The Best Revenge Page 12

  He was staring at her, waiting for her to say something.

  She stammered out a reply. “You, uh, don’t babble on about it, about the injustice, I mean. Not with me. Considering what you’ve been put through, I would think that you wouldn’t be able to talk about anything else. Where’s your rage?”

  He looked away from her for a second.

  Kelda opened her mouth to say something more, but Tom turned back, locked his eyes on hers, and spoke first. “I saw that Dr. Gregory today. How do you know him?”

  Kelda hesitated, moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She thought she’d succeeded in keeping her expression neutral. “A friend sees him,” she said. She stood, and repositioned her shoulder bag to better handle the weight of the Sig. She added, “You really should call the police, Tom. For your grandfather’s sake, if not for your own. What’s going on here at the house, this could be a serious problem.”

  “I’ll think about it. I promise.”

  He followed her out to the curb.

  “I’ve been wondering,” he said abruptly. “The call that you got about where to find the murder weapon? The knife? That just came out of the blue one day?”

  “Yes,” she said. Tom was silhouetted against the front porch light of his grandfather’s house. She couldn’t see his eyes. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  “I’d like that,” he said.

  On the ride back to Lafayette, Kelda began to wonder about how the possible had become the inevitable and how justice and science had somehow become Siamese twins.

  The whole way home she kept checking her mirror for the burgundy Toyota. She tracked a hundred pairs of headlights, but none of them followed her down 111th toward her little house.

  She half expected to see Ira’s car in front of her house or to find him sitting by her door with his daypack over his shoulder. She didn’t want to explain about her trip back to Boulder.

  She wouldn’t have to; he wasn’t there.

  CHAPTER 16

  Kelda had taken the phone call ten months before. It had come, just as Tom Clone had suggested, seemingly out of the blue.

  She recalled that the morning was cold for September and the evidence of the season’s always-surprising first snow was lingering on the still-green lawns of Denver. The thin coating of fat flakes that coated the grass felt like an affront to everyone who adored summer.

  When the phone rang on her desk, Kelda was standing across the big office she shared with other agents. She’d been talking with a friend of hers, an agent named Bill Graves, whose desk was ten feet away. She interrupted the conversation with Graves to take the call.

  She said, “Special Agent James.” After listening for a few seconds, she added, “Yes, this is Special Agent Kelda James. How can I help you?”

  That was how it all began. She’d taken a phone call while standing beside her desk.

  Three or four minutes later she turned to Bill Graves and said, “That was odd. Someone just called and told me that he knows where I can find the weapon that was used in an old murder.”

  Bill had returned his attention to a file on his desk. He looked up and said, “Really? Just like that?”

  “Yes, just like that. Guy says there was some old murder up in Park County in 1989 and he says he knows where the murder weapon is hidden. Said he saw the murderer hide it.”

  “You get a name?”

  “No, not from the guy who was on the telephone. He wouldn’t say, but he gave me the victim’s name. Dead woman was named . . .” Kelda glanced down at the notes she’d scribbled while on the phone. “She was named Ivy Campbell. Does it ring a bell? You weren’t here in ’89, were you?”

  Bill shook his head. “No, I was still in Topeka. Why did this person call you? Why didn’t he just call the local cops and tell them about the weapon?”

  Kelda looked away from the other agent. Even though she trusted Bill, she was embarrassed about the implications of what she was about to say. “He says he doesn’t trust the local cops, and that’s why he called the FBI. He said he asked for me, specifically, because of . . . you know, the girl.”

  Rosa Alija. The girl.

  Bill Graves nodded and sighed, as though he was disheartened by her reply. He knew precisely what girl Kelda was referring to. With half a smile on his face he said, “That little girl is like an annuity for you, isn’t she? She just keeps paying dividends year after year. Who would have guessed what those few minutes in that warehouse would do for you?”

  Kelda heard the echoes of envy in his voice. She’d heard them before from other agents, but never from Bill Graves. She said, “Yes. It seems that way sometimes.”

  “Why did he call after all these years?”

  “He said that he thinks the cops may have the wrong guy in prison for murdering this Ivy Campbell and he can’t live with that anymore.”

  “You going to check out his story?”

  “I don’t think I should ignore it. I’ll run it by the SAC. The guy was clear that he wants us to deal with the information he provides by ourselves. He said if we involve the local cops, he won’t tell me where to find the weapon. I told him I had to get clearance before I could investigate anything. He’s going to call back in a couple of hours to hear the decision.”

  Bill said, “It’s a no-brainer, Kelda. The SAC”—Bill always broke convention and put the emphasis on theA . For him, the Special Agent in Charge was the s-A-c—“loves stuff like this, stuff that makes the locals look bad and us look good. Especially given all the bad press we’ve gotten lately. He’ll tell you to check it out. Bet your lunch on it.”

  “If he tells me to check it out, then I’ll check it out, won’t I?”

  “You said Park County, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Get me in on it, Kelda. I could use a day in the mountains.”

  Kelda picked up the phone, called the switchboard operator, and asked for an origination number for the call that had just been forwarded to her extension.

  She took a call back in about a minute with the not unexpected news that the call had come from a pay phone. The phone was in Colorado Springs, not too far from Park County.

  Kelda spent about an hour on her telephone and on her computer getting her facts straight before she sent the SAC a concise e-mail about the chronology of Ivy Campbell’s murder and the subsequent response of the criminal justice system. She highlighted the convicted murderer’s recent efforts to gain a new trial. At the end of the e-mail, she described the anonymous phone call from the man who offered the tip about where the FBI could recover the weapon that had, purportedly, been used to slice Ivy Campbell’s throat all the way to the bone.

  The SAC’s reply came back to her in about ten minutes. It was as cryptic as he was.Do it.

  She e-mailed back asking if Bill Graves could accompany her.

  The reply was almost instantaneous.Yeah, take Graves. He has more experience collecting evidence than you do. Get a video record of everything you do while you’re there. And I want to know exactly what you two find before any calls are placed to the locals.

  Almost exactly an hour after Kelda read the SAC’s e-mail, the anonymous man called back. The agents were ready this time. A simple caller ID machine identified the source of the call as a pay phone in Woodland Park, about twenty miles east of Park County. The man on the phone listened to Kelda’s assurances that the local police wouldn’t be involved until after the search for the weapon, then gave her detailed directions to a rusted drainage pipe that was near a culvert about a hundred yards or so from Highway 24, not too far from Lake George.

  The chill was still in the air at three-thirty in the afternoon as Kelda and Bill Graves drove from Denver to a location that thePierson Guides map indicated hugged the boundary between Park and Teller Counties. Bill was thrilled at the chance to get out of the city and up into the mountains and was eager to drive. He chose to avoid the interstate, taking 67 out of Sedalia, passing up through Deckers,
and coming within sight of the intersection with Highway 24 a few minutes after five.

  “God, I love it in the mountains in the fall,” Kelda said as they neared their destination.

  Bill shot back, “Check the calendar, my friend. It’s still summer. It’s not fall. Fall means winter’s coming soon, and I’m not ready for winter.”

  “It snowed last night, Bill. Calling it summer doesn’t make it summer.”

  “A few flakes. That’s nothing. It’s going to be in the eighties tomorrow.”

  “How about Indian summer, then? I love it up here during Indian summer. Can you live with that?”

  “Yeah, as long as Indian summer lasts three months, or even better, six. Do I go left or do I go right at the intersection?”

  Kelda checked her notes. “If this is Highway 24 coming up, go right. Then we go nineteen miles and start watching for a dirt road on the left-hand side of the road.”

  A while later they both saw the dirt lane. “I turn here, right?” Bill asked.

  “You turn here,left . Apparently there’s a little clearing about fifty yards in. We park there.”

  The forests along most of Colorado’s Front Range are commonly pine or fir. This one was mostly pine. Although no visible signs of the previous night’s snow remained, the storm had left an unfamiliar moistness in the woods. After standing outside the car for ten seconds to gauge the temperature, Kelda shed her blazer and pulled a fleece jacket out of the backseat.

  Bill collected an evidence kit and a video camera and tripod from the trunk of the car. Kelda grabbed a big flashlight and hung a 35mm Canon around her neck. He said, “We look like a couple of tourists from Kansas.”

  She laughed. “You are from Kansas, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Bill said it proudly, with the kind of conceit that usually accompanied people announcing their allegiance to Texas.

  “Tell me something. Is your cousin really the governor, or is that just one of the stories you tell around the office?”

  “No, my cousin is really the governor. Second-term Republican. Elected first back in 1994.”

  “Are you guys close?”

  “We were as kids. He’s a little bit older than me. I followed him to Kansas Wesleyan for college. After I got my CPA, I worked with him for a while in the family trucking business in a little town called Salina.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. We have the same name. When we were little, everybody called him Bill and they called me Billy.”

  “Billy? You? People called you Billy?” She had trouble seeing anyone calling Special Agent Graves “Billy.” He stood six-two and was a chiseled 210 pounds.

  “Yes. Me.”

  “Can I call you Billy?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “I’m still not sure if you’re making this up.”

  He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

  “Were you a scout?”

  “No. But he was. The governor.”

  “Jerk.”

  Bill asked, “This is National Forest, right? Federal land? This whole area around here?”

  “That’s what the map says.”

  “I just wanted to be sure we have jurisdiction to do what we’re about to do.” He looked down the road. “So now what?”

  Kelda shrugged and looked at her notes. “We walk up the road a little bit until we see a drainage culvert coming in from the west. He said that the culvert is really just a big galvanized pipe that goes under the road. He said all we’ll really see from a distance is a dry creek bed.”

  Bill spotted the creek first. It was nothing more than a smooth contour of recessed barren ground. “That must be it, Kelda. It probably only has water in it during the thunderstorm season.”

  She glanced up briefly, nodded in agreement, and then continued reading from her notes. “Ten, twelve feet farther down the road there should be an old drainpipe that was part of the system that the culvert replaced. The guy on the phone said the pipe was small and that the entrance sticks up out of the ground only a few inches. It’s bent now, and rusty.”

  Bill walked a few paces farther along the road and announced, “Here it is. Here’s the rusty pipe, just like the man said.”

  Kelda was still examining her notes. “How big is it?”

  “I don’t know, four inches in diameter, maybe five.”

  “Big enough for a knife?”

  He tilted his head to change the angle of his vision. “Sure, big enough for a whole set of knives.”

  Kelda said, “We should probably slow down and take some pictures before we go any farther.”

  Bill said, “Yeah.” He pulled the lens cap from the video camera. “Did it cross your mind that this could be a setup?”

  “You mean a wild-goose chase? Of course.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I’ve been thinking that . . . this is a great way to get a couple of FBI agents out in the middle of nowhere. Let’s make sure we’re alone out here. That’s all.”

  Dusk had just begun seeping into the forest, and the approaching night seemed to highlight the discomfort in Kelda’s legs. The pain was reaching all the way from her toes to her hips. The tingling in her feet had degenerated into a burn. “I don’t see anybody, Bill. I don’t think it’s really necessary.”

  “Humor me, Kelda. Give me the flashlight.”

  Five minutes later Kelda greeted him on his return from his trek through the woods. He’d covered a perimeter that led away from the culvert at a radius of about a hundred feet. “See anything?”

  “Beer cans. Couple of old illegal campfires. Condoms, empty pint of tequila. What is this place, party central?”

  She shuddered. “Not my idea of a great place for a romantic interlude. Come on, it’s getting cold, Bill. Let’s get this over with. I got pictures of everything while you were pretending you’d been a Boy Scout. Why don’t I set up lights and do the video camera and you can decide how you want to proceed with the evidence collection.”

  Bill used the flashlight to peer down into the pipe. “If there’s anything in there, it’s probably more than a foot down the pipe. I’m not convinced we’ll get anything. It may turn out that we’re going to need to get some help getting anything out. Maybe it would even be best to excavate the whole pipe and take it back to Denver. The search would be cleaner that way.”

  “May I look?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kelda took the flashlight and stared into the pipe. “There’s something down there, I think. Look.”

  Bill leaned over the opening.

  Kelda moved her head out of his way. They were so close that she could smell whatever it was he used on his hair. She said, “Move the flashlight around. See that shadow on the left-hand side? A foot down, maybe a little more? Well, something is causing that shadow.”

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “I think I can get my hand into the pipe.”

  Bill laughed. “Yeah, maybe you can. The question, of course, is whether you can get your hand back out of the pipe. If you don’t, there will be a whole new Kelda James legend for the boys back at the office.”

  She scoffed, “Give me a glove. Let me try.”

  He handed her a glove. She pulled the latex onto her fingers and snapped it tightly around her wrist.

  Bill stepped away, hit the “record” button on the video camera, and checked the composition of the framing of the shot. “We’re rolling. Go for it anytime, Houdini.”

  Kelda paused, pulled off her fleece jacket, and rolled up the right sleeve of her shirt. Bringing her fingers together to make her hand as narrow as possible, she inserted it into the pipe. Her hand had disappeared almost to her wrist when she suddenly yanked it back out. She blurted, “Do me a big favor? Check again for bugs.”

  “Bugs?”

  “Spiders. I don’t like spiders. That pipe is a great place for a black widow or even”—she shuddered—“a brown recluse.”

  “A brown what?”

  “
Check for spiders, please.”

  He laughed, but he picked up a stick and used it and the flashlight to probe the opening for spiders.

  “Not even a web, Kelda. Now go on, go fish.”

  She took a deep breath and reinserted her hand. It was almost twelve inches into the pipe when she felt the metal of the opening tighten on her forearm, near her elbow. She tried not to think about the creatures whose home she was invading. “I’m not sure I can get it in any farther,” she said.

  As the words left her mouth she prayed that Bill was too much of a gentleman to take advantage of the fat serve that she’d just hit over the net. Sardonically, he said, “That’s too bad. I guess we’ll have to come back out here tomorrow when we’re better prepared. I still like the idea of excavating the whole pipe and cutting off a section. We’ll use power tools. Or acetylene torches. That would be even better.”

  “Wait, wait,” she whispered. “I feel something.”

  “What is it?”

  “How the hell would I know what it is? My arm is stuck down a pipe full of spiders.”

  “You know, Kelda, my brother’s a gastroenterologist in Topeka. Maybe we could get a flexible camera and a light like he uses for sigmoidoscopies and see what it is that’s down there.”

  “This isn’t somebody’s rectum, Bill. It’s a damn drainage pipe and I’ve got something hard between my fingers. I’m going to try and bring it up. Do you have gloves on? I’m going to need some help grabbing it if I am able to get this thing to come out. My fingers are going to cramp up in this position and I’m afraid I’ll drop it.”

  “Two seconds,” he said. He went back to the evidence kit and pulled gloves on both of his hands. “Kelda?”

  “What?”

  “You know, your butt is perfectly framed for the camera right now.”

  She cursed at him. There were maybe two men in the Denver field office that she would permit to get away with that comment. Bill Graves was one of them. She turned half a step so her body was in profile to the camera.