“You’ve got it,” Skip Lowell said. “That’s it in a nutshell.”
“And you’ll be buying it back from Terry Buckwalter?”
“Whoever the owner of record is, that’s who we’ll buy it n,” Skip answered. “The lawyers will be coming down next week to make the offer.”
“But what does all this have to do with Larry Matkin?” Ernie asked.
There was a slight hesitation before Skip answered. It could have been evasion, or simply reluctance.
“Obviously, Larry has known exactly what’s going on. One day the project is on a fast track. The next, after some company researcher discovers the mineral-rights problem, everything grinds to a halt. Larry had to be told, but he was sworn to secrecy.”
“You’re worried that he’s told someone?” Wilma asked.
Skip shook his head. “No, it’s worse than that. In the past few weeks, I’ve become aware that there have been several unexplained absences on Larry’s part. There’ve been times when I’ve tried to reach him when he clearly wasn’t where he said he would be, where he was supposed to be. Late yesterday afternoon, through a fluke, I discovered that he’s been golfing at a place out near Palominas. He’s been doing it on company time and in the company of Terry Buckwalter. It could be it’s all on the up-and-up. But I’m concerned that if they’re involved somehow-romantically, I mean-that the company will end up with a conflict-of-interest problem.”
Armand “Skip” Lowell was a company man to the bone. His sole worry lay in what kind of corporate repercussions might result from an inappropriate relationship between Terry Buckwalter and Larry Matkin.
krnie Carpenter and Joanna Brady were cops. Both their minds turned to murder.
“How much is that property worth?” Joanna asked.
“Surely, you don’t think…” Skip objected.
“How much?”
“Don’t quote me on this,” Skip cautioned. “The property is probably worth something in the upper six figures. Maybe even more.”
Suddenly Joanna was thinking about Terry Buckwalter-about how pleased she had seemed to be at receiving what she considered fair value for her dead husband’s defunct veterinary practice. She was hoping to come out of the deal with enough money to pay off her debts and maybe get away clean. She was counting on the insurance proceeds to fund her venture into the L.G.P.A. That didn’t add up to an upper-six-figures kind of deal. It sounded to Joanna as though Terry Buckwalter was being shafted. Maybe she knew nothing at all about the mineral rights, and maybe, just maybe, Reggie Wade did.
“Does Terry Buckwalter know any of this?” Joanna asked.
Skip Lowell frowned. “She might,” he said. “But she isn’t supposed to.”
Joanna stood up. “Come on, Ernie. We’ve got to go.”
“But I’m not finished-”
“We’re finished for the time being,” Joanna told him. “We can come back if we need to. For now, there’s something else we have to do.”
“What the hell is going on?” Ernie growled as he climbed into Joanna’s Blazer. “I don’t leave off interviews-”
“I think we’ve found our killer,” she said. “Reggie Wade pushing through a deal to buy out the clinic at something far less than an upper-six-figure figure,” Joanna said. “In fact, I think Terry may have already signed papers on this.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’ll bet Reggie Wade knows all about this mineral-rights deal. Knew it was coming and knew when it was coming.”
“You’re saying maybe he and Larry Matkin are in this thing together?”
“It’s possible.”
“So what are we going to do?” Ernie asked.
“Drive down to Douglas and find out,” Joanna told him.
Ernie leaned back in the seat, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes. “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Wake me when we get there.”
TWENTY
As they headed east on Highway 80, Joanna could barely contain her excitement. With Ernie Carpenter snoring softly in the passenger seat beside her, Joanna could see that they were about to crack the case wide open.
They didn’t have all the answers yet. So far, there were no proved links between Matkin and Wade. Other than Joanna’s having seen them together briefly at the Amos Buckwalter funeral, there were no direct connections. But Joanna was confident those would come. They had to.
Once the deal on the clinic closed, Reggie Wade would have bought himself a fortune for the price of a small-town animal clinic. Joanna’s fiction-fueled visions of the kindly, humane vet were fast going the way of the goateed composite-sketch artist. All artists didn’t wear beards and mustaches, and all vets weren’t James Herriot.
The desultory chatter on the radio told Joanna that nothing much was happening in the county. There was a disabled semi blocking the intersection of I-10 and Highway 90. Dick Voland and Jaime Carbajal were still in Elfrida working on the second composite sketch with Malt Bly. And Sheriff Joanna Brady was driving across the Sulphur Springs Valley on her way to solve Bucky Buckwalter’s murder.
On either side of the highway, the winter-blackened mesquite stretched for miles. The trees looked as though they were dead forever, but Joanna knew that within weeks-by the middle of February or early March-they would come alive again. Tender young leaves would cover the whole valley floor with a vivid layer of emerald green.
Speaking into the radio, Joanna let Dispatch know that she and Ernie were on their way to Douglas to interview a possible suspect. “Do you want us to notify the city of Douglas they can work backup?” asked Larry Kendrick.
Joanna looked across at the slumbering Ernie Carpenter. “Negative,” she said, answering quietly so as not to disturb him. “At this time it doesn’t look as though that’s necessary.”
She was just passing the Cochise College campus, halfway to Douglas, when another call came over the radio. Joanna could tell from the urgency in the voices that it was something important, but she couldn’t quite make out what was said.
“What is it, Larry?” she asked.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. “Up in Pinery Canyon in the Chiricahuas. An explosion of some kind. I’ve contacted ties Voland and Carbajal. They were just leaving Elfrida, which puts them better than halfway there.”
Something in the tenor of the words punched through Ernie’s drowsing consciousness. He shook his head, rubbed his eyes, and was instantly on full alert. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“There’s been an explosion of some kind,” Joanna told him. “Up in the Chiricahuas. Details are sketchy yet. Here, you handle the radio.”
Taking the mike from her, Carpenter pushed the “talk” button. “Okay, Larry. What have we got?”
“A guy named Dennis Hacker called in the report. He was hysterical. At first all he’d say was something about parrots. I couldn’t make it out. Finally he calmed down enough to say that somebody had set off an explosion of some kind. Blew up somebody’s cabin. Hacker was afraid it would bother his parrots.”
“Parrots!” Ernie exclaimed impatiently. “What do parrots have to do with the price of peanuts?”
“Ed Hacker is a naturalist who works for the Audubon Society. He has something to do with parrots-raising them or setting them free or something.”
“I know about that,” Joanna said. “There was a feature on him in the paper a month or so ago. He’s trying to reintroduce parrots into the Chiricahuas. The problem is, the parrots have evidently forgotten how to open pine cones. Before he can release them, he has to teach them the basics. Other-wise they’ll starve to death.”
Ernie shook his head. “Enough about parrots,” he growled. “What do we know about the explosion? Do we know who owns the cabin?”
“We’re working on that,” Larry Kendrick returned. “It’s one of the places on Forest Road 42, but we’re not sure yet which one. There are eight or nine cabins located out that way. Hacker’s too focused on his birds to know much about his two-legged neighbors.”