Strangers (9 page)

“How about Derek Zastroy?” I asked. “Does he use drugs?”

“Wouldn't surprise me.” Oliver shuffled his feet, tucked the Stetson down over his forehead again. “Look, I've got work to do. Mr. Neilsen comes in here and finds me wasting time talking, it's my butt.”

“Wasting time, Jimmy? When what we've been talking about is helping prove your buddy's innocence?”

“I didn't mean it like that. I want to help Cody, sure, but I told you everything I know, who I think hurt those women. Anything more I can do, you just ask. But right now…”

“Okay, then. Thanks.”

He moved past me by half a dozen steps, paused, half turned toward me again. “I better give you my cell phone number. I mean, you shouldn't just show up out here again when I'm working.”

“Or stop by your house unannounced.”

“Yeah, that too. My mother…” He shook his head, recited the number, and hurried away while I was writing it down in my notebook.

*   *   *

I was almost back to Highway 80 when the green-and-white sheriff's cruiser passed me heading in the opposite direction. I had the impression that the hard, chiseled face of the driver belonged to Joe Felix, and a few seconds later I was sure of it. In the rearview mirror I saw brake lights flare, the cruiser swing into a fast U-turn, the bar flasher on its roof begin to pulse as it came speeding after me.

I slowed immediately, pulled over to the side of the road. The cruiser slid up close on the Jeep's tail and out came Felix. I watched him pause for three or four seconds before he approached—looking at the rear license plate, I thought. I had the side window down, but he didn't walk up close; instead he stood off a few paces and gestured for me to step out.

The look of him was neither hostile nor friendly. He said in neutral tones, “Cody Hatcher's Jeep.” It wasn't a question.

“Borrowed, yes. With Mrs. Hatcher's permission.”

“Why? You've got a car of your own.”

“Mine doesn't have four-wheel drive.”

“No need for four-wheel drive out this way.”

“I didn't know that. I was told I'd need it for desert driving.”

“Planning to do a lot of that, are you?”

“Not exactly.” Then, to see what kind of reaction I'd get, “A trip out to lost Horse for a talk with Max Stendreyer.”

No reaction. I wondered if anything ever surprised Felix, if he was even capable of surprise. “Why?” he said.

“To ask him a few questions.”

“About the night he saw Cody Hatcher running away from the Oasis.” Again, not a question.

“Pretty much.”

“I wouldn't advise it,” Felix said.

“No?”

“No. It's never a good idea for city people to drive around in unfamiliar country. That goes double when you're in Cody Hatcher's Jeep. Feelings are running strong these days—you had a taste of that last night.”

“Uh-huh. And a lot of citizens own guns in this county.”

“That's right.”

“Max Stendreyer being one of them.”

“Right again. He has weapons permits and he's antisocial. Doesn't like strangers.”

I said, prodding a little, “Weapons to protect his livelihood as well as his property.”

Not so much as a flicker in Felix's gray-green eyes, but he knew what I meant by livelihood. He let half a dozen seconds go by before he said, “Be a good idea if you didn't believe everything you're told.”

“I'll remember that. If Stendreyer was a lawbreaker, you'd have him in jail along with Cody Hatcher.”

“If I had proof.”

“I'll take my chances with him just the same,” I said. “Unless you order me to stay away from him.”

“I'd have to have a legal reason for that. And you haven't given me one, so far.”

“I'll be on my way, then, Sheriff, if that's all.”

“Not quite,” he said. “Where were you coming from just now?”

I hesitated. Tell him the truth? Yes. Jimmy Oliver might not mention my visit, but his mother would surely tell his uncle I'd been around asking for the kid. And with a hard man like Felix, the wise thing was to always be straightforward. He was tolerant enough now, but he could make my stay miserable—or terminate it—any time he felt like it.

I said, “The Neilsen ranch. To see your nephew.”

Still the poker face. Felix stood stolidly with thumbs hooked into the sides of his Sam Browne belt. Pretty soon he said, “Why?”

“He's a friend of Cody Hatcher's.”

“Not any more he isn't. What did you expect him to tell you?”

“Just what he did. That he believes Cody is innocent.”

“He's wrong. Anything else?”

“The name of a man he thinks might be guilty. Derek Zastroy.”

“He's wrong about that, too. I questioned Zastroy, not once but twice. He has alibis for two of the assaults.”

“Your nephew said for only one.”

“Third time wrong. Two.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it's not Zastroy.”

“No. It's Cody Hatcher. What anybody says or thinks isn't going to change that. You're wasting your time.”

“My time, though, isn't it?”

“As long as you don't make any trouble. Or get into any.”

“You made that plain last night, Sheriff. Can I be on my way now?”

“One more thing,” he said. “Hatcher's lawyer was in to see me and the D.A., Frank Mendoza. Wanted us to let you have a short interview with Cody Hatcher. In the interests of justice.”

“And you and Mendoza said no.”

“Right. We said no.”

 

8

It was getting on toward late afternoon when I rolled back into downtown Mineral Springs. Less than a couple of hours of daylight left—not enough time for me to chance a trip to Lost Horse. Or to the Eastwell Mine, for that matter. The last place I wanted to be at nightfall was out in the desert, alone in Cody Hatcher's Jeep on desolate and unfamiliar terrain. As Felix had said, feelings were running high; I was enough of a target in the daytime. Talks with Max Stendreyer and Gene Eastwell would have to wait.

I parked in a lot around the corner from the Horseshoe Casino and walked back there. The interior of this place was an oblong cut into two unequal pieces, the largest devoted to gambling with the bar on one side, the smallest a coffee shop at the rear; otherwise there wasn't much to distinguish it from the Lucky Strike, except that the color scheme was red and gold, the casino walls had gold-flecked mirrors on them, and the watering hole—the Saddle Bar, according to a sign at the open entrance to it—was decorated in overblown Western style. The bartender was a balding man in his fifties; when I got his attention, he told me this was Zastroy's day off. Next scheduled shift: 4:00
P.M.
tomorrow. I said I had business with Zastroy and asked where he lived, and got the expected nonanswer that it was against the rules to give out personal information about employees.

When I finally tracked down a local telephone directory, it was no help either. No listing for Derek Zastroy. A talk with him would have to wait, too.

Likewise one with Gene Eastwell, if I could even get an audience with him. He wasn't at Eastwell Mining Company, a large suite of offices in a new stucco building a block off Main Street, and I couldn't get a straight answer as to when he would be available. The person I talked to, an Assistant in Charge of Operations, whatever that meant, was friendly enough until I told him my business with the boss's son was personal; if I was not involved in the mining industry, he wasn't interested in me. For all he knew, his expression said, I was an insurance salesman or something equally unwelcome. He did consent, grudgingly, to pass along a message to Mr. Eastwell. So I wrote “Please call cell # at your convenience” on the back of one of my business cards, put the card into a borrowed envelope, sealed the envelope, and wrote Eastwell's name and “Personal” on the face of it. On the way out I helped myself to some promotional literature on the Eastwell Mining Company. The more you know about who you're dealing with, the better.

From there I drove to Cheryl's house and exchanged Cody's Jeep for my car. The Jeep had drawn looks and stares around town as it was—one citizen had flipped me off on my way out of the downtown parking lot—and I had no intention of leaving my wheels overnight in Cheryl's neighborhood where it might be vulnerable.

Nobody had bothered the car during the afternoon; at least I didn't see any more key scratches or any fresh dents, the windows were all intact, and the engine started up right away. I drove downtown to the Sunshine Hair Salon, stuck my head inside long enough to determine that Alana Farmer wasn't at her station and to receive a laser glare from the frizzy-haired proprietress, and then wasted my time with a visit to the address I had for her, a somewhat rundown apartment building near the high school. Nobody home there, either. One more conversation on the back burner.

Too late in the day to start trying to interview the three rape victims? Yes. That was the tricky part of my investigation. It was not likely any of the women would be willing to discuss their ordeals with a stranger, particularly not after nightfall, and even if I did manage to interview one or two, it wasn't likely they'd have anything to tell me that they hadn't told the law and was not contained in Sam Parfrey's file. But I had to make the effort. And I had to be very damn careful how I went about it.

*   *   *

The only Internet service the Goldtown Motel offered was dial-up. I asked the desk clerk on duty if there was a place in town that offered Wi-Fi service; he looked at me as if I'd asked for a direct line to the White House. You could get laid in Mineral Springs a lot more easily, it seemed, than you could get connected in the conventional sense.

Our agency had an AOL Connect account for situations such as this, so I was able to get online, but it was a slow process. You don't have to be a fan of modern communication technology to become spoiled by and dependent on high-speed and Wi-Fi service.

Two e-mails from Tamara, one informing me that Jake Runyon had closed a case I'd been working before leaving San Francisco, the other asking how I was doing in “the wilds of Nevada” and if there was anything she could do to help. It took me a while to answer the second because it required a fair amount of typing. I could have called her at the office instead, but there was no urgent need and she'd be busy with end-of-the-day business. I tapped out a list of names for background checks—Max Stendreyer, Derek Zastroy, Jimmy Oliver, Rick Firestone, Alana Farmer, Gene Eastwell—and briefly outlined what I wanted her to look for. If there was anything important I should know about any of them, I wrote, she could call me on my cell, otherwise an e-mail report would suffice. When I finished and read over what I'd written, I added Cody Hatcher, Matt Hatcher, and Joe Felix to the list. Always pays to be thorough.

It was early, not much past five o'clock, and Kerry would probably still be at Bates and Carpenter, but I called home anyway. Emily answered. Home alone and glad to hear from me. We talked a little about her schoolwork, her singing lessons, then about Kerry. Doing just fine, in Emily's opinion. Did I want Mom to call me when she got home? No, because I might be working part of the evening. Just tell her, I said, that the reunion with Cheryl Hatcher had gone pretty much as anticipated and my investigation was progressing.

After I cleaned up, I went out to get something to eat. But not in either of the casino restaurants, with their palls of death smoke. On a side street I found a Mexican restaurant that had a separate nonsmoking room and took my time filling up on a pretty good chicken tostada and a bottle of Dos Equis. I kept the cell phone switched on, something I don't usually do in restaurants, but it stayed silent. If Gene Eastwell had gotten my message, he'd either ignored it or was taking his time about responding.

Back in my room, I debated whether to call Cheryl or go out to see her in person. I had more questions for her, but I didn't want to pose them prematurely, without a better understanding of what her son had or had not been up to. Too much personal contact was not a good idea, either; our past history was probably common knowledge among the locals now and it would be foolish to give the gossips and the wackos any additional information.

So I settled for calling her, only she didn't answer her cell or her landline. Working late, maybe, though it was close to eight o'clock.

I sat in the armchair with the repaired rip in the seat and read over the material I'd taken from the mining company's offices. Eastwell was a large and thriving outfit, all right. They owned three operating gold mines in the general area, the largest of them an underground operation in which such equipment as jack-leg drills, dynamite, scaling bars, muck machines, and slushers were used to get the ore out of the veins and up to the surface for processing by means of ball mills and jigging machines. Right. That was evidently the mine where Cody Hatcher had been employed and Gene Eastwell and Matt Hatcher still worked. Over the fourteen years it had been in operation, it had yielded an average of a million ounces of gold per annum.

The company's other two, smaller mines were of the open pit variety. This type utilized a chemical process in addition to the mechanical task of removing gold-bearing rock, something that had to do with the ore being pressed through carbon pillars and then interacting with caustic soda and cyanide to leach out the gold. More technical stuff that I didn't completely understand, not that it really mattered. Those two mines produced a combined total of just under a million ounces annually.

There was a profile of the Eastwell family, three brothers who had learned the business from their deceased father and built it into the multimillion-dollar force it was today. Gene Eastwell's name was mentioned, but without anything in the way of biographical information.