No streetlights since they’d left the Plaza, and out here the darkness was a thick, tangible fudge. Even with high beams, the address was easy to miss: discreet copper numerals on a single stone post. Katz overshot, backed up, continued up the sloping drive, slick with patches of frozen water. Five hundred feet of dirt road swooped through a snow-topped piñon corridor. There was no sign of the house until the third turn, but when you saw it, you saw it.
Three stories of rounded angles, free-form walls, and what looked to be a half dozen open patios along with an equal number of covered portales. Pale and monumental against a mountain backdrop, lit subtly by the moon and the stars and low-wattage lighting, it was ringed by a sea of native grass and globules of cactus, dwarf spruce, and leafless aspen branches that shivered in the wind.
For all its size, the place was a harmonious fit with the environment, rising out of sand and rock and scrub like a natural formation.
Officer Debbie Santana’s cruiser sat in front of the quadruple garage that formed the house’s lowest level. It was parked perpendicular, blocking two and a half garage doors. Katz left the unmarked several yards away, and he and Two Moons got out and stepped onto crunchy gravel.
A climb up twenty stone steps took them past a river of shrubs to massive double doors hewn from wood that looked ancient. Nailhead borders, hardware of hand-hammered iron. Above the door a carved plank: HAVEN.
Darrel pushed at the door, and they stepped into an entry hall bigger than Katz’s entire apartment. Flagstone floors, twenty-foot ceilings, some kind of free-form glass chandelier that he figured might be a Chihuly, peach-blush walls of diamond plaster, gorgeous art, gorgeous furniture.
Beyond the entry was a step-down great room with an even higher ceiling and walls that were mostly glass. Officer Santana sat on a tapestry sofa next to Sammy Reed. Reed had gone from weepy to numb.
Darrel said, “Nice place. Let’s tear it apart.”
They spent the next three hours going over six thousand square feet. Learning plenty about Olafson, but nothing that told them a thing about the murder.
A Jaguar sedan, green and sleek, resided in the garage, along with an old white Austin Healey and a red Alfa Romeo GTV. Olafson’s Land Rover had been ID’d in the driveway of the gallery.
They pawed through closets full of expensive clothes, mostly with New York labels. Bankbooks and brokerage accounts said Olafson was more than solvent. Gay and straight porno was stacked neatly in a locked drawer of the media room. Plenty of bookshelves in the leather-walled study, but very few books-mostly coffee-table numbers on art and decorating, and biographies of royals. The borzoi, huge and fleecy white, slept through it all.
Art was everywhere, too much to take in during a single visit, but one painting in the great room caught Katz’s eye: two naked children dancing around a maypole. The pastel tints were of a mellow summer. The kids were around three and five, with fluffy yellow hair, dimpled buttocks, and cherub faces. Given the sappy theme, it could’ve been poster art, but the painter was skillful enough to elevate the image. Katz decided he liked it and checked the signature. Some guy named Michael Weems.
Two Moons said, “Think we should look for kiddie porn?”
That took Katz by surprise, shook him a bit. He checked his partner’s face for irony.
“Eye of the beholder,” said Two Moons, and he headed for Olafson’s desktop computer.
The PC switched on, but the opening screen demanded a password and the detectives didn’t even try.
Bobby Boatwright, a sex-crimes guy on the two to eight-thirty shift, was as good with machines as any techno-head. Let him have a go at it before they bundled it off to the state police forensic lab on Highway 14.
They unplugged the computer and took it along with the printer and battery pack into the entry hall. Then back to the private world of Lawrence Olafson.
Under the four-poster in the regal bedroom, they found a tooled-leather scrapbook. Inside were clipped articles about Olafson.
“What?” said Darrel. “He lulled himself to sleep with ego trips?”
They paged through the album. Most were puff pieces from art magazines, describing the dealer’s latest auction, acquisition, or price-setting sale. But also there were negative pieces: whiffs of deals gone sour, questions about authenticity. Why Olafson kept those was anyone’s guess.
Under the scrapbook was another volume, smaller, bound in cheap green grass cloth. That one held clippings about ForestHaven, including the News-Press story about the small-time ranchers sued by the group.
Bart Skaggs, sixty-eight, and his wife, Emma, sixty-four, had been targeted specifically because they struggled financially to raise five hundred head of beef cattle to market weight, using their federal grazing rights in Carson Forest as collateral against bank loans for feed and stock and equipment. Each year, the interest ate up $31,000 of their $78,000 gross income, but until ForestHaven brought the Skaggses to court using the Endangered Species Act, they’d managed to scrape by.
The suit claimed damage wrought by the Skaggses’ herd was jeopardizing native rodents, reptiles, foxes, wolves, and elk. The judge agreed and ordered the couple to reduce the herd to 420. A subsequent refiling by the group cut that further to 280. Having to shift half their grazing to private land at ten times the cost plunged the Skaggses into red ink. They’d closed down and retired, were now living on a thousand dollars a month in Social Security payments.
“My family’s been ranching these lands since 1834,” said Bart Skaggs. “We withstood every natural disaster you can think of but we couldn’t stand up to crazy radical environmentalists.”
Emma Skaggs was described as “too distraught to comment.”
When asked for his reaction to the couple’s loss, ForestHaven’s board member and chief complainant was unrepentant: “The land is threatened and the land reigns supreme-above any individual’s selfish needs,” said Lawrence Olafson, a well-known art dealer with galleries in Santa Fe and New York City. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Olafson had highlighted his own comments in yellow marker.
“Proud of himself,” said Darrel.
“The land reigns supreme,” said Katz.
They filed the book as evidence and took it with them.
“Breaking eggs,” said Two Moons as they left the house. “That bashed-in head of his.”
Katz raised his eyebrows. His partner had a way with words.
They loaded the computer and its paraphernalia in the trunk of the car, and Katz warmed up the engine.
“The guy,” said Two Moons. “His house has a lot of stuff, but something’s missing.”
“Pictures of his kids,” said Katz.
“Bingo. The ex-wife I can see, but the kids? Not a single picture? So maybe they didn’t like him. Doc said the scene showed lots of anger. That’s how I saw it, too. What’s angrier than a family thing?”
Katz nodded. “We definitely need to track down the kids. Talk to the ex, too. Want to do it before or after we find Bart and Emma Skaggs?”
“After,” said Darrel. “And tomorrow. Those two got shafted. I don’t feel like waking them up at”-he peered at his watch-“four-eighteen. We’re well into overtime, partner.”
4
Katz put on as much speed as the dark, winding roads would allow, and they made it back to the headquarters at Camino Entrada by 4:45.
After logging Olafson’s computer into evidence, they did some preliminary paperwork on the case, agreed to meet for breakfast at nine at the Denny’s down the block from the station, and headed home. Two Moons had the Crown Vic because this was his month for take-home, and Katz made do with his grubby little Toyota Camry. Given the state of his social life, he didn’t need better wheels.