“Emmett Tufts and Kywin Bell weren’t at the location,” Watershed explained when she returned to the station. He and Kayan Rule were standing near the doorway to the lunchroom. They were the deputies who’d been charged with the task of finding the “witnesses,” as Alvarez was calling them, even though, deep in her heart, she thought them likely suspects. For now, she’d not label them as such—they were just “persons of interest.”
Hooking a thumb toward the hall leading to the interview rooms, Watershed said, “We found each of these yahoos at home. The Bell kid tried to convince us he wasn’t smoking dope while he was listening to music, plugged into his earphones. Preston Tufts had just gotten out of his car at his father’s house after making a run for pizza. So they weren’t at the filming.”
“They know about Marjory Tufts, right?”
“Yeah.” Both nodded.
“They’d heard, one way or another,” Rule said. “But the others—their brothers are definitely MIA. We’d gone up to Reservoir Point looking for all of them, but they weren’t there. We asked about them all, talked to the woman in charge of the shoot, Melanie Kline. She was none too happy that we were there, looking for kids who, she insisted, weren’t scheduled for filming tonight.”
“You accepted that?”
“Nope.” Rule had shaken his head. “We double-checked with the producer, Barclay Sphinx, and he confirmed that due to some last-minute changes in the script, those two kids and a couple of others weren’t on the roster to show up tonight. He even showed us the casting list. All true.”
“So find them,” she said, irritated, then went to the lunchroom, grabbed a cup of coffee from the quarter-full pot warming on a hot plate. She drank a couple of swallows of the bitter, overcooked brew, then mentally steeled herself for the upcoming interviews. She couldn’t wait to hear what the older Bell and Tufts kids had to say for themselves, for their brothers. Pausing to check that the audio/video equipment was working and that Blackwater and Zoller were in the viewing area to watch the interviews, she took a look at the “persons of interest” before heading into the rooms.
Through the two-way glass she saw Kip Bell. His face was grizzled from lack of a razor. He sat in his chair, looking around, glaring at the camera he spotted mounted on the wall. His arms were crossed over his massive chest and he glowered, throwing off the vibes that he’d like to tear the next person he saw limb from limb.
In the room next door, viewed through a separate windowed mirror, Preston Tufts was on the move. Nervous. Up on his feet. Back in his chair, knee bouncing uncontrollably as he waited. Chewing on a fingernail. Then standing and pacing again. Ready to crack.
Both of them looked guilty as sin.
And Alvarez, loaded for bear, was hell-bent on finding out why.
“Let’s have some fun,” she said to Blackwater and Zoller when she left the viewing room and her cell phone beeped with a message from Pete Watershed. He’d heard from another road deputy that Marjory Tufts’s dusty rose classic T-Bird had just been located on an abandoned mining road about a mile from the area where the body had been discovered. And it was no longer in pristine shape. Zoller forwarded a picture of the car, vanity license plate MADGE visible, to Alvarez. The bumper was crumpled, huge gouges visible in the pink paint, a large dent over the front driver’s side tire.
Alvarez didn’t bother with a text, but after giving Zoller and Blackwater the word that these interviews might have to be delayed, Kip and Preston kept “on ice,” she rang up Zoller instead. “Tell me where the car is,” she said.
“Better yet, I’ll show you. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
“I’ll drive,” Alvarez said.
The crime scene unit was already at the site, flashlights lighting the forest, a larger light focused on Marjory Tufts’s once-beautiful car. The T-Bird was destroyed, its body crumpled in spots, the paint gashed, one white wall blown. Obviously, whoever had driven it along an unused mining road and down this near-forgotten spur had bounced the classic vehicle across a creek, over boulders, and through a too-narrow passage that had allowed berry vines and branches to scrape and gouge its once-sleek sides.
Alvarez had parked at the end of the spur. She and Zoller had hiked up the overgrown road. Undergrowth nearly covered the twin ruts of gravel that had been laid half a century earlier and now had eroded into the forest floor.
Two deputies were guarding the area, the crime tech already going over the car that was half in, half out of a dry creek bed, driven as far into the woods as possible, then abandoned.
No one was inside but a tech. Lex Farnsby was carefully combing the interior, which held nothing but a designer overnight bag filled with a woman’s change of clothes and toiletries. Marjory’s things for her night away from her husband.
“Nothing unusual inside,” Farnsby said, “but the driver’s seat is set back to allow a lot of leg room.”
“A man,” Alvarez said.
“Or very tall woman.”
Like Terri Tufts. Ex-wife.
Farnsby went to work on the trunk, unlocking it with a pick and shining the beam of his flashlight over the empty, pristine interior.
“Hey! Got something over here,” another tech, a large woman, called as she took a picture of the sparse gravel and dirt of the once-upon-a-time road. “Cigarette butt. Looks like it’s fresh.” With gloved fingers, she picked it up and held it to her nose. “Yeah. Camel filter.” She dropped it into an evidence bag. Alvarez remembered that one of the Bell boys smoked Camels, but he probably wasn’t the only one in the crowd of kids who’d know Marjory. Hadn’t she seen Preston Tufts slide a pack into his pocket after having a smoke with Donny Justison on the steps of the Sons of Grizzly Falls Building at the end of the Big Foot Believers’ meeting?
And wasn’t this spur in the forest about half a mile from where the body of Marjory Tufts had been found and less than two miles from the Tufts’s home? For a strong athlete, covering the distance on foot would take little time. Kill the stepmom, dump her body, drive here and sprint home to catch the end of a ball game on ESPN. The gears inside Alvarez’s brain began to turn, and for the first time in this investigation, she felt a sizzle of anticipation, the inkling that things were finally falling into place. She was getting close to solving this crime.
Maybe.
“Bingo!” Farnsby said as he slid open a panel in the trunk of the T-Bird. Once the covering was removed, a hidden compartment, meant for more luggage storage, possibly a custom feature, was exposed and it wasn’t empty. Haphazardly jammed within that secret space was a very lifelike ape suit, mask and foot coverings included.
“The mother lode,” Farnsby said under his breath, and Alvarez couldn’t agree more.