“This is where the accident was?” Raoul asked him, recalling Canada’s story the night before.
“The guy’s driving too fast,” Tico said, pointing down the road. “Way too fast, and he comes around the curve-that one-and sees a guy standing in the road with a.45 pointed at his windshield.” He held up both hands. “This is what I hear. The man in the road fires a shot-you know, to warn the guy-a little bit over the top of the truck. Driver doesn’t handle it good. Freaks.” Tico then pantomimed a dive off a cliff before he kicked off his flip-flops and began pulling an ancient pair of orange high-top Keds onto his bare feet.
A moment later Raoul followed him down a scruffy hillside covered with nothing but scree and big boulders. They went down a hundred feet or more into a narrow wash that had been invisible from the road above. A battered, crushed, bronze Silverado with Colorado plates rested upside down on a rock that was half the size of Tico’s VW. Inside was the body of a man. The stink was horrific.
Tico said, “That’s the guy, the guy in the picture with Howard, the guy who met your wife in the Venetian. You want me to check for ID?” Raoul wasn’t able to come up with an answer for him, but Tico pulled on some work gloves and crawled into the overturned truck. A minute later he handed Raoul a Colorado driver’s license.
The name meant nothing to Raoul. “What’s farther up the hill? Where was he going?” Raoul asked.
“A couple of old cabins. Might be important. To you, anyway.”
“But not to you?”
“This… accident? It happened before Rachel lost touch with the boss. We weren’t too interested in what was up there. Not our business, you dig. We stay out of things that aren’t our business. That’s one of the boss’s rules.”
“Can we look?” Raoul asked him. “At those two cabins? Now?”
Tico said, “I got a little time.”
The second cabin they checked, the last one on the road, was where they found Diane. Raoul went in alone and found her cuffed to an iron bed. She’d been there a long time. She was delirious, almost unconscious.
Tico used his mobile phone to call somebody down in Vegas, asked them to send help. Then he told Raoul, “I gotta go before, you know… And my man? The police don’t need to know about the Silverado. That’d be better for everybody.”
Raoul told him he understood and he promised to come up with a story for the police.
Fifteen minutes later people started showing up to help Raoul save his wife.
I briefly relayed to Raoul most of what I’d told Lauren the night before. I told him about the tunnel and the car that had left Doyle’s garage right around the time Mallory disappeared. I told him that Doyle Chandler wasn’t Doyle Chandler, and that whoever he really was, he was dead.
“Are you coming home?” I asked.
“As soon as they clear her to travel,” he said.
“Can you tell me who the guy in the Silverado was?”
“Does it make a difference?” he asked. “I promised I’d be discreet. The cops didn’t find it. It needs to stay that way.”
“I think I know.”
“Who?”
The irony didn’t escape me: Raoul was protecting secrets, too. I gave him the name he already had: “Guy named Walter.”
His voice grew tight. “You’ve known about him for how long?”
“This afternoon. Just now.”
“He was a bad guy?”
“He had something important to hide. He was afraid Diane might have learned what it was from Hannah.”
“When I get back we’ll have a beer, you’ll tell me how you know all this.”
“I’m looking forward to that, Raoul. Listen, I’m with a… patient. Call me back when I can talk with Diane, okay? Please?”
We said good-bye after Raoul asked me if I had any idea how to thank someone for saving his wife’s life. “Canada?” I wondered.
“No, Norm Clarke,” he said.
I thought I’d read somewhere that Norm had a weakness for foie gras, but I promised Raoul I’d think more about it and stepped back out to the waiting room to get Bill Miller.
The front door was wide open. The coffee table was tipped over, magazines scattered on the floor.
Bill was gone. Damn. Immediately, I regretted leaving him alone for such a long time.
The winds seemed to have stopped.
68
Huh. What did Bill’s hasty exit mean? Why the overturned table and the open door? Had something happened while I was talking with Raoul, or was Bill making a statement about his frustration with me, or about his annoyance that I’d interrupted our meeting to take a phone call?
My relief that Diane was okay was so strong at that moment that I wasn’t particularly upset about whatever had prompted Bill’s departure, but I was perplexed. Why had he taken off so suddenly?
I was becoming more and more convinced that Mallory’s Christmas night disappearance had been accomplished with Bob’s help. What had happened next? I was guessing that she’d talked Bob into driving her somewhere and I was hoping that she’d somehow made it to Vegas to visit her mother. Where were mother and daughter right then? I didn’t know. Raoul’s story satisfied me that Bill’s boss, the by-then-dead Walter, hadn’t been successful in tracking them down in Vegas.
But where was Bob? If Sam had caught up with him, I was sure he would have called and let me know.
I straightened up the waiting room, walked back to my office, and phoned Bill Miller at his home. No answer. I left a message, and asked him to call me back on my pager. Then I called home. The girls were still out on their excursion. I left Lauren a message that I was going to run a few errands and that I’d be home in time for dinner.
As cold as it can be in Colorado in January, there are always respites, warm days in the high fifties or low sixties when the sun defies its low angle in the southern sky and the blue above is just a little bluer. I was surprised when I stepped outside to discover that the Chinooks had abated and left the day so much warmer than it had been earlier. The seat heaters in the Audi seemed superfluous. I flicked them off and drove east to begin my errands.
I felt the vibration of my pager while I was waiting in line to buy some fish for dinner at Whole Foods. Had Lauren asked for ono or opah? I couldn’t remember. I pulled the beeper off my belt and read Bill Miller’s familiar number. My turn at the fish counter had arrived, so I mentally flipped a coin and chose a good-sized piece of opah before I meandered over to the relative quiet of the dairy department to return Bill’s call.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“I went back out to the waiting room and-”
“I just got a call about Mallory.”
“From whom?”
“The Colorado State Patrol. They found a body, a girl, in a ditch near I-70 west of Grand Junction.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “What can I do?”
“I want to talk to you before whatever happens next. I need to make sure I’m thinking straight.”
“Bill, you just admitted that you’re using the therapy to shut me up. I don’t think I’m the right person to-”
“Fire me tomorrow. Tonight I need some help.” He sounded genuinely frantic. I couldn’t imagine his terror. I looked at my watch. “My office. Ten minutes,” I said.
“I have to be here, at home, if they call back. I can’t leave. Can you come over?”
“I’ll be right there,” I said. I tossed the opah on top of a display of organic butter in the dairy case, and sprinted to my car.
69
Maybe it was the time of day, just past dusk. Or maybe, as Sam predicted, the fierce assault of the Chinook blitzkrieg had scared everyone off. But the media encampment outside the Millers’ home was deserted, the street peaceful. Doyle’s house was dark.
Bill met me at the front door. I didn’t even have to knock.