Minor in possession

CHAPTER 21

Fortunately, Ralph Ames is a forgiving man-a most forgiving man with an inexhaustible supply of good connections. Once alerted to our plight, he hired another helicopter and came to Tucson to get us.

By three the next morning he had successfully extricated Rhonda Attwood and me from the clutches of the F.B.I. By four he had dragged us home to Paradise Valley. When it was time to go to bed, Rhonda made not the slightest pretense of going to her own designated room. She undressed in mine, crawled into bed, snuggled contentedly against my chest, and instantly fell asleep.

There was no seduction, no game-playing. We were both far too tired. I drifted off within minutes as well and slept the heavy, dreamless sleep born of exhaustion. My body's resources had been driven far beyond the reaches of endurance.

My own noisy snoring woke me up the next morning. The sun was already well up behind the looming hump of Camelback Mountain, and I was in bed alone.

Guiltily, I wondered if my snoring had awakened Rhonda and driven her from the room, but a quick check of her room showed it was empty as well, the bed untouched. I glanced at the bedside clock. It was already almost ten-high time to be up and about, especially considering the fact that Joey's funeral was scheduled for three that afternoon.

I hurried into the bathroom, took a quick showed, dressed, and then went prowling Ames' house in search of intelligent life. There wasn't any. Rhonda Attwood was nowhere to be found, and neither was Ames, but the coffee carafe was full of hot, aromatic coffee. I was just pouring myself a cup when the phone rang.

"Detective Beaumont?"

I recognized Guy Owens' brisk voice at once. "Hello, Guy. How's Michelle?"

"Much better, thank you. They pumped her stomach. She's up and around."

"What about you? How's the leg?"

"In a cast, but it'll mend." He paused, sounding somewhat uncertain. "I need to ask you a question, Detective Beaumont. I never had a chance yesterday, but today I need to know the answer."

"Shoot."

"Why did you and Rhonda Attwood come to Sierra Vista?"

I could feel myself being painted into a corner. I sensed the hidden traps inherent in any answer I might give, so I waffled. "You should ask Rhonda that question, Guy, not me."

"Put her on the phone, then, and I will," he returned.

"Sorry. She's not here right now."

"But now is when I need the answer," Guy insisted stubbornly.

I heard a hard edge come into his voice, a tone that I recalled hearing once before during our long, fruitless wait in my cabin, that night seemingly eons ago. Then we had been linked by the mutual bond of outraged fatherhood. A lot of painful water had gone under the bridge since then. Now, five long days later, my connection with Rhonda Attwood had somehow, inexplicably, forced me into a separate camp. Guy Owens and I were no longer on the same team. I could hear it in his voice.

"I'm sure Rhonda will be back soon," I countered. "She may just have gone out to have her hair done or do some shopping."

Truthfully, neither of those two options sounded much like the Rhonda Attwood I knew, but they were the best I could come up with at a moment's notice, and Guy Owens didn't question them.

"There are decisions to make," Guy Owens replied stiffly. "Important decisions, and they need to be made now. This morning. So you tell me, Detective Beaumont. Why did she come to the house? What did she want?"

And suddenly all the responsibility for the future of Rhonda Attwood's single potential grandchild was thrust solely onto my shoulders. With Michelle Owens already a patient in a hospital where the lieutenant colonel's best buddy ran the show, I knew there wouldn't be any problem scheduling her for a bit of minor surgery. The innocuous diagnosis would say that some unspecified female difficulty had prompted a routine D amp; C. In the process, the embryo of Joey Rothman's posthumous progeny would be summarily scraped out of existence.

"Rhonda wanted to talk to you," I said lamely.

"What about?"

Guy Owens wasn't making it easy for me. "To try to talk you out of the abortion," I replied. "She's willing to help with the baby, financially, I mean, and with raising it too. Joey was her only son, you see, and-"

Guy Owens cut me off before I could say any more. "That's all I wanted to know," he said bluntly, hanging up the phone without bothering to say good-bye.

I stood there holding the handset, looking at it gloomily, listening to the empty buzz of dial tone, and knowing I'd blown it. Completely blown it! Maybe Rhonda herself could have convinced him, but I sure as hell hadn't. Feeling both powerless and inept, I flung the phone back into its cradle. Where the hell was she anyway? Why wasn't she here to handle her own damn problems?

Far away, in some other part of the house, I heard a shower turn on. It was a welcome diversion. It meant someone besides me was still hanging around. I settled down to drink a cup of coffee and to wait and see who would appear.

Ames, still bleary-eyed, stumbled into the kitchen a few minutes later. He headed straight for the coffee. "Rhonda's still asleep?" he asked.

I shook my head. "Up and gone already," I told him. "I thought you and she had taken off somewhere together."

"Are you kidding? Not me. I just woke up a few minutes ago. Where'd she go, and how?" he asked.

"Beats me." I shrugged, but I was beginning to feel uneasy about her absence. Walking over to the door that led out to the garage, I opened it and looked inside. Ames' enormous white Lincoln wasn't parked where we had left it.

"Did you give her permission to use your car?" I asked.

Frowning, Ames came over to where I was standing and looked out at the empty garage for himself. "No," he said, shaking his head. "Not that I remember."

He turned back into the room and checked in the cupboard drawer where he usually deposited the fistful of car keys whenever he entered the house.

"The keys are gone," he announced.

"Stealing car keys must run in the family," I commented humorlessly.

Ralph ignored me. "She must have taken it, then. Are you sure she didn't leave a note somewhere telling you where she was going?"

"No. Not that I found."

"Great," Ralph muttered. "That's just great. Here we are, stuck without a car, and she's off God knows where doing God knows what. We'll just have to wait for her to turn up, that's all."

Maybe Ralph is constitutionally capable of sitting patiently and waiting for someone to "turn up," but I'm not. I'm terrible at waiting.

"You could always call and report the Lincoln stolen," I suggested.

"Are you kidding? Have Rhonda Attwood arrested for car theft?" Ralph asked incredulously. "Not on your life. She'll come back. You'll see. I'm going to go out and sit by the pool. Care to join me?"

"No thanks."

Instead, I paced the floor for a while, trundling back and forth through the house, looking out the windows and peering up and down the street hoping to catch sight of the Lincoln as it turned in at the end of the driveway. No such luck.

Time passed. I don't know how much, but finally, when Ralph came in to pour himself another cup of coffee, I couldn't wait any longer. I picked up the phone and dialed Detective Delcia Reyes-Gonzales' direct number at the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department. It was Monday morning, and she was at her desk.

"I see you're splashed all over the front page of the Republic again this morning, Beau," Delcia said with a musical laugh when I identified myself. "There are only fourteen counties in this state, and so far you've raised hell in five of them. How much longer do you plan on staying around?"

"This is serious, Delcia," I cut in. "Rhonda's missing."

"No!" Delcia sounded alarmed.

"I woke up around ten, and she was gone. So is Ralph Ames' car."

"No note?"

"Nothing."

"Any sign of a struggle?"

"No."

"These bastards don't give up easy, do they," Delcia breathed. She was leaping to the same uncomfortable conclusion that was beginning to dawn on me.

"Not very. What do you suggest?"

"Have you reported her missing?"

"No. Ralph didn't think it was necessary. He won't even report the car being gone. He's convinced she's just out running errands and that she'll be back."

"He could be right," Delcia said dubiously, "but I'm not so sure, especially considering what all's happened in this case during the last few days. But since it is his car…"

She let the end of the sentence linger in the air. After a momentary pause she asked, "What did those guys want, anyway? Why did they snatch Michelle? The newspaper story didn't shed much light on the whys."

"Money, for one thing, I guess. Money Joey had lifted from somebody and turned over to Michelle for safekeeping."

"How much money?"

"A hundred grand."

Delcia whistled through her teeth. "Sounds like big-time drug money to me. So maybe he wasn't lying about that after all."

"No," I said. "Maybe not. And since he seems to have been grabbing at money anywhere he could find it, my guess is that he got in a tight spot with his suppliers and was trying to make good on what he owed them. Either that, or to skip out altogether."

"Literally robbing Peter to pay Paul," Delcia put in.

"That's right. The creeps also said something about a paper as well as the money, but all I saw in the briefcase was green stuff, so I don't have any idea what the paper could have been."

"Maybe Michelle knows something about it," Delcia suggested. "The F.B.I. may have learned something from her about that. Do you know? Did they ask her?"

"They never got a chance to talk to Michelle, at least not while I was there. The chopper from Fort Huachuca had lifted off before the F.B.I. guys arrived on the scene. As far as I know, they still haven't interviewed either Guy or Michelle."

"Is it possible that the feds learned something from the prisoners?"

"Possible," I agreed, "but you know the F.B.I. They didn't breathe a word to anybody else."

"At least not to you," Delcia interjected good-humoredly.

My temper flared. "You're right. Not to me. You might have better luck on that score. You're a helluva lot prettier than I am, for one thing, and you're an official detective with an official connection to the case for another. Who am I? Just the poor stupid schmuck who happened to get caught in the cross fire with live bullets flying in every goddamn direction. Why the hell would I need to know anything?"

"Don't get all bent out of shape," Delcia cautioned. "I'm scheduled to call the F.B.I. this morning. If I find out something you should know, I'll tell you. As soon as I finish with them, I'm on my way to Phoenix for the funeral. Maybe Ralph Ames is right and Rhonda's out getting ready for the funeral. If she shows up in the next hour or so, have the dispatcher put you through to me in the car. Otherwise, when I get there, we'll see what other courses of action to follow."

"All right," I said grudgingly, knowing full well it was the only sensible thing to do.

I understand how missing-persons reports work. Police jurisdictions don't much like receiving them when the person in question has been missing less than twenty-four hours. It generates too much wasted paperwork.

"One more thing," Delcia added. "I did have a call for her. It came in to the department last night. The guys on duty thought it might be important and called me at home."

"A call for Rhonda?" I asked. "What kind of call? Who from?"

"A man. Gave his name as Denny Blake. Said he was neighbor of Rhonda's up in Sedona. He said he was worried because he hadn't heard from her in several days."

"Why'd he call you?"

"He read about the Joey Rothman case in the Sedona paper and knew I was working on it. He left a message with me to have Rhonda call him."

"You didn't tell him where she was staying or give him this number, did you?"

"I'm a cop, Beau," Delcia answered, a sudden chill creeping into her previously cordial voice. "And I'm not stupid."

"Sorry," I said hurriedly. "I didn't mean for it to sound that way. It's just that I'm worried, that's all. I'll see you when you get here."

"Hopefully she'll be there by the time I am," Delcia added, but she didn't sound totally convinced, and neither was I.

"So we wait?" Ames asked, peering at me over his raised coffee cup as I put down the phone.

"We wait," I told him.

But as I said before, I'm terrible at waiting. It goes against the grain. I have a compulsion to do something even if what I do may not always be right. Ten minutes later, I picked up the phone, dialed Arizona information, and asked for Denny Blake's number in Sedona. There was no problem. The phone number was there, unlisted. When I dialed it, a man's voice answered on the second ring.

"Blake's residence," he said.

I'm used to phone calls being much more difficult to make, people being harder to track down. Denny Blake answered before I had a chance to figure out what I was going to say.

"My name is Beaumont," I stammered. "J. P. Beaumont."

"Oh yes," he answered. "Rhonda mentioned you. From the sound of it, you must be some kind of he-man."

Denny Blake's sibilant s's allowed me to assume that he wasn't His words had a vaguely English cast to them that could have been real or could have been affected, I couldn't tell which, but what he said about Rhonda gave me cause for hope.

"You're talking about what happened yesterday?" I ventured.

"She told me all about it," Denny Blake declared enthusiastically. "Everything! From what she said, it must have been exciting. Too exciting for words!"

"It was exciting, all right," I muttered, but I was beginning to feel better. Obviously Rhonda had been in touch with Denny Blake sometime during the course of the morning.

"Rhonda doesn't happen to be there right now, does she?" I asked cautiously.

"She didn't come all the way here," he answered archly. "I wouldn't let her do that. Not with the funeral this afternoon. I met her at a little place in Camp Verde, J J's. They make the most marvelous biscuits and gravy."

For a moment I was speechless. "So you met her there?" I finally asked. "Why?"

"To give her the package, of course. I assumed it was important, since Joey had obviously gone to some trouble to send it. I was sure she'd want to have it. ASAP, if you know what I mean."

"Package?" I asked stupidly. "What package?"

"I didn't know it was from Joey, not for sure, but I assumed. It had the initials. J.R. penciled on it up in the left-hand corner where the return address is supposed to go, although it was post-marked Sierra Vista. I don't know how he could have gotten all the way down there to mail it, but he must have, poor thing."

"The package. How did you get it?"

"The mailman left it with me. Saturday morning, I believe it was. He does that, you know. Leaves things for Rhonda with me if she's not home and stuff for me with her if I'm not. Yes, I'm sure it was Saturday morning, but Rhonda wasn't here. That's not like her, not at all. She usually tells me well in advance if she's going to be away or calls if her plans change. We're pretty much on our own out here-the last of the Mohicans, as it were. The two of us simply have to stick together."

"But how did you find her, to let her know about the package?"

"I didn't. She called me. Around seven this morning. Said she'd just realized that when she came to pick up her thing, she'd forgotten to stop by and tell me she was heading back to Phoenix. She must have been positively wild, or she would have remembered. She called as soon as she remembered so I wouldn't worry That's when I told her, and we agreed to meet."

"And did you?"

"I already told you. We had biscuits and gravy, at least I did, and I gave her the package."

"What was in it?"

"It wasn't a package so much as an envelope. You know, one of those big zipper-type envelopes-the kind bookstores and libraries mail books in when you order them."

"What was in this envelope?" I persisted.

"Why, books of course. Several of them, actually. What did you expect?"

"What did they look like?"

"Oh, you know. The blank ones."

"Blank?" I asked.

"Haven't you seen them? They sell them everywhere in all the stores. Nothing but glorified notebooks really. People use them for diaries, I guess, or to scribble reams and reams of poetry. These had a frightfully ugly paisley design on the covers. A matched set, I'm sure."

"Notebooks. Did she read them?"

"Don't be absurd. Not while I was there, of course not. Rhonda would never be so rude as to read them in front of me, and it would have been incredibly gauche of me to expect her to. As soon as I finished my coffee, I left her alone so she could read them in private. Words from beyond the grave, as it were."

"Did you notice what kind of car she was driving?" I asked.

"I don't notice cars particularly. I suppose she was driving her little green car, whatever that ugly thing is. I could never see how an artist could own such an unsightly automobile."

"So she was driving the Fiat? Did you see it?"

"Who are you?" Denny Blake asked, as though he'd suddenly lost track of the beginning of our conversation and couldn't remember who I was or what I wanted. "Why are you asking me all these questions?"

"I'm trying to locate Rhonda, that's all," I said placatingly. "She left here driving a Lincoln Town Car, and now you say she's in the Fiat."

"I didn't say anything of the kind," he returned haughtily. "I didn't notice what kind of car she was driving. Why would anyone pay attention to cars in Camp Verde? What an absurd notion!"

I heard some kind of racket in the background, a loud insistent buzzing.

"I've got to go now," Denny Blake said energetically. "That's the timer on my oven. I'm baking bread. The biscuits inspired me."

He hung up. I didn't. I redialed the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department and asked to be patched through to Detective Delcia Reyes-Gonzales. ASAP.