A Nose for Justice (8 page)

Pete and Lonnie climbed out and were greeted by the frigid air. Then the group walked over to the pump.

“Where’s Oliver?” Peter wondered.

“Didn’t tell him,” Bunny answered.

“Smart move.” Pete smiled. “I’ll call on him at his office. Make him feel important.”

“You’re a good man.” Twinkie smiled.

As the official stenographer, Lonnie flipped open his notebook. He took off his right glove and looked imploringly at Pete to speed it up.

“Have either of you two seen any trucks or cars around here? I know you check these pumps regularly. Anyone ever come down the drive whom you didn’t know?”

“Nah. If they did, we’d stop them,” Twinkie responded. “No one ever comes up to these pumps but us.”

“Lynn Lloyd’s been up here,” Bunny contradicted Twinkie.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot about her.”

Lynn Lloyd was the master of a pack of foxhounds, called appropriately enough, Red Rock Hounds.

“Bunny, that was a year ago,” Twinkie said.

“Looking for hounds?” Pete knew the master.

“Yeah. Found ’em later. But I don’t think she has much interest in our pump.” Twinkie offered his opinion.

“I don’t, either, but I still need to ask these questions. Has anyone threatened you?”

“Me?” Twinkie was surprised.

Bunny smarted off. “Twinkie believes he is universally loved.”

“Fuck you,” Twinkie replied without malice.

“What about you, Bunny?”

“Only my ex-wife.”

“Which one?” Twinkie enjoyed a swift revenge.

“Number two.”

“I know the feeling.” Pete nodded. “Has anyone to your knowledge ever threatened Silver State? A letter, an email, text?”

“The usual.” Twinkie put his gloved hands in his pockets as his fingers were getting numb.

“What’s the usual?”

“Protestors who say the company’s trying to buy up everyone’s water rights. That’s standard, but every now and then we’ll get a complaint that
a pump site is an eyesore and can’t we landscape it?” A flash of indignation crossed Twinkie’s ruddy face. “Landscape them with what? One newcomer from across the border suggested we plant maples. Maples in high desert! Jesus, why don’t these people go home?”

For a second Pete recalled the sight of yesterday’s corpse sprawled in the motel room. That one had gone home all right. Funny, how most suicides who shoot themselves do it in bed.

Bunny piped up, “We’ve been asking ourselves who would blow up Pump Nineteen. All we can come up with is—what’s the phrase now, the bullshit phrase, oh yeah, someone mentally incapacitated or suffering complications from Asshole Syndrome? This was a nutcase. That’s all I can figure.”

“Silver State has plenty of detractors.” Pete folded his arms across his massive chest, which was made even larger by his coat.

“Yeah, any company turning a profit does these days.” Twinkie agreed. “But Pete, this fight’s reflected in the letters to the editor or the state house. You know, someone writes in about how we’re bleeding dry the good people of Nevada.”

Bunny feigned surprise. “You read the letters to the editor?”

“Unlike you, my lips don’t move when I do it.” Twinkie teased him back.

“Personally, the way my fingers feel right now, I don’t think I’ll ever write again,” Lonnie’s low voice informed Pete.

Pete looked down at the stenographer’s book. Lonnie’s penmanship deteriorated the farther down the page he read.

“Hell with it. Put your gloves back on. We’ll remember.” He turned to Bunny. “Apart from our shared opinion of Oliver Hitchens, could he know something he’s not telling?”

Twinkie and Bunny looked at each other, then back at Pete, the lawman.

Twinkie spoke first. “All the time, but if you mean is he crooked, no, I don’t think so. What do you think, Bun?”

“He’s a shithead, but he’s straight up. I mean Oliver isn’t stealing from the company in some way or making deals behind Silver State’s back.”

“What kind of deals?” Pete, alert now, lifted his chin, which he’d dropped into his mouton collar for warmth.

“Oliver knows where water rights are being purchased, where someone
refuses, that kind of stuff. He’s always on Craig Locke’s tail, asking about what and where have we bought. He’s nosy, but then again, after all the bigwigs look at the aerials and the topo maps and decide where a pump has to go in, Bunny and I usually go out with Oliver because he has to make the equipment call. We don’t use the same kind of pump each time. There’s a lot to this. How deep do we have to sink the shaft, what kind of drill bits? What will be the draw on the pump? How many gallons per minute during peak use now and what about projected peak use five years from now? Plus you never really know what you’re going to hit when you go down. So the truth is, the three of us figure it out. Much as I hate his guts, Oliver’s good at it.

“If Oliver wanted to, he could have bought up the water rights to some small parcels, some properties that didn’t cost millions. He’s shrewd with his money, but he never sneaked around like that,” Twinkie finished.

“We’d know,” Bunny said resolutely.

“How would you know?” Pete asked.

“Oliver’s not a big spender, but little things would show up. He’s in love with his wife. Not a bad-looking woman. He’d buy her a new car or earrings or something,” Twinkie offered.

“And he’d yank his kids out of the University of Nevada–Reno.”

“Bunny, why?” A devout Wolfpack man, this touched Pete’s pride in his alma mater.

“Snob. If he could afford it, he’d put those two kids of his in Yale or some East Coast school.”

“Stanford.” Lonnie spoke up.

“Oliver thinks the East is best. I sure as hell don’t. It’s those East Coast buttheads that got us all in this mess.” Bunny snapped his lips shut like a turtle.

“Got that right.” Twinkie nodded vigorously.

“Let me go back to one more question and I won’t take up too much more of your time. You said Oliver kept things from you but you didn’t think he was—what did you say—crooked?”

“Oh, he likes to hint there are rumbles in the office, George W. is going to make a change, stuff like that. It’s a snide way to try and scare us into working longer and harder for no overtime claims. We’re onto it.”

“George W.?” Pete asked Twinkie.

“George W. Ball, head of equipment. I think his official title is some more bullshit like Infrastructure. Anyway, he makes all our purchases, everything down to the last wrench. He’s an easy man to get along with, one of those techno guys. He’s up on the latest, whether it’s a computer or better pumps. Guess he has to be.”

“I don’t know him. Not that that means anything.” Pete recognized that while he knew many people in his own generation and his parents’ generation, Reno was big enough that he wouldn’t know all the natives and he sure couldn’t keep up with the newcomers.

“He’s from Elko. Grew up by the Ruby Mountains,” Bunny added.

“I like Elko,” Pete said offhand. “Last question. Jake Tanner. He’s a talker. Did he say anything, you know, how his neighbor hates Silver State or he’s seen a blue truck he doesn’t recognize? With Jake, you’ll get everything, including the last time he slept with his wife.”

“October.” Twinkie quickly said as the three of them laughed with him.

“Jake ranted on about the weather,” said Bunny, “about who might blow up a pump, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Hey, thanks a lot. For the record, I won’t report our conversation to Oliver. Given his need to constantly stress how important he is, it wouldn’t go down so well with him that I’d spoken with you first.”

“Thanks,” they responded in unison.

“If you should think of anything, even if it seems crazy, let me know,” Pete asked.

“We’re good at crazy,” Bunny replied.

“I’m counting on it.” Pete waved as he headed back to the SUV.

Back down on Red Rock Road, Lonnie asked, “What do you think?”

“They’re telling the truth.”

“Hey, we did our duty.” Lonnie checked his watch, then checked the time on the SUV clock. “We might find out who blew up the pump. Then again, we might not. It won’t hurt us if we don’t.”

“Why do you say that?”

“People don’t care all that much what happens to a Silver State pump. Neither does the department.” He meant the Sheriff’s Department. “Solving
murders, robberies, that’s what gets the headlines and that makes the department look good.”

Pete tilted his head slightly. Lonnie was right.

They rode in silence.

Lonnie noted it. “What’s on your mind?”

“I, well, I don’t know, but I feel like we’re standing at the edge of an arroyo and we think the ground is solid. Then it starts to slip. You hear a little slide first, see a few rocks. Can’t shake it.”

“Hope you’re wrong.”

“Me, too.” He turned left onto Dry Valley Road.

Jeep had called earlier about the skeleton and they were just now getting to it. Given recent events and the fact that Jeep felt this was quite an old skeleton, it wasn’t first on their list.

Lonnie brightened. “Jeep?”

“Um-hmm.”

“Isn’t that something? Finding an old skeleton in the barn?”

“Yes. And going back to what you were saying, if we find out who that old body is and then find out who killed him, that would make the news, but probably no one will much notice if we catch our bomber.”

Lonnie smiled broadly. “Crazy.”

“H
ow’s that strike you?” Standing next to Pete in the barn, Jeep cast her eyes upward to meet his warm brown ones, eyes much like her own. “Sounds like a plan, but you know I’ll have to run it by Sheriff Haley.” Pete was a deputy sheriff and a young one at that—testimony to the regard in which Pete was held by his superiors.

“They should give the human bones to us.”
Baxter felt strongly about this. He looked from Mags to Jeep to Pete and Lonnie.

“I can find better bones than these.”
That said, King did not disagree with the wire-haired dachshund.

Baxter glowed at his small social victory. Given the few phone calls he’d overheard Mags make back to New York City, he realized they would be at Wings for a long time. Of course, Mags had told him that, but hearing it over and over in her conversations drove the fact home. He knew he’d better work out some accord with the shepherd mix.

He agreed with King.
“Bet you can.”

“Easier when the snow melts.”
King sniffed Lonnie’s shoes.

Jeep suggested to Pete that given budgetary restraints and the fact that this murder most likely occurred one hundred and thirty years ago, at least, it wouldn’t look good if the department spent taxpayers’ money carefully unearthing these remains. Better to let the UNR do it and keep the whole story quiet until they found out who he was, if they could. No telling what kind of gold diggers would show up, claiming this was their long-lost great-grandfather.

As did all Reno residents, Jeep referred to the University of Nevada–Reno as “UNR.”

“Do they have an archaeology department?” Mags inquired, as this was
the first time she’d heard this idea from Jeep. Not that her great-aunt discussed her ideas all the time.

“Yes, ma’am.” Pete smiled. “Mostly they work with Native American sites, sometimes abandoned mine towns. This would be different. A novelty, maybe. Great idea, Miss Reed.”

“And they’ll be careful.” Jeep motioned for the two men to follow her out of the building. “Come on, let me warm you up. I know you’ve got a million things to do, but fifteen minutes in my kitchen won’t put you that far behind. And, Pete, if you call me Miss Reed one more time I will beat your ass with a wooden spoon. I’ve known you since you played second base in Little League. You’re old enough now to call me Jeep to my face. What you call me behind my back, keep to yourself.”

Before Mags could step up to Aunt Jeep, a grinning Pete gallantly offered his arm. Lonnie offered his to Mags, not sure whether this big-city girl would take it the right way, but she slipped her arm through his, so he relaxed.

In the kitchen, Carlotta fussed over the officers, taking their coats, pouring coffee, offering cinnamon rolls freshly baked that morning. She was vaguely acquainted with both of them. Everybody loved Carlotta; Pete and Lonnie were no exceptions.

“You keep telling me you’re going to find me a wife just like you.” Lonnie kissed her on the cheek.

“Give me time. Give me time. You’re special.”

Now seated, Pete drawled, “Lonnie, that means bullheaded. Will take a special woman.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“Anyone tell you two that you’re getting like an old married couple?” Jeep poured half and half into her coffee.

Lonnie wrinkled his nose as he looked at Pete. “Too hairy.”

Even Mags burst out laughing at this.

Jeep had shown the policemen the Nicholas Cavalry School ring. She’d also handed them an envelope with photographs of the ring for their records since she wished to keep it. Pete said since it was found on her property, and given the time frame of the crime, why not?

Pete knew Sheriff Haley would readily concur. He was a practical man.
Allowing the university to remove and study the bones would save his department money. It wasn’t as though the murder occurred yesterday.