As I was examining a shelf of houseplants, a woman came through a curtained doorway. She was around thirty, blonde, wearing red-rimmed glasses and a sweater to match. Dimples flashed when she smiled.
“Help you?”
“Are you Cammie?”
“That’s right. Cammie Charles. And you are?”
I gave my name, handed her my card, and said, “I just had coffee with Rich Three Wings. He said you might be able to help me out.”
“Sure. What d’you need?”
“Information. I’m cooperating with the sheriff’s department on the Hayley Perez case.”
A shadow crept into her gray eyes. “Poor woman. Rich was really upset when he heard she’d been murdered. I mean, they’d had some bad times, but she was his first love.”
“He didn’t know she was in town. Did you?”
Her gaze slid away from mine, down to an open book of FTD offerings. “Yeah, I did. Bud Smith mentioned it to me when we ran into each other on the street. I figured it was best not to tell Richie.”
“Why?”
“Selfishness, mainly. I didn’t want him to see her and maybe get involved again. She was so pretty…”
“You knew her, then?”
“No. I’m not from around here. I came up from the Bay Area for a vacation, met Richie, and never left. But Hayley came into the shop a couple of weeks ago-the day after Bud was here-to order a funeral arrangement to be sent FTD. I recognized her name from her credit card. She’s not as pretty as the picture of her I found in a box at Richie’s place, but still…”
“You have a record of that sale?”
“Somewhere. Is it important?”
“Might be.”
“Okay.” She rummaged in a drawer under the counter for an order book and paged through it. “Here it is-Jack Buckle, address in Olympia, Washington.”
Jack Buckle sounded very much alive when I called the phone number from the flower shop’s order form. Amused, too.
“Hayley’s idea of a joke,” he told me. “She’s sent me a funeral arrangement each year on the anniversary of the death of our relationship. I pass them on to the local cemetery.”
“So you broke up on October…?”
“October nineteenth, three years and some months after she came up here with me.”
“And you’ve received an arrangement every year since?”
“The first arrived five days after the split. But why does your flower shop need that kind of information?”
I hadn’t told him I was a flower shop employee, had just given him my name. Now I explained myself.
“Hayley’s dead? Murdered?” He sounded genuinely shocked.
“Yes, Mr. Buckle. I’m sorry.”
“… Poor kid. She was a whore, and greedy like they all are, but she didn’t deserve that.”
“Tell me more about her.”
“Let’s see… I was in Reno for an annual high-stakes poker game at a friend’s home. Hayley was serving catered food from the casino to us. Pretty little thing, and afterwards I asked her to come back to my hotel with me. In the course of things she told me that she was with this guy who abused her, that she hated Reno and wanted to get out. So I said, why didn’t she come along home with me? When I took her to their apartment she packed her stuff in fifteen minutes. I brought her back here to Olympia and we had fun till the fun ended.”
“And why did it end?”
“Like I said, whores are greedy. She behaved for a couple of years, acted like a lady even, but I caught her sneaking cash from my wallet. As if I wasn’t footing the bill for everything and also generous with an allowance. Finally, my maid told me Hayley’d been going through my home office, probably looking for the combination to the safe, and practicing signing my signature so she could forge checks.”
“So you threw her out.”
“No, ma’am. I politely told her to leave and asked her where she wanted to go. To tell the truth, I felt sorry for the kid; she’d had a miserable upbringing. I didn’t want to throw her onto the streets with nothing. She said she guessed she’d go to Vegas. So I bought her a plane ticket and gave her a little money to tide her over till she found a job-or another man. She must’ve done all right on one front or the other, because this year’s funeral arrangement was an expensive one.”
“Do you know an attorney in Vegas, Frank Brower, of Brower, Price and Coleman?”
“I’ve heard of him, but I’ve never made his acquaintance.”
“He got Hayley off on a few charges of prostitution.”
“Hard to imagine how she could afford that firm. They’re corporate lawyers for some of the bigger casinos.”
“One other question, Mr. Buckle, and then I won’t take up more of your time: what is it you do for a living?”
“I’m chief counsel for the Northwest Council of God.”
“The…?”
“Northwest Council of God.”
“… Oh.”
He laughed. “I said chief counsel, Ms. McCone. I’m not a member, and I don’t abide by their beliefs, nor do they expect me to. They simply want good legal representation and they pay me a significant retainer.”
“I see.” The pragmatic approach to faith, or lack thereof. “The Mono County Sheriff’s Department will be in touch with you shortly.”
“I’ll cooperate in any way I can.”
Immediately after I ended my call to Jack Buckle, my phone rang. Lark.
“We’ve designated the cabin at Willow Grove as a possible homicide scene,” she said. “We’re asking local pilots to help us out with an air search for a body tomorrow. Would you be willing to join in?”
I wanted to tell her she’d do better with cadaver dogs. It was unlikely a killer would have placed Amy’s body out in the open where anyone could see it, and to a pilot flying at legal altitude over that thickly wooded terrain, a concealed corpse would be damned near impossible to spot.
But to keep on her good side I said, “Sure. Hy’s coming up this afternoon: we’ll both join in. One more thing: this Tom Mathers-I’d like to talk with him.”
“No problem. He’s at Tom’s Wilderness Supplies and Vacations, about five miles out on the Rattlesnake Ranch Cutoff.”
The terrain off Rattlesnake Ranch Cutoff was barren, like Mineral County over in Nevada. A few volcanically created formations stood out in the distance, but otherwise the land was flat and covered by coarse grass and sagebrush. Tom’s Wilderness Supplies and Vacations, an orange-and-purple-trimmed stucco building with racks of rowboats and canoes at the back of the parking lot, was a bright, if gaudy, spot in the surrounding bleakness. A pair of dune buggies were pulled close to the building on the other side from the parking lot.
The building’s interior was fairly large and crammed with all sorts of outdoors gear: backpacks, tents, stoves and lanterns, life jackets, fishing equipment, heavy-duty clothing-if you needed it, it was there. Tom Mathers was also a weapons dealer: guns gleamed in locked cases, in others knives glittered evilly under the fluorescent lights.
Guns I know, understand, and respect for their lethal potential. Knives scare the hell out of me.
The man behind the counter was in his mid-to-late twenties: sandy-haired, sun-freckled and -tanned, with wide shoulders and biceps that bulged beneath his T-shirt. A bodybuilder, I guessed, as well as an outdoorsman. A cheerful one, too: he smiled as if his best friend had just walked in.
“What can I do you for?”
“Are you Tom Mathers?”
“The one and only.”
I went through my friend-of-the-Perez-family, cooperating-with-the-sheriff’s-department routine. Mathers’ smile faded and he shook his head.