Indian female with him. I'll give you the go-ahead or abort as soon as I know more.'
He swung back around to us. 'If we go with it, it's a risk, Madbird. I hope you're okay with that.'
It was a risk for Gary, too. As soon as Lon became aware of search planes and helicopters, he would know. Crafty and dangerous as he was, he might succeed in escaping.
'There ain't any choice from my end,' Madbird said.
'Mine, either,' Gary said.
53
I'd never actually been inside Evvie Jessup's office, but it was just like thousands of others-nondescript carpet and furnishings that were neither expensive nor cheap, a few paintings like you'd find in better motels, and fluorescent lighting that gave everything a polyester sheen. The temperature was warm enough to dampen my armpits and the air was close, pervaded by the sickly-sweet smell of a freshener.
Evvie was sitting behind her desk, looking extremely piqued. As soon as Gary stepped in the door, she challenged him.
'What's this about?'
'I want to know where your husband is, Evvie.'
'I have no objections to talking to you, Sheriff,' she said crisply. 'But I'd like to know why. And in private,' she added, with a haughty glance at Madbird and me.
Gary stalked to her desk, planted a fist down on it hard enough to make her cringe, and leaned his face forward to within a foot of hers.
'We're talking murder, and you're implicated,' he said harshly. 'There's another young woman's life on the line right now. You play games with me one more second, I'll do my god-damnedest to see to it you get old in prison.'
I never saw a human being's face change like Evvie Jessup's did.
It took her several tries to start talking. The words came out in a shaky voice hardly above a whisper.
'I don't know where he is. Maybe fishing. Maybe off on business.'
'Business! He's got business, all right-he kidnapped that girl and he aims to come back without her.'
Evvie's mouth quivered and tears streaked her careful makeup. It was not a pretty sight.
'I don't know anything about this, I swear. He was gone when I woke up, I didn't hear him leave. I-I take pills.'
'Where would he go? Where does he fish?'
'All over,' she said helplessly.
Gary exhaled explosively and stepped back from the desk, shaking his head. There were thousands of square miles of stream-filled woodlands around here.
'Do you at least know the vehicle he's driving, for Christ's sake?'
'He must have taken his pickup truck, it was gone this morning. But I think he has others he keeps different places.'
'You think?'
'He has secrets. He goes away and says it's business, but he takes my money and runs around, gambling and having affairs. I don't dare argue with him, I stopped a long time ago. He can be very frightening.' She covered her face with her hands and started sobbing, with mascara-darkened tears dripping through her fingers. 'Oh, God, I always knew there was something wrong. What is going on? Please tell me.'
I actually started feeling sorry for her.
Gary ignored her and took out his belt phone. 'That's an affirmative, Faith-get the show moving,' he said into it. 'Aircraft crisscrossing low, I want him to know we're looking. Search area's everywhere within four hours' drive. Check out all vehicles registered to him, but he might be on foot in the woods, and none of that's for sure.' He paused to glare at Evvie. 'And send a unit over here to take Mrs. Jessup in for further questioning. Anything yet on that BG check?'
He listened for a few seconds, then grimaced and said, 'Okay, thanks. I'll be back in a few minutes for a war council.'
Now Gary's expression was sour, the look of a man realizing that he'd been taken in by a long ugly con game played out right under his nose, and he was seriously pissed at himself for not seeing it.
'They don't know who he really is, but they know who he ain't,' he told us. 'The only Lonnie Jessup they can find that matches his date and place of birth died in 1956, at the ripe old age of nineteen months. How about that, Evvie? Did you know that was one of his secrets?'
She buried her face deeper in her hands and rocked in her seat, her sobs rising to a thin wail.
54
Madbird and I spent most of the next few hours outside the courthouse to stay out of the way, taking short walks around the neighborhood, then coming back to check in and glean whatever information trickled out. We heard the drone of the low-flying search planes and helicopters and we occasionally glimpsed one, but they had a vast area to cover; it had started out being as far as a vehicle could drive in any direction, which meant a rough circle about five hundred miles in diameter, and it grew exponentially as time passed.
So did our anxiety. Our grim hope was that he would keep her alive in order to make her walk to the destination-if he was in the woods, he wouldn't be able to drive far on the backcountry roads, still mired in snow and mud this time of year-and Gary had rushed the aircraft into service to let him know that he was made, so he would realize that killing her was futile.
But they might have been too late. And he might do it anyway.
There'd been no sightings of anyone matching the description of either Lon or Darcy, or of the pickup truck registered to him, and the police didn't know for sure that he was driving that vehicle, anyway.
It was turning out that nobody knew much about Lon, and there was a lot to know. The information that they were piecing together-some from Evvie, some from a search of the Jessup house, some from sources those led to-was painting a picture of a man who, behind his bluff good ol' boy exterior, led a very complex life.
For openers, his true identity was still a mystery. He had used a time-honored method of establishing a false past-obtaining the records of a child born around the same time as himself who had died in infancy, and with that documentation acquiring a Social Security number and driver's license, establishing credit, and so on.
Then there was the question of exactly what he did. The tacit assumption had been that he was sort of a sportsman and gentleman rancher, and a businessman who helped Evvie with her realty transactions and had investments of his own. But the ranch was devoid of livestock, his business trips were in fact gambling and partying junkets, and he paid no attention to the real estate operation-except that he had pushed his wife to wangle the job of selling the Callister house, no doubt so that he could keep tabs on Renee and the photo cache he'd planted.
He didn't have or make any money of his own-it all came from Evvie's inherited wealth-but he'd set up at least two corporate entities. They were clearly fronts which didn't conduct any tangible commerce; it appeared that he used them mainly as conduits to sock away large chunks that he drained from her, no doubt into bank accounts that would be difficult or impossible to trace. Through them, he also leased vehicles, with frequent turnover- enumerating them and getting their descriptions was another paper trail the cops would have a hell of a time unraveling-and a network of storage units, where he maybe kept some of them and Lord knew what else.
By all indications so far, Evvie was being honest about what she knew, although it was possible that this was an act she'd long been rehearsing.
According to her, Lon Jessup had first come to Montana about fifteen years ago to visit Astrid and Professor Callister. Astrid introduced him to her longtime friend Evvie-in her thirties, unmarried with no suitors, but rich-and romance bloomed.
The romance part didn't last long, but it wasn't one of those sordid situations that descended into abuse and
