Old Poison

by Joan Francis

  “Sorry you had to see that,” said Camas.

  Nothing on Evelyn’s body had been covered but that gaping skull. Sorry, my eye. He had deliberately set up this little revelation to see what reaction he could get out of me.

  “Sure you are. Please don’t confirm all my worst first impressions, Agent Camas.”

  It was very dumb of me to let my anger out in such a direct verbal assault on a federal investigator. I knew the minute I did it that I would pay for it. Anger flashed briefly in his cold blue eyes, but he had sense enough to control it. The tone of his reply was wonderfully balanced between the apology he voiced and the sarcastic condescension he implied.

  “Sorry to shock you, Ms. Hunter, but since you’re a professional investigator, I naturally assumed you were up to this.”

  To complete his show and tell, he turned Evelyn’s hands, palms up, so I could see that all the skin had been sliced from the tips of her thumbs and fingers.

  “Here’s why we got no prints.”

  Getting my anger under control, I realized I was lucky he thought it was the gore that had upset me. What had really shocked me was seeing that Evelyn had been murdered in precisely the same fashion as Antia in the Martian Diary. My suspicion of Borson jumped to the red zone. I prayed that the search Sam was doing would turn up some useful information that I could turn over to the FBI. That last mysterious message from Borson had really lit a fire under Sam. He had taken it as a personal affront to his skill as an intelligence professional, and he had turned on all his old skills to figure out how Borson was tapping into my apartment, my phone, and my computer. At this moment, however, I had nothing to give Agent Camas.

  I decided to play the role his prejudice had cast me in. I feigned illness and left the room suddenly. It gave me a moment to be out from under his scrutiny and go over the amount of truth I should tell him.

  I had gotten into Flagstaff late Friday, but Camas couldn’t be bothered with me until today, so I had spent Friday night at a motel. That wasn’t included in his expense reimbursement. From the moment we met this morning, he had pulled one obnoxious, bigoted, sexist thing after another. Brilliant he wasn’t, but dogged and arrogant he was, and he would be capable of making my life miserable if I wasn’t very careful.

  He walked up to me outside, stuck a piece of chewing gum in his mouth, and offered me one. I declined. His lopsided, sarcastic grin revealed large teeth with protruding canines. There is no way anyone would mistake that smile for friendliness. It radiated smart-ass arrogance.

  “Yeah, it takes a while to get used to that sort of thing, especially if it’s someone you know. Who was she?”

  “Her name is Evelyn Lilac. She is . . . was some sort of biology or ecology professor from Costa Rica.”

  “Costa Rica, huh. How did you meet her?”

  “Someone asked me to interview with her because she needed a research assistant for a novel she was going to write.”

  “Research assistant? Is that the level of work you do?”

  His voice was so derisive he almost taunted me into another angry outburst, but I had learned my lesson.

  “No, and I ended up rejecting the assignment.”

  “When and where was this interview?”

  “Late October, I don’t recall the date. We met on the San Gabriel River bike trail.”

  “You mean, like, bicycle? Is this how you usually meet prospective clients?”

  “No, Evelyn was in Los Angeles to speak at an environmental conference and was booked solid. Meeting her during her morning bike ride was the only way to see her.”

  He stopped chewing the gum and stared at me, open mouthed. I couldn’t decide whether he thought I was lying or was just incredibly stupid. Holding me in a long appraising gaze, he resumed chomping on his gum. Finally, he pulled out a small notebook and pen.

  “What’s her address and phone number in Costa Rica?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did she contact you?”

  Now there was a tricky question to answer. “She had some associate contact me and arrange the meeting.” That might not be strictly true, but there was no way I was going to tell this sneering, arrogant man anything about Martians and Red 19. Even if I had been dealing with a more reasonable investigator, that story could be career suicide.

  “What was the associate’s name and address?”

  I knew the questions would eventually come down to this, but I dreaded having to answer. “His name was Borson. I don’t have an address for him.”

  He looked up from his pad. “Where did you meet him, the Disneyland Autopia?”

  I blushed as I confessed, “No, a city park in Bluff Beach.”

  “A city park? Let me guess. You’re one of those hand-to-mouth PIs with an office that’s a typewriter and filing cabinet in the bedroom. Did we maybe think to get this Borson’s phone number?”

  I shook my head. “Just an email address, and it’s no longer a valid address.”

  “Jesus! Let’s recap here. You meet your clients on bicycle trails, city parks, and chat rooms, and you get no addresses and no phones. Hunter, if you’re bullshitting me, I’ll have you up on obstruction charges so fast it will make your friggin’ head swim. So what great PI job did you do for these unidentifiable clients?”

  “None. I met with Evelyn; we agreed I didn’t know enough about the environmental movement to help with her book, and I left.”

  “You got any notes of this meeting, any letter rejecting the work? Oh, I’m forgetting. You’d have to mail it to the bike trail. Do you know how flimsy that sounds? I could have a subpoena this afternoon to turn your ‘office’ and any other private property that got in the way of our search, so don’t hold out on me, Hunter.”

  In my most contrite and humble tone I answered, “I do realize how unprofessional it must look to have no more information on these people than I do, and I am thoroughly embarrassed by it, but you must understand, I never took them seriously. As you surmised, researching novels is not exactly my stock-in-trade.”

  I reached into my purse and pulled out a page from the Times documenting my message to Borson. “You see, Borson had someone deliver a cash retainer, and I don’t even know how to get it back to him. But I am being perfectly legal. I even opened a separate client trust account to keep his money separate from my other client funds.”

  Camas read it and handed it back. “He ever get in touch?”

  “He hasn’t sent me any address for the return of his retainer, but I promise you, when he does, I will call you with the address immediately.”

  If Agent Camas figured out the difference between the question he asked and the carefully worded answer I gave, I’d be dead meat. To distract him from that fine detail, I kept talking.

  “Look, all the guy asked me to do was some research that I didn’t think I would do anyway. I only obliged him in meeting with Evelyn because he said if it didn’t work out, he would go away and leave me alone. It was a way of getting rid of an unwanted client. It didn’t seem like a real case, so I didn’t take him seriously or check references. How was I to know this would happen?”

  He studied me and he studied his notebook. He needed a little redirection.

  “If you want more information on Evelyn, why don’t you check the organizers of the First International Environmental Expo in Long Beach. She was a keynote speaker or something. They ought to have lots of stuff on her.”

  He took a breath, gave me his toothy, lopsided smile and said, “Right. I’ll do that. It’s been a real pleasure dealing with such a pro, Hunter.”

  * * * * *

  THIRTEEN

  Her body had been found a hundred miles northeast of Flagstaff. The dry wash wasn’t on the map, but with the instruction I had gotten at the library in Tuba City, it wasn’t hard to find. I left the highway a few miles out of Tuba City and followed a good dirt road north to the foot of the butte. Parking my rented jeep at the first spot where the road bent close to the wash, I walked u
p the dry riverbed looking for some sign that would indicate the exact location.

  The temperature was right on my comfort cusp, a little too cool in the shade, making the sun feel deliciously soothing and warm. Despite my unhappy purpose for being here, the happy memories of childhood seemed to materialize in the clear air of the open desert, like ghosts, unexpected and unbidden.

  The mines my dad had run were always two hundred miles from anywhere, so I’d spent my free time searching those open, wild lands for neat rocks, trap door-spiders, lizards, coyotes, rabbits, birds, wind-carved caves and other secret places, known only to me and the critters.

  With habit engendered by early training, I placed my feet carefully, making only a whisper of sound in the sand and giving a wide berth to any brush or rock that might conceal a rattlesnake soaking up a last bit of the early winter sun before hibernation.

  The crime scene wasn’t hard to spot. There were several sets of tire tracks on the west bank, just before the wash made a wide turn past a red sandstone cliff. As I walked from the sunny wash into the cold shadow of the cliff, a shiver ran down my spine. It wasn’t due entirely to the change in temperature. If Evelyn’s spirit had survived, she was here in the desert, not in the morgue.

  At the library in town I had looked up the newspaper report on her death. It didn’t tell me much, but as I looked around, neither did this dry wash. I found month-old tire tracks, rounded spots in the sand that may have once been footprints, and a bit of rabbit fur caught on a creosote bush. Nearby coyote tracks finished the rabbit’s tale, but what of Evelyn? Was she dead when she was dumped here, or was this cliff the last thing she saw before she died? Etched in my memory was the look on her face as she left in that taxi, sad, frightened, resigned. Had she known her fate in advance? Why then would she run to it? Was her death due to that damned diary or her protests or some tragic accident of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  “Damn you, Evelyn! Why didn’t you let me help you?” The sound of my own voice breaking the silence of this empty place was a shock. More surprising was the pain I heard in my own cry. I sat on an outcropping at the edge of the cliff, studied the sand, and wondered what on earth I thought I would accomplish by coming to this spot.

  I stood and began a careful foot-by-foot search. I worked my way slowly upstream for about two hundred yards until the path became choked with rocks, cactus, and brush, then I turned around and headed back, searching the same ground from another perspective.

  By the time I retraced my steps the sun was setting and the clouds to the west were blocking what little daylight remained. Streaks of gray streamed down from the ragged edges of the clouds, and the winds carried the sweet perfume of wet earth, creosote and sage. Some lucky folks were getting rain, and I was getting cold.

  Standing there blithely considering the blessing of rain in the dry lands, it dawned on me that those heavy rain clouds were upstream, and it would be wise to head for higher ground. It is a bleak irony that every year a few folks die in the middle of the desert by drowning. You don’t get much warning. The water begins as a hard rain in the highlands. Drops collect one by one, forming many tiny rivulets that converge into fewer but larger dry stream beds until finally a wall of water of awesome power fills the main channel. Moving brush, boulders, and debris down the wash, the flood fills the silent desert with a monstrous roar. When I was a young girl I would go out and wait beside a wash, hoping to see a flash flood. Twice I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. I stood mesmerized, taking guilty pleasure in the exhilaration of being so close to such thrilling power, and knowing my dad would kill me if he found out.

  Thinking of childhood adventure, I climbed out of the wash and was brought abruptly back to present time. A man stood on the bank watching me. I thought briefly about the gun I had left in my suitcase in the car and hoped I wouldn’t need it.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  “I saw your jeep down there. You having any trouble?”

  “No, no trouble. You, ah, just passing by this far off the highway?”

  He smiled and his thin features lit with a warmth and shy charm. “No. Sorry if I startled you.”

  As he walked a little closer, I could see he wore a police uniform, but the identifying shoulder patch was hidden under his blue denim jacket. He was about five-foot-ten, slender, with wide shoulders, slim hips, and looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He introduced himself, but my brain was so busy wondering if this could be Evelyn’s killer that I didn’t catch his full name, just Jim somebody.

  I responded automatically with my own self-introduction and saw his face change completely. His smile was replaced with a look of startled recognition. In that first telltale moment, I saw a candor I usually associate with persons totally lacking in the stony-faced artifice of law enforcement. In the following moments, however, his quiet, slow appraisal of me showed the control and self-assurance of an experienced police officer. The measured tone of his voice told me he had carefully constructed his next question.

  “Diana Hunter. What brings you here, Ms. Hunter?”

  I decided to give no information until I got a little. “I was rock hunting. What brings you here?”

  He considered the question, and probably read my apprehension. His voice took on that quiet, relaxed, conversational tone a good police officer can use to reassure a nervous witness.

  “I’m on my way home. My house is just a little way on down this road. Out here if we see a car off-road, like your jeep, we check to make sure the driver isn’t lost or sick or injured. A few weeks ago I met another woman here when I was on my way to the office. I stopped to see if she needed any help and she assured me she didn’t. Basically told me to mind my own business. So I did, or thought I did. About a week later I saw her here again, but that time she had been murdered. So you see why I would be reluctant to leave another woman out here in the same place.” Though he tried to keep his voice even, I could hear an echo of my own regrets. Evelyn had gotten to him too.

  “You actually spoke to her a week before she was killed?”

  A hint of angry defensiveness slipped into his voice. “I tried to get her to let me help her, but she flat-out refused and she wasn’t doing anything to arrest her for or–

  “I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “I didn’t mean to imply criticism. Believe me, I understand. Evelyn did the same thing to me, refused my help and left in a taxi. I never heard from her again until the FBI called me yesterday to identify her body.”

  “Yesterday! Camas just got around to calling you yesterday?”

  A clap of thunder rolled through the clouds above us, and large drops of rain started making quarter-sized rings on the ground.

  “It was your PI card we found in her, her clothing?”

  It was more a statement than a question, but I nodded.

  “So you did know her. You called her Evelyn. Look, this case isn’t my jurisdiction. It’s FBI, and you aren’t legally obligated to talk with me; but I really need to know what that woman was doing and why she was murdered practically at my door step.”

  “Actually I was hoping you could tell me what she was doing. I don’t think I can help you much, but I would like to talk to you about it.”

  He looked at the sky. “We’re gonna get soaked if we stand here. Would you like to have a cup of coffee or something at my place?”

  All my instincts told me he offered no threat, but the cautious one on my internal committee still caused a momentary hesitation. He picked up on it immediately.

  “If we talked at the police station that would sort of make it official business, which it isn’t; but if you like, we could drive back to town and talk over dinner at a restaurant.”

  “No,” I answered. “A coffee at your house sounds fine.”

  His small trailer home was orderly except for the large number of books stuffed into every available corner. He offered me a seat at a table and began ass
embling the coffee-making equipment. With a shy apology he explained, “This won’t take too long. I just use this cone and make it right in the cup. Almost as fast as instant, but it tastes better.”

  I smiled and nodded.

  He looked in the refrigerator and then at me and said somewhat hesitantly, “I don’t have much in here but some leftover lamb stew.”

  “If that’s an offer, I accept. I just realized that I haven’t eaten today. After an unpleasant interview with Agent Camas at the morgue this morning, I went straight to the rental car agency and drove from Flagstaff to Tuba City.”

  As he put the stew on to heat he said, “Well, he’s enough to ruin your appetite, all right.”

  He said it in such a quiet, straight-faced manner that it caught me by surprise, and I laughed a little too loudly. His appearance at the wash had startled me, and my cackling outburst was partly an emotional release as my adrenaline began to subside.

  He served the coffee and sat down across from me. I was about to admit that I hadn’t caught his last name, but his first question distracted me.

  “You know, he had that business card of yours from the time the body was found. I know because I found the body. Why do you think he took so long to contact you?”

  “I don’t know, but the way he talked to me made it obvious that he has a low opinion of both private investigators and women. I’m afraid what I had to tell him pretty much confirmed his prejudice.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  His question was direct but did not have the coldness of interrogation. Taking a good look at my new friend in the light of his home, I found his brown eyes reassuring, observant and honest. Though there was tension in his face, he seemed to need to know about Evelyn on the same level I did. I kept my story simple and close to what I had told Camas. He listened quietly, without interruption.

  When I had finished, he went to the stove and dished up two bowls of hot stew. It smelled wonderful, and I dived in as soon as was polite. As we ate, I asked, “When you talked to Evelyn did she say anything that would help, like who she was meeting, where she was staying, why she had come to the desert?”