Free Strangers by Bill Pronzini Page A

good idea what they’d made of the nude photo. But Cheryl? What did she think of it?
    The bed was neatly made in here, too, clothing all put away and everything in its place. Cheryl’s doing; the law wouldn’t have left it like this. So no way of telling whether Cody was the tidy type or as sloppy as the majority of nineteen-year-old males.
    I went in and began searching. Impressions, a sense of Cody Hatcher, were all I was after; if there had been anything here even remotely pertaining to the three rapes, Felix would have confiscated it. That included the computer, but I booted it up anyway, long enough to determine that it was password protected. I thought that it was a good thing Cody hadn’t been into viewing hardcore porn; if he had been, Frank Mendoza would have used the fact to further stack the case against him.
    There was nothing to hold my interest in the two drawers in the desk, nor in the dresser or nightstand drawers. But inside the closet I found a waxed-canvas rifle case tucked in behind a rolled-up sleeping bag. I drew the case out, unfastened Velcro straps, withdrew the weapon inside—a Marlin lever-action .30-30 Winchester. New or nearly so: there were no marks of use on the stock or barrel. Several hundred dollars worth of firepower.
    I slid the rifle back in the case, closed the straps, and laid the case down where I’d found it. When I closed the closet door and turned, I was facing the heavy-duty electric winch. A closer inspection showed that it, too, was brand new, all its components shiny and unmarked—never installed or used. I had no idea what something like this would cost, but it wouldn’t come a whole lot cheaper than that Marlin .30-30.
    The rifle and the winch—two new, expensive nonnecessities. And Cody Hatcher had been out of a job for five months and his mother couldn’t be making much waitressing at the Lucky Strike. Presents from somebody other than Cheryl—Matt Hatcher, maybe? Or did Cody have a source of income that she wasn’t aware of?
    Out in the hallway, I hesitated before the open door to Cheryl’s bedroom. I did not like the idea of invading her privacy, too, but I did it anyway. Just long enough to determine that there was nothing new or expensive anywhere in her room. That would seem to let Matt Hatcher out as Cody’s benefactor. If Hatcher was going to lavish presents on somebody, it would be the object of his passion, not her son.
    So who had paid for the rifle and the winch? And for that matter, the five-year-old Jeep? Even secondhand, those babies don’t come cheap. If it was Cody, where had the money come from?

 
    7
    River Road, graded but unpaved, most of its numerous chuckholes gravel-filled, loosely followed the twisting course of a fairly narrow river. I was not used to either the Jeep’s manual transmission or its tight clutch; I had to fight the wheel and the gearbox on several occasions as I bounced along. The terrain out here was something of a surprise; I’d expected barren desert, but what I found was agricultural land and a fair amount of greenery nurtured by the river and its creeks and springs. The ranches were spaced far apart, with plenty of open space where irrigated crops grew and cattle and horses grazed on patchy grass.
    The Neilsen ranch was easy enough to find. A white, horseshoe-shaped sign spanned an access lane where it intersected with River Road, a huge X-Bar brand burned into it and the red-painted words P RIZE H EREFORDS below that. I turned in there, through an open gate, and jounced along through fenced pastureland until the ranch buildings came into sight.
    There were several of them, set in a hollow along a bend in the river. To my unaccustomed eye the main house, shaded by cottonwoods, looked to be a hybrid of wood, adobe brick, and native stone. Spread out around it were two barns, a couple of house trailers, a long structure that might have been a bunkhouse, a covered