Next to me, Mac gave a soft snort. I tugged my hand free. Phillips flushed.
“I pulled up what we have on Esta Quinn,” he said. “Single white female, aged seventy-one. Address is for a farmhouse forty miles east of here in the middle of what used to be acres of sugar beets before the farm went bust. Hell, I can remember driving those roads when I was a kid. Back of beyond if there ever was one. Esta is listed as the sole owner. A 2003 Jeep Grand Cherokee is registered in her name. And that’s pretty much everything we know about her at the moment. No known family, other than a nephew who attended a month of public school in Weld County some twenty-five years ago. You mind telling me why you want to talk to her?”
“We’re investigating her daughter’s death,” I said.
He cocked his head. “The only daughter on record died twenty-eight years ago.”
“That’s right.”
Deputy Phillips caught his laugh before it fully escaped. “You guys must have a hell of a backlog.”
“It’s the Davenport case,” I told him. “There might be a link between those deaths and the death of Mrs. Quinn’s daughter.”
His eyes lit up. “You’re kidding, right?” He glanced west, toward the next row of thunderstorms. “Let’s get this show on the road, then, before the next round of rains. Some of our low-lying roads have been flooding. We’ve got water running in creeks that have been dry since before my granddad was born.”
As Mac and I were getting in my truck to follow the deputy, Cohen called. I filled him in on our conversations with Wolanski and Jill and offered our tentative theories about how Raya’s death could be tied to those of the Davenports.
“Murderous railroad barons?” Cohen asked. “This just gets richer. We’ll have another go at Hiram and Lancing. You’re kicking ass on this, Parnell. Maybe you should be on the homicide squad.”
“Bandoni would love that. I heard you lost your lead suspect.”
“Word gets around. We’re working to piece together his movements over the last week, trying to see where his path crossed the killer’s. Right now, Bandoni and another detective are running through CCTV from the comic book store where Vander worked. But so far the guy’s a ghost.”
“Mac and I are on our way now to see Raya Quinn’s mother,” I said. “Maybe she can tell us more about her daughter’s relationship with Hiram and Alfred Tate. And about the night she died.”
“Stay in touch,” he said and hung up.
As we followed Phillips onto the road, I dialed Veronica Stern. I wanted to ask her what SFCO’s accident-reporting policy had been during her time there. And see if she could locate any of the documentation from the early eighties that Jill might have been working with.
When she didn’t pick up, I left her a message, asking her to call me back.
Jill Martin had been right. Searching for Esta Quinn’s home without a guide would have been like hunting for a white cat in a snowstorm. GPS was worthless out here. A maze of county roads crisscrossed through fields where sometimes the crops grew higher than the windows of the truck. The land was almost uniformly flat; we would have had to climb a tree to get perspective. If there were any trees.
The sun moved in and out as we drove, a fickle companion that shuttled light and shadow over the windshield. I thought about a young Raya Quinn; she must have been lonely out here with only a crazy mother for company. No wonder she’d longed for Hollywood. Or for a man who could take her away from it all.
Forty-five minutes later, Phillips turned down a single-lane road that, after a mile, narrowed into a rutted, muddy track. The track ran another two hundred yards, then petered out into what might have once been an expanse of green lawn but was now a gloopy mix of dirt and mud. I flashed my headlights at Phillips before he pulled into the circular drive, and he stopped. I pulled in behind him, killed the engine, and the three of us got out. I walked around to the back to let Clyde out. As soon as I opened the hatch, Clyde jumped down and lifted his nose, sampling the air. He wagged his tail and looked at me for permission to go check out whatever he’d found. But I snapped on the lead so he’d know this was strictly business.
“Sorry, pal,” I told him.
Phillips grinned. “He sure is excited about something. We got a lot of coyotes and rabbits out here. Badgers and ground squirrels, too. Too bad you can’t give him his head.”
I watched Clyde for a few more seconds. But he didn’t alert, and I turned to survey the house.
It was a two-story structure with a wraparound porch, the dark windows hung with lace drapes. The place was old and flagging and badly in need of paint on the south end, where the sun beat the hardest. The tiles on the roof had curled like tiny question marks, and the stairs leading up to the porch sagged from end to end.
The Jeep Cherokee Phillips had mentioned was parked on the south side of the house.
“Place sure doesn’t look lively,” the deputy said.
“Someone’s been here.” I pointed. A set of tire tracks ran along the length of the circular driveway. Someone had pulled in, swung around, and headed back out.
“Could be Quinn’s,” Phillips said.
“Could be,” Mac said. “But it looks like she usually parks on the side.”
As we drew near the house, I heard a faint metal pinging. On the north side of the house, a lazy wind fluttered through faded sheets, and floral-patterned dresses hung on a line to dry. The laundry was wrinkled and wet. The faint stink of mildew rode the wind.
The wind shifted and I smelled something else, a stench I knew all too well from my time in Mortuary Affairs. With the change in the wind, Clyde caught it, too. He dropped his tail.
Phillips wrinkled his nose. “You guys smell that? How long did you say since someone’s seen Esta?”
“Unknown,” Mac said.
The front of the house had three windows on the main floor, and two more upstairs. All were covered by curtains, and none showed any light. The porch, with its immense overhang, lay in shadow. The breeze kicked up again, and I saw something flutter in the darkness near the door before going flat again.
As we approached the steps, Clyde’s manner changed. His ears pricked and again he sampled the air. This time he looked more agitated than excited—something more than the death fear. I raised a hand to stop Mac and Phillips.
Clearly visible in the mud were the imprints of bare feet. The prints were large, likely too big to be those of a seventy-one-year-old woman. They led off into the weeds and disappeared.
“Whoever was driving the car, maybe,” Phillips said.
But something else had captured Clyde’s interest. Running parallel to the footprints and a few feet closer to the house were animal tracks, each larger than my hand. They were exactly like the spoor Clyde had found under the trees outside Cohen’s house.