This was working out well.
It had been a couple of hours since she’d spotted Max walking along the roadside. He would have made it to town by now. Tess had the dispatcher send out an Attempt to Locate on the actor Max Conroy. In case there was a deputy or PD officer who didn’t know what Max Conroy looked like, she uploaded a photo of him from the film and television site IMDb.
She called Pat again. “How’s it going there?”
“About what you’d expect. Bloody and stinky.”
“I need to run down the lead we were talking about—Max Conroy. I think he might have made it to town. I need a deputy here until our property and evidence unit gets here.”
Bajada County’s property and evidence unit consisted of one part-time crime scene technician and a volunteer who had taken a community college course on gathering evidence. They would be responsible for delivering the evidence to the Arizona Department of Public Safety crime lab.
“We need everyone we got,” Pat said. “This is one massive fricking crime scene.”
“I’ll stay here, then.”
“Yeah, that’s the right call.” He added, “You put out the Attempt to Locate. Don’t need to go running around like you’re the Lone Ranger.”
“Roger,” she said, and clicked off.
She sat in the shade of a mesquite, waited for property and evidence, and monitored dispatch.
And waited.
And tried to picture Max. Max getting the jump on Luther, Sam, and Corey, and killing them all.
She wondered why he’d do that. Why a movie star would go to Sam’s house and get the three of them down into the bomb shelter and kill them?
She thought about the last she’d seen of him, at the diner. He’d seemed normal to her then. But what was normal?
Tess called the deputy who’d been first on the scene. “Do you know why you were dispatched to the house?”
“Somebody called it in. God, I lost my lunch. It was like something out of a horror movie. Never saw anything like it.” He sounded embarrassed.
Tess said, “Somebody called it in. What did the dispatcher say?”
“An unknown person was trying to break into Sam’s place.”
Tess needed to hear the recording. She made a note of it. “That was what they said? They saw somebody trying to break in. Was it a man or a woman?”
“Man. The dispatcher said ‘he.’ ”
“When you arrived, what did you see?”
“What you saw. The carport, all shot up. Broken glass everywhere. The door was open.”
“What led you to the bomb shelter?” she asked.
“There were drag marks on the floor. And blood. I already gave you guys my statement.”
“I know,” Tess said. “I was just hoping you’d think of something new this time around.”
“It was hard to think, after what I saw.”
“I know the feeling.”
She disconnected and called the dispatcher. Toni cued up the recording, which came from an anonymous source.
Tess closed her eyes and listened. “There are two people trying to break into a house on Ocotillo Road. It’s the last house on the left.”
Max Conroy’s voice.
“Could you repeat that?”
Toni cued it up again and played it.
There are two people. Trying to break in.
“Is there any way to trace the phone?”
“No. We could spend a day or two to pin down the location, but—”
“We already know the location.” Tess disconnected and stared out at the middle distance. The clouds were amassing; the air was hot and humid. But so far, no rain.
If Max killed those three people, why did he call it in?
Unbidden, the image of the woman and the boy at Joe’s Auto-Wash came to her. The woman who’d bought a truck for Sandstone Adventures and dressed up to do it.
The woman who had stared right through her. Whose presence made the hair stand up on Tess’s arms.
Tess knew it was never a good idea to jump to conclusions. But as she set the phone down, the voice in her mind said, There’s your killer.
GORDON WAS GETTING worried—still no word from Shaun, and she wasn’t answering her phone. What was she doing? Paradox wasn’t that far away—she should be pulling into the healing center any minute with Max in tow. But he had not heard word one from her.
Then he turned on the news, and that was when he realized she’d gone too far. Three people slaughtered in a bomb shelter in Paradox, Arizona. Of course there were no names. But already on CNN he could see the deputies traipsing around the sunbaked property. Saw a gurney with a body bag strapped to it being rolled out the door.
Could one of those bodies belong to Max? God, no.
His phone chirped—Jerry.
Gordon didn’t want to answer now.
This was one mother-loving mess, and if Max turned up a bloody pulp—and the paparazzi were able to get a photo—his legendary status would be a thing of the past.
In this day of instant gratification and overt bribery, Gordon had no doubt that if one of the corpses was Max, someone had already gotten a candid shot of him with a cell phone.
And that photo would quickly make its way to the Internet. No question about that.
In which case, Max’s value would plummet, and they’d be left holding a very unappetizing bag. And knowing Jerry, Gordon knew he’d hear about it for the rest of his life.
The desk phone rang. He didn’t bother to look at the readout. “All right, Jerry. What now?”
“No, sir, this is Drew,” Gordon’s assistant said. “There’s a call for you.”
“I don’t want to talk now.”
“You might want to talk to this one, sir. She’s with the Bajada County Sheriff’s Office. Detective Tess McCrae.”
JERRY LISTENED AS Gordon’s phone went to voice mail. He waited for the tone and yelled, “Gordon, will you tell me what the hell is going on? I’m going out there!” He slammed the phone on the granite kitchen island and a piece of plastic flew off, almost hitting him in the eye. This made him angrier, so he took the phone and beat it against the edge of the island until it disintegrated.
Talia stood in the doorway, her eyes wide. “What happened?”
“Turn on the TV and see for yourself!”
She grabbed the remote from the desk and turned on the television. Horny Housewives was on. Jerry grabbed the remote from her and muttered, “The news, dammit.”
Three men had been shot to death in a home outside Paradox, Arizona. Their names had not been released yet, pending notification to their families.
“So what now?” Talia asked, her voice calm. Too calm. Had she taken another Xanax?
“So what now?” he repeated, parroting her “poor little me” voice. “We have to find out if Max was one of them. It’s probably best not to panic yet.” He stared at his broken smartphone. “Maybe there’s a way out. If they didn’t destroy his face. But you know it will come out. All the details. There will be at least one blurry corpse picture.” He stared at his new wall of storyboard scenes. Not worth the cheap paper they were drawn on, now.
He needed to calm down. For all he knew, Max wasn’t involved in the killing at all.
But his gut told him there was no way he wasn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Six
WHEN JIMMY MET up with Shaun at the Subway, they had lunch. Jimmy had a spectacular appetite, and Shaun enjoyed watching her boy eat. Her heart filled with love as she watched him. He was always intent on his food, like a wolf or a mountain lion, and she liked that she could see the predator in him.