The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [64]
Smiles greeted Clayton’s announcement as he rose from the table.
Ganged up on by his family, Clayton drove away from home feeling a bit put out. Not at Grace and the kids, but with his mother. Why the change of heart? She’d never wanted him to know his father, and now it was suddenly okay for Kerney to be treated like a grandfather. What was that all about?
He consulted the map Rojas had given him, told dispatch he was in service and where he was going, and made his way up the forest road into the mountains until a locked gate stopped him. He got out, climbed the gate, and walked the steep, curving road. At the last bend a large log cabin with a covered porch came into view.
It was one of those modern cabins made from precut logs, with a pitched green metal roof and two stone chimneys at either end of the building. The cabin sat on an elevated stone foundation overlooking a small meadow and a frozen streambed that meandered out of a narrow mountain ravine. Large windows gave a view of the forest beyond the meadow and the white-capped Sierra Blanca peaks in the distance.
Clayton gauged the size of the cabin and decided it was at least four thousand square feet, minus the covered porch with the redwood railing and massive hand-cut stone steps. It was way more than twice the size of his house in Mescalero.
Yesterday’s light snowfall in Ruidoso had left two inches on a deep bed of frozen snow in the mountains. It was the first precipitation since the Ulibarri murder. Clayton scanned the area for more cabins hidden in the trees and saw none. On the north side of the road, where the sun couldn’t reach, he knelt and carefully brushed away the fresh snow looking for tire tracks on the hard-packed ice. The last vehicle driven over the frozen surface had tires much wider than a car, pickup truck, or SUV.
He tried several more places with the same results and switched to the south side, brushing a channel across the width of the roadway. Again, only the very wide treads of a heavy vehicle showed.
Clayton stood in the driveway and studied the cabin, wondering if it was the private retreat where Harry Staggs’s fictitious Johnny Jackson provided female companionship for important, well-known men.
He decided that if Rojas was the pimp who provided girls for VIPs, he certainly wouldn’t have given him a map to the place. The windows were shuttered on the inside so Clayton couldn’t get a look. But from all appearances, it seemed to be just a rich man’s vacation lodge.
Rojas’s girlfriend had mentioned taking several hikes during her stay at the cabin, so at the front porch steps Clayton brushed away the snow, looking for any telltale remnants of boot prints. He did the same at the back door, at a trail head next to a covered wood pile that wandered into the forest, and on the front porch around an expensive hot tub where wind-blown snow had collected. There were bobcat and deer tracks in the snow behind the cabin, and old claw marks from a black bear on the trunk of a nearby tree. But Clayton saw no evidence of any recent human activity. Not even the woodpile had been disturbed.
On the side of the house he found more tire indentations that matched what he’d seen on the road, and clear boot tracks in a man’s size led to a propane tank lettered with the supplier’s name.
He called the company, spoke to the manager, gave his location, and asked when the tank had last been filled. The manager searched his paperwork and came back with a date that matched exactly the time Rojas’s girlfriend said she’d been at the cabin.
“Ask the driver if anyone was here when he made his delivery,” Clayton said.
“Let me get him on his cell phone,” the manager said.
Clayton waited patiently and smiled to himself when the manager reported that no one had been at the cabin when his driver had filled the tank. It was exactly what he’d expected to hear.
“I need to take a statement from him,” Clayton said, checking his watch, figuring