The Big Gamble (20 page)

“Can I use your computer and borrow some clothes?”

“Sure, I’d even throw in Tim, if you wanted him, but he’s out of town on business.”

Ramona laughed. Tim was Becky’s husband, and the two were about the most perfectly married couple imaginable. “Too bad. One night with me, and you’d be history.”

“I’ll tell him that when he calls.”

“Don’t you dare,” Ramona said as she pulled away from the curb. “See you in a few.”

 

A year apart in age, the two sisters were often taken for twins. Rebecca, a middle-school social-science teacher, was taller by a quarter of an inch, had thicker eyebrows, a slightly wider mouth, and a more oval face. On the phone to each other at least once a week, there wasn’t much catching up to do, so after a cup of tea Ramona explained why she needed to use the computer, and Becky asked if she could watch.

In the home office Ramona worked Jeff Vialpando’s favorite list of local Web sites with Becky sitting at her side, looking for a personal ad for Sally Greer. First she cruised the adult personals sites.

“Unbelievable,” Becky said abruptly, reading the sexually explicit narratives, many of which were posted with revealing or completely nude photographs that showed everything. “I wonder if our school computers block this kind of smut. This is just porn, for people who don’t want to visit the adult sites, isn’t it?”

“Ask your students,” Ramona replied as she exited a site and called up another. “They would probably know.”

She went to the preference screen and entered information closely matching Greer’s age and physical characteristics, and scrolled through the ads.

“Are these sites all like this?” Becky asked.

“According to Jeff Vialpando what we’re seeing is fairly typical,” Ramona said.

“Who is Jeff Vialpando?” Becky asked. She was always interested when Ramona mentioned the name of a new man, especially now that she’d broken up with her live-in boyfriend, whom Becky had never really liked anyway.

“He’s an APD vice sergeant,” Ramona said.

“And?” Becky asked, searching her sister’s face.

Ramona smiled. “And, nothing. At least not yet. We’re having lunch tomorrow.”

“I’ll want to be told everything.”

Ramona nodded. “Don’t I always?” She switched from the adult personals and started in on the list of love and relationship sites, which were much more mundane and rather like classified personal ads that ran in newspapers. Most consisted of blurbs describing how interesting the women were, and their laundry lists of desired traits in a man. Some wanted friendship only, others were looking for soul mates, and a few sought intimate encounters, cyber sex—whatever that was—or E-mail pen pals.

“It’s just an Internet meat market,” Becky said with a groan, getting out of her chair.

“Seen enough?”

“More than enough,” Becky said. “There’s something so sad about it all.”

“There are desperately lonely and needy people out there,” Ramona said.

“I’m going back to the real world,” Becky said as she picked up a thick manila folder from the desk. “I’ve got papers to grade.”

Ramona stopped scrolling and gave her sister an apologetic look. “I’ve stolen your space.”

“I’ll use the kitchen table.”

Becky left, and Ramona returned her attention to the screen. Time passed. Through the open door she heard Becky’s footsteps. She turned to find her sister in her pajamas with a toothbrush in her mouth. It brought up the memory of Becky wandering through their parents’ house every night just before bedtime, brushing her teeth and being ordered back to the bathroom to complete the job. No parental chiding ever stopped her behavior, and by the time Becky was a teenager their mother had given up trying.

Becky took the toothbrush out of her mouth and said good night. Ramona smiled in response, called up an ad for Sultry Sally, and clicked on the photo icon. A picture of Sally Greer in a scoop top that showed a lot of cleavage appeared on the screen. Ramona read the accompanying narrative.

The ad was new and the photograph looked very much like the work of Thomas Deacon.

Greer had included an Internet address for her personal Web site where visitors could view a photo gallery with new pictures recently posted. Ramona called it up and smiled as two photos she’d seen at Deacon’s studio appeared on the screen.

She perused the gallery. There were photos of Greer wearing a summer frock and smiling over her shoulder, on a bed with a long cocktail dress hiked up to show a bit of thigh, and sitting in a chair with legs crossed and a smoky look on her face.

One shot showed Greer and the woman who’d been in the hotel bar with the two men. Both wore short dresses and high heels and stood arm in arm smiling at the camera. The caption read:
THIS IS MY FRIEND STACY. WE LOVE TO DOUBLE-DATE!

Ramona printed out copies of everything and stuck them in her briefcase. Jeff Vialpando had written his home phone number on the business card he’d given her. She thought about calling him to ask if he’d be willing to respond to Greer’s ad, and decided the hour was late and it could wait until morning.

Pleased with her progress, Ramona shut down the computer, yawned, and undressed in the small guest bedroom. Sally Greer was a working girl, no doubt about it. How that tied into Bedlow’s modeling agency—if it did at all—was a question yet to be answered. She fell asleep anticipating her lunch date with Jeff Vialpando.

 

Clayton got up early and fixed breakfast for Grace and the kids. They sat around the table making small talk. Using her finger Hannah showed Clayton two different ways to make the letter
A,
drawing each letter carefully in the air. Very seriously she explained that one was big and the other was little.

“What do those letters do?” Clayton asked.

“Make words,” Hannah replied happily.

“Tell me an
A
word.”

“Apache,” Hannah said with a broad grin, poking herself in the chest. “That’s me.”

“You’re a very smart girl,” Clayton said.

Hannah nodded in agreement. “I have two
a
’s in my name. Little ones.”

“Who taught you all this?”

“Mommy,” Hannah said. “I’m gonna learn all my letters.”

From across the table, Wendell smirked at his sister. “What comes after
A
?” he asked.

Hannah lifted her chin in Wendell’s direction. “You,” she answered.

“That’s wrong,” he said with authority.

“
B
for boy, boy, boy, boy,” Hannah chanted from her high chair as her feet tapped against the underside of the table. “And
C
is for Daddy’s name.”

Clayton grinned at Grace. “I think she’s going to be as smart as you.” Perhaps, when the time came to give Hannah her Apache name, he would ask for her to be called Bright Girl. That would be perfect.

Grace smiled back. “Smarter, I hope. She wanted to wait up for you last night, so she could tell you what she’d learned. I had to make her go to bed.”

“Does my mother know of this wonderful achievement?” Clayton asked.

“Hannah told her over the phone last night. Grandmother was very proud.”

Hannah nodded in agreement.

Grace’s expression turned thoughtful.

“What is it?” Clayton asked.

“Something your mother told me after Hannah got off the phone. She once asked Kerney what he would have done if he’d known about you from the beginning. He said he felt he’d missed out on something important, and even against her wishes he would have wanted you to know him as your father.”

“But that didn’t happen,” Clayton said evenly.

“Hannah would like to tell her grandfather what she has learned,” Grace said.

Hannah nodded her head vigorously.

“Whose idea was that?”

“Your mother’s,” Grace replied. “But I agree with her completely.”

“So, are you going to call him so Hannah can recite her ABCs?” Clayton asked.

“We thought you should do it,” Grace replied.

Clayton considered it, or pretended to. “I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”

“Perhaps,” Grace said, “but he might enjoy talking to Hannah and Wendell.”

Wendell kept his head down, eyes fixed on his plate. For the motormouth he’d become, he was unusually quiet.

“Would you like to talk to your grandfather?” Clayton asked his son.

“I drew a picture for him,” Wendell said with a slight nod.

“Let me see it.”

Wendell brought him the drawing. It showed Kerney and Wendell standing together against a backdrop of mountains with the sun high in the sky. Wendell had carefully colored the sun yellow, the sky blue, and the mountains green, and lettered his name and the word grandfather, badly misspelled, under the feet of the crude figures. Both were smiling.

“It’s a very nice picture,” Clayton said, rubbing his son’s head and smiling at Hannah. “We’ll call your grandfather tonight, when I get home from work.”

Smiles greeted Clayton’s announcement as he rose from the table.

Ganged up on by his family, Clayton drove away from home feeling a bit put out. Not at Grace and the kids, but with his mother. Why the change of heart? She’d never wanted him to know his father, and now it was suddenly okay for Kerney to be treated like a grandfather. What was that all about?

He consulted the map Rojas had given him, told dispatch he was in service and where he was going, and made his way up the forest road into the mountains until a locked gate stopped him. He got out, climbed the gate, and walked the steep, curving road. At the last bend a large log cabin with a covered porch came into view.

It was one of those modern cabins made from precut logs, with a pitched green metal roof and two stone chimneys at either end of the building. The cabin sat on an elevated stone foundation overlooking a small meadow and a frozen streambed that meandered out of a narrow mountain ravine. Large windows gave a view of the forest beyond the meadow and the white-capped Sierra Blanca peaks in the distance.

Clayton gauged the size of the cabin and decided it was at least four thousand square feet, minus the covered porch with the redwood railing and massive hand-cut stone steps. It was way more than twice the size of his house in Mescalero.

Yesterday’s light snowfall in Ruidoso had left two inches on a deep bed of frozen snow in the mountains. It was the first precipitation since the Ulibarri murder. Clayton scanned the area for more cabins hidden in the trees and saw none. On the north side of the road, where the sun couldn’t reach, he knelt and carefully brushed away the fresh snow looking for tire tracks on the hard-packed ice. The last vehicle driven over the frozen surface had tires much wider than a car, pickup truck, or SUV.

He tried several more places with the same results and switched to the south side, brushing a channel across the width of the roadway. Again, only the very wide treads of a heavy vehicle showed.

Clayton stood in the driveway and studied the cabin, wondering if it was the private retreat where Harry Staggs’s fictitious Johnny Jackson provided female companionship for important, well-known men.

He decided that if Rojas was the pimp who provided girls for VIPs, he certainly wouldn’t have given him a map to the place. The windows were shuttered on the inside so Clayton couldn’t get a look. But from all appearances, it seemed to be just a rich man’s vacation lodge.

Rojas’s girlfriend had mentioned taking several hikes during her stay at the cabin, so at the front porch steps Clayton brushed away the snow, looking for any telltale remnants of boot prints. He did the same at the back door, at a trail head next to a covered wood pile that wandered into the forest, and on the front porch around an expensive hot tub where wind-blown snow had collected. There were bobcat and deer tracks in the snow behind the cabin, and old claw marks from a black bear on the trunk of a nearby tree. But Clayton saw no evidence of any recent human activity. Not even the woodpile had been disturbed.

On the side of the house he found more tire indentations that matched what he’d seen on the road, and clear boot tracks in a man’s size led to a propane tank lettered with the supplier’s name.

He called the company, spoke to the manager, gave his location, and asked when the tank had last been filled. The manager searched his paperwork and came back with a date that matched exactly the time Rojas’s girlfriend said she’d been at the cabin.

“Ask the driver if anyone was here when he made his delivery,” Clayton said.

“Let me get him on his cell phone,” the manager said.

Clayton waited patiently and smiled to himself when the manager reported that no one had been at the cabin when his driver had filled the tank. It was exactly what he’d expected to hear.

“I need to take a statement from him,” Clayton said, checking his watch, figuring his travel time back to Ruidoso on the forest road. “Where can I meet him in the next thirty minutes?”

“Do I have a problem with my driver, Deputy?” the manager asked.

“Not at all,” Clayton said as he walked quickly down the road toward the locked gate.

The man told him where to meet the driver. Clayton disconnected and smiled to himself as he climbed the gate. What was that old saying? Sometimes people were just too smart for their own good.

 

Detective Piño sat quietly in Sergeant Vialpando’s office while he examined the hard-copy printouts from Greer’s Internet personal ad and Web site. One shelf of a bookcase held a display of baseball caps from various police departments. On Vialpando’s desk was a framed photograph of a large, smiling black dog.