Trouble at the Red Pueblo (29 page)

Spider squinted at the screen as traffic reversed in a whir of grainy images. “What was it?”

“There.” Laurie stabbed a finger at the screen. “Hold it right there.”

Toby took his notebook out of his pocket and squinted at the screen. “That’s Dr. Houghton’s pickup and horse trailer.”

“I see now,” Spider said. “The horse trailer’s got
Braces
painted on the front. Huh.”

“We’re not looking for just anyone you might know.” Toby put his notebook back in his pocket. “We’re looking for people who have a connection to Austin Lee. Roll it, Sam.”

“Well, as to that—” Spider didn’t get his thought finished because Laurie jumped up again.

“Stop. Go back a bit.” She bent over and stared at the screen. “It’s hard because we don’t have color to help out, but look at that pickup. The one with a rack of lights on top?”

Spider whistled under his breath. “Matt Taylor.”

“We’ve got him signed in with the gatehouse,” Toby said.

Spider frowned at Toby. “You didn’t mention you had him on the gatehouse log.”

“Didn’t I?” Toby scratched the back of his head. “Well, we do. We only have him logged in, not out. Go ahead, Sam.”

Spider leaned forward, eyes on the monitor as traffic skittered across it in double time. He blinked periodically to rest his eyes but returned his gaze to the screen each time until he started to feel a dull ache at the back of his head. The ache morphed into a vise that was attached just behind the ears, exerting steadily mounting pressure. Closing his eyes eased that pressure somewhat, and he found himself giving in to the relief he found that way.

“Wait.” Laurie put her hand on his knee. “Was that Linda’s car?”

Spider opened his eyes. “I didn’t see.”

“Back up. Back up. There.” Laurie leaned forward and touched the screen. “See? Her SUV is tan, and the front bumper is turned down a bit, like a frown. I’m sure that’s her.”

“Well, well, well.” Toby peered at the screen and scribbled in his notebook. “So, Matt Taylor comes through, and twenty minutes later, when Linda comes through, Matt is still there.”

“Wherever ‘there’ is,” Spider said. “This road leads lots of places.”

Toby put his notebook away. “But we’ve got Matt in the gate log. Don’t forget that.”

Spider rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t feel like trying to argue. He clasped his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, and tried to ignore the tightening of the vise. He was being no help. Laurie was, though. And since he brought Laurie, he was a help, after all. He closed his eyes, felt the pressure ease, and decided to keep them closed.

Spider didn’t know how long he drifted in darkness. He may even have dozed, but Laurie’s elbow nudging his arm brought him back. “Linda again.”

“Stop,” Toby said to Sam. “Back up and let’s get a look at that. Yep. You’re right. She’s going back the other direction.” Out came the notebook.

Spider sat up and blinked. His headache was better, but when the images began racing across the screen again, he closed his eyes. How long was this going to go on?

“Boom.” It was Toby who nudged Spider this time. “There’s Matt, five minutes after Linda goes through.” He wrote furiously for a moment, closed the notebook with a flourish, and stood. “Thank you all for coming over. Laurie, you were a great help. I knew you would be.” He turned to the technician. “Thank you, Sam.”

Spider reached for his hat. “So, have we watched the whole time frame that you were given for the murder to have been committed?”

Toby scratched the back of his head. “Not the entire window. You think we ought to do that?”

Spider set his hat back down. “That depends on if you’ve got your mind made up about who did this or not.”

“I’ve got an open mind,” Toby said. “Okay. We’ve got another ten minutes or so to watch. Let’s get to it.” He nodded to the technician. “Roll ‘em, Sam.”

Sam rolled ‘em. Toby sat down, and Spider tightened his jaw as he leaned forward again, elbows on knees. They could have been out of here if he’d kept his mouth shut.

He watched for as long as he could before the pressure at the back of his head forced his eyelids closed. It seemed forever before Toby said, “That’s it, then. Looks like we didn’t learn anything more out of this last bit of footage.”

Spider stood and picked up his hat. “Yeah, but you feel good because you exercised due diligence.”

Laurie put her hand through Spider’s arm and pinched him, at the same time asking Toby, “Is that all you need us for?”

“Yes. Thanks for coming over.” Toby busied himself rolling one of the chairs back to its place.

“Glad to meet you, Sam.” Spider raised his hat in salute and walked Laurie out into the lobby. He blinked at the brightness and put on his hat and sunglasses as he headed for the entrance doors. Once outside, he took a deep breath. “I’m glad to be out of there. Old Toby Flint was wearing mighty thin.”

“He’s nice,” Laurie said.

“He’s willing to learn, but he’s a lightweight. Come on. Let’s go find a place to buy a Pepsi.”

“As long as it’s not thirty-two ounces, I’m with you.”

They walked to the pickup and drove with the windows down and the air conditioning on until they got to a drive-through. Spider ordered soft drinks and gave Laurie hers with a questioning glance. It was half the size of yesterday’s, and she took it with a smile.

Spider put the change in the ashtray. “Any other place you want to go, or shall we head home?”

Laurie’s eyes twinkled. “By home, I assume you mean Kanab? No, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Spider pulled out of the drive-in and got on the arterial that would lead to the freeway. Laurie sat silently sipping her drink, apparently lost in thought. She surfaced about the time he spied I-15 in the distance.

“Which way do you turn to get to Defrain Estates?” she asked.

“South. Why?”

“Um, I think I’d like to go there.”

Spider shot her a quizzical look. “Whatever for?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. There’s something I want to show you.”

Spider moved over to the right lane. “They won’t let us in the house. Probably not even the yard. It’s a crime scene.”

She raised her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It’s not near the house. I’ll show you when we get there.”

Spider glanced at Laurie. She leaned her head against the window, the soft-drink straw in her mouth. But she wasn’t drinking. She was staring straight ahead.

It didn’t take long to come to the off-ramp, and they soon passed through the intersection they had been watching all morning. “You just had your picture took,” Spider commented. He was rewarded with a faint smile from Laurie.

The gatehouse was uninhabited, so they drove up to the top of the mesa without stopping. When they turned onto Acacia Street, Laurie sat up and pointed. “Pull over where you parked yesterday.”

Spider did as he was directed. “Okay. What do you want to show me?”

“We have to get out.” Laurie opened her door.

Mystified, Spider turned off the ignition and climbed out of the cab. Laurie waited for him to join her, and he followed her across the vacant lot toward the edge of the mesa, repressing the urge to ask again what she had to show him.

She led him to the beginning of the primitive road that dropped down the slope to the bottom. “Notice anything?” she asked.

Spider stood with his hands on his hips and examined the lane. Not quite wide enough for a sedan to negotiate comfortably, it had obviously been used by dirt bikes and ATVs. Made mostly of clay soil, the grade was steep, and at one place rain had washed away part of the far edge. At the bottom, the track cut across a vacant field to an electrical substation sitting a couple hundred feet away from a paved road. Spider turned to Laurie and shrugged. “It’s a way to get off the mesa. It’d be hard in a sedan, but not impossible.”

“Well, that, too. But look here.” She pointed to horse tracks coming up the road to the place where a scrub juniper grew at the top. “I noticed these when I was checking for a bush I could use yesterday. Something about them didn’t register until we were watching the video this morning.”

Spider hunkered down and traced around one of the horseshoe prints. “You mean it registered when you saw Jack’s horse trailer?”

Laurie squatted beside him. “Yeah. That’s Taffy’s hoofprint. I’m sure of it.”

“Huh.” Spider stared at the track, his mind working. “What makes you so sure?”

“It’s the special shoes that Jack’s farrier uses.” She pointed to two places on the imprint. “The nail holes are placed differently from a regular shoe.”

“So you’re saying this is Taffy?”

Laurie sighed. “I’d stake my life on it.”

Spider stood and offered his hand to help Laurie up. Neither spoke, and when Spider walked away from the tree, eyes on the ground, Laurie followed.

“I don’t see any boot tracks,” Spider said.

“There’s one heel mark here,” Laurie said, pointing to it. “Up there on top, the soil’s sandier. You sink in farther, and the top falls in on it. It doesn’t keep a print.”

Head down, Spider scanned the area around the tree. “Here’s one that isn’t too bad.”

Laurie examined the print. “What size would you say that was? Man or woman?”

“Hard to say. It looks like the boot slid in the track. You think it could have been Amy?”

“I have a hard time thinking it could be Jack. Except—” She got a stricken look on her face. “Oh, dear.”

“That sounds bad.”

She sank to the ground in the shade of the tree and hugged her knees. “I think it may be.”

“You’ll get your bottom all dusty,” Spider warned, hunkering down beside her.

“In the great scheme of things, a dusty bottom is nothing.” She patted the place beside her. “Sit down. I’ve got something to tell you.”

Spider was tempted to make a joke about Laurie wanting the chance to dust off his rear end, but the look on her face stopped him. He sat with boot heels dug into the dirt and knees slightly bent. “Okay. Shoot.”

“It’s about Jack.” She picked up a stick and started drawing circles in the area between them. “I don’t know if you remember that day we had lunch at his place.”

Again Spider suppressed a flippant reply. Of course he remembered. It was a terrible, heart-wrenching day for him, the day he caught his wife in the arms of another man. “I remember,” he said.

“Well, we rode around to Goblin Valley. There’s a small cave there with a spring in it where white salamanders live. We got off the horses and were walking to where the cave was, and he got real dizzy. I had to hold him up— it seemed like forever. He wouldn’t let me help him sit down. Said he was like an old horse. He had to stay on his feet or he’d die.”

The sun went behind a cloud, and Laurie paused to look at the sky. A breeze sprang up, blowing her hair away from her face. She ran her hands through it and then continued her narrative.

“After a while he got over the dizzy spell. We gave up on the cave and went and got our horses. I had to give him a boost up on his horse, but he was able to ride home. On the way, he told me that he had cancer three years ago. They treated him but said he could expect it to come galloping back some day. He thought maybe that was the day.”

“Was that why he didn’t go riding with you?”

Laurie nodded. “He went to St. George to the clinic.”

“Huh. I saw him that day. He was pulling out of the parking lot where Austin has his office.”

Laurie grimaced. “That doesn’t look good. He told me, when we were rehearsing for Western Legends, that the doctor gave him six weeks or less.” She paused, looking up as the iron-gray clouds bulldozed in front of the sun. “He said he was busy getting loose ends tied up. Said he wanted things to be better for people after he was gone.”

“Farewell to red rock arches, farewell to wonderstone,” Spider murmured.

“Yeah.” A tear slid down Laurie’s cheek.

Spider put his arm around her.

She sniffed. “That’s why it’s been so hard to have you sniping at him all the time.”

“Well, it looked to me like he was in love with you, and that day it looked like you might be leaning toward reciprocating.”

Laurie’s eyes widened and she pulled away. “Spider! How could you think that?”

“Last week, when Karam and I were up on the mesa, I saw you down there in a long embrace. How was I to know he was feeling poorly at the moment? He’s always trying to sneak an arm around you.”

“That’s just his way. He honestly loves people but not in that way. He’s never been interested in girls.”

“Great suffering zot, do you mean he’s gay?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. He told me when we were teenagers that he would never marry. Said he didn’t feel for girls what he thought he was supposed to. I think he loved me because it didn’t change the way I thought about him.”

“Well, that sure puts a new face on everything.”

“That’s what I mean. You’ve been so jealous you couldn’t see what a good man he is. He’s dying, and he’s trying to make things better for other people.”

Spider cleared his throat. “That sounds really great until you think of what happened in that house over yonder.”

“I can’t believe that he did it.”

“Even in the face of that?” Spider indicated the tracks with his thumb.

Laurie was silent for a moment, and then she nodded. “Yes. Even in the face of that. I think Jack doesn’t have the capacity.”

Spider smoothed out the dirt, erasing the circles Laurie had drawn. “Have you remembered that there are two horses with misshapen hoofs?”

“Do you think I haven’t been thinking about that? But it won’t work. Dorrie’s farrier modified regular shoes, just like our man did. I saw the tracks just last week. They’re not the same.”

“So, we’re back to Amy.”

“Aggh! How do you deal with this kind of stuff all the time?” Laurie got to her feet and brushed off her pant legs.

“Give me a hand.” Spider reached up, so Laurie could help him stand. “I don’t often meet this kind of a situation, either.”

“Well, I’ve told you what I know. It’s yours to deal with. I’m not going to think about it anymore.”

Spider looked at the sky. “What if it rains tonight?”