Old Chaos (9781564747136) (27 page)

Maddie’s hackles went up. “Not with me she didn’t. I had no personal contact with Inger Swets. I voted for her. That’s it.”

“You wanted me to speculate. The truth is, I don’t know what finding the car here means. I’m surprised. Blind-sided. I need to talk to Larry again.” He turned away from her as Prentiss came up.

Prentiss acknowledged Maddie with a nod. “So what do you say, Neill? Suicide? We’ll have one hell of a time finding the body. That water’s high and fast. She could be in the Columbia already. Hell, she could be halfway to Astoria.”

“Or hung up at Bonneville Dam,” Maddie said sweetly.

Prentiss shot her a hostile glance. “Or that.”

Rob frowned. “Where’s Jack?”

“Out on the Columbia fishing.” Maddie didn’t elaborate. The commercial salmon season hadn’t opened yet.

Rob wasn’t interested in Jack’s freewheeling attitude toward fishing restrictions. He turned to Prentiss. “Jack Redfern has to know every pool and eddy on the Choteau.”

“I could call him,” Maddie offered. “He may be home by now.” Jack hadn’t intended to make a day of it. He just wanted to see how the salmon run was shaping up. She flipped her cell phone open and speed-dialed home.

Jack answered with his mouth full. Breakfast. She could hear his friend Will in the background clanking pans. “Maddie,” Jack said to Will. To her he said, “Where’s the truck?”

She explained what had happened in some detail. Jack listened without comment the way he usually did.

“That’s not good,” he muttered when she wound down.

“No. Here’s Rob Neill. He wants to talk to you.” She handed Rob the phone.

Rob explained that they had to look where a body might come ashore, listened to Jack’s response, and said, “Okay. I appreciate the offer.” He handed the phone back to Maddie. “His friend will drive him over. Thank you, Chief Thomas.” He was being formal in the presence of the state detective. “You can leave now if you want to.”

Maddie said, “If Jack’s going to take police onto trust land, I’m coming.”

“I’m
not.” Rob twitched the blue sling. “I’ll leave the search to Jack. Prentiss and Jake can go with him. No need to call in Search and Rescue until they’ve checked the likely spots.” He meant the places between the first cascade and the second where a body was apt to wash up.

It was not raining but it had rained. The sword ferns would ooze water over anyone walking through them. Maddie decided to go home. She left Rob peering in the windows of the Volvo as the SOCO crew worked over Inger’s car. Maddie wondered whether they’d find a suicide note.

There was no clue in the car as to what had happened to Inger Swets. When Jack didn’t find a body, Rob set a full search of the west bank of the river in motion. He got back to his office in the courthouse annex well after noon and found a message waiting for him from Meg, and a list of Drinkwater’s telephone calls, courtesy of Jeff, who was now working the financial angle.

Rob rang Meg at the library. She announced that she was about to do battle with her insubordinate assistant, Marybeth Jackman, an unsuccessful rival for headship of the library system. Jackman had been doing her best to undermine Meg’s authority since Meg’s arrival last fall. It was time to confront her.

“Buy me dinner,” Meg said in fade-away tones. “I won’t have the energy to cook.”

“Six-thirty at the Red Hat?”

“No need to get fancy. I’m in the mood for Mona’s hamburgers.

“Nature red in tooth and claw,” Rob said admiringly. “You’ll wipe the floor with Jackman.”

Meg sighed. “Probably, but I hate close combat. Oops, incoming call. See you at Mona’s.” She hung up.

Rob replaced his own receiver, smiling, and drew the list of names closer.

Meg liked to cook. She had raised her daughter on the salary of a librarian, so she didn’t have the habit of eating out, and she didn’t waste money on fast food either. Rob knew he took advantage of that. He was a fairly good cook himself but a little apt to eat Cheerios when he was dining alone. Pure laziness.

Cooking for one was no fun. Meg didn’t cook for one. She cooked for four and froze the leftovers. She had one of those devices that suck the air from heavy-weight plastic bags and seal them. When she was in a hurry she could toss the bag with the frozen meal in it into a pot of boiling water, whip up a salad, and have a decent meal in half an hour. She saved bundles of money and the food was tasty. Sometimes she wanted a break from cooking, though.

He resigned himself to dinner at Mona’s and began to sift through the list of names. Jeff had annotated it with whatever information he could come up with from police records, the Internet, and Sgt. Howell, equally informative sources, but unlike Jeff, Rob had lived in Klalo most of his life, so he brought that perspective to the list. For what it was worth.

There were few surprises. The day before the mudslide, Drink-water had spoken at length with his ex-wife, with his banker briefly, with Darla Auclare, Inger Swets, Matt Akers, and half a dozen people who were just names. Immediately after the slide, however, the calls flooded in, including a large number from media representatives. Rob had called Drinkwater himself during the rescue, trying in vain to get through to him about the layout of the development, the names of owners, and the number of people living there.

Drinkwater had put both phones on voice mail almost at once, returning very few calls. It was to those that Rob turned his attention. Who had Fred been willing to talk to in the aftermath of the disaster? He had probably gone out twice. The patrol cars had missed him both times. Rob wondered where he’d gone. So far no one claimed to have seen him, and his Lexus was not distinctive enough to be immediately noticeable, unlike Inger’s green Volvo.

Somewhere around six in the afternoon Drinkwater had stopped returning calls entirely. The ME thought he had died after seven, but it was not clear when he had returned to the house at Tyee Lake. He had eaten very little but corn chips all day and drunk quite a lot—vodka and orange juice, an odd choice. Whether or not Drinkwater had been at home, the calls had continued to flood in.

Exasperated, Rob culled the list, removing police numbers and the media, and asked Jeff to come in.

When Jeff had settled into the comfortable chair, Rob shoved the amended list toward him. “Let’s brainstorm. He talked to most of our suspects the day before the slide, notably Matt and Inger, but what are these other names?”

“I called all of them and left messages, got two return calls. One of them is a plumber Drinkwater owed for repairs to the hot tub. We can eliminate him. The other is an insurance agent. He said he and Drinkwater talked about car insurance. The rest haven’t got back to me yet. This Maury Schwenk has a couple of unpaid parking tickets in Portland. Otherwise they’re clean.” He meant they had no police records. Jeff was thorough.

Rob nodded. “Good work.” There were two unidentified names. “I don’t recognize them. They’re probably innocent bystanders, like the plumber.”

“Well, these two he talked to twice for longer than usual.”

“Hmm. Reo and Olsen. Okay, let’s see if we can eliminate them, too. That’ll leave us clear to pull in Matt and Darla for a little sweat session.”

“Akers is out on bail?”

“Yes, and he’s lawyered up. I doubt that Darla will have much to say, either, but I could be wrong.” He picked up the phone and asked Sgt. Howell to reach Darla.

Jeff rubbed his neck. “This Schwenk guy, the name’s unusual around here. I thought it sounded like somebody I’d maybe met once. Keiko and I don’t socialize much outside the soccer league parents, so I called her.” Jeff’s wife, a physician’s assistant, worked at the county hospital. “She said Schwenk sometimes worked at the hospital. He’s free-lance, not with the agency.”

A two-county agency supplied care-givers to health care facilities and private patients. Some care-givers preferred not to pay the agency its hefty cut of their wages. They developed their own lists of clients, and the hospital called on the reliable ones in emergencies. For the most part, these free-lancers were licensed practical nurses or nurses’ aides. There were also a couple of medical assistants and a few RNs and technicians who were new to the area.

A care-giver. Drinkwater had spoken with him twice. Maybe Fred had had a medical problem. No, the ME said he was healthy as a horse. A puzzle. Rob was tired of puzzles. He was even more tired when the hospital personnel director told him the two people Drinkwater had talked to twice were also free-lance care-givers.

At that point the phone rang.

“Undersheriff Neill.” He was finally getting his new rank right.

“Hi, Rob, it’s Darla. You wanted to talk to me?”

“Thanks for calling. Jeff Fong is here with me. Is it okay to turn on the speaker phone?”

“Sure. I guess.” She sounded doubtful. “Hello, Sergeant Fong.”

“Ms. Auclare.”

“You know I’m investigating Fred Drinkwater’s death,” Rob said when he had recited the usual interview formula.

“Yes.”

“I understand you knew him fairly well.”

“We had an ongoing relationship. I was fond of him.” Darla cleared her throat. “It was cooling down, though. He had somebody else.”

“Who?”

She gave a short laugh, half sob. “I don’t know.”

“Inger Swets?”

She sniffed. “No, of course not. That was over last summer. It was just a fling anyway. Have you found Inger? Larry called me. I’ve been worried about her. It’s not like her to just take off without a word to anybody.”

“You’re friends?”

“Sure. We run together a couple of times a week.”

Rob drew a breath. “Where do you run? Out in the country?”

“Around the high school track usually. Once in a while we take a jog in the country—when the weather’s good. It hasn’t been lately.”

“Did you ever run out beyond Two Falls on County Road 3?”

“Never,” she said promptly. “Why?”

He supposed the location of Inger’s car would be public property fairly soon. “We found her car there.”

“Her car but not her?”

“Not so far. Maybe she went for a run alone.”

“I doubt it. Neither of us likes to run alone.”

“Okay. That’s good information. What does she wear when she goes for a run?”

Darla described Inger’s running suits and her shoes—not the fragile kind used on indoor tracks but sturdier sneakers. Rob decided he’d better have Search and Rescue check along the road, too, in case Inger had been hit by a passing car while running on the shoulder.

He shifted gears and went back to the murder of Fred Drink-water. Darla knew nothing about Fred’s finances. He talked about money but she never listened, she admitted with a disarming laugh. Apparently she had spent the afternoon and evening of the day Drinkwater was killed on a shopping-and-dinner expedition to Portland with a girlfriend. She gave the friend’s name and phone number.

When Rob hung up, he sent Jeff off to check what sounded like a decent alibi and called Jake to widen the search for Inger. Then he went back to brooding over his puzzle. It was a two-parter. Why were the callers medical workers, and why had they called Fred? No, there were three parts. Why had Fred returned their calls on a day when his financial world was crashing around his ears?

A sharp rap on the door. Jake Sorenson stuck his head in. “Busy?”

“Busy running in circles. Come in, Jake. Did you find her?”

“No. No sign of Inger. I left the second team of searchers combing the shoulder of the road upstream from the turnaround, the way you suggested. We did find this downstream, along with plastic grocery bags and assorted pop bottles.” He held out a damp paper evidence bag.

Rob shook its contents onto the desk—a white sneaker, not new, with fluorescent green laces. “Looks like it’s been in the water awhile.”

“Probably leftover from last summer.”

“No, I’m afraid it’s Inger’s. I just had a description of the shoes she ran in.” He tapped the lace with the cap end of his pen. “Green laces. Darla thinks she wears size nine or ten.” He peered inside the shoe. “Nine and a half wide. Okay, let’s show it to Larry.” He thought of Meg. “Do
you
have time to show it to Larry? I’ve got a dinner date in fifteen minutes.”

“Meg making chili these days?” Jake was a connoisseur of Meg’s chili. “Sure, I’ll run it by him. Should I give you a call on your cell?”

Rob grinned. “Better just leave a message. I am taking the lady out on the town.”

“Wow. Is that a wise precedent?”

Rob thanked Jake and left, reflecting that it was pretty bad when his friends thought he was too cheap to take Meg out to dinner. His momentary amusement faded. Inger Swets was probably dead.