"So is the bureau working on the triangle now?"
"Of course they are. But some things take time. Right now there is a higher emphasis on crime scene analysis. But we've got somebody in Quantico working the triangle. The FBI is effective but sometimes slow, Harry. I am sure you know this."
"Sure."
"It's a tortoise-and-hare race. We're the tortoise, you're the hare."
"What are you talking about?"
"You're moving faster than us, Harry. Something tells me you figured out the triangle theory and are taking a shot at the missing point. The point of prey."
I nodded. Whether I was being used or not didn't matter. They were allowing me to stay in the hunt and that was what was important to me.
"You start with the airport and you end with Zzyzx. That leaves one more point-the intersection of predator and prey-and I think I've got it. We're going there."
"Then tell me."
"First tell me one more thing about McCaleb's notes."
"I think I already told you everything. They're still being analyzed."
"William Bing, who is that?"
She hesitated but only for a moment.
"That's a no-go, a dead end."
"How so?"
"William Bing is a heart transplant patient who was in Vegas Memorial getting a checkup and some tests. We think Terry knew him and when he was over here he visited him in the hospital."
"Did you people talk to Bing yet?"
"Not yet. We're trying to track him."
"Seems odd."
"What, that he would visit a guy?"
"No, not that. I mean that he would write that on the file if it wasn't connected to the case."
'Terry wrote stuff down. It's pretty obvious from all his files and notebooks that he wrote stuff down. If he was coming over here to work on this, then maybe he wrote Bing's name and the hospital number down on the file so he wouldn't forget to visit or call him. Could be a lot of reasons."
I didn't respond. I still had trouble seeing it.
"How did he know the guy?"
"We don't know. Maybe the movie. Terry got hundreds of letters from transplant people after that movie came out. He was sort of a hero to a lot of people in the same boat as he was."
As we headed north on Blue Diamond I saw a sign for the Travel America truck stop and remembered the receipt I had found in Terry McCaleb's car. I pulled in, even though I had gassed up the Mercedes after leaving Eleanor's house that morning. I stopped the car and just looked at the travel complex.
"What is it? You need gas?"
"No, we're fine. It's just that... McCaleb was here."
"What is this? You getting a psychic reading or something?"
"No, I found a receipt in his car. I wonder if this means he went up to Clear." 'To clear what?"
"No, the town of Clear. That's where we're going."
"Well, we might never know unless we get up there and ask some questions."
I nodded and pulled the car back onto Blue Diamond and started north again. Along the way I told Rachel my theory of the theory. That is, my take on McCaleb's triangle and how Clear fit into it. I could tell that my telling it drew her interest. She may have even been excited about it. She agreed with my take on the victims and how and why they may have been chosen. She agreed that it appeared to mirror the victimology-her word-in Amsterdam.
We brainstormed for an hour on it and then grew quiet as we started to get close. The barren, rugged landscape was giving way to outposts of humanity and we began to see billboards advertising the brothels that waited just ahead.
"Have you ever been to one of these?" Rachel asked me.
"No."
I thought about the steam-and-cream tents in Vietnam but didn't bring them up.
"I didn't mean like as a customer. But as a cop."
"Still no. But I tracked a few people through them. And by that I mean by credit cards and other means. We're not going to find the people here overly cooperative. At least I never did by phone. And calling in a local sheriff is a joke. The state collects taxes from these joints. A big chunk of it goes back to the home county."
"I get it. So how do we handle it?" Almost smiling because she had used the word we, I threw the question back at her.
"I don't know," she said. "I guess we just go in through the front door."
Meaning we play it straight and just go in and ask our questions. I wasn't sure it was the right way to go but she had a badge and I didn't.
We cleared the town of Pahrump and in another 10 miles came to an intersection where a sign with clear on it and an arrow to the left was posted. I turned and the asphalt soon gave way to a crushed rock road that kicked up a flume of dust behind my car. The town of Clear could see us coming from a mile away.
That is, if it was looking for us. But the town of Clear, Nevada, turned out to be little more than a trailer park. The gravel road led us to another intersection and another sign with an arrow. We turned north again and soon came to a clearing where an old trailer sat with rust dripping from its rivets. A sign running along the top edge of the trailer said, welcome to clear, sports bar open, rooms for rent. There were no cars parked in the clearing in front of the bar.
I drove on past the welcome wagon, and the new road curved into a neighborhood of trailer homes baking like beer cans in the sun. Few were in better shape than the welcome wagon. Eventually, we came to a permanent structure that appeared to be a town hall as well as the location of the spring the town was named for. We kept going and were rewarded by another arrow on another sign, this one reading simply brothels.
Nevada licenses over thirty brothels across die state. In these places prostitution is legal, controlled and mon- itored. We found three of those state-licensed businesses at the end of the road in Clear. The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies.
"Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "Why are these places always named after women-as if women actually own them?"
"You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys."
Rachel smiled.
"You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging."
"Slavery? Last I heard these women were volunteers. Some of them are supposedly housewives who come up from Vegas."
"If you believe that, then you are naive, Bosch. Just because you can come and go doesn't mean you're not a slave."
I nodded thoughtfully, not wanting to get into a debate with her about this subject because I knew it would bring me back to examining and questioning things in my own past.
Rachel apparently wanted to drop it there, too.
"So which one do you want to start with?" she asked.
I pulled the car to a stop in front of Tawny's High Five Ranch. It didn't look like much of a ranch. It was a conglomeration of three or four trailers that were connected by covered walkways. I looked to my left and saw that Sheila's Front Porch was of similar design and configuration and it had no front porch. Miss Delilah's to my right was the same and I got the distinct impression that the three seemingly separate brothels were not competitors but rather branches of the same tree.
"I don't know," I said. "Looks like eenie, meenie, minie, moe to me."
Rachel cracked her door open.
"Wait a second," I said. "I've got this."
I handed her the file of photos Buddy Lockridge had brought to Vegas the day before. Rachel opened it and saw the front and side shots of the man known as Shandy but presumed to be Robert Backus.
"I'm not going to even ask where you got these."
"Fine. But you carry them. It will have more weight coming from you, since you've got the badge."
"For the moment, at least."
; "Did you bring the photos of the missing men?"
"Yes, I've got them."
"Good."
She took the file and got out of the car. I did likewise. We both walked around to the front of the car, where we stopped for a moment and surveyed the three brothels again. There were a few cars parked in front of each. There were also four flat-head Harleys lined up like a row of mean chrome in front of Miss Delilah's House of Holies. Air-brushed on the gas tank of one of the bikes was a skull smoking a joint with a smoke ring forming a halo above it.
"Let's take Delilah's last," I said. "Maybe we'll get lucky before we need to go there."
"The bikes?" "Yeah, the bikes. They're Road Saints. I say let sleeping dogs lie."
"Good enough for me."
Leading the way, Rachel marched toward the front door of Sheila's. She didn't wait for me because she knew I would be following in her wake.
CHAPTER 31
Inside Sheila's we were greeted by the sickly sweet smell of perfume mixed with too much incense.. We were also greeted by a smiling woman in a purple kimono who did not seem the least bit surprised or put out by the idea of a couple coming into the brothel. Her mouth drew into an edge as straight and sharp as a guillotine's when she saw the FBI credentials Rachel flipped open.
"That's nice," she said with a falsely pleasant note in her voice. "Now let me see the warrant."
"No warrant today," Rachel replied evenly. "We would just like to ask a few questions."
"I don't have to speak with you unless you have a court order telling me to. I run a legal and fully licensed business here."
I noticed two women dressed in a page from Victoria's Secret sitting on a couch nearby. They were watching a television soap opera and seemingly uninterested in the verbal skirmish brewing at the front door. They were both attractive in a certain way but worn down around the eyes and mouths. The scene suddenly reminded me of my mother and some of her friends. The way they looked to me when I was a boy and I watched them getting ready to go out at night and work. I suddenly felt completely ill at ease in this place and wanted to go. I even hoped the woman in the kimono would succeed in sending us out.
"No one is doubting the legality of your operation," Rachel said. "We simply need to ask a few questions of you and ... your staff and then we'll be gone."
"Get the court order and we'll be happy to oblige."
"Are you Sheila?"
"You can call me that. You can call me anything you want as long as you're saying good-bye when you do it."
Rachel raised the ante by going to her don't-fuck-with-me voice.
"If I go for that court order, I'm going to first call for a sheriff's unit and I will have that car sit out in front of this trailer until I get back. You might run a legal operation here, Sheila, but which one of these places are all the guys going to pick when they see the sheriff sitting on this one? I figure two hours back to Vegas, a few hours waiting to get in to see the judge and then two hours back. I'm off at five so I probably won't be back till tomorrow. That okay with you?"
Sheila came back hard and swift.
"If you call the sheriff, ask him to send out Dennis or Tommy. They know the place real well and they're also customers."
She smirked at Rachel and held firm. She'd called her bluff and Rachel had nothing left. They just stared at each other as the moments went by. I was about to step in and say something when one of the women on the couch beat me to the punch.
"She?" the one closest to us offered. "Let's just get it over with."
Sheila broke her stare from Rachel and looked at the woman on the couch. She then backed down but her anger remained barely below the surface. I'm not sure there was any other way to handle it once Sheila jumped on us like that, but it was clear to me that all the posturing and threatening was going to end up getting us nothing.
We set up in Sheila's small office and interviewed the women one by one, starting with Sheila and ending with two women who were working when we first entered the establishment. Rachel never introduced me to anyone, so the problem of my standing in the investigation never came up. Uniformly the women could not or would not identify any of the missing men who ended up in the ground in Zzyzx and the same went for the photographs of Shandy on McCaleb's boat.
At the end of a half hour we were out of there with nothing to show for it but an incense intoxication headache for me and stress fractures in Rachel's outlook.
"Disgusting," she said as we walked down the pink sidewalk toward my car.
"What?"
"That place. I don't know how anyone could do that."
"I thought you said they were slaves."
"Look, it's not your job to throw things back at me."
"Right."
"What are you so upset about? I didn't see you in there saying anything to her. You were a big help." "That's because I wouldn't have done it that way. Two minutes into that place I knew we wouldn't get anything."
"Oh, and you would have."
"No, I'm not saying that. I told you, these places are like rocks. It's hard to get water. And bringing up the sheriff was definitely the wrong way to go. I told you, half his pay probably comes from the brothels in his territory."
"So you just want to criticize and not offer any solution."
"Look, Rachel, point your gun at somebody else. I'm not the one you're angry with, all right? If you want to try something different in this next place I'll give it a shot."
"Go right ahead."
"All right then, give me the photos and you wait in the car."
"What are you talking about? I'm going in."
"This is not the place for the pomp and circumstance, Rachel. I should've realized that when I invited you. But I didn't think you'd be shoving your badge down people's throats as soon as you walked in."
"So you're going to go in there and finesse it"
"I'm not sure I'd call it finesse. I'm just going to do it the old-fashioned way."
"Does that mean taking off your clothes?"
"No, it means taking out my wallet."
"The FBI doesn't buy information from potential witnesses."
"That's right. I'm not the FBI. If I find a witness this way, the FBI won't have to pay a thing."
I put my hand on her back and gently directed her to the Mercedes. I opened the door for her and ushered her in. I gave her the keys.
"Turn on the air conditioner. Either way, this shouldn't take too long."
I rolled the file up with the photos and put it into my back pocket under my jacket.
The sidewalk leading to the door of Tawny's High Five was also made of pink cement and I was beginning to see the appropriateness of that. The women we had encountered in Sheila's were hard cases with pink lining. And so was Rachel. I was beginning to feel like my feet were in buckets of pink cement.
I buzzed the door and was let in by a woman who was dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a halter top that barely contained her apparently surgically enhanced breasts.
"Come on in. I'm Tammy."
"Thanks."
I stepped into the front room of the trailer, where there were two couches facing each other on opposite walls. Three women sat on the couches and looked at me with practiced smiles.
"This is Georgette and Gloria and Mecca," Tammy said. "And I'm Tammy. You can choose one of us now or wait for Tawny. She's in the back with a customer."
I looked at Tammy. She seemed the most eager. She was very small and top heavy and had short brown hair. She would be considered attractive to some men but not to me. I told her she would do just fine and she led me back through a hallway that turned to the right and into another trailer. There were three private rooms on the left and she went to the third one and used a key to open it. We went in and she closed the door but didn't lock it. There was barely enough room to stand because a king-size bed took up most of the space.
Tammy sat down on the bed and patted the spot next to her. I sat and she reached to a shelf full of well
-thumbed mystery novels and pulled down what looked like a restaurant menu and gave it to me. It was a thin folder with a caricature drawing on the front. It showed a naked woman on her hands and knees and bent over, turning to look back at and wink at the man who was entering her from the rear. The man was naked, too, except for a cowboy hat and the holstered six-shooters on his hips. One hand was up in the air and holding a lasso. The rope rose above the couple and formed the words Tawny's High Five.