Our standard greeting.
Detective Russell Fairchild and his behemoth sidekick, Officer Day, stood smoldering at the entrance. At least Fairchild did; Day looked more like a block of cold concrete with eyes.
Hell of a way to start the day.
“You’ve really done it this time, Angel,” Fairchild said, which is what he always says when he doesn’t have a clue but thinks he does. He probably sees lethal injections in his sleep, hates it if the alarm clock goes off before the drugs take effect.
“How about you tell me what I’ve done,” I said. “And this is county, not city, so how’s it your jurisdiction?”
A puff of wind left his sails. “It’s not. I was invited. When the sheriff heard it was you, he asked if I’d come along.”
“And you brought the behemoth,” I said, looking behind him. “That was thoughtful.”
Officer Day rumbled, deep in his throat. Three hundred thirty pounds—he’d gained a ham hock or two since I’d last seen him.
Less than two months ago I’d been a national sensation. Then it had been Reno PD’s problem, but the entire country had followed me like they follow Kardashians, so it was likely that Washoe County Sheriff John Burnley’s eyes had bugged out when he heard the name Mortimer Angel mentioned in the same breath as Harry J. Reinhart during an early-morning 911 call.
I had no actual knowledge of that, but I assume his eyes had bugged out because that’s what they did when he barged in twenty seconds after Fairchild and caught sight of me—although Sarah was sitting beside me so I might’ve been wrong.
Burnley was fifty-two years old. A massive gut overhung his belt, so his NRA competition buckle was a trophy—it was said—that had gone to waist. He had brush-cut gray hair, hard eyes, a black automatic on his hip. His uniform shirt was tucked into blue jeans and he had on Nike running shoes, so he’d scrambled out of his house in a rush and wasn’t his usual photogenic, uniformed self, a fact that might bite him in the ass in next year’s election.
To forestall a whirlwind of questions, I said, “Over there on the table, Sheriff. It was on my doorstep yesterday evening at about eight o’clock, I picked it up, put it in the backseat of the car, we drove up here to Gerlach, and the package spent the night in the car. We opened it here in the restaurant at about five thirty this morning, and that’s absolutely all I know about it.”
He didn’t look impressed. “We,” he said. “You said we. Who’s we?”
“I opened the package, Sheriff. I did that.”
“Uh-huh. Again I ask, ‘who’s we’?”
“Me,” Sarah said. “I got it out of my car and brought it over here this morning.”
Burnley stared at her a second longer than I thought necessary. Only one second, which indicated a level of professionalism and control I couldn’t begin to touch. “Who’re you?” he asked.
“Sarah Dellario.”
Burnley looked at the two of us. “You two’re what? Father-daughter? Friends? An item?”
So much for forestalling a whirlwind of questions. Sonofabitch. This was going to drag out, and it was going to drag me and Sarah along with it like roadkill under a car. I was going to be a household name again, all across the land of the free. Make that we. We were going to be household names, Sarah and I.
But . . . father-daughter?
Shit, that hurt.
A techie of some sort got fingerprints off the hand using a little scanner that sent them off to the FBI via satellite. Man, I could use one of those. More techs got my gun out of Sarah’s car, gave it an official sniff test—three of them stuck noses to the barrel and inhaled—determined that it hadn’t been fired recently, not that the hand had bullet holes in it.
Sarah and I were separated, put in opposite ends of the room. There we wrote out statements and signed them. Then Burnley and a woman by the name of Carla Estes—forty-something, flat-chested, with a bland, innocuous look belied at times by a suspicious squint—read our statements and together she and Burnley came up with a list of questions that Sarah and I answered, again separately. Fairchild listened in. Fairchild, I imagined, because he had experience dealing with Mort Angel, PI. By far the most interesting question was why Sarah and I had come to Gerlach, of all places, as if Gerlach was akin to a leper colony. This brought up the topic of the search for Allie and Allie’s phone call yesterday, which had the benefit of dragging Fairchild deeper into the periphery of this mess since it was RPD’s detective squad who had given short shrift to Allie’s missing person case.
“Should’ve asked me to look into it,” Fairchild growled at me.
“I didn’t ask anyone to look into it,” I told him. “Sarah did, and it was over two months ago.”
“Not then. You should’ve contacted me yesterday when you got that call.”
“That would’ve been a grandmaster move on my part. RPD is swift like the eagles.”
At that, Burnley laughed, Estes smiled, and Fairchild gave me a look that would have killed a lesser man. Burnley didn’t have a dog in that fight, and I gathered there was some healthy competition between RPD and county law enforcement that served them well, kept everyone on their toes.
A digital recorder sat on the table between the four of us, red light glowing. “You and this girl, Sarah, you stayed the night here in Gerlach?” Burnley asked. “At the motel?”
I nodded, then said, “Yes, we did,” since the recorder wasn’t for shit when it came to nonverbal communication.
“What rooms were you in?” His pencil hovered a quarter inch above a small spiral-bound notebook.
“Nineteen.”
Burnley looked up.
