Authors: Michael Connelly
33
I
WAS OUTSIDE WITH THE TWO WOMEN in the Mercedes, running the air-conditioning and cooling them down. Rachel was still inside on the bar’s phone talking to Cherie Dei and coordinating the arrival of backup. My guess was that agents would soon drop out of the sky in helicopters and descend on Clear, Nevada, in force. The trail was fresh. They were close.
I tried to talk to the two girls—it was hard to think of them as women despite what they did for a living and even though they were old enough. They probably knew everything there was to know about men but they didn’t seem to know anything about the world. In my mind they were just girls who had taken wrong turns or been kidnapped and taken away from womanhood. I was beginning to understand what Rachel had said earlier.
“Did Tom Walling ever come into the trailer and hire any of the girls?” I asked.
“Not that I seen,” Tammy said.
“Somebody said he was probably queer or something,” Mecca added.
“Why did they say that?”
“’Cause he lived like a hermit or something,” Mecca replied. “An’ he never wanted no pussy even though Tawny would’ve thrown him some on the house like with the other drivers.”
“Are there a lot of drivers?”
“He was the only one from around here,” Tammy said quickly, apparently not liking Mecca in the lead. “The others come up from Vegas. Some of ’em work for the casinos.”
“If there are drivers down there, how come somebody would hire Tom to go all the way down and get them?”
“They didn’t,” Mecca said.
“Sometimes they did,” Tammy corrected.
“Well, sometimes. The dummies. But mostly we called for Tom if somebody got dropped off and stayed awhile or rented one of Old Billings’s trailers and then needed a ride back ’cause his ride was long gone. The casino rides don’t wait around too long. Unless you’re one of those high rollers and then probably . . .”
“And then what?”
“Then you wouldn’t come to Clear in the first place.”
“They got prettier girls in Pahrump,” Tammy said matter-of-factly, as if it was strictly a business disadvantage and not something that bothered her personally.
“An’ it’s a bit closer an’ the pussy costs more,” Mecca said. “So what we get up in Clear is your cost-conscious consumer.”
Spoken like a true marketing expert. I tried to get the conversation back on track.
“So, for the most part, Tom Walling came over and drove customers back to Las Vegas or wherever they came from.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
“And these guys—these customers—could have been totally anonymous. You don’t check IDs, right? The customers could use whatever name they wanted when they came in there.”
“Uh-huh. Unless they look like maybe they ain’t twenty-one yet.”
“Right. We check the ID of the young ones.”
I could see how it could be done, how Backus could have sized up brothel customers as his victims. If it appeared they had taken measures to guard their identities and hide that they had made the trip to Clear, then they had inadvertently made themselves perfect victims. It also played into what was known about the demons that drove his killing spree. The profile work in the Poet file indicated that Backus’s pathology was wrapped up in his relationship with his father, a man who on the outside held the vaunted image of FBI agent, hero and good man, but on the inside was a man who abused his wife and son to the extent that one fled the home because she could, while the one who couldn’t get away was left to retreat into a world of fantasies involving the killing of his abuser.
I realized there was something missing. Lloyd Rockland, the victim who had rented a car. How did he fit in if he didn’t need a driver?
I opened the file Rachel had left in the car and pulled out the photo of Rockland. I showed it to the women.
“This guy, do either of you recognize him? His name was Lloyd.”
“Was?” Mecca asked.
“Yeah, that’s right, was. Lloyd Rockland. He’s dead. Do you recognize him?”
Neither of them did. I knew it was a long shot. Rockland disappeared in 2002. I tried to think of an explanation that would allow Rockland to fit into the theory.
“You serve alcohol in there, right?”
“If the customer wants it we can provide it,” Mecca said. “We got a license.”
“Okay, what happens when a guy drives all the way up from Vegas and gets too drunk to drive home?”
“He can sleep it off,” she responded. “He can take a room if he pays for it.”
“What if he wants to get back? What if he needs to get back?”
“He can call over here and the mayor will take care of it. The driver will take him back in his car and then the driver just catches a ride back like with one of the casino cars or something. It works out.”
I nodded. It worked out for my theory as well. Rockland could have gotten drunk and had to be driven back by the driver, Backus. Only he wasn’t driven back to Vegas. I knew I would have to ask Rachel to check the remains identified as Rockland’s for a high alcohol level. It would be another confirmation.
“Mister, are we gonna have to stay here all day?” Mecca asked.
“I don’t know,” I said as I looked up at the trailer door.
RACHEL TRIED TO KEEP HER VOICE LOW because Billings Rett was at the other end of the bar acting like he was doing a crossword puzzle, when she knew he was trying to listen to and understand everything she was saying and that could be heard from the phone.
“What’s the ETA?” she asked.
“We’ll be in the air within twenty and then another twenty to you,” Cherie Dei said. “So sit tight, Rachel.”
“Got it.”
“And Rachel, I know you. I know what you will want to do. Stay out of the suspect’s trailer until we can go in there with an ERT. Let them do their job.”
Rachel almost told Dei that the fact was that she didn’t know her, that she couldn’t begin to understand the first thing about her. But she didn’t.
“Got it,” she said instead.
“What about Bosch?” Dei asked next.
“What about him?”
“I want him kept away from this.”
“That will be sort of hard since he found the place. This is all because of him.”
“I understand that but we would have gotten there eventually. We always do. We’ll thank him but we have to brush him aside after that.”
“Well, you get to tell him that.”
“I will. So are we set? I’ve got to get over to Nellis.”
“All set. See you inside the hour.”
“Rachel, one last thing, why didn’t you drive up there?”
“It was Bosch’s hunch, he wanted to drive. What’s the difference?”
“You were giving him control of the situation, that’s all.”
“That’s second-guessing after the fact. We thought we might get a line on the missing men, not be led right to —”
“That’s fine, Rachel. I shouldn’t have brought it up. I have to go.”
Dei hung up on her end. Rachel couldn’t hang up because the phone was stretched from the back wall and over the bar. She held it up to Rett and he put down his pencil and came over. He took the phone and hung it up.
“Thank you, Mr. Rett. In about an hour a couple helicopters are going to land here. Probably right in front of this trailer. Agents will want to talk to you. More formally than I did. They will probably talk to a lot of people in your town.”
“Not good for business.”
“Probably not, but the faster people cooperate, the faster they’ll take off and be out of here.”
She didn’t mention anything about the horde of media that would also probably descend on the place once it was revealed publicly that the little brothel town in the desert was where the Poet had holed up unnoticed for all of these years and had chosen his latest victims.
“If the agents ask where I am, tell them I went up to Tom Walling’s trailer, okay?”
“Sounded like you were getting told
not
to go up there.”
“Mr. Rett, just tell them what I asked you to tell them.”
“Will do.”
“By the way, have you been up there since he came in here and told you he was leaving for a while?”
“No, I haven’t managed to get up there. He paid the rent on the place so I didn’t think it was my business to snoop around his things. That’s not the way we are here in Clear.”
Rachel nodded.
“Okay, Mr. Rett, thanks for your cooperation.”
He shrugged as if to say he either had no choice or his cooperation was minimal. Rachel turned from the bar and headed for the door. But just as she got there she hesitated. She reached inside her blazer and pulled the extra magazine for her Sig Sauer off her belt. She hefted its weight once in her hand and then slipped it into the pocket of her blazer. She then went out the door and got into the Mercedes next to Bosch.
“So,” he said, “is Agent Dei mad?”
“Nope. We just brought in the case break, how could she be mad?”
“I don’t know. Some people have the ability to be mad no matter what you bring them.”
“Are we just going to sit here all day?” Mecca asked from the backseat.
Rachel turned around to look back at the two women.
“We’re going over to the western ridge to check out a trailer. You can go with us and stay in the car or you can go into the bar and wait. More agents are on the way. You’ll probably be able to get your interviews over with here and not have to go into Vegas.”
“Thank God,” Mecca said. “I’ll wait here.”
“Me, too,” said Tammy.
Bosch let them out of the car.
“Just wait here,” Rachel called to them. “If you go back to your trailer or go anywhere else you won’t get far and it will just make them mad.”
They didn’t acknowledge this cautioning. Rachel watched them walk up the ramp and into the bar. Bosch got back in and put the car into reverse.
“You sure about this?” he asked. “My guess is that Agent Dei told you to sit still until the reinforcements got here.”
“She also said one of the first things she was going to do was send you on your way. You want to wait for that or do you want to go see this trailer?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll go. I’m not the one with the career to worry about.”
“Such as it is.”
WE FOLLOWED THE DIRT ROAD Billings Rett had directed us to, and it ranged west from the settlement of Clear and up a sloping landscape for a mile. The road then leveled off and curved behind a reddish-orange outcropping of rock that was exactly as Rett had described it. It looked like the tail-end of the great passenger ship as it drew upward out of the water at a sixty-degree angle and then plunged downward into the sea. According to the movie, anyway. The rock climber Rett mentioned had climbed to the appropriate spot at the top and had used white paint to scrawl “Titanic” across the rock surface.
We didn’t stop to appraise the rock or the paintwork. I drove the Mercedes around it and we soon came to a clearing where there was a small trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was a junked car on four flats next to it and an oil drum used to burn trash nearby. On the other side was a large fuel tank and a power generator.
To preserve possible crime scene evidence I stopped just outside the clearing and killed the engine. I noticed that the generator was silent. There was a stillness about the whole scene that seemed ominous in some way. I had a real sense that I had come to the end of the world, a place of darkness. I wondered if this was where Backus had taken his victims, if this was the end of the world for them. Probably, I concluded. It was a place of waiting evil.
Rachel broke the silence.
“Well, are we just going to look at it or are we going to check it out?”
“Just waiting on you to make the move.”
She opened her door and then I opened mine. We met at the front of the car. That was when I noticed that the trailer’s windows were all open, not what I would expect someone would do if they were leaving their home for a long period of time. After that recognition came the odor.
“You smell that?”
She nodded. Death was in the air. It was much worse, much stronger than at Zzyzx. I instinctively knew that what we would find here would not be the buried secrets of the killer. Not this time. There was a body in that trailer—at least one—that was open to the air and decomposing.
“With my last act,” Rachel said.
“What?”
“The card. What he wrote on the card.”
I nodded. She was thinking suicide.
“You think?”
“I don’t know. Let’s check.”
We walked slowly forward, neither saying a word after that. The smell grew stronger and we both knew that whatever and whoever was dead inside the trailer had been baking in there for a long time.
I broke from her side and walked to a set of windows to the left of the trailer’s door. Cupping my hands to the screen I tried to look into the darkness within. My hands hitting the screen set off an alarm of buzzing flies within the trailer. They were bouncing against the screen, looking to get out as if maybe the scene and the smell inside were too much even for them.
There was no curtain across the window but I couldn’t see much from the angle I had—at least not a body or an indication of one. It looked like a small sitting area with a couch and a chair. There was a table with two stacks of hardback books on it. Behind the chair was a bookcase with its shelves full of books.
“Nothing,” I said.
I stepped back from the window and looked up the length of the trailer. I saw Rachel’s eyes focused on the door and then the doorknob. Something came to me then, something that didn’t fit.
“Rachel, why did he leave the note for you at the bar?”
“What?”
“The note. He left it at the bar. Why there? Why not here?”
“I guess he wanted to make sure I got it.”
“If he hadn’t left it there you would have still come up here. You would’ve still found it here.”
She shook her head.
“What are you saying? I don’t get —”
“Don’t try the door, Rachel. Let’s wait.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t like this.”
“Why don’t you look around the back, see if there is another window you can see in or something.”
“Okay, I will. You just wait.”