The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  “I fear that’s the point,” I said.

  Daniel and I were keeping track of our whereabouts quite well with map and compass, taking bearings, dealing with declination, and navigating around obstacles. I’d had a general idea of how to do it, left over from Girl Scouts when Mrs. Vorhazy, Becky Vorhazy’s mom and leader of our troop in Wisconsin, took the dozen of us out to Sammond’s Pond, told us to get out of the van, then drove away after saying, “There’s a shortcut to town over that hill. Go, go!”

  We obediently trudged off, realizing that somehow Becky had managed to remain in the van.

  Mind you, Mrs. Vorhazy had given us no training whatsoever in the use of map and compass; she must have felt that direct experience would be the best teacher. We stared at the coffee-stained AAA map she’d tossed to us, then followed the red ends of our compass needles, believing that they must point the way home. I guess we were all ten or eleven.

  We wandered the gently rolling woods for a couple of hours until we heard an automobile horn honking at signal-type intervals. We followed the sound to Mrs. Vorhazy’s two-toned Dodge van where she’d parked on the other side of the pond after having run to town to shop for ballerina shoes for Becky.

  In those days, adults did things like that without getting sued or even questioned. You never even thought to mention it to your parents. My brothers died laughing when I told them about it; then they showed me how to really find your way cross-country with a compass, map or no map.

  My reverie was shattered by a harsh sound from above. It sounded like a death rattle, not that I’d ever heard one. Some hermit dying in his tree house? We looked up. We heard it again.

  Petey pointed to a spaniel-sized black bird that had just settled on the tip of a huge hemlock.

  The bird gazed down at us, flapped its wings—whump, whump—and uttered its harsh, tragic cry again.

  “I’d say that’s a raven,” said Daniel.

  “No wonder Poe wrote that poem,” I commented.

  “I don’t think he likes us,” said the war-painted Petey, before resuming his front-running course.

  “Well, I don’t like him. Or her,” though I couldn’t readily imagine such a bird tenderly laying an egg, let alone feeding young. That black, curving beak looked like it could carry off a spring lamb.

  “Reminds me,” said Daniel, “of a carny I used to work for.” Once again Petey yelled, “Hey!” in a certain voice, and I hustled up to him.

  He stood in a rocky spot holding a camera in his hands, a digital one, quite small, in a plastic shock case. He tilted his hat back and said, “Here’s some blood too.”

  Indeed, in an area recessed from the weather, the light-grained rock showed a red smear that could have been a handprint. My stomach dropped, and I immediately scanned the area for more blood, but of course the rain would have washed away any more. That rain would have washed away evidence of a hog butchering.

  Daniel examined the camera. “Ansel Adams he ain’t, but look at these shots.” He pressed the button advancing the pix across the screen as Petey and I crowded in to see. “A grotto,” Daniel narrated, “and a bunch of ferns. A pretty crick. Ferns. A meadow, a falls. A lake. That’s the lake we were at, Rita. The boys’ camp. And there’s Lance.”

  I got light-headed when I saw the same pictures Kenner had shown me on his phone.

  Then I remembered what the grocerywoman, Lydia, had said of Lance and Gina, something like “they went in, but they haven’t come out yet.”

  “If they hadn’t come out of the woods, according to that bat at the store,” I wondered, “how could Lance have transmitted these pictures to Kenner?”

  “When we’re in the valleys, no way,” said Daniel. “But I suspect if you get high enough, I mean you really scale a peak, or find the top rim of the Harkett, higher than we were, you might get cell reception. He must have transferred these shots somehow to his cell phone. I doubt he’s got a sat phone.”

  “A sat phone?”

  “Satellite phone.”

  “Oh, right.” I then had the brilliant idea of using the photos as a sort of breadcrumb trail: if we could follow it backward, we’d end up at Lance’s car, and just maybe—

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Daniel, “but look—we’ve obviously been on a pretty good track here. If I were them, I’d keep going this way, at least for a while, because see that ridge? There’s gonna be easier walking up there, and you’d think you could maybe see something, some way to find a way out if you were lost.”

  Petey piped, “You guys think they need first aid?”

  “Yeah, I think they might,” I muttered.

  _____

  Gina panted along the forest road. In some places the plants reached so far into the roadway she could almost touch them with both arms. She ran past open clear-cuts covered with lifeless stumps and heaps of slash that were slowly giving way to new green brush and saplings. Odd how one type of environment followed the other, demarked by violently straight lines following no real land contours.

  The water in the ditch bounding the road rushed high and churningly brown, cutting into the roadside, crumbling it in places.

  She’d been going for perhaps twenty minutes when, jogging, she rounded a narrow bend and ran smack into what felt like an iron post planted in the middle of the road. After she bounced off, she saw it was Bonechopper Bjornquist.

  “Hey, hey, little lady!” he said in a fake-amused voice. “Why so far from home?”

  Alger Whitecloud was with him, and before Gina, half-dazed as she pushed herself up from the mud, even had a chance to register what was going on, a familiar voice rang out.

  “Gina! Hello!”

  She had imagined, so vividly, Lance calling to her that for an instant her brain thought the voice was his at last.

  But the voice, though similar to Lance’s, was a bit more Adam’s-appley, somewhat taller, looser. “I’m so glad to see you!” it said.

  “Oh, my God! Kenner!”

  Kenner de Sauvenard grabbed her up in his long arms. She hugged him tightly. “Oh my God, oh my God!”

  He released her and stood there cool and lanky, dressed in foul-weather gear, slightly stooped under the weight of a backpack whose black extension collar loomed behind his head like a crow. Rain dripped from the brim of his handsome Indiana Jones-type hat.

  “What are you doing here?” Gina asked as rain pooled around her feet. She fingered her filthy plastic poncho. Godforsaken place. “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you and Lance, naturally!” Kenner’s great wide smile.

  “How did you know we were lost?”

  She glanced back and forth between Kenner, Bonechopper, and Alger, scanning their faces for clues.

  “We were looking for Lance too,” said Bonechopper, “when this guy answered our shouts. Another de Sauvenard, we understand.”

  “Lance is my brother; I told you,” said Kenner, puzzled about these guys.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s back at camp,” Bonechopper asserted.

  “Then let’s go!” said Kenner.

  Gina gripped his arm.

  “I’m not going back to you guys’ camp,” she told Bonechopper. “Dendra tried to shoot me! Kenner, we’ve got to get out of here and—”

  “What?” Kenner turned to Bonechopper. “Who’s Dendra?”

  “She shot at me!”

  “What the hell’s—”

  “Shut up,” said Bonechopper, drawing an ugly black pistol from his coat. “Shut up, you both.”

  “Wait a minute!” Kenner’s hand went up to chest level, palm out, automatically. “Hey, hold on. Everything’s OK here. No need for a gun. I thought you guys knew where my brother was.”

  “He’s back at camp, like I said.” Bonechopper did not put away the gun.

  “No, he isn’t!” cried Gina.

  Bonechopper’s eyes had gone flat, almost blind looking. “One de Sauvenard’s as good as another,” he said vaguely to himself. Was he insan
e? Gina could not read Alger Whitecloud. He had not spoken. He was very calm. She couldn’t tell if it was a good calm or a bad calm.

  The cold rain slathered down on them, and Gina wondered if the wet would—could—disable Bonechopper’s gun. As if suddenly thinking the same thing, he positioned his other hand above it, his fingers cupped over the barrel like a little awning. It looked ridiculous and perfectly lethal.

  Alger Whitecloud, who had mended Lance’s hand, given Gina a blanket, and cooked bacon, cleared his throat. “The safest thing for you two right now is to come along with us.”

  Gina looked at him. He seemed disturbed by this gun business.

  His eyes met hers. “Trust me.”

  _____

  George Rowe cracked his knuckles as he hot-wired his way into Leland Harris’s digital accounts using the codes Bertrice de Sauvenard had suggested.

  It was a quarter to ten at night, and the floor was quiet except for a cube area near the elevator where two young engineers worked in front of a computer screen, excitedly having lapsed into their native Asian tongue. They didn’t even look up when Rowe, dressed in his generic service tech’s outfit, strolled by.

  Sitting there in the dark, scrolling through Harris’s professional life, he found that Harris was an online spender on stock-picking newsletters, cashmere socks, cigars from the Dominican Republic, hair-growth compounds, wrinkle creams marketed to upscale, virile, middle-aged guys, and Clint Eastwood DVDs. Eventually Rowe found an account linked to an outside bank, which he realized must be Harris’s personal expense account. He paid his American Express through it, as well as the other bills.

  Rowe looked for anything that might suggest a Swiss account: a blind account number, a notice from Credit Suisse, perhaps.

  He reasoned that Harris’s expense account could be a laundering place for funds from just about anywhere in the world. Because it was buffered from his home and anything shared by his wife, the account could allow him—and her, for that matter—a measure of deniability if it ever came to that.

  Rowe looked for unusual deposits and found none, just the monthly reimbursement for Harris’s Amex. This was a fairly unusual setup, he knew: only in a family-owned company could you find something as lax and convoluted as this sort of account keeping.

  Perfect for Harris, perfect for any sharp operator who could keep his greed in check. A guy who could do that could rob a place like this blind, over time. Time was the critical thing, of course. Trying to hurry the process was where they tripped themselves up. You get away with one small thing, you get bolder. Age-old story. You start to lose respect for your boss.

  Rowe reflected on that and realized that the very first thing you must lose in such a situation, however, is respect for yourself.

  He went back through the months and looked again at the deposit list, scanning for the name of the bank in Bangkok, the names Dashwood, Choudry, Platonov, anything. He looked for checks to the auction house that sold Leland Harris the Gene Delwaukee painting.

  Nothing.

  He got out his cell phone and started to punch Mrs. de Sauvenard’s private number when he stopped, his eye arrested by the word Harkett on the screen.

  It was in a list of transfers he’d almost scrolled past.

  “Harkett First Savings,” the line item read. Five thousand U.S. dollars to an account there. Rowe clicked through to the name of the recipient, a Gilbert Boyd.

  “Harkett,” he muttered. Wasn’t that the name of the jumping-off point Gina and Lance were going to start their location-scouting trip? Wasn’t it, by the way, the Harkett gorge where a hiker was found dead last week, when he and Mrs. de Sauvenard were waiting to hear the commodities report on her radio?

  He looked at the rest of the transfers in the list, all of which had occurred in the last two weeks.

  There were fourteen of them, all for the same amount, $5,000, and they all went to different financial institutions. Some to branches of big national banks, others to small savings and loans named after towns unknown to him. He mapped the towns on the Internet and found them all to be in the Olympic Peninsula area, maybe about a seventy-mile radius.

  When he clicked through to the receiving account, he saw the name Gilbert Boyd again. And again. And again.

  Every single transfer was for the benefit of this Gilbert Boyd.

  They added up to $70,000. And counting, he thought. Probably going to stop at a slightly rounder number, $75,000 or $100,000.

  Realizing that his hands had grown sweaty with excitement, Rowe sat back and dried them with his handkerchief.

  This was definitely a turn. In this line of work you sometimes found yourself following a promising avenue, only to bump up against a blind brick wall. Then you glance down and see a sewer cover ajar, and it’s an invitation, and you’ve just got to pry up that sumbitch and climb down there.

  Who was Gilbert Boyd? And why might he warrant getting paid $70,000 by Leland Harris, and why might the guy be allergic to the kind of attention a large deposit into one bank account might draw? How might this relate to Silver Coast’s $3 million payout to this Bangkok deal?

  Everything, he had learned by this point in his life, was related to everything.

  Chapter 15 – ‘Your Son Will Die!’

  Bertrice de Sauvenard set aside her book, Raising Hell in the Serengeti, by the woman cartographer who’d explored Africa by motorcycle, and hoisted herself by an elbow to reach her ringing bedside phone.

  “Yes?” Expecting to hear George Rowe, she was caught off-guard by a subliterate-sounding person saying something about her son Kenner.

  “What’s that again?” she said. “What about Kenner?”

  “Yeah, he is,” said the voice.

  “He is what?”

  “In trouble.”

  “What happened? Who is this?” She sat fully upright in bed.

  “We got your son.”

  “Who’s got my son? What the—”

  The voice seemed to pull itself together. “Mrs. de Sauvenard, we got your son Kenner and we demand one point two million dollars.”

  She exhaled, relieved. “Oh, for God’s sake.” Smiling faintly, she sat up cross-legged.

  “What?” The voice was male and sounded somewhat drunk. It was a rough, dumb voice, suited, Bertrice thought, for lodging not-guilty pleas in night court, or haranguing barmaids about onion ring portion size.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “Well, ah, where is he?”

  “Oh, he’s someplace very safe.” Pause. “Heh-heh. For the moment.”

  “I see. Well, where do I send the money?” Her bedroom was done in creams and grays, with a bit of the Asian flavor so many West Coast homes have. Straight fir trim, simple precise joinery.

  There was a long pause. “I think you should drop it in the green trash can behind Fourteen East Alder Street, Harkett, Washington.”

  “All right. Aren’t you going to tell me how long I have to deliver the money before you kill Kenner?”

  “Yeah!” said the guy. “By noon tomorrow.”

  “My, that isn’t much time. Maybe,” she suggested innocently, “I should call the police to help me.” She adjusted a pillow behind her back, glanced at the clock, and checked to see if there was any brandy left in her bedtime snifter. There was a little; she reached for the glass.

  “No!” shouted the caller sternly. “No police. We’ll be watching. If you call the police your son will die!”

  “Really?” She cradled the glass in her warm palm.

  “Really, lady!”

  Bertrice could restrain herself no longer. She burst out laughing.

  The person on the other end was silent.

  Mrs. de Sauvenard set down her glass to wipe her eyes. “Oh, Jesus Christ! Haha! Put Kenner on, OK?”

  “He—he’s not here,” said the voice uncertainly. “I mean, he can’t come to the phone.”

  “I know Harkett; Kenner, are you listening? I’ve been through there a time or two, you know. Is this one of your
old camp friends? Playing an old-boy camper prank on me?”

  “God damn it,” said the person on the other end.

  “Kenner, is that you? Are you trying to disguise your voice? It is you, isn’t it?”

  “No! I’m not Kenner; I’m—” The voice stopped.

  “You’re the ringleader, aren’t you?”

  “Damn right I am!”

  “All right, then, how much is Kenner paying you to make this call? A six-pack and a ten-spot? Carton of cigarettes? Honestly, put him on, OK? I’m serious now.”

  “I told you!” The caller was getting upset. “One point two million dollars!”

  She liked that “one point two million,” such a sophisticated number. Bertrice faintly heard another voice in the background. A woman’s? The voice seemed to be prompting.

  “In unmarked twenties!” the caller demanded. “By noon tomorrow!”

  “Kenner, I know you must be listening. Look, I love you. Mommy loves you more than you know. But this is not going to work, OK? I know you need money for your film but I am not buying into it. This is one of those things you’re going to have to do on your own. Maybe I can help you brainstorm ideas to raise money from investors who’re really knowledgeable about movies. Are you listening? Kenner?”

  A curse and a click.

  _____

  That day, Thursday, was a long one. Daniel, Petey, and I slogged all the way back to our camp and washed up. Given the clear, sweet water of the lake, we’d been able to keep reasonably clean. Following good camping practice, we scooped lake water in Daniel’s collapsible plastic basin and carried it fifty paces or so from shore, where our runoff would percolate clean before rejoining the lake. Daniel and I washed mostly in cold water to save fuel, while I warmed a pot for Petey and showed him how to scrub off with a soapy bandanna. His hands retained the stain of the red-brown war pigment, and his and Daniel’s faces required much distressing scouring to remove it.