3 Swift Run (26 page)

Les and I exchanged panicked looks. Well, mine was panicked. Les’s was more resigned.

Dexter appeared in the kitchen, snow clods falling off his boots. The cold had reddened
his handsome face, and his blond bangs half-hid his eyes. “I thought I’d—” He caught
sight of his dad and stopped.

“Hi, son—” Les started.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said. I didn’t know what Dexter thought it looked
like, but whatever it looked like, that’s not what it was.

Dexter turned on his heel and marched away, leaving a trail of snow melting on the
floor.

I started out of my chair. “Honey—”

Les grabbed my arm. “Let him go.”

A door slammed upstairs. I pulled away from Les and trotted up the stairs. Knocking
on Dexter’s door, I tried the knob. It was locked. “Dexter, your dad didn’t have anyplace
to stay last night, so I let him stay in the basement. It’s not … we’re not…”

No response. I tried explaining again but got only silence. “Your dad will be gone
soon, okay?” I waited a few more minutes, hoping he would say something, but he didn’t.
Trudging back down the stairs, I heaved a sigh. Parenting was a lot easier when the
kids were in elementary school. Now that they were in high school …

The kitchen was empty when I returned to it, the mugs still on the table. Had Les
gone down for a shower? Before I could even move the mugs to the sink, the doorbell
rang. I hurried to open it and found four burly police officers on the porch, patrol
cars behind them striping the snow with red and blue. My mouth fell open.

“Mrs. Goldman? We’ve had a report of a wanted felon in the area. Is Lester Goldman
inside?”

“Uh…”

“May we come in?”

I nodded, and they stamped their feet on the mat before stepping into the foyer. I
wished I could train the kids to do that.

“Do you feel threatened? Are you under duress, ma’am?” the policeman with three chevrons
on his jacket asked, his narrowed eyes taking in the living room, the staircase, and
the opening leading to the kitchen and the study.

“Um, no, I’m fine.” How did they know Les was here? A slight noise made me look up,
and I saw Dexter looking down at us from the landing, cell phone in hand, triumphant
smile tightening his lips. Oh.

“Where can we find Mr. Goldman?”

Even if I’d wanted to protect Les—and I wasn’t sure at that moment if I did or not—there
was no point in lying with Dexter standing right there ready to paint a bull’s-eye
on his father’s back. “I think he’s in the basement.”

“Where’s that?”

I pointed to the door.

“Is he armed?”

The question startled me. “No! I mean, I don’t think so.”

They headed for the basement door, saying, “Wait here. You, too.” They beckoned to
Dexter, who slouched down the stairs and propped himself against the wall, texting
furiously. The tall cop with ears that stuck out stayed in the front hall with us
while two others started down the basement stairs and the last one slipped out the
front door and around toward the garage, drawing his gun.

“They won’t shoot Les, will they?”

The young policeman’s eyes slid to me and then went back to tracking his partner outside.
I could tell he wished he was chasing Les rather than babysitting me and Dexter. “Probably
not.”

He sounded sorry about it. Before I could respond, one of the cops called from the
basement, “All clear. There’s no one down here.”

“Hey, Sarge, I found footprints out back.” The outside cop’s voice came over the radio.

I scurried across the living room and looked down into the backyard. Dexter and the
jug-eared cop followed me as the other policemen pounded up the basement stairs. Pretty
soon, we were all craning our necks to look down. Sure enough, a set of footprints,
big dents in the drifted snow, led away from the house and across the Klamerers’ backyard.
Les must have seen or heard the police pull up, I guessed, and taken off. Dexter snapped
photos with his cell phone.

One pair of cops started following the footprints, and the sergeant came inside, talking
into the radio clipped near his shoulder. Pulling out a notebook, he asked me, “What
was Goldman wearing?”

“Would you like some coffee? I’m sure you must be frozen, after—”

“Just answer my question, please, Mrs. Goldman.”

I was only trying to be thoughtful; he didn’t have to get all huffy. “Um, jeans,”
I said, “and a cerise-colored sweatshirt.”

“Say what?” The sergeant twisted one brow inward and looked up from his notebook.

“Red,” the tall young cop said.

The sergeant and Dexter eyed him suspiciously, and he blushed. “My sister’s an artist,”
he mumbled.

The questioning continued for ten minutes until the pair of cops chasing Les radioed
in to say they’d lost his trail. I wasn’t sure if I was glad or sad. The cops left
soon after that, the sergeant getting all stern and telling me to call immediately
if Les turned up again. “Harboring a wanted man is a crime,” he warned. “You can be
charged as an accessory.”

When they had driven off and I had closed the door behind them, I turned to have it
out with Dexter. “Did you call the police on your father because he wrecked your car?”
I asked, hands on my hips.

He gave me an incredulous look through the bangs draped over his eyes. “You just don’t
get it, do you, Mom?”

Before I could ask what he meant, because I had no idea, he was halfway up the stairs.
I called his name, but he kept going, waving the cell phone over his head. “Gotta
put these on Facebook.”

When I was growing up in Georgia, having a daddy in prison, like some of my classmates
did, was something to be ashamed of. In fourth grade, the Farrell twins went around
saying their dad was working in a car factory up north, and it wasn’t until I heard
a couple of women whispering in the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly that
I learned Mr. Farrell was really in jail for robbing a Smyrna bank. Now, the police
tracking your dad through the snow gave you bragging rights on Facebook.

I called Charlie to tell her what Les had said about Heather-Anne’s earlier husbands
and how he followed her to Colorado Springs, and that he was gone again. She answered
the phone sounding out of breath.

“Digging out Dan’s truck,” she said. “What’s up?”

When I told her Les had run off, she asked, “Did he leave anything?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check the basement and call you back.” Hanging up, I hurried downstairs,
happy to have something to do that didn’t involve trying to talk to my son about why
he sicced the cops on his father. The basement felt colder than usual, and I found
the open window Les must have gone out of. If it wasn’t just like him to leave it
open so the heater was warming the whole backyard!
He wouldn’t have done that if he were still paying the utility bill,
I thought, trying to close the window. It wouldn’t latch, and I realized Les had
broken it climbing through. Putting a throw pillow against the half-inch gap to keep
all the hot air from leaking out, I crept back to the guest bedroom, sneaking along
as if Les might still be there. He wasn’t.

The bed was unmade, the coverlet tossed on the floor, and the room smelled a bit sour.
I wrinkled my nose. Stripping the bed, I looked around but didn’t see anything that
might belong to Les. In the bathroom, I found a minitube of toothpaste, a wet washcloth
on the floor, and a pocket-sized spiral notebook on the toilet tank. Excited, I seized
it and riffled through the pages. Nothing. Not one single solitary phone number or
list or note. Tiny bits of paper caught in the spiral wire showed where pages had
been torn out.

Disappointed, I shoved it in my pocket and headed back upstairs. I didn’t have the
faintest clue who to call about fixing the window. That made me reflect that one of
the hard things about being a divorced single mom, which I’d never thought about before
I was one, was not being able to fix a broken window or blow out the sprinkler system
for winter, or know how to find someone to do it for you who wouldn’t cheat you. I
sighed heavily, closed the basement door, and got myself the last slice of lemon cake
and the Yellow Pages.

33

Charlie and Dan were back on the road again by nine o’clock, but it was too late for
Dan to comfort the dying woman; her family had called to say she’d passed on early
that morning. Charlie felt guiltier than ever for having dragged Dan to Wyoming, but
he swept aside her apology.

“Jean Warren and I had many conversations about this life and the next over the past
couple of months. She was a woman of faith and had come to terms with dying,” he said.
Charlie wondered what Dan would have to say about the next life, one she wasn’t sure
she believed in, but a fellow guest offered to drive them back to Dan’s truck, and
she didn’t pursue it.

Once they dug the truck out of the snow and got it back on the road, the rest was
easy since plows had cleared I-25 while they slept and the state police had reopened
the highway. Twenty minutes saw them in Denver, where billboards advertising the stock
show gave Charlie an idea.

“Is it okay if we make a half hour detour?” she asked Dan, pulling out her cell phone.

“You want to talk to Eustis, don’t you?” Amused resignation sounded in his voice,
though he kept his eyes on the road and the lighter than usual traffic.

She smiled at his acuity and nodded.

“I’ve got to see what I can do for the Warrens and talk to Joseph about funeral arrangements,
but I don’t suppose an hour one way or the other will matter greatly.”

With that tacit agreement, Charlie called Sheriff Huff, who called Tansy Eustis and
got her husband’s cell phone number.

“Do you know something I don’t?” the sheriff asked Charlie when he called back to
give her the cell number.

“Undoubtedly,” she said, “but not necessarily about the Eustis case. I’ll keep you
posted.”

Huff laughed and rang off. Charlie dialed Eustis’s number and explained who she was
and why she wanted to talk to him.

“Hell, yeah, I’ll talk to you if you think you’ve got a lead on that bitch who killed
my father,” he said in a cigarette-roughened voice. The sound of a bad PA system echoed
in the background, and Charlie had to put a finger in one ear to hear his directions
to a meeting place. Dan was taking the I-70 exit toward the stock show grounds even
as she hung up. Ten minutes later they pulled off the highway and parked in a dirt
lot packed with pickups and livestock trailers. A rancher was leading a bison on a
line, and the animal lowered his shaggy head to stare at Charlie and Dan as they got
out of the truck. Snow had turned the dirt underfoot to a mire, and an overzealous
plow operator had gouged furrows into the lot, making walking hazardous. Piles of
dirt-blackened snow edged the lot. By the time they made it to the exhibition building
where Eustis had said he’d meet them, Charlie’s jeans were spattered with what she
hoped was only mud from ankle to knee, and her boots weighed an extra two pounds each
from all the muck caked on them.

Charlie and Dan stamped their feet vigorously on the concrete pad outside the warehouselike
building and stepped into an atmosphere humid with moisture from damp coats, mud,
and, it seemed, a few thousand rabbits. Charlie sneezed.

Hutches lined several aisles, and crowds of people ambled past, admiring the gray,
white, brown, black, or speckled inhabitants. Some of the bunnies were the size of
cocker spaniels, while others would have fit easily in Charlie’s hand. If they hadn’t
been making her eyes itch and her nose run, she might have enjoyed looking at them.
As it was, she glanced around for Eustis and saw a man in a gray cowboy hat waving
at them from tables clustered near a hot dog stand. She and Dan wormed through the
crowd to Eustis and introduced themselves. Not wanting to distract Eustis by mentioning
Dan’s title, she introduced him merely as “an associate.”

Eustis was in his early forties, Charlie guessed, but looked older. He was a lean
man in well-used jeans and a pearl-snapped shirt under a worn leather jacket. He pushed
his hat back on his brow as he shook their hands, and Charlie eyed it, almost certain
she’d seen it and him leaving Heather-Anne Pawlusik’s hotel room at the Embassy Suites
a few days before the woman was strangled.

“Sorry about this,” he said by way of greeting, his voice gravelly, “but the rabbit
judging is happening now, and my youngest has several rabbits entered.” He gestured
vaguely toward the hutches and, Charlie assumed, his kid. “M’other boys raised Simmental
calves and made themselves a bundle on the sales, but, no, Eric’s got to raise goddamn
rabbits. Still, he’s won a few ribbons.” Distaste for the rabbits warred with pride
in his voice. He sank into a metal folding chair and pulled a pack of cigarettes out
of his jacket pocket. Sliding one out, he fingered it but didn’t light up. “Can’t
smoke in here,” he complained.

“We won’t take much of your time,” Charlie promised as she and Dan also sat.

“Tansy said you were out at the Triple E yesterday, that you showed her a photo of
a woman that might be Amanda?”

Charlie unfolded the photo and pushed it across the table to him. It stuck on the
tacky surface, and Eustis reached for it. “Could be her,” he said. He gazed at it
a moment longer, covering Heather-Anne’s hair with his thumb. “I think it might be
her. Where did you get this?” The page trembled.

“She lived in Colorado Springs for a while,” Charlie said, “and recently moved to
Costa Rica. Do you know anyone named Les Goldman?”

Eustis’s brow crinkled. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“He’s not someone you or your dad did business with?”

“Not me. Dad had deals going I wasn’t in on, though. Why?” He tapped an impatient
foot on the dirt floor.

Without answering, Charlie asked, “What do you remember about your father’s death?”

Eustis put the cigarette in his mouth and let it hang there. Like a pacifier, Charlie
thought. “Dad met her here.” Eustis flung a hand wide to encompass the entire stock
show. “They were married within two months. Indecent. My mother was barely cold in
her grave.”