“Oh, sure. We’re all hunky-mc’dory here.” He walked over and got right up in Lana’s face. She didn’t flinch.
“Gimme those.” Paul grabbed Scotty’s keys out of Lana’s hand. She offered no resistance, and Paul’s plan apparently ended there. He looked at the key ring in disgust and threw it onto the tarp. Then he kicked a box, causing the half-assembled jungle gym of PVC pipe to clatter to the ground.
“You done?” Lana held herself still, her face a blank wall, while Scotty scrambled across the room to set the rig back into place.
“Why. Are. You. Here.” Paul had switched to an imitation of a tough guy, gritting his teeth and standing straight, legs wide, arms folded across the line of sweat on his T-shirt. His gruff appearance was blunted by the box fan blowing in his face, ruffling his hair up like a child who’d woken in the middle of the night with a bad dream.
“You didn’t kill that young man,” Lana said. “Ricardo Cruz.”
“I’m listening.”
“I know who did.”
Paul said nothing.
“And I need your help to prove it.”
“Why should I help you?”
“Well, first of all, it’ll get the cops off your back. They think you did it.”
Paul waved that off. “I didn’t.”
“Right. That argument’s done you real well so far. Look, Paul, if you don’t help me, I’ll go to the cops. It’d be a twofer: I’d be turning in a lowlife murder suspect in hiding and an illegal marijuana operation.”
Paul glared at her. Sweat had started dripping down his shirt toward his navel.
“Oh, and Paul? These plants aren’t on your farm anymore. They aren’t property of an LLC you set up with an online form. They’re in the yacht club. A business owned entirely by your good friend Scotty here. I’m not sure how many laws or health code regulations you’re breaking . . . but I’m sure the sheriff’s department would be happy to illuminate us.”
Paul stared at Lana. Lana and Scotty stared at Paul.
After Paul thought about it for an unreasonably long time, he gave a tight nod. They shut the door on the musky wind tunnel and made an uneasy transition down the hall to the dining room. Paul led the way with the key ring, Lana behind him, Scotty in the rear, stopping by the bar to grab three glasses of water and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red.
“How do we do this?” Paul asked as they settled at a table in the empty dining room.
Lana still wasn’t sure about that.
“First, tell me why you kept the bike,” she said.
Paul eyed her over the bottle of whiskey. “I thought you believed me.”
“I do. But this is a loose end. It’s one of the reasons the sheriffs are looking for you right now. I need to know.”
“I saw a bike cluttering the side of my shop. I took it inside. End of story.”
“When?”
Paul took a swallow from his glass, then looked up at the decorative fishing nets hanging from the ceiling. “It would have been Saturday. Late morning. The day before he was found.”
“Did you know it belonged to Ricardo Cruz?”
“No!”
“Do you have any idea how it got there?”
“No, but . . .” Paul looked reflective. “That Friday night, Scotty and I went out. With those chicks from Seaside, remember?”
Scotty grimaced. “You sang Nickelback at karaoke. Talk about a mood killer.”
“Yeah, well, anyway, I got back to the Shack about midnight. I was blitzed, so I crashed on the cot in the back. But then some weird sounds woke me up around two, three a.m. I thought raccoons were raiding the dumpsters again. Then on Saturday morning Jack mentioned the bike when she got here, and I went outside to check it out.”
“You think the bike was dumped in the middle of the night?”
“Maybe.” Paul shrugged. “It makes as much sense as any of this.”
“So Saturday morning you saw this mystery bike, which maybe was dropped on your doorstep in the middle of the night. And you took it inside.”
“I thought I was being a Good Samaritan, helping someone who’d come back for it later.”
Lana ran it through her head and gave one tight nod of satisfaction. “It fits.”
“What do you mean?” Scotty asked.
“The detectives told me this theory they had, that Paul killed Ricardo and then floated him down the slough and made a fake kayak tour booking to pin the death on whoever was leading the tours when, or just before, Ricardo was discovered. I didn’t think Paul was smart enough to come up with that. No offense,” she said, turning to him.
Paul shrugged. He took another swig of whiskey.
“But there was someone else who’s pretty damn smart. Someone I think could have come up with that plan. Someone who could have killed Ricardo, used Ricardo’s phone to call in the tour booking, and then dropped the bike down here in the middle of the night to complete the picture.”
“And you know who that is?”
She nodded.
“Why don’t we just go commando and grab ’em ourselves?” Paul said.
“I don’t have enough evidence yet,” Lana said. “The cops still think you’re the bad guy. I don’t think a citizen kidnapping would change their minds.”
She picked up a water glass and took a sip.
“Tell me why you moved your grow operation here,” she said.
Paul and Scotty exchanged a look.
“Clock is ticking,” she said.
Paul sighed. “You gotta understand, this isn’t about drugs. It’s an entrepreneurial experiment. An innovation. Fruitful. We had this idea of hybridizing marijuana plants with fruit, well, not really hybridize, but we thought if we grew the plants in proximity to strawberries, there might be some interesting ways the leaf would take on the character—”
“Look.” Scotty turned to Lana. “It’s not complicated. I knew Hal Rhoads from way back. He was always up for a new idea. I pitched him on this one, and he gave us some land.”
“Were you growing legally, with a permit?”
Now Scotty took a slug from the bottle.
“It was just an experiment,” Paul said. “At first no one ever came down there. It seemed safe enough.”
“What changed?”
“A year ago, the land trust took over the farm to the east of Hal’s,” Scotty said. “They sent that naturalist, Ricardo Cruz, to do an audit of the property. I ran into him when I was out there watering the plants.”
“Were you worried he would tell someone what you were doing?”
“Nah. But that’s when we added the fence.”
“Did you ever see Ricardo again?”
“One time, maybe four months ago, up at the Rhoads house.” Scotty looked up. “I told the sheriffs about it when they interviewed me. I was dropping off fresh clams for Hal, and he was there. Just the kind of kid Hal loved. Another dreamer, big into the outdoors. I think his dad herded cattle on Hal’s land at one point. But then Hal got shipped down to that nursing home and the vultures started circling. Hal’s kids. That big boss from the land trust. We decided to keep our heads down and hope Hal got better. So much for that.”
Paul shook his head. “After Ricardo Cruz died, the cops came sniffing around the land trust property. I was out there checking on the plants and saw a bunch of investigators and dogs picking their way along the mud flats. It freaked me out. And then Hal died, and suddenly everyone and his sister was tromping all over the ranch. Our hidden little enterprise didn’t feel so hidden anymore, and we didn’t want to lose everything we’d built. So, over the past couple weeks, I’ve been transferring it all here.”
“Transferring via kayak? Sometimes at night?”
Paul nodded. “It took a lot of trips.”
“Did you use a wheelbarrow?” she asked.
“Nah. Just a shovel, a cooler, and these right here.” Paul held up his hands, laced with calluses.
Lana wondered again about the man she’d seen with the wheelbarrow. Could Diana have roped her brother into coming down late Friday night from San Francisco to dump Ricardo’s body in the creek? Or did she have another impressionable man to do her bidding?
“Can we ask you some questions now?” Scotty asked.
Lana nodded.