Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 127715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
He found a place to swing in so he could give it the attention it deserved, parked in a spot at the back of the lot at the grocery store, and he took the call.
“Jesse,” he greeted.
“Harry, you got time?”
Never.
For this, though, absolutely.
“Yeah.”
“Right. We did our thing in LA. Jace said he briefed you on that?”
“Briefly,” Harry said.
“Well, nothing strange. They had reasons to find the quiet life. All we got on them there was all we’d get if we asked around MP. Good folk. Solid folk. Likeable folk. They were remembered and there was worry they seemed to drop off the face of the earth, since they’d been keeping in touch. Particularly Avery. Apparently, the woman wrote a helluvan entertaining Christmas letter.”
Everything…absolutely everything he’d learned about the Rainiers stated clear they were good, kind, loving, hardworking, decent people.
And they ended up in an unmarked grave on the side of a mountain a state away.
Fuck him.
“They had valid concerns,” Harry muttered what they now knew too well.
“When we got to Idaho,” Jesse continued, “we worked on the idea that it was Sonny and Avery’s destination. That they were going to report what they knew here, out of Washington State, to law enforcement that was enough removed, Leland Dern might not brush shoulders with them at a local convention.”
“Safe assumption,” Harry murmured.
“So we figured they got a hotel room.”
“Right.”
“Fortunately, not only was Avery a knockout, Sonny wasn’t tough to look at either. Found a woman who remembered Sonny.”
Fucking hell.
“No shit?” Harry asked.
“Part was he was good-looking. Part was, her dad remembered both of them. They run a mom-and-pop motel, a lot like our Blue Mountain. Clean, the proprietors give a shit, but not expensive. The woman we talked to was next gen, but she worked there back then, remembered her father talking about it. Had to wait until she could get in touch with him. They retired. Went down to New Mexico.”
“Okay,” Harry said.
“She got in touch with him, he got in touch with us. And this dude still remembered Sonny and Avery.”
Fuck, these guys were good.
“What’d he say?” Harry asked.
“We hit the mother lode, Harry.”
Harry closed his eyes as relief, and the first flicker of hope surged through him.
He opened them and urged, “Hit me with it.”
“He said he wasn’t surprised someone was poking around, because when his daughter phoned him, and he tuned into the local Coeur d’Alene news and saw two bodies were found, he and his wife were debating calling the cops due to remembering Sonny and Avery.”
They made an impression. An impression that lasted sixteen years and was the first thought these people had when bodies were found.
The hallmark of a good witness statement.
Harry stared unseeing at the parking lot he was in, and he listened hard.
“The dude said they were memorable first because they looked straight out of Hollywood. He said he’d never seen such a good-looking couple. After he got over that, he noticed they were acting odd. Not like they were on the run, more like they were being chased.”
“Fuck,” Harry whispered.
“Yeah,” Jess agreed. “Then, they made the request to check out very early, and asked if they could just leave their key in the room so they didn’t have to disturb anybody with checkout. Onward from this, feeling tweaked about their demeanor, that night, this guy recalls seeing a man in a car in his parking lot, parked across the lot from their room. He was just sitting there, and not a patron, so this guy went out to ask him what he was doing. The minute the hotel owner started to approach, the man in the car put his headlights on and drove away. Due to the headlights, the owner didn’t get a good look at his face.”
“What’d you get on this car and this guy?”
“Only that it was for sure a white male, dark hair, beard, youngish. Twenties, maybe early thirties at a stretch. And the car had Washington plates. It was a Ford sedan, he thinks dark blue or black, but that was all he got before the guy was gone.”
“He remember any digits on that plate?”
“Unfortunately, no.”
“Still puts someone from around here, there,” Harry said.
“Yeah, it does. But that isn’t all.”
Harry felt his blood start to heat, the good kind of that shit happening.
The kind you got when all leads seemed to have run dry, and then suddenly a window opened and you had your pick of them.
Jesse continued, “This dude told us he was surprised when the maid went in the next day, and they hadn’t checked out. All of their belongings were still there. They didn’t come back that day or check out the next, and considering this was all fishy, he reported it to the cops. But at the time, the cops had no interest in it. He did, and thought something was off, so he carefully packed their belongings and put them in storage.”