Blue Heaven (35 page)

Villatoro watched her carefully. She spoke without guile. She obviously believed her husband came into their wealth through legitimate means.

“He did well,” Villatoro said, looking around. “My wife Donna would kill for a home like this.”

She smiled in a proprietary way. “The man shocked me. Really shocked me. I didn’t know he had any interest at all in stocks or anything. I didn’t even know about this fishing thing until we moved up here. That just goes to show you that you can live with somebody for twenty years and not really know them, you know?”

She sat back and sighed. “I have to admit, though, I sometimes miss the old neighborhood. There was nothing special about it, just a street with a lot of forty-year-old houses on it. But I miss hearing kids out on the street, and the block parties we would sometimes have in the summer. It was chaos, but I miss being a part of it. I guess I miss neighbors. All I ever hear up here is birds. That gets a little boring at times. I’d like to have a reason to charge out of the house to see what’s going on, you know?”

Villatoro stood up and closed his pad. He felt sorry for her, with her
big house and big body and big bowl of macaroni and cheese. She seemed like a nice, normal woman, someone his wife would be friends with.

“I know what you mean,” he said, and thanked her and said he would let himself out.

“Stick around,” she said. “You can watch me pound that guy when he finally gets home. I’ll glue a damned cell phone on his forehead for the next time.”

THE SKY FLASHED and there was a rumble of thunder as Villatoro approached his car in the driveway. The storm clouds had shut a curtain over the dusk sun, making it darker than it should be. The air was moist, and he expected rain any minute.

Tony Rodale, who had been working security at Santa Anita with Jim Newkirk on the day of the robbery, who sought early retirement, who was the treasurer for the SoCal Retired Peace Officers Foundation and therefore in charge of making cash deposits into their account, was missing. If he showed up, Villatoro wanted to meet him. There had to be a reason why only four of the five ex-cops had volunteered to help the sheriff together, and the fifth went his own way. Maybe an argument between them, maybe dissension. Maybe, Villatoro conceded, Rodale just wanted to go fishing.

There was a flash of lightning and a thunderclap that seemed to sway the treetops with its power, and sheets of heavy rain lashed through the trees. There was no buildup to the rain, it just came, furiously. He switched his wipers to high and turned on his headlights.

He was so consumed with his thoughts and the driving rain as he drove that when his headlights swept over a parked car nearly blocking the road to Rodale’s home near the two-lane, he reacted late and almost sideswiped it, missing the car by inches. He braked a few feet beyond it and glanced up into his rearview mirror.

The driver’s door opened on the car he had almost hit, and the dome light came on. Newkirk got out. The ex-cop was lit in the red glow of Villatoro’s taillights, and he walked out of the view of the mirror and tapped on the passenger-side window.

After searching for the window switch in the rental car, Villatoro
found it, pressed it, and the window whirred down. Newkirk leaned in. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me in the parking lot. I think we need to talk.”

“Do you want to meet somewhere?” Villatoro could smell the whiskey on Newkirk’s breath.

Newkirk shook his head. “No place is safe. I don’t want us to be seen together.”

Villatoro found himself gripping the wheel so tightly that his knuckles were white. Slowly, he let go and relaxed them.

“Too many people know my car,” Newkirk said. “Let’s go in yours.”

“The car is not very big.”

Newkirk looked down. The passenger seat was covered with maps, files, paper. “Clean that off and I’ll get in.”

“I’m not sure …”

“Do you want to talk or not? Make up your mind. I don’t like standing out here where someone could drive by and see me. Besides, I’m getting soaked.”

Villatoro realized what an opportunity this could be. It could crack the case. But he was scared. There was another lightning flash and a low-throated roar of thunder. He gathered up the papers and tossed them over the headrest into the tiny backseat, and Newkirk swung in heavily and closed the door. Steam rose from his clothing.

“Where are we going?” Villatoro asked.

“Just drive,” Newkirk said.

Villatoro put the car into gear, and they slid out onto the state highway. Large raindrops hit the windshield like balls of spit.

“I’m going to show you where the bodies are buried,” Newkirk said, “so to speak.”

J
ESS ENTERED Kootenai Bay under a strobing pyrotechnic display of lightning, and the rain fell hard and steady, creating a jungle drumbeat within the pickup. A close flash of lightning lit the cab, leaving the afterimage of his Winchester, muzzle down, on the seat next to him.

Sheriff Ed Carey lived in a modest ranch house in an older neighborhood not far from downtown. Streetlamps on the corners lit up the falling rain in the orbs of their halos and created blue lightning bolts on the wet streets. Carey’s county Blazer was parked in his driveway. A white SUV Jess didn’t recognize was also in front of the house. A white SUV? Like the one Annie and William had seen?

Behind Carey’s Blazer was a small yellow pickup. Jess frowned, familiar with it from his daily encounters. What in the hell was Fiona Pritzle doing at the sheriff’s home at this time of night?

He drove by slowly, saw that the curtains were open and the lights on. He continued down the block and parked under a dark canopy of old cottonwood trees, as far away from the streetlights as he could get.

Jess had a yellow cowboy slicker rolled up behind the seat, but he decided to leave it there. The yellow would stand out, even in the dark. He’d just get wet.

Leaving the Winchester in the truck, he walked toward Carey’s house in the rain, stumbling once on a section of sidewalk that had risen and buckled from a tree root.

He didn’t know whether to knock, ring the bell, or try to figure out what Fiona was doing there first. As he approached the house, a thin stream of rainwater poured from his hat brim. He could hear nothing from inside because of the sound of the rain coursing through the trees and hitting the street and sidewalk with a sound like applause.

Rather than walk up the sidewalk to the front door and lighted porch, Jess cut across the grass of Carey’s next-door neighbor toward the corner of the sheriff’s house. There was a picture window in front of the house and a smaller window on the side that was open except for a storm screen. Aiming for the opened window and the shadows beside it, he felt the suck of soft mud beneath his boots.
Christ
, he thought,
I’m walking across their newly planted garden. I’ll apologize later.

Jess stood to the side of the open window in the mud, slightly under the eave of the roof so the rain didn’t hit him. He looked out from the shadows and saw no cars on the street, no neighbors looking out of their windows at the rain.

The sound of Fiona Pritzle’s sharp, high-pitched voice cut through the rain like a razor through fabric.

“There’s always been something odd about him, don’t you think?” Fiona was saying. “I’ve really noticed it lately. Like he’s got a secret life, and he doesn’t want anybody to know it.”

Jess took a chance and looked in the window. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t be entering anyone’s view.

Fiona sat in the middle of the room, perched on the edge of a chair that must have been brought in from the kitchen table. Her hands were clamped between her thighs. She leaned forward toward Carey, who sat on his couch in a T-shirt and sweatpants, his hair uncombed. Jess could see the side of his face, and he looked troubled or irritated. Since it was Fiona sitting there talking, Jess figured both were likely. A man Jess didn’t recognize at first was in an overstuffed chair across from Carey listening to Fiona. He was trim and compact, with close-cropped silver hair. His bearing suggested authority, his face a mask of world-weariness except for his eyes, which studied Fiona with a kind of manic fascination.
Jess could see his face in three-quarter profile and identified him from Annie’s drawing. It was Singer.

“He seems, you know, evasive,” Fiona said. “I try to be friendly and sweet as pie, but he always seems to be somewhere else, you know? Like he has other things on his mind.”

Singer turned to Carey, ignoring Fiona, and said, “Do you know him, Sheriff? Is he familiar to you? Gonzo had a problem this afternoon with a rancher who wouldn’t let him search his property. Is this the same guy?”

“I know him,” Carey said. “In fact, I sat next to him at breakfast at the Panhandle just this morning, Mr. Singer. He did ask a few questions about the investigation, as I recall.”

Jesus
, Jess thought,
they’re talking about me. What is Fiona up to?
Jess withdrew from the front of the window but pressed his shoulder against the siding next to it so he could hear better and not be seen.

Fiona said, “You know as well as me what’s happened out there over the past few years. First, his wife left him. You know about his son. He’s a tragedy, just a tragedy. Something
obviously
happened to him.”

Carey said to Singer, “He’s the trustee who mops the floor at the station. You’ve probably seen him around.”

“I’ve seen him,” Singer said.

Jess couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Fiona continued, “Why else would an old single man be buying food that only little kids eat?”

“That’s not much to go on, Fiona,” the sheriff said.

Her voice rose. “But think about it. His ranch is failing. His son is a mess. His wife leaves him, but he shows absolutely no interest in the opposite sex. I mean, single lonely man, available woman”—Jess could imagine her gesturing to herself—“and he doesn’t do anything? At first I thought it was me, but maybe it’s because he has other interests, you know? Even his employee left him recently, I found out. He’s completely by himself out there. Who knows what he’s up to? Maybe he’s got those kids, and he’s holding them prisoner!”

“Fiona …” The sheriff was skeptical. He turned to Singer. “What’s this do to our theory about Tom Boyd?”

Singer shook his head quickly. “Not much.”

Carey paused, waiting for clarification.

“We’ve got the tape,” Singer said. “Boyd’s missing. That part of our theory still holds.”

“So where does this rancher fit in, if at all?”

Jess was frozen where he stood, stunned.

“I’ve read a lot of magazine articles about sexual predators,” Fiona interjected, her voice rising. “It
grows
in them. Just grows in them until they get the opportunity to gratify it. I’ve never thought before how much he fits the profile. Look”—she dropped her tone again—“he gets mail in large envelopes without any return addresses on them. Maybe that’s how he gets his pornography?”

No
, Jess thought absently.
That’s how developers send offers these days, knowing I won’t open them if I know where they came from. Jesus …

“I’m surprised you haven’t looked to make sure,” Carey said, deadpan.

“I can’t believe you said that,” she sniffed. “That’s a huge insult. I could lose my job with the postal service if I did, you know.”

Fiona suddenly got an idea and nearly shot out of her seat. “Hold it! Maybe that’s how he met Tom Boyd? UPS delivers out there, you know. Maybe the two of them struck up a friendship based on a common interest,” she paused dramatically, “
pedophilia
. I’ve read where those people seek each other out.”

Jess didn’t know what to do. Burst in, set the record straight? He was so flummoxed he didn’t even know if he could speak clearly. But how would he explain the groceries without telling them the rest or coming up with some kind of lie? What if the sheriff held him, or arrested him on the spot? Singer could send that dark ex-cop, Gonzalez, back to his house to find the Taylor children. He wished Singer weren’t there, because he might have a chance of clearing himself if it was just Fiona and the sheriff, because obviously Carey didn’t give Fiona much credibility. But with Singer there …

“You can either do something, or I’ll call my contacts at the networks,” Fiona threatened. “I’m sure they’d find this new development very interesting.”

Jess walked away from the window. The rain pounded his hat. He was angry, and getting angrier. He swung into the cab of his pickup, started the motor, and roared down the street, not caring if anyone could hear him leave.

J
ESS COULD see J.J. through the locked front doors of the county courthouse. As usual in his orange one-piece trustee jumpsuit, J.J. was cleaning, spraying banisters with disinfectant, rubbing the wood until it glowed. Jess rapped hard on the glass of the door. Inside, J.J. looked up, but in the wrong direction. Jess rapped again, hitting the glass so hard it stung his knuckles. J.J.’s head swiveled, and his eyes narrowed when he saw Jess. There was something canine in the way J.J. looked at him.