Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 11 - Flashback

by Flashback(Lit)

  21

  Anna indulged herself in an early and quiet evening. She read Raffia's letters, then went to bed before dark. The following morning she woke, feeling more clearheaded than she had in days.

  For the first time since she'd come to the Keys, the morning wasn't bright and sunny. A stiff breeze blew out of the southeast. The sky was heavy with dark clouds and, where they broke open, she could see paler gray clouds above, long, stretched, mare's tails that told of winds at high altitudes.

  In the office she turned the radio on and tuned it to the marine weather frequency. Rain and winds to thirty knots. Small craft warnings were out. No hurricane. Anna was disappointed. Had she been a shore-bound homeowner she'd have been relieved. Out on Garden Key the fort had withstood a hundred and fifty years of storms with little damage. The rangers liked hurricanes; they blew the tourists away.

  Feeling snug behind fifteen feet of brick wall, she took out the photograph she'd studied the day before.

  Just to be sure residual drugs in her bloodstream weren't making her see things, she downloaded the pictures she had taken of the corpse Bob Shaw kept company with on East Key.

  Sure enough, on the dead man's calf was the same tattoo as in the snapshot of Theresa and two Hispanic men she'd pilfered from Lanny's house. Given this tattoo was the mark of a brotherhood of smugglers, as Florida law enforcement said, it was safe to assume more than one man had it. The height, weight, hair length and coloring of the corpse and Ms. Alvarez's companion also matched.

  It was the same guy.

  Anna turned from the photos to let her mind clear. The runaway girlfriend had spoken with the man on the Scarab hauling fuel. Theresa was Cuban. It was a good bet in this part of the country the two Hispanic men with her were Cuban as well. The second man might very well be the fellow whose penis and hand rested in cold storage in the researchers' dorm. Garden Key was a small place. The three of them might have met by chance, gathered together in birds-of-a-feather mode to speak their native language or exchange recipes.

  Anna doubted it. The men killed in the Scarab's explosion were here for reasons other than socializing. It was their knee-jerk reaction to run from the law in the person of Ranger Shaw, which brought about the original blast. They must have had a pressing reason to come to the docks and beaches where rangers lurked, a pressing need to talk with Theresa.

  Anna flipped over the photograph of Ms. Alvarez and the men to check the date. The picture had been printed in Key West a week or so after Theresa left Lanny. Anna called up the prior month's duty roster. Lanny had his days off the week the photo was printed. The timing was right but what mattered was when the photo was taken.

  Again she dialed Lanny's number. Anita answered, and after a minute of cajoling went to fetch her patient or master-Anna still wasn't sure what sort of place Lanny was living in.

  At length his voice came over the phone. Anna thought he sounded marginally sharper, but sufficient time had not passed for the antipsychotics to wear off even if he remembered not to keep taking them.

  No other avenue open, she asked her questions, couching each in simple descriptive language to help him remember. Since he was in a particularly suggestible state, she had to concentrate on her words lest she create a false memory for him.

  The talk, though mumbling, often slurred and beset by meanderings, was not completely a waste of time. Lanny might remember the picture. He might have taken it himself. He must have had it developed on his lieu days if that's what the date was. If all that could be so, then it might have been the roll he finished up the day before Theresa left.

  Not exactly testimony Anna would want to put before a jury.

  The radio crackling snatched her out of this morass of thoughts.

  "Hey Anna, it's Patrice, are you there?" the lighthouse keeper said. Though Patrice and Donna had been coming to Loggerhead one month a summer for many years, and Patrice had once been a police officer, they refused to use proper radio protocol. It was a point of pride with them.

  "I'm here," Anna said and smiled. The rebel women made the male-created radio protocol seem foolish: boys playing at being soldiers.

  "While Donna was up in the lighthouse fiddling with something greasy she spotted another one of your go-fast boats. Thought you might want to know."

  Go-fast boats weren't a rarity in the Dry Tortugas but neither were they the usual fare. Recent events made this sighting of interest. Anna jotted down the color of the boat and the direction it had been heading, thanked Patrice and went back to her telephoning, this time tracking down the owner of the green boat. Since she'd turned this particular task over to Lieutenant George Henriquez in Key West, she was relegated to the job of nag. Accepting the new role, she dialed his number.

  Luck was on her side; George was in and answering his phone. It might have been her imagination or her inborn cynicism, but it seemed with each new invention developed to make communication easier-call waiting, forwarding, voice mail, fax, pagers, cell phones-the more difficult it became to get in touch with anyone.

  "Hey George, Anna Pigeon out at Dry Tortugas." She heard a sigh and a scuffle and knew her projects had not been on the top of Lieutenant Henriquez's undoubtedly daunting To Do list.

  He was kind enough to be apologetic instead of peevish. He'd faxed the registration number she'd gotten off the engine to Manny Silva in the coast guard office. He gave her Mr. Silva's direct number and the extension. On the Theresa Alvarez thing he'd gotten a few numbers, which he passed on to her.

  The boat registration could wait. Theresa's connection to the men on the boat would not. Anna dialed the first of the numbers Lieutenant Henriquez had given her, a Mrs. Alvarez, Theresa's aunt on her father's side.

  Mrs. Alvarez was home. No number menu to punch, no machine; a human voice. The woman's English was not the best and Anna's Spanish was rudimentary, but they managed.

  Anna introduced herself and said why she was calling. Through a patient sifting of words in two languages and the aggravating delays on the line, Anna pieced together a short and unenlightening story. Theresa was happy with Lanny. She'd never mentioned leaving him. She'd never come home. According to the aunt, Theresa was a good girl, "never in no trouble," and had strong ties with her community. "Everybody love our Theresa. She always doing for people."

  Theresa was not an American citizen but was in Florida legally. When Anna asked after Theresa's mother, father and Mrs. Alvarez herself regarding the immigration issues, the aunt suddenly lost what English she had.

  Out of questions and Mrs. Alvarez frightened into "Si" and "No comprendo," Anna was about to begin her thank-yous when Theresa's aunt had a sudden attack of confidences.

  "Something bad happened. Theresa don't just not come home. And she don't walk out on Lanny. When Willy he introduces them, Theresa seemed not to care, like she's pretending. But Theresa loved that Lanny even he's an old man for her and not rich. Something bad happened."

  Anna tended to agree that something bad had happened to Theresa. "I'll look into it," she promised and put the receiver back in its cradle, not much wiser than before she'd made the translingual call.

  Before she'd had time to let go of the receiver, her mind clicked back to Mrs. Alvarez's last remarks. "When Willy introduced them." Willy, William.

  "Shit," Anna said, picked the receiver back up, and hit redial.

  "This is Ranger Pigeon again, Mrs. Alvarez," Anna said as soon as the other woman picked up.

  "Hallo?"

  Realizing she'd rattled her words so quickly Mrs. Alvarez probably wouldn't have understood even if English had been her first language, Anna repeated herself at a more genteel pace.

  "Yes?" During the second Anna'd needed to reach epiphany Mrs. Alvarez had thought better of talking openly with government authorities.

  "Who did you say introduced Lanny and Theresa?" Anna asked.

  "Willy, he introduce them," she said guardedly.

  Anna wanted Willy's last name but had a hunch her calling
back so abruptly had scared Mrs. Alvarez more than a little. "Is Willy American?" Anna asked. "I'm not from immigration, Mrs. Alvarez, and I don't want to cause anybody trouble. I just want to find Theresa. I think this Willy may know something. Is he an American?"

  "Oh yes. He is an American now," Mrs. Alvarez replied.

  Anna felt a pang of disappointment strong enough it was physical. She had been so sure she was onto something, she was tempted to think Theresa's aunt was lying, but she'd answered with such enthusiasm Anna believed her. Basically decent people preferred to tell the truth and often grew angry when backed into a corner they had to lie their way out of. It was exactly the opposite with those who were not basically decent. Willy was not born in America. He was originally a citizen of Cuba. To finish up the charade Anna would ask another couple of questions and move on. "So Willy came here when he was little? With his folks?"

  "No. No. His parents they got killed. This lady-nice lady, she been dead a long time now-he call Tia Blanche-Auntie Blanche-she raised him up. Such a sad little boy. You would cry to see him. Marks of those chingalas still on his body."

  Anna sat up from the slump her disappointment had lured her into. "What marks?"

  "This was a long time ago when Castro he throw out all the Americans and snatch lands. Some of his men they tortured this little boy. Willy never said but Blanche tell me they whip him over and over with barbed wire to try and make a baby tell them where his mama and papa hide. Then they kill them."

  Without realizing she did so, Anna put her free hand over her eyes as if it would help to block out the image in her mind. To torture a child with a brutal beating that would leave scars in body and mind was evil. To force that child to betray his parents to their deaths was unspeakable. It would almost have been kinder to kill him.

  Barbed wire. Her hunch about Willy was correct. "The little boy was born in Cuba?" Anna asked.

  "Yes, but his papa was American so Willy is an American, too, without taking no tests."

  "Willy-William-Macintyre."

  "Si. Macintyre. His papa's name."

  William Macintyre, Mack, the man who said he'd been born into land and money but had it stripped from him. The man with old scars on his back and legs scars he'd said he'd gotten in prison when he had no felony record, the boy who'd been whipped with barbed wire by guards in a Cuban prison before he was six years old.

  "Gracias, Senora Alvarez," Anna said politely and returned the earpiece to its cradle.

  Mack had more depth to him than she had suspected. He was born in Cuba and raised in a Cuban neighborhood in Miami. The same neighborhood as Theresa Alvarez. Anna'd thought he'd met Theresa here at the fort. He'd never said otherwise-apparently not to anyone. Surely if he had, with all the talk there'd been of Theresa's absconding with the Supervisory Ranger's heart, somebody would have mentioned it.

  Theresa was photographed talking with two men, one bearing a smuggler's tattoo Anna'd later seen on a dead man. Odds were good that Theresa had known these men prior to moving to Garden Key. Had Mack known them as well?

  Anna considered calling Lanny Wilcox again to see if she could get the details out of him: where and when he'd met Theresa, if he knew she was more than a chance acquaintance of Mack's, whether or not the course of true love had run smooth, and, possibly most important, whose idea had it been that Theresa come to live with him on Garden Key. The state of Wilcox's brain dissuaded her. He wouldn't be able to tell her much, and what he did divulge would be highly suspect.

  Anna put in a call to the Chief Ranger in Homestead. This time she did have to push menu buttons, speak with a secretary and sit on hold for a while. When Flescher came on the line Anna told him what she needed. "You're bound to have more clout than I do," she said. "Can you work it out?"

  "I'll call you back."

  He hung up before Anna had finished the bye in goodbye. She didn't know whether he was in a rush to get right on it or whether he needed time to decide whether or not to waste his credit with the local FBI on the say-so of some lady ranger out of Mississippi who had a reputation for stirring up trouble.

  For forty-five minutes Anna waited by the phone. She didn't dare make any calls to follow up on the engine serial number lest she tie up the line. She couldn't leave the office for fear she would miss the call. Her mind was too scrambled to focus on anything else. To keep herself from pacing and rehearsing the four-letter words she'd learned after hours at Mercy High School, she clipped her nails, ordered Lanny's desk drawer and worked three crossword puzzles gleaned from a stack of old newspapers piled beside the coffee machine.

  When the phone finally rang, she pounced upon it with such alacrity she knocked the receiver to the floor and had to drag it up by the cord.

  "Dry Tortugas National Park."

  "What are you doing? Playing hockey using the phone as a puck?"

  It was Chief Ranger Arnie Flescher.

  "Can you do it?"

  "Let's slow down," he said.

  Those words, spoken by a superior, usually segued into "No."

  Anna made a point to say nothing, not the teensiest little peep that would give away the fact she was not really a team player.

  "Cliff and the Activa will be out in a couple days. Why don't you hold off till then? Send the dead boatman's hand in and ID can be done in proper order at the lab. Finding out who these guys were has got to be attempted, but there's no rush on it that I can see."

  Anna ran a quick check to make sure no snide words or sarcastic edges tainted words or tone, then said: "I think they may have had some-thing to do with the disappearance of Theresa Alvarez. I found a picture of her and the man Bob tried to rescue."

  "Disappearance? I thought she ran off. Is this the guy she ran off with? We don't want to get a thick finger stirring in the domestic pot."

  "Maybe she didn't run off."

  "I don't want to hear this."

  "How was it decided she'd run out on Lanny? Who said that? Lanny?"

  There was a jumble of words as the chief and she talked over one another, forgetting the one-second wait the phone system levied.

  "I don't know," the chief said at last. "It was just sort of known the way those things are."

  "If she ran off she didn't take much with her and, according to her aunt, never showed up anywhere."

  "Nope. Didn't want to hear that. Check it out."

  "That's what I need your help with."

  Several ticks of the big wall clock went by, the red second hand seeming to pause to gather its courage before each jump. "This is news," the chief said. His voice was sufficiently neutral Anna guessed he was pissed off. Chief rangers-the good ones-do not like being kept in the dark.

  "I just saw the picture," Anna said. "And I talked to Mrs. Alvarez only a few minutes before I called you. I mean, I'd seen the photo before, but I didn't recognize the guy till just now."

  Probably because he wanted results, he didn't question her story. "Okay," he said after a bit of thought that came at Anna in edged silences. "Here's what you do. No guarantees. It depends on how good the prints you lift are. The submersion in water may be a help. It sort of puffs things up."

  Though the instructions were short and simple, Anna wrote them down. She had no intention of screwing this up.

  Finally free of the phone, she collected her fingerprinting kit and returned to the researchers' dorm. As she turned the key to let herself in. she had the sudden and horrible thought that the hand, her only way of finding out the identity of the man blown to smithereens on the green Scarab, would be gone. In her naivet‚ she'd not secured the body parts, not even thought of them as evidence and had made no effort to lock them up. Anyone at the fort could easily get the key to the dorm if they didn't already have one.

  Her fears were unfounded. Sitting in the refrigerator, palm up in lonely supplication, was the most important remaining part of what had once been a human being. Having had his penis severed, the victim might not have agreed with her assessment on the varying
levels of importance, but there were no national data banks for finding matches to penis prints.

  From the rough and disengaged life these five fingers had suffered, the skin was perilously loose, and Anna handled the thing with extreme care. Using black ink, she would print only the thumb. Her knowledge of how printing worked after death and submersion was sketchy at best. Should her method somehow destroy the skin of the thumb, she wanted to leave the other four fingers for a technician more schooled than she.

  Had the hand been newly dead, firm of flesh, she might have lifted the print on sticky tape. As it was she feared the tape would pull away flesh as well as ink. When she gripped the back of the hand to roll the thumb, she had a bad moment. Till then the hand had been merely an object of study. Feeling the give of the flesh, the familiar bone structure beneath, it reverted to a macabre chunk of a once-living person. Revulsion would have had her throw it away with a girlish shriek. Closing her eyes, she let the impulse pass, then carefully rolled out three prints. The first two were smudged. She'd used too much ink. The last was good.