Tortoise Soup (24 page)

With that done, I headed over to the office to check out the damage. There had been plenty. The furniture was a total write-off, and wiring and plastic from our only computer were scattered across the floor like day-old party favors. Coffee stains added to the ambiance, splattered against the wall from the pot I’d forgotten to empty. The only upside was that I no longer had to worry about the paper work I’d never caught up with.

I entered Sam’s office where paintings of his beloved cows now decorated the floor. Picking up the phone, I discovered that it miraculously still worked—which meant there was no getting around it. I dialed the number to Sam’s ranch. Sitting amidst the debris, I was glad there was a state between us.

“Jesus Christ, Rachel! If this is what happens during your first three months on the job, what’s gonna happen after I leave?” Sam demanded, though his voice was filled with concern.

Fortunately I didn’t have to answer.

“And I might as well tell you now,” he continued, “it seems the shit has hit the fan.”

My heart thumped in my chest as I waited to hear that I had been fired.

“The regional director called yesterday demanding to know what the hell you’ve been up to. Seems you got Monty Harris’s skivvies all tied in a knot. The man is running around screaming about how you’ve been stepping on NDOW’s toes.”

Evidently Monty had found out about the tortoises disappearing from Golden Shaft’s freezer.

“I told the director that the problem, as Monty sees it, is that you’re doing your job.” Sam’s chuckle took me by surprise. “So congratulations, partner. With all the ruckus that’s been stirred up, you’ve just inherited the title of newest SOB in town.”

I let out a sigh of relief. If I had Sam backing me up, everything was all right. At least as far as my employment status was concerned.

“Sorry about all this, Sam,” I said, sounding a bit too cheerful.

“Sorry's fine, Rachel. But it ain’t gonna keep you alive. Whatever it is you’re into, you better back off,” he advised.

“That’s the problem: it seems I’ve struck a nerve, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is,” I told him.

Sam clicked his tongue in disapproval. “You making any headway on those missing tortoises yet?”

“Sam, why didn’t you tell me that these break-ins at the Center have been going on for years?”

A long pause crackled over the line before Sam spoke again. “That’s because it’s news to me. There’s never been a report of any goings-on there before. Could be that you’ve stumbled onto something. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Gorfine and Georgia have been staging the break-ins—you know, stirring the pot to brew up some trouble.”

He warmed to the topic. “Hell, for all we know, they could have set off the bombs! The man’s a damn physicist, spending his time frying his brain in the sun, for chrissake. Who knows what he’s up to?”

Noah might have been a lot of things, but I doubted that a mad bomber was one of them.

“The way I see it, the bombings could just as easily have been the work of ranchers blowing off steam,” I responded.

But Sam was determined to place the blame on Noah. “Don’t be crazy, Rachel. These ranchers are solid family men. They aren’t gonna kill some female agent and her dog for no good reason.”

Obviously we weren’t eye to eye on this one.

“Just don’t go running off and doing something stupid,” he warned. “I don’t need to start over with another replacement just yet.”

Sam paused, and I knew I was in for more pearls of wisdom.

“You gotta be smart and have patience, Rachel. Just like those old wily coyotes. They always get what they want. I’ve seen ’em take a whole week to kill a calf, just biting a little snippet off the critter’s tail each day. You gotta do the same if you want to make any headway on this job. This is the West you’re dealing with.”

So everyone kept telling me. I wasn’t likely to forget.

“And don’t worry. I’ll help you fix up the office as soon as I get back,” Sam promised, before signing off.

I hoped he planned on bringing a construction crew with him, as well.

I was still at the office, picking through bits and pieces of rubble, when the phone rang. Its buzz jangled my nerves, and I picked up the receiver warily, afraid someone was checking to see if I was alone.

“Rachel, are you all right?” Brian sounded sincerely concerned. “I heard you had some trouble last night.”

“I’m fine,” I answered, the phrase echoing like a skipped record in my mind.

“I was worried,” he reprimanded me. “I warned you to be careful, that you were playing with fire. Remember I told you not to dig too deep? Now you can see I was right.”

I felt like a truant schoolgirl who’d been called in for a scolding. “Do you know something I don’t, Brian? Because I’m having a hard time unraveling what this is about.”

Brian’s voice scaled back a notch. “All I’m saying is, let things cool off. Take it easy for a while. Deal with routine business only.”

“Would you care to define that for me?” I snapped.

“Come on, Rachel; you know what I mean. Do the things every other government employee does: answer phone calls. Write a few letters. Catch up on some old reports,” he suggested. “I know that your office got hit but there must be somewhere you can sit and do that kind of work.”

I was as likely to sit around and do nothing as I was to get up on a Las Vegas stage and shimmy. He had pricked a nerve. Once again I was being told to be a good girl and keep my nose out of trouble.

“Is that what you do, Brian? Just enough to get by on the job?” I prodded.

My question was met by a long moment of silence.

“I care about you, Rachel. I just don’t want anything to happen,” Brian finally responded.

I felt myself begin to soften in spite of my anger.

“How about I pick you up this evening and we go somewhere quiet? Someplace without rattlesnakes in jars or bombs going boom in the night. Just you and me and a nice desert sunset?” Brian asked.

It was tempting. I came close to accepting, when I remembered that Santou was coming to town.

“Sorry, Brian. But I’m going to be tied up for the next few days,” I told him.

His voice was tinged with disappointment. “Do you at least have a place to bunk down?”

“Yes, thanks. I’m staying with a friend for a while.” I didn’t offer to give him the number.

“Then just promise me that you’ll watch your back,” he said.

I promised, feeling slightly guilty, as if I were cheating on the man by seeing Santou. It wasn’t until I hung up that I wondered how he had managed to learn of the bombing so quickly. And how he knew just where I could be found.

With a few hours still to kill before Santou’s plane landed, I decided to pay lab boy a visit. My plan was to confront Holmes with the fact that this wasn’t the first tortoise theft at the Center; it was just the only one he’d ever bothered to report.

Fortunately he had decided to show up for work today. I walked past the display of dead wildlife and down the hall, where he was conferring with a girl whom I recognized as a pretty, part-time staffer. His hand brushed against her leg as she giggled, making me wonder if I had possibly overlooked a wry sense of humor on his part. I decided not. More likely, the girl was bucking for a full-time position.

Holmes caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye. Leaning in toward the babe, he whispered something in her ear as his palm lightly grazed her fanny. She turned to stare at me before walking away.

“So did you find my tortoises yet, Porter? Or are you too busy dodging bombs these days?” Holmes asked, pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose.

It appeared that news traveled fast.

“I wasn’t aware that those tortoises were your private property, Bill,” I replied. The fact that he thought of them as such made it all the more interesting. “By the way, how did you hear about the bombing?”

Holmes snorted, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat. “Are you kidding? You’re the talk of the town. Not only are you unable to find three hundred and fifty missing tortoises but you somehow manage to get your office blown up in the process. I’d say that’s right up there in the ranks of royal screwups.”

I didn’t care whose nephew he was. The kid was going down.

“Well, Bill, that’s one of the reasons I came by to see you today,” I informed him.

“Sorry, but I’m not available to help solve the case,” Holmes snickered. “I can only do one job at a time. So I’m afraid you’re on your own with this one, Porter.”

The overhead fluorescent light cast a shadow on the acne scars that were lodged in his face, giving him a sinister air.

“Speaking of royal screwups, I had an interesting talk with Harley Rehrer the other day. You’ve got quite a history at this Center. It seems these tortoises are just part of a long line of reptiles that have turned up missing. Why is it that the others were never reported before, Bill?” I asked.

The real question, why he had decided to report the theft this time, hung silently in the air.

Holmes’s eyes nervously swept the room before he answered. “Those other tortoises you’re referring to were picked off by ravens.”

I knew what ravens were capable of. Sam and I had come across the carcass of a newborn calf one day when we were out in the field.

“You see that? It was pecked and poked and ripped until the poor little fella just laid down and bled to death,” Sam had observed. “Hell of a way to go, but that’s ravens for you.”

While it was common knowledge that the birds considered baby desert torts as irresistible as I do a chocolate sundae, one thing didn’t make sense.

“You mean they were snatched up like a platter of hors d’oeuvres from inside their cages right here at the Center?” I questioned.

Holmes bared a set of incisors that would have been the envy of any rat. “I used to place them outside during the day.”

“Still, there must have been tops on the pens. No one could have been naive enough to put them outdoors unprotected.” That would have been like telegraphing a free-for-all at the local Denny’s.

“No, Porter,” Holmes growled. “Something dug its way inside the enclosures to feed on them.”

A faint sheen of perspiration dotted his brow.

“Hmm. So ravens dug their way under the fences. Pretty unusual, don’t you think, Bill?”

“I don’t know—we’re still working on it.” William spat out the words.

Like old wily coyote, I kept snipping away at his tail. “But Harley was told the incidents were all thefts. Uncle Ed said the same thing.”

“I can’t control what my uncle says, Porter. He’s his own man. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true.”

“In other words, he has a tendency to lie?” I waited for an answer.

Finally Holmes said, “I didn’t say that. What I’m telling you is that I’m not responsible for what those ranchers think.”

“I suppose your uncle could have said the tortoises were stolen and dumped in order to rile up the ranchers. It’s certainly one way to rouse the natives. If nothing else, I bet that would ensure their vote for your uncle’s resolutions. Make sense to you, Bill?” I asked.

Holmes continued to stare without saying a word.

I decided to try a different approach. “By the way, you weren’t at work the other day, so I stopped by your house to try and catch you. Those are pretty fancy digs you manage to juggle on a government salary. Wish I could afford something like that.”

Holmes ran his tongue along a lip heavily coated with chapstick. When he spoke, his voice was thick and low.

“Maybe something can be worked out to accommodate you, Porter.” He waited for me to answer, the skin beneath his eyes beginning to twitch. “Would you like that?”

What I’d like was to catch Holmes red-handed. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that comes close to sounding like a bribe—which might lead me to suspect you’ve been stealing and selling the tortoises yourself. A cash business like that would make for a tidy profit.”

Though a drop of perspiration rolled down Holmes’s temple, he didn’t make a move to wipe it away.

“It would be easy enough to blame a group of crazy environmentalists. After all, what rancher around here wouldn’t love to believe that eco-nuts are in cahoots with the government?”

William’s fingers jerked nervously, as if they had been hooked up to electrodes and were receiving a series of tiny shocks. “Interesting theory, Columbo. But that would be pretty hard to prove,” he said.

I decided to call Holmes’s bluff. “Not necessarily. There’s that wildlife dealer in Pahrump. What’s his name? Wes Turley? He’s passed on word that he might be persuaded to talk for the right price.”

His face turned pale and his body visibly sagged as he leaned against the wall.

I turned up the pressure. “But what I’m still trying to figure out is your tie-in to Annie McCarthy. Other than the tortoise imprint found on her bathroom wall, of course.”

“I don’t like your accusations, Porter. I had nothing to do with the murder of that woman. I never even heard of her until now.” Holmes’s twitch traveled up into his hands as he brushed a lock of hair from his brow. “You’d make better use of your time by questioning those eco-nuts I told you about. I’d bet that tortoise symbol is their calling card.” He forced a tight smile.

I studied his features, wondering how he had gotten away with the scam for so long. And what it would take to catch him.

“If you didn’t know until now who Annie McCarthy was, how did you know she was killed?” I asked.

Holmes pushed away from the wall swiftly, bringing his face to within inches of mine. “Fuck you, Porter. You’d do better to concentrate on your own situation. That bomb didn’t get you this time, but it could the next. Or maybe it won’t be a bomb at all.”

His eyes danced wildly. “What is it that frightens you, Porter? Think about it real hard. And then imagine that someone out there knows what scares you as well.”

My fingers strayed to my throat, where I could still feel the blade that had seared through my skin only months ago, back in the bayou.

Holmes gaze followed as he laughed soft and low. “You’ve got proof of nothing, Porter. I’d advise you to leave me alone and worry about your own skin.”