The sun was low enough now for every stunted little bush to cast a long shadow. The graded dirt road wound through hills up onto the bajada. He turned off onto what was little more than a two-track out to the old mining buildings. The last time there had been a real road out to them had to be in the twenties. Now it was just twin paths that hunters used through the ocotillo and prickly pear cactus. But Jack Godin, who liked to fly his Piper Cub all over God’s green acre, said he’d spotted a wrecked car over by the slag heap.
A newly wrecked car, since a few people had dumped cars there over the years.
Jack was a teller of tall tales, but Gus knew he wouldn’t flat-out lie.
As he approached the old buildings from Belvedere Mining Company, the smell of burning came through the air vents.
He stopped outside the building. The many-paned windows at the front had been shot out by kids or by hunters or both, and the place was strewn with junk. He drove on past the mining building, up the steep road to the slag pile. He rounded the hill and parked on the little turnout and walked out to the edge, looking down the slag heap. The shadows slanting down in the red glare, the brown, black, and purple slag glittering here and there where the sun hit it. Down below he saw the long rectangular shape of a car lying on its side.
He called it in.
Couldn’t get down there—not with his knees.
Gus stepped out of the SUV and, gun drawn, walked along the edge of the slag heap, looking for movement. The light getting dimmer by the minute. He almost tripped over a rock, and looked down. The rock had been painted crimson, looked like. Kind of resembled a man’s head.
Vomit shot out of him like a projectile missile when he realized it was a head.
THE BAJADA SHERIFF’S Department had access to the automated fingerprint system. Marge, a ranch woman turned part-time deputy, was the go-to person for fingerprints. Marge rescued dogs and always had one of the smaller ones with her. You always knew when she was coming your way because the doggy smell preceded her.
Pat didn’t have to smell her, though; he was still at the slaughterhouse on Ocotillo Road. Marge told him the fingerprints on Jensen’s truck came back to one Max Conroy. Apparently, before Conroy became the world’s biggest dreamboat, he’d spent three semesters teaching auto mechanics at a community college in Fullerton—the system required every teacher be fingerprinted. A lucky break.
So Max Conroy stole the truck, which, along with the kidnap video, put him right here on the stretch of road running right by the house on Ocotillo. Turned out his fingerprints were also all over the crime scene in the bomb shelter, as well as the carport and inside the Chevelle and the Saturn.
Amazing how that happened.
But he’d been acting strange at the cafe yesterday morning. Pat thought at the time that Conroy had been disconnected from the proceedings. In his own little world. Pat remembered Tess McCrae’s recounting of the men in the limo giving Max a hard time.
And now this: Gus Stenholm’s photos of the car wreck at the Rosasite Mine slag heap, sent via his cell phone. The car was a stretch limo. Gus had also sent a picture of a man’s head on the ground—it looked like a misshapen beet.
Jesus.
Pat didn’t know if the head belonged to Hogart or Riis—or if the head belonged to either one of them—but he was pretty sure that both Hogart and Riis were dead. Unless they’d pushed their own limo off the slag heap, which defied logic.
The body count was rising. Three dead in the house, and probably two at the mine. Max Conroy had been busy.
Pat knew Conroy was unstable—and that was a polite word for it. He’d sensed that from the moment he’d sat down with Tess and Max. No surprise that Max thought he could do anything he wanted, even kill. Hollywood was a cesspool. All those hijinks, everybody sleeping with everybody else, out-of-wedlock babies—and they were proud of it—the drugs, the alcohol, the silly liberal causes—they thought they were entitled.
He called Bonny. “I’m gonna need more help, now there’s a secondary crime scene. Where’s Tess?”
“She’s been advised of the secondary crime scene at the slag heap. But right now she’s working the case from another angle,” Bonny said.
At that moment, Pat could have thrown his phone against the wall.
It wasn’t right. Here he was, with two bloody scenes and no help. They were both detectives. He was still a detective. Bonny should tell him where Tess had gone. But he wasn’t about to ask. No way he’d give Bonny the satisfaction.
All he said was, “I could use her here.”
“I’m sure you could,” Bonny said. He sounded sympathetic but unmovable. “As soon as she’s available, she’ll meet you at the scene.”
As soon as she’s available.
To hell with him.
To hell with them all.
For a moment Pat was temped quit right then and there. But he was six months away from retirement. His mother always told him, “Don’t cut your nose off to spite your face.” He swallowed his bile. “Anything else?”
“You measured the scene and collected evidence?”
No, I’ve been lunching at the Casbah. “You mean doing my job? Yeah.”
“Sorry,” Bonny said. “I was just thinking out loud. When do you think you can get to the mine?”
“Soon. I’m gonna need some help, though.”
“I can send another deputy, but we’re running out of them,” Bonny said. “Never saw anything like this—five homicides that we know of. It’s a good thing I have you both working this.”
Pat swallowed again. He had to take it. He had no choice. And meanwhile, Tess McCrae was out doing God knew what, following “leads,” looking for the bad guys with that X-ray vision of hers.
Sometimes, X-ray vision wasn’t enough. Sometimes it took years of working as a detective, years of putting in the time, the late nights, the long days, to know what you were doing. To be a real detective.
Four years in Albuquerque didn’t quite do it, Pat thought. No matter how talented you were.
Chapter Thirty-One
JERRY FOLLOWED TALIA off the jet and into the silver Range Rover with the Desert Oasis insignia on the side. The Desert Oasis Healing Center logo was the proud but Roman-nosed profile of a Plains Indian, maybe a Sioux warrior, against a background of what he could only guess were the concentric circles of an open-pit mine. The guy driving the Range Rover was dressed like an Australian and had an annoying fake Australian accent. But Talia liked him. Jerry could tell because Talia was all over Jerry, doing it for the fake Australian’s benefit. She’d been on strike sexually, but now feathered kisses along his neck and reached down between his legs. Fortunately, the leather man purse she’d bought for him for Christmas and insisted he take everywhere was between her long lacquered nails and his genitalia.
You can take the actress out of the trailer park…“You have to excuse our friend here,” Jerry said. “She was so upset over Max’s disappearance, she took one Xanax too many.”
“That’s all roight—I’ve seen it all before, mighty,” the fake Aussie said. “We’ll be there in two shikes of a lamb’s tile!”
Gordon met them in his usual regalia. The fringed deer hide jacket was white this time. But Gordon looked pale under his tan and seemed distracted. Normally, his gaze was a laser. His voice was a laser. His personality was a laser. But now he looked…stunned.
“What’s up?” Jerry asked, not expecting a real answer. Gordon wasn’t into sharing. He liked to deliver his tablets from on high.
But Gordon said, “We’ve run into a snag.”