J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“Louis.”

“Age?”

“I don’t think she ever said exactly how old.”

“What about friends here?” Mel asked. “Did you meet any of those?”

“No.”

“Doctors, dentists?”

Mason shook his head. “If she was sick, she never mentioned it to me.”

“Where did she live?”

“In a mobile home court north of here, just this side of I-5, but I never went there until after she was gone. In fact, I didn’t find it until long after she disappeared. By then, it was too late.”

“What do you mean, you found it?” I asked while Mel jotted down the address details.

Mason gave me a pained look. “We always met somewhere else-at the mall or the movies or something. I thought she was ashamed to show me where she lived. I tried to tell her that didn’t matter, not to me. By the middle of December, when I could see the cops weren’t lifting a finger to find her, I hired a private detective. He’s the one who found out about the mobile home park. He talked to the lady who worked in the office there. She told him Marina’s rent was due on the fifteenth. When she didn’t come back or pay up by the first of December, the landlady sent in a crew to clean out her trailer. They bagged up everything in it and sent it to Goodwill or the landfill.”

Skipping town when the rent’s about to come due is the oldest trick in the book. The local cops might have uncovered that detail themselves without bothering to pass it along to Mr. Waters. It would also go a long way toward explaining why they had determined Marina had left of her own free will.

“When they cleaned out her place, did they find anything of value?” Mel asked.

Mason shrugged. “If they did, I never heard anything about it, not from the cops and not from my PI, either.”

“Did Marina wear any distinctive jewelry?”

“The ring I gave her,” he said. “A pretty little diamond engagement ring that we bought from the Fred Meyer store in the mall. Picked it out together. We had just gotten it sized and on her finger when she disappeared. And that’s what the missing persons guy told me. He claimed the ring was all she was looking for, and that once she had what she wanted, she took off. But you’ve got to believe me. Marina wasn’t like that, not at all.”

“Any other jewelry that you remember?” Mel asked.

I thought he’d mention the toe ring. Instead, Mason Waters heaved himself out of the recliner and then left the room for a moment. He returned carrying a small square box which he handed over to Mel before dropping back into the recliner. “When we were looking for the ring, I saw she was looking at this and that she liked it. I was planning on giving it to her for Christmas.”

Mel opened the box, glanced at the contents, and then wordlessly handed the box over to me. Inside was a lady’s watch-a Seiko with a gold band.

“The one she had was an old Timex. This new one is so much prettier that I could hardly wait to give it to her. In fact,” Mason added, “I probably wouldn’t have held out all the way to Christmas. I’m a sucker that way. I mean, if you want to give someone a present, why wait?”

Hearing the word Timex along with the cowgirl stuff pretty well sealed the deal for me. Mason’s beloved Marina wasn’t ever going to wear that watch. But I wasn’t ready to tell him that straight out and neither was Mel, not until we had actual proof about the identity of those charred remains in the morgue at Ellensburg. All the same, our physical presence in Mason Waters’s humble Federal Way living room was a warning shot across his bow. It told him something was up, and it gave him a chance to prepare himself for what was coming. Truth be told, I think he already knew.

“Can you think of anything else?”

Mason shook his head. Mel closed her notebook and put it away, then she and I both stood up. Mason stayed where he was. “You’ll let me know?” he said. “If you find out anything, I mean.”

“Yes,” Mel said. “If we learn anything at all, you’ll be the first to know.”

“How’s your nose?” I asked as we crossed the porch and started down the walkway.

She touched her nose. “Why? Is something the matter with it?”

“Any minute now, it’s going to start to grow,” I told her. “Just like Pinocchio’s.”

When we got back in the car, the clock on the dash said 3:30 P.M. With rush-hour traffic already settling in, I was ready to call it a day. While I fastened my seat belt, however, Mel went to work programming an address into the GPS. Clearly she didn’t need to do that if we were headed straight home.

“Where are we going?”

“I thought we could just as well stop by Marina’s trailer court,” Mel said. “It’s already rush hour. Even if we leave right now, we’ll still be stuck in traffic. Let’s work a little longer and wait it out.”

That made sense, and traffic was already bad enough that it took us the better part of an hour to make our way north to the Silver Pines Mobile Home Park. I confess that while we drove I formed a pretty bleak mental picture of what we’d most likely find there. I expected to see a few run-down moldering mobile homes, weeds, dead cars, stray garbage cans, and plenty of stray dogs and cats as well. What we actually found was quite a bit different.

For one thing, Silver Pines was much larger than I had expected. For another, there was a remotely operated entry gate with a phone and a sign that said, GATE CLOSES AT 10:00 P.M. CALL MANAGER FOR ADMITTANCE. NO EXCEPTIONS. At that time of day, however, the gate stood open.

Inside the park we found what I estimated at first glance to be seventy-five to a hundred mobile homes parked next to a winding but smoothly paved street. Some of the mobiles were clearly older models, but they all seemed to be in decent repair. A few of them boasted awnings and many of them had patio furniture stationed on the concrete slabs outside their doors. The only visible vehicles appeared to be in running order. What grass there was showed signs of having been recently mowed.

Mel stopped outside the trailer marked MANAGER with a NO VACANCY sign posted just below that. As soon as we opened the car door, however, our ears were assaulted with the roar of traffic from the freeway just a few hundred feet away. The noise alone probably made the property less attractive and explained why, in the midst of a real estate boom, this mobile home park hadn’t been bought up and turned into tract housing.

We entered a tiny, dingy office that was bisected by a Formica-covered counter. Beyond the counter sat a woman with her eyes glued on a television soap opera. Without rising to greet us, she pointed to the NO VACANCY sign.

“We’re all booked up,” she said. “Can’t you read? The sign says ‘No Vacancy’ plain as day.”

I’m used to being dissed by clerks and receptionists everywhere I go. It’s the story of my life. Mel is not used to it at all. She’s usually able to get around people by being both good-looking and gracious-a killer combination. The woman behind the counter had a hard edge to her-the kind of edge that comes with years of living on the streets and usually includes a natural aversion to cops of all kinds. In this case, the woman’s hard edge struck Mel’s hard edge the wrong way. The resulting clash sent sparks flying in all directions.

“We’re homicide investigators,” Mel said, slapping her ID badge down on the chipped gray counter. “With the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.”

“So?” the woman returned. She was still far more interested in what was happening on the screen than in the ID packet Mel had placed within her reach.

“We’re here to speak to whoever was working this desk last fall-September, October, November,” I added helpfully.