Valley of Shadows

by Steven Cooper

  “What does this have to do with Viveca’s murder?”

  “I have a friend. He’s got the gift. I’d like him to talk to you.”

  She rolls her head and Mills can hear her neck crack from where he’s sitting. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughs. “Does your department approve?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What would the taxpaying public think, Detective Mills?” she asks, batting her eyelashes a thousand flirtatious and heinous ways.

  “Do you really want to discuss taxes, Mrs. Norwood?”

  “Touche.”

  “He’s nearby. He can be here in minutes.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m not really comfortable with this.”

  “Of what he might find out?”

  She whips her face at him. “I have nothing to hide.”

  “OK. Of course not. Never mind.” Mills rises to his feet. “I should get going.”

  “Can’t you stay for lunch?”

  Mills, surprised by her invitation, looks at her and sees a faraway woman, a lonely soul whose sphere is unbroken by the affection of others. She’s out there, across the room, adrift at sea, and it’s probably best for him to leave her this way. But he’s curious. Mills is curious, as any detective would be, about what information a casual lunch would yield. If he can be honest with himself, and who the fuck can he be honest with if he can’t be honest with himself, he’s stumped. The tentacles are a tangled mess.

  “I’d love to join you for lunch, but my friend and I had plans,” Mills tells the woman. “Maybe he can join us.”

  “If that’s the only way you’ll stay . . .”

  “It is.”

  “Fine,” she says. “Let me order lunch for three.”

  And she does.

  27

  Gus notices his unruly straggle in the rearview mirror. Often confused for Jesus, Gus has to do a better job with the morning shave. The sandals don’t help. People don’t actually think he is Jesus, but they often do a double take and tell him he’s the “spitting image.” Gus laughs it off because, as far as he knows, and he knows even less than those who claim to know everything about Jesus, Jesus was several shades darker than him. Several Semitic, Arabic shades darker. Though they both have surfer bodies because Gus was, in fact, a surfer, and Jesus might have spent time surfing the waves of the Galilee which, now that Gus considers it, might explain why so many people think Jesus walked on water. Just as his ruminations are going off the rails, he gets a text from Alex.

 

  Five minutes later he’s walking through the door of Francesca Norwood’s bungalow, escorted by a butler who insists on referring to him as Mr. Welch, familiar with him from his stays here at the Desert Charm with Billie. Gus doesn’t bother to correct him. Alex makes the introductions and Francesca Norwood says, “Charmed,” as if she was paid by the hotel to say that. Gus’s arrival is followed a few awkward minutes later by a buffet lunch that rolls into the room as if it’s strutting down a culinary catwalk.

  “Mrs. Norwood tells me she was planning to move, indefinitely, to Tahiti with Viveca Canning,” Alex says.

  “Transcontinental Airlines?” Gus asks reflexively.

  “I don’t remember,” the woman says. “But I can check.”

  “You must,” Gus insists. “I know about an ill-fated flight.”

  The woman laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says demurely through her chuckles, “but I’m not accustomed to prophecies outside the church.”

  Gus looks at her and nods, keeps nodding, studies her, this blackhaired woman; she reminds him of a cobra, the position of her head and the curvature of her neck, the way she looks ready to pounce despite her fine manners.

  “You’re making me nervous, Mr. Parker,” she says.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Call me Gus.”

  She doesn’t respond. Instead she leads them around the buffet where they pick at the food. Gus has filled his plate with a conservative mound of salad and topped it with a few cubes of grilled salmon. Alex, like a defiant child, is eating chicken strips and sweet potato tots and completely confident about his choice. “Detective,” the preacher’s wife says, “I’d appreciate it very much if you would not share anything else about our conversation with your friend.”

  A tot on its way to his mouth, Alex says, “Of course. Whatever you wish.”

  As they eat quietly for a few minutes, Gus stealthily studies the woman again. He has a knack for knowing when people look away. Those moments, however brief, are opportunities. He conducts a foray. He does the Jiffy Lube version of a psychic maneuver. He swoops in and gets out. “You don’t have a daughter,” Gus says to her.

  She looks up from her scoops of tuna salad. “Are we warming up with a guessing game?”

  “No,” Gus says.

  “But it was a good guess. I don’t have a daughter.”

  “But you wanted one. Right?”

  “Also a good guess,” she says.

  Gus crunches into a tooth-defying crouton. “I sense a lot of fear, Francesca.”

  She tilts her head. Her eyes look like black pearls. “You fear me or I fear you?”

  “Neither,” Gus says. “You’re afraid of something. A kind of fear you run from. Which explains the trip to Tahiti.”

  Alex clears his throat and says, “Actually, Gus, the trip to Tahiti was planned. It doesn’t appear that Francesca was running away.”

  Gus nods. “I’m just saying what I sense.” And then to Francesca, “Is there a fear dominating your life?”

  She turns to a wall and ponders, then turning back she smacks her lips and says, “Isn’t there always? To varying degrees.”

  “You won’t tell me,” Gus says, “so I’ll tell you. You fear the church. There is something about the church that you’re running from. Am I right?”

  She balks. “I don’t have to answer to you.”

  He treads lightly, relaxes his posture and says, “Of course not. I’m just trying to help you.”

  She points to Alex and says, “No, you’re trying to help him.”

  Gus explains that he hopes to help both of them, that he’s here to decipher whatever messages are in the air, that he has no bias. He says it wouldn’t be the honest thing to do to deliver messages that only benefit Alex. “It doesn’t work that way. I deliver whatever’s in the room. I don’t pick and choose.”

  She turns back to the tuna salad, spreads some of it on a triangle of pita. The splash of the fountain outside fills the silence. So does the hum of estrangement. Gus guesses he’s the only one who can hear the hum. It sounds like an empty house where the din of the appliances and the whir of the air make up for what can’t be or won’t be said. Gus remembers the first years of his own banishment, when he could hear the Parker home wherever he went. A lively conversation, a clanking diner, a rock concert could not displace the hum of that place. He would always know the hum of the Parker home. He knows he has some vacant space in his heart, but with his mother dead and his father dead, it’s not the void of estrangement. And Gus suspects this is not about him. He hears the longing and the separation, he hears the abandonment and the regrets, because the church is speaking and Francesca Norwood has had to make a choice, a frightful choice, a lifechanging choice.

  “Your son wants to come back to the church,” Gus says.

  She looks up, alarmed. “I did not say he ever left.”

  “I know,” Gus says. “But I sense the turmoil and the separation. I sense he was removed.”

  “Did Detective Mills send you a text while I wasn’t looking? Is that how this sideshow works?”

  Alex drops his fork and says, “No. Gus can show you his phone if you’d like. This isn’t a sideshow.”

  “I understand your skepticism,” Gus tells her. “But did he leave? Your son?”

  “Yes,” she hisses. “He did.”

  “I’m a banished son, as well,” Gus tells her. “That’
s probably how I picked up on it. I’m sensitive to experiences I’ve experienced, but not exclusively. I’m sensitive to all kinds of happenings in the universe.” Francesca eyes him, openly smirks. “I’d like to keep my son out of this,” she says. “Will either of you be wanting coffee?”

  Alex declines, so does Gus.

  “Then we’re probably through here,” she says. “I have calls I need to make.”

  “Of course,” Gus says.

  Alex pushes back from the table. “Francesca, if you don’t mind, I do have another question or two about Viveca,” he says. “It won’t take more than a minute.”

  She sighs, removing the cloth napkin from her lap and tossing it on the table. “What?”

  “Why was Viveca leaving the church? We haven’t discussed that.” She grips the edge of the table. “Viveca was leaving the church to fully reconnect with her daughter, Jillian. To finally end the banishment.”

  “By moving to Tahiti? That’s no closer to San Francisco.”

  “Her relationship with her daughter was not compatible with the church. She had slowly been moving away from her role at the church without actually leaving.”

  “Because she was afraid to leave?”

  “Afraid?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of the rumors that bad things can happen to those who defect.”

  “Rumors!” she huffs.

  “What about Bennett?” Mills asks. “If she leaves the church to reconnect with Jillian, doesn’t that leave her erased by Bennett? It doesn’t make sense.”

  The woman shakes her head and sighs again. “Those are the kinds of questions you’d have to ask Viveca. And, as we all know, she’s not available.”

  “I think there’s something you’re not telling me,” Alex says. “Viveca Canning was rewriting her will. She had been leaving most of her estate to the church, but recently decided to change her beneficiary.”

  She gets up and nervously straightens the table. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s all part of the investigation,” Alex replies. “Were you aware of that?”

  “Of course not.”

  Gus can see the skepticism in Alex’s eyes.

  “So you’re saying she made a sudden decision to move to Tahiti, but you don’t really know why?” Alex asks her. “Even though you were going with her?”

  “Exactly.”

  The disbelief at this point is so palpable the curtains look embarrassed.

  “When we were on the phone earlier, you said your husband would kill you if he knew about the trip with Viveca,” Alex says, his eyes following her as she flits about the buffet cart, then to the sofa. “But you also told me your so-called divorce has been all arranged and you’ve reached an agreement. So why would he care about your trip?”

  She freezes. “He doesn’t care where the hell I go,” she growls. “But not with her. Not with a defector.”

  “I see,” Alex says. “Does he know about the change to her will?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, flopping her arms to her sides. “You should ask him.”

  Gus rises. “Should we ask your husband about the key?”

  Francesca trembles. He can see it in her wrists, her shoulders. She steadies herself at the edge of the sofa. “What key?” she murmurs.

  Gus moves to her. “I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me with this vision. I see you with a key, Francesca. And I don’t know where you’re going. But you’re heading to a door. And the door is heavy and the light is red, and maybe there’s artwork. I’m not sure. But you want to turn around and run, don’t you?”

  “Enough!” she cries. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about. I want everyone to leave. This minute.”

  Gus apologizes for upsetting her. “I’m going to leave you my phone number. Call me if anything I’ve said begins to make sense. Again, I’m sorry.”

  “As am I, Francesca,” Alex adds. “It wasn’t my intent to frighten you. Please remember, I’m investigating a homicide. So, I’ll be in touch if I have more questions. I certainly hope you’ll call me if you can think of anything helpful.”

  She doesn’t move. She doesn’t say another word. Alex, apparently, doesn’t need another cue. He turns to leave. Francesca Norwood regards them bitterly and looks away and, as she gazes off into nowhere, Gus grabs her cloth napkin from the table and follows Alex out the door. Outside in the parking lot, in the sauna of a Phoenix afternoon, both men stand there shaking their heads. It’s a silent debrief that says everything. Alex kicks at a small palette of pebbles on the ground. Gus twists his sandal in the pavement. A squawking bird soars overhead as if it’s mocking their silence. Gus stuffs his hands in his pockets and says, “Francesca Norwood’s not being straight with you.”

  Alex smiles meekly with a nod. “No shit.”

  “She’s answering questions, but she’s not on the level,” Gus tells him.

  “Yeah, I suspected as much.”

  “She knows much more than she’s saying.”

  “Is that a psychic thing or just an observation?”

  “A psychic thing,” Gus says. “And the psychic thing also tells me that as much as you think Viveca’s move to Tahiti was planned, she was fleeing, Alex. It was a planned escape.”

  “Duly noted,” he says. “Interesting that you mentioned your vision of a key, but you never mentioned we actually have a key in evidence.” “It wasn’t my place to mention.”

  Folding his arms across his chest, Alex says, “So was the vision for real? Did you actually see her with a key? Or were you just messing with her?”

  Gus whips his head back. “What? You know I don’t mess, dude. Why would you even ask?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything.” Then Alex gets a text message, reads it, and says, “It’s Powell. She’s on the lookout for that reporter. Aaliyah Jones. Have you heard from her?”

  “No. Not in a while,” Gus replies. “What’s going on?”

  Alex shrugs. “We don’t know,” he says. “She called me the other night, said she was being followed. And no one’s seen her since.”

  “And it never occurred to you she was in trouble?”

  “Of course it did. But I thought we’d look in the obvious places before we put all our resources into finding someone who might not be missing. She could have convinced herself she was being followed and just took off because she was scared.”

  Gus shakes his head vigorously. “No, no, no. That’s not it, Alex. No, the last time I talked to her I warned her that she could be in trouble. I mean, I actually warned her that she might be followed. Maybe not in those words exactly, but still. She didn’t take off. She doesn’t scare easily.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you not to shrug this off. She’s someplace against her will.”

  “Your gut or your vision?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, Jesus fucking Christ, Gus, why the fuck didn’t you tell me about the warning you gave her?”

  Gus backs up a few steps. “Hey, Alex, chill, okay? I’ve only met the woman twice. I can’t say if her investigation of the church was intertwined with Viveca Canning’s death. I know she had her suspicions. But you never said it was connected. You never told me otherwise. So how about you don’t put this on me?”

  “Buddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Gus tilts his head, sees his reflection in Alex’s sunglasses, sees the blistering, seething expression on his own face. “Then how did you mean it?”

  With a deep exhale, Alex says, “Ah, I don’t know. The thing is Aaliyah and I only scratched the surface. I have no idea if she would have led me anywhere near the Canning homicide with her investigation of the church. It was all about her sources. All about a group of people who came forward.”

  “Did she put you in contact with any of them?”

  Alex wipes his forehead. “No. It was going to take some convinci
ng.”

  “Can’t you track her phone?”

  “Yes. I asked Jan to get on that this morning,” Alex tells him. “In the meantime, why don’t you see what signals you pick up in that psychic head of yours?”

  Gus shakes that psychic head of his, once again, and turns to his car. He gets in, rolls down the window. He takes a serious look at Alex. He gazes all over him. He sees Alex fidget nervously at the wordless surveillance. “You’ve got all kinds of crazy all around you, my friend.” “That’s exactly how it feels. Is that exactly what you see right now?” “Yup.”

  “I don’t like the expression on your face,” Alex tells him. “Is it worse than I think?”

  Gus peers into the crazy all around Alex Mills. The strands of it whip in the air like Medusa’s snakes, coiling tightly into a cyclone. The desert erupts. All of it, the venomous cyclone dipping to the earth and the pillars of dust rising to the sky, is coming after Alex. Gus nods. “Yeah. It might be worse than you think.”

  Then he drives away, eyes on the road, but he’s out of his own body where there is no GPS.

  28

  On the way back to headquarters, Mills receives a series of text messages from Jan Powell, each one of mounting importance, too many to respond to; instead he sends one group text to the squad indicating it’s time to reconvene. They’re waiting for him in the conference room when he gets off the elevator. He walks in and says, “Jan.” “Good afternoon, Detective.”

  “Fill us in.”

  “The lab has completed as conclusive an analysis of prints as we can get at this point,” she says. “From the residence, we have prints from the victim and the maid, who volunteered her prints when we asked. We also have two extra sets of prints that, right now, can’t be identified. Nothing shows up in the databases.”

  “One could be Bennett’s,” Mills suggests. “But they could be anybody’s. A worker. A visitor. Who the fuck knows?”

  “From the vault, we have one fresh set of prints. It does match one of the sets from the residence,” Powell says, her inflection cresting. “So, I’m guessing Bennett. We know he visited the vault the day of the break-in.”