Dead Dry (14 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Dead Dry
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At least she hadn’t presumed to climb in between my sheets, but then again, she probably found them lacking.
I took in a long, slow breath and let it out. Then I got up and found her a blanket.
 
 
THE PHONE RANG AT 5 P.M. GILDA STIRRED, OPENED her eyes briefly, and then closed them again. I was amazed that she could sleep that long in a strange room and under that blanket. Thundershowers had cooled the neighborhood, but it was still pretty warm in that room.
It had stopped raining, so I took the phone out onto the porch. It was Michele on her way in from the airport. “I have a visitor,” I told her.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been in communication with my office, and they put me through to Ray. What have you gotten out of her? Anything?”
“She’s been asleep. I take it she was up all night.”
“Rough way to travel,” Michele said. “So we can presume that the lady has no available cash.”
“Perhaps it’s a part of the green lifestyle. Don’t waste resources. The truck is going through anyway so it can carry me, too.”
“Nah, I’m calling her broke. So you think she killed him for his money?”
“You like that diagram?” I asked.
“What? Oh, I get it, you’re speaking in metaphor in case she’s listening.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I don’t think she’s the heavy lifter in this job, but I think she’s got a part in it.”
“Tell me more.”
“Oh, as in, what did I learn after I dropped you in Denver?”
“Yeah.”
“Not much, at first. It took me until this morning to get a warrant, and when I got back up to the ranch, there wasn’t much to see.”
“Nothing there?” I asked.
“Nothing at all. Well, the yurt just had clothes and stuff, nothing of interest, but McWain’s office had been stripped.”
“No shit!”
“None whatsoever. The question is of course who did that and, as importantly, why, and that’s your department. Who wanted that geological information he had there? Why was it important? Or worth killing and then breaking and entering to get?”
I said, “Gotcha. I’m on it. But there’s another way to ask that question.”
“Which one?”
“The ‘Who wanted it?’ one. You can want the stuff, or you can want the stuff to go away.”
“Ah.”
“So what else can you tell me?”
Michele hummed into the phone, thinking. “I can give you this: All four men we met at the Sedalia Grill had alibis. Or shall we say, I haven’t been able to bust them yet.”
“And?”
“And tell you more?”
“Yeah!”
Gilda opened one eye and looked at me. I offered her an apologetic grin and, after a moment, she sighed and turned her back to me.
Michele said, “Well, I didn’t question them all myself, so what can I say? Ernie Mayhew—the sheriff’s deputy there—he questioned two of them without me present and he came along with me for the other two. That was pretty messy.”
“How so?”
“Well, like you told me as we were driving down there yesterday, the place until recently was a very small town. So they all knew each other. Seems all of those men played football together at Castle Rock High, along with Mayhew. It was almost like a social occasion, like, ‘Let’s all humor the female from Utah.’”
“And you were spoiling their party with the questions you asked.”
“Precisely. Mayhew as much as suggested that whatever happened to McWain happened in Utah and had nothing to do with anybody in Colorado.”
“Could be.”
“And pigs have wings.”
I asked, “Which ones did you see personally?”
“Upton and Attabury. The latter was particularly tight with Mayhew.”
“Wait, of the other two, you say they
all
were on the team?”
Michele said, “What? Oh, I get what you’re saying. No, Bart Johnson wasn’t on the team, but his son, Zachary, was. You didn’t meet him. He’s a hapless sort, pours drinks at a place in Sedalia called Bud’s Bar. And so you don’t have to figure out how to ask me, yes, it’s just the two of them—Bart and Zach—out there on that ranch. Mrs. Johnson is dead, and you’ll recall that Bart hasn’t much time left himself, by the looks of him.”
“Okay. So what’s their beef?”
“Ah, a cattle ranching joke, huh?”
I smiled. “Don’t mess with me.”
“Okay, here’s who those guys were: Attabury, the big one—”
“Who knows something about flying,” I interjected.
“He does? Yeah, well, Attabury is a Realtor. I asked him if he sold McWain his ranch, or rather, if he was the broker on that transaction, but he said no, and he seemed grouchy about that.”
“He’s local?”
“They all are, like I said. Anyway, uh, let’s see … Upton, the preppie guy with the narrow face and the BMW, he’s a lawyer. Specializes in real-estate law, estates, that kind of stuff. Then there’s Entwhistle. He has the local savings and loan, holds a lot of local mortgages.”
“Belonging to anybody we know?”
“I couldn’t find out about McWain’s ranch, whether that was mortgaged or not, but I’m working on it. I had hoped to get those records from his office, but as I said, by the time I got there, they weren’t.”
“Ah.”
“The last guy was Bart Johnson. He owns the adjoining ranch to the north.”
“The one with …”
“The barking dog. You’ll love this. The dog’s name is Barker.”
“Perfect. And?”
“And what?”
“Gossip?”
Michele didn’t say anything for a moment. Just when I thought we’d lost the connection, she said, “A woman at the ice cream shop in Sedalia says Attabury and Johnson are involved in a development project called Wildcat Estates, and that McWain is part of a citizens’ group that opposes it. I’ll bet—hey!” She broke off and hollered at someone who was cutting her off in traffic. Then, she said, “So I’ll come over to your house, okay?”
I looked back into the room. Sleeping Beauty’s eyes
were open and she was looking at me. “Fine. Let me give you directions.”
Michele chuckled. “I know where you live. I’m a cop, remember?”
 
“WHAT WAS DR. MCWAIN DOING IN SALT LAKE County?” Michele asked Gilda.
Michele had asked her this in the car as we drove her to Denver the day before, and Gilda had stonewalled us. Today, she was merely uninformative. “I don’t really know,” she said, infusing her voice with the deep, breathy tone of the tragic heroine.
Michele decided to be blunt. She said, “You know, Gilda, there’s some mutual back-scratching to be done here. You give me information and I’ll see if I can open doors for you at the morgue. You understand?”
Gilda put a hand to her heart. “
Would
you take me there?” she cried.
Michele raised an eyebrow. “Surely he said something to you. How long he’d be gone, who he’d be with?”
Gilda turned both palms upward in a poetic gesture of innocence. “He just said, ‘See you in a few. Hold down the fort.’”
“A few days? A few hours?”
“You know men.” Gilda sighed. It was quite a performance. She was playing the We-Poor-Girls chip. “Afton was a … a free spirit.”
That was an image for the ages.
Nature Girl meets Free Spirit, coming to a theater near you.
I asked, “Was he out here to do geology? I mean, was it a professional trip?”
“He really didn’t do much of that anymore.”
“He’d given up geology?”
“Pretty much.”
I said, “But when I looked in the windows of his study I saw that he had work spread out. It looked to me like he was working on something.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “He fiddled around a little,
I suppose. There’s not much to do on a ranch with no electricity or running water, you know.”
I suppressed a derisive smile.
Sure, nothing to do but water the stock, keep the buildings and fences repaired, cook three meals a day …
Michele asked, “Did Dr. McWain take any luggage with him when he left home?”
Gilda waxed prim. She was sitting on the edge of my bed with one leg folded over the other, and she now drew herself up narrow and steepled her fingers over her knee. “Such as?”
“A suitcase with a change of clothes,” Michele said. She managed to keep her voice even through this ridiculous question.
Gilda blinked glassily.
I said, “How about an attaché or a small backpack? Surely he had to carry notes or field gear.”
Gilda’s eyes widened ever so slightly, but both Michele and I saw it. She said, a bit too emphatically, “Afton never took anything with him, anywhere.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, then said daintily, “Afton had taken a vow against consumerism.”
Michele said, “A vow?”
“Yes. One should not purchase that which is being cast off as waste.”
“Wow,” I said, “I’d like to see the other nine commandments on that list. So you mean he was into scrounging pens and paper if he needed to write something down.”
Gilda fluttered her lavish eyelashes and waited for the next question.
In the afternoon light that was coming in the west windows of my room, I took a good look at her. Yes, there were decided crow’s feet forming around those genteelly made-up eyes, and the skin underneath her jawline was just starting to soften. What did that make her, forty-five? Had she ever actually married, or was she just an itinerant opportunist
who moved in with wealthy men to the detriment of their marriages? She couldn’t play that game forever. She must be feeling the need to nail down a nest egg before her flesh descended any further.
Michele asked, “So does that mean he was into hitching rides the way you do?”
“Oh, yes,” Gilda said. “In fact, he taught me that ethic.”
Ethic? This was an ethic?
Michele said, “So then, is that how he got to Salt Lake County? We’ve checked all the public transit for the past several days and have come up dry. And you say he didn’t own a car.”
Gilda raised her bird-like shoulders in a tiny shrug. “He hitched a ride, I imagine.”
“In a truck, like you did?”
I had to be paying very close attention to catch the everso-slight tensing that whipped through Gilda’s body. How I would have liked to have her wired up to a polygraph machine.
Michele let silence hang for a full minute. She had seen Gilda’s lapse, too. She asked her question again in two different forms, but Gilda had seen her error in this chess game and had moved her queen back into the defense of her king, whoever that might be now that Afton was dead.
At length, Michele said, “Why was he dressed the way he was dressed?”
Gilda countered with, “How exactly was he dressed?”
While Michele pondered her next move, my mind tumbled down a rabbit hole of speculation. What had someone as vain and arrogant as Afton McWain been doing wearing worn-out clothes? It didn’t jibe with the prosperous Afton I remembered strutting his masculine stuff in the hot springs and lavishing his field trips with top-end foods. Where had his money gone? And what had drawn him away from his professional circle to a run-down ranch?
Something about that ranch was bothering me. A ranch is a small economy unto itself, a closely-managed system
of resources, especially one that is “off the grid.” I said, “Hey, Gilda, where were you guys getting your water out there at the ranch?”
Gilda froze like a pin-ball machine that has just gone TILT.
Had I asked something important? Or was she one of those creatures who knew absolutely nothing about the origins of the natural resources she consumed in such quantity? I said, “I mean the water you drank. What you washed in.”
Irritably, she said, “From the tap.” As in,
Where else, silly?
“And how did the water get into the tap?”
She began to look a little insulted, as if I were making fun of her. “Why, out of a pipe, of course. Afton was in charge of all of that.”
Michele said, “Why do you ask, Em?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just this drought. It’s the worst I can remember, and yet even in lesser droughts, there were years when we were hauling water from the creek to water the horses. So I was just wondering, what with this green lifestyle stuff and not driving a car or that truck in the barn, how you got your water.”
Gilda said, “I do not know,” enunciating the words sharply, as if they were separate sentences.
Michele let the silence widen again. Finally, she said, “So now, Gilda. I understand that you came here for a purpose, and that perhaps your purpose has not been completed. How can I help?”
Gilda’s response was explosive. “I need to see his body!” she cried, flailing her hands. “I need to have … have …”

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