Astride a Pink Horse (21 page)

“No need to curse, Grant.”

“Damn it, Sarah! You were just a kid back then. There’s no way they could possibly hold you responsible for your actions. It’s not the same for me. And you seem to be forgettin’ that there’s a dead man involved. Besides, I’ve been tellin’ the cops, reporters, and FBI that I didn’t know Giles. They’ll catch me in a lie. Then what? Why the hell did I ever start down this road?”

“Because,” Sarah said seductively, “you liked tender young meat, and you let your little head do your thinking for you back then instead of your big one. Besides, you wanted to get even with the government.”

“A government that snookered me out of an important chunk of my land and then tried its damnedest to steal my water. The sons of bitches! You’re damn right I wanted to get even.”

“And you sued them and won.”

“Yeah, and what did I get for it other than them comin’ back later and tryin’ to destroy my son?”

“You can’t prove that, Grant. You should have forgotten about trying to get even a long time ago. Maybe if you had, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Hey, at least I didn’t jump ship for some gangster biker.”

“Let’s not go there, Grant. Okay?”

“Fine, we won’t.” Rivers picked up his fork and toyed with it nervously. “So what’s our strategy now?”

“We sit tight and keep our mouths shut.”

“And what do we do when they find out about the Takatas?”

“They already know about Rikia and Kimiko. I told that air force OSI major and the Platte County sheriff about them both.”

“Why on earth would you give them a heads-up like that?”

“So they’d go sniffing up someone else’s shorts instead of mine.”

“Have you told Kimiko and Rikia to keep their guard up?”

“Of course. I’ve talked to Kimiko twice. And do you know what her response was? She headed off for Heart Mountain. Stupid, but she’s been tiptoeing toward senility for years.”

“What a fuckin’ Achilles’ heel those two could turn out to be,” said Rivers as a waitress arrived with their food.

“Anything else for you?” the waitress asked, placing their meals on the table and refilling Sarah’s cup with decaf.

“No,” Sarah said. She watched the waitress walk away until she was certain she was out of hearing range. “I’m afraid I have to agree with you about the Heart Mountain thing, Grant. Mother always said that place would be Kimiko’s undoing.”

“For once I’m in agreement with your mother.” Rivers stabbed a sausage link with his fork and ate the link whole.

“Then why not let that place be Kimiko’s Waterloo? I think we should worry less about her and more about that reporter I mentioned on the phone, Elgin Coseia. Worry about him, that OSI major—Cameron’s her last name; I don’t remember her first—and the Platte County sheriff.”

“Agreed,” said Rivers. He took a long, thoughtful sip of coffee before asking, “What’s Buford’s take on all this?”

“The same as always. Shoot and ask questions later.”

“Could be he’s right for a change.”

“If so, it would be the first time in a long time.” Sarah found herself staring wistfully at her former lover.

“Hey, you’re the one who chose him.”

“That I did.” She scooped up a forkful of scrambled eggs, frowned, and said, “Cold.”

“The same way I’m hopin’ this Tango-11 thing gets—cold and forgotten real fast. Like my granddad used to say, old crimes may not be bold crimes, but they can get you hung just the same.”

“I don’t think we’ve done anything to warrant anything as barbaric as a hanging, Grant.” She leaned from their booth and waved for their waitress.

“Something wrong?” the waitress asked, quickly returning.

“My eggs. They’re cold.”

“Sorry, I’ll have them scramble you up a new order.”

“Thank you. And while you’re at it, maybe you can warm up the disposition of the man sitting across from me.”

The two women smiled at one another before the waitress walked away, but their smiles were lost on Grant Rivers. Stroking his chin, he asked, “What if Rikia and Kimiko end up tellin’ the sheriff, that lady OSI major, or Coseia somethin’ different from what you and I have been tellin’ them?”

“They won’t.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“As sure as I can be. But if they do, I’ll make certain to have Buford nudge them a little.”

“Your knight in shinin’ armor to the rescue once again,” Grant said sarcastically.

“I’ve already told you: don’t go there, Grant.” Sarah slammed her right hand down on the tabletop, causing the couple at the next table to look up.

“Sorry,” Rivers said, aware that no matter how wistfully she may have looked at him earlier, when Sarah Goldbeck said she was finished with an issue, she meant finished.

After driving Colorado and Wyoming for two straight days, Cozy was happy to be back home even though he hadn’t slept well the previous night. Just past two in the morning, the dream that had haunted him for years had kicked in full bore, and he’d once again found himself riding a motorcycle into a misty haze. He’d finally drifted back to sleep around four, awakened late for work at nine, showered leisurely, and headed for the office, just missing Freddy and Thaddeus Richter.

Red-eyed and yawning, he now stood in the sparsely furnished Digital Registry News front office, leaning his butt against the front
edge of Lillian Griffith’s desk. Lillian had stepped out for her midmorning vanilla latte, and as he absentmindedly sorted through his mail, looking for Colorado Rockies tickets he’d ordered, he found himself wondering why, despite all the disappointment he’d had in association with the game, he still loved baseball.

Had he been standing at anyone else’s desk, he would’ve let the voice messaging system that Freddy constantly complained about do its job when the phone started ringing. But knowing how much the compulsive, multitasking Lillian disliked having to return phone calls, he lifted the receiver and said, “Digital Registry News.”

The no-nonsense-sounding man on the other end of the line said, “I’d like to speak to Mr. Dames.”

“He’s not here. Can I take a message?”

“Yeah. Tell him Otis Breen called from Kansas City and that I’ve got the name of that company Thurmond Giles went to work for after leavin’ Seattle. He called here last night at close to midnight askin’ for the name. And as strange as this may sound, first thing this morning, some air force OSI officer called here to ask me the same thing. You Dames’s secretary?”

“No, just one of the reporters who works here.”

“Guess it’s okay for me to give you the information, then. Anyway, the company Thurmond went to work for was Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd. Took me a while to find the business card Thurmond sent to me. Finally found it in one of my sock drawers this mornin’.”

“Do you know what Giles did for the company?”

“Nope. Just give Mr. Dames my message, okay?”

“I certainly will, and thanks. Here’s my cell-phone number if anything else comes up.” He recited the number, hung up, and headed for his workstation. For a change, his computer was up and running and he quickly Googled Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd. What filled the screen turned out to be the computer equivalent of a television infomercial, a lavishly produced, three-minute, praise-filled piece detailing the lengthy history and landmark achievements of the first company in North America to successfully develop and manufacture radiation therapy equipment for treating cancer. The testimonial credited the work of a Canadian medical physicist, Harold Johns, for his invention of the cobalt-60 teletherapy machine in the early 1950s and stated that although the machine had run its course in Western medicine, having been replaced by the more efficient, less tissue-damaging linear accelerator, the cobalt-60 machine had nonetheless remained a low-cost workhorse in Third World markets.

As he scrolled through the references at the end of the piece, Cozy found himself wondering whether Thurmond Giles’s nuclear-missile savvy might not have earned him a shot at peddling an outdated product to an unregulated Third World market. Although he didn’t know one thing about the rules regarding the sale and transport of radiation therapy equipment, he did know that anything nuclear and American had to be regulated by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and that he was going to put a call in to Applied Nuclear Theratronics immediately. He also understood that black-market sales of Western goods to Third World countries was big business, whether those goods were two-hundred-dollars-a-pair sneakers or outmoded radiation therapy
machines. What mattered in the end, no matter the product, was profit, and he’d learned enough about Thurmond Giles to know that making money was one of the things that had made the man tick.

The human resources department at Applied Nuclear Theratronics of Canada Ltd. didn’t provide Cozy with any more information about Thurmond Giles than he’d gotten from Otis Breen, and aside from affirming that Giles had once worked there, in response to Cozy’s concocted story about running a background check because his company was considering hiring Giles, the person fielding the call wasn’t of much help.

Cozy disappointedly hung up and walked from his living room, where he’d been stretched out on the couch while talking on the phone, into his kitchen to retrieve the ham and cheese on rye he’d made for his lunch before calling Canada.

Plucking the larger of two Golden Delicious apples from an antique fruit bowl on the kitchen counter, he polished the apple with a shirtsleeve, took a bite, and thought about where to head next with his Thurmond Giles murder investigation.

At least he knew more about the murdered man than he’d known three days earlier. Knew for sure that Giles hadn’t been any old nuclear-warhead maintenance man but a military-brass-connected, ego-charged, down-home, slick warhead expert and an athlete. Giles had also womanized his way from base to base over his twenty-year military career. The question that needed to
be answered, it seemed to him, was which of all those attributes had triggered Giles’s murder.

Deciding that his next course of action would be to powwow with Freddy, he took another bite of apple, sat down at his kitchen table, and stared down at the burnished nicks and bruises in the hundred-year-old table’s patina. He suddenly felt alone. It had been two years since his grandmother’s death, and for much of that time he’d been spinning his wheels. He was pretty much the same small-market, web-based reporter he’d been a couple of years earlier, and although he had a decent job and had inherited a house that was paid off and filled with valuable antiques, he felt somehow bogged down. He had no real reason to gripe. He enjoyed what he did, his boss was his best friend, and he even had a little money in the bank. What he didn’t have was a life that had real meaning or existed outside the sphere of Freddy Dames. Everything he did revolved around Freddy. His friends, even most of his acquaintances, were also Freddy’s. The women he went out with, made love to, and occasionally argued with always seemed in one way or another to be connected to Freddy. He had the sinking feeling that if he weren’t there already, he was rapidly becoming anything but his own man.

He’d lost a shot at his lifelong dream because of hotheaded, competitive stupidity—linked to whom else but Freddy—and although investigative journalism seemed to be a good fit for him, in spite of its increasing reliance on computers, cell phones, BlackBerries, modems, and other assorted technocrap, he wasn’t sure that Digital Registry News was where he wanted to be in five years.

Finishing his apple and thinking that if his career as a journalist ever began to crumble, he’d best have an exit strategy, he decided that after the Tango-11 investigation was finished, he’d spend some time putting together just that. For the moment, however, he planned to finish his lunch, then head back to the office and call Bernadette, tell her about the stonewalling he’d gotten from the people at Theratronics, and see what she had that was new. He had to admit that the exotic-looking major had rubbed against the edges of his lonely circle of one, and although Bernadette Cameron seemed to be the kind of thoughtful, feminine, self-assured person that Freddy typically labeled
Too good to be true
, Freddy wouldn’t be the final judge on the matter for a change—he would.

The vein that ran along Colonel Joel DeWitt’s properly trimmed, regulation-length right sideburn bulged in anger. Bernadette, who’d seen the odd-looking phenomenon before, tried not to stare.

Slapping a hand down on his desktop, DeWitt shook his head in disgust. “I never would’ve ever expected that I couldn’t trust you, Major.”

Standing at attention in front of DeWitt’s desk, eyes locked straight ahead, Bernadette said, “I’m not certain I’ve done anything to lose your trust, sir.”

“Major, please. You talked to the very people I ordered you to stay away from. Are you aware that by speaking with Dames and Coseia you may very well have compromised the integrity of our Tango-11 investigation and, even worse, cast a shadow on my command?”

“Sir, all I was trying to do was determine whether Coseia and Dames had information that might be helpful to us.”