Then She Vanished

by T. Jefferson Parker

  The tent door flap blew open and closed and open again. No rifle in the sapling.

  And the young woman, Charity, working on her tan again, looked uncomfortable on her towel in the little meadow.

  “Get the guns,” said Tola.

  I’d already swept my binoculars from under the seat. Saw the bloody body of Charity on her beach towel. Flies and meat bees already at their tasks. Saw the glint of brass in the grass and more near the lilting door flap. Gave Tola the field glasses, hopped into the truck bed, handed her gun through the back window, and loaded the legal ten shot shells into my own security weapon. I saw the helicopter hovering far out.

  “You can stay here,” I said.

  “Wrong.”

  “If you’re not used to this kind of . . .”

  “Roland, I’m going in with you. So go.”

  “Follow me and keep the trees between you and the tent.”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep your finger off the trigger until you’re close enough to hit what you’re pointing at. Never bluff. The shot spreads out wide and fast with that barrel.”

  “I know, I know exactly what shotguns do.”

  The willows along the creek were big with foliage from the winter rains.

  We kept to the streamside, rocks slippery but the gurgle covering our noise. Made a wide, slow circle around the meadow where Charity lay dead in her blood-drenched swimsuit.

  Up close to the tent I could see that the big cistern had taken fire, leaked and soaked the ground around it.

  I motioned for Tola to stay, then hustled to the tent, pulled open the flap and ducked inside, head low, gun up and scanning. Fallujah. If it’s armed, it’s over. Tola suddenly behind me just like Avalos, damn her. Bullet tears in the far wall, leaking sunlight. Brass on the floor and a throw of blood drops on the tent wall beyond the air mattress. No sign of Kirby or his rifle. A long gash in the north wall, where Kirby had likely slashed and dashed.

  We tracked the blood drops and footprints on a rocky trail that led uphill into the forest. I guessed at least three sets of prints. The blood and prints vanished at a branching game trail, a matted pathway and no wider than the deer that made them. We picked up footprints again but no blood and I wondered for the first time if whoever was bleeding—likely Kirby—wasn’t critically wounded at all, and had maybe even found a way to out-scramble the killers. In the distance, the helicopter circled and lowered.

  The forest grew taller and darker and the game trail faint. Steep enough to pull ourselves upslope by branches. Both of us breathing hard and I felt the weight of my legs, not from strain but from nerves. Fallujah again, hardwired into my memory.

  The trail widened. Onward with a sinking feeling. You see the punch before it’s thrown. Avalos used to see things before they happened, saw the canal footbridge blowing up as we crossed it and two hours later coming back across the unblown-up bridge, the IED blew it in half. Now drying blood on an oak leaf, just hours old, the same age as Charity’s. Buzz of my boxing scar. Dread sharpening.

  Then through the trees I saw a clearing bathed in sunlight, a tawny cloak of oak leaves over boulders of black basalt. Beyond the clearing stood a thicket of cottonwoods, dense and pale trunked.

  “I see . . . him,” said Tola.

  Just then my eyes found Kirby, too. Half-hidden within the glimmering cottonwood leaves, his white naked body dangling straight as the crowded trunks in which he hung, head cocked sharply and purple faced.

  We cut him down wordlessly, laid him out on the rough rocks. Tola cried and kept touching his blood-matted red pompadour.

  Certainly they had carried rope just for this purpose. His hands had been bound with a black-and-white New Generation bandana.

  Holes shot through his skinny body like in the old outlaw pictures, but not just a few holes. Scores of them. The modern language of the automatic. Postmortem cartel insults, I thought. More than insults. Warnings.

  “The real target is me,” said Tola. “I’m bad for business.”

  “So are your growers, Tola,” I said. “We should get over there right now.”

  “I’m not leaving him here.”

  “Help me get him into the truck.”

  “I thought of everything. I thought I thought of everything.”

  “You can’t think of everything.”

  “It was Calderon. I know it was Calderon.”

  We wrestled her brother into the bed of the truck and tied a blue tarp over him. I cut loose his hands and put the cartel bandana in the big locking toolbox.

  * * *

  The San Diego County sheriffs were all over Tola’s pot grow, only two miles down-mountain from Kirby’s tent, as the crow flies.

  Tola’s breath caught as we topped the rise and looked down on the vehicles and deputies. The helicopter waited, blades still. Uniforms and windbreakers, men and women moving amid the knife-sundered plastic walls of the greenhouses. Lights and frost heaters thrown to the ground. Through my binoculars I could see the plants, scorched black and limp. Flamethrowers, I thought, much faster and more dramatic than Roundup.

  The deputies moved with purpose, a sense of aftermath and order, Tola staring down at them with bloodshot green eyes.

  I eased the truck over the crest and began the long, rutted descent.

  THIRTY

  Late that evening, Dalton’s black BMW X5 came barreling up the long drive toward my house. The Irregulars and I watched from under the palapa, where we were finishing dinner.

  “I’ve never met my legislator,” said Dick.

  “Corrupt,” said Liz. “He’s hiding behind his missing wife.”

  “I feel that his wife will come to harm,” said Odile. “I see her slouching in the shadow of a dragon in the desert sun.”

  Since the explosive debut of The Chaos Committee two weeks previous, Odile’s visions and prognostications had become more pessimistic. She told me that The Chaos Committee’s actions were affecting the behavior of almost every cognizant citizen who consulted her. Even children. Only the mad were immune. She was beginning to dread her consultations because of the “darkness of our times.” She asked me if I thought people would be better off not knowing their immediate futures. She could not change her findings, but she could pause or even cease her practice. Find a new calling. I didn’t have an answer for her.

  As Dalton’s vehicle approached, Local Live! filled my enormous-screen TV with “Massacre Near Palomar,” in which three state-licensed marijuana grove workers were gunned down and burned with flamethrowers. And two more individuals—“possibly campers and not believed to be involved in the cannabis industry”—were apparently shot and killed. Evidence at the scene pointed to the deadly New Generation cartel, which was known to be battling the Sinaloa cartel. The massacre was seen as part of a larger New Generation strategy to control all drug distribution within the United States. Legalized marijuana was the Achilles’ heel of all the drug cartels, said Local Live!

  Hours ago, when the news crews had been allowed in to see the Palomar crime scene, Tola had done her best to speak to the reporters. She said that all of her workers were U.S. citizens or legal immigrants working in a state-governed agricultural industry. One of the deceased was a Native American.

  “And most importantly, they’re good people,” she said. “Good souls. Until the banks will take our legal money and cartel gunmen can’t cross our borders and get automatic weapons, this kind of thing will happen again.”

  I couldn’t see through her sunglasses on the TV, but her voice was shaking with grief and fury. At the time of her interview I had been squatting down behind one of the sheriff vans.

  Just as she finished on Local Live!, Dalton clomped from the darkness into the patio light, out of breath and sweating hard, and slapped a nine-by-eleven clasp envelope on the picnic table in front of me.

  “Hi, y�
�all,” he said to the Irregulars. Shook each of their hands and looked them in the eye. “Sorry to interrupt. Uh, Roland, this was in my mailbox when I came home an hour ago. I ripped it open and knew you should see it. Cut myself on the metal.”

  He loomed over the table eagerly, showing us the blood-marked bandage on the side of a knuckle.

  I noted the jaggedly torn envelope, the bent clasp still attached, the smear of blood.

  The Irregulars crowded behind me as I slid out a sheet of printer paper and set it on the table. The message had been printed in a common roman font:

  I will tell you how to save your wife. Until then, suffer quietly as America suffers. Your last full measure of devotion will be required. If you show this evidence to law enforcement, you will never see Natalie again except in your memories.

  I upended the envelope and out slid a shirt, neatly folded and wrapped in plastic, as if fresh from the dry cleaner. Light blue and long-sleeved by the look of it. Blood on the plastic.

  “It’s Natalie’s,” said Dalton. “I recognize the glass buttons. Damn the world, Roland—they’ve got her.”

  Ash Galland, on what her sister had worn to breakfast the day she vanished: a light blue satin blouse the color of her eyes.

  “Why did you open it?” asked Burt. “You must have seen how foolish that was.”

  Dalton gave Burt a fuck you, little guy look but said nothing.

  I righted the empty envelope before me and read the sender’s name and return address. Heard the catches of breath from the Irregulars behind me. Handwritten block caps, right slant, neat.

  JUSTINE TIMMERMAN FORD

  RANCHO DE LOS ROBLES

  48 OLD HIGHWAY 395

  FALLBROOK, CA 92028

  “What?” asked Liz.

  Odile shook her head. “What does this mean?”

  “Who did this?” asked Dick.

  “Someone trying to get personal with Roland,” said Burt. “Someone trying to anger and distract him.”

  A moment of silence fell over us as Natalie Strait’s image filled the TV, Local Live! updating us on week two of her disappearance, a sidebar to the Palomar massacre, as part of the Strait family misfortune that had seemingly followed them for decades.

  All eyes on Dalton.

  “Any dinner left?” he asked.

  * * *

  Burt and I sat up late in my upstairs office again, saying little while we viewed more hours of Mike Lark’s surveillance video on my desktop monitor. Some of it crisp and clear, and some of it muddy and useless. Jackie O? Nowhere to be seen.

  I felt the anger creeping up on me. If none of Lark’s battalion of eager federales had been able to spot Jackie O, how could we?

  What if someone else in The Chaos Committee had mailed the damned bomb? Lark had professed faith in my luck and eyesight, and in our friendship, but I sensed he’d recruited me less as an able-eyed volunteer than as an informant on the Straits.

  I left another message for Tola. Rang off uneasily, the scar on my forehead tingling. I sipped bourbon against the bloodshed of the day.

  “What worries me most about Dalton is how little he cares for Natalie,” said Burt. “And how much leverage and publicity he’s enjoying. All the while carrying on with big pharma’s dreamy lobbyist. Maybe the sheriffs are onto something. Maybe he’s behind Natalie’s absence. Look at the benefits—it frees up his love life, increases his sympathy votes in November, and makes it easier to blame her in court. She can’t even defend herself. What’s to keep him from hiring out the kidnapping, putting you between him and the cops, mailing himself Natalie’s blouse as a diversion? Invoking Justine as a way to confuse and divert you?”

  I paused the video and thought about that. All of it credible and possible.

  I asked the obvious. “Did he have her killed?”

  “If he arranged her abduction, her death would solve certain problems.”

  I grunted, stood, looked out at a western sky pricked with stars. Felt like I was trapped in a cage with high black walls and a faraway lid with little holes in it to give me air and hope.

  “The question is, would he?” said Burt. “What kind of man is Dalton Strait at his core?”

  “It depends who you talk to.”

  “I’m talking to you, champ. You fought a war alongside him.”

  I told Burt what I’d learned about Dalton’s behavior in Fallujah, regarding Harris Broadman and the burning Humvee. That his battlefield heroics were in question, and his alleged Silver Star heroism had left a man badly scarred. And that by one commanding officer’s account, Dalton’s Purple Heart was earned through bad judgment and reckless conduct.

  “But if you sit down with him one-on-one,” I said. “When he talks about Natalie, you get a different version of him. He loves and adores her. They’ve spent well over half their lives together. She’s someone he . . . admired and wanted to be worthy of.”

  “So, his love appears real,” said Burt. “Just as his heroism does.”

  “I don’t think he’d have her abducted or killed.”

  “Semper Fi, Roland.”

  “Faith has nothing to do with it, Burt.”

  I resumed the video, trying to concentrate on the surveillance footage, but my mind was picking back through every minute of the last two weeks that I’d spent with Dalton—reevaluating him, looking for a different angle or something I’d missed, re-vetting my own interpretations when Dalton had left me unclear or doubtful. I knew Burt was half right. The marine in me wanted Dalton not to have done such things.

  Then I was back in the green meadow where Charity had died. And in the groves of cottonwoods where Kirby had been hanged and mutilated, and in Tola’s grow with the bullet-riddled, flame-thrown humans and plants left heaped on the ground with equal disregard, and the sliced panels of sun fabric fluttering in the breeze.

  My eyes locked on the monitor, where another dark-haired woman mailed another package. UPS, Portland, Oregon, according to the footer. Not Jackie O.

  And so on, into the late hours.

  After Burt retired, I soldiered on, seeing no one very much like our prize.

  I called and woke up both Dalton and Virgil with concern over Tola’s whereabouts and well-being. Dalton said he had no idea where she was and her grandfather said she could take care of herself. I reminded him of the lopsided slaughter on Palomar.

  I finally crashed on the office couch, landing in dreams of Tola Strait and gunfire. I’d never been around Tola and gunfire at the same time and later I wondered if it was a premonition. I wondered a lot of things.

  My phone rang loud in the timeless dark.

  “I’m at your gate,” she said.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The next morning, Lieutenant Hazzard and Detective Proetto sat in their Valley Center station interview room, Natalie Strait’s blue satin blouse in its blood-touched plastic wrapper on the table before them. Beside it lay the torn envelope and the sheet of paper.

  “Why didn’t Mr. Strait bring this to us himself?” asked Hazzard.

  “Off to Sacramento early this morning,” I said.

  “Convenient, like the video of his shackled wife that only he has actually seen. Because it self-destructed on his phone.”

  I shrugged but said nothing.

  Proetto used a pen to bring the torn mailer closer.

  “Dalton’s prints and blood are on it,” I said. “He lost his patience, ripped it open. Handled the blouse through the plastic. At least he didn’t touch the garment. The evidence techs might have a shot at some hair and fiber.”

  Proetto held up the envelope by one corner, worked in his pen into the torn opening, gave the mailer a good shake.

  “The lab found another horsetail hair in Mrs. Strait’s BMW,” he said. “Which now makes three. Thick, black, cropped at both ends.”

  Hazzard ey
ed me unhappily. Proetto poked at the plastic-covered blouse with his pen.

  “Dalton gave us run of the house last week and we found nothing there that correlates to horsehair,” Hazzard said. “No belts, jewelry or accessories, purses, crafts or works of art. No clothing or furniture containing horsehair. Natalie doesn’t ride horses recreationally. Which leads us to the abductors. And makes me wonder if there might have been some activity in that vehicle. A struggle, maybe Natalie trying to get out, she got a handful of—whatever was made of horsehair. A necklace or bracelet. Even a rope, maybe.”

  I tried to think of another, unrelated, source for decorative horsetail hairs in Natalie’s SUV. Drew blanks on top of blanks.

  But if the horsehairs didn’t come from Natalie herself, then her abductors were a very possible source. So, what did we know about these abductors? Little. According to witnesses, two men and a woman. No good physical descriptions. There was no suspect or even persons of interest. Except in the mind of Hazzard, focused on Dalton himself. My own short list was long indeed: a world full of people looking to take down Dalton for a multitude of transgressions. Brock Weld? What evidence did I have on him except an admitted attraction to an attractive woman, a disdain for that woman’s husband, and a creaky alibi for the morning Natalie was abducted? But what use would either of them have for horsetail hair?

  I considered Hazzard’s ham face and small, aggressive eyes. I understood why he disliked me, and why he was in a hurry to convict Dalton Strait. I wondered what else was stoking his anger. The abduction of an innocent woman? The Chaos Committee itself?

  “Thanks for bringing this in,” said Proetto. “I’ll walk you out.”