‘Of course. One at each end of the dining room.’
‘Good,’ I said, thinking I was going to need a drink or three before the evening was over.
‘Is there anything else?’ she wondered.
‘Not that I can think of. Point me in the direction of the reception?’
With an audible sigh of relief, the girl pointed.
I hustled along the carpeted hallway and pushed through a handful of attendees milling around one of the closed dining-room doors. I checked my watch, said cheerily, ‘Just five minutes, folks!’ opened the door and eased through.
When I caught up with Susan she was fluttering around the appetizer table, re-arranging the cocktail napkins and fussing with the nasturtiums that decorated the base of the centerpiece, an ice sculpture the size of a cat, carved in the shape of a Bigfoot taking an oh-so-casual stroll through the fruit platter. ‘How can I help tonight?’ I asked.
‘Work the crowd. Meet and greet, especially the speakers.’ She tapped her nametag. ‘They have green ribbons.’
‘That doesn’t sound too onerous.’ I snitched a mushroom. ‘What about dinner?’
As I popped the mushroom into my mouth, Susan scowled, so I re-arranged the remaining mushrooms with a flick of my index finger, closing the gap and erasing all evidence of my premature sampling.
‘It’s a buffet with open seating. There’s a table reserved for staff over near the lectern, but honestly? I’d rather you mingled with the attendees.’
‘Who’s speaking tonight?’
Susan’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Martin Radcliffe. I thought you knew.’
I ignored the not-so-subtle rebuke. ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘He’s talking about video fakery.’
‘He concentrates on Bigfoot, of course, but he touches on bogus UFO videos and mentions Nessie hoaxes, too.’
‘I thought the Loch Ness monster had been debunked ages ago,’ I said.
‘Hope springs eternal,’ she said. ‘You can even explore Loch Ness using Google Street View these days. Can I get you a glass of wine?’ Susan asked unexpectedly. An apology, perhaps, for being a bit snarky.
‘I wish,’ I said, ‘but I think I’d better have my wits about me. Perhaps later.’ As she led me toward the bar nearest the podium, I added: ‘I’m kind of surprised that the conference is starting with a focus on fakery. Most of these people are believers, surely.’
‘True, but they are as eager as anyone – perhaps even more eager, to expose the fakers.’
I could see the logic behind that. ‘So by showing how much of the so-called evidence out there isn’t real, they can concentrate on what might actually be real.’
Susan grinned. ‘Eliminate the pranksters in monkey suits, and then …’ She winked. ‘Anything can happen.’
Susan introduced me to each bartender in turn, saying, ‘Anybody has an issue tonight, refer them to me or to Hannah here,’ then sailed off again on another errand.
‘A club soda with lime,’ I told the bartender.
I had taken my first sip when the ballroom doors flew open and a man I recognized from a photograph in the conference brochure as Randall Frazier exploded into the room. All he needed was a safari hat and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and he’d be good to go for a charge up San Juan Hill. ‘Where’s the bar?’ Frazier bellowed, loud enough to be heard by all his troops. A half-dozen neatly dressed men and women flowed into the room in his considerable wake.
‘He’s two minutes early,’ I grumbled as I checked my watch.
The bartender shrugged, arranged the tip cup more prominently on the bar in front of him and said, ‘It’s show time.’
FOUR
Paris, France, 1784. ‘There is lately arrived in France from America, a wild man, who was caught in the woods, 200 miles back from the Lake of the Woods, by a party of Indians … He is near seven feet high, covered with hair, but has little appearance of understanding and is remarkably sullen and subdued. When he was taken, half a bear was found lying by him, whom he had just killed.’
The London Times, January 4, 1784
As the room filled and the pre-dinner cocktail party progressed, I made it my goal in life to chat up Randall Frazier, the superannuated Indiana Jones who I kept my eye on as he migrated from one bar to the other, followed by his entourage. The man was down to one devoted fan, rapt, hanging on to his every golden word, when I crossed the room and pounced. ‘Hannah Ives,’ I said, extending my hand. ‘One of the organizers. How’s the conference going for you so far?’
His female companion, a petite, middle-aged woman dressed in a hot-pink tracksuit with matching athletic shoes – an outfit brought up to cocktail party standards by the addition of three-quarter-karat diamond ear studs – fixed me with eyes as green as the sea and shot shrapnel my way. Frazier, blustery but gentlemanly, introduced us. Monique Deschamps was from Montreal, I learned, and the author of the definitive Sasquatch work, Bigfoot: Fact, Fiction and Fable. ‘Monique is here to promote her book,’ Frazier explained, sounding like a proud father. ‘It’ll be on sale in the dealers’ room.’
Monique’s face softened and she flushed.
I promised to stop by her booth to check it out when the exhibits opened in the morning. She must have decided that I, a lowly conference organizer, was no threat to her relationship with the great man because she took the opportunity to wander off and refill her plate, leaving us alone.
Based on what Susan had told me about Frazier, I wanted to quiz him about the enigmatic yeti finger but didn’t know how to bring it up. I decided to ease into it. ‘Did I read in the program that you’re organizing an expedition to explore the lava tubes of Mount Saint Helens this coming August?’ I asked.
‘You heard correctly.’ He brightened considerably. ‘Interested in coming along to observe the filming?’
I laughed and sidestepped the question. ‘Looking for Bigfoot, I presume?’
‘Hope to find him, too, in spite of Radcliffe’s naysaying. I’m pretty confident. A local Indian gal pinpointed the spot so we’re not going in blind.’
‘What kind of equipment do you need for a trip like that?’ I asked.
‘Leica night-vision binoculars, of course. I’ve also got a Nikon D1x top-end, single-lens reflex camera with shutter speeds up to 1/16,000th of a second that will freeze a cheetah running flat out, thermal imaging equipment and a ton of motion sensors. I even have access to a helicopter, although nowadays we’re having pretty good luck using drones.’ He leaned forward. ‘Guy working for a real estate company in Sacramento was filming some property aerials and got footage of Bigfoot instead.’
‘No kidding!’ I said.
‘Check it out on YouTube,’ he said helpfully.
‘Sounds expensive, an expedition like that,’ I commented, taking a ladylike sip of club soda.
‘Oh, it is, it is, but my sponsor has deep pockets. Very deep.’
I was thinking National Geographic or the Nature Channel when Frazier bumped my arm with his elbow and gestured with his long-neck bottle of Rainier ‘mountain fresh’ beer. ‘Over there, hogging the shrimp platter.’
I turned slowly to see to whom he was referring. A portly gentleman dressed in a close-fitting dark blue business suit was dragging a shrimp by the tail through a shell-shaped bowl of cocktail sauce. As I watched, he tilted his head back, suspended the shrimp for a moment over his wide-open mouth then dropped it in. ‘Smooth,’ I commented.
Frazier laughed. ‘Greg Gilchrist doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him. He has more money than God.’
‘Must be nice.’
‘Mining,’ he explained. ‘He’s chairman of Western Amalgamated Mining and Bank Amerika-Mexico, among others. Makes money faster than he can spend it. Gilchrist bankrolled my first expedition to Nepal. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’
‘It rings a bell,’ I said, sensing an opening. ‘Something about a monk and the finger from a yeti?’
Frazier waved his beer dismissively. ‘That was a huge disap
pointment. Got the relic smuggled out of Nepal as far as London but the customs people picked it out of her carryon at Heathrow.’
‘Her?’
‘A famous actress.’ He lowered his voice an octave. ‘I’ll say no more.’
‘What happened to the finger after that?’
‘Since it was an artifact they sent it to the British Museum for testing. Turns out to be old but definitely human.’ He leaned closer. ‘If you can’t trust a monk, who can you trust? Paid good money for that finger, too.’
‘And a bottle of Scotch?’
Frazier chuckled. ‘You have done your homework, Hannah.’
‘Your fame precedes you,’ I said, glancing back to the buffet with stuffed mushrooms on my mind.
Clinging with laced fingers to Gilchrist’s free arm and gazing at him adoringly in spite of his boorish behavior – or perhaps because of it – a leggy twenty-something dressed in a halter-top mini-dress tottered on a pair of strappy, high-heeled sandals. Her white-blonde hair, parted in the middle like a seventies rock star, fell straight as a stick to cover her bare shoulders. Her glossy red lips moved and parted. Gilchrist dredged another shrimp through the cocktail sauce and dropped it onto the woman’s tongue, then bestowed a paternal kiss on her forehead.
‘Who’s she, then?’ I asked Frazier.
‘Nicole Baker,’ he said.
‘Nicole?’ After a moment, I said, ‘Her resemblance to Janice, the lead guitarist for Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem is uncanny, don’t you agree? Down to the inch-long false eyelashes.’
‘Doctor Teeth?’
‘The Muppets,’ I explained.
‘Meow.’
I shrugged and grinned. ‘It’s what I do.’
I decided not to comment on what was all too obvious. Nicole had to be a good forty years younger than her Sugar Daddy. As I watched, she returned the favor of the shrimp by sliding a carrot stick between his teeth. If they kept this up much longer I was going to need an insulin injection.
Fortunately Monique Deschamps sidled up to the mogul and his girlfriend just then, interrupting their tête-à-tête mid chicken skewer. Nicole had been demolishing it, one tidbit at a time, dragging the skewer seductively through her teeth.
Meanwhile, one of Frazier’s fans tapped his shoulder, tackling him with a burning question about provisioning for the Mount St Helens expedition, so I excused myself, gladly leaving them to their discussion of down versus synthetic sleeping bags.
When dinnertime rolled around, I hung back from the buffet at first, hoping I might bump into Jake and Harley, but when they didn’t show up I joined the queue at the buffet table. I passed up the fried chicken and the sliced beef swimming in gravy, but a Southwestern beans and rice concoction labeled ‘Ranchero’ looked appetizing so I spooned a portion onto my plate then moved on, closing in on the steam tray of broccoli and cauliflower smothered in cheese sauce.
‘Oh, dear,’ the woman in front of me said to no one in particular.
‘Is something wrong?’ I looked up from the grated cheese I was sprinkling on my rice. The speaker was attractive, about my age, with medium-length, honey-gold hair that flopped carelessly over her left eye.
Holding her plate in both hands, she smiled benevolently at the server – the same young woman who I’d met earlier in the discussion over the ranch dressing. Now the server wore a uniform and a badge that identified her as ‘Tina.’
‘Do you have any plain broccoli and cauliflower?’ The woman’s tone was almost pleading. ‘I’m a vegan and I don’t eat cheese.’
Tina beamed. ‘Oh, honey, don’t worry.’ She flapped a dismissive hand over the vegetables. ‘That’s not really cheese.’
I’d been about to help myself but drew back. ‘What is it, then, Tina?’
Tina leaned forward over the steam tray and whispered, ‘You don’t want to know.’ With a sideways I’ve-done-my-homework look at me, she added, ‘It comes in a tub. I read the ingredients, though, and it doesn’t have a smidgen of milk or eggs in it.’
‘That’s OK,’ the woman said, raising her hand, palm out. ‘I’ll just have salad.’
‘I can take the broccoli back to the kitchen and rinse it off under hot water for you.’ Tina, again, trying to be helpful.
‘Um, no, thank you. Salad will be fine.’
‘Salad! What a good idea,’ I said, laying the ‘cheese’-coated serving spoon aside and moving along the buffet line behind her.
Sensing a kindred spirit and mindful of Susan’s request that I mingle with the attendees, I trailed after the woman’s sheer, multicolored paisley top as she headed toward a vacant table. ‘Mind if I join you?’ I asked just as she was sitting down.
She brightened, her blue eyes twinkling at me through rimless, almost invisible eyeglasses. ‘Please.’
I set my plate on the table and glanced casually at her nametag: Leah Solat, Sacramento, CA. ‘What brings you here, Leah?’
‘I’m a journalist, writing an article for The Sacramento Bee.’
‘Pro or con?’
‘Hah! I try to maintain my impartiality but it’s all hogwash, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I’ve never seen a Bigfoot but I’m betting more than half the people here are convinced they have. The catalog of sightings goes back for centuries, as you probably know. Can all those people be mistaken?’
While Leah pondered a response, a red-haired woman I recognized as the one who’d been standing in front me earlier at the reception desk drifted past, scanning the tables as if she were lost. ‘Please, join us,’ I said, taking pity. ‘I’m Hannah and this is Leah.’
‘Athena Davis,’ the woman said, indicating her nametag. ‘My husband, Jim, is around here somewhere. Ah, there he is!’ She began waving frantically, as if trying to hail a cab.
As she sat down, she said, ‘Jim’s been fascinated with apes ever since he read Tarzan as a kid.’
‘Edgar Rice Burroughs?’ Leah said. ‘But that’s fiction, surely.’
Athena lowered her voice. ‘Don’t tell Jim that.’
Jim Davis, when he joined us, wore a nametag decorated with a green ribbon that said, ‘Speaker.’ It clashed loudly with his banana-yellow Hawaiian shirt decorated with surfboards and palm trees.
‘So, what will you be talking about?’ Leah asked as Jim sat down at the table opposite us.
‘Surveillance,’ his wife supplied.
Jim swallowed a mouthful of beef and washed it down with a gulp of iced tea. ‘We used to own a Radio Shack franchise in Altoona,’ he explained. ‘When the company went belly up I simply closed the door. But – silver lining! – I got all this cool equipment to play with.’
‘You should see our garage,’ Athena grumped in a good-natured way. ‘It’s a disgrace.’ She waved a fork at her husband. ‘If you’re not careful, Jimmy, you’ll end up on that TV show, Hoarders.’
‘You’ll sing a different tune, Athena, my love, when the system works.’
‘What does your system do, Jim?’ I wanted to know.
‘It’s a prototype for a 360-degree remote video monitoring system.’
‘Like a webcam?’
‘Similar,’ Jim said, ‘but a webcam is usually fixed.’ He drew a circle in the air with his index finger. ‘My camera revolves.’
Athena bounced in her chair. ‘Jimmy’s a genius! It’s all connected to his laptop on the Internet.’ She cupped her hand and rotated it from side to side like a searchlight. ‘Jimmy’s goes all the way around like this, doesn’t it, sweetie?’
Across the table, ‘sweetie’ flushed modestly and nodded. ‘Twenty-four seven.’
‘The cool thing,’ Jim added, gesturing with a fork piled high with mashed potatoes dripping gravy, ‘is that it’s triggered by motion. Once the camera starts filming it sends an alarm directly to my laptop.’ He demonstrated: ‘Whoot, whoot, whoot!’
Athena beamed. ‘I told you he was a clever boy.’
‘Are you giving a demonstration here at the conference?’ Leah as
ked.
‘Better than that. I’m setting the system up in the woods out there.’ He gestured again with his fork, dangerously heaped with faux-cheesy broccoli. ‘Not far from the Metolius River.’
‘There have been multiple sightings of Bigfoot along the river,’ Athena said.
‘Then tomorrow, I’ll fire it up,’ Jim continued as if Athena hadn’t spoken. ‘Demonstrate how it works.’
‘It sounds expensive,’ Leah said.
‘Not at all, Miss Solat. Radio Shack is no longer around, of course, but you can buy all the component parts at Best Buy, or even over the Internet. Beautiful, huh? Three, four hundred dollars tops for the lot.’
‘It would be worth that much to catch whatever is getting into my garbage cans at night,’ Leah commented.
‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if Jimmy caught a Bigfoot on camera?’ Athena said. ‘That would show Mr Smarty Pants a thing or two.’
Jim tore a roll in half and used it to sop gravy off his plate. ‘Athena means Martin Radcliffe.’
I raised an interrogatory eyebrow.
‘My husband took a series of Bigfoot videos,’ Athena clarified, ‘and posted them on Facebook. Martin McNasty told everyone they’d been faked.’
‘To be fair,’ Jim said, ‘the quality sucked. I was using a cheap, battery-operated wildlife camera in those days, but still, there was no need for Radcliffe to question my integrity.’
‘Our new equipment is state of the art,’ Athena said. ‘When Bigfoot shows up we’ll be ready for him.’
‘So you’re believers?’ Leah asked, stating the obvious. I noticed that during the course of our conversation with the Davises she’d extracted a small notebook from her handbag and had begun taking notes.
‘Absolutely!’ Jim said. ‘And I’m hoping to prove it. Right here. Right now.’
Footprints to Murder Page 4