“Ajax didn’t say so, but I wondered if he knew what Brink was really doing. Maybe he thought the plan was to kill her, and he didn’t want to be there when they talked about that.”

“So what went wrong?” Darrell asked.

Ruby shrugged, as if she’d asked herself the same thing many times. “I have no idea. Neither did Ajax.”

“Now’s not the time to hold anything back, Ruby.”

“I’m not. I swear. Ajax went to the Fair Day to talk to Brink a couple of days later, but Brink was already gone. He’d left town. So Ajax went out to the trailer. Jesus. He saw the bodies, and he ran. He didn’t want to be anywhere near that scene. He didn’t go back until Norm found Kip and Racer and called you.”

“Did Ajax try to contact Brink?” Darrell asked.

“Sure he did. He called him at the law firm, but Brink denied knowing anything about the murders. Ajax said Brink sounded stunned to hear what had happened. Brink said Kip and Racer were alive when he left. The deal was done, and he wanted to be long gone when Kip and Racer went after Sandra. He had no idea who’d killed them.”

We heard hesitation in her voice.

“But?” Darrell asked.

“But Ajax thought Brink was hiding something.”

“Like what?”

“Ajax didn’t know.”

“Is that when Brink started paying Ajax? To keep him quiet?”

Ruby’s eyes narrowed. Her nostrils flared with some of the anger I was used to seeing from her. “Paying him? What are you talking about?”

“Ajax had a separate bank account. He was getting five hundred dollars a month from somewhere. We suspect Brink was the one behind it, because the payments stopped after Brink died. And that makes sense if Brink wanted to stay clear of a murder investigation.”

“Five hundred dollars? A month? That little—”

Ruby hurled an obscenity at her dead husband.

“You didn’t know?” I murmured.

“No. He never told me. Sometimes I was surprised that he could afford the things he did. I had no idea he had that kind of money coming in on the side. He never let me near the bills. He said he would take care of everything.”

“Did Ajax have any contact with Brink after that summer?”

“Once,” Ruby replied, nodding. “When some new guy at the mine tried to feel me up, he called Brink and said the mine better get rid of the guy. They did.”

“What about when Brink was murdered?” Darrell asked. “Ajax had to be worried that Brink’s death was connected to Kip and Racer.”

“Yeah, he was scared about that. He was concerned that you’d figure out that he was connected to all of it, too. Or that—”

I stared at her. “What?”

“Or that the killer would figure it out and come after him next.”