Cyanide Wells (27 page)

He poured wine from the open bottle of merlot. Carly entered, carrying a manila envelope, and held it out to him.

“I found this at the back of her closet,” she said. “I never knew it was there.”

The envelope was stuffed full of photographs: their wedding, holidays, the two of them on his father’s boat. Gwen stood in front of him, and he had his arms wrapped around her, his chin resting on the top of her head. A happy young couple, their whole lives ahead of them…

“I can’t deal with this, Carly. Get rid of them.”

“No, I’ll put them away for you. Just like I’ll keep her stuff—for now.”

He was sitting at the table when she came back, his eyes closed. Her hand touched his shoulder briefly; then she sat and picked up her glass. “How did it go with Grossman?”

On the drive back he’d realized he could hold nothing back from her. She was his friend, and besides, he was the one who had insisted that they, and they alone, should bring the situation to its conclusion.

“He wants me to spy on you. Here’s the deal.”

“Okay,” Carly said when he’d finished, “I don’t blame him for using whatever means he can to work his case. In fact, I think it’s damned clever of him. What information did he feed you?”

“Ballistics. And you’re not going to like what you hear. The bullets they took out of Chase Lewis and his motel room wall were unusual. Short thirty-two caliber, copper-jacketed, of a type not manufactured in this country. The lab technician thought he’d encountered something similar before, so he accessed past records for county homicides. The bullets were a match for those that killed Ronnie and Deke.”

“I never heard anything about the bullets that killed them being unusual.”

“It was never revealed by the department, even after Mack Travis killed himself and they closed out the case. Grossman said the sheriff never believed in Travis’s guilt.”

“Then Ard didn’t kill Lewis, after all. Whoever killed Ronnie and Deke did.”

“Possibly.”

“Gar Payne? Milt Rawson?”

He shrugged.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about ballistics. Could they tell what kind of gun the bullets were fired from?”

“Not the exact make, but from the bullet, the tech thinks it’s an older gun, perhaps a collector’s item.”

Carly swirled her wine, stared into its depths. Matt could tell that the information had disturbed her.

“The technician couldn’t be wrong?” she asked.

“Grossman said that kind of evidence, like fingerprints or DNA, doesn’t lie.”

She nodded, still staring down. When she finally looked up, her face was pale.

She said, “Let’s go, Matt. There’s something I need to check out.”

He shut off the Jeep’s engine and lights. The night was oppressively dark, the Talbot house a black hole before him. Carly slid out and slammed her door, then looked back through the open window and said, “You coming?”

“Yeah.” He unlatched his seat belt, took his time. Easing into it. All the way here she’d been silent, refusing to answer his questions, her tension palpable. He knew without a doubt that whatever her reason for coming back to the house, it would lead to yet another unpleasant revelation—perhaps the most unpleasant of all.

By the time he caught up with her, she was through the door and taking a flashlight from her daypack. He followed as she switched it on and moved along the hallway to an open door about halfway down. Inside was an office with a row of file cabinets and a computer workstation that was at odds with a handsome rolltop desk. She went to the desk, opened it, shone the light around.

“Carly, what…?”

“In a minute.” Her voice was grim. She fumbled with an ornately carved panel, pressing it in several places till it popped open, then took out a set of keys that were its only contents. “Come on.” She led him across the hall to a facing door.

The room was a library, furnished in leather, with bookcases built into the walls. Below the heavily laden shelves were carved wooden doors with brass fittings. Carly went to one of them, squatted down, and slipped a key into the lock. It wouldn’t turn, so she tried another and then another until one did.

Matt moved closer. She was removing a glass-fronted display tray, one of several that were stacked inside the cabinet. “Help me with this, would you?” she asked.

He grasped one end, and they lowered it to the floor. She turned the flashlight’s beam on it.

Handguns. Sunk into velvet-lined indentations specially contoured for them. Each depression had an engraved brass plate positioned below it.

And one was vacant.

Carly made a sound close to a sob.

Matt read the label: “Austrian Rast and Gasser Army Revolver, Manufactured eighteen ninety-eight.”

Carly said, “Ronnie’s father’s collection. The missing gun is probably the one Ard used to kill Chase Lewis. And Ronnie. And Deke.” Her voice shook.

“Not them, too! My God, Carly. Killing off a man who abused her and was threatening to take Natalie away is one thing, but Ronnie and Deke were her friends.”

She was silent.

Still not believing it, he asked, “Where would she get ammunition for that kind of gun?”

“The collection includes it.” She motioned at spaces for cartridges—eight of them, all empty.

He took the flashlight from her hand, shone it upward at her face, and had a sudden vision of how she would look as an old woman.

She shaded her eyes and said, “Ard has known for years that these guns are here. And she’s also known where the keys to the cabinets are kept.”

“But so do you. And probably any number of people. Mack Travis—”

“Would have had no way of knowing about them. Ronnie didn’t like the guns, locked them up, but kept them out of sentiment—or guilt. He couldn’t get rid of any of his father’s stuff, because while he loved him, they didn’t get along. His father was always after him to give up on the lifestyle he’d ‘chosen.’ As if he’d gotten up one morning and said, ‘I think I’ll turn gay now.’ ”

“What about Gar Payne? Or Milt Rawson? They might’ve known.”

“No, I’m sure neither of them has ever been in this house.”

“Other friends of yours?”

“Some of them may have known about the collection, although not many. Ronnie didn’t talk about it much; that would’ve been dangerous. Burglars go after firearms, particularly old and valuable ones. And I seriously doubt that anybody knew where the keys were kept. The only reason Ard and I found out was that during the last Christmas party here we were wrapping gifts in the office. Ronnie came in to get the keys because an old friend of his father’s had stopped by and wanted to look at the collection, thinking he might buy it.”

“Was the friend with him?”

“No. Ronnie was even uncomfortable that Ard and I saw him get the keys.”

Though it was cool in the library, Matt’s face was filmed with sweat. He got up, felt his way across the room, and sank into one of the leather chairs. When he spoke, he barely recognized his own voice.

“Why would Ardis kill Ronnie and Deke?”

“Well, she did get a great series of stories out of their deaths.”

“No one kills a friend to score a journalistic coup.”

“Try this one, then: a rich vein of gold running under a house whose owner has just made you executor of his will.”

All the way back to Carly’s house they argued about taking what they knew to Grossman.

“Her killing Chase Lewis I can somewhat understand,” he said. “But this other—you can’t be willing to risk her getting away with it.”

“I need time—just overnight, that’s all.”

“Christ, Carly, you don’t know what else she’s done. Or what she might do next.”

“Will ten or twelve hours make a difference?”

“It might.”

“She’s not some crazed serial killer. Besides, they issued a beon-lookout order for her days ago. What more can they do in the middle of the night?”

She had a point. “All right, but we’re going to see Grossman first thing tomorrow.”

“Agreed, Why don’t you come over at eight? We’ll drive down to Santa Carla together.”

After he dropped Carly at her footbridge, he sped off, turning on the Jeep’s radio in the hope that some music would calm him. The only station that came in clearly was KSOL, easy listening out of the county seat. Not his first choice, but in his present frame of mind, anything would do. He’d just arrived at Sam’s when the announcer’s voice broke in; he left the Jeep running and turned up the volume.

“This just in: Acting on an anonymous tip, Soledad County sheriff’s deputies stopped a car driven by Cyanide Wells Mayor Garson Payne and, in the process of investigating a routine traffic violation, seized a handgun from the glove box. Although ballistics experts have yet to confirm it, a department spokesman says they are ‘ninety-nine percent certain’ that the weapon, an old Austrian army revolver, was used to kill San Francisco musician Chase Lewis in his Westport motel room last weekend. In a related development, the spokesman said that technicians have matched the bullet that killed Lewis with those used in the three-year-old fatal shootings of prominent Cyanide Wells residents Ronald Talbot Junior and Deke Rutherford. Interviewed outside the Talbot’s Mills sheriff’s department substation, where Payne is being held pending arraignment, the mayor’s attorney, James Griffin, stated that his client has no idea how the gun came to be in his car. The case against the mayor will be thrown out of court upon arraignment, Griffin contends, because of the ‘illegal nature’ of the search…”

Matt put the Jeep into a fast U-turn.

Carly McGuire

Saturday, May 18, 2002

W
hen she’d entered the house after Matt dropped her off, Carly had taken grim satisfaction at the sight of Ard’s stacked and strewn possessions. Earlier she’d allowed him to sway her about immediately disposing of them, but on Monday they were headed for the Salvation Army. Or maybe the county dump. She didn’t want to saddle anyone, no matter how needy, with the accumulation of Ard’s lying, cheating, murderous life.

In the postmidnight hour she moved through the empty house. It felt as it had the night she’d moved in, a lonely twenty-eight-year-old who feared she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. How could she, who had lived in crowded, noisy cities since her late teens, adapt to such isolation and silence? What had possessed her to think she could grasp the reins of a failing country weekly and guide it to success?

Well, you adapted, grasped, and guided. You created a successful life for yourself. You would’ve been fine if Ard hadn’t come into it. Moral: Never pick up hitchhikers.

But for years the hitchhiker, and later her daughter, had brought joy to this house. In spite of the fights and Ard’s penchant for fleeing, there had been many good times.

All behind you now, McGuire, the good
and
the bad.

But can you ever really put that big a part of your life behind you?

She tried to reconcile the woman she’d thought she knew with the woman who had killed their friends, but couldn’t. She thought back to the night they’d died, trying to find a shred of evidence that would prove Ard innocent. The coroner had put the time of death at around three in the morning. Ard was supposedly in bed beside her at that hour. But they’d had an argument, and Carly had taken a sleeping pill. Still, wouldn’t she have noticed if Ard had left for any appreciable length of time? Maybe, maybe not. And Ard was the only person besides her who had access to Ronnie’s gun collection…

Suicide.

The word loomed suddenly in her mind. Odd that the two men who had fixed things for Payne and Rawson had killed themselves. Could there be a connection…?

The phone rang, shrill in the silence. She started, then rushed to the kitchen to pick up.

“Carly?”

The sound of her name, spoken in the old familiar way, jolted her. She drew in her breath, a combination of surprise and anger threatening to choke her. It was a moment before she could respond.

“Ard. Where are you? Where’s Natalie?”

“Carly, I need your help. Chase…It’s been on the news. Everybody thinks I did it.”

Get her back here, McGuire. Make her turn Nat over to you.

“Look, Ard, why don’t you and Nat come home? I’ll hire a good attorney; we’ll get through this together.”

“I can’t. It’s over between you and me. It’s been over for a long time. But Nat…she’s sick. She caught cold and then her asthma flared up, and now she’s out of medication, but I don’t dare go to the pharmacy for a refill. And I think the cold’s turning into pneumonia. I want her to be with you, where she belongs. Our…your place is the only home she’s ever known.”

“Of course I’ll take her. I’ll see she gets what she needs.”

“Thank you. I can’t be responsible for her anymore. She’s been sick for a week—so sick I haven’t been able to move her—and it’s all my fault.”

“Then bring her here right away.”

“No, I can’t come there. It’s the first place the sheriff’s department will expect me to show up. They’re probably watching the house.”

“They were, but not anymore.”

“Look, will you quit talking and come get her?”

“Okay—where?”

“At the Knob. We’ve been camping out in my rental van near that lookout point—the one Ronnie showed us.”

“I can be there in half an hour.”

“Good. And one other thing…could you bring me some money? My credit cards’re maxed out, and I’ve run through all my cash.”

Demanding a ransom, are you?

“How much do you need?”

“A few thousand. Whatever’s in your emergency stash.” Nearly three thousand dollars in a Jiffy bag in the office-supply cabinet. Ard must’ve snooped. She’d never respected anyone’s privacy.

“I’ll bring it.”

“Oh, Carly, thank you. I know you’ll take good care of my little girl.”

Chase Lewis’s little girl, who has now become excess baggage.

“Half an hour,” she said, and replaced the receiver.

Carly pulled her truck into the parking area at the trailhead and got out. The national forest was an eerie place at night: chill even after the hottest of days; silent but full of dangerous, prowling life. She took out her flashlight and began walking along a familiar path that was altered by darkness, keeping a wary ear out for sounds in the underbrush. A dry winter had brought mountain lions and bears down from the higher elevations in search of food and water; coyotes and wild pigs also inhabited these foothills.