Cam turned to look at him and gradually focused. “Matt. Where? Um, out in the desert. There was this really cool camper. Maybe I’ll get one of those. It was so compact and efficient, you know?”
“Yes, Cam, I’ve seen it. It’s very nice. Were you alone there?”
“Well, sure. That was the deal. I was working. Oops!” His eyes darted around the room. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone about that. It’s a secret.”
“Does it have to do with the gemstones? The peridot?”
Cam’s face fell. “You know? I didn’t tell you, did I?”
“No, Cam, I found out myself. Did you see anybody else out there?”
Cam shook his head vigorously. “No. And I waited for days. And nobody came. I was about to go looking when this guy showed up.”
If Matt had been a dog, I swear his ears would have swiveled toward Cam. “What guy? Was it someone you knew?”
“Nope, never saw him before. But he was real nice, offered me a ride into town. Even gave me a cup of coffee too.”
Matt leaned forward in his chair. “Then what, Cam?”
“I, um . . .” Cam’s brow wrinkled in concentration. “I’m not sure. We went somewhere for a while. And then there was this woman. She was nice. And then I was here. What day is this?”
“Tuesday, Cam,” I said quietly. I looked at Matt. “He asked that before. Is any of this helping you?”
Matt looked defeated. “I don’t think I’m going to get anything coherent out of him now. If it’s peyote, he should be more rational by morning. I might as well wait until then to talk to him. At least we know he met a guy out there at the RV and there was a woman involved somehow. And since he didn’t identify the guy, it’s probably no one he knows.” Matt rubbed his hands over his face. “I should go. Keep an eye on him, okay? He’ll probably just go to sleep.”
“Have you gotten anything from the disk yet?”
“Not yet. We’re working on it.”
“You’ll come back in the morning?”
“Count on it.”
We said good night with more weariness than passion, and I shut the door behind him and turned back to Cam. He’d cleaned his plate, and mine, and the plate of toast I’d made. “Em, I’m hungry. Can I have some more?”
“I’ve got toast. Is that okay?”
“Sure. You have any of that pink jelly?”
“The prickly pear stuff? Sure.” I fed more slices of bread into the toaster and retrieved the cactus jelly and put in on the table in front of Cam. When the toaster popped up, I buttered the toast and set in on the plate in front of him.
He picked up a piece and starting spreading jelly on it. And kept on spreading jelly on it, swirling it around with the knife, his expression rapt. “Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes, very pretty, Cam.” This was beginning to feel like entertaining a cheerful five-year-old. “Are you going to eat it?”
“What? Oh, sure.” He bit into the jammy toast, and a look of bliss spread across his face. “Oh, that’s good!”
How long was this going to last? I wanted answers as much as Matt, but clearly I wasn’t going to get any soon.
Cam had finished a fourth piece of pretty pink toast when I heard the sound of a key in the lock, and Frank walked in—followed by Allison.
I hadn’t managed to think ahead far enough to plan how to tell Allison that the lost was found, but now that decision had been made for me. When she saw Cam, Allison stilled, and I watched expressions chase across her face in quick succession. Cam took a moment longer to look up at her, but when he did, he stood up abruptly and lost the silly grin he’d worn since he’d walked in the door.
Then like magnets they began to move toward each other, slowly at first, then faster until they collided in the middle and wrapped themselves around each other. I had to look away from the sheer intensity of their reunion. I caught Frank’s eye and we smiled at each other. He gave me a thumbs-up gesture. So far nobody had said a word. Even the dogs were fascinated by this weird human behavior.
I wondered if there was a protocol dictating how long we should wait. If there was, I chose to ignore it, but after about fifteen seconds, I said, “Cam? I think maybe you and Allison should talk privately, don’t you? Go on.” I nudged them, still entangled, toward Cam’s bedroom. Allison pulled back a minimal distance, laid a hand on his arm, and drew him toward the door. It closed behind them.
I took a deep breath. “Well.”
Frank echoed, “Too right. You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you now? I think we’ve got some catching up to do.”
“I do, and I’ll join you. And I’d guess you’ll be sleeping on the couch tonight.”
Chapter 25
In the past, ground peridot has been used as a treatment for asthma.
I finally managed a decent night’s sleep and awoke
to the sound of voices: I could hear Allison’s fluting accent, Frank’s rumble, and an intermittent word or two in Cam’s baritone. I knew that there were still a lot of unanswered questions, starting with who killed Alex, but having Cam back, safe and sound, made a huge difference in my outlook on life. I wondered when Matt would appear—and that thought prompted me to get out of bed and face the day.
I scurried to the blessedly free bathroom, showered, and emerged clothed, ready to take on bears. In the big room Cam and Frank were seated at the table, while Allison hovered, bringing food and refilling coffee cups. Everyone looked at me as I approached.
“What? Is my hair on fire or something?” I helped myself to coffee. “How are you feeling, Cam?”
“Foolish. Kind of weird. Was I talking strangely yesterday?”
I smiled into my coffee. “You might say so. You said you could hear the soap.”
“What the hell happened to me?”
“I was kind of hoping you could answer that. The best guess was that you’d taken some mescaline. You were really out of it, baby brother.”
He looked stricken. “But I don’t do stuff like that—you know that, Em. How . . . ?”
“Cam, I don’t know. Do you remember anything?”
“No—it’s all really fuzzy.”
“Matt said that was normal, but you should be okay today.” I wondered if Cam would ever reclaim the memories of the last few days, but I wasn’t going to stop him from trying. I concentrated on eating. “So, you two make up?” I sneaked a glance at Allison, who had scooched her chair as close to Cam’s as possible without actually climbing into his lap.
Allison blushed. Cam blushed. It was very sweet.
“Do you want me to fill you in on what you missed? I mean, after you disappeared?”
“I guess. Why do you say ‘disappeared’?”
“Because you stalked out of here without telling me where you were going, you dummy. We had no idea where you were.”
He glanced briefly at Allison. “Sorry about that. I was mad—at Allison, at you, at the world in general. But I did have this short-term consulting deal set up, and Alex said he had a camper or RV or whatever that I could use, out in the desert, and it seemed like a good idea to just get away from everyone and think.” Suddenly he looked stricken. “Where’s my laptop?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t you have it with you?”
“At the RV, sure. Was I carrying anything last night?”
“Not a thing. And it wasn’t at the RV either.”
“How do you know?”
I sat back in my chair and stared at my clueless brother. “Cam, you disappeared. I figured at first you just wanted some time to work things out, so I didn’t think too much about it. But after a week, when I knew you had planned to start work, uh, two days ago, and you hadn’t phoned or e-mailed or anything, I got worried. I reported you missing to the police on Saturday, but it was Frank and I who found the RV.”
“Alex knew where I was. Oh, that’s the guy it belonged to, the guy I was working for. He took me out there, the day I left here. Alex Gutierrez. I guess you didn’t know that.”
A heavy silence fell, and Frank and I exchanged a look. Finally I said, “Cam, Alex is dead.”
“What?”
“He was found in the desert, and not anywhere near the RV. If we hadn’t been looking for you, probably no one would have gotten around to identifying his body for quite a while. But when I reported you missing, Matt asked about recent bodies, and we found Alex at the morgue. Cam, he was murdered.”
Cam paled noticeably and shut his eyes. Allison laid a hand on his arm, watching his face. It was a few moments before he spoke.
“How much do you know about what I was working on? Because I signed a confidentiality agreement with Alex, and I think he had a partner.”
“He did. His name’s Denis Ryerson. We’ve been talking to him. I think we’re pretty much up to speed on the whole gem thing. Frank’s been amazing.”
“You flatter me, Em,” Frank said. “But gems are my business. Plus Denis filled us in on the property deal. Said Alex handled most of it, though.”
Cam studied the tabletop, thinking out loud. “Alex knew what he was talking about, when it came to the geology. I wasn’t sure I could help much, but I think I did a respectable job, given what I had to work with, and the time limitations. And I think he would have been pleased with the results—which are on my laptop. Damn!”
“I have to admit that I wondered how you would manage without an Internet connection.” I helped myself to more of Allison’s homemade bread.
“The RV had plenty of power, and I really didn’t need anything from the Web. Alex was kind of secretive, didn’t want me doing too much searching on my own. I wasn’t getting any connection out there anyway. But he handed me a lot of data that he’d collected, and he was very thorough, so I had more than enough to work with. I was kind of happy to be alone for a while. He did have a really sweet little unit, even if it was kind of a pigsty.”
Frank and I exchanged glances again: what we had seen in no way resembled a pigsty.
A knock on the door, followed by the pups’ enthusiastic response, heralded Matt’s arrival. I went to let him in.
“How’s he doing?” he asked in a low voice.
“Fine, I think. He seems to remember what happened early on, when Alex took him out to the RV. We haven’t talked about what happened after that.”
“Good. Sorry if I’ve been snappish, but there’s a lot going on here, and coordinating with the sheriffs’ offices hasn’t been a picnic. I don’t know if having Cam back is good or bad in terms of the investigation—but I claimed first right to interview him.”
“You want us to stick around or to vanish?”
“You can stay as long as you promise to keep your mouth shut.”
“What, me interfere?” I grinned. “And I don’t think we can pry Allison off him with a crowbar.”
“Things back on track there?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then let’s get to it.” He headed toward the table. “Cam, you look a lot better than you did last night.”
Cam stood up. “If you say so. I don’t remember a lot. And I’m sorry to hear about Alex. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
Silently I put a mug of coffee in front of Matt and sat down. Matt pulled out a pad and cleared his throat.
“Let’s start with a time line, since we still aren’t exactly sure when Alex died. You left here on Saturday, the sixth?”
“Yes. When Em told me that Allison was still in Ireland, I decided to go over to Alex’s house. We went out to the RV that afternoon, before dark. He said it was kind of a rough road and suggested that he do the driving, to spare my car—I’d told him how it had been acting up on the road, going back and forth from San Diego. The original plan was that I would work on mapping his site, based on the data he provided and what I could review myself on the ground, and then come back here the next weekend and review things with him before I started work. When was Alex found?”
“Last Sunday, in the desert,” Matt said. “Because there was no ID on him, the ME originally assumed that Alex was another illegal who had crossed the border. But it turns out he had some rough peridot in his pocket, so I asked the ME to take a closer look, and when I showed his partner Denis a picture, he identified the body. The ME found that Alex’s skull had been cracked.”
“Wow.” Cam shook his head. “The way we left it, Alex was going to come back and pick me up on Friday—our contract was for a week. I wasn’t too worried when he didn’t show, but by Saturday morning I was getting nervous, so I thought I’d walk to the nearest town and find a phone, since my cell didn’t get a signal. We’d driven through one on the way in, so I knew it wasn’t more than a few miles. Except . . .”
“What?” Matt prompted.
“I’m sorry. That’s when things get kind of fuzzy. I can remember getting ready to hike into town and then a knock on the door.”
I think we all leaned forward to hear what Cam would say next.
“I figured either it was Alex, or he’d sent someone to pick me up,” he went on. “I mean, if you’ve seen the place, you know people just don’t happen to wander by. I opened the door and there was a man I didn’t recognize standing there who said Alex had sent him to give me a ride back. So I collected my stuff, shut the door, and followed him to his car.”
“Make? Model? License plate?” Matt snapped.
“Hey, I wasn’t paying attention, all right? I think it was a four-door, not dark, definitely not new. It had lousy shocks. I really didn’t think it was necessary to get his license number.”
“Sorry, Cam. It’s been a rough few days. So you got in his car and he started driving, right?”
“Right. He offered me a cup of coffee—he had a thermos. I hadn’t had any decent coffee for days, so I accepted. Oh, shit—is that where the stuff was? The mescaline?”
“Probably. The coffee would mask the bitterness. Then what?”
“I think we went back to the nearest town, and he volunteered to buy me lunch—said Alex would want him to. And that’s really about all I remember.”
“Nothing between lunch on Saturday and when you showed up on Em’s stoop last night?”
“Fragments, flashes. Nothing I’d trust, really.”