Another round of silence settled over us.
“Might be Mary’s sister, if she’s got one,” Sarah said.
“Or,” Jeri said. “Bob’s girlfriend, a close neighbor, the wife of a friend. Or Leland Bye’s wife or a girlfriend, one of his secretaries, or maybe his daughter if she looks a little old for her age.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “Aren’t you a pip, raining on this parade?”
More silence.
“I wonder if Bob Odermann even knows there’s a Mercedes SUV registered to his wife,” Sarah said uncertainly.
“I think he does,” I said. “When I mentioned that I wanted the fliers to sell a Mercedes SUV, he stared at me for a moment like I’d sprouted wings. Took him a few seconds to shake it off.”
“So he’s probably involved somehow,” Jeri said. “Now what we need is something like that with Bye. See if a similar comment gets a rise out of him.”
“Back to his office?” Sarah asked.
“Maybe we oughta hold off on that, think about this for a while. We might get Ma’s advice while we’re at it. She’s probably at home by now. We could go over there, talk to her.”
“Or,” I said. “We could sit around a table in the Green Room where they’ve got beer and beer nuts.”
Jeri turned and looked at me. “Beer has nuts? I didn’t know.”
“Well, aren’t you a pistol, sweetheart?”
Jeri smiled, then shrugged. “Ma would probably go for that. I’ll find out.” She pulled out her cell phone.
We held a powwow in the Green Room. O’Roarke was just coming on duty so I gave him two free-drink coupons—I still had about twenty left from the fistful he’d given me in the hospital—and we sat around a table, Jeri and Sarah with Cokes—free, no coupons needed—Ma and I with Wicked Ales straight from bottles like real men. Sarah was in a modest T-shirt and jeans, Jeri in a yellow blouse and white pants, so things had settled down, at least for now.
“I’ve been all over that SUV, trying to get at the financial end of it,” Ma said. “Not gettin’ anywhere, though, but Bob’s last 1040 had his gross income at only fifty-four grand.”
I perked up when I heard 1040. It’s hard to turn that shit off. Ma put a hand on my knee and said, “Take it easy, boyo.” To everyone—including me—she said, “Mary Odermann owns that Mercedes outright, so maybe you can take it with you in spite of what everyone says. Anyway, if she owns it, then so does Bob. How that happened, I don’t know. I don’t see a lending institution of any sort giving him—or her, God rest her—a loan for a hundred-twenty-thousand-dollar car. And, I’ll bet she doesn’t drive much.”
“What if he didn’t buy it?” Jeri asked. “What if he doesn’t have it and never did? It looks like he knows about it, but . . . what if?”
Ma cocked her head at Jeri. “My, what interesting thoughts.”
Jeri took a sip of her Coke. “I think Leland Bye is in this thing up to his waist, if not to his neck. Maybe he put up the money.”
“Got us a conspiracy by the tail, huh?” Ma said.
“Could be. In what, exactly, I don’t know, but we’ve got two women, Allie and this other one, driving around doing stuff it looks like they don’t want anyone knowing about. Like shipping the hand of a presidential candidate to Mort, which I have to say I don’t like one fucking bit.” She gave me a look.
“Same here,” I said. “It’s been a real drag.”
“Jesus,” Jeri said. She turned to Ma again. “I get scared when he gets serious, so right now I’m good, but you should try to dig a little deeper around Leland Bye. Try to find out who’s got the car now, how it was paid for.”
“Leland I can do, but that car ain’t easy, hon. Especially who’s got it now. If it hasn’t been reported stolen, anyone can drive it. If they don’t get pulled over or get in an accident, there’s not gonna be any record of who’s been behind the wheel lately.”
“Exactly my point. Something’s going on that someone doesn’t want anyone looking into, not with a vehicle registered to a dead woman. I don’t know how Mort getting that hand fits with any of this, but if it weren’t for that SUV popping up all over the place up north and this FedEx thing, we wouldn’t have the slightest idea there might be any connection between Allie and Reinhart.”
She looked at Sarah. “You and Mort made that giant leap up in Bend with that guy, Fred Something. I’ll bet the FBI isn’t on the same planet as us right now, investigation-wise.”
“Maybe we ought to turn it over to them,” I said.
Ma stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Bite your tongue, doll. We cut this tree down, we get the lumber. I’m talking Good Morning America, The Today Show, Dateline, Hannity—”
“Hold it down a little, Ma,” Jeri said, looking around. The bar had another three or four people in it by then.
Ma patted my knee. “Got a little carried away there, but you get the idea. This could be retirement, Caribbean beaches, Fiji, lovely brown men in tiny bathing suits bringin’ me mai tais in a cabana.” Her eyes danced. “Anyway, I’ll keep digging. We gotta find that SUV. That’s key. We find that and we’re golden.”
But we weren’t golden yet. Things were squishy, which felt like a long way from golden. On the bright side, Ma was probably right about us being miles ahead of the Feds. I oughta know. I used to be one. The size of any bureaucracy is inversely proportional to its effective IQ. Put twenty FBI guys in one room and the collective IQ wouldn’t be sufficient to open a can of Spam. A task that size would require weeks of high-level meetings, an organization chart, an environmental impact statement, and a look at applicable OSHA regs. Same thing in the White House and Congress,
