Emily had been staring straight ahead with a placid smile during our exchange. Now she turned her head in a regal sweep and smiled at me. “Laura?” she asked.
“No darling,” Ben said. “This is Brigid Quinn, a friend of Laura’s.”
I started to explain that my own parents were looking for a good retirement center, and that Laura had mentioned to me that Ben and Emily seemed very contented here at Paloma Vista. I wanted to come see for myself and ask them personally about their opinion of the living quarters, the food, and other services, before I made an appointment with the management for a formal tour.
“They’ve been extraordinary,” Ben said, as Emily, interest waning once she found I was not Laura, had turned with gusto back to her pudding. “Not every facility is willing to deal with Emily’s needs, so we were especially fortunate.”
We were interrupted by my cell phone, which made everyone in the dining room look my way as if they were aliens and that was the signal from the home planet. I dug into my tote and checked before turning it off. It was Max. Rather than find out what new pressure he had devised to torture me into a confession, I let it take a message.
I chatted with Ben a bit longer, my wondering how to broach the topic of Laura’s whereabouts, when Ben did it himself. He appeared to lose a little of his Perfect Host quality, seemed to grow a little uncomfortable. “May I ask you a question?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“This feels a little odd to ask of someone I’ve only just met, but our daughter calls every single day to check in on her mom. I’ve been concerned that she hasn’t called in three days. I left a message yesterday on her cell phone but she didn’t respond.” He seemed to grow more embarrassed. “I hate to seem like that kind of parent, but have you been in touch with her?”
I laughed lightly. “Oh, Laura? She’s fine. Fine! I know she’s been deeply involved in a huge case that’s coming to trial. You know how our Laura is, dotting and crossing everything in sight. She mentioned once that you told her anything worth doing was worth doing well.”
Ben seemed like the sort of person who would dispense that wisdom. He laughed, too, possibly trying to remember when he’d said it, but greatly reassured nonetheless. I extracted myself from the dining room as quickly as I could without making him suspicious.
The message from Max, which I listened to once I was back in the car, said to call him, that he’d discovered something that would interest me. And he wanted to hear again about how I’d fallen in the wash and bumped my head. And while he was on the subject, that hiking stick that Carlo made me with the blade on one end … did I still have that stick? His voice had an un-Max-like threatening edge to it. I didn’t call back.
Instead, pulling out of the retirement center and driving who knew where I tried calling Sigmund. I was as upfront with him as I could be. “I think I fucked up big time, and I think Agent Laura Coleman is in trouble, and no one will listen to me,” I said. I told him about where we were in our investigation of Lynch, about the disappearance of Coleman, even about the shooting in the park. I fell short of talking about Peasil. I didn’t think that was necessary given the circumstances of the other attempt on my life. He asked me about the shooting incident in some detail, down to the second shots from the direction of the Pima Pistol Club. He grew quiet.
I let him think, then finally asked the silence, “What should I do?”
“Tell Morrison.”
“Morrison doesn’t want to hear it. I even called Royal Hughes, remember what you said about the public defender and Coleman?”
“Was I right?”
“Yeah, you were right, but even he doesn’t think there’s anything to be concerned about.”
He came at me from a totally unexpected direction. “It’s been hard for you, hasn’t it.”
“What?”
“I heard that Zachariah Robertson killed himself. That must have been shocking for you, Stinger.”
“I know, that was so awful, but I don’t even have time to process it just now. I have to find Coleman.”
“Stinger, why did you stay in Tucson?”
He wasn’t saying anything I expected him to say, didn’t even seem to be listening to me. “Are we having the same conversation?” I asked.
“We never talked about that. I’ve always thought you stayed in the Southwest to be closer to the case you couldn’t solve, like a murderer who can’t stay away from the scene of the crime. You never lost your obsession with it.”
“Don’t analyze me now, Sig, I don’t have time for it.”
“Frankly, after our last conversation I started to think you may have been experiencing some post-traumatic stress linked to revisiting the Route 66 case, opening those wounds. And now, with Zach Robertson’s suicide, well.”
Something spun off kilter in my brain and I felt a dizzy sensation, almost vertigo. Too dazed to be angry, I pleaded, “But, Sig, you agreed with us about Lynch, you said to go after that investigation.”
“And I still feel that way. I’m just saying these fears about Laura Coleman being abducted is…” there was a pause that felt like someone deciding when to rip off a Band-Aid. “Brigid, Laura Coleman isn’t Jessica Robertson,” he said gently.
My cheeks burned and I said, “You think I’m delusional.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way at all. You’ve been beating yourself up for years over Jessica’s death. Now you have another agent, the same gender and approximately the same age that Jessica would be today. Only this one is, shall we say, a little unreliable. Or maybe she just doesn’t need you anymore. Because she doesn’t return your calls, you break into her house and decide she’s been abducted. Stinger, you’re playing back Jessica.”
“You mean there’s no telling what I might have imagined, right down to the attempt on my life.”
“I’m just saying you seem to be the only person who’s concerned,” he said.
“You think I’m paranoid,” I said.
“Stop it, Stinger. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying you need to pause and think a moment. I’m not worried about Laura Coleman. I’m worried about you. I was worried about you the last time you called. I should have stayed out there so we could talk more about you.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said, and hung up.
Statistics show that, in an abduction, the trail goes cold after forty-eight hours and the chances of finding the victim alive are greatly diminished. I looked at my watch and remembered the last sure contact I’d had with Coleman: BTW, you were right! That was around 8:00 A.M., a little over seventy-two hours ago.
Forty-one
I felt like a blind mouse in a maze, making some small progress like finding out that Coleman hadn’t gone to visit her sick mother after all, and then hitting a wall, not knowing which direction to take next. The wall was where I was right now. Coleman was missing and all I had to prove it was her unlocked car, the fact that she didn’t call her mom for three days, and lying to Morrison. Apart from that, she was still sending e-mails to the office. All my instincts were screaming that she was in trouble, but if Sigmund thought I’d gone off my rocker, Morrison would laugh me out of the office.
Sometimes it helps if the mouse doesn’t aim directly for the cheese. Rather than jumping on my horse and riding off in all directions, I called Gordo to find out if Carlo was safe. He didn’t answer the phone and didn’t call me back in the next ten minutes, so I headed back to the house to check on Carlo myself, stopping on the way for a coffee and a roast beef sub with everything.
I took a roundabout way into the development, via Bowman, rather than turn down the street closest to the house. That way I could approach more slowly and stay at least three houses away, where I parked and waited, engine idling and AC on, so I wouldn’t pass out in the heat.
Munching on the sub, doing surveillance on my own house, I sat there with no better place to go, sensing Jane’s ghost beside me throughout the evening, yet feeling like I had a little purpose in gua
rding Carlo while I figured out what next in my search for Coleman. We sat there, Jane’s ghost and I, the two women in Carlo’s life come and gone.
The light next to Carlo’s reading chair went on inside the house as the sky finally darkened. My own novel would be sitting on the table next to my own chair. I struggled and failed to remember what I had been reading the day before; I was that overwhelmed and mind-sore.
Later Carlo emerged once more to take the Pugs out for their evening walk in the opposite direction from where I parked; it was too dark for him to see my car. Was he stooped more than usual? Were the dogs a little subdued? I was beginning to feel like a ghost myself and wondered if they were all missing me as brutally as I was missing them.
I had long before now turned off my engine as the clear sky allowed the heated earth to cool more rapidly. Drank the third of four bottles of water I’d brought along, and which now tasted like bathwater. I kept telling myself it was silly to sit there all night, but found myself unable to drive away. What if? I thought. And if not that, what if? All kinds of imaginings. Then I thought that maybe if I just did a bit of a perimeter check I’d feel better about dozing off for a bit. Besides, I had to pee and could do so in the darkened arroyo behind our property.
I took a small flashlight out of the glove compartment and walked the short distance down the street, turned right, and hugged the high cinder-block wall of the neighbor’s property, playing the light over the ground ahead of me to surprise any snakes before they surprised me. No snakes, but once I came too close to a hunting tarantula that did some threatening push-ups to scare me off, and succeeded.
The yards are separated from one another by the concrete walls, but down the property lines it’s all fence made of thin wrought-iron rods. Regretting that I didn’t have a spare walking stick with me I held on to the fence for balance as I picked my way over the uneven ground until I came to our own backyard. Ran the flashlight over the ground. Everything seemed safe here, no signs of human activity in the dirt. The back of the house, seventy feet from where I stood, was dark, and I could just barely make out the back door that Carlo sometimes forgot to lock. And was that bedroom window open? How many times I’d chided him about that. Civilians have no real sense for security.
I put the flashlight in my pocket, stopped to relieve myself in the dark, and stepped up on the low part of the concrete wall that was supposed to keep bobcats and coyotes from slipping under the fence. I scrambled ungracefully over. It hurt, landing on the gravel slope and skidding down to sit hard on my butt. By this time I noticed that the flashlight was overkill. The clear sky and a full moon gave the yard a monochrome feel, the trees, the walls, the gravel, the house all pale blue-gray. I was able to see well enough to move quickly past Jane’s yard art, the full-size Saint Francis statue and the stone birdbath, without knocking into any of them.
A quick check of the back door to make sure it was locked and an escape out the side gate would have been easy if I hadn’t been spotted by one of the Pugs. Without my knowing, through the glass back door he (or she) had been watching me approach and now set off a barking that attracted the other Pug, who joined in. Then I saw the bedroom light go on.
I ducked behind the Saint Francis statue just as the porch light went on. I didn’t dare look, only listened as keenly as I could as he opened the door, told the Pugs to stay inside in case there was a coyote out there. I glimpsed his shadow as he came to stand in the middle of the yard, making himself an easy target to whoever I might have been. It was all too much like a scene from one of the comic operas he loved. Disgusted with myself, I stood straight and stepped out from behind the statue, because keeping him safe was more important than my pride.
“Jesus!” he shouted, and dropped the flashlight that he carried and, like mine, had not turned on.
We both sleep in the buff, and I couldn’t help but notice he had taken on the same color as the rest of the yard, his flesh like cold gray marble in the moonlight, or like death on a slab. Another image I could do without. “Since you came out, I need to ask you for something,” I said without greeting or apology.
He stared at me through the gloom, his fingers clenched at his sides, looking the kind of pissed that comes just after being startled out of your wits. My whole being wanted to rush to him, to take him in my arms and comfort him, but my pride couldn’t go quite that far. He would push me away, had already cut himself off from me, I could feel it.
Keeping my voice as level as possible, with the tone you use when you’re giving directions to a motorist, I said, “Give up the evening walk for now. Keep the doors locked and windows closed. If the Pugs bark, don’t come out of the house like this. Stay inside. Don’t even raise a blind to look out a window. If someone you don’t recognize comes to the door during the day, don’t answer.”
“Enough melodrama!” He threw his hands up in the air as if finally he’d had enough. “This is crazy, and ever since, since that day you said you fell, you’ve been behaving like some character in a Mike Hammer novel.”
That stung, especially coming from the man I had loved, but I understood his anger. I said, “You may be in danger. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but serious danger. I don’t know how else to tell you that and I don’t have time right now to work on it.”
“How long?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I have to find someone who I think has been kidnapped. I’m the only one who believes that, and if I stop looking for her she could die. She disappeared three days ago, so if she’s not dead already I’m thinking she’s got less than twenty-four hours. That’s the only truth I can care about at the moment, Carlo. Go back inside now.”
He bent over to pick up the flashlight and raised it as if he would hit me with it, then he got control. “You think that’s it?”
Now it was my turn to just stare, waiting for more.
He tried to speak with the same level tone as I, and nearly succeeded. “You think you can just come here, give me a cryptic warning, and leave? That isn’t how things operate in the real world. There are other people involved. There’s me.” He paused, took a deep breath, “Max was here.”
There was an echo of Paul in his words about how things operate in his world, such a different world from mine. “When?”
“This morning.”
“What did he want?”
“He asked me a lot of questions about you, where you were, what I knew about the day that man was killed in the wash. He asked if you still had that hiking stick I made you. He wasn’t himself.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked, genuinely curious. There had been so many stories invented I wasn’t sure which ones he knew.
“The truth.”
My pulse sped up at the sound of the word. “What truth?”
“Everything I remembered. That you said the stick broke. The odd way you’d been acting ever since that day you came back from the wash and said you’d fallen.”
Said I’d fallen. The roundabout way of accusing me of lying was the worst thing of all. It made me defensive. “You don’t know shit about the real world, do you?” I said.
He didn’t look offended, just sadder if that was possible. He said, “I actually thought I did, but apparently I was wrong. Max told me a lot, about how you killed an unarmed suspect when you were an agent. The circumstances were equivocal; I think that was the way he put it.” He waved the flashlight as if to dispel a sudden wave of smoke. “It’s incredible to discover how little I knew you.”
Forty-two
Without waiting for any response from me, without saying good-bye, Carlo went back into the house, shooing the Pugs as they tried to come out to me. I left through the side gate rather than look like a jerk scrambling back over the fence. Everything seemed secure here, and if Carlo followed my instructions he should be safe with or without Gordo’s protection.
I sat in the car, thinking some. It seemed more logical that the killer was trying to silence me and wouldn’t bother with my husband. M
y absence would draw fire away from the house while I searched for Coleman and tried to find out who was trying to kill me. Even if everyone else thought I was either crazy or bad, I was more certain than ever that these two things, the attempts on my life and Coleman’s disappearance, were connected.
I stared at the street in front of me, unable for the first time to avoid the thought that there was no reason to suppose that Coleman was still alive. I mean, if they tried to kill me, why not her? Thoughts heading in that direction, already on edge to the point of falling off, I was shocked by a face in my window.
“FUCK!” I shrieked, and grabbed for my gun on the passenger seat, where it should have been, but found only my flashlight. I flicked it on and aimed it through the window, hoping to at least blind my assailant.
Max stood there, blinking. “It’s me,” his muffled voice came through the glass. I slid the window down and, uncaring about the neighbors or Carlo, yelled, “You want to get yourself killed?”
“I don’t think that flashlight is loaded.” Trying to maintain his tough-guy expression but unable to suppress a small smile, he walked around the front of the car and tried to get in the passenger seat, but the door was locked. He waited. I had no choice. I leaned over and flicked the lock.
When he had made himself at home, he said, “Why are you staking out your own house?”
Either I was still in a bit of shock from the surprise, or I was just getting fed up. It seemed I was out of new lies. Also the dark does something for honesty. “Why’d you have to discuss my past with Carlo?”
“I was surprised he didn’t already know. It’s the kind of thing you share with your spouse.”
“Share it with your own spouse. Max, someone is trying to kill me and I’m worried about Carlo’s safety because I think someone has abducted Agent Laura Coleman.”
“Yeah, right,” he said.
So much for honesty. But then it sounded kind of wild to me when I heard myself say it. Kind of trumped up.
Rage Against the Dying Page 21
