The Tooth of Time

by Sue Henry

  WE HAVE YOUR WEENER DOG. GIVE US WHAT SHIRLEY MORGAN LEFT WITH YOU OR HE DIES. IF YOU WANT HIM BACK PUT SOMETHING RED IN THE WINDOW AND WAIT FOR A CALL.

  TWENTY-ONE

  EVERYTHING GREW A LITTLE DARK AROUND THE edges and I had trouble catching my breath. A great pain of anguish grew in the center of my chest as I stood there with the note in my hand, staring at the words that seemed to swim on the page. Then I dropped it, whirled, and went from one end of the Winnebago to the other, calling for him and looking—sure that it couldn’t be true and that he must be there somewhere.

  Of course he wasn’t—not anywhere. I even looked in all the cabinets and closets, went outside and opened every storage space under the motor home.

  All sorts of thoughts went through my mind: if I had only taken him with me and left him in the car at the restaurant—if I had made dinner for myself at home and not gone out at all—if I had never taken to the road like a gypsy and stayed in Alaska where I belonged. I wished that Butch Stringer had not gone back to Santa Fe. It was desperation and I knew it—and that I was being totally irrational. But it was like having one of my children snatched.

  I dearly love that dog.

  And Daniel had entrusted him to me.

  Oh, Daniel, I’m sorry. It’s all my fault and I’m so very, very sorry.

  There wasn’t room in my head for what Daniel might have said in reply—probably several Aussie curses at the circumstances.

  It was only when I slowly began to settle down that I thought to call the police.

  Herrera arrived in less than fifteen minutes. By the time he got there I had shed a few tears—and I almost never cry. But they were angry tears, and that reaction was growing. Life on the Last Frontier doesn’t create many wimps. We Alaskans don’t take threats lightly, or knuckle under. We tend to get involved. In times of trouble we take care of each other and I meant somehow to take care of Stretch as I had promised Daniel I would.

  I unlocked the door, let Herrera in, and handed him the note without a word. He read it, glanced up in a concerned assessment that told him how angry and determined I was.

  “Well,” he said, “this certainly changes the equation. Have you got a cup of coffee?”

  “Coffee?”

  “I’d say we’d better talk and it may take a while. But I need to get the guys working on anything they can find here.”

  I didn’t think I needed the caffeine, but made a pot anyway while he called back the investigation crew, who dusted black fingerprint powder over my living space again, mostly around the dinette and on the door I had found open. When they had finished and gone, I cleaned it off and poured us coffee before sitting down across from him at the table.

  Interrupting only once or twice, he sipped at his coffee and took rapid and copious notes as I told him everything I could think of that had happened, or that I had learned since I arrived in Taos, or that I thought could possibly relate to the reason for Stretch’s abduction. I included the phone number that might be for Shirley’s ex-husband, Ken Morgan, also that I had found her abstract painting on the wall of the gallery and spotted Alan Medina hurrying away on the street outside. It all seemed impossibly related, yet unconnected at the same time, and I could only hope that he could make better sense of it than I could.

  “What do they want?” he asked, when I finally wound down. “What did Shirley Morgan leave with you?”

  “Nothing! She left nothing. I have no idea what they want.”

  Not knowing what they wanted was a large part of what was making me anxious and angry.

  “Whatever it is they think I have, it’s probably what they tore the place apart looking for on Thursday and may have torn Shirley’s things apart looking for on Friday.”

  “You’re right. And if this is an indication, they clearly didn’t find it.” He held up the note. “Well, at least we know from this that there’s more than one of them. Interesting.”

  “There may be. But what are we going to do?”

  He looked at me with narrowed eyes and shook his head.

  “You,” he said, suddenly all law enforcement official, “are going to do nothing. You will stay here and do exactly what they say to do—hang something red in the window and wait to see if you can find out what they want.”

  Stay there? I may have been angry and ready to help in getting Stretch back, but I’m no dummy either. A woman of my age is no match physically for someone like Alan Medina and whoever else might be involved—and I had decided he had to be part of the thing. I told Herrera that I didn’t like the idea of being alone if they—whoever they were—came back.

  “You won’t be. There’ve been two murders in the last week and I’m not interested in having another. So I’ve put someone outside to watch this place. You won’t see him and neither will they, if they come back, but he’s already there—armed—if you need him.”

  Armed?

  I hesitated for a long minute, thinking hard about my shotgun in the concealed space in the Winnebago, before I asked with cautious phrasing, “Would it be wise if I were armed as well?”

  There was a longer pause as he gave me a sharp, perceptive look, then said, choosing his own words carefully, “A license or permit to possess a rifle, shotgun, or hand-gun is not required in New Mexico. Interstate transportation is another thing and the carrying of a concealed weapon is forbidden. Would you know how to use . . . such a firearm . . . if you had one?”

  “I grew up using rifles and shotguns.”

  “Ah-h.” He nodded and added a caution to our carefully hypothetical topic of conversation. “Firearms can be turned on their owners, you know.”

  I nodded.

  We understood each other.

  After giving me a number with which to reach him directly, which I programmed into my cell phone as a one-touch number, he was soon gone.

  I stood at the door, looking out into the brush and trees that surrounded the RV park next to where I was parked, and wondered just where my guardian angel was hidden. The only nearby sound was a cricket chirping in the dark, so wherever he was he was keeping very still. A light breeze rustled the leaves and swept the scent of sage into my face. I took a deep breath, closed and locked the door, then took a red blouse from the closet—that something red to hang as a signal.

  Oh, lovie, where are you? I thought, as I secured it in the window over the table, hoping against hope that they were treating Stretch well.

  Can you call it kidnapping when the victim is a dog?

  It was one of the worst nights I have spent in my life.

  I had handed over responsibility for Stretch’s welfare to someone else and it was both a relief and a frustration to have done so. That Herrera would do his best I had no doubt. He was a kind man and seemed not just good at his job but resourceful and respectful of the people involved as well. But would he care enough about an animal? I thought he would, for as he left, standing below the coach steps, he had turned to look up at me.

  “I have a Yorkshire terrier,” he said. “Puñado rides with me sometimes. We’ll do our best to find your dachshund, Ms. McNabb.”

  Find him? I would rather he had said “rescue him,” but I knew what he meant and would take what I could get in terms of language.

  As soon as he was gone I got out the shotgun, made sure it was loaded and ready to fire, and propped it against the wall next to my bed. Then I lay down without undressing and tried, unsuccessfully, to rest.

  There was little sleeping, or even snoozing lightly. The breeze would periodically rattle something outside and bring me fully awake again and sitting up in the bed. After midnight, when it died, a couple of coyotes howled a duet for half an hour, reminding me of how they had sung on the night Shirley had stayed over.

  Poor Shirley. Herrera had said little about her death in answer to my questions, just that they now knew for sure that it had been a homicide and that the investigation was ongoing. But his attention and focus on the current developments told me that for his own
reasons he felt there was a serious connection.

  I thought that was pretty obvious, and shoved the pieces to the puzzle of the last few days around and around in my head, but they seemed to have been mixed together from more than one box, for I couldn’t make several of them fit at all—the dead man in the dye vat, for instance, and Shirley’s painting.

  Why did the people who had taken Stretch think she had left something with me? One or more of them must have all but torn apart the Winnebago in their hunt for it. It was clear that both their intensive exploration and the theft of Stretch were related to getting what they wanted, whatever it was. In their search they had not found the secret hidey-hole where my shotgun usually resided. Could there be other places they had missed—that I had missed? Possibly. That would depend on the size and shape of the item, wouldn’t it? Anything of a noticeable size would have been quickly found. So it had to be something small, or the right shape to have been slipped in, under, or behind something else.

  The idea took me back to my friend Sarah’s death and a number of hiding places in her Victorian house that had figured largely in revealing her murderer. We had amused ourselves with secret spaces as roommates in college and the habit endured through the years. But we had learned a lot about how to hide things in ordinary places. Could I use what I had learned back then to find something I only suspected that Shirley had left in the Winnebago?

  Swinging my feet out of bed and turning on lights as I went from one end to the other of the motor home, I searched for over an hour and came up empty and frustrated. There was always the possibility that I was hunting for something that wasn’t there at all, but somehow I didn’t think so. It made such good sense that she might have left it where she hoped they wouldn’t think to look. Someone must have been following her that night to know she had stayed with me.

  At four o’clock I gave up and turned out the lights again before returning to the bed. It seemed so strange to be there by myself, with no small friend in the basket beside me or curled up behind my knees under part of a quilt or bedspread. It was quiet—so quiet. I missed hearing him breathe and roll over periodically. I missed . . .

  It was a soft knock at the coach door that woke me to another bright and sunny morning. The clock read seven o’clock—I had slept for almost three hours.

  “Who is it?” I called through the door.

  “Officer Jim Tolliver, Ms. McNabb. Wanted you to know I’m going off duty now. Call if you need us.”

  I opened the door to find a tall young man looking up at me with a high-powered rifle in one hand, nightscope and all. He looked tired and dusty from lying all night on the ground somewhere in the brush.

  “My guardian angel.”

  He grinned, saluted, and was gone.

  Blessings on him, I thought, and on the head of Officer Herrera.

  Locking the door again, I went to take a shower while the coffee brewed, leaving the cell phone within reach so I could hear it if it rang.

  It didn’t.

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE FIRST COUPLE OF HOURS OF THAT MORNING passed so slowly that I felt if the clock had been an hourglass I would have been able to watch one grain of sand fall at a time. Half the time I sat staring out the window, watching clouds float overhead that for the first time looked a little gray, as if they might hold rain, and half of it I paced back and forth between the front and back of the Winnebago.

  The phone remained ominously silent. I didn’t know how they could have the number of my cell phone, but it was the only phone I had, so they must have obtained it somehow. All I could do was wait, as directed.

  Coming back past the galley after one such circuit, without thinking I reached under the sink for the kibble to fill Stretch’s empty bowl. With it in my hand I realized what I was doing and the whole loss of him that I had been keeping at bay with anger swept over me again. Unable to see for the tears that welled up along with a surge of hot fury, I blindly tossed the bag back into the compartment and kicked the door shut so hard I thought I had broken a toe. Limping across to the sofa to sit down and find out, I soon knew it wasn’t broken, but the pain provided an excuse for my red eyes and damp face when I answered Herrera’s knock at the door.

  He stepped in and noticed my limp.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “Something stupid,” I told him. “Never mind. It’s not critical.”

  I waved him to the table and poured us both coffee.

  “My officer says there was no sign of anyone but that you were up most of last night.”

  “I was trying to find what they seem to think she left with me and want back,” I admitted. “I couldn’t find a thing, but then I have no idea what I’m looking for, so it’s hard to know where to look. Anyway, it may not be here at all.”

  “Maybe we can find out more when they call. I’ve got someone listening, so it’s worth a try if you can keep them talking as long as possible. For now, there’s something else you may find interesting. You already know about the body found in the weaver’s dye vat last Tuesday.”

  “It was in Thursday’s paper.”

  “Yes, well. It turns out he was not a local, but a man with a considerable record up and down the western half of the country. His real name is Earl Jones, but he’s had several aliases, one of them Tony Jones, and”—he looked up and grinned—“wait for it—Andrew Coleman.”

  Andrew Coleman—Anthony Cole. They were too close for coincidence. “So you think—”

  “Yes, we think he was the Anthony—‘Tony’—Cole that Shirley told you had conned her out of that big check.”

  A previously unconnected piece of my mental puzzle slid neatly into place. But how had he ended up in the vat and who had—?

  “But she said he had left town.”

  “Maybe she just assumed he had and he was lying low—or he came back for some reason. Anyway, he had to be here to get himself killed, didn’t he? And it gives her a hundred-thousand-dollar motive.”

  True.

  “I know you never saw him, but do you know of anyone who could positively identify him?”

  I thought back to the day I had first met Shirley and taken her home from the hospital—the day I had heard her story about Tony. I couldn’t remember if Pat had said she ever met him, but Ford Whitaker had at least seen him with Shirley.

  “And Ann Barnes,” I told Herrera. “She evidently liked him enough not to mind his moving into the duplex.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’m going to go find these folks and see if they can identify him from a photo or two we have from his record of arrests. I’ll be back, but I’ll be told if they call you. Don’t leave here without letting me know, right?”

  “Right.”

  But Herrera was no more than ten minutes gone when there was not the sound of my cell phone but a knock on my door.

  I opened it and found the manager of the park outside.

  “You have a phone call at the office,” she told me. “We don’t usually take personal calls, but he said it was long distance and an emergency. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” I told her, my thoughts immediately turning, of course, to the welfare of my children. But realizing that I might miss the call I was waiting for on the cell phone, I snatched it up along with my bag and keys, locked the door, and hurried with her to the office. Halfway there it occurred to me that Joe and Carol usually called me on the cell phone and an ominous feeling that the caller would be neither of them grew. I would have to call Herrera and let him know.

  “Hello,” I said into the office phone.

  “So you have got what we want,” an unidentifiable whisper rasped in my ear. “Still want your mutt?”

  What could I do? If I said no, it would probably be saying yes to Stretch’s death.

  “Yes,” I told him—at least I thought it was a him.

  “Good. Smart lady. Now here’s the deal. You will not contact that cop that’s been hanging around. We’ll know if you do.”


  So they had been watching.

  “Or the one who spent the night outside.”

  Watching closely.

  “Now listen up. Wrap the thing in something waterproof, take it with you, and drive to the Taos Plaza. Park in the first place you come to and walk to Charley’s Corner at the north end. Go through the store and into the stockroom, then out the back door, where you’ll find a Dumpster. Toss the package into the Dumpster and go back inside and shut the door. Walk back to your car and drive around to where you left the package. If you’ve given us what we want, you’ll find your mutt in the Dumpster. If you haven’t . . .” His voice trailed off threateningly. “You’ve got half an hour, so you better hurry. Got that?”

  I swallowed hard.

  “You got that?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” I managed to croak out, trying to think. “But I don’t ...”

  There was a click and I was alone on the line.

  I laid the receiver back in the cradle and turned to find the manager standing close behind me.

  “Bad news?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her truthfully, heading quickly for the door. “But I’ve got just half an hour and am going to the plaza. If anyone asks, please tell them that, will you?”

  I couldn’t wait for her answer.

  Halfway into downtown Taos it crossed my mind to wonder why, with all the police presence in the last day or two, she hadn’t come around to find out what was going on in her RV park. Would Herrera think to ask her if she’d seen me leave? I hoped so, though she wouldn’t be able tell him anything but where I was going. Glancing behind me on the road, I could see no police car, or anyone who seemed to be following me, as I both hoped and dreaded there might be. I was on my own.

  As usual, where Paseo del Pueblo narrowed as it came into downtown the traffic was heavy, even for a Sunday. Bumper to bumper it crawled along, making me crazy with frustration. Then, at the turnoff for the plaza I had to wait for the light to turn yellow in order to make a quick left turn and my watch told me I had just over five minutes left. Finding a space halfway along, I parked in front of the New Directions Gallery, tumbled out, and walked, as I had been told, to Charley’s Corner, though I have never walked so fast in my life. Inside, I headed straight through to the back, only to be hailed by a clerk near the stockroom door. Why can you never find one when you need one, but they’re all over you when you don’t? Ignoring her, I pushed my way past and into the back, hearing her behind me.