Expiration Date (43 page)

Engine 418 arrived on May 5, 1980.

Clay, at five years of age, had joined in the fanfare, while local news crews covered the event. Nobody suspected she had secrets yet to unveil. It had taken another young boy to uncover the hidden wooden tube.

But Kenny Preston’s treasure seemed so innocuous.

“None of it makes sense. I mean, how does it fit with the dates or the deaths?”

“Got me on that one,” Sergeant Turney admitted. He had joined Clay at the fence. “And maybe we’re graspin’ at straws. All I know is, Summer visited this train the night she was struck down. And Mr. Coates, he helped paint the engine. The next intended victim, accordin’ to the way you tell it, was Kenny Preston. He’d been explorin’ this thing and found this mysterious object on board, correct? Did you get a look at it?”

“It wasn’t much. A carved wooden tube with a stone chess piece inside. A black king with some writing around its base. Pretty sure it was in Russian. Maybe it’s from a set that belonged to Rasputin or the Romanovs. Considering this train’s heritage, it’s certainly possible.”

“And that’s it? You know nothin’ else about it?”

“Nothing.”

Sarge looked disappointed. “But, Clay, you had it in your own hands. Least that’s what Kenny said when I met with him and his mom. Did he give the tube to you?”

“He did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“Didn’t think it mattered, Sarge. It’s gone.”

“In Crater Lake?”

Clay nodded in defeat. Then his eyes snapped up. “But we might be able to find it. I had my GPS unit and marked the spot where I jumped in.”

“Sakes alive. I’d hafta rescue your butt all over again.”

Clay grinned.

“So, kiddo, did this Russian object belong to you?”

“Well, no. I was supposed to protect it.”

“From who?”

“The man who was chasing Kenny, I guess. Some guy in a white Taurus.”

“A Taurus, you say?” Sarge squeezed shut his dark chocolate eyes. “Boy, it’s enough to gimme a headache.” He peered up at Clay. “Remind me again why you called me here? It’s more than an hour round trip between JC and Corvallis.”

“There’s something I need to show you.” Clay reached into his pocket. “I explained about my friend Bill Scott and about the numbers, but I should’ve told you about these. Read them for yourself.” He surrendered a set of envelopes. “I got the bottom note this morning. Seems to refer to a detective I talked to at the station.”

Sarge pawed at the papers while Clay read over his shoulder.

“Detective Freeman?” Sarge pondered the name. “I know of the man.”

“His date’s coming up. August first.”

“We’ll give him round-the-clock protection—whatever it takes.”

“He’s got a brain aneurysm. I don’t think it’ll help.”

“Hmm. I don’t like this.” Sarge scraped his hand over his short hair. “There’s a thing or two I haven’t told you yet, either. You already know about your belt buckle they found at the Coates place, but detectives have found a second item of yours.” He flipped a sealed Polaroid picture from his pocket so that Clay could see its subject.

“My high school hall pass?”

“Count your blessings. Least it’s before the days of photo IDs.”

“No kidding. But where’d they find this? I lost it that day at the river. Along with the buckle and the rest of my stuff.”

“So what’s it doin’ at a crime scene off Ivy Street in an apartment rented out to a Victoria Blomberg?”

“Any relation to Stan Blomberg? He’s my boss.”

“His daughter. You weren’t messin’ around with her, were you?”

“No! Definitely not. Is she dead?”

“Her boyfriend is. Kid named Mako, a bouncer at a local hangout.”

“Died of a gunshot wound. July twentieth. Yeah, he’s the one who tossed me out of the Raven. I felt his arm and his expiration date, but I had nothing to do with that.”

“Mako took the bullet on the fifteenth. Don’t worry. You were hundreds of miles away, stuck up on a mountain trail. Know that one for a fact. Not to mention, a coupla neighbors had noticed a guy with an accent and bright blue eyes. Driving a Taurus.”

“A white one?”

“How’d you guess? Same guy is after the item from this train—that’s my theory. I’ve got a couple of leads, some fingerprints from a rental car in Eugene.”

“And you think someone planted my ID card and my belt buckle?”

“Startin’ to look that way. Like someone’s settin’ you up, tauntin’ you.” Sarge studied the notes in his hand. “Where’d you say you found these?”

“One was stuck on the seat of my parents’ truck. The others showed up in the
Register-Guard
, one of which Kenny Preston put there himself.”

“The same kid?”

“That’s how I met him, Sarge. Caught him on the doorstep one morning, and he said some lady had asked him to deliver it.”

“Did he know who she was?”

“No, but I do. Henna Dixon. She and I were in school together years ago.” Clay looked up. “There’s more to it. She’d have to have been in two places at once to do all this, plus she was sitting on her mother’s sofa the night I got the note in the truck.”

“What’re you gettin’ at?”

“I think she has an accomplice.”

Turney beckoned with his hands. “Let’s hear it.”

“What if it’s Wesley Scott?”

“Scooter?”

“Think about it. What if he was related to Bill Scott? Wesley and William. They could’ve been brothers. This could be Wesley coming back for revenge.” Clay ignored Sarge’s raised eyebrow. “Listen. Each date adds up to thirteen, which is just too crazy to be a coincidence. I think somehow Wesley knows what I did on the thirteenth of March at the river, and he and Henna won’t stop until they drive me to my grave.”

Dmitri forked chocolate cream pie into his mouth, then glanced across the plates at his female contact. Svetlana was a hard-jawed woman with dark red hair. Fifteen minutes earlier she had called to arrange this meeting at Shari’s Restaurant on the south end of Salem. She’d told him where she was seated and what she was wearing. If she had on reading glasses when he arrived, he was to abort, make sure he was not followed, then head for the alternate meeting spot at a bookstore downtown.

“Are you under observation?” he had asked.

“This I don’t know,” had been Svetlana’s reply. “But I suspect so.”

Although Dmitri found her without glasses on, he could tell something was wrong. The eyeliner ringing her eyes only amplified their anxiety. This was not his concern, unless it affected her ability to carry out her duties.

“You are tense.”

“They’re close by. I can feel this.”

He nudged her water glass toward her. “Take a drink. Clear your mind.”

“You think I’m making this up?”

“I think you’re under stress. This is normal, considering the circumstances.”

Svetlana pressed her lips together and tried to smile. “Look at this.” She tapped a CD on the table. “The girl you seek is in these photos.”

Dmitri unfolded his laptop on the cushioned seat, slipped in the disk. Svetlana’s telephoto lens had captured a young woman’s turquoise eyes beneath choppy black hair and a silver eyebrow ring. The second jpeg image showed the woman in a long skirt on the front steps of a charming older home. Her shoulders were straight and proud, as though to compensate for her slight frame.

A wooden sign declared: Tattered Feather Gallery.

“Josee Walker,” he mused aloud.

“Da. She’s a worker at this place. She has a room on the floor above.”

“She’s an artist?”

Svetlana shrugged. “I went into the gallery as a customer. She was behind the counter, making notes in a book. The store owner is her roommate.”

“I need an address.”

“It’s on Southwest Second Street in Corvallis. Not far away.” Svetlana relinquished a slim file containing newspaper articles, one of the gallery’s brochures, and a brief biography of Ms. Walker. “She is watchful. You must use caution.”

Dmitri nodded. The file held his attention. Was Gertrude Ubelhaar sending him on a fool’s errand? Or was Josee Walker an actual connection to the Tsars?

“Svetlana, did you do a search? What does this girl have that is not hers?”

“With the help of others, da, I searched. We found that she has a bank account in Florence.”

“On the Oregon coast.”

“She received an inheritance from her grandfather. A deposit box. Months ago she signed in at the bank to view this box for the first time. Thank goodness for modern technology, nyet? Motion and heat detectors are used in many vaults, but security cameras are everywhere. You’ll find this interesting, I think. It’s on a file on the CD.”

Dmitri stared down at his laptop. His chest contracted. As his fingers led the cursor to the mpeg file, as it loaded and began to play, the restaurant shrank from view, and the screen became his focus …

Josee, black spiked hair, in a sweater, looking over her shoulder, opening the deposit box on the viewing table, blocking its contents with her back, but allowing a brief peek beneath her arm. Dmitri paused and zoomed in for a glimpse of a felt bag, a twinkle of rose diamonds, a spherical shape.

One of the lost Fabergé eggs? This would be priceless!

“How did you get this video recording?” he asked his contact.

She wrung her hands in her lap. “I cannot give all the details, Dmitri. We had help from a friend of Gertrude Ubelhaar. He put pressure on the new security officer at Bank of the Dunes, and the officer was very relieved when his relationship with his wife’s sister remained secret.”

“It’s not difficult,” Dmitri noted, “to find weakness in American homes. Blackmail becomes easy, nyet?”

Without reply, Svetlana whipped her chin over her shoulder. Apprehension sprang into her eyes, and tiny splashes of sweat appeared on her temple. On alert, Dmitri reached for his cell phone weapon and scanned the restaurant, calculating possible threats and escape routes but finding no cause for her dismay.

Perspiration coated Svetlana’s forehead. “Can I can go with you to the hotel?”

“Not tonight,” he told her.

“But I’m without a home. I’m alone and afraid.”

“You live not far away. Enough teasing, okay. I must keep on task.”

“Please. I cannot go back.” She rubbed her hand over her forearm, let her eyes slide toward the window. “My apartment’s in shambles. I found my things torn and thrown on the floor.”

“When?”

“This morning. Only hours after we talked on the phone.”

“Da, we have enemies everywhere. But this difficulty is only one of many obstacles in our journey. You’ll find a new place, a new beginning.”

“But my American clothes, my—”

“Enough! You do no good crying now.” Dmitri closed his laptop, wolfed down the rest of his pie, rose from the booth, and put money on the table. “Do svidanya.”

He left her bent over the table, arms hugged around her waist, muttering prayers in Russian and flinching from the passing diners and waitresses like an asylum patient quarreling with ghosts in her head.

Nickel’s Arcade was closing down, and the night was robed in black. Clay slouched behind the Duster’s steering wheel. He could see the Subaru parked up the street. Henna and her daughter stepped from the arcade. Moments later they were driving up Dane Lane to the intersection with Lovelake Road.

Clay kept his distance on this lightly traveled road. Should he keep following? It appeared Henna was headed home.

As he suspected, the Subaru turned onto the Dixons’ gravel drive.

He swept on past, his headlights cutting swaths through dust and darkness. He should’ve known not to play amateur sleuth. Sergeant Turney thought it might be worth keeping Henna Dixon within eyesight since she was linked to the anonymous notes, but now Clay was questioning his suspicions of her.

Particularly after Sarge had dismantled his Wesley Scott theory.

“Scooter? A criminal mastermind?”

Clay could still hear Sarge’s belly laugh. “Hey,” he said, “I’m not kidding.”

“But Scooter’s such a mild-mannered guy—a former pot-smokin’, roleplayin’ slacker, if you gotta know. Is he related to your friend Bill Scott? Doubt it. Does he have some plan for revenge?” Sarge shook his head. “No sir, if that were the case, he wouldn’t have called me from Diamond Lake to let me know your next steps. Without him, I would’ve never been there to yank your sorry bones from the water.”

“Didn’t think about that.”

Clay had too many things to think about. Family. Finances. And fate’s agenda in this town he had long ago left behind.

He could relate to Jonah …

I don’t wanna be here. I don’t want this burden, this seduction of knowledge
.

Before reaching the train trestles, Clay made a U-turn, sure that his stakeout of Henna had been time down the drain. As he curved back toward the Dixon property, he spotted headlights. The Subaru was nosing back to the main road.

He punched off his own lights and jerked the car off the pavement. He counted to thirty, then moved back out and tailed her into town from a discreet distance. She altered her route, going down River Road this time. Only as they neared Junction City’s heart was he compelled to narrow the gap. Henna was the Subaru’s lone occupant; she must’ve dropped off her daughter at the grandparents’.