Snake in the Glass (22 page)

As I shoved that unpleasant thought out of my head, I looked around again. “No electric wires. What keeps this place going?”

“Built-in generator, runs off the gas tank. Looks like this has been here for a bit, so whoever was using it wanted to have all the comforts of home. And he probably kept his power use low.” Frank gestured toward a propane lamp on a shelf. “There’ll be a water tank too. Pretty sweet little setup, actually.”

I wandered over to the tiny refrigerator, which wasn’t running, and opened it with one finger. Inside I found several jugs of water and not much else. Opening a cupboard with the same one-finger technique, I saw cans and packages of pasta and quick meals-in-a-bag, and a couple of rolls of toilet paper. This was definitely a bachelor hangout, and if someone spent time here, he probably went into one or another of the nearest towns for real food. Assuming, of course, that he had a car. Nobody would walk this far, not in Arizona, unless they were desperate.

Nothing I saw screamed “clue” at me. No bodies, no blood, no weapons. Maybe I should be looking at what
wasn’t
there—starting with people, Cam in particular. I didn’t see anything that looked like my brother’s computer, and that spurred another question. “Frank, if there’s a generator, would that be enough to power a computer? A laptop, anyway?”

“Sure. Nobody travels without a computer these days, right?”

“But there isn’t one here, in any case.” I scanned chair backs, hooks—anyplace that might be used by a guy to drape something and forget it: nothing. “Frank, what does this look like to you? The place is clean and tidy. There’s no fresh food and no clothes.”

“Looks to me like somebody came along and took any and all of the personal stuff.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. I agree. It all looks perfectly innocent—but it looks too good. What the heck are we dealing with here?” I tried to picture myself explaining to one or more law enforcement types that I was suspicious because the RV was too tidy. That would go over really well.

I was running out of ideas.
Cam, if you were here, can you send me a message or something?

I opened a few more cabinets, and then I got lucky: there was a plastic wastebasket tucked in one of them, under the sink. I pulled it out slowly and peered in: fresh plastic bag, empty, but stuck to the side of the container there were a couple of pieces of torn paper. “You have a handkerchief, Frank?”

Like a good Boy Scout he fished out a clean handkerchief and handed it to me. I covered my hand, reached into the trash container, and pulled out a piece of paper with writing on it.

I recognized the writing: Cam’s.

The flood of mingled relief and fear that swept through me then was almost nauseating. My brilliant deductive reasoning had been right: this had been Alex’s desert camp, and he had brought Cam here. Cam had been here. But now Cam was
not
here, and it looked as though somebody had gone to some length to conceal that he ever had been. That scared me.

“What’ve you got?” Frank’s voice startled me.

“It’s Cam’s handwriting. He must have been working here at some point—this looks like some kind of calculation—so that pretty much fits what we figured out. But then he left . . . with or without help.”

I looked around me at the too-tidy space and wrapped my arms around myself. “Frank, before we get ahead of ourselves, can you take a look around the place, outside, see if anybody was kind enough to leave us footprints?”

“Right.” Frank stepped carefully out of the RV, studying the ground, then moved off in a clockwise direction. I looked around inside again and considered my options. Which were pretty close to none. There were no clues of any value that I could see. I assumed the proper authorities would be able to “see” better and could look for fingerprints and other things. Cam had not left a neatly signed note saying “Help! I have been abducted by thugs! Please send assistance to . . .” It was time to call in the big guns and let them do their stuff.

I stepped down from the RV and pulled out my cell phone. It was fully charged, but it got no signal at all, which did not surprise me. It also confirmed my suspicion that Cam couldn’t have called me even if he’d wanted to. And obviously, he hadn’t had his car, so he couldn’t have driven to a phone—or someplace with a Wi-Fi connection. He could conceivably have walked the few miles back to the highway and sought help. But how long would it have taken him to decide that he needed help?

I could picture him here, nursing his wounded heart, distracting himself by digging into whatever modeling problem Alex had handed him. I could imagine him losing all sense of time. After all, he had food, water, and enough power to run his beloved computer, right? What more did he need? Maybe after a few days, when he had finished whatever he had to do, or Alex had missed a scheduled rendezvous—because he was dead—Cam would have begun to worry, a little. How long would he have waited before setting off to find civilization? And how quickly had he been interrupted by . . . who? Alex was dead, and Denis didn’t know where the RV was. Had Alex given someone information about where to find it? And had that information included the fact that Cam was there? Or was it purely coincidental that someone had stumbled on the RV? Or had Cam cleaned up before heading out and then gotten waylaid? Or worse, lost?

Frank came back. “Nothing like usable footprints, but it looks like one guy came, two guys left.”

“It didn’t look like one of them was resisting, or possibly being dragged?” When Frank shook his head, I went on. “I guess it’s time to call Matt. He’ll know who should cover this. I’m not even sure what county we’re in. My cell phone doesn’t get a signal out here, so we’ve got to go back to Oracle.” The town could be counted on to have working telephones and cell phone service.

We drove back in silence as I mulled over what I wanted to say to Matt. Oracle turned out to be a nice sleepy town. I knew it had become something of a bedroom community for Tucson, since it was just under forty miles away (although I much preferred my commute, which could be measured in feet), and I seemed to remember something about an Oracle Pumpkin Festival.

When I finally found a signal, I punched in Matt’s cell, and he answered quickly. “What’ve you got?”

I matched terse with terse. “We found the RV, outside of Oracle. Nobody home, but it looks like somebody worked hard to tidy it up. No dust, no mess. If this was Alex’s home away from home, there should have been junk lying around. There’s nothing personal there at all.” I swallowed. “Matt—I found something with Cam’s handwriting on it. I’m pretty sure he was there.”

Matt’s sigh echoed over the ether. “Pinal County. Figures. Okay, I’ll get the ball rolling. Can you find someplace in town to sit tight until I get there?”

“Will do. See you soon. And, Matt? Can you hurry?”

Matt called my cell phone when he arrived in Ora
cle and met us at the pizzeria where Frank and I had taken refuge. He dropped into a chair and ordered a cold drink before asking, without preamble, “Where is it?”

“A couple of miles outside of town, to the west. It’s back in an arroyo, so you can’t see it until you’re pretty much on top of it. Who are we waiting for?”

“The rest of the troops are coming. They had to do some song and dance about who’s in charge. I just gave them the general outline and told them to meet me here. You okay?”

“Good enough. FYI, I found the papers with Cam’s writing on them in the wastebasket under the sink. Before you ask, I didn’t touch them directly, and I left them where I found them. We didn’t mess with anything else except to make sure no one was hiding in the bathroom. Frank looked around outside and found some footprints. Matt, I know it doesn’t seem like much, but like I said, the RV is just too clean. If this was Alex’s place, I would have expected junk lying around. How does that match up with Alex’s home?”

“Night and day,” he said absently. “Frank, you get anything that Em missed?”

“I would have missed the ‘clean’ part.” He grinned. “Outside? People have been around, not too long ago. Still plenty of gas for the generator, and water in the tank. Nothing out of place.”

Matt’s eyes were on a Pima County sheriff’s vehicle that had pulled up outside behind his cruiser, followed shortly by a Pinal County one. “Show’s about to start. Frank, you can guide us out to the site. But, Em, I think you ought to stay out of this—go back to Tucson.”

“Go back and tend to my knitting while the big boys do all the work?” I said, angry even though I knew it was unreasonable.

“You know I don’t mean it like that. But this is going to get crowded, fast, and the fewer civilians, the better. I will pass on that you identified the writing as your brother’s and that there is good reason to believe that he was there. But it’s going to be bad enough just explaining what you were doing there.”

I was pissed, but I knew that he was right: I’d only get in the way. “All right,” I said, trying not to grit my teeth. I stood up. “See you later, if you aren’t too busy.” I stalked away before Matt could say anything else, or before I said something I would regret.

On the drive back toward Tucson, all by my lonesome, I wondered just what I could do now. I’d been doing my part, giving everything I found to the right authorities. What did that leave me with? Not much.

What advantage did I have? I knew Cam, although a lovelorn Cam might not act exactly normally. And . . . I had Denis’s confidence. He had come to me when he was scared. I had counseled him to come clean to the cops, and he had. Could I use that trust?

The police had searched Denis’s and Alex’s homes and offices. But had they really “looked” at them the way I had looked at the RV? I had noticed how clean the RV was—and that was not typical of a bachelor like Alex. So maybe, just maybe, I could find something that they’d missed at Denis’s. It was the best—or more like the only—idea I had at the moment.

I knew Denis’s address from the form he had filled out at the shop, and I turned and headed in that direction, hoping that he’d actually be home. I assumed that in the midst of an investigation, he might have decided not to show his face at his department on campus and would be lying low at home. It was worth a try.

Denis’s house turned out to be a cookie-cutter adobe in a development maybe ten years old. Not awful, but nothing special. There was a car in the driveway, which was a good sign. I parked behind it, marched to the front door, and rang the doorbell.

“Oh, Em!” Denis said as he opened the door, clearly surprised to see me standing on the other side. “What are you doing here?”

I pushed past him without waiting for his permission. “I wanted to talk to you.”
And scope out your house.
“How are you holding up?” It wouldn’t hurt to be civil to him.

He closed the door behind me. “Okay, I guess. You know the police were here?”

“Yes, Matt told me. Do you know what they were looking for?”

“Mostly anything that had to do with Alex and the investments. But they went through just about everything. They were very thorough. I had to spend most of the night putting things back the way they were.”

“Yeah, they can leave a mess behind. And with your wife out of town . . .” I tried to look sympathetic.

“Exactly. She’s very particular about how she wants things. She would have gone ballistic if she had seen it the way they left it.”

Ah. She probably had him well trained. “It’s a lovely place”—which I couldn’t have described three minutes after I walked out—“and she’s done a nice job with it”—if your idea of interior design was beige on beige. “How much have you told her about what’s going on?”

“Very little. Mostly that Alex and I had run into a little trouble, and that Alex had been killed.”

“How did she take the news that Alex was dead?” I remembered that Denis had spirited his wife out of town before Matt had learned that it was murdered.

“She was upset, of course. We go back a long way. We were all friends.” Denis shrugged. “I wasn’t sure how much was safe to tell her, with Alex’s killer roaming around. Elizabeth hadn’t seen her folks for a while anyway, and she had vacation time coming. I haven’t told her about the search here yet.”

“Denis, did the police find anything, take anything with them?”

He shook his head. “I told you, and I told them, Alex kept all the records. I had copies, and they took those. But it’s not like Alex was being secretive or anything—I mean, I trusted him. I just wasn’t that interested in the business side of things. I signed the tax forms each year, and I kind of eyeballed them, reviewed the bottom line, but I don’t have a mind for financial stuff. I never really looked at the copies, just filed them. I think the police took those. Hey, you want something to drink? Water, soda?”

“Water would be fine,” I said. Denis seemed relieved at the opportunity to play host rather than interrogee, but I wasn’t going to let him off that easy. “Did they find Alex’s records at his house?” I asked as I followed him into the kitchen. There, Denis opened a cabinet. I noticed that all the glasses were lined up according to size.

Denis took out a tall glass, filled it with ice cubes from the freezer, added tap water, and handed it to me. “No, but they didn’t say much anyway. Mostly they asked where things were, like my own records. I let them look at everything. I don’t have anything to hide.”

“And they looked in your office, and Alex’s, at the university?”

“That’s what they said. What are you looking for?”

“Denis, to be honest, I’m not sure. I just hope I recognize it when I see it. You told the police about Alex’s RV, right? Was it Alex’s or the partnership’s?”

Denis shrugged. “Alex’s, I think. Though I’m pretty sure he claimed it as a business expense. Does it matter? I never saw it.”