No Immunity

him to hurry. You know the kind of thing you make a fuss about when it’s not the real issue. What the real issue was I couldn’t tell you.” She stopped and her face puckered as if she realized the ominous implications for Irene. “Is she the one who sent you? You a friend of hers maybe?”
    Kiernan shook her head. Irene could have used a friend-Grady Hummacher might have seemed like a friend, but he watched her get sick, dumped her off at the morgue, and called Jeff just once to find out what happened. Some friend. Jeff must have told him the disease’s progress, and Grady would have recognized the increasingly ominous symptoms in the boys. But he didn’t gas up the car and drive like crazy to Vegas or Reno or even St. George, Utah. He didn’t even call Tremaine back. Grady Hummacher sat in his motel room and watched the boys dying. What kind of man was he? She shot an accusatory glance at Tchernak, but if Tchernak felt guilt by association, he wasn’t showing it. He’d only said he’d known Hummacher; he hadn’t said how well. And what about Jeff Tremaine? How, she wondered, did Grady Hummacher even know Tremaine?
    But Faye’s focus was still on Irene. “Where is she?” Faye insisted. “She didn’t take those boys, that I can tell you, and she didn’t look like a woman aiming to go on a picnic in the park. I know people, and she wasn’t a woman al! het up about kids, particularly those kids. I’d give you odds Grady never told her he was bringing them along on their date. You can see why she was pissed.”
    She couldn’t let Faye go on ignorant of the truth, not if she planned for her to be an ally. “Faye, Irene is dead. She was dead before Grady was shot.”
    “Was she shot too?”
    “Disease.”
    “What the boys had?” Faye asked slowly, as if keeping herself at arm’s length from the words.
    “Could be.”
    Faye looked slowly around the room. She had the look of a woman who had held herself together as long as she could and was fading fast. “I’ll have to fumigate, the whole Place. Be closed days for that—all today, and Wednesday too. Have to call”—she held up fingers on which to enumerate—“Tri-City Committee, before they head out of their meeting. Ministers’ group. Wednesday. Tell the Carson Clubbers to head out to Vegas from somewhere else.” Kiernan was about to ask if the groups actually met in the cafe or just ate pie afterward. But Tchernak’s announcement stopped her. “Carson Club,” he said. “Grady Hummacher was a member of that.”
    Faye nodded, and glanced into the dark where the highway lay. In the silence that surrounded her hesitation, the growl of an approaching engine seemed to startle her out of her I-know-people persona. “Could be,” she muttered, more to the window than to Tchernak.
    The engine sounded smooth, tuned, powerful. Kiernan didn’t have to look to guess who was driving. “You called the sheriff before you came out, right?”
    Faye shrugged. “What did you think-—I’d let you just drive off into the night?”
    Right, what did she think? “Come on, Tchernak.” She strode out the cafe door into the darkness that in a minute would be filled with pulsing red lights. Faye didn’t follow. She had done her job.
    “Tchernak, Jeff Tremaine was a member of the Carson Club.”
    “That could be how Grady knew him.”
    “Exactly. So, try this. Irene gets sick on their picnic, too sick to drive three hours back to Vegas. Grady calls Jeff and leaves her with him.”
    “And flies off to Panama and back.”
    “What that means is the call Grady made to Jeff Tremaine wasn’t about the boys at all. It was about Irene.”
    “Sure. If he was worried about the boys, he’d have taken them to the doctor’s office. Obviously he knew where it was.” Tchernak hesitated. “So why didn’t he?”
    “That’s the question. Because Jeff told him Irene was dead? Because Jeff panicked?”
    “Or because Grady had some other plan for the boys when he brought them up here.”
    Kiernan nodded, impressed. “Maybe so.” The patrol car was pulling up at the cafe. She stepped into the shadows and passed Tchernak her cell phone. “You said Grady arrived in Vegas a week ago Friday, was up here Sunday and back in Panama City Tuesday night. By Friday Adcock’s so pushed out of shape about it he calls me and hires you. The questions are: why did Grady do an overnight trip, and why not on a commercial flight? Was he on a Nihonco charter? I’ll keep the