The other deputies from the Elfrida office showed up, one by one, to see the crime scene. He wasn’t sure how much their appearances had to do with professional curiosity, and how much with morbid fascination, but he was in no mood to argue with them.
Always, he was aware of the ticking watch on his wrist, the hours slipping by. Lulu Lavender was out there somewhere, possibly getting farther away every moment, possibly closer to death. If there was something he could find here that would point him in the right direction, he needed to look for it.
But the more he looked, the more he felt there was nothing that would do the trick. No road map with a route handily marked in yellow highlighter. No postcard saying “Wish you were here.”
He had talked to the various reporters who had shown up and asked them to hold the story. He hadn’t liked doing so. The cynical part of him thought the whole idea was a smoke screen. Maybe Ed just didn’t want to have two high-profile disappearances at once. The sheriff was an elected official, after all, and getting reelected was never far from his thoughts.
Of course, he didn’t know if the probable abduction of a mixed-race girl, of Hispanic and African-American descent, would have the same grip on the television viewing public as that of a pretty blond white girl. The savage nature of the murders might help, but then again, blacks and Latinos died all the time in America without making the evening news.
Getting word out to the press sometimes helped in this kind of case. It brought in volunteers who could scour the surrounding countryside for clues. Scoot Brown and Carmela Lindo were on that, dressed in yellow slickers and rubber boots, walking the acreage of the Lavender place and the public lands beyond their fence. Publicity also brought tips, most of which were nonsense but had to be investigated anyway, wasting valuable person-hours. Sometimes a tip paid off, though, and as long as this case was shielded from the media, that wouldn’t happen.
Raul Bermudez was back at the substation, where he had taken Lulu’s personal computer. She had a Dell desktop system, and Raul, their resident techie, was sure he could break her passwords. Maybe an e-mail from an admirer, or a stalker, would help identify a suspect. Buck had searched Lulu’s room for a diary, finding none. Donna Gonzales was cataloging what Lulu did own—a few photos, a case of CDs and books, jewelry, makeup. Her clothing. Clues could be anywhere, especially when you had no idea what you were looking for.
When it became apparent that the forensics team would be working late into the evening, Buck called home and told his wife Tammy that he wouldn’t be there for dinner. “You need your strength,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m at a crime scene,” Buck replied. “It’s a bad one, Tammy. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d want anything to eat anyway.” Even though he had passed on lunch, he still didn’t have the slightest appetite.
“Well, you drive careful when you do come home. I’ll pray for you, Buck.”
“You do that,” he said. “While you’re at it, pray for the Lavender family. They need it more than me.”
“Well, I don’t know who they are, but I’ll do my level best,” she promised. Tammy had unending faith in the power of prayer, notwithstanding the fact that most of her prayers went unanswered. She prayed every day that Buck wouldn’t have an accident or die in the line of duty, and so far he had done neither. But she also prayed for bigger things, like an end to abortion across the globe, death to all terrorists, most members of the media, all homosexuals and assorted liberal figures who came into her crosshairs. Mostly Buck found her goals ridiculous and was just as glad that she didn’t have the direct pipeline to the Lord that she wished for.
She was a good woman in a lot of ways: honest, hardworking, loving, kind to strangers and animals. She had taken most of the responsibility for raising Trey, their son, who had been killed six years before in the crossfire of a gang war in Phoenix when he’d gone to the wrong nightclub on the wrong night. As long as you didn’t cross her fairly arbitrary lines of decency, at which point loving turned to hating in a heartbeat, she was fine. It was that streak—judgmental, intolerant, happy to use her religion as a cudgel instead of a crutch or a foundation for a decent life—that scared Buck. He found that he didn’t mind working long hours, sometimes seven days a week. The times he’d tried to talk to her about her intolerance she had turned angry, accused him of trying to lead her away from God.
Which had not been his intent. But each time he tried, she seemed to turn more and more to the cornerstones of her faith: her Bible, a couple of TV evangelists, and some right-wing websites she had found that buttressed her more extreme viewpoints. He had, after several nights spent on a couch in their living room, decided that he considered peace at home more important than trying to interfere with prayers that had little effect anyway.
But watching the sun disappear in the west from the Lavenders’ front yard, he wasn’t sorry he was here instead of there.
When exhaustion claimed Buck and he finally climbed into bed and drew the covers over himself, Tammy rolled over to face him. “I prayed for you,” she mumbled.
“Better you’d prayed for the missing girl,” he said.
“But her family’s been killed? She’s better off dead.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Dead she’s in the arms of our Lord,” Tammy said, sitting up in bed. “With her family, if they carried Jesus in their hearts.” Buck had found her beautiful once, a long time ago. When he met her, she had long dark hair and dark eyes that flashed with mischief, sensuous lips that he loved to feel against his own. With her conversion to religious extremism, however, she seemed determined to erase everything any man would find desirable or sexy. She’d let her body go—she wasn’t fat, just flabby, with no tone, no shape to speak of. To bed, she wore an ankle-length cotton housedress, buttoned almost to her chin, with plain white socks on her feet. The outfit had all the sex appeal of a hospital gown, except that it didn’t gap open in back. She had taken to cutting her hair herself, and it looked it—about chin length, all the way around. She wore no makeup, and she cried constantly, usually about the world of sin and wretchedness she inhabited, which left her eyes bloodshot and her nose chapped and red. “I know I’d want to die if you were gone,” she added.
He had often thought of leaving her. But then she said things like that, and he thought it was just selfish to divorce a spouse because she had found a new way to live that you didn’t agree with. She was still the same woman, somewhere deep inside, the same Tammy who had loved laughter and children and puppies and sex and the wildflowers that bloomed twice a year, in wet years, after the winter rainy season and the summer monsoon.
It just seemed harder to find her now.
“She’s still alive out there, and I’m sure she’s terrified,” Buck said. He didn’t know that for a fact—and he still wasn’t sure if she had done it all herself—but he dearly hoped it was the case.
“She’s young, right? She’d most likely be in heaven if she had died too.”
“You can’t possibly—” Buck didn’t end the sentence. Tammy could believe what she’d said. That was the whole problem. She had gone so far over the edge that she would rather see Lulu Lavender dead than rescued.
Buck couldn’t agree with that, couldn’t even accept that if God—the way Tammy thought of Him—existed, He would let a family be slaughtered like hers had been. Where was the sense in that? What purpose could it serve?
By the same token, he didn’t hold the devil responsible either. Whoever had killed the Lavenders and taken Lulu was evil, but that evil lived within the murderer’s heart, not someplace deep under the Earth’s crust. No cloven hooves had marked the Arizona dirt that day, and the wounds Buck had seen had not been caused by a pitchfork.
Better people take responsibility for their own actions, Buck thought, than try to pawn off their deeds on imaginary beings.
Tammy rolled away again. He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. He
would have liked to make love tonight, to try to salvage some bit of human closeness from what had been a horrific day. He knew she wouldn’t have it, though. She wanted to less and less, it seemed. She had got it in her head that unless they were trying to have a baby—and they couldn’t, no more after Trey the doctor had said—it was sinful, even if they were husband and wife. Once in a while he could convince her otherwise, but only through heroic effort, and he had to deal with the aftermath the next morning, when she knelt in prayer so long that her knees were rubbed raw, tears streaming down her face as if she had consigned herself, through that marital act, to eternal damnation.
He closed his eyes and tried to will sleep to embrace him in her stead.
Interlude: 1536
The wind soughing through the branches of pine trees mimicked the rumble and crash of distant surf. Years had passed since Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had seen the ocean, and it would, he believed, be a lifetime before he would see it again. He had loved the sea until it turned on him. Even so, he found himself missing it.
Squatting out of the wind behind an outcropping of dun-colored rock, Alvar looked down the hill at the throng filling the valley. He had come to think of them as his people. Six hundred strong, they represented more than twenty different villages. They were savages whose only exposure to the true Faith was what he had been able to bring to them, most of them naked or else clad, as he was, only in the rawest skins, their faces and bodies painted or tattooed or scarred or adorned with bones, but they were kind and decent people who followed Alvar and his three companions willingly, even enthusiastically.
He rested on his haunches, observing his congregation. The sun had dropped behind the hills that walled off the valley a short time earlier, and in twilight’s gloom the Indians gathered around fires. Some ate; others danced or shouted or sang. The Moor, Estevan—Alonso del Castillo’s slave—no doubt was either making love to one of the Indian girls, or was about to, or possibly had just finished. Alvar didn’t know if it was his exotic appearance, with his dark brown skin and tight black hair (But then, to the savages weren’t they all exotic, pale skinned, hairy-chested and bearded?), or his easy laughter or his facility with languages, but the girls seemed unable to resist Estevan’scharms, and he unwilling to deny himself their attentions. Alvar suspected trouble would come of it, sooner or later.
Probably sooner, because these past several days Estevan had changed his ways, paying attention to only one young lady. A remarkable beauty, to be sure, she had thick black hair draping down her back like an ebon waterfall and dark eyes that fairly glowed with an inner fire when she laughed (which, in Estevan’s presence, she did often). But she was also the daughter of a shaman and betrothed to a young warrior, a tall, muscular specimen who wielded a spear as if he had been born holding it. Alvar didn’t like the way the young man eyed Estevan, didn’t like the way Estevan made no secret of his attraction to the girl, didn’t like the way the girl responded whenever Estevan so much as glanced in her direction, and the way she had stopped paying the least mind to her intended.
If it came to trouble, Alvar would have to try to keep it confined to those two, Estevan and the young warrior. He had not survived shipwreck, slavery and solitude just to die under the spears and arrows of his followers, turned against him by the actions of one of his own.
Alvar turned his gaze to the east, where the moon had just begun to rise over the hills they had crossed yesterday. Was it ungodly to think of the Indians as his tribe, his congregation? He was no priest or holy man, just the simple treasurer of the ill-fated Narváez expedition. There was no earthly reason for strangers to flock to him over anyone else.
But they had. He liked to credit the force of his own personality, but in his honest moments he knew it was because he had the power to heal, and because he treated those he met with respect and decency. Surely God had bestowed the healing abilities on him as a means of saving his life for some future task. If not for the fact that he could lay hands on the ill and the injured and restore their health, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca would have been killed long ago, in the Floridas or somewhere else along the way. Instead, he had survived, even prospered, if prosperity were counted in the number of people who called one friend or brother, or in skins, or in backloads of corn laid at one’s feet.The storm that had lashed the ships of the Narváez expedition had occurred in October of 1528, he remembered. He had tried to keep the calendar in his mind, tried to note the changing of the seasons, in case he ever found his way back to civilization and would need to report his adventures to the Crown. It was hard to do, though. They passed through arid country, cold in winter and hot in summer, but dry far more often than not, making spring and autumn hard to distinguish. And during the times he had been near starving, naked and alone in the wilderness, or kept in the bonds of slavery, his mind had not been working as it should and the days and weeks and months had blurred into one another. He believed that five years had passed, possibly more, since he had last seen any Christians other than Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes and Estevan.
The miracles that the good Lord worked through Alvar’s hands had terrified him initially. On the first occasion, an Indian had been taken ill with horrible stomach cramps, vomiting and diarrhea wracking him to the point that death of thirst or starvation seemed imminent. Alvar had been brought into the man’s presence by the Indian sorcerer into whose service he had been pressed. While the sorcerer blew on the sick man through a tube, chanting and clicking his tongue—all to no avail—Alvar had felt himself filled with the power of the Lord. He had tried to resist, fearing that Satan, not God, directed his hands. But he had been drawn to the patient’s side, and his hands—quite out of his control by now—pressed down onto the sick man’s stomach. Words he had never heard, much less uttered, escaped his lips, and blood flowed over his fingers even though the man’s gut had been uninjured, his skin taut. Then something emerged into Alvar’s waiting hands, a stone smaller than his fist, as smooth as a river rock, coated with blood. Reacting instinctively, Alvar hurled the stone into a nearby fire, where it sizzled like a ball of fat and vanished.
With its disappearance, the man’s health returned. Almost instantly, he sat up—his stomach still smooth, skin unbroken, although coated with the blood that had washed over Alvar’s hands—and smiled. Color flooded into his cheeks. When hespoke, a cheer went up from those gathered around. Within a few minutes, he strode around the village telling all who would listen how the slave had saved his life.
Alvar’s master had been unable to keep him after that—and more, had immediately come to see Alvar as a peer rather than an inhuman beast. He had freed Alvar, who headed west, as he had always encouraged the others stranded in the Floridas with him to do. East would only take them to the same ocean they had come from, with Spain an impossible distance away. West and south, in Mexico, he would find Christians, he was sure. So he followed the sun, and God led him to his fellows, captives of the Anagados. He joined them, and on their second day together they managed to escape. Running for days, they finally found the Avavares, enemies of the Anagados, who happily took them in. When a fall injured one of the Indians and Alvar, again doing the Lord’s bidding, healed his injury, the Indians excitedly spread the word to the peoples to their west.
In this way, the four reunited Christians made their way toward the sunset, word of Alvar’s powers preceding them, the welcome they received growing at every stop. Villages offered everything they had to the Christians, knowing that when they brought the four travelers to the next village they would be repaid and more. No two tribes spoke the same language, but there were similarities from one tongue to the next, so they could understand one another and translate the next village’s words.
There were moments when Alvar forgot his humility and thought of himself, looking upon those who followed (and, yes, worshipped) him, as their Lord and them as his flock. At those times, God the One and Only refused to smite him, so Alvar determined that he was being s
aved for some other purpose in days or years yet to come. When the temptation grew too strong, Alvar had to remove himself from the others, to remind himself that it had not been so very long since he had been naked and starving, wandering mindlessly through the wastelands of the Indies. He tried to make his plans at these times, uncorrupted by adulation and unswayed by his fellow Christians.Now he worried about Estevan and the girl. He didn’t believe that the generosity of the Indians was without bounds, although he had yet to find them. If it came to a fight between the Moor and the Indian warrior, though—over a situation in which Estevan was clearly in the wrong—the Indians might easily rise up.
And yet when he saw Estevan and the girl together, he recognized lust and more, and it became ever harder to imagine that the black would give her up without a struggle.
He would talk to the Moor, he decided. And to Estevan’s master, Castillo. He would make them both see what could happen, if they were not careful. His mind made up—anyway, the wind sent icy fingers under his loincloth, and below, warm fires and prickly pear wine beckoned—he started down the hill. He dressed as the Indians did, barefoot, with an animal skin over his loins as his only attempt at modesty. He carried a spear with a stone tip lashed to it, which God willing he would never have to use against a human being.
When he reached the valley, what he found in the glow of the fire outside the shelter the Indians built, every night, for him to share with his comrades, shocked him. Estevan was not making love, after all, although he was with the girl again. Instead, he had found a chunk of white stone that looked as pure as Italian marble. The girl sat cross-legged in the dirt, naked, arms folded almost demurely over her breasts, while Estevan chipped at the stone like a sculptor, using harder rocks as hammer and chisel.
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