by Sarah Lovett
Matt jogged around to the driver's side and hitched a farewell finger at McPeavey. "Just remember to wash your hands before you handle the meat."
He slid behind the wheel, started the engine, and backed so close to McPeavey that the reporter stumbled on the steps.
Sylvia groaned, shook her head, then laughed as Matt guided the Caprice onto Grant Avenue. "You're crazy."
"Don't go all technical on me, Doc." He glanced at the woman sitting beside him as they pulled up to a stop sign. She was slumped against the seat, but she wasn't relaxed. Her opaque brown eyes gave her away; they were focused too intently on a fire truck as it inched across the intersection. The rumble of the truck's engine made speech impossible for fifteen seconds.
She picked at a loose thread on the hem of her skirt. If she tugged in the wrong spot, the entire seam would unravel, but she couldn't keep her fingers still.
Matt turned left onto Catron Street and said, "You better stop appearing as witness for the defense."
"Then tell the prosecution to give me a call." Her skin had lost its usual olive warmth, her lower lip was trapped between slightly crooked front teeth.
When she spoke again, her voice was a whisper. "Flora Escudero's mother stood up in court and blamed me for letting Randall walk."
"She should be blaming Erin Tulley and the case investigators."
The words were meant to soothe, but Sylvia heard something else in her lover's voice. She stared at him. "Don't tell me you think she's right. You think I'm responsible?"
He caught the dangerous glint in her eyes, and he knew it was too late to convince her that her instincts about him were off base. A part of him couldn't stomach the fact that she had anything to do with a scumbag like Anthony Randall.
He said, "I don't always understand your career choice."
"Is this the I-work-like-hell-to-put-them-away-and-you-let-them-off speech?" They were on opposite sides of the fence when it came to professional issues. That wouldn't change. His job was enforcement and control; hers was evaluation and treatment. They'd had their share of fights, but so far they'd managed to avoid a showdown. They agreed on one crucial point: the protection of the public had priority.
Matt's voice was soft. "No. Not that speech."
"Good." Sylvia brushed an unruly strand of dark hair from her face and tried to shift internal gears. But she felt overwhelmed by the constraints of her professional identity. She shrugged off her jacket, pulled her blouse loose from her skirt, and stripped off damp pantyhose. Then she dug her fingers into her hair and brushed it into wild disarray.
She was edgy, volatile. And right now she was wired. Matt knew that. But there were times when she let her guard down, when she let go, and a different woman emerged. A vulnerable woman. She kept him off balance.
She asked, "Where are we going?"
He glanced at her. "I thought you said the Zia for lunch."
"Did I?" She tucked her legs under her butt and touched his shoulder gently. "Let's go back to your place instead."
"Hey, I'm happy to take advantage of your mood swings." His delivery was deadpan, but one arched eyebrow gave him away.
"Or we could fuck in the car." She turned and stared out at a school playground. It was empty except for two teenage boys perched on tires that swung beneath a large cottonwood. The air was hazy with smoke and dust and gave the scene a soft-filter quality like a Hallmark memory, trading nostalgia for gritty reality. While Sylvia watched, the smaller boy eased himself back, his knees hooked over rubber, and hung upside down. His hair brushed dirt and weeds. Both boys grinned.
"Will somebody keep an eye on Randall?" Sylvia's voice was suddenly harsh.
"Yeah . . . but when we get too close, his lawyer's going to scream harassment."
"Somebody better ride Randall's ass."
"Hey, relax." Matt reached across the seat with his right hand and touched her bare knee. He could smell the soft scent of her perfume intensified by heat. His eye caught the curve of one breast, visible where the fabric of her blouse puckered between buttons.
Sylvia smiled. "Hey, yourself." She glanced at her watch and groaned.
"What?"
"I've got a session in forty-five minutes. With Kevin the Terrible." She didn't usually talk about her clients with Matt, but he knew about this particular case. He had made the initial arrest that resulted in probation and court-ordered counseling.
Matt nodded. "Kevin Chase. Lucky you."
They were approaching Guadalupe Street, and Sylvia pointed like a kid. "I can't go back to work without my chile fix."
Muttering under his breath, Matt cut the wheel to the left, and the Caprice swerved across the curb into the parking lot of Bert's Burger Bowl. It was a fifties-style takeout stand where locals had been ordering chile-cheeseburgers for forty years.
Before the car rolled to a complete standstill, Sylvia was out the door.
Matt followed her past a cherry 1960 Buick filled with teenagers. At eleven-thirty, the lunch rush had barely begun; only a handful of customers waited inside Bert's. When the order was ready, Matt carried out iced tea and burgers wrapped in wax paper. Tin umbrellas provided tiny islands of shade for the tables. Sparrows patrolled concrete surfaces for crumbs. One bird hopped across the table where Sylvia waited.
She tore off some bun for the sparrow and then she took a bite of burger. Matt watched her eat. He saw a striking woman. Her bone structure was all angles, almost too sharp. Her brown eyes were wide set. Her lips were full, lipstick worn away, mouth fixed now around a thick green-chile cheeseburger.
He asked the question that had been on his mind. "Why did you agree to evaluate Randall?"
She set the burger on the paper plate and wiped mustard from her chin. Her gaze was unflinchingly direct. She said, "He was accused of false imprisonment, criminal sexual penetration, attempted murder. Stacked, those felonies carry a maximum stretch of fifty years. If the prosecution had requested the evaluation, the results would have been the same—the outcome was inevitable. Bottom line, the man had the right to a competent psychological evaluation."
Matt nodded slowly. "That didn't have to be you. There are other shrinks out there." His expression went dark, suddenly unreadable. "You've handled more than your share of creeps lately. Why didn't you just let this one go?"
She tipped her head; her look said, You're out of line.
"You knew Randall would be a high-profile case—"
"So what? I take low-profile cases, too. It's my job."
"I have a small problem with the fact Randall's out again. And he'll hurt another girl just like he hurt Flora Escudero."
Sylvia stared at him. "You think I don't know that? Randall could be meeting his next victim as we speak. And I'll make you a bet: next time, he'll kill." Her voice hardened. "But maybe next time, the state police will get a valid confession, and someone like Tulley won't have the chance to recant. And maybe the sadistic sonofabitch will be caged in North Facility, which is the only place in this world for Anthony Randall."
Matt swallowed the last of his iced tea, and then he crumpled the waxed cup. "You still haven't answered my first question. Why didn't you let this one go?"
When she didn't respond, Matt pressed. "Every time a scumbag rapes some poor kid like Flora Escudero, you've got to be there. Why?"
She gathered up the food wrappers on the table and then raised her eyes to his. "Today, in that courtroom . . . that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
"So why not walk away?" Matt stood and followed her toward the car.
When Sylvia reached the Caprice, she turned to face him, then stood stock still. "You shouldn't have to ask that." She took a deep breath and shook her head. "Not everybody can do what I do. Most people can't stomach working with these guys. But I'm good at it. At my best, I help people. At my best, I make sure someone like Anthony Randall doesn't get the chance to hurt another human being."
A sudden gust of wind blew her hair back from her face. T
he branches of an old cottonwood rustled. Paper and other debris skittered across asphalt. She stepped toward Matt and touched his cheek. "Now, can we go? I've got to be back at my office in five minutes . . . and it's been a shitty day."
Instead of a verbal response, he pushed her against the Caprice and kissed her. His mouth was rough, needy, and she let him suck the air from her throat and lungs. His hand crumpled silk as his fingers found her breast.
She was caught off guard; heat traveled along her thighs, up her belly. They kissed until the teenagers began to honk the Buick's horn in appreciation.
Inside the Caprice, the fight started again.
He said, "I think you should lighten your caseload. We could spend more time together—"
"My schedule's no worse than yours. You want me to stay at home with an apron on?"
Matt just rolled his eyes.
They'd been over this territory before: a familiar trail where the traveler was smart to avoid a misstep. Neither of them was ready for marriage. They loved each other, but they weren't good at sharing territory.
"We're both happy with the way things are, right?" Sylvia didn't like the strident tone of her voice.
To her surprise, Matt blushed. He turned crimson from neck to ears. Then, to cover his embarrassment and frustration, he turned the key in the ignition, revved the engine.
He dropped her off outside the building that housed her office. As he drove away, she was left with the beginnings of panic; she wanted to call him back. She couldn't shake the feeling Matt was withholding something. But then, so was she. She'd never been able to relax with the idea of commitment. Her brief and unsuccessful marriage was evidence of that fact. So was her more recent affair with Malcolm Treisman. Before his death from cancer, Malcolm had been her mentor, her associate, her surrogate father—and the man she loved.
Desertion, divorce, death. She had a bad track record when it came to men.
It took her a moment to calm herself. She stood on the hot sidewalk and listened to a dog barking frantically in a nearby yard. Thirty thousand feet overhead, a jet left a shaving-cream trail in the sky. The usual summer thunderheads were nowhere to be seen; instead, the firmament was smeared with smoke from the Dark Canyon fire that burned in the Jemez Mountains to the northwest. Closer to earth, the blue-gray foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains set the northeast boundary of Santa Fe; above eighty-five hundred feet the air would be noticeably cooler.
Sylvia tucked her briefcase under one arm and began the short walk to her office. She tried to focus on her upcoming session with Kevin the Terrible, but her mind replayed the recent scene in the courtroom—Flora Escudero's mother crying out, "You're a bad woman!"
Matt was right, she should have walked away from Anthony Randall.
Each day she dealt with men who had psyches as twisted as shrapnel. She probed, explored, contained their darkness. She had the ego strength and the endurance to commit herself completely to her work. But because she had come so close to evil, Sylvia knew her immunity to it was less than perfect.
CHAPTER THREE
ANTHONY RANDALL SLOUCHED across the intake desk at the Santa Fe County Detention Center and licked his lips. The female clerk scowled and slid the release form across the counter.
"Sign it."
"Bitch." He mouthed the word when she glanced away. Then he smiled and scrawled his name at the bottom of the form. Overlooking the desk, glassed-in detention cells housed offenders and indigents taken into custody the night before, or those inmates awaiting transport to other facilities. Vapid faces pressed against the reinforced glass; they were the witnesses to Anthony Randall's release. At 1:55 P.M. on July 5, he was officially a free man. He pocketed his thirty-two bucks and change, took the paper bag with his few possessions, and turned his back on the prisoners, the orange linoleum, the intake clerk. He walked out the rear door, the same way he'd entered three months earlier.
Outside the detention center there were no cops, no reporters, there was no crowd Randall's lawyer, Tony Klavin, had encouraged interviews in front of the courthouse after the hearing. Anthony had given his statement: "In my case, justice won out, and I want to thank God for His help. I offer my sincerest condolences to the Escudero family because somewhere out there—the real rapist is free."
Klavin had filled in the rest: "Law enforcement should be concentrating on finding the real perpetrator instead of destroying the life of an innocent man."
Randall figured "law enforcement" would be on him like ugly on a frog. But he didn't see any cops as he walked past storage sheds, trailer parks, and minimart gas-ups. It was a three-block stretch to the intersection of Rodeo and Cerrillos roads, where the Villa Linda Mall occupied eighty acres. Here and there, clusters of poplars and juniper had escaped bulldozers. For those who had been in the area long enough, the trees touched a memory of high-desert prairie, of ranches, meadowlarks, and Spanish land grants. But Randall had no such memory; he, his mother, and his younger brother had drifted from Van Nuys, California, three years earlier.
No, the cops hadn't shown, and neither had his mother. He didn't expect to see her for days. She was keeping a safe, alcohol-dulled distance from her bad seed.
He turned north, thumb out, cocky smile. My lucky day. It took him only minutes to hitch a ride on the back of a Honda 750. The biker cruised him the twelve miles out to Pojoaque—past the Santa Fe Opera, past piñon-studded hills, past Pueblo bingo parlors and Camel Rock—to his final destination: the Cock 'n' Bull. He would be hammered before the sun even began to set beyond Nambe Valley.
It was a roadside bar, weathered and faded, with a cracked billboard. The dusty parking lot was filled with pickup trucks, gas guzzlers, and enough Harleys for a biker convention. On the fifth of July, the holiday weekend was still a party at the Bull.
The Honda skidded to a stop behind a turquoise pickup, and the engine throbbed while Randall nodded thanks for the ride. A fat and very drunk man wearing a leather Harley vest stumbled out the bar's saloon-style swinging doors. Randall slapped road dirt from his Levi's and strutted into the Cock 'n' Bull.
Instant noise and irritation. His regular bartender was gone; he didn't recognize the black-haired witch who was setting up draft beers by the dozen. In fact, it was hard to see anyone in the dim, crowded room. Nobody looked familiar, although he'd been gone barely three months. Anthony Randall didn't expect a hero's welcome—he wasn't a man who had friends. But he did expect somebody to pay some attention when he entered a room.
I beat the fucking system.
He shouldered his way to the bar, yelled, "When's Kiki working?"—and got smoke in his face. He paid for a double shot of Herradura Gold and a Bud chaser. The only empty table was wedged into a corner at the back of the large room. Randall pushed his way past revelers and serious drinkers. The air was stale with sweat and alcohol, the noise level was harsh. He sat down, did the shot, and slammed the glass on varnished wood just as a string of firecrackers exploded across the room.
A girl in skintight black pants had jumped up on the bar. Surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, she was chugging a pitcher of draft. Randall shook his head in disgust. The bitch was looking for a good time.
He finished off his Bud just as the girl drained her pitcher. Beer had soaked her face and neck, and her T-shirt stuck to her skin.
Above laughter and applause for the chugger, a voice sounded in Anthony Randall's ear: "It's cool, what you did."
Randall glanced up and found himself staring into a face obscured by black sunglasses. The guy from the Honda 750.
The biker set four double shots of tequila on the table. He straddled the chair opposite Randall.
Anthony Randall grunted. The guy wasn't a cop; he'd smell that shit a mile away. One-handed, he slipped a pack of smokes from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and slid it between his full lips.
Broad-shouldered, pumped up, sporting a three-day growth of beard, the biker was wearing a brown leather jacket even though it was hot His skin
was chapped by sun and wind. He jerked his head in disgust "Nobody else understands about what you did. You stuck it right up the ass of the cops, the judge, the whole stinking system." He held up a glass, raised it to Randall in salute. "To you, man."
Anthony Randall took the second double shot and poured oily tequila down his throat Heat streaked through his belly; his muscles began to loosen up. He wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get blind. He had it coming after all that time inside. Maybe this motor-dude could do him a favor.
"Baby Did a Bad Thing" blasted from the jukebox.
Randall gripped another glass, and tequila slopped onto the table. "You got any smoke to go with this?" He did the shot.
The biker's face slowly transformed behind a stupid grin. "Outside."
In the parking lot, a sudden gust of wind shot Randall's hair with static and left grit in his eyes. An empty beer can clattered across gravel until it lodged behind a tire. Randall followed the guy to the edge of the dirt where the 750 was parked next to a white panel truck under a stand of elms and cottonwoods. The groaning tree branches leaned into the wind. Two cars pulled out of the lot and turned onto the frontage road.
Randall slapped his new friend on the back and stumbled toward the biggest cottonwood. The cords on the thick tree trunk stood out like veins. He reached down and unzipped his fly with unsteady hands. He had to take a piss. Beer and tequila always did it to him, made him piss like a faucet. His urine spattered off a handmade wooden cross planted at the base of the tree.
What did they call them, the crosses that marked where somebody died on the highway? There was some word in Spanish he never could remember.
This cross was made of rough pine stakes, maybe twenty inches by twelve, nailed together and planted deep in earth. The ribbon had faded from sun and dust, the plastic flowers looked new. So who the fuck got wasted?
His urine cut a yellow rainbow through space, and Randall flashed on the girl gazing up at him, legs splayed out, face all bloody. The way he left her to die. But the stupid bitch had stayed alive, almost got him a long vacation. Almost. It was his lawyer's job to keep him out of the joint And the shrink's. Other guys got caught, did hard time, not Anthony Randall. He had plans.