Dead Silver

54

Madbird and I spent most of the next few hours outside the courthouse to stay out of the way, taking short walks around the neighborhood, then coming back to check in and glean whatever information trickled out. We heard the drone of the low-flying search planes and helicopters and we occasionally glimpsed one, but they had a vast area to cover; it had started out being as far as a vehicle could drive in any direction, which meant a rough circle about five hundred miles in diameter, and it grew exponentially as time passed.

So did our anxiety. Our grim hope was that he would keep her alive in order to make her walk to the destination-if he was in the woods, he wouldn't be able to drive far on the backcountry roads, still mired in snow and mud this time of year-and Gary had rushed the aircraft into service to let him know that he was made, so he would realize that killing her was futile.

But they might have been too late. And he might do it anyway.

There'd been no sightings of anyone matching the description of either Lon or Darcy, or of the pickup truck registered to him, and the police didn't know for sure that he was driving that vehicle, anyway.

It was turning out that nobody knew much about Lon, and there was a lot to know. The information that they were piecing together-some from Evvie, some from a search of the Jessup house, some from sources those led to-was painting a picture of a man who, behind his bluff good ol' boy exterior, led a very complex life.

For openers, his true identity was still a mystery. He had used a time-honored method of establishing a false past-obtaining the records of a child born around the same time as himself who had died in infancy, and with that documentation acquiring a Social Security number and driver's license, establishing credit, and so on.

Then there was the question of exactly what he did. The tacit assumption had been that he was sort of a sportsman and gentleman rancher, and a businessman who helped Evvie with her realty transactions and had investments of his own. But the ranch was devoid of livestock, his business trips were in fact gambling and partying junkets, and he paid no attention to the real estate operation-except that he had pushed his wife to wangle the job of selling the Callister house, no doubt so that he could keep tabs on Renee and the photo cache he'd planted.

He didn't have or make any money of his own-it all came from Evvie's inherited wealth-but he'd set up at least two corporate entities. They were clearly fronts which didn't conduct any tangible commerce; it appeared that he used them mainly as conduits to sock away large chunks that he drained from her, no doubt into bank accounts that would be difficult or impossible to trace. Through them, he also leased vehicles, with frequent turnover-enumerating them and getting their descriptions was another paper trail the cops would have a hell of a time unraveling-and a network of storage units, where he maybe kept some of them and Lord knew what else.

By all indications so far, Evvie was being honest about what she knew, although it was possible that this was an act she'd long been rehearsing.

According to her, Lon Jessup had first come to Montana about fifteen years ago to visit Astrid and Professor Callister. Astrid introduced him to her longtime friend Evvie-in her thirties, unmarried with no suitors, but rich-and romance bloomed.

The romance part didn't last long, but it wasn't one of those sordid situations that descended into abuse and despair. Lon simply wasn't interested in her. She and her money were a convenience, and he made it clear that he intended to use them as he pleased and do what he wanted. It took her a while to accept that, as it would anyone, but he was very effective at getting it across. He didn't use violence or outright menace. He was the kind of man who didn't have to.

Once that was settled, they got along quite well. He was outwardly solid and decent, and above all he was a husband, rescuing her from spinsterhood and giving her that societal credential. If there was a hole in Evvie Jessup's heart, she had plenty of things to fill it up with that most other people didn't.

But it had never occurred to her that he might be an entirely different person than he claimed.

He had never been a suspect in Astrid's murder. Besides his being a good friend of the Callisters and a respectable citizen, with no hint of a motive, Evvie remembered distinctly that he had been out of town when it occurred and had hurried home to offer his support to the family. But that was an alibi almost certain to fall apart under new police scrutiny.

What the motive might have been was still unknown. But an intriguing connection had surfaced. Lon had occasionally let something drop to Evvie that indicated military training-as a Navy SEAL, she thought. However, he had insisted that she never mention anything about it.

The fact that he didn't want that known inclined me perversely to believe there was something to it. I'd never met a man who denied that kind of credential, and I'd run into several who claimed it when it wasn't true. It was a measure of how seriously Lon Jessup wanted his background erased.

Further, before coming to Montana, he'd been living in Colorado-the home of the phantom ex-Special Forces ranger who supposedly had led Astrid on a raid to shoot up a gyppo logging camp.

And who Astrid had counted on to blow up the Dead Silver Mine.

I remembered Buddy Pertwee's story about her sudden emotional upset and change of attitude not long before her death, as if something had gone very wrong.

Was Lon Jessup the commando? Did he and Astrid have a falling-out, maybe involving the demolition plan? Something that angered or threatened him enough to drive him to murder her?

Such as fear that the past he'd worked so hard to conceal might be exposed?

Then, just after three o'clock that afternoon, one of Gary's deputies stuck his head out the courthouse door and yelled at Madbird and me to get our ass inside.

A helicopter had spotted a woman with long dark hair in the mountains around the old mining town of Basin. She had run from the cover of trees out into a clearing, frantically waving her arms to flag them down.