Crunch Time

24

I sighed. “He’s not here at the moment. But I can put you on with a member of his team. His name is Sergeant Boyd.”

Boyd shook his head but took the phone from me anyway. He identified himself, then gave his Furman County Sheriff’s Department cell phone number to Pargeter.

“Careful fellow,” commented Boyd, who handed me back my cell phone, then answered his own.

While Boyd listened to Pargeter talk, I reflected that I still did not know how everything connected. I didn’t know what the connection, if any, was between Stonewall Osgoode and any of the suspects in Ernest’s murder. Sean Breckenridge had taken pictures of puppies that might have been Osgoode’s. Was Sean Breckenridge Stonewall Osgoode’s investor? Had Sean been hoping for a big payday with the marijuana grow operation, a payday that would enable him to leave Rorry and marry Brie? If so, then why kill Osgoode? Because he knew too much? Had that been Ernest’s problem, too, that he knew too much?

What about Kris? Had he somehow learned that Ernest was snooping around him at Yolanda’s request? Or had he just not liked that she was living at Ernest’s house?

Humberto had been the most directly threatened by Ernest’s investigations, besides maybe Osgoode. Ernest had managed to retrieve Norman Juarez’s long-stolen necklace, tying Humberto to the theft of the Juarez family fortune. Had Humberto followed Ernest and killed him, then retrieved the necklace? Or had he had one of his henchmen do it? Or had Humberto hired Osgoode? Who had changed Ernest’s dental appointment, Charlene or somone else? I shook my head, feeling helpless, just as Boyd hung up.

“So what was that all about?” I asked.

Boyd did not answer me. Instead, he asked, “How did you happen to get Pargeter’s number?”

Oh, crap. I said, “I can’t tell you that,” thinking of all the TV crime shows I’d seen, of how evidence got thrown out because it had been obtained illegally. Fruit of the poisonous tree, the defense lawyers always maintained. And out went those apples.

“I’ll talk to Tom,” said Boyd cryptically, and I thought of a prosecutor saying, Inevitable discovery, Your Honor. But inevitable discovery of what?

I shivered. We were driving along Main Street toward the Bertrams’ house, which was less than ten minutes away. Behind us, the prowler’s lightbar still blinked, which made me feel safe. I said, “Can’t you tell us anything?”

Boyd said, “Joe Pargeter suspects Kris in what was ruled the accidental death of his wealthy mother, Rita Nielsen.”

Yolanda gasped. Boyd said he couldn’t tell us any more until he had talked to Tom. I hugged my sides, frustrated.

Boyd and our police escort carried our boxes into the house. Overhead, the clouds had cleared without our having a storm. The late-afternoon sun was shining. The weather was cool for just after three o’clock.

Some cops, undoubtedly those with the day off, had begun arriving. Despite all that was going on, I felt safe walking down the Bertrams’ driveway. One of the investigators told me Tom would be arriving within the hour. Good, I thought. I had a lot to tell him, as did Boyd.

Beside me, Yolanda glanced up at the hulking ruins that constituted Ernest’s burned house. Once her gaze had snagged on it, she couldn’t take her eyes away from the place.

She was shaking, so I put my arm around her. Ferdinanda still looked grim.

Yolanda said quietly, “I wish Ernest could be here. I feel as if this is all my fault.”

“None of it is your fault,” I replied. “Let’s go inside.”

To my surprise, the first person I saw upon entering the Bertrams’ house behind Ferdinanda was . . . Father Pete.

“The Bertrams invited me,” he said hastily. When Yolanda drew back, Father Pete moved forward to embrace her. “I came early. I am hoping you will forgive me, Yolanda. I know you have been through a rough time, and I didn’t mean to startle you in the grocery store. I am absentminded.” He hesitated. “You have been a good friend to Goldy. I hope I can be a good friend to you.”

Yolanda said, “That would be nice. And of course I forgive you.”

Ferdinanda, unforgiving, rolled toward the kitchen. I wondered if, in the pastoral business, a 50 percent success rate was considered good.

“Do you know where Penny Woolworth is?” I asked Father Pete.

“In the kitchen. She has been working very hard here, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. The last time I was in this house . . . well, never mind.”

I glanced around the living room. The upholstered brown furniture was what the discount houses call “Early American.” It was old but freshly polished, and the worn orange wall-to-wall carpeting had been vacuumed. There was no clutter. Penny must have performed a miracle.

SallyAnn, greeting guests, winked at me and then hustled over. “Thank you so much for sending your friend. I’ve thrown away more junk, and donated more out-of-style clothing and shoes, than I even knew I had.”

“Did you find anything valuable?” I asked.

“My sanity,” she replied, then left to say hello to more folks.

The kitchen was gleaming, and there was plenty of counter space. As Yolanda began unloading our first box of food, she opened a refrigerator that was half-full . . . and sparkling. Ferdinanda pulled drawers wide to find utensils. Penny herself, a bucket of soapy water at her feet, was washing the kitchen walls. SallyAnn was nowhere in sight.

“Penny?” I said. “It doesn’t look as if you needed us after all.”

Her face shone with sweat. “You’re right. I was in a panic the first hour. Now I’m almost done. There are two clean bathrooms with new towels in them, and one clean bedroom, the master, where people can put their coats.”

“Thank you so much,” I said. I slipped the four hundred bucks into her jeans pocket. “You’re the best. How many sacks of discards did SallyAnn end up filling?”

Penny stopped scrubbing and shook her head. “Five. They’re in my pickup. I’ll take them to Evergreen Christian Outreach on my way home. But get this: There are another five full garden bags stacked in their trash shed, out by their garage. When I go home, I’m sleeping for twelve hours straight, or until Zeke calls me tomorrow, whichever comes first.” She lifted an eyebrow and lowered her voice. “What do you think of the décor?”

I looked around at mismatched but clean canisters, large wooden salt and pepper shakers, and a garage-sale rack with half-full bottles of spices and herbs that didn’t look as if they’d been used in a decade. The pictures on the walls were decoupaged cards, pictures of tiny mice clinging to autumn leaves, kittens snuggling, puppies playing. I whispered, “Well, it’s different from Kris’s.”

“And from Marla’s, and from nearly every other house I do. But they have money. SallyAnn told me. She just hates to clean. So I’m taking them on, even after Zeke comes back.”

“You are good,” I said, “and I am so thank—” My eyes caught on something. “What is that?” I pointed to a framed print from Sesame Street. “They don’t have kids, so what gives?”

“Oh.” Penny’s tone was offhand. “I didn’t find it until we removed about a ton of stuff from that counter. It’s a picture of Bert and Ernie, you know? I think John Bertram’s old partner gave it to him. You know, the partner was called Ernie, and the cops call John Bertram Bert—where are you going?”

I dashed into the living room and looked around for Boyd. It really couldn’t be that simple, could it? I hadn’t even processed it when SallyAnn first told me about the nicknames. But when I saw the picture, it seemed to make perfect sense. “Where’s Sergeant Boyd?” I asked a couple bringing in a covered casserole dish.

“Uh,” said the man, a tall fellow whom I vaguely recognized. “On the patio, I think. Having a beer.”

I thanked him and raced outside. Boyd, his right hand around a can, was giving advice to John Bertram, who was trying to start the propane grill. Boyd was laughing.

“Sergeant,” I said, my voice urgent. “I need you. Please?”

Boyd’s shoulders dropped, but he put down his beer and followed me. “Where are we going?”

“I need you to show me the crime scene. I mean, where Ernest was shot.”

Boyd exhaled but moved in front of me. John Bertram’s paved driveway was wide and long and led to the detached garage where he kept the numerous cars and trucks he was ostensibly working on. We walked down the driveway until we reached the field of boulders that stretched upward, to the left, between the Bertrams’ place and Ernest McLeod’s spread. Boyd turned and began climbing across rocks and over wild grass.

Finally he stopped. Nobody had followed to see what we were up to. For that I was thankful. This was a bit morbid.

“Here,” said Boyd, pointing to the gravel service road used by the fire department to reach otherwise inaccessible stands of trees. “He’d come down from his house. He must have heard something, or was suspicious, so he detoured onto this road. Then, we think, he turned back up toward his house and came into this field of rocks. Still, whoever was tracking him found him anyway. The cancer had weakened Ernest, we figure, so he couldn’t move so fast anymore. But he must have heard something and turned around . . . the killer shot him in the chest, then dragged him out of sight of the main road.”

I turned in a complete circle. There were boulders and pine trees, the Bertrams’ long driveway and big detached garage, their low-slung house, the main road, then uphill, to more boulders and evergreens, and the ruins of Ernest’s house.

“Say he didn’t detour down this road,” I said. Boyd looked skeptical. “Bear with me. Let’s say Ernest knew his house was being watched. So before someone could break in there, he put evidence incriminating Sean and Humberto into his backpack, with the intention of hiding it in John Bertram’s garage. Then imagine that he said to Ferdinanda, ‘If anything happens to me, ask Bert,’ not ‘ask the bird.’ And then Ernest, aka Ernie, walked down here and hid something at John Bertram’s place.”

“Goldy,” said Boyd, with doubt in his voice, “we don’t think so. There were no footprints, and nothing was dropped—”

“But it rained, and then it snowed. Any footprints would have been rinsed away.”

Boyd was still dubious. “Well, if there was anything hidden in John’s house, it’s probably in the bottom of a trash bag, if it’s there at all. Your friend said she’s been cleaning for several hours. John Bertram and Ernest McLeod were polar opposites in the let’s-keep-things-tidy department.”

I turned again, less sure of myself. My gaze swept across the vista. Ernest was neat; John was not. Ernest McLeod had left Saturday morning to walk into town. According to Ferdinanda, he had his camera, wallet, and other belongings in his red backpack. The backpack had not been found. SallyAnn hadn’t mentioned it, and Penny certainly hadn’t.

The detached garage was a quarter-mile away. Say Ernest sensed he was being followed, and wasn’t sure he had the strength to escape whoever it was. But he went ahead and made his stop first, then wended his way back up through the boulders in the direction of home. . . .

Nobody had cleaned in the garage, or, as far as I knew, even looked in there for Ernest’s backpack. It was too far away from the crime scene.

“May I search John Bertram’s garage?” I asked Boyd eagerly.

“Goldy, no. It’s a total mess. I don’t know how John even finds his tools in there.”

“Please?”

Boyd’s shoulders slumped again. “All right, I’ll come with you.”

“I’d rather you stayed with Yolanda.”

“Okay. I’m going to watch you go in there, though. We’ve got more cops here than a law enforcement convention. But don’t stay long. I’m telling you, if we had hurricanes here, you’d say that garage got hit ten years ago, and nothing had been cleaned up.”

“Thanks.”

I scrambled down the rocks, huffing and puffing for the second time that day. When I stopped to catch my breath, I realized I could see down to Cottonwood Creek and the main twisting road into Aspen Meadow. I stifled a whoop when I saw Tom’s car rumbling along behind a line of traffic.

Finally, finally, I arrived back at the propane grill, which John Bertram was still trying to light. Ferdinanda, who’d just whacked John with her baton a couple of days before, showed no hint of remorse as she gave John directions on lighting the grill.

“John,” I gasped. “Ernest called you ‘Bert,’ right?”

He looked up at me. “Sure. We were Bert and Ernie. No big deal.”

“May I look around in your garage?”

His cheeks reddened. “Well, it’s kind of . . . chaotic in there. I mean, Ernest was always after me to clean it up. What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure,” I called over my shoulder as I walked briskly down the pavement. I didn’t see Boyd anywhere and I didn’t want to wait for him. Yolanda needed him more than I did right now.

Behind me, Ferdinanda yelled, “Hey, Goldy! If this man ever gets this grill lit, we got to put the pork on. Where are you going?”

“I’ll be back shortly,” I called. “We don’t need to cook the pork for at least another hour.”

To my dismay, the sound of Ferdinanda’s wheels squeaked along behind me. She called, “Come here, Goldy! I don’t want you going anywhere without something I’m going to give you.”

I stopped. Tom would be here soon, and I wanted to look in the garage before he arrived. But I dutifully waited for Ferdinanda. Maybe she would give me a Santería talisman, or—

“Take this,” said Ferdinanda. She reached beside her hip and pulled out the baton. “You’ve made enemies out of Humberto and, it sounds like, Sean Breckenridge, and maybe Kris, too.” She pointed to a button on the side of the baton. “You want it to extend, punch this.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d need both my hands if I was going to search through trash and who knew what all in the garage, but I did not mention this. “I’ll be right back.”

I raced off, but to my dismay I again heard Ferdinanda’s wheels squealing along slowly behind me. Maybe she would find somebody else to give advice to along the way. I certainly hoped so.

The crowd was thick, and it took me more than five minutes to thread through it. With any luck, Ferdinanda would be held up much longer, and not bother me on my quest.

The garage door was a red wooden sliding entrance, more like the type you would find on a barn. I slid it open, felt along the right wall, and switched on overhead fluorescent lights.

As promised, the place was a wreck. I counted six trucks and two cars, each in varying states of disrepair. The hoods of most of them yawned. Like many Coloradans, John Bertram cannibalized his old vehicles for parts to put in newer ones. But that wasn’t what interested me.

Which vehicle looked clean? Which one looked as if Ernest might have been in it?

It took only a minute. While the pickups were generally filled with rags, old cans, and all manner of detritus, there was one, a red one, over by the other side of the garage. I could see it well because daylight spilled in from the regular-size door on that side. The roar of traffic from the road below was clearly audible.

There was even a somewhat clear path to the red truck, as if someone—in my mind, Ernest—had tried to indicate where one should walk to get to the red truck, which looked as if it had been hastily wiped down by someone who wanted to indicate he’d been there. I walked quickly to it.

Someone—again, I was willing to bet it was Ernest—had dumped all the trash that had been in the back of the truck on the garage floor. I levered myself up to check the cab. It was empty. With my free hand, I pulled open one of the doors and felt along the floor and between the seats, but my hands came up with nothing. When I opened the glove box, a crumpled heap of old restaurant reviews spilled onto the floor. I checked through them quickly, but found not a shred of anything of interest.

Cursing, I slammed the door shut and climbed up one of the wheels, vaulted over, and landed with a soft thump in the back, which was empty . . . except for Ernest McLeod’s backpack.

“I got it!” I cried as I lifted the backpack with my free hand. But then someone—a man, moving very quickly—vaulted into the truck bed behind me. And then something very hard, very hard, hit me across my shoulders. I screamed and fell, the baton slipping from my grasp. The big thing—the butt of a gun?—cracked against my back.

The pain made sickness shoot through my body. Then the butt of the gun hit me again.

I’m going to die, I thought. I imagined Arch motherless, Tom without a wife—

“Did you really think you were going to steal from me?” Kris Nielsen’s menacing voice came close to my ear. His free hand grasped my neck. I stretched out my right hand, trying to find the baton. Once my fingers closed on it, I pulled it quietly toward my body. Kris said, “Did you really think you could just waltz into my house and take files, and I wouldn’t discover it? The next time you burgle someone’s house, don’t run out the back door where someone in the house can see you. What’s mine is mine. I am smarter than you, and I will destroy you. Now, drop the backpack, or I’ll shoot you in the head.”

I let go of the backpack but pressed the baton against my thigh. “Please,” I said, “please stop—”

I torqued my head sideways and saw a glint of metal. Kris was indeed holding a gun. The whoosh in the air from his raising it again made me wince. I pressed the extension button on the baton and whacked backward with every ounce of strength I possessed.

Stunned, Kris tumbled onto the floor of the truck bed. The gun rattled away in the darkness, but Kris, using his superior strength, snatched the baton out of my hand before I could get my feet under me. He levered to a standing position while I tried to scramble away from him.

“Hey, Kris!” came Ferdinanda’s unexpected shout.

Kris turned toward the front of the garage. I grabbed the side of the truck bed and pulled myself up to a half crouch. Ferdinanda sat in her wheelchair near the red truck, her hands in her lap. Light from the big doors created an aura around her.

“I should have had Osgoode run over you twice, you old bat!” Kris yelled.

“I’m not that easy to kill,” she said, “so you better come get me now.”

Kris raised the baton, his face flushed as red as the backpack dangling from his other hand. I estimated how far it was to the open side door if I tried to vault from the truck bed. But I couldn’t just leave Ferdinanda here with Kris. What if he recovered his gun? If I screamed, would it carry to the house?

Before I could figure out what to do, I watched Ferdinanda pull something out of the recesses of her ever useful wheelchair. I had time to register that it was a gun—Tom’s .45 from our garage, I vaguely realized—and heard Kris shout something. Then the woman who had been a sniper, a francotiradora in Castro’s army, pulled the trigger and fired once, twice.

Kris Nielsen fell against me, sending us both back down to the truck floor. I wiggled out from beneath him. A cratered hole lay where his forehead had been. He wouldn’t be stalking anyone ever again.

At least twenty cops descended on the Bertrams’ garage. I didn’t see or hear much, because the sound of the shots had once again temporarily deafened me. Kris’s blood was on my face, in my eyes, and dripping into my ears. My whole body quivered uncontrollably. I wanted to get away from Kris Nielsen’s corpse as fast as humanly possible.

But of course the whole place was now a crime scene.

Tom arrived and took his gun back from Ferdinanda. She confessed immediately, saying that she’d been looking for a weapon from the first morning she’d awakened in our house. That was what she had been doing in our pantry when I’d come upon her so early. She had not been looking for cans. She’d also searched in our freezer, because she couldn’t believe a law enforcement officer wouldn’t have a weapon hidden somewhere.

And after breakfast that first morning? Ferdinanda had told Yolanda she was still scared, even with Tom in the house. Ferdinanda had told Yolanda she’d had a terrible night. Even after Boyd and Tom built the ramp, Ferdinanda insisted she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to sleep easily in our dining room. And when Yolanda kept saying they would be safe sleeping under our roof, Ferdinanda had continued nagging, saying she didn’t feel secure. Finally Yolanda had said they would be fine, because Tom kept a gun in the detached garage—a fact I had told her.

Then Ferdinanda, who was perhaps not as hard of hearing as she had claimed, had overheard me remind Tom of the code to our garage door. She’d had her work cut out for her.

“It was all for self-defense,” the old woman told Tom.

Well, not quite. There was something else Ferdinanda had needed to do—arm herself. She had the baton; she got the gun. When Kris bought the house across the street from us, he had installed Harriet there. But really, Ferdinanda insisted, it was because he wanted to keep an eye on Yolanda, perhaps to kill her. I suspected she was right.

So Ferdinanda knew something, some event, some person associated with Yolanda—that would be yours truly—would pull the trigger on Kris’s rage. That was why she gave me the baton. That was why she kept the .45 beside her in the wheelchair.

Kris had discovered my break-in at his house. This was what had frightened him into action. Because I had taken the number of Joe Pargeter, and Joe Pargeter knew quite a bit that the authorities in Colorado did not. When I’d handed the phone to Boyd, Pargeter had told him about the death of Rita Nielsen, whom Pargeter believed was murdered. After Kris was dead, I asked Boyd to tell me the story, and he obliged.

Johann and Rita Nielsen, Kris’s parents, had been flinty Scandinavians who’d built a farm, saved every nickel, and researched stocks in farming equipment and other companies. They’d savvily bought and sold the stocks according to their research—and made millions. Ten years ago, Johann had died and left everything to Rita. In his will, Johann said he wanted his son to make his own way, just as he had. Word around Lake Bargee, Minnesota, was that Kris was furious. His mother had inherited twelve million dollars, and he’d gotten nothing?

Three years ago that month, Kris had dropped out of graduate school in Colorado and returned to Lake Bargee. Rita still lived out on the farm. In the years since Johann’s death, she’d sold the livestock and had only a small garden. But she was managing. Then Kris arrived and told everyone that he would be taking care of his mother from then on. People from the grocery store, the farmers’ wives club, and the Lutheran church asked after Rita. He said she was fine, but he refused to let people come visit.

I sighed. This was a typical abuse pattern. Isolate the victim from everything that’s familiar.

Boyd said that Kris was there for a few months. A grocery store clerk remembered him buying a turkey for Thanksgiving but not for Christmas. That year, beginning the nineteenth of December, they had their first big blizzard. Four feet of snow fell before Christmas Eve. Two days after Christmas, Kris Nielsen called the Lake Bargee police department from Colorado. He said he’d left his mother after they’d celebrated Christmas together, and driven back to his apartment. Now he couldn’t reach her, and would somebody please go out and check on her? Two officers went out on snowmobiles and found Rita dead. The exhaust to her furnace was completely blocked with snow. The carbon monoxide had done her in.

Joe Pargeter’s theory was that Kris had been waiting for a big snowstorm so he could block up the exhaust, kill his mother with the carbon monoxide buildup, and drive away before anyone could catch him. But there were no footprints, no physical evidence. Kris had no alibi, except to say that he’d left his mother on Christmas Day. He had no gas or hotel receipts. He said he learned thrift from his parents and always paid in cash. The Minnesota authorities couldn’t prosecute him on the basis that he hadn’t bought a Christmas turkey.

Pargeter had held up the death certificate for as long as he could. He flew out to Colorado to question Kris Nielsen. But Nielsen stuck to his story. He lived alone and worked hard as a chemistry grad student. Of course, I thought. Actually, he’d said in that flat Minnesota accent, medical isotopes are used for— And then he’d stopped. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was well acquainted with chemistry; he was desperate for them to think he was a California entrepreneur. The one person who knew his secret was Stonewall Osgoode.

But then, Tom said, came the kicker. I was not the first person to call Pargeter about Nielsen. No, that would have been Ernest McLeod, who’d rifled through files at Nielsen’s house, found Pargeter’s number, and traveled the same mental paths as yours truly.

So. When Kris discovered I’d broken into his house and stolen his file marked Mother, he guessed that I might have discovered one of his worst lies: that he hadn’t earned his money starting a data-processing business in Silicon Valley. Lolly Vanderpool had figured that out: A real data-processing geek would have known, in answer to my question, that I needed to buy a USB hub.

Kris liked to be in control. He’d lost Yolanda. He’d gotten rid of Ernest and Stonewall Osgoode, who we later found out had been an accomplice of Kris’s. Both victims knew too much or had crossed him. And then I became a threat. He had driven over to our place, where he’d watched us leave with the police escort. He’d followed us and climbed up to the crime scene via the back way. The last thing he wanted was for me to get Tom looking into the death of Rita Nielsen.

But then he’d overheard me talking to Boyd about the backpack and feared yet more evidence against him or Osgoode would be on Ernest’s camera. He’d found his way via the back door into the garage . . . where he attacked me.

Ferdinanda had known to be ready. That was why she’d given me her collapsible truncheon; that was why she’d wheeled down to the garage. When Kris had come at her with her own baton, well . . . she was a francotiradora, and she knew what to do.

When Tom arrived at the Bertrams’, he took charge. My knees buckled when he hugged me. He helped me sit on the grass outside the garage. I made a complete statement. Tom called Arch and asked if he could spend the night with Gus, as I was indisposed. Arch had asked if I was all right, and Tom said I would be.

Boyd, of course, felt terrible that he had done what I asked and stayed with Yolanda instead of accompanying me into the garage. But how could he have known that Kris would find his way in from the road below? He had followed the police escort, figured out where we were going, and climbed up the steep hill that led to the Bertrams’ garage.

Harriet, whose odd jobs included being a handywoman, immediately confessed to being Kris’s accomplice. She had done some odd jobs for Kris in the past year, including sleeping with him from time to time. She’d found a regular job working at Frank’s Fix-It. In fact, she claimed she was the only one who actually did any work there. Kris had offered her room and board and money, promised to drop her in the morning and pick her up at night . . . if she would only sabotage an electric frying pan and loosen some bolts on a hanging pot rack at the Breckinridges’ house the day of the dinner party.

But it was Charlene Newgate who had given Tom the key to the case. Faced with a possible charge for conspiring to grow marijuana—of which she was actually innocent—she confessed to being paid to provide Stonewall Osgoode with information about Yolanda, information that she gleaned as a temporary secretary. When she’d jealously asked Stonewall if Yolanda was some other girlfriend of his, he’d laughed and said Yolanda was the ex-girlfriend of his boss. Charlene had typed the new will for Ernest McLeod while working for Allred, the attorney. She’d worked for Drew Parker, the dentist, enough to know how to set up the fake dental appointment for Ernest McLeod, the trap that had gotten him killed.

She also admitted to acting on Stonewall’s order to chat up Humberto Captain at the Grizzly. She’d stolen Humberto’s cell phone at an opportune moment and handed it over to Stonewall later. He’d used it to call Ernest’s house moments before torching the place, with us inside. Tom figured Stonewall was trying to throw suspicion for the arson onto Humberto.

In addition, Charlene acknowledged she had accompanied a real estate agent and Stonewall Osgoode to Jack’s house, where they’d pretended to put an offer on it, then backed out. She and Stonewall had come over to our house, too—the “elderly couple”—to make sure they had the right place, the one belonging to Goldy the caterer, the one where Yolanda was staying.

And yes, Charlene also confessed—to avoid a conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge—Stonewall Osgoode had worked for Kris Nielsen. They’d hooked up in graduate school at Colorado State, where Stonewall was in veterinary school, because they were both interested in making money selling drugs. But it was dangerous, and could lead to unwanted attention from law enforcement.

What Tom and the department theorized was that after Kris killed his mother, he didn’t need money anymore. He told Stonewall they should get out of the drug business. That was probably why Stonewall had been so upset when his partner had left the enterprise.

And then someone—probably Kris, the department again theorized—had anonymously turned in Stonewall, who’d been kicked out of veterinary school. Kris’s files revealed he had paid a lawyer to defend Stonewall, who’d gotten the light sentence. I can control you, Kris’s actions said. That control thing was the way his mind worked.

After Stonewall’s stint behind bars, he had bummed around for several months, not doing much of anything, according to Charlene. Charlene said when Stonewall drank or smoked dope, he would tell her these things. That Kris had met Yolanda and was crazy in love, but then she had dumped him. And then Kris’s real craziness had once again surfaced. He’d been obsessed with Yolanda, even though that obsession hadn’t stopped him from sleeping around. Yolanda had gotten a sexually transmitted disease. She’d confronted Kris, who’d flown into a rage and hit her with a broom. Yolanda and Ferdinanda had moved out.

Stonewall’s job for Kris expanded from trying to get rid of Ferdinanda—in June—to full-out stalking of Yolanda. The pages I’d taken from the files showed the payoffs to Stonewall, for surveillance, for looking in the windows of Yolanda’s rental and our house, for arson, and for murder. Stonewall’s bank account showed the exact amounts that Kris had paid him being deposited the next day.

Still, Stonewall hadn’t been able to stay away from the easy money of drugs. He had told Charlene that there was “money to be made” in the drug business, but she insisted he hadn’t told her about the puppies or the grow operation. He’d said, “You don’t want to know.”

Yet Kris had found out. He knew Marla’s puppy, rescued from a mill, had gotten sick. We’d gotten the news at the Breckenridges’ party. A dump of Kris’s phone showed a call to the veterinarian’s secretary. She said he claimed to be the puppy’s owner, wanting to know what had been taken out during surgery. She said she wasn’t supposed to say, because the veterinarian was calling the cops. Kris had driven over and, claiming he had adopted a sick beagle puppy, too, charmed the information out of her. She was so sorry, she told sheriff’s department investigators, she just felt so bad for an owner whose puppy had been spayed so a container of marijuana seeds could be smuggled inside. . . .

Stonewall Osgoode had told Charlene it was all over. His “partner,” as he referred to Kris, had fired him. He didn’t want him growing weed, because it could attract too much attention to the two of them. “After all I’ve done for him,” he’d grumbled to Charlene.

From us at the Breckenridges’ dinner, Kris had found out about Hermie Mikulski. His phone log showed he’d called her, to tell her about the puppy mill, to set her up to be there when he hid beside Stonewall Osgoode’s house until an opportune moment to shoot Osgoode. Kris had been hoping to frame Hermie for Osgoode’s death. More important, he wanted to keep the cops from associating him with Osgoode.

Kris had used the same gun that he’d loaned to Osgoode, when he’d hired Osgoode to shoot Ernest McLeod. Tom said Stonewall had killed Ernest, on orders from Kris, using a gun supplied by Kris, the same one Kris used to kill the gas station attendant, the same one he used a few days later to kill Stonewall Osgoode himself. All this was confirmed by the files I’d taken from Kris’s house . . . and the .38 they found beside Kris Nielsen.

Kris had used that same .38 to shoot a fellow grad student, who’d been working at a gas station outside of Fort Collins. That poor young man, Tom theorized, had seen Kris when he was driving back from Minnesota after killing his mother, by sweeping snow over the furnace exhaust pipe. The young grad student, working at the station, had probably accosted Kris, been glad to see him at that ungodly hour. Driving back from Minnesota days earlier than he later claimed, Kris had not wanted anyone to know exactly when he arrived back in Fort Collins.

“Such a waste,” Yolanda said. “So many people died so he could have money. And power over others. But . . . why couldn’t he leave me alone?”

That was the psychology of stalkers, Tom explained. They want their partner back, because without the partner, they don’t feel whole. A piece of them is missing, and they’re desperate to retrieve it. Father Pete had inadvertently given us the clue to Kris’s behavior when he’d talked about his support of Charlene all those years. He’d said the church is a safety net.

Kris hadn’t wanted Yolanda to have a safety net of any kind. That was the key to those papers with dates, letters, and figures that I’d taken from the file marked Miscellaneous. Kris had paid Stonewall to surveil Yolanda—“S.” Stonewall Osgoode, whose files revealed a receipt for a Unifrutco oil can, had burned down the rental. That was “B.” When Kris heard from Charlene that Ernest had left his house to Yolanda, he’d hired Stonewall to murder Ernest—“K”—then firebomb Ernest’s house, while she was in it, just so she would know he could find her anywhere.

In addition to Kris being killed, the big news from my searching the Bertrams’ garage was my discovery of Ernest’s red backpack. Inside was Norman Juarez’s mother’s necklace, a digital camera showing Sean Breckenridge and Brie Quarles in various clinches, and the pages he’d photographed from Kris’s files, which had set him on the track to find out about the suspicious death of Kris’s mother.

Everyone had a lot to thank Ernest for, we heard, when we had the delayed party to celebrate his life a week later. People in AA expressed gratitude for Ernest’s support. Norman Juarez, with the discovery of the necklace and the diamonds in Humberto’s chandelier, was now a wealthy man. The gold, Tom speculated—when Humberto refused to confess—was long gone, spent on Humberto’s land, cars, house, and lifestyle. Norman Juarez is suing Humberto for it, nonetheless.

In typical humble style, Norman said Ernest’s tenacity had brought him new hope after years of trying to lock up that thief, Humberto Captain.

Yolanda apologized to me, again and again, for not telling me Ernest had told her he was investigating Kris. I told her it was fine; I understood the insanity that her life had become. Did I ever.

At the memorial party, Ferdinanda and Yolanda gave thanks for Ernest laying down his life for them. They have moved out of our house and into an apartment in Lolly Vanderpool’s building. Norman Juarez, with his wife’s blessing, gave Lolly Vanderpool a diamond, for her bravery in helping Ernest recover his mother’s necklace. She repaid Julian, returned to MIT, and is no longer working as a hooker.

Norman Juarez gave Yolanda and Ferdinanda another diamond. Yolanda squealed—with happiness? surprise? disbelief?—when she heard Ernest had left his land and house to her. She and Ferdinanda are drawing up plans for a new place. They’re already squabbling over the size of the kitchen.

Rorry Breckenridge is divorcing Sean and moving back to New Orleans. Facing a charge of conspiracy to commit assault, Sean admitted to Tom that it was Kris who’d asked for the Navajo tacos at the church party and Kris who had told him Yolanda had hepatitis. Sean is looking for a job, but according to a gleeful Marla, no one is willing to hire an accountant who hasn’t kept up with tax law for over a decade.

Brie and Paul Quarles are separated. Father Pete asked for, and received, the resignations of both Sean and Brie from the Saint Luke’s vestry. According to Marla, Brie has moved to Albuquerque. Marla said, “Maybe she’s working as a hooker.”

Hermie Mikulski is very happy that Stonewall’s puppy mill is closed. All the beagles have been adopted. She’s now starting a drive to restore habitat for the wild birds that flock to Aspen Meadow. The avian population declined after the forest fire, and she wants to bring their numbers back up. All in all, that pursuit seems safer than trying to close puppy mills.

Norman Juarez offered Tom, Arch, and me a diamond. I was tempted, because if we do have a baby, we’ll probably need more money. But the temptation lasted only a moment.

“I know someone who needs it more,” I told Norman Juarez. “It’s a kid named Peter at Arch’s school. He has leukemia, and the family might have trouble with their bills.”

Norman Juarez gave Peter’s family the proceeds from the sale of three diamonds. At last report, Peter was getting better.

And Tom and I, well, we are trying to get pregnant. It’s fun.