Pamela’s alibi was solid; she’d been at a killer bridge tournament at the Hyatt Regency Gainey Ranch, in sight of eighty other people. But Cooney had been with the noncombatants, who’d spent the night in the lobby bar, the spa, the giant heated pool … or one of the bedrooms. People had seen him, all right—but there were gaps. And it was a five-minute drive from the hotel to his house.
Meanwhile, John Jaramillo had dropped off the face of the earth. His wife refused to be interviewed, though gossip in his neighborhood said she wasn’t that broken up over his absence.
I was debating whether to try some of Jaramillo’s other gardening clients, or invite Cooney Pratt out for a drink and show him pictures, when the phone rang.
“I’ve found him!” Pamela’s voice was high, and nervous, for her.
“Who, Jar—”
“The gardener, yes.” She swallowed, audibly. “Do you want a story? Come right away—meet me at my house. Come now.”
“It was the damn squirrels,” she explained, leading me down her front drive. “I kept trapping more and more of the little buggers, and finally realized they were coming from the house next door, crawling through the breeze blocks in my wall.”
“Yeah?”
“So I looked at the house next door.” I looked too. The next-door house was vacant, with a realtor’s sign.
“And?”
“The morning it happened? The murder? I had a hangover, and I was drowning those fucking squirrels in the garage, and I was so irritated by the racket from the air conditioner next door. Then, of course, there was lots more racket from the pool deck, and I forgot all about it.”
I looked up at the roof. The AC unit now was off. The yard of the empty house was spiked with fried weeds sprouting through pink gravel. There wasn’t a soul in sight, bar a garbage truck cruising slowly, picking up the big round turquoise dumpsters, tossing the trash, then slamming them back on the pavement. Half the dumpsters had fallen over from the impact and lay on their sides, wheels spinning.
“Class warfare,” Pamela said, seeing me look. “The garbage guy hates rich people. Wait till he’s gone.”
We did, and she filled me in rapidly on her deductions. The house wasn’t being shown; nobody would show a house with the yard in that condition. But if the house was empty—why run the air conditioner?
“Jaramillo,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the empty house. “It’s got to be him. That’s where he keeps the drugs.”
It was possible. Obviously nobody was there now; not with the AC turned off. On the other hand, the cops took a dim view of breaking and entering. I mentioned this, and Pam pulled out a key, flourishing it under my nose.
“We traded keys with the people who used to live here—you know, in case of emergencies.”
The key was for the kitchen door. The house was unfurnished and silent, but I stopped dead, the back of my neck prickling. I’d thought she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. The air was thick and stifling and probably at least 115°, but it didn’t have that dead feel that abandoned houses have.
What it did have was one very bad smell. I thought it was time to call the cops right then, but Pam had gone ahead of me, through a door, and she gave a strangled scream.
I went after her and found myself in a narrow room furnished with a washer, a dryer, and a corpse.
There were flies and he’d been dead long enough that the flesh was sagging off his bones and had a greenish tinge. Pam was standing behind the body, holding a gun.
“Told you I found him,” she said.
“Yeah. Let’s put the gun away, shall we, and call the cops.”
She swallowed, and pointed the gun directly at me.
“Oh, come on!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound sorry. “I can’t let Chloe be arrested for killing him. Everybody knows you’ve been looking for him. So you found him, and he shot you, and you shot him. By the time anybody finds you, nobody will be able to tell how long either of you’s been dead, and …” Her voice was shaking, and so was her hand.
A shadow behind the door moved. My eyes flicked to it, and Pamela made a little throaty noise. “Oh, don’t even try that …” she began, and then went “Uk!” as a slender Hispanic guy in dark jeans and a black T-shirt stepped out and hit her on the head with the butt of his gun.
Pamela’s weapon spun out of her hand as she went down and hit the washing machine with a booming noise, but I didn’t try to dive for it.
“Who the hell are you?” the Hispanic guy said, looking me over.
“A newspaper reporter. Should I ask who you are?”
“No, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” He spoke good English, but it wasn’t his first language. He glanced at the body and shook his head, then peered back at me, thoughtful.
“Okay,” he said, making up his mind. “You going to help me get him out of here, all right?”
“Er …” I raised an eyebrow at Pamela, who was groaning on the floor.
“Yeah, right. Put the lady in the closet.” He waved the gun toward what looked like a broom closet—though you don’t usually see broom closets with deadbolts on the outside.
Pamela was bleeding from her scalp, and vomited when I dragged her up onto her feet. It was a messy business, but I got her in the closet and the door bolted. I was streaming with sweat by the time I finished, and wondered whether there was any air in the closet. Then I looked up and saw small holes drilled through the wood—ventilation.
“For troublemakers,” the guy said with a shrug. “Just in case, you know?”
I looked at the body, and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. His stomach had swelled up like a balloon, and it was too damn easy to imagine what it’d be like if he popped.
My friend was thinking along the same lines.
“Garbage bags,” he said, gesturing with the gun toward the door to the garage. “Move slow.”
The garage was crowded with filled garbage bags, some of them broken and spilling. Fast-food wrappers, fragments of stale tortillas, empty refried-bean cans. Several small furry things scuttled out of the pile, and the guy kicked at one but missed.
“Rats,” he said with a shrug.
“Ground squirrels.”
My pal shrugged and motioned to an open box of giant leaf bags. I took two, and, holding my breath and keeping a grip on my belly muscles, slipped one over Jaramillo’s head and the other over his feet. The guy with the gun tossed me a set of keys.
“Back the truck into the driveway.”
The truck might have been Jaramillo’s; it was a pickup with a ratty trailer made of white wire mesh, rakes and shovels in holders at the back, piled with garden trash. I wrestled Jaramillo’s body into the trailer, then got behind the wheel, at my friend’s urging.
“Drive.”
Within ten minutes we were headed south on the 101. The pickup had good AC and my hands and arms were freezing in the blast of cold air, but I was still drenched in sweat.
“How did you get them in there?” I asked at last, breaking the silence. A SWAT negotiator I’d interviewed once told me that what you do in a hostage situation is get the perp talking. Keep them talking, because if they’re talking, they aren’t shooting.
My captor blinked.
“The illegals,” I said. “You’re a coyote, right?”
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“Heck of an idea. Hiding them in Scottsdale, I mean. How’d you get them in and out of the house?”
He lifted one shoulder, off-handed.
“Yard trucks, hoopties. You drive a truck like this down any street in Scottsdale, three, four Mexicans in the back—who looks at yard guys? Everybody’s got yard guys. A beater car pulls up at the end of the street, two women get out—domesticas, nannies.” He smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “They belong here.”