Defiled: The Sequel to Nailed Featuring John Tall Wolf (A Ron Ketchum Mystery Book 2) (20 page)

Misjudging his father’s appetite completely, Ron had made a reservation at Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Walt ordered the tomato and onion salad and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Ron wasn’t sure but he thought that pairing was correct. He was positive that he’d expected Walt to order a steak and a beer.

Keely avoided beef, too, making Ron think maybe she’d be better off with Walt, after all. She had the barbecued shrimp and a glass of Pinot Grigio. Sticking with the restaurant’s featured fare, Ron ordered a New York strip steak and a Heineken dark beer. His dining companions gave him indulgent smiles.

Ordering steak at a steak house? How banal.

Ron was tempted to growl in reply.

Instead, he asked his father, “You’ve gone vegan?”

Walt shrugged. “Before I came up here, I was watching a lot of TV. When there wasn’t a Dodgers game or USC football on, I turned on one of those food channels. I was hoping Esther might pick up some cooking hints. She just laughed at those shows, but I learned a few things. Like when it’s better to eat light.”

“And that would be dinner time?”

“At my age, yeah. Keeps you from getting acid reflux when you go to bed.”

Keely grinned. Ron gave her a look.

“Any of those shows cover dinner conversation?” he asked his father.

“Now that you mention it. Keep it light until you get to the after dinner drinks. Then you can get down to business.”

“That’s what this is, a business dinner?” Ron asked.

“Among other things. That was my first thought. But I was tickled when you asked if you might bring Keely along.”

She squeezed Walt’s hand. “You’re sweet, but when we finish eating, I can sit at the bar and keep an eye out for passing sailors.”

Ron rolled his eyes. He told his father, “Keely knows all my secrets. Anything you have to say to me isn’t going to shock her.”

Keely nodded. “I’m very hard to shock.”

“You don’t want to wait for after dinner drinks?” Walt asked.

Ron cut a piece of steak, popped it into his mouth and shook his head.

“All right. I think you ought to take Clay Steadman’s advice and run for mayor.”

Keely might not have been shocked but she began to gag on a piece of shrimp. Ron gave her a good open-handed smack between her shoulder blades, the currently recommended way to aid choking victims. The offending morsel shot out of her mouth and landed in the middle of Walt’s salad. He examined it for a moment, speared it with his fork and consumed it.

Keely winced.

Ron laughed. “Now,
that’s
my old man.”

“A little protein never hurt anyone,” Walt said.

Keely, who’d just taken a sip of wine, had to stifle a laugh before the Pinot Grigio wound up coming out of her nose.

“Can’t take you two anywhere,” Ron said. He asked his father, “Is that why you wanted to have dinner? To tell me I should run for mayor?”

“Well, that and one other thing. As I said, Clay mentioned it to me, and I think he’s right. Who better to run this town than you? Nobody I know. The other thing I wanted to say … if you should decide to run and think, maybe, it’d be better for you not to have an old redneck bastard like me around, well, Clay and I are about done with our work, and I could go back to L.A.”

Ron put his knife and fork down and looked at his father.

“Do you want to go back to L.A.?”

“Not really. I know I haven’t seen a mountain winter yet, but I kind of like it here. It’s peaceful in a way I’ve never known. Someone gets killed up here, it’s a big deal not just another crime statistic.”

“How about someone putting a dirty bomb out on Lake Adeline?” Ron asked.

“You’ll catch that SOB, and my money says if one of those damn things ever goes off in this country, it’ll be in some big city not a place like this.”

Ron told Walt, “Dad, if you want to stay, so long as it’s not under
my
roof, you stay as long as you like.”

“So you’re not going to run?” Walt asked.

“No, I’m thinking about it,” Ron said.

“You are?” Keely asked.

“Yeah, but if I run and win, I’m going to need a new chief of police. You interested?”

Keely was dumbstruck. In that moment of silence, a grim-faced Sergeant Stanley stepped into the restaurant. He saw where Ron and his party were and started their way. Every eye in the room was on him.

Walt said, “This doesn’t look good.”

“Not at all,” Keely agreed.

Sergeant Stanley arrived and nodded politely to Ron’s dinner companions.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, Chief, but this won’t wait.”

“Go ahead, Sarge.”

“A car exploded on Lake Shore Drive.”

“A crash?”

“A bomb.”

Ron thought for a second, recalling who was on surveillance at the Jade Emperor. “Alighieri and Babson are okay? They responded to the blast?”

“Yes, sir, on both counts.”

“Was the car bomb a diversion?”

“It was.”

“And what happened at the Jade Emperor?”

“It was firebombed. Every available resource from the fire department is either on the scene or on the way.”

Ron got up and said, “Your treat, right Dad?”

Walt nodded, and Keely said, “I’ll take him home.”

Ron nodded and told her, “We’ll talk some more later.”

Then he and Sergeant Stanley were out the door.

The centerpiece building of the Jade Emperor Hotel was scorched but not seriously damaged. Construction there had yet to reach the point where an abundance of combustible materials was in place. Damage was done to the electrical system used in the building process but neither the concrete walls nor the structural steel frame were compromised, not that Ron could see. Safety inspectors and engineers would have to be called in, no doubt. The wiring would have to be replaced. Completion of the hotel would be delayed, but it wouldn’t be stopped.

Most of the fire department assets had already packed up and left.

No reason why they shouldn’t. Nothing was even smoldering.

According to Alighieri and Babson, there’d been a bang-boom and ball of fire at the hotel. All very theatrical. But now there was nothing to keep the crowd of gawkers engaged. They needed nothing more than a polite coaxing from the cops on hand to be sent back home.

The whole thing reminded Ron of finding the dirty bomb that didn’t detonate.

Something potentially very destructive that had fizzled.

Either he was dealing with some very inept terrorists or somebody was playing a game that was a cover for something else.

“Ron?”

The chief refocused on his opposite number, Vern Kasen, the chief of the town’s fire department. With them was Special Agent Benjamin. She said she been in her car, driving with the window down, and had heard both explosions. Domestic terrorism being part of her portfolio, she’d sped to the scene.

“Yeah, Vern?”

“We’re good that this is a clear cut case of arson?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ll have the county arson investigator come out tomorrow just to make that official.”

“Right. Is there anything you can tell me about the composition of the bomb? There wasn’t anything radioactive?”

It had just occurred to him that if a lot of people had been exposed to something like, say, Cobalt-60, maybe the bomb had been more deadly than he’d first thought.

Ron saw Benjamin tense up at the mention of that idea.

But Chief Kasen shook his head. “After what you went through on the lake, I put in a request to the mayor for a half-dozen portable dose rate meters. He said get whatever I needed. They came this morning. My people found nothing higher than general background radiation.”

Benjamin’s shoulders relaxed.

“Well, that’s good news anyway,” Ron said.

“Yeah, and here’s something else that’s fortunate.”

Chief Kasen walked over to the chain-link fence bordering the sidewalk of Lake Shore Drive. He put the beam of his flashlight on the fence. Ron and Benjamin could see that the links from bottom to top had been scorched.

“The fireball reached this far?” Benjamin asked. She looked back to the hotel’s centerpiece building, the ignition point of the fire. “That’s what, a hundred feet?”

“A hundred and thirty-five,” Chief Kasen said. “To answer your question, Ron, I’m not sure what kind of incendiary device this was. But it was more than just a few gallons of gasoline. Makes me think about that substance you found on the boat. C-4, you thought it was, right?”

Ron nodded.

“Well, that’s another reason to get the county investigator out here. That stuff not only blows up it also burns. And I want to show you this.” Vern Kasen flashed his light on a no-parking sign outside the fence. The paint on the sign had been scalded from the heat of the fireball.

Chief Kasen said, “Your two people standing watch out here told me they were parked right next to that sign. Officer Babson said, being a mild night tonight, she had her window open. If they’d still been sitting there when the bomb went off …”

The fire chief held his hands out.

“They’d have been singed real good,” Ron said.

Benjamin shook her head. “Char-broiled is more like it.”

Ron walked Abra Benjamin back to her car and asked a question he’d never put to an FBI agent before, “Are you all right?”

She gave him a sidelong glance. “Meaning what? Don’t I look okay?”

“Right now, you do. Back when I asked Vern Kasen about radioactivity, you looked like you wanted to be somewhere else fast.”

“Radiation is scary stuff.”

Generalities were a sure sign, Ron knew, that you were being told to butt out.

“Okay,” he said.

They walked in silence until they reached Benjamin’s car.

“See you tomorrow,” Ron said.

Benjamin said, “I have some more news. My people interviewed the SUV owners. It went the way I thought it would. There’s no one they really like for our bomber.”

“Shrewd judges of character, are they?” Ron asked.

The special agent started to offer a snarky reply, but then she just nodded and said, “They’re all smart and experienced.”

“Good,” Ron said.

“You were just trying to get a rise out of me. See what I’m really feeling.”

“Can’t fool you.”

“You can stop now. It won’t work … and I’ll admit I was scared for a minute when you asked about radiation. I found out just before I came out here that I’m pregnant.”

“Oh. Well, it’s only natural then, worrying about the baby.”

“You have any children, Chief?”

“No. I wanted to, but it didn’t work out.”

“You or your lady? As long as we’re getting personal, who had the problem?”

“My ex-wife wanted to make it in show biz. A family wasn’t in her plans.”

“I can understand that. My career’s important to me, too. I didn’t intend to get pregnant, and I haven’t decided whether to keep the baby. But just a few minutes ago the thought of losing him — or her — petrified me.”

Things had gone far past the point Ron thought they would.

All he could say was, “You never know how life is going to work out.”

That thought was still uppermost in Ron’s mind when he pulled up to his house. A light was on. Keely was still making herself at home. He hoped it was her anyway. If Leilani had decided to drop by … no, he didn’t even want to think about that.

He still felt a measure of surprise that Keely had responded positively to his call for help. Then in nothing flat they’d gone to bed in both her hotel suite and his house. Moving right along, he’d blurted out a suggestion that he’d like her to become his chief of police should he become mayor.

Mayor.

An idea that had never crossed his mind until Clay Steadman suggested it.

Clay, whom he now knew was stricken with Alzheimer’s disease.

He opened his front door and stepped inside. Maybe if he got a good night’s sleep, it would all turn out to be a dream. But that notion didn’t get off to a good start when Keely’s voice, coming from his bedroom, called out, “If you’re not Ron Ketchum, you’ve got three seconds to get out before I start shooting.”

Then she added, “If you
are
Ron Ketchum, you’ve got three seconds to get in here or I start shooting.”

Before he could respond, the phone rang.

“Can I answer that?” Ron asked.

“Keep it brief,” she told him.

Ron snorted, went into the living room and picked up the phone.

“Ron, it’s me, Lauren.”

Deputy Chief Oliver Gosden’s wife sounded as if she’d been crying.

“What’s wrong, Lauren? Are Danny and Oliver all right?”

“They’re not injured, not physically, but we’re all hurting.”

“Oliver took the job?”

“No. He said if Danny and I wouldn’t be happy here, he couldn’t do it. He told the Sedona people he was sorry but had to decline their offer. They said they were sorry, too, but Oliver told me he’d bet they had an acceptance from their second choice before he left the building.”

“So you’re coming back here and, what, Oliver’s not happy?”

“He says he can’t go back to Goldstrike because you’ve brought in your old partner. Is that right?”

Keely chose that moment to appear in the living room doorway wearing only the jacket of Ron’s dress uniform. The one with the stars on the shoulders. He always wore the pants that matched the jacket. Spit-shined shoes, too. But Keely’s take on dressing for success had much to recommend it. At least if you looked as good as she did.

Ron took his eyes off Keely and told Lauren. “Please tell Oliver his job is secure, I can probably get him a decent raise and I won’t razz him more than once a week about watching college wrestling on TV. If he’s too stubborn for that, you and Danny come back. He won’t last a week without the two of you.”

A soft laugh pierced Lauren’s gloom.

“Remind me to bake you a pie, Ron Ketchum.”

“Just one?”

“Wouldn’t want you to get fat.”

“Me, neither. Tell Oliver he won’t like it if I have to drag him back.”

The deputy chief outweighed his boss by forty pounds, was twelve years younger and had, in fact, been an All-American college wrestler. Nothing short of a team of Clydesdales was going to drag him anywhere. Lauren laughed again, her mood audibly brightening.

“Okay, two pies,” she said.

“Great. But, Lauren, seriously now, tell Oliver he has no reason to worry.”

He said goodbye, having done his best to try for a happy ending.

Keely came over and sat on his lap.

He peeked down the opening at the top of the jacket.

“Are you naked under there?”

“I might be. Did you work out whatever that problem was?”

“I hope so. If you’re trying to show me what you might look like as the chief of police around here, I have to tell you I just made sure you’ll have a heck of a deputy chief.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

“Five times no? But I think you’ll like Oliver. He’s a good cop.”

“He probably is, but this right here?”

Keely stood and unfastened all the jacket’s buttons.

When she had Ron’s undivided attention, she told him, “This is as close as you’ll ever get to seeing me as the chief of the Goldstrike PD.”

She took the jacket off and flipped it to him.

He followed her to the bedroom to continue the discussion.