by Attica Locke
The hotel-room phone was ringing now. He tried to ignore it at first, but it kept going and eventually Randie said, “Darren . . . do you need to get that?”
“Yeah, just give me one sec.”
“Actually, it’s kind of getting late here. I have a seven o’clock call time.”
“Right,” Darren said, feeling a squeeze in his chest. He wanted to keep talking, but the moment had passed and the hotel phone wouldn’t stop ringing.
“It was good to talk to you, Darren,” Randie said. “Really.”
He nodded and smiled, though she couldn’t see him. “For me too.”
Then she said softly, “Darren.”
Hearing his name on her tongue broke through their shared pretense that this conversation was harmless. It was nearly inexplicable to him, but no less real, how utterly safe he felt talking to this woman. And he could no longer ignore the desire that was tangled in that fact.
“You should forgive her, whatever it is,” Randie said. “I wish I’d had the chance to do the same with Michael. I wish I hadn’t held it over him like I did.”
He hung up one phone and answered the other.
The woman on the hotel line started talking before he could say hello. “I know this isn’t room two-oh-seven, I know that. But I’m not getting anything out of anyone at the front desk, even though I’ve been calling for two days.”
At the mention of room 207, Darren immediately stood from the bed. That was the room right above his, the one from which he’d heard those startling noises the other night, the room about which Sandler Gaines had told him a bald-faced lie. “Slow down,” he said. “You called before, didn’t you? This afternoon?”
“That’s right. I was wondering if I had the wrong room number or something or if there’s some other explanation for why I can’t find her.”
“Who?”
“Monica Maldonado.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find her?”
“We had an appointment and she never showed. Isn’t answering her phone either.”
“What’s your name?” Darren said, reaching for a pen and the pad of hotel stationery on the nightstand. It was embossed with a vine of roses across the top.
The woman hesitated. “I’m not looking to cause trouble, I just—”
“Ma’am, my name is Darren Mathews, and I’m a Texas Ranger, and you’re not the only one who thinks something is wrong.”
“Gail Combs,” she said then, almost sighing her own name in relief. “I run a notary business here in Jefferson. Ms. Maldonado reached out to me when she arrived in town a couple of weeks ago about using my services for some legal documents she needed signed. I asked for payment up front, since she mentioned something about having to travel some distance to the signatories, and I wrote up an invoice for my services. I sent it to her office . . . ” And here it seemed like she was carefully reading the name off of her own paperwork. “Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene in Alexandria, the one in Virginia. I never received payment or acknowledgment that they’d gotten the invoice, and like I said, she never showed for our appointment. Maybe I’m a nosy one who ought to mind her own business, but I think it’s weird that she won’t answer her phone, and even though this is the hotel she told me she was staying at, the front desk keeps telling me they never had a guest by that name, even when I told them the room number she gave me as her contact info when she first called me.”
And when Darren had asked about room 207, he’d been told that the guest had checked out the same night he’d heard strange noises coming from the room, the same night Darren had seen Gaines escort a possibly inebriated woman through the Cardinal’s front doors, a woman he now believed was Monica Maldonado. “I just hope she’s safe,” Gail said. “I mean, my husband tells me I watch too much Dateline, but a woman traveling alone, and now missing . . .”
Missing.
Darren let the word settle in his head. It seemed an extreme assessment of the situation, seemed statistically improbable that there were two missing-persons cases in Marion County. He considered the situation. He had a notary’s admittedly alarmist fears, fueled for all Darren knew by the fact that she hadn’t been paid, and he had a woman he’d hardly glanced at who had apparently vanished. Assuming the drunk woman with Sandler Gaines and Monica Maldonado were one and the same, Darren couldn’t have given a sketch artist anything more than the dark shade of her hair. He was almost tempted to believe that he’d made this whole thing up, that Monica Maldonado had never been to Marion County, or had never checked into the Cardinal Hotel, or maybe didn’t exist at all. Almost. But there were two things that rushed at him the second he ended the call with Gail Combs. One, he remembered her first call, when Lisa had just left this room, how he’d sat for a while trying to understand what the name Monica Maldonado meant to him, why it tickled some recessed corner of his brain, like he was holding his breath for a sneeze that wouldn’t come. And two, he remembered where he’d seen the name of that law firm. That’s what ultimately put it together. The names Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene had scratched at his memory because he’d seen them earlier today, in black ink on the bent business card that was taped to Leroy Page’s kitchen wall. Darren hadn’t seen the Virginia address on the card, but he’d seen the name. It was Monica Maldonado.
Part Four
17.
HE COULDN’T get into the room until the next morning, so he spent a good portion of the night looking for information on Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene on various search engines, coming up with precious little about the firm save for their Alexandria, Virginia, address and a note on Martindale.com, the legal directory, that theirs was a general civil practice, which meant that Leroy Page was not in fact a criminal client of Monica Maldonado. After only a few hours’ sleep, Darren woke up even more confused; he had no idea why the woman had been in the town of Jefferson, let alone what her current whereabouts might be. Neither the receptionist at her office nor the managing partner he’d asked to speak with after several calls (the second it hit nine a.m. on the East Coast) would even confirm for Darren that Monica Maldonado was in Jefferson, Texas, much less tell him why.
“I’m afraid that’s privileged information,” the partner, whose name was Dale Godwin, said, not sounding in the least concerned by the fact that a Texas Ranger was asking after one of his employees. For all Darren knew, Mr. Godwin, like many outside the state, did not understand the Rangers’ role in law enforcement in Texas; he might have been talking to a park ranger for all the sense of urgency in his voice. He did, at least, confirm that Monica worked for Chafee, Humboldt, and Greene, but he assured Darren that she was a big girl—his actual words—who knew how to take care of herself.
“Well, she’s not been seen at her hotel in two days and she failed to appear at an appointment she arranged with a local notary, Gail Combs, an invoice for which I bet you have sitting somewhere in your files right now,” Darren said. He let that sink in for a moment before adding, “But I’m sure your firm’s been in contact with Ms. Maldonado over the past forty-eight hours, right, Mr. Godwin?”
The lawyer blew out a heavy thud of breath, not so much a sigh as the sound of a bass drum, the music in a Western that told of dread on the horizon. “Let me talk to her secretary,” Godwin said. “And I’ll get back to you.”
After more than an hour, Darren still hadn’t received a return call.
While breakfast was being served in the dining hall off the lobby, he headed to the second floor, bypassing the front desk altogether and trailing one of the hotel’s maids, a whippet-thin black woman with a head of pressed hair and flyaway strands that refused to lie down for anybody. He watched as she knocked on Sandler Gaines’s room and announced, “Housekeeping,” in a dulcet but perfunctory tone. When she received no answer, she opened the door with her master key. Darren, his fears allayed by the fact that Mr. Gaines was nowhere around, flashed the woman his badge and said he needed to get into room 207.
“It’s empty, sir,” she said.
>
“No matter,” Darren said with a forced air of authority, speaking at a clipped speed that left little room for questions, “I need to get in there, ma’am. This is state business and as serious as it gets. I’m ordered to search this room.”
The maid—BARBARA, her name tag said—shot Darren a look that suggested she thought it was possible it was some bullshit mixed up in this, but Darren was black and carrying a badge so she gave him the benefit of the doubt but also felt she was within her rights to mutter under her breath as she opened the door to room 207, “Better not get me fired over this neither.” Then she left him alone.
The velvet drapes were thrown open to a view of the same courtyard garden that was outside Darren’s suite downstairs. From a floor up, he saw a few guests taking their coffee outside, one of whom was Sandler Gaines, his pomaded pompadour shining in the golden morning light. Darren stepped away from the window quickly, so as not to be seen snooping in this room, and felt a crunch underfoot. He looked down to see a hair comb cracked into pieces under the heel of his boot. It had been peeking out from under the bed, and as Darren knelt to get a closer look, he realized the hair comb, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, had already been broken. The other half of it was a few inches farther under the bed. Even in shadow, Darren could see hair tangled in the teeth of the comb. He lifted the tails of his white button-down and grabbed both pieces of the comb with the fabric. He dropped them both into a laundry bag from the room’s closet, but not before inspecting the clump of hair. It was the same shiny black color as the hair of the woman he’d seen with Sandler Gaines.
He walked all of it the few blocks to the sheriff’s office on Austin Street.
The hair comb, the scuffle he’d heard in room 207, the lady he’d seen with Sandler Gaines, the notary who’d called looking for Monica Maldonado, and the fact that after Darren had spent the night calling rental car companies at DFW and Love Field, the nearest major airport to Jefferson, Texas, striking out every time, he’d hit the jackpot when he called the Avis car-rental agency at the Shreveport airport, just over the Texas/Louisiana border. It had taken little convincing for the young woman working the desk on the graveyard shift to give up information to a Texas Ranger over the phone. Monica Maldonado, who lived on Russell Road in Alexandria, Virginia, had rented a white Pontiac Sunfire that should have been returned to that airport location yesterday. Inside Sheriff Quinn’s small office with the MAGA hat and the mason jar filled with buffalo nickels, Darren also added the fact that he’d seen the woman’s business card in Leroy Page’s kitchen in Hopetown, offering it as proof that Ms. Maldonado did exist and had indeed been in Marion County at some point.
Quinn, who appeared to be wearing the same clothes as he’d been wearing last night at the steak house, leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, showing two large yellowing pit stains. “So what is it you’re trying to say there, Ranger?”
“I think this woman may be missing,” Darren said. “And I think Sandler Gaines was the last one to see her. I saw the two of them together.”
“You can identify this woman?”
Darren hesitated, then lied. “Yes.”
“And Page—what all’s he got to do with this?”
“I don’t know, but he clearly had some contact with the woman.”
“You’re saying we got a serial killer in this county?” Something in the idea amused Quinn rather than frightened him. “You sure know how to make trouble out in Hopetown, don’t you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Page.”
“It was Sandler Gaines who was the last one to see her, I said.”
Sheriff Quinn lowered his arms and rested them on his desk, his face taking on a sober quality. “I never had no trouble with Leroy Page before all this,” Quinn said, speaking as if he hadn’t heard Darren at all. “And truth be told, I never wanted to believe he’d hurt that boy, but the talk out there, the rumors and suspicions now, it’s a bell you can’t un-ring, Ranger. You’da done well to remember that before you went mentioning his name anywhere near Gil Thomason and his trailer-park posse. You damn near signed that man’s death warrant before the feds even had a chance to make an arrest.”
Darren felt his stomach drop. He heard a sharp note ringing in his ear, so Quinn’s words, when they came, sounded distant. He felt his long legs go weak and wiggly as pepper jelly as Sheriff Quinn said matter-of-factly, “Leroy Page was shot last night.”
Darren shook his head, at first in numb disbelief and then in anger. “What happened to the men you had posted outside his place?”
“They got past ’em somehow,” Quinn said, a little too businesslike for Darren’s taste, as if he were conceding the deputies out front of Page’s house had only been for show. “We think they got in around the back some kind of way.”
“And who’s ‘they’?”
“I got deputies going through the trailer park like a tight comb picking for lice. I’m not stupid, Ranger. I put this on the trash out there.”
“And Mr. Page, is he—”
“He’s alive,” Quinn said, suddenly standing. “They got him to Marion County Hospital in time. With his age, though, it’s touch-and-go. He got them Caddos praying over him up there on the third floor. He may make it.” He shrugged to indicate that he could not understand the ways and means of a narrow band of Caddo Indians who’d lived among black folks for well over a hundred years, but he refused to question their divine authority lest he tempt exemption from heaven by starting any new shit with Indians.
“Talk to Sandler Gaines,” Darren said on his way out of the sheriff’s office. “He knows what happened to Monica Maldonado. I’d bet my badge on it.”
Quinn wrote the name down but insisted he had bigger fish to fry and wasn’t prepared to drop everything to find a grown woman no one was looking for save an unpaid notary. “I’m not gon’ let you run over me the way you done the sheriff down to Shelby County.” So word about the arrests in Lark had gotten to Marion County—especially the fact that the sheriff in those parts was damn near arrested for the collusion Darren had unearthed between him and Wally Jefferson over the murder of Geneva Sweet’s husband. Sheriff Quinn looked at Darren with an irritation that was threaded with grudging respect and something else he was fighting against: fear. Darren felt again the particular power that the badge on his chest held and wondered if Quinn was right. Had his asking about Leroy Page in Hopetown put the man’s life in danger?
If Darren ever caught a bullet in Marion County, he hoped that someone would have sense enough to take him over the border to Shreveport or, Jesus, just the few miles south on Highway 59 to Marshall, both towns bigger and better equipped than Jefferson, he would think, to handle a gunshot wound. But Leroy Page was in a double room in a medical facility that did the bulk of its business coaching stubborn diabetics through the lifestyle changes necessary for their survival, all within twenty feet of vending machines that sold Dr Pepper and Twix bars on every floor.
Darren had been directed to the unit where longer-term patients were housed. He went past cheaply framed paintings of bluebonnets and dogwood trees, the heels of his ostrich boots clicking on the vaguely sticky tiled floor—the sound like the peeling of a bandage off skin, over and over again—and finally found Mr. Page’s room near the third nurses’ station from the elevator. Mr. Page shared the room with a white man in his forties who was eating something out of a Whataburger bag and talking on his cell phone. He did a double take when he saw Darren and the badge but otherwise could not be distracted from his food or his phone. Behind a gauzy curtain on the other side of the room, Mr. Page was asleep, or at least his eyes were closed. His body seemed to be twitching of its own accord, and the black woman sitting on a stool next to his bed had a hand laid across his body, pinning his arms at his sides. She turned when Darren stepped inside what counted for a private room at this small hospital. He saw the resemblance immediately—the same deep hickory skin tone, reddish in parts, hair black with a lo
ose curl pattern and thick, bow-shaped lips. Mr. Page’s were dry and crusted with some white substance at the corners; hers were painted a deep pink that had faded and left her lips looking cracked and bleeding. She glanced at Darren, taking in the hat and the badge, the whole Ranger uniform, and then she went back to watching her father with great intensity, as if she could see through flesh and bone to where he was hurting, as if she could kiss the pain away with the force of her caring. “Erika,” Darren said, because that’s what Margaret had called her when he’d eaten at her home. This was Leroy’s younger daughter. Along with the yeasty odor of damp skin where Leroy had sweat through his blue hospital gown, Darren smelled pipe tobacco.
He turned and realized he hadn’t seen Margaret in a back corner of the room. It seemed the tobacco had cured her tawny skin, so much was the scent a part of her; he hadn’t noticed it in her house, but it struck him full on now. It was sweet, this smell, like baked cherries and damp tree bark, and Darren found it vaguely comforting, though he noticed Erika cutting her eyes at the spectacle of Margaret Goodfellow, red-and-blue shawl over her shoulders, head lowered as she murmured hushed words, almost breathing them into her own chest. She was praying fervently but privately.
“I don’t think Daddy would want you here.” Erika was looking at Margaret, but she was talking to Darren. “You think he’s a killer.”
“Why’s he shaking like that?”
“Fever,” she said. “I’ve asked them every twenty minutes to do something. They said if it hits one hundred and five, they’ll get the ice blanket.”
“I tried to help your father. I told him to get a lawyer.”
Erika was wearing a thin gold cross that caught sunlight through the sliver of a rectangular window on the other side of the hospital bed as she turned to Darren to speak. “My father didn’t do anything wrong. This is ridiculous. My father would never hurt Lester’s grandson. He loved that man.”
