Chapter 1 – Remnants from a Storm

In my heart I’ve always known Julie wasn’t coming back. The day I found out for sure, I was watching America’s Most Wanted on FOX TV, unprepared for my teenage granddaughters, Winston and Franklynn Pierce, to come bursting into my condo sobbing with swollen and bloodshot eyes. I jumped out of my La-Z-Boy ready for…I didn’t know what. Franklynn immediately wrapped her arms around my neck and began sobbing, “Oh, Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa.” Since Winston isn’t the huggy type, I made a conscious effort to pull her in between the two of us. Her body was trembling and hot tears spilled from her cheeks onto my cotton tee-shirt as Franklynn choked out, “Mommy’s dead.”

Her statement hit me like a sledgehammer in the chest and I squeezed the girls tighter.

“You remember that storm we had two weeks ago?” Winston asked, trying desperately to control her voice.

I nodded my head against hers and vaguely recalled missing a workday due to weather.

“Blew over an old chokecherry tree at the peace officer’s memorial in Idlewild Park and scattered human bones across the lawn?”

“Yes,” I said, clearing my throat against what I figured was coming next. “It was front page news.”

“That was Mommy,” Franklynn said, and began sobbing harder.

I let go of the girls and collapsed on the davenport. They plunked down on opposite sides of me and continued weeping. I closed my eyes and shook my head; Julie’s bones in Idlewild Park? How did she end up buried there, in the middle of Reno?

“Just before we came over,” Franklynn said, as she found her voice, “Detective Zorn and some Asian-looking cop questioned Daddy. Said they’d identified Mommy’s remains, but couldn’t return them because they were evidence. Can you believe. . .”

I wrapped my arms around my granddaughters. I’d like to question their father myself.

“. . . We can’t give her a proper burial until they finish their stupid investigation,” Winston said, finishing the sentence for her little sister. “Maybe not even then because they only found about half her bones.”

“Half her bones?” I asked, my voice squeaking like it had when I was a teenager.

Franklynn sobbed and hugged me tighter. “They never found her arms and legs.”

I swallowed hard, not wanting to believe what I was hearing.

Winston and Franklynn started sobbing again and all I could do to keep from sobbing myself was hug them close. “Where’s your father?” I asked. Although I was delighted they had come to me, it really was his place to console them.

“When the cops left he said he had to go to Vegas.”

“I thought he just got back.”

Winston sniffled and wiped her eyes. “Oh, Grandpa, what are we going to do?”

I squeezed her close and sighed. “I don’t know sweetheart. But you knew this day was coming. Your mother never would have left you . . . either of you . . . for any reason.” Your father maybe, but not Julie. Shari and I raised her better than that.

Voices from my fifty-five inch HDTV droned as the three of us huddled together on the davenport, each isolated in our own sad thoughts. I sniffled a few times as the girls cried themselves out, then pried myself free and clicked off the remote. “I think we all could use a cup of hot chocolate,” I said.

“Like mommy used to make?” Franklynn asked, still sounding teary.

Winston hopped up. “Is there any other kind?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” I said, stepping into my one-butt galley kitchen and pulling the double-boiler from a cupboard beneath the sink. Julie had always made it with half & half and real whipped cream. Way too rich for my stomach. But the girls loved it, and it always made them feel better when they were hurt or sad. I popped a couple Lactaid tablets and opened the icebox.

Winston scooted behind me and grabbed the carton of heavy whipping cream from the top shelf. She poured it into the Kitchen Aid mixing bowl sitting on the counter, pulled the speed lever forward, and dumped in a ton of sugar. I stirred Ghirardelli intense dark cocoa into the half & half warming on the stove. The humming mixer and bubbling chocolate soon filled my condo with a luscious aroma that made my mouth water and brought teary smiles to the girls’ faces.

I’m not sure where our daughter, Julie, came up with the names for the girls because my ex-wife Shari and I thought Winston was a terrible name for our granddaughter the first time we heard it, but by then it was too late. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long before the name fit her like the brass ferrule in a compression fitting, and getting used to Franklynn after that took no time at all. Most people think they were named after Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but that simply is not the case. Julie just liked the names is all. Perhaps because her husband, George, had wanted boys, he agreed to the unusual handles much the same way my father had agreed to naming my sister Muffy, and me Chip.

The girls and I sat around the dining room table for a half hour or so sipping hot chocolate from their grandmother’s fine china teacups and reminiscing about her and their mother, two women now missing from their lives. They’d been in primary school when Julie went missing, Winston in third grade and Franklynn in first, yet both reading at a fifth grade level. Long gone are the days when I’ve been able to help them with their homework, except for the wood-shop class Franklynn is taking. I get a real kick helping her finish the projects she brings to my shop when the power and woodworking tools at school are broken or missing.

It’s amazing how much Franklynn reminds me of Shari with her cute little turned-up nose, teak-brown eyes, and baby-fine, honey-maple hair. Watching her grow is like experiencing a forty year déjà vu. In the family album, black and white photographs of my ex-wife look dated, but the images of the gangly teenager tilting her head to the side and grinning are identical to that of the girl sitting across the table from me. It’s not difficult to imagine how she’ll look as a young woman and it makes my gut churn like a concrete mixer.

A month after Julie disappeared, Shari began having a glass of wine or two a day, and it didn’t seem all that long before the garbage bags began clinking with the empty bottles as I carried them out every night. I thought her going to bed early and sleeping late was just a way to cope with Julie’s disappearance, but when she graduated to vodka and began talking of divorce, I spent everything we’d saved during our thirty-nine year marriage trying to dry her out. Losing a child is a scab on your heart and it just keeps getting pulled off . . . and you bleed again and again and again, and you don’t know how much you can keep going, but somehow you do.

Then, two years ago, she returned from completing the program at the Betty Ford Center inebriated. She was with Harold Nelson, another drunk, who laughingly referred to the rehab facility as “Camp Betty” and obviously came from money. He had the nerve to tell me, in words more slurred than not, that he and Shari were soul mates and I should grant her the divorce because he was giving her all the things I no longer could. I was furious at the betrayal. But eventually, and with much reluctance, I gave Shari what she thought she wanted and she moved to Palm Springs to share Harold’s whiskey-sodden life. I can only pray that Franklynn didn’t inherit her grandmother’s destructive, habit forming genes.

Winston, on the other hand, has lustrous Burmese rosewood colored hair, smoky gray eyes, and thousands of cinnamon freckles that she obviously inherited from her dad, but doesn’t seem to mind as she rarely wears makeup. Not that it would do any good even if she did, considering how much time she spends in the sun playing fast-pitch softball. Winston plays center field primarily because she’s the only girl on the team who can throw a ball to home plate from the outfield wall. When she was three, I taught her to chunk rocks overhand like a boy into the Truckee River and in no time at all she was chunking them clean over it. She’s also their fastest sprinter.

Since the girls’ father had once again shirked his duty, I sent them off to bed and cleaned up the kitchen trying to figure who would kill my little girl and bury half her body in Idlewild Park. My stomach ached from the hot chocolate and anxiety about my daughter’s dismemberment. I hope to God that her murderer didn’t cut her up before killing her. I don’t want to go there but can’t get the thought out of my mind.

Even though it’s been nine years since Julie went missing, the hot tears I was holding back spilled out of my eyes and burned down my cheeks. Half her bones; how could I ever tell Shari?

Chapter 2 – Uprooted Clues

The next morning, I had a difficult time playing rhythm guitar during the early service, which is far more contemporary than any Presbyterian church service I ever attended as a boy. Sometimes I think the protestant church is entering into a reformation period with their music as the beat and lyrics become punched up, which is probably a good thing because it seems to have increased attendance by younger folks, my granddaughters included. Except when their father is in town; he always has some excuse why they can’t make it. But with him in Vegas, or who knows where, they followed me over to Covenant Presbyterian in Winston’s Jeep. My truck only seats two and the girls have somewhere to go after the service.

Most Sundays I really get into it, but today I felt half a beat behind, which got me a questioning look or two from the preacher who plays lead on a twelve string. I’ve been playing for close to fifty years, so there’s really no excuse for messing up 4/4 time. I can strum it in my sleep. The only other services I’ve messed up have been when Julie disappeared and Shari left me, so I wasn’t too surprised when Pastor Ray Thompson pulled me aside as we put our instruments away.

“What’s going on, Chip?” he asked, taking me by the arm. “You want to talk about it?”

I didn’t, but went with him to his office anyway. Pastor Ray sort of has this way of locking his hand onto your arm like a pair of vise-grips every time he gives advice or expresses condolence. I know he means well, but his talents lie in his music and his biblical knowledge. I took a seat on one of the club chairs in his office as other churchgoers milled about the narthex drinking coffee or juice and munching on Krispy Kreme donuts waiting for Sunday school to begin. Winston and Franklynn were heading for the parking lot.

“They found part of Julie’s remains,” I said, struggling to get the words out as Pastor Ray closed the door.

“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping beside me and placing a hand on my shoulder. “I knew it had to be something like that. Is there anything I can do?”

I pulled my glasses off and shook my head thinking at the moment that all the prayers in the world wouldn’t help. Nothing would bring Julie back and news of her death would only send Shari deeper into the bottle with Harold. So I gave him the pat Presbyterian answer, “Pray for me,” and excused myself for Sunday school where the lesson was about Grace, of all things.

A pretty young woman in a video talked about how she’d been brutally raped and had difficulty getting on with her life even though the two men who assaulted her had been caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. She had difficulty moving on because during the assault they’d also murdered her fiancé. It wasn’t until she’d visited them on death row and forgiven them for their sins that she felt free to live again. “Well, that’s easy for her to say,” I said, becoming angered by the discussion that followed. “She’s still alive. They took her dignity; she earned it back. My daughter is dead; forgiving whoever killed Julie won’t bring her back.”

“It’s not about Julie,” the class leader said, sounding sympathetic, “and it’s not about who did it. It’s about you, Chip. Living with the anger and the hate will eat you alive. Whoever killed your daughter doesn’t know how much you hate them, and even if they did they probably wouldn’t care. You can yell and scream all you want. Punch your fist through walls, they won’t feel a thing.”

Somewhere in the middle of his response I got up, knocking the folding church chair over, and made a hasty exit. I didn’t want to hear some bleeding-heart liberal BS thrown at me by someone who hadn’t lived or experienced what I was going through. Sure I enjoyed the music and church fellowship; however, since Shari left me, I merely tolerated the sermons and lessons. I needed a release and punching my fist through a wall wasn’t far off – about a foot and a half, as a matter of fact. One of the first things I hung on the back patio wall after Shari left was a speed bag, which I’ve since learned to use and have become quite good at punching.

The bat-ta-ta, bat-ta-ta of the leather bag bouncing off my fists and its slight sting on my knuckles soon had me zoned out. I’m not sure just how long I worked the bag before my upstairs neighbor, Steve Aldrich, leaned his head over the balcony and hollered, “Hey, Rocky, wanna hold the noise down? I’m trying to watch a game here.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow. “Who’s playing?”

“A’s and Mariners; come on up and watch. Zoe’s taken the grandkids miniature golfing and I’ve got the place all to myself.”

“Maybe later . . . after I finish my workout.”

“Suit yourself, but it’s a good game.”

I like Steve. He’s an okay guy, but he just never shuts-up. Watching a game with him is next to impossible as he only ever complains about what’s wrong with our homeowner association. I figure it this way: you’re either part of the problem or you’re part of the solution. It doesn’t do any good to complain without volunteering to serve on a committee or two. Fix something, don’t just complain about it. I grabbed my jump-rope and headed for the garage. Watching baseball on TV is like watching paint dry.

About ten minutes into it, I had worked up a real sweat and it hit me. I’ve waited nine years for the cops to find whoever took Julie and part of her has been buried in front of their memorial the whole time. She hadn’t just walked away from her family. I spent those nine years driving the streets and alleyways, crawling through abandoned mines, and even hiring a private investigator to look for her. The day after she went missing, Shari and I posted a ten thousand dollar reward and plastered Reno with posters picturing Julie and listing our home phone number. That was a mistake. We took hundreds of calls and chased down leads that didn’t go anywhere. In retrospect, all our efforts seem misplaced.

I’ve always believed in letting the police do their job, but I was just fooling myself; hoping against hope. Sure they have more resources than I do and a ton more experience, but they’ve still come up empty. The worst part all this time has been the not knowing. I swung the jump-rope around in a double arc and it whistled through the air as I finished jumping with a new sense of direction and purpose.

A brisk walk down the recreational asphalt path beside the Truckee River, which flows just outside my bedroom window, has been a weekday ritual for the past five years. I no longer jog; my right knee sounds like a box of Rice Krispies every time I climb a ladder or take the stairs. Even so, most mornings after getting the girls off to school, I head downtown to Java Jitters on Front Street and have a cup of joe, which is what I’ve called coffee ever since my four year hitch in the Sea Bees. The pathway winds through Idlewild Park not far from where Julie’s remains were found and I took off in that direction.

The afternoon was heating up and a swarm of gnats buzzed above the Truckee as white puffy clouds floated overhead in a radiant blue sky. At the last moment, I hoofed it past the turnoff to the police memorial. I just couldn’t make the turn and bring myself to go there. How could the world be so peaceful and beautiful, yet I feel so tormented. Fifteen minutes later, at Java Jitters, I ordered a cup of joe with two extra shots of espresso.

“That’s different,” said Ruby Spearman, the owner, as she grabbed a twenty ounce traveler off a stack of paper cups beside the cash register.

“What’s with the shades?” I asked, as she placed two shot glasses beneath a double spout on the espresso machine.

“Zigged when I should have zagged,” she said, tamping down finely ground beans into a small metal basket and screwing it onto the machine above the spout.

I watched as she opened a valve sending a blast of steam through the grounds, which condensed and began dripping from the double spout into the shot glasses. As Ruby turned, I saw an angry purple bruise extending down her left cheek that she’d attempted to cover with makeup. I also noticed that both her wrists were red and raw. “Right,” I said, forgetting my own emotional distress. “Who did that to you Ruby?”

“Nobody, Chip. I fell.”

“I thought you just said it was a zig-zag thing?”

She stopped what she was doing and glared at me through her sunglasses. “What are you, Dr. Phil or something?”

“I wish. I wouldn’t be living in this town anymore.”

“Right,” she said, and poured the two shot glasses into the twenty ounce traveler.

Ruby and Shari had been best friends since grade school and I’ve known her a long time. I sighed. “Well, maybe not, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

She turned away and placed the traveler under a large thermal carafe filled with French Roast and began pumping the top. “It’s none of your business,” she said, over her shoulder.

“Don’t be that way, Ruby.”

She turned and handed me the cup. “There’s nothing you can do, Chip.”

I shrugged. “Perhaps not, but I am a good listener.”

Her shoulders sagged as she came around the counter. “Cover for me would you Alice,” she said, and collapsed into a chair far away from the other patrons by the window.

I took a seat across the table from her, set my joe down, and waited. After a lengthy silence she said, “You remember last week how someone threw a brick through the front window?”

I nodded and took a sip of joe.

“Well, what nobody knows is that there was a note attached to the brick that said if I didn’t want it to happen again, I would have to make regular payments to someone who would be around to start collecting them in the morning.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said. It sounded like something out of an old B movie.

“I was just about to call the cops when this little hoodlum struts in like he owns the place and tells me he’s one of the El Diablos and if I don’t want to get hurt I better pay up and not say anything to the cops. I told him to go to hell and threatened to bash his skull in with the brick. The little punk pulled the biggest gun I’ve ever seen out of nowhere and tells me that would be a very bad idea.

“Well, I didn’t go to the cops, but I didn’t pay the thug either. So, Friday night three of them came back just before closing and roughed me up. They were just about ready to smash my espresso machine when I told them if they did that it would put me out of business and they wouldn’t get a cent. About that time this weaselly-looking creep the others called, Pick, walks in and tells them to back off. Said it would cost me a hundred dollars a week for him to protect me from the three other punks. I figured he was their leader and that it was cheaper than getting my place busted up and worrying about something happening to me or my family.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe it. When’s your next payment due?”

“Don’t do anything stupid, Chip,” she said, standing abruptly. “I’m sorry I told you.”

I stood also, placed a hand on her shoulder, and sighed. “I won’t, Ruby.”

“I’m serious. Those hoodlums are dangerous. You can’t go to the cops.” She lifted her sunglasses off her face and glared at me through one eye. The other was swollen shut. “Promise me!”

“I promise,” I said, holding up my right hand. “Right now I’ve got enough problems of my own.”

* * * *

Tears welled up in my eyes as I stopped on the way home and stared at a fragment of frayed yellow crime-scene tape clinging to the bark of an old elm tree shading an ugly brown scar in the lush green lawn. I’ve passed the memorial more times than I can remember but can’t recall ever stopping except once with Winston and Franklynn about a year after their mother went missing. We’d spent that morning playing at Idlewild’s kiddie amusement park.

I recall Winston looking up at all the embossed bronze names and questioning, “All those people are dead?”

“Yes,” I said. “They were police officers killed in the line of duty.”

She stared at the names and dates a moment.

“That’s a lot,” Franklynn said.

“Not too many for such a long time,” Winston said, glancing over at me for a sign of approval that she’d been able to grasp some sort of a statistical concept without knowing exactly what she’d figured out.

“That might be true,” I said, touching her chin with my finger, “unless it’s you who happen to be one of those ‘not too many.’”

“Like, what if one of them was Mommy,” Franklynn said. “That would be too many!”

“Correcto mundo.” I said, as I swallowed the lump in my throat, stooped, and hugged both the girls close, not knowing that we were practically standing on their mother’s crude grave.

I tried to remember what the area looked like, but couldn’t. Another name had been added to the memorial since then and a small chokecherry tree off to the side had a bronze plaque in the ground bearing the officer’s name. I tried to picture the scene a hundred years from now. The tree dedicated to him would undoubtedly have died, but how many others would have been planted?

My grandmother used to say, “A tree that grows too fast isn’t any good.” Not that I have anything against chokecherry trees, or that I know whether they grow too fast or not. But Reno is growing like fungus across the valley floor with a mushrooming crime problem that will undoubtedly add more names to the Peace Officer’s Memorial at a faster rate than in previous years.

I stared at the earthen scab where my daughter’s body had been uprooted and felt a sudden tightening in my throat. The park’s wound would heal long before mine or the girls’. “I promise I’ll find who did this to you, Julie,” I said, choking on the words as tears flowed, not really knowing where to begin. According to the newspaper article, a forensic team had scanned the surrounding area with ground penetrating radar and sent cadaver dogs looking for other remains without result. I wondered where Julie’s arms and legs might be. Were they buried elsewhere in the park? Were they even in the park? What kind of animal could have done such a thing to my little girl?

There had to be a clue somewhere that time hadn’t erased, but I worried about not being able to recognize it when the police hadn’t recognized it either. They’d been investigating Julie’s case on and off for nearly a decade. Every couple years, a cold case detective named Zorn would call, ask the same questions, and let us know they weren’t giving up. Now, with nearly half my daughter’s remains in the forensic lab, the case was open again.

I scanned the list of names on the memorial. The only officer killed in action anywhere around the time Julie disappeared had died nearly a year before: Sergeant Roland Overlock, Reno P.D. He was only thirty-three years old. I spent the better part of an hour looking around the monument without having anything jump out at me, then peeled the fragment of crime-scene tape from the tree bark, tucked it in my shirt pocket, and headed back to the condo feeling less than capable of living up to my promise. Over the years, I’ve learned to act more positive than I feel, which always seems to help. People don’t want an organ recital every time they ask how you’re doing. They just want to hear, “Good, thanks, and you?”

As I approached my condo complex, Jill Sommers, who is on the homeowner association board of directors and usually draping herself over the president like a cheap plastic drop cloth, was walking the grounds with a man in a straw hat who had piercing, cornflower blue eyes and was considerably younger than she. If her mental capacity was as large as her chest, she’d be a genius; however, most of the time she seems lost in space. Jill usually wouldn’t give me the time of day, but for some unknown reason said, “What are you up to on such a beautiful day, Chip?”

“Gathering clues to my daughter’s killer,” I said, patting my shirt pocket with the crime scene tape in it. “I’m hot on his trail.”

“That’s nice,” she said, and resumed talking with her young friend who had a quizzical expression. I turned and headed for the building’s main entrance.

Chapter 3 – Start at the Beginning

Except for a four year service hitch, I’ve lived in The Biggest Little City in the World fifty-nine years now. I used to love it here. Reno was a great place to grow up. However, over the past half-dozen years or so it has become the third fastest growing city in the nation, with new residents flooding the valley like sludge from a busted sewer pipe. Suburban developments are oozing up the mountainsides in all directions because there are more jobs here than people to fill them, which, I guess, is another reason why they just keep coming. I think it was a destination article in Money Magazine or something that cracked the pipe by naming Reno one of the ten best places to live. At the time, everyone thought the publicity was a good thing. Now, they’re not so sure, as downtown feels more like a big city than the sleepy little gambling town where I used to pitch pennies as a kid in front of the First National Bank. The unchecked growth breaks my heart and I think about it every time I have to go into the office.

“Thousands Standing Around,” is how my boss Jake Du Monde, owner of the Reno, Nevada Handyman Inc. franchise, refers to the Transportation Safety Administration agents swaggering through the hallways of our building, or standing in clusters outside the entryways smoking. Unfortunately, when the bureaucracy formed after nine/eleven, the local branch rented out most of the building. The other major tenant is U.S. Customs and their regional offices, which always draws a snide “Brand-X” comment from Lew Inman, a former Treasury Agent now working as one of our craftsmen.

The slight head nods I received passing through the fog bank of secondhand smoke were almost comical. Max Johnson, our scheduler, who rarely leaves the building between 7:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., once told me that most of the agents from TSA and Customs thought Handyman Inc. was a front for a CIA or FBI operation. Apparently they had run background checks on some of the craftsmen and discovered Max ran a martial arts studio in the evenings, Larry Kyle was a former combat Search And Rescue pilot, J T Mayberry had a pyrotechnic forensics background, and Lew Inman had U.S. Treasury connections. They figured only the CIA or FBI had reason to assemble a team with such specialized talents. Of course, they found nothing on the owners, Jake and Tammy Du Monde, or Gil Young who is a defrocked priest, myself, and many of the other craftsmen. But everyone knows the two Federal agencies can alter and obscure background files. For what possible operation they can’t imagine, but figure it has to be big. I pursed my lips and returned the subtle nods.

It was Monday and I’d skipped my morning walk going instead to the office to pick up a new job and drop off the paperwork from the last. I’d just finished a two week project painting a house that had 550 feet of four-rail fence around the yard with hog wire stapled to it to keep several sheep inside. I had a paper sack filled with white fleece under my arm and handed it to Tammy Du Monde as I entered the office. She turned seventy just before Christmas last year, but still acts like a teenager. Her hair is snow white and she wears it in a ponytail that hangs halfway down her back. She’s dressed in her signature powder-blue polo shirt with a Handyman Inc. logo over the breast pocket, a pair of jeans, and white tennis shoes. Other than a pair of matching half-karat diamond stud earrings, a plain gold wedding band, and a little lip gloss, she never wears jewelry or makeup.

“Hi, Guy. What’s this?” She calls everyone “Guy” because she doesn’t remember names, never mind that I’ve been working for Handyman going on five years now. Tammy and Jake are well beyond retirement age and eligible to collect Social Security but haven’t felt a need to apply. They spend more time in the office than necessary arguing with each other as only those who have been married fifty-three years can do.

“A little something for you, Doll,” I said, like I didn’t remember her name either. Fortunately, her husband has a sense of humor. I think anyone would after being married to Tammy as long as Jake has. “Got any joe?”

“Yup,” Max Johnson said, without dropping the phone as he toasted me with his mug and continued pricing out a job for one of the other craftsmen who’d called in with the details. Max constantly complains about being stuck in the office, farming out jobs to a bunch of idle rich guys, as he calls the retirees who moonlight part-time as handymen just to have something to do. I enrolled my granddaughters in his martial arts school and they attend when their father is out of town. Winston is going for her purple belt in Tae kwon do, which Franklynn already has.

“We made the good stuff this morning,” Tammy said, glancing up at the clock above the door before looking in the sack. “We thought you’d be coming in. Kind of early for you though, isn’t it?”

It was 8:17. Maybe she really couldn’t remember names, but she still had a mind for details.

“Is that Chip?” Jake Du Monde bellowed from his private office behind Max’s desk. “Send him in here.”

“Let me grab a cup of joe and I’ll be right in, Boss,” I hollered back.

“Ooh, nice,” Tammy said, as she opened the sack. Tammy’s hobby is weaving and she enjoys spinning her own yarn or whatever it is that weavers do. “Where’d you get this, Guy?”

“Last customer gave it to me,” I said, filling my stainless steel mug. “I asked him if I could have some because I thought you could use it.”

“I can,” she said, forgetting what she’d been doing and returning to her desk engrossed in grading the fleece. “I love the color. All it needs is a little washing and combing.”

Jake bellowed again. “Get in here, Chip.” His voice is coarse as 36 grit sandpaper and he always comes across a bit crotchety, but his heart is big as an anvil and all the regulars know it. The new guys and transient workers cut him a wide path.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, winking at Tammy with a lightheartedness I didn’t feel and heading into his office.

“Ran a little long on that last job?” Jake said, without smiling, as I came through the door.

“Shot myself in the foot again,” I said, and waited for him to invite me to sit.

“You got any toes left?”

“A few.”

He nodded at the chair. “Remember when you first came to work here and I asked if you knew how to bid a job?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“I didn’t lie to you then, Boss. It’s just that the reality has changed.”

He rolled his eyes and ran a meaty hand across his balding head. He was wearing a powder-blue, Handyman, Inc. logo shirt like Tammy. They always wore matching shirts like they were going steady or something.

“I thought I bid that job a little high.”

He snorted. “Good thing you bought yourself a compressor and paint gun or you’d still be out there.”

“J T’s your painter. I just do it part-time.”

“He would have had that job done in a week and a half.”

I shrugged. “I made money.”

“Not as much as you should have.”

“I bid any higher I wouldn’t have gotten it. Besides, sixty percent of something is better than a hundred percent of nothing. So what are you complaining about?” The truth is I can’t ever do a job like I’m not doing it for myself. Taking time to do it right the first time also means not having to take time to go back and fix it later. Handyman Inc. gives customers a one year warranty on labor, but won’t pay its craftsmen another nickel to make the repairs.

“It’s your time,” he said, shook his head, and almost smiled. “I only keep you around because customers seem to like your work.”

“And I only stay because I love the abuse I get around here. So, what do you want?”

Jake folded his bread-loaf arms across his barrel chest and leaned back in his chair. “I want you to go down to Arrow Creek and give Lew a hand. He’s enclosing a patio and needs some framing and finish work done. Maybe the two of you will be able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time and I’ll be able to make some money.”

“You take sixty percent of everything we earn.”

“How many times do I have to tell you this, birdbrain?” Jake never swears when Tammy can hear it and won’t tolerate anyone else doing so, either. All the regulars know it and keep their language pretty clean. “It works out to thirty-seven percent. Out of that sixty comes your workman’s comp, income tax, social security and . . .” I tuned him out as he blathered on with the same old spiel. It’s easy to pull his chain.

Lew Inman is one of two craftsmen who would be able give me advice on looking for Julie’s killer. After thirty years investigating crime for the Treasury Department he’d know where to get started. The other craftsman is Dale Edwards who’s always bragging about his connections in the Reno police department. I once asked him if he thought the two dozen or so cases of missing women in the area were related. Sergeant Peter Zorn, the cold case detective assigned to my daughter’s case, didn’t seem to think so and I wanted to know if he was telling the truth. Dale said that more than two thousand people went missing every month in Nevada, ninety-six percent of them runaways. He promised to check with his contacts but never got back to me. Sometimes I think he might even consider me a suspect. I have to remind myself it’s nothing personal; he just has the mind of a cop.

“Yes, Boss. Sorry I forgot,” I said, as Jake finished his indoctrination lecture on pay and benefits. “You got the address?”

He squinted at me and pulled a pencil from behind his ear, scribbled across the bottom of a sheet of paper, tore it in half, and handed it to me. “Lew knows you’re coming. He just won’t expect you this early,” Jake said, with an undertone of sarcasm. Never mind that he knows I have two teenage girls to get off to school. Jake is one of those disgusting morning people who finishes his first cup of joe and reading the paper before the sun peeks above the horizon.

* * * *

Arrow Creek is nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills southwest of Reno and overlooks the city. It’s one of those posh neighborhoods where every spacious undeveloped lot has a view and sells for more than a completed four bedroom home inside the city limits. I had less trouble getting into Davisville, the Sea Bee base just south of Providence, Rhode Island when I was stationed there in the early seventies. Two guards and a supervisor wanted to know where I was going and why. I think mainly they wanted to scope out my metallic blue 1953 GMC panel truck and used the scrap of paper Jake had given me as an excuse. Normally I would have had a work order, but it was Lew Inman’s job and I was just assisting with the framing and finish carpentry work. Half a dozen or so contractor and delivery trucks had backed up behind me while the rent-a-cops called the office and then the customer before waving me through.

Lew Inman always wears a gray fedora no matter how hot the weather is; a salty white stain fringed the dark ring of sweat soaking through his hatband into the broad-brim. Lew does great masonry and tile work. I’d helped him on several jobs around town and learned that he’d retired from the U.S. Treasury and had worked undercover infiltrating himself into smuggling and counterfeiting rings, the sort of stuff you’d see on TV and not quite believe. He just doesn’t look the type who could fit into the criminal underworld. I have less trouble picturing him working with the Secret Service on temporary assignments guarding the President, which he says he’s done on two different occasions.

Lew picked up his stone working skills trying to stretch his government service pay while renovating an old Virginia homestead he’d purchased. Said he’d attended a Saturday morning class at the local Home Depot and learned how to set tile in his entryway. His wife liked it so much she had him do the kitchen and both baths. Then every time they moved, she’d want something else tiled. In one house he built a brick fence and barbeque and said it just felt natural. He loved the physical labor as it seemed to work off stresses he took home from the job, which he finally retired from after thirty years without any regrets. At least that’s what he says. But sometimes I’ll notice a faraway look in his eyes when he talks about current news stories and purposefully lets slip something that isn’t in the paper. He pretends to catch himself and says it came from a friend who’s still active and “If I tell you his name I’ll have to kill you.”

Lew is medium height and about my age or maybe a little older and still in great shape. Even so, he was struggling with a lazy man’s load of 2 x 4s as I pulled up to the curb in front of a sprawling, newly constructed Tuscany mansion. Judging from the ongoing work on other houses in the development, it couldn’t have been finished more than a month ago. Handyman Inc. had gotten the job enclosing the new owner’s patio because the original contractor wanted about a third again as much as our bid. Lew smiled and waved as I stepped out of my truck and locked the door. There were too many transient workers in the development to leave my tools unattended in an unlocked truck.

“Let me give you a hand,” I said, and helped him carry the cumbersome load of eight-foot studs around back where he showed me the permit drawings.

“It’s a bigger job than I wanted to do myself,” Lew said, as I studied the blueprints, “but Jake said bid it anyway and he’d send someone to help. I’m glad it’s you.”

“Thanks. You know why a chicken coup has two doors?”

He looked at me sideways. “No.”

“Because,” I said, handing the plans back and wondering whatever made me begin the stupid joke Julie had told the girls and me the last time we were together. I couldn’t just blurt out that I needed Lew’s help finding her killer. I had to work up to that, gradual like. “If it had four doors it would be a chicken sedan.”

He shook his head and set the plans down. “Let’s get the rest of those studs,” he said, and walked back the way we’d come. We jackassed building materials in silence and laid them out beside the patio. Framing would be easy since the patio was already enclosed on three sides. The plans called for an exterior wall set with double pane plate glass windows and a French door entry beneath a flat roof observation deck that would be accessed through a second set of French doors in the master bedroom suite. The project would have been a whole lot easier to complete during the new construction phase than going back and retrofitting, but I wasn’t complaining. Work is work and anyone who wants it can find a job in Reno.

Lew labored at a steady pace without a break until 12:30 p.m. when he stopped for lunch. Since it was his job, I did likewise. Normally I take ten minutes for a cup of joe in the morning and the same in the afternoon without stopping for lunch. Jobs seem to go faster if I eat while I work and munch a few sunflower seeds in between. To me, food is just fuel for the body, whereas joe is to be savored. Lew took a full thirty minutes to eat. I swear he must have chewed each bite twenty-eight times. I was on my second cup of joe when he said, “What’s bugging you, Chip?” like he was reading my mind or something.

“What makes you ask?”

“I don’t know. Chicken joke aside, you seem a little preoccupied this morning. I just thought maybe something’s on your mind.”

Lew’s perceptive like that; reading people with eyes that take in more than they give out, which is probably how he survived thirty years infiltrating all those criminal organizations. “It’s Julie,” I said, realizing how bad I was at covering my emotions. “They found some of her remains a couple weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was more difficult talking about than I figured. Julie’s been gone nine years, but hearing Franklynn tell me on Saturday night, “Mommy’s dead,” brought all my feelings back to the surface again. I took a deep breath and tried to speak with an even voice. “I just found out this weekend. Now,” I said, pausing to clear my throat, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Go on living. It’s all you can do.”

“No. I mean about finding her killer.”

“You have to let the police do their job.”

“They haven’t done it in nine years.”

“Well, in all fairness,” he said, closing his lunch box, “if they didn’t have a body they didn’t have much to work with.”

“Julie wasn’t the first woman to go missing around here. I found articles in The Gazette-Journal about five others who disappeared before she did. Since then, I’ve clipped nearly two dozen more. I think a serial killer is working the area and Reno’s finest haven’t been able to stop him in over a decade. I also think they’ve had an exclusive on my daughter’s case long enough.”

He chuckled. “And you think you’re going to solve it?”

I dumped the cold dregs of joe from the bottom of my mug on the ground. “Can’t do any worse,” I said. “I was thinking maybe you could give me some pointers. Kind of tell me how or where to get started.”

He removed his hat and slowly wiped his face with a large blue-plaid handkerchief that he pulled from his hip pocket. “It’s always best to start at the beginning . . . the day she went missing. What was she doing the last time anyone saw her? Who did she see and who did she talk with? Did she do anything out of the ordinary? Did she have any enemies or anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?”

I shook my head. “That was nine years ago. How am I supposed to remember all that?”

 

Getting to his feet, Lew replaced his hat, and shoved the handkerchief back in his pocket. “It’s what you’re expecting of the police. More, in fact! Fortunately, they take copious notes and keep them chronologically in case files for future review.”

“You think they’ll show them to me?”

“Probably not. Although that shouldn’t deter you from asking. If they refuse, then ask to see them under the Freedom of Information Act. Generally the public is entitled to most original police reports. However, since it’s an ongoing investigation, I think you’re going to be out of luck.”

“You think Dale Edwards can get them for me?”

“No. Dale is full of himself. Likes to talk big, but the truth is he’d jeopardize his pension getting you those files. Something, I’m sure, he’s not prepared to do even if you were his best friend.”

Which, I’m not. I don’t have a best friend; least ways not since Shari left me. Julie’s disappearance had over-torqued the setscrew holding us together.