Walt took a deep breath and spoke in a harsh, faint voice. “Damn you, Gilly.”
Menquez ventured another look, but again couldn’t maintain it.
“The first time I suspected something,” Walt explained, “was when I saw how thick the forest was over the SUV—Gale’s rental. You said you’d picked up the heat signature from it. I don’t think so. If everyone hadn’t descended on the site at once, maybe I’d have spotted your tracks by daylight. You knew that about me—my tracking skills. I should have understood how it was you failed to hold them all back from the scene. Should have seen through that.”
“Sheriff, I . . .” He hung his head.
“Putting the ATM card back. That was quick thinking.”
“I don’t know nothing about any of this, Sheriff.”
“But it was a stupid thing to do. You could have just thrown it out. Tossed it into a dumpster. But I imagine that’s when it began to unwind for you: how to make it look like you’d just come across Gale’s rental, when in fact you’d discovered it much earlier.”
“Don’t know nothing about any ATM card.”
“Blompier mentioned the poacher case. The ATM card. The lack of a camera in that ATM. Your poacher case, Gilly—the case you handled. There were only a few of us who knew that particular ATM didn’t have a camera in it. You knew. That’s why you chose it.” Walt gave him a moment to absorb it all. “Not telling me about the SUV, that’s not exactly a crime. Not something you could go to jail for. Lose your job, maybe. But not jail time. It’s when you sobered up and realized how deep you were in this that you decided to return the card to the wallet, to let me find Gale’s SUV. You thought that card being found still in his wallet might make things okay. But we’ve been onto the withdrawals since they first started.”
A person couldn’t lower his head more than Menquez was now. “I got no idea what you’re talking about here, Sheriff.”
“You sure that’s the way you want to play this, Gilly?” Walt reached for the laptop. “I need to clear this up. I need to know what you found when you first came across the SUV. I need a clean chain of evidence, and you screwed that up for me. I can’t get that now, and you’re to blame. But you’re of value to me if you’re willing to come clean and tell me exactly what happened, exactly what you found, what you saw. You’re nothing to me if you play dumb like this.”
Menquez remained bent forward.
“Have you lost your job?” Walt asked rhetorically. “I suspect you have. Are you in jail? Not yet. Cut your losses, Gilly. Play it smart.”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Gilly . . .”
He leaned into Walt and whispered harshly. “You got nothing.”
Walt dropped his fingers onto the space bar. The black and white video ran on the overhead screen, winning Gilly’s attention. But it played too quickly for him to see it for exactly what it was.
Walt hit the rewind button and played the clip again.
The screen showed an elevated view of a quiet street with the signs of Ketchum establishments lining either side. There was an Inter-Mountain Bank sign a block in the distance. The short clip played out as a series of stills—like from a bank’s security