The Bitter Past, page 2
The early morning sun reflects off the patches of snow on the surrounding hillsides as well as the parking lot, making the world appear almost black and white. I drop my aviator sunglasses over my eyes real subtle like and motion her to my black-and-white police pickup at the far end of the lot.
When we get to the truck, Agent Locke looks up, scanning the perimeter. “What’s with the razor wire?”
She climbs in and I start the engine, mistakenly cranking the air conditioner. Sometimes I get confused over the blue and red on the temperature control. “Well, you know we’re just due east of Area 51 here.”
She rubs her upper arms vigorously, trying to shake the cold. “And?”
“Little known fact,” I say, stepping on the gas, “aliens hate razor wire.”
She isn’t quite sure what to make of that, or me for that matter. “You mean illegal aliens.”
I pull onto the highway that stretches more than three hundred miles through landscapes that look the same today as they must have to the Shoshone when they first found it, much of it still pristine wilderness. “Nope, and we call them undocumented persons out here, Agent Locke. I mean the aliens from space.”
Her eyebrows suddenly knit together, her head cocking slightly. “Oh,” she says, and I’m sure she’s wondering how many cards shy of a full deck I am.
I let the awkward silence play out until she peeks over at me like a hitchhiker in a horror movie. “The razor wire surrounds our detention facility. We house more than a hundred prisoners at any one time, mostly from Clark County and North Vegas.”
The air explodes from her lungs. “Shit, I thought you were serious.”
That keeps me smiling almost the entire sixty miles to the victim’s house. About two miles into the dirt road leading to Big Rocks, she blurts out, “Where the hell are we going?”
I give her my best blank stare, which is Oscar-worthy by the way. “We are going to Agent Atterbury’s house. The crime scene. I thought we covered this already.”
She’s had just about enough of me, and that’s fine. The road gets a little nasty now, the snow turning to slush and making my tires do the tango. We hit enough large rocks—by accident, mind you—to make Agent Locke think she’s riding a bull at the National Finals Rodeo. Finally, we arrive at the house.
“You are fucking kidding me,” she says, staring at the single structure set against a backdrop of giant stones.
I take a deep, clean breath into my lungs. “I know, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?” There are places up there in those rocks that no man has ever set foot, and that thought always fills me with a sense of awe.
Johnny or Jimmy Green, I’m not sure which one, is standing post just outside the front door. Whichever one he is, he’s half the matched set we refer to as the Twin Peaks, identical twin deputies out of our main station sixty miles to the north in Pioche, both six and a half feet tall and good-natured young men, a trait which has earned them a second nickname, the Jolly Greens. They were my first two hires when I took this job, so you would think by now I could tell them apart, but like I said, they’re identical.
“Johnny, meet Agent Locke, FBI.”
“It’s Jimmy, Sheriff,” he says with a wince.
“It was worth a shot. Jimmy, meet Agent Locke.”
Sana Locke walks right by him, lifting the yellow crime scene tape over her head. “You’re very tall.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
She looks back at me. “Booties and gloves, Sheriff?”
The question catches me off guard, coming from a seasoned FBI agent. She’s aware we found the body yesterday, so is she thinking we’ve somehow left everything in place for her? “The scene is fully processed. You’re good. Careful, though, we’re staging for an open house later today.”
Just out of spite, I guess, Locke pulls a pair of gloves out of her coat and puts them on, giving me that look that federal agents display whenever they have to lower themselves to work with Neanderthals.
We enter the home, and I notice the stench of death is not as prominent today, though it hasn’t completely abated. I lay out the photos in the appropriate places to give her the best possible sense of what we found and how we found it. She spends a lot of time looking over the ones of Atterbury himself, and I can see her body shudder as if suddenly hit by the icy wind of my air conditioner again.
“My God.”
My gut tells me she has some experience with murder, but I can’t tell how much. “Not your run-of-the-mill home invasion,” I say.
She turns away from me, slowly but methodically moving around the living room, examining the photos of evidence and the relation each has to where the body itself was. “Not your run-of-the-mill anything.” Her gaze lingers on the damage to the walls in various places. I watch her canvass the rest of the house, equally as abused by the killer but without the blood, while she periodically references the report Tuffy compiled.
“Are you thinking one suspect?” she asks.
I have a theory but am not willing to share it just yet. “Difficult to say. We found no prints, other than the victim’s and a couple of local handymen, both of whom have solid alibis. No trace evidence. Very clean for a killing that appears to have been performed with this much … anger.”
Locke shoots me a quick, inquisitive glance as we enter Atterbury’s ransacked office. “You think he was angry. That’s interesting.”
“I said appears to have been angry.”
She’s on the floor now, rifling through some of the papers emptied from the four-drawer filing cabinet. She’s looking for something but isn’t finding it. She looks up at me. “Do you have a theory?”
My eyes are the perfect shade of noncommittal, and Locke doesn’t wait for me to respond, as if she has just asked a silver-back gorilla what he thinks about the price of eggs. My department has a number of cases every year that necessitate calling in the feds, mostly drug-related, and I’ve learned to be careful about sharing ideas too quickly.
When we finally make it to the kitchen, Agent Locke doesn’t find anything interesting in the cupboards or refrigerator. She almost completely passes over item #32, the photo of the box of thallium salts I placed on the island.
“What’s this?”
“Thallium salts. Old rat poison. Not readily available anymore.” She stares at the photo too long. “Something?”
Sana Locke shakes her head. “Nope. Just not familiar with it. I’d like to see the body now.”
I give her a quick nod. “It’s a bit of a drive.”
* * *
“I wish I had known the body was in Las Vegas before I made the drive to Upper Butt Crack, Sheriff. You could have saved me a few hours.”
Agent Locke is not happy. Even the coffee I pick up at Lou’s in Alamo, literally the best for fifty miles in any direction, the only actually, doesn’t seem to be helping her mood. I try unsuccessfully to stifle my amusement by letting the coffee burn my upper lip. “I assumed that you would know that out here in the sticks we don’t have the facilities or expertise for an autopsy, so we utilize the Clark County coroner’s office. I thought everyone in the Las Vegas field office of the FBI was aware of that.”
She doesn’t say anything. Mostly because she’s not from the Las Vegas field office, and now she knows that I know that. It’s a good two-hour drive, so we have some time to chat. “You’re from D.C., I take it.” Not a question.
She looks over at me, feigning surprise. “What makes you say that?”
Okay, if we have to play that game, let’s play. “If you were from Vegas, you would have been in my office yesterday.”
“Not necessarily.”
“So, someone figured Atterbury’s killing was a big deal. We called you guys about twenty-four hours ago. That means Vegas called D.C., a decision was made by someone pretty high up on the food chain, and someone had to track you down and get you out here. By the time you were ready to go, it would have been too late to catch a commercial flight, except a red-eye. You didn’t take a red-eye because you look like you just came from a photo shoot and don’t have any sleep in your eyes, which means, in all likelihood, you flew out on one of those DOJ Gulfstreams and got plenty of sleep.”
Her eyes light up. “You think I look like I just came from a photo shoot?”
That was poor execution on my part. Now she knows I find her attractive. I attempt to distract her by adding, “And the SUV you drove up in is a rental car. Vegas and Reno feds use their own vehicles when they come here and get reimbursed for the mileage.”
Agent Locke turns back to me, not a cursory examination this time but a much deeper one. “Well, I never said I was with the field office in Las Vegas, but impressive powers of deduction all the same.” She swivels in her seat so that she’s fully facing me now. “What else?”
I’m about to ask why FBI headquarters thought it necessary to take this case, but the radio crackles to life and Arshal Jessup at the Alamo substation interrupts me.
“Beck, it’s Arshal. You copy?”
Arshal is somewhere in his late sixties, I’m not quite sure where exactly, and his voice sounds like he’s swallowed most of the gravel on Lincoln County roads in his forty-plus years on the job. That’s because he’s had three separate bouts with thyroid cancer, not uncommon for people who grew up downwind of the test site in the 1950s when we were setting off atomic bombs like firecrackers. Arshal was one of those kids who were given radiation badges to wear on their clothes so the Atomic Energy Commission could swing by later and collect them to compile data on the dangers of splitting the atom in the open air. My mom was one of them, too.
He’s had two sisters die from cancer already, one from leukemia and another from bladder cancer, but you won’t hear him complain about it. He’s had a good life by most measures and lives with a daughter that dotes on him like roses on a loamy soil. Arshal is also the best Jack Mormon I know, which means aside from drinking Pepsi and working on Sunday, he would give you the shirt off his back and his last penny if he thought it would help.
I pull the radio from the console. “Yes, sir.” This is my military training coming out. Even though Arshal works for me, he’s earned the respect.
“Ayup. Just an FYI for now, Beck, but I got a call from the people over at the cemetery this morning outside Rachel. Seems there was a bit of vandalism last night.” Ayup, so you know, is not a Paiute greeting, just Arshal’s way of saying yeah.
I catch Agent Locke’s grin out of the corner of my eye. “Big case,” she whispers.
At this point, I have no choice but to shoot her in the head with my loaded finger gun. “What sort of vandalism, Arshal?”
“Couple three graves got dug up, looks like.”
“How many is a couple three?” Agent Locke asks me with a giggle.
I hold up four fingers and key the mic. “Dug up?”
“Ayup, that’s affirmative. Four caskets opened.”
“Vandalism to the remains?”
A few long seconds tick by. “Well, here comes the odd part,” Arshal says. “I don’t think there was anything in those caskets to vandalize.”
Agent Locke starts humming the theme from The Twilight Zone, and I give her a gentle shove on her nicely toned shoulder to shut her up. This is known as law enforcement foreplay.
“Say again, Arshal?”
“I went out and checked them myself, Beck. If anything had been rotting in there, it hasn’t been for a good long time. Maybe never. And the caretaker said the same graves were dug up a few years back.”
None of this makes much sense. “Whose graves were they, Arshal?”
“Unknown. They were unmarked.”
I honestly don’t know what to say to that. The radio chirps again. “Beck, you there?”
“Okay, keep me posted. I’m headed to the coroner’s office. Might catch you on the way back.” I replace the radio in its holder, but something is nagging in my brain, so I pull it off the console again. “Arshal, how old were those graves?”
“Best we can figure by their placement, they go way back,” he says. “To the 1950s.”
I see Agent Locke whip out her cell phone. “Who are you calling?”
She looks at me with deadpan eyes. “Ghostbusters.”
Wonderful.
THE PAST
Freddie had only been in town for ten days when he first set eyes on Katherine Ellison. It was late March 1955, and he was on duty at the newly opened Dunes Hotel and Casino, a magnificent, neon-sparkling oasis in the middle of the Mohave Desert and the fast-growing city of Las Vegas. He had applied to be a dealer in one of the games because he heard the tips were good, but those jobs had been filled already, and the hiring manager told him his job would be to attract gamblers to the tables as a shill.
“You’re not half bad in the looks department,” the man told him. “We want guys like you throwing dice and playing cards.”
In fact, Freddie Meyer knew he was considerably better than half bad, with soft blue eyes and champagne-colored hair that crested just over the six-foot mark. And playing with house money, it was easy to lure other gamblers to the games. Blackjack, roulette, craps, it didn’t matter. It was easy work, though not entirely on the up-and-up in Freddie’s Presbyterian mind. It was only the second night on the job when he saw Kitty. She was in the Helps Hall where the employees ate their meals, with a group of other young women. She wasn’t the most striking, wore little makeup compared with her friends, and with her black cat-eye glasses and conservative clothes, had suppressed any semblance of glamour. She looked like a math teacher with her butterscotch hair perpetually tied efficiently behind her head, not alluring like the cigarette and cocktail girls in the casino, and it seemed appropriate to Freddie that she worked in the count room. Her friends seemed shocked when Freddie approached them and asked for her name rather than one of theirs.
Their first date followed a week later, dinner and Frank Sinatra. Freddie spent his entire paycheck to impress the bookish girl from Chicago, and it worked. They saw each other as often as possible over the next few weeks, on shift and off. They were a couple. Kitty and Freddie. A bit of an odd pairing, some thought. The couple themselves seemed oblivious to their differences and were continually surprised at what they had in common, which culminated on a night in mid-May when Freddie started talking about the composition of the cosmos under a million stars at the magnificent red sandstone formations known as Valley of Fire about fifty miles north of the city.
“I took physics in high school and a year of it at Penn. But then my mom got sick, and I had to leave.” He told her the story that eventually left him alone in the world and finally led him to the desert.
“I lost my mom, too,” she said. “Three years ago. Polio.”
Freddie shook his head. “And now I hear we have a vaccine for it. I’m sorry.”
“The future is up there,” she said as they lay on a Navajo blanket on a large slab of limestone that in the darkness looked like a strawberry-vanilla swirl. “In those galaxies that look like clouds, and the ever-expanding universe. Just like Hubble described it.”
Freddie’s pupils flared. “You know physics!”
She laughed. “I studied physics at the University of Chicago.”
He thrust his hands in the air. “How did I not know that?”
She looked at him, lowering her glasses down the steep incline of her nose. “A lot of boys would find that intimidating.”
Freddie shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why are you here? Why are you working in a casino?”
Kitty drew in a long breath and released it slowly. “Not easy for a woman to get a job in the sciences. And my father wanted me to be here with him. He was alone my last couple years at school.”
Freddie raised up on one elbow and faced her, taking her hand. “Tell me about him.”
She curled upward to him, undoing her ponytail and letting her hair fall naturally. “He’s a physicist and one of the leading scientists at the atomic testing site not far from here.” She rolled her eyes. “He’s going to flip when he meets you.”
Seconds before 4 A.M., Kitty kissed him deeply. And then the sky lit up like it was the middle of the day, illuminating their faces. They looked up at the same time.
“My God,” Freddie said in awe. They could see the multicolored mushroom spiraling into the heavens.
“Not God,” Kitty said. “That’s my dad.”
* * *
A few weeks later, she asked him home for dinner. It was a nice house with a tan brick exterior and just about a mile west of the center of the rapidly expanding city, its population now close to 45,000 by recent estimates. Opportunities abounded in the desert.
Kitty showed Freddie into her father’s study and introduced him. Roger Ellison was a tall, big-bellied man in his late forties, a good three or four inches taller than Freddie, and he had long slender hands, one of which seemed to be always around his pipe. Soft hands, Freddie thought as they shook. The hands of a scientist. His dark brown eyes were like those of a hawk, widely set on his oval face and not missing anything. Freddie felt they could see right through him. They made small talk for a few minutes over drinks until Freddie caught sight of the chessboard on a small table along the exterior wall. It was the pieces that actually caught his eye.
The three of them crossed the room and Freddie picked up one of the finely crafted ivory pieces, an elephant. “This is beautiful.”
“Do you play?” Dr. Ellison asked.
He answered by beating Kitty’s father in eleven moves.
“I don’t meet a lot of people who understand the game so well,” Dr. Ellison told Freddie over a nice ham and mashed potatoes a few minutes later. “Especially your age. Where did you learn?”
Freddie was still chewing, so he politely held his hand in front of his mouth. “In school mostly. During the winter, we didn’t go outside that much, so a lot of us learned chess.”
Kitty winked at him. “Daddy’s impressed with you.” And to her father, “He’s a physics buff, too, Daddy.”
