Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  "Some," she said stiffly. She was still holding out on me.

  I turned to her. The look on my face made her furrow her brow. "How long have you been out here?" I asked her.

  "Since it happened," she said.

  "There are others, aren't there?" I asked. "Other accidents like this one. Other boys missing."

  Even with her cap and sunglasses she looked shocked. I had scored a direct hit. "How many?"

  "Four," she said warily. "Over the past three years."

  Three years. The same amount of time that elapsed since Terrance Davidson, the first of the vanished three, had left Los Angeles.

  "What are the similarities?"

  "The boys were between the ages of thirteen and fifteen," she said. "Only partial remains were found. In Caden's case, very partial. The explosions were ignited by white phosphine refuse and some other type of accelerant. The adults who died in the fires had large traces of Xanax in their systems, which suggested that they were in a crash period after a binge. All of them were operating Beavis and Butt-head labs like this one. Every explosion was ruled an accident—and the boy was given the blame in each one."

  "How could they be ruled accidents if the boy was given the blame?" "Because the boy wasn't around to tell them differently." "Are there any differences among the explosions?" "Different counties," she said. "All in the Central Valley." "How many lab accidents did you have to go through before you came upon these?"

  "Three years' worth," she said flatly. "It's your turn." As much as I wanted to be wrong, I was convinced that one of these young boys Caroline Hughes had just referred to had been in the video I had watched the night before. "Do you have pictures of these boys?" "I said it's your turn."

  I tried to empty my face of my thoughts and emotions. She had re-searched three years'

  worth of meth lab accidents for a reason. She had some idea of the identity of the demon who had come for Caden McCormick; otherwise she would have gone home by now. She had a theory of her own, and I wanted her to reveal it to me before I shared mine.

  "I want to see their pictures," I said. "Then I'll tell you everything I know. It's a lot."

  "Follow me," she said.

  Chapter 17

  Caroline drove a silver Chevy Tahoe that had tinted windows and new-looking all-terrain tires. I followed her past Avenal State Prison, then west on Highway 148. We skirted the edge of a small town called Coalinga and headed directly into the rounded hills.

  After almost twenty minutes on the road, the Tahoe turned right off the highway, between a pair of valley oaks whose branches touched the ground on all sides of their thick trunks. I followed her across empty grassland toward a dense thicket of trees that climbed a slope up ahead. We passed through what looked like a giant electrified fence.

  In the middle of the trees was a log cabin with a giant barn alongside it. Caroline pulled the nose of her Tahoe right up to the barn's doors. I parked my Jeep in the middle of the clearing and stepped out. She offered me a drink as soon as we stepped inside the cabin. I declined, eyeing the schoolteacher's desk as she walked toward the galley kitchen; I wanted to rifle through its drawers. There was a map of the state on one wall and an old sofa covered in hand-sewn quilts.

  "Your mother lived here?"

  "No," she said. "My father."

  "Were they still together?"

  "No," she said. She seemed to hear the sharpness in her response and rested one shoulder against the kitchen doorway, a beer bottle in her right hand. "You sure you don't want one?"

  "I don't drink."

  She filed away this fact about me and took a slug from the bottle. She had removed her sunglasses. Her eyes looked like frozen amber. In the right light, they would have been beautiful.

  In the cabin's darkness, they were unnerving. "My parents separated when I was a kid," she said,

  "after my father chained me to a two-thousand-year-old redwood to keep it from being cut down." She saw my surprise. "His friends were there, too. Chained to the tree, I mean."

  "Your father was an activist?"

  "Depends on who you ask these days," she said. "Activist. Terrorist. They're practically one and the same now. Whatever. He never let go of the sixties. Back then, people got convictions the way we get e-mails."

  A silence fell. I studied the map of California. Five black thumbtacks had been shoved through different towns throughout the Central Valley. I figured they marked the sites of the four abductions she had discovered. A wider spray of red thumbtacks spread out all over the entire map. "What are the red ones for?" I asked.

  She opened her desk drawer and dropped a file folder onto her desk, then handed me a child's drawing, a detailed pencil sketch of a trailer surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Behind it, a pit bull had been rendered as a grotesque monster, its gaping jaws twice the size of the rest of its body. In the expanse of open field behind the trailer, there was a small dark figure without a face, its head rounded slightly as if it were wearing a helmet of some kind.

  "Caden drew that in my mother's class on the afternoon of the explosion. See the man in the background?"

  "Yes."

  "Turn the drawing over."

  I did. Written there in a schoolboy's raw handwriting were the words: He's a demon. He comes every night now.

  "Tonya McCormick had a pit bull," Caroline said. "Just like in the drawing. Its jaw was crushed with a steel trap before the trailer blew up. I've got the bones to prove it."

  I looked at her. The dog's jaw was the most solid piece of evidence she had that someone had planned to abduct Caden McCormick.

  "When they were loading my mother into the ambulance, she was saying something about the dog. But they couldn't understand her. I think she was trying to tell them that the dog was dead when she showed up. She was trying to tell them that what happened wasn't an accident."

  She went into the kitchen. I opened the file folder. Each page inside contained a photo assemblage of one of the four boys she had told me about, including Corey's younger brother.

  Across each one she had written each boy's name and the location and date of the explosion. The photos of the boys were a conspicuous depiction of their retrogression in the care of drug-abusing and drug-cooking parents. As the four got older, their stares grew more vacant and their hair more shaggy and unkempt. Front teeth disappeared, never to grow back. Scars appeared, and eventually the boys' heads were all shaved.

  I asked Caroline about it. "Lice," she explained. "They drive tweakers nuts. Most of them see bugs everywhere they look already. Shaving the kid's head is easier than taking him to get a haircut. At least when you're too freaked to go outside."

  I picked up the collage of Caden McCormick and studied it. The boy had his brother's high forehead and long eyes. In most of the pictures, his mouth was set into a listless line. I picked up another boy's photos.

  Toby Cooper had been abducted in December of the previous year from the town of Taft. I had seen a road sign for it on the way to Avenal that morning.

  The night before, I had watched Toby Cooper stumble toward me down a dirt trail bathed in white light, his arms outstretched and a blindfold over his face. Seven months had elapsed between Toby's abduction and the movie filmed in my apartment—seven months in which he had been transformed from a wasted waif to a chubby-cheeked angel. Joseph Spinotta had nursed the boy back to health before violating him on camera. I imagined he had the same plans for the other three boys, and for Corey's younger brother.

  "Who do you think took these boys?" I asked Caroline, even though I had my own answer.

  "It's your turn, remember?"

  "I said I'll tell you everything I know."

  I suspected she was just as wary of voicing her theory as I was of relating mine. I eyed the red thumbtacks in the map on the wall next to me. She took a seat on the quilt-covered sofa, held her beer bottle against one knee, and regarded the floor as if she were meditating.

  "For the past six years,
some individual has been fucking with the Central Valley meth trade," she began. "It's loosely organized to begin with. You can cook the shit anywhere. But any Mexican national who tries to take control, who tries to get things organized, either goes missing or ends up dead in a ditch. Trucks full of supplies have been exploding as soon they cross the border. A super-lab outside of Redding blew sky high last year. There have been so-called accidents at the other end of the Michoacan trail as well. It's the—"

  "I know what it is," I said. Martin Cale had used the term with me the night before. It was the pipeline of men and materials that flowed from Mexico into the Central Valley to feed the meth trade. Reynaldo Reyez, Corey's boyhood lover, and his family had traveled it to the small town of Visalia.

  "I hear meth cooking is a dangerous business," I remarked.

  "It is," she answered. "But there's the type of lab accident where a cigarette ignites a few jars of acetone. Then there's the kind where a vat's worth of white phosphine refuse ignites a fire so hot and toxic that it's the kind of fire they come up with a nickname for." She let this sink in for a few seconds. "The DEA knows what's going on, but their theory is that the Mexican nationals in central California have been targeted by the Colombian cocaine cartels. Meth was a boon for the Mexicans. It was stronger than cocaine and they could make it themselves. They didn't have to rely on the Colombians for the raw ingredients."

  "And the Colombians aren't happy about that."

  "I haven't asked them, and I don't give a shit," she said. "My guess is they have too much cocaine to worry about to start picking off Mexican meth lords. There's one individual behind this, and he's not a rival drug lord."

  "Who is he?"

  Her eyes fired into mine. "Some people think he's a hero. Meth is a virus, and this guy is killing the hosts to keep it from spreading. But he still scares the shit out of them." I took note of how she had gone from making statements of fact about this mythical assassin to quoting the beliefs of others, as if she thought expressing her own belief in this urban legend would send me racing from the cabin. She took a slug from her beer and glared at the floor as if she could force the boards to buckle. "They call him El Maricon. You know what that means?" She looked up and me, and I nodded. "I didn't make it up. Don't get offended."

  "How did he get the nickname?"

  Her eyes dropped. "Not sure," she mumbled. Then she focused on me again. "El Maricon is very fond of white phosphine as an ignition source. I don't know. Maybe it's a symbolic thing—

  the fact that the resulting fire is so . . . bright."

  I looked again at the map's red thumbtacks, the locations of crimes she was attributing to the man called El Maricon. She held him responsible for the death of her mother and was tracking him. Hunting him. "You're sure this guy is a crusader?" I asked. "Maybe he's just a hit man."

  She grimaced impatiently at me. She was oddly defensive of the man she held responsible for the death of her mother and the abduction of thirteen-year-old Caden McCormick.

  "All right," I said after a brief silence. "So why is he abducting these boys?"

  "This is a war," she said. "He's the only one fighting it. He needs soldiers." Her sudden conviction shocked me. "And he's expanding his operations. He's not just blowing up the addicts who make the stuff and deal a little. He's targeting the small-time labs. The everyday users. He's already brought hell to the Mexican nationals out here. Six years ago they found a petty drug lord named Eduardo Velasquez in a ditch. He was missing his head. He was also the strongest fist the Mexican nationals ever had out here. They still haven't replaced him. People think El Maricon did it."

  Eduardo Velasquez.

  I had heard the name before, but I had to grope to remember where. Then I remembered that I'd heard it the same place I had first heard another term Caroline had just used: the Michoacan trail. Martin Cale's yacht. Corey's boyhood lover, Reynaldo Reyez, had traveled the Michoacan trail to the small town of Visalia, where he and Corey had fallen in love. His father had worked for a drug lord named Eduardo Velasquez. His grandmother's murder had been ordered by a drug lord named Eduardo Velasquez, and the repercussions had torn apart his family.

  Reynaldo Reyez. Missing. Presumed dead.

  I had studied the faces of Reynaldo Reyez, Corey McCormick, and Joseph Spinotta, convinced of a connection among the three men forged during that secret meeting between Corey and Spinotta. Now I was even more convinced. I didn't have to shoot down Caroline's theory. We were both right. The connections were there, but I still didn't have the first clue why a vigilante like Reynaldo Reyez would end up working for a pedophile. The look on my face brought Caroline to her feet. "Adam?"

  "Any idea what El Maricon looks like?"

  "He's pretty," she said. "Eyes like a cat's. That's probably why he got the nickname."

  I asked her to wait and then walked out of the cabin. My bag was in the Jeep's backseat. I reached in and pulled out the drawing of Reynaldo Reyez.

  When I turned, Caroline was standing right behind me. I handed her the drawing. Her eyes consumed it. She turned her back to me as she studied the drawing, probably to hide her reaction.

  "Is that him?" I asked her. "Is that El Maricon?"

  She looked across the clearing to where the front bumper of her Tahoe rested against the doors to the huge barn, its doors secured by a large silver padlock I hadn't noticed when I drove in. "You ever been to a twelve-step meeting?" Caroline asked.

  "No."

  "Me neither," she said. "But they use this saying I like. You ready?" I nodded. "What you see here, what you hear here, let it stay here. Here here."

  She tongued her upper Up. "My mother's scalp came off when they loaded her into the ambulance. She had no skin left on her back. Even then she was trying to tell the cop who was with her that what happened at that trailer was not an accident. I'm going to listen to her, Adam.

  I'm going to do whatever it takes to listen to her. If you don't approve, you can hit the road."

  I looked to the barn doors. Then I gave her a small nod.

  She squeezed herself between the Tahoe and the barn doors, unlocked the padlock, and pushed the doors inward. The second she stepped into the darkness, I saw a man lassoed to a metal bed frame with two lengths of nylon rope that met in a thick knot under his back. His long face was skin on bone, and he was asleep or drugged, his slack jaw revealing chipped and blackened teeth.

  His arms were riddled with track marks. Several looked fresh.

  I instinctively pulled the doors shut behind me, plunging the three of us into near darkness lit by wavering shafts of light from slats in the rafters. Caroline lit a Coleman lantern and placed it next to the guy's head. He didn't react. The rest of the barn contained a Skilsaw and a stack of old plywood. "Is he drugged?"

  "He's been drugged since he was a kid. Now he's under medical supervision."

  With that, she crossed to a small leather bag that sat on the Skilsaw table behind the bed. I watched, stupefied, as she loaded a syringe from a small medicine bottle.

  "This is bullshit," I whispered.

  "Actually, that's what we're going to find out as soon as Eddie starts talking."

  "Some of those track marks are fresh," I said, pointing to Eddie's upturned right arm. "How long have you been at this?"

  "A little less than a day," she said.

  "You wake him up to see if he'll talk, then you knock him out again?"

  "Something like that." She took a seat on the edge of the bed.

  "That's torture."

  She gripped Eddie's left wrist, just below its cinching of nylon rope, and squeezed, searching for a vein. She didn't find one. She squatted down next to the bed frame, found a vein in the man's ankle, swabbed it with an alcohol pad, and made a quick, clean injection. Then she rose and took a step back from the bed.

  "Bigfoot had Roger Paterson and Bob Gimlin," she said. "El Mar-icon has Eddie Cairns, petty criminal, lifetime meth addict, and teller of tall tales."

  The
man named Eddie Cairns sputtered. His jaw quivered with the first threat of tears. He made a pained sound in his throat. Caroline rested her hand on Eddie's forehead and regarded me.

  "Going or staying?" she asked.

  I stayed. She returned her attention to her broken captive. Keeping one hand on his forehead, she raised the drawing of Reynaldo Reyez so he could see it.

  Eddie Cairns let out a scream so loud and piercing it blasted me backward. He bucked and writhed against his constraints as if Caroline had dropped a box of snakes on him.

  He bucked and yelled for so long that I pulled the drawing out of Caroline's hand so he could catch his breath. She backed away from the bed without a glance at me.

  Eddie had twisted his head away from us as he struggled to breathe through his open mouth.

  Caroline sat down cross-legged on the floor. I saw an old tape recorder in front of her.

  "Tell us about him, Eddie," she said.

  Eddie flinched. There was no place for me to sit, so I backed up to the nearest wall. Eddie finally turned his head to stare up at the ceiling as if an angel had appeared to him between the rafters. From the sudden wide-eyed expression on his face, it looked like the angel had instructed him to obey Caroline.

  He started talking.

  Eddie Cairns was sixteen years old when he met the old rancher with a face like a horse. The rancher was sitting in his pickup in back of the diner where Eddie's mother and older sister both waited tables. When Eddie emerged from the back door with a trash bag in each fist, the guy bent forward over his steering wheel, his rheumy eyes wide and chapped lips parted, as if Eddie were as remarkable as the sunset setting fire to the hills.

  Eddie was pretty sure the guy was some sort of pervert, so he dropped the trash bags off and headed quickly for the back door. Just then, the guy rolled his window down and asked Eddie if he'd like to make some money.

  "You some kinda weirdo?" Eddie asked, even as he approached the truck.