Nightwalker (28 page)

“Picture A and picture B,” the tech murmured.

“Does it mean anything?” Tarleton asked.

Dillon looked at Jerry Cheever. “Can you get someone in personnel to let us know if there are any variations in the uniforms for the waitstaff?”

“I’m on it,” Cheever said, reaching for the phone.

Tarleton had risen and was standing right next to the screen, staring at it pointedly and blocking Dillon’s view.

“What is it?” Dillon asked him.

Tarleton stared a while longer. “Hell if I know. But there’s something else. It’s right on the edge of my mind. Maybe….” He sat down but kept staring. “Ah, hell. I can’t figure it out, and I’ve got to get back. Thanks for letting me play cop for the hour, guys. And I know I saw something. I’ll call if I ever figure it out.”

J
essy didn’t remember crawling up on the bed with her grandfather, but she felt as if she were lying with him the way she had as a kid when they went to the lake. They would lie on the ground on big beach towels, looking up at the clouds and turning the rare wisps of white magic in the Nevada sky into fairy-tale creatures.

Today, the clouds were strange. They seemed to fill the sky. Timothy pointed up and told her, “There. Do you see him? That’s Billie Tiger. Don’t be afraid of him. He’s a Seminole, but he was captured and forced West, where he escaped and joined up with Sitting Bull.”

“How do you do, Mr. Tiger,” she asked politely, because, now that Timothy had pointed him out, she could see him, of course.

“He’s a good friend,” Timothy told her.

Something in her felt sad that he found his friends in
the clouds and on the walls, but she wouldn’t say so; she loved him too much to hurt his feelings.

“Billie Tiger shows me what happened,” Timothy said. “He’ll show you, too.”

The clouds shifted as Timothy described a town with one long street that was all rutted sand. A breeze blew, but it had only hot air and desert sand to toss around. A tumbleweed danced across the road now and then. She saw a big sign on one building identifying it as the Crystal Canary. Another building was a bank. There were horses and a livery stable. People wore old-fashioned clothes, the women in long dresses, often in pastel flower patterns, and bonnets to protect their complexions against the sun.

“There’s the newspaper office,” Timothy said. “And there…” He pointed up to the sky. “There’s the saloon.”

She felt as if she walked with him through the swinging doors into the saloon, where she saw a piano player. He was a handsome man, more brown than copper, with beautiful green eyes, and might have been a deeply tanned white man, an Indian or even a black man.

She was suddenly sitting on his lap, but it was all right, because somehow the man had become Timothy. A young woman was standing next to them, singing.

There were four men at the poker table. She recognized two of them: Ringo—and Dillon. Except that it wasn’t Dillon, only someone who looked a lot like him. The other two men weren’t familiar to her. One had a goofy smile, and the other one looked mean, the sour and gaunt kind of mean. She didn’t like him.

Then the doors burst open, and tall and dark and
looming, and seeming to cover the sun,
he
was just there. The clouds turned dark when he arrived and seemed to roil with anger.

She was afraid.

“Hide,” Timothy said. Except that he wasn’t Timothy anymore, he was the piano player again. “I have to rouse the townfolk.”

She crawled under the piano.

The man in the doorway entered and walked to the poker table, followed by four of the biggest men Jessy had ever seen. Then, suddenly, everyone was standing and guns were blazing. She wanted to scream, but she was hiding and was afraid to give away her presence…

Only two men were still standing at that point.

And then…

The swinging doors opened again. A huge man came in, dragging a beautiful woman in deerskin. But she wasn’t an Indian, she was a blond-haired white woman.

Jessy looked at the man who was so like Dillon. His mouth was moving as he looked at the beautiful woman, and Jessy strained to hear what he was saying. She could see that the blonde didn’t understand him, unable to hear his words over the bullets.

But Jessy could hear him.

And the word he said was
here.

The guns stopped firing, and she looked around to see that both the men were dead, and the beautiful blond woman was standing alone, weeping.

Jessy woke abruptly. She wasn’t lying on the bed next to Timothy but was sitting in a chair in the break
fast room. She must have fallen asleep with her head on the table, just as Nikki’s was.

Jessy closed her eyes and groaned. Timothy wasn’t crazy at all.

Billie Tiger had just shown her Indigo.

Had she really heard John Wolf speak? Great. Another cryptic one-word message that might mean nothing at all.
Here.

Brent Blackhawk was coming up with some interesting connections. One of the most surprising was that Jessy’s friend Sandra was a descendant of Milly Taylor, the singer in the saloon at the time of the shoot-out. He wondered if Sandra was aware of her heritage.

He kept searching, and another correlation fell into place. Tanner Green.

His father’s side of the family might have come from Philadelphia, but his mother’s family had been from the West, and their surname had been Hornsby. There were a number of Riley Hornsbys listed in the Nevada census, surely one of them could have been the goon who had accompanied Frank Varny and an ancestor of Green’s.

Brent was growing more and more amazed. The hapless parking attendant, Rudy Yorba, could be traced, through the maternal line once again, to the gambler Mark Davison. Odd, though, that a bad guy in the past was connected to a good guy in the present.

An hour later he sat back and considered the amazing web of names and connections he’d discovered. Virtually all the names Dillon had given him had ancestors who’d been in the area at the time, including Darrell
Frye, Hugo Blythe and Detective Jerry Cheever, whose genealogy could be traced back to the ineffectual sheriff of Indigo, Grant Percy.

The real jackpot was Emil Landon, though. He could claim a direct line right back to Frank Varny.

Brent kept searching and found something odd, so odd that he wasn’t even be sure it was relevant. It looked as if Emil Landon had more than the one child he acknowledged, who lived with an ex-wife back East. He’d accompanied a pregnant hooker to the hospital in Reno twenty-some years ago, when he had been just a kid of twenty himself.

Brent peered at the computer screen, reread the article he’d found and cursed. There was no mention as to whether Landon had been in the delivery room with the prostitute or had only been playing Good Samaritan, but he jotted down the hooker’s name and quickly turned back to his search.

The hooker was named Celia Smithfield, and her maternal great-grandmother had been named Varny. Brent pulled out his cell phone and put a call through to Dillon.

Jessy left Nikki sleeping and went out into the hall to stretch her legs. She was startled to run into Sandra there, and stunned to see that her friend’s eyes were red, as if she had been crying.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Jessy asked, worried.

“You’ve got to see this! Come on, hurry. It’s just outside,” Sandra said, tugging on Jessy’s hand.

“All right, calm down, Sandra.”

Since she was just going down to the parking lot—and with Sandra, not some stranger—Jessy decided against waking Nikki. She put a comforting arm around Sandra’s shoulders and was shocked to realize that Sandra was trembling.

“Sandra, please, let me help you.”

“Just—come,” Sandra said. “Please.”

Jessy followed Sandra downstairs and waved cheerfully to Jimmy. “I’ll be right back,” she told him.

“My car is right there,” Sandra said when they reached the lot, and she threw open the door to the backseat.

Jessy leaned forward to see what Sandra wanted to show her and was stunned when Sandra suddenly shoved her forward, into the car. Her head struck the handle of the far door, and she felt a searing pain. She heard Sandra gasp and say, “Oh, shit!”

And then the pain in her head exploded and the world went black.

Dillon was still thinking about the cocktail waitress uniform that wasn’t quite right. In fact, there was something not quite right about the cocktail waitress herself. Her hair was strange, for one thing. Too big and tilting oddly to one side. It had to be a wig.

And, according to Jerry Cheever, who’d talked to the personnel manager, all the waitstaff uniforms were made from identical fabric.

As he drove away from the station, Dillon realized that the woman was familiar. It was something about the way she stood, the way she moved.

His phone rang.

It was Adam. “I think your man Darrell Frye is in on it. I heard him in the coffee shop, talking to a strange-looking woman in a bouffant wig. She was angry, told him that ‘it’ had to be this afternoon. If you can get hold of your buddy Cheever, tell him he needs to find some excuse to pick up Darrell Frye.”

“Got it. And I think I saw the same woman on the security tape from the night Green was killed. She was the one who slipped the LSD to him,” Dillon said. “I’ll call Cheever right now.”

He had to leave a message, because apparently Cheever was in the men’s room.

“Tell him he needs to find an excuse to pick up Darrell Frye—pronto. And he has to get back to me right away,” Dillon said.

His phone rang the moment he hung up with the cops. Brent was on the line. “Get this. Just about all of your guys collide, just like you thought, even that Darrell Frye you weren’t sure—”

“I’ve left a message for Cheever to trump up some excuse to pick him up right away,” Dillon said. “Anyway, sorry for interrupting. What else have you got?”

“Here’s the wildest. I think Emil Landon had a child.”

“Yeah, he has a kid back East.”

“No, in Nevada. Illegitimate.”

“A son?” Dillon asked.

“I don’t know, the kid just disappears. But guess who the mother’s family line goes back to?” Brent asked him.

“Who?”

“Frank Varny. Bizarre, huh? Landon goes back to Varny himself. So he had an affair with a woman to whom he was distantly related.”

Dillon finally remembered where he had seen the woman in the tapes before, and why she had looked familiar.

“It was a girl,” Dillon said, cursing his own stupidity. He’d been led around by the nose like an idiot. “Get back over to the home and get Jessy and Nikki. And Timothy, too. I’m afraid something is going down right now. I’m going to call Cheever back and get out to the morgue. Brent, I’m scared as hell. Get over there quickly. Please.”

When Jessy came to, her head was killing her. It took her a moment to realize that she hadn’t been dreaming, that Sandra really had shoved her into the car and abducted her.

“Sandra, what the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded, trying to sit up, then failing in the face of the pain.

“Reggie!” Sandra cried.

“Reggie?” Jessy said, baffled.

“They couldn’t get to you because you were with Dillon, so they kidnapped Reggie and told me to get you. They’re waiting in Indigo, and if I don’t hand you over to them in half an hour, they’re going to kill Reggie.”

Jessy swallowed hard. She understood, but she had to find a way to talk Sandra into doing the smart thing. The
right
thing.

“Did you call the cops?” she asked.

“I can’t call the cops!” Sandra cried hysterically. “They’ll kill her, don’t you understand? She’s nothing to them. Once they have you, they’ll let Reggie go. And they swore they wouldn’t hurt you, either. They just want you as leverage so they can get Dillon to tell them where the gold is.”

“That’s insane. Dillon doesn’t know where the gold is.”

“They think he does.”

Jessy’s head was spinning. Why would anyone think Dillon knew where the gold was? She thought back to Dillon’s theory about the connection between past and present, and then she remembered Timothy’s words.
They are assembling.
Did someone believe that by putting together the descendants of those who had died and recreating the bloodbath, that would somehow reveal the location of the gold? That Dillon would somehow channel his ancestor’s memory of the past and lead them straight to the treasure?

Jessy blinked, trying hard to clear her head and make sense of what was going on. “Have you got any aspirin or anything up there? You really hurt me—you bitch.”

She was almost sorry for the last when she saw the tears streaming down Sandra’s cheeks.

“I’m sorry, but I had to,” Sandra said.

“Sandra, we have to tell the police what’s going on.”

“I don’t trust the police!” Sandra insisted vehemently.

“Why?”

“Cheever took me home last night. He knows where I live,” Sandra said. “How can I be sure he didn’t tell them where to find Reggie?”

“But…Sandra, you’re listed in the phone book, anyone could have found you,” Jessy protested.

“Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because they said that if they saw the police, they’d kill her.”

“Calm down and tell me about the whole thing,” Jessy said, knowing even as she spoke that she was asking the impossible. Calm down? These people had already killed three times. What would Reggie’s life matter to them?

Sandra drew a long shaky breath. “I went to the grocery store. When I came back, I could tell Reggie had come from school because—I found her knapsack. Then I got the phone call.”

“Was it from a man or a woman?”

“I don’t know! They used one of those things that disguise your voice.”

“Are you sure they really have Reggie? That they’re not bluffing?”

Sandra started sobbing even harder. “They put her on the phone. She was crying.”

“Okay, so they have Reggie,” she agreed. “But, Sandra, we have to call the police. Don’t you see? Even once they have me, they won’t let Reggie go. They can’t. She knows too much. They’ll kill all of us. Indigo’s a ghost town in the middle of nowhere. If you don’t trust Cheever, we can call the state police.”

“We can’t call the police,” Sandra said.

“Why?”

“I forgot my cell phone again.”

Dillon put through a call to Tarleton’s cell, but the M.E. didn’t pick up. He called the main number at the
morgue, figuring Doug might be wrist deep in a corpse and unable to pick up his phone. Instead, he discovered that Tarleton was out but due back shortly, and Sarah Clay had taken the afternoon off.