Not surprisingly, Carmen had learned more about what had really happened than I had.
When I found her after my interview, she told me that it had indeed been Gibbs, in disguise, who had delivered the Walkman and the duct tape to Holly in the covered dish on the front porch of the Craftsman bungalow. Gibbs’s pitch? She had promised Holly a visit by Sterling, who was offering a carnal encounter in the basement while the turkey was resting on the kitchen counter upstairs. Gibbs instructed Holly to wear the Walkman and follow all the instructions she heard to the letter, which included directions on binding and gagging herself with the tape.
Wow.
I told Carmen I was leaving town and offered her a ride as far as O’Hare in Chicago. She declined. She was determined to stay in South Bend in case there were any loose ends to tie up. What else? She didn’t say so, but I think she still wanted to find that South Bend detective who had called her “ma’am” and then blown her off about Holly’s peril. She wanted to help Orange County win the Gibbs Storey lottery. And she made me promise to tell her what really happened that day between Gibbs and Sterling in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame.
Carmen and I ended up saying good-bye on the sidewalk outside the South Bend PD in one of those poignant moments that I haven’t had many of in my life since I left college. I admit it crossed my mind that had I lingered a little longer in South Bend, Carmen and I might have had only one room that night at the Days Inn, not two.
That was the main reason for staying.
It was also one of the two main reasons for leaving.
The other?
Simon.
I filled the tank in the Cherokee and pointed it toward Minnesota.
I napped away most of the next morning in Angus’s den, and then Simon and I spent a wonderful Friday afternoon arguing whether having turkey and cranberry sandwiches while watching college football the day after Thanksgiving was almost as good as having turkey and stuffing while watching the Lions lose on Thanksgiving.
I lost the argument. I didn’t care.
Sherry and I talked after Simon was in bed for the night. We said what we had to say to each other in about five minutes. I gave Angus a big hug, declined his offer of a bed, and headed south on Interstate 35. I ended up spending the night in a Super 8 in Mason City, Iowa.
Things were feeling a whole lot clearer.
SEVENTY-THREE
It was my first trip to Omaha, ever. Given that it was the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend and given that I was flying standby, I felt lucky to get there at all.
A taxi took me to Sam, who was flat on his back in the University of Nebraska Medical Center. A Puerto Rican nurse named Yashira was being much nicer to him than he deserved. She was refusing to even try to find his “lost” car keys unless he arranged for somebody to drive him back to Colorado.
The somebody was me.
“It felt just like the heart attack. Maybe worse.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
The day before, around lunchtime, Sam had started passing a gallstone he didn’t even know he possessed and had driven himself to the emergency room in Omaha thinking he was having another MI. Two hours of agony in the ER provided enough time for the stone to move on, a one-night stay in the hospital for observation convinced the docs that Sam’s heart was stable, and my presence in Nebraska motivated Yashira to search a little bit harder for his missing car keys.
While I was still trying to find my way out of Omaha, I summed up the obvious. “Kidney stones, gallstones, and heart disease. You’re a picture of health, my friend.”
“Stress might have something to do with it,” he said.
“You think?” I replied.
“That, and the fact I’m fat. Though I might have lost a few pounds. Can you tell?”
Before I found the westbound entrance to I-80, we’d talked a little about Sam’s day-after-Thanksgiving trip up to Minnesota, and I’d answered all his questions about Lauren’s health and the long-term efficacy of Emily’s paw umbrella. The Gibbs and Sterling Storey saga was a little more complicated, though; covering that ground took us almost all the way to Lincoln.
Sterling’s story didn’t surprise Sam. I’d started, of course, at the river in Georgia with Sterling’s contention that he was washed downstream maybe a quarter of a mile before he pulled himself out.
“The Ochlockonee,” Sam had said. “Tell me something. Did he really go down there to help that woman in the minivan?”
“He says he did, but who knows? I don’t think Sterling exactly found God over the past week, Sam. He’s still the same guy he was when he was flying around the country having extramarital sex with strange women.”
“Not just extramaritaclass="underline" recreational. Hell, not just recreationaclass="underline" extreme.”
“Yeah?” I was curious but decided to proceed without the details. “Anyway, an old man with a semi full of chickens gave Sterling a ride as far as Montgomery. He had enough cash with him to make his way back to Colorado to talk to Gibbs.”
“He knew she was setting him up?”
“By then, yes. She basically told him when he was in Tallahassee. He says Gibbs is smart, and he figured she’d done a great job of pinning the murders on him. He came back to Boulder to talk with her, try to straighten things out, see if he could get her to admit what she’d done before your colleagues found him. When he couldn’t find her, he came by my office to give me his side of the story, hoping I could help influence her to give herself up. Then he was going to see a lawyer on Friday, turn himself in, and try to get her picked up. That was his plan, anyway. What a mess.”
“Did he know?” Sam asked. “What she’d been doing?”
“He says he didn’t. In fact, with the exception of Louise-the woman in California-he didn’t even know that any of the women he’d… you know, had these things with… were dead. When the women recontacted him to arrange a follow-up sexual encounter, Gibbs took the message. She was always the liaison anyway. That was her role.”
“Her role?”
“She set everything up for him with the other women. And then she watched. She liked to watch.”
Sam sighed deeply, as though he were trying to get something toxic out of his lungs. “She watched? She told you this?”
“I can’t tell you what she told me. What I’m able to talk about I got from Sterling.”
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Sam said. “After all these years, why did this bust open now?”
“After their move back to Boulder a few months ago, Sterling decided he didn’t want to be married to Gibbs anymore.”
“Ah,” Sam said. “So she was going to lose him anyway. All her efforts at eliminating the competition were for naught.”
“Exactly. She was determined to make sure she didn’t lose him to another woman, though.”
“What was your part?” Sam asked me. “Why’d she bring you in?”
“I’ve been wondering about that. Clinically, I can’t comment. But criminally? I think she needed somebody to help her play the battered wife card. She figured I’d do it.” I sighed. “She figured right. And she wanted someone she could tell things to, somebody who couldn’t tell the cops. And let’s face it, indirectly she used me to get you involved.”
“She needed a channel to the police. I obliged. Gibbs fooled you about where she was the whole time, too, didn’t she?”
“She fooled me about a lot of things, Sam. I was in a better position than anybody to figure out what she was up to, and I didn’t see this coming. I thought she was the victim in that relationship. I was blind to it.”
“Me too,” he said. “She’s good at smoke screens, Gibbs is. She’s so pretty, that’s part of it.” From Sam that constituted quite a confession. I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. He repeated his earlier question. “But she fooled you about where she was?”