Bull had gone very still while I spoke. But I sensed the fury building in him, like distant flares of lightning. Clyde sensed it, too. He kept his eyes on Bull.
Bull sneered. “Okay, so maybe Hiram killed her. First and last time he did his own dirty work.”
I went on. “We also wondered if it might have been Alfred who killed her because she stole something valuable from him. Something that cost him part of his railroad. That seemed likely, too. But then I got to thinking.”
Bull folded his arms, rotated his head back and forth.
“I asked myself who else was there that night. There was the sheriff. Raya’s friend, Jill. Hiram and Alfred. And you.”
“I was a cop. I was supposed to be there.”
“The little I know of Alfred Tate made me think he was too mild mannered to be a killer, so my money was on Hiram. I thought maybe he hired you. As you said, he doesn’t like to do his own dirty work.”
Bull began tapping his knee with the nail file.
“But I’ve been thinking while you and I have been having this little conversation.”
“You think a lot, don’t you?”
“My boss said something to me a couple of days ago. That people used to say you were such an asshole because some woman broke your heart.”
He snorted.
“Then I remembered how you used to raise pit bulls. I saw the stake and chain at your house. And tonight, before I came in, I walked around to the back of the bar. And what did I see?”
“So what?”
“A pit bull. There was dog hair on Raya’s clothes the night she died. But she didn’t own a dog.” I was going out on a limb with the hair. But Bull wouldn’t know. “Now, I agree that none of that makes you much of a suspect. But there are two things that do.”
“Can’t wait to hear.”
“One is a comment made by one of Raya’s friends. She said there was a man who’d taken a fancy to Raya. Used to send her love notes. They called this man Devil Eye. Not eyes, Bull. Eye. So I know, that’s a minor point, too. But then, while I was thinking about all of this, I got to the alcohol they found in her car. An empty bottle of Rebel Yell.”
“A lot of people drink it,” Bull said.
“Raya didn’t drink at all, so that made it odd. Where are you from, Bull?”
“What?”
“What state? I know you’re from the South. But what state are you from?”
He spoke before he saw the trap. “Kentucky.”
“Did you go home and visit your family that summer, Bull? Or maybe over Christmas? You would have brought back as much Rebel Yell as you could fit in your car, I imagine. Because you couldn’t buy that bourbon in Colorado. Not back then.”
He threw the nail file at me. I dodged it, heard it clang on the concrete wall. Clyde growled.
“That’s what I figured,” I said. “You must have gotten tired of driving a beautiful woman around at the beck and call of a man you knew would drop her like a used tissue as soon as he tired of her. What happened that night, Bull? Did you follow her from work? Could you just not take it anymore? Did you offer her love? Marriage? Security?”
Fury swept across Bull’s face. He leapt to his feet. “You don’t know anything about it.”
Clyde gave another growl and shot in front of me. Bull looked at him, then sank back onto the cot.
“Did she laugh at you, Bull? Did she call you ugly, tell you she’d rather die? She would say something like that. Because Raya had big plans. Bigger than anything you could offer her. It’s why she named her son Roman. She wanted him to own an empire.”
“She was a bitch!” Bull shouted. “A cold, icy bitch. She had it coming. Laughing at me when all I did . . .” He buried his face in his hands. “All I did was offer her everything I had.”
“How’d you get her to drink, Bull? Did you tell her you’d hurt her if she refused? But even after the bourbon, she still said no. All the alcohol in the world couldn’t make her fall for a man like you. So you wrapped your hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.”
Bull was sobbing now.
“Then you took the papers she’d stolen from SFCO and gave them to Hiram. He was probably a little sad about Raya. But it was the papers that mattered. He forgave you.”
The door into the storage room clicked open. Delia.
“What’s going on in here?” she asked.
Rain began to pound the roof.
I stood, crossed over to Bull, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on him. Then I pulled out my phone and called the Aurora police, told them they’d find a killer handcuffed in the storage room at the Royal Tavern.
“Enjoy that T-shirt,” I said to Delia as I walked by. “I think that’s all you’re ever going to get from Fred Zolner.”
CHAPTER 30
I’d been raised on excuses. But the Marine Corps taught me that excuses don’t matter. That excuses—even when prettied up as reasons—are just a way to avoid doing what needs doing.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
I sat in my truck with Clyde, thinking of greed and lust and murder while rain pounded the roof and the interior of the cab grew warm and moist with our breathing.
To the west, lightning flashed. The storm, coming on hard.
How could we have come so far, learned so much, and still not know where Roman had hidden Lucy? What were we missing? How had all of Hiram’s gold failed to protect him?
“Gold,” I said aloud. All the gold in Roman’s room. The gold mining map pinned on his wall.
He’s in the ground now. Where he belongs, Esta had said.
I thought of Ennis Parker, the man who’d staked a mining claim on land now occupied by the cement factory. According to what Tom O’Hara had learned, Parker had never found much of anything—he’d been focused on panning for gold, not digging it up.
Parker had died in a gunfight—what if the man who shot him had wanted his claim? What if, after Parker’s death, he’d mined that land for gold?
Mines meant tunnels.
With rising excitement, I started the truck. I turned on the defroster and the wipers. Outside, the branches of the ailing poplars flung about in the wind. The neon ROYAL TAVERN sign bled in the rain.
Alfred’s family had owned that land long before Hiram bought it. Maybe—I sat up straight—maybe the land was riddled with tunnels, and Alfred Tate knew it. Once he realized Hiram planned to use part of the land as access for his bullet train, the news might have been enough—even after the stroke—for him to order the survey. It wasn’t uncommon in Colorado for undocumented mines to open up suddenly beneath structures—buckling roads and swallowing homes. No one could build high-speed tracks on land like that. The results of Alfred’s survey would be one more weapon to use against Hiram in their ongoing war.
A gust caught the truck, rocking it. In the seat next to me, Clyde panted.