“How’d you get my address?” I asked.
“I didn’t get all of it. Only your name and Ralston Street, but obviously that was enough. You’re famous, Mortimer. I was sure it would get to you, and of course it did.”
Man, I didn’t like her calling me Mortimer. If she gave me a chance, I would drop her down that mineshaft on top of Harry.
We rode in silence for a while. She’d told us most of it, but not all. Jeri was still working on my ankles and I wanted to keep Julia distracted.
“Why put this car in Mary Odermann’s name?” I asked.
“Why not? I didn’t want it in my name, and Leland didn’t want it in his. He knew his sister’s date of birth, social security number, everything else he needed. He handled it. He gave Mary’s husband, Robert, five thousand dollars to not say anything, just let the car be in his wife’s name, that he, Leland, would pay the registration every year. keep up the insurance, whatever was needed to keep it legal. He told Robert he wanted to keep an affair quiet that could mess up his life if it got out. Maybe Robert was a romantic, because he went along with it—either that or the five thousand dollars did the trick.” Julia laughed. “Anyway, that was months before Candy entered the picture. Leland bought the car so he and I could see each other. We couldn’t afford to have my car running out to that house in Fernley. Harry and I had vanity plates. My car was SENATR2, which was much too visible.”
“Leland bought you a hundred-thousand-dollar car,” Jeri said to keep her talking. “What a guy.”
“Wasn’t he, though? This turned out to be really useful when I was hauling stuff out to Candy.”
“Why’d you have this love-mobile painted white?” I asked.
She was silent for five seconds. “It is white. What do you mean ‘have it painted’?”
Truth is in the hesitations. “About a week ago it was green.”
She was quiet for a long time, thinking. Then the car slowed as we went through Gerlach. I hoped Deputy Roup was on the ball, watching the highway, that he would pull her over and bust her ass, at least stop her and question her, but no such luck. The car picked up speed as we went out the other end of town, back into empty desert. I didn’t know how far the trailer was from Gerlach, but I didn’t think we had much time left. Jeri was still working on the rope around my ankles.
“You’ve found out some stuff,” Julia said. “Interesting.”
“The FBI will think it’s interesting, too.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you and Nancy Drew back there got lucky. You called the little whore Allie a while ago, so you know her name. So you know her, which means you’re connected to her somehow and you stumbled across me. She phoned her sister when I was pumping gas in Gerlach. That must have been it. I don’t think Harry’s hand had a thing to do with you finding me.”
“Wrong,” I said. “You were seen dropping that package into a drop box in Bend.”
She was quiet a while longer. “I still don’t see it,” she said. “I still think you got lucky . . . if you want to call your situation right now lucky.”
Ha, ha. Really—I wanted to kill her. Somewhere to the north I hoped to find a mineshaft with her name on it.
Then my legs came free. Julia hadn’t put plastic ties around our ankles, which was a mistake. If I could get Jeri’s legs free, she could kick Julia to death, just like she’d almost kicked Victoria’s head off her shoulders back in August. Jeri’s head was toward the front of the car now, and mine was toward the rear. I felt her legs move until her feet were at my hands, then they stopped. I began to work on her knots, exploring, trying to figure out how the knot was tied, where the ends were.
“Still doesn’t explain why you had this thing painted white,” Jeri said.
“Which was at Lou’s Auto Body in Bend,” I added, hoping she would make a mistake if she got rattled. “Lou was the guy in the wheelchair, in case you didn’t know.”
Again Julia was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I’d been through Gerlach in a green car at least twenty times in the past few months. Then Candy phoned her sister, which was stupid. I didn’t like that. I thought a change of color would be a good idea.”
“That’s all? A good idea?”
“What else? It was a good idea. I was doing everything I could to stay off anyone’s radar.”
“Real good,” I said. “Here’s how good it was: the VIN number of a car is reported to the DMV if its color is changed. The FBI will be all over that. But speaking of a change of color, you’ll look good in an orange jumpsuit.”
More silence.
Finally, she said, “This thing is registered to Mary Odermann, Leland’s sister. Leland is about
