classes, so I’m gonna disappear for a while, if that’s okay.”
“Sure is dark in the trunk, but have at it.”
She stared at me. “Disappear figuratively, Mort.”
“Far be it from me to toss gravel in the gears of science. Just keep down the noise so I can sleep.”
“Well, hell. You’re no fun. I usually read textbooks aloud while I’m snapping gum.”
She hauled out a thick textbook—Fundamentals of Structural Dynamics, which looked like a real hoot—and went into heavy-duty college student mode, total concentration, writing in a notebook, the pages of which fluttered in the breeze.
Half an hour into it she said, without looking up, “This math is so sucky. I hate eigenvectors and eigenvalue problems.”
“We used those in the IRS. Let me know if you need help.”
She laughed, then fell silent again. So here I was, out in the middle of nowhere working two cases—Allie and Reinhart—neither of which was going to earn Jeri and me a dime. Someone had sent me Reinhart’s hand. I wanted to know who did it and why. I was on someone’s radar, which was more than a little spooky. And, trying to narrow things down, that someone was hidden in at least a quarter of the adult population of the United States, so the winnowing process wasn’t going to be easy.
After another hour of hard study, Sarah put the book away and leaned back with her eyes closed, took in the autumn sun with a sigh. She looked like a supermodel and was into math that I would never come close to understanding. If I weren’t so good at finding body parts of famous missing people, I would’ve been intimidated.
We reached the outskirts of Bend at 6:35. I pulled off Highway 97 and we put the Audi’s top back up. One of us put on a new shirt in about five seconds, one with an equation on it that said something so cryptic about the number pi that I couldn’t decipher it. More intimidation. A quick check with the cell phone told us the FedEx shipping center was on Jamison Street at the northern edge of Bend. We went through the middle of town then circled around a bunch of unfamiliar streets for a few minutes until we found Jamison Street. A sign on the door of the FedEx place told us it had closed at five thirty and would open again at eight a.m. Lights were on in the back of the building, but the front door was closed, office dark. Reinhart’s case would have to wait till morning.
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