by Laurel Dewey
“Really?” Jane asked with genuine interest. “How?”
“Because I started smokin’ again on day six! Took that damn edge right off!” Bo chuckled, enjoying his joke at Jane’s expense. “I sure as hell hope you’re quittin’ for the right reasons. I quit because a friend of mine got emphysema. I felt like shit when I heard that. And then, it dawned on me. What in the hell was I thinkin’? He’s got the disease, not me! Why should I quit ’cause he’s dying?!” Jane was dumbfounded. Bo’s mind was a seriously odd little place to dwell. Bo slapped down the menu. “Oh, I almost forgot!” Reaching into the inside of his shirt, he pulled out a black-and-white photo. He slid it in front of Jane. “This belongs to you.”
Jane looked at the photo. It was a crystal clear shot of her Mustang purposely zooming past the speed camera across from the infamous bridge. The bridge was easy to see, proving the point of her experiment. “Good. It worked. I think you should replace this static camera with a 24/7 video feed for the duration of the investigation…just in case there’s activity on the bridge that could prove fruitful.”
“Is that right?” Bo snorted in a dismissive tone.
Jane could see this was heading into the same ballpark as the last game they played in his office. “You said on the QT that they’re putting up security cameras all over town. Why can’t they put one up there temporarily just for this…”
“I’ll look into it,” Bo said, cutting her off, “but no promises.” He pulled a ticket out of his chest pocket and slapped it in front of her. “You can give me a check now for that or pay it at the front desk.”
Jane read the amount: $175.00. “Is this a joke?”
“No, little lady, this is not a joke. Camera clocked your ol’ stallion goin’ sixty-five in a forty-five zone.”
Jane was dumbfounded. This bloated asshole was doing everything he could to piss her off. She wanted to tear up the ticket and shove it down his throat. Fortunately, Annie arrived with the coffee.
“Hey, Bo!” she said sweetly.
“Hey, sweetheart! This is my good buddy over here, Morgan Weyler.” Bo stopped there, effectively omitting Jane. Jane took a hefty gulp of her potent brew.
Annie took their orders, with Bo disregarding the menu and ordering a schizophrenic cornucopia of breakfast items, including sausages, waffles, steak, hash browns, pancakes and three kinds of juice. “Keep the green off my plate!” he reminded Annie. Coffee, he announced, made him sleepy. Jane chalked it up to his backward wiring, possibly dysgenic, bizarre behavior. Once Annie was out of earshot, Bo gave them the rundown on her and this popular diner. It seemed that Annie, all of twenty-five years old, had been a beloved member of the Midas community since she and her late mother moved to town when she was fifteen. Dad was out of the picture, Bo was quick to say, and her last name, Mack, was her mother’s maiden name. Jane deduced that the kid was either the product of an ugly divorce or illegitimate. Either way, Jane couldn’t care less. She wanted to tackle the Van Gorden case. And yet, they got to hear more about dear Annie.
“All she ever wanted to do was open a restaurant,” Bo told Weyler. “It’s been her dream since I can remember. This place used to be called The Crimson Café, run by a couple of lesbian hippies from Vermont. You should have seen what it looked like before she took it over. God help us. Bathroom was painted in lacquer red. Floor, ceiling, walls, everywhere you looked, shiny red was starin’ back at you. God, it was like taking a shit in the middle of a blood clot.”
“How does a kid that age afford to buy a place like this?” Weyler asked.
“After her mother died of cancer, she got some life insurance money as a start-up. Then fortune shined on her. An anonymous benefactor sent her a check for $35,000.”
“We should all be so lucky,” Jane said in a rushed tone as she brought out a stack of pages. “Look, we need to go over some new information I uncovered last night…”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist. We’ll get to it!”
This was outrageous. “Excuse me?”
Weyler intervened. “Bo, Jane’s found some new information that could be pertinent.” He nodded to Jane.
She pulled out the plastic-covered blank page impregnated with urine and placed it in front of Bo. When she told him that the funky aroma on the page was piss and that it spelled out a sentence, he was actually speechless for a couple seconds. “He’s smart. He knows we can’t get DNA off urine. But he’s also making a point, I think, with the metaphor.” Bo looked baffled. “He’s pissed-off about something big.”
“Well, obviously,” Bo responded, dryly. “The guy’s deranged!” He pushed the sheet toward Jane with his chubby index finger, not wanting to get too familiar with it. “I don’t buy your metaphor idea. See, I think he just wanted to disgust us.”
“Have you ever heard of a street named Imperial?” Jane asked.
“10-74,” Bo stated, using code again for “No.” Jane explained how she found the address in Jake’s locker at The Rabbit Hole. “What in the hell are you rootin’ around in his locker for?”
“For anything, Bo! Anything that might lead us to something!” This is getting pointless, Jane deduced. Annie showed up with the food. Bo’s multicourses took up over half the table. After rearranging the plates several times, Bo slathered an empty hot plate with butter pads, stirring them around on the dish with his knife until the entire circumference was dripping in the liquid fat. He then piled that buttery plate with food and dove in with the delight of a starving Ethiopian. While he was preoccupied chewing, Jane put forth her idea that the clues were telling a story—a speculation that Bo tossed around with Weyler. She doubted he would care about her next theory, but she laid out the possibility that there was a missing clue that the Van Gordens were holding back. That one didn’t go over well.
“Don’t serve me a plate of crazy, girl! And don’t get all lippy with me either!” Bo said, spitting out bits of egg. “His parents are beside themselves with worry. They’ve been nothin’ but cooperative with us!”
“Bailey said he pulled the officer assigned to trace any calls coming into their house because, after four days, it wasn’t convenient for him. That doesn’t sound like he’s being cooperative!”
“Hey!” Bo leaned across the table with a mean look on his face. “There’s a damn limit to what a man can handle. I understand that! So, I didn’t see any problem when he asked to pull the cop.”
Jane took a bite of her eggs and washed it down with another hearty swallow of coffee. “Well, I do see a problem…”
“That’s ’cause you’re an outsider with an agenda.”
“Bo…” Weyler interrupted.
“No, no, let me have my say here! I’ve dealt with this crap before so I know what I’m talkin’ about! We had a group called Atheists United a few years back that convinced the county idiots that they were worthy of sponsoring a section of the highway outside of town for cleanup. They posted a sign that proudly displayed ATHEISTS UNITED in big bold letters. Every time I passed that sign, I wanted to blast it to hell along with the heathens that put it up. As the weeks past, that section of the highway was dirtier than it had ever been. I called up the head SOB of the group and said, either you atheists are too damn lazy or you don’t believe that trash exists. Either way, I said, I want you to give up your contract. Well, he wasn’t up for that. He wanted me to be tolerant of his sign and his beliefs. His problem was that he had his head up his ass. He had his finger up there too, so it was crowded down there. But I wasn’t about to let that Godhating fool tell me what was gonna happen! See, within a week, I personally had the wrath of his nonexistent God breathin’ down his neck in the form of state agencies, the county and even one of those crazy Eco nuts. You ain’t suffered until you’ve had an Eco nut ridin’ your rump from dusk ’til dawn!” Bo sat back. “In short, I made his life a livin’ hell and he agreed to give up that section of the highway. I handed it over to a nice little group of blue-haired ladies from the Midas Book Club. It’s so cl
ean now, you could do brain surgery on the side of the road.”
Outsiders with agendas, Jane thought. Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Bo Lowry. After Bo’s long-winded story and inference that he could make her life miserable and drive her off the case, she wanted to grab her six shots in the dark, plus her two to go, and drive back to Denver. And she would have done just that if she didn’t feel something deeply for the missing kid who everyone else seemed to be using for collateral. She wasn’t about to bring up the mysecretrevelations website. Nor would she utter a word about the suicidal animated drawing on the sketchpad. Bo was a fucking asshole, she decided. And no matter how tight he and Weyler were or what bullshit happened long ago that caused Weyler to think he “owed” Bo something, she’d work the angles and she’d do it quietly. And she’d make damn sure she kept as much distance between herself and this corn-fed blowhard as possible. Jane crammed one bite of food after another into her mouth and hoped her silence would speak volumes to Weyler.
Bo looked at Weyler. “We gotta focus on the one man who is the most likely contestant in this game…Trash Bag Jordan.” Jane happened to glance over to the far corner of the diner. It took her a few moments to realize that it was Jordan Copeland. He sat alone, bent over a plate of food, with his back to her. “I don’t have to read his jacket to know what I’m dealing with,” Bo continued, referring to Jordan’s criminal file. “See, I look at the way people think by picturing a series of nuts in their head. People who think clearly have their nuts all lined up in a neat little row,” he said, demonstrating this belief by lining up the salt-and-pepper shaker along with several bottles of condiments. “But then you have people who think up and down and all around.” Bo furiously mixed up the bottles. “I call that uneven nut distribution. Jordan Copeland has severe uneven nut distribution.”
Weyler chimed in. “You think he’s doing it with some help?”
“Not sure. See, the perv talks to no one. Has no friends. I imagine the only people he would ever talk to for any length of time would be as crazy and nutty as he is!”
Jane’s gaze was still focused on Jordan. Now it was her turn to penetrate the back of his neck with her jagged vibe.
“Is this a two-person operation with one person holding little Juice Box and the other playing note deliverer?” Bo postulated to Weyler in a hushed tone. “Or did Jordan just kidnap him and kill him, and then confuse us with riddles and notes that mean nothing and go nowhere?”
Bo continued yammering in the background, but Jane tuned him out. She was focused on Jordan’s back. There was a slight turn of his head to the right. At first, Jane thought he was reacting to the television that blared above his head. But that wasn’t it because the slight turn graduated into a roll that stopped just short of seeing Jane. She’d connected with him. Somehow, he knew she was there staring at him from across the room. She didn’t let herself slide back into the booth mentally until she heard Bo mention Jake’s name.
“What’s that?” she asked, still slightly out of it.
Bo looked frustrated. “I said that the problem with Juice Box Jakey was that he thought too damn much! That’s when you get yourself in trouble.”
“Thinking?” Jane asked.
“10-4. Questionin’ everything! See, he never could take a breath because he was too busy rehashin’ crap and then requestionin’ all the crap! God, it would make a man weary just watchin’ it.” Bo let out a long, tired breath. “Now the irony is he’s got all of us doin’ the same damn shit, tryin’ to figure out where his sorry ass is right now. While he’s 10-72’n he gets 10-65’d,” he moaned, using code for committing suicide and kidnapped respectively. “I guess at the end of the day all we do is hope.”
Jane felt her back stiffen. There was that empty word again. She shook her head, and took another gulp of her dark brew and a bite of food. “Hope lays there waiting for something to happen or for someone else to improve your circumstance. Hope teases you into believing that around that next corner everything will magically change.”
Bo regarded Jane with a baneful eye. “Well, pardon me if I disagree with you. Hope, for a lot of us, keeps you alive.”
Jane met his mean glare. “It keeps you in prison.”
“Well, what in the hell do you suggest we do if we don’t have hope for Jake?”
Jane considered his question carefully. “Belief and action. We believe we can save him and we take action to make that happen.” She finished the last bite on her plate, grabbed her to go coffee and pried herself off the vinyl cushion. “I’ll be outside,” she told Weyler, throwing a $10.00 bill on the table.
She started down the aisle when she saw the talking head of a Denver news reporter on the flat screen diner TV mentioning the kidnapping of Jake Van Gorden. Jake’s face was splashed across the large screen, his ponytail draped around the neck of his black T-shirt. All eyes in the diner turned to the TV and a hush fell over the crowd. The next shot on the television was an establishing shot of Midas’ Main Street, taken the day before the film crew visited the town. Jane winced, knowing what was coming next. As expected, there was the scene outside the Town Hall with Bo at the microphone and Weyler and her in the background. But instead of the camera focusing completely on Bo, Jane was easy to see in the frame. She thought she’d hid her discomfort when she was standing up there, but her angst was painted across her face for the world to see.
She wanted to dissolve out of that diner, and she was on her way out when she noticed Jordan Copeland, still seated in his booth. He was staring at the TV with his right arm dangling by his side, shaking uncontrollably.
Outside, the cold bit at her skin. She pulled her jacket tighter around her body. God, a cigarette would taste damn good right about now. Every nerve ending was raw; every emotion like a scab pulled off a wound that wasn’t healed. The frigid wind whipped around Jane’s body. It felt like a storm was moving in and preparing to dump a foot of spring snow in the high country. That was the thing about Colorado—March and April were often the snowiest months of the year. But, in keeping with Colorado’s erratic late winter patterns, you could see a foot of snow on Monday and have eighty-five degrees on Tuesday. At that moment though, the cold was unforgiving. She started down Main Street toward the B&B but she only got about thirty feet when she heard Weyler calling her name.
She turned and saw a somewhat uneasy look on his face. Walking toward him, the look of concern grew. Her gut twisted. “What is it?” she asked.
“The receptionist at Town Hall just got a call from the kidnapper. The voice was distorted. All he said is ‘I’m waiting’ and left the line open. They triangulated the signal and found the scene. There’s a black car there. And Jake’s body may be in the trunk.”
CHAPTER 14
Jane followed in her Mustang while Weyler rode with Bo in a patrol car. It was the same damn, two-lane road with the red rock on the right side; the same road that led to the bridge and Jordan Copeland’s hideaway. But now, they drove past the infamous bridge, past the speed cameras and past Jordan’s ten-acre fenced property. They continued for another two miles as the sky darkened and thick flakes of snow fell indiscriminately across the landscape. The whole time, Jane felt sick. Weyler quietly told her that the deputy smelled decomposition coming from the trunk of the vehicle—the vehicle that matched the color description of the car seen on the bridge. Was the kid who sought the truth and declared it on a poster in his bedroom lying dead in the trunk of a car, abandoned on the side of the road? Had the truth become this dangerous?
By the time Jane and Bo pulled up to the scene, the sky had given way to diagonal waves of snow. As Jane got out of her Mustang and walked along the road to the site, the flakes quickly covered the hoods of the three police vehicles that had already shown up. Weyler brought an umbrella and sheltered Jane as they made the solemn journey past the police vehicles and up a short, dirt incline that led twenty feet further to a twodoor, black beater of a car that looked to be a thirty-five-year-old Chevy Vega.
No plates. Busted tail pipe. Smashed in passenger side with primer covering the door. A small rock cairn sat in the center of the car’s closed trunk, seemingly marking the spot. It wasn’t easy in these mountains to successfully triangulate a cell phone ping. Jane asked a cop standing nearby how the deputy discovered the car since it was pretty much off the road and out of sight. The cop pointed to another larger rock cairn positioned neatly on the side of the highway. The kidnapper was doing everything now to make sure his handiwork was seen.
Jane didn’t need the cairn to locate the black vehicle. The smell of decomp was overwhelming, starting from the moment the three of them walked up the hill to the scene. Several cops near the vehicle covered their mouths with cloths to repel the nauseating stench. Jane, Weyler and Bo stood waiting while the police photographer took shots of the rock cairn on the hood. The snow subsided as quickly as it started, with only a few errant flakes falling on the ground. Weyler discarded the umbrella as the photographer finished the last shot. Bo gave the order to “Open ’er up.” Another cop stepped forward with a tire iron and jimmied the trunk. Jane’s heart raced as it popped a couple inches and stuck, releasing the ungodly stink of death. A nearby cop quickly turned, vomiting. One more good thrust and the trunk lifted.
“Good Christ Almighty!” Bo exclaimed. “That bastard!”
Jane and Weyler had to step back. Staring back at them was a heap of animal carcasses, most likely road kill, in various stages of putrefaction. The rotting stench was like getting hit in the head by a two-by-four. What looked like a raccoon had almost dissolved to liquid goo that intermingled with the bloated carcass of a deer. Thousands of maggots feasted on the trunk’s contents, moving freely through the empty orbs and out the well-devoured nostrils. While it was difficult to judge—given the fact that the animals were already flattened and disintegrating prior to being tossed in the trunk—Jane wild-guessed that the sickening soup of death had been cooking in the Vega’s trunk for at least five days. That was important to her because it meant that this clue had been planned from almost the moment Jake was kidnapped. If her theory that the kidnapper was telling a story was correct, what in the hell did this mean? Where was the symmetry that gave this clue significance?