White Cloud Retreat

by Dianne Harman

“Well, the world is full of nut cases. She’s probably just another one. I’m starving. I’ll set the table while you finish up.”

  “Deal. Does that mean you’ll do the dishes?”

  “Don’t push your luck, Sweetheart.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Thursday morning Kelly opened the front door of her house and walked outside with Lady. It was 5:30 a.m., just before dawn, and a time when the night sky is at its darkest. Lady growled and began to bark furiously. Out of the corner of her eye Kelly saw someone running away from Mike’s patrol car which was parked in the driveway. “Lady, stay. Stay.” She put her hand on the dog’s shoulder, feeling her raised hackles. She walked over to his car and saw a note stuck under the windshield with the words, “Be very careful. I know where you are.” written on it. She lifted the wiper it was under and put the note in her purse.

  Mike has enough problems without starting his day seeing this. I’ll tell him about it tonight. I saw someone, but I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman and there’s no doubt in my mind that Lady saw something.

  It was another busy morning at the coffee shop. The topic of Scott’s death was still the number one item of discussion. Many of the customers expressed frustration that the killer hadn’t been caught. When Amber had been murdered the previous June, many of the residents of Cedar Bay had bought guns to protect themselves and their families. Once again the people were afraid. A killer was loose in their town and they felt violated. Cedar Bay had always been a place where there had been very little crime of any kind. Now they were dealing with the third murder in seven months. The tension in the air was palpable.

  Kelly walked over to the counter and picked up the ringing phone. “This is Kelly, may I help you?”

  “It’s Luke. I’m really glad you’re the one who answered. I’m sorry to bother you again, but remember when we talked yesterday and I told you about Blaine?”

  “Yes, of course. I told Mike about Blaine last night and he’s going to check him out today through the FBI database that lists persons of interest.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’ll be in there for any past crimes. I don’t think he’s ever been arrested for anything. I think it’s more about his mental condition. Anyway, the reason I called is to tell you he’s disappeared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. The residential trainees are required to attend early morning meditations with Zeb as part of their program, but Blaine wasn’t there this morning. After the meditation ended, Zeb came to me and asked if I’d given Blaine permission to skip the meditation this morning. I told him absolutely not. We decided to go to his room and find out why he hadn’t attended the meditation session. When we got to his room we discovered it had been cleaned out.”

  “What do you mean by cleaned out?” Kelly asked.

  “I mean he was gone and so was everything belonging to him. We went to the parking lot and found that his car was gone as well. I have no idea what it means, other than it’s quite suspicious. I thought you might want to tell Mike. I just called his office, but he was on another call and I didn’t have time to wait. As you know, Scott’s service is this afternoon and I have a lot of things I have to do to get ready for it. From the calls I’ve been getting, it looks like a lot of people plan on attending, even people from quite a distance. I’m glad I decided to have it from 4:00 to 6:00. That will give people a chance to get to an airport or drive back to where they came from before it gets too late.”

  “Luke, did you talk to any of the other residents? Did Blaine say anything to them? What did they think of him?”

  “Yes, Zeb and I spoke with all of them and evidently he hadn’t said a word to any of them about leaving. Many of them said he’d told them he wanted to be a Zen Master, but none of them felt particularly close to him. A few even said they thought his commitment to Zen wasn’t real. They felt he was almost frantic about becoming a Zen Master, but it wasn’t genuine.” Luke was quiet on the phone for a long moment and then said, “A thought just occurred to me.”

  “Please, tell me whatever you’re thinking.”

  “Well, after you left yesterday, Blaine came into my office and asked me who you were. I told him you were the sheriff’s fiancée and we’d been talking about Scott’s murder. Then he asked me if I was going to become the Zen Master here at the White Cloud Retreat Center. I told him I’d been thinking about it and yes, I probably would become the Zen Master for the Center. I told him Scott had given me a transmission, so theoretically I had the necessary credentials to do it. Now I’m wondering two things. First of all, he may have been concerned that Mike was getting close to solving the murder, or that he had become a suspect. Who knows what goes through a schizophrenic’s mind? On the other hand, maybe he realized he wasn’t going to become the Zen Master here at the Center and there was no real point in his staying. I don’t know, but those are about the only explanations I can come up with for his sudden departure.”

  “I think you might be right with either one or even both. I know you’re in a hurry, but thanks for telling me. I’ll see you this afternoon.”

  Well that’s interesting. Maybe Blaine was the person I saw this morning by Mike’s car. Maybe Luke’s right and he was concerned that Mike was getting close to solving the case and determining he was the killer.

  CHAPTER 21

  Mike closed the door to his office and sat down at his computer with Rebel at his side. Last night he’d remembered that the FBI had a database that identified people who had been designated as “persons of interest” in criminal cases. He’d decided to see if the database had any information on Dante and Luca Pellino, Luke Monroe, Blaine Wright, or Jim Duncan. Even though he and Kelly had talked about Deidre, he didn’t feel she had risen to the level of being considered a suspect. It had almost been a week since Scott had been killed and Mike was getting desperate to find the killer. An hour later he sat back in his chair, thoroughly frustrated. His search had come up with nothing.

  Well, since I’m getting absolutely nowhere with those four, might as well plug in the names of everyone we interviewed in connection with his murder. Maybe I’m overlooking something.

  Halfway through his search, he got a match for Deidre Nelson. He spent a few moments studying the information and reached for his phone.

  *****

  Detective Joel Ackerman of the Tucson, Arizona Police Department picked up the ringing telephone on his desk and said, “This is Detective Ackerman. May I help you?”

  “Hello, Detective. My name is Mike Reynolds and I’m the county sheriff in Beaver County, Oregon. I’m working on a homicide case up here that occurred in Cedar Bay, Oregon. A woman by the name of Deidre Nelson was one of several we interviewed in connection with this case. I ran her name through the FBI database that identifies all persons in a criminal case designated by the investigating authorities as a person of interest. I came up with a hit that listed your department as well as your name and telephone number as a contact for any follow-up requests for information. I was wondering if you might have some recollection or information about a woman named Deidre Nelson that might help me with my investigation.”

  “I sure do, Sheriff. Don’t mind at all sharing the information we have. I was the detective assigned to the case and I clearly remember the facts and circumstances that were involved in it. It was a missing person case with a strong suspicion that some type of foul play was involved. The missing person was a forty-five year old man by the name of Albert Finley. He lived with his wife and family in a house in a Tucson suburb. There were no suspicious activities or signs of any type of trouble in his background. According to all reports, he was a respectable, upstanding and well-liked member of the community. He was a handsome, rather athletic type of guy who liked to go jogging every morning. One morning about ten years ago, according to his wife, he left the house to go for his regular morning jog and was never seen again. His bloodstained shoes and socks were found on a jogging trail not far from
his house. For reasons we don’t know or understand, after his shoes and socks were removed he walked away, either voluntarily or under threat of force, from the location where his shoes were found. We followed a trail of his bare footprints for a short distance, but then the trail disappeared. I always thought it was pretty strange he’d wind up being barefoot on a remote jogging trail in early spring. It was still very cold at that time of year.

  “As part of the work up on the case, I canvassed the neighborhood and interviewed all the neighbors, asking them if they’d seen anything suspicious prior to Mr. Finley’s disappearance. The next door neighbor was a woman by the name of Clara Nelson. She was the mother of Deidre Nelson, who at the time was nineteen and living at home with her mother. Mrs. Nelson told me she didn’t know anything that would help me with the case. She suggested I talk to her daughter who was at home and in her bedroom.

  “Mrs. Nelson, who appeared to be in poor health and was confined to a wheelchair, told me to just walk down the hallway and knock on her daughter’s bedroom door if I wanted to talk to her. I knocked on the door and a young woman’s voice said ‘Come in.’ When I walked into the room I observed Deidre, who was an attractive looking young nineteen year old woman with bright red hair, sitting at a small writing desk in the room. I immediately noticed that there were ten or twenty photographs of the missing man, Albert Finley, tacked up on the walls of her bedroom. Several of them were life-size blown-up photographs of Mr. Finley. After I explained to Deidre the purpose of my visit, I asked her why she had the photographs of Mr. Finley tacked up on the walls of her bedroom.

  “She explained that she wanted to become a professional photographer and was studying photography at a local community college. One of her class assignments was for each student to prepare a collection of photos of some person that they knew. It could be a family member, a neighbor, a fellow student, or whoever. She told me she’d selected Mr. Finley, but she decided not to tell him about her project and just take photos of him without his consent. She said she thought using that process would make her photos of him more natural and lifelike, without a lot of posing and phony smiles. All of the photos she took of him were taken with a camera equipped with a telephoto lens. Other than that, Deidre denied knowing anything about Mr. Finley’s disappearance.

  “I thought her explanation of why she had the photographs of Mr. Finley displayed on the walls in her room was rather suspicious and for that reason I entered her name in the case file as a person of interest. A few days later I contacted the professor at the community college who was teaching the photography class and he verified that Deidre and his other students had each received an assignment from him along the lines that Deidre had described to me. I asked him why he required life-size photographs. He told me that was not part of the assignment and he had no idea why a student would do that unless they wanted to see if they could enlarge the photographs they’d taken. According to him, some of the students hoped to work in a photo lab and that could possibly be the reason.

  “We never found Mr. Finley and there were no active leads for us to follow. About two years after he went missing, the case was closed and transferred to our cold case files. When the case was closed and as part of the routine file closing procedure, one of our administrative staff members entered Deidre’s name as a person of interest in the FBI database you referred to earlier. By the way, about the time we were getting ready to close the case, I went back out to the neighborhood to have a final interview with the neighbors and see if they had any new thoughts about what might have happened to Mr. Finley. When I was there, I learned that Mrs. Nelson had died the previous year and that according to the neighbors, her daughter, Deidre, had moved to the Pacific Northwest, but none of them knew where. That’s about all I’ve got, Sheriff. Don’t know if any of that can help you, but if you need anything else, feel free to call me.”

  “Thanks, Detective Ackerman. I really appreciate your input. Not sure if it will help, but it just might. Again, thanks,” Mike said as he hung up the phone.

  Now isn’t that interesting. Deidre took numerous photos of Mr. Finley in Arizona, just like she did here in Oregon of Scott Monroe. I wonder if this is a pattern of behavior on her part. It’s not uncommon for a young woman to fantasize about an older man. I’ve heard of some who start stalking a man and taking pictures of him without his knowledge or consent. Stalk, photograph, fantasize, and then kill, is certainly a possible modus operandi of a deranged individual. I wonder if she was stalking Finley when he disappeared. For that matter, I wonder if she was stalking Scott. I’ve got meetings the rest of the day and then the service for Scott this afternoon, but talking to Deidre has become a high priority for me. I’ll do it tomorrow.

  CHAPTER 22

  Kelly happened to look up just as the door of the coffee shop opened and Diedre walked in. “Good morning, Deidre. How are you doing today?”

  “Much better. I wanted to come by and personally thank you for bringing my wallet to me, so I decided to take an early lunch. Is there any special table I should sit at?”

  “No, this is the calm before the storm. Sit wherever you want. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Kelly went into the kitchen to check on Charlie and see how he was doing. He’d stepped out the back door and was smoking a cigarette. “Jes’ takin’ a little break before the lunch crowd gets here, Boss.”

  “Take your time. We have a lull in the action at the moment.”

  “Got a message for you from Dad. He says he had a dream that you were in danger. Ya’ better take it seriously. Dad’s dreams are kinda legendary on the reservation. If he dreams something, you can almost take it to the bank that it’s probably gonna happen.”

  “Did he say what kind of danger I was in?”

  “Nope. Only that you better be very careful for the next few days.”

  “Swell. That’s just what I wanted to hear. Okay, tell him I’ll be extra careful.”

  “That’s not all, Kelly. He said to tell you that Mike’s in more danger than you are.”

  Kelly felt a chill run along her spine. She considered Charlie’s father, Chief Many Trees, to be a friend and knew he was not one to speak lightly. If he said she and Mike were in danger and should be careful, they probably should.

  “Charlie, we better get back in there. Tell your dad thanks and we’ll be very careful.”

  “Have you decided what you’d like to eat, Deidre?”

  “Yes. I’ll have a bowl of chili and a cup of hot tea. It’s cold outside and that sounds good.”

  “I’ll be right back with your order.”

  “Oh, I’m in no hurry. Phil thinks my work is pretty good, so he cuts me some slack if I run a little over for my lunch break. I understand you’re going to be marrying the sheriff in a couple of weeks. How did you two meet?”

  “The same way I met you. Here at the coffee shop. He’d been coming in here for a long time and one day he said how much he liked my cooking. I invited him to dinner and that was how it all began. He was divorced and I was widowed. He’s a fine man and I’m honored that he’d want to marry me. Why do you ask?”

  “He interviewed me the other day out at the Center, you know, the day Scott was killed. He was very kind to me. I was crying so hard I had trouble talking and he put his arm around me and consoled me. I thought that was a very nice thing for him to do. He made an impression on me because he knew about my shoes.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Well,” Deidre said. “I was in the group of students that had assembled near the murder scene right after you discovered Scott’s body. Sheriff Mike interviewed each of us and then we were released. I went to my car to change my shoes and I put on some different shoes, actually they were Christian Louboutin sandals. You know, those are the ones with the red soles. After I changed shoes, I decided to go back into the Center to go to the restroom before driving home. As you know, the Center has a policy that no one can wear sho
es while they’re inside it. After I used the restroom I went back out to the porch to put my sandals on. While I was putting them on the sheriff walked by and asked me if they were Christian Louboutins. I was curious how he knew and he said he’d just read an article about them in the business section of the Portland Tribune. He said he spotted the red soles on my sandals. I was impressed. I’ve never met a man who knew something like that. You’re a lucky woman.”

  “Yes, I am,” Kelly said. “I don’t want to make Phil over at the photography shop mad at me for keeping you so long, so let me get you your chili and tea.”

  Mike knows about Christian Louboutin shoes? That’s strange. And even stranger that someone would remember that.

  A few minutes later Kelly returned and said, “Here’s your order, Deidre. Enjoy! I need to talk to some other customers. See you later.”

  “You’re going to the service for Scott this afternoon, aren’t you? I’ll see you there.”

  “Yes, I’ll definitely be there,” Kelly said.

  Kelly locked up the coffee shop as soon as she and her employees finished cleaning it up and getting ready for the next day, anxious to get home and change clothes. Mike was meeting her at home and they were going to drive to the service together.

  *****

  “Hi, Sweetheart, be with you in a minute. I need to change clothes,” Mike said when he opened the front door.

  “Actually, Mike, I think you better wear your sheriff’s uniform. Luke told me that people usually wear white to solemn occasions like this and I don’t think you have a pair of white pants. As you can see, I’m in white, but it’s a lot easier for me to be dressed that way than it is for you. Everybody knows you’re the sheriff and it might make some of the visiting dignitaries feel good, knowing that the sheriff is there.”

  “That’s a good point. Okay, you sold me. Let me wash my face and hands. Why don’t you let the dogs out before we go and I’ll be back in a couple of minutes?”