Savages

26

JAKE RUNYON

It was late Wednesday afternoon before he finally got on the highway back to San Francisco. Tamara understood about the delay when he called her to explain, but he still didn’t like leaving her and Bill hanging an extra day, unavoidable or not. He’d been away too long already.

One reason was the long night; he didn’t get to bed until almost 3:00 A.M. Another was that he had to go back to the sheriff’s department in Red Bluff to sign a written statement of what he’d told Rinniak and Sheriff Macon the day before.

Rinniak was there, bleak and haggard, when Runyon arrived late in the morning, and they had a few minutes together. The two women had made separate signed confessions by then, Sandra Parnell tearfully, Ashley Kelso gloatingly. Turned out they were lovers, bisexuals-one angle he hadn’t figured on. No real surprises in the rest of it. Rinniak made no mention of Kelso, and Runyon didn’t ask.

Ashley was the leader, of course. Paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex-you didn’t need to be Freud to see that. She hated her father because of his strict authoritarian ways and she hated Jerry Belsize because she’d given him her virginity and he wouldn’t stand up to Kelso or have anything more to do with her after the ass-kicking incident. She itched to pay back both of them for the imagined hurt they’d done to her and, in her words, “have fun doing it.” Some of the “fun” had been spur-of-the-moment, but most had been planned over a period of months.

She and Sandra were still friends even though she had taken Ashley’s place with Belsize; the Parnell girl looked up to her. Ashley took their relationship to a different level by seducing her, “making her fall in love with me.” That gave her a hold on the weaker woman that became controlling, hypnotic. Sandra would do anything Ashley said-the torching of empty and abandoned places, for starters, using tins of kerosene Ashley swiped from Battle Hardware. Since she was a kid, Ashley had been “getting off on watching things burn,” the sexual thrill common to most firebugs. She also saw to it that Jerry found out about the homosexual affair-the reason he’d broken up with Sandra, told his parents that she wasn’t the girl he’d thought she was, and didn’t want anything more to do with her. Their relationship was stagnant anyway because of her deepening involvement with Ashley.

The breakup allowed Ashley to turn Sandra against Jerry, convince her that he deserved payback, manipulate her into the kidnap scheme. They lured him out to RipeOlive with the promise of three-way sex, and he was just dumb enough to go along with it. Ashley clobbered him with her favorite weapon; they dragged him into the warehouse and used a pair of her father’s handcuffs to leave him shackled to the beam. She didn’t care if he was alive or dead when they went back last night to torch the buildings. All she wanted, she said, was to watch him burn.

The murder of Manuel Silvera had been premeditated. He’d seen Ashley and Sandra leaving the scene of the barn fire, made the mistake of going to Ashley about it instead of her father. Like a lot of people in Gray’s Landing, Silvera was afraid of Kelso, but he was a moral man and his conscience wouldn’t let him keep quiet about what he’d seen. Ashley saw killing him as the perfect way to shut his mouth and blame Jerry at the same time. There was another reason, too: she was curious to know what it felt like to kill somebody. She arranged to meet Silvera in the barn Friday night, made the anonymous call to the Belsizes to lure them away, hit him with the two-by-two when he wasn’t looking. Stringing him up was what she called “an inspiration”; she’d never seen anybody hanged before, and the idea excited her. After she and Sandra finished planting the false evidence in the hayloft and in Jerry’s room, they went back to the barn for one more look at their handiwork-and that was when Runyon arrived. They hid behind the stack of lumber, and he got the same two-by-two treatment as Silvera. He might’ve gotten the hanging treatment, too, if the Belsizes hadn’t come back when they did.

The game playing was partly kicks, partly a means of tightening the frame around Jerry, partly payback against Runyon; Ashley was pissed at him for showing up at the farm and almost spoiling her plans. Jerry had never been in the trailer at the migrant workers’ camp. The whole thing-roach butts, sleeping bag, fast-food remains, Sandra coming to Runyon with her plea for help, the anonymous phone call to Kelso-was an elaborate setup. Sandra hadn’t wanted to do it-she was afraid of Runyon as well as Kelso-but Ashley forced her into it. She hadn’t been told in advance about the anonymous call; her reaction to Kelso’s arrival on Sunday had been genuine. Ashley’s little surprise joke.

Runyon had figured out the sham even before he found Belsize, been pretty sure then that Ashley and Sandra were the real perps. Too many inconsistencies, too many lies. Jerry didn’t drive like a maniac or run down dogs in the road or beat up on his women-that was game playing and character assassination. He didn’t do drugs, had never bought weed from Gus Mayerhof. But Ashley did and had. Nobody knew Jerry or had seen him in Lost Bar because he’d never been there. Sandra hadn’t seen him on Friday night because he was already shackled at RipeOlive by then, and Jerry’s father hadn’t told her that Runyon was a detective because she hadn’t talked to his parents in weeks. The little scene between Ashley and Sandra in the restaurant parking lot on Saturday night had been staged, too. Ashley made a slip then that Runyon hadn’t caught until later. “I’ll bet if Jerry hit you any harder with that two-by-two, he’d’ve taken your head right off.” Unlikely that either her father or Rinniak would have told her the exact nature of the weapon. There was only one other way she could’ve known.

The label fragment hadn’t gotten into the trailer on the bottom of Jerry’s shoe but on the bottom of Ashley’s or Sandra’s. Once Mayor Battle had identified it, Runyon remembered Jerry’s summer job at RipeOlive a few years ago and Rinniak telling him Sandra’s father had worked for the olive processors. The fact that Martin Parnell headed the skeleton crew before RipeOlive shut down for good made it a fair bet he’d had keys and still had them. Simple enough for Sandra to lift the ones to the rear gate and the warehouse door and return them later.

All of this Runyon had told Rinniak and Macon yesterday after he delivered Jerry Belsize to the hospital ER. And it was all in the statement he signed.

On the way out of the station he saw Kelso coming in. Dressed as usual in full uniform down to the Sam Browne belt and holstered revolver. Same cowboy walk, same aggressive jaw thrust, everything in place and untouched. Except for the eyes. The eyes were as dead as a corpse’s. One glance passed between them; Kelso’s went right through him. Best that way. Even if he’d been on friendly terms with the man, Runyon would have had nothing to say to him. His only child hated him, too, with a deep and abiding hatred, but they didn’t even have that in common.

Joshua, despite his problems, was a responsible member of society.

Ashley was a demon seed.

T he third reason he didn’t get on the road until late was Jerry Belsize. Rinniak had told him the kid’s condition was critical, but that he was conscious and responding to medical treatment and would probably pull through. On Runyon’s first trip to the hospital, a few minutes past noon, a nurse told him visitors would probably be permitted for a short period, but that it wouldn’t be until after a doctor’s examination at two o’clock. So he was forced to waste two hours with lunch and some aimless driving around Red Bluff.

Belsize’s parents were there when Runyon was admitted to the ward room at two thirty, and he had to endure a weepy round of gratitude from them. The kid was doped up and foggy and didn’t seem to be tracking too well; he didn’t have much to say other than a whispered thanks. Runyon didn’t stay long. He wouldn’t have stayed long in any case.

Before he left he did what he had to do, even though it cost him some of the parental goodwill and made him feel like a shit.

He served Gerald Belsize with his subpoena.