But why would a life change make John B. Drake want to kill Cabot? Could his hormonal insecurities leave him so easily angered at Edwina’s obstreperousness that he’d want to see her accused of murder? Why, when he could just fire her? And if Tawny’s death had been planned, why would John B. plan it? They were breaking up anyway. Unless the split was totally her idea and he was that angered by it.
His shirttail flapping in the wind, revealing a hunting or fishing knife worn in a sheath at his waist, Homer pointed out a great ugly bird circling above and shouted, “Turkey vulture.”
It glided over them trailing a shadow Charlie could feel when it blocked the sun’s warmth. Its wingspan was at least six feet, its feet yellow, and its featherless head an obscene red.
“Looks like an ordinary buzzard, only bigger.”
“Yeah, that’s another name for them,” Earl said, the bill of his cap turned around to shade his face this time, “but there’s more of them here for the same reason they’re bigger. They’re needed as nature’s undertakers.” He raised his eyebrows and gave her a wide-eyed stare.
She leaned close to his ear. “I’m so sorry about Tawny. You two seemed pretty close.”
He simply stared out over the water, as if so fed up with klutzes he saw no reason to bother answering one.
She couldn’t blame him. Here she’d narrowed down the list of suspects to six men, largely because they were all in one place. Meanwhile, the real murderer was probably winging his way high overhead about now on his way to California. And feeling pretty smug too.
Canyon walls broadened into layered shelves on one side of them and the APC plant sprawled on a curve up ahead, dump trucks and pickups in the parking lot.
Tamarisk trees laced broad areas of shoreline, their wands fringed with feathers of lavender-pink flowers bowing in the wind and alive with bees. Charlie thought them beautiful. Edwina thought them an abomination. Like most imported plants they were taking over and robbing the natural cottonwoods of a home and of the critters who lived in them.
The boats slowed as Homer pulled over and then stopped at a man-made pile of concrete rubble and aggregate.
“Somebody thought they’d build a hotel in here,” he told Charlie as the rest fanned out over the site. “Got as far as the foundations and a wall or two and the river took it out. This is where it landed.”
Sid and John B. and Mitch wandered and looked and thought. Earl had his tiny camcorder out again.
“Got a clue for you, darlin’,” Scrag whispered in her ear. “What’s it worth?” And he wandered off too.
“First, I got to tell you how disappointed I am,” he said when Charlie caught up with him, “you fallin’ for that old Hilsten line just like any female. I thought you were different. Savvy, special, smart.”
“Clue to what?”
“I don’t know that I even want to think about it, maybe that’s why I’m shoving it off on you.” Scrag Dickens looked up at the turkey vulture, which seemed intent upon following them. Pausing for maximum dramatic effect, he then claimed with a totally straight face that he’d passed behind Tawny and Dean Goodacre shortly before the fatal accident. “Darlin’, I had the weirdest impression she was using lighter fluid for perfume.”
Chapter 22
Charlie watched the turkey-vulture-buzzard. That was one big bird. She practiced just the right arrangement of words to impress Mrs. Beesom, a neighbor in Long Beach and a bird nut, to avoid thinking of the beautiful dead woman. Funny, Cabot’s demise hadn’t really penetrated—
The “guys” were climbing back into the boats. Two of them squaring off at each other.
“… lawsuit,” Sidney Levit said, still in a white dress shirt but at least wearing canvas shoes. He stared up at the buzzard too.
Earl Seabaugh, camcorder dangling from one hand, baseball cap from the other, stood toe to toe with the older man, face fused with emotion. “Lawsuit? Ben’s dead. Who’s to sue? She didn’t fucking have anybody.”
But it was the killer look the Ecosystem’s director of photography leveled at his own producer/director, John B. Drake, that brought Charlie up short. She watched everybody watch everybody and tried to catalog looks. Sullen, bleak, suspicious, thoughtful, and afraid.
Once they were moving down the river again, Charlie found her mood had lightened. Even though the buzzard stayed with them. There were six guys here with a lot on their minds and a lot of hostility and just maybe more clues like Scrag’s. Some of them might even be true. Just maybe, the noose around her mom’s neck was loosening a tad.
She sat next to Dean Goodacre on this leg of their jaunt and asked him about what he’d been doing up in the helicopter the night he’d come to the rescue.
“Started out to scout the power station site, see if there was any need to have an airborne camera. Sid and I decided against it later.”
“You weren’t over the substation when I saw you first and you were a long way from it when you got to us in so short a time.”
“Yeah”—he was chewing on a toothpick now and he parked it to one side to whisper loud enough for the buzzard to hear—“decided to look for that UFO that might have left the night watchman from the uranium mill on that mesa top. The one that ended up backing you off a cliff.”
“And did you?”
“Yeah, there was something big there for a bit I couldn’t see through. I’ve seen ’em before. Most pilots have, one time or another.”
Sometimes Charlie felt as if she were the only sane person left in this world. Even though she knew certifiable nuts regularly thought so too. “What do you pilots do about it?”
“Ignore it mostly.” His honest, steady gaze was a little too much and his long curly hair fanned out in the wind so like a woman’s would that the giant arms on either side of the beefy chest looked like prostheses. “Once you fly, see, you don’t want to do anything else. And flying jobs are hard to come by. And seeing UFOs is not reassuring to your average employer.”
He worked for a company based in San Diego that chartered choppers and pilots to film studios, rescue and medical units, news media, and private corporations trying to impress customers, stockholders, and suppliers.
The U.S. Navy had taught Dean to fly helicopters. “I’d kill to keep this job.” He spit the toothpick over the side and pulled a stick of gum out of a shirt pocket under his life jacket. “But I didn’t.”
He chewed in self-important silence for a while, enjoying the ride and the scenery, and then turned to Charlie with a hard look. “Now it’s your turn. What’d you see up there, before you backed off the mesa?”
“Whorls,” Charlie told him. “Round swirls in the dirt.”
They left the tamarisk shores to explore deepening canyons, the colors changing with the light. The river had sliced through layers of the planet’s crust, like a knife through a stack of sandwiches, exposing the hardened fillings in varicolored swaths and crumbling ledges that extended up to the top level two thousand feet above her.
Charlie tried to scratch an itch on her neck with nails filed to nubbins. She’d take canyons walled by buildings any day.
They beached on a porous hardened mud bottom dotted with rotting weeds, a dead rat, driftwood. Homer guided them past a tiny horizontal forest of petrified logs felled aeons ago and back into a cave with a sliver of sunlight coming from a crack in the cliff rock a thousand feet above. The stick figure of a four-legged animal was etched in the wall.
“I tell the tourists this is a deer drawn by the Anasazi.” Homer had a gap between his front teeth and whenever he paused in his speaking his tongue would play with it. “Can’t help but wonder if some weren’t carved by bored cowboys working from the line camps that used to litter the area.”
“Or by river guides who want to have something to show the tourists?” Charlie voiced the thought by mistake.
The cave was small and somebody kicked a hole in an old pack rat midden that showed only as a dark patch along one wall. A familiar odor saturated the air
and they all stepped out.
“Edwina says the pack rats make their nests by mixing dried pellets of their shit with urine. Kind of like rodent adobe,” John B. said and stripped off his shirt. The day was heating up. “Talk about your recycling.”
“Be like living in your own toilet.” Sid just rolled up his sleeves. They’d all glanced quickly at Charlie at the mention of Edwina.
John B. carried his muscle on his shoulders and back, leaving a chest full of ribs and tufts of black hair in front. He used his cowboy hat to fan himself.
Mitch took off his shirt too and followed the director up a rock outcropping where they could pose while surveying the possible scene from three angles instead of one.
“I’m curious,” Scrag said quietly behind Charlie in that country-western-singer voice. “Aren’t you the least bit worried being out here in all this vastness, alone with seven guys all wearing their identities in their shorts?”
Mostly Charlie envied them their right to go topless when not doing so made life miserable. She turned to find Scrag wearing his shirt wrapped around his head to keep off the heavy sun and sporting a more impressive chest than either the director or the superstar.
His grin made her giggle. “Aren’t you a little nervous by the fact that one of these people could be a murderer?”
His know-it-all look wavered and his shirt nodded with his head. “If that was lighter fluid I smelled on or around Tawny, they could have the wrong person in that jail cell in Moab for murdering Gordon Cabot.”
“Exactly. And Tawny, for your information, was the only one of your little clique who agreed with me that Edwina couldn’t have done it.” Could Tawny have been murdered for that reason alone?
“You’re out here today to pick up psychic ammunition for your mamma’s defense, darlin’, I suggest you be right careful.”
It wasn’t difficult to be intimidated by a bunch of guys showing off their musculature. But Charlie didn’t have to be psychic to feel the undercurrents, know they had little to do with her. Tawny’s “accident” may have gotten them all rethinking Cabot’s murder.
“You’ll have to admit your mom’s one weird duck though,” Earl said in tune with her thoughts, as they sat on petrified logs to eat bananas and Oreo cookies, Homer’s idea of a morning coffee break.
“That personality change you noticed and her behavior,” Sidney Levit joined in, “you have to consider the possibility of your mother’s mental instability. It can happen to anybody. At different periods in our lives, our bodies are driven by chemical and hormonal reactions nobody can predict or explain.”
Finally it had come out in the open. Everyone had been dancing around it since Charlie arrived, including Charlie. “Are you suggesting, Sid, that my mother went crazy and murdered Cabot because she’s menopausal? Most violent crime, including murder, is committed by people suffering from testosterone overload not estrogen deprivation.”
“Every man has male hormones, damn few commit murder. It affects them in different ways. You women lump all men in some common pot. It might not be politically correct to say so but the fact is, we are individuals.”
“Charlie lumps Mitch in a different pot than the rest of us,” Scrag said.
Mitch glanced briefly at Charlie, who along with everybody else ignored that remark.
“Sid, that fist you waved at the heavens last night just before the shoot went wrong?” Charlie took a swig from her canteen. “I saw it and that looked like odd behavior to me.”
Sid glanced shyly away from Charlie, rubbed his hands together. “I really thought we had that one. From up where I sat, Charlie, that was one hell of a take. I felt bigger than God for a minute there. In fact, I think we might still be able to save it. I’ll have to see the dailies.”
“Sid, did you see Tawny from up there?”
“No, I only saw Koop, our stuntman, set his protective suit on fire. He had his own set of problems and didn’t even see her until it was too late. What I can’t figure is why the hell she was in there.”
“The camera might have seen her. It might show what happened to her. The insurance company would want that footage.”
“And I’ll be sure they get it, if there’s anything to see. Charlie, I’ll never forgive myself for that poor woman’s death. Accidents like Tawny’s are terrible, but they do happen.” He was into his kindly, shy, fatherly routine. Charlie could not forget that he’d been closer to Gordon Cabot than anyone here. “Gordon’s death,” Sid reminded her, “was no accident.”
The men wandered around for a while longer, some probably to pee in private, and when they’d all boarded the jet boats for the next leg of their journey, one of the engines refused to start.
It was the lead boat and Homer had a few descriptive phrases for the occasion. Dean wanted to know if the other craft could tow it, but Homer didn’t think the remaining engine had the power.
“And we’re going downriver now but we’ll have to fight the current coming back.” He and Dean fiddled with the engine to no avail. Homer asked for volunteers to stay behind and be picked up on the way back to no avail either.
He could well be the only person on this excursion who did not suspect that one of the group was a murderer. Nobody wanted to be abandoned on a strange beach with one of those.
Homer grumbled that he could lose his guide license for putting them all in the same boat. But he did.
This time Charlie sat between a cooler of food and a red can of extra fuel from the abandoned boat, trying to put as much space between her and the testosterone as one could get in the crush. The smell from the red can made her half sick. It reminded her of a flaming makeup artist.
Mitch was watching her again. Just let the bastard watch.
But later, when they pulled over for their last stop and started off across country to view an old cowboy line camp, he dropped back to walk beside her.
“Careful how you handle the menopause angle, Charlie,” he warned. “Rita may need it to defend your mother.” He was down to two small bandages on one hand and one wraparound on the other.
“You think my mother’s crazy enough to commit murder?” And you pretended to like her. Me too, for that matter.
“That’s not what I said. But Rita may need all the ammunition she can get. Don’t say anything here that can be used against Edwina at the trial. Any of these people could be called back to testify.”
He walked off to join the guys all trying to outdo each other in the I-can-hike-faster-than-you-can tournament, leaving Charlie to limp along behind. Feeling sorry for herself. One foot throbbing again.
Edwina probably had ten years on anybody there except Sid and Homer. But they had all passed their life’s testosterone peak.
Mostof the men—except for Sid—were wearing their shirts like turbans. Earl wore his under his baseball hat more like a Bedouin.
Charlie slapped at something she couldn’t see biting her arm and hoped the Arabs up ahead were getting eaten alive. She was still trying to digest the word trial.
Somewhere in Charlie’s fantasy world, Edwina’s innocence would be proven before this whole nightmare reached the trial stage. And old Sheriff Ralph would be eating crow. Or turkey vulture.
Denial fed a good portion of Charlie’s fantasy. She simply had to get home—to work she much preferred to this detecting. To a daughter who—The pain in her stomach made her foot feel like a coward. Charlie once again switched thought scenes and fast.
Chapter 23
The path was well worn and Charlie had no trouble finding the line camp even though the men had vanished from sight before she reached it. It was past lunchtime and the afternoon weather built as she watched.
A dust devil careened across the path ahead and wind stirred up the scratchy scents of sage and dead wood. Lightning lit the face of the cliff in front of her, etching the desert varnish splashed across it like stage paint.
That peculiar prestorm light, where the sun shines low under a darkening sky, lengthens sha
dows to stark angles, glows only on one side of things. Charlie notched up her pace despite her complaining feet.
The path ended at a wooden pole fence, unpainted, weather-grayed, forming the outer boundary of a corral. It made a large semicircle closing in on a sandstone cliff face at each end. A wooden chute for loading animals sagged inside it.
Desert weeds of mixed parentage crowded up to the chute as if demanding transportation out of here.
She stepped into a black half-moon hole yawning in the cliff and the weight of the sun lifted off her head and shoulders so suddenly she took a surprised intake of cool damp air. It was like entering a darkened movie theater, the light from outside blinding the eye to any solid forms, causing them to gradually emerge like the rows of seats and the people in them.
Like the seven men in various positions who’d gone still as stones and as silent the minute she’d entered. Not a gallant among them, they’d gone off and left her and now seemed hostile at her approach.
They’d beep talking about her.
And they weren’t sure what she’d overheard. And she’d been so busy getting herself spooked by mother nature she hadn’t overheard anything. Damn it.
During that instant tableau when their shapes firmed up gray out of nebulous blackness, Homer Blankenship knelt in the dirt with a plastic-wrapped sandwich in the hand he was pulling from the mouth of a bag.
John B. Drake hunkered next to him, hand and arm angled over to receive the sandwich. Hunkered in that odd Third World posture that’s a substitute for chairs—legs folded double, thighs tight against chest and stomach, buttocks just off the dirt. Pretty limber for forty-five. Three minutes in that position and it would take a crane to get Charlie unfolded.
Mitch Hilsten looked to have been pacing. He lowered a gesturing arm. Earl Seabaugh had been studying the ceiling but glanced down now at Charlie with a flash of anger so sharp and sudden it felt like a blow. He tried to blink it away. Dean Goodacre and Sidney Levit perched on a boulder as if an audience for Mitch’s presentation, twisting to look over their shoulders at her. Scrag Dickens relaxed on the dirt floor leaning against the rock wall at the back of the cavern, legs crossed at the ankles, head cocked to study her.