SYLVIA MACKENNA HAAS was a woman with more than the usual amount to lose. Currently she headed a list of five or six people being considered as the running mate of presidential hopeful William Jackson Price next year. At the moment, “Billy” was the front-runner in his party, but nominations were still nine or ten months off.
Sylvia didn’t need a scandal. The definition of politics is image over substance. A video of any sort getting loose, especially a blackmail video, would cut her off at the knees.
But wait. A video of what? What would a pair of dippy high school girls have gotten a video of?
I could think of only one thing.
Ma was still at her computer when I walked in. “Hold the presses,” I said.
She swiveled toward me. “You found another stiff and I need to find a new assistant. As if I want one.”
“Nope. Even better.”
“Jesus, I hope so. All I got is Janet Anza Miller, sister of Jake and Kyle. She’s got a kid, Katie, age four. Janet’s married to Thomas Miller, an electrician. They’re in Sioux City, Iowa, probably not involved in what’s goin’ on with Jake and Kyle. What’ve you got?”
I wagged my eyebrows at her. “Sylvia Haas.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What about her?” Ma asked.
“She’s our lieutenant governor.”
“As if I didn’t know. What about her? And what’re you doin’ about Elrood Wintergarden?”
That stopped me. “Elrood?”
She smiled. “Gotcha. Screw Elrood. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. What’s up with Haas?”
“She referred the Wattses to Sue Harvey of RE/MAX.”
Ma screwed up her face. “So?”
“So Haas has a lot to lose, Ma. Especially now.”
“You think a VP hopeful hired the Anzas to put the kibosh on what might be a blackmail video?”
I gave her a narrow look. “In the unlikely event that you don’t remember, I once received the shaking hand of a presidential hopeful via FedEx.”
“Well … shit. So you did. So what?”
“So, karmically I’m tied into all kinds of oddball crud. Excluding hot women, of course. I’m tied into that, but it’s a different kind of karma.”
She gave that more thought. “Teenage girls. It’s just like you to come across something as bad as that, Mort.”
“Thanks.”
“That wasn’t a compliment, boyo, but, okay, good job. Don’t know how you do it. I’ll check out Haas, see if I can connect her to any part of this horror story.” She turned back to her computer.
I watched her for a moment, then thought about Kyle. He was still loose. I wondered what he was up to. Might be nice to get eyes on him, if possible. In fact, I thought it was time to monitor the tracker on his car, make sure he was still at the Grand Sierra Resort.
The tracker worked with an app on Ma’s cell phone. I loaded the app on mine, found Kyle’s Lexus at GSR. Good deal, but maybe I should keep an eye on it. He’d been in there long enough to have decided on a plan of action. And it was almost eleven o’clock. He could have a television on in his suite. By noon, Jake and Joe would make the news. Kyle and the mystery woman who’d hired him might set up an emergency meeting. If so, I’d like to get in on it—from a distance. I could set up surveillance on his car, follow him if he went somewhere, get a line on this dame.
“Goin’ out, Ma,” I said.
She waved a hand over her head, didn’t turn around. I went out to the parking lot, hopped in my old nondescript Toyota, and drove to the GSR. Harper had reported that Kyle parked in the G row. I drove the row and … no Lexus SUV, no Kyle. But the app said the tracker was still there.
I didn’t like that one bit. It took a while, but I finally found the tracker stuck inside the left rear wheel well of a Prius. I cruised every row in GSR’s parking lot, which took twenty minutes. I found several Lexus SUVs but none with Kyle’s stolen plate on it.
He had found the tracker, reassigned it to folks from Wisconsin, and disappeared.
I phoned Lucy, but it went to voice mail. She might be in a dead zone, somewhere on U.S. 95, south of Hawthorne. I left a voicemail message for her to call me.
I went back to Ma’s, told her that Kyle had slipped his leash.
“Well, fuck,” she said, which summed up the situation nicely. “Get Russ to put out a BOLO on that Lexus. See if he can round him up or at least get eyes on him.”
“Think he’ll do that?”
“Get hold of the brother of the guy in that basement who is either a murderer or a victim? He’ll do it.”
I called Russ on a burner.
“What?” he answered cautiously.
“Kyle’s gone. He found the tracker and took off in his Lexus. He’s in the wind.”
“And I should do what about that?”
“Put a BOLO on his car. Pick him up or at least find out where he is.”
Silence for a moment. “Okay, I can do that.” He hung up. He’d sounded distracted.
Now what?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t go out, drive around hoping to come across Kyle’s Lexus. I looked at Ma. “Got anything interesting yet?” I asked.
“Not much. Sylvia is forty-four. She’s been married to a Dr. Carl Haas for twelve years. Her first, his second. He’s fifty-one and an orthopedic surgeon in private practice in a medical group with two other MDs. They’ve got three kids, Quinn, Jenny, and Ethan, ages seven, eight, and ten.”
“Forty-four? That seems kinda young to be up for vice president.”
Ma shrugged. “Kennedy was elected president at age forty-three. Also, it’s a godawful lousy field this year, and she rounds out the ticket. So say the pundits.”
“Yeah. Politics.” She went back to her computer.
So, a government bigwig and a surgeon. Pillars of the community. I tried to picture them, and the family. When I did, kids rose to the surface. That quickly morphed into babysitters for the tots, Quinn, Jenny, and Ethan.
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I said.
Ma turned. “No argument there. What’s up?”
I pulled up the screenshot I’d made of the Facebook conversation between Vicki and Cathy. I pointed to the line where Vicki had said: lucky u. i’m w/ q-j-e
“Quinn, Jenny, Ethan,” I said. “I think this has to do with babysitting.”
“Jesus.”
“What’re the Wattses kids’ names again?”
Ma found it. “Denise and Mark.”
In the first line Cathy said: i’m with d-m 2nite
“It’s coming together,” Ma said, smiling.
“I get a nice big bonus for this, right? No lump of coal in my stocking for Christmas like I got last year?”
In all the excitement, Jake had let slip that the person who’d hired him and Kyle was a woman. Which meant we had her now: Lt. Governor Sylvia Haas.
Maybe. Likely, but not a hundred percent. We didn’t have enough to go hammer on her door, drag her out into the street and slap on handcuffs. Yet.
Kyle was still running loose.
Lucy wasn’t answering her personal cell phone or her burner.
I decided Ma could handle the computer search now that we had a direction, a target. I wanted to be with Lucy. And Harper, of course, but Lucy was my life. I had to make certain she was safe.
Which meant a trip to Tonopah or Goldfield. I didn’t want to trust my antique Toyota for a trip like that. It wasn’t fast enough or reliable enough. At sixty miles an hour the driver’s-side mirror whistles, sounding too much like Madonna. That was a problem, but the bigger problem was that the car was closing in on two hundred thousand miles. And it didn’t have air-conditioning.
I phoned Avis, ordered up an SUV, settled on a Toyota Sequoia.
I slowed down long enough to really think about what I wanted to take on a trip like this. It wasn’t likely that Lucy and Harper were in any kind of trouble. They were probably still in a Verizon dead zone. But Lucy and I have a poor track record when it comes to trouble, so I wanted to be with her, prepared for anything. I came up with a few items not on most shopping lists, one of which was an S&W .44 Magnum revolver loaded with “critical defense” rounds. Man stoppers.
By 12:25 I was on I-80 in a red Sequoia, headed east toward Fernley. Half an hour later I was nearing Fallon on U.S. 50 when my phone rang. It was Ma.
“I think Sylvia Haas and Kyle Anza are an item,” she said without preamble.
“How’d you get that, Ma?” I reached a 45-mph sign at the west end of town so I knocked it back from sixty-five.
“I already mentioned Thomas Miller, married to Janet Anza Miller, Jake and Kyle’s sister. But then I worked on Sylvia Haas’s family tree and found that Tom Miller is her third cousin, so it’s likely Sylvia knows the Anza boys.”
“Jury-wise, that’s thin, Ma. And how does that make Sylvia and Kyle an item? Which, of course, would be huge if we had proof.”
“I’m gettin’ there, boyo. I’ve got Kyle in a suite at the Peppermill on the fifteenth a month ago, paid with a credit card in his name. So I got into the hotel’s video and caught Sylvia in a poofy blond wig and dark glasses at 8:25 that same evening near the elevators.”
“Sure it’s her, Ma?”
“Better than ninety percent.”
“We can’t go before a jury with that either. Not that we were actually thinking that far ahead.”
“No, we can’t. But the point is, we’re sneakin’ up on those two. By the way, Kyle Anza was Navy, a SEAL, ended up with a bad conduct discharge, BCD. Got that from his DD214. He did six months in a naval brig in Jacksonville on an assault charge, got out with his BCD eight years ago. His 1040 has him as a laborer, whatever that is. Last year he claimed a gross income of forty-two thousand, which doesn’t spell a mortgage and a year-old Lexus to me.”
“Keep on it. I’m in Fallon, about to head south. Let me know if you get anything else.”
“Will do.”
An ex-SEAL with a BCD. Shit. Still no Lucy and I was about to hit a bunch of Verizon dead zones on U.S. 95.
I pulled into Tonopah at 4:05 that afternoon. I had a signal on my cell, but Lucy still wasn’t answering hers. No sign of her Mustang anywhere, including at the Raley’s parking lot. But the Suburban Jake had been driving was there, doors locked, a little engine heat wafting from under the hood that might’ve been nothing but the sun blazing down on it. I made a quick circuit of Tonopah’s motels and business district—still no Mustang. I gassed up the Sequoia and took off for Goldfield, twenty-six miles farther south.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I spotted Lucy’s Mustang in front of a unit at the Goldfield Inn. In the slot next to it was a Toyota Corolla, which would be Harper’s. The two cars were in front of units 5 and 6. Two other cars were in the parking lot, no silver Lexus in sight.
I parked, got out, knocked on the door to 6, got no answer, knocked harder. Still nothing, so I knocked on the door to room 5. Hard.
Still no response.
I didn’t like that. I walked to the office and went in. A woman of sixty was in a room behind the small reception area. I hit the bell and she came out in a tired housedress, tired eyes, tired half-smile, cigarette burning in one hand.
“He’p you?”
“I was supposed to meet the girl in the Mustang who came in this afternoon. My wife. Which unit is she in?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t give out information like that without some kinda ID.” She glanced at the register, then back up at me. Not being mulish, just careful.
I showed her my driver’s license. Same last name.
“Okay, then. She and the other girl are in six. Both of ’em tired as all get-out, looked like.”
“I knocked. No one answered.”
“Like I said, they was tired. Couldn’t keep their eyes open. Probably asleep by now.”
“I knocked pretty hard. Can I get a key, see if they’re in there, make sure they’re all right?”
She thought about that, then took a key off a rack and came around the counter. “I’ll go with. That okay?”
“Fine by me. I really appreciate this.”
I followed her past rooms along a covered walkway. We were ten feet from the door to room 6 when my cell phone rang, not the burner Russ would use, but my regular phone. I grabbed it from a pocket. The screen showed a picture of Lucy.
“Hola,” I said. “You had me scared, sugar plum.”
“No one’s ever called me that before,” Kyle Anza said, not a trace of humor in his voice. “Let’s you and me talk.”