Caroline seemed to be reading my thoughts. "You said the boys are drugged. Maybe they never know what happened to them. Maybe they have no memory of it." Her voice sounded hollow and her eyes fell to the pavement at her feet.
"You think Spinotta doesn't visit them when they're awake?" I asked sharply. "And we still don't have the slightest clue what happens to these boys when they're too old for Spinotta's liking. Billy Hatfill told me he was never young enough for Spinotta, and they met when Billy was eighteen."
'Teah, well," she whispered, "at least with Spinotta, their parents aren't hogging all the drugs." She grunted, pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead for a few seconds, then ran her hands down her face. "Fine!" she snapped. "So what do we do? We get a room nearby?
Wait for them to come back?"
"All their stops have been at night," I said, folding up the map.
"Yeah, so?"
"Tomorrow night, we get a room nearby. Check in with the attendant and wait for them to come back." I grabbed the car door handle, but she didn't move.
"That's your best plan?"
"Until something better comes along."
"I sure fucking hope something better comes along."
"So do I," I replied. "Tomorrow we'll go see Claire Shipley. She obviously doesn't want to talk to us. That means we want to talk to her."
I was chasing a young boy through an endless shimmering field. I jerked awake and felt something heavy fall on my legs. I kicked it to the floor and saw that it was a patchwork quilt. I was in Caroline's cabin, on Caroline's sofa. The only light came from the desk lamp. The photos of the four young boys who had been abducted were spread out on Caroline's desk. I had meant to study them when we had returned, but I had collapsed in exhaustion.
Now I had been awakened by a shrill series of beeps that sounded like they had come from a giant microwave. Caroline's sleeping loft was an empty mess of comforters. The front door of the cabin was open. Caroline was gone.
In the galley kitchen, I opened a cabinet door and found a rack of long-bladed knives just like the one Caroline had used to cut Eddie Cairns's restraints. I pulled one from its sheath and was struck by its light feel. It was perfectly weighted, with a five-fingered rubber grip, perfect for swinging, perfect for striding out into the dark when you didn't have the slightest clue how to wield a knife.
At the front door, I saw Caroline squatting at the entrance to the clearing. At first it looked like she was conversing with a friendly deer, only there was no deer. Her back was rigid, her head still. I approached slowly.
She had slipped into a man's shirt and pushed her hair back over her head. In the darkness, it looked like a solid plate against her back. The gun she held in both hands was larger and meaner than the pistol Billy Hatfill used to take his life. It was black with a squared-off barrel and butt.
The sinking half moon sent vague light across the empty expanse of field beyond. I could just make out the fence posts in the distance. "This place has a perimeter alarm?" I asked under my breath.
She got to her feet and locked the gun's three safeties with practiced speed.
"Did you see anything?" I asked.
"No," she answered. "Probably just a wayward cow."
My palm had greased the knife handle with sweat. I threw the thing to the dirt as if it had taken a bite out of me.
"That's a Glock field knife, in case you're interested. Strong enough to break a window or an ammunition box," she said. "The gun's a Glock too."
"You feel like telling me why your dad needed a hideout with a perimeter alarm?" I asked.
"I told you," she said. "He was an activist."
"Maybe he got a little too into his work."
Instead of taking the bait, she returned her attention to the moonlit field beyond the tree line.
"You've been asking a lot of questions about Reynaldo Reyez," I said. "Maybe he's onto you."
"You think he's looking for me now?" she asked. She sounded excited by the prospect. I didn't share her enthusiasm. "If that was the case, we would both be dead."
"You really think you know this guy, don't you?" I asked her.
She turned to face me, then slid the Glock into a holster hidden underneath her shirt. I figured she had been wearing it all day, but her baggy T-shirt had concealed it. The open cabin door threw a weak spray of light onto her face.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You called Reyez a crusader," I said. "That's the same as an activist, right?"
I saw the insult in her eyes. "Are you judging me?"
"I guess," I said.
Caroline shifted from one foot to another. "Your friend Corey wanted to know where Joseph Spinotta was. He used you to try to find out, and you're still doing his work for him. Even though he's dead. You must have really loved this guy."
"Corey didn't use me," I said. "That's the whole point. He used a body double. He didn't do what Billy asked him to do."
"Yeah," she said. "Have you stopped to think that maybe Corey believed in Billy's plan?
That maybe Corey wanted you to believe it was you on that tape, even if it wasn't. That Corey wanted to send you out here to find Spinotta."
"What does it matter?" I asked sharply. "He's dead."
"Exactly," she said. "And you're still doing what he wants. You're going to save his little brother, right?"
She had my mother's special way of pressing words into your chest with the flat of her hand, and I was confident that if I shared that with her she would only press harder.
"You made your point, Caroline," I said.
I walked back inside the cabin. She didn't follow me.
I sat down at Caroline's desk and examined the photo assemblages of the four young boys who had been abducted. I tried to memorize their names and faces. There was no pattern to the dates of the abductions that I could discern.
My eyes kept drifting back to Jim Clark, the first boy to have been abducted. He looked familiar to me. He looked familiar to me because I had seen him before. I picked up the sheet containing his photos. He wore an angry glower in most of his pictures, but his eyes were big.
Huge. They looked like each one could use its own pool man.
A little more than twenty-four hours earlier, I had watched Jim Clark cut Martin Cale's throat. His name was Everett now. When I had asked Everett about his parents, where he had come from, rage had flickered in his big blue eyes. He had been fourteen at the time of his abduction, and the physical transformation he had undergone was so total that I hadn't recognized him when I had first looked at this picture. He had ended up in Billy Hatfill's care, following Billy Hatfill's orders even when it meant murder.
Billy had been grooming Everett for a life as a potential trophy boy, he said. Were the other three boys in front of me supposed to meet the same fate?
Everett had been fourteen at the time of his abduction. That made him sixteen now, around the same age as Brian Ferrin, the young man Spinotta had drugged and raped years earlier.
Everett was physically beautiful and still of an age to be desirable to Spinotta, but for some reason he had been sent away in his prime.
Had Spinotta rejected Everett because the boys desires for sex and murder couldn't be controlled? I wondered if the pathologies of the young man I had met were a product of the time he had spent with Joseph Spinotta or of the abuse visited upon him before his abduction.
Chapter 20
We made it back to Visalia by ten o'clock the next morning. The rising temperatures had stretched a layer of brown haze across the valley that stole the definition from the mountain backdrop. Caroline pulled to the curb two blocks away from the tiny aluminum box where Claire Shipley lived.
"You said she was waiting us out last night?" Caroline asked.
"A security light went on over the back door right after we left," I said. "Then the light in the kitchen went on, too."
"So what are we going to ask this woman?" she said.
I repeat
ed the story Martin Cale had told me, that Reynaldo Reyez's father had tried to leave the meth-running business behind because his wife had become addicted to the stuff. When his boss got wind of this, he ordered the murder of Reynaldo's grandmother down in Mexico.
Reynaldo's father had responded to the news by turning a gun on his wife and then himself. Some people claimed they saw Reynaldo being driven out of town by his father on the morning of this murder-suicide.
"You think Claire Shipley actually knows something?"
"I think she doesn't want to talk to us."
"You didn't answer my question."
"I don't have an answer."
We got out of the Tahoe. When we were a block away, I saw that Claire Shipley's driveway was empty, the curtains drawn. I looked for movement behind them and didn't see any.
Caroline opened the front gate and walked straight through the leafy plants and down the side of the house. I followed her onto a concrete patio in back that had no furniture on it. A toolshed sat against the back fence. Caroline opened the screen over the back door and stopped.
Her back was to me. She reached under her shirt and removed the Glock from its holster.
I said her name softly. Instead of responding, she gave the back door a gentle shove. It swung open onto a hallway lined with deep shadows. "Miss Shipley?" she called. No response.
Caroline stepped inside. I stood in the doorway, wondering whether or not I should clock her and pull the gun from her grip. She swept the kitchen on her left with a practiced stance and saw nothing of interest. She continued down the hallway. I stepped inside the house.
To my right, the door to Claire Shipley's bedroom was open. A large, unadorned crucifix hung above the bed, and a row of small ceramic statues crowded the windowsill. They were saints.
I turned and saw that Caroline had frozen in the doorway to the living room, the gun held in front of her with rigid arms.
"You want to put that away, honey?" an old woman asked her without the slightest trace of fear in her voice. Caroline didn't move. "Tell your precious little friend to come on in. Is he packing, too?"
Caroline kept the gun level. "No," I answered. "Miss Shipley, we just wanted—"
"Shut up now, honey," said the old woman with vicious politeness. "Your lady friend and I are in an interesting predicament. Come see."
I edged into the room. Sitting in a La-Z-Boy was an ancient-looking woman with a thick wave of wiry gray hair pinned to the back of her head. She had teardrop-shaped eyes that were mostly pupil, and sagging cheeks and jowls. Her fat mouth was an inverted U that stretched from one corner of her square jaw to the other. She held a sawed-off shotgun on us, with one meaty hand above the chamber and the handle resting against her stomach. The hand wrapped around the shotgun's chamber had red scars on it.
The only thing on the wall above her head was a larger version of the plain wooden crucifix in her bedroom. A tiny television was positioned on a shelf across from her that contained books with titles I could see all dealt with government conspiracy theories and imminent apocalypses.
An overflowing ashtray and a pack of Chesterfields sat on the end table next to her elbow. "I hear y'all have been asking questions about Corey McCormick," she said. She had a flat southern accent that sounded like it had softened over time spent in California. "I also hear y'all have been going around town telling people Corey was fruit. That true?"
"Watch your language," Caroline said. "Adam's a fruit, too."
Claire Shipley's eyes flicked sideways to meet mine. "Is your lady friend going to put that thing away or not?"
"You first," Caroline said.
"No thanks," she replied.
"Why don't we all count to ten," I said.
'Why don't both you jackasses count to a thousand and get the hell out of my house while you're doing it," Claire Shipley said. "I haven't seen Corey McCormick in years and I'm not real upset about it."
"Good," I said. "You won't see him again. He's dead." The news struck her visibly. I seized the opportunity. "How many years has it been since you've seen him?" I asked.
"Four," she said almost to herself, as if remembering. "Four, I think. He came back here . . ."
She realized she was speaking too freely and clammed up.
"Came back here to do what?"
"He was asking questions, just like you guys," she said.
"What kind of questions?"
"None of your business," she retorted. "Corey abandoned his grandmother on her deathbed.
He was tired of watching her die. So was I, but I stuck it out until the end. I don't have much respect for Corey's decision, and I told him so to his face."
"He was sixteen," I reminded her.
"Corey McCormick was never sixteen," she said. "He was never ten. He was never eight.
There was more of Corey's mother in him than his grandmother ever wanted to believe. I saw it.
The boy took what he wanted when he wanted it. If you caught him taking it, he would throw it right at your face."
"Why did he come back here four years ago?" I asked.
Claire Shipley's grip on the shotgun loosened and the barrel fell by a few inches. "He's dead?" she asked. "How? What hap—"
Caroline bolted across the room, her gun raised in both hands. At the very second that Claire Shipley attempted to raise the barrel of her shotgun, Caroline jammed the barrel of the Glock against the old woman's right temple. I found myself standing in the middle of the room, my hands raised in an attempt to quiet a sudden explosion that had made almost no sound.
Her shotgun slid to one side of her lap and tipped off her thigh. I sprang forward and grabbed the mouth of the barrel before it could hit the floor.
I was jarred again by laughter—the thick, fluid-filled sound of Claire Shipley's guffaws echoed in the room. "Town witch shot dead," she whispered. "Bobbsey Twins suspected. Film at eleven."
She lifted her eyes to meet Caroline's ferocious look. The old woman's features tensed.
"Hand me my glasses, pretty boy," she whispered.
I found them on the nightstand. She slid them on and studied the furious woman standing over her. "Caroline Hughes," she whispered. I felt Caroline tense. "I saw you in the papers.
That's a terrible thing that happened to your mother—"
I didn't believe the concern in Claire Shipley's voice was genuine, so I cut her off. "Four years ago, Corey came back here asking questions. What was he asking questions about?"
"An old friend of his," she said. "Reynaldo Reyez. He thought the guy might still be alive.
He had heard stories, stories about some assassin they called El Maricon. He thought it was Reynaldo."
In the aftermath of her revelation about Reynaldo Reyez, Caroline and I fought not to exchange a look. The same year Corey had met with Joseph Spinotta, he had returned to Visalia on the hunt for El Maricon. A major piece of my new theory had just been confirmed.
Adrenaline quickened my pulse.
"Why did he come to you?" I asked. "What would you know about Reynaldo?"
The old woman seemed to settle a debate within herself; I saw the resistance leave her body.
She ordered us to sit. I went to a high-backed chair on the other side of the room; Caroline stepped away from the woman, but she didn't lower the gun and she didn't take a seat.
"Corey came to me because he knew Reynaldo's father and I had a conversation the morning Reynaldo disappeared," she began. She paused, considering. Then she started talking.
Reynaldo's father, Jose, had been a handsome charmer, one of the most popular men in Visalia.
He spent most of his days driving around town, delivering bags full of his wife's authentic Mexican cooking to the women around town whom he wanted to befriend her. Lucinda McCormick, Corey's grandmother, was one of those women. But Ruby Reyez was a recluse who spoke poor English, and even after Jose Reyez managed to get most of the women in town addicted to her cooking, none of those women was able to draw out hi
s wife.
From the start, Claire Shipley saw Jose Reyez for who he was: a thug and an operator who used his charm and good looks to distract people from his real profession. When Claire asked him point-blank how he had been able to afford the brand-new pickup truck he drove around town, Jose told her that he had managed to save up money working various field jobs. In Claire's opinion, his answer lacked even the pretense of deceit.
Claire saw the relationship developing between Corey and Reynaldo's son and warned Lucinda about it. But Lucinda paid no attention. One afternoon, Claire followed Reynaldo and Corey up to Lake Kaweah, where the boys had wandered off into the woods and done things to each other's bodies that boys sometimes did out of simple necessity. This information Claire had not shared with Lucinda.
By then, Lucinda and Jose Reyez had developed a friendship. Jose would often stop by the ranch out on Highway 198 and the two of them would sit on the porch watching the sun go down. Sometimes Claire would listen on the other side of the screen door. Lucinda McCormick was already showing signs of the cancer that would eat away her bones, but she listened patiently to Jose's long orations about the dreams he had for his family and his young son.
Claire was eavesdropping the night Jose finally came clean to Lucinda about what he really did for a living: running meth and the materials to make it for the Mexican nationals who had managed to organize part of the trade in the Valley. As usual, Lucinda had withheld judgment.
She had even offered Jose work on her ranch. Jose politely declined.
"See, manual labor—that kind of work was beneath a man like Jose Reyez," Claire Shipley told us. "Destroying families. Driving perfectly good women out of their minds—that was Jose's speed, if you know what I mean."
Jose stopped visiting after Lucinda’s cancer diagnosis. Then one afternoon word got out that Ruby Reyez, the shy shut-in, had been arrested stumbling down the highway in her slip, trying to explain in fractured English to anyone who would listen that the passing cars were communicating with one another about her. When Claire heard the news, she realized that Jose Reyez had somehow brought his business home. She wasn't surprised. She had known the chickens would one day come home to roost for the Reyez family, but she had no idea what form God's retribution was going to take.
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