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  But Gary Jenkins was gone.

  His shirt was found hanging on a bush near the stream, and the ranger who’d summoned Corrie showed her the tracks he’d found nearby. Mountain lion. For Corrie, it had been easy to imagine what had happened. The young man had gotten up early on the last morning of his life, went down to the stream to wash up, bent over to splash water on his face, and the cat had pounced on him. Killed him. Dragged him off and ate him.

  Gary Jenkins had been a small fellow. Five feet six, one thirty. Two or three good meals for a big cat. There might literally be nothing of him left.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Corrie and the houndsman had tracked the mountain lion who’d left the tracks by the stream. The first pile of its dung they’d found had been thick with porcupine quills. The next pile had contained something equally unappetizing: blue denim. According to Gary’s father, his son had worn his favorite pair of Levi’s to go camping.

  The powers that be still listed Gary Jenkins as missing, and wouldn’t rule out the possibility of foul play at the hands of another person. Corrie, of course, had heard her share of grisly true-crime stories, even tales of psychotic cannibals, but she’d never heard of anyone who ate people while they were still in their blue jeans.

  No, a lion had claimed the unfortunate young man. And if there were any remains that hadn’t passed through the animal’s digestive tract, they would be skeletal at best. Skeletal and tucked up in the branches of a tree or the recesses of some rocky den.

  She stood up and wondered why the cat hadn’t kept to its home range. In the Sierra, a given area of a hundred square miles usually provided enough game to keep half a dozen mountain lions well fed. Maybe this particular animal’s area had gotten overpopulated, and he was the odd man out. Or maybe he was infected with some feline disease that made him behave out of character. Or …

  Or maybe, as intelligent as these big cats could be, it had simply discovered that humans were very easy prey. They didn’t have gouging antlers like deer, and they didn’t run nearly as fast. And maybe, from the lion’s point of view, people were a delicacy, too.

  Corrie Knox smiled mirthlessly. Wouldn’t that notion delight Chief Ketchum?

  She repacked her materials, stood up and surveyed her surroundings again. No sign of the fucker. No sense that she was being hunted, either. Maybe her prey had travel plans to keep right on moving north. Felis concolor, the cat of one color, could be found anywhere from Canada to South America.

  It’d make her job a helluva lot easier if the beast stayed nearby.

  Not that the chief would like to hear that, either.

  Charmaine Cardwell ushered Oliver Gosden into the suite at the Hyatt that Clay Steadman had arranged for the Cardwell family. She seated him on a sofa and asked if she might call for coffee for him. The deputy chief politely declined.

  Little Japhet Cardwell dressed in black slacks and a white shirt peeked out from behind the folds of his mother’s black dress.

  “Are you a policeman?” the four year old asked seriously.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You gonna catch the bad man who killed my daddy?”

  The question pierced Oliver’s heart like an arrow. This boy was two years younger than his own son. And he’d already lost his father. Glancing up at Charmaine, Oliver saw that she, too, was interested in how he answered the question.

  “If he’s in our town,” the deputy chief told them, “we will catch him. If he’s run away … then the FBI will have to catch him.”

  “What’s gonna happen when you catch him?”

  “He’ll go to trial and when he’s found guilty he’ll have to pay the price.”

  “You mean if he’s found guilty, don’t you?”

  Oliver looked up to see that Mahalia Cardwell, also dressed in black, had entered the room.

  “Lots of folks get away with murder these days, don’t they?” she asked.

  “Grandma, please,” Charmaine said. “You’ll upset Japhet.”

  Tears were forming in the boy’s eyes as his mother picked him up. He’d understood what his great-grandmother had said. He brushed his tears away with the back of a hand and turned his huge liquid brown eyes on Oliver.

  “Don’t let the bad man get away,” the boy pleaded fearfully.

  “We won’t,” Oliver said, and meant it. “I promise.”

  As Charmaine Cardwell carried her son from the room, her look said that she hoped Oliver wouldn’t disappoint either of them.

  “Where’s that white boy?” Mahalia Cardwell asked, drawing Oliver’s attention back to her. “He sent you to do his dirty work?”

  The old woman had remained standing. Oliver got to his feet so she wouldn’t be able to look down on him.

  “I’m the deputy chief of police in this town, ma’am. I don’t tote dat barge for anyone around here.”

  Mahalia Cardwell was unimpressed. “You don’t come from around here, either, do you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The chief of police, he bring you in from Los Angeles, too?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So you’re his house nigger.”

  Oliver took a deep breath to maintain his cool. “I don’t use that word, ma’am. I have a son not much older than Japhet, and he’s not going to hear it from me or anyone else in my presence.”

  “Not even the chief of police? You’re going tell your boss to watch his mouth?”

  “The chief doesn’t use that word, either.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. He’s a reformed white man, or somethin’.”

  Oliver didn’t want to spend one minute more than necessary in this woman’s company, so he decided it was time to get down to business.

  “Mrs. Cardwell, I’d like to ask you some questions about your grandson now, if you don’t mind. You might have some information that will help me keep my promise to Japhet.”

  “Oh, you bet I do. I know who killed my Isaac.”

  “And who would that be?” Oliver asked carefully.

  “His no-good daddy, that’s who,” the old lady said. “That lying, thieving, whoring, murdering charlatan that calls himself Jimmy Thunder. That’s who killed my baby. May he burn in hell!”

  Chapter 16

  As predicted, the Reverend Jimmy Thunder was not happy to see Ron Ketchum. But he had experience in the inevitability of talking to the police when they insisted on talking to you. He knew his current status could postpone the time when he’d have to talk to them, and in other circumstances he might have enjoyed making the bastards cool their heels. Right now, though, he just wanted to get it over with.

  He received Ron in his sunroom.

  “Nice view of the lake,” the chief said, looking around.

  Thunder was sitting, but he didn’t offer Ron a chair. So the chief contented himself to stand.

  “You come to get my alibi?”

  Until that very moment, Ron hadn’t considered the possibility that the man might have killed his son. He had to laugh inwardly, thinking all the clean mountain air he’d been breathing the past three years must have been responsible for that omission. Back in L.A., he’d never let a little thing like paternity excuse somebody from the suspicion of homicide.

  “Do you need an alibi, Reverend?”

  “I was playing cards all night. Until I went to bed.”

  “Solitaire?”

  “Poker. With Texas Jack Telford.”

  Even in a town lousy with celebrities, Texas Jack stood out as one of the more colorful characters. A five time world poker champion, he’d retired on top. But now Jimmy Thunder had told the chief he had Texas Jack over to the house for a friendly little game.

  “Guess I don’t need to ask who won,” Ron said.

  As Jimmy Thunder had told Ron in his office, he repeated, “I know about you. Marcus Martin is a friend of mine … and one of my lawyers.”

  Ron kept his face blank, but he wondered if Marcus Martin was his personal curse in life, and if
he’d ever be free of the prick.

  The chief repeated his words to Thunder, “We know about each other, Reverend.”

  “Meaning to you I’m just another nigger and ex-con. Well, you think what you want. Deacon Meeker was here with Jack and me, too. He can back me up.”

  Ron smiled. “I’m sure he will. He likes to play cards, too?”

  “He didn’t play. He was just here. Reading his Bible.”

  The chief looked at Meeker. Fancy clothes and little gold cross or not, the guy was a graduate of a state pen, not the Yale Divinity School.

  “Devout,” Ron said. Then turned back to Thunder. “But what I came to ask you about is your son. How long was he in town? And did he stay with you?”

  Thunder nodded. “He was with me here six days. I think he was at a hotel a night before that, but I don’t know which one.”

  Jimmy Thunder picked up a fat manila folder from the table next to him, stood up, and handed it to Ron.

  “What’s this?”

  “Hate mail. What came just last month. You want more, we got boxes of the stuff in storage. The top ones, the ones clipped together there, they were mailed locally.”

  “You think someone could have killed your son to get back at you? Are there letters in here that threaten him specifically?”

  Reverend Thunder shook his head. “Weren’t many people who knew Isaac was my son. So, no, nobody mentioned him by name. But you look at all that filth, then you tell me what people would do to hurt me.”

  Ron hefted the file in his hand. “I will. I’ll read every piece of it myself.”

  “Like I said, you want more, just call. Now, can I do anything else for you?”

  “I’d like to talk with the rest of your household staff. Without the deacon in the room. If that’s all right with you.”

  Clearly, it wasn’t. But Thunder knew this, too, was inevitable. He grunted his assent and walked out on Ron.

  Chapter 17

  Oliver Gosden was back on the sofa in the Cardwell’s suite at the Hyatt. The old lady sat opposite him in an armchair. Her eyes were focused on the past, and the lack of movement in her face as she spoke would have done credit to a ventriloquist.

  “Jimmy Leverette was black trash who lived at the end of our block in Baytown, Texas. The family moved in from somewhere out in the piney woods. Story was the daddy ran off with some whore. His mama, she was always spouting the Bible, but she was rattlesnake mean.”

  The deputy chief half expected a challenging look from the old lady, daring him to make a comparison, but the irony was lost on her and she continued with her deadpan reminiscence.

  “The two Leverette girls, Dorothy and Marjean, they were quieter than whipped dogs. But Jimmy, his mama couldn’t beat him down. He was a high school football hero, and in Texas that made you important, even if you were black. Jimmy strutted back and forth in front of my house in his football jacket. I knew what that boy was after. He wanted my baby girl, Natalie.”

  “Natalie is your daughter?” Oliver asked.

  A moment of anger animated the old woman’s face. “She was my daughter. The way I figure it, Jimmy Leverette killed her, too.”

  The deputy chief wanted to hear about that, but he knew better than to interrupt someone who was speaking freely. He’d let Mahalia Cardwell tell her story her own way. He would hold his questions until she was finished.

  “Natalie was smart and pretty,” Mahalia said, looking inward once again. “But she was too gentle for her own good. My late husband, Ernest, and I worked five jobs between us to see that our baby could go to college and amount to something in life. So, I wasn’t too worried about Jimmy Leverette. Natalie would go off to college, and that would be the last she’d see of that piece of trash.

  “I didn’t know for a whole year that Jimmy Leverette had followed my baby girl. He had a scholarship offer from the University of Texas, but he chose West Texas State to run after Natalie. I didn’t find out until my daughter came home pregnant after her freshman year and announced she was marrying Jimmy.”

  Mahalia Cardwell closed her eyes and put a hand flat on her chest. A minute passed before she could go on.

  “I think that was what sent my Ernest to an early grave, so maybe that’s another Cardwell the high-and-mighty Jimmy Thunder has on his conscience.” The old woman snorted. “If he has a conscience.

  “After Natalie got married, I wanted to visit her. Help her through those early days of pregnancy. She was a small girl, not like me. I worried about how carrying a baby might wear on her. But she kept putting me off. Said she didn’t want to trouble me, make me travel all the way across Texas to El Paso. But the more she put me off, the more she worried her daddy and me. It wasn’t like our baby not to take help from us.

  “Then, one day, I got a call from the refinery. Ernest had a heart attack, the man told me. He was alive, but just only. I better get to the hospital right away, the man said. I did. My husband was unconscious, and he never would wake up and see me again. My heart broke just looking at him, but I didn’t know what real sorrow was right then.

  “I called Natalie to come quick and see her daddy before he passed on. She told me she’d come as soon as she could. But she didn’t arrive until the day I put my Ernest in the ground. She turned up at the cemetery, and that was when I saw Jimmy Leverette had been beating my daughter. His pregnant wife.

  “I took Natalie home and dragged the whole story out of her. Jimmy had been taking drugs, seeing other women, gambling, and spending the money the football boosters gave him on the high life instead of taking care of Natalie and her baby. It wasn’t Natalie’s nature to speak up or complain, but when she finally did, Jimmy started beating on her. Pretty soon, she didn’t have to say a word to get a beating. Just look at him funny was all.

  “She didn’t come home to see her daddy before he died because Jimmy didn’t want her to go, and she was far enough along in her pregnancy she thought another beating would kill her baby. Finally, she couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing her daddy again and she borrowed bus money secretly from a neighbor. And right then, in her mama’s house, as she was telling me all this, she was shaking with fear that her husband would come after her and kill her.”

  A smile of grim satisfaction crossed Mahalia Cardwell’s face, and she nodded her head.

  “He did come, too. That no-good nigger walked right up to my front door with all the nerve in the world and rang my doorbell. He didn’t know I was expecting him; he didn’t know I was ready for him. I had been hoping and praying he’d come. I yanked open that door and I had my rolling pin held high in my right hand. I smacked him alongside his head with all the strength God gave me. I don’t recall just how many times it was I hit him. But when I got tired of swinging my arm, I finally dragged him off my porch and out to the gutter. I went back in my house and called the sanitation department to come haul him away.”

  “What did you do when the police came?” Oliver asked.

  “I told them what Jimmy Leverette had done to my daughter. I showed them the teeth he’d knocked out of her head. I showed them the scars he left on her. I told them how she feared for her life if he got his hands on her again. Those policemen, they had children. They understood. One of them took me aside and told me if I hadn’t laid such a good whipping on Jimmy Leverette, he would have. And he told me don’t worry about Jimmy no more.”

  The old woman shook her head several times slowly, as if in deep regret.

  “Jimmy went away, all right, but he never bothered about no divorce. In the end, that didn’t matter, though. He broke something inside my Natalie, something I never could fix. Lord, how I tried. Gentling her, taking care of Isaac when he was born. Then I tried to make her mad at me, urged her to put up a fight. I knew if I could get her good and mad just once, I could turn her around and show her where to aim her anger. But I never could do it.

  Mahalia Cardwell focused her eyes on Oliver.

  “You ever hear of people who die of a br
oken heart?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s what my baby Natalie did. She gave her love, her heart and her body to Jimmy Leverette and he stomped her flat. She died when she was twenty-four. Doctors couldn’t find a single reason why. But I knew she was fixing to go one night when she took my wrist with more strength than I ever knew she had and told me to take good care of Isaac.”

  “That’s how Jimmy killed her?” the deputy chief asked.

  Mahalia Cardwell nodded.

  “I raised Isaac to be a fine man. I used his daddy as an example of everything he shouldn’t be, and when Jimmy Leverette killed that poor white boy from New York, he proved me exactly right. Isaac grew up fine and righteous. Only thing I worried about was he had his mother’s gentle nature. So, I helped him to learn to be strong. He took to it, too. Wouldn’t back down from any man, but would never strike a blow, either. He went to the university and theological school out here in California —he was a real minister, not a charlatan like his father — and when he married Charmaine, they brought me out to live with them.”

  “How did Isaac come to be in Goldstrike, Mrs. Cardwell?”

  “A man came to our house about two weeks ago, an Englishman name of Colin Ring. You ever hear of him?”

  “No, ma’am,” Oliver said, but he wrote the name down.

  “He’s a writer. Writes books about famous people. Only he tells folks the real story about what the high and mighty get up to when they think nobody’s looking. He wanted to know if I could help him learn about the real Jimmy Thunder.”

  Oliver had to repress a grin. He’d bet his badge this old lady had practically dragged the man into her house. “You talked to him?”

  “Of course, I did.”

  “Did you ever think he could be a scammer, a blackmailer?”

  “I wouldn’t have cared. But he had one of his books with him to show me. About some celebrity woman who was awful to her children. Said he’d done others, too. Believe me, I’ve never been so happy to meet a white man before in all my seventy-seven years.”