No, Annie was hiding something. The mystery intrigued him.
Then he smiled at himself, amused by his self-deception. Impersonal curiosity alone would hardly have prompted him to call Gary with a request for information, or to respond so eagerly to his friend’s invitation, a half hour ago, to meet at this tavern and review what he’d learned.
He was… interested in Annie Reilly. True, he barely knew her, had hardly seen her at her best, and probably hadn’t come off too well in her eyes, either. Even so, he was interested.
The date of birth in her M.V.D. file was March 12, 1966. She had just turned thirty. Could pass for twenty-five.
Walker himself was thirty-five, and he was aware that he came off as older than his age; cops often did.
No particular reason to think it could work between them.
Still…
In the photo portrait she had been smiling. She did have a lovely smile. And her green eyes, mischievous and alert-he much preferred them to Erin’s cool gray gaze.
He supposed he’d agreed to look into Erin’s disappearance a little more deeply for the simple reason that he wanted to see Annie again.
Most cops were extroverts, but he had always been rather shy around women, especially women he found attractive. Shy and slow to act. Sometimes too slow.
Rotating his glass, watching chips of ice twirl like glass fragments in a kaleidoscope, he thought back to a party he’d attended last year. In the crush of people, mostly strangers to him, he’d bumped into a dark-haired woman with a quick smile and an intensely perceptive gaze. Her name was Caroline.
They talked for a while, first shouting above the din of conversation, then retreating to a quieter part of the house. Walker was reasonably sure she wanted him to ask her out, but something made him hesitate. Then they got separated, and later in the evening she left with another man.
He heard nothing further of her for months, until the friend who’d thrown the party reported casually that Caroline- You remember her, don’t you, Mike? — had gotten married. She meets the guy at my party, and next thing I know, I’m watching them exchange vows at the altar. Go figure.
Sometimes in the lonely post-midnight hours, Walker thought of Caroline. He wondered what would have happened if he’d been quicker to act on his feelings that night.
Nothing, probably. It was ridiculously romantic, an adolescent delusion, to think that if she’d left the party with him, she would be his wife today.
But how many similar opportunities had he missed? How many relationships had failed because he hadn’t stated his feelings, hadn’t risked intimacy, hadn’t said I love you when the words were clearly called for?
He didn’t want to make that mistake with Annie. Didn’t want to add her name to the roll of lost chances and might-have-beens. Didn’t want to think of her, with regret, on sleepless nights alone.
“Hey, Mike.”
He looked up from his drink and saw Gary Kendall slide into the banquette opposite him.
“Gary.” Walker reached across the table to shake hands. “Hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you too much.”
A sunny shrug. “No problem, my man.”
As usual, Gary looked like a recent arrival from L.A.-chinos, baggy Lakers T-shirt, mirrored sunglasses tipped back on his forehead. People sometimes mistook him for a tourist.
In fact, however, he had never lived in L.A.-or anywhere outside of Tucson, for that matter. He talked of relocating to The Coast, as he called it, but there was no chance of that; he liked his job too much to leave it.
For the past two years he had been associate metro editor of the Tucson Standard, and though the stories he covered rarely involved more than car accidents and labor disputes and the endless controversy over the quality of the city’s water supply, he seemed to regard himself as a true journalistic crusader, some mythical amalgam of Woodward and Bernstein or, better yet, Redford and Hoffman.
“Truth is,” Walker said, “it’s probably not that important. I’m not even sure why I thought it was worth pursuing.”
“A hunch, maybe? The kind that TV cops are known for?”
“Could be.”
“Well, if so, good buddy, you just may have qualified for your very own series.”
Walker blinked at him. He was about to ask what that meant when the waitress stopped at the table.
“Get you something?” she asked Gary.
“Beer.”
“We got Bud, Coors, Heineken, Amstel Light-”
“Corona.” He’d heard they drank a lot of that in L.A.
When the waitress was gone. Walker leaned forward. “You were telling me my hunch paid off.”
“Big-time.” Gary removed two folded sheets of paper from his pants pocket. “I visited the morgue, looked up the relevant articles. All that stuff is on microfilm, natch. I mean, we’re going back a long way.”
“How long?”
“Nineteen sixty-eight. That’s when Lincoln Connor offed himself.”
“Lydia’s husband?”
“Right. They lived in the area. Look, I’d better start at the beginning.”
Before he could, the waitress returned with a bottle of Corona and a glass. Gary paid with a bill. “Keep the change.”
Pouring the beer, then sipping it, he told the story. Across the room, the pianist played “How High the Moon” and soothed his sore throat with a cigarette.
“Lincoln and Lydia had a son, Oliver Ryan. In 1968, at age eighteen, Oliver ran away from home. It made the paper because he stole a neighbor’s car to do it. His parents confirmed there’d been a family fight. That was in July.
“Few days later, stolen car turns up in the mountains near Prescott. Still no word on Oliver. But three weeks after that, a Tucson dentist, friend of the Connor clan, is in the Prescott area on vacation, and he spots Oliver. Kid’s joined up with a tribe of hippies camping near Granite Mountain.
“The dentist goes up to Oliver, tells him his mom’s worried sick and he ought to come home. Oliver gives what the Standard described as an unprintable reply.”
“Wasn’t the kid wanted for auto theft?” Walker interrupted.
“Yeah, but the dentist is hardly in a position to make a citizen’s arrest while surrounded by hostile anti-Establishment types in the woods. Once he makes his report, some local deputies go looking for Oliver, but by then the counterculture crowd has cleared out.
“Now here’s the interesting part. Four days later, Lincoln disappears.”
“The father?”
“Right. Turns out the dentist wasn’t exaggerating when he said Lydia was worried sick; she had a nervous breakdown right after Oliver ran off, has been recuperating at Tucson Medical Center for nearly a month. Friends say Lincoln’s irrationally angry at Oliver. He blames his wife’s condition on the boy, says Oliver’s brought disgrace on the Connor family. So the supposition is that Lincoln’s gone off to find his son and drag him home to face the music.
“Finally, the climax of our little drama. I printed out this article. Read for yourself.”
He unfolded one sheet of paper and pushed it across the table. Walker picked it up.
MURDER-SUICIDE IN PRESCOTT NATIONAL FOREST
Prescott-The bodies of two individuals tentatively identified as Lincoln Connor, 46, of 100 E. Ravine Road in the Tucson area, and his son, Oliver Ryan Connor, 18, were found yesterday in an isolated part of Prescott National Forest near Iron Springs, local authorities said.
Edward Winslow, chief deputy coroner of Yavapai County, said that both victims apparently died of shotgun blasts to the head. A Remington Model 870 12-gauge shotgun with a sawed-off barrel, a weapon known to belong to the elder Connor, was found in Lincoln Connor’s hand, he added.
“ It appears that Lincoln Connor first killed his son, then turned the gun on himself,” Mr. Winslow said. “No suicide note has been recovered.”
Friends of the family report that Lincoln Connor had expressed hostility and rage toward his son since Oliver ran away from home on July 10, allegedly stealing a neighbor’s 1962 Buick Roadmaster.