Desert Wind (37 page)

As if realizing what he’d said, he backtracked. “Not that his death had anything to do with us.”

Maybe. Maybe not. “Do you think he believed more uranium could be found on your land?”

A dry laugh. “He couldn’t possibly be that foolish. As I said, before Jeanette and I purchased the ranch, I went over every inch of the place with a Geiger counter. There were no hot spots which might have indicated either fallout or uranium deposits. Mr. Tosches wanted to build another resort like Sunset Canyon Lakes, that’s all. Now, not that this hasn’t been an interesting digression, but I thought you wanted to talk about Gabriel Boone.”

“Correct. You started to tell me why Gabe feels so indebted to you.” Indebted enough to confess to a murder he didn’t commit to get your son out of jail.

The story Olmstead told was a sad one. After Boone’s wife died from esophageal cancer, the bank foreclosed on his ranch. He spent the next few years wrangling for other ranchers until his drinking problem became so serious he couldn’t hold a job. “The property passed through several hands before my wife and I turned it into a guest ranch,” he said. “We were doing fairly well, too, until Jeanette…” He swallowed. “But on June 12, 1996, the day Mr. Boone arrived at Sunset Trails…”

He turned away and pretended to sneeze, not before I saw a drop of moisture on his cheek.

“Gesundheit,” I said, to help this proud man save face. But I also wondered why a busy man like Olmstead could remember the exact day a drifter had turned up at his ranch.

“Thank you.” He grabbed a tissue and made a big deal out of blowing his nose.

“Go on.”

He cleared his throat. “That day Mr. Boone was pretty much at the end of his tether. His clothes were in rags, he had the shakes, he could barely talk. He wanted a job, but there was no way I could use anyone in his condition. Still, I felt sorry for him so I sent him over to the wrangler’s cookhouse for a square meal. One for his dog, too, although the blue-eyed thing looked a lot healthier than Mr. Boone.”

He stared off into space.

I waited.

“About an hour later is when…Jeanette was in the family quarters out back, hanging up a picture. You’ve probably sneaked out there and seen our house, right?”

“Big fenced yard. Good idea, with such a big family and the Virgin River being so close by.”

His mouth twisted. “It wasn’t fenced then. Jeanette was careful, a pearl of great price. She always kept close watch on everyone, especially the kids with Down syndrome. One of her sisters was living with us to help out, so everything should have been fine. But when Jeanette…” He had to take a few more breaths before continuing. “When Jeanette had the heart attack, it was chaos. I was up here at the lodge, and Miguel, that’s our second oldest, called me from the house and I ran back there, and the kids were crying and screaming, and her sister was doing chest compressions, but I could see there was nothing to be done, but I took over and tried for the longest time, but the Lord had already called her home.”

After taking a big gulp of air, he fell silent for so long I had to prompt him, “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Olmstead, but what does this have to do with Gabriel Boone?”

He stood up. “Excuse me, but I need to get a drink of water. Would you like one?”

“I’m fine.”

For the next few minutes I sat there alone, listening to pots rattle in the kitchen, beyond that, the sound of horses neighing. Floating over the musty smell of record books and old leather, I could smell garlic and oregano.

When Olmstead returned, his eyes and nose were noticeably red. Sitting down, he said, “Life is for the living, even amidst death. In our grief, we didn’t remember that Leilani wasn’t in the house. She’d always been highly intelligent, curious, and very active despite her leg, so we’d bought one of those big swing sets that had a slide, teeter totter, all the bells and whistles, just to keep her occupied. To make a long story short, while the rest of us were working on Jeanette, we forgot about Leilani. The children had been warned about the river, told to never to go there, but once she realized she wasn’t being watched, she made a beeline for it.” He gave me a sad look. “She was only five. You know how children are at that age.”

“Tell them not to do something, and that’s the first thing they do.”

“Exactly. In that, I failed her. But Mr. Boone didn’t.”

“How so?”

“He’d finished eating at the cookhouse and was walking toward the road when he saw her playing on top of the riverbank. When she suddenly disappeared, he knew she’d fallen in. Taking no care for his own safety, he ran and jumped in after her. The current’s strong at that spot, and he almost drowned saving my daughter’s life. For that, I and my family will be eternally grateful to Mr. Boone.”

I could see it in my mind. A broken-down old drunk carrying a load of grief no one should have to carry, showing up at his old homestead to beg for a job, and getting turned down. Free meal or not, many men would have been bitter enough to just walk away.

Not Gabe Boone.

I remembered his face, the one I’d seen in the interview room. Careworn. Noble.

Olmstead had answered only half my question. “I can see why you’re indebted to Gabe, but why does he feel indebted to you?” Looked at from another angle, Gabe had a strong reason to resent the entire Olmstead clan, since they were living on the ranch he’d once owned.

Olmstead shrugged. “We took him in, helped him get straightened up, but that’s what anyone in our situation would do. Once he was released from rehab…”

“Who paid for that?” A good rehab facility could run thousands of dollars per week, and the free state-run places had long waiting lists.

“We did, of course.”

In other words, Hank Olmstead paid for it out of his own pocket.

Glossing over his extraordinary generosity, he continued, “Once Mr. Boone felt better, we gave him a job and he’s been with us ever since. So you see, we’re the ones who owe the debt, not Mr. Boone. We lost Jeanette that day but Gabriel Boone gave us back our Leilani.”

***

The death of a peace officer brings out even more law enforcement than the death of a gazillionaire. On the way from the ranch toward Sunset Canyon Lakes, I drove though a desert literally carpeted with police cruisers. Hoping for some first-hand information, I approached several officers but found none willing to talk. Forced to mind my own business, I allowed myself to be directed off the highway and onto a rough track between two mesas. The detour, which was almost as rough as the riding trail along the Virgin River, curved far away from the actual crime scene.

Less than fifteen minutes after returning to the blacktop, I knocked on Nancy Donohue’s front door. When she answered, she was surprisingly genial.

“Another bad penny turns up,” she sniped. “Come on in, Jones, but don’t expect hors d’oeuvres. Coffee’s all you’re going to get and that’s only because Olivia made it.”

The reporter was sitting on the floral sofa, her thin fingers curled around a carafe.

I settled myself at the other end of the floral sofa and asked, “Have either of you heard about Deputy Stark?”

Nancy, who’d plopped herself down on the overstuffed chair across from us, responded only with a nasty smile, but Olivia nodded. “I’ve already started checking to see if his death is connected to the Black Basin Mine. The kid who found the body works here and is desperate for his fifteen minutes of fame, so he told me all about it.”

“Kid?” I realized then that I’d taken it for granted Monty found the body. What did that say about the way my mind was tracking?

“Danny Ross, a sometimes golf caddy,” Olivia said. “Very photogenic, like all the help seems to be here, so I snapped a picture, just in case. He lives in Walapai Flats, said he comes over to caddy whenever he’s needed. Which was this morning, happily.”

“What’d he say?”

“Pretty much what you’d expect. He noticed Stark’s cruiser sitting on the side of the road with its door open. When he stopped and looked inside, he saw Stark slumped across the passenger’s side. He called 9-1-1. Not that it did any good.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Nancy chirped cheerfully, holding out a jar of generic coffee creamer. “Hope the pig suffered. Cream, anyone?”

“Black for me, thank you,” Olivia looked more amused than shocked by Nancy’s callousness.

“No cream for me, either,” I said. “Nancy, you sound like you might have had a run-in with Deputy Stark.”

The merry widow flashed big, yellow teeth. “Show me a woman in Walapai County who hasn’t and I’ll show you an agoraphobic who never leaves her house. Stark’s one of the reasons I volunteer at Haven. I was never able to talk that poor wife of his into taking advantage of our safe house program, but what can you expect? It’s impossible to help someone who’s not aware she needs help. Might as well try to talk the sun out of setting in the west. All water under the bridge, now, eh? Too bad we don’t know who shot the miserable sonofabitch. I’d like to send him a thank-you note.” With a satisfied sigh she ladled three teaspoons of ersatz creamer into her coffee and stirred until it looked like floating cottage cheese.

“Him?” Olivia said, a twinkle in her dark eyes. “Why not a ‘her’?”

“That’s always possible,” I said. Sometimes, although not often enough, victims fought back. The fact that Stark had been shot to death in his cruiser made me briefly wonder if this was Connie Stark’s shopping day. If so, she’d have had access to the family sedan. She could have known his regular patrol route and decided to lie in wait.

The scenario was intriguing, but I put it aside and responded to something Nancy had just said. “You’re a volunteer at Haven?”

“Why, of course.” She took a sip of lumpy coffee. “You’re not from around here, Jones, so you won’t remember that awful case three years ago when one of the groundskeepers here beat his wife to death. Roger Tosches tried to make Ike write up some lying press release claiming it was an isolated incident, that the man was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing. Hell, everyone knew he beat the poor woman on a regular basis. I told Ike that if he wrote that release he could start looking for a new wife, so that was the end of that. Not that it mattered. The thinking in town at the time was that if women were stupid enough to put up with beatings, they deserved what they got. Truth was, women usually have no place to go, and few have access to firearms, like the lovely Winchester Safari Express I owned at the time my first husband hit me.”

Olivia pretended interest in the sofa’s fading floral print. After I caught my breath, I said, “Would you mind explaining that, Nancy?”

“You mean Miss Nosey Nose hasn’t already discovered that I shot my first husband?”

Olivia smiled serenely at a tapestry geranium.

“Yes, in the course of my investigation into your husband’s death I did check up on you, but I took it for granted the incident involving your first husband was a hunting accident.”

Nancy cackled, teeth flashing. “I went on the hunt for the bastard, all right, but I can assure you the shooting was no accident. Any man who messes with me deserves what he gets.”

If Nancy Donohue hadn’t had access to firearms, she could have bitten her first husband to death with those big, yellow teeth. Then I wondered—had Ike Donohue ever “messed” with her?

The conversation turned to idle chatter for a few minutes until Nancy, her blood lust not yet satiated, interjected, “I hear the cook at Sunset Trails confessed to Ike’s murder. Does that make sense to either of you?”

Before attending the Downwinders meeting, I would have responded in the negative, but now I listened as Olivia sprang to Gabe Boone’s defense.

“When I interviewed Mr. Boone, he couldn’t even come up with a consistent motive,” she said. “First he talked about your husband maybe kicking his dog, then he said something about not liking Ike’s looks in the first place. Then he talked about those bomb tests several years back. Granted, there are a lot of hard feelings in this area about them, but he was obviously casting around for anything that would stick. His whole story was such garbage that when the interview was finished, I demanded to see Sheriff Alcott. Alcott agreed with me, but said that when someone comes in confessing to a crime, he pretty much has to hold them while checking out the story. He said…”

Nancy broke in. “Wait a minute, Olivia. What could the bomb tests have to do with anything? Ike wasn’t involved with the loathsome things. When that crap started he was still toddling around in diapers.”

“But Gerald Heber…” I began, before Nancy interrupted me, too.

“I’m tired of hearing about that government stooge!” she snapped. “He was Ike’s boss once, showed him the tricks of the trade, and that was the end of their relationship.”

“But there’s a picture of Heber in your den, the man who looks like someone’s jolly old uncle. He’s shaking your husband’s hand, and they look pretty friendly to me.”

“Correction, there was a picture of him in there.” Nancy jerked her head toward the den. “The den was Ike’s, to do with as he pleased. We had an agreement; he didn’t bitch about my crappy housekeeping and I didn’t bitch about his den. I’m not saying he didn’t have a case of hero worship for the loathsome little slug, who believe me, was nowhere near as jolly as he looked, although that friendly appearance of his came in handy, considering what he did for a living. But Ike most definitely had nothing to do with those bomb tests. If he had, I’d have shot him when I met him.”