Set the Dark on Fire

by Jill Sorenson

“How close did you get?”

  Fernando gave an approximate indication, widening his arms.

  “You didn’t touch her?”

  “No. Nothing to do. She was already dead.”

  “How did you know?”

  He thought about it. “Her chest was not moving. Head … turned funny.”

  Luke was silent for a moment. “Did you see anyone else this morning? Driving on the road, or in the area?”

  “I passed a few cars on the main drag. No one near the Graveyard. No one for miles.”

  Luke slanted a glance at Shay. “Anything you want to ask?”

  “Fernando, you’re a hunter,” she said, leaning forward. “Did you notice anything unusual at the Graveyard?”

  “Si,” he said. “No tracks. No blood.”

  “What do you think killed her?”

  “Un león,” he replied immediately.

  “Did you see one?”

  “No. I have never seen one.”

  Shay sighed. The locals would be whispering about vampires and chupacabras. She turned to Luke, not sure what else to ask.

  “You said you recognized Yesenia,” Luke continued. “How well do you know her?”

  Fernando shifted in his chair, uncomfortable for the first time since the interview began.

  “La conóces … o la sábes?” Luke asked.

  Shay felt heat rise to her face, and not just because Luke was asking Fernando if he knew Yesenia in the biblical sense. By posing the question in Spanish, he was cutting her out of the conversation, dismissing her as if she weren’t there, and insulting her by assuming she wouldn’t understand. He was wrong. Not only did she catch his meaning, she discovered something new about him: he was not a native speaker of Spanish.

  His pronunciation was a little too … hard. Spanish speakers tended to soften some consonants and drop others altogether.

  “I didn’t know her very well,” Fernando replied in the same language, choosing to ignore Luke’s insinuation. “But where are my manners?” he said with a smile. “Would either of you like something to drink? There is cold cerveza inside.”

  Shay shuddered and Luke declined, standing and thanking Fernando for his time. When they passed through the kitchen once again, she inhaled deeply, wishing such a feast would be waiting at her house.

  Instead she’d be met by a sink full of dirty dishes and an empty fridge.

  She said good-bye to Angel with a conflicted heart, hoping Dylan wasn’t serious about her. Angel seemed like a nice girl, but she represented the kind of complication her brother didn’t need. Dylan was rebellious, abrasive, and smart as a whip. Shay wanted him to go to college more than she’d ever wanted anything for herself. As much as she loved Tenaja and respected its blue collar men, she wanted better for her brother than a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor under the hot desert sun.

  As they walked toward Luke’s pickup, Shay shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her sweatshirt, feeling the heaviness of damp denim against her legs and the weight of the world on her shoulders.

  She settled into the passenger side, not bothering with her seat belt, and studied Luke with open interest. He could be of European heritage, she supposed, but with his dark coloring, and a name like Meza, she’d figured differently.

  “What?” he asked, surprising her. She’d have sworn he could pull off stone-faced silence for any length of time.

  “You speak Spanish like a white man.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. It was a stupid thing to say, impulsive and presumptuous, but what the hell. She was curious, and he didn’t like her anyway. “I’m Luiseño,” he said, turning his attention back to the road.

  “Really?” Her interest was piqued further. The Luiseño tribe, named by the founding fathers of the San Luis Rey Mission, was one of the twenty-six registered tribes in the area. San Diego had a more diverse Indian population than any other place in the United States. “Where were you born?”

  “Pala.”

  Shay was stunned. Pala Reservation was only thirty miles from Tenaja, and one of the poorest communities in the county. Luke Meza wasn’t a well-to-do city boy from the lights of Las Vegas. He was local. Not only local, but Native.

  He’d probably grown up with less than she had. Now he thought he was too good for her, and that rankled her hard.

  “Who’s Dylan?” he asked, rolling to a stop in front of her house. “You mentioned that name to Fernando’s daughter.”

  “He’s my younger brother,” she said, glancing toward the door.

  “He lives with you?”

  “Yes.”

  He followed her gaze, assessing the single car in the driveway, rusted basketball hoop above the garage door, and sadly neglected front lawn. “Where’re your folks?”

  The question shouldn’t have caught her off guard, but no one in Tenaja Falls ever asked about her parents. They already knew. “Gone,” she said shortly.

  He nodded, looking down the road instead of at her face.

  She supposed that was his way of saying good-bye, and it left a lot to be desired. “I can’t say it’s been a pleasure,” she muttered, getting out of his truck.

  “I can’t, either,” he replied, his eyes licking down her body once more before he slammed the truck into gear and drove away.

  Eager to put some distance between them, Luke was driving too fast along the bumpy dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

  He knew he’d done the right thing, but he cursed himself for having the presence of mind to say no when she’d been soft and pliant underneath him, granting him free use of that sweet-looking mouth and luscious body.

  He groaned, picturing her pert little breasts, encased in the sexiest scrap of black lace he’d ever laid eyes on, and those pale pink panties, clinging to her ass like wet tissue.

  He could have kissed her. Hell, he was almost certain she’d have let him strip off her panties and bury himself in her right there on that sun-warmed rock. He was hard all over again just thinking about it.

  His hands curled around the steering wheel until his knuckles went white.

  Perhaps it was a poor excuse for the intensity of his physical reaction, but he’d been too long without a woman. Sin City had a way of making a man feel dirty, inside and out, and the last few months in Vegas had really taken their toll. He’d seen enough bachelorettes, strippers, and whores to last him a lifetime.

  So why was he panting after this small town bad girl?

  Shay was easy on the eyes, to be sure, and she was probably easy in bed, but women like her were hard on men. And Luke had never been into casual sex.

  He’d never been tempted to throw down his bone in the great outdoors either, but when the opportunity presented itself, he’d been so goddamned ready. He was still ready. For some reason, her earthy sensuality triggered this utterly primal, embarrassingly powerful, “me Tarzan, you Jane” response.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about her wet panties.

  Shifting in his seat, he leaned back and eased off on the gas. If he took the turns any faster, he’d end up in the ditch.

  He should have gone ahead and given her what she’d been asking for. Never mind that he was on duty. Never mind that until he heard from the county medical examiner, he was supposed to be investigating a possible homicide. Never mind that if the autopsy report indicated wrongful death, he might have to consider Shay Phillips a suspect, along with her “rebel without a clue” boyfriend and gun-toting next door neighbor.

  “Goddamn it,” he muttered, hitting his palm against the steering wheel.

  Garrett Snell had told him all about Fernando Martinez this morning. Apparently, the man had caught his wife in bed with another hombre a few years back, and according to Garrett, Fernando ran them both out of town with a shotgun.

  The quiet, unassuming father of five he’d met a few moments ago didn’t quite match up to Deputy Snell’s colorful description of him. Luke didn’t know who to believe, but his deputy was as shady as t
hey came. He might have to add Garrett’s name to the list of suspects.

  Cursing his luck, which had taken a turn for the worse in Vegas a few months ago and gone downhill from there, Luke reached into the glove compartment for his cell phone. As he leaned toward the passenger seat, he got a whiff of Shay Phillips’ sweet herbal scent. His upholstery would probably smell like her for days.

  Gritting his teeth, he checked his messages. Two missed calls and no bars. Damned hillbilly town had the least reliable cell phone service this side of the border.

  This interim sheriff position was turning out to be a real bitch.

  Luke hoped the ME would be able to make an unequivocal decision regarding cause of death, to reconstruct the last moments of Yesenia Montes’s life in a way that explained every unanswered question, and to rule out foul play.

  Maybe he was mistaken about the body being moved postmortem, and wrong to think the scene had been staged. Maybe, just this once, good had prevailed over evil, and the most innocent explanation would turn out to be the right one.

  The county medical examiner was long gone, so he had to deal with Barry Snell, the funeral home director. In addition to being Garrett’s father, Barry was the mayor of Tenaja Falls and its coroner when no suspicious circumstances were evident. Having already been introduced to him, Luke knew that unlike his son, Barry had an upbeat temperament and perpetual smile. Luke wasn’t sure which man he trusted less.

  “Official ruling is accidental death,” Barry said as he opened the door to the morgue’s side entrance, his gentle grin belying the seriousness of his words. Luke wondered if Barry was capable of a suitably grim expression. “But Dr. Hoyt remarked upon a few anomalies.”

  Luke followed him to the autopsy room. “Like what?”

  “Take a look,” Barry said, ushering him inside.

  Luke had seen his share of dead bodies, mostly drunks and vagrants, old men who had succumbed to illness, drug and alcohol abuse, or the elements. He wasn’t a homicide detective, however, and the only time he’d been in this particular situation, standing over the corpse of a young woman in a morgue, he’d been identifying her body.

  The memory was painful, to say the least, and carried with it a thousand regrets. Though he’d tried to, he hadn’t been able to save her. Leticia Nuñez had been another casualty of Vegas, the city that chewed up beautiful women and spit them out.

  Luke pushed the disturbing recollection aside, because the victim before him deserved his full attention. He vowed not to fail her, too.

  Yesenia Montes was lying on her stomach on a stainless steel table, her head turned to the side, sightless eyes staring forward. Under the light of the high-powered lamp above her, he could see a number of broad, vertical lines on her naked back, shoulders, and buttocks.

  “They’re lividity marks,” Barry explained, thumbing through a three-ring binder.

  Luke was no forensic expert, but he knew such marks were common postmortem artifacts. A body often bore signs of whatever it had been resting against, or upon, in the moments or hours after death.

  Stepping forward, he studied the darkened bands of flesh. They were widely spaced and evenly distributed, obviously not a result of the lion’s attack or caused by the soft dirt she’d been stretched out on. He frowned, guessing such marks couldn’t be found anywhere in nature, and feeling as though he should recognize their origin.

  “What else?” he asked, his pulse accelerating.

  Barry gave a good-natured shrug. “The doctor said he’d never viewed a victim of a lion before, but the wounds were consistent with what he’d researched. Trauma to the spinal cord and cardiac arrest were the primary causes of death.”

  “Hmm,” Luke replied, wondering about the lack of blood.

  “Says here the lion had a broken tooth,” Barry added, flashing his own pearly whites.

  “Really?”

  “One of the punctures left less of an impression than the others,” he said, closing the binder. “Dr. Hoyt made a dentistry mold.”

  “What about DNA?”

  “He took a sample from the bite area, in case there was saliva. And several swabs from …” He cleared his throat. “Other places.”

  Luke glanced at the body on the table. With so many cuts and scrapes on her battered form, it was difficult to determine whether the woman had also been the victim of sexual assault in the days or hours before her death. Noting the pink stains on Barry’s rounded cheeks, Luke decided to discuss that possibility with the medical examiner. “When will Dr. Hoyt be available for a phone consultation?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  Luke sighed and rubbed his tired eyes. There was one more thing he had to do before he went off duty, and it was the worst job imaginable. “Who’s her next of kin?”

  Her house was unnaturally dark, quiet, and empty.

  It was also stiflingly hot, so Shay made the rounds, opening the windows in her bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen, pushing aside the sliding glass door in the living room and turning on the ceiling fan overhead. They had an air conditioner, one that worked, but now that the temperature outside had dropped there was no reason to turn it on. By midnight, if she left the windows open, the house would be cold.

  As predicted, a pile of dirty dishes littered the kitchen sink. A plastic milk jug, sans milk, sat out on the cream-colored tile countertop. The red leather purse she’d been carrying last night was upended next to an open pizza box on the coffee table in front of the TV, proof that Dylan had fended for himself.

  He’d left her a single dollar bill and one solitary slice.

  Upon sight of congealed cheese, red pepper flakes, and grease spots on cardboard, her stomach should have rebelled. It didn’t. Sighing, she sank onto the couch, picked up the cold slice of pizza, and took a bite. It wasn’t half-bad.

  Having anticipated her little brother’s presence, and an inevitable discussion about Angel Martinez, she should have been relieved he wasn’t there. Instead she pictured Yesenia Montes’s battered, bitten body and felt a trickle of unease. Dylan hadn’t left a note, but that was nothing new. She was lucky he hadn’t taken her car.

  Normally Shay appreciated solitude. She worked alone a lot and enjoyed her own company. Her friends were few but constant, her social calendar steady, if uninspired, and her love life … well, her love life had always been hit or miss. More miss than hit, but who was counting? She had her friends. She had her career. And she had Dylan.

  Except that she didn’t have Dylan anymore. She hadn’t had him in a long time. Her mother’s death had torn them both apart, and he’d met the tragedy the way boys do, with defiant glares and sullen silence. Shay, on the other hand, had waged a teenage girl’s rebellion, falling in with the wrong crowd and staying out all night.

  If her father had stepped up as head of the family during that tumultuous time, maybe things would have been different. But her daddy had never been much of a provider, emotionally or financially. Hank Phillips was a restless dreamer who refused to be tied down by mortgages or material things. While Shay went to community college, they’d survived on welfare checks, food stamps, and the grace of God.

  Shay managed to graduate at the top of her class despite these hardships, and when she’d been offered a scholarship to Cal Poly, she’d jumped at the chance to escape her dysfunctional home life. In some ways, she’d sacrificed Dylan to save herself.

  Since then her brother had been distant. By age ten, he’d mastered the art of apathy. She’d given him space, thinking he was missing their mother, having growing pains, and grieving in his own way.

  As soon as she came home from college, their father took off again. Dylan hadn’t shown any reaction to his departure.

  They hadn’t seen Hank in almost five years now. Every so often they got a postcard from Tucson, Albuquerque, or Saskatchewan. The sporadic correspondence was a poor substitute for a father who hadn’t been much of a parent when he had been around.

  She wasn’t sure who’d had the mor
e unconventional upbringing, her or Dylan. Shay had been raised almost solely by her mother, Lilah, a tenderhearted flower child no more equipped for reality, or the trials of parenthood, than her freewheeling husband. She’d been too soft, too emotional, too ethereal for this world.

  For all her faults, Shay had loved her mother desperately, and been loved by her the same way.

  Feeling a lump in her throat. Shay swallowed her sudden sentimentality along with the last bite of pizza. Directly across from her, next to the boxy old TV set, three half-deflated helium balloons were hovering above the carpet, their shiny, crinkly surfaces rustling under the whir of the ceiling fan.

  Happy birthday.

  5

  Dylan made his way down Calle Remolino with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and his head hanging low.

  At just past 10:00 P.M., late by Tenaja standards, the street was deserted. The only sound was the almost indiscernible crunch of his sneakers on hard-packed gravel, and for the thousandth time, he wished he had an iPod.

  He was tired from the long walk and an intense pickup game. Every Saturday night a motley mix of locals, some white, some Indian, played against the only rival team, a group of Mexicans who were short, quick, and ruthless. There had been a few minor scuffles, but that was to be expected, because from the high school cafeteria to the b-ball court, Indians and Mexicans were always feuding.

  As far as Dylan could tell, the two heritages had a lot of similarities, so he wasn’t sure what the beef was. Mexico was part of North America, and the culture was, by definition, a mixture of Native and European. Dylan figured most Mexicans had as much Indian blood as the guys on the reservation.

  Even so, they seemed to hate each other.

  Tenaja Falls was kind of backward that way. A lot of the white kids, who enjoyed a slight majority at Palomar High School, stuck together and acted superior to everyone else. It was lame, but there wasn’t much else to do in this buttfuck town but drink and fight.

  He could see his house in the distance, and knew Shay was home because the lights were on in the living room. Instead of going inside, he decided to keep walking. His pulse accelerated and his mouth went dry at the thought of seeing Angel again.