Old Chaos (9781564747136) (23 page)

“Man, is that good.” Charlie speared a last bit of salmon, chewed, and rolled his eyes in pantomime ecstasy. He was easy to cook for.

“Is this a piece of Jack’s fish?” Rob had kept pace with Charlie, even one-handed. He twitched the blue sling as if it annoyed him, a good sign.

Meg nodded. Jack Redfern was grateful to Rob for saving Madeline’s life the previous fall. Being a man of few words, Jack expressed himself in material ways, the enormous fish being an example. It was not jack salmon, as a matter of fact, not even coho, but Chinook, the king salmon. Meg saved the filets for special occasions. She thought Charlie deserved salmon. Rob, too. Maybe.

“Wild salmon always tastes better than the farmed stuff,” Rob said. He’d looked half-dead when he came in the door, but the magical fish revived him.

Meg poured coffee and set out a plate of the cop-cookies. “Any progress?”

“We took my assailants into custody.”

“Rob!”

“Thanks to Linda’s connections. Now the trick is to persuade them to talk about who hired them. As for the murder investigation…” Rob made a face. “Facts are trickling in.”

“And?”

He frowned.

“I’m a reserve deputy, remember.” Meg was proud of her calm, unaccusing tone of voice, but Rob’s fits of reticence maddened her. Imagine not telling her immediately that the muggers had been found. She drew a breath, seeking patience. “God knows
Charlie
has a legitimate interest in your investigation.”

“In Ed Prentiss’s, anyway.” Rob turned to Charlie. “Prentiss is the state investigator. He’s shrewd and thorough, and he has access to all kinds of information I’d have a hard time getting to.”

“So you handed over to him. Makes sense.” Charlie nabbed another cookie.

“Yeah. I just wish I didn’t have to go through a marking-of-territory ritual every time he shows up. Fortunately I had the files copied before I gave them to him.”

Meg was disappointed. “So you had to waste a lot of time with bureaucratic shuffling. Pity. Tell me a fact.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“You said facts were trickling in.”

“Okay. One of Fred’s investors was Lars Bjork.”

“Wow. When did he pony up?”

“I’m not sure. Three or four years ago at least. I imagine our green commissioner isn’t all that happy to be tied to a developer, even indirectly.”

Meg started clearing the table. Thanks to the previous evening’s melodrama, she had not had a chance to tell Rob the details of her dinner at the Columbia Gorge Hotel. “Would it make any difference that Mr. Bjork has Alzheimer’s?”

Rob stared. “Where did you hear that?”

Meg explained. It took a while, because she was scraping and stacking dishes and because Charlie kept asking irrelevant questions about Kayla’s mother. He seemed to find Dede diverting.

“So Catherine Bjork has power of attorney.” Rob swallowed coffee.

“She does now. Or so Mrs. Marquez said.”

“And the son is at odds with his stepmother?”

“Ready to dish the dirt,” Meg said amiably.

Charlie grinned.

“If there is any dirt. Is he staying at his father’s house?”

“No idea. I doubt it. I could see there was a lot of tension.” Meg frowned. “Maybe he and his wife are staying at the hotel. That didn’t occur to me.”

“I’ll check it out. Thanks, Meg.”

“So this how real detectives work,” Charlie said.

Rob raised his coffee cup in ironic salute. “Stumbling around bumping into choice bits of information by accident? Absolutely.”

“The old guy can’t be too far along if he’s still able to go out to dinner parties.”

“He was quiet. I assumed he was shy around strangers.” Meg ran water into the mashed potato pan. “Ask Beth what she thinks. She sat next to him at her dinner.”

Rob winced. “I’m afraid to call her. Beth raked me over the coals this morning. I’d rather face Mack in a rage any day.” And he regaled them with an account of the dressing down Beth had given him. Charlie found his clowning amusing. Meg’s sympathies lay with Beth.

When Rob mentioned pepper spray, Meg said, “You could scream and run away next time. That was what I was told to do by a police sergeant when I tried to take a self-defense class.”

Charlie snorted. “Did you follow his advice?”

“I dropped the class.” She removed his cup and Rob’s, ran a sink full of soapy water, and handed Rob a scrub brush. “See you later.” As she slipped off to her home office, she could hear the two men discussing who was going to wash. She almost had them trained.

When she had checked her e-mail, she went out for a stroll and met Tammy walking Towser. He bounced while they chatted. By the time Meg returned to the house, Charlie had gone home and Rob had gone up to bed. She’d neglected to ask him who else had invested in Drinkwater’s scams.

Charlie left when he finished washing up. After Rob shelved the dishes, he called Beth. She confirmed Meg’s rumor, so he called the hotel, too, while he was at it. Warren Bjork was registered. He answered the phone as if he were expecting an important call. When Rob identified himself, the man sounded hostile but agreed to come to Rob’s office the next day around three.

A day of solid interviews to come—Inger Swets and Matt Akers in the morning, Warren Bjork in the afternoon. It was time to expand Sergeant Ramos’s horizons. Linda was good at interrogation, but she wasn’t used to mixing with the rich and infamous.

Yawning, Rob shut down his cell phone and went up to bed. It occurred to him that his back was feeling better. Or maybe it was all those muscle relaxants. Or Jack’s salmon. He was asleep before Meg came in.

And gone before she woke up the next morning. The Roads crew had uncovered another slide victim at Prune Hill, the driver of a blue lowrider, a young man whose mother-of-pearl rosary lay smashed in the rubble. There had been no missing persons reported the day of the slide and none since, yet there he was.

Sickened by the sight—and smell—of the crushed remains, Rob came in late for his interview with Matt Akers. Matt fumed and spluttered, but Rob was in no mood to put up with bluster.

“Sit.” He jabbed a finger at the visitor chair, the one he reserved for people he disliked. Light from the window hit the sitter in the face.

Matt sat. He was a big, red-faced man whose strong suit was not subtlety. When Linda entered, bearing a recorder and notebook, he leered but not with any real interest. “That your secretary?”

“Sergeant Ramos will assist me.” Rob nodded to Linda, and she set the recorder on his desk. When she was settled on the other chair, the comfortable one with armrests, he turned back to Akers. “I hope you don’t object to the recorder. It’s standard procedure.”

Matt objected. He huffed and threatened to call his lawyer. Rob shoved the phone toward him, and he subsided. He had come, he said, from a long interview with Ed Prentiss. “And I suppose you’ll cover the same ground.”

“Lieutenant Prentiss is investigating another matter.”

Akers frowned. “Isn’t this about the Prune Hill development?”

Rob said, “I’m looking into the death of Fred Drinkwater.”

Akers stared. “I thought Fred had a heart attack.” There had been no public statement regarding Drinkwater’s death.

Rob suppressed his skepticism with an effort. In a town the size of Klalo word should have got out. “The medical examiner believes he was murdered.”

Akers jolted upright. If he was faking it, he was doing a good job. “Murdered!”

“That’s right. Tell me about your involvement with Drinkwater. I know he threw a lot of business your way.”

Akers looked blank. “He was a good idea man.”

Wonderful. “And?”

“I worked for him. He owes… owed me a lot of money.”

“I hear you invested in his projects.”

The contractor took out a blue bandanna and mopped his forehead. “We’ve worked together a couple-three years now. Look, Neill, shouldn’t you Mirandize me or something? I mean murder, that’s serious.”

“I’m not charging you with a crime at the moment. I’m looking for information about Drinkwater.”

“Then you should look somewhere else. We was strictly business, me and Fred. I didn’t socialize with the guy. Too fancy for me.” He snorted. “Him and his fancy women.”

“We don’t know why Drinkwater was killed,” Rob said. “Might have been strictly business.”

Akers mopped his forehead again. Linda adjusted the recorder and flipped a page in her notebook. She was not writing down what Akers said, just how he said it. She was good at that. She was capable of coming up with unexpected, insightful questions, too.

“You suggested I look at Drinkwater’s women,” Rob said. “Who?”

“You know who.”

“I know he enjoyed the night scene here and across the river.”

“And out at Tyee Lake,” Akers sneered. “Had himself a real love nest out there.”

“So who are we talking about?”

“Darla Auclare, for one. That little cunt, Kayla Graves.”

Rob deduced that Kayla had turned Matt down. He was divorced. “And?”

But Akers’ mouth set in a hard line. “I dunno. He talked big.”

Rob decided Akers didn’t know much about Drinkwater’s social life. If Inger had been playing around with the developer, she had been discreet. Well, I knew that, he told himself. Shift gears. “You say you invested in Drinkwater’s projects. Did that include Prune Hill?”

“No! That was straight contract work. He bought the land. He chose the architect. Back when I invested, we was buying land in the north county, near the national forest. And I put money in the senior condos east of Two Falls. I built those for Fred.”

“On the edge of the Klalo trust lands.” Madeline Thomas had objected to the construction. Linda raised her eyebrows. Rob nodded, so she watched Akers closely, eyes narrowed.

The contractor was sweating again. “We didn’t build on Indian land, and we didn’t mess around in the Gorge Scenic Area either. We bought the old Patterson place. It was free and clear. The commissioners approved.”

“That would be Tergeson, Auclare, and Hal Brandstetter.”

“Yeah, Hal.”

“He was a good friend of yours, as I recall.”

“So? Hal fooled a lot of people, me included.” Akers looked at Linda. “Can she keep her mouth shut?”

Linda gave him a dazzling smile.
“¿Señor?”

He muttered something about Mexicans.

Rob said, “That reminds me. Do you know two young men, casual laborers, by the name of Chavez and Santos? What were their full names, Linda?”

“Jorge Chavez and Manuel Santos-Rivera.”

Akers paled. “I dunno. I hire some Mexican workers.”

“These young men were taken into custody yesterday morning. Sergeant Ramos has been talking to them, getting to know them, you could say. They’re illegals. They claim you hired them to attack me.”

“No!”

“That so? One of your regular crew says you pulled them off the job the day I was knifed and had a long conversation with them. They drove off together in their pickup.”

“Who? Who said that? I want a lawyer. Now.”

Annoyed with himself for jumping the gun, Rob read Akers his rights. He could have pried more information from the man, but there was time.

It took a while to charge and process Akers. Rob figured the contractor would be out on bail within the hour and didn’t intend to object. He despised Akers for a racist, sexist jerk and an old-fashioned bully but didn’t think he had killed Fred Drink-water. And Matt was unlikely to run. He had too much invested in Latouche County to want to leave it.

If Inger Swets had been on time for her appointment Rob would have had to keep her waiting half an hour because of the Akers paperwork. She entered his office just as he and Linda returned.

Rob stood. “Ah, Inger, thank you for coming. Do you know Sergeant Ramos?”

Inger didn’t smile but she gave Linda a stiff half bow. “Larry said you wanted to talk to me about courthouse procedure.”

“Have a chair. Do you mind if we record this?”

Inger sat on the edge of the chair Matt Akers had vacated. “I don’t object, but I don’t know what I could tell you—”

“That’s the tale I spun for Larry,” Rob said. “In case he doesn’t know.”

“Know what?”

Rob sat. He twitched the blue sling for effect. It didn’t do much for his arm but it was a great prop. “I’m looking into Fred Drink-water’s death.”

“So?” Inger had gone pale but her tone was as cool as a glacial breeze.

Rob kept his face blank. “Your name keeps coming up. Among Fred’s many, er, romantic entanglements. Were you having an affair with him, Inger?”

“No, I was not, and I resent the question.”

He thought she was lying but she was cool, very cool. She was also beautiful in a tall, full-bodied way that was timeless rather than fashionable. If you put Inger beside Cate Bjork, Rob reflected, the stylishly lean commissioner would look like a
memento mori
.

Now why did I think of that, he wondered as he waited, silent, for Inger to start babbling. But Inger was not a babbler. Linda Ramos sat very still.

At last he said, “Your husband is away a lot. Who could blame you for wanting a little companionship?”

She gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Who? Every voter in La-touche County, not to mention my father the commissioner. Use your head, Rob. I’m not a moron, and I like my job.”