Desert Run (31 page)

Hoping to ease my skittery mind, I put on an old vinyl of Tampa Red and listened to his bottleneck guitar while I nuked some ramen for lunch. But the scratchy sound of the vinyl got on my nerves after a while, so I turned the stereo off, lay down on the floor, and started doing crunches. After working myself into cramps, I took a long shower, then sprawled naked across my non-Persian Pink Lone Ranger and Tonto bedspread and tried not to think about Warren.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so within minutes I was thinking about another troublesome subject: the Erik Ernst case. After trying unsuccessfully to block that from my mind, I gave up and started reviewing what I knew. Out of sheer mental exhaustion, I decided to skip the details and just list the major events in chronological order.

On Christmas Eve, 1944, Erik Ernst, Gunter Hoenig, Josef Braun, and twenty-five other Germans POWs escape from Camp Papago. Christmas night, the Bollinger family is murdered. Some forty years later, someone rams Erik Ernst's dinghy with a speedboat. He loses both legs and his attacker is never caught. More than two decades after that, he is murdered. Days later, a reporter who wrote the book about the Camp Papago escape is found shot to death. Next to die is a deputy who worked the Bollinger case.

Could it be any more obvious that the Ernst murder was tied to the Bollingers?

Yet despite my efforts, Scottsdale PD still believed that the Ernst killing was unconnected to the Bollingers' deaths. It was possible they might change their minds after ballistics tests on the bullets harvested from Fay Harris and Harry Caulfield were completed, but I didn't think so. Even if the bullets matched, and I was certain they would, the prosecuting attorney would be able to dream up a scenario—however unlikely—that separated these two murders from the bludgeoning death of Erik Ernst.

One thing I knew for certain: Rada Tesema was no murderer. While he might be desperate to bring his wife and children to America, I refused to believe he was foolish enough to jeopardize his precious green card in order to steal a few pawnable trinkets, let alone evil enough to kill a helpless old man. The very fact that Tesema continued to care for Ernst after the money ran out was proof that he was driven more by compassion than malice.

But if not Tesema, who? Gunter Hoenig, wherever he might be?

I was tempted to go through Gunter's journals yet again, but stopped myself, deciding that I needed to strike out in an entirely new direction. It might be worthwhile to compare Fay Harris' notes on the Bollinger murders to Chess Bollinger's ramblings, so I peeled myself off the bedspread, smoothed the wrinkles out of the Lone Ranger's face, and found the fat manila envelope Fay had prepared for me before she died. Since her notes were more organized than Gunter's journals, it didn't take me long to find the pages I was looking for.

While I was able to decipher Fay's puzzling shorthand on most of the pages, two notes still challenged me.

CasNos/ccTrail/C/budSysNK/Van.

I pulled out a notepad and began working on a possible translation.
CasNos.
Casa Nostra? Had Fay found hints of organized crime in both murders? Or had she meant
Case Notes
? Then there was a slash, followed by
ccTrail
, possibly a hasty misspelling meaning
copies of Chess' trial transcript
. Or if no misspelling, how about…
copies in trailer
? The trailer in question might be Harry Caulfield's, who had once worked on the Bollinger case.
C/budSysNK/Van.
On other pages, I'd noticed that Fay used
C
for various words; sometimes
copy
, sometimes
Chess
. And
Sys
? Could that be
system
? Or
says
? After squinting my eyes at the line for a while, I wrote down
Case notes. Copies in trailer. Chess' buddy says
…meaning Chess' buddy, Sammy Maurice.

I was almost there.

NK/Van
. If my reasoning was correct, that would be
Not Kill, Vandalizing
. Sammy Maurice confirmed that he and Chess were out Christmas night laying waste to Scottsdale High School, not to Chess' family. Somehow Fay had found that out, possibly from a conversation with Harry Caulfield, who might have kept case notes on the Bollinger case in his trailer. Tomorrow I'd call Reverend Sammy and ask him if he'd ever talked to Fay, but I was pretty sure I now knew what the answer would be: a definite yes. With a thrill of satisfaction, I realized that the deciphered sentence now read
Case notes. Copies in trailer. Chess' buddy says not kill. Vandalizing.

Tomorrow I'd call Detective Villapando again and find out if the search of Harry Caulfield's trailer turned up any material related to the Bollinger killings. Maybe the murderer hadn't found them.

Confidence rising, I tackled the next line.
Ols/kdSAuG?CFG.

Ols/.
The only thing that leapt immediately to mind was
Olds
, as in '39 Oldsmobile. Edward Bollinger's had disappeared forever the night of the killings.
KdSAuG.
I wondered if the first part in this series meant
kid
. Possibly. In 1944, two kids were involved in the case, Chess and Sammy.
SauG.
Sig Sauer
, as in the popular firearm? At the time Fay made her notes, no firearm of any kind had been involved in the crimes. Oops. Wrong. Edward, the first of the Bollingers to die, had been killed by his own shotgun. But not a Sig Sauer.

After studying the rest of the series for almost an hour and trying out various combinations, I gave up. Tomorrow I'd get on the phone and find myself a code-breaker. For now, I put aside Fay's notes and picked up the case folder I retrieved from my office early this morning. As I leafed through my own notes, I came across yet another puzzle.

Spilt milk. The gas said it.
Those were the worlds Chess had mumbled during my first visit with him. At the time, I'd dismissed them as word salad ramblings of the typical Alzheimer's patient, but what if I'd been wrong? As my later visit proved, Chess sometimes had moments of lucidity. What if he'd been describing something that actually happened? During the same conversation—if you could call an interview with Chess an actual conversation—he also claimed that his Daddy had killed him. Since Chess was still alive, in a manner of speaking, that part was obviously wrong. But what about the rest?

The gas said it.
Gas: sometimes inert, sometimes active. Gas: to talk, to yak, to gab. Gas: without it, cars won't run. Spilt milk? Spilt gas? During WWII, spilling gas would be a major infraction, and Chess' abusive father might think it worth a beating. Still, gas couldn't talk, so how was it possible that “the gas said it”?

Suppressing a scream of frustration, I tossed the case folder aside and sat there staring at the walls, trying to empty my overloaded mind so that sane thoughts could make their way in. But my brain wouldn't cooperate and threw nothing more than scrambled words and initials back at me. Hoping that another shower might help—I'd been known to solve crimes while standing under a shower—I went back into the bathroom, but a half hour later emerged from the shower stall feeling more confused than ever. Something was blocking me.

Halfway through dressing, I figured out what the block was.

Unfinished business.

And it had nothing to do with the Erik Ernst case.

***

The sun had dipped behind the Papago Buttes and the film crew was gone, leaving only a solitary guard patrolling the perimeter, so I headed for the Best Western. As I had hoped, the Golden Hawk was parked outside Warren's motel room. It only took me seconds to get up enough nerve to knock on his door.

“Lena, what…what brings you here?” Like me, Warren smelled of soap and freshly laundered clothes. “I thought you needed time to think.”

“I think fast. May I come in?”

He stood aside, then closed the motel door behind me. “I wasn't sure I'd ever see you again. When I discussed my past with you, you backed off so fast I can still feel the burn.” His voice was wary, but mine would have been, too, given the circumstances.

I took a seat in one of the club chairs by the window, putting my carry-all on the heavy oak card table next to the film's shooting script. “I've been unfair to you.”

Looking a little more hopeful, he sat down across from me. “Not necessarily. Merely careful. You've been through a lot in your life, and I don't blame you for not being anxious to get involved with someone who carries around the kind of baggage I do.”

“We all carry baggage. The only thing that matters is how well we distribute the weight.” I reached my hand across the table.

He didn't take it. Instead, he got up, came around the table, and drew me into his arms.

***

“So. Did you buy the Golden Hawk?” The motel room smelled like sweaty sheets, and my head was nestled in that concave place between Warren's shoulder and chest. We'd said so many heavy things to each other already that now it was time to simply relax and chat.

He kissed me again, then drew away and smiled. “Sure did. Yesterday. When I walked into the showroom with my checkbook, Mark almost pissed himself. Now he's tempting me with a '48 Hudson. Sometimes I suspect he isn't as interested in film as he says he is, that he just keeps showing up on the set to sell me cars.”

I nuzzled his ear. “Oh, I don't know about that. You're pretty easy to tempt.”

“Only by the right woman.”

We sweated up the sheets some more until I fell asleep in his arms…

…and was four years old again, riding through the night on a white bus, mere seconds before a bullet put an end to my memories.

I heard singing, but the only thing I cared about was my mother's promise. “Yes, I'll shoot her! You just watch. I'll shoot her right now!” She held me on her lap, and to my four-year-old eyes, the gun she pressed against my forehead looked like a cannon.

“No, Mommy!” I cried. “Please don't!”

No one tried to stop her. They just sang louder, as if attempting to overwhelm her anguish with their voices. The tunes I recognized as hymns from that peaceful, far-off life lived among tall trees and green fields. But the words were different.

Abraham loves me, this I know.

All his writings tell me so.

Little ones to him belong.

We are weak, Abraham is strong.

Mommy wasn't singing and I couldn't hear Daddy sing, either. He usually accompanied these strange hymns on his guitar, but for some reason he wasn't with us. Then I remembered. A few days before, we'd left Daddy in the forest glade, along with a group of crying children.

Now I was the only child left.

“See, I'll kill her now!” Mommy screamed.

But she kicked me in the stomach first. I fell through the open door of the bus at the same time I heard the shot and pain stabbed my head. The concrete rushed up to meet me and my…

…my own screams blended with my mother's. Although one part of me lay bleeding on the Phoenix pavement, the other part of me remained wrapped in my mother's protective arms.

“Mommy!” I screamed.

“My poor baby!”

But it was a man's voice, not my mother's. I opened my eyes to find Warren holding me close, rocking me back and forth, just as my mother had oh so long ago. “My poor baby.”

Still shivering, I buried my face in his chest. “Don't call me baby. Please don't.”

***

The next time I awoke, daylight filtered through the closed curtains. I heard Warren's rhythmic breathing, but as I started to sit up, it changed. When I looked over at him, his eyes were open, staring at me.

“Do you always dream like that?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He pulled me to him.

After we made love, we showered together. Then he ordered breakfast brought to the room from the restaurant next door. He didn't bring up last night's memory-nightmare again, just tilted me back against the pillow and fed me as if I really were a baby. His hair was damp and dark from the shower, and the contrast made his blue eyes even bluer.

“You need someone to take care of you.”

I opened my mouth to receive another bite of toast. “No, I don't.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Like hell.”

“Like real.”

I started to get up. “Warren, I told you…”

Gently, he pushed me back down and fed me another piece of toast. “Okay, okay. But here's what I want to say. There aren't that many scenes left to shoot, the one today with Frank Oberle standing around as the gaffers dismantle one of the barracks—I've decided to actually put that in the documentary—then the helicopter shot of the Germans running across the desert. Two more after that, but both are interiors I'll shoot on the sound stage in North Scottsdale. My guestimate is that we'll finish this week, then close up shop and go back to L.A.”

My mouth was empty again but since no more toast was forthcoming, I knew that he was ready to say what he really wanted to say.

I was right. “Now that I've found you, I can't leave you behind. I want you to come with me.”

Wanting and getting are two different things. The memory-nightmare had left me feeling vulnerable, and vulnerability was just too threatening. This time I didn't let him push me back down. I sat up and put my hand against his chest, keeping him at a forearm's distance. “It's too early.” He knew I wasn't talking about the time of day. “Don't look at me like that, Warren. I didn't say that something more permanent isn't possible between us, but it's too much too soon.”

“Honey, I…”

“And don't call me honey, either. Just let me finish. My feelings for you, they're…they're strong. But I have a business to run, too. I can keep Desert Investigations open and commute to L.A. and work on
Desert Eagle
with Angel. It would give you and me time to…” I stopped. Time to what? Count the skeletons in our mutual closets?