“She kept mumbling the word, ‘Money.’ Over and over. ‘Money, money.’ That’s what the nursing supervisor thought it sounded like, anyway. ‘Money,’ or maybe ‘honey.’ Something like that. The nurse couldn’t really make it out, what with the tube in Ms. Bollinger’s mouth.”
Money. Honey. Funny. Sunny. Runny…
“Maybe she meant Bunny.”
“… Bunny?”
“He’s a PI. Works for Charles Dowd, the attorney who represented Dorian Munz. Bunny’s his nickname.”
“Who’s Dorian Munz again?”
“The guy who went out with Janet Bollinger after Ruth Walker dumped him.”
“Dorian Munz, who got executed for murdering Ruth.”
“One and the same.”
I told Rosario about my run-in outside the federal courthouse with the Human Doberman, he of the squished scrotum, and his threat that I get out of Dodge or else.
“The dude’s a stone-cold thug,” I said. “Except for his ears. He looks like a jack rabbit.”
“Which explains the ‘Bunny’ part,” Rosario said.
“What keen powers of deduction. You must be a detective.”
“I’ll check him out.”
I asked her if her department had tracked down the tattooed gangbanger I’d exchanged pleasantries with outside Janet Bollinger’s apartment. Not yet, Rosario said. She promised to let me know when they did.
“The woman had lost a lot of blood by the time I got in there,” I said.
“Nobody’s blaming you, Mr. Logan. There wasn’t much you or anyone else could’ve done.”
Her sentiments were appreciated. But they didn’t make me feel better.
Hub Walker seemed genuinely surprised when I told him about the paternity test Greg Castle had voluntarily taken to disprove he was the father of Walker’s granddaughter, Ryder.
“Greg never told me he took any test,” Walker said. “Neither did Ruth.”
“Paternity tests aren’t exactly something you post on Facebook, Hub.”
We were sitting in Walker’s home office, looking out onto the backyard. His wife and my ex were lounging poolside in bikinis, sipping umbrella drinks and giggling about something, their legs swishing playfully in the turquoise water while Ryder swam at the shallow end. Granted, I may be biased, but Crissy Walker, former Playmate of the Year, had nothing in the looks department when it came to the former Mrs. Cordell Logan.
“That test could go a long way knocking down Dorian Munz’s lies, that’s for sure,” Walker said.
“Castle hasn’t decided whether he wants to release the results.”
“He will when he understands how important it is.”
I glanced around. Had I racked up a combat record like his, my walls and shelves might’ve been crammed with shadow boxes touting all of my many citations and medals, but there were none on display in Walker’s office. The decor included two framed photos of his granddaughter and a framed cartoon rendition of a bulldog wearing a red sweater — the mascot of the University of Georgia. Only the wooden model sitting on his desk of an O-2 Skymaster like the kind he flew in Vietnam conveyed any hint of his wartime deeds.
“Any news on Janet Bollinger?” Walker asked.
“She died last night.”
He leaned back in his desk chair and gazed sadly out the window, shaking his head.
“Why in the world would somebody have wanted to do something like that to her?”
“I don’t know, Hub.”
He watched his granddaughter swim. “Sweet Jesus,” is all he said.
Whether truly grief-stricken or guilt-ridden, his reaction again was tough to read considering I’d only known him all of three days. I wanted to believe that he had nothing to do with Janet Bollinger’s death. Nothing pointed overtly to his involvement except some vague, ill-defined gnawing in my gut. When you’re a skeptic, I suppose, all the world’s a suspect. Sometimes even war heroes.
“The detectives’ll probably want to ask you and Crissy a few questions. You might want to call them.”
“Whoever hurt Jan needs to pay,” Walker said, his gaze still directed outside, “just like Dorian Munz.”
I dug Detective Rosario’s card out of my wallet and slid it across the desk.
“That private investigator you told me about? His name’s Herbie Myers,” Detective Rosario said when she called me back that afternoon.
“Herbie ‘Bunny’ Myers. Definitely has a ring to it.”
“I ran his records. He spent twelve years as a special agent for the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service before getting his PI license.”
“He worked for NCIS? That fits.”
Despite what TV producers would have you believe, Navy criminal investigators are about as high speed as the Mayberry Police Department. At least that’s the impression they left when I was with Alpha and we’d occasionally cross paths with them. Their primary mission back then was ferreting out closeted homosexual sailors who would then be deemed unfit for military service and automatically discharged. Bunny’s files showed that his own naval career ended abruptly, according to Rosario, after he’d stabbed a reputedly gay gunner’s mate in the hand during a bar fight in downtown San Diego’s tony Gaslamp Quarter. Witnesses said it was self-defense — both men had blades — but the sailor’s uncle happened to be an admiral. Bunny was threatened with a punitive transfer and loss of six months’ pay. He quit instead. How he ended up working as a private investigator for Dorian Munz’s defense lawyer, Charles Dowd, was not readily clear. What was clear, however, was that Detective Rosario was eager to question him as soon as possible in what had evolved overnight from an assault on Janet Bollinger to a homicide.
Only problem was, Bunny had skipped town.
“Dowd says he has no idea where he’s at, and the only thing Bunny’s neighbors know is that he left town in a big hurry,” Rosario said over the phone. “We think he may be hiding out in the Yuma area with a cousin. And get this: the cousin? His name’s Daniel Zuniga. Goes by, ‘Li’l Sinister.’ He matches pretty closely your description of the knucklehead with the neck tattoo you chatted up outside Ms. Bollinger’s apartment.”
“His name’s Li’l Sinister and he wears boxers with little lightning bolts on them?”
“What can I say? It’s a weird world.”
“Indeed.”
Rosario said she and her partner were concerned that Bunny was planning to cross the border with Li’l Sinister into northern Mexico, where the men had relatives to harbor them. She was unwilling, however, to contact authorities in Arizona and have them make an arrest for fear that the local cops might tip off the suspects instead.
“The Mexican drug cartels have a lot of reach out there,” she said. “It’s hard to know who to trust on either side of the border anymore.”
“Hard to trust anybody anywhere.”
Rosario didn’t disagree.
Yuma is about 175 miles east of San Diego across the Anza-Borrego Desert. On a good day, the drive takes less than three hours, but this, the detective said, was not one of those days. An 18-wheeler hauling fresh eggs had collided with a tanker truck filled with extra virgin olive oil. Both big rigs had exploded. Aside from making the world’s biggest frittata, the accident had shut down Interstate 8 in both directions. No one could say how long the freeway would remain closed.
None of that should’ve been any of my concern. Savannah and I were “napping” in the Walkers’ guesthouse. No man with a lick of sense would’ve willingly left under those circumstances. But most pilots have no sense. What else explains the inclinations of otherwise sane individuals who trade the safety of terra firma for the ever-unpredictable wild blue, an inhospitable domain that can spit out anything ever built by man and send it crashing back to earth faster than you can say “terminal velocity”? Still, for all its risks, a true aviator will jump at any legitimate reason to aviate — even if it means extracting himself from a warm bed and supple bedmate. And so, when Detective Rosario said that a fugitive was at large in the Yuma area and that the road there was impassable, I said what the pilot of any small airplane would’ve said: