“The truth,” Ed said.
“What truth? What does that mean to you?”
For Ed, that was the tipping point, the one bit of proof he needed to bring everything into focus. Charles Marsh was lost. For all his money and connections, he had absolutely nothing to go on. Even now, with everything going his way and Ed’s professional ruin in his hands, Charles Marsh was begging for Ed to give up the clue that had eluded him.
“It means you’ll have to do your own work for once, Charles. I’m not giving you shit. Not ever again.”
Marsh’s expression turned cold. He glanced over his shoulder at his film crew packing up their vehicles. Then he turned back to Ed. “You’re gonna regret this, Ed.”
“We’ll see.”
And with that, Ed went to the back of his Suburban and pulled out the spare tire. He wedged the jack under the vehicle. It started to rain hard as he cranked the tire iron. He bent his head, his rage turning to frustration, but refused to let his frustration give way to sobbing. If some of Marsh’s crew were still filming him—and it would be unlike them to miss an opportunity such as this—and they caught him wallowing in his own misery, he would never be able to hold his head up at a convention again.
Once the tire was changed, he closed the back door to his Suburban and thought for sure he was done here. He was in the process of climbing back into his Suburban when an old woman staggered out of the rain, a bucket in her hand. He put a hand over his eyes yet still had to squint against the downpour to see her. She made no attempt to shield her eyes though.
“You’re wrong,” she said in Spanish.
“About what?”
“About the children. About what happened to them.”
Ed dropped his hand from his face. The water was running into his eyes, but he didn’t notice. “What do you mean?”
“There is no chupacabra,” she said. “There never was.”
“I know that.” He had to shout to hear his own voice over the pounding rain. “So who did kill those children?”
The woman put her bucket down and pointed up the road.
Ed glanced that way, but he couldn’t see a thing through the heavy rain. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
“You’re the one who told them it wasn’t a chupacabra the last time.” It wasn’t a question.
“That’s right.”
“Do you think that is the work of the chupacabra?”
“What?”
“Those crosses. Did a chupacabra do that?”
Ed shook his head. “No.”
She nodded. “There’s a woman that lives in the house down the road, that way. The dog you found last time was hers.”
“Okay,” he said. He had no idea what she was driving at. “Do you think she’s responsible?”
The woman didn’t answer. She picked up her bucket and made like she was going to walk off.
“Wait!” he said. “Please, wait.”
He took a step toward her but slipped on the muddy ground.
“Please, wait,” he said again. “Why are you telling me all this?”
She pointed down the road again. “Because you were the only one who stopped to look at the crosses.”
And with that she was gone.
Ed remembered seeing a ranch house down the road from the old church, near the banks of Atascosa Creek. Nobody made mention of the house the last time he was down in this area several years ago, which didn’t really surprise him. The townsfolk had been in high spirits back then, and despite all his claims to scientific integrity and the completeness of his investigations, he too had been so caught up in the excitement of possibly getting to study a real-life chupacabra that he’d failed to learn anything about the geography of the county. His attention had centered on dash-cam videos and interviewing ranchers and looking at rotting canine carcasses.
But he remembered that the rancher they’d brought Ed to see at the time had also lived along Atascosa Creek. A little farther north from where he was now, but still in the same area. Maybe the specimen that rancher had killed really did belong to the woman down the road. A loose dog, even one afflicted with mange, would have had no trouble straying a couple of miles. And the mange was known to dehydrate its victims, which would explain why the dog would stay close to the water. Ed didn’t see how that connected the dog’s owner to the five children who had been killed, but it was a better lead than anything else he had to go on.
He pulled out of the church parking lot and headed back up Farm-to-Market Road 474, toward the creek. The rain was still coming down pretty hard, but he could see the house well enough, and it was immense, even by the ranch-home standards of South Texas. It looked tumbledown though, almost like it was abandoned. There were no lights in the windows. The roof sagged at one corner, and parts of the porch railing that had once ringed the entire front of the massive one-story house were warped and broken. Others were missing altogether.
He was tempted to get out and explore but didn’t relish the idea of slogging through knee-deep mud. Plus, this was Texas, and people in these parts hung signs in their yards that said things like THE SECOND AMENDMENT MAKES ALL THE OTHERS POSSIBLE and YOU CAN CALL 9-1-1, I’LL CALL .357.
The idea of getting a gun muzzle jammed into his ear appealed to Ed even less than wading through the mud, so he decided to head back to his motel. It’d give him a chance to clean up and unwind with a beer while he did some research online.
On the way, it looked for a time like the black pickup that had fallen in behind him on County Road 17 was following him, but it turned off as he entered town and Ed dismissed it as nerves.
And after the day he’d had, who could blame him?
His room was on the second floor of the Cuero Motor Lodge, all the way at the end of the parking lot.
The rain had slacked off a little, but it was still coming down, and so Ed walked to his room with his eyes on the ground as he fiddled with his keys, his mind still on the old woman he’d met in the churchyard.
He didn’t notice his door was open until he reached it.
He froze. Somebody was rummaging around in there, and through the crack in the door he could see his room had been trashed.
“Hey!” he said, and pushed the door open.
His stuff was all over the floor. A man in a green T-shirt was standing by the bathroom door, his back to Ed. As he stepped into the room, Ed had just enough time to realize the man was wearing pressed jeans when a second person he hadn’t seen blindsided him.
His attacker drove his shoulder into Ed’s rib cage and smashed him into the wall, knocking the wind from him. Ed slumped to the floor, his vision a swirling mess, and came close to losing consciousness.
“Let’s go!” the second man said. “Grab the computer and the file and let’s go!”
The one who’d roughed him up was already out the door. Ed never got a look at him. But he recovered quickly enough to see the guy in the green shirt and pressed jeans scoop his laptop and the accordion file from the bed. As the man ran for the door, Ed lunged at him, throwing his arms around the thief’s knees.
They both went down on the wet walkway outside the door. The man in the green shirt managed to hold on to the file, but Ed’s laptop hit the ground with a nasty crack. The man kicked again and again, trying to plant his heel on Ed’s chin. He missed Ed’s face but managed to hit the nerve at the base of his neck, and once again Ed felt the fight drain out of him.
With his last bit of strength, Ed dropped a feeble hand on the top of the broken laptop and pulled it toward him. The man in the green shirt tried to wrest it away from him, but Ed started to yell for help, and the two assailants finally gave up and ran down the walkway toward the stairs.
With a groan, Ed pulled the laptop out of the rain and crawled back inside his room.
Ed pushed the clothes and bags of chips and newspapers off the bed and put his laptop there. It was gritty with mud. He wiped that away with part of the bedsheets and studied the computer. The
left-side hinge was busted so that the monitor and keyboard wouldn’t close correctly. He opened it as carefully as he could, but the plastic casing was broken, and he had to prop the monitor up against a pillow to keep it in place. The screen was spiderwebbed with cracks, and the space bar had popped out. He tried to snap it back into place, but it wouldn’t fit. Ed tried typing a few words on the keyboard, but every time he hit the space bar it popped out of the housing.
Frustrated, he threw the long key across the room.
His side ached where the thief had kicked him, but the sudden sense of defeat and malaise that washed over him was worse.
He’d written eleven books on this machine.
Eleven fucking books.
Marsh, he thought. You miserable goddamned bastard.
Ed’s whole professional life was in this laptop. He had nearly everything backed up to Dropbox, and he had duplicates on memory sticks scattered all over his office and his apartment and in the glove box of his Suburban, but the laptop itself was his life. He’d put more miles than he could count on that keyboard, and now it was just a piece of junk.
Ed leaned forward and took the laptop’s cracked display in both hands.
His feelings of defeat and bootless frustration vanished. What was left of him, his recalcitrant pride, caught fire and turned to anger. Marsh, he thought, you will not beat me. I won’t let you.
A peal of thunder shook Ed from his thoughts.
He turned toward the door. Marsh’s goons had shattered the frame, and it wouldn’t close right. Every time the wind blew, it yawned open. Ed stood up, careful of his aching ribs. It was getting dark outside, and at some point while he’d been lost in the Internet, the rain had stopped and a second wave had come in, threatening to roll over the little town of Cuero.
He went to the door and stood there, thinking about what he’d learned. The air smelled of wet asphalt and grass. He looked across the parking lot to the crumbling two-lane road that ran through the middle of town. Steam was rising from the roadway, even as a glowering sky the color of a fresh bruise rolled in from the south.
A flash of lightning made him jump.
He closed the door and faced his wrecked room.
Marsh, he thought. The bastard had tried so hard to break him. He’d put a gag order on the cops, and when that failed to keep information out of Ed’s hands, he’d sabotaged his vehicle, robbed him, and even sent his goons to beat him up. But he hadn’t won.
Not yet.
Ed took out his phone and dialed Deputy Kohler’s number. He was pretty sure the deputy was in Marsh’s pocket, but Ed required information he couldn’t get anywhere else. He needed a local, and Kohler was the only one he could possibly turn to.
“You got a lot of nerve, calling me at work,” Kohler said in a low whisper.
“I want to know everything you can tell me about Anna Aguillar de Medrano,” Ed said.
“What?”
“You heard me. The woman who lives in the ranch house down by the crossroads. What’s her story?”
“What makes you think I’m gonna tell you anything?”
“Two reasons,” Ed said. “One, Charles Marsh has you bought and paid for—”
“Excuse me?” the deputy said, clearly angry. But that was okay. That was what Ed wanted.
“You heard me. Either Charles Marsh owns you, in which case you’ll run to him with everything we’re about to talk about—”
“Or?”
“Or, you’re an honest cop who wants to know who killed those five little kids, in which case you’ll tell me all you know about Anna Aguillar de Medrano.”
There was a long pause before the deputy spoke. “What is it you want to know?”
That was a good question, because Ed didn’t really know. He’d spent most of the day trying to work on his mangled laptop. He’d learned that the ruined ranch house he’d seen down on FM 474, and the three thousand acres of prime South Texas grassland that it sat on, was worth a mere eight hundred thousand dollars. Hardly the true value of a prime piece of real estate in the heart of ranching country.
The owner was listed as Pedro Medrano, who, according to an obituary Ed had found from September 2009, had been one of the leading advocates for Texas cattlemen up until his untimely death from a heart attack at the age of forty. He’d left everything—his house, his land, and his numerous business affairs—to his thirty-eight-year-old wife, Anna Aguillar de Medrano, whom Pedro had brought to Texas from Mexico, and who apparently knew absolutely nothing about running a ranch.
Within two years, Mrs. Medrano had sold off nearly five thousand head of prize-winning cattle, allowed her once-glorious home to descend into a tumbledown wreck, and all but resigned from society. If she was still alive—and Ed had no proof of that beyond what the old woman from the migrant worker village had told him—she had become a shut-in.
“Tell me what happened to her house,” said Ed. “I checked the county tax assessor’s website and it looks like it’s only worth a fraction of what it should be.”
“You’ve seen the place. It’s a trash heap.”
“Yeah, but even so, with that much land, it should be worth a fortune.”
“It used to be,” Kohler said. “Before her husband died.”
“Heart attack. I read about that, too.”
“That’s right. You get that from the obituary?”
“Yeah.”
“It left out the part about her being pregnant when he died, didn’t it?”
That caught Ed by surprise. “She was pregnant?”
“Doña Anna has had it pretty rough these last few years.”
“Doña Anna?”
“It’s what we call her around here. It’s a sign of respect. A woman like her, who’s had the bad breaks she has, deserves a little consideration.”
“What kind of bad breaks?”
“Health issues, mainly. She got sick after her husband died. Started losing weight, wasting away. You know how people can get when they’re heartsick.”
“Yeah,” Ed said. “What about the baby?”
“Oh, well. She, uh, she lost the baby. It’s buried on the property.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. She lost the baby.”
“No,” Ed said. “The other part. You sounded like there was more to that story. What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing but local gossip and superstition.”
“That’s where I live,” said Ed. “Tell me.”
“It’s the wetbacks over in that little village down the road from her property, mainly. They’re the ones who say it. Respectable people don’t believe it, of course.”
“Believe what?”
“Well, like I said, it’s those wetbacks, mainly. But they say she carried that baby for four years before it finally came out stillborn.”
“Four years? That’s impossible.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Kohler said. “It’s just ignorant people talking about stuff that ain’t their business.”
“But . . . how does a rumor like that get started? How come I didn’t hear about it when I was here last year?”
“ ’Cuz it only happened about six months ago.”
“You’re joking.”
“I told you. Nobody believes it. Nobody respectable anyway.”
“But what’s the story?” Ed asked.
“About six months ago, one of them wetbacks from the village come into town in one of Doña Anna’s pickups and bought a headstone. Paid cash. He didn’t make no secret it was for Doña Anna’s dead baby. Said she’d delivered her baby stillborn and wanted to bury it on her land.”
“I didn’t see any reference to that. If she had a stillborn child, there should be records, right? A death certificate?”
“Well,” Kohler said, and Ed could almost picture the man shrugging his shoulders, “nobody really bothers Doña Anna. We did pay her a visit, shortly after that, but she didn’t answer w
hen we knocked on the door and we didn’t push it.”
Ed let that sit for a moment, trying to take it all in.
“What about her dogs?” Ed finally asked.
“She used to raise champion Weimaraners. Back in the day.”
“Does she still?”
“I don’t think so.” Kohler paused for a long moment. “Why do you want to know about Doña Anna anyway? ’Round here, we just leave her alone.”
“I think it was one of her dogs I dissected last time I was here.”
“No,” Kohler said. “No, that ain’t possible.”
“I think it was.”
“I thought you said it was some kind of dog-and-coyote hybrid with mange.”
“It was. But the dog part of it . . . I think it was one of her dogs.”
Kohler didn’t say anything, and Ed could almost hear the wheels turning in the man’s mind, like he was trying to figure out what to do with the information he’d just learned.
Ed didn’t feel like waiting for him to come around.
“I’m going out there,” he said. “Tonight.”
“What for?”
“Answers,” Ed said. “And you can tell that to whoever wants to know.”
Ed didn’t see anybody following him while driving out to the ranch, but that didn’t surprise him. This was the big reveal. Ed could sense that. Whatever the answer to this riddle was, he was close. And Marsh knew it, too. He’d be careful. Hang back. Wait for Ed to do the dirty work before swooping in to claim the credit and the glory.
So Ed took his time.
He stopped in front of the Medrano home and waited for nightfall. Storms rolled in from the south, and soon it was raining hard again, but that didn’t bother him. It would work against Marsh and his crew, and that was good for Ed.
What he wanted—what he needed—was some kind of link that connected Doña Anna to the murdered children. As it was, he had the word of an old woman whose name he didn’t know, some local gossip, a dead dog-and-coyote hybrid with mange, and a lonely, heartbroken, middle-aged woman, but no real proof of anything. He couldn’t even say the five dead children had been murdered. Ed required something tangible, some sort of affirmative link that tied it all together.
Seize the Night Page 36