Dust Devil (55 page)

“
All
right,” Liz said slowly, the wheels in her sharp, legal mind
obviously churning as she speculated upon what, if any, relationship
Renzo might have with Papa Nick— and what possible bearing that
might have upon the former’s guilt or innocence with regard to
the two murders, not to mention the dope-dealing charges Hoag had
tacked on to the list against Renzo. “Sarah, I’m sorry...
so terribly sorry about what Hoag and Dwayne did to you. That was
totally uncalled for, and they had absolutely no right to do anything
like that! No right at all! And you can be sure I’m going to
tell Parker and Kingston when I get back to the firm. This town’s
just
got
to
stop looking the other way where Hoag and Dwayne are concerned, to
realize they’ve been the sheriff and deputy for so damned long
around here that they’ve got to thinking
they
make
the
laws instead of just enforce ’em. They’ve gone too far,
they’ve overstepped the boundaries.” With that
observation, Liz departed, leaving Renzo and Sarah alone together in
the cell.

*
* *

At
the arraignment, despite how Frank Bannister, the town’s
district attorney, argued strenuously against it, Judge Pierce ruled
that neither Renzo nor Sarah, who both owned property in town, was a
flight risk, and he set bail for each of them. Shortly after Renzo
had put up the bail money, they were released from jail. They
collected Alex from Papa Nick’s big, red-brick house on the
hill and returned home to begin planning their defense.
Unfortunately, the only thing they possessed as evidence of their
innocence was Lamar’s note to Renzo—and without the
accompanying diskettes, which had been destroyed at Morse’s
house, it was virtually worthless. As, unlike those of big cities,
the town’s docket ensured that Renzo and Sarah’s trial
would take place sooner rather than later, they didn’t have a
whole lot of time to prepare, to prove their innocence.

That
night in bed, driven by a dark, powerful sense of fatalism, they made
fierce, feverish love together, losing themselves wholly in each
other, Sarah with a wild abandon and savage desperation to match
Renzo’s own. Afterward, she lay in his arms and wept
soundlessly, while he held her close in the moonlit darkness, so
drained and dispirited that for the first time, he had no solace to
offer.

In
the small hours of the morning, he awakened gasping and in a cold
sweat from his old nightmare, the one in which he was bitten and
swallowed by the road-snake. To his relief, Sarah slept on, so
exhausted that she was undisturbed by his rousing. But Renzo lay
there silently in the greying night, drinking the Scotch he poured
for himself,
smoking
endless cigarettes and staring at the ceiling, sick with fear and
despair at the thought that by coming back to this town, to her, he
had, instead of renewing their lives, utterly destroyed them.

Out
of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength
because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the
avenger.

The
Holy Bible

—
The
Book of Psalms, 8:2

In
the end, it was Alex who solved the puzzle for Sarah. Always, there
had been something about Lamar’s diskettes that had bothered
her. She just had never been able to put her finger on what it
was—although afterward, she realized it was so obvious that she
should have seen it from the very start.

She
and Alex sat at the kitchen table, eating a subdued and solitary
supper. Renzo was in town, at the
Trib,
his
hours long and difficult now that he no longer had Morse
to
rely on and so many of the town’s businesses had yanked their
advertising, in light of the accusations against Renzo and Sarah.
Alex was, naturally, horribly upset by all that had happened,
although he was bearing up manfully. He had, Sarah thought, come to
love his father deeply.

Now,
as he picked listlessly at his food, Alex said, “You know, Mom,
what I don’t understand about this whole thing is...well, if
Lamar lived down in the ghetto, he couldn’t have had a whole
lot of money, right? So where did he get the computer?”

Her
son’s question was like a lightbulb suddenly switching on in
Sarah’s brain. Where, indeed, had Lamar got the computer? She
could think of only one place: Field-Yield, Inc., where he had worked
as a janitorial assistant.

Sarah
knew the murder and dope-dealing charges against Renzo were untrue,
that he was being cleverly framed by some unscrupulous person in
town. Now she asked herself slowly if it made good sense that, that
being the case, the killer would have relied on Lamar’s
grass-transaction records as evidence against Renzo if the killer
were somehow involved with Lamar’s marijuana fields and pot
peddling. And the answer was no. The killer would have had to suspect
that with half the town being named as pot purchasers, Hoag would at
least be forced to consider calling in the state bureau of
investigation —which would have meant a real risk of eventual
exposure for the killer, were Lamar’s drugs at the bottom of
the affair. Which meant that something else entirely must have been
on the diskettes Lamar had sent to Renzo... something Lamar had
perhaps discovered in Field-Yield, Inc.’s computer system.

It
would doubtless be in a hidden directory, Sarah thought, her heart
beginning to pound horrifically as she suddenly remembered Krystal
Watkins’s words that night at the Grain Elevator—and
Lamar’s own words to his grandmother, about getting Keisha what
she deserved from the man.

She
had to get to Field-Yield, Inc., Sarah realized, to get into its
computer system. Fortunately, after Bubba had
fired
her,
so many things had happened so swiftly that she had never had a
chance to return her master key to the fertilizer plant to him,
even if it
had
occurred
to her to do so. She still had access to all
the
company’s
buildings—and it was highly unlikely that Bubba had thought to
alter the code for the alarm system.

Before
leaving the farmhouse, Sarah placed three calls. No one answered at
the
Trib
;
Renzo must have gone over to Fritzchen’s Kitchen or someplace
else for supper, she thought. Tiffany Haskell wasn’t busy and
agreed to come right over to baby-sit Alex. Tully O’Neill,
Morse’s friend and Sarah’s old professor in computer
science at the university, was only too happy to give her
instructions as to how to go about tracking down a hidden directory
in a computer system. So that she wouldn’t have to trust her
memory or hastily scribbled notes, Sarah repeated them verbatim after
Tully, recording them on Renzo’s voice-activated, pocket tape
recorder, which he had left on the nightstand that morning.

Then
she told Alex where she was going and why, so he could inform Renzo.
After that, she grabbed her purse and keys and left the farmhouse.

Sarah
parked in the space at Field-Yield, Inc. reserved for J. D.
Holbrooke, not only because it was the one closest to the front
doors, but also because it was shielded from the highway by a row of
tall, spreading quince bushes. Although she didn’t spy anyone
else around, she nevertheless got out of the Jeep furtively, closing
the door as quietly as she could before striding quickly toward the
front doors of the big building. Her hand trembled as she inserted
her master key into the lock, pushed open one of the heavy glass
doors. Once inside, she deactivated, then reset the alarm system,
relieved that it accepted the code she punched in. Then she swiftly
made her way past the switchboard-reception desk, down the long,
dimly lit halls to Bubba’s office. The whole time, her heart
was racing and her mouth was so dry that she could hardly swallow, no
matter how hard she tried to tell herself that this night was no
different from any other when she used to work late at the fertilizer
plant. It was. She had never before been a trespasser here, never
before attempted to break into unknown areas of Field-Yield, Inc.’s
computer system.

Nervously,
she switched on the banker’s lamp on Bubba’s desk,
dismayed by how shadowy and sinister everything once so familiar to
her suddenly appeared in the dim light, as though it were somehow
distorted, a scene from a nightmare.

“
That’s
silly, Sarah. Get a grip,” she muttered to herself in a futile
attempt to bolster her faltering courage.

“
You’re
letting your wild imagination run away with you, is all.”
Still, her fingers itched to turn on the overhead fluorescent lights.
But that would undeniably announce her presence here. She was taking
a big enough risk as it was, without flagrantly attracting attention
to herself. The soft glow of the lamp probably would not be spied
from the highway, especially with the blinds drawn, and if it were,
she hoped it would be put down to Bubba himself working late or to
the janitorial staff doing their nightly cleaning.

That
she wasn’t totally alone in the building mitigated Sarah’s
fear a little, comforting and reassuring her. She determinedly pushed
from her mind the knowledge that Thaddeus Rollins was old and slow,
not very bright and slightly deaf, besides. If anything untoward were
to happen, if she screamed, he would surely hear
that,
would
have sense enough at least to telephone the sheriff or to go for Otis
Krueger, the night watchman.

Sitting
down in Bubba’s burgundy leather chair, Sarah flicked on the
computer. In the semidarkness, the light from the monitor seemed much
brighter than usual as the machine warmed up and the screen came on
in a burst of brilliant color. Once she was into the system, she
pulled from her handbag Renzo’s voice-activated, pocket tape
recorder and began to play back the detailed instructions Tully
O’Neill had given her for finding hidden directories and files
in a computer system.

Her
former college professor was undoubtedly an expert at it, but for
Sarah, this exercise was a maddeningly slow and tedious process, made
all the more nerve-racking by the fact that she didn’t know
exactly what she was
looking
for and was apprehensive about being discovered, so she jumped at the
slightest sound. She had never before been so conscious of the vast
emptiness of the building at night, of all the noises it made. There
were things she had never been aware of before: the loud workings of
the air-conditioning system, the whoosh and hiss of the cool drafts
through the vents, the gurgle of the water cooler in the hallway, the
ringing of a telephone line that went unanswered in some office, the
distant drone of Thaddeus’s vacuum cleaner somewhere beyond,
the thud of june bugs against the office windows, attracted by the
glow of the lamp.

More
than a few times, Sarah made mistakes that forced her to backtrack in
the computer system. Once, she became hopelessly lost somehow in a
mass of warehouse-inventory files and was finally compelled to power
down to purge the computer, and then start all over again. So it was
more than an hour later when she at last managed to pull up a hidden
directory that looked as though it might be what she was searching
for. She requested a list of the files it contained, but instead of
receiving that,
Enter
Password
flashed
on the screen.