The Deader the Better (40 page)

“Get out of here,” I said. “Take the rental.”

“You?”

I’d thought about leaving, but there was no way it would float.
In the next couple of hours, state cops were about to start pulling
electronic surveillance equipment out of city offices. Half of city
government was on the lam. Two city cops were going to turn up
missing. “I leave now, they’ll be waiting in my driveway for me
when I get home.”

He nodded. “They’re really gonna hate misplacing two cops.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll probably be a while.”

Floyd wiped his dripping face with a soaked-through sleeve.
Grimaced.

“Don’t forget the bag,” I said, pointing to the pale green
pillowcase resting on the lawn. All the guns were in the bag. Floyd’s
rifle and the police riot gun we’d broken down into pieces and
thrown into the sack on top of the three handguns. We shook hands. A
trickle of water fell from the flattened tip of his nose.

“I’ll see they get half a ferry ride,” he said.

THE TRUCK WAS RUNNING AND SO WAS SHE. RAMONA Haynes staggered out
the back door of her house carrying a suitcase nearly as big as she
was. She used both hands to swing the bag up onto the edge of the bed
and then pushed it over the side. She looked up, breathing hard, and
finally saw me standing there.

“You sorry son of a bitch,” she shouted. “What are you doing
here?”

“Just wanted to see you off,” I said.

She started to lie, to tell me it just looked like she was leaving
town, but changed her mind. She went back into the house. I’d
changed into dry clothes. Found a yellow rain jacket in the cabin.
Probably Claudia’s. It was too small to fasten, so I held it closed
at the neck, listening to the rain smacking the hood. She came back
out with a matching garment bag and rolling suitcase. Threw them into
the truck.

“I’m going to—”

I cut her off. “You’re going to get your ass out of town while
you still can,” I said. She started to open her mouth, but I kept
talking. “It had to be you. None of the rest of those dolts could
plan their way out of a paper bag. You’re the only one with the
drive and the initiative to put something like this together.” She
set her jaw and kept silent. “Your chin is red,” I said. “Must
be the exertion that does it.”

She put her hands on her hips and sneered. “Well…that’s the
only way you’re going to see it, isn’t it, then…you pathetic,
impotent bastard?”

“Whoa, now,” I said. “I said I wouldn’t, not that I
couldn’t. What say we don’t confuse the two?”

The rain rolled off the plastic jacket, wetting my jeans from the
knees down.

She turned and started for the door. Stopped and turned back my
way. “Do you have any idea what it is you ruined? I mean, do you
have even the slightest glimmer about how many lives you’ve screwed
up?”

“Like the Springers’?”

She began to shout. “They didn’t amount to anything,”

she screamed. “They were afterthoughts. Nothings. Their families
didn’t give their whole lives to settling this valley. They haven’t
spent a hundred thirty years trying to wring some sort of a life out
of the land.” She waved her arms about. “They just show up one
day and expect everything to come to a halt because they want to
start their little fishing business.” She dropped a hand
disgustedly to her side. “If you’d just stayed the hell out of
it, we could have saved this town. We could have revitalized this
whole end of the valley. And you—”

“And become millionaires in the process.”

Something in her snapped. She began to shout. “Why not? It’s
my birthright. That stupid son of a bitch lost everything. Gambled it
away in some stupid Indian casino, until I was left with
nothing…nothing but”—she waved at the house—“this hovel and
a few hundred useless acres of land that still technically belonged
to my mother…or they would have taken that, too.” She kicked the
door closed.

“Everything. The idiot lost everything.”

“You saw a way to put it all back together, didn’t you?” I
prodded. “But you weren’t sure it could be done altogether
legally. So you kept the property in your mother’s name and brought
in Nathan Hand to handle any complaints.”

“It should have been easy,” she said. “Just one old man.”

“An old man who wouldn’t sell.”

“All we had to do was wait. He was ancient.”

“Except Nathan Hand got impatient and tried to hustle things
along. So he shot the old man’s dog.”

Her surprise was visible. “How…” she started.

“Pissed the old man off, so, just to spite you, he sold it to
the only guy he knew who wouldn’t sell it back to you at any price.
A guy he figured you couldn’t run off, either.”

“We had him, too. He was no more that sixty days from going
under.”

I already knew the answer, but I decided to say it anyway.

“And, just in case his life wasn’t fucked up enough already,
you started running your number on him, didn’t you? And nobody
escapes from that tender little trap of yours, do they?”

She brushed her hair back from her face. “He was easy,”

she said. “Just like the rest of you little boys. Stuck out
there with those snot-nosed kids and that cow of a wife. His life
coming apart. J.D. needed a shoulder to cry on.” She smiled.

“Unlike you, his equipment worked.”

“Same way you kept the Pinkerton guy from Loomis hanging around,
while you kept trying to put the deal back together. Coming back over
and over. The deal must have been good, or else the company wouldn’t
have kept footing the bill, but I’m betting you were a whole lot
better.”

“
You’ll
never know, now will you?” she sneered.

“I’m figuring maybe Nathan Hand, too.” Despite her best
efforts, I could see that I’d hit a nerve. “The way he deferred
to you in public,” I said, shaking my head. “Money or no money,
most men I know only put up with that level of crap from women
they’re sleeping with.” Her lip curled as she opened her mouth to
speak.

I’ll never know for sure if my guess about the sheriff was true.
As Floyd and I knew only too well, Hand wasn’t going to be filling
us in, and before she could utter another word, her eyes went wide;
that pulled my head around. State cops. Two cars. Four cops. No guns
this time. For questioning. Both of us.

BILLY HEFFERNEN
DUMPED THE PLASTIC EVIDENCE BAG out onto the table. Five cameras,
five mikes. All wearing little white tags that told where they’d
been found and by whom. Jed reached over and touched the back of my
hand.
Don’t
touch
,
was the message.

Billy’s ears were bright red. “And you’re going to sit there
and try to tell me that you don’t know anything about this.”

“Perhaps you should take notes,” Jed suggested. “We’ve
answered this query at least four times. My client has no knowledge
of either that equipment or how it came to be found in whatever
nefarious locations your minions supposedly uncovered it.”

Billy kept his eyes locked on mine. “We’re going to sort this
out. Count on it.”

Jed yawned mightily into the back of his hand. “Sorry,” he
said. He shot a glance my way. “It’s been a long week.”

Billy started in on a litany of the technological innovations by
which the state crime lab was going to link the surveillance gear
directly to me and thus seal my doom. I tried not to look smug. They
were going to find nothing. No sales receipts, no fingerprints, no
hairs, no nada. Whatever the crew’s moral failings, they were
professionals. Way I saw it, if crime lab threats and hoping I’d
touch the evidence were the best Billy Heffernen could muster, then
Jed must have been right to begin with.

Jed had arrived at the Peninsula County Jail at about seventhirty
Thursday night. Maybe six hours after they’d hauled me in for
questioning. He’d looked tired. His tie was pulled down, the seat
of his pants sagging a bit. He ran his hand over his head.

“Sorry it took so long,” he said.

“Thanks for coming again.”

“I’ve been out there for an hour,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Being threatened.”

“With?”

“Oh…a waltz before the judicial ethics committee…possible
prison time for conspiracy…accessory both before and after the
fact…which, of course, means…” he let it hang in the air like
smoke.

“Yeah?”

“I mean, they brought out the first team, Leo. Hell, the
Peninsula County DA himself is out there casting aspersions about
both our mamas.”

“Which means?” I prompted.

“They don’t have shit,” he said with a smile. “I’ve
never heard such a raft in all my life.” He patted me on the
shoulder. “Stonewall,” he said. “You know the drill. You’d
prefer not to speak other than in the presence of your attorney, and
your attorney is going home for the weekend.” He started for the
cell door.

I hated the idea of spending the weekend in jail. “Am I under
arrest?”

“You’re being held as a material witness. As things stand
right now, you’re not charged with anything.”

I did the math. Material witnesses can be held without bail or
charge for seventy-two hours. I counted on my fingers. Thursday
afternoon till Sunday afternoon, which, in the jurisprudence
business, was the same thing as Monday morning.

“Yeah…go home,” I’d said.

Billy now scraped the electronic gear back into the evidence bag.
Jed yawned again and got to his feet. “I take it we’re finished,
then?”

Billy looked over at the assistant DA, who stood against the far
wall. The ADA said, “Yes…for the moment, you can go.” Heavy on
the “for the moment.”

I stood up and followed Jed toward the door. Billy stopped me with
a hand on my chest. “May I have a private word with your client?”
he asked Jed.

Jed looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. Jed and
the ADA closed the door behind them. “I’m going to give you one
last chance, Leo,” he said.

“For old times’ sake.”

“Call it anything you want.” The muscles along his jaw looked
like knotted rope. He stood there staring holes in me. He was a good
cop doing what the state of Washington paid him to do, so I tried to
help him out.

“All I’ll say is this, Billy. There’s an old man here in
this town who’s sitting in a rocking chair waiting to die, because
everything that mattered to him is gone. And there’s a family over
on the mainland whose husband and father doesn’t come home anymore
because somebody shot him in the face and then burned his body to a
cinder.” I took a deep breath.

“As far as I’m concerned, other than them, everybody else
connected with this case is getting exactly what they deserve.”

Billy’s voice rose in this throat. “I’ve got two dead
bodies. I’ve got a couple public officials upstairs pointing
fingers at each other. A couple more who seem to have packed up and
taken unscheduled vacations. And most interestingly, I’ve got two
missing cops, who you claim are dirty, and who don’t seem to have
packed a damn thing before they went missing in a city patrol car.
You want to help me out here?”

“Justice has been served as well as it’s going to be,” I
said.

“That’s not your call, goddammit,” he snapped.

“Sometimes…” I began. Thought better of it. Stopped. “I
said everything I’ve got to say, Billy. Can I go now?”

He walked over and put his face in mine. “Listen to me, you
arrogant bastard. I put my best crew on this. There’s no way—”
Same old, same old. I interrupted.

“Me, too,” I said and headed for the office door. For the
first time in four days, the rain had stopped. The air smelled like
it had been washed and hung out to dry. My get-out-of-jail party had
dwindled to one black Lexus. I got in.

“Where to?” Jed asked.

“Home,” I said.

WE STOOD ON EITHER SIDE OF THE KITCHEN SINK, where we could keep
an eye on Alicia and Adam running around the backyard. Claudia
Springer held her cup of tea with both hands. “I got a card from
Rebecca,” she said tentatively.

“New address and phone number?”

She nodded and blew the steam from the top of her cup.

“We’re going to try something different for a while.”

Anyway, that’s what we were telling people. I still wasn’t
sure what the problem was, so I was definitely a bit fuzzy as to why
we needed separate residences in order to process the
situation…whatever the hell that meant. She’d been gone when I
got back. She rented an apartment somewhere in ever-so-trendy
Belltown. Hired movers to come and get the stuff she wanted. Said it
was only temporary, but my insides told me different. Except for the
past year, I’d spent the majority of my adult life living by
myself. And yet I felt totally unprepared for the empty feeling
inside my body. It was as if there was no place in the house that was
mine, just a succession of spaces that invited me to move on to the
next. We’d agreed to let a couple of weeks pass before we talked
about it. I figured I could live with it for that long. At least,
that’s what I was telling myself.

“I saw on the news”—she took a sip of tea—“about the
scandal in Stevens Falls. The TV station and how everybody was bugged
and everything. And the steamroller thing blocking the door and that
naked guy with the note.”

So had everyone else in the Pacific Northwest. The tape had played
for the better part of nine hours before a city maintenance crew had
managed to jackhammer their way through the wall. By that time, half
the people on the peninsula had recorded the juicy parts. The media
were having a field day. The cops found Tressman holed up in a roach
motel in Aberdeen, trying to work up the courage to blow his brains
out. Yesterday, when I spoke with Judge Bigelow on the phone, he said
that he’d heard they were rolling over on one another like trained
seals. Blaming each other for the scheme and the dirty work on Nathan
Hand. Claudia set the cup on the counter. “Was that…uh…us?”