And now here she was, bringing her own special energy into the command center and well-nigh burbling with excitement over what she had to share.
“Alba Callahan knew Alonso Smith. You need to get a trained interviewer over there to talk to her, but here’s what we have now. The man was married to a woman named Janet. Alba heard about a later wife named Sandra, which tracks with the newspaper article from Kingfisher County, but she doesn’t know whether there was a divorce or whether Janet died. Janet and a baby—Alba says she was a girl—are in the picture from 1986 and Alba knew of one more child who died at birth before that time, also a girl. She says that Alonso and Janet Smith and their baby girl dropped out of sight in the late 1980s, and she hasn’t heard anything about them since.”
“Good to know,” Ahua said, neglecting to mention that he had successfully hustled Cully in and out while she was gone. “Progress on finding out about Alonso Smith is progress on finding his accomplice in the bombing. I wish I could say that we knew anything at all about why Stacy Wong is still missing, but I’ve got nothing. I’m sure you can imagine how many agents we have at our disposal, and a lot of them are looking for Stacy Wong. She’s disappeared without a trace.”
“Do you think that Liu is right that Stacy left the hotel because she wanted to get a look at the underground rooms by way of the storm sewer?”
“It’s conjecture, but yes. I do think that Liu may be right. She’s the one who gave Stacy the information to find that back door in the storm sewer, and she knows her pretty well.”
* * *
Faye agreed with Ahua, but there was another option and she felt compelled to put it on the table. “It’s always possible that she got sick of her life and walked away. It happens.”
“Yes, it does.”
Faye was a scientist, so she was uncomfortable with squishy data and conjecture. Faye liked to prove things with numbers and photographs and, when absolutely necessary, with eyewitness reports that were confirmed by multiple people. Preferably crowds. She steered the conversation to data that was incontrovertible because it came with the blessing of a laboratory scientist.
“What about the bombing? You’ve got lab data there, and your evidence people are still working.”
“Yes. They could crack it open tomorrow. But now? Objective evidence? We haven’t got much. We have DNA results that tell us that the children left in the painted room are the bomber’s sons. They also tell us that the boys had hemophilia, which the bomber did not have, meaning that their mother was a carrier.”
“That’s almost always the way it works.”
“True. Footprints found in that room match the boots on bomber’s body. A gasket for a pressure cooker like the one used for the bomb was shipped to an address where Alonso Smith was known to work and to receive mail. The signature on the walls reads ‘Lonnie,’ which is often a nickname for Alonso, so we believe the bomber and the painter are the same person, but this takes us out of the land of hard evidence and into a soft circumstantial place.”
“And there’s no evidence to tell us who defaced the paintings? No footprints, no fingerprints, no anything?”
“None. The room was accessed from the storm sewer and the vandal splashed paint on the floor on the way out to cover any footprints.”
Faye’s head was full of images—the painted psychedelia of the room that connected to the storm sewer, the memory of a tremendous blast that turned her world inside-out, and the heartbreaking sight of three blanket-wrapped bodies.
“We’re getting nowhere,” she said, “and I can think of no reason for you to be paying me to sit here while we chase our tails.”
“I can.”
Puzzled, she said, “What do you need me to do?”
“I want you to look at the photos of the paintings again, now that we have a photo of Alonso Smith and his first wife, Janet.”
Ahua pulled up the photos on the workstation in front of him, rose, and gave Faye his chair. “Now I need to go light a fire under some forensics people. They just might be able to get me some evidence that’s not based on conjecture.”
“Even better—maybe they can get you some evidence that isn’t squishy.”
* * *
Faye was beginning to appreciate the artistry of “Lonnie,” and she was now pretty sure that he also went by “Alonso.” The portraits that he had painted appeared to be hardly more than cartoons until she looked closer. Now that she’d seen a photo of Alonso and Janet Smith, she saw that Alonso Smith had painted the people in his murals as individuals.
In just a few brushstrokes, he had captured his own image, time and again. Every man’s painted face was framed by a distinctive receding hairline. Beneath each wispy brown beard was a similarly receding jawline. The gray eyes of every male face were set deeply into their sockets. All of those faces looked like the newspaper photograph of Alonso Smith.
Faye could see now that he had painted the women as two distinct individuals, and only two. Janet and Sandra resembled each other, to be sure, but only superficially. Lonnie/Alonso had a type, and that type was women with long, dark hair and swelling hips. When magnified as far as possible, Faye could distinguish the individual brushstrokes that made up their faces and bodies. It was almost like reading the artist’s intent.
A straight line along one woman’s jawline made her look younger and thinner than the soft curve of the other’s jaw. The younger woman’s breasts sat higher on her chest and her waist was narrower. After all, a man knew the shape of his wife’s body. No, make that his wives’ bodies.
The older woman’s eyes were a lighter shade of brown and her lips were thinner. Stippled shading over her cheekbones suggested the freckles that she’d seen in Janet’s photograph. Her skin was more pale than Sandra’s, paler even than Lonnie’s. It was possible that Sandra was Asian or Latina or Native American, but not Janet.
Now that she could distinguish the adults, she understood the groupings of the family scenes better. In two of the scenes, she counted five children. Lonnie held a baby and a young child leaned against his leg. Another child sat on Sandra’s lap. Janet held a second baby, and an older child stood to the side, leaning against a tree.
But these couldn’t be all of Lonnie’s children, because three swaddled bodies had been left in the painted room and the three older children were bigger than those little boys ever got. The list of Lonnie’s children included these five, plus at least one more baby boy and the baby girl who had died at birth. This scene must have been painted before the boy was born or after the missing boy died.
That made seven children total. There could have been more, but not fewer. Faye wanted to believe that some of them had survived to adulthood. If any of them were girls, they had a reasonable shot at survival. Any boys would have had a fifty-fifty shot at avoiding hemophilia, which would make them far more likely to survive. Their mothers, too, could still be alive.
It seemed critical to Faye that at least one of the people in the paintings be found. All of the women and children had dark hair, but how many brunette men and women between the ages of about twenty-five and seventy could there be in Oklahoma? And who was to say that they were still in the state?
In just a few days, Faye had met so many people who fit that description. Ben McGilveray and his wife, Gloria, were brunettes. So was Cully. Stacy. Kaayla. Sadie. Dr. Dell. Dr. Althorp. Grace. Lucia. Agent Goldsby. Even Agent Liu. There was no reason to expect that she was looking at painted images of any of these people, but Faye’s intuition—which she would never admit that she trusted—was telling her that the answer she sought was nearby.
A quarter-century or more had passed since the artist named Lonnie captured two dark-haired women and their dark-haired children on four blank walls. He had walked away from those paintings so long ago that a mat of dust had collected on the floor beneath them. During that time, he had gone underground.
&
nbsp; While she stared at the photos, Ahua called to say that Alonso Smith had never been legally married, despite telling people that Janet and Sandra were his wives. Only one of the children existed on paper, a little girl born in 1985 and named Lonna, because of course Alonso Smith would name his daughter after himself.
Other than the lucky strike of finding the man who had sold him a pressure cooker gasket and the woman whose lawn he had cut, they’d found no trace of Lonnie/Alonso Smith since the 1990s. He had filed no tax returns since then and he’d held no job traceable by the IRS. He had no credit history at all. They knew that he had let his driver’s license lapse in 1996 and had owned no registered car since then. He’d never been arrested. And that is all that they knew.
The answer to the mystery of Alonso Smith would not be found by computers. It lay in long-held human memory.
Her hand went to her phone and pressed speed dial.
“You want me to do what?” Carson asked.
“Get your mother to look at the pictures on your conference website. Ask her if she recognizes any of the faculty. Then take her walking through the hotel but don’t act like you’re looking for anything special. Just walk around and let her look at the employees and guests. Heck, tell her to look at all of the FBI agents running around. Bonus points if you can find Agent Goldsby and Agent Liu.” She almost said, “Try to find Cully, Ben, and Gloria,” but that would have been silly. Alba knew Ben and Gloria, and everybody knew what Cully Mantooth looked like.
“And if we find them, then what?”
“Ask her if she recognizes any of them from a long time ago. That’s all. If she recognizes them well enough to know their names, even better. But don’t tell her why.”
Carson laughed for a long time. “You want me to tell my mother I won’t answer her questions? That’s funny.”
“Tell her you’re doing a favor for me and I didn’t tell you why I needed it done. Because I’m not going to tell you, so don’t ask me.”
* * *
Faye’s second attempt at tapping long-held cultural memory came up dry. A phone call to her father-in-law Sly was as entertaining as usual, full of snide political commentary and sparked with filthy jokes, but Sly knew nothing about Alonso Smith and his family or separatist cult or commune or whatever it was.
It made sense that Alba Callahan had been more tapped into Smith’s world in her younger days than Sly. She, like Alonso Smith, had been a fervid political activist. Even opponents know each other. Sometimes they understand each other better than their friends do.
Sly, like Alba, had been born in Sylacauga but he had never lived anywhere else. He had married young and started driving trucks right afterward. Joe had been born right after that. Sly had no reason to know Alonso Smith. From what Faye knew of Smith, not knowing him was a very good thing.
As she said goodbye to Sly, she cast about for other people with long histories in Oklahoma who might be able to help. It hurt her heart to think that the next person she would have called was Stacy, whose life work was Oklahoma history.
Joe had been a kid when Alonso Smith and Alba Callahan had been raising hell, and so had Carson. The only other people she knew in Oklahoma City were associated with the conference and, among them, only Cully was a native Oklahoman. But how could he be any help when he left the state while Alonso Smith was just a child?
But maybe Angela Bond didn’t. She, too, fit the too-broad-to-be-useful profile of an adult between twenty-five and seventy-five with dark hair.
If her stepfather was telling the truth when he said that the body found in the Oklahoma River in 1962 wasn’t hers, she would have been about the right age to be Alonso Smith’s older wife, the one whom Alba knew as Janet.
Faye’s loaner phone wasn’t capable of downloading the photos of Alonso Smith’s paintings, so she went old-school and printed some of them on the command center’s printer. She put the one that gave the best view of the older woman right on top and folded the printouts before putting them in her back pocket. She placed a call to Cully and, when it went unanswered, she decided to corner him in his palatial suite. It was time to go to Cully and get some answers.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Faye only glimpsed Cully for an instant, walking across the grounds of the Gershwin Annex. So he wasn’t in his palatial suite.
She set out after him, but the conference attendees were on break and it was hard to make her way through the crowd. If she didn’t hustle, she was going to be outrun by an old man, and she was damned if she’d let that happen.
Cully was fumbling with a pack of cigarettes, which was normal for him when he was outdoors. The strange thing was that he was leaning forward a bit, which was not ordinary for a movie star with perfect posture. Dodging a cluster of gossipers, she got a better look at him and saw that the forward lean was compensating for a backpack, which seemed even less in keeping with Cully’s public persona. Why was Cully carrying a backpack?
And why was he wearing a black T-shirt? This wouldn’t have been notable for anybody else, except for the fact that Cully had been wearing a sport coat and collared shirt when she met him and on every occasion when she’d seen him since. Musing on his wardrobe took her to his pants. He was wearing jeans, which in no way fit his carefully cultivated casual-but-not-too-casual image.
A movie star was letting himself be seen wearing jeans and carrying a backpack. Where was he going and what was in that pack?
A nervous-looking woman approached, and when Faye tried to step around her, the woman put her hand on her shoulder and said, “I hear Cully Mantooth is a relative of yours. I’ve always loved him in the movies. Can you tell me what he’s really like?”
Ignoring her went against everything Faye’s mother had taught her about how to treat people, but there was a time when using good manners was the wrong thing to do. Faye shook off the hand, bolted to the left, and ignored the nice lady asking questions.
And now Cully was out of sight.
She stood in the space between the hotel’s two towers, knowing that he must be somewhere near. Spinning in a circle, she searched for an older man who looked like he wasn’t quite comfortable in his casual clothes.
Other people walked past, blocking her view, and she dodged and weaved between them. He wasn’t to her right, between her and the street that the Tower Annex faced. She didn’t see him straight ahead, entering the other tower. Scanning the sidewalk to her left, she found Cully walking away, his long black-and-silver ponytail swinging free of the dun-brown pack on his back. A flash of white on the bottom of his foot told her that he was wearing sneakers, meaning that his clothes were out of character from neck to sole.
These clothes were so far from his everyday image that Faye thought he must have shopped specifically for them. Cully must have had a reason to go out and buy some down-market clothing, and he’d done it in a hurry. He was heading for a place where he needed to be comfortable, to move freely, to get dirty. Cully was going to a place where he needed shoes with traction. She ran after him, wondering what on earth was in the backpack.
The first time he looked back over his shoulder, she was sure that he’d seen her, but no. He kept moving forward without turning to ask why she was following him. She ducked behind a dumpster at the rear of the North Tower, pressing herself close to its warm metal sides as she watched him walk.
A few fat raindrops fell, leaving star-shaped wet marks on the pavement beneath Faye’s feet. Cully looked back again, but her hiding place did its job and he didn’t see that he was being followed. He turned left and she watched to see where he would go next. Cully obviously didn’t want to be followed and this made her sure that following him was the right thing to do.
He was moving fast, maybe because he was in a hurry and maybe just because the rain was starting to come down harder. When she gauged that he was far enough away, she eased out from behind the dumpster.
At that moment, Cully was moving surreptitiously around the corner of the building next door to the South Tower, a nondescript Depression-era storefront building. When Faye reached the corner, she paused to flatten herself against its bricks. Taking a quick peek around the corner, she saw a blind alley that ran between the building where she stood and a still-shabbier building made of concrete blocks ending at a brick wall.
The alley was a problem. Faye couldn’t follow Cully, because the alleyway was as devoid of hiding spots as a wind tunnel, so she was trapped where she stood. She wished hard for her binoculars.
Far down the alley, Cully stepped behind a lean-to shed that projected from the back of the concrete building. It was so small that Cully’s entire head and one of his shoulders was visible above the sloping roof. He reached down and did something with his hands. It looked to Faye like he was manipulating something small, mechanical, and balky, like a lock or a latch that was rusted shut. Making it work was a strain for him—Faye could tell by the tension in his shoulders—but he must have accomplished whatever it was he had set out to do, because he stood up straight again. Shaking the tension out of his neck, he reached into his backpack again. A flicker of light on his face told her that he had flicked on a flashlight.
Next, Cully took a deep breath and bent down so low that Faye couldn’t see him over the shed’s low roof. He disappeared and, though she waited for more than a full minute for him to stand back up, he never did.
* * *
Joe was one of those men who truly enjoyed the company of women. He sought their opinions and he laughed at their jokes. He also enjoyed the company of older people, which was only to be expected of a man who loved fishing, gardening, flintknapping, cooking, and hunting, all of them activities that were usually learned through the patient instruction of an elder. Therefore, when Joe saw that Carson had brought his mother to the conference, he headed straight for Alba, who greeted him with a hello hug.
Catacombs Page 22
