Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  On an afternoon in February, Jose Reyez came to Lucinda's ranch. Lucinda had been upstairs in bed, with Corey at her side. Claire Shipley had forbidden Jose from coming inside even as he pleaded for Lucinda's help.

  "He kept telling me over and over again that his family had been destroyed," Claire Shipley said to us. "I asked him what that meant. He told me he had driven Reynaldo that morning up into the woods past Lake Kaweah and told him to run away. He said the boy refused, so he pulled a gun on the kid and threatened him, told him to run into the mountains, to get as far away from Visalia as possible. Then he told me that Reynaldo had finally obeyed him. That Reynaldo had finally run off into the trees."

  She gave us a dyspeptic face.

  "You didn't believe him," I said.

  "Reynaldo would never leave his family behind like that. I didn't care how bad his father scared him." A genuine and belated pain trembled beneath the old woman's words. "I drove up to the lake. I went to the parking lot where Jose told me he had taken Reynaldo. It took me three hours to find him. Reynaldo Reyez had been shot in the back. He was dead when I got there.

  Jose didn't even know that he had killed his own son. He had fired a shot in the air to get the boy to run, and it had killed him."

  "What did you do?" I asked the old woman.

  "I buried him," she said. "I buried Reynaldo Reyez in the woods and I prayed over him. I even wept, God forbid I should admit that to the two of you."

  Caroline let out a sharp breath. I studied the ruined old woman who had described her outpouring of emotion for a death she had concealed with a child's defiance.

  "Four years ago," I finally said, "when Corey came to you—" "I told him!" Claire Shipley snapped. "I told him that I had buried his best friend. He asked me why I had kept it a secret from him. I told him the truth—his grandmother needed him, and I didn't want him grieving for the son of some drug pusher."

  "Did it work? Did Corey stick by his grandmother's side until the end?"

  Claire Shipley stuck out a furious lower lip.

  Caroline cursed under her breath and turned from the room. It was clear that she believed my theory had been shot all to hell. She was wrong. I could feel the pieces realigning themselves into a new theory that was as simple and elegant as the ones James Wilton had come up with over the past week. I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't do it here.

  "You be careful, Caroline Hughes," Claire Shipley said. Caroline stopped but didn't turn to face the old woman. "Grief fills the world with shadows, and when the world is full of shadows, it looks like there are no limits at all. All your old rules no longer apply. Isn't that right, missy?"

  Caroline turned and gave the old woman a stare that had more pain in it than I had yet to see her display. Claire Shipley seemed to think her words had worked their intended effect. She sank back into her La-Z-Boy and folded her scarred hands across her lap, looking satisfied. The old woman's eyes shifted to me. "What did Corey do when you told him this?" I asked.

  "He kicked over that chair you're in and left."

  I looked at Caroline.

  "Wash your hands in a child's blood and see what color your judgments turn out to be,"

  Claire Shipley said.

  As we drove away from the house, Caroline's knuckles were white against the steering wheel. I could see anger, even betrayal in the set of her jaw, and she wouldn't look at me. I reached into the backseat and brought the file on the four abducted young boys onto my lap. Someone had abducted them. Someone who had used the signatures that had been attributed to an assassin they called El Maricon.

  "She's lying," Caroline said.

  I ignored her. I studied the photos of a boy named Jim Clark and thought back to one of the other stories Martin Cale had told me. Jim Clark had been taken into custody by Joseph Spinotta and then placed in Billy Hatfill's care; two weeks earlier, that same Jim Clark had come off Martin Cale's yacht and Corey had reacted as if he had seen a ghost.

  Four years earlier, Spinotta had asked Corey to set him up with Reynaldo Reyez. When Corey had set out looking for Reynaldo, he had discovered that Reynaldo had been dead for years, buried by his grandmother's best friend. But someone abducted the young boys whose pictures were spread across my lap.

  I imagined Corey waiting on the dock as his uncle's yacht came into port two weeks earlier, saw his shock when a young man named Everett sauntered toward him. Corey had been stunned to recognize the boy. He had recognized the boy because he had abducted him.

  "Corey pretended to be El Maricon," I finally said. "Corey abducted these boys."

  Caroline jerked the car to the shoulder and brought us to a stop.

  I told her about the incident that Martin Cale had related to me, showed her Jim Clark's picture, and described the reaction Corey had had when he laid eyes on the man. "He knew him because he abducted him, Caroline."

  "You're saying Corey abducted his own brother?"

  "Yes," I answered. "Corey believed Spinotta's lies. Corey believed he was saving these boys from a childhood just like his. He wanted his own brother to have everything he missed. Then he saw Jim Clark walk off his uncle's yacht and he realized what was going to happen to his brother.

  He understood what Spinotta was really up to, and three days later he tried to find out where Spinotta was."

  I saw my bloodied drug dealer lying facedown on the floor of his apartment, beaten nearly to death by the man I had known as Corey Howard. I saw three other scorched footprints in the earth just like the one left by Tonya McCormick's trailer, saw the parents of the boys incinerated.

  I had been so eager to cast Corey as the victim that I had overlooked his rage.

  "It probably wasn't that hard to trick Spinotta," I said. "He probably never wanted to risk meeting Corey face-to-face. They exchanged four kids over the past three years, probably at a drop-off point. Then Corey gives them his brother, finds out what they're really up to, and realizes he can't blow his cover because they'll probably kill Caden just to get rid of the evidence.

  So he tries to blackmail Billy Hatfill into giving him Spinotta's location. But everything goes wrong."

  "And they kill him," Caroline said. "They killed their own supplier and they don't even know it."

  I waited for her to realize another implication of what I was saying: the man she was hunting, the man who had killed her mother, was already dead.

  She handed me Jim Clark's picture and turned to face the steering wheel. "Jesus. This whole time—you and I were looking for the same man," she said.

  "He's dead, Caroline."

  I reached into my pocket and took out the golden scorpion chain. She took it, ran it through her fingers, studied it. Then she closed it in one fist and brought her fist down against the steering wheel loud enough to bleat the horn. She kicked open the driver's-side door and stumbled out into the hazy sunlight. She regained her footing, straightened up, and kept walking away from the car.

  I let her go. I thought she might give up right there and go back to whatever life she still had in San Francisco. I could try to convince her that Joseph Spinotta was ultimately responsible for the death of her mother, but I didn't have the energy. As for my own mission, I was not done. I still didn't have the identity of Corey's killer.

  Twenty minutes later, Caroline slid behind the wheel. Her eyes were bloodshot but her tears had dried. She tossed the scorpion chain onto my lap and started the engine.

  "This video you saw," she said. "Describe it to me."

  I did. She showed no reaction.

  "How long do you think they keep them before they . . . tape them?"

  I pulled out the photos of Toby Cooper, the young boy I had seen in the video, and told her he had been abducted seven months earlier. "So maybe Caden has time," she said. "Maybe we can get to him first."

  She glanced at me, then returned her attention to the road. I kept my mouth shut. I did not want her to know how relieved I was. I did not tell her that I thought her mother would be proud.
<
br />   "So I guess we're heading down to Wasco tonight," she said.

  Some seven hours later, as the sun crept behind the Coast Ranges, we left Caroline's cabin and drove south on Interstate 5. We had spent the rest of the day in a state of catatonic exhaustion, speaking to each other in fractured sentences. Caroline was mourning the loss of the crusader she had been hunting, and I was trying to absorb the fact that the man I had known as Corey Howard had slaughtered eight people.

  It was dark by the time we got to Wasco. Our helpful gas station attendant was not on duty yet. We bought gas and then got a motel room at an Econo Lodge just down the highway from the Stop 'N' Go where Roger Vasquez and Ben Clamp had made semiregular visits. Once we settled into the room, I saw our plan for what it was: obsessive and senseless. We could spend the rest of our lives in Wasco, and Vasquez and Clamp might never make another appearance.

  Exhausted and depleted, I sat on the foot of the bed and watched television. Caroline went to her car and came back with a large backpack. "Give me your leg," she said.

  I did as I was told. She rolled up the right leg of my jeans. Then she pulled out one of her Glock field knives, the gleaming handle visible in its Velcro holster. She wrapped it around my shin, tugging the straps tight. Then she rolled my jeans down over the knife slowly and methodically. I kept watching television. "This is stupid," I said. "I'm sorry." She shrugged and stared out at the window, her face lit by the flares of passing headlights. "We need to regroup.

  We know they're out here. Maybe there's another way to figure out where they are."

  "So Eddie Cairns was lying?"

  "You showed him the drawing of Reynaldo before he started talking," I said. "He told you what you wanted to hear."

  "Because I tortured him," she said. I thought I could hear a trace of remorse in her voice.

  "You heard him scream, Adam. I didn't electroshock the guy. I just drugged him a little."

  "I think he saw Eduardo Velasquez get murdered," I said. "I think he saw something. He's just too fried to know what the hell it was."

  "You know what I'm asking, Adam. He may not be Reynaldo Reyez, but do you think El Maricon is real or did everyone here just make him up? Is it really just some dispute between the Mexican nationals and the Colombians, and everybody wants to believe it's the work of one man?"

  "Why do you still care?" I asked her. "Corey McCormick killed your mother."

  Three hours later, we were watching an episode of ER when Caroline's cell phone rang. She reached for it on the nightstand without taking her eyes off the television. I heard her answer in a bored voice. Then she kicked me in the back and leapt to her feet. "They're here!" she shouted.

  At first I didn't believe her. She grabbed her backpack by one strap and headed for the door.

  "You're kidding, right?" I asked her.

  "No!" she shouted. "That was our new friend. She said they just pulled in."

  Minutes later, we were rushing into the Stop 'N' Go just as a large black Chevy Suburban swung out onto the highway and headed toward Interstate 5.1 glimpsed Roger Vasquez behind the wheel. Ben Clamp was in the passenger seat. The distance between our vehicles robbed the two men of any distinctive characteristics that might make them appear different than the photographs we had used to locate them. They wouldn't seem like flesh and blood until I was staring them in the face.

  Ben Clamp and Roger Vasquez went north on Interstate 5. We followed from several car lengths behind them. The Suburban fell into the fast lane and accelerated. They had a long way to go, and it didn't look like they were going to stop anytime soon.

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Brenda's number. She answered after one ring and managed to say half of my name before I interrupted her. I read her the license plate number of the Suburban. I heard rustling papers and figured she was reaching for a pen.

  She asked me to repeat it and I did. Then she asked me what the hell it was.

  "It's a plate number for the Chevy Suburban Roger Vasquez and Ben Clamp are driving," I said.

  "Holy shit. Well, it's not like I can get Dwight to run it. Not with everything that's going on right now."

  "Give it to Jimmy."

  "I'll try," she said. I waited for her to continue. "I'm staying at a hotel."

  Jimmy had learned she had helped me get out of LA and he was obviously punishing her for it. I'm sorry, Brenda."

  "Whatever. I told you to find something, and it sounds like you did."

  I promised to call her back as soon as we found out where Vasquez and Clamp were going.

  "Adam," she said quietly, "are you armed?"

  When I didn't respond, Caroline gave me a brief suspicious glance, the first time she had taken her attention off the Suburban since we had merged onto the Interstate. "Okay," Brenda said. "Whoever's with you— are they armed?"

  My lack of a response had told her that I wasn't alone. Moment to moment, Brenda Wilton made for a better detective than her husband, probably because her instincts were to protect the people around her, while her husband was driven by a desire to expose criminals he had never met. "I don't care if they get you by the balls," she said. "You don't pick up a gun, you understand me? You don't have the first clue how to shoot. That means it'll kill you before it kills anyone else."

  "I'm just tailing them, Brenda."

  She ordered me to call her back as soon as I had followed Roger Vasquez and Ben Clamp to their final destination.

  Chapter 21

  The Suburban turned onto 580 East and suddenly we were heading into the dark rolling hills we had been driving alongside for almost three hours. There weren't that many other cars on the road with us, so Caroline was keeping a long distance. At first I thought I was hallucinating the massive spindly shadows on the hillsides, but after a few blinks, I realized they were wind-powered electric generators, just like the ones Corey had included in his drawing of me.

  "I've got a good guess where they're going," Caroline said.

  We were on a direct course for the Bay Area. "You ready to go home again?" I asked.

  "Ask me when we get there."

  At a little after one in the morning, low clouds merged in the sky overhead to threaten fog, and the wind rushing through my cracked-open window dropped by ten degrees. The Suburban joined the thin stream of traffic lined up at the tollbooths for the Bay Bridge. The cloud cover smeared the top of the Transamerica Pyramid and carried the downtown lights away from their sources. It was my first visit to the city. I remembered that it was Jimmy's hometown as well and wondered if he would have wanted to be the one to introduce me to it.

  The Suburban crossed Market Street and headed into the heart of downtown. Stone canyons rose all around us, and strong winds made cyclones out of the litter in the gutters. After spending almost forty-eight hours in the rural and small-town Valley, I thought the city looked poised to come tumbling down on us. It took me a few seconds to discern that the dark mounds resting against security gates and freight entrances were homeless people.

  From a distance of almost three blocks, we followed the Suburban past Union Square. I recognized the St. Francis Hotel from movies. The dark tracks for its glass elevators made the slender concrete building look as if it had been subjected to a triple bypass.

  I rolled the window up, with a new understanding of why people said Southern and Northern California were different countries. The city looked as cold as my hands felt, as if it were afraid to display anything soft or bright because it might lose it to the night winds.

  After several anxious minutes of circling blocks on one-way streets, we rounded a corner and saw the Suburban parked at the curb up ahead. The street was lined with low-rise masonry buildings, and the storefronts belonged to pawnshops, electronics stores, and adult video stores that advertised all manner of visual gratification with blinking neon letters.

  Caroline braked abruptly, then pulled behind an idling garbage truck. My view was blocked, but she could still see the Suburban a block ahead of us.


  "Ben Clamp just got out," she said. "Follow him. I'm on their car."

  The minute I stepped onto the curb, the garbage truck started moving forward. Before it blocked my view, I glimpsed a broad-shouldered hulk of a man standing on the far corner. The Suburban turned past him and disappeared.

  The Tahoe didn't move an inch. I retreated into a dark doorway and let the garbage truck roll past me. As it rounded the corner, Caroline followed it, then swerved past it in pursuit of the Suburban.

  I got a good look at Ben Clamp's face in a storefront's wash of neon four doors down.

  Excessive prison-style weightlifting and possibly steroids had bloated him past the point of being the all-American jock archetype in the photograph I had carried. His mouth's natural position was slack and dumb-looking, his lips parted as if he were about to take a breath he had been waiting for all his life.

  There was a hotel on the corner across the street, the kind of hotel that didn't have security, room service, or optimism of any kind. Ben Clamp was casing it. A few of its windows were shot through with the harsh glow of overhead fluorescent lighting. Some of them spat bedsheets-turned-curtains into the wind.

  Ben crossed the street and strolled inside as if he were a guest. I edged in after him, entering the tiny lobby just as he disappeared up a flight of steps. The clerk's station was empty save for a copy of Wired magazine and a dismembered copy of the San Francisco Examiner.

  I mounted the first steps, listening to the sound of Ben's footfalls overhead. The center of the stairway was too small to see anything beyond shadows above. The footsteps stopped, and I started my ascent. I was just below the second floor landing when I heard a knock from one floor above me.

  Several steps below the third-floor landing, I stared through the banister and across a sweep of warped hardwood floor. There were about three inches between Ben Clamp's nose and the door to room 3J. His head was bowed, and he had pushed his baseball cap down on his brow.