“Who are you?” the man said with a thick Spanish accent. He looked to be in his mid-twenties.
Napoleon wasn’t sure he wanted to answer that, so he didn’t. “A traveler. Like you.”
“I’m not a traveler. I mean, at least, I don’t think I am.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“Well, I was crossing the desert on my way to the border.”
It took a while for the terms to register in Napoleon’s head. “Which border?”
“Texas.”
“From Mexico, you mean?”
“Yes. But I got turned around. Where are we?”
Again, Napoleon didn’t want to answer. At least not truthfully. “Well. Not Texas.”
“Mexico then?”
Napoleon shook his head.
The man looked Napoleon up and down. “Listen. My name is Marcos. I was traveling with my wife and…”
“And?”
“There were others. A group of us. You understand, right?”
“That you were part of a bunch of illegals trying to sneak across the border? Yeah. I got that.”
Marcos looked around, confused. “It got late. The truck taking us broke down. We had to start walking a lot sooner than expected. All of us, really, but especially my wife and I. We paid extra to be driven over.”
Napoleon nodded. Marcos was a sucker. No one was driven over. He woulda had to walk at some point anyway, but this explained why he was dressed up for a wedding instead of for a border crossing.
“Anyway. Twenty of us set out, but by the second day, well, there were four older people. They didn’t make it.”
“What about the smugglers?”
“They gave us two jugs of water, turned us loose and took off.”
“They had their money.”
“Exactly.”
“So then what?” The wind was blowing warm a few feet off the ground, carrying that same odd, metallic taste. Napoleon tried his best to keep his lips closed.
Marcos looked around and shook his head. “By the third day we were out of water.”
It was the way he said it that made Napoleon’s heart heavy, as if the entire concept of doom could fit into the eight words.
“Then?”
Marcos again looked around and said, “Where am I?”
“Marcos… what happened next?”
Panicking, Marcos spun around in a quick circle. “I can’t see her. Angela!” he screamed.
Napoleon felt sand blowing across his face, grains of it getting caught in the stubble of his beard, and waited.
Marcos returned his gaze to Napoleon, and then lowered his eyes. “Half of the rest died three days later. One by one, they just kind of fell over, like trees. We were all too weak to help each other but it was worse than that.”
“Worse?”
He looked up at Napoleon with wet eyes. “We were too tired to care anymore. Ya know. Like, it was every man for himself.”
Napoleon nodded. He was beginning to wish he’d never run into Marcos.
“And your wife?”
“She stayed by my side. It was hard, but we pressed on. At night it was cooler, but for her, it was too cold. She took a fever. That’s when I noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“There were eight of us left and one of the other men, he had a small water bottle hidden in his jacket. I could see the cap sticking out while he snored.”
Napoleon ran his fingers through the hair over his temples, shaking sand loose in the process. The wind was picking up.
Marcos held his hands out pleadingly. “Look. I had to do it.”
“Do what?” But Napoleon had spent a lifetime looking at the sketches of guilt in people’s faces. This man’s face? It was an oil painting.
“Angela had a fever. I needed the water, or she would die.”
“So you took it?”
Marcos nodded. “But then he woke up. I was sneaking it out of his pocket and he woke up. He fought me but he was weaker. I covered his mouth so no one would hear. It’s why he slept so far from the group, you see, so he could drink it without us seeing.”
“And?”
Marcos looked around again, this time in panic. As if he sensed something. He let out a soft moan as he turned back to Napoleon. “Who are you, señor? Please tell me.”
“My name is Napoleon.”
Marcos nodded vigorously. “Thank you. I think I know where I’m at now.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” His voice cracked with emotion. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“Anyway, it’s good to tell someone, you know?”
Napoleon nodded.
Marcos grew somber. “Napoleon, are you the devil?”
Napoleon laughed softly and shook his head.
“No? I didn’t think so. You don’t look like I thought he would.”
Napoleon was a bit startled. “Oh? And how is he supposed to look?”
“Worse than you.”
The wind doubled. Napoleon scanned the horizon, worried that a sandstorm was approaching.
“So. I killed him. Smothered him. Then I woke Angela and snuck her out of there.”
“You took the water?”
Marcos nodded, a look of shame crossing his face.
“The others?” Napoleon asked. “Without the water…”
“Do you think that counts?” Marcos asked. “I mean… do you think that means I killed them too?”
“Probably not,” Napoleon lied.
The way Marcos looked at him broke Napoleon’s heart.
Marcos wept into his hand. “No. It does count, huh? I could’ve shared, I could…”
“Look man, listen…”
Then, as if out of nowhere, Marcos made a final confession, his eyes wide with sorrow and madness. “Three of the ones left were kids, man.”
The words spun there between them like a small tornado. Napoleon had no reply.
“I had a chance to do the right thing. My whole life I done wrong. I’ve grown drugs, sold them in my own barrio. Who knows how many lives I messed up, and then, with those three kids, man? I had a chance. I did.”
“You can’t do anything about it now.”
Marcos nodded. “I know.”
Then Napoleon heard them, swiftly approaching, stifled by the sand but only just: hoofbeats, steady and determined. As if a horse were approaching.
“Oh my God,” Marcos cried. “I have to finish.”
“Finish what?”
“Telling you the worst part.”
Both of them were looking around for the horse, but in the whipping sand and growing wind, it was impossible to know the direction from which it was coming. Visibility was getting shorter and shorter.
“You don’t have to, Marcos.”
“She died, you know. Angela died. In my arms, two days later. It was all for nothing. I killed that man, took the water and let the rest die, all for nothing. She died anyway and then—”
Marcos stopped, unable to say it, so Napoleon finished the sentence for him. “Then you died.”
The sand blew up in a massive wave about sixty feet away and down the dune from where Marcos had first approached.
Napoleon had no sooner seen the rider, a painted man in Native American dress with a spear in his left hand, than he felt his body go numb and he collapsed sideways onto the ground. At first he panicked, but then he sensed that somehow this was The Gray Man’s doing, as all the sand around him swirled and buried him completely, except for his face.
It seemed that he wasn’t even visible to Marcos anymore, who looked to where Napoleon had been standing with confusion before he stumbled and ran down the slope of the dune they were on and up the face of another one nearby.
The man on the horse rumbled by, his attention fixed on Marcos.
Fixed on his prey, Napoleon thought.
As he descended down the dune towards him, Marcos screamed, a primal, guttural cr
y from the depths of a terror that Napoleon had never known. Then it only got worse: the screams resolved themselves to words. “¡El diablo! This is how he looks, this is how he looks, this is how he looks! Help me! Someone help me, please!”
Napoleon didn’t know what was worse: the horrible screams as the rider caught up with Marcos and fell upon him, or the sound of The Gray Man, right there, curled up tightly in Napoleon’s mind.
He could hear him, clear as day. The Gray Man was weeping.
KENDALL AND PARKER had left right after the three of them spoke with Hazel Jay who, as promised, came by the station to try to help with any information she could with regards to the possible whereabouts of her friend Ashley Barton.
It didn’t take long to get pretty much nowhere, but as with any case, be it the search for a missing bike or getting down to the brass tacks over who threw the first punch in a bar brawl that had sent somebody to the hospital—the fodder that Conch was more used to dealing with—some questions often gleaned answers that could be useful.
First, Ashley Barton was indeed a virgin. This, in and of itself, though rare these days, was no great cause for alarm. But Ashley’s “relationships” had suffered for it. The three boyfriends that Hazel could identify were little more that prolonged crushes, stretched out under the spell of a warped kind of puppy love, and in all three cases they ended poorly: she’d broken up with all three boys before they could break up with her.
This, according to Hazel, had left Ashley more than a little bitter. She had soured on boys and had spent nearly the past year staying single and out of the post-high-school spotlight. This wasn’t as hard as one might imagine, as most of their friends had gone off to college or trade school, likely never to return to little old Beaury.
Hazel herself was “stuck,” as she put it. Her boyfriend since sophomore year was working as a mechanic at Frank’s Auto Shop and, against the advice of her mother, Hazel had moved in with him when he’d got his own apartment. She’d worked at the A&W for a while, but when her hours got cut it was Ashley who’d gotten her a shift at her uncle’s liquor store. They still hung out quite a bit, with Ashley tagging along as a third wheel sometimes when Hazel and her boyfriend went to a movie or something.
Parker glanced at Conch when Hazel mentioned this, pretty much confirming that they both saw a red flag there. More than one guy had been caught banging his girlfriend’s best friend before.
But once Hazel mentioned that she was home with her boyfriend, Robbie, all night because he was home sick with the flu all day yesterday, the flag went down some. Kendall had quietly excused himself and returned a moment later with a nod to Conch. Conch didn’t have to ask: Kendall had obviously called Frank’s Auto Shop to confirm that Robbie had missed work yesterday. It was possible that the two of them had done Ashley harm, and Robbie would have to be interviewed now too, but Conch wasn’t feeling or seeing it.
Hazel was a mess. Her eyes were swollen from crying earlier, evidently, and now she seemed focused in a panicky, frantic kinda way. Ironically, she was the one playing detective, guessing at this possibility or that, dismissing off-hand that Ashley would run away, asking if they could get Ashley’s texts from her phone, informing them that Ashley had an account with Verizon, and turning ideas in her mind over and over again trying to find any guy who’d come on to Ashley or acted inappropriately in any way towards her. In short, these suggestions were just the opposite of what someone who’d done harm to Ashley would make.
Parker was looking fidgety, so it was obvious he wasn’t making Hazel as a suspect either.
They’d told Hazel to go on home, and she hadn’t liked that. “What can I do at home?” she’d asked, grossly perplexed. “I can’t help her from home.”
Conch imagined Hazel as a girl in the old west: if she could, she’d not only volunteer to join the posse, but organize it herself, it seemed. He sighed. Like the saying went: What are friends for?
For a lot of things. But not usually for looking for you when you’ve been abducted or killed.
He chastised himself for bringing death into his thoughts and tried to encourage Hazel to go home and not to worry.
“But what about her mom?” Hazel asked, blinking back tears. Conch noticed for the first time that her eyes were the color of her name.
It was Kendall who had the right idea. “Exactly. Hazel, her mom needs you right now. Badly.”
Conch held his breath and waited.
Hazel nodded, stood up stiffly and left, walking in such a dazed fashion that from a distance you could’ve mistaken her for a sleepwalker.
After that, Conch, Kendall and Parker strategized a bit. The business cards were not brought up again. Like talismans, everyone knew they were there but no one knew what they meant, so being good cops, they got to work on what they could. Parker would be a volunteer ride-a-long with Kendall, first to go look at the possible crime scene one more time, and then to swing by and check on Hazel’s boyfriend, Robbie, just to be sure.
When they were gone, Conch poured himself a cup of cold coffee and sipped it black. It was nasty. But at his age any caffeine was better than no caffeine. The sky outside was overcast and bleeding dull through the blinds of the station, making everything inside look darker instead of lighter.
Mandy called and asked when he’d be home tonight. When he told her “later than late” and that he had a guest cop in town, she told him fine, then she’d be bringing her beef stew down to the station with some biscuits. Conch tried to protest, but his wife was not only his better half, but pretty much his entire whole. She was going to take care of him whether he liked it or not, and she was already none too pleased by this case, Conch could tell.
Even in a slow-moving town like Beaury, a cop’s wife could reserve the right to hate her husband’s job. Mandy did. It had cost her too much sleep over the years.
As the cold coffee began to do its work, Conch moved over to his desk.
It was time to take look at the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, or NCIC. He hadn’t logged in to it in over a year, when he’d been researching another case, so he had to dig around in his desk drawer for the piece of paper that he wrote all his passwords on.
Once logged in, he checked the missing persons registry. It was too early to register Ashley Barton here, or to expect to find anything on her, but Conch didn’t want to over think things up front. He never did.
The fact of the matter was that he had a missing girl, aged twenty, and he believed that someone had abducted her. More often than not, the people who did such things had done them before. To make matters worse, he had the sad thought that later, while he would be eating stew in the station and working to figure out where Ashley was, she might very well be out there suffering somewhere, and her mother would be at home, terrified and sick with worry, fending off the nightmarish thoughts of what was happening to her daughter.
The screen was crowded with data in small print, so he put on his reading glasses and got to work. Over the next three hours, as the sky outside grew dimmer and the office darker, he combed through the registry using various search criteria, then refining those criteria and then refining them some more. Before long he had a headache, but he was focused now, and neither the headache nor the increasing darkness of the office was enough to make him break away from the keyboard to get up and turn on the lights or to even answer his screaming bladder.
He knew he’d had no other such cases in Beaury during his time here, but the rest of Kern County wasn’t as merciful. The total number stunned him at first: 1,917 people had been reported missing in the county in the past year. The vast majority of these were teens with a history of running away, or individuals with substance abuse problems that had probably hitched a bus out of town to become transients elsewhere.
Still, after all of these likely individuals were subtracted, there were 347 cases in which the missing person was deemed to be “in danger.” Of these, there were abducted children, some by persons unknown, many
by one parent or another during a divorce dispute, and a number of missing elderly people. He eliminated all of them from the search as well and focused in on females aged eighteen to twenty-four. This netted him 121 names.
One by one he dug into the case files of each of these women, seeing the standard frozen-face photos of them during happier times in their lives, their smiles bright in tragic contrast to whatever had most likely happened to them by now. Conch was old and crotchety, but not blind: almost every one of the girls was pretty.
He was moving from the thirteenth file to the next when, while the new page was loading, something caught his eye from the prior page just as it blinked off to Internet Elsewhere. He immediately clicked the back button on his browser and noticed an alias notification attached to the prior woman’s name that struck him as somewhat familiar: Christina Ward. At the time of her abduction, she was going by the name of Christi Herman.
He clicked the name and up popped her photo and physical description again. She’d disappeared two years ago, in Bakersfield, after leaving work at the Mobil Mini-Mart gas station, where she’d worked as a cashier on the day shift.
Two of the other missing girls had worked at 7-Elevens. Ashley Barton? Robert’s Liquor & Deli. The work similarities were obvious, and he made a mental note of it, but that wasn’t what bothered him most.
What bothered him was that he knew Christina Ward. At the time, she was a pixie of a girl with dark eyes, a tight black hair cut and a fondness for pot who always hung out with the emo crowd and was rumored to be willing to trade blow jobs for blunts. Since then, she’d gone blond, gained some weight and aged quite a bit, but he remembered her clearly.
About three years ago she’d dropped out of high school.
Beaury High School.
CHAPTER 15
PARKER SAT IN DEPUTY Kendall’s cruiser just outside a 76 station on the edge of the town. Kendall was inside the mini-mart, speaking to the manager, following up on the story that Robbie, Hazel’s boyfriend, had given them about coming in late last night to buy cough syrup. Gas stations were great for videotape, but Parker suspected it would all check out.
Standing in the doorway of his apartment earlier, Robbie had looked like hell: sunken eyes, a face absent any color, his hair matted to his fever-smacked forehead. Even his upper lip was sweating. He opened the door shirtless, on what was becoming a fairly cool late afternoon, and hardly seemed to notice, which meant the fever was bad. No marks, scratches or cuts anywhere from the waist up. Parker had even asked Robbie to turn around so he could check out the tattoo of a carp on his shoulder, but really all Parker wanted to see was Robbie’s back; except for a few zits, it too was clean.
A Million to One: (The Millionth Trilogy Book 2) Page 14
