SK01 - Waist Deep (21 page)

37

A
Porsche.
I should’ve known.

After leaving the Rocket, I’d driven up High Drive and found my way south to Fillmore High School.
A Zip’s Burger was across the street from
the faculty parking.
I backed the Celica into a parking slot and waited.
After a while, the smell of
burgers and fries got to me.
I wandered inside and bought a plain burger and some more coffee.
My headache had subsided to almost nothing and I didn’t want it coming back out of hunger.

I sat in the driver’s seat of the Celica, munching my burger and sipping a cup of coffee that had a slight burnt taste to it.

When the kids got out, large groups s
treamed across the street for that post-school burger, a universal fixture since burgers were invented.
I kept my eyes trained on the faculty lot, wondering how long it would take for Gary LeMond to leave.
Was he the kind of teacher who stayed until five, working on papers and lesson plans?
Or did he bust right out of there, getting off-campus even before some of the students made it?

I didn’t know.
But of all the people I’d come into contact with since I started looking for Kris, LeMond was the only one I couldn’t put my finger on.
He bugged me for some reason.
Since I didn’t have anywhere else to go, unless Adam worked a miracle for me, checking up on LeMond was as good a place to waste time as any other.

A solitary figure strolled purposefully around the faculty lot.
I recognized the shirt and the shape.
It was the school security officer, Bill, pulling parking lot duty.
He was probably there to make sure none of the kids vandalized a teacher’s car after school.
Ah, the glamour.

I realized that LeMond might have some kind of after-school activity.
Maybe the drama club was meeting or something.
Hadn’t
Marie
Byrnes said something about it being his turn to produce a play?

The last of the burger tamped down my hunger.
I balled up the wrapper and returned to sipping my coffee.

My questions became moot fifteen minutes l
ater when I spotted LeMond speed
walking out to the parking lot.
He had some books and folders under one arm.
Bill gave him a comradely wave but LeMond didn’t notice.
He strode directly to a white Porsche 911 and got in quickly.

Like I said, I should’ve figured.

I started the car and slipped into traffic behind him.
He drove like a maniac, slipping in and out of traffic like he was on a
N
ASCAR
tryout.
Just in the short drive down to
Twenty-ninth
and over to Grand Boulevard, three s
eparate cars honked at him. O
ne guy in a Blazer shot him the bird.
LeMond ignored
them all
and zipped along.

The nice part about long straight-aways like
Twenty-ninth
was that it was easy to keep his car in sight.
But when he turned right on Grand Boulevard, I had to speed up to avoid losing him.
By the time I got to the intersection, the light had changed and the car in front of me was waiting to go straight.
I looked frantically down
Grand Boulevard and watched the
distinct Porsche rear end
go around the bend.

When the light changed, I chirped my tires, pulled around the corner and accelerated hard.
By the time I got to the curve in the road, LeMond’s Porsche was out of sight.

I slowed down and thought about it.
Unless he’d sped up to about fifty or sixty, he couldn’t have reached the crest of the hill at
Fourteenth
, where Grand Boulevard drops down into the downtown area.
Besides, Grand is a
twenty-mile-an-hour
zone and heavily patrolled by traffic cops.
The traffic up near the park slowed to a crawl.
More likely, he turned off on one of the side streets.

Manito Park appeared on my left, a huge park with
a
wide open grassy area around a duck pond and gentle, treed slopes.
He hadn’t turned that direction, so all that remained was a right hand turn.

I took the next right and drove down the side street for several blocks until it approached the maze of streets next to Rockwood Boulevard.
Another two blocks and the houses went from middle class to upper class in a hurry.
I hoped that LeMond wasn’t privately rich or banging someone who was.
At least that way, he had probably stayed to the west of Rockwood Boulevard.

I drove down the residential side streets on a serpentine course, looking at the cars parked in driveways and on the streets.
It occurred to me that LeMond might have a garage of some sort to keep his Porsche, in which case I would never spot it.

Once I started looking for Porsches, it was amazing how many I came across.
Only one was white, though and it was a 944 parked outside a large brick house that was several tax brackets above a teacher’s income.

I was down to
Sixteenth
and just about to give up when I finally spotted LeMond’s Porsche
. He was
parked in a d
riveway next to a small rancher, mid-block
.
The Porsche was rest
ed under a portable carport directly next to the house.

The neighborhood was solidly middle class and bustling with late afternoon activity.
A pair of elementary-aged kids were playing catch with a football in the front yard just two houses away from LeMond’s.
Another, who might have been a high schooler or maybe only junior high, was trudging sullenly up the sidewalk.
Across the street from LeMond’s house, a trim woman about thirty was doing some sort of yard work in the flower bed next to her porch, her breath pluming upward in the air as she worked on her knees.
The rest of her yard was sharply manicured.
I imagined it was a sight to behold once
spring
came around.

I drove around the block and parked f
our houses up from LeMond’s
on the opposite side of the street.
This put me as far away from the two kids playing football and the diligent yard mistress as possible, but still left me a decent view of his place.
I wasn’t sure how long I could sit and watch without arousing suspicion, though in a neighborhood like this I didn’t think it would be very long.
On a street like this, everyone knows everyone else’s cars.
Plus, the house I was parked in front of didn’t have a driveway
. That meant
I was
probably sitting right in what some
resident felt was his personal parking place.

In reality, the street is public property and anyone can park there.
But I didn’t feel like trying to explain that to an irate homeowner while the rest of the neighborhood looked on.
Especially with the two kids, who I’d come to believe were brothers, playing half a block away.
The last thing I want
ed was someone thinking I was some kind of a burglar. Or a
pervert.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to wait very long.
Barely ten minutes
passed and I saw exactly why LeMond had been driving so fast.
A small red car pulled up direc
tly in front of his house. A
dark haired beauty stepped out.
I put her a
t twenty or twenty-two at first. She carried
school books
, but she could be in college
.
But then I noticed how
she still walked with the carefree step of a younger girl.
I lowered my estimate and that put her in high school.

The girl’s hair was long and hung nearly to her waist ab
ove pert buttocks
.
This was a girl that would never buy her own drink in a bar when she was old enough to get in.
A goddamn heartbreaker.

Like Kris Sinderling.

The girl rang the doorbell and LeMond answered almost instantly. He flashe
d a big, dopey grin at her. S
he gave him a quick embrace before stepping inside.
LeMond cast a glance up and down the street before closing the door.

Sonofabitch, I thought.
He was sleeping with her.

On the tail
end of that came the devil’s advocate, arguing that maybe he was tutoring her.
Or maybe she was in drama and he was going over lines with her.
Or maybe she was a college girl and my first impression of her age had been dead on.
Nothing wrong with a high school teacher sleeping with a college student, is there?

And who’s to say that he’s actually sleeping with her?
Maybe—

I shut that argument down.
The quick hug and the furtive look up and down the street told me all I needed to know.
He was sleeping with her and for whatever reason, he wasn’t supposed to be.
I didn’t know if that
look happened
because she was a student like Kris or because he had a wife or girlfriend and he was just cheating or what.
But he was up to no good.

What I really wanted to do w
as to sneak up to his house,
peer into the windows and get a look inside, even though I was afraid of what I might find.
But it was still light out and would be for a while yet.

Besides, I knew what I needed to know.

Gary LeMond was a slime ball.

3
8

I drove to the gas station and filled the tank.
While I was there, I called Adam again.
He answered on the second ring.

“Adam, it’s Stef.”

“Oh, hey, how’s it going?”

“Good.
You get my message?”

“Yeah,” he said.
“And I’m sorry, but I was too busy to get lunch anyway.”

“You want to grab some dinner?”

“Can’t.
Nikki and I have plans.
Thanks, though.”

“Okay.”

We were silent for a moment and I felt foolish for talking in code.
It’s not like the Russians or the Feds were listening in.

Adam said, “Listen, t
hough, I’m not as busy tomorrow
as I thought I was going to be.
I could probably meet you for coffee in the morning, if you want.”
His voice was smooth and casual, but I knew him well enough to sense the excitement underneath.

“That sounds good,” I said, trying to mask my own excitement.
“The usual
place
?”

“Sure,” Adam said.
“See you there.”

I hung up, thrilled.
He had found something, I knew.
He was excited because of whatever the technological feat was to accomplish it, but I was excited because tomorrow morning I would have something to go on.
Maybe.

And
I’d be
one step closer to finding Kris.