No Immunity

isn’t it?”
    “Surely you know if Jeff—”
    Connie lifted the brandy glass to her mouth and sipped pensively. “I don’t know anything about Jeff Tremaine anymore. He lives in town; I live here. Oh, sometimes I stay in his house there for appearance’s sake, so people don’t wonder where I live. But it’s a big house.”
    “So the dead woman could be someone he knew,” Kiernan said. “But why is the sheriff involved?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “What about the naval installation off Route Ninety-three, the Admiralty of the Sands? Does Jeff have old navy buddies there?”
    Connie laughed again. “One thing you can count on with Jeffrey Tremaine is that he has no naval buddies. Jeff was thrown out of the navy after a year.”
    “On what grounds?” Kiernan asked, amazed. “The military wasn’t meting out general discharges for fraternization back then. Drugs?”
    “Insubordination.”
    “Really?”
    “You’re that shocked? Insubordination—you can’t believe he had it in him, can you? Poor Jeff would be so insulted.”
    “Well, no,” Kiernan admitted. “Jeff Tremaine in med school wouldn’t dare to have questioned authority.”
    “There he never got the chance. He was a middle-of-the-road kid in a very liberal environment. There was always someone else eager to leap first into the fray.” Kiernan nodded slowly. Her picture of Jeff Tremaine was still the stiff kid in med school. She assumed Africa was an aberration in his life. But the man Connie was describing fit the doctor in Africa, who had been stopped by neither rules nor customs. There, Jeff hadn’t stepped aside for anyone. “Between med school and Africa Jeff was so insubordinate he got himself thrown out of the navy?” she said, still amazed. “Insubordinate about what?”
    “Secrecy. He wasn’t about to administer unproven drugs to unsuspecting sailors. Gulf War kind of thing.”
    “So, then it’s a safe guess he’s not involved with the local navy?”
    Connie picked up her glass and started to the kitchen. “There’s very little I would swear to about Jeff. Maybe that he’ll always be sneaking off to some woman. Surprisingly, that he’s a good doctor. And definitely that he’s not in league with anyone in the navy. Hundreds of acres of land right next to his town being off-limits and the government refusing to say what’s going on there—it bugs the hell out of him.”
    “Does Jeff think they’ve got nuclear waste there?”
    “Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s top secret, and the navy’s got more influence over what goes on around here than it should.”
    “By which you mean...?”
    “Well, I’ll tell you how Jeff put it. It’s like a battleship that gets separated from the fleet so long, the admiral forgets he’s part of the country and starts thinking of himself as head of his own floating empire. Then any boat that comes near is the enemy.”
    “So you think—”
    “Steer clear of it. You don’t have time to get hassled. Believe me.”
    Kiernan followed her to the kitchen doorway. “Okay, but answer me this, then—the reason Jeff brought me to Gattozzi was to get me to take responsibility for the body, right? Was that because he was afraid of the sheriff?” Connie’s glass was in one hand, and a washrag hung suspended in the other. She turned and leaned back against the sink, oblivious of the precious drops of water splatting onto the floor. “I’m the last one to make excuses for Jeff. It probably doesn’t look to you as if Jeff has much of a career, but he’s active in the state medical association, the state committee on historic cities, the Carson Club, the Nevada Environmental League, the Anti-Nuclear Alliance, and who knows what else. This is his state and he’s concerned about it. But the sheriff is another thing. And yes, Jeff’s afraid of him.”

CHAPTER 36

    The road was black: black macadam, blackness on either side. To his right, the Weasel knew, was Lake Mead, built by the WPA to create Hoover Dam and the zillions of kilowatts that made Vegas possible. He had been to the lake, had to tail a visiting Jersey punk there once. He’d had himself a good laugh watching the Hoboken hood staring at the lake shore. “Like they turned on the tap in a brown tub.” That was one thing the little hood had been right about, there was no beach, no trees or shrubs or even grass, just rock, dirt, and water, and marinas every few dozen miles. But deep, and useful, as the late Jersey punk had