CHAPTER 22

WHEN ANGSTROM pulled into the parking lot for the sheriff’s office and jail, Runyon’s truck was already there, parked next to a white SUV with the department logo on its door. If it was the one driven by deputy Len, he’d already taken his handcuffed passenger inside. Rosemary hoped the woman, Sammie Andre if that’s who she was, had been stowed somewhere safe and distant, preferably also cold and uncomfortable.

“He’ll be fine here,” said Angstrom with a nod at Tank. But when he came around the car to open Rosemary’s door, the dog whined and lunged at the screen confining him to the rear seat.

“I want to bring him with me.”

“Rosemary, he’s safe here, and so are you.”

“Never mind, he’s coming with me or I’m not coming.”

“Hey, I could always arrest you,” said Angstrom, but he opened the rear door and stood aside as Tank bounded out and Rosemary seized the trailing leash. “Come on, you know the way.”

This was true, she thought with mild amazement as they set off for the short walkway to the door for the second time in as many days.

“Hey, Annie,” Angstrom said to the uniformed woman who appeared behind the glass-shielded desk. “Len and his passenger get here okay?”

“Evening, Sheriff. We got her booked and found her a bed. Read her her rights and told her she could make a phone call, but she just told us what we could do with our telephone. Not a lady, that one.”

“So I’ve heard. This is Mrs. Mendes, who’ll be signing the complaint.” He glanced around and saw Steve Runyon getting to his feet from a chair against the far wall. “And Mr. Runyon here can fill us in on her identification, if she hasn’t provided that yet.”

“Sammie Andre,” said Steve before Annie could answer. “She’s worked for the Conroy family something like twenty years. She’s Brian D.’s chief of staff, and far as I can tell, she’s now taking over that same slot for David. Or was,” he added.

“Got it,” said Annie.

“Good. Okay, troops, let’s go in where we can sit and talk.”

Angstrom led the way down the hall to the door that said SHERIFF. Inside, he seated Rosemary in a chair before his desk, waited until the dog had settled beside her, gestured Runyon to the second chair, and moved into his own place behind the desk. “Mrs. Mendes, Mr. Runyon. It’s late, and everybody’s tired. Since you were both involved in this evening’s events, I thought, with your permission, I’d talk to the two of you together. We’ll get it on tape, to transcribe and sign later.”

Runyon gave his characteristic shrug, and Rosemary said, “Fine.”

“Good.” Angstrom pulled a small tape machine to the center of his desk and turned it on. “Mrs. Mendes, will you tell me again just what happened at your house tonight.”

Rosemary told her story again, from the moment Tank heard someone approaching until Steve and Kim Runyon arrived and she called the sheriff’s office.

And she answered questions. No, she’d never seen the woman before, except for that brief glimpse on the computer monitor Sunday afternoon. She knew nothing about her beyond what she’d read in the political piece there. There’d been no message of any kind, from the woman or anyone who might be connected with her. Rosemary had simply opened the back door to let her dog out, found a stranger there, struggled to control the dog, and been attacked from behind while she was doing that.

“Did she say anything to you?”

She didn’t have time, thought Rosemary, remembering Tank’s instant reaction to the woman’s appearance. “Not one word.”

“What about afterwards, when you’d escaped from the cellar?”

“She was running, from Tank and from my rifle. She got in her big black SUV and started the engine and I’m not sure whether I was afraid she’d come at me with that thing, or just had a sudden mental picture of her with the damned gas can in her hand.” She turned a questioning look on Angstrom.

“The can will be tested for prints, tomorrow.”

“Good. Anyway, I yelled to her to stop, and when she didn’t, I put a bullet in her right rear tire. And then Mr. Runyon appeared and took my rifle and fired another shot.”

She paused to take a breath, caught by an inner question: What would she have done had Steve Runyon not arrived when he did? “Then she did try to drive away, and lost control of her vehicle, and wound up in the wood pile. In retrospect, that seems appropriate.”

The two men were looking at her oddly. “And that’s all I really remember, except that when Mr. Runyon got her out of her vehicle, she didn’t seem to be hurt or frightened, just angry.”

“Have you given any further thought to what her reason was for attacking you?”

“Well,” Rosemary began cautiously, “I understand she’d lost her job when Congressman Conroy learned that e-mail messages from his daughter had apparently been—hijacked somehow?”

”She did. So did I and everybody else within reach,” said Runyon. “It didn’t bother me much, I was kinda tired of politicians anyway. But ol’ Sammie, that job was her life, her stage, her connection. Shit, she’d been Conroy’s right arm for twenty years, and after his stroke, she and her little band of gofers were his main connection to the world. She couldn’t believe he would do that to her.”

Angstrom shifted his glance to Rosemary, who spread her hands, palms up. “So if she’d learned that I was the person who discovered the backup disk and told the congressman, I suppose she might have held me responsible for the loss of her job. Although,” she added, “I’d say it’s quite a stretch from that to burning my house down with me in it.”

“Pretty much everybody heard about you,” said Runyon. “B.D.’s attendant, his driver, his pilot, anybody who was within earshot at the ranch after your phone call Sunday morning.”

“His son and daughter-in-law?” asked the sheriff.

“Oh sure, Dave was always in touch. He was actually at the ranch over the weekend, and karen, too. His wife,” Runyon added. “Under normal circumstances, B.D. would’ve had Dave fly him here Sunday afternoon; but this was definitely not a normal situation. B.D. Is the kind of guy who clears the decks with a twelve-gauge when he suspects he’s been had.”

“And when you got fired, you decided to come here, too?”

Runyon looked at Angstrom for a long moment. “I was about to hit the road anyway, to be here for my cousin Eddie’s widow. Eddie’s dad, my uncle Harry, called that morning to tell me Eddie had been killed.”

Rosemary had a sudden memory of Steve Runyon’s face when he discovered who was in that stalled SUV. “You obviously didn’t like Ms. Andre. What had she done to you?” she asked.

Angstrom’s gaze moved quickly from Rosemary to Runyon, who flushed red, took a deep breath, and expelled it.

“When I got here Monday morning—Christ, that was this morning! Anyway, I went to see Kim, and she told me Eddie had been real upset about something for more than a week, and she was sure he’d called me two or three times at least. And she herself had called after he took off. I never got those calls.”

“And you thought it was Ms. Andre who caught those calls?”

“Like I said, she ran the whole show up there, and she sure as hell had the best chance to hijack those e-mails. B.D. kept his private quarters unconnected except for a telephone, so the computers were all in the office, where she spent a lot more time than he did. As for me, I’d left September twenty-third for a vacation way up in northern Idaho, out of cell-phone range. Got back to Alturas October fifth. She’d have had no trouble keeping an eye on my calls; I work out of a building nearby but she has keys.”

“Why do you think she’d have done that?” Angstrom asked.

Runyon shrugged. “After grabbing those e-mails, she’d have been on full protective alert, and she didn’t like me much.”

“What do you think your cousin was calling about?”

“Since I never heard the messages, I’ve got no idea. And I didn’t bother to ask Ms. Andre tonight.”

“Well.” Angstrom turned off the recorder, pushed his chair back, and stretched. “Long day. We’ve got Ms. Andre all safely tucked in for the night, and I think we’ll just leave her there for now, present her with these accusations in the morning. I’ll wait until then to get in touch with former Congressman Conroy, too. And I’ll ask both of you to come in to sign your statements tomorrow,” he added as he got to his feet. “Runyon, you gonna be staying at your cousin’s house?”

Runyon got up as well. “Nope, she doesn’t have room. I’m booked in at the Mountain home Motel just west of town. I figure on being there for a few days, at least.”

“Fine.” The sheriff came around the desk, saw Runyon to the door, and then turned to Rosemary, who was thinking about her proper course of action as well as wondering whether she might be suddenly too tired to get out of this chair.

“How about it, Rosemary? you still sure you want to go back to your house tonight? Because we could find you a clean, comfortable motel room, and I know several that will take your dog as well.”

“I want to go home,” she said firmly as she stood up, Tank’s leash in her hand.

REAL rain was falling now, not wildly but steadily. Angstrom got an umbrella and held it over the two of them as they dashed to his vehicle. “No, you can wait until we get home,” Rosemary said to her dog as she settled into her seat and fastened the seat belt.

They made the twenty-minute trip in weary, oddly companion-able silence until Angstrom pulled the truck up in front of her gate and turned off the engine. “Looks quiet enough, but I’ll see you inside and take a look around to make sure everything’s okay.”

Rosemary only half heard him. She was looking at her open driveway gate, and the churned-up ground, and the blackness beyond. And feeling more than mildly queasy.

“Rosemary?”

“Oh. Sorry.” Grasping his suggestion belatedly, she simply said, “Thank you,” and waited for him to come around to her side of the truck with the umbrella. Tank bounded happily ahead of them, visited a bush, and reached the house before they did.

Even though the motion lights had come on, the house looked dark and cold and empty. She unlocked the front door and hesitated for a moment, making no effort to stop Tank from charging in, wet feet and all, before she reached inside to turn on the light. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”

“Right. But damn cold. I’ll check the place out while you go turn on your furnace. And better keep your coat on for a while.”

Pushy, pushy. But at the moment she was embarrassingly comforted by the presence of a large, capable male. He began a circuit of her small domain; she turned on the heat and headed for the kitchen and back hall, pleased to encounter no odor of gasoline. The windows she’d left open probably had something to do with that, and luckily the rain was the straight-down kind and not blowing in, or at least not much.

As Rosemary closed that window, Angstrom moved past her to open the back door and step out onto the porch. And step back inside quickly, brushing moisture from his hair. “Okay. I’d say that rain will take care of any gas left on the porch or the shingles.” He closed the door and locked it. “The rest of the house looks and smells normal to me; probably you should have a look around yourself.”

She turned on the light to the basement, pushed the battered door open, and peered down to see a big, cold space that looked just the way it had some hours earlier. Making a mental note to call Baz tomorrow and ask him to come by for a look, she pulled the door more or less into place against the splintered frame and went to make her way through the rest of her small home. Ordinary, normal, lovely.

In the living room, she found that Angstrom had closed the windows there. “Everything looks fine,” she told him. “Thank you. I could make coffee if you’d like?”

He shook his head. ”Thanks, but I’m getting too old to do that late-night coffee thing. And if you plan to get any sleep at all here tonight, you probably shouldn’t have any, either.”

“True. And I know it’s very late, but I have a couple of questions?” She went to perch on the edge of one of the fireplace chairs.

“Fire away,” he said, and unzipped his jacket before taking a seat on the couch.

“Thank you,” she said again. “Gus, do you think my charges against Ms. Andre will stick? Steve Runyon wasn’t here in time to see the actual attack.”

“Well, let’s see. You may not have noticed, but you have quite a knot on your forehead, gonna be real apparent by tomorrow, I’d say. You couldn’t have locked yourself in that basement, and clearly the shot through the door came from down there. You’re favoring your left arm.”

“I landed on my elbow as well as my head. It still hurts.”

“You might want to have a doctor take a look at it. Anyhow, she drove into your yard. She had a pistol in her car; we’re looking into whether it’s registered. This is your property, you have a right to defend yourself.”

“Good.”

“I can testify that somebody poured gasoline in and around your house, and like I said, we’ll test the cans for prints.”

“Which will be hers,” Rosemary said. “She wasn’t wearing gloves, and no one else touched it after she threw it down.”

He nodded. ”She hasn’t presented much of a story yet. But given the evidence that I’ve seen, and your statements, I’d say the D.A. will be happy to bring a case. If he is, and the judge is available, and Andre gets herself a lawyer, she could be arraigned tomorrow.”

“Will I have to be there?”

“Not right away, but you’ll be testifying eventually. But there is one other thing.”

“What?”

“She says your vicious dog attacked her without reason and should be collected and destroyed.”

Rosemary bristled. “Somehow that does not surprise me. Did she have any wounds to display?”

“Some scratches on her hands, but nothing that drew blood. What’s funny?”

She hadn’t meant to smile. “Just something Gray told me. He says wolves and coyotes know how to kill, but pet dogs generally don’t. Tank really didn’t know how to go about whatever it was he had in mind, so I was able to pull him off in time.” The dog, who’d settled onto his bed by the desk, flicked an eye open at the sound of his name, and closed it again.

“Lucky for both of you.”

“More so for her, I’d say. Just let me talk for a moment, Gus; I’m trying to get at something.” When he nodded, she unbuttoned her coat and settled back into her chair. “Monday’s my day at the senior center, and it was a busy place today. After I got home, I just—settled into what looked like normality and did some planning for a visit here by my brother and his little girls. By the time I’d wrapped that up, I was past the idea of supper. Eventually I poured myself a glass of wine…” she lifted one hand as if raising a glass “…and slid a CD into the player, put my earphones on, and turned off the lights and just sat in the dark, in peace. Listening to Mozart.”

He was leaning forward, arms propped on his thighs, as she talked. Sharing her scene, she thought.

“And while I was doing that, she came up my road, which has no lights. And opened my new driveway gate, which has no lock yet and is well-oiled and quiet. And drove in, or more likely turned her engine off, along with her lights, and coasted. There’s a bit of a downslope from the road. Anyway, she got her big SUV into my side yard and parked it there.

“I think she must have stood still for a while out there in my yard, to listen,” Rosemary went on. “Originally I thought she’d have heard the music, but I’d forgotten I was using earphones. And my truck was in the shed. So I suppose it’s possible she thought I wasn’t at home.”

“Rosemary—”

“Anyway, she, my midnight visitor, didn’t approach the front door. She came very quietly across the yard to the rear of the house. Maybe at that point her intention was simply…” Rosemary grimaced at that word, and began again. “Maybe she came here to burn down my apparently empty house. To get even. Not everything is clear yet, but here’s something that is: whether or not she came here to kill me, she certainly intended to do that once I’d seen her and been locked in the basement.

“But before that happened, Tank heard her. I wouldn’t think even the smartest dog could sense evil intent, but an awareness that something is seriously wrong, someone creeping around quietly out there where there should be no one at all? I think he’d get that. I think he got that.

“Anyway, he saved my life,” Rosemary said, in flat tones that brought her rapt listener suddenly upright. “And if the animal control people plan to come for my dog, you’d better let me know about it well in advance, Gus Angstrom, so that I can take him safely away. Or I promise I’ll find some way to make your life miserable.”

“Jesus, Rosemary! you tell one hell of a ghost story, particularly when it’s true. Don’t worry about your dog, I can deflect Animal Control.”

“Good.” The clock on the mantel began to strike, and she clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to know what time it is. I want to let my dog out one last time and go to bed. But Gus, thank you for coming when I called, and for driving me home, and for listening.”

“Welcome. All in all, it was an interesting day.” He got up, zipped his jacket, and gave her a long look. “But I still worry about your being out here alone. If you like, I could stay.”

She got to her feet, a bit unsteadily, and shook her head. “Actually, I’m better off right now than I was, say, a week ago.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve always locked my doors at night, and kept the phone handy. But now I know that I have an excellent alarm system lying right over there,” she added with a nod at the sleeping dog. “And I have a perfectly good rifle I’m willing and able to use. This is my home, and I will stay here on my own. So I’ll decline your kind offer, with thanks, and say good night.”

“Another time, then,” he said as he opened the door. “Good night, Rosemary.”