No Immunity

idiot? He wanted to tell him to go to hell.] But this case was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. A big-money case like this could set up Tchernak Investigations. “Kiernan’s out of town—”
    “Look, I’ve got a guy missing here. He could be lying t dead in the sand by now. I told her—”
    “She’s dealing with an epidemic. North of Las Vegas . That’s a no-wait situation. Contagious hemorrhagic fever,” he added. Wouldn’t hurt to lay it on, big-case-like. His brow was sweating like Niagara . Maybe Kiernan was right; maybe he wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, not if he went to pieces like this on a phone call. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and breathed in through his nose. He sounded almost normal as he said, “You’re Grady’s boss, that right? He missed a big meeting with you two days ago.”
    “Right. If you know Grady, you know that flying close to the edge is his style. But he’s not a flake, and I’ll tell you, this was one helluva vital meeting for him.”
    “And for you?”
    There was a pause before Adcock said, “Right.”
    The sweat all over Tchernak’s body suddenly felt cold, refreshingly cold. Reston Adcock had blinked. “I’m glad to I help you, Mr. Adcock. I liked Grady. But I want to be thorough; I’ll proceed as if I were a stranger. I’ll start with what you’ve got in his personnel file. And of course what you know about him yourself.”
    Adcock sighed. “I was hoping to get O’Shaughnessy on this right away. Like I said to her, Nevada ’s a big, empty state. You make the wrong decision here, you forget what you need, it’s easy to die before someone figures out where you are.”
    Was Adcock going to whine about Kiernan forever? “Oil exploration’s no desk job. Grady knows more about survival than ninety percent of mankind. Are you sure—”
    “Listen, Grady Hummacher left Panama and arrived back here at McCarran a week ago. Tickets were on the company; I know he used them. He came in Friday. I was out of town till Wednesday. I scheduled him for Thursday at one.”
    “He didn’t show?”
    “No call, no nothing.”
    “You didn’t call him?” Guy like Adcock would be on the horn by one-fifteen.
    “Of course I called him. Had my girl try him then, Friday morning and afternoon. I like Grady; I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then I started to worry. Grady could have stopped off, had a couple drinks, made a wrong decision....”
    “Adcock, I know what kind of guy Grady is, what he’d do, things he’d rule out by reflex. The guy lived above me for a year. I can...” He forced himself to stop and take another breath. “But if you’d rather wait till Kiernan gets back tomorrow— No, tomorrow is Sunday. Give her rill Monday morning to be back in the office—” He could hear Adcock’s breath, a Niagara of its own.
    “Yeah, fine, Churner—”
    “Tchernak.”
    “Yeah. I wait two days, I might as well call the mortician. So, yeah, come. Go through his apartment, think like he thinks, see if you can come up with any lead. Grady’s apartment’s in my name. This is all legal. How soon can you get here?”
    Tchernak glanced at his watch. He glanced around the studio he’d lived in for over a year, the first decent place he’d had since he left football, with the first job off the gridiron in which he felt like he was living again. He owed Kiernan a lot. He’d miss her, and—he leaned over and scratched the head of the big dog lying at his feet—he’d miss Ezra.
    But it was her own fault, right? Right.
    “I’ll catch the ten o’clock flight and be at your office before noon.” He broke the connection, paused, and dialed the woman who took Ezra in emergencies. There was no telling how long he’d be gone.

CHAPTER 7

    The autopsy room in the Constant Mortuary was suitable for its main purpose, embalming a body for a quick good-bye. On a scale of one to ten, San Francisco ranked about eight, the makeshift facility in Africa one, and this place about three. It didn’t have a dirt floor, and Kiernan felt obliged to give it a point for that. But even the smaller county where she had worked as the forensic pathologist provided a room three times this size, with a fridge room double this, and the freezer where “long-term residents” were kept at ten degrees was as big as this space. Here there was one troughed gurney, one set of sinks, a fluorescent tube on the ceiling, and a rattling exhaust fan that would render the autopsy tape almost