Mackenzie #2
The cruiser parks in an actual space, which tells me everything about the next hour.
The deputy is young. Twenty-four, twenty-five, uniform pressed by somebody who loves him, and he comes across the ice with his hat on and a clipboard already out and no gloves, because he is twenty-four.
"Ma'am. Gavin Young, Pondera County. We had a welfare check called in on Room 6."
"Called in by who?"
"Party didn't identify."
"At what time?"
He looks at the clipboard. "Ten fifty-one."
At ten fifty-one I was sitting eleven feet from a wall unit with a rag in the flue, watching a drone come off a grid.
I did not know. Ruby did not know, asleep at the other end of the building with her television going.
The Bureau did not know. Nobody drove past. Nobody heard a thing through cinderblock.
Somebody knew.
He had hours. The church, the graveside. He could have done it any time in that window and been hours away from Rimrock by the time I got back to Room 6.
Somebody sat somewhere with the picture of that room in his head and got up and made a phone call and would not give his name.
Not the man who hired it done. That man is not calling anybody. He set a room to write its own report and then he went to bed, and the last thing on earth he wants is a sheriff's car in this lot in the middle of the night with me still breathing.
So it is the other one. The one who came in here with a rag and a screwdriver, did the job he was paid for, and then got out to his truck and sat there, and somewhere between this lot and wherever he sleeps, the guilt took over.
He could not say it out loud. Saying it out loud is a confession with his own voice on it.
Welfare check is what you say instead.
It is the only phrase in the language that sends a cop car and does not require a story.
"Ma'am?"
"Tatum. FBI." I show him the badge and watch him stand up straighter.
"Deputy, before you write anything. Nobody has been back in that room and nothing in it has been touched.
There is cloth packed into the flue behind the heater housing, four inches up, and the detector on the wall has no light on it. Photograph both from the doorway."
He gets his phone out and takes two pictures from the threshold and does not go in, because there is nothing to smell in there and he has been told at least once in his life what that means.
"Huh," he says. "Those things, the battery goes and folks pull it out to stop the noise. Happens all the time." He is writing while he says it. "Then something backs up in the vent and the guest don't know, and by morning..."
He hears the end of his own sentence and stops.
"Somebody packed it, deputy. That's not a bird's nest. That's four inches of rag put in by hand."
"Birds get in them." He says it fast, like a man handing back something hot. "Mice. You'd be surprised what comes out of a vent on one of these old units."
"It's from October."
"I'll note it." He does not note it. He notes something. "County will have somebody look at the appliance."
"Who?"
"Sheriff will assign it."
"Deputy." I wait until he looks up from the clipboard. "The call. Landline or cell?"
"Ma'am?"
"Your dispatcher has a number on a screen. Which was it?"
He thinks about whether this is his to give away and decides, because I am federal and he is twenty-four, that it is. "Pay phone. There's one outside the Cenex on the north end. Only one left in town, far as I know."
Nobody uses a pay phone. There is no reason on this earth to use a pay phone except that you have thought carefully about what happens after you hang up.
"Man or woman?"
"Man."
"Did he sound drunk?”
“He sounded like he was outside.” Young shifts his weight and puts the hand that is not holding the clipboard into his armpit. “Traffic on it, maybe. Or he was cold. He said the room number and he said welfare check and then he was gone. Dispatch tried to hold him.”
“Say it the way he said it.”
“Room 6 at the Riverview, somebody needs to go check on her.” He hears himself doing it and his voice comes down. “Then he hung up.”
Her. Not somebody. Not a guest.
He knew who was in the room.
Off to my left, Holt Blackwater stands with his hands at his sides, looking at the tire tracks in the lot. The ones under his own and the ones that were there before.
He has not said a word to law enforcement in nine minutes. He’s not shifting his weight and he‘s not blowing on his hands. He’s standing in it the way the light pole is standing in it.
Once, while Young writes, Holt's eyes come up and find me across the lot and hold there half a second longer than checking on a witness requires. Then they go back to the tracks like they were never anywhere else.
Young's pen quits on him. He works it against the corner of the page, puts the barrel in his mouth to warm it, then gets three more words out of it before it quits again, and he says something under his breath and writes the rest in a hand that is getting worse by the line.
Whatever is going on that page tonight is going to be short, and short is how a thing becomes an appliance.
I call Salt Lake standing in the lot.
I get the night desk, and then I get Tom, who is at home, and who listens to all of it without interrupting because he is good at that part.
"You're not hurt?"
"I'm not hurt."
"Mac." A long breath on the other end of the country. "I'm not going to be able to move anybody this week. You know what the staffing looks like."
"I'm not asking for a detail. I'm asking for one body who can sit in a car."
"I know what you're asking for."
"Tom, somebody called it in. Pay phone outside the Cenex, ten fifty-one, wouldn't give a name, and he said her.
" I hear my own voice climbing and take it back down.
"That is a person who knows what was done to this room.
Pull the line records. That is one subpoena and it has a name on the other end of it. "
"On a pay phone that takes coins?"
"On a pay phone somebody drove to."
"Write it up as an attempt," he says. "I'll push it. But the county's calling it an appliance, and I'm going to need something on paper that isn't an empty detector and a dirty vent, or it's going to sit."
Five months, some cold little voice says. It sat then too.
I put that away where I put things.
"Fine," I say and hang up. I stand there with the phone in my hand and both hands going inside the gloves now that there is nothing left to do with them.
I would like to call it the cold. I am dressed for the cold. I have been dressed for the cold for twenty minutes and my hands did not start until I put the phone down. I put them in my pockets.
Holt has come up on my right. He does it without sound on ice.
"You heard it on a scanner," I say.
"Yes."
"You got here fast." I watch his face while I say it. "Sideways into a full stop, before Young was even off the highway. Young told me dispatch went out at ten fifty-one."
He doesn't answer that.
"And Young didn't blink at no name. A deputy who's worked this county three years should have blinked at that."
Either it happens here all the time and I've misjudged the place, or he had the same thought I did, and drove like it.
I have a file on this man that says Army, says honorable, says nothing else worth the paper. Whatever trained him to read a phone call the way I read a balance sheet did not show up in five months of Bureau digging, and I am done pretending that's an oversight.
He looks at the tire tracks.
"You did that math in your driveway," I say.
"I did it before I had my coat on."
So he knew that fast. He had it before his boots were laced, and he has known it the whole time he has been standing in this lot saying nothing to a deputy.
"My father wants me to tell you something."
"Of course he does."
"He's offering security cooperation. Local. Someone on you until this closes."
I turn and look up at him.
"Someone," I say.
"Yes."
"Say the name of the someone."
He does not move. "Me."
Out loud in a parking lot well past midnight, and I have to hand it to Gideon Blackwater, who has never once in his life carried his own knife anywhere.
He put this in his son's mouth. He made the man stand in the cold on the night of the funeral and say it himself, to a woman who already has his name written down as a suspect in Jacob's murder.
And Holt said it. Flat, no argument in it anywhere, the way a man reports a number.