It wasn’t until I was two miles down the road that I started to wonder, what if Kampa was telling the truth, as unlikely as that might be—what if he had warned Rush to get outta Dodge? I pulled to the shoulder and tried to call Chief Gustafson. I didn’t have any coverage. I drove closer to town. It wasn’t until I was near the outskirts of Libbie that my cell phone picked up the faintest sliver of a bar.
“Hey, Chief,” I said when he answered my call. “I know you have a lot on your plate right now, but I’d like you to check something for me, if you could.”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking about the Imposter’s car. You said you found it parked in the lot over at Lake Mataya.”
“What about it?”
“You said you had it towed back to the rental agency.”
“That’s right.”
“Why tow it?”
“We didn’t have the keys.”
“The Imposter abandoned the car but didn’t leave the keys?” I said.
“Probably he just slipped them in his pocket without thinking about it. That would be a natural thing to do, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose. Except I keep going back to my original question. Why abandon the car in the first place? Why not just drive off? And why abandon it at the park, where it would be easy to spot?”
“What’s on your mind, McKenzie?”
“Lake Mataya is on a main drag out of town, right?”
“White Buffalo Road, sure.”
“I want you to call the rental agency and see if there was any trouble with the car. See if it started and drove okay.”
“Do you think the car broke down, that’s why it was abandoned?”
“It’s a possibility.”
The chief thought about it for a few beats, and I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking. Turned out he was.
“Rush figures someone is onto him and panics, just like you thought,” he said. “He fully intends to head somewhere like Rapid City, but his car breaks down. The only person he can trust to give him a ride would be his accomplice.”
“We think that the Imposter is in the Cayman Islands because that’s where the money is,” I said. “Except there are at least a half-dozen people with the account numbers and password that could have stolen the money. If the accomplice was one of them—”
“The accomplice would have known the bank account was as flush as it was going to get, that it was time to pull the plug—”
“Which meant he no longer needed Rush. He could have killed Rush—”
“Kept the money for himself, and because we found the car abandoned at the lake—”
“We would assume that the Imposter blew town with the money and would be spending our time looking for him instead of the real villain.”
The chief gave it another beat.
“It’s a good theory except for one thing—there’s no body. Where is Rush?”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
“You do that. I’ll call the rental agency and get back to you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Night seemed to fall quicker and more colorfully in Libbie than it did in the Cities. Out here it went from orange to red to purple to dark blue to black, and it went through this transformation in mere minutes. I found myself sitting in my car next to the Pioneer Hotel watching it, wishing I didn’t have to wait twenty-four hours to see it again.
Sharren Nuffer was back behind the registration desk when I finally stepped inside the hotel. Her eyes were still red and puffy.
“Hi,” she said.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m okay. It’s been a tough day. I think the whole town is in mourning.”
“I can appreciate that.”
“Nothing like this has ever happened to us before.”
I liked how she said “us.” In the greater Twin Cities, which boasts a population of about two-point-eight million, us was a comparatively small group of people consisting of families, friends, and co-workers. Murders occurred with some frequency, yet they nearly always involved someone else, rarely us. Out of either indifference or self-defense, we didn’t take them personally. In a small town like Libbie, which had far fewer people than your average Twin Cities high school, us was everyone. In a very real sense, what happened to one happened to all. Presumably it was the reason people in small towns looked out for each other more than we did in the Cities.
“How did it go with Mr. Miller?” Sharren asked.
“About what you would expect. Are you sure that Rush received a call from Miller the Tuesday night he disappeared?”
“That’s what the caller ID said. Does he deny it?”
“Yeah, but he’s the only one that does.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. Can you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I need a list of the names of all the city council members and where I can find them. Tracie was going to introduce me, but…”
Sharren stood perfectly still for a moment; she didn’t even blink.
“Of course,” she said. “I am so sorry about Tracie and Mike. It’s depressing. It makes me feel old. I don’t like to feel old.”
“I understand.”
“Oh, I nearly forgot.” She reached under the desk and produced a sheet of white paper. “This was faxed to you.”
I studied the sheet. Sharren did the same, looking over my shoulder.
