Death Song (20 page)

Stanley shook her head. “I don’t know. He didn’t talk about working or having a job, but he had money. Not a lot, but some.”

“Did he tell you where his money came from?”

“No. Listen, it wasn’t like I spent oodles of time with him, you know? Sometimes we would hang out together. I liked him because he wasn’t always coming on to me. We could just chill.”

Clayton couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anyone use the word
oodles
. “How did you meet him?”

“At a party up by the university.”

“Who threw it?” Clayton asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where was it held?”

“I don’t remember,” Stanley replied, sounding testy. “I just heard there was this party and I crashed it.”

“You crashed it alone?”

“Yes, alone.”

“How did you come to have possession of his Harley?”

“He left it with me while he’s gone. Is there some kind of law against that?” she snapped. Clayton smiled again. Her strong reaction convinced him that she wasn’t being completely truthful. He reached across her and opened the car door. “You can go back to work,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

“That’s it?” Stanley asked.

“For now.” Clayton gave her his business card. “I may need to talk to you again, but in the meantime call me if you see Brian or if he gets in touch with you or any of your friends.”

“Yeah, sure,” Stanley replied.

Armijo gave Clayton a quizzical look as the young woman hurried toward the club entrance. “You know she’s lying,” he said when Clayton joined him in the front seat.

“Yeah. Do you want to stick around and see what she does next?”

Armijo nodded and killed the dome light. “It’s going to be a while before she gets off work.”

“I’ve got nothing better to do, have you?” Clayton asked.

“Not since my wife left me for the assistant manager at our local supermarket. And I thought she was just forgetful when it came to getting stuff we needed at the grocery store. Boy, was I stupid.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Clayton said.

Armijo put the car in gear. “Let’s find a place were we can stake out the front entrance without being spotted, and get some people over here to cover her car and the staff entrance.”

“Can you free someone up to keep an eye on her inside the club?” Clayton asked.

“Good idea.” Armijo reached for the radio microphone.

While Armijo was calling for assistance, Clayton looked up and down the street. There were no crowds standing outside the nightspots waiting to get in; foot traffic was almost nonexistent along the avenue, and only a few cars were stopped at the intersection waiting for a light to change. Except for the smattering of bars and clubs on both sides of the street, most of the businesses were closed and dark.

“So where’s the big-city nightlife?” he asked.

“Except for the weekends, you’re looking at it,” Armijo replied with a chuckle as he pulled away from the curb. “It really gets your party juices flowing, doesn’t it?”

“Big-time,” Clayton said.

Armijo found a spot behind a parked pickup truck that gave them good concealment, and after the officers called to assist were in place, the two men passed the time in bursts of silence and conversation.

Two hours into the stakeout, the detective inside the nightclub called Armijo and told him a customer had just walked in, slipped a small envelope to Stanley, and was on his way out the front door.

“He’s six-one, about one-eighty, mid-thirties, clean-shaven, brown and brown, wearing a suede leather jacket and blue jeans,” the detective said.

“I see him,” Armijo said as he cranked over the engine. “You couldn’t make him?”

“Negative,” the detective replied. “He’s not one of the usual suspects.”

“Stay on Stanley,” Armijo said. “We’ll cover the customer.”

The man outside the nightclub walked quickly to a new silver Ford Mustang and got behind the wheel.

“Are you going to stop and question?” Clayton asked as Armijo eased into traffic one car behind the Mustang, heading east on Central Avenue.

“Is that want you want to do?”

Clayton shook his head. “Let’s see where he takes us.”

“I like your style, Sergeant.” Armijo nodded at the laptop computer that was attached by a mechanical arm to the dashboard. “Do you know how to use that thing?” he asked.

Clayton nodded. The laptop was tied into motor vehicle records and federal and state crime information systems. He had a desktop computer at work with the same capacity, but the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office had no money to put laptops in its vehicles, which put the department further behind the pack when it came to state-of-the-art technology and equipment.

Armijo swung the laptop so that Clayton could easily reach the keyboard. “Have at it,” he said

By the time they had passed under the railroad tracks on Central Avenue and were climbing the hill toward the university, Clayton had the name of the registered owner and his DMV driver’s license photo on the laptop screen. They were following Morton E. Birch, age thirty-two, with a home address that Armijo said was in the opposite direction.

As they passed by the university, where all the streets were named for elite private eastern colleges, Clayton accessed NCIC and state crime data banks for wants and warrants on Birch. He got no hits.

“Apparently, Mort is clean,” Clayton said, glancing at the street signs, which now carried the names of dead presidents. “At least, so far.”

“That only makes me believe that he’s guilty of something,” Armijo said as he glanced at the dashboard clock. “Our friend Minerva clocks out of work in an hour. What would you like to do about her?”

“Let’s have her picked up and held for questioning. I want to know what’s in that envelope.”

Armijo nodded in agreement. “No problem. If she balks, we’ll arrest her on the old pot charge and hold her incommunicado until we get tonight’s excitement sorted out.”

“You’re having that much fun, are you?” Clayton asked, tongue in cheek.

“You’re a bright spot in my otherwise dull, mundane existence, Sergeant,” Armijo replied.

The traffic had thinned on Central Avenue, and Armijo stayed two cars behind the Mustang to avoid detection. “Looks like Birch is heading toward the Four Hills neighborhood,” he said as they approached the foothills. “Wasn’t there a John Birch Society that was active forty or fifty years ago? If I remember correctly from a political science class I took in college, it was an ultraconservative organization of hawks who hated communism, wanted to dismantle the United Nations, and hoped to spread capitalism and democracy throughout the world. Whatever happened to it?”

“The society members and their clones are now running the country,” Clayton replied.

“Don’t you want an America that’s strong, safe, and secure?” Armijo asked with passionate conviction.

Clayton decided to avoid a political debate on the off chance he had misread the sarcasm in Armijo’s voice. “Absolutely,” he said with equal sincerity.

Armijo gave him a quizzical look and said nothing more. The Mustang turned onto Four Hills Road, and they entered a subdivision that had all the trappings of an established high-end neighborhood, with big houses on large lots, quiet streets with mature trees, and expansive front lawns.

Armijo explained that Four Hills had been the first foothills subdivision built in the city, back in the 1960s, and that it came complete with its own country club and golf course. On the empty residential streets, he killed the headlights and slowed, but kept the Mustang’s taillights in view. Up ahead the car turned into a driveway. Armijo pulled to the curb and turned off the engine.

The houses on either side of the street were almost entirely obscured by evergreen trees and shrubs. Most of the houses were dark, with only a few showing some interior lights veiled behind drawn curtains and barely discernible through the branches of the trees.

“What now?” Armijo asked.

Clayton opened the passenger door. “Let me do a little sleuthing.”

“Does that mean you’re going to trespass on private property without reasonable suspicion or probable cause?” Armijo asked.

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

“I’m liking your style more all the time, Sergeant Istee,” Armijo said with a laugh. “And if Birch leaves while you’re out sleuthing?”

“Follow him,” Clayton said, “and give me a call.” He rattled off his cell phone number.

Armijo popped open the glove box and gave Clayton a night vision scope. “Here. You’ll need it.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t get caught sleuthing.”

Clayton stepped out of the vehicle. “Not a chance, Detective.”

Canyon winds coursing down from the mountains had dropped the temperature considerably. Clayton quietly closed the car door, zipped up his jacket, and turned up the collar, then scooted between two houses and paused behind a tree to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. From some distance away a dog barked lethargically, paused, barked again, and fell quiet.

The houses on either side of Clayton showed no sign of life. Moving low and slow anyway to avoid rousing any light sleepers, he passed into a backyard, staying as far away from the houses as possible. Hunched over, he took careful steps to the back end of the lot, where he found concealment behind a stand of trees that graced an empty stone pond.

Clayton froze at the close yelp of a coyote. Lackluster barks from the dog resumed. In the dim moonlight he saw the coyote quickly lope across the lawn in the direction of the barking dog. The coyote vanished, and Clayton moved on to the house where Birch had parked the Mustang. From a safe distance he made a full three-sixty reconnaissance. The house, on a double lot of at least half an acre, sat at the edge of a hill that dropped off steeply. There were no houses behind it, and thick stands of trees on either side blocked views from the adjacent houses. A high privacy wall ran from the driveway of the attached garage across the front of the house and severely restricted Clayton’s view. No lights showed at any of the windows.

Along with the Mustang, two other cars were parked in the driveway. From across the street, concealed behind some shrubbery, Clayton used the night scope to read the license plates. A late-model Audi coupe carried Canadian plates from British Columbia, and a domestic minivan had California tags. He called the information in to Armijo, switched his cell phone ringer off, and considered what he’d seen.

The house was a mid-sixties modern, with a vaulted roof, an expanse of glass windows that overlooked the backyard, and a soaring stone fireplace that rose above an elevated deck positioned to take in the city views below. There were no lights burning inside and no sign of activity.

He decided to take another tour of the property and crept through the trees on the north side of the house to the backyard. A closer look at the rear wall of glass through the scope revealed that some kind of material had been used to cover all the windows as well as the glass doors that opened onto the raised deck and the backyard patio. He checked all the windows on both sides of the house and found the same thing. It was impossible to see inside the house.

From the back of the lot Clayton mulled over the implications. Even though the house was almost completely secluded from prying eyes, every window had been blacked out. That meant the occupants were very serious about not wanting people to know what was going on inside. Also, the grounds at the back of the house were badly neglected, which didn’t fit with the character of the neat and tidy upscale neighborhood. But at the front of the house the grounds were well cared for, which meant that the occupants were hiding whatever they were doing in plain sight.

Clayton was pondering the possibilities when a car engine kicked over. He stayed put until the sound of the departing vehicle faded in the distance and then made his way to the street, staying in the shadows of a big tree. The Mustang was gone, which meant that Armijo should be tailing Birch. A text message on his cell phone told him that was exactly what Armijo was doing.

He decided to stake out the front of the house to see what happened next, and hunkered down under some low branches with his back against the trunk. All stayed quiet until the sound of a squealing, frightened dog pierced the silence and abruptly stopped. Within minutes Clayton saw the coyote come into view as it padded down the middle of the street carrying the limp body of a small dog in its tightly clamped mouth. A negligent owner had provided the coyote with a tasty meal.

Coyote, according to the Mescalero creation story, was a jokester put on the earth to remind human beings of their weaknesses and foolish ways. Almost without thinking, Clayton silently raised his chin to acknowledge the animal. The coyote glanced in his direction and passed by without pause, trotting toward the mountains that loomed above the Four Hills neighborhood and the city below.

Among the Mescalero, if you carried out a devious trick, such as trespassing on private property without cause, which was what Clayton was doing, or if you accomplished a stellar prank, it was called “pulling a little coyote.” The fact that the jokester had caught him red-handed almost made Clayton chuckle out loud.

The sound of an approaching car drew his attention back to the street. Headlights came into view and a vehicle passed by, continued up the road, and disappeared around a bend. Except for the canyon winds whistling through the trees and occasional traffic sounds that drifted over from Interstate 40, all was quiet for the next half hour. In spite of the growing cold and the deepening of the darkness, Clayton remained motionless, watching the darkened house for any sign of life, wondering what was inside.

Was it a safe house for illegal immigrants smuggled across the Mexican border? Was it a drug house run by a trafficker? Or a warehouse to store product for distribution along the infamous I-25 drug corridor? Maybe Birch and his buddies were operating a meth lab inside. Or a prostitution ring could be using it as a bordello, or to house sex slaves brought in illegally from one of the Eastern European countries. And what was with the Canadian and California license plates?