“Entirely possible. But then, you start looking at the big picture and Julia makes sense. A lot more than some random woman who happens to resemble her.”
“Which still doesn’t make it Julia.”
“What about Allie?” Holiday asked. She was picking at a bagel in front of her, pinching off sparrow-sized bits.
“That I don’t know. Sophie said she didn’t see a girl with the woman.”
“Things are still squirrelly,” Jeri said. “I don’t mean you didn’t do good or get us somewhere, but there’s still a lot we don’t know.”
“True. But one thing we’ve got is the VIN number on that SUV that went from green to white. It’s the same as the VIN registered to Mary Odermann, so we’ve nailed that down.”
“Meaning what?” Holiday asked.
“Meaning,” Jeri said, waving one of my fries around, “we’ve got to track down Julia, see if she’s driving a white Mercedes SUV, then check its VIN number, see if it’s the one registered to Mary Odermann, and if all that checks out, then we’ve pretty much got her. Then maybe we can find out about Allie.”
“Who no one has seen in a week and a half,” Holiday said. “If it was her.”
Jeri put a hand on her arm. “We’re gettin’ there. This has been a pretty weird deal. I mean, with Reinhart’s hand being sent to Mort and Reinhart’s chief of staff being murdered. As far as we know, the FBI isn’t even in the game right now. And I don’t think we want them in, at least not yet.” She stole another of my fries, chewed on it thoughtfully, then said, “We know where Julia lives. We have an address. Ma says she can get us into that gated community. What say we give that a try tomorrow?”
“I’m in,” Holiday said. “My last class is at noon. I can be ready to go at one or a little after.”
I nodded. “I was gonna go bowling, but I’ll blow it off.”
“One o’clock it is, then,” Jeri said, then swiped my last fry and dipped it in catsup, smiled at me as she ate it. “Now I want to hear more about that Sophie deal. Sounds like you had fun up there.”
“Okay, then. Let me tell you about cantaloupes.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. They’re round and about this big and they taste real good with vanilla ice cream.”
“You didn’t. Please tell me you didn’t.”
Sarah wasn’t going to be ready until after one p.m., so Jeri and I slept in. By eleven we were at Ma’s office, and by eleven fifteen she had us a pass through the gate into the exclusive neighborhood where Julia and Harry Reinhart lived, not that we expected Harry to show up. Ma knew about fifteen people who lived there, one of whom was a private investment counselor by the name of Nathan Milbarger. Milbarger seemed eager to please. He phoned the gate and told them he had a party of four coming in between one thirty and two, and one of those people would be Maude Clary.
We went in Ma’s Caddy. Ma drove. We picked up Sarah at her apartment at one twenty and roared off in the Chariot of Fire, south on 395. Sarah was in sandals, black jeans, and a white UNR sweatshirt with the Wolf logo on it, looking very much the pretty college coed.
We were waved through the gate by a guy in his midtwenties as soon as the name Milbarger floated out the driver’s-side window. Up and around we went through a maze of streets, none of which went in a straight line for more than a hundred feet. We never did see Milbarger’s house, but a map and some backtracking got us to a three-million-dollar mansion with a million-dollar view of Reno and Sparks spread out below in the valley and a pretentious fountain in a front courtyard—a half-naked maiden pouring water out of a jug into the water at her feet. So this was where Nevada’s lying senator lurked when he wasn’t lurking in his Washington D.C. townhouse, chuckling about his latest taxpayer rip-off. Nice. Wish I could pull strings and have money come in under the table—as long as I didn’t end up in Hades in molten lava, which might be where Harry was even as we sat in the car and thought about what to do next.
“Two cars are registered in Julia’s name,” Ma said. “A Lexus IS 350 Sport in her name alone, and she and Harry have an Audi Q7 SUV in both their names.”
“How about Harry alone?” I asked.
Ma checked her cell phone. “Lexus IS 350 Sport. They got his and hers. His is black, hers is red.”
None of which was in sight now. The house was on a dead-end street with a wide turnaround at the end, so traffic was nonexistent. Doors on the four-car garage were down. We were in a brown 1963 Cadillac Eldorado idling at the curb, a car Hispanic kids in a gang might drive—which was a very politically incorrect observation, but accurate, as politically incorrect observations often are. I wondered how long we could stay there before a politically incorrect police car or two pulled up behind us. Another multimillion-dollar house was across the street, so I gave us ten minutes, fifteen tops.
“Time to roll,” I said.
“Right-o,” Ma said. She swung the car around at the end of the street, then stopped. The street ended at a sidewalk and a low rail fence. Beyond that, a hillside of dry sagebrush went on for miles, nothing but empty scrub and rocks. No big fence, no barbed wire, no razor concertina wire to keep undesirables out.
“What do you think, Jeri?” Ma asked.
“Doable,” Jeri said. “Might be worth the risk.”
“Better if there was a moon out.”
“City lights ought to be enough.”
“Huh?” I said, obviously out of an important loop. Then I said, “Well, yeah. City lights oughta
