Earthquake Games

by Bonnie Ramthun

  Rosen stood on the doorstep holding his gym bag and a six-pack of distilled water bottles that dangled from their plastic loops like little hanged men. Joe immediately wanted to punch him in the nose, and saw the tight line of muscles in Rosen’s jaw. Rosen probably longed to punch him back.

  “Come in,” Joe said. “I haven’t had time to pack. You can help.”

  Rosen said nothing. He followed Joe to the sports room and set his gym bag and the package of water on the floor. The room had been a nursery before Joe bought the house, and he’d never bothered to change the wallpaper. Banding the center of the walls was a happy collection of animals being loaded on a whole set of arks, with Noah and his wife cheerfully waving all the animals aboard. There were no clouds in the pastel blue wallpaper sky. Rosen contemplated the artwork and touched a gentle finger to the elephants. Joe felt a little less like hitting him.

  Joe had arranged his equipment neatly on the carpeted floor. He had biking gear and his bike along one wall, his safety vest and helmet for whitewater rafting in one corner along with some climbing equipment that he had used only a few times. Climbing gave him no thrill at all, even though he gave it a few tries to really decide. He was simply scared and cold and mad at himself the whole time he was climbing, and tired afterwards. He had some fishing gear as well, but his hiking equipment was by far the most used of the lot. He had recently bought a new pack so he tossed his old one at Rosen. It still had his old sleeping bag and pad tied at the bottom. Rosen would probably get cold in his old bag, but right now Joe didn’t much care.

  He picked up his new pack and checked the contents. He had a propane camping stove, matches and a flashlight, toilet paper and bug spray, and sunscreen. He had a small set of cooking dishes and a plastic flask of Glenlivet Scotch. He had a ceramic water filter—but there was no water in the dunes. He left it in there anyway. He had a good first-aid bag with a snakebite kit. What else? Compass, but no map. Flares for bears that were useless in the sand dunes but might come in handy if they ended up anywhere in the San Juan Mountains. Mountain lions and bears did not like the huge hissing noise and the bright red light of a road flare. Joe had never actually tried this out, he had merely read it on the Internet and decided it sounded like a great idea. He’d secretly wanted to encounter a bear ever since to see if it worked, which he knew was a very foolish idea. What if it didn’t?

  “Food and maps, and a set of warm clothing,” he said to Rosen. “Do you have a GPS?”

  “Yes, I do,” Rosen said. A GPS module was essential if they intended to find latitude 37.47.50 and longitude 105.33.20 in the dunes. Otherwise they could stumble in circles for days and never find their spot.

  “Alan has one, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Rosen said. “Is there anything I can carry?” He’d loaded his borrowed pack with his water and clothing, and it sat empty on the floor.

  “Yeah, the tent,” Joe said. “I’ll carry most of the food and we’ll split the water. Maybe we won’t have to go in after them.” He contemplated his newest sports room addition. It was a .357 handgun, polished steel, oily looking, and ugly. Eileen taught him how to shoot it, picked it out for him, showed him how to care for it. He still didn’t like it much.

  “You have a conceal-carry permit?”

  “Yes, I do,” Joe sighed. “Eileen made me get one.”

  “Then take it,” Rosen said. “If you need it, you’ll have it. Is that the tent?”

  Ten minutes later they were out the door. Joe folded up his Frankenputer laptop and carried it with him along with his pack and an empty Thermos. He intended to fill it with hot truck-stop coffee when they refueled, somewhere between here and the San Luis Valley.

  “I’ve got a division car,” Rosen said. Joe had to smile. It was a full-sized Ford Bronco, old and battered. Originally a deep blue, the paint had faded over the years and turned a milky color over the fenders. It didn’t look at all like a cop car.

  “Does it work?” he joked.

  “Yes,” Rosen answered, and Joe rolled his eyes. That’s right, Rosen had a very strange humor bone. The late afternoon was now definitely early evening. The sun was starting to set over the mountain range to the west, and Joe realized they would be driving over roads that were going to turn to slippery ice in a matter of hours. He stepped through slush to get to the back of the Bronco and put his gear inside, slush that was getting colder by the minute as the temperature dropped.

  “I hope you’re a good driver,” Joe said.

  Rosen shrugged, setting his backpack into the Bronco. Joe kept his laptop and his Thermos with him as he settled into the passenger seat. He put on his seatbelt and held his computer with both hands as Rosen muscled the Bronco into the street. They didn’t skid on two tires going around the street corner, but Joe would have sworn he felt the tires lighten up on his side.

  “Don’t worry, I can drive,” Rosen said, as he roared toward the interstate. Joe nodded and gave him a big smile. Rosen glanced over at him and Joe winked.

  “Go faster,” he suggested, trying not to clutch his laptop too hard. He’d be damned if he were going to let this cop out-macho him.

  “As fast as we can,” Rosen said. Joe found he could relax as they made their way to the interstate and accelerated up the on-ramp. Rosen was a very good driver. He pushed the limits of the Bronco but never exceeded them. Something about his driving seemed to reflect a hidden Rosen. His driving was flamboyant and arrogant. He took the car to the edge at every corner and squealed the tires like a freshly pinched girl at every stop. His driving was anything but emotionless. Joe decided he was starting to like Rosen. Maybe.

  20

  The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

  “What about Detective Rosen? Is he available?” Lucy asked. She’d kicked off her shoes the moment she got back into her car. Despite the fact that they were low-heeled and cushioned, she had blisters on the upper parts of both heels. The walk back through the archives and then her fast walk out to her car had broken one of the blisters, and it hurt like fury.

  “One moment, ma’am,” the administrative assistant said.

  Lucy looked around the parking lot and saw no one close. She held her cell phone to her ear with her shoulder and reached under her skirt with both hands. She ripped a hole in her pantyhose pulling them down, but she didn’t care. In a few moments she had the horrid things dangling from one hand, and her broken blister stopped throbbing so badly.

  “I’m sorry, he’s not available,” the assistant said. Lucy remembered him, Bob. Evidently he was a whiz at administrative duties, but he hated Eileen and she disliked him right back. Consequently, he’d never been helpful to Lucy on the few occasions she called the Colorado Springs Special Investigations Bureau.

  “Get me Captain Harben,” she said, starting her car and slamming the door shut.

  “He’s in conference,” the Bob voice said smugly. “I can take him a message.”

  “Tell him Lucy Giometti called for Eileen Reed. Tell him this has a material bearing on their current investigation. Tell him I have information that might save their lives. Can you tell him that, Bob?”

  “I’ll let him know, ma’am,” Bob said. “Can you give me a number where he might reach you?”

  Lucy relayed her cell phone number and started her car. She started the long drive home with the air conditioner blowing and her bare feet feeling strange on the pedals. She was on the beltway and moving slowly in the constant traffic jam when her phone chirped.

  “Captain Harben?” she said.

  “Mrs. Giometti,” Harben said. “I wasn’t aware your agency had any interest in this case.”

  “They don’t,” Lucy said impatiently. “This was a favor for a friend. As such, everything I say is off the record and unusable in court. But Eileen needs to know this. Is she there? I need to reach her.”

  “My detectives are on assignment,” Harben said cautiously. “And this is a cell phone on your side?”

  “Yes,” Lucy said, and b
lew a sweaty lock of hair from her forehead. “We’ll just talk in a roundabout way, then. Okay?”

  “No way to get to a land line?”

  “None,” Lucy said, looking at the traffic. “Listen to me. I found the file that Joe asked me about. Certain information that was supposed to be there was missing. There was plenty there, but the file we wanted to look at was empty.” Here Lucy had a memory of the open box with the files and the pictures and the ancient dead dove encased in plastic, the inexplicable white dove. “The—er, sanitized person that Eileen asked me about was the one who took the contents out of the file. So he took it, and he is using it, and I think he is more dangerous than she may suspect.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He took the plans, but he left some of the other documents,” Lucy said. “I know what he’s doing, and it’s huge.” She had a copy of the folder but Tate and Randy had insisted on keeping the original. Her visit was unofficial and they were planning on taking the theft to their own highest level. They were incandescent with fury, even though the Tesla designs had been stolen before the box had arrived from the FBI. Randy had broken the FBI seal on the box to let Lucy look inside. Lucy was awed by Randy and Tate’s command of curses in English, French, and what must have been medieval Latin when they saw the nearly empty folder.

  “This could be difficult,” Harben said slowly. “Your information isn’t enough for an arrest warrant, and I don’t have enough either. We could get a temporary for a few hours if my detectives find him in a compromising location.”

  The dunes, Lucy whispered silently to herself. Eileen was in the dunes with Rosen and she was going to try and find Jacob Mitchell.

  “I have an idea,” she said finally. “I have a contact with the FBI out there. I can get things moving on the FBI side to confiscate his—whatever it is, device, as material to an investigation here in Washington.”

  “We’ve been trying to get some action from the FBI on our side as well, since the young lady involved was a government contractor. So far, no luck.”

  “Let me try,” Lucy said grimly. “I’ll call you when I get some information.”

  “Thank you,” Harben said gravely.

  “Thank me when it’s over,” Lucy said, and hung up the phone. She tapped her bare toes on the gritty surface of her brakes and tried to think. She wanted to go out there. She wanted to get permission to fly out there, as she had once before, and meet up with Eileen and defeat the bad guys. She lifted her phone to call the travel agency. Then she put the phone back down.

  She could not go. She could not. Hank was still a nursing baby. He needed her every four hours. She couldn’t take him with her, either. What was she going to do, put him in a carrying sling? How ridiculous. The air conditioner spat cold air at her and the traffic shimmered through the heat waves and Lucy started to cry. She cried bitterly for what she could not have, cried as inconsolably as a child wanting a toy that has been taken away. When she was done, she blew her nose one-handed and wiped her eyes, and then she picked up her cell phone and dialed the FBI.

  The Williams’s Ranch, San Luis Valley, Colorado

  The main gate to the Williams’s Ranch was closed and locked, an arrangement Eileen found curious. There was a button set into a pole at the gate, positioned for an easy reach from a truck. She pushed it, and waited. Eventually a tall woman in an enormous sheepskin duster arrived. Her name, Eileen learned later, was Susan, and as she approached, Eileen knew she was everything her own parents had hoped she would become. This was a woman, strong and tall and sunweathered, who would want nothing more than the land, the cattle, the horse, forever.

  Eileen felt a piercing sorrow watching the other woman approach. She wanted nothing else, in that moment, but to be married to her childhood friend Owen Sutter and to live on a ranch in Wyoming. She wanted to be wearing a sheepskin duster and calfskin gloves and know nothing more of death than what happens to steers in the fall and lambs in the spring.

  Susan was driving a pickup truck so exquisitely battered it could have been some sort of art sculpture. Or maybe it had just been rolled a few times. It was covered in icy mud, and the hood was wired shut with a twist of baling wire. Susan’s expression was as chilly as the ice on her truck as she pulled up at the gate.

  “Yes?” she said, then her expression changed into bewilderment. “Do I know you?”

  “I think you know my father,” Eileen said. “Alan Baxter. Is he here? Could I talk to him?”

  Susan’s face crinkled into a broad grin, changing her in an instant from sternness to merriment. “Of course, you’re Eileen! I’m Susan Williams. You look just like him.”

  “Everybody says that,” Eileen said under her breath as Susan spun a combination lock and swung open the gate. Eileen had never seen a locked ranch gate before and it puzzled her. Why would you lock your front gate? What kind of visitors would you want to keep out of a ranch? In Wyoming, most people depended on their dogs to warn them of visitors. Visitors were rare where she was from. She drove through and pulled her Jeep over so Susan could take the lead after she closed the gate. This bit of ranch savvy elicited a raised eyebrow from the other woman.

  Beth and Sam Williams’s spread was instantly familiar to her, an arrangement of main house and outbuildings much like her own family home in Wyoming. At the main house, Susan waved Eileen to a parking spot in the slushy yard, then led the way to an enormous mud room where Eileen was shown a hook on which to hang her winter coat and hat. The floor was tile and it was covered in mud and dirt. Hooks and shelves and baskets held an astonishing array of coats, hats, gloves, and boots. Underneath a particularly large pile of mud-smeared clothing, a washing machine clanked and hummed busily.

  Susan, shedding her duster and a shapeless wool hat, revealed herself to be younger than Eileen thought at first. She was Eileen’s own age, but she topped Eileen by six inches of height and forty pounds of weight. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her; she was just large all over. She smelled strongly of horses, a scent that made Eileen draw a deep breath in nostalgia. Eileen used to smell that way.

  “Horses,” she explained to Susan. “I used to ride just about every day.”

  “I’m surprised you could tell,” Susan said, brushing at her jeans and frowning. “I rode out this afternoon, but it was too muddy for Charlie so I came back and got the truck.”

  “You don’t smell that strongly,” Eileen said, sitting down at a handy bench and tugging at her shoes. “I just haven’t smelled horse in a while, that’s all.”

  “You could go out with me tomorrow, if you’d like,” Susan offered. “My old mare, Origami, she’s as gentle as a rocking chair. I don’t ride her much since I got Charlie.”

  Eileen had to swallow before she spoke. What was wrongwith her? She wanted to accept; in that moment, it seemed as though she wanted nothing else.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here,” she said. “Is my father here?”

  “No, he’s in town having lunch with somebody who might know about Krista Lewis,” Susan said, so casually it made Eileen jump. “He should be back pretty soon.”

  “You know about Krista Lewis?” Eileen said.

  “Sure, and Jim Leetsdale too,” Susan replied, shaking out her short brown hair. “Come on, Mom’s got coffee and sweet rolls waiting. She’s going to be really excited to meet you.”

  The kitchen, clean and warm and smelling of cinnamon and vanilla, was inhabited by a woman who could only be Susan’s mother. She was as tall as her daughter but larger by far, with brown hair going to gray and light-colored eyes.

  “I’m Beth Williams. Susan told me she was bringing Alan Baxter’s daughter,” she said, in a voice as warm as her kitchen. Susan patted her shirt pocket for Eileen’s benefit. A cell phone.

  Beth held out her hands and Eileen found herself being drawn into a hug. “I’m so glad you found each other,” Beth whispered, for Eileen’s ears only, then released her. Eileen found herself swallowing hard for the second time in fi
ve minutes.

  “Coffee, and rolls,” Beth said briskly, turning away. Eileen found a place at the big country table, watching as Susan poured herself a cup of coffee and rummaged around a cabinet until she found a package of what looked like hot chocolate mix. She dumped the powder into her coffee and stirred it with a spoon, then came and thumped down next to Eileen.

  “Want one like it?” she offered. “It’s my version of a hot chocolate. Hot coffee chocolate.”

  “Just coffee, thanks,” Eileen said, grinning. She was starting to feel a bit less overwhelmed. The sweet rolls were very good, steaming and full of raisins and with just enough icing. She hadn’t eaten lunch, she recalled, and she wolfed two of the rolls and finished a cup of coffee in just a few minutes.

  “You look better now,” Beth said, leaning back over her own coffee and roll. “You were pretty pale. So why are you here?”

  Eileen opened her mouth, and looked at the two women sitting at the table with her. Their hospitality was more than simple ranch manners, she knew. Her treatment was a reflection of the impact that Alan Baxter had made on this place. She knew what that was like. She liked Alan Baxter, too.

  “I suspect he might try to find Krista’s murderer on his own,” she said, and before the words were out of her mouth she knew they were true. Either Alan Baxter was the murderer, or he was going to try and find the murderer. There was really no other explanation for what he was doing. In order to find out what he was, Eileen was going to have to play along with him. And it might get her killed. She’d known that, too, before she’d gotten into her Jeep. It was a risk that seemed acceptable. It still seemed acceptable.