Murder in a Hot Flash (19 page)

It was a somber group that climbed aboard two shallow-drafted jet boats, the grim picture of a tortured Tawny still writhing flames in their memory vision, the ghastly smell of her death still a ghost in the air they breathed.

Mitch, John B., Sid Levit, and the guide, Homer Blankenship, rode in the lead boat. Charlie, Dean Goodacre, Earl, and Scrag in the second—Earl and Dean pouting because the guide chose Scrag to drive their boat. To add to the insult, the desert rat explained the workings of the craft to the other males.

If the boats were shallow-drafted so were the engines. They looked like outboards but instead of propellers had pumps that sucked in river water and forced it out in a “jet” of water to propel the boat forward. And unlike the propellers, the pumps were enclosed and didn't snag as easily on sandbanks, logs, and rocks.

These were black rubber boats with white foam coolers holding their passengers' lunch, water, and canned drinks. Homer insisted they all wear bright orange life vests. A colorful, if short, caravan formed on the dark water.

The river looked black down here instead of the chocolate-mud color it took on from above. Maybe because it reflected the vertical rock walls, looming maroon-black with shadow, that channeled it at this point.

Over a hundred feet wide and shallow enough in places to expose rotting tree limbs stuck on sandbars, the Colorado River slithered instead of flowed. Heavy with residue of the canyon it was busy carving, it moved strangely silent for water.

Ducks bobbed along the edges, upending to feed on the bottom, their small pointy tail feathers and paddle feet sticking up from the surface like overturned bathtub toys.

Mitch was avoiding Charlie, which was fine with her. She had to keep her perspective. Of the seven men, six were possible candidates for murderer. And she must study them all on this, the last day she had to prove her mother's innocence by finding someone else's guilt. Not that Charlie felt she should be doing this. Simply that she didn't know anybody else who would.

Perhaps it was learning of Tawny's death, but suddenly Edwina had remembered how she'd propped the ax up against the trailer hitch before they'd sat down to dinner that fateful evening. Charlie had been facing away from it and Edwina was probably too upset to notice any movement around it.

While she and Charlie were arguing, a hand could easily have slipped out of a night shadow and grabbed it, even before Gordon Cabot came back from his tour-bus shoot in the Humvee. The murderer could have lain in wait for him to start off for the concrete johns. Which meant anybody could have done it—including Mitch Hilsten.

Homer Blankenship, a plump man with a benign smile and graying temples, stood knee-deep in the river, his pants rolled to mid-thigh, and showed Scrag how to start his engine. Then he leaped into the other boat. A surprisingly strong current, for what appeared so sluggish a river, had shoved them sideways out into the stream of things before the quiet was shattered as first one outboard roared to life and then the other.

The plan was that Scrag would follow Homer exactly because Homer knew where the channels and snags were. Charlie'd hoped for a quieter trip, where the men would talk to each other and to her and she could watch and listen. But it was hard to talk over the jet engines and she couldn't see much in the way of expressions in the boat ahead of them.

Still, she could hear some of the conversation from the lead boat because the people in it had to yell over their own engine and because sound travels over water and because Charlie's hearing was unusually acute. Not that she expected anyone to conversationally admit to killing Cabot.

And if Tawny had been murdered, it couldn't have been Sid because he was way up on the crane. And if her death was not the accident it seemed (her hair and clothes had apparently caught fire in a wayward spark shower), the chances of it being a different murderer were slim.

Two murderers on one set was pretty far-fetched even for Hollywood. Which meant that all the people here except Homer were at the scenes of both crimes.

Charlie knew she just wanted poor Tawny to have been murdered because Edwina couldn't have done it from her jail cell, which meant she didn't kill Cabot either if one person did them both in.

The giant uranium dump below the mill slid by, abandoned and misshapen. Was it safe to have radioactive material so close to the river's edge? If Charlie remembered correctly, the Colorado nurtured a fair portion of the country. And a fair portion of that in California, where even now Libby might be drinking some.

The morning had been pleasantly warm until the boat started moving. Now Charlie hugged her life vest, wishing it had sleeves to break the cold wind of their passage, which dried out her contacts even behind sunglasses.

She turned around to look at their driver. Scrag smiled intimately. He'd made a ridiculously overblown point of showing off Edwina's ax practically the minute Charlie stepped out of the car her first night at Dead Horse Point. And he'd been even more obvious about what a threat Charlie's mother supposedly was. He could have been setting Edwina up to take the blame for Cabot's murder even then.

Scrag had hung around the fringes of the industry long enough to have developed some grudge against the director. Or he could just be nuts enough to have taken more than an ordinary dislike to Edwina and decided to set her up for disaster.

Charlie was on the canyon's third level this time, at the very bottom. Vertical walls gave way to turrets and spires and ledges. Massive shapes in front of even more massive shapes. Hollywood could make you feel small, but she'd always resented nature for doing it so much better.

Sidney Levit, now, might have seen murdering Cabot as a chance to save the
Animal Aliens
budget and realize a dream of being a director at the same time. Edwina would be a convenient scapegoat to his ambition and business acumen. Or maybe just working closely with Cabot could actually drive one to murder.

Blue and purple shadow hues changed to russets and dull oranges when the sun hit the rock cliffs and formations rearing to either side of Charlie. It was as vast and alien as the other levels but in a different way. It would be so easy to disappear here. The only softness in the whole landscape was the water and it would want to drown you.

In the boat ahead of her, Mitch Hilsten reached an arm around the hunched shoulders of his friend, the director of
Return of an Ecosystem
.

According to the dead Tawny, John B. Drake was going through a life change. In men, that often meant the need to sleep with ever-younger women—as if that proved prowess and youth, rather than privilege and exploitation. Tawny hadn't been able to “deal with it.”

So what does life change mean in women, Charlie?

It means hot flashes and mood changes and panic attacks. It does not mean murder.

The hard cliff walls amplified the harsh sounds of the engines. The jarring of the boat against the water brought back all the soreness of Charlie's cliff-hanging experience. One foot had started throbbing again. The tastes of coffee and bacon mixed unpleasantly with sloshing stomach acids and returned, burning, to her tongue.

But why would a life change make John B. Drake want to kill Cabot? Could his hormonal insecurities leave him so easily angered at Edwina's obstreperousness that he'd want to see her accused of murder? Why, when he could just fire her? And if Tawny's death had been planned, why would John B. plan it? They were breaking up anyway. Unless the split was totally her idea and he was that angered by it.

His shirttail flapping in the wind, revealing a hunting or fishing knife worn in a sheath at his waist, Homer pointed out a great ugly bird circling above and shouted, “Turkey vulture.”

It glided over them trailing a shadow Charlie could feel when it blocked the sun's warmth. Its wingspan was at least six feet, its feet yellow, and its featherless head an obscene red.

“Looks like an ordinary buzzard, only bigger.”

“Yeah, that's another name for them,” Earl said, the bill of his cap turned around to shade his face this time, “but there's more of them here for the same reason they're bigger. They're needed as nature's undertakers.” He raised his eyebrows and gave her a wide-eyed stare.

She leaned close to his ear. “I'm so sorry about Tawny. You two seemed pretty close.”

He simply stared out over the water, as if so fed up with klutzes he saw no reason to bother answering one.

She couldn't blame him. Here she'd narrowed down the list of suspects to six men, largely because they were all in one place. Meanwhile, the real murderer was probably winging his way high overhead about now on his way to California. And feeling pretty smug too.

Canyon walls broadened into layered shelves on one side of them and the APC plant sprawled on a curve up ahead, dump trucks and pickups in the parking lot.

Tamarisk trees laced broad areas of shoreline, their wands fringed with feathers of lavender-pink flowers bowing in the wind and alive with bees. Charlie thought them beautiful. Edwina thought them an abomination. Like most imported plants they were taking over and robbing the natural cottonwoods of a home and of the critters who lived in them.

The boats slowed as Homer pulled over and then stopped at a man-made pile of concrete rubble and aggregate.

“Somebody thought they'd build a hotel in here,” he told Charlie as the rest fanned out over the site. “Got as far as the foundations and a wall or two and the river took it out. This is where it landed.”

Sid and John B. and Mitch wandered and looked and thought. Earl had his tiny camcorder out again.

“Got a clue for you, darlin',” Scrag whispered in her ear. “What's it worth?” And he wandered off too.

“First, I got to tell you how disappointed I am,” he said when Charlie caught up with him, “you fallin' for that old Hilsten line just like any female. I thought you were different. Savvy, special, smart.”

“Clue to what?”

“I don't know that I even want to think about it, maybe that's why I'm shoving it off on you.” Scrag Dickens looked up at the turkey vulture, which seemed intent upon following them. Pausing for maximum dramatic effect, he then claimed with a totally straight face that he'd passed behind Tawny and Dean Goodacre shortly before the fatal accident. “Darlin', I had the weirdest impression she was using lighter fluid for perfume.”

Chapter
22

Charlie watched the turkey-vulture-buzzard. That was one big bird. She practiced just the right arrangement of words to impress Mrs. Beesom, a neighbor in Long Beach and a bird nut, to avoid thinking of the beautiful dead woman. Funny, Cabot's demise hadn't really penetrated—

The “guys” were climbing back into the boats. Two of them squaring off at each other.

“… lawsuit,” Sidney Levit said, still in a white dress shirt but at least wearing canvas shoes. He stared up at the buzzard too.

Earl Seabaugh, camcorder dangling from one hand, baseball cap from the other, stood toe to toe with the older man, face fused with emotion. “Lawsuit? Ben's dead. Who's to sue? She didn't fucking
have
anybody.”

But it was the killer look the
Ecosystem's
director of photography leveled at his own producer/director, John B. Drake, that brought Charlie up short. She watched everybody watch everybody and tried to catalog looks. Sullen, bleak, suspicious, thoughtful, and afraid.

Once they were moving down the river again, Charlie found her mood had lightened. Even though the buzzard stayed with them. There were six guys here with a lot on their minds and a lot of hostility and just maybe more clues like Scrag's. Some of them might even be true. Just maybe, the noose around her mom's neck was loosening a tad.

She sat next to Dean Goodacre on this leg of their jaunt and asked him about what he'd been doing up in the helicopter the night he'd come to the rescue.

“Started out to scout the power station site, see if there was any need to have an airborne camera. Sid and I decided against it later.”

“You weren't over the substation when I saw you first and you were a long way from it when you got to us in so short a time.”

“Yeah”—he was chewing on a toothpick now and he parked it to one side to whisper loud enough for the buzzard to hear—“decided to look for that UFO that might have left the night watchman from the uranium mill on that mesa top. The one that ended up backing you off a cliff.”

“And did you?”

“Yeah, there was something big there for a bit I couldn't see through. I've seen 'em before. Most pilots have, one time or another.”

Sometimes Charlie felt as if she were the only sane person left in this world. Even though she knew certifiable nuts regularly thought so too. “What do you pilots do about it?”

“Ignore it mostly.” His honest, steady gaze was a little too much and his long curly hair fanned out in the wind so like a woman's would that the giant arms on either side of the beefy chest looked like prostheses. “Once you fly, see, you don't want to do anything else. And flying jobs are hard to come by. And seeing UFOs is not reassuring to your average employer.”

He worked for a company based in San Diego that chartered choppers and pilots to film studios, rescue and medical units, news media, and private corporations trying to impress customers, stockholders, and suppliers.

The U.S. Navy had taught Dean to fly helicopters. “I'd kill to keep this job.” He spit the toothpick over the side and pulled a stick of gum out of a shirt pocket under his life jacket. “But I didn't.”

He chewed in self-important silence for a while, enjoying the ride and the scenery, and then turned to Charlie with a hard look. “Now it's your turn. What'd you see up there, before you backed off the mesa?”

“Whorls,” Charlie told him. “Round swirls in the dirt.”

They left the tamarisk shores to explore deepening canyons, the colors changing with the light. The river had sliced through layers of the planet's crust, like a knife through a stack of sandwiches, exposing the hardened fillings in varicolored swaths and crumbling ledges that extended up to the top level two thousand feet above her.