Boobytrap

16

The first thing I did when we cleared the immediate area was to try calling Tamara on the car phone. No good; I couldn’t get through a wall of static. I’d had trouble with the mobile unit before in mountainous terrain, particularly bad-weather or windy days, and during the past hour or so a high, sharp wind had begun to blow up here. Kerry kept telling me to get the thing replaced with a more sophisticated cell phone and I kept putting it off like the bullheaded procrastinator she said I was. Damn car was going in for a new unit first of next week.

I drove too fast along the rough road, Marian sitting rigidly beside me, staring straight ahead and not making a sound even when a bump or pothole bounced us around like clay figures in a box. She didn’t want conversation right now and that was fine with me. There was plenty of time — between five and six long hours — for what talking we had left to do.

We cleared the last sheriffs roadblock at the Bucks Lake Road intersection, began to wind down to lower elevations. I tried the phone again as we neared Quincy. Still staticky, but I could make out circuit rings through the crackle, which meant Tamara and I could hear each other. I stayed on until she answered, and it was all right as long as both of us spoke loudly and distinctly.

“Been hoping you’d call,” she said. “Bombs, kidnapping — man, shit does happen when you’re around.”

“Yeah. How’d you hear about it?”

“Joe DeFalco. Called a while ago, said soon as he got word what was going down up there he knew you were involved.”

“What’d you tell him?”

Mutter, mutter wrapped in static.

“Say that again. Louder.”

“Told him everything I know — nothing much. Where’re you?”

I told her that and who was with me and where we were going; the rest could wait until later. “What I need,” I said then, “is for you to keep on top of the situation with Latimer. I don’t mean media reports, I mean an official pipeline — I want to know immediately if and when anything breaks over the next five hours. Can do?”

Static. Then, “…be no problem. Felicia owes me one.”

Felicia was Felicia Jackson, a friend of Tamara’s who worked in the SFPD’s communications department. Tamara never ceased to amaze me, not only with her computer skills but in other ways; in a few short months she’d made personal contacts in strategic places that it would’ve taken me years to establish.

“Any news,” I said, “even if it’s unconfirmed.”

“You got it.”

Into Quincy, out of it again rolling southeast on Highway 70. Traffic was fairly light; I let the speedometer needle ease up over seventy and hang there. My instinct was to bear down even harder, but I was afraid to run the risk of accident or attracting the attention of the Highway Patrol. There were quite a few HP patrols in the Sierras during summer months and they weren’t inclined to be forgiving of speeders.

Marian still had nothing to say. I glanced over at her now and then and her position didn’t change; she seemed almost catatonic, lost deep inside herself. The inside of my head was not a good place to be right now; the inside of her head, I thought, must be three times as bleak and haunted.

We were coming up on a wide place in the road called Cromberg when the phone buzzed. I yanked the receiver out of its cradle, almost dropped it in my haste to get the line open.

Cantrell. And a static-free connection. I heard him loud and clear when he said, “You’re out of luck.”

“What does that mean?”

“No rentals in the Half Moon Bay area by Donald Latimer or Jacob Strayhorn.”

“Your office is sure of that?”

“Positive. I even had my girl check back two full months, just in case.”

“How wide an area did she cover?”

“All of San Mateo County.”

“All right. Listen, call her back and have her check Santa Cruz County rentals. And if that’s a dead end… a list of all the rentals by a single male in the Half Moon Bay area over the past six weeks. He could’ve used another name.”

“You don’t want much for your hundred bucks.”

“I thought you weren’t doing this for the money. Or the publicity.”

“…Okay, right. But what good’s a list going to do you? Rental could be in a man’s name only, but he’s taking the place for his family, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. Bound to be a lot of names in any case, this time of year.”

“We can narrow it down. Chances are he wouldn’t have much money to spend, and he’d have to pay in cash. And his references would be shaky at best.”

“Have to be a low-end property,” Cantrell said musingly. “A dog listing that some agent’d be so anxious to unload, he wouldn’t bother to check references. I don’t operate that way, but there’re some in the business who do.”

Oh, sure, you’re not one of them. I said, “Anything that looks promising, have your office person call the agent and find out if the renter’s description matches Latimer’s.”

“Fat chance. He looks like half the white guys on the street these days. Besides, that’s liable to take all afternoon.”

“You planning on going anywhere?”

“No, but I’m tired of sitting around, away from all the action.”

“I feel for you. But not half as much as I feel for the Dixons.”

“Yeah, all right, I hear you. But this is the end of it.”

“One way or the other,” I said.

If he heard that, he didn’t respond to it. Noise had started up in the background, voices chattering words I couldn’t make out. After about fifteen seconds, Cantrell said, “Mack just came in. Looks like the bomb squad’s finally finished and on their way out of here. Bomb didn’t blow up, at least there wasn’t any big boom, but something must’ve happened. Mack said an ambulance just went tearing out that way.”

I let all of that pass. “Call your office. Don’t let us down, Cantrell.”

“Count on me, don’t worry.”

Yeah. The lid was coming off the shotgun slaying of Lieutenant Dewers; once it was all the way off, the excitement level at Deep Mountain Lake would climb again. That and the impending media swarm would lure Cantrell like flame lures bugs. If his “girl” had gotten back to him before then, I’d get another call from him. If not, I’d just had my last conversation with the caring, reliable, and humanitarian Hal Cantrell.

Marian roused herself as I slid the phone receiver back into its cradle. She’d been listening to my end of the exchange, had figured out from that what I had Cantrell doing. She wanted to know how I knew Latimer had been living in the Half Moon Bay area. I told her about Nils Ostergaard’s suspicions, the Safeway receipt I’d found in his truck.

“Latimer killed Nils, didn’t he. It wasn’t an accident.”

“It looks that way. I think he caught Nils snooping around his cottage Sunday night and killed him there and then moved the body later.”

“Poor Nils. My God.” Then she asked, “Do you think it’s possible Latimer took Chuck to Half Moon Bay?”

“Possible, yes.”

“But not likely.”

“As likely as any other possibility right now.”

She didn’t believe it. She fell silent again.

All right, I thought, so it’s a long shot. What else do we have except long shots?

The miles rolled away and we were in Truckee shortly before three o’clock. I stopped on the outskirts for gas and something to put in my stomach. No food since last night and the tension had created a sour, burning pain under my breastbone. While the tank was filling I bought three packaged sandwiches and a couple of sodas in the station’s convenience store. We were back on the road again in ten minutes, heading south on Interstate 80 five minutes after that.

Marian refused the sandwich I offered and I couldn’t coax her into it. She did take one of the sodas. I washed a tasteless ham-and-cheese down, made myself eat a second sandwich, some kind of stale meat, on the theory that I needed to keep my own fuel level up; the food lay in my stomach in a hard glutinous mass and the carbonation in the soda gave me gas that I had difficulty controlling. Not that Marian would have noticed if I’d belched like a foghorn. She sat over tight against the passenger door, her head tilted back and her eyes closed, but she wasn’t resting. The tension level in the car was as heavy as dead air in a vacuum.

Up and over Donner Summit, down past Emigrant Gap. I kept glancing at her, at the equally silent car phone. I wanted the thing to ring — and I didn’t want it to ring. If it did and it was Tamara, it would probably be bad news.

Baxter, Colfax, Bowman, down toward Auburn. Running into more traffic now. And my gut was hurting again; the damn sandwiches seemed to have solidified down there, resisting all internal efforts at digestion.

Nothing from Tamara.

Nothing from Cantrell.

Auburn. Newcastle. Rocklin.

The dashboard clock: 4:05. My wristwatch: 4:08.

Roseville. Sacramento next.

And the phone went off.

Marian jumped, made a sound in her throat. I grabbed up the receiver, and Tamara’s voice said, “Felicia be just calling. There’s news.”

My breathing went a little funny. “Yes?”

“State cops found Latimer’s car, the Chrysler.”

“Where?”

“In some trees just outside the Truckee-Tahoe airport.”

“You mean abandoned?”

“Since just after eight this morning,” Tamara said. “No sign of him or the boy. What he did, they think, he parked the car there and walked into the airport and rented himself a car under his own name, then drove it back and picked up the kid and whatever else was in the Chrysler. Cleaned out when it be found. The man’s got stones, you gotta give him that.”

I was breathing all right again now. “What kind of car’d he rent?”

“New Toyota wagon. Dark blue. You want the license?”

“Go ahead.”

She read off the number. Easy one; I wouldn’t forget it.

“Not half as bad as it could be, right?” she said. “At least they didn’t find any bodies.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Tamara.”

“Just be hoping I don’t have to call you again.”

Marian was a bent wall of stone beside me, her eyes like cave openings in its pale face. She said “Chuck?” as I replaced the handset, in the same fearful way she’d spoken his name on the Judsons’ dock earlier.

“No word yet. Latimer switched cars at Truckee.”

“Damn him.” Savage whisper. “Goddamn him.”

I had nothing to say to that. We were both out of words again; the silence rebuilt, heavier than before. It was like something else in the car with us, an unclean thing crouched so close I could almost feel its prickly touch against my skin.

Rush-hour slowdown getting through Sacramento: more nerve-strain, more frustration. We finally broke loose on the western outskirts and I opened her up to near eighty, not much of a risk because the average traffic-flow speed on the long stretch between Sacramento and Fairfield is upward of seventy.

Five-twenty by the dashboard clock, and we were approaching the Carquinez Bridge, when the phone buzzed again.

Cantrell this time, to my relief. “I’d just about given up on you,” I said.

“Yeah, well, you’re lucky I’m a man of my word. Some party going on up here.”

And he’d already joined it, judging from the faint slur to his words. “I don’t care about that. What’ve you got for me?”

“Four names, three towns on the coast — all low-end, short-term rentals. Took the girl until a few minutes ago to narrow it down that far. The original list—”

“Latimer’s description match any of them?”

“No. She talked to three of the agents, they see dozens of people every day, none of ‘em could remember back as far as a month, two months. Except one woman thought her client, the one in Montero Beach, was a fat guy in his sixties, but I know the agent, she drinks like a fish and you can’t—”

“Names and addresses, Cantrell. Slowly.”

Marian was alert beside me, and when she heard me say that she opened her purse, rummaged up a notebook and pencil. By then, Cantrell had run through the list once. I had him do it again, repeating everything aloud so Marian could write it down. Two of the names I asked him to spell so I could be certain we had them right.

Adam Greenspan, 21178 Coast Highway, Montero Beach.

Frank R. Slaydon, 1817 Seal Rock Road, Half Moon Bay.

K. M. Dusay, 850 Bluffside Drive, Half Moon Bay.

Howard Underwood, 1077 Cypress Hill, Pescadero.

“Any of the names mean anything to you?” Cantrell asked.

“No.”

“Slaydon’s a little like Strayhorn, huh?”

“A little. Okay, Cantrell. Thanks — we appreciate all your help.”

“Don’t forget where you got it,” he said, and we both disconnected at the same time. For the last time.

Marian said, “If any of these men is Latimer… which one?”

“No idea yet, but if he was running true to form at the time, maybe we can find out.”

I still had the receiver in my hand; I tapped the memory key for my office number. When Tamara came on, I said, “Now I’ve got something — computer work for you to do. Call up everything you can locate on the Latimer case five years ago, see if any of the four names I’m going to give you is connected in any way. This is urgent, Tamara.”

“Be on it soon as we hang up. Names?” And when she had them, “You must be close to home by now. Where?”

“About fifteen minutes from the Bay Bridge,” I said. “We should be at the Dixon home before six-thirty if the traffic cooperates. If you can’t reach me on the car phone, try the number there.” I asked.

Marian for it, rather than trust my memory, and relayed it to Tamara.

During the evening rush most of the bridge traffic is eastbound, out of the city; since we were westbound we got across without much slowdown. 101 South was congested as usual. I stood it as long as I could, got off and did some maneuvering on side streets that brought us up into Monterey Heights almost as fast as a more direct route would have. It was 6:25 — and Tamara hadn’t called back — when I pulled up in front of the Dixons’ Spanish-style house.

“I don’t see Pat’s car,” Marian said.

“He’d have it in the garage if he’s been holed up all day.”

“Oh God, please let him be here.”

She wasn’t talking to me, so I didn’t answer. She was out of the car before I was; I took her arm to steady her as we climbed the front steps, both of us stiff and sweaty and drawn to the snapping point.

The front door was locked; Marian used her key. And we went in to find out if God was going to answer her prayer, give us at least a partial reprieve.