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“Greta, I said what did you think of the briefing?”
“Good initial summaries, but there were more doofus questions than I’ve heard in a long time.”
Boylan frowned. “Greta,” he said carefully, “I vouched for you to Connors and Harward. It seemed like something you were aching to get involved in. Don’t screw up and make me look bad.”
She blushed, embarrassed, and regretted her flippancy. She usually kept better control of the evil Greta or, at least, that one’s tongue.
“I’m sorry, Alex. It just popped out. I promise I’ll be good. Thanks again for the recommendation. You won’t regret it, I promise.”
“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Let’s try it again. What do you think?”
“I think the factual summaries were good, and I think there’re several possible motive leads that are going to need a lot of checking out. That’s unless someone up and confesses, which I don’t think is gonna happen. What’s the next step?”
“Like Connors said, nothing in the Toompas trailer seems relevant. The car contents will be available for examination in about another hour, around four-thirty or so. Connors wants to look it over, and we’ll meet and talk then how to proceed.”
Assuming the meeting went an hour, by the time she got home it would be eight o’clock.
I wonder if there’s a good seafood place here in Newport? she thought.
Having nothing to do but wait, Greta went back out to the parking lot and sat in her vehicle. They hadn’t introduced her as part of the team. Did she care? Yes and no.
Her previous visits to Newport had been in and out, so she drove around the next hour to get a better feel for the city. It was twice the size of Tillamook City’s 5,000 population, and about the same size as Lincoln City’s 10-11,000. Greta preferred where she lived in Pacific City, at just over 1,000 people. She’d come to feel as if she knew most of the residents, although she realized that wasn’t true. However, it was the feeling that was important.
The Newport harbor area was impressive for this part of the world. She drove past the Coast Guard facility with two docked cutters, an aquarium, a marine biology research center, and a couple of marinas with pleasure and fishing boats. Then she swung back north over the bridge to Newport and roamed the streets until it was time to get back to the station. At four-thirty, she walked into the city police building. The receptionist directed her to the room set aside for the investigation. There, she found Boylan, Connors, Tomasek, Sheriff Harward, the Lincoln City police chief, Savilla, and a couple of others she didn’t know.
Connors saw her first and waved her over. Men were standing around a table covered with various sizes of ziplock bags—full of evi
dence, she wryly deduced.
Connors introduced her. “This is Tillamook deputy Greta Haverston. She’ll be our liaison to Tillamook County.”
The two chiefs, both of them under 5’9”, looked up at her and her 6’3” raised to 6’4” by her boots. She interpreted the various expressions on their faces as surprise at her height, at being female, at being so young—hell, for all she knew, surprise that Tillamook County had any deputies.
“Thank you,” she said. “And it’s Havorsford, Greta Havorsford . . . not a common name.” She pronounced it with a smile to soften the correction.
“Good to have you working with us on this, Deputy Havorsford,” said Harward. “It makes things easier to coordinate with Sheriff Wallace’s department.”
From rumors, she assumed Harward meant that past coordination had been problematic, at best. They were probably relieved not to have to deal with Wallace any more than necessary.
They accomplished the ritual handshaking. Two other men who had been hanging around, and whose names she filed away, moved over to participate in the ritual. A burly one, only a couple of inches or so shorter than Greta, gripped her hand hard and held it with increasing pressure.
A dickhead, she thought, trying to impress the weird female deputy. She morphed her firm handshake to match his. Not expecting such a response and unready for the vice-like pressure, in surprise, he relaxed his muscles. She gave a quick final squeeze and deadpanned a hello as she released. He didn’t respond, but his mouth tightened.
Their attention returned to the table, and Greta got her first look at the contents of the victim’s car.
What was this guy, a pack rat? was her first thought, but she restrained from letting it escape her mouth. “Well, this is an interesting assortment of items,” she said instead.
The others had evidently already examined the table’s contents, so Greta took her turn. There were the obvious “look at me, I’m a clue” items. A spear gun, several rifle rounds of various caliber (that was all she could tell and only by their different sizes and shapes), a pair of brass knuckles, a hatchet with what might be blood on it.
Then there were the “What the hell?” items. A cheese grater, a rubber duck, a cracked Minnesota Vikings logo’d football helmet, half a dozen tapes of Tony Robbins explaining how to achieve success in life, seven un–checked out library books, from three different counties—four were books about Nepal and the Himalayas, one about spiders, and two Tom Clancy novels—and a postcard with a scene from Nepal, mailed from Memphis, Tennessee, addressed to Toompas, and with the brief message, “Wish you were here.” A pink flamingo, faded, with what looked like chew marks on its beak. Why would Toompas have one in his car? Of course, why anything about Nepal or a rubber duck? Several pieces of paper of all sizes, ages, and contents. Several receipts wadded up or not, some yellowing with age, some with writing so faded only size and shape suggested they had been related to a purchase. A piece of white paper with handwritten music staffs and notes covering both sides.
Don’t tell me Toompas was a secret composer? she wondered.
There was a small green flip notepad with a dozen pages or more of seemingly random numbers and letters. A code of some kind? If the Homeland Security people see this, they’ll go ape shit, she thought.
A squeegee; a tire iron, yet no spare tire; jumper cables missing one clamp and therefore of questionable utility; a bag of pistol ammunition; empty beer cans; two open jars of honey and three more unopened; a map of southern California; a gold-colored button; three two-inch Philips screws; a large slotted screwdriver; a half-full bottle of baby aspirin; several hundred pennies; an unopened DVD of the third season of Star Trek Generations; enough dirty clothes for two washer loads; seven gloves, only two of which matched; muddy boots; and two different tennis shoes.
In a large bag, a black wetsuit lay next to bags with the spear gun, flippers, and an abalone pry-bar. Greta recognized the tool from the time she’d assisted a Fish and Game officer in arresting two men coming out of the surf with a bag of illegally harvested abalone. Along with the diving gear were a fishing pole, a reel, and a box of hooks and lures.
