‘Shot out your tires. It’s being investigated right now. In fact, you’re going need to talk to the investigator – Brad Holmes. He’s with the sheriff’s department.’
‘No! No!’ Kate closed her eyes. ‘What’s going on? What did I do, for God’s sake?’ She put her head down on the table.
In a way he wished he hadn’t told her, but he had to. He wished she were tougher, then again he didn’t.
‘God.’ Kate’s hands began to shake. ‘How am I going to feel safe back in Arizona? I don’t even feel safe in that motel room now.’
‘Tell you what,’ he said, like a fool, ‘when you go back to your room the Ativan’s going to kick in. You can get some sleep. I’ll sit outside the door in my car and keep watch.’
They would have to go over everything, both of them knew, but for the moment Malcolm let her rest. He stared out the plate-glass window at the lights of the cars and trucks going by on the freeway, at the Wendy’s, the Kroger’s, the Kentucky Colonel, waiting till she was able to compose herself.
The shining lights out in the parking lot, the cars going by, the blank night sky with its stars blotted out: how oddly beautiful it all seemed. He’d flown clear across country to this alien place, but already it was beginning to feel like home.
Late that night in his rented car, parked under a street light near the door of Kate’s room at the motel, Malcolm searched the web on his laptop. A few entries in he found an article from some obscure paper, Vermont Art News. Kate Waters, Director of the Rustic Arts Collective. And a picture of Kate, longer hair, a brighter smile – possibly even happy. Vivacious Kate Waters, the article said, has lived here for the last eight years with her partner, sculptor Rick Church.
‘I hung around the New York City art scene for a few years,’ Kate was quoted as saying, ‘me and my arty friends, Ellen Wilson, Mandy Foster, Karen and Sandy. We called ourselves the Ooblecks.’ And why was that? ‘It’s a joke.’ Kate laughed. ‘A long story. To make it short we were all feeling down one day, and someone said how low can you go, and we all decided green slime was pretty low.’
So, not just someone from Kate’s past, but anyone – anyone motivated enough to search the web – could have come up with Ellen Wilson and the Oobleck thing. It was quite an elaborate scheme – someone would have to be a highly motivated egomaniac to carry it out. It put Hairy Lite back in the picture. Kate had told him about the man who’d looked at the house and the missing key. No reason once you had a key not to make copies. He wasn’t going to really go into it with Kate, but he suspected she was alive today because of a barking dog.
The door to Kate’s room opened. Malcolm checked his watch: four forty-five.
Kate came over to the car, fully dressed, wheeling her carry-on.
He opened the window.
‘My flight’s at seven. Thank you,’ she said, ‘for keeping me safe. I was thinking maybe this whole thing is one of those events people stage.’
‘What people are we talking about?’
‘Artists. They stage something, film it, and it’s an event.’
‘I haven’t seen any cameras.’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘Me neither. See you back in Arizona.’ She turned away.
‘Wait,’ said Malcolm. ‘Where are you staying when you get back there?’
‘With Dakota.’
‘Be sure to talk to Officer Holmes right away.’
Kate nodded. ‘I put his number in my contacts,’ she said. ‘That way I’ll always have a policeman when I need him. Oh, wait, maybe I already do.’ She smiled, and for the first time Malcolm saw her smile without the cloud of anxiety.
She held up her hand, fanned her fingers. ‘Bye, bye,’ she said.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Malcolm went to his room and managed to get three hours’ sleep after Kate left for the airport. Then he went to McDonald’s, fueled up on coffee and three steak, egg and cheese McMuffins, then called the number for Abbie of Evan Bright Realty on the card Kate had given him.
‘An investigator,’ Abbie said, after he’d explained. ‘That’s wonderful. All of us here in the office have been just freaking out about this whole thing.’
He drove over to Evan Bright Realty, pushed open the glass door, found a line of desks and three women ranging in age from twenties to fifties. Two of them smiled brightly at him, expectantly.
‘Hi there,’ they said in unison.
‘Abbie here?’
One of them nodded her head at a third woman at a desk near the back, partially obscured by a youngish couple. ‘Helping a client,’ she said. ‘Are you Malcolm?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have a seat. She’s expecting you.’
He sat, surveyed the office. Cheery with potted plants, family photos on the empty desks, a trophy case displaying sports trophies. Basketball, it looked like. Then the couple left, and Abbie came towards him, blonde and plump, wearing a red suit.
‘So you’re with law enforcement in Arizona,’ she said. ‘That must be exciting! Never a dull moment, apparently, in that state.’
He considered making some crack about New Jersey and The Sopranos, but didn’t. ‘Right,’ he said.
‘Here’s the house key and also Steve’s card. I called him myself, when I got back to the office after talking to Kate. He can answer some of your questions that I can’t. But he told me to tell anyone concerned to wait till next week when he’s back from the conference and can check his notes.’
Malcolm opened the front door at 350 Roscommon Drive with the key Abbie had given him. He’d stopped at Kroger’s and bought a cheap flashlight and a pair of rubber gloves. He didn’t want to leave any fingerprints to confuse the issue, if in fact anyone decided there was an issue. Inside, he put the gloves on; they weren’t the greatest, but they would have to do. He planned to tell law enforcement the whole story as Kate had told it to him – luckily, she’d notified the police about Ellen’s absence – but he wanted to go throughthe house first.
The scenario, as he envisioned it, was get her out of her element, in a strange place. She would be disoriented, not thinking clearly, wondering where her friend Ellen was. A perfect spot: empty houses on either side, woody fields behind, out of sight of any occupied houses on the street. Plus, from the look of all the ‘For Sale’ signs, the neighbors wouldn’t be as aware of who was who as they might normally be.
Get her in there, then slip in late at night with your key. Except a dog barked and woke up the neighborhood.
Focus.
He walked down the hall, starting with the kitchen, opening all the drawers, the cupboards. He opened the dead refrigerator, its insides smelling faintly of old food, and found nothing – nothing in the freezer part, the vegetable hydrator, the meat keeper. Nothing in the bedrooms, under the beds, the closets, the drawers of the only chest of drawers. Nothing in the living room. He went back to the kitchen, found the door to the basement.
He opened it, got a whiff of old mold and must. The steps looked pretty steep to someone as sleep deprived as he felt. He held on to the railing as he went down. At the bottom, light shone through a couple of high narrow windows, dim with dirt and spiderwebs.
He played the flashlight all around – the floor was beige speckled linoleum tile, the walls cinderblock painted white. Two cardboard boxes were against one wall – he walked over and opened them. One held a stack of National Geographics and a large dead daddy long leg spider, the other a cache of glass jelly jars. There was a sink in one corner, hook-ups for a washer-dryer, and that was about it.
Nothing at all of interest that he could find in the whole house, not even a handkerchief embroidered with the monogram HL. Not only that, there was no sign of any break-in. There was nothing of interest or anything personal in the whole house, which made the snapshot Kate had found in one of the bedrooms maybe more significant than it might normally have been. She’d shown it to him this morning. A woman in a bikini, smiling. Tall Pines Lake, 2005.
He’d laughed, thou
gh, because in a way it didn’t look like a real snapshot, more like those pictures that come in frames when you buy them.
‘But it is real,’ Kate had protested.
‘I know, I know, it just has that phoney look. Familiar, somehow.’
He walked outside and around the house – roses bloomed at the side, yellow like the ones in front – looking for something, anything. He checked the borders, the perimeters. The basement windows were half above ground, half submerged. He knelt and peered down through the dirty glass into the basement.
Nothing.
Time to return the key to the realtor.
At the police station Officer Matt Dodds came out from the back, chewing on a carrot. ‘You with Mesa PD, huh?’ he asked Malcolm. He was a friendly looking guy, young, baby faced and blonde, probably went into law enforcement to keep the peace rather than to chase bad guys, or maybe a little of both.
‘Not now,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’m on leave.’
Officer Dodds laughed. ‘But you can’t stay away.’
‘Just can’t.’
‘I remember Cindy pretty well; it was just a couple of days ago. It was a little premature to file a missing person report, but I checked out the house, made sure her friend wasn’t dead in the basement.’
‘Cindy?’ Malcolm stared at him, feeling as if he’d fallen through some hole in space into another dimension. ‘Kate,’ he said. ‘Her name is Kate.’
‘Kate. Yeah. Didn’t I say Kate? Sorry. So, what’s up? She find her friend?’
Malcolm launched into the whole story.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Officer Dodds when he finished. ‘What kind of a joke is that?’
‘It’s a little too screwy, you know what I mean? It looks like a stupid joke, but I have concerns it might have been a set-up. And I understand you guys were called out to Roscommon Drive on that same night Kate stayed there.’
‘I hear you. I remember thinking it was kind of strange, two incidents on that same basically quiet street so close together, but I couldn’t see any connection. Let me get Officer Brindle out here – he went on that other call.’
Officer Brindle was as congenial as Officer Dodds, as if they’d both just taken a workshop about community relations.
‘I filed a report on that,’ he said. ‘Suspicion of a prowler. He was gone when I got there; I just put down what the neighbors told me. So many empty houses in that neighborhood; you worry about homeless guys breaking in to sleep.’
‘Yeah,’ said Officer Dodds. ‘Homeless guys, like probably the former owners.’
They both chuckled sadly.
‘Anyway,’ said Officer Brindle. ‘There was nothing specific to indicate that anything of a criminal nature was going on.’ He looked over at Officer Dodds.
‘You got any sort of description at all of this alleged prowler?’ Malcolm asked.
Officer Brindle laughed. ‘Male. Height, medium to tall. Wearing a baseball cap.’
‘There’s a guy, Harry Light. He might be involved in this.’
‘An ex, you mean?’
‘An ex.’
‘An ex. Lures her here. Has nefarious plans for her late late at night, but the big dog chases him away. Justice!’
‘Justice.’
‘This Harry from around here?’
‘Not as far as I can tell. Maybe you can run an APB on him and see if anything turns up locally.’
‘Sure thing.’
Malcolm doubted anything would turn up.
While the officers were running an APB, Malcolm went outside for some air. Parking lot. Big office-building across the street, fringed with smokers. Cindy had quit smoking shortly before he met her, had taken it up again, and had quit for the second time a few months before she killed herself. Why had she bothered quitting that second time? Malcolm wondered now. And what was she doing popping up here in this faraway state instead of buried in a graveyard in Mesa, Arizona? Ha ha, joke.
Abruptly, he turned and walked back into the police station, away from a thought of Cindy in a pretty red blouse he’d given her one year for her birthday, laughing at something silly – blonde hair soft, blue eyes smiling, happy. The lighting inside was bland, comfortingly sterile.
Officer Dodds came out the door by the plate-glass sliding window. ‘Got nothing on your guy, Harry Light. Sorry.’
‘Thanks, anyway,’ he said.
‘Not a problem.’
As he walked out the door Malcolm realized what was going to happen. No crime had actually been committed, and the police were not going to be investigating anything he had told them. Budgets were being cut all over the country. Nothing was going happen at this end. Nothing at all.
‘Hey, wait a sec,’ Officer Dodds called to him.
Malcolm turned.
‘So this all started with an email to your friend?’
Malcolm nodded.
‘You trace the IP address?’
‘Next on my list,’ Malcolm said.
Malcolm drove back towards the motel. He had a friend in Phoenix who could do the IP trace and cellphone too, though by now whoever had sent the fake emails from Ellen had probably covered his – her? – nah, probably not, but maybe – their tracks. He hadn’t found out much; wasted his time, if you looked at it a certain way, but another way, he hadn’t wasted it at all considering the other options he had for spending his time, so – so what?
He pulled into a fast food place, Kentucky Colonel, and decided to park, go inside and order. They had iron tables and chairs out in front; he could eat dinner to the smell of gas fumes. He went in and came out in a few minutes with a three-piece dinner: dark meat, corn, mashed, biscuit on the side. Coffee to go with it. The sun was beginning to sink in the sky, the light slanted a funny way and as he watched the cars drive by, while sitting at the table, he had some sense of déjà vu, that he’d been in this place before, this very place, eaten this exact same meal in some other life that resembled a paradise.
This is it, he thought. I’ve finally gone over the edge.
His cellphone chimed. Lupita. Lupita. That’s right; he’d flown back east for Lupita, to talk to Rose, sad pretty Rose. She’d left him messages to call her, and he never had.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Malcolm, where are you? I haven’t heard from you in days, and you haven’t come into the restaurant.’
‘I’m in New Jersey,’ he said. ‘Investigating. I talked to Carrie’s Cooper’s sister. She—’
‘You could still have gotten back to me,’ Lupita broke in, her voice accusing, with a hint of tears. ‘Chico escaped from the jail.’
‘What?’
‘He escaped. He just walked out. No one knows where he is. His lawyer’s really mad.’
‘I don’t blame him.’
‘I think he must have gone across the line. We have some cousins there.’ Her voice trembled. ‘He was going to be a famous artist some day, and now he’ll just be like all those illegals. When are you coming back? Did you find out anything from the sister?’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow, then we can talk, okay?’
‘You come into the restaurant. Frank’s got a new recipe, peanut soup.’
‘I will, I will.’
He would, he would. Chico had escaped. That was dumb – the dumbest thing Chico could have done. In some obscure way it seemed like his fault – he’d lost track of what he was doing, derailed by Kate.
TWENTY-NINE
Kate took the shuttle from the airport back to Dudley. What’s the worst that can happen, anyway? she thought as the shuttle made the turn at the Sierra Vista exit. So I’m murdered. Then I’ll be dead, no more worries.
I can do it.
It helped that the views here were all unimpeded as they passed through the small dusty towns of Whetstone and Huachuca City. Mountains rose to her right, close, and to her left, further away. It wasn’t like coming home, exactly; she didn’t know where her home was any more. But should she die prematurely, murdered right here in Arizon
a, where would she be buried? In the tiny dusty graveyard outside of Dudley, full of miners and their wives?
No way.
Bill. Her stepfather. She hadn’t talked to Bill in a while, not since he’d called her the night of the murders. She needed to get in touch, tell him to reserve her a burial plot next to her mom. Or had he done that already?
Back in Dudley, Kate walked up from the shuttle stop to her house. The weeds that lined the driveway had blossomed in the rainy season and gone to seed in the dry. She opened the door. The house smelled musty; she’d closed all the windows before she left, and the house had baked for days in the high desert sun. No dog waited for her in the house, no cat, only the spiders. With fresh eyes from a journey, everything looked drabber. She noted that her one and only house plant, a fern, was now dead.
She went around the house, unlocking all the windows, opening them. Most had screens except in the back bedroom, which was unused but for an ironing board and a pile of unironed clothes. The window in there was already unlocked and open a couple of inches. The lock was old and didn’t catch. Had it been closed all the way when she left? She couldn’t remember. She’d been in a hurry.
She hardly lived here; how was she to know? Ask the spiders; they never left home.
She called Ernie’s garage. Her car was ready. She called Dakota, got a ride over there.
‘Chico escaped from jail,’ Dakota told her on the way over.
‘No! How did he do that?’
‘Just walked out the door is what I heard. He had some trustee job ’cause they, haha, trusted him. Rumor has it he went across the line.’
Kate thought of his show at the gallery, the tortured dolls. But then she thought: what if he had actually killed those tourists? Maybe he had. Who knew?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Dakota said as she pulled into the gas station, ‘but he didn’t do it.’
Kate got out, went into the office.
‘Hey, you’re quite the talk around the garage,’ the guy called Ed, according to his name tag, said as he gave her the keys. ‘You all take it easy now, you hear!’
She waved goodbye to Dakota, got in her car and immediately called the number Malcolm had given her – Officer Brad Holmes, who was investigating the shot-out tire case.
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