Dark Target

by David DeBatto

  “Hello,” she said. “Do they have coffee in the lobby? Or sweet rolls?”

  She had an East Coast accent.

  “I believe they do, but I think it’s for guests only,” DeLuca said.

  “Oh, that’s okay—I always pay slippage for using the parking lot,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  DeLuca didn’t feel obliged to wait for her, but he was nevertheless still there when she returned.

  “Good run?” she asked cheerfully, sipping her coffee, a baked good in her other hand and a copy of USA Today tucked under her arm. She had a slow and deliberate walk, almost a shuffle, barely lifting her feet as she moved.

  “Pretty good,” he said. “I don’t know what the altitude is here, but it feels like I’m not quite acclimated.”

  “It’s 5,314 feet,” she said. “Hold on—I’ve got something for you.”

  She disappeared into her RV, then returned with a paper bag in her hand, and in the bag, a bottle of beer. DeLuca thanked her but said it was a little early for drinking beer.

  “Look at the label,” she said. “I’m told there are only twelve bottles of this stuff in existence.”

  DeLuca did a brief double take. The label read “Herr Totenbrau,” with a crude line drawing of a skeleton passed out in an alley with a beer in his hand. “Herr Totenbrau” translated as “Mr. Death-Beer,” and it was a homebrew that DeLuca and Phil LeDoux had made in their off-duty hours, years ago when the two of them were stationed in Germany, manning listening posts along the East German frontier. Phil still had one sixpack, and DeLuca had the other, with the understanding that some day when they’d both retired and the world was at peace, they’d get together and have a drink.

  “With General LeDoux’s compliments,” the woman said. “I would have knocked on your door when I got in at four o’clock this morning, but I was driving all night and I was just wiped. Peggy Romano.” She extended her hand.

  “David DeLuca,” he said, shaking her hand, which she then wiped on her bathrobe.

  “I know,” she said. “You wanna step into the RV? Tell you what—why don’t you take a shower first, and then you can see my RV.”

  He was back in fifteen minutes, a Styrofoam cup of coffee from the lobby in his hand. Peggy Romano was at the dining table, reading the sports pages. There was a signed photograph of WNBA player Sue Bird, framed and hung on the wall by the sink, and a Diana Taurasi bobble-head propped on the dashboard, next to a small stuffed teddy bear wearing a red Christmas scarf.

  “You follow women’s basketball?” DeLuca asked.

  “Do I follow it?” the woman said. “I’m obsessed. I dream about it. I get all the games on dish. I’m obsessed. My entire goal in life is to sleep with one WNBA player. I think it’s because I’m short. You want a tour?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why ‘Ms. Kitty’?”

  “Mobile Secure Combined Intelligence Tactical Telecommunications and Yada-yada-yada. But I couldn’t use a C for ‘combined’ or people would call it ‘Ms. City.’ Come on. It won’t take long,” she said. In addition to a kitchen/dining area, shower, and sleeping compartment in the rear, the motor home was packed floor to ceiling with enough technology to give the operations center at Cheyenne Mountain a run for its money. There were four computer stations in the central section, each with its own flat-screen monitor, a plasma screen that folded down from the ceiling above the dining area for briefings, and the tabletop, which appeared to be smoked glass, converted to a full-color touch-screen LED display as well, with a virtual keyboard embedded but repositionable and a graphics support that let the user draw on the screen in color.

  “I don’t know why, but I like looking at maps when they’re flat and not on the wall,” she said. “It’s up to you. Don’t worry about what’s in the closets, because I’ll take care of that stuff, but it’s mostly servers and processors and communications stuff. All you really need to know is that we’re fully firewalled, shielded, encrypted, scrambled, armored, and the glass is bulletproof to withstand an RPG. All your calls and your wireless goes through here, uplinked to a satellite not even NSA knows about—they know about it, but they think it’s something else.”

  “I assumed you were NSA,” DeLuca said.

  “Not anymore, I’m not,” Peggy Romano said. “I’m a private contractor now—I’m the guy they call when they don’t want anybody to know they’re calling the guy. Like in those old movies, where the blonde takes off and says, ‘I’ll send someone for my things.’ Send who? I could never figure out who that would be, but that’s who I am, in a way—I’m the techno-fixer they use when they can’t call the super.”

  “Who’s they?”

  She laughed.

  “Like I’m going to tell you?” she said. “If you want to check my credentials, you can talk to LeDoux, and I’m fully read on to Darkstar, so you tell me how you want to play it.”

  “I haven’t told my people about that part,” he said.

  “Probably wise. Just keep me posted. I just want to reassure you that nothing comes in here that you don’t want, and nothing goes out that you don’t want. I’ll do all your tech support, and I imagine your people are trying to figure out the PDAs we gave you, right about now, so please tell them I’ll be happy to walk them through the setup protocols. The rest of this is just like what you’re used to using, but call if you need me. I’ve got printers and graphics to cook up any IDs you need—all I ask is that this is a $35-million vehicle, so please use coasters and restock what you use from the minibar. Which is gratis. And no cats because I’m allergic to them. I’ll write down the code for you to get in and out. I’m going to get a room at the Red Roof so that you people can have some privacy in here, and if I’m not there, I’ll be at the pool. One last thing…” She handed him a paper bag full of keys on assorted keychains. “These are for all the cars in the back row.” She pointed out the window to a row of vehicles of various makes and models, ranging from a new Mercedes to a beat-up fifteen-year-old Toyota pickup. “You tell me how you want these things registered and I’ll take care of it. I can also fix parking tickets. I’ll check back in an hour.”

  “Okay,” DeLuca said. “Peggy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s not your real name, is it? Peggy Romano?”

  “Not even close,” she said. “By the way, I read the report you sent LeDoux, so you might be interested to know—Hilton Jaynes is speaking tomorrow night at the university. Room 103, Regener Hall, North Campus. Toodles.”

  When she was gone, he logged on and sent Walter Ford an e-mail:

  Walter,

  Get on SIPERNET and tell me what you can find out about girls disappearing in the desert along the U.S./Mexican border, let’s say Yuma to El Paso, going back 25 years. Don’t ask me what I’m looking for because I don’t know. Patterns, anomalies, etc. I recall things from when I was with Yuma PD but I’m not up to date, beyond what I read in the papers. Also, tell me what you learn about Koenig/Huston ASAP. I want to talk to them again but I need more info first. Personal stuff, to push their buttons a little. Thanks.

  David

  MacKenzie and Vasquez drove south to meet in El Paso with an old friend of DeLuca’s, a man named Wes Vogel who’d been an instructor at Fort Huachuca before joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Vogel would take them across the border and introduce them to Colonel Martine Guzman, head of the Chihuahuan State Anti-Drug Joint Task Force. Sami took the Mercedes for the short drive to the Brethren of the Light compound, with the intention of giving them the car and all his other worldly possessions if they’d let him join. He’d spent five years undercover in Boston playing the part of a Mafia-connected drug dealer, taking down various Colombian and Jamaican gang members venturing north out of Brooklyn and Central Falls, Rhode Island, to peddle their wares. It had been a while since he’d had to get over on anybody, “But hey, what are they gonna do to me if I fuck it up—shoot me with their phasers?” He spent the morning in preparation, Googling the Bret
hren and chatting on the phone with a reporter from the local paper who covered the UFO beat, pretending he was writing a book on UFO cults.

  DeLuca managed to reach Cheryl Escavedo’s uncle on the phone and asked if he could see him. When the uncle, a man named Henry Soto, said he’d be flying to Atlantic City that evening and would be out of town for the next two weeks, DeLuca grabbed a flight out of Albuquerque International on Southwest and was in Las Vegas by lunch.

  Soto’s office was in a downtown building on the corner of Fremont and Fourth, across the street from the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino. A Native American receptionist, a woman about fifty in a floral dress with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, asked him to wait a moment, picked up the phone, and called to make sure her boss was free, then showed DeLuca in. Soto stood to greet his visitor, offering him his hand and nodding as he shook.

  “Please sit down,” he said. “Can I tell Louise to get you anything? Coffee or tea?”

  “I’m fine,” DeLuca said. Soto was in his midsixties, DeLuca guessed, heavy, his hair black with a touch of gray, brushed straight back and worn long over his collar. He was dressed in a black suit, a white shirt, a red tie held in place with a tie clasp that featured a tasteful sampling of the kind of beadwork DeLuca associated with the Cocopah. The horn-rimmed reading glasses on the end of his nose added a professorial note to his appearance. On the walls of the office were large framed color photographs of various Indian casinos around the country, Mystic Lake in Minnesota, Foxwoods in Connecticut, sometimes with an inset of Soto shaking hands with officials DeLuca presumed were the owners. Soto’s job involved recruiting, training, and supervising Native American employees for positions within the gaming industry, with the goal of making Indian casinos 100 percent Indian-operated, even at the highest executive levels where currently non-Indian industry professionals drew salaries. “We do everything except the entertainment,” Soto had explained on the phone. DeLuca saw photographs of Soto shaking hands with Wayne Newton, Siegfried and Roy, Celine Dion, Sinbad, even one of him standing between George Burns and Bob Hope. DeLuca made sure not to admire anything he saw too much or let his gaze linger, because the Cocopah were such a generous people that they often gave you something if you were careless enough to comment that you liked it. A plaque on Soto’s desk read “Xawitt Kunyavaei—Sovereign Nation of the Cocopahs.”

  “You flew Southwest?” Soto said. DeLuca nodded. “You must be hungry—they’re so cheap they don’t even give you peanuts. Come on—I’ll buy you lunch. Louise? Mr. DeLuca and I are going to be across the street. I’m leaving my cell here but if there’s an emergency, you know where to find me.” He turned to DeLuca. “I always leave my cell phone when I’m having lunch with somebody. Do you know there are people who will take a cell phone call in the middle of talking to you? My people had a way of dealing with such rude sorts.”

  “What was that?”

  “Usually we crossed the river to get away from them,” Soto said, grabbing DeLuca gently by the arm. “Come on.”

  Traffic on Fremont at midday was light, the neon struggling to hold on until nightfall. The floor of the Golden Gate was surprisingly crowded, Soto explaining that at this hour, the older casinos downtown did better business, per square foot, than the giant ones out on the strip, “mostly old people who came here years ago when this was ground zero. You win one time in a place and you get sentimentally attached to it, even though none of these places bears much resemblance to what they used to be. The steak is okay but stay away from the Mexican food—it’s not as good as one might hope.”

  The waitress who took their order wore a skimpy uniform, spilling out of her low-cut top when she bent over to clean the table. Soto noticed that DeLuca noticed. He smiled.

  “Just so you know, she used to be a man,” Soto said. “I told her I thought she overdid it with the implants but I guess she was trying to make up for lost time. Anyway, you said you wanted to talk about Cheryl. I’ve already spoken to Ben Yutahay, but I wondered if you had anything more to tell me.”

  “Not much,” DeLuca said. “I found some people who may have been in the area, but I haven’t found anyone who saw anything. Yet. And I talked to her roommate, who said she left a note—I shouldn’t say she left a note, but the roommate found a piece of paper, a scrap, with the words ‘Tom never…’ on it. Do you know if she knew anybody named Tom?”

  Soto shook his head.

  “I don’t think so, but she was never much into sharing her personal life with me. I’m just the old fuddy-duddy, to her. We talked, but not so much about that sort of thing.”

  “You raised her, right?” DeLuca asked. “I’m a little unclear on how that was.”

  “Her father was driving drunk with her mother, my sister,” Soto said. “I was raised for the first part of my life by my grandparents after I lost my folks when I was six, so it wasn’t so unusual for us.”

  “In Somerton?” DeLuca asked. “I used to be a policeman in Yuma, so I know U.S. 95 pretty good.”

  “I know,” Soto said. “Your name rang a bell when I heard it so I made a phone call. You testified against my cousin’s boy at one of my first trials. I was a property lawyer but they asked me to speak for him anyway. It was for vandalism. He was guilty, but what I remembered was that you told the truth. There were other cops in Yuma who would have lied on the stand. Testi-lying, they call it. Especially against an Indian.”

  “I know,” DeLuca said. “Where did you study law?”

  “Billy Mitchell in Minnesota,” Henry Soto said. “After my grandmother died, I became an orphan, and the BIA had a program to place Native American orphans in the homes of white people, to help us assimilate. I was raised by a Lutheran family in South Minneapolis. A minister and his wife. They were very nice. Some people tell me I still have a Minnesota accent.”

  DeLuca had noticed something odd about the way Henry Soto spoke but hadn’t been able to place it.

  “It must have been difficult to go from a place as hot as Yuma to a place as cold as Minnesota,” he said.

  “Actually I loved it,” Soto said. “I learned how to skate and went to the U of M on a hockey scholarship. I was small but fast, and I think the white boys were scared of me. We didn’t have goons or enforcers, back then, but we wouldn’t back down from anybody. I came back after I got my degree and studied for the Arizona bar, and I think maybe that inspired Cheryl a little bit, because I was the first person in our family, one of the first in our whole band, to go to college. I told her she could do anything she set her mind to.”

  “Ben said you kept the Jeep at your trailer, ” DeLuca said. “Is that a family place she might have gone to for comfort?”

  “I think so,” Soto said. “Though it might not be the kind of comfort you’re thinking of. It’s up in Pai Pai country. It’s just a trailer, but I used to take her there, just to get away from things. I kept the Jeep there for hauling things and doing chores.”

  “Have you been there lately?” DeLuca asked. Soto shook his head. “Would you mind if I went and had a look around?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Soto said. “It’s not locked. I’ll have to draw you a map. It’s not easy to find.”

  “Do you know of any reason why she might have headed from there for Spirit Mountain?” DeLuca asked.

  “Why Cheryl would have?” Soto said. “I don’t really know. She didn’t care much for the traditional things. Religion and so on. I know sometimes Cocopahs go to Spirit Mountain when they’re on a vision quest. There are Hohokum places there that are very old, but few know about them. I don’t think Cheryl did. Maybe she did. Sometimes the younger people become disillusioned and come home to get religion. Maybe she was headed for Mexico?”

  “Maybe, but the road she was on dead-ended a few miles from where we found the car. She wouldn’t have made it.”

  “Well, it’s easy to get lost,” Henry Soto said.

  “Did she say anything was bothering her?” DeLuca said. “Anything that made you think
she was in trouble of any kind?”

  “I don’t think so,” Soto said. “I’ve been racking my brain. She didn’t like being transferred, but she knew the Army did that sort of thing.”

  Huston had told DeLuca she’d asked to be transferred.

  “Can I ask you one last question?” DeLuca said. “This might be a bit difficult for you. One of her coworkers said she thought Cheryl was gay. Do you have any reason to think that might be true?”

  Soto thought.

  “Hmmm. I don’t think so, but how would I know?” he said. “Was her roommate… ?”

  “No. She had a boyfriend,” DeLuca said.

  “Maybe she’d be a better person to ask,” Soto said.

  “She might be,” DeLuca said, “but we don’t know where she is.”

  DeLuca rented a Hummer2 at the Yuma airport, a beefy yellow and black model that looked like a Checker cab that had lost its temper and turned into the Hulk. The hole in the roof where the SAW gunner sat, in the military version, had been replaced with a sliding glass moon roof, and without the extra two thousand pounds of armoring, the vehicle was much more responsive, but it was still a beast. He liked the air-conditioning, the power windows, and the CD player. Ben Yutahay said, when DeLuca picked him up, that he knew families of four that lived in smaller quarters. DeLuca handed him the map Henry Soto had drawn and asked Yutahay if he knew the area.

  “I’ve been up there hunting,” Yutahay said. “It’s pretty rough country, and it’s going to be dark by the time we get there. If Cheryl Escavedo went there to hide, it would have been pretty hard to find her.”

  “That depends on what you’ve got looking,” DeLuca said. “My son works with satellite image intelligence and he tells me they’ve got cameras that could measure Fidel Castro’s bald spot. And Sergeant Escavedo certainly knew that.”

  “They can’t watch everywhere, can they?” Yutahay asked. “They would have to know what to look for, I would guess.”