Page 23 of The Children of Eve (Charlie Parker #22)
CHAPTER XXIII
I made two cups of coffee, put a carton of milk under my arm, added a can of soda to my jacket pocket, and went outside to speak with Zetta. She had stopped grinding metal for a while and was examining a pile of what resembled spearheads cast in bronze.
“I brought coffee,” I said, “or a soda if you’re hot. If you need sugar for your coffee, you can add the soda.”
“I’ll take the coffee,” she said. “The soda will keep.”
She set the soda on a shelf, added milk to the coffee, and sat on a folding chair by the door, her legs outstretched.
“So, Sherlock, have you found the solution yet?”
I leaned against the wall and took out my notebook. Macy had gifted me a slim Kaweco fountain pen in brass, and the notebook had a hollow spine into which the pen fit neatly. I’d started liking the arrangement despite myself, even if I felt I should be writing my notes in sonnet form.
“You mentioned that Wyatt was reluctant to talk about his military service,” I said. “But he must have revealed some details to you.”
“Not many. He told me he’d done two tours in Afghanistan, but didn’t mention anywhere else. He spoke of boredom punctuated by moments of fear, but he may just have read that somewhere and was using it to deflect questions. I didn’t want to pursue the subject, not if he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. I hoped that might change with time.”
“Did you notice tattoos, military insignia, anything that offered a clue to his unit?”
“No, nothing like that. Wyatt has no tattoos. But then, I have enough tattoos for both of us.”
“He has no tattoos at all?”
“Nope. I checked out every inch of him for myself.”
She flicked a pierced tongue at me. Had I been twenty years younger, I’d still have run a mile from Zetta Nadeau, though not without regrets. If she wasn’t the girl my mother warned me about, it was only because my mother couldn’t have conceived of anyone like her.
Wyatt Riggins’s avoidance of tattoos wasn’t necessarily shocking, but it was unusual. I’d known my share of men and women who’d been in the military, and some Millennials who were currently serving. The latter were so enamored of body modification that the army had been forced to adapt its policy on tattoos to permit them on the hand, ear, and neck. But even decades earlier, tattoos were more common than not. It was a conviction passed down by soldiers from generation to generation: warriors marked themselves as such.
“You told me he had trouble sleeping?”
“Sometimes. Pot helped.”
“And prescription medication?”
“So you found his pills. I was going to tell you about them, but I decided you might prefer to discover them for yourself. If you hadn’t, I’d have mentioned them, probably just before I dispensed with your services for missing them in the first place.”
I took out the bottle I’d discovered in the bathroom.
“According to Dr. Google, these are sometimes prescribed by military doctors for ex-servicemen suffering from PTSD, though that doesn’t necessarily mean Wyatt was traumatized, not the way tranquilizers are handed out these days. Kids on playgrounds may be taking Tofranil with sips from their juice boxes. But Wyatt was anxious enough to seek help, which is interesting. Next: Do you own a gun?”
“No,” said Zetta. “I don’t like guns.”
“Was Wyatt aware of that?”
“I told him I wouldn’t allow a gun in the house. He said he was okay with it and that he didn’t need one.”
I removed the pistol, still in its Ziploc bag, from my jacket pocket. It was a Sig Sauer P226, chambered in .40 S&W. The gun had seen service, but was clean and well-oiled.
“This was hidden behind the baseboard in the bathroom,” I said. “Unless it was left by a previous tenant, Wyatt may not have been telling the whole truth about a weapon. It still has its serial number, which means it can be traced from manufacturer to dealer to buyer—or the original buyer, anyway. If it was stolen or sold on, that line of inquiry peters out.”
I studied Zetta carefully, but she appeared genuinely shocked at the sight of the Sig.
“Assuming it’s Wyatt’s, why did he hide it in the bathroom?” she asked, which wasn’t a bad question.
“I imagine he’d have preferred to keep it closer but couldn’t risk your finding it. Also, you have a house alarm, right?”
“It was already installed when I moved in. It’s linked to the main property, and the studio is connected to the same system. My tools and equipment cost me a lot over the years. I don’t want some asshole addict stealing them to sell for chump change.”
“So Wyatt wagered that if someone came at him while he was in the house, he’d have time to get to the gun, day or night.”
“What about when he was working?” asked Zetta. “If he was worried enough to have a gun here, wouldn’t he want to be armed the rest of the time?”
“Either Wyatt brought this one with him when he left each day and returned it to its hiding place when he got home, or he had another gun stashed somewhere. I’d go with the second option, because there was a chance you’d notice if he was carrying, however briefly.”
For the next twenty minutes, I peppered Zetta with questions, only a handful of which she could answer. Wyatt Riggins’s parents were dead. He had one sibling, a stepbrother in Utah or Idaho who was a pastor in some Holy Roller church, but they weren’t close, or so Wyatt had informed her. The stepbrother’s name was Regis, but whether he shared Wyatt’s surname Zetta couldn’t say, and she had made no effort to trace him. Wyatt owned a vehicle, a blue Toyota Camry worn around the edges but sharp inside. She knew its license plate number. She’d written it down on the chalkboard in the kitchen because—well, just because.
What did it all mean? That’s what Zetta wanted to know. On the one hand, the gun shouldn’t have come as a surprise: a man who leaves everything behind on receipt of a cell phone message advising him to run isn’t living his best life, and fear might be occupying some of his bandwidth. Given Riggins’s military background, the acquisition of one or more guns would be a natural response to a threat. On the other hand, he was working at a cannabis store and attending gallery openings, so he wasn’t exactly hiding in a cave. Yet as soon as the RUN message came through, Riggins walked, and in a manner beyond all but the most disciplined of men. He hadn’t said a last goodbye to his girlfriend, hadn’t collected his modest belongings, and hadn’t even tried to retrieve his gun. That suggested he might have had cause to vanish before.
There are two ways to lie low, one more permanent and extreme than the other. The permanent way is akin to witness protection, a new name and a new existence, far from friends and family. You stay away from places you know and people who might know you. It’s what you do when you think your life is in danger and is set to remain so until you no longer have any life left to lose. The second is less extreme but more hazardous, as it’s based on unknowns. It may be that someone wants to find you, someone from whom it might be better to stay out of reach, but you can’t be sure and you don’t want to cast all to the wind on the off chance. So what do you do? You temporarily divest yourself of as many encumbrances as possible—job, romance, whatever dump you’re renting—and find somewhere quiet and safe. And because you don’t yet have cause to reinvent yourself, which is a time-consuming and costly process, you keep your name, and maybe the place you choose isn’t entirely devoid of friends, the type you can trust to help you if the hammer falls or keep their mouths shut when that special person comes asking after you.
My instinct was that Wyatt Riggins fell into some version of the second camp. He might have had feelings for Zetta Nadeau, but if he did, they weren’t deep enough for him to write a note letting her know he was okay, no hard feelings, ships passing in the night, you know how it is. But he had left the text message on the Nokia, despite taking the time to delete the contacts list. Then, rather than dump the phone, he had dropped it somewhere it might be found, and by someone who knew it was his. It seemed that he wanted to let Zetta know he’d been forced to skip town and wasn’t just ditching her after a good time. He’d struck lucky with her because her home—secure and out of the way—was the perfect spot for a man who might be on edge, but he hadn’t known Zetta before he got to Maine. So, why choose the state as a base while he waited to see how things panned out? A plausible answer was that he had contacts in the Portland metropolitan area, folks who could act as a support structure, help him find work, and brush away his tracks if he had to scoot again. He might have stayed with them for a night or two when he first arrived, but they wouldn’t have wanted him so close for too long, not if he was marked.
“What about friends?” I asked Zetta.
“His or mine?”
“Both, if relevant.”
“Wyatt didn’t socialize much with my friends. I didn’t mind. If he and I stayed together, that would come with time. As for his, he didn’t really have any, except for this one guy, Jason, who also works at BrightBlown. They’d known each other back when they were kids in the South. But Wyatt didn’t see a lot of Jason, even at work. In fact, I think he was surprised to find out that Jason was up here.”
“Does Jason have a last name?”
“If Wyatt told me, I’ve forgotten. BrightBlown will know who I’m talking about. He’s been working for them since they opened.”
I threw a few more curveballs at Zetta, but she’d told me all she could. I assured her I’d stay in touch and urged her not to worry too much. Wyatt Riggins struck me as a man with a well-developed sense of self-preservation. If I failed to find him, Zetta might choose to take that as a good sign: If I couldn’t find Wyatt, there was a chance that the people he was running from wouldn’t be able to find him either, in which case I told her I’d consider refunding any overpayment of my fee, but rounded up to a full day. In return, Zetta gave me the finger and returned to her art.
I considered visiting BrightBlown on my way back to Scarborough, but it had been a long day and I didn’t feel any great sense of urgency about Wyatt Riggins, who currently didn’t want to be found. If that meant Zetta Nadeau struggled to get to sleep for worrying about him, she could take a pill. I no longer had the energy to fight every battle on other people’s terms. As Riggins might have confirmed, had he been around to offer an opinion, that was a sure way to lose a war.