They never talked again. When Deidre died, the guilt came crashing down on Serena, and she filtered it through bottles of Absolut.
She remembered how amazing it was to her that she could put bottles in the freezer and let the alcohol get colder and colder and colder, and still it didn’t freeze.
Sixty-eight pounds, God.
Following the directions that Jay Walling had given her, she pulled onto the shoulder at the end of a long dirt track off old 395, near the house where the murder had taken place. She got out of the car and enjoyed the silence. The few sounds she did hear were crisp and clear, like the crunch of gravel under her feet and the distant rumble of a plane climbing over the hills out of the Reno airport. A hawk pin-wheeled above her, scanning the fields, but otherwise, she didn’t see another living soul anywhere around her.
A handful of old ranch houses dotted the overgrown fields. Farm machinery lay rusted and unused nearby, and telephone wires sagged between poles. She saw the tall mountains to the west, with evergreens climbing the sides and patches of snow clinging to the very peaks. Closer by, the foothills were covered with auburn down, which would turn green when the rains came.
The house she had come to see was modest, a gray twostory with an RV parked on the side. Its closest neighbor was a half mile away. There was a large white-fenced meadow in which she expected to see horses, but it was empty, its bitter-brush bending in the cool breeze. The air was fragrant with wild flowers.
She had a large cup of coffee. She sipped it while she waited, leaning against the hood of the car. Fifteen minutes later, she watched a white Ford Taurus pull up behind her. It was glossy, as if it had just been washed. Serena figured that Jay Walling probably took personal offense at any dirt particles that had the audacity to affix themselves to his car. She knew Walling well. They had worked a nasty homicide the year before, in which a body had been found in the Las Vegas desert and its head had turned up in the ball rack of a Reno bowling alley. Who said murderers didn’t have a sense of humor?
“What say, Jay?” Serena said as Walling got out of the car. “What’s with the bird crap on your coat?”
He looked down in horror, and Serena laughed. Walling wore a black shearling overcoat that must have cost him two thousand dollars, and he pampered it like a baby. He also wore a black fedora that made him look like a holdover from 1950s Manhattan. He was tall, with a long face and a boxy mustache.
“I’ve missed your sense of humor, sweetheart,” Walling told her. “I hope my phone call last night didn’t interrupt a little love fest between you and Detective Stride. I was truly figuring I would get your voice mail.”
“Ten minutes earlier, and you might have heard some heavy breathing.”
“Ah, good” Walling looked a little uncomfortable with the details. “So is it serious?”
“I think so,” Serena admitted. “He seems to think so, too. I’m trying not to screw it up.”
Walling, who knew some of Serena’s history, nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I appreciate your coming up here. Can you tell me more about this receipt you found?”
Serena gave Walling a quick summary of the hit-and-run in which Peter Hale had been killed and told him about their discovery of Lawrence Busby’s car in the parking lot of the Meadows Mall. “The receipt was under die driver’s seat,” she said.
“No line yet on who stole the car?”
Serena shook her head.
“Shame. This could all mean nothing, but it smells funny. That receipt of yours was from a little convenience store less than five miles away. About two hours after those half-dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts got sold, a woman was murdered at this ranch. Then the receipt shows up in a stolen car used in a hit-and-run in Las Vegas.”
“I don’t like it.”
“No, neither do I.”
“So what happened here?” Serena asked, inclining her head toward the ranch house.
Walling tugged at his mustache and then removed the fedora. He smoothed his carefully trimmed gray hair.
“Brutal killing. We don’t get cases like this very often. Albert Ford came home from a golf game and found the front door open and his wife lying in the foyer. Clean cut across the carotid. Near as we can tell, she opened the door, and the perp dropped her right there. Bloody mess.”
“Motive?”
“We don’t have one,” Walling said. “Nothing was taken from the house. It doesn’t look like he even went inside.”
“And no witnesses?”
Walling shrugged and gestured at the empty landscape. “Out here? Not many neighbors. The road dead-ends to the east. We haven’t found anybody who saw a thing.”
“What do we know about the woman who was killed?”
“Salt of the earth,” Walling said. “Both of them. The Fords are multi-generation Reno residents. Both retired. Albert Ford bred horses for decades and sold out a few years ago. His wife Alice was a schoolteacher-third grade. She put in thirty-five years and retired around the same time that Al unloaded the horses.”
Serena shook her head. “A third-grade schoolteacher?”
“Exactly. It makes no sense.”
“And Al is in the clear?”
Walling nodded. “His golfing buddies gave him an alibi. Alice had been dead for several hours when he found her.”
“They have kids?”
“Four. All grown. The youngest is in her early thirties.”
“Any of them in Las Vegas?” Serena asked.
“No, two in Los Angeles, one in Boise, one in Anchorage. All clean. Alice has a brother in Reno, but that’s it within the state. Al’s the only one left in his family.”
“I don’t suppose the brother is mobbed up,” Serena said.
Walling laughed. “Retired director of an adoption agency. He’s in a retirement home now.”
“So we have a twelve-year-old boy run down by a car and a retired schoolteacher with her throat cut,” Serena said. “Nothing similar about the MO, nothing similar about the location. The only thing we have to tie the cases together is a few doughnuts. Maybe we’re just blowing smoke here, Jay.”
“Except both vies do have something in common,” Walling said.
“Oh?”
“We can’t find a reason why anyone would want to kill them.”
ELEVEN
Rex Terrell was thirty minutes late.
It was fiveo’clock, and Stride and Amanda had a booth in the corner at Battista’s, underneath a wall of vintage celebrity photos that spanned the decades. They had already shooed away the accordionist, who was ready to serenade them, and turned down the house wine that came with dinner, but they had finally agreed to accept two bowls of penne with meat sauce, on the house.
Terrell had picked the place, which was on a side street behind the Barbary Coast. “Real Vegas,” he said. “A landmark.”
Stride had Terrell’s number from MJ’s answering machine, and he had finally reached him in the middle of the afternoon. It turned out that Rex Terrell was a freelance writer who did gossipy features for entertainment magazines, including LV. Stride wanted to know what Terrell had told MJ Lane about his father and the Sheherezade.
They waited impatiently. Amanda stabbed a few noodles with her fork.
“So what’s it like in Minnesota?” she asked.
Stride smiled. “Are you thinking of moving?”
“Who knows? I know how this sounds, but I wouldn’t mind living somewhere a little less strange. Bobby and I have talked about getting out.” She added, “It would be nice to be someplace where not everybody knew, too, know what I mean? My little secret, that is.”
Stride nodded. “Minnesota is cold.”
“Cold? Is that news? Here’s a hint, Stride, that white stuff that hangs around up there for six months? That’s called snow.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Stride said. “I don’t care about the weather. I used to live right on the shore of Lake Superior. I’d watch the big ore freighters come and go from my porch”