Best of all, there didn’t seem to be an ounce of romantic chemistry between them. Dave Rosen was six feet tall with ink-black hair and soulful black eyes and a handsome, chiseled face, and he didn’t turn Eileen’s crank one bit and never had, even when Rosen was a rookie and she was still working with Jim Erickson. Rosen didn’t seem to find her attractive, either. Eileen read an article on pheromones once, and the theory of the researcher was that if two people were not genetically compatible—that is, if their offspring would be defective—then the two people would not be attracted to each other at all, no matter what they looked like.
Eileen expressed this thought to Rosen one night on a very boring stakeout, when they were sharing a messy twelve-inch meatball sub. If Eileen had been sharing a meatball sub with Joe Tanner, she would have attacked him the first time he put his fingers in his mouth and sucked off the thick chunks of spaghetti sauce, like Rosen was doing. Joe, not too physically different from Dave Rosen, drove her to distraction. Everything he did was intensely arousing. Joe was a fascinating man, she explained to Rosen, licking her own fingers one by one. It wasn’t that he was some sexual passion, some meathead that she liked to sleep with. She loved him. He was just also incredibly sexually attractive.
“You two’ll make pretty babies,” Rosen said, typically brief. “You and I would make three-headed monsters with big noses and hair all over their bodies.”
Eileen laughed so hard at this that she choked on a piece of sandwich, then whacked her forehead on the dash while coughing it up. Rosen offered her a sip of her Coke with eyes glittering with laughter.
Major Bandimere swung the Jeep to a stop and hopped out. She managed to make her standard Air Force uniform look like an expensive department store suit, something worn by a little mannequin with pertly curled blonde hair. Her triangle of blue skirt was tight and short and her pale blue shirt was tailored to her pointed, high breasts. A wave of perfume enveloped Eileen as the major stepped out of her Jeep.
“We’re pretty sure this is a suicide,” she repeated, pulling out two visitor passes from a leather folder. The passes had clips to attach to their shirts. “Major Jim Leetsdale, found in the park by 12-E where he worked. Gunshot wound, but nobody heard it. It was either during the earthquake, or maybe right after. We don’t know.” She handed a pass to Eileen and stepped over to Rosen. Ignoring his hand held out for the badge, she stepped close to him and attached it to his shirt pocket.
“There,” she said, patting her little hands on Rosen’s broad chest. Eileen smothered a grin as she attached her own visitor’s pass. Peterson Air Force Base was a pleasant place, with trees and broad avenues. The buildings were twentieth-century cinder block affairs, but an attempt had been made to make them pretty with bushy green landscaping and groupings of trees. The parking lot where Major Bandimere led them was in front of 12-E. The building’s designation was clearly painted in black letters nearly five feet tall. Only a few cars dotted the lot. Beyond the parking lot was a pretty little green space, a park, with a cannon on the rise of a hill. A soldier stood sentry near the cannon.
No, wait. Eileen saw the edge of a blue tarp. The soldier was standing sentry next to the body. Their body. She felt the taste in the back of her throat, the pleasant little taste like biting into something tart and sweet at the same time. She’d long ago gotten over the guilt about feeling so good. This is what she loved to do.
“Who found the body?” she asked.
“Private Amy Szneski,” Major Bandimere said. “She’s trying to get into Special Forces school so she’s out running every morning at dawn carrying a big pack filled with rocks. At least that’s what she says. We’ve got her in 12-E, in the break room.”
“Okay,” Eileen said, and sighed. Deanna Bandimere was competent, at least, if not any fun. “Let’s look at the body.”
The major gestured, and they walked toward the cannon and the sentry.
“Anybody touch the body?” Eileen asked.
“Just Szneski, feeling for a pulse. And me, same thing. I have a call into Doctor Durland’s office. He’ll have the crime scene team out here in an hour or so.”
The sentry was bored and cold. The day was still threatening rain. The wind was chilly and the soldier was dressed in summer camouflage. He drew up and saluted Major Bandimere.
“Go get some food and pick up your jacket,” she said. “Be back in an hour.” The soldier dropped his salute and set off at a run.
Eileen drew on a pair of latex gloves. She kept a whole box of them in her Jeep. Rosen, too, silently put gloves on. Bandimere had her own set. Eileen stepped forward and pulled the tarp back carefully.
There he was. Major Jim Leetsdale, if Bandimere was correct. The man was very dead. He was lying on the slope of the little hill that held the cannon. His eyes were partially open and glazed. Some blood had trickled from his nose, mouth, and ears. His hands were at his sides, his palms open and up, his feet together. There were a few flies, made sluggish by the cold, crawling around his mouth. The gun was lying in his right hand, his finger still through the trigger guard. A single black hole marked his face, in his left eyesocket. The force of the bullet had knocked the eye out of true but hadn’t destroyed it. The eye gazed forlornly off to the side while the other one stared indifferently at the sky.
Eileen felt her belly tighten. She gave a careful sidelong glance at Rosen and saw his tiny nod. She turned back to the body.
There was an empty wine cooler in the grass. A small puddle of a purplish substance was still in the bottom of the bottle.
“We’ll want that tested,” Eileen murmured. “When the crime scene crew gets here.”
“If that’s his,” Rosen said.
“It’s his,” Eileen said, as Bandimere nodded. Eileen explained to Rosen. She had been in the Air Force. At every base, grounds cleanup was meticulously thorough. There were no cigarette butts, potato chip wrappers, or paper cups on any military base. As a recruit in basic training, Eileen had worked on countless cleanup crews. In a double line, they would sweep across a parking lot or a field and pick up every tiny piece of trash they would see. If the sergeant found the tiniest gum wrapper, there would be no weekend leave. This tactic was still used today and helped keep every base meticulously, even spookily, clean.
“So,” Eileen concluded, “an object as big as a wine cooler bottle couldn’t be left more than overnight.”
“Seems like overkill,” Rosen commented.
“I’ve got one word for you,” Eileen grinned. “Mines.”
“Oh,” Rosen said, blinking.
“These guys occasionally get deployed to lovely spots like Bosnia,” Eileen said. “Being meticulous is a good way to stay alive.”
Rosen, economical with words as always, nodded. Eileen could almost see the busy librarian in Rosen’s brain filing the information away, categorizing it, and extrapolating it to fit any future situation. Rosen was smart. It was fun to teach him something new.
“Was there a suicide note?” she asked Bandimere.
“Not that we found here,” Bandimere replied. “But there might be one in his office. We sealed it off. Didn’t even go in yet.”
Eileen squatted down next to the body. She put one finger on his chest, a chest that was silent and still and flattened to the ground. Then she really looked at him, looked past the beginnings of bloat and the flies and the queerly aimed gaze. This was Jim Leetsdale, a man, perhaps a husband and father. What was he like? She saw the new lines of sadness and care in his forehead and bracketing his mouth, lines of sorrow so new they looked almost like cuts. Behind that were smile lines and fine crow tracks. The crow tracks looked like they were made squinting into wind or sun, tracks that spoke of boating or hikes or biking or some kind of good fun. His teeth, seen through the slackness of his mouth, were clean and straight, his arms were well muscled, his belly slightly soft. He had thinning blond hair that was cut short, with no pretense of comb-over or other nonsense.
“Was he married?”
“Married, lost his wife last year,” Bandimere read from her folder. “Lori Leetsdale, killed in the Burbank earthquake. A wall fell on her and a couple other people. She was pregnant.”
There was a small silence. Eileen, squatting by Leetsdale, looked up at Rosen. He met her eyes and didn’t need to shake his head for her to understand the look. She nodded and turned back to the body.
No comb-over of the hair, good looking, soft in the belly from desk work but otherwise fit. A well-loved man, before a disaster took his family from him.
“Why a wine cooler?” Rosen asked abruptly.
Eileen stood up and shook out her legs. She had that thought too, although she was unhappy to think about it.
“A fruity sweetish drink. More like a girl’s drink,” she said, and grimaced. “Not that I really want to say that.”
“Maybe the wine cooler has a drug in it,” Bandimere said. “Wine coolers are sweet and might mask a bitter taste. So he could work himself up to pull the trigger.”
Eileen looked at Deanna Bandimere with new interest. This was more than she expected from the major.
“Hey!” shouted someone from behind Eileen, making her flinch. She spun around, instantly angry at being surprised like that. The man coming up the slope of the hill behind her was in a business suit. He looked furious. Bright pink burned across his cheekbones. He had thick brown hair and eyebrows and hazel eyes that were rimmed in red, as though he’d spent a sleepless night or had recently been crying. His skin was pitted with old acne scars, which gave him a rough, handsome look. He was tall and broad, a man who looked like he knew he was handsome, or at least thought he did. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists.
“Hello,” Rosen said mildly.
“Mr. Mitchell,” Bandimere squeaked.
“What is the meaning of this—travesty?” Mr. Mitchell’s voice was deep and powerful and very angry. Bandimere nearly quailed, her little form shrinking under Mitchell’s angry gaze. This made Eileen furious, not just with Mitchell’s tone of voice but with contempt at Bandimere.
Women, of which she was one, should never, ever quail before men. She backed her belief with self-defense training and two guns. Eileen tried to arm women at every opportunity, and she found it odd and puzzling that most women, who got the best use out of guns and who rarely put them to bad use, were so adamantly for gun control. What, so if there were no more guns men would stop using their fists, too? Or they would abandon cotton pads soaked with ether and burglar’s tools, like Teddy Shaw?
All this flashed through Eileen’s thoughts in an instant.
“So who the hell are you?” she asked pleasantly, and was rewarded with Mitchell’s angry gaze.
“Jacob Mitchell, director of Ops, 12-E,” the man said. “Why aren’t you taking care of this poor man?”
“We are, sir,” Bandimere said in a voice so breathless and tiny she sounded like a cartoon mouse. Eileen could have kicked her.
“You call this taking care of Jim? He’s dead, he’s killed himself, and you’re standing around him like a bunch of goddamned buzzards letting the flies crawl over him!” Mitchell turned his furious face to Rosen, ignoring Eileen.
“You, who are you? Are you in charge here?” he asked.
“I’m in charge here,” Eileen said tightly. “Detective Reed. This is Detective Rosen. Colorado Springs homicide. Let’s step away from the crime scene, shall we? I don’t want you to accidentally contaminate evidence.”
“You’re calling suicides crime scenes, now? Don’t you have anything better to do, like some real crimes?” Mitchell yelled. A chilly, gusty wind snapped the edge of the blue tarp and sent some stray leaves over the top, making a sound like cornflakes rattling into a bowl.
“Let’s just step away, sir,” Eileen repeated.
“I want you to take care of my friend,” Mitchell said. His voice broke on the word friend and his cheeks burned pinker in the gray afternoon.
“We’re sorry about your friend,” Eileen said gently. “But we have to follow certain procedures. Let us take care of this, all right? Let’s just step away, now.” Eileen made the mistake of putting her hand on Mitchell’s upper arm. The muscles of his arm were humming and writhing like a nest of cottonmouth snakes. He threw her hand off with a cry of disgust and stepped backward. The slope of the little hill made him lose his footing, and he nearly fell down.
“Major Bandimere, I want you to take care of this situation immediately!” he shouted, regaining his balance and shaking out his sleeves as though he’d been burned by Eileen’s touch. “And you,” he said, looking at Eileen, “I’ll be placing a call to your superior and I’ll have your job.” Mitchell turned and walked toward his car, a brand new torpedo of a sedan that snarled like a jungle cat as he revved the motor. He puffed some black smoke out of the tires as he pulled into the street.
On the hill by the cannon, there was only the sound of the rattling leaves on the tarp and Deanna Bandimere’s anxious breathing.
“Well,” Eileen said. “That was unpleasant.”
“He’d be terrible at your job,” Rosen said, deadpan.
Eileen started laughing and then abruptly stopped as she saw Bandimere. The little woman was pale-faced and wild-eyed and looked entirely spooked, like a teacup poodle thrown into a pool.
“So who was that clown, Deanna?” she asked. “What’s up with him?”
“Oh, no,” Bandimere moaned, wringing her narrow hands. “We really, really can’t make Mr. Mitchell upset. He’s really important. He’s got power.”
“Not over us,” Rosen said calmly.
“Fill us in, Deanna,” Eileen said. “Don’t forget, you can blame everything on us. We’re protected all the way to Congress. Remember, they passed that law about military bases and capital crimes?” Bandimere nodded miserably. “No matter what Mitchell is at Peterson, he’s got no power over us. He looks familiar but I can’t place him. So who is he?”
“He’s a former state congressman. Didn’t you recognize him? He made a run for President a few years ago, but dropped out before the primaries were over. Now he’s the project chief at 12-E,” Bandimere said. “You guys must not follow politics very much.” She sighed and blew a strand of blonde hair off her forehead, but her expression lightened as she looked from Rosen to Eileen. She spread her hands wide. “And before you ask me what that is, I’ll have to tell you I don’t have the foggiest idea. Something compartmentalized.”
“What’s compartmentalized mean?” asked Rosen.
“Above top secret,” Eileen said absently. “Access only by special password. So if you are working on a compartmentalized project, you have a top-secret clearance and a special access code, like ‘doom,’ for example.”
Eileen gulped and stopped abruptly. She had “doom” access clearance, clearance that she shouldn’t have on a particularly dangerous piece of American history. Somehow the word just slipped out. Her and her big mouth. Luckily, Rosen and Bandimere were nodding without comprehension, as though she’d made up the word instead of spilling a special-access password. Damn secrets. Eileen didn’t like them and didn’t like keeping them.
“So Mitchell’s on a special project,” she said quickly. “So what?”
“It’s something very big and powerful and he pulls a lot of money to the base, that’s all I know,” Bandimere said. “He’s a politician. He really does have power. Can’t we hurry and wrap this up, just to make him happy? You guys would really be doing me a favor.”
Eileen glanced over at Rosen, whose shoulders raised a tiny millimeter. A whole conversation went between them in the arch of her eyebrow and the shrug of his shoulders. The gusty cold winds were getting fiercer and the light was fading. The day was tending toward real rain. Eileen looked toward the Front Range. The enormous bulk of Pikes Peak should have been clearly visible, but it was shrouded in clouds.
“Deanna,” she said. “I would like to wrap this up, but we’re going to have to do some further investigation.�
��
“On a suicide?” Deanna wailed. “Are you trying to kill my career, here?”
“On a homicide,” Eileen said. “This man didn’t kill himself. He was killed, and he was set here to make it look like a suicide.”
“Tarp,” Rosen called. Eileen leaped to grasp the other edge of the tarp before a particularly heavy gust of wind tore it from the body. She and Rosen struggled for a moment before they secured the tarp with some of the loose rocks at the base of the cannon.
“When is Dr. Durland going to get here?” Eileen said as the first pellets of cold rain rattled against the tarp. She ducked her head as a spray of icy droplets swept against her cheek.
“Crime scene crew should be here within the hour,” Bandimere said in a stunned, lost voice. “You say he was killed? You think he was killed?”
“He was killed,” Eileen said, and Rosen nodded.
“They only missed a few things,” he said. “They almost fooled us.”
“Oh my God,” Bandimere said softly. The rain plastered her blonde hair against her cheeks, making her look even younger and smaller. “Murder.”
5
The Williams’s Ranch, San Luis Valley, Colorado
Alan Baxter almost fell full across the bed, dirty and tired as he was, and let sleep take him. But he was sandy and dirty and this bed was sweetly clean and white. Beth Williams’s guest room was a haven and he couldn’t bring himself to foul the sheets on his first night.
He wearily stripped his travelling clothes and kicked them into a pile. The guest bathroom was freshly scrubbed and spotlessly white. The scent of cleaner still hung faintly in the air. Pale oak cabinets held everything from untouched toothbrushes to an electric razor. Thick white towels, ridiculously fluffy, hung from long oak bars. Beth Williams was happy to have guests, Alan decided, turning on the water in the shower. The water was hot in moments and stayed that way, all the way through his shower. He stood under the water and let the pounding spray take some of the ache out of his elderly muscles.
Earthquake Games Page 5