Crunch Time (49 page)

The garage door was a red wooden sliding entrance, more like the type you would find on a barn. I slid it open, felt along the right wall, and switched on overhead fluorescent lights.

As promised, the place was a wreck. I counted six trucks and two cars, each in varying states of disrepair. The hoods of most of them yawned. Like many Coloradans, John Bertram cannibalized his old vehicles for parts to put in newer ones. But that wasn’t what interested me.

Which vehicle looked clean? Which one looked as if Ernest might have been in it?

It took only a minute. While the pickups were generally filled with rags, old cans, and all manner of detritus, there was one, a red one, over by the other side of the garage. I could see it well because daylight spilled in from the regular-size door on that side. The roar of traffic from the road below was clearly audible.

There was even a somewhat clear path to the red truck, as if someone—in my mind, Ernest—had tried to indicate where one should walk to get to the red truck, which looked as if it had been hastily wiped down by someone who wanted to indicate he’d been there. I walked quickly to it.

Someone—again, I was willing to bet it was Ernest—had dumped all the trash that had been in the back of the truck on the garage floor. I levered myself up to check the cab. It was empty. With my free hand, I pulled open one of the doors and felt along the floor and between the seats, but my hands came up with nothing. When I opened the glove box, a crumpled heap of old restaurant reviews spilled onto the floor. I checked through them quickly, but found not a shred of anything of interest.

Cursing, I slammed the door shut and climbed up one of the wheels, vaulted over, and landed with a soft thump in the back, which was empty . . . except for Ernest McLeod’s backpack.

“I got it!” I cried as I lifted the backpack with my free hand. But then someone—a man, moving very quickly—vaulted into the truck bed behind me. And then something very hard,
very
hard, hit me across my shoulders. I screamed and fell, the baton slipping from my grasp. The big thing—the butt of a gun?—cracked against my back.

The pain made sickness shoot through my body. Then the butt of the gun hit me again.

I’m going to die,
I thought. I imagined Arch motherless, Tom without a wife—

“Did you really think you were going to steal from me?” Kris Nielsen’s menacing voice came close to my ear. His free hand grasped my neck. I stretched out my right hand, trying to find the baton. Once my fingers closed on it, I pulled it quietly toward my body. Kris said, “Did you really think you could just waltz into my house and take files, and I wouldn’t discover it? The next time you burgle someone’s house, don’t run out the back door where someone in the house can see you. What’s mine is
mine
. I am smarter than you, and I will destroy you. Now, drop the backpack, or I’ll shoot you in the head.”

I let go of the backpack but pressed the baton against my thigh. “Please,” I said, “please stop—”

I torqued my head sideways and saw a glint of metal. Kris was indeed holding a gun. The whoosh in the air from his raising it again made me wince. I pressed the extension button on the baton and whacked backward with every ounce of strength I possessed.

Stunned, Kris tumbled onto the floor of the truck bed. The gun rattled away in the darkness, but Kris, using his superior strength, snatched the baton out of my hand before I could get my feet under me. He levered to a standing position while I tried to scramble away from him.

“Hey, Kris!” came Ferdinanda’s unexpected shout.

Kris turned toward the front of the garage. I grabbed the side of the truck bed and pulled myself up to a half crouch. Ferdinanda sat in her wheelchair near the red truck, her hands in her lap. Light from the big doors created an aura around her.

“I should have had Osgoode run over you twice, you old bat!” Kris yelled.

“I’m not that easy to kill,” she said, “so you better come get me now.”

Kris raised the baton, his face flushed as red as the backpack dangling from his other hand. I estimated how far it was to the open side door if I tried to vault from the truck bed. But I couldn’t just leave Ferdinanda here with Kris. What if he recovered his gun? If I screamed, would it carry to the house?

Before I could figure out what to do, I watched Ferdinanda pull something out of the recesses of her ever useful wheelchair. I had time to register that it was a gun—Tom’s .45 from our garage, I vaguely realized—and heard Kris shout something. Then the woman who had been a sniper, a
francotiradora
in Castro’s army, pulled the trigger and fired once, twice.

Kris Nielsen fell against me, sending us both back down to the truck floor. I wiggled out from beneath him. A cratered hole lay where his forehead had been. He wouldn’t be stalking anyone ever again.

A
t least twenty cops descended on the Bertrams’ garage. I didn’t see or hear much, because the sound of the shots had once again temporarily deafened me. Kris’s blood was on my face, in my eyes, and dripping into my ears. My whole body quivered uncontrollably. I wanted to get away from Kris Nielsen’s corpse as fast as humanly possible.

But of course the whole place was now a crime scene.

Tom arrived and took his gun back from Ferdinanda. She confessed immediately, saying that she’d been looking for a weapon from the first morning she’d awakened in our house. That was what she had been doing in our pantry when I’d come upon her so early. She had not been looking for cans. She’d also searched in our freezer, because she couldn’t believe a law enforcement officer wouldn’t have a weapon hidden somewhere.

And after breakfast that first morning? Ferdinanda had told Yolanda she was still scared, even with Tom in the house. Ferdinanda had told Yolanda she’d had a terrible night. Even after Boyd and Tom built the ramp, Ferdinanda insisted she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to sleep easily in our dining room. And when Yolanda kept saying they would be safe sleeping under our roof, Ferdinanda had continued nagging, saying she didn’t feel secure. Finally Yolanda had said they would be fine, because Tom kept a gun in the detached garage—a fact I had told her.

Then Ferdinanda, who was perhaps
not
as hard of hearing as she had claimed, had overheard me remind Tom of the code to our garage door. She’d had her work cut out for her.

“It was all for self-defense,” the old woman told Tom.

Well, not quite. There was something else Ferdinanda had needed to do—arm herself. She had the baton; she got the gun. When Kris bought the house across the street from us, he had installed Harriet there. But really, Ferdinanda insisted, it was because he wanted to keep an eye on Yolanda, perhaps to kill her. I suspected she was right.

So Ferdinanda knew something, some event, some person associated with Yolanda—that would be yours truly—would pull the trigger on Kris’s rage. That was why she gave me the baton. That was why she kept the .45 beside her in the wheelchair.

Kris had discovered my break-in at his house. This was what had frightened him into action. Because I had taken the number of Joe Pargeter, and Joe Pargeter knew quite a bit that the authorities in Colorado did not. When I’d handed the phone to Boyd, Pargeter had told him about the death of Rita Nielsen, whom Pargeter believed was murdered. After Kris was dead, I asked Boyd to tell me the story, and he obliged.

Johann and Rita Nielsen, Kris’s parents, had been flinty Scandinavians who’d built a farm, saved every nickel, and researched stocks in farming equipment and other companies. They’d savvily bought and sold the stocks according to their research—and made millions. Ten years ago, Johann had died and left everything to Rita. In his will, Johann said he wanted his son to make his own way, just as he had. Word around Lake Bargee, Minnesota, was that Kris was furious. His mother had inherited twelve million dollars, and he’d gotten nothing?

Three years ago that month, Kris had dropped out of graduate school in Colorado and returned to Lake Bargee. Rita still lived out on the farm. In the years since Johann’s death, she’d sold the livestock and had only a small garden. But she was managing. Then Kris arrived and told everyone that he would be taking care of his mother from then on. People from the grocery store, the farmers’ wives club, and the Lutheran church asked after Rita. He said she was fine, but he refused to let people come visit.

I sighed. This was a typical abuse pattern. Isolate the victim from everything that’s familiar.

Boyd said that Kris was there for a few months. A grocery store clerk remembered him buying a turkey for Thanksgiving but not for Christmas. That year, beginning the nineteenth of December, they had their first big blizzard. Four feet of snow fell before Christmas Eve. Two days after Christmas, Kris Nielsen called the Lake Bargee police department from Colorado. He said he’d left his mother after they’d celebrated Christmas together, and driven back to his apartment. Now he couldn’t reach her, and would somebody please go out and check on her? Two officers went out on snowmobiles and found Rita dead. The exhaust to her furnace was completely blocked with snow. The carbon monoxide had done her in.

Joe Pargeter’s theory was that Kris had been waiting for a big snowstorm so he could block up the exhaust, kill his mother with the carbon monoxide buildup, and drive away before anyone could catch him. But there were no footprints, no physical evidence. Kris had no alibi, except to say that he’d left his mother on Christmas Day. He had no gas or hotel receipts. He said he learned thrift from his parents and always paid in cash. The Minnesota authorities couldn’t prosecute him on the basis that he hadn’t bought a Christmas turkey.

Pargeter had held up the death certificate for as long as he could. He flew out to Colorado to question Kris Nielsen. But Nielsen stuck to his story. He lived alone and worked hard as a chemistry grad student.
Of course,
I thought.
Actually,
he’d said in that flat Minnesota accent,
medical isotopes are used for—
And then he’d stopped. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was well acquainted with chemistry; he was desperate for them to think he was a California entrepreneur. The one person who knew his secret was Stonewall Osgoode.

But then, Tom said, came the kicker. I was not the first person to call Pargeter about Nielsen. No, that would have been Ernest McLeod, who’d rifled through files at Nielsen’s house, found Pargeter’s number, and traveled the same mental paths as yours truly.

So. When Kris discovered I’d broken into his house and stolen his file marked
Mother,
he guessed that I might have discovered one of his worst lies: that he hadn’t earned his money starting a data-processing business in Silicon Valley. Lolly Vanderpool had figured that out:
A real data-processing geek would have known, in answer to my question, that I needed to buy a USB hub.

Kris liked to be in control. He’d lost Yolanda. He’d gotten rid of Ernest and Stonewall Osgoode, who we later found out had been an accomplice of Kris’s. Both victims knew too much or had crossed him. And then I became a threat. He had driven over to our place, where he’d watched us leave with the police escort. He’d followed us and climbed up to the crime scene via the back way. The last thing he wanted was for me to get Tom looking into the death of Rita Nielsen.

But then he’d overheard me talking to Boyd about the backpack and feared yet more evidence against him or Osgoode would be on Ernest’s camera. He’d found his way via the back door into the garage . . . where he attacked me.

Ferdinanda had known to be ready. That was why she’d given me her collapsible truncheon; that was why she’d wheeled down to the garage. When Kris had come at her with her own baton, well . . . she was a
francotiradora,
and she knew what to do.

When Tom arrived at the Bertrams’, he took charge. My knees buckled when he hugged me. He helped me sit on the grass outside the garage. I made a complete statement. Tom called Arch and asked if he could spend the night with Gus, as I was indisposed. Arch had asked if I was all right, and Tom said I would be.

Boyd, of course, felt terrible that he had done what I asked and stayed with Yolanda instead of accompanying me into the garage. But how could he have known that Kris would find his way in from the road below? He had followed the police escort, figured out where we were going, and climbed up the steep hill that led to the Bertrams’ garage.

Harriet, whose odd jobs included being a handywoman, immediately confessed to being Kris’s accomplice. She had done some odd jobs for Kris in the past year, including sleeping with him from time to time. She’d found a regular job working at Frank’s Fix-It. In fact, she claimed she was the only one who actually did any work there. Kris had offered her room and board and money, promised to drop her in the morning and pick her up at night . . . if she would only sabotage an electric frying pan and loosen some bolts on a hanging pot rack at the Breckinridges’ house the day of the dinner party.

But it was Charlene Newgate who had given Tom the key to the case. Faced with a possible charge for conspiring to grow marijuana—of which she was actually innocent—she confessed to being paid to provide Stonewall Osgoode with information about Yolanda, information that she gleaned as a temporary secretary. When she’d jealously asked Stonewall if Yolanda was some other girlfriend of his, he’d laughed and said Yolanda was the ex-girlfriend of his boss. Charlene had typed the new will for Ernest McLeod while working for Allred, the attorney. She’d worked for Drew Parker, the dentist, enough to know how to set up the fake dental appointment for Ernest McLeod, the trap that had gotten him killed.

She also admitted to acting on Stonewall’s order to chat up Humberto Captain at the Grizzly. She’d stolen Humberto’s cell phone at an opportune moment and handed it over to Stonewall later. He’d used it to call Ernest’s house moments before torching the place, with us inside. Tom figured Stonewall was trying to throw suspicion for the arson onto Humberto.