NOT MUCH CHANCE of that. Last time I saw Jake, he wasn’t saying anything or trying to. He gave me the heebie-jeebies as Day and I sat him on the floor and propped him up against the workbench. I wore nitrile gloves as I tied a rope around his chest under his armpits and around a leg of the bench to keep him upright. One more thing for the crime scene techs to chew on.
Ma had stayed out on the street, watching for people and traffic as Cliff and I hustled Jake into the house, and as we left. In Gil’s Café, Ma had run the Suburban’s VIN. It was registered to a Harold Barnes in Elko, but the plates were for a Nissan Titan in Sparks. More hanky-panky with the vehicles. Someone in the Monroe neighborhood might remember a Suburban coming and going in the driveway, but I doubted anyone would connect it with the one about to be abandoned in Tonopah.
Ma also ran the plates on the Lexus Kyle was driving. The plates were for a Lincoln Navigator that belonged to a Walter Corbell in Sparks. Kyle Anza owned a Lexus, so he might have been using his own car—stealing plates being easier than stealing a car—driving safely to keep the police from running the plate and pulling him over. Ma got him in a DMV database. He was thirty-eight years old and had a home address in Reno. Ma gave Officer Day the address. He went by the house, but the Lexus wasn’t there, and no one answered the door when he rang the bell and knocked.
Jacob Anza was forty-one, with an address in Sparks. No one was at that house either, nor would Jake ever be there again.
Forty minutes after Ma called 911, I drove past Monroe on a cross street, Mark Twain Avenue. I glanced to my left as I went by, saw four police cars with lights flashing, a coroner’s wagon, and a paramedic van.
I kept going. Russ was in there. Police Chief Menteer had put him in charge of the crime scene. Russ had given me a flash call on a burner, told me Jake was awake, sort of, and breathing, which I already knew. Jake’s eyes would track lights moving from side to side in front of him; otherwise he was as unresponsive as a carrot. Russ didn’t ask what had happened to him, but a question was in his voice. Given time, he would figure it out on his own.
I drove to Ma’s office on Liberty Street, parked in back and went in. First thing I saw was a poster of a Coca-Cola ad circa 1927. Swing that out of the way and there I’d be, in the buff, full frontal, on a poster behind the Coke ad.
I stood there for a moment, hoping Ma had gotten rid of the poster. I swung the Coke ad aside and—nope—there I was. The only thing hiding what should remain hidden was a little red body paint, put there by a gorgeous girl, Sarah Dellario, also known as Holiday, when we rode in the World Naked Bike Ride in San Francisco a year and a half ago.
Ma was in front of a computer, engrossed, scrolling through a database.
“When are you gonna retire this goddamn poster?” I growled at her.
“When hell freezes over, boyo. It’s mine. Keep your grubbies off it.”
“I worry about you, Ma. So what can I do to help out?”
“Get on the other computer and see who owns that house on Monroe. Probably nothing there that’ll help us, but you never know.”
I booted up a laptop and got into the Washoe County property tax database, put in the address for the house on Monroe Street, came up with a Bernard and Natalie Watts. I gave the names to Ma.
“Never heard of ’em. Find out where they work, what they do.”
That took one of the several restricted databases Ma subscribed to as a private investigator. Bernard was thirty-six with an MBA in accounting, an assistant director in the Department of Corrections, making sixty-seven five a year.
Natalie didn’t appear in that database. I got her using a special program written by Ma’s best and most expensive hacker, a program that, as I understood it, scurried around to several databases and other sources compiling hard-to-find data, which meant we weren’t going to announce that we had obtained the information. Natalie was twenty-nine, had two children, Denise and Mark, ages four and six. She didn’t have an outside job. On the family’s 1040 last year her occupation was listed as housewife.
Bernard’s salary wasn’t enough to keep the kitchen remodel going after so much of the underlying structure had been found rotten. The remodel was on hold, along with the sale of the house. That might be causing trouble in paradise. Bernard was a mid-level worker bee in Nevada’s government. I wondered if that could have anything to do with the attorney general being murdered.
I gave all that to Ma.
She swiveled in her chair. “Not sure what to do with it, but good job—we’ll keep ’em in mind and dig deeper if the name pops up again. Now see if you can find anything on those girls the Anzas killed last week.”
“What kind of things?”
She stared at me. “What part of anything did you not get?” She went back to her computer.
Okay, a couple of teenage girls, found hung in a dank basement. That sounded like fun.
Not.
But I got online and got to it.
Vicki Cannon was a month over seventeen years old when she’d been found. Cathy Jantz was sixteen and ten months. They would have been seniors at Reno High the coming school year. They’d lived half a mile from each other in a good part of town. Vicki’s father was a dentist. Cathy’s was a senior executive at the Golden Goose Casino, of all places. The Golden Goose was the biggest casino in Reno. It was also site of the Green Room, a bar Lucy, Ma, and I used as an informal office where Patrick O’Roarke tended bar with a hot girl, Traci Ellis, his live-in girlfriend, twenty-six to his forty-seven, which meant I’d had to revise my opinion of the lad. Upward, of course.
“As if any of that matters,” Ma said when I told her.
Rebuffed, I dug deeper, using several of the special techniques I’d learned from Ma. “Special” actually meant illegal, but we didn’t use that sucky terminology.
Vicki was a B-plus student with a 3.32 GPA, and Cathy had been running a solid A with a 3.96, taking more math than Vicki—trigonometry in her junior year. Cathy had registered for AP calculus the coming year. Both had been homecoming princesses. I pulled up last year’s yearbook pictures. Very pretty girls. Gone now.
I sat there and stared at the screen.
Now what?
Facebook, that’s what, since against all odds, it was still the crown jewel of social media, if crown jewel makes the slightest bit of sense, referring as it does to a place that competes with messages left on bathroom walls—parents take note. If I got nowhere with FB, I might try Instagram, Weibo, and Reddit. Meetup would be a last resort. I hoped I wouldn’t get that desperate or that the girls had ever been that desperate for attention either.
But first, Facebook—if the parents of the girls hadn’t thought to remove their accounts, and if the girls hadn’t created bogus accounts, if they hadn’t password-protected their accounts so their parents couldn’t see what they were up to. How to do any and all of that would be “well, duh” information to every high-school teen in the country.
I typed in “Vicki Cannon” and got a list of potentials. I scrolled through, weeding them out, one by one, then came up with a Vicki Cannon at Reno High. I went through her pictures and comments by her friends, much of it illiterate unless your okay with your replacing you’re. I slowed to read more carefully when I found an exchange between Vicki and Cathy that took place less than a month ago:
Cathy: i’m with d-m 2nite
Vicki: lucky u. i’m w/ q-j-e
Cathy: xlt$$ but yuk. pt’s out 2gether?
Vicki: i think so
Cathy: not sure? c$ mite show
Vicki: not w/o u i hope
Cathy: not safe now! d upset ttyl
Vicki: tl
I read it again. And again. Then I called Ma over, had her take a look at it.
“The world is goin’ to hell,” she said when she’d read it through twice.
“Got that, but what do you make of it?”
“They were talkin’ in code. Or shorthand, or both. Or what passes for language by today’s youth.”
She went through it again. “Hard to say.”
“Dollar signs indicate money. And that ‘not safe now’ is intriguing.”
She shrugged. “They’re into something there. Keep at it.” She scooted back to her computer.
My phone rang. It was Lucy.
“Hola, cupcake,” I answered.
“Hola, yourself. Harp and I are a few miles south of Fallon. Probably hit a dead zone soon. She and I didn’t get a good chance to talk before. Now we do, just sayin’.”
“Uh-oh. That can’t be good.” And she’d called Harper Harp. So, friends. They might talk about any damn thing.
“She told me about that lady, Olivia, coming into the room with the clothes she’d dried and you were up, getting a towel Harp had thrown across the room. She said Olivia was impressed by the sight since you’d gotten out of bed right before she came in.”
“You should gag her until you reach Tonopah.”
“No way. Laughing keeps me awake. I’m really tired, but I’ve got to get my car before someone at the Stargazer has it towed or something.”
“I’m tickled to be a source of humor and derision for your amusement.”
“Just humor, Mort. Oh, and she told me why she had to throw your towel across the room.”
“That’s bogus. She didn’t have to do anything of the sort.”
“She said it was so she could sleep. Giggling keeps her awake. Anyway, she says she’s got more stories like that so I’ll be okay all the way to Tonopah. Not sure I’ll be able to drive back today, though. I’m exhausted. I think she and I will stay the night in Goldfield. I miss you, but there’s no way I can drive all the way to Reno from Goldfield without getting a decent night’s sleep.”
“I miss you too, but do what you gotta do.”
“Um, how is that guy, Jake?”
“Unresponsive, according to Russ.”
She was silent for a moment, then, “That’s good. Is he likely to stay unresponsive a while longer—like forever?”
“I would bet a six-foot pile of gold bars on it.”
“That’s good. Okay, I better go before I lose the signal. Anyway, like I said, Harper’s got more things to tell me.”
“Don’t believe a single word she says.”
“Why? So far it sounds just like you. But don’t worry, I get it. Bye, Mort. Be safe.”
“You too, Luce.”
I ended the call, then went back to the computer and read the exchange between Vicki and Cathy a few more times, couldn’t make sense of it, so I saved a screenshot of the conversation since things on Facebook tend to show up then disappear forever. I read it one more time, feeling as if I were missing something that was right in front of me.
I found more cryptic exchanges between the two girls going back six months. In one of the earliest ones I saw the figure $500! and the return comment OMG!
The most recent exchange, not two weeks ago, was a short one:
Vicki: hear a-t yet?
Cathy: no. talk on zx!
Vicki: not safe here?
Cathy: not for $$$$! Jeez v
Vicki: k…@zx
That was it. I saved a screenshot of that, too, then had Ma take a look at it.
“They were into something bad,” Ma said.
“It involved money. It got them killed.”
“Obviously. And someone hired the Anzas to fix it.”
“They made a video. Probably blackmailed someone they thought had deep pockets. Someone, it turns out, who had enough to lose that murder seemed like a reasonable option. Jake said something about the two girls asking for half a million each.”
“Greedy,” Ma said. “And smart, but not nearly smart enough to get away with something like that.”
Jake knew about the remodeling problems with the Monroe Street house. He had insider knowledge, which meant he had an in with the realtor, the contractor, or with Bernard or his wife, Natalie. Someone had scouted around for an empty house with a basement. A realtor would be a good bet if a person wanted to locate a house with certain amenities. Like a place to waterboard girls.
I phoned Russ.
“What?” he growled.
“Kinda brusque, Russ. I need a name or two.”
“I’m in the middle of something here.”
“And I’m your good buddy. You’ve probably got what I need. Who’s the realtor for the Monroe house, and the contractor who’s doing the remodel? I don’t want to drive by to get a look at the for sale sign out front. I might get pulled over for rubbernecking.”
“Ah, jeez. Hold on.” I heard voices in the background, then Russ said, “Realtor is Sue Harvey at RE/MAX. Like all realtors, she’s polite as hell, always on the lookout for a new client. I had a guy speak to her already. The contractor is a Robert Edman, E&L Contracting out in Sparks.”
“Got phone numbers for those?”
“Look ’em up, Detective.”
“Okay, Detective.”
We disconnected in the same nanosecond.
I phoned Sue Harvey first. We got through the usual pleasantries in short order, then I said, “I wonder if we could meet in person. Are you free sometime today?”
“I’m in the office right now, but a prospective client is due here in twenty minutes.”
I got an address; told her I’d be there in ten. I grabbed a print of Jake’s face, Kyle’s too. “I’m goin’ out, Ma,” I said. “Back soon.”
She didn’t turn around. “Find more dead people and unemployment is at 4001 South Virginia Street, boyo.”
What a great sense of humor.
Sue Harvey was a pleasant-looking lady of forty-five. She did a professional job of masking a hopeful look as I came in the door, so I knew she’d been a realtor for a long time. She was one of two realtors currently in the office, and a young girl was at a reception desk. When I told Sue I was a private detective, all trace of the hopeful look went south and she was all business. I had the feeling she hoped I would wrap it up quickly and leave.
I sat in front of her desk and showed her a picture of Jake Anza. She gazed at it, then said, “No. I’ve never seen him.” So I showed her the picture of Kyle that Lucy took. “Could be,” she said, so I showed her his driver’s license photo. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “He was in here. Edward Vale. I remember the name.”
Of course, he’d give her a fake name, and of course, she would remember names. That was her job. And she’d just tied Kyle into the murder of the two teens. I would have to tell Russ, though that might not lead us to the woman who was bankrolling this operation, so I would hold off on that for a while.
“Can you tell me when he came in? And what he was looking for,” I asked.
She checked her cell phone, which doubled as an appointment book. “I showed him a house five days ago, at three thirty in the afternoon.” Her eyes widened. “I spoke to a Reno detective not long ago. There was a murder in that house, but”—she slumped in her chair—“I guess that’s why you’re here.” She closed her eyes. “What a disaster. That house already had problems. It’ll never sell now.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m trying to find out where Edward Vale got a key to the place.”
She stared at me. “He had a key?”
“Evidently. He went in through a side door.” I didn’t tell her I watched him do it and my hands were tied behind my back at the time—and it was his brother, and his name was Anza, not Vale.
“Well, I don’t know. He certainly didn’t get one from me—or us. We don’t do that. Ever.”
“Could he have unlocked a window and left it closed while you were showing him the house?”
“Oh. I … I guess that’s possible.”
“He could’ve come back later that night, gone in and changed that side-door lock. It was brand new.”
“I … I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I stood up. “Not your fault. You can’t check twenty or thirty windows every time you show a house.”
“No, no I couldn’t. But still …”
And that’s when the gold-plated thought occurred to me, out of the blue, as they do. “I don’t suppose you keep a record of who refers a seller to you? Or a buyer. Not cold-call walk-ins, but personal referrals?”
“We do, yes, whenever possible.”
“I wonder if you could tell me who referred the Wattses to you—if anyone did.”
She looked up as two people in their fifties came into the office. She called out to the receptionist, “Anne, could you please help this gentleman?” Meaning me. She offered her hand. I shook it, then she turned and greeted the new arrivals.
Anne was in her early twenties, very pretty, all smiling teeth, blue eyes, and enthusiasm. “What can I do for you?”
I told her. She said, “Easy,” and asked her all-knowing computer, squinted at the screen, tapped a few keys, and a printer whipped out a single sheet.
“Here you go,” she said.
I gave the sheet a quick scan, had to work to keep my expression from giving anything away.
Anne gazed at me. “Um, aren’t you that … that guy who … ?”
“I know who you mean, and I’ve been told I look a lot like him. It causes me no end of trouble, let me tell you.”
“You even have that same scar.” She ran a finger from the bridge of her nose across her left cheek.
“That’s my biggest problem. Gotta run, kiddo. We’ll have to do lunch sometime. Bye.”
I got the hell out of there.
I sat in my car and stared at the sheet Anne had given me one more time. It had addresses, a few dates, a brief in-house comment by Sue, and a name.
The referral had been made by Nevada’s lieutenant governor, Sylvia MacKenna Haas.
Hot damn.
Sometimes investigations slog, but sometimes a piece breaks loose and the whole thing unravels like a cheap sweater. Okay, this sweater hadn’t exactly unraveled, but I had what looked like a nice loose end to pull.
Maybe.