Family. The ones who know you best. Not much love there. I thought it likely that she would kill him at some point, haul him into the desert, let the coyotes and buzzards have him. He would make a hearty meal.
“Why make the video in the first place?” I asked.
“Insurance. No specific reason. At the time, I realized it was the one and only chance I would ever get to do it. I didn’t think I would need it, but if I did, I would have it.”
“Then it was Buddie who wrote the note,” I said. “Figures. It looked like it was written by an eight-year-old.” If her love for him was as wobbly as I thought, the note might put her over the edge. Worth a try.
Her dark eyes locked on mine. “What note?”
“A note was left in their mailbox. In Celine’s mailbox, at the house where she lived.”
“What on earth did it say?”
“It asked for a million dollars.”
“A million . . . oh, good Lord, what a stupid . . .” Her gaze turned inward for a moment. “I will skin him alive. That stupid damn kid of mine. Always so greedy.”
“Like his mother.”
“Not like me. I control it. I am patient. It hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve kept him under control.”
“Until you turned him loose to follow Celine. Four hundred miles from mom, he got ideas.”
She shook her head. “What else did that damn note say?”
“I left it with a cop yesterday, but I took a picture with my cell phone. The spelling and grammar will make you proud.”
“That’s Buddie. He almost made it to the eighth grade.”
Almost. I liked that. Seventh-grade education in a country that promotes kids based on age, not accomplishment. See Spot run would probably tax his little brain.
“Did you kill Jo-X down here or up in Reno?” I asked.
“Neither. We found him dead in that hideaway place of his, up in the hills.”
“Sure you did.”
Arlene gave me a funny look. “We did. That girl flying off in his helicopter was a bad sign. I figured Xenon was about to go off the rails, taking that girl up there. He’d never done anything like it before. Maybe it was the size of her bust. Men are like that. Buddie found the place over a year ago. We figured Xenon had to have all kinds of stuff up there, worth a lot of money. But he was giving us three grand a month to keep quiet about who he was. Thirty-six thousand a year, just to keep his secret, let him know if anyone came snooping around, let him know if the diner was empty and it was safe for him to fly in. Buddie doesn’t even make that much with his backhoe.
“But all of that would end if people knew where he was hiding out, then that damn girl goes up there. The next morning she came back in Jo-X’s SUV, alone. He flew in later, looked like he was hurting, then he flew back up to his place that afternoon. I didn’t like any of that, so when Buddie got back the next day after tailing that Celine girl to Reno, I sent him up there the next day and he watched the place for a while, told me he didn’t see anyone moving around, so he came out of the hills where he’d been watching. Doors weren’t locked, so he went in. He looked all over, finally found Xenon dead, shot twice.”
I believed her. She said it with matter-of-fact simplicity, no sign of duplicity. “So you raided the place,” I said.
She shrugged. “What would you have done? Of course we did. Well, Buddie did. He used the backhoe to rip out something across the road that blows out tires, then went up and got a big safe out of a locked room. Backhoe took out a wall in nothing flat. Buddie said he tipped the safe into the scoop with a big iron bar and loaded it onto the flatbed, brought it back here.”
“He got the generator, too. It was in the shed where he found Xenon’s body.”
She cocked her head and gave me a long look. “How do you know where he found him?”
“I know lots of things. But if you’re wondering how I knew exactly where he found Xenon, I went up there and had a look around. There was blood in the generator shed and no generator.”
“And you’re sure Buddie stole it, not someone else?”
“I would only be ninety-nine percent sure except that I found it in that storage unit of yours, the one at T&T Storage in North Vegas. So, yeah, I’m a hundred percent sure.”
A kind of shudder went through her. “How on earth did you find out about that place?”
“Police got it for me. If you listen very carefully, you might hear sirens.”
She listened for a moment, then shook it off.
“You might’ve gotten ten grand for the generator, except this game of yours is just about over, Arlene. Really, I’m surprised the police aren’t all over this place right now.”
Buddie came in through a back door behind me. I heard him but didn’t see him until he came around and got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator behind Arlene.
“He says he got into our shed at T&T,” Arlene said to him.
“That right?” Buddie gave me a reptilian stare, then opened the bottle and took a long drink.
“He found the generator you put in there.”
“And the gold bars,” Lucy said.
Another tremor passed through Arlene. “You took them.”
“Nope,” I said. “Unlike you, we’re not thieves.”
She thought about that for a moment, then looked at Buddie. “Tell me you didn’t leave a note in a mailbox in Reno asking for a million dollars. Please tell me you aren’t that stupid.”
His mouth dropped open, and he stared at her, lips wet. Made him look like a baleen whale, scooping plankton.
“You are,” she said, shoulders slumping in defeat. “You
