Then She Vanished

Twenty-Seven

After dark, I found a place in the Tourmaline Resort Casino parking tower. Took the stairs down to the employee level, located Brock Weld’s white Suburban and attached a GPS tracker to the bottom of the trailer hitch. The powerful magnet clanged with an echo. I turned it on and a few minutes later was sitting in the Terrace Café.

Just as he had the night before, at ten minutes after eight o’clock Weld came off his shift with the same two coworkers. Again, the younger man wore the black moto jacket and carried his helmet. They disappeared into the employee parking garage. As before, Moto Jacket came out first, easing his burping rocket down the ramp. But tonight the blonde came out next, alone and at the wheel of a yellow Mercedes two-seater. Last was Brock Weld in his clean white Suburban.

I turned on my tracking app, laid my cash on the tray, and headed out.

Easy tracking with the Vigilant 4000, the best $299 a PI can spend. I have three. With one-second real-time reporting you can follow far behind and still track the target on a three-color map with a flashing indicator. On your phone, of course. The only downside is that the whole contraption runs on cell signal, which can be spotty and sometimes nonexistent. You can program the app to give you a complete two-week driving history, nailing down the bad actor/cheating spouse/runaway son or daughter without having to follow him or her all over town. You can use it to set up a geo-fence that notifies you when the unit enters a certain area.

Highway 76 to Cole Grade Road, through Pauma Valley. In sunlight a beautiful valley, heavy with orange groves, rimmed by hills. In the moonless night a dark expanse, with Weld’s white Suburban easy to see up ahead of me. He turned right on Valley Center Road, again on Lilac, then Via Clemente. I hung back and drove by his house a minute later, saw the Suburban in the driveway and the house lights coming on inside. The neighbors were just lights on a hillside road, neither distant nor close.

I found a turnout in the trees, pulled up tight to the fence, cut the lights and engine. I’ve modified my truck to be one hundred percent lightless and silent with the engine off — no anti-theft warnings or bluffs, no interior indicators or beeps. Blackout windows, exterior chrome replaced by matte black metal. Reflectors likewise.

I set my wristwatch in a cup holder to defeat reflection. Pondered Brock Weld’s domicile. It was a small, rectangular, flat-roofed adobe with iron grates over the windows and faded peach paint. Baja California all the way. Gravel instead of grass, with columns of ocotillo and sticks on fire reaching up past the roofline. A cracked asphalt driveway, pricked by weeds. Scattered pots mostly without plants, an empty hose reel leaning against the living room wall below the window.

Always interesting to compare the animal to its lair. Brock’s minimalist groundskeeping contradicted his sharp personal grooming, apparent physical strength, and swift opinions. The home had the look of the temporary. But so did Weld himself. A man used to motion. Fit, armed, and ready to engage. I thought back to the IvarDuggans bio — security work for cruise lines and casinos.

The faint ghost of movement behind the curtains. Then again. No flicker of TV light yet, and I had the feeling that Brock Weld was getting ready to leave. My lucky night. Or not. The last time I’d followed a hunch and tracked someone into the night, I’d ended up battered, broken, and about half-dead.

An inner house light went off, then another. When Weld came out his suit had been traded for jeans, white athletic shoes, and a baggy red hibiscus-print Hawaiian shirt.

He went west out Valley Center Road onto Highway 76 again, but east toward Palomar Mountain. Past the Rincon Indian Reservation and the observatory exits. It was black out there that time of night. A barn owl, white in my headlights, lifted a mouse from the road and churned up into the darkness. I hung back and let the Vigilant 4000 track my prize.

Past the La Jolla Indian Reservation, past the glistening black water of Lake Henshaw. Weld sped by a fat motor home and I tucked in behind it for the fast stretch to Highway 79.

A quick five minutes later, my phone map showed Weld turning northeast on Highway 79. Interesting. Because Highway 79 would lead him to S2, which would take him to Borrego Springs.

Beautiful, wild Borrego Springs.

Harris Broadman’s Borrego Springs.

The scar on my forehead itched and my mind bounced merrily along in front of me like a bird dog working a meadow. Zigging and zagging, checking the cover, looping back and checking again.

A few minutes later, for the second time that day, I turned onto S2. Then watched the Suburban start the long gentle grade toward Montezuma Valley and Borrego Springs beyond.

Bringing to mind the molten-faced innkeeper Harris Broadman, who was pulled not quite to safety from his burning Humvee during the battle for Fallujah by the young, terrified grunt Dalton Strait.

Bringing to mind Natalie, Dalton’s lovely, unstable wife, abducted, in credible danger, and recently indicted by a federal grand jury for misuse of campaign funds — along with her philandering husband.

Leading straight to the aggressive Brock Weld, who had bluntly made himself available to coworker Natalie and had no certifiable alibi for his whereabouts the morning she vanished.

Maybe Brock Weld was now on his way east to some other desert destination. Maybe to the Salton Sea, one of the most polluted bodies of water in the state. Or to one of the poor, dust-bitten desert towns that surround it. Perhaps headed south to Mexico or north to Las Vegas, driving hundreds of miles out of his way to get there. Maybe he was leading his friendly neighborhood PI on a snipe hunt. Or into an attack even worse than the one I had stumbled into last year.

I watched the road and checked the phone screen every few seconds. Up the grade, through the rising plains of Montezuma Valley, then the long, steep drop to the bottom of the desert floor.

Welcome to Borrego Springs.

Eighty-two degrees and a brisk breeze shivering the creosote. Far ahead, Weld went right onto Palm Canyon. I kept well back, used a plodding old VW van for cover. Watched the Suburban on my phone screen, moving slowly toward Christmas Circle, where he went south on Borrego Springs Road, toward Harris Broadman’s Bighorn Motel. I doubted the apparent coincidence of encountering the Bighorn Motel twice in one day.

But then, Weld passed the Bighorn.

Five and a half dark and breezy miles later, he pulled into La Casa del Zorro, the swankiest resort in this part of the desert. I drove past, saw his Suburban parked near the lobby and Brock Weld swinging down from the driver’s seat. A quarter mile down I U-turned and pulled into the resort just as the white Suburban turned onto the self-parking road.

I’d stayed at La Casa del Zorro before and I knew the layout: quaint casitas with private pools; a good restaurant and bar; tennis courts and verdant grounds under graceful palms, all especially beautiful at sunset. La Casa del Zorro had a romantic air, like the masked Zorro himself, robes and slippers and private hot tubs. Thus, popular with couples. I thought of Tola Strait in her Zorro-style hat that night in Sacramento, perhaps trying to strike a deal with an FBI agent posing as a state regulator.

I looped back to the restaurant lot, parked and rolled down my windows. Nice breeze. Nice angles for my camera. The restaurant was busy on this Friday night. I tried to coax some news from my radio but FM got me faint music and AM nothing but static. Watched my phone screen as the Suburban came to a halt. It took a moment for the Google map to load but when it did I saw that Weld’s Suburban was parked conveniently for any of four casitas on a cul-de-sac bordered by a wall, with open desert beyond. The image was aerial and reasonably clear.

Twenty minutes later, Weld came from the lobby, dressed as before but carrying a silver aluminum briefcase. His coworker from the Tourmaline was with him, still dressed in her dark work suit, hair down and lifting in the desert breeze. It was just after ten o’clock. She’d made good time in her little yellow sports car. They stood at the turnout, Weld with an almost palpable air of annoyance. Looked at his watch. I got some decent pictures with my G9. A moment later a black Yukon with blacked-out windows pulled in and stopped. Weld and the woman climbed into the back passenger-side seat. In the brief moment before the door shut I saw the shape of a driver but no detail.

Following the Yukon without the Vigilant 4000 considerably upped my chances of getting busted in a tiny town with no traffic to hide in this late. So I cautiously followed, up Borrego Valley Drive to Palm Canyon Drive, then left, back toward town.

I slowed and pulled over, watched the taillights disappear.

Tried to imagine what Brock Weld and his companion were doing here in this desert. I had no idea, and thought less of myself for the failure of imagination. But I’m not paid to be imaginative. I’m paid to find things other people can’t. Such as Natalie Strait. She was the center of this, she had led me to all four of these people — indirectly, of course, without having ever spoken a word to me. Unless you counted HELP, written in lipstick on the back of her car seat.

I headed for home, alone in my truck with the scattered pieces of a puzzle on this moonless night, somewhere in the San Diego County desert. Waiting for the pieces to fall into place, as they sometimes do if you stare at them long and hard enough.

Tried again for radio news; not quite back into range.

Which was when my phone went off. Burt’s name and number and a text message with video attached:

The video was brief, clear, and concise:

The three familiar grimly masked actors and two balaclava-hidden operatives standing against a white interior wall. The Chaos Committee in all its deranged and hideous glory.

This time the splatter mask spoke, in the same digitally altered doomsday voice as the Iroquois tribal mask had used during the Local Live! studio takeover.

“We have sent another gift to another government thug in beautiful, deluded California,” he said. “A woman. She cannot be protected. Strike your matches, great state! Burn the disease from this once holy cloth. Burn the government to the ground. Violence is justice. Chaos is purity!”

I called Burt. He’d already talked to Dalton and his campaign headquarters about opening any packages or even mail, especially those addressed to female workers. He’d counseled the Irregulars to stay in rather than go out tomorrow and not to open any unexpected package from any carrier.

I drove fast into radio range, switching from station to station, trying to piece together the chaos.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has furloughed all nonessential state workers for at least two days and will deploy National Guards to search state offices and mailrooms for bombs… KNX News Radio has learned that police and sheriffs are being assigned to some city halls, county offices, and courtrooms… Police officers were shot and killed in Fresno, Oxnard, and Oakland less than an hour ago, bringing the state total to six since The Chaos Committee released its call to violence… dozens of harmless packages apparently mailed to elected officials… widespread tagging of Southland churches and synagogues… library fires set in Hayward, L.A., and Adelanto, heavy damage, officials say… impossible to determine who is responsible… continuing reports of car fires and gunfire throughout the state, Rudy, but the number-one fear here is looting. None of that, yet, thank goodness… So, KFWB’s thanks to the millions of fine people in California who are reaching out to help or at least staying home and away from this unprecedented social upheaval…

I stayed up late in my home office that night, plugged in to the TV, the radio, my computer, and phone — whatever might shed light on the threatened Chaos Committee bomb and the no-longer-simmering violence.

Talked briefly with Lark, Dalton, and Burt.

And later, with Terrell Strait. I’d been thinking about him since Dalton’s misfired press conference. Where Terrell witnessed his father selling his mother down a river.

“It looked like I was on his side,” he said over the phone. “I hope Mom didn’t see it.”

“She knows you better than that,” I said.

The boy was grimly determined that his mother was okay, that she’d walk out of “her latest episode and back to us when she’s ready.”

He asked for a report on his dad, whom he refused to call. I filled him in as best I could. Terrell said he was back at school, packing up to come home for the summer.

It was well after two o’clock. Nowhere near sleep, I sat back down at my desk and considered the newly arrived brown paper shopping bag. Courtesy of Cassy Weisberg, for carrying my many tourist brochures. Upended it over the scarred and venerable desk, a gift of the Timmerman clan, as part of their wedding gift to their daughter and me. I felt a tinge of guilt over wasting so many good pamphlets as a way to keep Cassy talking. What should I do with them now? Return them and say I’d gotten what I needed?

I fanned them out on the table in no order and with no purpose whatsoever. The night sky tours and the hiking trails maps looked promising.

The Bighorn Motel pamphlet pictured the motel in younger days. The parking lot full, kids thick in the pool, moms and dads in ’50s fashions and coifs, sipping colorful drinks. I wondered what had drawn Broadman to a desert like Iraq’s after the terrible thing that had happened to him there. I wondered, too, at a man so disfigured that he felt more comfortable hidden than seen, going into a business that brought in strangers by the carload.

In the wee hours I logged in to IvarDuggans and paid my way into the facial recognition program to run my best photo of Brock Weld’s Tourmaline companion.

Her name was Gretchen Deuzler. The IvarDuggans photos of her were five and eight years old, respectively. A handsome woman, blond then brunette. Age thirty-one, born in Denton, Texas, to a mining engineer and a college math professor. A degree in hydrology engineering from Arizona State. Member of the fencing club. I saw that she had worked as a blackjack dealer on some of the same cruise ships and at the same time as her consort Brock Weld. Tracking her bio against the hard copy of his file, I saw that Gretchen had moved into security work for the same casinos in New Jersey and Las Vegas, again simultaneously with Weld. So, based on shared employment, they’d known each other for at least thirteen years. She’d worked briefly for the United States Post Office. She had never been married and had no children, according to IvarDuggans. She owned a home in Escondido, was certified as a scuba instructor and as a small vessel boat captain by the Coast Guard.

Gretchen Deuzler’s father was also a former president of the West Texas Blasters and Demolition Union.

Which would no doubt have given him — and maybe his daughter — easy access to restricted explosives and related materials: blasting caps, fuses, timers, high-nitrogen fertilizers.

Which sent a cool bristle of nerves down my neck.

In this age of anger and violence.

In this age of chaos.

I finally fell asleep while watching Lark’s surveillance video of possible Jackie O’s mailing the bomb that killed my congressman and his assistant.