Rob clucked his tongue. “This is great soup. Can I have more?”
“Help yourself.”
“I will.” And he did. “I forgot lunch.”
Meg buttered a piece of bread. “Okay, so Vance paid Hal and his pothunting friend to steal the collection, and that was that for a while. Everybody was happy.”
Rob was eating with fierce concentration.
“What destabilized the situation?” Meg chewed artisan bread. Excellent texture. She’d have to buy more. “That’s what I don’t understand.”
“His wife made him clean out his junk.”
“What?”
“Spring of last year. A year and a half ago. Emil Strohmeyer was ailing. I think Vance moved the collection to the garage while he waited for the old man to die.”
Meg shivered. “That’s so cold.”
“His wife told me he uses people, and I can believe it. If you’re right about his urge to show off his collection to the select few, his showplace at the lake will include some kind of vault or secure display area for the loot.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know it. I’m speculating. Huge houses at Tyee and other scenic spots have always struck me as strange. People who can afford them don’t live in them. They use them maybe twice a year for a couple of weeks.”
“And the houses sit idle the rest of the time?”
“Some do. Some involve time-shares. People buy a week or two, and bring their families or friends for a good time. The owner hires a cleaning service. Other places are owned by corporations for the use of clients and upper-level executives. Some are essentially small hotels.”
“Hotels?”
“Guest houses. I suspect Vance was moving in that direction. He could advertise the amenities back East, or in Japan or Germany, supply fishing and hunting guides, cater the food. I looked up the plans. There are four suites in one wing with an apartment in the other for a manager. Professional kitchen and pantry. Storage rooms, sauna, spa for eight, wet bar in the ‘great room.’ Entertainment center with all the bells and whistles in a less formal lounge.”
“The only thing lacking would be willing maidens,” Meg said sourly. She laid her spoon down. “And he could hire those, no doubt.”
Rob shrugged. “Wonderful what money can do. If his clientele were foreigners, a gallery displaying the artifacts would be a real drawing card.”
“Then I hope the baskets and drums were liberally dusted with DDT,” Meg said with venom.
Rob stared. “I don’t follow.”
“Gosh, I didn’t tell you. Let me show you.” She jumped up and ran from the room, returning with the printout of the article on DDT contamination. Excitement made her voice rise. “They’ve sent out health warnings!”
Soup forgotten, Rob read the article from start to finish, set it down, and looked at her. “Do you know what you have here?”
“A clue?”
He was silent for quite a while. Then he got up, walked around the table, pulled her to her feet, and kissed her on the mouth. He tasted of soup and Scotch.
“Hey!”
“I beg your pardon. I was overcome.”
They stood staring into each other’s eyes, sexual enthusiasm flashing like heat lightning all around them. At last, Meg said, softly, “Rats, I was saving that up.”
“What?” His mouth twitched at the corners.
Reluctantly, very reluctantly, Feckless Meg smiled at him. “Upstairs, mon ami. I don’t do kitchens.”
A telephone rang upstairs. Faintly. It was not Meg’s phone. She was sloshing in the downstairs tub, enjoying the overall tingle that came of a good sexual romp. Two years it had been since the last time, and well worth the wait.
She climbed out of the tub and toweled herself off. It was, incredibly, only eight p.m.
The phone stopped ringing.
She took her time dressing in the rose-patterned caftan she had brought down. She felt energized and wide awake. Rob, on the other hand, had fallen asleep as if poleaxed—with a smile on his lips. She contemplated that sad fact. He had had perhaps two hours of sleep since their steak dinner the night before, so it wouldn’t be fair to indulge in feminist resentment. Still, he might have squeezed out a word or two of postcoital conversation.
Dressed but damp around the edges, she strolled into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. Upstairs, the shower switched on. Meg inspected the ice cream torte and decided to leave it in its icy nest next to the chili.
She had finished washing the dishes by the time Rob straggled downstairs. His hair was wet, his clothes were crumpled, and he looked sheepish.
“How about them Mariners?” Meg said amiably.
He laughed. “I’m sorry. That was gauche.”
“Coffee?”
“Thanks. Obviously I need it.”
“Ice cream?”
He rubbed one shoulder. “Why not? Mind if I listen to the message that woke me up?”
“Feel free.”
He had the tact not to leave the room when he pressed the Play button on his cell phone.
“Rob, it’s Jake. Jake Sorenson. Will you call me? I’m at home.” Jake sounded worried. He gave the number.
“It’s not going to go away,” Rob muttered. He set the phone on the table and walked around to where Meg was slicing ice cream torte with her French knife. “Hey.”
“Is it about Todd?” She set the knife on the counter and turned.
“I don’t know.” His eyes were dark. He bent and kissed her on the forehead. “I’m sorry. You’re a lovely woman and a great humanitarian.”
“Call Jake,” Meg said gently.
While he placed the call, she poured two cups of coffee. His side of the conversation was calm and not informative.
He said, “Phone Ginger again, and don’t worry. He’s probably just driving around. Yes, I know, Jake. We have to wait.” The phone squawked. “Yes. Call me again when you’ve talked to her.” He set the phone down.
“So?” Meg sat down and took a swallow of coffee.
“Jake’s worried because Todd has gone off somewhere.”
“Are you worried?”
“There are half a dozen harmless possibilities, but yes, I’m worried.” He was frowning down at the ice cream as if it might contain DDT. “He was very, very angry.”
“Jake?”
“Todd. He wanted to kill Meek himself.”
“Because of his cousin?”
“Yes. Todd found Meek’s body.” He glanced at her, frowning. “It was a headshot. Ugly. Todd threw up. For a kid with a lot of pride, losing control would be hard enough. Then Jake found Meek’s wallet and told Todd Meek was suspected of killing his cousin. A jolt from the opposite direction. It tied Todd in knots. He couldn’t move.” He poked at the ice cream, gave up, and drank coffee.
Meg said, “I’m so sorry for him. He won’t, uh, harm himself, will he?”
“I don’t think so. It would take longer for him to get to that point.” He grimaced. “He’s more likely to go off half-cocked into a fire fight.”
“Like his cousin?”
Rob was silent.
“What are you going to do?”
“What the hell can I do?” He set his coffee cup down and it slopped. “Sorry. I’m frustrated. With civilians, there’s a twenty-four-hour waiting period before we act on a missing person report. I can alert the dispatcher, though. I’d better do that now.” He stood up and this time took the phone into the hall.
Meg ate a bite of ice cream that tasted like cold straw. Ridiculous. She got up and went for the Scotch. When Rob returned she said, “A tablespoon in hot water?”
His mouth relaxed. “Better make it a straight shot. Do you mind talking about the DDT article?”
“I don’t mind. Let’s take it into the living room.” She poured careful measures of Laphroaig into two glasses. Then she stuck the ice cream dishes in the freezer.
Meg was edgy. She thought Rob was, too. He sat in her
easy chair, the better to avoid a cuddle. She sat opposite, on the love seat. “So,” she said. “DDT.”
He took a swallow of Scotch, eyes closed. “There were traces of DDT in the soils sample from your garage.”
Meg groaned.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“I just paid an enormous sum to have a contamination kit shipped here overnight.”
He smiled. “Not a bad idea. You can give me the receipt. I’ll have Earl come over in the morning to retest, just to make sure.”
“I guess it makes a difference?”
“It gives me semi-solid evidence the loot was here.” He drew a long breath and exhaled slowly. “With the fragment of petroglyph, it will give me grounds to ask for a search warrant.”
“To search Vance Tichnor’s lodge?”
“Yes.”
Meg brooded. “You said semi-solid evidence.”
“It’s conceivable that old Strohmeyer routinely used DDT in his garage.”
“Oh, no,” Meg wailed.
“Hey, don’t give up. I’m trying to think like a Tichnor lawyer. Tomorrow I’m going to ask the parks director whether they ever used DDT on the exhibit. If they did, that will sway at least one judge I can think of.”
“It’s all politics, isn’t it?”
“So I’ve been told.” He sounded almost cheerful. “Now, come up with a way I can demand a pound of flesh from Vance Tichnor, and we’re home free.”
“A pound of flesh? Oh, fatty tissue. DDT accumulates in fatty tissue.”
“Right. According to this.” He tapped her printout. “If he’s been handling the organic artifacts repeatedly, there should be a fairly high level of contamination.”
“He looks as healthy as a horse.”
He tapped the printout again. “Unless you’re allergic to it, DDT doesn’t cause obvious symptoms in people.”
“It just accumulates. In fat cells. How about testing Towser?”
His eyes narrowed. “Now there’s an interesting thought. No, I won’t have to test him. I’ll have the lab recheck the results on your corpse.” When she stifled a gasp, he gave her an apologetic look. “If the dirt in that hole is contaminated, then Redfern’s body will show traces. He lay in the ground two months.”
“What about the petroglyph?”
“I need to talk to the parks people. I need to know whether they used DDT and how they used it. If they sprayed each organic piece separately, then the petroglyphs, being inorganic, won’t show much in the way of contamination. But maybe they fogged everything in sight.”
The cell phone rang again. Rob answered without hesitation. “Yeah, Jake. Okay. Yes, in the morning. I’ll call Chief Thomas, too. Yes. Talk to you tomorrow.” He set the cell phone on the arm of the chair, leaned back, and closed his eyes.
Meg stared at him, bewildered.
After two minutes that seemed much longer, he sat up and smiled at her. “Do you have deputy clothes? Your outfit makes you look like a peach melba.”
Meg blushed. That was the whole idea. Good enough to eat. “Deputy clothes? Something unisex and severe?”
“Jeans and a jacket. I need to talk to some people tonight, two of them women, and I don’t want to roust Linda Ramos out.”
“You actually intend to treat me like a cop?”
A slow smile touched his eyes. “Only temporarily, believe me.” He stood up. “I’m going home to get a recorder.” He picked up the cell phone. “And to change the batteries in this damned thing. It’s fading on me. Can you be ready to go in twenty minutes?”
“Uh, sure. Better brush your teeth.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Ah, the Scotch. You’re right.”
He took more like half an hour. Meg waited in the kitchen once she had changed into pants and a blazer. She had brushed her own teeth, thriftily rescued their whisky glasses and covered them with plastic wrap, the better to prevent evaporation. She had found a pen and notebook, organized her purse, and had saved the remains of the split pea soup to the freezer by the time Rob got back. Not that she was impatient.
He knocked at the side door and entered. “Ready?”
“Who are we interrogating?”
He clucked his tongue. “Such a word.” He seemed in high spirits. “Dennis. Tammy. Carol. In that order.”
Meg dried her hands and fumbled the keys from her purse. “Okay, let’s go. Want to bet Dennis is playing computer games while Darcy reads to their son?”
“No takers.”
But it was Darcy who answered the door. She blinked at them.
“Just a neighborly call,” Rob said affably. “I need to talk to Dennis.”
“Uh, okay. He’s with Cody. Hi, Meg.”
Meg smiled and didn’t explain her presence.
“Uh, I’ll get Dennis.” Darcy vanished from sight.
Rob set the recorder on a doily on the nearest end table and they waited, side by side on the sofa but not touching. Rumbles from the bedroom area indicated that Dennis was not best pleased. A child’s voice piped, high and querulous.
At last Dennis deigned to appear, wearing sweats and a hostile expression. “What d’you want, and why is she here?” He caught sight of the recorder.
Rob said, “I thought you might prefer to talk here, Dennis. Ms. McLean was sworn in as a reserve deputy several days ago. She’s going to operate the recorder. Meg?”
Breathing a prayer to the gods of media, Meg pressed Record. The machine began to whirr.
Rob gave the date, adding, “It’s eight forty-seven p.m. Present are Dennis Wheeler, Deputy Margaret McLean, and myself, Robert Neill.” He finished the rigamarole with stately relish as Dennis began to sweat.
“Do I need a lawyer?”
Rob shrugged. “If you want one. I just have a few questions for you about the house keys you returned to Ms. McLean.”
“Oh, them.”
“And about your relationship with the late Commissioner Brandstetter.”
“Relationship!” Dennis huffed. He remained standing, as if sitting would be a confession of weakness.
“Friendship,” Rob amended, mouth twitching.
“So I liked Hal, so what?”
“No problem.”
“I been working out of town most of the time since school started. Didn’t see much of him.” He crossed his arms and shifted from one foot to the other.
“Okay. Where were you the first two weeks of August?”
Dennis repeated the story Darcy had told of Cody’s first trip to Disneyland and the engine that overheated in Ukiah. By the time he wound down, his arms had dropped to his sides.
“Dates?”
Dennis screwed up his face and came up with exact dates.
“Did you see Brandstetter immediately before and after your trip?”
“Well, yeah, but just to talk to on the street. He walked the dog evenings. Darcy made me warn him about letting the ridgeback run loose. He didn’t like that.”
“And?”
“And that’s it.”
“Okay. I understand you shared Brandstetter’s political ideas.”
“I thought it was time for the gov’ment to pay some attention to real Americans, yeah. Want to make something of it?”
“No, just interested. Did you contribute to his campaign fund?”
“A hundred bucks. It was deductible. My tax man said it was okay.” His voice rose and he took a step forward.
“Hey, Dennis, I don’t work for the 1RS.”
“Yeah, well. It’s a free country. Or was.” Dennis rubbed the back of his neck. He was red in the face and looked absurdly young. The donation was probably his first political act, a sad thought.
“Now, about the keys,” Rob said.
“Old Strohmeyer gave them to me! He asked me to keep a set in case he got locked out. He was always forgetting his keys those last years.”
“And you didn’t give them to Mrs. Tichnor at any time?”
“No, never talked to her.”
Ro
b frowned. “What about her son?”
“The doctor?” Dennis looked wary.
“Vance. The real estate dealer. The one with the pearl gray Windstar with Oregon plates.”
“Uh, no.” Dennis glanced at Meg, looked away, fidgeted.
Meg said, “You told me Mr. Strohmeyer had the lock changed on the back door of the garage. That key is newer than the others.”
“Sure, yeah. He changed it awhile before he died.”
“Did he say why?”
“Um, kids were fooling around, getting in.”
“The lock hasn’t been changed,” Rob said with the absolute authority of one who has looked at everything through a forensic lens. “Not in years. Come on, Dennis, give. What’s with the key? It doesn’t open the back door.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No.”
“Shit. They told me—” He broke off. He rubbed his face, let his hands fall. “Okay, so I lied. Carol asked me for the keys, the whole set, couple of days before we took off for California. She returned them the next day, except for the back door key. Said she’d lost it. When we got back from California, there was an envelope in the mailbox with a new key. The note said she’d copied the real estate folks’ key and not to tell anybody about the missing one. I didn’t try it out, honest.”
“What’s the story about Strohmeyer replacing the lock?”
He rubbed his thick neck. “Hell, I just made that up when Mrs. McLean asked why the key looked different. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I thought the key would work and she’d never know.” He sounded aggrieved. “I didn’t want to get Carol into trouble. Dumb bitch.”
“So the back door key has been missing from your set since before you went to California?”
He stuck his jaw out. “I said so, didn’t I?”
“You didn’t lend it to Hal Brandstetter at any point?”
“Hal?” He looked bewildered. “Why would I do that? It was Strohmeyer’s key. Hal never had nothing to do with Strohmeyer. The old man was a goddamn pinko liberal. Hell, he was a stinking socialist”
“I thought you went fishing with Mr. Strohmeyer,” Meg interposed.
Dennis glowered at her. “Well, yeah, he knew where to go, all the good holes. He was okay about fishing. But he was always talking about unions, said he was a member of the carpenters’ union, never hired nothing but union labor. He told me I ought to join the machinists’ union. I don’t believe in that shit. I told him so. He cackled some song, something stupid about bloodstained banners.” Dennis heaved a sigh. “What the hell, he wasn’t a bad old guy. He just liked to push my buttons.”
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