course.”
“He’s clever, this cop. Looks big and thick but he’s anything but. He’s more Howie Long than Lyle Alzado.”
“Got it.”
“Consider your answers carefully, that’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m good, Marty.”
“If you’re so good, what the hell were you doing shooting your gun off the other night?”
Silence.
“You thought I wouldn’t hear about that? The whole town’s heard about that. What kind of a dumbass thing—”
“It was a personal security matter, Marty. A disgruntled former player. They were warning shots is all.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Keep the damn gun in the closet, asshole. We don’t need any more attention than we’ve already got. This thing . . . her . . . People are going to jail for this shit. Jail, I’m talking about.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Not me. You hear me? Not me!”
“So noted.”
“Stick to one-word answers. Don’t get creative. That mouth of yours. And you’re under no obligation to—”
“Stu’s here,” Wynn said. “He’ll do all the talking.”
“Stu? Well, tell him hello for me.”
“I’ll do that.”
“He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Be careful with this guy, for your own sake.”
“I will be. I negotiate for a living, Marty. No one ever knows what the hell I’m thinking.”
Marty Boatwright coughed out a laugh. Half his lung came up. Once it started he couldn’t stop it. He shut down the call without signing off and sank into his desk chair and weathered the storm of old age, his eyes and nose running, the Depends warming at his crotch.
Prison. No way.
19
“This isn’t charity,” Boldt stated as Walt pulled the Jeep up to the wrought iron gate blocking Vince Wynn’s driveway. Walt rolled down his window and announced himself to a speaker key code box.
“Far from it,” he said.
“You’d like in on this interview. That’s why the escort.”
“Not entirely true,” Walt said. “I’m interested in Wynn for Gale. Absolutely. He threatened the man to my face. And I’m curious as to how he reacts to your questioning about Vetta. Absolutely.”
“I don’t see a guy like Vince Wynn dumping a body alongside a highway, especially not the busiest road you’ve got. The bottom of a construction site maybe, but more likely he’d drive him, or more likely pay someone to drive him, a long way into the wilderness and leave him for the scavengers.”
“Agreed. But I can see him clubbing him from behind. Wynn’s too smart to take on a guy like Gale face-to-face. You hit him when his back’s turned. You make sure he’s not getting backup.”
“He could have been jacked, Sheriff. We talked about this. Lured out of the vehicle maybe. Struck from behind. It’s more and more difficult to see it otherwise. We’ve got to find that SUV.”
Gale’s missing SUV, a rental from Avis, had been the topic of much discussion. City and sheriff patrols were searching parking lots, motels, and campgrounds. State police had been notified and a BOLO—a Be On Lookout—had been issued in the six-state region surrounding Idaho. Walt had hoped for results by now and, along with Boldt, secretly feared they’d lost the vehicle for good.
“You think it was staged to look like a carjacking,” Boldt said.
“I think guys like Wynn know what guys like us expect to see. An agent at his level, he’s all about selling an impression of something that maybe isn’t true, maybe isn’t all it’s made out to be.”
“So he gives us what we want. I’d buy that.”
“Plays into our comfort zone.”
“A carjacking gone wrong,” Boldt said, nodding.
“It’s all after the fact,” Walt said. “He’s all boozed up and he does the guy and then has to backfill. But a guy like that reads the paper up here. He knows what kind of crime we see and how often we see it. We had a carjacking not six months ago where a man was struck with a tire iron while changing a tire. Wasn’t exactly like Gale, but close enough. The doer finished changing the tire and drove off in the car, having no idea the driver had already alerted OnStar. We were given GPS coordinates and had the guy in custody within the hour.”
“And the body?”
“Stuffed into a culvert twenty feet from the car. Wynn could easily have read about it and pulled a copycat.”
Boldt said, “If he’s the killing type.”
The gate opened electronically and Walt drove through, parking by a basketball backboard.
“Which is what we’ve come here to find out.”
“Indeed it is.”
“If Caroline Vetta got him started, broke his cherry, then doing Gale wouldn’t have mattered much to him.”
A wry smile overcame Boldt. “You and Matthews would