“Can’t say that I have.”
“It’s harder than it sounds. If you put it in a river or lake, it comes up, eventually. If you bury it in the ground, the coyotes dig it up. If you put stones on top of the grave to prevent that, then it looks like a grave, and that makes you look guilty. I was defending my life, so I called the sheriff.”
“What happened?”
“He’d already heard reports that the guy was looking to kill me, so I didn’t have to prove that. And the guy’s gun went off when I hit him, so you could say he’d shot at me. And the fence post had his blood and brains all over it, so my story was obviously true.”
“So, you walked?”
“He didn’t even run me in, he just told me to try to stay out of situations where I might have to do that again. And I’ve tried to take his advice.”
“So, what are you going to do if Eagle asks us to off Barbara?”
“I don’t know,” Vittorio said, sounding thoughtful. “God knows she needs it.”
“Yeah,” Cupie replied, “she does.”
17
Cupie and Vittorio sat in the car straight through lunchtime, and James Long never showed himself. Around two o’clock they drove to a sandwich shop and came back to the studio with their food. Long’s car had disappeared from the parking lot.
“Shit,” Cupie said. “We were gone, what, twenty minutes?”
Vittorio put the SUV into gear and drove away from the studio.
“Where are we going?”
“I want to see if he went back to the hotel,” Vittorio said, “but…”
“Why would he go back to the hotel?”
“I don’t know, but where else are we going to look?”
“The airport, maybe?” Cupie offered.
Vittorio took a hard left and gunned it. “All right, the airport. Albuquerque or Santa Fe?”
“Long doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would fly commercial,” Cupie said. “ Santa Fe.”
They drove to Santa Fe Airport, parked the car along the fence and looked around. “Where do they park the rentals?” Vittorio asked.
“I don’t know, but guys who fly in private airplanes drive their cars onto the ramp and abandon them.”
They walked over to the Santa Fe Jetcenter and peered through the fence and out onto the tarmac. The Lincoln was parked on the ramp, and the trunk was still open. A Citation was taxiing away from the FBO.
“He’s going back to L.A.,” Vittorio said.
“Does that mean Barbara is still in L.A.?” Cupie asked.
“Why would she be in L.A.?” Vittorio asked.
“I don’t know,” Cupie said, “but that’s the last place I saw her. I told you about seeing her in Venice.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense, not if she wants to kill Ed Eagle.”
“Maybe Long’s not in touch with her,” Cupie said.
“I thought we’d already decided that Long is the only person in the world who would spring her from that prison. After all, he’s helped her before.”
“Maybe she’s staying at his house in L.A.,” Cupie said. “She’s done that before, too.”
“That might explain why Long is headed back to L.A.,” Vittorio said. “He wants to get laid.”
“If he wants to get laid, why did he leave her and come to Santa Fe?”
“I think we should operate on the premise that Barbara is in Santa Fe,” Vittorio said. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense, given what we know about her, and if she’s not here she will be, when she gets around to taking a shot at Ed Eagle.”
“Okay, I buy that,” Cupie said. “If you were Barbara, and you were lying low in Santa Fe, waiting for an opportunity to kill Ed Eagle, where would you lie low?”
“Not a hotel,” Vittorio said. “Too expensive. An apartment maybe, or a house, but something nice. After all, she’s been in prison for months. She’ll want some comfort.”
“If she’s in an apartment or a house, she probably found it in the
“Why not one of those real estate magazines that are all over town?”
“She wouldn’t look there for a rental,” Cupie said. “Those are for sales.”
They got back into Vittorio’s SUV and drove to the newspaper’s office. Cupie bought ten days of back issues and took them back to the car. He handed Vittorio half of the papers. “Look for something comfortable, not too big and furnished,” he said.
Vittorio began opening the papers to the real estate section. “Here’s one,” he said, circling an ad.
“Let’s go through them all,” Cupie said.
They spent most of an hour cutting out and dating ads for possible houses and apartments, then sorted through them, finding seven likely properties.
Cupie went through them again, checking the dates. “There are ads for three houses that stopped running in the past couple of days,” he said. “That means they’ve been rented.” He handed the ads to Vittorio.
“Two of them are from the same agent,” Vittorio said. He got out his cell phone and called the agent’s office and asked for her.
“Hello?”
“This is Sergeant Rivera at the Santa Fe Police Department,” Vittorio said.
“How can I help you, Sergeant?”
“You ran ads for two rental houses in the
“More than two,” she replied. “I specialize in rentals.”
“There are two that you stopped advertising: one in Tesuque, one at Las Campanas.”
“Yes, both those have been rented.”
“Can you give me the renters’ names?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “The Tesuque place went to a Mr. and Mrs. Torrance, and the Las Campanas house-it was a guesthouse-went to a Mrs. Keeler, from San Francisco.”
“Can you describe Mrs. Keeler?” Vittorio asked.
“Five-six or -seven, slim, auburn hair, very attractive.”
“Thank you so much,” Vittorio said and hung up. He turned to Cupie. “What was that guy’s name that Barbara married in San Francisco?”
Cupie screwed up his face. “Walter something, electronics zillionaire. I can’t think of the last name.”
“Could it have been Keeler?” Vittorio asked.
“It could have been, and it was!” Cupie said.
The two men exchanged a high five.
“Let’s get out to Las Campanas,” Vittorio said.
18
Barbara dressed carefully in casual but elegant clothes: tight silk pants and a tight cashmere sweater that showed off her cleavage.
At dusk she turned out the lights in her guesthouse and walked up to Dolly’s place, bearing a good bottle of wine. As she reached the door it occurred to her that she should have left a light on for her return home, but then it didn’t really matter, as she kept a small flashlight in her purse. She knocked on the door.
Dolly opened it, smiling. “Hi, there,” she said. “Come on in.” She was dressed similarly to Barbara but wearing
