Chase shakes his head. “Damn,” he says. “This is sort of freaking me out.”
Gus is perspiring again, his muscles weak, his legs wobbly. “Okay,” he says. “Is that enough for today?”
“Did you see their faces?”
Gus shrugs. “Not completely. But it doesn’t matter. It was Theodore Smith at the Peak, and it was Theodore Smith here. Same man, same car.”
“You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
“I’m fine.”
They’re in Chase’s car now, descending. Gus has an urge to call Beatrice and an urge to call Billie Welch. He understands the first urge, not the second. But he’s come to realize that that which he doesn’t understand is usually more meaningful. They turn on to Camelback. “You mind if I gas up before I take you home?” Chase asks.
Gus shrugs. “Whatever.”
Three blocks later they pull into a Circle K, and Chase gets out to pump fuel. Gus listens to the chunk-chunk of the pump as it begins to release gasoline, and then the full gush when it starts to fill the tank. He just sits and listens, and he feels an affirmation coming. In his state, he knows he can’t really handle a full head-on affirmation at high speed, so he braces himself. And then it hits, more gently than he would have expected: this is the gas station where Lindsey Drake met Theodore Smith. This is where she asked him for directions. Of course.
Chase pokes his head in the car. “She’s all filled up. You want something from inside? I’m all out of water.”
“You know this is where Lindsey met Smith.”
“Yeah. That’s the theory. Not exactly psychic. We have the receipt from her car.”
“No. I realize that. But it just occurred to me that we’re at the same place. I’ve just confirmed it.”
“You still think Smith is still following you?” Chase asks with a smile.
“Probably.”
“Water?”
“Yeah.”
Chase is in no hurry walking into the store. He strides like a man who’s done his day at work. So it’s surprising that he’s in such a hurry coming out. He’s thundering toward the car, juggling the water, his face seething with urgency.
“What is it?” Gus asks when Chase jumps in.
“We have a body,” Chase says, flinging the bottles to the floor. “Some hikers found a body this morning at the Superstitions. The crime scene’s a match!”
“Jesus. . . .”
“No shit. I get a call from headquarters while I’m standing in line with the water.” He starts the car. “I don’t even know if I paid, ’cause all I could hear was there’s a body and a carving and we’ve got crews on the way.”
Chase pulls out to Camelback, nearly hitting a pedestrian. In an instant, they’re going fifty-five and climbing.
“My house is the other way,” Gus says gently.
Chase turns to him suddenly. “Are you kidding? Are you freaking kidding? You don’t want to come along? Especially now?”
“Well, it’s just that I think I’ve nailed Theodore Smith about as good as I’m going to nail him.”
Chase grips the steering wheel. “Fine,” he says. “Then I’m going to have to let you out here. Call a cab or something. I don’t have time to take you home.”
They’re at Hayden Road. Beatrice could come get him. But Chase shows no sign of slowing down.
“Hey, if you need me out there, I’ll ride. Okay?”
Chase accelerates. “It would be helpful to know if this is the real thing or not. Could be a copycat now that the trails are open and the story of the petroglyphs has all but gone public.”
“I was worried about that,” Gus says. “But, honestly, I think this is Theodore Smith taunting us. It’s just a vibe I get.”
Chase nods. He obviously thinks so, too. He swings onto Route 60. And it’s the Superstition Freeway all the way from here.
A door creaks open, and through it a petite woman passes. She stops for a moment, looks across the sanctuary, and sees them. Their eyes meet. Hers are wide with anticipation, and she approaches them. She’s wearing a cardigan sweater and a denim skirt. Her hair is white, pulled back tight, clenched in a ponytail that drapes down her back. There’s a scar on her neck, just above the jugular, like a warning. Her walk is steady, but she walks slowly, guiding herself by clutching the end of the pews until she reaches theirs. She’s a bird, tentative, but curious. “Can I help you?” she asks them.
“I’m Alex Mills,” he says, rising, extending a hand. She gives him hers, and they don’t shake but rather stand there holding the introduction tenderly.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Mills?”
“This is my wife, Kelly,” he says. The older woman offers his wife a tiny blossom of a smile that fades almost as quickly. “I’m a detective with the Phoenix Police Department.”
“So I’m told,” she says. “What could you possibly want with me?”
“It’s about your son,” Mills replies. “I have some questions.”
He feels her hand tremble in his; she pulls it free and places it to her chest. “My son?”
“Theodore Smith,” Mills says. “Junior.”
Her eyes are brimming. But she steels herself. Her posture goes stiff. “What about him?”
Mills assures her that he is not on duty, that they can talk off the record, that this is not entirely official business.
“Not in here,” she says. “Please follow me outside.”
The older woman leads them to a picnic table at the side of the church, at the edge of a pine grove. Mills and Kelly sit on one side, Priscilla Smith opposite them. The trees towering above them whisper in the breeze, and for a moment that’s all they hear. The crackling defense of branches and the faint whimpers of a woman who, in her wild eyes, is begging them to go away.
“My son is dead,” she finally says.
36
About ten minutes into their speedy ride on the freeway, Gus’s phone rings.
“Where are you?”
It’s Beatrice.
“Hey, Bea. I’m on my way to the Superstitions.”
“There’s another murder, right?” she asks.
“Wow. You must be psychic.”
“Seriously, Gus. That’s what I’m seeing. That’s why I’m calling.”
“You’re calling about the murder?” He turns to Chase who shakes his head and puts his hand up like a stop sign.
“I just woke up feeling like today’s the day,” she sings into the phone.
“For a murder?”
“Maybe,” she says. “You’re getting closer.”
“We’re on the trail of Theodore Smith, if that’s what you mean. I’m feeling him every step of the way.”
“Hmm. Right. As you should,” she whispers. And then she disconnects.
Gus rolls his eyes. “My friend Beatrice Vossenheimer is a trip,” he tells Chase. “I think you’ve met her.”
“I’d appreciate a little discretion here, Gus. You can’t just go telling everyone about the murder. It’s not public information yet.”
Gus shrugs. “It’s just Beatrice—”
“I don’t care who it is.”
Duly reprimanded, Gus shuts up. The reprimand reminds him in a way of his father, and he closes his eyes and imagines his father standing over the hospital bed of Meg Parker. His father stands there stiffly, holding his wife’s hands, looking brave in his misery, in his fear. His eyes are wet with tears that won’t let go. Gus looks at his helpless mother. Her skin is mustard-colored, and her hair is flat and gray and matted against the pillow.
He leans against the car window, his eyes still shut. And he begins to survey the landscape of regrets. What they couldn’t have known. What he should have told them. If only he could have explained it better. Or shut up altogether. If only he had decided not to pursue this gift. What, then? There was really no decision. Had they been looking for a reason to let him go? Or did he legitimately frighten them? He was frightened, too, he remembers. And exhilarated
. And exhilaration won. He feels the rush now.
There’s the rush of knowing something that few others know. There’s the rush of exploring where no other has explored before. There’s the rush of chasing down an apparition who is out of reach but not unreachable. And now he’s speeding down the highway, and that’s a rush, too.
He opens his eyes and looks to the detective who has gone into his own sort of trance, as well. There’s a guy sitting there who might as well be driving alone. Chase’s eyes are glazed over, and his lips are forming microscopic words. Timothy Chase is on a mission, and Gus respects the mission. Chase seems to have forgotten his passenger, and that’s okay by Gus; he understands more now than ever that a detective is not so much what he does but how he thinks. It’s that zone of crime calculus that Gus has never understood, has never had to understand, but he sees the pieces coming together on Chase’s face. Those lips moving so subtly. Spelling out the story of Theodore Smith, not rushing to a conclusion but figuring out where one sentence ends and another one begins. Now Gus is a lip-reader. He hyper-focuses on the words until, like the occupants in this speeding car, the words are trapped in inertia. One word, really.
“I sense you’re thinking about a fire,” Gus says.
The man snaps to attention, his eyes bulging. “As a matter of fact, I am. That’s remarkable,” Chase tells him.
“What about the fire?”
“How it all makes sense.”
Gus nods. Then suddenly bristles at a ghostly chill.
Kelly clutches Mills’s hand and says, “I’m so sorry,” to the older woman.
Priscilla Smith nods, like a woman truly accepting condolence. She’s bereaved, and yet she’s placid, as if her loss was processed long ago. Mills listens to his thoughts fidget. He knows he must tell her.
“Look,” he says. “We have reason to believe that he didn’t die in the fire.”
She studies the picnic table, tracing a groove with her delicate finger. She doesn’t look up when she says, “I know he didn’t die in the fire, Mr. Mills.”
“You do?”
“Oh, yes. I do.”
“But you just said he’s dead.”
“To me. He’s dead to me. Hardest thing I ever had to do was to let go.”
“What happened?” Mills asks.
“Please. Can’t we just leave it at that? I can’t relive the heartache. Please,” she begs.
Her eyes begin to fill. Kelly reaches to her, but the woman stiffens.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith,” Mills tells her. “But your son may be linked to some horrible crimes.”
Then she just stares at him hard, and now he sees all the years of prison written across her face, a kind of inevitable indifference in her eyes. “I don’t want to know,” she says.
“I understand,” Mills assures her. “I’ll keep it as simple as I can. I just want to ask you some questions.”
She says nothing.
“Mrs. Smith?”
Still nothing.
Mills removes a notepad from his front pocket and flips through it. “Thirty-five eighty-nine North Angel Gem Road,” he reads. He looks up at Priscilla Smith. He sees a woman braced.
“That’s my house,” she tells him. “That’s where we raised him.”
“Except for the summers,” Mills says. “That’s when your family would go to the ocean. To Cape Cod.”
“Correct.”
“We tracked a pickup truck in his name to the Angel Gem Road address,” he says. “We think he’s living there now.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“So, it’s common knowledge he didn’t die in the fire.”
She shakes her head. “No,” she corrects him. “It’s not. But I have a feeling it will be.”
“Tell me what happened to your son, Mrs. Smith,” he says. “Legally I can’t make you answer any questions. And I’ll remind you I’m not on official business, but I’m asking you to please help me.”
She leans in close. “You know I killed my husband in that fire?”
Mills nods.
“It’s all public record now. I had to kill him. He had been terrorizing me and Teddy for years.”
Mills takes a deep breath, then exhales. “So I’ve read.”
“He was a good artist,” she says. “But he was crazy. He went off the deep end. He had no idea. No idea who he was.”
“Sounds like you were living in fear,” Kelly says.
“Of course I was. He knocked me unconscious so many times I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I’d stand there and look and say, ‘Who is she?’”
“Oh my God,” Kelly says, reaching again to the older woman. Priscilla Smith takes her hand.
“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m better now. I haven’t had a nightmare in years. And yet, I . . .”
She hesitates and shakes her head.
“Go on,” Kelly tells her.
“And yet I knew I wasn’t finished with Teddy.”
“How so?” Mills asks.
“Well, he never forgave me. Not even after all the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father. Ted had indoctrinated him into his madness. It was ritualistic and scary,” she says.
“What did your husband do to him?” Mills asks, meeting her eyes, trying to project warmth from his.
“He would beat him, but while he was beating he would say, ‘I love you, Teddy. I love you. You’re the best boy in the world.’ It was very sick, and I couldn’t stop it. And then Ted got all obsessed with symbols and started making them up, though I don’t think he knew he made them up. . . . I think he thought they were real. And then one day I walk into the garage and he has Teddy splayed across a workbench, and he’s carving symbols into his skin.”
Kelly takes a sharp, audible breath. Mills puts his arm around his wife’s shoulder and squeezes. “What kind of symbols?” he asks.
“The kind from his book,” she says. “Supposedly old Indian symbols.”
“And your son? He didn’t try to get away from his father?”
“Yes. He did at first. There was a lot of screaming and fighting. And I tried to call the police, but then I’d end up unconscious. After a while, it became a ritual, like I told you, and Teddy thought it was something special, very special between the two of them. Like some kind of magical secret. I couldn’t take Teddy to a pool or a lake or anywhere to swim because everyone would see what Ted had done. When we were at the ocean I made him wear a T-shirt in the water.”
“He must have those scars today,” Mills says.
“I would imagine so,” Priscilla answers. “I’m sure he wears those wounds like some kind of tribute to his father.”
“He knew you killed Theodore Senior?” Mills asks.
“Yes. I told you. He never forgave me,” she replies. “He didn’t know at first. I sent him to live with my sister and brother-in-law. He wasn’t even on the Cape when it happened. He was here in Prescott with them. But obviously the case made the news, and as much as they tried to shield him, eventually Teddy figured it out. I mean, it was in the newspapers everywhere.”
Mills says, “I have a son.”
“Everything that’s wrong with Teddy is my fault,” Priscilla says. “Had I known the depth of my husband’s madness I would have moved my child out of harm from the very beginning. Lord, if I knew anything, I never would have had a child.”
This is when Mills expects her to weep. But she doesn’t. She’s stone-faced.
“Everything that’s wrong with my son is not my fault,” Kelly tells her.
“Amen,” says Mills.
Priscilla looks right through them. “Once he figured it out,” she says, talking deep down from the pocket of a memory, “he started sending me notes in prison. Notes meant to torment me. All they said was, ‘I love my daddy,’ just like the words across his back. Nothing else.”
“What words?”
“Ted Senior carved those words across his back. ‘I love my daddy.’ And, again, in very small script
, on each of Teddy’s shoulders. He made me stitch up the wounds myself.”
“That’s sick,” Kelly says. “I’m sorry, but that’s evil.”
“I know,” Priscilla says. And now she begins to weep.
They watch her cry. Mills and Kelly steal a haunted look at one another, but they watch Priscilla Smith cry her eyes out.
Mills hears a car door. He turns and sees Bridget Mulroney stumbling out of the SUV, like a drunken coed. He waves her back. She doesn’t notice. He flails his arms at her until, as she’s moving toward them, she stops in her tracks. She puts her hands on her hips. Her mouth makes the words, what the fuck. He points to the SUV. She shrugs and turns around.
“Would you like to come to the house?” Priscilla suddenly asks.
“If you think that would be helpful,” Mills replies.
“I do,” she sniffles. “I still have those awful notes. I want you to see them.”
Mills tells her he’d like to see the notes and anything else about Teddy Jr.
“You can bring your friend,” Priscilla says, pointing to the SUV where Bridget waits.
“Good,” he says. “She’s a colleague. We’re stuck with her.”
Priscilla says she’ll pull her truck around so they can follow her home. “But tell me, first, what is my son accused of?”
Mills feels his jaw tighten like a vise. He gets up and says, “He’s not accused of anything at this point. But surely you’ve heard about the cave murders around Phoenix.”
She starts to swoon, like a branch floating to the ground. He rushes to her side and grabs her. “Mrs. Smith?”
Desert Remains Page 35
