“Actually, the room had been vacated early that morning but not rented again. The murdered woman was an employee. She took the key and met him there.”
Ronnie sank back into his chair.
“How tall is tall?” Paul asked. “What exactly did your wife tell you?”
“She didn’t say anything specific. I’m five ten. Anything over that was tall to her. Here’s what keeps me awake. Why did he let her go that first time when she saw him, only to kill her the next morning?”
“Couldn’t get to her before that,” Paul said. “Circumstance. Maybe he’d killed that day for the first time and it didn’t occur to him right away that he might need to kill again.”
“I was watching out. I feel like shooting myself right now for letting her outta my sight. Okay. She told me he looked athletic, not like some loser. She was only fifty-five years old and she has—had her little boy in Virginia. Yesterday was the funeral. Hundreds of people came. Half the staff at Prize’s.” Tears dripped down Ronnie’s nose. He picked up a napkin and blew into it.
Paul touched Ronnie’s hairy forearm. Ronnie continued to weep, no force behind it, no storm, the weeping of somebody made of tears. His grief had incapacitated him for now. He had had no time to prepare emotionally. Death was devastating, and sudden, violent death was twice as destructive. Paul had seen it many times before. He usually looked first at the spouse when investigating a homicide, but Ronnie appeared to be experiencing such uncomplicated grieving, Paul felt pretty sure he hadn’t had anything to do with it. “I’ve spoken to the police but I plan to stay in close touch in case they come up with anything. Meantime, I’ll talk to the hotel staff. Casinos like Prize’s rely heavily on security cameras. Unless this murderer is a ghost, they may have shots of your wife’s killer. However, there’s something you need to hear. You might not like it.”
Ronnie dropped the napkin and looked Paul in the eye.
Paul explained that Brenda might have been murdered at the bus stop in a random act of violence by a local purse-snatcher, junkie, or gambler in over his head. Certainly, the police would pursue that angle.
“Nobody took her money. You’re saying the police want to think she died for seventy bucks? That’s utter bullshit.”
“Oh, I agree,” Paul said. “But there’s a remote chance.”
“You’re suggesting that makes her suspect in some way, like she was involved in something dirty? You think she was conniving with drug dealers, or laundering money or something?” Ronnie asked, now red-faced with controlled tension.
“No.”
“A housekeeper’s lucky to clear twenty grand a year. Hey, I’m happy to provide you, the cops, and the media information on our taxes. Feel free to look at our checking account. It’s a pathetic picture, okay? She was in cahoots with nobody. She came home at night talking about what products worked best to clean a mirror, for God’s sake.”
“I know.”
Ronnie waved his hand. “Go nuts. But lemme tell you this. If my wife was murdered for no reason at all, I’m blowing up that place. I’ve got the means.”
“I’d think like that, too,” Paul said. “Maybe I’d do it.”
“It’s corrupt. Free money! Free drinks! Brenda and I, we never gambled.”
“I get that, buddy.”
“Her death better mean something, even if it’s a sick shit who thinks she saw him. I can’t stand the thought that she died for nothing. I loved her so much. I didn’t deserve her!” Ronnie approached Paul and grabbed him in a bear hug and sobbed on his shoulder. Paul patted him on the back.
“It’s bad, buddy. I’m sorry.”
Paul rang Nina’s bell promptly at seven in the evening, sun long down, dark long descended, energized by his afternoon travails.
She answered, covered, as advised, head to toe in warm gear. Hitchcock stood beside her. Paul held out a hand and Hitchcock gave it a respectful sniff.
“Bob?”
“Doing homework. Hitchcock on patrol. Father and uncle notified in case.”
“There’s no danger, Nina. I wouldn’t put you in danger.”
She shrugged. “I’m a mother. I think about these things.”
Paul petted her dog. “He’s not supposed to bark, though, is he? Isn’t that the definition of a malamute?”
“Sometimes he barks. He’s not a purebred.” She eased the door shut behind her.
“We need a few things from your storage area before we go,” Paul said.
They drove out to Pioneer Trail, turned left on 50, and left again onto 89 toward Sorensen’s Resort. Nina was decompressing, listening to the radio.
Paul wondered how long he would remain free. He was taking an enormous risk bringing her along. But she was in a torment about Jim Strong, all mixed up and didn’t know whether to believe Paul.
Nina’s eyes closed. He wondered if she actually had the gall to doze off but noticed her bare hand in a tight, quivering fist on her lap.
Opening the driver’s-side window, he inhaled the odors of the forest. Traffic was light. Headlights intermittently blinded him, then passed by. Although the blizzard of the night before had passed and the snowplows and sun of day had done their duties, the road remained fairly compromised, icy in patches where it wasn’t slushy.
Driving uncharacteristically slowly, not for safety’s sake but for the sake of remaining invisible, he clicked off the radio. They would soon arrive and he wanted his head clear. Where was that turnout?
At the time, two years before, in a snowstorm, with a body wrapped up in the trunk of his Mustang, he hadn’t expected to come back to the place. His thoughts had gone like this: he needed to find some place remote, where the body could never be found. He had considered hacking the body into pieces, as he had once fancifully suggested to Bob, but practically speaking, that had been retrospective wish-fulfillment. That snowy night, he had needed to get rid of it fast, and he had needed to hide it in a place nobody would be likely to stumble upon.
South Lake Tahoe hosted 3 million visitors every year, but every year at least twenty of them didn’t gamble or drink themselves silly or go to shows or break an ankle ice-skating. No, at least twenty every year, the intrepid types, went out in all kinds of weather, climbing up frozen falls, hiking into remote, unwelcoming places they thought nobody else might have hiked before. And they found secrets of all kinds in the woods.
So on that night two years before, Paul had considered several locations, mentally tossing a coin between Christmas Valley and the road toward Sorensen’s Resort. After ruling out the first area as too well traveled, he had driven toward the resort.
How difficult, tonight, to return to this place he had visited only in his bad dreams, watching anxiously for the broken-down bridge on the left and the ruins of old buildings that had marked the spot where he had turned off.
He glanced at Nina, whose eyes remained closed. He looked at the eyelashes sweeping across her cheek and listened to her regular breathing. Asleep or not, she trusted him. Whatever he showed her tonight, she wanted to see.
Paul had buried Jim Strong’s body under snow and fallen logs and litter. Man, he had strained to make that sucker disappear forever.
He swallowed and took a deep breath. He had spotted the road that led over the remains of the bridge, past decrepit foundations of cabins that had once sat there. By now, Nina’s brown eyes had opened to the wilderness. She said nothing, just watched him fumbling with the car. He found the powdery path that led upward and followed it until the road dipped near a stream. Then he stopped the car and turned off the engine.
It was one of those moments in life when you weren’t sure of yourself or the world in any way. You rode with it.
“You buried him all the way out here?” Nina said, pulling on her ski gloves. She grabbed her parka from the backseat and buttoned it up, then covered her head with a wool cap. “A lonely place.”
“So you knew.”
“Where else could you be taking me? I’m ready.”
<
br /> Paul got himself suited up, then stepped outside the car, clicking the door shut behind him. Nina followed. He looked around and listened to the melting snow, the two of them breathing, cars a dull roar on the highway a quarter mile away.
“Stop for a minute.”
They stood together in the cold, breath making clouds.
He saw and heard nothing unusual. Cars made sounds interrupting the silence of the night. Wind breezed softly through the trees. He ferreted out Nina’s shovel and a pick and locked the trunk.
“I’m amazed your car made it up this road,” Nina said, looking downhill, stomping around the car to stand beside him.
“It’s a Mustang. Mustangs are the princes of the car world. Snow tires help, of course.”
The last time he had come up here, he had been seized by adrenaline fury and energized with purpose. This time, he felt reluctant and nervous. He handed Nina the pick and shouldered the shovel himself.
He walked toward where he thought he needed to go, memories dropping hints, leading him like old bread crumbs. Nina followed close behind. Everything appeared the same as he remembered except for a uniform layer of fresh snow. Along the edges of a clearing not too far from the Mustang, thick pines loomed like border guards. They made their way with difficulty, breaking through the hard crust of snow, falling a few times.
“How can we find him up here?” Nina said as they stared out over the clearing, and Paul heard the fatigue in her voice. “Snow. Trees. Piles of stuff. Miles of this.”
“He’s close by.”
Pushing branches aside, he entered the dusky underbrush, looking for—ah, there it was, the huge treefall. Two years later, the trees had decomposed somewhat, but Paul felt it immediately.
Jim’s body.
The unholy grail.
He approached the treefall, Nina right behind him, and began to remove the rocks in the pile.
Nina did what she could with the pick.
They worked for over an hour before the first faint signs of a grave showed.
“Here lies Jim Strong, murderer,” Paul said, hoisting a rotten log off the spot, sitting in spite of the freeze. “These trees are his coffin, better than he deserved.”
“After two years, nobody has disturbed his grave?”
“So it appears. Well, I feel grateful for that.”
“Let’s finish. I need to look at him and realize he’s gone. He’ll never come back to threaten me or Bob or my family. Seeing him might end my nightmares,” Nina said. “And then I can finally believe everything you said. Sorry about needing proof.”
Paul laughed slightly. “You’re the lawyer.”
After they had almost given up several times, had a spat, rested, and tried again, they saw it, a bit of cloth or something. Paul got down on his knees and reached in with gloved hands and touched it. A torn piece of tarpaulin pulled out easily. He shone the flashlight, turned it over, and thought about many things, some things that he regretted now.
The tarp was still there. The earth continued to rotate at its usual speed and angled around its axis; his life was not upside down. Should he go any deeper? Why? The thing wrapped in the tarp was also still there, or the tarp would not remain. And he was getting cold now, his seat drying fast and chilling him, and getting spooked in this starless place, the way the shadows seemed to be moving in on him, bringing memories.
He pulled the heavy thing out, grunting, and shone the flashlight on the wrapped remains of Jim Strong.
“Pull the tarp away a little,” Nina said. Her voice did not shake.
“You sure?”
“I need to see him.”
Paul didn’t want to do it, but he did. In the dry climate, buried in snow, even after two years, Jim’s body was remarkably preserved. You could recognize his hair, the cut of his athletic body, even see long bits of skin. Decomposition had proceeded to the point where several of the limbs had disarticulated at the joints.
He was part bone, part flesh, the flesh mottled and greenish. He stared from his half-skull vacantly at Nina. His eyelids seemed to have disappeared. The upper lip, what was left of it, was pulled back from the white teeth.
Horrible. They had interrupted a quiet, eerie process. No one should see a human being like this, but it had been necessary.
Nina stared at Jim’s corpse under the cold light of the flashlight for a long time. She said with remarkable composure, “Question. What are the chances of them tracing the tarp back to me?”
“Them? There is no them. Nobody, I mean nobody, knows this place. Where’d you get the tarp, though?”
“Some painters left it behind when I had the living room done. Bob put it in the storage area.”
“You want me to take the tarp? I very much doubt you or Bob could be connected to it at this point.”
Nina looked at the corpse of her tormentor. “Never mind. Where’s his wallet?”
“I threw it over a cliff at Twin Bridges. To complicate things.”
“Was his driver’s license in it?”
“Don’t remember.”
Paul pushed the piece of tarp back into the vacancy he had made underneath the treefall and hastily filled it in, working fast. Nina helped load rocks and branches back on.
Then Paul shone the light around again.
The grave had sunk back into the forest. Here lay Jim Strong, murderer, desolate, shaded by tall trees and washed over by clean mountain air.
Paul pulled himself from the nest of branches, breathing hard. Seeing the remains had shocked him. A man amounted to nothing more than this, a jumble of bones in dirt. What remained of Jim Strong? Paul’s mother used to say what remained lived in the memories of the people who loved you. Where did that leave Jim Strong? Nobody had loved him. Even his father had hated and feared him. If any small awareness of the being that once hosted Jim Strong lived on, it dreamed alone and unremembered, unloved.
The sky clouded over. Another light drift of snow would arrive, covering over their activities. Good. Paul laid the remaining branches haphazardly over the log and examined his handiwork.
In the daytime, it would be unfindable by anyone who didn’t know what to look for.
He took out his portable GPS. He noted the spot’s coordinates.
As they hiked back to the Mustang, Nina asked, “Have you ever thought about the moment of death, what you feel?”
“Yes.”
“I think you go back to all the wrong things you did. We all do wrong things. You make them right. You come out okay.”
“You have a religious background.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think, for a few moments, it’s like a dream, a crazy drama. Then you recede. You find yourself moving backward from all that. Finally you turn around and see what was really going on back there. Hey, you’re shivering.”
“He’s haunting us.”
“You saw him. That’s all there is of him now. Look, you wanted to be sure. Are you sure now?”
“I guess so.”
“You believe in ghosts. I should have known. Up the Irish.”
“I’m more afraid than I was before,” Nina said. “It’s uncanny, the harm the dead can cause.”
“Especially when money’s involved.”
“Secrets come alive themselves, maybe. They want to come out.”
“It’s not him. It’s us. I don’t like carrying his fucking body in my heart everywhere I go. I don’t. I have to find a way to get rid of it for good.”
“We feel guilt, Paul.”
“I never thought I would when I did this.”
CHAPTER 17
Eric Brinkman called Nina from the San Francisco airport at 8:00 a.m. on Monday and asked for a meeting in four hours at her office. Speaking in a hoarse voice, he kept the arrangements short. He had spent a long few days in Brazil and in the air, and he would be coming straight from the trip.
Philip and Nina waited for him in the conference room.
Paul had asked to come. N
ot an official member of the team, he had promised to participate only as a friend to Nina. He arrived shortly before noon, shaved, showered, and full of energy. The little conference room immediately began to feel crowded. He shook hands with Philip and sat down.
Moments later Nina and Paul heard Eric Brinkman come in and greet Sandy. She brought him in and took her own seat, shutting the door behind her. With the blinds drawn, the room felt tight and secure.
A place for secrets and straight talk.
“Hi, all,” Eric said. He looked awful, as awful as he could look, anyway. He hadn’t shaved for a day or three—long enough to have developed a lush stubble. Puffy red streaks struck out from his irises. Nina imagined the jet lag he must be suffering. Let’s see, Brazil was five hours ahead of California, and with the planes to and from southern Brazil, the trip had taken almost seventeen hours with layovers. His fatigue made him look younger. His face was thinner than Paul’s, bones standing out in high relief. He wore a black T-shirt with a light gray jacket that had obviously gone to a foreign country and back.
Everybody shook hands some more. Eric accepted a cup of espresso, loading it with sugar. “I came straight here from the airport.”
“We appreciate that,” Nina said. “Now sit.”
He sat across the conference table from Paul, looked at him, drank, and put his empty cup on the table in front of him, next to his briefcase. “It’s hot down there. End of summer. I forgot how hot it gets.” He accepted the bottle of water Sandy offered. Snapping open the case, he pulled out a file full of thin, stapled-together paper stacks. He passed them around, all brisk business.
“Copies of a new affidavit,” he said. “One I got down there.”
Nina glanced at her copy, then set it down. “Let’s get to this in a minute. Did you see him? Did you see Jim Strong?”
“No. Got a lively song and dance from the lawyer about how as a fugitive he had changed his appearance and didn’t want to give up his disguise. She said he has a right to contest the sale even though he won’t show his face. She says she has never met with him, only talked with him on the phone. Her English is excellent, by the way. She’s a solo practitioner with a fancy office in a downtown office building. I don’t know how solid she is. Lawyers are experts at hiding their financial status and how they’re doing.” Eric rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Excuse my fatigue, Nina. Ordinarily, I don’t make foolish generalizations. Let’s just say she looked legitimate, and I didn’t turn up anything to contradict that.”
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