Sweet Hearts (12 page)

It felt strange to find herself
in a neighborhood of tract homes with squared-off block walls separating them.
So different from Taos. But she made the turns and found herself in front of a
flat-roofed house stuccoed white with a few bits of bright green wood trim.
Freeform brick borders separated the winter-brown lawn from sections of colored
rock and some evergreen shrubs. A fairly new blue Pontiac sat on the concrete
driveway, taking up both sides of the double garage door in front of it.

She got out of the truck and
followed a precise strip of sidewalk to a flat front porch.

Lisa Tombo came to the door
wearing a turquoise track suit, with a ball cap over her brown hair and earbuds
dangling from their cords over her shoulders, like she’d just come in from
running. She held the door to a narrow wedge, to keep the heat in and her
visitor out.

Lisa seemed puzzled when Sam said
she was trying to locate Tito Fresques, her brown eyebrows drawing together in
the middle. After a minute, she invited Sam inside where they settled on a pair
of armchairs that looked they were never used.

“Well, yeah, I worked with him,”
Lisa said when Sam mentioned having talked to some people from Bellworth. “We
were pretty close, you know. He’d talk about his wife and baby all the time. We
ate lunch in the company cafeteria quite a bit. Even though we worked in the
same department, he was in the electronics lab most of the day and I had a desk
job. Assistant to the department manager. So we met up in the cafeteria and
swapped stories for a half hour or so. Sometimes a few of us would go out for a
beer on Friday nights after work. But Tito never stayed late. One beer, he’d
go.”

“Some people said there were
rumors about an affair.”

“Yeah, an investigator brought
that up right after he left. But me and Tito? Hunh-uh. He was a hundred percent
in love with his wife.”

The way she said it made Sam
think that Lisa would have been perfectly willing had Tito made a move.

“And you haven’t heard from him
since? Not even a card or letter?”

She noticed no signs of deception
when Lisa Tombo said no. “He disappeared from my life at the same moment he
disappeared from work. And I moved on shortly after that, myself. I’d already
gotten a job in Denver and given my notice at Bellworth a couple weeks before
Tito left.”

Sam tried to think what else Beau
might have asked, but couldn’t come up with anything other than whether Lisa
knew anyone else Tito had been close to, someone he might have confided in.

“What about Harry Cole or Bill
Champion?” Sam asked. “They worked with him.”

Lisa shrugged. “Different section
from mine. I knew the names but wasn’t really close to either of them.”

Lisa got up to walk Sam to the
door. “You know, there was something unusual that last day he was there. I
didn’t remember it when that investigator questioned me. That day, I met up
with Tito for lunch like usual. Well, he came in all flushed and nervous. I
joked around, asked if he’d gotten a jolt from a wire or something. He laughed
it off, but now that I think about it, he kept looking around the room. Like
maybe somebody was going to come in and chew him out. I just figured he’d
broken something in the lab and was hoping not to catch hell for it.”

Sam opened the door and felt the
chilly breeze rush into the house. She pushed it closed again when Lisa spoke.

“Actually, later that afternoon,
somebody did come around looking for Tito.” Her brows did that wrinkly thing
again as she worked at remembering. “Dark suit, white shirt, tie. I’m thinking
blond hair, maybe? He popped up at my desk and I told him which way to go down
the hall to the lab. He had all the right clearances and an ID card on his
lanyard, like everyone else who worked there. I guess I never gave it a second
thought.”

“That was on a Friday?”

“That’s right. I remember Tito
skipped going out for beers that night because he and the family were driving
somewhere to go visit his mother or somebody like that.”

Sam nodded and thanked Lisa Tombo
for the information. Back in her truck, she wondered what, exactly, she had
learned. Tito was nervous on his last day of work and later some guy in a dark
suit had come looking for him. That could be explained in so many ways,
including the way Lisa viewed it—Tito had broken something in the lab and
someone from management wanted to speak to him about it.

But then, what had happened over
the weekend? Sam couldn’t help but believe Tito’s disappearance was tied to his
job at Bellworth. If he’d simply been grabbed off the streets in Taos and
robbed, he would have turned up—dead or alive—shortly afterward.

She opened Fenton’s file and
found the notes from her phone calls the previous night. It took a few minutes
with the city map but she located streets and jotted directions before pulling
away from the curb, mulling over all the information as she left Lisa’s little
tract neighborhood.

Harry Cole’s home was the closer,
so she followed Montgomery Boulevard east until she reached his area. Another
tract home, another winter-dry yard, this one not as neatly kept as Lisa’s. No
answer at the door.

Sam caught a neighbor openly
watching her, eyeing her red pickup truck suspiciously. She crossed the space
between the two yards and walked toward the woman who quickly began coiling up
a stiff length of green garden hose.

“They ain’t home,” came the
brusque greeting. “Prob’ly down to Isleta.”

Sam remembered Cole’s comment
about liking the casinos and guessed that the Isleta Pueblo had a good one. She
thanked the neighbor, deciding against leaving a message. The nosy woman didn’t
need to know any of what was going on in Taos. Cole hadn’t been especially
helpful on the phone anyway. She drove away, noticing that the neighbor stared
at her until she rounded the corner.

Her only other contact, Bill
Champion, met her at the door of his fairly new, upscale home and ushered her
into a world of hardwood floors, pale beige furniture, and minimalist décor.
Seeing no wifely touches, Sam decided he had hired an expensive decorator.

“Yeah, I sure do remember your
call,” he said, offering her a beer while he muted the volume on the football
game on a huge flat-screen TV. “You found out anything about Tito Fresques
yet?”

He ushered her toward a leather
couch, while he resumed his spot on a recliner beside an end table full of
snack food packages and beer bottles.

“Not a lot. Glenda Cooper seems
to be in the computer business now and Lisa Tombo lived away from Albuquerque
long enough that she’s lost touch with everyone.”

“Yep, yep. Not surprised.” His
eyes darted toward the silent TV screen about every fifteen seconds.

“Lisa did mention someone who was
looking for Tito the last day he was at work at Bellworth. She thought he had
blond hair, wore a suit and tie.” Even as she said it, Sam realized what
pitifully little information that was.

Champion actually turned his
attention toward her, chewing at the inside of his cheek as he thought about
it. Slowly, his head began to nod.

“Could have been Rick Wells. He
still comes around once in a great while. Inspector, auditor maybe?” He
stopped, as if that explained everything.

“He still works for Bellworth?”

“Oh, no. Outside guy. Used to
come in a few days at a time, keep everyone jumping, finding reports and all.
Well, I guess he did. Wasn’t part of my job description.”

“But he audited Tito’s work? Or
Tito reported to him?” Sam’s experience with auditors was nil, although she’d
once had to send copies of her bank statements to someone at the IRS, years
ago.

“No idea. I suppose so. I would
see Wells show up, Tito would talk to him awhile. That’s about all I remember.”

His eyes were back on the game,
his face lighting up at whatever was going on there, and Sam knew she wouldn’t
be getting much more from Bill Champion. She stood, which distracted him from
the TV long enough to listen to her request for Rick Wells’s address, hand her
the telephone directory then see her to the door.

Back at the truck she pulled out
her map again and repeated a tedious perusal of the city map. Forty-five
minutes later she’d made her way across the river to the suburb of Rio Rancho,
missed two crucial turns in the horrendous traffic on Coors Road, and finally
pulled onto the street she’d identified as Wells’s. His home was a
cookie-cutter bachelor condo, the kind of place a guy buys after a divorce has
forced him to split twenty years of accumulation with the ex who’s finally had
it with his non-stop—fill in the blank—work hours/womanizing/drinking or
general slobbery.

When Wells came to the door, Sam
put her money on womanizing. The guy was good-looking and knew it, probably
always on the prowl. He wore his blond hair short and businesslike, and his
casual warm-up suit looked as if it had been custom made for him.

She briefly explained her
mission, asking if he remembered Tito Fresques and if he knew anything that
might help the authorities to locate the missing man.

“Absolutely, I remember Tito. He
was in electrical engineering at Bellworth, one of the companies I routinely
audit. Personable guy, very forthcoming.” His smile brightened in a way that
reminded Sam of those infomercial hosts who sell ice cube makers to Eskimos.

“Were you at Bellworth the last
Friday of August, ten years ago? Or maybe the following Monday? Tito
disappeared sometime that weekend.”

“Really? I’m so sorry to hear
that. He was a nice guy.”

She asked a couple more questions
and got the same type of answers. Sam watched his face as he talked. He seemed
genuine enough but was he actually giving her any information? Maybe that’s how
auditors were—trained to get more information than they gave.

After ten minutes of conversation
she began to feel that they were going in circles. She couldn’t think of
anything more to ask, and the sun had definitely given up trying to warm the
day. She shivered her way back to the truck.

She made a couple of quick stops;
there were always things available in the city that couldn’t be easily obtained
in Taos, and after grabbing a quick burger for lunch she was northbound again
on I-25.

The weekend traffic on the
interstate roared past her.
Sheesh,
she thought as a big black Suburban
with opaque windows nearly took off her rear fender,
am I that much of a
country rube?
I’m not going that slowly.

She watched as the vehicle
crossed three lanes and disappeared at the next exit. She left the northern
boundaries of the city putting the close encounter behind her and beginning to
relax.

With no companions in the truck,
she found herself again thinking about Tito, his last day at work, his drive to
Taos and his final day with his family. What would possess a man to abandon
everything and go underground? When she phrased it that way, she wondered if
perhaps the guy had led some kind of secret life. Bellworth got a lot of
government contracts. Much of the work in Albuquerque and Los Alamos,
particularly, was classified. Maybe he’d seen or heard something on that Friday
at work that he wasn’t supposed to know about.

The Rio Grande rushed counter to
Sam’s northbound heading as she neared Taos, and the final climb to the high
desert revealed the crooked slash of the gorge with the town and mountains
sharp in the distance. The magnificent scene soothed the city stress out of
her.
A person can just never get tired of this,
she thought.

Her speedy trip to Albuquerque
had netted information; she just wasn’t sure what to do with it yet. She should
check on Marla, find out whether she’d been taken to the hospital. But Sam felt
that she should report her findings to Beau first. She pulled out her cell
phone and speed dialed his. He sounded a little distracted but told her to stop
by his office. Apparently his plans for a day off had changed too.

With any luck he would either
reopen the investigation or press hard with the Albuquerque police to do so.
She slowed as the road narrowed into the outpost of Ranchos de Taos, past the
old church famously depicted by Georgia O’Keefe. It soon widened again within
the town limits where curbs and sidewalks were a recent addition.

The sun had dropped low over the
western volcanoes, making her crank up the heater setting one more notch. The
turnoff to her street beckoned but she ignored it and headed toward Beau’s
office. Whether he was interested in opening Tito’s case or not, Sam needed to
see him.

Not many people had business with
the sheriff’s office at dusk on a Saturday, it seemed, and she easily found a
parking spot. The desk officer greeted her with a smile, glancing at her watch
to see if her shift might be nearly over. Apparently not.

“I think he’s in his office,” she
told Sam. “Go on back.” She sighed and went back to some papers.

Since Beau had taken over the job
of sheriff, after the previous man was run out of town in disgrace, he’d
inherited an actual office rather than one of the desks in the open-space squad
room. She walked up to the open door, prepared to tap, but he wasn’t there. She
glanced around and a flash of red caught her attention.

She felt the breath go out of
her. A heart-shaped box of her special chocolates sat on the corner of the
desk, open. Felicia Black had been here.

Sam stared around the squad room
and into the empty interrogation room. Called out to him. Beau was nowhere to
be seen. The lid on the chocolates was propped partway open. Two pieces were
missing. Her heart sank.

She slowly replaced the lid. He’d
eaten some of the candy and she would bet money that Felicia had stood there
and watched him do it. Then she’d probably worked her bright smile and
flirtatious ways on him. Sam felt her temper rise.