She undressed and then had to bound over Lady’s prone sleeping body to make it into bed.
Butch reached over and wrapped his arms around her. “You’ll probably have nightmares,” he said. “I’ll probably have nightmares.”
It turned out Butch was wrong about Joanna having nightmares. She didn’t. In actual fact, she put her head on her pillow, closed her eyes, drifted off immediately, and slept like a baby.
Lupe Rivera was still in the interview room when Mel and I went out into the lobby and placed a call to Ross Connors. Once he heard the background he was adamant. “Find ’em a hotel room,” he said, “someplace with a restaurant. Put it on your company Amex. With this Rios character out gunning for them, you sure as hell can’t take them home.”
So that’s what we did. It turned out that the same Best Western where Jaime Carbajal was staying was the only place that filled the bill as far as sleeping and eating were concerned. But it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. At least Jaime would know what to do if things got rough.
By the time we took them to the hotel, there weren’t any stores left open. “We’ll come over tomorrow morning,” Mel told Lupe. “We’ll help you pack up clothing and so forth.”
Or buy new, I thought. I found myself wondering how many times Lupe and her sons had actually worn clothing that wasn’t secondhand.
Mel and I had driven over in separate cars, and we went back the same way. “See you at home,” she said with a wave, and then set off out of the parking lot at something just under warp speed.
I took things a little slower, remembering the stenciled sign on Mason Waters’s maroon Kenworth. DRIVE SAFE. ARRIVE ALIVE.
I was making my solitary way past North Bend when I remembered Ken Leggett, the heavy-equipment operator who had found Marcella Andrade’s body months after her death. North Bend, Cle Elum, and Ellensburg are all little beads of towns strung on the necklace of I-90. Before today, we’d had only North Bend and Ellensburg. Now we had Cle Elum as well. On a whim, I turned off the freeway and made my way back to Ken Leggett’s place with the Lady in the Dash telling me over and over in the firmest possible voice that I was “off route” and to “make a U- turn where possible.”
No one answered the door at Ken Leggett’s place, but that wasn’t surprising. It was 10:00 P.M. on a Friday night. Without much worry about being wrong, I made my way to the Beaver Bar, and there he was-sloshed as can be and slouched in a corner booth.
As I came through the door, the bartender recognized me. “Don’t worry,” he said, nodding in Ken’s direction. “I already cut him off. He’s drinking straight coffee.”
When I sat down opposite him, Ken gave me a bleary-eyed stare. “Who the hell are you?” he wanted to know. “And who said you can sit here? This booth is taken.”
“I’m a cop, remember?” I said. “I’m the one who came to talk to you about that body you found in the woods.”
He stiffened. “I don’t wanna talk about it,” he said.
“I don’t blame you a bit,” I said. “So let’s talk about something else.”
“What?”
“Who do you work for again?”
“Bowdin Timber. Why? What’s it to you?”
My heart quickened as I heard the name. It was the same company that employed Tomas Rivera.
“Did you ever run into a guy by the name of Tomas Rivera?”
Ken squinted at me over the top of his coffee mug. “Sure,” he said. “I know Tommy. I’ve known him for years. On the crew we all call him Tomba, Tomba, Tomba. Don’t know why.”
“Did you happen to see him today?” I asked.
“Do I look like somebody’s attendance officer?” he said. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“I could have sworn I saw his red pickup parked outside my equipment shed as I was leaving, but I remember his crew chief complaining that he never showed up for work today.”
If I could find Tomas’s vehicle, maybe I could start to get a line on where he had gone.
“By your shed,” I said eagerly. “Where’s that? Can you tell me how to get there?”
“Hell, no,” Ken said. “You’d be lost for years. Some elk hunter would find you dead in your car next winter. But I can show you.”
He heaved himself out of the booth. “Come on,” he said.
Ken staggered outside. There was no way I was letting him drive, but when I showed him my Mercedes, he hooted with laughter. “That thing’ll high-center and we’ll end up needing a tow.”
In the end, we took his four-wheel-drive Toyota Tundra. I drove. He directed me down I-90 and off into the woods on roads that made no sense and where I began to believe he was right-that once we got in, we’d never get out. But eventually we rounded a corner and there, in front of us, was a massive metal shed with two sets of huge garage doors. And parked off to one side was a red Toyota pickup truck.
I suddenly felt nervous and wished I were wearing my Kevlar vest. I was there alone, except for Ken, but he was drunk and I knew he wouldn’t be any help if push came to shove. I was going to tell him to stay put and let me go scout around. Before I had a chance, he swung open the door and half tumbled/half stumbled to the ground. Then he righted himself and started toward the shed, swearing under his breath.
I yelled at him to stop, but he ignored me. Instead, he set off in a staggering broken-field trot, lumbering toward the shed. I got out of the Tundra, too. Once I was on the ground, I heard what he had heard. Coming from inside the shed was the low-throated rumble of some kind of heavy equipment.
By the time I caught up with Ken, he had fumbled a set of keys out of his pocket and was opening a door that was set into the side wall of the shed. He reached inside and switched on a light. Then, after hitting a button that opened the garage doors, he came rolling back out of the shed coughing as a thick cloud of diesel smoke and carbon monoxide billowed behind him and rose skyward in a cloud through the open garage doors.
We waited for a few moments for the air to clear. When Leggett went back inside to turn off the bulldozer, I followed behind. A man sat slumped at the wheel. I knew from the way he was sitting that Tomas Rivera was gone.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. Amazed to see I had a signal, I called Mel.
“You’d better turn around at the next exit,” I told her. “We have a problem.”
CHAPTER 16
As Best Man, Joanna was due at the church for wedding photos at nine. By seven-thirty she knew she was having a bad hair day. After wetting her hair down completely and starting over, she managed to make the grade.
After the fuss Dennis had made during the rehearsal, she and Butch decided to run up the flag to see if Carol could keep him with her rather than having him mess up the ceremony. Jenny wouldn’t be there, either, which meant it would just be Joanna and Butch. If kids did something to wreck the festivities, they would be someone else’s kids and someone else’s problem.
While getting dressed, Joanna had also decided that she would do nothing about the funeral-home photos until after the wedding. Most of the people who weren’t on duty would be at the church.
People need to have a chance to enjoy themselves, she told herself as she sprayed her unruly hair into submission. Besides, since the victims in question had been dead for months, there was no point in putting in a lot of costly overtime to jump-start the investigations.
Butch whistled appreciatively when she finally emerged from the bedroom. “Most of the best men I’ve met aren’t nearly this good-looking,” he said.
They dropped Dennis off at Carol’s place on the way. Once at the church, Joanna started inside for the formal wedding photo ordeal while Butch told her he would wait in the car until closer to the ceremony.
“You’re just going to sit here?” she asked. “You didn’t even bring along something to read.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t need anything to read. You’d be surprised how little time I have to just sit and
