No Immunity (12 page)

Behind the door Louisa sounded like she was choking.

“Any lead, Louisa.”

“
Street News
!” a man called from the parking lot. “Hey, man, you got your issue of
Street News
? Just off the presses.” He ambled toward him.

Tchernak waved him off. “Louisa,
any lead
!”

“Grady had two deaf teenaged boys he brought back from Yaviza.”

“Were they here?” Tchernak asked.

“They were until Grady broke in and took them. He got them an apartment three blocks north, half a block to the right. Number One.”

“T
HAT TRUE?”
C
ECIL
M
C
G
UIRE
kept the point of the knife against Louisa Larson’s throat. Damned woman was bigger than he was. But he’d taken her by surprise. They called him the Weasel, and he was good at finding holes and passages, but when it came to springing like a cat, dead quiet with fangs ready to slash, hell, there was no one better.

This lady doc, she thought she was street-smart. Lot to learn for this one. She didn’t open the door right up wide like a hooker looking for trade. She figured she was smart just cracking it an inch.

Smart? Yeah. Open’s open. She put up a helluva fight, but the stupid broad broke half the pictures and beakers and glass gizmos herself. And then she told him where the tape was, like he was going to do like he said and not tie her up. Stupid broad. Then the dick’s banging at the door. His pulse is banging at his skin. All the doc needs to do is scream. But she don’t. She plays it smart. If she’d been that smart to begin with …But she was too scared then. “I said: Was it true, what you told him?”

She didn’t answer.

He pricked her skin. Scare her some more.

She didn’t even gasp. He ached to do another, dig the knife in deeper, but good sense stopped him. He hadn’t made it all these years in Vegas, when big guys were going down all around him, by being stupid. “Don’t fool with me, lady. You don’t give me the truth, I won’t be giving you just a scar. Get it?” He levered her around so that she was looking into the upended chairs, smashed pictures, broken glass. “What you told the dick, that true?”

“Yes!” He could feel her body lurch forward as she let out the word. He yanked her back by the wrists. His free hand was ready to slap over her mouth, but she didn’t scream.

“These kids, they know where he is?”

“I don’t know.”

He hesitated. “Maybe I better take you with me. Let you get them to tell me.”

She turned her head toward him. And then the damned bitch laughed. “By the time you do that, they’ll be gone. That private eye’ll have them halfway to L.A. by then.”

He gave her a good cut for that, a slash right beside the eye where she’d remember it. She gasped at that one.

Then he ran for his car.

T
HE
G
ATTOZZI
S
HERIFF’S
D
EPARTMENT
was not much bigger—or better—than the picture of the century-old Pioche lockup on the sheriff’s office wall. The whole affair was one storefront wide, with a counter blocking entry to two cells, bathroom, and the twelve-foot-square office in which Kiernan sat. The cells in the old Pioche jail were tiny windowless rooms with metal bed slabs and low openings barely large enough for a meal tray. The other half of the dank slab building was the “exercise room,” whose main features were the drain in the floor and the big metal eye for shackling prisoners. Lest the rustlers and card cheats conjure thoughts of unhooking themselves and escaping the garrote that hung in their future, the cellblock was surrounded by another building as if the two were Russian nesting dolls.

The sepia-toned photograph hung on the side wall of Sheriff Fox’s office where the present-day interrogee could study it in horror and the sheriff could ponder better days gone by. “Gives you pause, doesn’t it?” he said. “What it tells you is, in the state of Nevada we don’t lose prisoners. In Nevada we’ve had a century of practice keeping them.”

Fox nodded toward the photograph, vibrating his lower chin in the process. There was nothing of the fast, lithe fox in his bearlike build, his wide nose, brush of a mustache, his round red cheeks. It was as if the fox were in costume and visible only in the tight hazel eyes that peered out beneath his fluffy red-blond eyebrows. At a distance, Kiernan thought, Sheriff Fox’s big, soft body, his round face, could have lulled the unwary onto his lap to present their Christmas wishes. “We don’t,” he repeated, “lose our prisoners.”

“Congratulations.”

He might have mumbled something in response, but Kiernan couldn’t hear it. The voice that shouted in her head was Tchernak’s, repeating his oft-repeated maxim to her: “No taunting, no speeding, no defenestration!” Well, she’d already blown the first one. If she didn’t watch it, she’d have to count on the last two—in reverse order.

Fox leaned forward, his red-blond brows scrunched angrily. “Look, lady, you don’t dump a dead body, not in my district.”

“You want to talk law, let’s talk about kidnapping. I’m willing to discuss Jeff Tremaine’s dead woman with you, but if you continue to threaten me, you’ll be talking to my lawyer.”

“You better think carefully before you make your one and only phone call.”

She took a deep breath and then another. No way was she going to let Fox find out, but she wanted to know his take on the dead woman as much as he did hers. She breathed more slowly, until her skin no longer vibrated in anger. “The policeman is your friend,” Tchernak had teased her the last time he’d launched into his lecture on dealing maturely with authority figures. She hated authority, and the authority she hated most was this kind of asshole made omnipotent by his isolation.

She had ended up in jail three times before. This jail in Gattozzi was not one she wished to make number four. She took a deep breath and said, “Dr. Tremaine called me to confirm his findings on the cause of death of the deceased. I am a pathologist. We worked together in Africa and we had both seen Lassa fever deaths. This woman’s condition appeared to be similar. But there’s no way to tell until your pathologist does a complete postmortem and gets the results of toxicology reports. Doctor Tremaine would have told you all that if you had bothered to ask him instead of dragging me back here.”

“I interviewed him, all right. Know what he told me? He told me you dumped this body and ran.”

For an instant the room seemed to swirl. She gave her head a sharp shake. “Why would he say that?” She put up a hand to forestall his retort. “I mean, what reason would I have? I’m a licensed—” This was not the place to mention being a PI; she didn’t need Tchernak to remind her of that—” physician in San Diego. I flew in this morning, rented a car, and drove up here. The only place I stopped—the only place
to
stop—was the Doll’s House Cafe. Are you suggesting I came all the way from California to transport a dead body from there to here?”

Fox jerked back as if she’d punched him. Then he hunched forward, as if protecting that bruise. “I don’t know you flew in. The airline will tell me someone with your name came in.”

She held up one finger. “Someone who had to show a photo ID.”

Fox laughed. “Someone who’s got their picture on the ID that says Kiernan O’Shaughnessy.”

She lifted a second finger. “So pull up my motor vehicle file from California.”

Slowly, deliberately, Fox glanced around the room. “Dam, I guess the big fancy computer the taxpayers out here bought us just up and disappeared.”

Her fingers crushed into a fist. “What kind of lawman are you? You’re so determined to believe I’m a fraud, you won’t check the evidence. You’re wedded to the idea of me crossing a state line to relocate a corpse I have no connection with. Do you have psychedelics in the water out here?”

“Lady, I don’t put up with—”

“What’re you going to do? Arrest me? Take me back to Vegas and kidnap me again?”

“Lady!”—His face was all red now. He was yelling—” I am damned well going to make you tell me the truth about this.”

“Fine.” She leaned back on her chair, propped her feet against his desk, and said, “You’ve decided what the truth is. Tell me about it.”

His arm came down hard, stopping an inch from her shins. She forced herself to maintain the rhythm of her breath, to give no indication that his muscular control was more frightening than the hit would have been. “Am I under arrest? Or is police brutality a gift to every citizen?” Her voice was too loud for her languid pose, but she needed the volume to cover the quiver that was threatening to expose her. Fox was twice her size, but she wasn’t about to lose.

“You brought the body here because you figured you’d dump it out in the country where we wouldn’t be smart enough to know it was contagious.”

“Did I bring it from California? Flying in coach? I flew Southwest; maybe I got a ‘friends fly free’ fare.”

The cords in his neck sprang out, but he didn’t speak. He fingered a small picture on his desk, staring at it as if for control. “You’re a private eye. You got hired out of Vegas.”

So he’d already done a background search on her, a background search that he’d had to get the sheriff in the county seat to do on his computer, then dispatched five deputies to pick her up. This guy had a lot riding on her guilt. A sensible woman would choose each word with caution. “So I’m disposing of someone else’s dead body, huh? Why would one of your fine citizens hire an out-of-state detective to get rid of a corpse? Surely in Las Vegas you’ve got enough thugs who are expert at that?”

“You’ve got no local connections. Word’s not going to be all over town before the body’s cold.”

“But why would I bring it here? This state is ninety percent desert. I could have driven ten miles out of Las Vegas, dumped the body, and made my flight back to San Diego with an hour to spare for the slots. Why would I go to all the trouble of bringing her up here and foisting her on a guy I haven’t seen in years?” She dropped her feet to the floor with a thud. “Just tell me that.”

Fox’s pudgy face broadened into a smile. It was clear from the strained lines across his jaw that this wasn’t an expression he employed often. “You brought the body here, Doctor, so that you’d have a reason to see Jeff Tremaine again.”

“So you’re changing your story? I didn’t just drop the body and run, then?”

His hard-held smile dropped, and for the first time he seemed flustered. The picture frame slid from his fingers, landing facedown on the desk.

“You know, Sheriff, if I’d wanted to see Jeff, I could have met him and his wife in Vegas for dinner. It would have been easier.”

“Ah, but that’s just what you couldn’t do. Mrs. Tremaine is a fine woman, much too fine a woman to eat with you. She knows what happened in Africa.”

Kiernan stared, the game gone flat. The air felt thicker, filled with the stale odor of dust like the dry earth that swept around every door and through the windows in Africa. How could Jeff Tremaine’s wife know about Hope Mkema? Jeff had said just today that he hadn’t mentioned Hope’s name since he left India. There were no other Americans on the project. Surely Mrs. Tremaine in Gattozzi, Nevada, hadn’t been in contact with the British or African doctors from the Lassa fever project. And yet, if Jeff didn’t tell her …She herself certainly hadn’t. And Hope Mkema was dead.

“Gotcha there, Doctor. Crime always catches up with you. You should have just left Jeff Tremaine alone.”

Her eyes shot open. “What! Are you crazy? You think that
I
—”

“There’s no point in lying now.”

“I’m telling you—”

He started to reach for her arm, then seemed to think better of it. “You come in here, dump a body, lie to the sheriff, and now you figure I’m going to believe your word over that of one of the most respected citizens in town?”

“Sheriff,” she said through tightly clenched jaw, “there’s a lot of accusation without the presence of the accuser going on here. Get Jeff Tremaine and his wife over here and let them speak for themselves.”

“Out of town.”

“What?”

“They’re out of town.”

“Jeff was just here this afternoon.”

“And you were in Las Vegas this afternoon.”

“Fine, then let me speak to the person who says he saw me dumping that body off.”

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention. I just told you, he’s out of town.”

She opened her mouth, but there were too many questions to ask, and, she knew, no answers forthcoming. She let her mouth close, and she sat staring from the back of the fallen frame on Fox’s desk to the photograph of the dank and cruel nineteenth-century jail built in the era when accusation and guilt were one and the same.

Her silence seemed to stump Fox as no previous assault had.

After a moment she stood up. “Sheriff, I know nothing of this dead woman. I didn’t bring her here. You’ve got no evidence to merit charging me. So call your deputy and have him drive me back to Las Vegas.”

“The bus comes at seven A.M. Hotel’s two doors down.”

She took her time poking her arms into her coat sleeves, hooking her pack onto her belt, glancing at the jail. What had she been thinking to let herself be stranded in a desert village with not even a bus out till morning? She was as trapped as the photo in the overturned frame.

Idly she reached for the frame, tacitly daring Fox to make a territorial fuss.

“Sheriff, maybe you don’t realize the potential danger this dead woman puts you in. You and everyone in Gattozzi and beyond. We don’t know what she has, but it could be contagious enough to wipe out anyone downwind. Jeff and I didn’t go near her without protective gear. We’re talking epidemic, bleeding out—”

“That’s going to be your defense, huh?”

She bit back her normal retort. This was too important. She leaned her hands on the edge of his desk. “What can I tell you to convince you?”

“You can confess.”

She took a final look at Sheriff Fox. The man was no fool. Behind his pudgy face was the mind of a fox, she was sure of it. A fox used to big empty fields where the hens had nowhere to hide. He’d be a fox who didn’t have to scheme any too often. Was he just plain bored enough to break the law for the hell of it? Was the idea of epidemic too awful to consider? That didn’t follow the law of reason, but when you’re the law, the law’s however you want it to be.