Still not sure which news she was referring to, I switched to more neutral ground. “Any word on how he’s doing?”
“He survived the ride to the ER,” she said, picking up her phone. “Ask me, that right there is a goddamn miracle.”
I waited to see if she had anything else for me, but she was focused on her computer screen, dialing a number from it. A few rings, then she said, “Yeah, this is Deputy Sheriff Hollis Zulke, out in Marfa? We just picked up your BOLO.”
CHAPTER 19
I spent the afternoon and most of the night listening to the meth cook across the hall perfect her impression of Janis Joplin. At the literal crack of dawn, a deputy appeared with Benny and Steve.
“Jesus, you must have left right after she called you,” I said to Benny as the deputy let me out.
“And I got so much time to spare right now,” he growled.
The deputy led us to the squad room where Hector and I had been booked the night before, him in front and Benny behind me with the dog. When we got there, Zulke was at her desk. Hector was nowhere in sight. They sat me in a chair out of earshot and did some paperwork, then Benny put Steve on the lead, handed it to me, and herded us down the hall and out into the alley.
Maines’s Crown Vic was parked there, next to Benny’s cop car. Steve eyed a nearby telephone pole with a wistful whine, and I stepped over to let him water it. When he was done, Benny unlocked the passenger side of his cruiser and gestured us in.
“How’s Maines going to get home?” I said, nodding toward the Crown Vic.
“The hospital’ll fly him in when he’s stabilized,” Benny said. “He won’t be driving for a while.”
My guts were trying to do all the knots in the Boy Scout handbook. “How bad is he?”
“We’ll stop by the hospital on our way out,” Benny said, sliding behind the wheel.
“What about—Juan?” I asked, needing the pause to remember the name from Hector’s fake ID.
Benny gave me a quizzical frown, and I felt a blip of relief. If the cops had busted Hector’s identity, Benny would know about it.
“There was a local helping us with the case,” I explained. “They locked him up last night, too.”
“Oh, the Mexican dude? His wife came and sprang him last night.”
Benny was focused on getting his cruiser out of the parking space and into the street, which was a good thing. I couldn’t see my face, but I felt the blood drain out of it like someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of my neck. Steve seemed to sense that I wasn’t feeling like I’d just won the lottery and watched me with what I could swear was sympathy as he settled down on the console next to me.
The concept of Hector having a wife, even a fake one, gave me some unpleasant moments, especially in light of the feeling I’d had earlier about him not telling me something. He had to be portable, considering his coyote work and his concerns about the feds, so where the hell had he picked up a female accomplice? I won’t try to pretend I wasn’t jealous, because that was at least fifty percent of it, and the rest was resentment. I’d tied myself in knots more than once for a man who didn’t deserve it, and it hadn’t been enjoyable. I wasn’t looking for a repeat performance.
CHAPTER 20
It was about forty minutes to the medical center in Alpine, which gave me plenty of time to stew. I ran through my recent interactions with Hector in my head, trying to find cracks, but I knew it was pointless. Once my hormones are engaged, my radar is no better than anyone else’s. I’d just have to wait until the other shoe dropped.
Benny pulled into a vast parking lot in front of a low, sprawling building almost indistinguishable from the flat brown landscape around it. I put thoughts of Hector away and got out of the car.
“You can’t bring pets in here,” the guy at the reception desk said when he saw us.
Benny expanded his considerable chest. “Service dog.”
“He don’t got no vest on.”
“He’s undercover,” Benny said, keeping a straight face.
Receptionman didn’t look convinced, but he gave us directions to ICU without any more argument. When we got there, Benny showed his ID to a passing nurse, who took us to Maines’s private room. A young blond doctor was inside, making notes on a clipboard.
Maines’s eyes were open, but he looked pretty out of it. He lay completely flat, his neck swathed in bandages and gauze. A couple of IVs ran into one bare, bony arm, which was pale and freckled, like a kid’s.
The doctor came around the bed and shook hands, introducing himself as the surgeon. “If he can survive the next twenty-four hours, he’ll probably be OK.”
“What’s the hurdle?” Benny asked him.
“Stroke,” the doctor said. “We repaired the vascular injuries—the veins—and everything seems to be flowing fine right now, but as healing sets in things can change fast. We have to run the gauntlet—with his medications, I mean—between him bleeding too easily or clotting up.”
“Makes sense,” Benny muttered, looking over at the bed. Maines’s eyes had moved in the direction of our voices. “Can we talk to him?”
The doctor looked down at Steve, who was gazing anxiously toward the lumpy, disinfected form on the bed. “Go easy, OK? No Frisbee or anything.”
Maines’s fingers lifted toward us as the doctor left, and Steve pulled me over to lick at them. A faint smile crossed Maines’s face, which was so pale it looked almost blue. His eyes moved slowly up to my face.
“Nice work,” he croaked.
“Same to you, smart-ass,” I murmured in reply.
His gaze shifted to Benny. “Get her?”
“Sorry, John,” Benny said, coming closer. “Julia gave us a description, and I put a bulletin out on that, but we been waiting on you for full specs on the car.”
Maines swallowed carefully and looked at the ceiling. “Bronze four-door. Arizona plates. Sells dealer.”
“Get a look at the driver?” Benny asked, taking out his notebook.
Maines started to shake his head, then thought better of it. “No.”
Steve had hopped up onto the side chair and laid his head gingerly on the edge of the mattress. His nose was almost touching Maines’s left ear.
Benny fiddled with his tiny pencil, looking away. Finally he asked, “How’d she get you, man? You ain’t that easy to blindside.”
“My fault,” Maines croaked, closing his eyes. “Took my eye off the ball.”
I’ve seen a lot of horrifying stuff in my day, so I couldn’t figure out why watching an ex-cop that I didn’t particularly like struggle to form simple sentences was ripping me up so much. Then Benny said, “The ex-husband full of bullet holes didn’t make you kinda wary?” and my head split open.
“He didn’t know,” I said, the words almost choking me as they spilled out. “He never got your message.”
Maines’s eyes closed, his lips compressing into a faint smile. Benny glared at me.
After what seemed like a decade, he asked Maines, “You want me to call Grace?”
“Better,” Maines said. His sluggish eyes moved to me. “You gonna fill us in?”
Afraid Benny might hit me, I stepped around to the end of the bed. “That’s not Rachael Pestozo. It’s somebody pretending to be her. The real Rachael Pestozo died six months ago.” I looked into Maines’s half-closed eyes. “Juan identified the body.”
I saw him understand who I was talking about. A kind of weary merriment passed across his face.
“Why would anyone want to impersonate Rachael Pestozo?” Benny said.
“She had cut her ties in Azula and was moving to a new job in Arizona,” I said. “If she mentioned that to someone around here before she died, maybe they took advantage of the opportunity to get a U.S. passport.”
Benny snorted. “And then fucked it all up by trying to kill a man on American soil? Kinda stupid.”
“Rachael was also a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation,” I said. “Sells is the capital. They have their own justice system.”
Benny frowned at me, and I explained, “My mother is Apache. I grew up in Florence, just south of Phoenix.”
“Well, whatever deal they’ve got, I doubt it covers attempted murder off their lands,” Benny said. “That’s a capital crime.”
“It depends on the deal they’ve made with the state,” I said, trying to remember what had happened to the guy who lived next door to my cousin Norma on the Gila River reservation when I was in my teens. He’d shotgunned his wife while drunk one night in August. The smell of hot, dry dirt and cigarettes came back to me, his murky ramblings and her sister screaming.
My brain slammed shut before the memory could come all the way up; something ugly had been trying to come with it. I couldn’t imagine a memory more disturbing than the sight of that woman’s brain matter all over the front wall of the house, with her almost-headless body sprawled on the porch below, but the filter in my head makes these decisions without my input.
“I’d better call the feds,” Benny muttered, feeling for his phone. He headed for the door and stepped out into the hall.
“Pointless,” Maines croaked as the door swung shut, leaving us alone together in the quiet white room. I could barely hear him, and stepped closer to the bed.
“Pissed them off going to Cuba,” he said. “They won’t do jack, they hear I’m involved.”
“Listen,” I said, as much to keep him still as anything else, “Benny didn’t say that Orson was Rachael’s husband, in that message. By the time—”
The look in his eye stopped me. “Don’t matter now. Forget it.”
It was worded like a forgiveness, but both his tone and his face told me it was something else. I couldn’t tell what.
The ache in my chest was too much. I pushed it away and turned on the brain. “Hector says Rachael died in December. When did she leave Azula?” I asked Maines.
“Fifth,” Maines croaked.
I narrowed my eyes, thinking. “Liz Harman’s still working on Orson’s time of death, but her first guess was between three and six months ago. It’s June 15 now, so that would make the earliest he could have died December 15.”
Maines blinked at me. “Close.”
“Maybe close enough for Rachael to have killed him before she left.” I nodded. “Estimating time of death isn’t an exact science.”
I remembered Hector’s report that Orson had been pressuring Rachael to have surgery, and the impostor’s comments when we’d found her in Ojinaga.
“Did you find anything about a restraining order when you were looking into Rachael’s history?” I asked Maines.
“No…” He paused to take a slow breath. “Wish I had. Would have slowed us down.”
My chest convulsed again. What the hell was that? I swallowed it away and said, “Well, Rachael and her ex both dying under mysterious circumstances, within six months of each other—there has to be a connection.”
“Beware the obvious,” Maines replied.
“Sometimes the obvious is the answer,” I told him. “Although I’m not seeing the obvious on why this woman wanted to pose as Rachael.” I paused, then asked, “Are you sure there’s nothing about her that would make her identity worth trying to kill you to keep it?”
“Did a pretty good check on her,” Maines said. He swallowed, and I could tell that talking was costing him. “Nothing unusual in her background. Except the O’odham thing.”
I sighed, frustrated. “Two-and-a-half dead people to play Indian Princess just for the fun of it seems excessive. There must be a reason for it that we’re not seeing.”
Benny came back in, looking wounded.
“I see you mentioned my name,” Maines rasped.
Benny’s caterpillar eyebrows jumped up his low forehead. “Something you want to tell me?”
Maines produced that near-death smile again, and I started thinking about brain damage. He’s not usually much of a smiler.
“They’ll look into jurisdiction and get back to me,” Benny said, when it was apparent Maines wasn’t going to answer him. “That’s fedspeak for ‘fuck off.’”
Maines moved his fingers at me and opened his mouth to say something, but the monitor above his bed started to beep. Steve leapt to the floor, barking, and a couple of nurses rushed in. Benny and I hustled out of the way as the doctor appeared.
“Y’all need to wait outside,” he said.
CHAPTER 21
It was a long two hours in the waiting room, a mint-green icebox with a view of the parking lot and a television blaring in one corner. When the young blond doctor finally reappeared, he looked completely different.
“Stroke,” he informed us, affability gone. “We’ve got him stabilized, but the bleeding was pretty extensive.”
Benny was sitting with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped, looking at the floor. I’d been standing up, but now I needed a chair. The doctor watched me sit down, then went on.
“We won’t know the extent of the damage for a while, but he’s almost certainly going to need rehab, and maybe long-term care.” The doctor paused. “Does he have any family?”
Benny’s head dropped so that all I could see was the top of it, sprigged with his stiff black hair. “I called his ex-wife. She’s on her way.”
A cold horror was seeping up through the soles of my shoes, climbing toward my head. I’ve killed people, and been responsible for their deaths in other ways, but they mostly deserved it. Never anything like this.
The television faded into silence, and the glint off the silver sports car I’d been watching while the doctor talked burst into supernova, obliterating everything else. I sat there blind and deaf until I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the nurses.
“Miss?”
I blinked the blinding light out of my eyes and looked up. Benny was standing behind her, his face alarmed.
“I’m fine,” I said quickly, getting up. “Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER 22
Benny’s face was even grimmer than usual as we walked to his cruiser and got in. My mind was going in circles, spiraling out into space and then back into the present moment again, over and over. I couldn’t stand being in either place. I put my hands up over my ears. I don’t know why. It was quiet in the car.
Benny glanced over at the movement.
“You’ve got to let me make this right,” I said, dropping my hands.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” he replied, turning his stony gaze back to the windshield. He didn’t start the motor.
“Let me go get her.”
Benny made a noise that was somewhere between a snort and a laugh. He didn’t answer.
“I can do it,” I said, looking at him. “You know I can.”
“So can the cops,” he said. “And they won’t make a bigger mess in the process.”
“She’ll be gone by the time they finish drawing straws for the job. She had no qualms whatsoever about trying to kill Maines. Whatever she’s up to, she knows she’s got to get it done fast and then disappear.”
“I put a BOLO out on you and found you in twenty-four hours,” Benny reminded me.
“Once she gets to the reservation, no BOLO of yours is going to bring her back,” I said. “Half of the Tohono O’odham lands are in Mexico, and the tribe doesn’t let anybody patrol that border. There’s absolutely nothing to keep her from crossing over and disappearing forever, whenever she wants to.”
As the words came out of my mouth I was struck by the absurdity of what I was saying. Why would “Rachael” go all the way to Arizona to disappear into Mexico when she could do it way easier from here? All she had to do was get across the bridge.
“I don’t care,” Benny said, sounding tired. “Tribal cops, Arizona state troopers, FBI—it don’t matter to me who gets her, as long as someone does. And someone will.”
“Look at me,” I said.
He did it.
My voice felt like a slush of ice pouring out of my throat. “You can lock me up, but
as soon as I get out—even if I’m a hundred—I’m going to find this broad, wherever she is. I can do it now, while it’s easy, or I can do it later, when it’s hard. But I’m going to do it.”
Benny and I sat there staring at each other for a long time.
“Be a human being,” I pleaded. “Just this once, be a human being instead of a cop.”
He didn’t say anything, just leaned forward and started the car.
“Where’s Rachael’s body?” he said.
CHAPTER 23
The Ojinaga hospital was a surprisingly modern-looking teal-and-white building just off one of the big main boulevards. The building directory was in both Spanish and English, and we quickly found our way to the morgue. Nobody gave us any grief about Steve, who trotted along next to me like we were related. I was just starting to think our task was going to be easy when the white-coated young woman at the front desk shook her head.
“You have to be a relative,” she told Benny, in Spanish.
He pointed to the badge pinned to his shirt pocket, as he had at the hospital in Marfa. “It’s a criminal matter.”
“Do you have a warrant?” she asked him.
He sighed and looked at me, taking a step back from the window with one hand braced against the counter edge. After a minute, he stepped back up and took another shot at it.
“I need to confirm the identity of a U.S. citizen whose body has been here since December,” he said. “If I have to get a warrant, it might turn into an investigation.”
She glanced at me, uncertain, then said, “One moment,” and shut the reception window.
We watched her roll to the telephone and make a call, talk for several minutes, then come back and slide the window open.
“Dr. Darling will be with you shortly.”
“This is going to be tricky,” I murmured to Benny as she shut the window again. “Darling and I have already crossed paths, and it didn’t go well.”
“Meh,” Benny said, lifting one shoulder. “Maybe it’ll worry him enough to play us straight.”
I doubted it, but I didn’t say so.
South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) Page 8
