The Big Gamble - Michael Mcgarrity [81]
“It’s your call,” he said.
Pearson’s slight nod of agreement gave Kerney no sense of satisfaction. She had the look of a small animal about to be eaten by a predator.
“Come inside the house,” she said.
It took an hour for Pearson to tell her story. Part confession, part rationalization, it spanned the years just before Norvell’s return to New Mexico and his election to his first term in office. Pearson had been the number-one girl in Norvell’s Denver stable; the most expensive, the most in demand, the one with the most repeat customers.
She had made money, spent money, gotten high, lived the good life: designer clothes, weeks at luxury resorts with wealthy men, extravagant gifts, world travel. She explained what it had meant to a girl from a dysfunctional family who’d felt worthless and stupid.
She told him how watching Norvell’s older girls get dumped as they lost their bloom made her realize she had to do something with her life before it was too late. How coming to Santa Fe on working weekends to be with clients, she found a place where she thought it would be possible to turn things around.
Kerney didn’t interrupt. He heard her out as she talked about breaking away from Norvell, moving to Santa Fe, going into therapy, apprenticing with a clothing designer, opening her business, meeting her future husband, starting a family. Finally, she stopped, exhausted by the outpouring. But her eyes looked clearer, less troubled.
Kerney decided not to press too much for specifics. That would come later in an in-depth interview. He brought up Adam Tully and Luis Rojas and got confirmation that both were Norvell’s partners. He learned that Rojas lived in El Paso. She had no knowledge of Cassie Bedlow, Gene Barrett, or Leo Silva.
“We’ll need to meet again,” he said. “You can pick the time and place, but it must be soon.”
“How did you find me?” Pearson asked.
“Luck,” Kerney replied.
“Here at the house is best, in the mornings after eight. My husband goes to work and drops the children off at preschool on his way.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Kerney said. “I think we can wrap things up in one session.”
Pearson’s eyes bored into Kerney with the hardness of a con who’d been trumped. “You suckered me with this bullshit about the grand jury, didn’t you?”
“Not necessarily,” Kerney replied. “I’ll try to work something out on your behalf.”
She snorted in disbelief. The sound stripped away the last shred of her sophisticated veneer. “Yeah, right. Son of a bitch. Have you got a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Neither do I.”
“If you change your mind about tomorrow, our deal is off.”
“No kidding,” Pearson said.
Outside, the glare of sunlight bounced off the roofs of the houses in the valley below, washed out the roughness of the mountains beyond, and pulled most of the color from the sky. Kerney drove away from Helen Pearson thinking that the siren call of Santa Fe had always drawn searchers, dreamers, nonconformists, and oddballs looking to transform their lives. Why not a hooker? Considering everything, Pearson had done a damn good job of it.
His cell phone rang. At Kerney’s request, the fiscal officer who kept the records of legislators’ travel and per diem reimbursement payments had searched Senator Norvell’s old files. Norvell had attended a three-day meeting of a joint-house finance committee in Santa Fe that coincided with the date Anna Marie Montoya had disappeared.
Kerney now had motive and opportunity, but he needed more. He decided a trip to Lincoln County would be worthwhile. That was where Montoya’s body had been found and where Norvell and his buddy, Adam Tully, had grown up. The connection between the two was too strong to dismiss.
He checked the time. The architect was waiting for him at the building site with a survey crew, and Sara was standing by at Fort Leavenworth for his call. This was the day the site for the house would be spotted and staked. It was the last chance before