“Who rented you the space?”
“Elizabeth Banks at Clear Creek Realty.”
I made a mental note to call Beebee. “Have you heard from your aunts in the last few days?”
“Kay called and said that Carol was flying in from Miami and that we have to have a family meeting on Thursday; something about the Will.”
“Today?”
She looked sheepish, and it was a look that agreed with her. “Is it Thursday?”
“Yep, I think they knocked Wednesday out of you.” I was silent for a moment too long, and she blinked and looked at me. They were fine dark eyes giving a clear view into a very fine mind that continued to operate despite recent abuse. “I’ve got something to tell you, Lana.” It hung there between us as the baseboard heaters ticked in the private room.
“It’s about my grandmother?”
“Yep, it is.” She didn’t move as I told her about the evidence we had assembled; instead, her attention shifted to the knees that were pulled up to provide a resting place for her crossed arms. As I talked, it seemed as though she was drawing in, growing smaller as the world grew colder. I calculated the risk and decided to go ahead. “Lana, do you know about the methane development that’s going on down on your grandmother’s place?”
Thought clouded her eyes for a moment. “Kay is in charge of the estate, but I’m not sure. Carol might be in charge of the ranch. There’s a manager who lives in the old house on Four Brothers.” She shrugged. “I really don’t know.” She was still looking at me when I glanced back up. “You think the same person that killed my grandmother tried to kill me?”
I rubbed my face and looked through my fingers. “I’d rather be chasing one killer than two; it gives me better odds.”
I got all the way to the front desk before Vic accosted me. She was eating an almond cookie. “So did you have to step on every one of the fucking footprints at the bakery?”
“I didn’t want it to be too easy for you.” I leaned against the receptionist’s desk. “I’m assuming you checked those?”
She winked and pulled two more out of a ziplock bag and held them out to me. “That’s what I’m doing now. Want one?”
I shook my head. “I’ll wait till the report’s in.”
She shrugged and ate another cookie. “Naphthalene’s easy to trace in food. The smell is hard to hide.”
“Where’s the high-altitude Mexican?”
“I left him at the office. He went there from Sonny George’s.”
“Anything at the junkyard?”
I noticed she wasn’t smiling. “The bleeders on both the front and rear brakes had been loosened just enough for the fluid to escape. I called Fred Ray over at the Sinclair station, and he said he did a full brake job on the Mercedes about two months ago, and there is no way the car could have lasted that long with them loose.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ll need to talk to Sancho.”
“He’s going through the boxes and cataloging the crap from Mari Baroja’s room which, I might add, is a lot of crap cataloging.” She looked off toward the windows and casually walked over to the waiting room to watch the snowfall. “Letters, boxes, and boxes of letters, notes, and telegrams. You name it. If it was written, she kept it.”
“That may be handy.”
“Yeah, we got her whole life in boxes.” She turned, and her eyes locked onto mine. “Note the phrase whole life in boxes and note that Sancho is at the office. When we got there this morning, there were the cartons. We found out that the staff at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had taken it upon themselves to box up Mari Baroja’s life, send it to us, and clean the fucking room.”
I could feel my jaw muscles tightening. “I guess they didn’t notice the bright yellow tape across the door that says SHERIFF’S BARRICADE DO NOT CROSS?”
“Maybe they can’t read.” She cocked her head and continued to look at me. “Are you going to get really mad? ’Cause I like it when you get really mad.”
I ignored her. “Anything in the letter boxes?”
“Well, we’re just getting started, and a lot of it’s in Basque, so Sancho’s the only man for the job. A couple of letters from Northern Rockies Energy Exploration, pretty straight forward stuff, and all of it from Baroja-Calloway down in Miami.”
She waited, the tarnished gold of her eyes lying heavily upon me. Then she pulled what looked like a stack of assorted letters from her other jacket pocket. They were old and tied together with a faded piece of red fringe that had been pulled from the edge of a scarf. It looked like the one that had blown across the Powder River and had snagged on the European blue sage that I had seen in my dream. I carefully took the stack of thin paper and looked down at the address: Room 201, The Euskadi Hotel, Durant. In a swirling hand, the letters were addressed from Lucian.
“I thought you might want these.”
I nodded and looked at the fragile letters with the faded words and the worn fuzzy edges. Words like accessory to commit fraud, conspiracy, tampering, and a myriad of others hung there in the small space between us. I glanced up at her, but she was watching the snow, and I stood there for a moment, looking at the reflection in her eyes before quietly shoving the letters in my own jacket pocket.
She remained silent for a moment, then reached out to place the tip of her forefinger against the glass, and I saw her as a child, the kind of child who had to touch everything, the kind of child you couldn’t say no to. I had a child like that and reminded myself to ask Ruby if I could expect Cady by Christmas. “So, are you going to go over to the Home for Assisted Living and assist the staff in an ass-chewing or what?”
I ignored her some more. “No moth balls?”
She licked her cookie-crumb lips. “No moth balls.” She held the bag out to me again. “Last one.” She smiled. “So… you think we should have a look at Mari Baroja’s last Will and Testament?”
I looked through the glass doors of the hospital at the gentle but ever-falling precipitation. “We should be thankful for the snow, it’s probably the only thing that’s holding Baroja-Lofton-Baroja-Calloway at bay.”
“Oh, the hyphen-harpies called.”
I sighed. “When?”
She finished off the last almond cookie and stuffed the bag in the inside pocket of her coat. “This morning. I’m assuming they are assembling for the charge.”
“Well, that’s my problem. If there’s nothing over at the bakery, then I guess you should go back to the home. Get the names of everybody who went into that room. Start fingerprinting with the easy stuff, get what you can from contrasting powder and silicon lifts, superglue fuming, and simple photography. Hit the AFIS. It’s a long shot, but you never know.” She was already nodding and smiling. “What?”
“I love it when you talk dirty.”
I nodded and self-consciously adjusted the brim of my hat. “I want the names of everybody who was in that room, and I want all of them in my office at exactly 3:45 or I come and get them. Remind them that if I have to come and get them that I will not be happy. We will impress upon them the seriousness of our line of work by fingerprinting all of them in the jail.”
She looked at her watch. “What’re you going to do between now and 3:45?”
“Find the Will.”
She continued to smile. “The will to what?”
“That would be Jarrard and Straub.”
“That was your old firm. Do you remember any of the details?”
He reshaped the corner of his mustache and smiled. “It was not a close relationship. I think the law made her uneasy.”
Amen.
“When was her Will attested?”
“Which one?”
I studied him for a moment. “Oh, now why do I not like the sound of that?”
Vern leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “She was of a mercurial disposition and, according to her mood toward her children and grandchild…” He paused. “This is all completely off the cuff and an old cuff at that. You understand that I had already left the firm?” I nodded for official purposes while he captured the front of his mustache in his lower lip and thought. “The last one that I saw was a three-way split, straight up the middle.”