The Fort Collins police turned out to be more confident than they had reason to be. Sally, Maude, and Aggie hung around for the next two hours, while the cops took Billy away and searched for Charlie Preston. To no avail. Sally wondered why. Maybe the girl had actually been at the mall, working at her job, when Sally and Maude and Aggie had first arrived. Maybe Charlie had somehow caught sight of them and fled, without getting word to Billy Reno. That would explain his coming to pick her up, and Charlie being nowhere to be found.
Or possibly Charlie had seen them come into the place she worked, and hidden in a back room until they left. And then gone back to work for a while, or simply skedaddled.
Or maybe they’d just missed her, in all the mall madness. Charlie worked her shift selling shampoo or candles or wireless plans or chicken teriyaki, and when she got off, headed out into the parking lot to meet Billy. She might have seen the cops and run off then.
Or maybe Bea Preston’s people had found her. Sally decided not to think about that, for the moment anyway.
Whatever the situation, it was Billy Reno’s bad luck. The Fort Collins cops had ID’d the Miata, had made the driver’s license Billy gave him as a fake, had connected the dots between the car, the missing girl, and the boy with the dragon tattoo. They’d tapped into Billy’s rap sheet, put the cuffs on him, and hauled him off, complaining about how much paperwork it would take to get him extradited back to Wyoming.
Sally had no idea whether Billy Reno might have killed Brad Preston. She just didn’t know enough about him, about the circumstances, about the crime. But she did feel damn sure he hadn’t stolen the Miata. Aggie and Maude agreed with her on that point, and they kept one another spun up about it all the way back to Laramie.
“Billy’s a really nice guy,” Aggie kept saying. “I mean, he’s a criminal and all, but that doesn’t mean he’s, like, evil or something. He just steals cars. And maybe some electronics and stuff.”
“Aggie,” said Sally. “I know that’s what Charlie told you. But at the very least, he’s got some serious problems.” She wondered how to ask. “Is it possible that he’s the one who’s been beating on Charlie, and she’s trying to cover for him? That’s pretty common, among battered women.”
“No! You should have seen her when she first started living with us, Sally. She was a mess. And she didn’t even know Billy then. And she says he’s really sweet. He gave her a diamond necklace.”
“I bet he did,” said Maude dryly.
“Don’t be mean. Charlie says she loves him. So we’ve got to help him. He’s been in so much trouble, if they put him in jail, they might never let him out.”
“I don’t think they can do that over a stolen car. But maybe we should see what we can do,” said Maude.
“I think you should talk to Sheriff Langham,” Aggie insisted.
“Billy’s probably still in Colorado. They have to extra-dite him to Wyoming,” said Maude.
“At the very least,” said Sally as they pulled into town, “we can go down to the jail and see if Dickie’s there. I think,” she continued, “that we ought to take you home first, Aggie.”
“Don’t even think about objecting,” said Maude, as Aggie opened her mouth to protest. “Consider what your mom and dad would do to me if we took you along.”
That did it. She pouted a little, but she conceded the point. They dropped Aggie off, and Sally and Maude headed straight for the sheriff’s office.
They walked into the reception area, separated by an upholstered half-wall partition from a bullpen where clerical workers took phone calls, stared at computer screens and clicked keyboards, relayed messages, and sorted piles of paper. At a desk in one corner, a woman clerk was talking quietly with Dave Haggerty and Scotty Atkins. The detective and the lawyer glanced up when Sally and Maude came in the door. Scotty’s eyes narrowed microscopically, but he appeared otherwise indifferent to their presence. Haggerty bobbed his head in their direction and returned to the conversation.
“We might as well get out of here,” said Maude. “The kid evidently called Haggerty to represent him. There’s nothing else we can do. I’ve got animals to feed.”
Sally didn’t. And Scotty hadn’t come out and asked them to leave, or even bothered to inquire what they might be doing there. She really ought to let the police know that Bea Preston had the blond guy out looking for Charlie. Plus Dave Haggerty had acknowledged them. So she felt like sticking around, at least for a while. Hawk would be wondering where she was. She’d better give him a call.
She pulled out her cell phone, realized she’d shut it off. When she turned it on, she found Hawk had left a message. An old friend of his from grad school had called to say he was in Cheyenne, doing a deal for a coal-bed methane developer. He’d offered to buy a couple of steaks at the Hitching Post, and that had sounded good to Hawk. He hoped Sally had been having a good therapeutic time at the mall and had spent lots of money. He’d have his cell phone if she needed anything, and he’d be back mid-evening.
No rush getting home then. Sally told Maude to go ahead and go, that she could walk home or get a ride with Dave Haggerty. Maude gave her a look, then told her to call with any news and took off.
And so she sat down in a grimy plastic chair in the waiting area, picked up a tattered copy of a three-year-old Red-book magazine, and nonchalantly strained her ears to filter out ambient noise, to catch anything she could of the conversation between Haggerty, the clerk, and Detective Atkins.
Years of practice picking out talky students in lecture halls had honed her auditory skills. And then, of course, she’d put herself through college and grad school playing country rock in honky-tonks. She’d spent hundreds of hours trying to tune a guitar in the midst of shrieking crowds, hollering musicians, shattering glass. Or it might be that she was just terminally nosy. She caught plenty.
They were holding Billy Reno in the Fort Collins jail on a count of grand theft auto. Nothing new for Billy, who was a congenital car thief, after all. They’d be transferring him to the custody of the Albany County sheriff’s department by tomorrow.
But it seemed that they’d also nailed him for outstanding traffic warrants, giving false information to an officer, and a bunch of other things he’d piled up and run from since he’d last been in jail, not to mention a few that popped back up from years before. They’d added a count of malicious destruction of property: the trashed apartment.
Sally heard Haggerty ask Scotty about bail. Scotty answered, voice dropped down a notch, too low for her to hear. She wondered if she’d been too obviously eavesdropping. Of course, she was being pretty obvious just by sitting there. Still, she tried to act as if there was nothing strange about sitting in the sheriff’s waiting area, reading an article about the miracle of cosmetic surgery. In fact, she read the piece about ten times. She was beginning to wonder what she might look like without eye bags.
“A hundred grand?” Haggerty exclaimed. “Come on, Detective. I really don’t think any judge would go for that. It’s a frigging car. And all that old stuff is just horseshit. If you’d been able to pin him down on that crap, you’d have done it by now.”
Sally looked up from her magazine. Scotty glanced in her direction. The two men continued talking, in hushed tones. Did she hear Scotty mention the words “murder charge” and “Brad Preston,” somewhere in the midst of an extended exchange? Then Scotty said in a normal voice, “The kid’s a proven flight risk. Let it go, for now, and I’ll work with you as this thing develops. It won’t do him any good for you to yank my chain right now. I’ve got things to do.”
Scotty turned and walked back through the bullpen, opened the door at the back, and disappeared. So much for getting the chance to tell him about Bea’s effort to find Charlie.
Haggerty picked up his briefcase and told the clerk that he’d wait while she made copies of the paperwork. Then he walked around the divider that separated the work area from the waiting room, sat down next to Sally, and removed the magazine from her hands.
“Why are you here?” he asked her, voice cordial but inscrutable.
“I was at the mall in Fort Collins with Maude Stark and her niece Aggie,” she said. “We were looking for Charlie— don’t ask. At least right this minute,” she added when he looked a question.
“We didn’t see her, but we did see the bust. I just . . .” She shrugged. “I just thought I’d see what happened to Billy next. I don’t think he stole that car, Dave. He was telling the truth about picking her up.”
Haggerty nodded. “It’s getting pretty complicated. What are you up to now?”
Sally looked around, as if there were someone standing over her shoulder who might tell her how to answer. “Um. Nothing much. No plans. In fact, I thought I’d try to talk to you, then walk home or hitch a ride. My, um, boyfriend can’t pick me up. He’s, er, in Cheyenne for dinner.”
“Okay,” said Haggerty. “So why don’t we go to my place and fuck like wild animals?” he inquired in the same mild, friendly voice.
Sally’s jaw dropped.
“Just kidding,” he said. “An old attorney’s trick of misdirection. What about waiting with me until I get the paperwork, and then we can go someplace and get a burger or something?”
They ended up at a brand-new restaurant down on Grand, facing the railroad tracks. The place called itself Le Brasserie de Laramie, which was enough of a hoot by itself. But when you got inside, you discovered that it wasn’t Gay Paree on the High Prairie, but was instead a kind of fern bar (Laramie enters the eighties!). Sally hadn’t been there before, and none of her friends was talking about it yet, since it had been open only about a week. There was a chance she’d end up running into somebody she knew. How often, after all, did somebody have the wild idea of opening a French restaurant in Laramie? Within two more weeks, all her friends would have been there, and if it was any good, they’d make it a regular stop. If it sucked, they’d soon be mocking it. She fast-forwarded to a time they might be referring to the place as The Bra.
But that was in the future. For now, a random encounter with a friend wasn’t guaranteed at The Bra (she couldn’t help herself) as it would be at theYippie I O or the Wrangler or El Conquistador. Sally wasn’t about to show up with Dave Haggerty at one of her usual hangouts. Particularly not after his astoundingly crude (not to say arresting) remark at the cop shop.
She reminded herself that this was, in a sense, a business meeting. There was a chance that Haggerty knew where Charlie was. He might even tell Sally. After all, they were both trying to help the kid. And besides, once they’d exhausted that subject, she might even lay the groundwork for hitting Haggerty up for some bucks for the Dunwoodie Center. Yeah, lots of business to do.
Like wild animals? Tigers, maybe? Ooh la la.
Haggerty ordered a scotch on the rocks. Sally thought that sounded good, but in the effort to protect her integrity, stuck with good old Jim Beam. She hadn’t been born yesterday. You started out ordering “what he’s having,” and pretty soon you lost your head entirely.
So when the waiter brought their drinks, and Haggerty settled on the steak sandwich, she requested the salade niçoise, figuring that it had tuna, and that was brain food. It probably wasn’t the greatest choice, given the season, the distance from the ocean, and the possibility that nearly every ingredient would, or possibly should, have come out of a can. She took a sip of Beam, standing her ground.
“You’re representing Billy,” she said. “How come?”
“I like to lose?” Haggerty inquired.
“I sincerely doubt it,” said Sally. “How did you hook up with him, anyway? I can’t imagine that you do a big business in car thieves. I’d have thought your practice would run more to victims of the system.”
“It’s a big system, so there’s plenty of latitude for all kinds of victims,” Haggerty said, contemplating his scotch. “And when you get to know the victims, nearly all of them are also perps. People aren’t simple. When I first opened up my practice, there was this girl who worked part-time for me, filing and doing small stuff. She was something of a hard case, high school dropout, but really bright. Shitty taste in men.
“She got pregnant. I kept her on, even when she started having trouble showing up for work. She didn’t take very good care of herself, to say the least.”
“Billy’s mother, I presume,” Sally said.
Haggerty nodded. “She did what she could, on and off. But the boyfriends weren’t a lot of help. And she had some real substance abuse issues. Put it this way. The best times of Billy Reno’s childhood were when his mom took off and left him to shift for himself. That didn’t exactly equip him to make wise life choices.”
“So how were you involved with him?” Sally asked.
“Kind of an informal Big Brother thing. I tried to keep an eye out for him when I could. Gave her money when she asked. A time came when I figured out what she was buying with it, so I stopped. Billy ended up in foster care, and for a while I was his guardian ad litem. He was a handful, to say the least. By the time he was eighteen, he thought he was John fucking Dillinger.”
“Violent?” asked Sally.
“Fights, starting in elementary school,” said Haggerty. “Said he had to defend himself, and I bet he did. By high school...well, he wasn’t in high school all that long, but you’d be surprised how many teenage boys have guns. They frigging love guns. Some girls too.”
“Like Charlie Preston?” Sally said.
“I don’t know,” Haggerty answered. “Do you have any idea where she is?”
So much for Sally’s hope that he knew. She shook her head. “I’m kind of hoping that Bea Preston doesn’t know either.”
“Charlie would probably be better off with the police,” Haggerty agreed.
Sally asked the question. “Does Scotty think Billy killed Brad Preston?”
Haggerty bit his lip, took a swig of scotch, and said, “He’s got some reason to think so.”
“Do you?” she asked.
“I’m his attorney,” said Haggerty. “I’ll leave it at that.”
“But from what you’re telling me, if Billy Reno had wanted to kill Brad Preston, he’d have had access to a gun, and have known how to use it.”
“True,” said Haggerty. “But there’s one little problem. As I understand it, you and your friend Green were the ones who found Preston. And you also found a lug wrench, which appeared to be the weapon used to beat Brad Preston to death.”
Sally nodded.
“Well, it seems,” Haggerty continued, “that the Miata the cops are holding down in Colorado, registered to Bradley Preston, contained a custom tool kit. All the tools were there, except the lug wrench. And it also seems”— and now Haggerty took a truly large gulp of scotch—“that the cops here lifted specimens of two different fingerprints off the wrench found with the body. One set belongs to Billy Reno. The other came from Charlie Preston.”
Sally’s shoulders sagged. “I guess I ought to be surprised, but I’m not. I’m probably out of my mind. I still want to believe that somebody’s setting Charlie up.”
“Why?” asked Haggerty.
“I can’t see her killing him. Yeah, evidently Brad had been beating her up for some time, but she’d gotten away. Seems like she made it at least as far as Fort Collins. Why would she come back and yank him into an alley and kill him? I thought people usually chose between flight and fight.”
“As I said,” Haggerty told her, motioning to the waiter for refills, “when people have choices between one thing and another, they generally try to do both.”
“So you’ll be defending Billy on a murder charge?” she asked.
“Looks that way,” said Haggerty, flicking his eyes at the waiter, who’d come to serve their food. They said nothing until their plates sat in front of them and the waiter had departed.
Her salad didn’t look toxic, if you didn’t mind pale lettuce, mealy tomatoes, Chicken of the Sea, and mushy olives. She didn’t think she’d become a regular at The Bra. “What about Charlie?”
“Someone from my office will take the lead on her case. They’ll undoubtedly charge her too, as an accessory at least.” Haggerty picked up his steak sandwich, took a big bite. If you dealt with violent crime a lot, you probably needed to keep up your strength, no matter what the dinner-table chatter might be.
“So where do you start?” she asked.
“With the coroner’s report. They gave me a copy. They put the time of death as some time that morning. Somebody came up behind Mr. Preston and hit him over the head, and kept on hitting, more than was absolutely necessary. Whoever did it wanted to be sure of the results. Sorry. I’m afraid I’m spoiling your dinner.”
Sally stopped picking at the salad, set down her fork. “Don’t worry about it. This whole thing pisses me off. The violence just breeds and breeds and breeds. What the hell was Brad Preston doing in that alley anyway? Don’t you think the cops ought to be asking about that?”
“They are. So am I. And could it be”—and here he put down what remained of his sandwich, reached across the table, and stroked a finger down her face—“that you will too?”
She ignored the stroking, which felt at the moment more like one of his famous distractions than an enticement. “Look. Here’s the way I see it. Preston was either looking for something, meeting somebody, or forced by someone to go into the alley. Now that they’ve got the fingerprints off the lug wrench, it seems clear that it wasn’t some random assault by a thug looking for money.”
“We don’t get much of that around here anyhow,” commented Haggerty.
“Yeah. Stay with me. Preston might have been alone when the attacker caught him. Or maybe he met whoever he was looking for, and there was an accomplice who did the beating. I can imagine somebody pulling a gun, say, marching him into the alley, and then the second person hit him.”
“All plausible. So the question,” said Haggerty, “is, what was he doing in that area?”
“Maybe he was on his way to the protest at the clinic,” said Sally.
“He’d surely have known it was coming.”
“I doubt he’d have been going to the demonstration,” said Haggerty. “Brad embraced the politics, but he steered clear of that kind of public display. He played it tough, businesslike, and detached.”
Tough. Businesslike. Detached. And back behind the closed doors of his tasteful Victorian dream house, out of control. “I admit, the easiest explanation is that Charlie talked Billy into helping her kill him. Her father would have gone with her into the alley if she’d asked, or met her there. But why there and then?”
“Good questions,” said Haggerty.
Sally pushed on. “You’d have to assume that whoever killed him was either crazy with rage or standing to gain, in some way, from his death.”
“Only two of those circumstances could apply to Charlie Preston,” Haggerty pointed out.
“Granted. But play along, Dave. Who else had reason to be furious with him? And who was in a position to gain, financially or otherwise, from his death?”
Haggerty polished off the last of his sandwich. “On the financial front, his wife, obviously. As for anybody else, you’d have to get a look at the will, which I certainly intend to do. And then there’s the fact that the Republicans were setting him up to run for Congress, a development that should have scared the shit out of everybody.”
“Maybe. But who’d have been scared or pissed enough about that to actually want him dead?” Sally said.
“Maybe he had some old enemies,” Haggerty replied.
Old enemies? Maybe Dave Haggerty himself? “How long have you known him? Can you think of anybody who really hated his guts?”
Haggerty polished off his scotch. “Twenty-five years, maybe? We went to law school together. He was brilliant, I’ll give him that, but he was always a self-centered, self-righteous son of a bitch. He was a famous pain in the ass even before he started running to the right, and you didn’t have to be on the other side of the political fence to know that. Not to mention that over the years, he’s undoubtedly pissed off some of the people who lost to him in court. But that comes with the territory.”
“Like who?” Sally asked. “What kinds of cases did he take? Anything especially notorious?”
“He made his bones representing insurance companies contesting claims,” said Haggerty. “That’s what his firm does. Whenever there’s a toxic waste dump that needs liability protection, or a blind grandmother to be denied a couple of grand for some frivolous thing like a pacemaker, he’s taken on the good fight. He’s done at least one case that had to do with denying benefits to unmarried domestic partners. But I have a question for you. Why are you getting so involved?” he asked. “I know you care about Charlie Preston, but why? Most professors wouldn’t go so far for a student.”
Sally pushed her nearly full salad plate to the side and leaned forward. “She came to me for help. She’d been horribly beaten. I gave her money. I gave her my coat. The whole thing was a rude shock. It’s been years since I actually had to deal with domestic violence face-to-face. I teach my students about it, but I hadn’t personally dealt with a woman who’d been assaulted since I was in grad school, when I ran the women’s center here. It’s a vicious situation. The victims need medical doctors and cops and shrinks. Most of them never get to the point of getting out of the house, of even trying to get away.
“So when they come in the door, looking for help, they’ve already made a big step. But even then, most never press charges, and damn near all of them end up going back to their abusers. It makes you sick. When one of those women does manage to get away, and get justice, and start over, and you had some little part in helping, it’s amazingly rewarding.”
“Yeah,” said Haggerty, smiling warmly. “You know, it really is.”
“I’ve got friends who are still in the trenches, helping out personally.” She thought about Maude, who never stood back. “But not me. I’ve been a smug little armchair feminist for a long time.”
“There are lots of ways of being on the front lines,” said Haggerty. “You don’t have to be answering the Safe House hotline to be involved. You’ve done plenty for women.”
“How the hell would you know?” said Sally.
“I just met you. I’m proud of the things I’ve done with the Dunwoodie Center, but that’s pretty ivory tower stuff, after all.”
“You don’t exactly hide in the tower, Dr. Alder,” said Haggerty. “Seems to me that you take some risks. I like that in a woman. In fact, I’ve been watching you, seeing what you’ve done with the Dunwoodie, and liking what I saw, a long time. I like everything about you.” He grinned. “You might say I have this little crush on you.”