See Her Run

by Peggy Townsend

  She was stopped from more fashion musings by a yelp from P-Mac. The Brain Farm was on her couch, studying the crime scene photos on the obscenely large TV she’d grudgingly accepted. They had obviously hacked into her email and found the file she’d requested from Michael yesterday. She wanted to tell them her email was private and not to be tampered with, but what good would it do to set rules for anarchists?

  P-Mac moved toward the TV in a half crouch. He pointed triumphantly. “There it is, baby. Right there,” he said.

  In front of him was a wide-angle photo of the crime scene, Hayley’s body splayed in a sandy wash. One arm was spread outward as if reaching for something, the other folded almost protectively across her chest. Her wounded body and missing eye belied the appearance of someone at peace.

  “Crank it up, Tick.” P-Mac tapped the screen. “Zoom in right there.”

  Tick tapped commands into the laptop, causing the photo to enlarge and shift and then enlarge again.

  P-Mac pointed to a corner of the TV. “See that? That’s your evidence.”

  Tick and Doc got up from the couch and joined P-Mac. They squinted at the screen. “Hell, yeah,” Doc and Tick chorused.

  “I don’t see anything,” Aloa said.

  P-Mac waved her over and pointed to a grainy image of a spiky creosote bush located five or six yards from Hayley’s body. There was something under it, something small with a curved shape to it. “See that?” He tapped the screen again. “That’s your answer.”

  “Your big fat answer,” Tick echoed.

  Aloa wondered how much of the wine box the old boys had emptied.

  “What is it?” Aloa asked.

  P-Mac straightened. “If that’s not a sapper tab, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “The leading edge of America’s sword,” Tick cried.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Aloa leaned closer to the TV. She could just make out the small, arched shape. It was pushed against the base of the bush, most of it covered in sand. One edge curled outward to reveal what looked like the top half of the letter S or a C.

  “Comes from the French word, ‘to dig,’” P-Mac said. “Sappers were brave sons of bitches, the guys who dug trenches under enemy fire so the attacking army could get close to a fortification. Nowadays they blow up stuff, clear landmines. There are only three skill tabs in the army: Special Forces, Ranger, and Sapper. You’ve got to be badass to wear them.”

  “So you’re saying . . . ?” Aloa asked.

  “I’m saying, somebody associated with the army, a sapper, was near your girl’s body when or just before she died,” P-Mac said.

  An eerie tickle ran down Aloa’s spine, the sense that something dangerous had just tapped her on the shoulder. She’d had the same feeling once, hiking in Montana with her father. Circling back a short time later, they’d found the paw print of a grizzly over their own footsteps.

  “Her killer?” she said.

  “Exactly,” said the Brain Farm and nodded their collective gray heads.

  “If that thing is what you say it is, how come the police didn’t take it as evidence?” Aloa asked.

  “Look at the shadows,” Tick said. “It’s late. The cops probably wanted to get out of there. They scooped and scrammed.”

  “Plus something like that would wreck their suicide theory,” Doc said. “Pigs see what they want to see. That’s why you’ve got those white cops shooting black people for felony possession of the wrong skin color.”

  Aloa remembered the surliness of Detective Torres, his disdain for campers like Hayley who came into his jurisdiction and caused trouble with the locals. And wasn’t the lead detective a few weeks from retirement when he caught Hayley’s case? Maybe he wasn’t a bad guy, maybe he wanted to do his job. But wouldn’t it be easier to pick the obvious answer instead of leaving with an unsolved murder on your conscience? A last failure?

  “I’m thinking that girl didn’t go into the desert voluntarily,” P-Mac said.

  The Brain Farm nodded their heads.

  “It was a death march,” Tick said.

  “You can run but you’ll only die tired,” P-Mac said ominously. “That was something they said in Iraq.”

  “But at some point, your girl fought back,” Doc said. “She tore that tab off her killer’s shirt.”

  “She wanted us to find her murderer,” Tick said. “She gave us a last clue.”

  Aloa lifted a hand. “Hang on a minute, please.”

  A lesson she’d learned as a reporter was not to immediately dismiss a theory but also not to embrace it without question.

  “So you’re saying Hayley was killed by a sapper, by someone in the army?”

  The men looked serious.

  “Are you thinking it was the mechanic, Calvin?” Aloa said.

  “Maybe he followed her there. Maybe he got triggered. You said he was in love with her,” Tick said.

  “No one who goes to war ever comes back the same,” P-Mac said.

  “Was he a sapper?” Aloa asked.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” Tick said.

  “You should eat your soup,” Doc said, handing Aloa the container the men had brought from Justus. “Erik said we shouldn’t leave until we saw you eat it.”

  Aloa pried the lid off the take-out container. Smells of ginger and citrus rose to meet her. She thought of Calvin. Had war planted the seeds of violence in him? Enough to kill a friend?

  “Wine?” Doc asked and held up the box.

  “I’m good,” Aloa said, and took a spoonful of soup, her mind running.

  A few minutes later, Tick sagged back in his chair. “Infantry. Not a sapper.”

  “A wannabe then,” P-Mac said. “I’ve seen it. He could have washed out of the program but wouldn’t let go of the idea.”

  “He seemed more like a guard dog than somebody who was jealous,” Aloa said.

  “And what happens when you mistreat a dog? He bites back,” Doc said.

  “Or it could have been PTSD, a triggered blackout,” P-Mac said. “I’ve seen guys lose days after something as simple as a car backfire or a scene in a movie.”

  “Maybe something set him off out there in the desert,” Doc said. “Maybe he thought she was the enemy.”

  “We need to find out if he was there,” P-Mac said. “You know, look at credit cards, cell phone records.”

  “Can you get hold of them, Tick? Maybe find Hayley’s cell phone records too?” Aloa asked.

  “I can try,” said the grizzled anarchist.

  “How about VA records for Calvin, psychiatric reports?”

  “Those are tough,” Tick said. He looked up as a grin split his face. “But there are always back doors to what they don’t want you to know.”

  P-Mac began shimmying his shoulders in a lewd way and singing an old blues tune. “You gotta open doors, on what they don’t want you to see.”

  “Shut up, old man,” Tick growled.

  “Ladies in the dark, little girls in their finery,” P-Mac sang.

  Tick lifted a fist. “How’d you like a bite of a knuckle sandwich?”

  “Wait. Wait. That’s it,” Doc said. “‘Little girls in their finery.’ ‘What they don’t want you to see.’” He snapped his fingers. “What if Calvin is also the reason we can’t find Samantha? What if that goofball is out murdering women he befriends?”

  “Jesus,” Aloa said.

  She thought of the serial killer she once had interviewed in prison, a cell-phone salesman named Jimmy Anderson who’d abducted five women over the course of three years and, after raping and torturing them to death, cut off their index fingers to wear as a necklace. Anderson had seemed completely normal as he talked to Aloa about growing up in Oklahoma, about hunting with his contractor father, and dropping out of TCU. And yet, there had been something in his eyes that gave away the sickness inside him: a flat deadness that made Aloa feel as if she were sitting across from the devil himself.

  She had felt none of that with Calvin a
nd yet . . . She thought of him waving the knife, of his warning about staying away from the High Priest. What if the High Priest was an alter ego? What if he was out there murdering women? A ripple of nausea passed through her as she imagined him standing over Hayley’s body. She set the soup aside.

  She was saved from considering more by a discreet knock at the front door.

  She stood. “You guys do what you can. I’ll be back in an hour or so.” But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. The Brain Farm was already deep in argument, zooming in and out on crime scene photos and dissecting investigations into serial killers who had haunted California: the Grim Sleeper, the Night Stalker, the Trailside Killer. Aloa hated the way the media turned murder into movie titles, the way it tried to titillate with death. She’d covered enough trials to know murder was neither sexy nor entertaining. It was ugly and evil and the very darkest part of humanity.

  CHAPTER 18

  Sunk in the soft leather seat of a black Porsche SUV, Aloa was whisked to a three-story house in the Marina District across from the Palace of Fine Arts.

  It was a neighborhood of expensive homes, built on a former marshland that had been covered with the rubble of bricks and stone from the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake and later converted to housing by developers. Its boggy, hodgepodge foundation would come to haunt the neighborhood in 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake returned the neighborhood to a tumble of shattered walls and fallen chimneys. It was quickly rebuilt and now housed the city’s newest and most hip millionaires.

  The driver pulled up in front of a sage-colored stucco house accented with rich wood and tall windows. Its straight lines gave it a more modern feel than the Mediterranean Revival–style homes around it.

  “I’ve notified Mr. Collins of your arrival,” said the man. He had a ramrod-straight back and brush-cut hair and had identified himself as Vincent. She guessed he was ex-military.

  He led Aloa across the sidewalk and through a pair of wood-and-frosted-glass gates to the house’s front door. The air here smelled of salt and sea and money.

  Vincent held his cell phone up to a recessed reader and escorted Aloa through a pair of hammered-copper doors to a vestibule of wood and stone where an elevator awaited.

  Aloa stepped into the paneled cubicle and Vincent leaned in and tapped a button. “There you go, miss,” he said.

  Aloa did not believe in stereotypes, but as the elevator doors closed with an almost reverent hush, she suddenly wished them to be true. She hoped Michael had turned into the hackneyed geek—unwashed, scruffy beard, sweatpants, ratty shirt—and that this beautiful house would be filled with rumpled couches, Star Trek posters, pizza boxes, a pool table.

  Instead, the elevator doors opened to an expanse of wood and glass. Expensive parquet floors, sleek furniture, and a handsome blaze in a floor-to-ceiling fireplace filled the space. Rock music played softly from hidden speakers. She stepped out and there he was near a bank of windows: dark-haired, feet bare, wearing jeans and a cream-colored thermal top that showed off buff pectoral muscles and biceps. Aloa could not help the ripple of want that tickled low in her belly.

  “Aloa,” he said.

  “Good to see you, Michael,” she answered, though they both knew it was a lie.

  For a moment, there was no sound except for the faint thrum of rock music, like an erratically beating heart, and she wanted to step back into the elevator, push the buttons, and go.

  “Shall I take off my shoes?” Aloa asked instead, looking at his feet on the beautiful floors.

  “If you want,” he said. “I lived in Japan for a while and just got in the habit, but I don’t ask others to do it. I have slippers if you want.”

  “I guess I’ll keep my boots on,” Aloa said, remembering the socks she’d pulled on with their threadbare heels.

  “Please. Come in,” he said, and Aloa moved into the room. Awkwardness was a wall between them.

  “That’s a nice view.” Aloa nodded her head toward the front windows, which looked out onto the Palace of Fine Arts. It had been built for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition and now was one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. At night, its soaring columns were golden with light.

  “Maybeck is one of my favorites,” Michael said of the building’s architect.

  “I’m more the Julia Morgan type,” Aloa said.

  “Can I get you something? Wine? A martini?” asked Michael, ignoring her challenge. He swept his arm toward a beautiful coffee table dotted with small plates of sushi and bowls of edamame and pickled vegetables. “I ordered a few things. I didn’t know if you’d be hungry.”

  “No thanks. I just ate,” Aloa answered, guessing he didn’t know her history. People usually pressed plates of fattening foods on former anorexics. Pastas, cheeses, cakes—as if not eating was simply due to not having enough hearty food in front of you.

  “Well.” Michael looked toward the fireplace where a blaze crackled against the evening chill.

  “I’ll take a glass of wine, though,” Aloa said.

  Michael seemed relieved to have something to do. “Pinot?”

  “Sounds good,” Aloa said as he went over to a curved bar made of some kind of exotic wood.

  She stood, her eyes roaming the space as he opened the wine: gleaming kitchen, a staircase descending to the floors below.

  “Your home is pretty impressive,” she said.

  “I guess,” he said. “I bought it a year ago. I needed something near the office. We’re transitioning most of our folks here.”

  “But you live in New York,” Aloa said.

  “Most of the time. I also have a place in Montana.” He said it almost apologetically.

  He poured two glasses of wine and moved toward her. He smelled faintly of soap.

  His eyes moved from her hair to her lips, which she’d painted a dark burgundy. “You look good, Aloa,” he said quietly.

  “Stress and poverty do wonders for a girl,” she said.

  He smiled. “I appreciate that you came.”

  “You’re paying me, aren’t you?”

  A pause. A slight dilation of his amber eyes.

  “I suppose I am,” Michael said. “Shall we sit for a few minutes?” He gestured toward the couch.

  “You’re the boss,” Aloa said. She took the wineglass, careful that their hands would not touch, and waited for him to settle. She perched on the opposite end of the sofa.

  He swirled the wine and took a sip, not pretentiously but appreciatively. Aloa did the same. The wine tasted of blackberries and mineraled soils. Exquisite, of course.

  She set the glass aside and cleared her throat. “Listen, before we go any further, I need to clear something up.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Exactly what made you hire me? You and I both know there are plenty of journalists out there who’d jump at the chance to write for you. Plenty of reporters who aren’t carrying around the baggage that I am,” she said. “If pity is the reason, then I’m out of here. I don’t need some prince swooping in to save the ruined reporter from the streets.”

  “That’s not how it is,” he said quietly. He swirled his wine in the glass. “I asked you to check out the story because you’re a good reporter, Aloa,” he said. “The people at Novo are great, but they only want the big story. They don’t see why anybody would care about some woman who walked off into the desert. They don’t understand that she’s somebody’s daughter, somebody’s friend.”

  Aloa saw his jaw work. Bruce Springsteen leaked softly from the speakers.

  “Or somebody’s sister?” she asked.

  He tossed back his wine and poured himself another glass. “Yeah, that too.”

  Aloa knew what Michael’s sister had meant to him. He’d told her out on the raft one day when the heat was like a blanket and even the frogs wished for a breeze.

  “You had no part in Michelle dying,” Aloa said.

  “The hell I didn’t.” He stood up and went over again to
the window. “The reason she ended up where she did is exactly my fault. I told her not to push him, but she did. I should have gotten her out of there.”

  He shoved a hand in the pocket of his jeans.

  “When she died, people said, ‘Oh well, just another dead delinquent. So what?’ She wasn’t cute enough, not all-American-girl enough—until my father shot himself, and then the press descended like flies. You want to know why I wanted you to do this story?”

  He turned back to her.

  “That’s what I asked,” Aloa said.

  “Hayley’s death felt the same way to me. Like nobody cared enough to look beyond the obvious. Did you know Hayley had a miscarriage five months before Ethan left?”

  Aloa felt a wave of lightheadedness. “Nobody told me.” She took another sip of wine.

  “She was only about eight weeks along, but Emily said she and Ethan had already decided the Africa trip was going to be his last. They were going to move to Wyoming, to live off the land instead of living off sponsor money. He even built her a cradle, for Chrissake. Hayley told her mom it took feeling a life inside her to understand that simply walking the earth was a miracle. When she lost the baby, it was more than a month before she accepted it wasn’t inside her anymore. Then Ethan died.”

  He moved away from the window toward her. “She was somebody, ’Lo. I knew you would get that. I knew you would see Hayley as more than a headline because I’ve read the stories you’ve done. I also knew that, given the opportunity, you would work twice as hard as anybody else. I trust you to do this right.”

  Aloa’s hand shook as she set down her glass of wine. Change the subject, she told herself. Change it now.

  “You know the mom is a little off,” she told him.

  “I gathered that.”

  “She told me she talked to Hayley’s ghost.”

  “Grief is grief, ’Lo.”

  He stood halfway between her and the windows, a distance that seemed to stretch from the past to the present and made them quiet.