Apache Country (37 page)

He shook off his somber thoughts and
concentrated on the present. By now Ironheel would be back in the
mountains above the Mescalero Reservation. He pictured him out
there, moving steadily, tirelessly. Well, now it’s my turn, he
thought. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to the fifteen mile
cross-country hike that lay ahead of him, but he had to get through
the police cordon somehow, and this was the only way it could be
done.

“You’re sure you’ll be all right?” Ellen
Casey said.

“I’ll be fine,” he replied. “I’ve got all
day.”

“God bless you for this, David,” she said.
She put her hand on his shoulder, leaned across and kissed him on
the cheek. She smelled of Nina Ricci.

Easton got out of the car and watched as she
drove off toward town, then negotiated the barbed wire fence
bordering the highway and headed southeast toward Blackwater Draw.
The morning sun was bright and hot, only faint wisps of white cloud
in the sky. Around about now, he thought, Ironheel would be letting
himself be seen up around Mescalero, and telephones would soon
begin ringing.

The bait was out. But would the fish
bite?

“District Attorney Olin McKittrick,”
McKittrick snapped into the two-way security squawk-box at the
entrance to the Casey ranch. “Urgent police business. Open up,
please.”

He was still unsure how to handle Kit
Twitchell, and his annoyingly inconclusive discussion with Joe
Apodaca about the implications of interrogating her hadn’t helped
him decide. Although they both knew the cellphone call to the Casey
ranch proved only that Easton – at least they agreed it could only
have been Easton – had contacted the ranch, to his way of thinking
the fact it had happened at all suggested strongly that Easton
believed or was hoping Kit Twitchell would help him. There didn’t
seem to be any way he could have known Ellen Casey was at the
ranch.

“Kit Twitchell and Easton used to be an item,
remember,” he had said to Apodaca. The sheriff shook his head.

“I also remember Robert Casey shot that
romance down. And that Easton was pretty bitter about it.”

“Then why would he call her? What would he
want?” McKittrick had queried.

“Money, food, assistance. The more important
question is, if he asked her for help, would she cooperate?”

“You think she would?”

Apodaca pulled a face. “Hard to figure,” he
said. “But on balance I think not. Old times’ sake is one thing,
but she’s Ralph Twitchell’s wife, for Chrissake, she’d have too
much to lose.”

“But … she might? It’s a possibility?”

“Like I said, hard to figure,” Apodaca
replied.

“I’ll call her now,” McKittrick said and
reached for the phone. Apodaca stopped him in the act of lifting
the receiver.

“Phone’s out,” he said. “Line’s probably
down.”

McKittrick made an impatient sound. “Don’t
they have a cellphone?”

“No reply there, either.”

“So?”

“One of us better go talk to her.”

“Me, you mean?” McKittrick said.

“You get along with those people, Olin,”
Apodaca pointed out. “You know damned well I do not.”

It was true, as far as it went. McKittrick
got along with the Caseys because he needed to, although he had
never really liked them. To his way of thinking the Caseys had
always come on like they thought they were Riverside royalty, and
Ralph Twitchell and his wife ran them a close second. If he ever
established that either Ellen Casey or Kit Twitchell had given even
the smallest of helping hands to the two fugitives, it would give
him a great deal of pleasure to noisily and publicly rub their
snotty noses in it.

“I’ll drive up there now,” he decided
aloud.

“Had a feeling you might,” Apodaca had said
as he headed for the door. It had unsettled him when it was said,
and he still wasn’t quite sure what the sheriff’s inference had
been.

Tapping his fingers impatiently on the
steering wheel, McKittrick glanced at the digital clock on the
dash. It was a little after ten-thirty; he’d made good time coming
up from town. Electronic static crackled in the speakers and a
voice he recognized as Kit Twitchell’s came through, breathy,
tinny.

“Mr. McKittrick, oh, thank God you’re here!
Wait a second and I’ll buzz you in. Come right up, please, as fast
as you can.”

Kit Twitchell’s agitated greeting was not at
all what he had been expecting and it unsettled McKittrick even
further. He hated it when situations got away from him. He got back
into his car as the gate swung open and proceeded up the graveled
drive that led to the turning circle in front of the big house. As
he came to a stop, the porch door opened and Kit came out. She was
wearing dark blue jeans with a white silk blouse. Her hair was
loose and her face was without makeup and she looked
distraught.

“Thank God,” she said again. “How did you get
here so quickly?”

“Quickly?” he frowned as he got out of the
car. “What do you mean, what’s happened?”

“Mother and I – wait, you mean you don’t
know?”

“Know what?

“They were here,” she said. “Easton and the
Apache.”

Expecting to encounter evasion, equivocation,
perhaps even lies when he confronted her, he was thrown completely
off balance. Uncertain now how to proceed, he regarded her
warily.

“When was this?” he asked. “When were they
here?”

“This morning,” she said, hugging herself as
if it was cold. “This morning, early.”

“And?”

“They told us they had to have food,
clothing. We gave them what they wanted. And they went.” She waved
vaguely toward the nearby hills.

“Who is we?”

“My mother was here, sleeping over.”

“Is she here now?”

Kit shook her head. “She went down to Brio to
call the police. I thought – isn’t that why you got here so
fast?”

He frowned. “Why didn’t she call from
here?”

“One of them cut the phone wires. Ironheel, I
think.”

“Don’t you have cellphones?”

“He took the sims.”

She hugged herself again. He hesitated,
perplexed and no longer certain exactly how to continue. Everything
she was telling him jibed with the fact that they had been unable
to reach the ranch by landline or cellphone. But …. drab years
spent in even drabber courtrooms had instilled in him a conviction
that even when people were telling the truth, they never told the
complete truth. It would cost him nothing to wait and be wary. Play
along, he decided. Play along.

“You’re shivering,” he said, putting concern
into his voice. “Perhaps we’d better go inside?”

“Yes,” she said, and shivered again. “Of
course. Please. Come in.”

They went into the big living room. He had
never been inside the house before. He looked at the Charles
Russell paintings on the walls, the gleaming black piano, the solid
furniture, the bookcases stacked with Ralph Twitchell’s collection
of modern first editions, all material evidences of the kind of
lifestyle that never needed to think about money. “I’m sorry,” Kit
said. “It’s just … all this. On top of everything else. I
don’t—”

“I know how difficult these last few days
must have been for you,” McKittrick said. Feigning compassion was
another courtroom trick he was good at. “And you have my deepest
sympathy in your loss. I wish I didn’t have to put you through any
more aggravation, but I need you to tell me exactly what happened.
Do you think you can do that?”

“I … think so,” she said. The words came in a
breathy rush now, as if it was a relief to be able to say them. “It
was around midnight. The phone rang, I was asleep. It was David
Easton. He said they were coming, we had to help them.”

“Why didn’t you call the police right away?”
he asked.

“I told him that I was going to. But he
begged me to wait, to give him a chance to explain. To tell me what
was really happening.”

A chill of apprehension touched McKittrick’s
spine, but there was no hint of insinuation or hidden meaning in
Kit Twitchell’s voice or expression. Wait, he told himself, be
careful, wait, wait.

“Please,” he said. “Go on.”

“They got here around sunup, maybe six
thirty. David … Easton came to the door. The Apache was with
him.”

“Wait a minute. How did they get past the
security gate?”

She looked surprised, as if the question had
not occurred to her before. “I really don’t know. But wait … their
clothes were wet. Could they have come across the river?”

It was possible, he supposed. The Apache
would know how. “They might have done,” he said. “Go on.”

“He said they had to have food, clothes. If
we didn’t give them what they wanted, they would take it
anyway.”

“They threatened you?”

“Not in so many words… but they had guns. We
were frightened.”

“You said he told you he wanted to explain.
What really happened.”

She nodded and took a deep breath, like a
swimmer preparing to dive. “He said they hadn’t wanted to kill that
man up in the mountains, Mose …?”

“Kuruk,” McKittrick said. “Mose Kuruk.”

“But they had no choice, he had been hired to
hunt them down.”

Did she know? Had he told her? Careful, be
careful.

“Go on.”

“David … Easton said Ironheel didn’t kill my
father and Adam, and he could prove it. That was why Kuruk was
trying to kill them.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said he wasn’t a hostage. That Ironheel
was a material witness.”

“And you believed him?”

“We didn’t know what to believe. We were
frightened. We just wanted them to go away.”

“How long were they here?”

“They left a little before eight. Ironheel
cut the phone line to make sure we couldn’t call anyone. They said
no one must leave the house until they’d been gone an hour. My
mother left as soon as she thought it would be safe.”

McKittrick’s mind was racing now, half of his
brain listening to what Kit was saying, the other half examining
and rejecting possible alternative scenarios. On the one hand, she
could be telling the truth: the phone company records Apodaca had
obtained confirmed that Easton’s call to the ranch had been made a
few minutes after midnight. The other timings were all about
right.

On the other hand, all of this could be an
elaborately constructed fabrication containing just enough truth to
make it believable. Easton would know they would check the phone
records and could have briefed her accordingly. Then before they
left, disable the ranch phones to consolidate the plausibility of
the story.

Which, dammit, which? It was too soon yet to
tell. Wait, wait.

“Let’s go back aways,” he said, picking his
words with care. “I’m not sure I have this right. You say Easton
claimed Ironheel didn’t kill your father and Adam?”

She nodded, yes.

There was no way around it. He plunged.

“Did he say who did?”

“He said he knew who it was but that it
wasn’t safe for him to tell us,” she said. “That if we knew we
would be in the same danger they were.”

“And that was all he said? Nothing else? A
name, anything?”

Her eyes met his without any guile that he
could detect.

“It wasn’t like a conversation. Just them
telling us what they wanted. It was very … tense. Especially when
Mother got angry and told him how cruel it was of him to treat us
so badly after we’d once been … well, you know, like family. He
said he was sorry, but the way things were, he had no choice.”

“And then they left.”

“Yes.”

“Did they give you any indication of what
their plans were? Where they were going?”

She frowned. “David – he said something about
getting help.”

“What kind of help?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just got
an impression he meant friends. Someone in Riverside.”

Another two-edged sword, McKittrick thought.
She might be telling the truth. Then again not. It had always
figured Easton might indeed try to get to Riverside to seek help.
On the other hand, he might have told her that so as to disguise
his real intentions. He would know how difficult it would be to get
past the police roadblocks, especially with the Apache in tow. That
might explain why they had doubled back to disappear into the
mountains and then maybe try for Las Cruces or even
Albuquerque.

“When will your mother be back?” he asked,
abruptly changing tack.

“She won’t. She was going on down to
Riverside.”

It all sounded perfectly plausible. But the
thin worrying maggot of distrust was still squirming inside
McKittrick’s brain. He couldn’t put out of his mind the fact that
Easton and Ellen Casey had once been close, and that Kit Twitchell
had once been his girlfriend. Wasn’t it much more likely they had
agreed to help him, and if that was so, wouldn’t he also have told
them what had really happened out on Garcia Flat?

Maybe.

But on the other hand, would Kit Twitchell be
sitting talking with him as calmly as this if she knew the
truth?

Everything – everything – depended on
establishing now whether Kit Twitchell knew the truth or any part
of it. If she did, certain steps would need to be taken; if she did
not, others. He pulled his chair closer to hers and leaned forward
confidentially. One thing he was sure of was his own skill as an
interrogator. If she was lying, he could and would break her.

“I know how hard all this must be for you,”
he said, putting syrup on it. “Especially after such an ordeal. But
do you think you could go over the whole thing for me just one more
time? Tell me what they said, what they did, whatever they told
you. From the beginning.”

Kit nodded and gave him a tentative smile.
“The phone rang about midnight,” she began.