Defiled: The Sequel to Nailed Featuring John Tall Wolf (A Ron Ketchum Mystery Book 2) (27 page)

Ron told him, “You starting to get sentimental?”

Clay had given him the same smile he used when shooting movie villains.

“Not hardly, but I do have some video I think you should see.”

They went to Clay’s screening room. The mayor cued up the forty-seven minutes of video he felt it would be most important for Ron to see. They watched it together. Then the mayor showed the chief how to replay it and left, saying he’d be in his home office. Come see him before he left.

Ron watched his father bare his soul — a surprise right there that he even had one. When his eyes were dry and a sense of calm settled over him after the first viewing, Ron went to see Clay. “Thank you,” he said.

“Didn’t make the recordings for you, but sometimes things work out in ways you don’t expect. I’ll be watching those videos again myself. Your father, for all his faults, was quite a man. I’m going to make a helluva movie based on what he told me. But what I want from you right now is an answer. Are you going to run for mayor or not? If not, I have to find someone else.”

“I am,” Ron said. “I don’t know if I’ll win or I’ll be any good if I do, but I’m going to run.”

“You’ll win,” Clay said. He sounded like he’d already bought every vote in town.

With the way people in Goldstrike felt about him, and Hale Tibbot out of the way, maybe he had.

That matter settled, Ron told Clay about Veronika Novak feeling she should be compensated for taking a risk in fingering Helios Sideris, and about Glynnis Crowther holding back something the police should know. The mayor’s approach to both women had been identical: scare them first and then buy them off.

Good government in action, Ron thought.

But if he could be half the mayor Clay was …

Then he got to the final items, for the moment, on his list.

“I need to retrieve at least one thing and maybe two from the bottom of Lake Adeline,” the chief said.

Clay knew that Ron had thrown the detonator of the dirty bomb into the water and correctly guessed that was one of the things the chief wanted. He asked what the other was.

“Sergeant Stanley has told me that so far there’s no sign of Helios Sideris anywhere in town. Now, he could be anywhere else in the world but —”

“If he killed Hale Tibbot and he’s dead, too,” Clay said, “that complicates matters for the cops and the courts. And if he’s dead what better place to dump a body than the nice deep lake right here in town? But it is a
big
lake. Finding a body in it could take some doing.”

“I have an idea,” Ron said, and told him what it was.

Clay actually laughed. “I like that, and I think you could be right. So what’s next and how much will it cost me?”

“You mean cost the town?” Ron asked.

“I mean me. If it was a sure thing, that’d be different. On spec, it’s on me.”

Ron said he wasn’t sure of the cost, but he told the mayor how he wanted to go about the salvage effort.

Clay told him to get the figures and he’d have his lawyer okay the payout.

Then the mayor told the chief he was tired and was going to retire early.

Feel free to watch the video again, he said. Call the other cops in to work on things, whatever he wanted.

“That’s very generous,” Ron said.

Clay snorted. “Yeah, that’s me, generous. But I am thinking of leaving this house to the town to use as the mayor’s official residence.”

With a wave of his hand the mayor was off to bed.

Ron, being a cop, was able to put two recently learned facts together. Clay Steadman had told him he would be the next mayor and Clay would be leaving his home for the use of future mayors. So for at least four years, the chief would reside in a house he’d never be able to afford on his own.

And the mayor had richly rewarded Veronika Novak and Glynnis Crowther.

Not to mention the late Walter Ketchum.

All that philanthropy made Ron remember Elvis Presley’s words of wisdom, “Money’s meant to be spread around.”

But the chief couldn’t recall how close to his death Elvis had been when he said that.

Ron Ketchum and John Tall Wolf decided the way to go was to engage in a bit of police theater. Many a sworn officer thought he or she would be a natural fit in show biz. Former Chicago cop Dennis Farina was all over TV and the movies, sometimes playing a good guy, sometimes a bad guy. Ex-NYPD officer Eddie (Mahoney) Money had spent two years on the job before becoming a pop singer. Just putting on the uniform was part of getting into a role.

Popular culture had made cops of every stripe — good, bad, indifferent — stock characters. The association between the people who did the job and the people who played cops had become so close that more than a few actors and other celebrities had volunteered their time to become “reserve” officers.

Meaning they got to pal around with cops without the worry of getting shot.

Ron and Tall Wolf on the other hand took precautions against the real possibility that one or both of them might at least be the target of gunfire. They wore Kevlar vests and body mikes. The chief sported a buttonhole video camera on a shirt pocket. Keely Powell, Abra Benjamin and a dozen heavily armed Goldstrike cops would flood the scene in a heartbeat if any shots came from the house the chief and the special agent were approaching.

The Chevy SUV was still in the driveway next to the house. On the driver’s door was the stylized R logo of the California Natural Resources Agency. Special Agent Benjamin’s vehicle search hadn’t extended to SUVs owned by local and state governments. Benjamin had kicked herself a little about that. She was probably aggravated, too, that none of her colleagues bothered to give her any shit about the oversight.

Cops could be cruel that way.

They knew the sharpest needle was always self-administered.

Not counting lethal injections, of course.

There was a half-hour of daylight left but lights were already on in the house. Both Ron and Tall Wolf were happy to see that. It would have been much harder to spot a shooter setting up in a dark room. So their target either hadn’t noticed the police surveillance or he was pretending he had nothing to worry about.

Playing innocent was often the role a bad guy brought to the drama.

Only in this case the circumstantial evidence continued to mount.

Three red arrows painted in blood had pointed the way to the target’s neighborhood. A couple more could have led directly to the man’s door. Then there was his name, on file as the plaintiff in the breach of contract suit against the Cartwright Estate and Hale Tibbot. A bit more problematic, but probative nonetheless, was the claim made by Herbert Wilkins that their target was the man who had found Timothy Johnson’s long lost motherlode of gold.

All of that was well and good, but Ron wanted a rock-solid reason to obtain a search warrant for the man’s house.

Ron and Tall Wolf stood on the sidewalk opposite the man’s house, facing it as if they might walk up to the front door and knock. They didn’t. They remained on public property and waited for the target to appear in a window and take note of their presence.

If he was engrossed in some personal activity — bomb-making, for instance — he would be called by Special Agent Benjamin and asked if he might come to his door. The cops all thought the target would take a peek out a window first to measure the extent of his jeopardy.

That was when Tall Wolf would do his reveal.

Hold up the huge nugget of gold Benjamin had taken from Helios Sideris’ safe-deposit box. Let the man know the jig was up. Things were not going to work out well for him, but circumstances would be less awful if he just gave himself up and confessed.

The target wouldn’t have to start shooting to draw a crushing response. If he reacted with visible panic and ran away from a window, say, the cops would come crashing through his door. Exigent circumstances. The man was already suspected of being behind the aborted attempt to defile Lake Adeline. Who knew if he might have another dirty bomb in his residence?

That possibility had been thoroughly discussed by the four cops at Clay Steadman’s house. Their conclusion was that if he did have another bomb, dirty or conventional, and he’d been foolish enough to keep it at his house, he’d have it either in his basement or his garage. It wasn’t going to be the centerpiece of his dining room table.

There were cops out back watching the garage from the adjacent alley.

If the front door had to be taken down, Ron insisted on being the first man through. It was his town, after all. Tall Wolf promised he’d be close behind and expressed the idea that it would be ironic if he ended up braining the target with the nugget of gold.

Standing there on the sidewalk, Ron told Tall Wolf, “The thing that scares me most? It’s the idea that Goldstrike might become an actual mining town.”

Tall Wolf had shared with the chief the details he’d learned about how precious metal exploitation was done in the twenty-first century.

“I think we’ll be able to work that out,” Tall Wolf said.

He’d told the chief his plans.

“I hope you’re right,” Ron said.

Tall Wolf smiled. “Remember who sent me here in the first place?”

Ron laughed and said, “Yeah, the EPA. Well, God bless all tree huggers.”

Benjamin’s voice reached them through their earbuds. “Sergeant Stanley has brought Roger Sutherland into police headquarters. They’re waiting for his lawyer to arrive. Sutherland says he’s willing to talk if his lawyer says it’s okay.”

“Let’s hope,” Ron said.

The last hurdle they faced was finding a connection between their target and Sideris. Keely and Sergeant Stanley thought they might have found one. The sergeant knew everyone who was anyone in town. He knew their networks of personal, business and political connections, too. Once Tall Wolf had introduced the six degrees of separation idea to Keely and she’d relayed it to the sergeant, he’d immediately remembered the suggestion to have civilians supplement the police in patrolling Lake Adeline at night.

“Let’s look at Roger Sutherland,” Sergeant Stanley said. “See who he’s met in his travels.”

Quite a few people in his capacity of a documentary filmmaker, it turned out.

Sutherland had done a film called “Vegas Graveyard Shift.”

It examined some of the more exotic characters who came out at night in Sin City. There were gamblers, hookers and drug dealers, of course. But there were also “guys who knew guys.” To take care of problems that needed permanent solutions. One character was a thug who’d already done ten years for manslaughter. He said he’d mended his ways, but he knew other fellas who were still “you know, people you wouldn’t want to meet under any circumstances.”

If Ron or the feds could get Sutherland to say he’d put their target together with one of those scary Vegas fellas, well he might turn out to be Helios Sideris. Or someone who’d made a referral to Sideris. The county DA had said that and all the other accumulated facts should be enough for an indictment.

Their target fooled them. Didn’t do a window-peek at all.

Just opened the front door and stood there, backlit, no gun in sight.

“That the guy?” Tall Wolf asked.

Ron said, “That’s him. Jake Burkett.”

Jake squinted and said, “Is that you, Chief Ketchum? What’s going on?”

Clay Steadman’s bedroom was large but spartan. Floor to ceiling windows with mountain views. A California king bed on a redwood platform. A writing table and a chair against the opposite wall. Above the table were two rows of five head shots. None of the photos was of him. The lower row featured his favorite leading ladies, three of whom he’d married, two of whom had given him four children. He’d long ago set up irrevocable trusts to provide for his former spouses and the offspring he saw only occasionally. The upper row was a rogues’ gallery of his favorite villains, the co-stars whose onscreen odiousness had made him seem all the more heroic.

Looking at the photos inspired him when he sat at the table and rewrote the scripts he would put into production. He had deals with three studios. He played the suits off against one another to get the best terms. Kept them on their toes, made sure none of them ever felt left out for too long. Coaxed them into coproduction deals when a shoot demanded a really big budget.

The mayor had been outlining the story for the movie based on Walt Ketchum’s life at the table. When he had all the elements structured to his liking, he’d turn it over to one of his screenwriter friends. Normally, the two of them would go back and forth through any number of drafts until Clay put the finishing touches in place.

With his next two movies, he wasn’t going to have the luxury of taking his time with the writing. It’d be an outline, a first draft, a polish and roll camera. Clay had outlined the first two acts of the script he and Walt had worked on and had the third act clear in his head. He had a working title, one he thought Walt would have liked.

“Texas Mean.”

The mayor thought that captured the way Walt had been raised and the attitude he’d carried with him as an LAPD cop.

That night, though, Clay wasn’t working on his next movie.

He was cleaning his gun.

He’d fired the weapon dry on the police department range yesterday, but he released the magazine and made sure the chamber was clear. There was
no
excuse for shooting yourself with a weapon you were cleaning.

The safety check accomplished, Clay field-stripped the Beretta. He didn’t need to look at the weapon to do it. Not yet. Even so, he watched his hands at work, doing his best to imprint the process on his disintegrating brain.

He looked at the component parts he’d laid out on the white cloth he’d used to cover the table. He asked himself the name of each component. Was pleased none eluded him for even a moment.

Clay swabbed out the bore with a solvent-soaked patch pushed by a cleaning rod. The mayor smiled at the male-female symbolism. It made him think of Marlene Flower Moon. He knew she was after as much of his money as she could grab. That didn’t bother him a bit.

Sure, she was greedy, but there was something between them, too.

They were both predators, admired each other’s cunning.

Better his money should be passed on to people he liked than be left behind like the carcass of a once majestic animal to be fought over by scavengers.

The mayor continued to clean his gun, finished that and began to lubricate it.

He held the barrel up to the light to check for residue.

Finding none, he fitted the barrel back into the frame rails.

He soon had the gun back together and started to feed cartridges into the magazine. He slapped the clip back into the Beretta. He chambered a round, disengaged the safety and pointed the weapon at his head. He took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

He didn’t pull the trigger. Not tonight. Not in his home. Couldn’t expect Ron Ketchum or any other future mayor to live in the place if he did that. But he had to keep in practice. Remember exactly what to do. What the hell would be the point of feeling suicidal if you forgot how to kill yourself?

He clicked the safety back on and left the gun on the corner of the writing table. He put the cloth, cleaning equipment and tools back in his bedroom closet. He’d probably forget where they were eventually. That was why he always left the gun on the table.

He’d told the chief he was going to bed because he was tired. He hadn’t wanted to explain the ritual of the nightly gun cleaning. The purpose of that would have been obvious and the last thing he wanted was people trying to save him so he could crumble before their eyes. Now, though, he
was
tired.

But there was one more thing he had to do before he could sleep.

Outline the third act of “Texas Mean.”

Before he forgot what he wanted to write.

“Five minutes and then we’re leaving,” Tara Driscoll said.

Ms. Driscoll was Roger Sutherland’s lawyer. She’d arrived at the Muni Complex fifteen minutes after her client. Sergeant Stanley had seated them in the PD’s main conference room. Provided each of them with a Snapple green tea. Made sure they were comfortable.

“But you’ve been here only five minutes, Ms. Driscoll,” Sergeant Stanley said, “and you spent that time conferring with your client.”

“Very well, we’ll stay as long as you like … provided the police department pays us our combined hourly rates. I believe the total will be above a thousand dollars per —”

Sutherland leaned in and whispered into his attorney’s ear.

“Very well,” she said to him with a smile of approval. “Our time will cost you fifteen hundred dollars an hour. Can you authorize that, sergeant? If not, how would you like to make use of your remaining three minutes?”

Sergeant Stanley knew he was far from a detective, but he was an expert at getting people to see where their best interests lay.

“Mr. Sutherland,” the sergeant said, “there was recently a major act of vandalism at the Jade Emperor construction site. As a prelude and a diversion to that attack, a car blew up on Lake Shore Drive, just up the street from the construction site. We’ve been able to trace that car to a dealership in Nevada.”