by Mason Cross
Sarah was gripping on with one hand, but her fingers were starting to slip. I gripped her wrist with both hands and took a second to balance myself.
“You okay?”
She nodded quickly. “Just get me out of here.”
I braced my heels against the floorboards, hearing them creak in protest, and started to pull her up. She grabbed the edge with her other hand and then steadied herself on her forearms as I helped drag her the rest of the way out.
Sarah let out a long breath and wiped her brow.
“That was close.”
I got as near to the edge as I was comfortable with, trying to ignore the creaking, and shined the beam of the flashlight around. The cellar was clear aside from some broken packing crates. I examined the edge of the hole and saw the traces of dry rot in the struts holding the floor up. We were fortunate the floor hadn’t caved in anywhere else yet.
I straightened up. Sarah was rubbing a graze on her arm and looking down into the hole.
“Daylight would definitely have been better,” she said.
Carefully, we picked our way back to the entrance, the creaks of the floorboards sounding far more alarming than they had on the way in. I kept my eyes on the ground and the flashlight beam in front of us. It felt like walking across the surface of a frozen lake. We found another place where the floor had caved in closer to the door, but the gap was smaller.
We reached the exit and both of us breathed a sigh of relief as we stepped out onto the firm concrete of the steps outside.
“Let’s not do that again.”
“We still have the rest of the town to enjoy,” I reminded her.
We stuck together, moving from area to area in an efficient, methodical pattern. We searched Main Street first. The buildings that were open or partially fallen down, we went into. The ones that looked particularly dangerous, we stayed outside and examined through windows and doorways. The few that were secured and boarded we checked for signs of entry. Had the town been less remote, I would have expected to find homeless people using it for shelter. But Corinth was too far off the beaten path for that. Living here without access to a car would require a twenty-mile hike across the wilderness every time you needed supplies.
Once we had cleared Main Street, we moved on to the southwest corner of town. Sarah brought out her tablet and we split the town into quadrants, using Main Street as the center. We started in the southwest and moved clockwise. It would have been faster to split up and cover twice the ground in the same time, but neither of us suggested that. Anyway, there really wasn’t that much town to cover. Even at its peak, Corinth had been one of the smaller mining communities of its kind.
The houses were of a uniform design: one-story dwellings with three or four rooms. A square of yard out front and one at the back: usually surfaced with cracked paving or weed-invaded gravel, occasionally brown patches of dirt that might once have been a lawn. We searched from house to house, taking the same approach: going inside the open ones, checking the secured ones.
Like the stores, the houses had been cleared out and picked clean. In a couple, we found the remains of fires and empty beer cans: the residue of adventurous college kids seeking out an off-the-beaten-path party venue.
It took us just over an hour to cover the town with reasonable thoroughness. We found nothing. The whole time, the silence enveloped us like a blanket. It almost felt like a transgression when one of us spoke. We found ourselves back at the car just after ten o’clock.
Sarah opened the back door of the Ford and tossed her backpack inside, breathing out a heavy sigh. “So what now?”
She was disappointed. I was too, but this wasn’t the end of the road.
From somewhere out in the desert, we heard the howl of a coyote. It could have been miles away; it was difficult to gauge distance. It was the first sound that hadn’t been made by either of us in over an hour, and it was a little unsettling.
“Now,” I replied, “we’ve crossed something off the list. So let’s think again. Why would she come here?”
“Not for the club scene.”
I didn’t reply, looking back up at the hulk of the town hall. I knew I was probably imbuing the building with more significance than it warranted, just because it had been what led us here via Carol’s sketch. I thought about the door on the platform inside. We had encountered more than a few secured doors in the old town, but something about this one bothered me.
“You want to take another look?”
I shook my head. It was time to call it a night. “If things don’t work out in Quarter, we can come back in the daylight. We’re not going to find anything tonight.”
27
We didn’t talk much on the drive back to Iron City. I wound my window down and let the night air blow through the car. It was cold now, but it was a refreshing cool after the heat of the day and the stale interiors of Corinth. We were in view of the lights of town when Sarah’s phone buzzed.
“Looks like we’re officially out of the wilderness,” she said, looking down at the screen. She examined whatever the message was, and then tapped a couple of times and held the phone to her ear. I listened to her side of the conversation again.
“Hello, Greg? Sarah Blackwell, how you doing?”
Greg Kubler, I was guessing. Sarah’s contact at the Las Vegas PD. I kept my eyes on the road as Sarah navigated the pleasantries and got down to business. What did her friend know about Detective Costigane and his interest in Dominic Freel?
Kubler was doing most of the talking. Sarah listened intently, chipping in with an occasional comment. “Yeah ... interesting ... naturally ...” and then something that surprised her. “Oh? Okay.”
I glanced over at her. She was looking straight ahead at the road, her mind obviously miles away. She bit the corner of her bottom lip as she listened.
“No that’s really great, thank you. One last thing, does the name Trenton Gage sound familiar to you? No? Just wondering.”
There was a pause and I guessed Greg had said his piece and was now asking her a question.
“Oh, you know me. Idle curiosity.” Another pause and then a smile. “You’ll be the first to know.”
She thanked Kubler and hung up. We had reached the parking lot of the Iron City Inn. I pulled off the road, parked, and turned the engine off before I gave in and asked.
“Well?”
Sarah shook herself out of her thoughts.
“He says he doesn’t know Costigane well, but he has a reputation for being kind of a hardass. He’s been with the department thirty years. The dependable type.”
“But he doesn’t know anything about Gage.”
“Didn’t ring a bell, but like I said, Greg’s not exactly front-of-house anymore.”
“So what about Costigane? What’s he been working on lately?”
Sarah paused. “Does the word ‘Ellison’ mean anything to you?”
The word did sound familiar. I repeated it, testing it out on my tongue. Someone in the news, recently, I thought. Not someone, something. A company name, not a person. I snapped my fingers as soon as it came to me.
“The big heist in Vegas over New Year’s.” I had read about it. It had been national news for a day or two.
“Bingo. Made the front pages out here for a week. Holiday weekend, perfect crime.”
“But they got someone for it, right?”
“Right. But there was no way he was acting alone. And they still haven’t accounted for some of the take.”
“And this is the case Costigane is working?”
Sarah nodded. “Mmhmm.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“It was a professional job,” Sarah said. “But the funny thing was, it didn’t seem like the work of any of the usual operators. Vegas is fairly clean now, not like the old days. I wonder about that sometimes. When you clear up a problem, it always pops up somewhere else.”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “You want gangsters running casinos these days,
try Macau. You won’t be disappointed.”
“So the police did a pretty good job. There were four or five men involved, but they tracked one down after an anonymous tip-off and he had most of the take.”
“Most?”
“They got all of the high value jewelry. Some of the loose diamonds were unaccounted for. Not a trivial sum—definitely a couple of million, as I remember.”
“And the easiest merchandise to sell,” Blake said. “I don’t think it was a coincidence that the loose stones were the part they didn’t recover.”
“So what do you think? Freel knows something about it? Maybe he has evidence on the people who did it? Or maybe he was the anonymous tip-off, and somebody wants revenge.”
“Or maybe it’s something simpler than that,” I said.
All of a sudden, I began to see recent events in a new light. Freel lying low in a Vegas suburb. Telling Carol they needed to leave right away. The men who’d come in the night. Costigane’s interest in finding him.
She shook her head. “I don’t know Blake ... What are you thinking?”
The pieces were starting to form a picture. And I didn’t like the look of it one bit.
“Same thing I’ve been thinking all day. We need to talk to Dominic Freel.”
28
PHOENIX
Trenton Gage booked a room in a hotel on the south side of Phoenix, after first stopping by a branch of Hertz to pick up a car for the onward journey. They rented him a silver Chrysler 300 with an open-ended return date. It was more expensive than he would have liked, but the next best option would have been hitchhiking to Quarter. The room was as basic as the one in Vegas had been, but at least it didn’t have the noisy neighbors.
He charged his phone, which had gone dead a little while after he had dealt with Logan McKinney. Just after eleven, he called the number the leader of the three men in Vegas had given him; the one who said his name was Walter. Walter answered immediately, and expressed polite surprise that he hadn’t heard from Gage until now.
“How are things proceeding?”
“Things are proceeding well. I spoke to an associate of Freel’s this afternoon.”
“An associate?”
“That’s right, his name was McKinney. Sound familiar?”
There was a pause of perhaps half a second too long.
“I’m not familiar with that name, no. And was this Mr. McKinney able to help you?”
Gage reached into his pocket and took a small metal object from it. Until a couple of hours before, the object had hung on a chain around Logan McKinney’s neck, like a charm. It hadn’t brought him any luck, or at least, not enough.
The object was a key. About three inches long, made of brass, and with a small engraved logo: two Cs intertwined, and the number 2 in a smaller font. Gage had had a hunch of what it was almost immediately, but he had confirmed his suspicions by looking up the company represented by the logo. Centrum Co. A company that specialized in the manufacture of safes. As the number suggested, the key was part of a set: a dual system meaning two people had to be there to open it up. He had a good idea of who the owner of the key’s twin was.
“I believe so,” Gage answered. “I think we’re definitely getting somewhere.”
29
We rose early, and were on the road by seven. The sun was already full in the sky. The traffic was nonexistent as we headed south, and we were in good time for Sarah to keep her one o’clock appointment with Diane Marshall. I drove, and Sarah bunched up her hoodie against the window and snoozed for a little longer. As we lost altitude, the landscape flattened out and the greenery ceded to sweeping desert. The only features to break up the road were the telegraph poles. Distant mountain ranges rose ahead, but never seemed to get any closer. By eight a.m. I had to switch the air conditioning on. I thought about how different an environment this was from the one in which I had last seen Carol. A different world, almost. I thought about that rainy November night in a guest house out on Long Island. I had been called away in the early hours of the morning. I had said goodbye, and we had never seen each other again.
I had almost forgotten there was somebody else in the car with me when Sarah startled me with a question.
“If we find her, how do you think she’ll react?”
I glanced over at Sarah. “Hmm?” I responded, pretending I didn’t know exactly who she was talking about.
“Carol. I mean, it’s been a few years, right?”
“I don’t know how she’ll react,” I said. Which was the truth.
“What will you say to her?”
“I don’t know.”
Sarah yawned and stretched as best she could within the confines of the passenger seat. She stared ahead at the straight road that stretched to the horizon and smiled. “Of course you don’t. I mean, it’s not like you’ve had a long time to think about it.”
I turned the question around. “What about you? What are you going to say to her?”
She bit her bottom lip, thinking. “I think I might try to wring her neck.”
“Maybe I should speak to her first.”
We saw our first car in nearly an hour twenty miles north of Quarter. It was a dark blue pickup driven by a big, tanned guy wearing mirrored shades and a Stetson. A minute after that, we saw another pickup, a green one this time. And then a yellow Toyota, and then the sight of other cars ceased to be a novelty and we were in light traffic. Ten minutes after that, we hit the Quarter town limits. The sign welcomed us and told us the population was a little under six thousand.
On Main Street, there was a line of stores, all open and doing business in stark contrast to the other town we had seen last night. There was a gravel parking lot next to a place called Norrie’s that advertised COFFEE in type larger than the name of the establishment. I pulled into a space and went inside to take them up on the suggestion, while Sarah pulled up a map on her phone.
Nome’s was decked out like a ‘50s-style diner—red leather upholstered booths, black and white checkerboard tiled flooring, an old-fashioned jukebox in the corner. It was also just about deserted. I decided this would be as good a place as any to wait while Sarah went to see Diane Marshall. When I got back out to the car with two coffees in go cups, she had already worked out our itinerary. The meeting with Diane first, and then we would work through our list of potential locations until we either found Carol, or struck out completely.
At a quarter to one, Sarah gulped the last of her coffee and held her hand out for the keys.
“Sure you don’t want me to come?” I asked.
“Better I go alone. You can put the finishing touches to the list, but if we’re in luck, we won’t need it.” She inclined her head in the direction of the back seat, where her pack had lain since last night. “Paperwork’s all there, enjoy.”
I grabbed the backpack and got out of the car. Sarah took my place behind the wheel.
“I’ll call you as soon as I get done,” she said, starting up the engine.
I watched her back out of the space, turn and head back out onto Main Street, going in the opposite direction from where we’d come. I didn’t know how long Sarah would be gone, but I had enough to keep me busy. I carried the pack into Norrie’s and took a seat in one of the booths next to the front window. A waitress came over and offered me a menu. I declined and ordered another black coffee, to stay this time.
I looked out of the window at the street. There was a line of stores and a Mexican restaurant and a library opposite. A weekday lunchtime, so the sidewalks weren’t exactly busy, but not deserted either. Just a typical small town. I watched the passers-by. Mostly retired folks and moms with young children; everyone else probably being accounted for by work or school.
Quarter, population 5,827 according to the sign. I wondered how often they updated those signs. I assumed they didn’t send someone out to the town limits with correction fluid and a Sharpie every time someone left town, so maybe they tied it in with the census. Or maybe they only
bothered to update it when the signs were replaced. Either way, 5,827 wasn’t a lot of people, considering. I hoped it wouldn’t be too difficult to track down just two people out of that population.
Before I got to work on that, I hooked Sarah’s tablet up to the diner’s free wifi and looked up some news articles on the robbery of the Ellison Jewelry Company on New Year’s Eve. I had scanned a few the previous night in the hotel at Iron City. I remembered the basic details from reading about it in January, but it was useful to find a summary of the case a few weeks later, after the first—and to date only—breakthrough. An anonymous tip-off had led the police to one of the men responsible for the heist. The suspect, a security guard at the company named Rayner Deakins, had been killed in an exchange of gunfire with the police. They had recovered eighty per cent of the yield, but that still left approximately two million dollars’ worth of premium diamonds unaccounted for. The whereabouts of the stones was one of two important questions, from where I stood. The other was the identity and whereabouts of the person who had called in the tip. I was betting a lot of people would be keen to find that person, and not just the police.
My coffee arrived and I took paperwork out of the bag. The pages of archived newspapers Sarah had printed out at her house. I hoped Sarah’s contact would come through, but this was the backup. The previous two months of the real estate section from the local weekly newspaper. I planned to go through and cross off everything that had come off the market in the time since Carol had left Summerlin. That would give us a list of addresses, and we could start knocking on doors.
It didn’t take long. Quarter wasn’t exactly a property hotspot, and I was barely halfway through my coffee and two-thirds of the way through the sheaf of pages when something caught my eye. It wasn’t one of the rental or sales notices, though. It was from the April 19th edition, and there hadn’t been quite enough property ads to take up the whole of the page. No such thing as blank space in a newspaper, so a couple of job ads had been snuck in at the side to fill the void. One was for a teaching assistant in a local school, the other was for a temporary librarian post. Fifteen hours a week, experience desirable, flexibility important.