Nailed (13 page)

Chapter 14

As Ron pulled out of the police parking structure, an SUV started to follow him. It was a 4x4, but, unlike his all-business police Ford Explorer, this one was a gleaming black Range Rover. Complete with a rhino guard. For a second, Ron thought it might be the mayor behind him. He had a Rover like that, except the chief didn’t remember the mayor worrying about rhinos. Then Ron noticed that the plates weren’t the mayor’s.

Clay Steadman’s vanity plates read MFL — Mayor for Life.

Maybe the Rover behind him just happened to be going the same way he was. There were lots of fancy cars in town, and the guy was so blatantly obvious, hanging in there twenty feet off the chief’s rear bumper, he couldn’t be trying to fool anyone. But after two turns, the second of which caused the Rover to run a red, Ron decided the sonofabitch
was
following him. He just didn’t care if Ron knew about it.

The chief took out his sidearm and laid it on the passenger seat. He took another look at the Rover’s plate and called it in. When he got his response, he pulled over to the curb. The Rover nosed in a car length behind him.

Ron got out of his unit re-holstering his weapon and walked back to the fancy import. The tinted window went down with an electric hum. The driver was a wide-eyed white kid with beads of sweat on his downy upper lip. He was probably right out of journalism school, maybe even a summer intern.

“What are you doing?” Ron asked mildly.

“Driving,” the kid replied, a picture of innocence.

“He’s doing his job, Chief. Which is whatever I tell him to do.”

This came from the black man sitting in the passenger seat. He had salt and pepper hair and a matching beard. He wore a khaki safari jacket, although the morning was already too warm for such clothing. But it did go nicely with the Rover, Ron thought, and it would look good on television.

The man’s name was Ben Dexter. Ron recognized him from the tube. He’d been an anchor on one of the network news magazines. Now he was an independent producer-reporter. He liked to go after stories with racial angles. He sold them to whomever he thought would let him slant the story his way. He did a lot of things on PBS and the cable news channels, but he still turned up back at his old network stomping grounds once in a while.

He thought he was tough.

There was a guy with a videocam, and a soundman in the back seat. The camera operator looked like he was itching to start shooting video, but he hadn’t been given his cue yet. Ron knew the camera guy would act on his own initiative, however, if he got rough with these bozos.

The chief knew Dexter would like nothing better than to have Ron muscle him.

White racist police chief harasses crusading black journalist.

Ron stepped around the Rover to Mr. Big. Dexter lowered his window. The camera operator had his lens pointed Ron’s way, even though the camera was still off. The sound guy, however, had his recorder on and his mike pointed at the chief.

Ron crouched and leaned in close to Dexter, making it just about impossible for the camera operator to get a shot at him without his boss’s head getting in the way. Maybe it would mess up the sound-man’s levels, too.

“And did you tell your driver to follow me, Mr. Dexter?”

“Yes, I did.”

The TV reporter kept his face nose to nose with Ron’s, made the chief sorry he’d brushed his teeth so thoroughly that morning. Dexter evidently hadn’t.

“If you’d like an interview, why don’t you call my secretary?”

“We’re not looking for an interview. At the moment.”

“So you’re just following me?”

“That’s right.” The ‘What are you going to do about it, motherfucker?’ was implied.

“I’m conducting official business now.”

“That’s what we want to see.
How
you conduct official business.”

“If I told you that your presence might hinder a murder investigation, what would your response be?”

“A free press comes at a price.”

“Nice irony,” Ron commented. He pushed off the Rover and stood up.

“Okay,” he said. “You want to see how I work? Keep your eyes open. But I don’t think it will make very good TV.”

The camera operator exercised independent judgment on that point, hitting Ron with his bright light. But he didn’t catch the chief punching out Dexter or breaking the Rover’s windshield, or even kicking dents in the door. All he taped was Ron calmly walking back to his unit, making a call on his radio, and waiting there without moving.

Ten minutes later two cars arrived, one blocking the Rover in front, the other in back. But they weren’t police units. There weren’t cops inside. There would be no tape of Dexter being led away in handcuffs. Not in Goldstrike, thank you. Ron had called the district attorney’s office and the town’s corporation counsel. The two lawyers who had responded would explain to the intrepid reporter the criminal and civil penalties that could ensue for interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duties.

If the sonofabitch could make a TV show out of that legal boilerplate, more power to him. On the other hand, since Dexter was a member of the bar himself, he’d understand clearly that if he kept fucking around, there would be consequences.

Ron drove off, having shed his tail.

He felt there were times when it was very tiring to be a nationally known recovering bigot. People kept coming after him. Hoping with all their might to set him off.

Of course, sometimes, like right now, Ron felt a greater than usual empathy with his father, the unrepentant bigot. Times like these, he’d like nothing better than to ring his baton off some people’s heads. Whatever their color was.

But he maintained control and worked on his problem.

One day at a time.

Just like recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.

Chapter 15

The guy who spoke to Ron over the intercom at the gates to Jimmy Thunder’s estate was another candidate ripe for police brutality.

“I’d like to see the reverend, please,” Ron said evenly.

“He ain’t seein’ nobody. He’s in mournin’.”

“I’m afraid this isn’t a social call.”

The guy on the other end of the intercom apparently had exhausted his gift for conversation and the gates remained closed. Ron leaned on the call button.

“Did I mention that I’m Chief of Police Ketchum? And that if I have to, I’ll come back with a warrant. Now, how would that look to the neighbors?”

After several more seconds of silence, during which Ron thought he might actually have to follow through on his threat, the gates swung open. The chief idled his car onto the Thunder estate at five miles per hour. The better to eyeball the grounds.

A white man in a short-sleeved blue work shirt and matching pants was carefully maneuvering a riding mower around ornamental trees on an expanse of emerald grass the size of a football field. The man wore a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap, and though Ron couldn’t see his face something seemed familiar about him.

If the man on the mower was the guy responsible for the grounds, he did a heckuva job. All the plantings the chief could see were meticulously kept. Flowerbeds featured colorful arrays of petunias, pansies and marigolds. Evergreens shrubs were set among well-placed granite boulders. Quaking aspens, mountain alders, and willows lent their grace and shade to the setting.

For a moment, Ron wondered why the man was working on Sunday. Then he thought that he himself would rather be in this park-like setting smelling newly mown grass than stuck in a church wearing a coat and tie. Or maybe the guy was Jewish. Or an atheist. Or he worshipped plant life. In California anything was possible — and usually encouraged.

Thunder’s mansion was a large, imposing structure of cream-colored brick. Its graceful lines were disfigured by the functional cube of a TV studio appended to the far end. That and the adjacent parking area that had to be large enough for the chartered buses that brought in Jimmy Thunder’s studio audiences. A row of willows only partially obscured this financial engine that both blighted and supported the rest of the property.

Ron got out of his Explorer directly in front of the mansion’s entrance. He climbed the four shallow steps and rang the bell set in the shining brass fitting next to the gleaming oak doors. He waited long enough to consider leaning on the doorbell, but finally a scowling black man opened the door.

The man was six inches shorter than Ron, but he had the shoulders, chest, arms and muscle tone of a middleweight boxer ready for a championship bout. His hair was clipped as short and neat as the lawns behind Ron. He wore a white linen suit and an open at the throat French vanilla silk shirt. Pinned to the shirt’s right collar point was a small golden cross.

“I’d like to see Reverend Thunder,” Ron said again.

“He’s busy with his TV show. It’s Sunday morning.”

“He tapes his show on Thursday afternoon,” Ron countered patiently. “What kind of police chief would I be if I didn’t notice when busloads of believers arrived in my town?”

“He likes to
watch
the show on Sundays. See how it plays.”

“Then he’s done with the mourning you talked about when I was at the gate?”

The man started to close the door but he thought better of it when Ron shook his head in stern disapproval.

“Do that,” the chief said, “and I’ll arrest you for fucking with me, also known as interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duties.” There was a time to call in the lawyers, Ron knew, and there was a time to assert naked police authority. Besides, he had taken all the crap he intended to take for one morning. He continued, “Now, that’d be a chump charge for a tough guy … but for a man of the cloth, it’d be something he’d rather not face.”

Let this guy define himself, Ron thought.

The man stepped back and opened the door to let Ron enter.

“What’s your name?” he asked the middleweight as he moved into the mansion.

“Deacon Meeker.”

“Deacon? Is that your name, or your position with the reverend?”

“Both. Reverend Thunder ain’t gonna be happy to see you.”

“So few are,” Ron conceded.

In the woods adjacent to Highway 38, near the point where Mary Kaye Mallory was attacked, Corrie Knox found the tracks she was looking for. Mountain lion, no doubt about it. At a glance, the tracks appeared to belong to the same animal she’d been hunting for the past month. Corrie looked around, and then she looked up. Cats climbed, ate in and slept in trees. They also liked to pounce from them.

But people hardly ever looked up. Good for mountain lions. Bad for hikers who didn’t aspire to become kibble.

Mountain lions almost always used sneak attacks. They struck from behind and crushed the base of the skull and the spine with one massive bite. Just in case the first bite didn’t do it, they wrapped all four legs around their prey and held it helpless until they got the job done.

Pound for pound, mountain lions were the strongest and most lethal of the big cats.

They also saw you a long time before you saw them. But even a tenderfoot, unless lost in the raptures of nature or otherwise distracted, often got the feeling that something was not quite right when a big cat was nearby. The police report on Mary Kaye Mallory stated that she’d felt, with complete accuracy, that she was being stalked.

Corrie Knox was no tenderfoot. Her father, a wildlife illustrator who held no illusions about the need to carry a rifle, had begun taking her into the woods as soon as she could walk. He’d started teaching her to shoot when she was five. She cradled her 30-30 Winchester 94 carbine as naturally as most women her age would hold a baby. She also had the strength to handle the .45 caliber pistol she wore on her hip.

But looking around, and up, once more, sniffing the air and extending her consciousness as far as she could, she couldn’t feel the presence of any predator. Dropping into a squat, with her rifle across her legs, she shrugged out of her backpack. She took out a measuring tape, a sketchpad and a pencil. She flipped the pad open and started taking the measurements of the lion’s tracks. First she wrote down the numbers and then she sketched the tracks. The daughter of an illustrator, she’d also received art lessons. Her drawings were highly accurate. But she also photographed the tracks.

When this work was accomplished, and not before, she looked at the images and dimensions of the tracks she’d previously recorded for the cat she’d been hunting. She didn’t want to look at them earlier and have them subconsciously influence her present work.

She needn’t have worried. The deformed toe on the animal’s right rear foot and the dimensions of all four feet matched. You added that to the reported scar above the left eye and there was no doubt that the animal that attacked Mary Kaye Mallory was the same one that she felt certain had killed a hiker already.

Officially, Gary Jenkins, age eighteen, was a missing person. He’d gone alone into the Sierra, eighty miles south of Goldstrike, one weekend at the beginning of July to camp and test the wilderness skills he’d learned in an Outward Bound course. When he hadn’t returned home as planned the following Monday, his parents alerted the police. Corrie had been called in when a park ranger found Gary Jenkins’ campsite.

Everything was in perfect order. His tent was neatly pitched near a stream. His sleeping bag and all his other supplies were accounted for, as far as his parents had been able to tell officials. Even his wallet, with cash and a credit card still inside, was found in the tent.

But Gary Jenkins was gone.

His shirt was found hanging on a bush near the stream, and the ranger who’d summoned Corrie showed her the tracks he’d found nearby. Mountain lion. For Corrie, it had been easy to imagine what had happened. The young man had gotten up early on the last morning of his life, went down to the stream to wash up, bent over to splash water on his face, and the cat had pounced on him. Killed him. Dragged him off and ate him.

Gary Jenkins had been a small fellow. Five feet six, one thirty. Two or three good meals for a big cat. There might literally be nothing of him left.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Corrie and the houndsman had tracked the mountain lion who’d left the tracks by the stream. The first pile of its dung they’d found had been thick with porcupine quills. The next pile had contained something equally unappetizing: blue denim. According to Gary’s father, his son had worn his favorite pair of Levi’s to go camping.

The powers that be still listed Gary Jenkins as missing, and wouldn’t rule out the possibility of foul play at the hands of another person. Corrie, of course, had heard her share of grisly true-crime stories, even tales of psychotic cannibals, but she’d never heard of anyone who ate people while they were still in their blue jeans.

No, a lion had claimed the unfortunate young man. And if there were any remains that hadn’t passed through the animal’s digestive tract, they would be skeletal at best. Skeletal and tucked up in the branches of a tree or the recesses of some rocky den.

She stood up and wondered why the cat hadn’t kept to its home range. In the Sierra, a given area of a hundred square miles usually provided enough game to keep half a dozen mountain lions well fed. Maybe this particular animal’s area had gotten overpopulated, and he was the odd man out. Or maybe he was infected with some feline disease that made him behave out of character. Or …

Or maybe, as intelligent as these big cats could be, it had simply discovered that humans were very easy prey. They didn’t have gouging antlers like deer, and they didn’t run nearly as fast. And maybe, from the lion’s point of view, people were a delicacy, too.

Corrie Knox smiled mirthlessly. Wouldn’t that notion delight Chief Ketchum?

She repacked her materials, stood up and surveyed her surroundings again. No sign of the fucker. No sense that she was being hunted, either. Maybe her prey had travel plans to keep right on moving north. Felis concolor, the cat of one color, could be found anywhere from Canada to South America.

It’d make her job a helluva lot easier if the beast stayed nearby.

Not that the chief would like to hear that, either.

Charmaine Cardwell ushered Oliver Gosden into the suite at the Hyatt that Clay Steadman had arranged for the Cardwell family. She seated him on a sofa and asked if she might call for coffee for him. The deputy chief politely declined.

Little Japhet Cardwell dressed in black slacks and a white shirt peeked out from behind the folds of his mother’s black dress.

“Are you a policeman?” the four year old asked seriously.

“Yes, I am.”

“You gonna catch the bad man who killed my daddy?”

The question pierced Oliver’s heart like an arrow. This boy was two years younger than his own son. And he’d already lost his father. Glancing up at Charmaine, Oliver saw that she, too, was interested in how he answered the question.

“If he’s in our town,” the deputy chief told them, “we will catch him. If he’s run away … then the FBI will have to catch him.”

“What’s gonna happen when you catch him?”

“He’ll go to trial and when he’s found guilty he’ll have to pay the price.”

“You mean if he’s found guilty, don’t you?”

Oliver looked up to see that Mahalia Cardwell, also dressed in black, had entered the room.

“Lots of folks get away with murder these days, don’t they?” she asked.

“Grandma, please,” Charmaine said. “You’ll upset Japhet.”

Tears were forming in the boy’s eyes as his mother picked him up. He’d understood what his great-grandmother had said. He brushed his tears away with the back of a hand and turned his huge liquid brown eyes on Oliver.

“Don’t let the bad man get away,” the boy pleaded fearfully.

“We won’t,” Oliver said, and meant it. “I promise.”

As Charmaine Cardwell carried her son from the room, her look said that she hoped Oliver wouldn’t disappoint either of them.

“Where’s that white boy?” Mahalia Cardwell asked, drawing Oliver’s attention back to her. “He sent you to do his dirty work?”

The old woman had remained standing. Oliver got to his feet so she wouldn’t be able to look down on him.

“I’m the deputy chief of police in this town, ma’am. I don’t tote dat barge for anyone around here.”

Mahalia Cardwell was unimpressed. “You don’t come from around here, either, do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The chief of police, he bring you in from Los Angeles, too?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So you’re his house nigger.”

Oliver took a deep breath to maintain his cool. “I don’t use that word, ma’am. I have a son not much older than Japhet, and he’s not going to hear it from me or anyone else in my presence.”

“Not even the chief of police? You’re going tell your boss to watch his mouth?”

“The chief doesn’t use that word, either.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forgot. He’s a reformed white man, or somethin’.”