Dead Time Read online

  I tried to spot Mel and Amy. They weren’t in the crowd that had gathered at my end of the street. Before I approached Sam, I hiked the long block that ran parallel to the one the duplex was on so that I could search for the girls behind the perimeter tape at the other end of the street. They weren’t part of that group either.

  I called Mel’s cell phone. No answer. I left a message.

  I called Amy’s cell phone. No answer. I left another message.

  I retraced my steps to the other end of the block. I tapped Sam on the shoulder.

  “Took you long enough to get here,” he said. He barely glanced my way.

  I had an urge to give him a hug, something I wasn’t sure I’d ever done with him as a greeting. Sam’s reluctance inhibited my spontaneity.

  The penalty for crossing the line? I didn’t want to know.

  “I’ve been looking for the girls,” I said. “Can’t find them. Are they inside with the police?”

  Sam shrugged. He repeated my question to the patrolwoman standing on the other side of him. She shook her head, raised herself on her toes, and whispered a couple of words toward his ear. Damn, I thought, she’s flirting with him.

  “Don’t know,” Sam said to me.

  I said, “What’s going on inside the house? You learn anything?”

  He put a hand on my back and led me a few steps away from the patrol officer. “That friend of Carmen’s? She had an LAPD detective call me with a status report on this. RP—older lady next door on the left—saw an intruder at the back door. That’s how it started—she thought she saw a man go in a window in the back. The first explosion was from a gas wall heater near the front of the house. Could have been deliberate—somebody may have screwed around with it. The second explosion was a flash-bang from SWAT. The uniforms who responded to the initial call thought they might have a hostage situation and went in after the first explosion.” He shrugged. “They’re no longer sure about the intruder theory, but they’re thinking a woman inside may have tried to kill herself. She was taken away by ambulance. She’s okay. Some minor burns, that’s it.”

  “That might be Kanyn, Sam. The Grand Canyon alumnus. She has a history of dysthymia.”

  He glared at me. “That’s like a secret shrink code word for depression? How do you know that?”

  “Her roommates.” If the word “dysthymia” bothered him, I wasn’t about to tell him about the trichotillomania.

  His jaw tensed. “Something’s up,” he said. “That’s what I think.”

  I gestured toward the cop. “Would your new friend know where they took Kanyn?”

  He walked over and said something to the officer in a voice low enough that I couldn’t hear him. After a brief exchange, they both ended up laughing. He came back over to me. “Kanyn’s probably at County.” He glanced back at the patrolwoman.

  She smiled at him in a way that made me grin, partly in disbelief, partly in admiration. She was indeed flirting with him.

  Sam was the most unlikely of sex machines. They’ve all been cops, I thought. Even Ramona.

  “Well, I can’t find the girls,” I said. “They haven’t called back.”

  “You said that.”

  Sam’s rejoinder took me back to sitting on the front steps of the duplex with Amy—script supervisor Amy—earlier that day as I watched her dissect the bird-of-paradise blossom she’d deadheaded. I said, “I’ve been repeating myself a lot lately.”

  “You’re getting old. What’s next?”

  “I was hoping you would tell me.”

  Before Sam had a chance to scoff at whatever I suggested, my phone buzzed. Sam took the opportunity to saunter back over to the patrol cop. I looked at the screen, where I saw an unfamiliar icon. I guessed it meant I had a new text message. Or maybe an attachment to something. If I did nothing, I figured whatever it was would find a good temporary home—digital foster care—alongside the map to A.O.C. that Amy had sent me before dinner.

  I didn’t know how to open attachments. The instructions for the phone were in Boulder. Jonas, my teacher, was asleep—I hoped—in White Plains.

  Texts and attachments would have to wait until our next chat.

  I longed for my old phone. The one I knew how to use. The one that the taxi had obliterated. During our electronics shopping trip in Times Square, Jonas had explained to me that if I paid the monthly fee, I could even watch TV on the phone he’d picked out for me. He thought that was a pretty cool feature. At the time, I’d been dubious about the usefulness of watching television on my phone. Standing behind the police line in Mt. Washington, I must admit I had begun wondering if it might be a good time for an episode of CSI.

  Cell TV would be an advanced lesson. For me, mobile telephone graduate school. I returned the phone to my pocket.

  I was thinking how much I liked Sam Purdy. I couldn’t think of anyone I would rather be loitering with at that hour on that street corner in Los Angeles. When I looked up, I caught his eye. He took a step my way.

  I said, “You’re a good friend, Sam. Thank you.”

  He looked at me as though I were something he’d just stepped in that he wished he hadn’t just stepped in. He said, “We’re only visiting SoCal, Alan. Don’t go all Left Coast on me. Deal?”

  I could tell that he was trying to keep from smiling while he said it.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Sam asked me how to get to Merideth’s condo. I explained about the peculiar gifts of Chloe the watercolorist—my GPS avatar. He was amused. He agreed to follow Chloe and me back to West Hollywood.

  Chloe knew the way, of course. Hector was gone for the night. His replacement at the first-floor desk was a guy in his fifties who’d recently lost a lot of weight. The man’s clothes didn’t fit. His skin barely fit. Unlike Hector, he was looking for neither drama nor trouble. I told him I was the guest who was staying in Merideth’s unit.

  He said, “Fred. Nice to meet ya.” The man glanced at Sam, but didn’t give him an apparent second thought.

  The on-duty sign on the Carrera marble counter read FREDRIC. Fred was a Fredric like I was a doctor. The tag was all part of L.A.’s alternate reality.

  What was surprising to me was how okay I was with it.

  Sam was impressed with his boss’s condo.

  He did a quick self-guided tour, returned to the kitchen, grabbed two Asahis from the fridge, and joined me out on the balcony. More fog had infiltrated the atmospheric mix. I could still smell refinery fart.

  “Never seen a shower like that,” Sam said, handing me a beer. “Looks like a car wash. I might need directions from you on how to operate it.”

  “Keep turning knobs. You won’t want to get out,” I said.

  Sam wasn’t done with his design critique. “Place is kind of modern for my taste. But that’s better than girly. Nice TV. Big flat screen covers a lot of sins. Bet they don’t teach that in decorator school. Maybe they should. Is that plasma or LCD? You know? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s only one bed here.”

  I sipped the beer, wondering when Sam’s caffeine overdose would wear off. “The bed’s yours, Sam.”

  “I wouldn’t want to sleep in Sherry’s bed either.” He shivered. I couldn’t tell whether the shiver was real or a dramatization. Sherry was Sam’s ex. Either way, it was clear he understood the whole ex-wife pheromone thing.

  He said, “That was Ranger Ramona who called me earlier, just before I stopped for the patty melt.”

  “Yeah? Just staying in touch? Women love you, Sam. That cop at the duplex? She was all over you. I admit I don’t get it. Just for the record.”

  He drove over my opinion as though it were an inconsequential speed bump. He said, “I’d asked Ramona to check a few things for me. The Park Service keeps a log of who goes down what trail in the Grand Canyon when. So the rangers know if someone’s overdue. Missing. Whatever. What supplies they have with ’em, like that.”

  I wasn’t surprised by what Sam was saying. The Forest Service used the same voluntary
procedure to track hikers in Colorado’s mountain parks and national forests. But Sam didn’t have my full attention. I remained preoccupied with what had happened in Mt. Washington. I was increasingly worried that I hadn’t heard back from Amy and Mel. I’d called them again while on the way back to the condo.

  Sam didn’t notice my distraction. “Specifically, I’d asked Ramona to check the logs for the days before Jaana’s hiking boots were found. And for a while before that sneaker showed up downriver. I had a theory that the Nick guy from Vegas, Jaana’s companion, might have gone back down to cover his tracks somehow when he realized the shoes were a problem.”

  I looked at Sam. “Yeah? Cover his tracks for what?”

  “If he was involved.”

  “If he hurt her while they were down there? That’s your theory?”

  “Hurt her. Killed her. But Nick’s name wasn’t on Ramona’s list. Doesn’t mean he didn’t go back down. Just means he was smart enough to send somebody else or to use a pseudonym if he did it himself. But you know who did go down on one of the South Rim trails six days before Jaana’s boots were found under that brush? A one-night trip, rim-to-rim?”

  “Eric?” I guessed. Poor Merideth. Despite the rotten first impression Eric had made earlier in the evening, I didn’t want it to be true.

  “Good guess. But no. This Lincoln Oden guy. The ranger who coordinated the search. He went down.”

  I didn’t see the significance. “So? You think he was following a lead?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he had a hunch. But it was his day off. Ramona checked. If he had a lead, he could’ve grabbed a seat in a chopper, saved himself a long, hot walk.”

  Sam’s “maybe” sounded suspicious, but I didn’t see the relevance of Oden’s presence on the canyon floor. “Oden wasn’t down there the night Jaana went missing, was he? You don’t think he—”

  “No, he wasn’t. He was up at the North Rim. Coordinating.”

  Sam actually said cord’natin’—an Iron Range linguistic cousin of c’n-oo-in.

  “What then? If he was up to something, he could have used a fake name.”

  “Too many people knew him. Don’t know what I think. Just talking it out. It’s one of those things that doesn’t line up right. Been thinking about it since I got back on the road with my belly full of grease. Could be a coincidence, of course. That happens…sometimes.” Sam said “that happens” grudgingly, the way he reluctantly admitted to me one night on the roof of the West End that the president had mishandled certain aspects of the Iraq War. “Could be Oden knows what really happened to Jaana down there and has reason to want it to stay secret. Or could be that Oden knows she made it back out of the canyon, and he has reason to want that fact to stay secret.” He took a long slug of beer. “Just about covers all the possibilities I’m considering. Got anything to add?”

  “Why would he go back down?” I asked. “Does Ramona have a theory?”

  “Ranger Ramona doesn’t like Nick Paulson. She recognizes the timing of Oden’s rim-to-rim as peculiar. But she says rangers explore the canyon all the time on their days off. Once they fall in love with the canyon—and almost all of them do—they can’t get enough of the place. Did say that the fact that he went down that section of canyon, and that he did it from the South Rim, was surprising. Guy worked on the North Rim. That section of the canyon is heavily trafficked by visitors and tends not to be terribly interesting to the rangers. Usually they go to more remote parts of the canyon.”

  He was being tantalizing. I’d seen him do it before. “You got more, Sam. I can tell.”

  He made a face. “I had to press her, but Ranger Ramona admitted she always thought Oden was kind of creepy. She’d heard stories about his trips to Vegas. Gambling, whoring.” He shrugged. “And he used to hit on park visitors. There had been some complaints. She thought he had the recessive stalker gene.”

  “Her words?”

  “My words.”

  I asked, “Men or women?”

  “Good question. I didn’t think to ask,” Sam said. “I assumed women. Ramona would’ve said something if it was men.”

  I had a feeling Sam’s theorizing was more advanced than he was letting on. He wanted me to be patient. I wasn’t feeling patient. “What are you thinking, Sam?”

  “I’m thinking that if I were a real cop”—he turned his head and smiled an ironic smile—“and if this were my case, I’d want to take a peek at Lincoln Oden’s finances back then. See if he had a rich aunt die or something. Won the lottery. Came into some cash.”

  “You think he was paid off?”

  “Nick Paulson’s family has money,” he said. “A lot. Oden quit the Park Service a few months after all this came down. That surprised everyone, Ramona says. None of his colleagues saw his resignation coming. Guy ran the investigation. Have to think it’s possible Oden figured out what happened down there with Jaana. Let’s say he had something, confronted Nick with it. Maybe they cut some kind of deal. Crazier things have happened.”

  “Oden interviewed Nick back up at the rim? You’re sure?” I said.

  “I read his report. Remember, he left out the parts about Jaana being pregnant. Oops.”

  I said, “And that’s the part that might have given Nick Paulson a motive.”

  “Yeah.”

  I thought about Sam’s theory. “If you’re right about this, Sam, and if they were smart about how they did it, it could be very hard to trace. We’re talking Vegas. Oden could have been paid in chips, cash…”

  “Drugs,” Sam added. “Some of those around too.”

  “Ranger Ramona share your suspicion about Oden being involved?”

  “Hard to tell. She’s had her money on Nick for a long time. If Oden cut a deal with him, it’ll turn out she was right. Indirectly.”

  I took a deep breath. I was tired. I was thinking I wanted to call Lauren. I asked, “See any way this is going to help Merideth find Lisa? Or Wallace feel any better about how his daughter is doing?”

  “My philosophy is this,” he said. He finished his beer with a flourish, standing the bottle straight up above his tongue to catch the final drops. For a moment, I thought I was going to have to guess how finishing a beer amounted to a philosophy. My brain, I knew, wasn’t up to the task. Sam bailed me out with a more easily digestible explanation. “You solve the big puzzle, the little ones tend to fall into place. Nicely.”

  “You’re still working on the big puzzle?”

  “I am.” He pointed the beer label my way. “My first Japanese beer, ever. I like it.”

  “You don’t eat sushi.”

  “So?”

  “That’s when most Americans drink Japanese beer. At sushi bars.”

  “Is that a dig?”

  “Just saying,” I said. “I could take you to one.”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll just pick up a six-pack of these”—he displayed the empty—“at Liquor Mart.”

  “It’s from Canada,” I said. “It’s not really from Japan.”

  He sighed a you-can’t-trust-anyone sigh. “One other bit of news from Ranger Ramona—Jaana’s girlfriend from Estonia, the one that Nick said was going to go with her when she had that abortion?”

  “Yeah?” Sam was finally about to tell me what he’d been tantalizing me with earlier.

  “Her info is in the original file—she was Jaana’s emergency contact for work. After I asked about her, Ramona ran her. The girl went missing six, seven months after Jaana did. Circumstances were kind of like Lisa. Clothes gone. Suitcases gone. Her friends were clueless. Her boss had no idea.”

  He had my attention. “She didn’t go back to Estonia?”

  “State Department said no. Passport wasn’t used, at least not in the old U.S. of A. Lease on her place was almost up when she left. Local cops decided she left on her own.”

  “Where was she living?”

  “Bullhead City? Is that right? Near Laughlin. She’d been dealing blackjack at one of the casinos. Maybe I should go to L
aughlin. Bet they have five-buck blackjack tables there.”

  “You think this is all one puzzle?”

  Sam stood up. “I do. I told Ramona about Jack falling off the radar yesterday. She agrees there’s way too much disappearing going on for coincidence. We figure out any one of the puzzles, we’ll get all the others.” He paused. “Time, I think, is the kicker. You going to drink that beer?”

  “Enjoy.” I handed the almost-full bottle to him. “You like L.A., Sam? Seriously.”

  He drank a third of the beer before he responded. “You know, I do. I don’t like what that might say about me, but I do like L.A. Against all odds, the place just…kind of works.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I like the sun. I like the people. I like that the Pacific is right there. I like the…optimism. Think the traffic would make me psychotic.”

  “Maybe,” Sam mused, “I’ll sell my North Boulder house and buy—I don’t know—I might be able to afford a four-hundred-square-foot studio above somebody’s garage in Venice. I could be out in the sun every day. Live close to the ocean. Walk everywhere. Learn to surf. Lift some weights. Play beach volleyball. Get a good attitude.”

  “Cute,” I said.

  Sam took a step toward the door. “I’m on my way to defile Merideth’s fancy shower. Then I’m going to fall asleep in her poofy bed. Got me a feeling I’m going to solve me a puzzle tomorrow. Earn my bonus.”

  “Merideth’s paying you a bonus?”

  “She is.”

  I said, “I’m not as confident about all this as you are. It’s morning in Holland. I think I’ll call Lauren. Then I’ll try to get some sleep too.”

  I waited for noises that indicated that Sam had figured out Merideth’s shower before I phoned Europe. I got Lauren’s voice mail. I told her I loved her and that I would try again later.