Burn Out (12 page)

Why didn’t Bud Smith sleep in the larger room with the queen-sized bed? Perhaps he shared the trailer with someone who was tidier than he?

Well, that information could be had online. But while I was here . . .

The master bedroom’s closet contained a man’s clothing—mostly vintage and odd, as I’d seen Bud wear. So it was his room after all. The bathroom didn’t tell me much. A Water Pik and two electric toothbrushes, some first-aid supplies, aspirin, and sinus headache pills. No prescription drugs. A razor and shaving cream on a shelf below a mirror in the shower stall. Third bedroom, mostly empty—a guest room that hadn’t been used in quite a while, judging from the layer of dust.

Back to the room with the unmade bed. The closet held some newish-looking woman’s jeans. A couple of sweaters were draped across a chair, and there were a few tops hanging in the closet. Woman’s underwear in the bureau, and a flannel nightgown tossed on the bed. Makeup items and a pair of earrings on the bureau.

So Smith had a female roommate. She was probably at work.

I moved back to the living area, looking in drawers and cupboards, gave the whole trailer another once-over, then left and started back to the ranch.

I sat at my laptop, thinking about Bud Smith—a convicted child molester who may have been covering for his younger brother. Smith, who had told me he knew Amy Perez and, if Amy had followed Dana Ivins’ advice, may have tutored her in algebra. Who had sold a life-insurance policy to Hayley, with Amy as beneficiary. Had he known Hayley before she bought the policy? Probably not, given their age difference.

I logged on to Mono County property records and learned the land and the double-wide had belonged to Smith for seven years. When I went to the state insurance brokers’ registry, I found that he’d received his license the same year he’d purchased the land. The California Registry of Sex Offenders showed he’d contacted them within a day of his arrival in the state, and reregistered when required.

Which proved . . . ? Not much.

The
Mineral County Independent News
in Hawthorne didn’t have online issues going back twenty-six years. I could drive over there and check their archives, but it was getting on toward five o’clock. Better to wait till morning.

Well, what about the paper in Reno? A controversial rape case would have warranted mention. I checked, found their online archives didn’t go back twenty-six years, either. Tomorrow I’d have to visit Mineral County.

But now I’d take a ride on King, who was probably waiting for me. Tonight I’d cut a path across open land where our small herd of sheep grazed. Hy had told me the sheep had something to do with a subsidy or lower taxes—I forget which—but I suspected he kept them out of sentiment. His stepfather, to whom he’d been considerably closer than to his birth father, had been a lifelong sheep rancher.

The ride was without event, and I felt a growing kinship with the horse. I’d been traumatized by the events of the night when he’d charged me, but so had he. Animals are essentially innocent, until we humans treat them badly and give them cause to fear. King needed my reassurance.

As we retraced our steps, I wondered if this caring for the horse indicated a caring for other things in my life.

Ramon was at the stable when King and I got back, cleaning out the stall. He said hello and went on with what he was doing, allowing me to tend to King on my own.

When I finished rubbing King down and led him into the clean stall, I noticed Ramon’s dark eyes were shadowed and puffy. He attempted a smile, but it didn’t quite come off.

“How’re you doing?” I asked.

He made a wobbly gesture with his hand. “We buried Hayley up in Bridgeport today.”

“Oh, I wish you’d told me. I would’ve—”

“Not necessary; you didn’t know her. It was a nice turnout, though. Even that wild man she ran off with and his girlfriend came. The girlfriend brought beautiful flowers. She works at Petals.”

So Rich Three Wings and Cammie Charles had paid their respects to Hayley. Rich, because he still loved her, and Cammie, probably because she felt guilty that her imagined rival was dead.

I asked, “Did Miri attend?”

Ramon’s eyes narrowed, the lines around them deepening. “No.”

“Why not? She was only on seventy-two-hour hold at the psychiatric ward.”

“Yeah. And then she checked herself into a rehab facility they recommended. By this morning she was gone. She’s probably in Reno or Vegas, helling around or selling herself. I’ve washed my hands of her. Sara’s real broken up about this, but she’ll get over it. You gotta go on.”

“And what about Amy? Anything from her?”

“Not a word.” He leaned in the doorway, and for a moment I thought he’d sag to the ground. “I loved that little girl, Sharon. I should’ve never let Miri run me off. I should’ve stayed and fought for the last of my nieces and nephews.”

I went to him, took his hand, and drew him over to the nearest bales of hay. As we sat, I said, “You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

“Anybody could’ve read the signs that she was headed for bad trouble. But not me, I was too offended at Miri, too dug down into my own unhappiness. Sara and I had two boys, you know—Peter and Raymond.”

“I didn’t know. Neither of you has ever mentioned them.”

“They’ve been gone a long time. Peter died in a gang shootout over in Santa Rosa. Raymond died of a drug overdose. I didn’t do so good by them, either.”

Sadness welled up inside me—guilt, too. “I’m sorry,” I said, “and I understand how you feel. I had a brother, Joey. Always was a rebel and a loner. After he graduated high school, he took off and very seldom came home. Ma—my adoptive mother—got postcards occasionally, but that was it. And then he died all alone of a drug and alcohol overdose in a shack up near Eureka. Ever since then I’ve wished I’d done more. That any of us had done more. But we just . . . let him go.”

“I’m sorry, Sharon. Us people, we’re all so careless. I don’t want to let go of Amy.”

“Neither do I. I promise I’ll find her.”

That night I dreamed of the pit again—only this time it was bigger. Impossible to place both my hands and feet on its sides and climb into the sunshine like a spider. I woke in a near panic, sat up, collapsed back on the pillows.

Told myself,
I will not allow this to get the better of me.

Tomorrow I’d keep my promise to Ramon. Start an intensive search for Bud Smith who, my instincts said, was at the center of Amy’s disappearance.

Maybe that would keep my nightmares at bay.

Tuesday
NOVEMBER 6

The Nevada sky was cloudless as I coasted past the red-and-white sign welcoming me to Hawthorne, population 3,311. Larger than Vernon by far, and the county seat, but still a small town. Laid out on a grid, so I had no difficulty locating the
Independent News
building on D Street.

The man I talked to was pleasant and friendly. Back issues on microfilm? No problem. They were going to put everything online someday, but who knew when that would be? Soon I was seated in a dusty room fitting reels onto a machine with fumbling fingers. How could I be clumsy at the act I’d performed so many times before I’d become computer literate? Another symptom of burn-out?

I returned the films an hour or so later, having learned too few new details to justify such a long drive, except that Smith’s rape victim had remained too traumatized to identify her assailant.

It was after two in the afternoon, so I asked about someplace to eat lunch. McDonald’s; everyplace else had stopped serving. I hadn’t had a Mickey D’s burger in years, and it was a strange experience: not what I now think of as a burger, but a different substance entirely. I blocked out thoughts of what that substance might be and ate it anyway.

Back in the car, I checked my cell to see if it worked here—which it did—and consulted my notes. Got the number for the prosecutor in the Smith case from Information. Warren Mills, now retired, was home and willing to see me once I assured him that I was an investigator, not someone planning to write a book on the case. “Too damn much of that sensational crap going around these days,” he told me.

Mills lived only a few blocks away on East Eighth Street. The house was a low-slung rancher, one of a number on that block that were probably built in the late forties before developers realized that the wartime boom in the Hawthorne economy—due to activity at the nearby munitions depot—was dropping off. I parked out front and went up a concrete walk bordered on either side by cacti and polished rock. Westernized, I believe it’s called, for yards that don’t require much water or maintenance.

Warren Mills answered the door—a tall, erect man with thick gray hair and black-rimmed glasses who, according to the newspaper accounts, must now be in his late seventies but could have passed for mid-sixties. He led me inside to a den with a big-screen TV. The furnishings were overstuffed and looked comfortable; framed photos hung on the walls—color shots of Walker Lake to the north, he told me.

“Coffee, Ms. McCone? A soda?” He had a deep, rich voice that must have resonated in the courtroom.

“Nothing, thanks. I’ve just come from McDonald’s.”

“I should have offered you an Alka-Seltzer. Please, sit down.”

I sank into a brown chair that enveloped me in an embrace that made it hard to sit up straight.

Warren Mills settled on the couch, propped his moccasin-shod feet on a scarred coffee table in front of it. “You said on the phone that you’re a private investigator and interested in the Herbert Smith case. Why?”

“He may have recently been involved in the abduction of a young woman over in Mono County. I’ve read all the newspaper accounts of his case, but there’s so much that seems . . . unsaid. And a friend of Smith’s claims that you yourself were uncertain Smith was guilty.”

Mills nodded. “His confession was as false as I’ve ever heard.”

“Then why did you accept his plea bargain and send him to prison?”

“It was as if Smith was trying to talk his way behind bars. He insisted on his guilt, refused a lie-detector test when his public defender wanted to order one. I didn’t need to build a case against him; he built it for me. And of course the district attorney was hot for a quick trial and conviction. The rape and sodomy of a thirteen-year-old . . . small towns like this need to put crimes like that behind them and move on.”

“The victim—”

“I can’t tell you her name. But she was a nice girl from a decent, hardworking family. Too friendly and trusting, that’s all.”

“What happened to her?”

“The family moved away. She was severely damaged by the assault. And as you must know, you can keep the victim’s name out of the newspapers and court records but word gets out anyway and then it’s blame-the-victim time.”

“Smith’s friend claims he was covering for his younger brother, Davey.”

“The friend’s likely right. Davey Smith was a genius, had just graduated high school at fifteen, with a full scholarship to some college back East. My thinking is that Herbert—Bud, everybody called him—didn’t want to see Davey’s promising future disrupted, even if it meant going to prison for something he didn’t do.”

“Why? If Davey was a rapist—”

“You have to understand the way it was with the two of them. The mother died young. Father raised them well, but he had a fatal heart attack when Bud was sixteen. A young man, just starting out in life, and he could have put his little brother in a foster home, but he didn’t. Instead he quit school, picked up where the father left off, took whatever jobs paid best to support the two of them. That’s sometimes the way some family members are. Bud loved Davey, and I think he saw his brother’s promising future as a kind of a way of ensuring the family would go on.”

“And where is this genius today?”

Mills shrugged, shook his head.

I said, “Bud Smith is working as an insurance broker in Vernon, on Tufa Lake. He lives in a double-wide trailer in the country—nice property, but nothing fancy. And he’s a registered sex offender. I guess his brother—wherever he is—didn’t have the same sense of family.”

“He could be dead. Or incarcerated somewhere else.”

“True.”

Mills was silent for a long moment. Then: “I imagine in your profession, Ms. McCone, you’ve had reason to regret certain of your actions.”

Oh, haven’t I. Mr. Mills, you’ll never know how much I regret them.

“Of course.”

“So have I.” His eyes, behind their black-framed glasses, grew pained. “I regret not pushing harder to prove Bud Smith’s confession was false. I regret not looking more closely at Davey Smith. Whatever’s happened over in Mono County is not Bud’s fault.”

“And Davey . . . ?”

“My biggest regret: that I may have let a monster walk free.”

He paused, seemed to listen to his words. “Talk with an attorney named John Pearl in Carson City.” He reached for a pad and pencil on the scarred coffee table and scribbled. “This is his office address and phone number. I’ll call ahead to say you’ll contact him. He may be able to tell you what I can’t.”

I took the paper. John Pearl: Bud Smith’s former public defender.

The munitions depot occupied a vast expanse of land on the outskirts of Hawthorne. Standard military buildings and cracked and weed-choked pavement were visible from the road, although I’d read on the Net that its golf course and officers’ clubhouse had now been turned into a public country club. Storage bunkers covered the land to the east like Indian mounds, and the landscape was stark and uninviting. I passed through the town of Babbitt, which had once been a bedroom community for base workers, and eventually came to Walker Lake.

I drove north along the shore of the elongated body of water that was rimmed by sand-colored hills to the east. It was currently in ecological crisis, as Tufa and Mono Lakes in California had once been, primarily because the waters of its feeder stream, the Walker River, had been overallocated for agricultural use. Hy had done some work with the organization trying to preserve Walker, one of only five deepwater lakes in the world that are able to sustain a good-sized fishery, and had told me that if the water levels continued to drop, increased salinity would destroy its fish population.