Alone with him again, Joanna sighed. “Things have been hectic on this end too.”
“In what way?”
“The FBI dropped by our headquarters Tuesday morning.”
“Really? Where were the agents from?”
“Just one. He’s out of Bakersfield. I forget his name at the moment. I’ve got his card back at my office. Do you need it?”
“No.” Michael said. The important thing was that it hadn’t been Higgins or someone from the L.A. field office. Bakersfield was a satellite office that probably had been tasked with the case grunt-work. “Did the agent go up to Carl’s hermitage in the hills?”
She paused. “No, why would he?”
“Might be worth a second look around the place.”
Their drinks arrived, and Joanna immediately drained a third of her tall glass.
“Rough day for a Sunday?” he asked sympathetically.
“Aren’t all the days, lately? I’m sure that if Carl would just come forward, this whole mess could be cleared up in no time at all. We all miss him so much. His guidance. His faith in what we’re doing. And I’m sorry, Michael, but I just can’t believe he murdered this Rashid character.”
“Razin.”
“Pardon?”
“The victim’s name was Nastour Razin. And you’re in growing company.”
“What do you mean?”
Her revelation that her only contact with the FBI had been at a low level, through Bakersfield, now freed him to stretch the truth: “Oh, some of the brighter bulbs involved in this case are beginning to question the idea that Carl killed Razin.”
“Why’s that?”
“Motive,” Michael replied. “Let’s suppose Carl met with the Iranian in Nevada to finalize a deal. Hiring himself out to Teheran to do the survey on a nuclear site is the pet theory, if you subscribe to this scenario.”
“I don’t subscribe to anything about this anymore,” she said wearily.
“Neither do I. Still, the U.S. government would never let the doctor go off to Iran, so Razin and he rendezvoused at a remote quarry to cement the deal. The question, then, is—how did things go so wrong in the marble pit that Carl saw no other way out than homicide?”
“Could it have been a sudden quarrel?”
Interesting, he thought: She was using California statutory language for voluntary manslaughter—the unlawful killing of a human being upon a sudden quarrel or heat of passion. “The evidence at the scene neither confirms nor rules out something like that.”
Joanna fell silent, looking very pretty in the candlelight as she reflected about something. For Michael, the only thing missing in her was the innocence he’d found so appealing in Dulcie. “I don’t like saying this,” she went on, tentatively, “but Carl has a temper. The people at the Department of Energy could certainly testify to that.”
“I doubt a judge would rule that admissible. What the investigation needs to jumpstart it again is a rock-solid reason why somebody as rational as Dr. Kincannon would just haul off and kill somebody, anybody, not to mention a character so disreputable simply meeting with him dumped Carl’s credibility in the toilet. Maybe we should rethink the entire case, start from scratch and re-interview everybody even remotely involved.”
She was smiling questioningly at him again. “Where’d you go to university?”
“I didn’t, a year at Cerro Coso Community College is all.”
“But you’re obviously educated. Just the way you speak.”
“I’ve always loved to read, but last few years I’ve had a mentor who’s giving me some direction.”
“Incredible. I can only imagine what you’d become if you had the same opportunities I did.”
As Joanna continued to smile at him, he wondered if she was on the verge of offering him the same Pygmalion-like arrangement Kincannon had given her. Sorry, he thought, no thanks.
But then, abruptly, she changed the subject: “The first time we met, Michael, I said I’d give you whatever help you need. Are you headed back to Furnace Creek tonight?”
“No, I’ll probably bunk with a bachelor deputy in Olancha.”
“If I let you inside Carl’s offices to look around tonight, it’d arouse too suspicion with our security. We can do this more casually during the day. Can you swing by our headquarters sometime tomorrow morning?”
“How does ten o’clock sound?”
“Perfect.”
* * *
From inside his cruiser, Michael watched Joanna walk the rest of the way to her Corvette. There had been a moment as they parted outside the restaurant entrance that she appeared to vacillate about something, probably over inviting him to her apartment in Ridgecrest for a nightcap. Twice, while chatting inside the bar, she had referred to her domicile for no real reason. But then, her better judgment seemed to take hold of her, and she let the night go with a quick shake of Michael’s hand before turning for her car.
She waved as she drove past him, then headed south along State Route 14, presumably toward the turn-off to Ridgecrest. As she went past him, Michael memorized the configuration of her car lights.
He had powered down his side windows but had yet to start his engine. Sitting there, he studied both vehicles he had observed parking in the lot while he drank inside with Joanna. The occupants of neither seemed worthy of suspicion, elderly couples in both cases, but he noted the makes and models of their cars, should they cross paths with him again in the coming hours.
He waited a full five minutes before pulling away from the restaurant. That, he figured, was enough time for Joanna to have made a cell-phone call, if she had. This was all based on a hunch, the planting of a seed as he had with Dulcie about Eureka Valley, and it might not bear fruit.
Michael turned south, as Joanna had. Yet, he had no intention of shadowing her into Ridgecrest, eight miles distant. He would bet that she was on her way home, as she’d said. He had no reason to doubt her.
Nor was he northbound, as he’d suggested to her, to bed down for the night at a fellow cop’s place over the line in Inyo County. Instead, he watched for somebody to fall in behind him somewhere along the highway.
Twisting around, he reached back between the front seats and grabbed the carbine that was ordinarily stored in the rear cargo area of the cruiser. His shotgun and pistol had been impounded as evidence by the Nye County S.D., looking ahead to the day when Carson’s remains were recovered and the lethal force investigation could go forward. And there’d been no time to check another twelve-gauge out of the armory, although he kept a spare semi-auto in the bungalow which he now carried.
Traffic was moderate, mostly Southern California vacationers going to and from the campgrounds in the Sierra. The sultry darkness was teeming with moths. They came in clouds, their soft bodies pattering against the windshield like rain. He kept to fifty-five miles an hour, ten below the posted limit. That forced the southbound vehicles to stack up behind him. Those drivers who had no interest in him whisked around the cruiser whenever it was safe to pass. A few did so before it was safe, the near head-on collisions pissing Michael off—he wasn’t in the mood to help clean one up. And one pair of low-beams consistently hung back at least a quarter mile, its driver keeping pace with Michael after coming out of the north at high speed.
It was time. He decided to test this driver.
Route 178, which eventually wound through Death Valley on its eastern continuation, struck west off Fourteen here. The exit was a mile ahead. The two-lane road went over Walker Pass, into the southern Sierra, and on to Isabella Lake. Before the pass, it climbed steadily out of Indian Wells Valley through a long and open wash, giving Michael a clear view of anyone following him.
Returning late from Los Angeles after his first meeting with Higgins and then Carson, he had pulled over near the mouth of this wash, which was within a mile of Robbers Roost. He now gave thought to taking a dirt track toward the big rock, but then decided against it: He didn’t want to get hemmed in a washout and caught on
the barren desert.
He glanced in his rearview mirror. “Buon.”
The driver had taken the bait. He was pursuing Michael into the mountains. The moon had yet to rise, and the starlight was scarcely enough to glint off Los Angeles’s silver-painted jugular, the siphon pipe to the aqueduct system that ran along the east face of the range. Michael believed the driver was in an SUV. He had boosted his beams to high and increased his speed after veering off Route 14.
Michael did the same, punching the gas pedal flush to the firewall. They had the road to themselves, as far as he could see ahead or behind. He kept a wary eye on his temperature gauge, but as the slipstream gushed in through the windows over the next several minutes it became noticeably cooler. The grade was rising steeply now toward the mile-high summit. Beyond the pass, Michael recalled curves in a plunging canyon he could make use of.
Then his rearview mirror lit up with Christmas lights.
“Goddammit!”
His pursuer was a cop, either the Highway Patrol or Kern Sheriff’s Department, both of which fielded some SUVS in the desert. Michael switched to the normal frequency used down here just in time to hear the Ridgecrest-based dispatcher say that she copied and would go to a tactical channel. One that was scrambled, no doubt, preventing Michael from eavesdropping.
He had leaned his carbine against the passenger seat, but now stowed it behind him again, covering it with a floor mat. Not that he had any intention of allowing himself to be stopped. Even a friendly traffic warning would be passed on to the watch commander in Independence, alerting Gorman to this extracurricular activity when Michael should have been resting up at a motel for tomorrow’s interviews.
He flew over Walker Pass at ninety-five miles an hour, but then braked to a crawl before finding a side road that led north into a ravine. That way, he raised virtually no dust as he followed the unpaved road. Then he stopped, killed his lights and shut his eyes for a count of ten before opening them again. They were better adjusted to the night as he continued northward, but still he stuck his head out his open window to avoid having to look through his tinted windshield.
Behind him, the spill of his pursuer’s emergency lights flashed over the crest of the ravine, the cop hell-bent for Isabella Lake at the same high speed. Michael stopped and got out, examining the ground off to left of the narrowing and worsening road. The sand felt solid enough to support the weight of his Expedition, so he got back in and inched cross-country.
He parked behind a wind-toppled Joshua tree.
He doubted that, in a veteran cop’s mind, this spontaneous chase warranted having a chopper fly over the Sierra from the airbase near Bakersfield. No, rather than that, he’d have the deputy or highway patrolman in Isabella set up on that end of Route 178 and herd his fleeing suspect into the trap. After a while, both cops would grow bored with the game and move on to the next meaningless blip in their turbulent stream of detailed existence. By morning, when all of this was long forgotten, Michael would slink down off Walker Pass and into Inyokern.
For now, he shut off the engine and opened the moon roof, then crawled between the front buckets and across the rear bench seat. He grabbed his day-pack out of the cargo area for his pillow and stretched out as best he could. He was far enough from Ridgecrest for stars to show through the retracted roof. The rise of a half-moon was an hour or two away, and the stars were brilliant. As he lay there, watching them, a skirl broke the quiet. Downed Joshuas were a favorite haunt of rattlesnakes, and his driving up had bothered one. “Forgive me, little wavy one,” he said, growing drowsy. “You can go out hunting. It’s not your den I’m going to hit.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Small aircraft were coming and going on the runways of the Inyokern airport as Michael parked outside the headquarters of Alternative Energies Institute. Fenced in behind the converted hangar was the motor pool, mostly Hummer pickup trucks. Michael intended to drop by the yard after checking in with Joanna.
He grabbed his digital camera, looped the strap around his neck and limped for the entrance. This morning, he’d dispensed with the cane, even though his calf was still tender.
The receptionist summoned an aide, who deposited Michael in an empty conference room on the third floor, saying only that Ms. Wallace would join him in a few minutes. Alone, Michael wondered what had happened to Joanna’s promise last evening to let him slip inside Kincannon’s office this morning.
Undoubtedly, somewhere in the man’s papers was proof that Carl had had previous business dealings with Razin, providing anyone who found the file a lead on contacting the Iranian-American. DMV would’ve had his current address in West Hollywood.
That’s what really mattered here—who knew what and when.
More recently, both Carl and Nastour might’ve been under the false assumption that they were negotiating with each other, when in fact both were lured to the meeting in the marble quarry by a third party. That choreographer, yet undisclosed, had relied on past history to fabricate a scenario for how the two men would’ve behaved in the pit, had they gone to Carrara on their own. And he or she knew enough about investigations to leave some loose ends, some blanks the investigators could fill with their own flashes of brilliance. The surest way to snow a detective was to make him feel smart.
Michael checked his wristwatch: It was 10:09.
A half-hour ago, Higgins had phoned him from Los Angeles, a conversation worth mulling over, carefully—but at that instant Joanna burst into the conference room and shut the door behind her. She was back to her khaki jumpsuit. Dark circles of perspiration showed under her arms. Impatiently, she waved Michael over to the table, where she had placed what appeared to be a checkbook on the polished surface.
“Look at this,” she said, keeping her slightly ragged voice down. She flipped open the book to the topmost check. The maker’s name was Carl Kincannon, the institution High Desert Bank of Ridgecrest. Its face had been shaded over with what appeared to be pencil graphite, revealing the impression left by the filling out of the check that had lain over it—a trick that may have compromised the document’s evidentiary value.
“Who did the shading?” Michael asked with a frown.
“I did. Is something wrong?”
Michael felt no need to answer. She knew exactly what she’d done by tampering with the check; handling it alone could have destroyed any latent fingerprints that might be lifted off the paper by modern lab methods.
But he let that pass. For the moment.
The issue date was July 1st of the current year. The amount was two hundred thousand dollars. It had been signed by Carl, or at least in his name. The payee line was still blank, which made sense if one speculated that the geophysicist had decided to wait until he met face-to-face with Razin for instructions on this. At least, that’s how the choreographer would have foreseen it. Staging a crime was an exercise in imagination.
“Carl researched something before making out this check,” she said, wiping a sheen of sweat off her upper lip with a tissue she took from a pocket. Air-conditioning had made the conference room cool. Almost chilly. “Something I found on the browser history to his computer.”
“And what was that?”
“He visited the IRS website on limits for reporting cash transactions.”
“So?”
“Don’t you see?” she asked stridently, beginning to get irked with him. “After realizing that the two hundred thousand would be reported no matter what, he decided to go ahead and write out a check to Rashid.”
“Razin,” Michael said, correcting her a for a second time in twelve hours. Needlessly corrected, he was now sure. He thumbed through the register—the check hadn’t been entered into it. “And what do you think the money was for?”
“It had to be extortion, Michael. Razin was blackmailing Carl, which explains everything...doesn’t it? He was pressuring Carl to go to Iran. He must have refused. Helping the Iranians is the last thing he’d ever do. And when he back-pedaled, Ra
zin saw an opportunity for personal gain.”
“Joanna, last night, you promised to let me inside his office.”
“I haven’t forgotten. Can you wait until noon, when Carl’s secretary steps out for lunch? Don’t you want to swing by the bank to follow-up on the check? I can give you the manager’s name.”
“Carl had a file for the project with the shah of Iran, didn’t he?”
“Told you before, I wouldn’t know where to begin to look. And we had a warehouse fire a few years ago.”
“That’s okay,” he said indifferently, “the FBI can just add that to the subpoena duces tecum they’re putting together for Carl’s will and trust.” Latin for bring with you under penalty of punishment.
“But that means the FBI’s convinced a judge that Carl is dead...doesn’t it...?”
He let her question dangle in silence.
“I’ve never seen the contract with the shah, Michael, but yes, a few of our old-timers have mentioned the existence of something like that.” She licked her lips. “I’ll see what I can find out. I’m still trying to help, but it’s all so complicated. Everything is so complicated.”
A sad echo of how Dulcie had described this situation at their first meeting in his bungalow.
“This interest in Carl’s private affairs mystifies me,” she went on. “How can any of it matter in the least if it can be established he’s still alive...?”
Michael had brought along an evidence envelope for any questioned documents he found in Carl’s office. He now dropped the checkbook into it. “All right, I’ll go into Ridgecrest. But do you mind helping me with one thing on my way out?”
“Anything.”
“Walk me down to motor pool. I’d like to photograph the same kind of Hummer Carl disappeared in.” Counting the will, this was the second issue she’d dragged her feet on, despite protestations that she was cooperating every step of the way.
“Why?” she asked.
“For an updated flyer we’ll be sending out.”
“Of course, that explains the camera.” She turned from the table toward the door. In the course of that simple move, she seemed to regain her composure. She even found the emotional reserves to smile at him. “Where’d you wind up spending the night?”
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 21