A half hour later they had a five-year-old picture of Wade Poole. A half hour after that, Tess drove out see Peter Deuteronomy.
This time the dog must have been inside. When Peter saw her he came out without his rifle. Tess was clearly making progress.
“Peter!” she called from her car, which she had once again parked diagonally so that the engine block was between him and herself. She’d opened the door and stood behind it. Better safe than sorry.
“What do you want now?”
“I want to ask you something about your friend George Hanley.”
“I don’t tattle on my friends. So you’d better go away.”
“Tell you what.” Tess rose and walked out from behind the car door and stood there so he could see her hands were away from her weapon. Just in case. “I think a bad guy killed George. The thumb drive you gave me showed that he was investigating someone, and that’s who I think killed George. You do want to help find George’s killer, right?”
“Hardly knew him.”
“But he trusted you. He gave you the thumb drive. He entrusted you with it.”
Peter canted his head, thinking.
“Just let me show you these photos, and if you see anyone familiar, you let me know. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Okay. But you can’t make me testify to anything! I will not set foot in a United States court. They’re liars and beggars!”
“You won’t have to testify,” Tess lied. She reached for the small poster board with six photos. “I’m just pulling out these pictures. Is that okay?”
“What do you take me for? Of course it’s okay. What do you think? I’m paranoid?”
Tess eased the poster board out and walked toward him, held it out.
He looked at it for one instant and said, “The fourth one, second row.”
Tess hid her triumph. “You’ve seen him before?”
“Saw him maybe two weeks ago.”
“Can you tell me where?”
“I saw him down in Credo. I think he was on a scouting mission.”
“A scouting mission?”
“I saw him from the road. I heard a noise—I’ve got really good ears, you gotta have good ears out here. And there he was, sneaking around. I noticed he had a rifle, and I keep track of stuff like that because I was meeting my—” He stopped. “What I noticed, see, was he had an AK-47, like the Mexicans do, only he’s Anglo. He went over to a tree and he fooled around some, and when he came back away from the tree he wasn’t carrying the rifle.”
“Do you mean he put it in the tree?”
He gave her a look that intimated she was completely clueless.
“Of course he put it in the tree.”
“You saw him put the rifle in the tree?”
“No, but he fooled around, you know, like maybe he had duct tape or something, and hid the rifle. Like they do. You know. They do it all the time down here—it’s their
“One of the oaks. They give a lot of shade, and it’s easy to hide stuff.”
“Whereabouts? In relation to the cabins?”
“Not too far from the one farthest from the road. The one at the end—on the little hill.”
The cabin where George Hanley died. Tess asked, “Which way from the cabin?”
“Down by that little dry creek. There’s an oak there.”
Tess remembered it. “How long ago was this?”
“I’m not sure. Before what happened to George. I just assumed it was somebody doing something—you know, drug running, gunrunning, people running, that kind of thing. No way I was gonna poke my nose in that hornet’s nest.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this the first time we met?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t connect it.”
“So you saw him as you were driving by?”
“
“You weren’t driving your truck?”
“Didn’t you hear me the first time? I was
“You just went for a walk?”
He looked at her, defiant. “Uh-huh. Just a walk.”
“Look, I’m gonna be straight with you. I don’t care what you do or whom you do it with. I just want to make sure what you’re telling me is accurate. All I care about is George Hanley and finding the guy who killed him.”
“Well, that guy is
“Sounds like he was pretty far away.”
“I have twenty/ten vision. I was a sniper in the army.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so. It was getting dark.”
“Did you see a vehicle?”
“Nope. My guess is he left it way up or down the road, since he was sneaking around like that. I’ve seen stuff like that before.”
“Did you ever see George Hanley meet someone out there?”
“Only during daytime hours. I don’t walk down that road every night, though. Just once in a while.”
“Thanks,” Tess said. “You’ve helped a lot.”
“That’s good. Just being the Good Samaritan.”
Tess drove down to the Credo gate. She didn’t have a key to the padlock, but it was easy to slip through the four-strand wire farther down.
She walked to the cabin where George Hanley had been killed and then continued on down to the creek and the oak. The oak scattered deep shade on the mosaic of white stones and riverbed. There was a fork in the oak low down, and another place where more branches diverged. She spotted a small patch of duct tape hanging from the higher crook in the tree.
To get a job in law enforcement, you had to be fingerprinted. Wade Poole had been a homicide cop. His fingerprints would be on AFIS. She always carried latex gloves and evidence bags in a case in the back of the Tahoe. She went back to the Tahoe, donned gloves, and brought one of the larger bags. She also carried a knife. Back at the oak, Tess photographed the duct tape, then carefully peeled it off. Gingerly, she dropped the duct tape into the evidence bag, and back at the truck, she marked it.
Any luck, it would come back to Wade Poole.
Jaimie drove out on Harshaw Road, which led south toward the Mexican border. It was a graded road early on but then started to wind and get narrower. She was looking for a sign for the ghost town of Mowry. On her right, she passed the graveyard of another ghost town, Harshaw, for which the road was named. A lot of colorful fake flowers, whitewashed stones and crosses, and piled rocks to keep the coyotes away, although the people buried there were from the early part of the twentieth century and long past edibility.
