Astride a Pink Horse (26 page)

Cozy nodded understandingly and said, “But you’re off the case, Bernadette.”

“I know.”

“What could you do, anyway?”

“Help him, I guess. And maybe solve what are now two murders.”

“How many times do you need to be reminded? You’re not a cop, Bernadette.”

“Yeah, I know. But somebody needs to pick up the pace on the Tango-11 investigation. Colonel DeWitt sure won’t.”

“There’s still Sheriff Bosack.”

“Come on, Cozy. The man’s probably more interested in grooming his horse.”

“Well, you certainly can’t take it on yourself to find out what really happened there. You’ll buy yourself more trouble.”

“Yes, I can,” Bernadette said, surprising Cozy with the swiftness of her response. “But I’ll need your help.”

“Are you serious?” Cozy asked, shaking his head.

“Absolutely. As for trouble, I’ve been there before.”

“Okay, Ms. Trouble’s My Middle Name. Where do you plan to start?”

“I think that
we
, Mr. Coseia, should start from the rear of the bus. Begin with Sarah Goldbeck’s murder and work our way up to the front from there.”

“Fair enough,” Cozy said, uncertain whether he was out to simply placate Bernadette or truly help her.

“So, here’s the first question. Why kill Sarah Goldbeck if you’re Sergeant Giles’s murderer, and how are the two murders connected?” Bernadette stopped pacing, sat down on the floor, stretched both legs out in front of her, and leaned back against a leather ottoman, deep in thought. As her partially buttoned shirt separated to reveal her navel, she said, “Might as well get comfortable,” to Cozy before leaning forward to tug the uncooperative shirttail back into place. “We’re going to be here a while. I’ll call room service and order some coffee. What time is it, anyway?”

“A little past midnight.”

“Late,” she said, sighing. “Anything you’d like besides coffee?”

“Yeah. Ask if they have any French raisin rolls. My grandmother used to bake them by the dozen and send them vacuum-sealed to me in Oklahoma. Freddy and I lived on those things.”

“You’re on,
mon ami
,” Bernadette said, smiling. “I’m partial to them myself. Got semiaddicted to the things while I was touring with the U.S. tennis team in France the summer after I finished college. They’re right up there on my list of favorite pastries, right behind sticky buns.”

“Too gooey for me,” Cozy said, frowning and shaking his head.

“You’re badly in need of expanding your horizons, Mr. Coseia,” Bernadette said, smiling and again leaning back against the ottoman. This time she made no attempt to tuck the navel-revealing shirttail back into place.

After diagonally crossing Missouri and half of Oklahoma, Silas Breen had reached the outskirts of Oklahoma City. It was twelve thirty a.m., and as he rolled past billboard after billboard beckoning him to bed down at this or that motel for the night, he planned to stay where he always stayed when he was on the road: Motel 6. He’d have easy access to I-40 in the morning, and the coffee and doughnuts were free. Thinking that even if he slept in until eight, he’d be able to make Lubbock by two, he slowed down to fifty and relaxed.

Despite the trip’s rough spots, which now included an Oklahoma Port of Entry citation and a three-hundred-dollar fine for running on illegally recapped tires, he was still making progress. He’d been delayed for nearly an hour at the port of entry while some overzealous POE officer had called God knew where to verify the origin of his load. But things were now pretty much back on keel. By this time the next day, he planned to have a wad of cash in hand and a big-chested girl on each arm to help him spend some of it.

The bizarre trip had one other downside, however. His delivery deadline had forced him to bypass Kansas City, so he’d missed hooking up with his father. He and Otis had had their differences, especially after he’d lost his basketball scholarship and dropped
out of college. But now that he’d successfully started his own business, those differences appeared less magnified, and OT, the initials Otis Breen preferred to be addressed by, seemed to be less the snap-to-attention, drill-sergeant personality he’d been raised by.

Cruising beneath an overhead sign announcing that his exit was two miles ahead, he patted his belly. It was his late-night way of telling himself that his day would soon be done. His only lingering worry was that he hadn’t heard from F. Mantew all day, and although he’d vowed not to obsess over that fact, he was worried, especially since Mantew had indicated that he’d be in touch one way or another every day of the trip.

He rubbed the underside of his jaw thoughtfully, slowed to take his exit, and once again found himself wondering what on earth F. Mantew actually had him hauling. The issue had begun to bother him so much that before going to bed, he planned to call OT to discuss the issue. Then he might uncrate one of the boxes he was hauling and have a look inside.

The Motel 6 he pulled up to looked like any of the dozens of cookie-cutter sleep boxes he’d stayed at since starting his trucking business. The woman at the front desk, tired-looking but friendly, gave him a first-floor room that was clean, had towels aplenty, and had a bed that, although a bit too rubbery for his taste, at least didn’t sag.

By the time he’d finished a soda, brushed his teeth, and changed into the Notre Dame running shorts he’d bought in South Bend, it was a quarter past one. Exhausted, he sat down on the edge of the bed, checked his cell phone to make sure it had a healthy charge, and punched in his father’s number, knowing that even though the
friction between them had lessened, OT would be unhappy to hear from him or anyone else at one fifteen a.m.

Otis Breen’s response to the call was a groggy “What?”

“OT, it’s Silas. I’m in Oklahoma City.”

“What the hell time is it, boy?”

“A quarter past one.”

“And you couldn’t’ve called me earlier?”

“I was on the road trying to make up time.”

“Well, did you?”

“Yep.”

Offering his usual critical counsel, Otis said, “Then I guess you’re finally learnin’ what responsibility means. Where you headed for, anyway?”

“Lubbock.”

“Hell, if you’re in Oklahoma City, you’re almost there.”

“Six and a half more hours of driving at the most. But I’m dog tired, so I decided to bed down for the night. Need to ask you something important first.”

“Get to askin’.”

“It’s about the load I’m hauling and the person who hired me to haul it. I’m worried about them both.”

“What are you transportin’?”

“Used hospital equipment—at least that’s what the manifest says.”

“Sounds safe enough. So, what’s got you spooked about your employer?”

“Just the fact that the son of a bitch is weird. I don’t really know if I’m working for a man, a woman, a midget in tights, a
seven-foot giant, or a drug runner and thief. All I know is that whoever it is goes by the name F. Mantew and that we communicate generally by fax. Even stranger, I’ve had my destination changed midstream. Started out on my way to Amarillo.”

“Does sound a little odd.” Otis flipped on the lamp on his nightstand and sat up in bed. “How’d you get the job, anyway?”

“The easy-money way, OT. The same way white folks get jobs—contacts. In fact, this one came by way of an old friend of yours, Thurmond Giles. He called me about seven weeks back and hooked the whole thing up.”

“What!” Otis leaped out of bed.

“What’s the problem, OT?”

“You mean you ain’t heard about Thurmond?”

“No.”

“He’s dead, Silas. Murdered. They found him hangin’ inside an abandoned Minuteman missile personnel-access tube a few days back.”

“Shit!”

“You got that. And right now, I’d say you’re swimmin’ in it. Have you taken a look at what the hell you’re haulin’?”

“I’ve checked it out a couple of times, but everything’s crated up.”

“Then you need to uncrate somethin’, see what the shit you’re transportin’, and be prepared to call the cops. Hell, with Thurmond buyin’ it the way he did, and with him at one time bein’ a hotshot missile-warhead mechanic, you could be haulin’ around a damn nuke.”

Silas shook his head. “I picked up my load from a hospital. Come on, OT.”

“Who in the hell says you’re really haulin’ hospital equipment? Where’d you start your trip from, anyway?”

“Ottawa.”

“Canada. Well, hell. The last time I talked to Thurmond, he told me he was workin’ for some company up north of the border. Damn it, Silas, I’m thinkin’ you’ve got yourself caught up in somethin’ that’s hell-bent serious here.”

Silas stood and started pacing the room. “Think maybe I should go pop one of those crates I’m hauling right now?”

“I sure do, and I think you should call the cops. I’ve already had some air force OSI major and a reporter from a news outfit outta Denver called Digital Registry News talk to me about Thurmond.”

“Have the cops called?”

“No, thank goodness. But now I’m thinkin’ they probably will. Never figured you’d ever be tied in to any of Thurmond Giles’s messes. Damn.”

“I’m not sure that I am tied to one of his messes, OT. As far as I know, I’m still just hauling a load of used hospital equipment.”

“Well, make damn sure you are. Get your ass in gear and go open up one of them crates this instant.”

OT’s commanding tone, the same authoritative tone Silas had been forced to live with for most of his life, triggered a rush of resentment. “I’ll handle this, OT, okay?”

“You better, boy, or I’ll be callin’ the cops myself.”

On the verge of yelling,
I’m in charge here, Sergeant; butt the hell out!
Silas instead said, “I’m headed to have a look at my cargo right now.”

“Fine. Call me back and let me know what you find. You hear me?”

“Will do,” Silas said, biting his tongue and hanging up.

A carton containing a single half-eaten raisin roll sat on the coffee table in front of Cozy. His sweet tooth satisfied, he was sitting on the floor of Bernadette’s hotel suite, legs outstretched like hers, eyeing the raisin roll. The suite smelled strongly of sweet rolls and coffee past its prime.

Bernadette was busy jotting notes on a yellow tablet and glancing back and forth between the dozen maps of deactivated air force missile-silo sites in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Montana, and North and South Dakota that she’d spread out on the floor. She’d been studying the maps for the past half hour as she and Cozy ate raisin rolls, drank coffee, and tried to come up with a connection between the events at Tango-11 and some eight hundred deactivated missile sites in seven states. With their thighs touching in a leisurely, unromantic way and their shirts untucked, they looked more like a couple of college students cramming for an exam than two people trying to solve a murder.

Amazed by Bernadette’s dogged persistence as she continued to check off missile site after missile site, jotting each one’s code name, number, size, activation date, and decommissioning date down on her tablet, Cozy leaned forward and asked, “Think maybe we should move past the silo sites and on to something else? How about Sarah Goldbeck? What do you think about the idea that Buford might have killed her?”

“No way. The man was devastated when he called me to say he’d found her body.”

“Maybe he was faking it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then who killed her?”

Bernadette flipped several pages of her tablet back and stared at a note she’d written a few minutes earlier. “Somebody who didn’t want Sarah spilling her guts to the authorities would be my guess. I’ve got a feeling she knew who killed Sergeant Giles.”

“Maybe the killing involved a love triangle—between Sarah, Thurmond Giles, and Grant Rivers, perhaps. Didn’t you say earlier that Rivers and Sarah were once an item?”

Bernadette shook her head. “No, I said that’s what newspapers hinted at back in the late ’70s when Sarah’s neurotic mother was busy dragging the poor girl around the countryside to missile-site protests. I hate to admit it, but thanks to Colonel DeWitt, I located a bunch of official air force photos of Sergeant Giles, Sarah, and her mother in a couple of old OSI files at Warren just before I left. Sarah couldn’t have been more than fifteen or so.”

“So maybe Rivers liked robbing the cradle, and maybe for some reason after all these years he ended up being as mad at Sarah as he is at the government. He has a landing strip on his ranch, and that means he has access to rapid transit, you might say. He could’ve killed Sarah and been back home to Buffalo pretty quick.”

“Okay, Mr. Love Triangle,” Bernadette said, nudging Cozy’s hip with hers. “I’ll make a note of your
As the World Turns
concerns. And just so you know, that preacher Wilson Jackson’s wife had an affair with Giles, too. Colonel DeWitt told me so himself. Wanna move on to Howard Colbain and the Takatas?”

“Might as well,” said Cozy, briefly considering the new Wilson Jackson wrinkle. “First off, Colbain’s too far away to have dashed up here from New Mexico to kill Sarah. As for the Takatas, I’d need a motive.”

“Too far away? I don’t think so,” Bernadette said with a sly smile. “Grant Rivers owns a plane; why not Colbain?”