Canada hesitated before he shook his head.
“Do you recognize the other man?” Raoul asked.
Canada took another fleeting glance at the paper. “If I admit I do, what happens then?”
Raoul jumped at the bait. “If Diane’s okay, I swear I’ll-”
Canada held his left hand out. A stop sign. “No, my friend. No… No. The ifs are all mine. You don’t get any ifs. These two people weren’t working for me. I don’t know what they’ve done, or to whom. That means there are no ifs left over for you. We clear?”
No, Raoul thought. He said, “Yes.”
“Good. I repeat, if I admit I do recognize him, what happens then?”
“I will be grateful for your assistance,” Raoul said.
“How grateful?”
Raoul wondered momentarily if Canada was trying to extort some money. He recalled Tico’s admonition in the car-Everything’s temporary but people. That’s what he says, says it all the time-and decided that it wasn’t likely that Canada was squeezing a reward from him. Raoul said, “I will be completely grateful. So grateful you won’t be playing any echoes about this.”
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“And if you happen to run across Rachel?”
“Goes without saying. You’ll know first.”
Canada poked at the photograph. “This guy? The one with Howard? Showed up in town a day or so before your wife, went to Rachel’s apartment looking for her, failed, then started asking around about how to find her. Howard alerted us that the guy came to the chapel. Howard, it now appears, was playing both ends against the middle. Well, that’s a tougher game than Hold ’Em-and soon enough, if he isn’t already, Howard will regret he anteed in. We started keeping an eye on the new man. Lost him for a while. Found him again. Eventually he had a traffic accident. Sad thing.”
“Serious accident?” Raoul asked.
Canada feigned a sympathetic face. “Misjudged a curve in the mountains. His car had Colorado plates. Tico?” he called.
Tico hustled in carrying a half-eaten piece of cold pizza. His mouth was full. Canada pointed at the photo. “You know where?”
Tico glanced at the picture, then at Raoul, swallowed, and said, “I could probably find it.”
“Show our friend.”
“Not sure I can do it in the dark, Boss. You tell me to try, though, I will.”
Canada tapped his manicured fingernails on the arm of the chair. “Find Raoul a bed for the night, some clean towels, and offer him some food. You can take him out in the morning. And Raoul?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind that I hold on to this?” He lifted the photograph. “I’d like to show it to Howard.”
62
I was wide-eyed and body-weary long before Sam’s arrival for our Saturday run, but the winter sky was too black for daybreak and the bedroom too cold to consider popping right out of bed. I waited for the growl of the paper guy’s Power Wagon to come and go and for the first unmistakable illuminations of dawn before I rolled reluctantly into the day.
Even the dogs thought I was crazy. Emily sighed at me, but she didn’t bother to get up to see what I had planned. Anvil, whose ears were beginning to fail him, didn’t acknowledge that I’d moved.
I forced myself to drink some water and I downed a banana after mindlessly trying to peel a plantain that Lauren or Viv had stuck in the fruit bowl. The plantain wasn’t ripe and wasn’t at all eager to be peeled. I totally mangled the thing before I figured out that I wasn’t wrestling with a mutant Chiquita.
New errand: Replace the damn plantain.
I thought I heard a car on the lane and peeked out the front door at 7:25. No Sam. I was hoping he’d spaced out the run or that he’d overslept. Jogging on a fifteen-degree morning didn’t sound any more appetizing to me than had eating an under-ripe plantain.
Seven-thirty. No Sam. Out loud, I prayed, “Give it a rest, Sammy. Take a day off.” That, of course, is when he drove up the lane. He climbed out of the Cherokee in his fancy running duds and a brand-new pair of trainers. His frosty breath was visible in long, slow rolls. Lauren’s advice from the night before felt as sage to me as it had then, but I still hadn’t decided exactly what I knew that I could tell Sam that might help Diane. He rescued me from my temporary paralysis by saying, “Let’s stretch a minute. I want to tell you about the tunnel search.”
The tunnel. The opening that had been excavated from Doyle’s basement was cut at a steep enough angle that it actually descended all the way down below the spread footing of the foundation of the Millers’ house. At that point the track-and-trolley system terminated and a vertical shaft about two feet in diameter rose straight up into the Millers’ crawl space. The top of the shaft was covered by a fitted piece of one-inch-thick plywood upholstered with an ample amount of dirt that had been glued to the wood with some kind of industrial-strength adhesive.
Were someone to venture into the crawl space, any evidence of the construction project was hidden from view by the thick-milled black-plastic sheeting that stretched from foundation wall to foundation wall over the entire expanse. The plastic was installed to collect the natural radon that was common in soil in Colorado, so the gases could be vented to the outdoors and the lungs of the home’s inhabitants could be protected from the toxic consequences of long-term radiation exposure.
Access from the tunnel into the Miller home was ingenious. False sills had been attached to the tops of the foundation walls in the corner closest to the tunnel shaft. The plastic sheeting had been removed from the original sills and reattached to the false sills, where it could be easily lifted and folded back to reveal the opening of the shaft. After an intruder was ready to return to Doyle’s house next door, he had only to lock the false sills back in place-which would return the plastic to its normal location-and then slide the plywood lid back over the shaft.
A cursory examination of the crawl space by someone in the Miller home would reveal no evidence of the tunnel. Once Sam was down in the crawl space, it had taken him a few minutes to figure out exactly how it all worked, despite the fact that he knew almost precisely where the tunnel should be entering the house. The only clue to the location, he said, was a slight interruption in the dust pattern on top of the plastic sheeting.
Bill Miller professed shock and ignorance at the discovery of the tunnel. Although the revised warrant that Sam delivered to Bill’s door gave him no choice about the matter, he was totally cooperative with the police about access to his crawl space.
He also rapidly put two and two together and got four. “Where is Doyle?” Bill had demanded. “Have you guys talked to him? Is he under arrest? Somebody tell me something! Does he know where Mallory is?”
Sam made a tactical decision to allow Bill to hover close by during the search-he wanted to observe him-but he wasn’t buying Bill’s act. “He knew it was there,” Sam told me. “Might even have known Doyle was dead.”
“He knew about the tunnel? What makes you think that?”
“You interview enough people you get to know when they’re lying. Meryl Streep could lie to me and get away with it, maybe Al Pacino. Definitely what’s-his-face, Anthony Hopkins. But Bill Miller? He couldn’t even get a bit part with the Flatirons Players. Must be the same for you, you know, in your business.”
The truth was that my patients often lied to me with absolute impunity. I rationalized my often embarrassing credulity by trying to convince myself that when my patients lied to me they were lying to themselves as well, and that was why I was so inept at spotting their mistruths.
But the simple reality is that I am gullible. In reply to Sam, I said, “Yeah.”
He chuckled. “Exactly what I’m talking about. Exactly.”