The Investigator (Letty Davenport, #1) (36)

Turner kept asking for reassurance that Rivers might still be out there somewhere, not charging anything on his Visa card. Letty wasn’t interested in lying to her, so Kaiser did it, telling Turner that Rivers probably didn’t come back because he didn’t want to endanger her or the children.

“That’s probably it,” she said, showing some relief. “The kids, he loved the kids. Loves the kids.”

Letty asked if she could keep one of the Visa bills—“Maybe we could use some government computer to trace him,” she said. “We’ll let you know.”

Turner glanced toward the back of the mobile home, to the bedroom. “He left his laptop, which sorta worries me, because he usually took it when he was going somewhere. Didn’t use it for much of anything but email and porn . . .”

“Mind if I take a look?” Letty asked. “Could give me an idea where he went.”

Turner had to think about that, then said, “I guess. If he’s dead, it can’t hurt him. If he’s alive, and you find him, then at least I’d know.”

She went back to the bedroom and fished a laptop out from under a bed and brought it back to the living room, dragging the power cord. An aging Gateway running Windows 7, the machine produced a long list of porn sites, a shorter list of right-wing political sites, and dozens of emails going back six years. Almost all the emails were routine spam, never deleted, but one, from a sender who called himself RamJam, said, “Don’t put this shit in email. Delete it.”

Rivers apparently had deleted the offending email, but not the comment about it. The delete file was empty, so he apparently knew enough to take the last step to get rid of it.

Letty noted RamJam’s email address, and continued scrolling through the mail. Kaiser chatted with Turner as Letty worked, to keep Turner thinking about something other than the laptop.



* * *





When Letty first moved in with the Davenports, in Saint Paul, Davenport had a desktop police radio tuned to the police channels. He never listened to it, and Letty asked if she could keep it in her bedroom. When she tired of listening to the cops, she fished around on the dozens of other channels available on the radio and stumbled on the cell phone frequencies.

Many of the cell phone calls involved apparent drug deals and followed a simple format: “Uh, hey man, this is me.” “Where you at?” “Down to the corner.” “How’s the corner?” “It’s all right. You working?” “I’m working.” “See you then, ten minutes?” “See you.”

Some of Rivers’s emails had the same clipped feel: “Let’s get coffee.” “What time?” “Ten.” “See you then.”

Letty couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, but something was going on.

When she was done with the email, she checked the other files on the machine, but found nothing useful. The photo file, for which she had hopes, was filled with porn. She shut down the computer and twisted the bar stool she was on, to talk with Turner.

“These people that Stony was hanging with, back in the Rand Low days—did you know them? Other than Crain and Sawyer?”

“I couldn’t tell you much about them, those I met,” Turner said. “Oil workers, most of them, the ones that had jobs. Some had been to prison. Most of them were in the Army, some of them a long time ago. Talk about it all the time. Stony never was in the Army, he felt kind of out of it when these other guys would be talking about Willy Pete or MREs or Charlie Foxtrot and that shit.”

“Names?”

She shook her head. “That was all a while ago.”

“How tight was Stony with Rand Low?”

“Rand was the one everybody listened to. He was . . . intense. Stony liked him for that. I knew Rand would get him in trouble, but Stony did what Rand told him . . . right up to the trial.”

“If I were to go hunting for him . . . Rand Low?”

“Not a good idea, girl. But if you was to look for him, he wouldn’t be up here, he’d be down in the oil patch or even further down south. That whole bunch would cross over to Mexico, to Juárez, what they called the tolerance zone, and get laid. Like a fraternity initiation. Then it got too dangerous to go to Juárez, they were having the dope wars over there, so they started hitting a place they called Pussy Park in El Paso. Stony said he never went for that, but I expect he was lying. Rand and his boys would be someplace between Midland and El Paso, if I had to guess.”



* * *





Back in the truck, Kaiser said, “We don’t know for sure that he’s a dead motherfucker.”

“No, but he’s a dead motherfucker,” Letty said.



* * *





Their DHS briefer, Billy Greet, had told them to call if they needed information support during their research. On the way back to Midland, Letty called Greet, gave her Rivers’s credit card number, told her about the bank account at Wells Fargo.

“Are you in your car?” Greet asked.

“Yeah, we’re in Lubbock, Texas, we’re heading south to Midland, should be there in two hours,” Letty said.

“I’ll be back to you before then—this won’t take long,” Greet said.

“While you’re at it, we have a couple more names to check—it’d be great if we could get some addresses,” Letty said. She gave Greet the two names they’d gotten from Turner, Max Sawyer and Victor Crain. She added RamJam’s email address to see what might come of that.