“I’m a federal agent,” she reminded him.
“You want to talk?” he asked. “If so, I drive.”
She sighed. “Fine. Stay up all night driving me around.”
He shrugged again. She saw that he had two books in his hands and he stopped by the clerk to pay for them before they left, assuring the clerk—who, of course, knew about the desert corpses—that they were on it, and he didn’t believe anyone else was in danger, but that, of course, they should all be careful and stay in groups to be safe.
“Seriously,” he said when they were in his patrol car, “why were you prowling around the shop at this time of night?”
“I just finished work for the day.”
He paused, frowning. “You went in to work on the skull after getting Heidi home, getting Kanga back to the stables and...and after this morning?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said lightly.
“Oh, yeah. I guess I forgot,” he murmured.
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
Gazing ahead at the road, he smiled at that.
“So why were you shopping for tourist books in your own town?” she asked him.
“Our victim.”
“Oh?”
“Yep. I came in to see Grant Winston—the old guy who owns Desert Diamonds. Jay Berman, the victim in the desert, bought the same two books I’ve just purchased. Seems he was big on Lily’s history. All he talked to anyone about was the old legends. Apparently, a few locals, including Caleb Hough, have been in buying the same books. Anyway, right now, I’m trying to learn whether Jay Berman was looking for something out here. Something the history or the old legends might help me figure out.”
“I’m sure there are lots of legends—and a lot of pretty violent history,” Jane said. “So far, I’ve heard about Sage McCormick. Who disappeared.” She turned to face him. “And I’m also sure you think the sketch I did of our skull suggests it belonged to Sage McCormick.”
His jaw tensed.
“Yes,” he said after a moment.
“I don’t understand. Why does that bother you so much?”
He let out a sigh. “I guess it shouldn’t.”
“But it does.”
He glanced over at her. “Remember, Agent Everett, I’m a man from these here parts,” he said, exaggerating his accent once again. “Sage McCormick was my great-great grandmother. Not that I knew her, or that my parents did. Call me sentimental, but I still don’t like to think she might have been viciously murdered—and that her body is scattered all over the place!”
He swung his eyes back to the empty road, but he was aware of her shocked reaction. Which quickly turned into a nod of understanding.
“That explains a great deal,” she murmured.
He didn’t ask what.
5
It was difficult to believe he’d just met Jane Everett, or that it could be this easy to sit at his house with her, discussing the case. She’d spent a few minutes stroking Cougar and, naturally, the cat had reveled in the attention.
Johnny Bearclaw had left pulled pork in the oven and a salad in the refrigerator; there’d been plenty for two. When they’d finished cleaning up, they sat at the table together and he went on to tell her everything he knew about their victim.
“Jay Berman didn’t have any relatives in New York. He took off from Oklahoma twenty years ago and never looked back. Both parents are dead now and his only family’s estranged. He had no rap sheet in New York, but he didn’t seem to have any friends, either, which makes me think he was lucky—he just never got caught. He worked part-time as a mechanic in a shop and lived in a studio up past Harlem. It’s not possible to support yourself in New York City with only the money from a part-time job. No one that any of the New York authorities managed to track down seemed to know anything about him, so I suspect he moved in the underworld. Petty theft, that kind of thing. He had a legitimate Social Security number and paid taxes. But other than that...”
“So some guy who didn’t have any friends in New York came on vacation to Lily, Arizona, and wound up being shot in the back of the head,” Jane said thoughtfully. “Why?”
She was leafing through the books he’d purchased at Desert Diamonds.
“He was looking for something,” Sloan said. “Okay, that’s speculation on my part, but I’m willing to bet he was. And I’m trying to find out what.”
“At Desert Diamonds?”
“These books are replica editions. The Great Gold Heist is actually a compilation by a historian in the 1890s who put together a book composed of newspaper reports on the disappearance of a stagecoach carrying gold—right around the time Sage disappeared. The second is written by Brendan Fogerty, the sheriff in the town when all this was going on. Certain incidents, although they occurred about the same time, weren’t believed to be connected in any way.”