See Her Run

by Peggy Townsend

  T.J. slid his trucker cap back on his head. “She just had a lot of feelings for people, you know.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  He frowned. “Sure I do. Hay was special.”

  “Hayley’s mom said you two were close.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Aloa waited half a beat. “She also said you might know who killed Hayley.”

  “Hayley didn’t . . .” He stopped. “Wait. What? Nobody killed Hay.”

  Aloa leaned forward. “Emily doesn’t agree. She says the police didn’t do a good job. That Hayley was murdered.”

  T.J.’s eyes darted out over the view then back to Aloa. “Listen, Emily needs to accept what happened,” he said. “Hay was messed up. Everything was going bad. Her shins, the movie, Ethan. She relapsed. The end. Emily doesn’t know anything.”

  “It must have been hard to lose two friends like that.”

  He cleared his throat and gave a slight shake of his head. “It sucked.”

  Aloa waited. A late-afternoon breeze whispered through the trees.

  He plucked at a thread in his faded jeans. “Sometimes, things are going along fine, you know, and then you think you want something big and awesome, and so you go for it, but it turns out when you get there it’s not what you thought at all.”

  “Are you talking about life in general or the Africa trip?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever. Just forget it.” He tossed the denim thread over the edge of the canvas.

  “I read Ethan’s blog,” Aloa said. “He talked about being afraid of the Tibesti trip but said something like he needed to do it to bring change.”

  “Sometimes Ethan thought too much.”

  Again Aloa waited. Silence often drew more than questions did.

  “He was all weirded out about stuff that happened, about Hank being in Africa.”

  Tremblay had never mentioned being in Africa. Aloa stored that bit of information.

  “What stuff are you talking about?”

  “So we went there on this private jet, and there was this guy Hank brought along—some right-wing dickhead. Archie something-or-other.”

  “No last name?” Aloa asked.

  T.J. shrugged. “I don’t remember if he told us, but he was all on our case. He called Ethan and me cowards for not joining the army. Said global warming was a lie designed to kill jobs. Our trip was supposed to be about species loss and climate change, you know. He and Ethan started arguing, Ethan shoved the guy. Hank told Ethan to calm down, that Archie was there with Hank for some important mission and that Ethan would understand later.”

  “What kind of mission?” Aloa asked.

  T.J. shook his head. “Who knows? Hank was always into different stuff. He just kept calling himself a warrior for good and said we’d understand later, but Ethan didn’t like it. He said he didn’t want to be part of anything that Archie guy was part of. He and Hank argued some more. Then Ethan disappeared for five or six days.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “He left the hotel. Told me he needed to get his head together. Hank freaked but I told him Ethan was like that. Sometimes he’d pull a hermit, go off by himself, but he’d be fine when he came back.”

  “And was he?”

  “Sort of. He was all jacked up. He said he’d followed that Archie guy back to the airport and watched all these boxes get unloaded from the jet we’d been on—not our gear but cartons with Chinese writing on them. There were these shady dudes there too. The boxes got loaded on a truck and then the shady dudes left. Ethan got in Hank’s face after that, and he said Hank told him all about the mission and that it would blow my mind if I knew.”

  “He didn’t tell you what it was?”

  T.J. shook his head. “He just said everything had changed, that he was going to leave RedHawk after the trip.”

  “He was going to quit climbing?”

  “Not completely, but the miscarriage shook him up. You know about that, right?”

  Aloa nodded.

  “He was going to write a book.”

  “About climbing?”

  T.J. shook his head. “I think it was about this tribe in the Tibesti. Ethan told me that a few months before he left for Africa, he’d pitched some big-time agent about writing a book about them. They lived for like a hundred years and were all mystical and stuff. She said books on mystical tribes could sell like a million copies and maybe he’d even get a movie deal. Ethan signed up with her. He called it his declaration of independence. He always talked like that.”

  A crow flapped onto a nearby branch with a rush of wings. It eyed the two humans invading its territory and let out a raspy, scolding call. Aloa remembered how her father had admired crows but said you never wanted to get on the bad side of one. He liked to tell the story of a bunch of researchers being dive-bombed months after they’d stopped catching and banding crows. And it wasn’t just the abused crows who’d been set on revenge, her father said. It appeared the birds’ friends and family were out for frontier justice too.

  For a long moment, both T.J. and Aloa studied the bird. Finally, T.J. spoke. “I wish we’d never gone to Africa,” he said. “None of this would have happened.”

  “Ethan wasn’t killed by robbers, was he, T.J.?” Aloa asked gently.

  T.J. bowed his head.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  She held her breath.

  “I didn’t think,” he said finally.

  “What didn’t you think, T.J.?” Aloa kept her voice low.

  “I didn’t think they would kill him.”

  Aloa moved closer, stilled herself. Waited.

  The story came out in half-finished sentences and stuttered words. The arrival of the men in headdresses, the threats, the poking with guns. T.J. had been so frightened, he said, he’d blurted out that their sponsors would pay good money to have the three of them returned safely.

  The men’s captors had paused, asked each man his name, and then sliced the throats of Ethan and Atahir, their guide. They’d bound T.J. and forced him to walk. He’d been in shock so he didn’t remember what else they’d said, only that they’d stopped for the night, his captors had broken into the whiskey the men had brought, and, when the hyenas came, he’d gotten away.

  Aloa knew that just like the followers of any religion, not all Muslims adhered to prohibitions against alcohol. Still, she wondered if the two Chadian spies had been wrong.

  “I never meant for that to happen,” T.J. said, his voice cracking. “I wanted to keep all of us safe.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the truth, T.J.?” Aloa asked.

  T.J. sighed. “I don’t know. People expect you to be this hero when you’re not.”

  Aloa thought of T.J. holding his sibling but not being able to save him.

  “Plus, that reporter, Combs, kept showing up everywhere, asking questions. Hay said I should lie so he’d go away. She said she was going to finish what Ethan started and that she needed everything to be kept quiet for a while.”

  “What did Ethan start?”

  “I guess it was that book.”

  “About the tribe?”

  T.J. nodded.

  “But how could Hayley finish Ethan’s book if she never met the tribe?”

  Aloa watched T.J.’s mind slowly churn. “I don’t know, man. Maybe it wasn’t even that. I know he tried to call her once from this village, about two weeks into the trip. There was a guy there with a satellite phone.”

  “What did he say to her?”

  “I don’t know. I was outside. When he came back he just said she wasn’t there.” T.J. blew out a breath. “Then, later, he sent her a letter.”

  “From the middle of the desert?”

  “He gave it to a trader who was going to Bardaï. That’s a town a few hundred miles north of where we were,” T.J. added when he saw Aloa frown.

  “And you didn’t know what it was about?”

  T.J. shook his head. “He didn’t say. I figured it w
as private.”

  “Did you ask Hayley about it?”

  “By the time I got back she was acting weird and said I should keep my mouth shut about anything Ethan told me. I told her that was easy because Ethan didn’t tell me anything. I just wanted to forget that trip. After that, Hayley got dark and down, you know. She kept saying Ethan would have been so disappointed.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. I thought the same thing, though. That I let Ethan down by freaking out.” He pressed his lips together and swallowed hard. “It was all my fault. If I hadn’t gotten Ethan killed, Hay wouldn’t have killed herself.”

  He pulled in a long breath and scrubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand. “Shit,” he said.

  Aloa gave him a minute to compose himself. “Did you see anybody take a photo of Ethan’s body?”

  “What? No. That’s sick.”

  “How about Calvin, Hayley’s friend? Did you know him?”

  “Sure. I met him a few times.”

  Aloa took a long breath. “His body was found this morning.”

  T.J. looked up. “Ah, man.”

  “And Samantha, Hayley’s ex-roommate, is missing.”

  “Wait. She’s not dead. She’s at this cattle ranch called Wind River. What happened to that Calvin guy?”

  Aloa ignored the question. “Why did Samantha leave, T.J.?”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  From below came a rustle of branches. Aloa looked over the edge of the tarp. Jordan was about twenty feet below, moving smoothly as a dancer. She turned back to T.J.

  “Who’s Boots?”

  “Boots?” T.J. frowned. “I don’t know anybody named that.”

  “He was at the campout,” Aloa prompted. “The cops never interviewed him.”

  “Oh.” T.J.’s eyes darted left. “Um, I don’t know. He, um, just showed up. Just a guy. He, um, was tall.”

  “Is that what somebody told you to say, T.J.?” Aloa remembered the exact same description in the police reports.

  “No.” He shook his head with a little too much earnestness.

  “Look, I’m not the enemy, T.J. I’m here to help.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” the climber mumbled.

  “Think of Hayley. Think of Ethan. You don’t want to let them down again, do you?”

  T.J.’s chin dropped to his chest. Another rustle of branches came from below. Jordan was closer now.

  Aloa leaned in. “What was going on, T.J.?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, man.”

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  T.J. rubbed a hand over his face. His voice came out strangled and low. “I think it was Hank. I think Hank pulled the strings.”

  CHAPTER 26

  At home, Aloa made herself two soft-boiled eggs that she spooned over slices of the Bayonne ham and toasted baguette and sprinkled with sea salt and spicy Piment d’Espelette.

  She ate standing at the front window, watching sunset color the bay. The climb had made her ravenous and the conversation with T.J. busied her mind with thoughts of details and connections instead of with calories. Work had always been good for her.

  Some of the yolk dripped down her fingers, and she licked it off. After, she washed the dishes and made herself a strong pot of coffee in preparation for the work ahead.

  At her desk, she read about Tremblay’s degree in mathematics from UCLA and the years he’d spent as a bass player in a series of B-grade rock bands in Southern California. He’d done a little acting (a couple of commercials) and spent two dissolute years in Europe and then India—years he called “enriching” in an interview but which seemed to involve a lot of drinking and drugs—and then had been summoned home after his father was diagnosed with a rare neuromuscular disease. He found his father’s company at the brink of bankruptcy following a lawsuit by three men who claimed one of RedHawk’s products had caused them to suffer debilitating strokes. The lawsuit had been settled and, to almost everyone’s surprise, Tremblay turned out to have a talent for business. He rebranded RedHawk’s products and hired the daughter of a powerful conservative legislator as his marketing director when a bill designed to regulate the supplement industry was introduced. He also produced two TV shows—American Mercenaries and American Bounty Hunters—whose chief audience members were those most likely to buy RedHawk products: young, testosterone-driven males.

  Aloa considered Tremblay. He was arrogant and insufferable but also smart. Outside, darkness had fallen.

  She made a few notes and added what she knew to her timeline—Tremblay arriving in Africa, Ethan sending a letter to Hayley from the desert, Hayley insisting T.J. lie, Calvin dead—and wondered what she’d missed. What did it mean that Hank pulled the strings?

  She was just getting up and deciding whether to go for a walk or pour herself a glass of Pellegrino when her phone rang.

  “What the hell, Ink?” said a sandpaper voice.

  “Hello to you, too, Tick,” she said.

  “We’ve been waiting. What gives with the . . .” He stopped. “Wait. Did you hear that?”

  There was a tinny echo on the line as if either she or Tick had stepped into a cavernous room.

  “Oh, that,” she said. “I think my phone’s dying.”

  “Dying, hell,” Tick said. “That’s Uncle Satan on the line.”

  Long before the revelations of Edward Snowden, Tick—and the rest of the Brain Farm—had been firm believers in the intrusive reach of the US government. Which is why only Tick had a cell phone, and it was so antiquated it barely qualified as a communications device, let alone one that could be monitored.

  “Could be, but I think it’s the phone. It barely holds a charge anymore,” Aloa started to say, but Tick was already barking orders. “Not another word. We’ll rendezvous at twenty-fifteen hours. Usual place.”

  “At Justus?” Aloa asked.

  “Jeez, Ink, don’t say it out loud.” He groaned. “OK. New plan. We’ll meet you at Maja’s,” he said, and disconnected the call.

  The men were out of breath from the hike up the hill when they arrived forty-five minutes later. They flung themselves into the rosé chair and the couch with noises that sounded like the last gasps of a steam engine.

  Aloa fetched them water, which they drank greedily.

  “So there’s been a new development,” she started to say when the men had caught their breath, but Tick held up his hand.

  “Not another word until you take the battery out of your phone,” he said.

  “Yeah, Uncle Satan is everywhere,” Doc said, and glanced out the window into the evening.

  There was a bird in Africa, the drogo, that could mimic the alarm cries of its avian brethren and even of meerkats. It would sound a warning, then swoop in to eat while other birds fled. An article she’d read about the drogo said it would be as if a dog could yell “fire” in a crowded restaurant and then settle in for dinner when everybody ran. And while Aloa didn’t believe in overreaction, she also knew inaction had its dark side.

  “How about if I put my phone in the fridge?” she said. “I heard Snowden did that.”

  The gray-hairs nodded vigorously.

  “You guys want coffee?” she asked.

  “We’re too old,” P-Mac said. “We could die before that fancy coffee of yours is ready. You got any red lying around?”

  Aloa shook her head, put her phone next to the yogurt in the fridge, and dug up a bottle of wine. She settled the men with glasses, then broke the news. “I’m pretty sure Calvin’s motorcycle tires didn’t match the crime scene.”

  The men grumbled a mixture of relief and disappointment.

  “But this news is worse,” she said. “Calvin is dead. Murdered, I think.”

  P-Mac’s head snapped up. “Gun? Knife? Garrote? Blunt instrument?”

  “None of those,” Aloa said, and described Calvin’s death scene.

  “That’s some sickness there,” Doc said.


  The old war photographer’s eyes shimmered. “I’ll see what I can do about getting him into a military cemetery. He deserves that much from his country.”

  “Damn straight,” Doc said. “He also deserves what guys like him don’t get and that’s justice.”

  Tick stood. “He’s right, boys. We got us some work to do.” He pointed. “Doc, I want you to run down and get us a box of cabernet. P-Mac, I’d like you to go through the crime scene photos again and check the shots Ink took at the shop. I’ll hit the computer and see if I can track down the truck that killed our mechanic friend, and find the witness the cops conveniently couldn’t locate.”

  P-Mac and Doc heaved themselves to their feet while Tick settled himself in front of the computer. From his shirt pocket he pulled out a pair of orange zebra-print reading glasses he’d appropriated from the lost-and-found bin at the library and slipped them on. The glasses were a direct outgrowth of his belief in freeganism: the avoidance of consumerism and the use of salvaged or discarded goods. All the men were adherents of this philosophy. Consequently, they often looked like a yard sale on six legs.

  Aloa watched the men move and mutter and went to the kitchen to heat up a bowl of leftover ginger-carrot soup. She could have told the Brain Farm that she could handle the story herself, but with the image of Calvin’s body fresh in her head and the feel of her vertiginous fall still in her body, it was good to have living, breathing people around.

  She returned to the living room with her soup and went to work.

  She borrowed Tick’s antiquated phone and made a call to the property manager, who sounded like he was well past buzzed and headed toward full-on drunk. Nope, he didn’t have the surveillance tapes from the building, the cops had taken those, he told her, but if she wanted to join him at the Patch, he’d buy her a drink. She declined.

  She then moved to a check of Tremblay’s property holdings, where she uncovered the fact he’d sold a four-bedroom townhouse in Vail and an apartment in Barcelona in the last year and also that he lived, not in the Nicasio Valley as she had assumed, but in a fancy Nob Hill apartment with a view of the bay and rents that hovered around $10,000 a month. She guessed, for the rich, cutting back was selling your vacation homes. She wrote down the apartment’s address.