Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “And I never called you a wetback,” Buck said. “Now, what’d you find on the girl’s fancy typewriter?”

  It took Raul a second to realize Buck was kidding. When he did, he just shook his head. “Like I said, she had a blog. I’ve been reading the entries for the past couple of months, and it’s pretty interesting.”

  “Girl’s eighteen years old,” Buck said. “What could she have to say that would be so fascinating?”

  Raul raised an eyebrow. “To begin with, I think she’s involved with an organization that provides assistance to UDAs,” he said. He always used the acronym for undocumented aliens when referring to the illegal migrants, and hated it when Buck refused to. Raul had family on both sides of the border and was cognizant of the fact that some Mexicans believed that Latino law enforcement officers were ruled by self-hatred, so he tried to demonstrate Latino pride in whatever outward fashion he could. Buck made a point of always using some other term: illegals, wetbacks, pollos, taco-benders, tonks—a Border Patrol term that described the sound a migrant’s head made when hit with a flashlight—just to tweak Raul. They had known each other long enough to be friendly enemies. “Bridges Not Borders. There are a few references—oblique, but clear enough, I think, to working on behalf of folks who were robbed or lost or dehydrated on the trip.”

  “But she’s—”

  “I know. She’s eighteen. Teenagers do have minds of their own, Buck, if you can remember that far back. And there’s nothing yet to say that her parents weren’t involved too.”

  “Keep reading, and let me know. That could be enough to get them killed, the way some people feel about illegals around here. Or if maybe they were hiding some on the property, or a coyote came over and there was a fight.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” Raul promised. “But there’s more. This is what I wanted to show you. These last few entries, on the night she died and the days before, she keeps talking about a dream she’s been having. Like a recurring dream.”

  He swung the monitor around so Buck could read it, and pointed to the text in question. The night she died, Lulu had posted:

  The dream again. Getting tired of writing that. Only it’s a little different each time, and this time it was clearer than ever. She’s coming, and in this one I could actually see where on the border. It’s like she’s giving me a map so I can meet her. I know this spot. I could see stars and the moon in the sky, so if I wanted to put that much work into it I could probably figure out when. What I don’t get is why she’s telling me all this. Does she really expect me to be there to meet her? She’s a figment, right? Dream stuff? She’s got to be, because in my experience marble statues don’t walk and talk. I think I even hear her name in the dream, but I’m not sure if that’s what it is. Something like Aztlán.

  “Pretty strange, huh?”

  “You think it has something to do with her disappearance?” Buck asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s mostly the timing—the night she disappears, she posts something like this. And before that, night after night for almost two weeks, she’s writing about this dream. This statue girl, made of white stone, only her eyes open and her lips move and she says things, and all the time she’s getting closer and closer to the border. Lulu even names places in Mexico that she’s stopped on her way up.”

  “So she’s got an active imagination, or she’s taking drugs, or something like that.”

  “Buck, you know as well as I that Lulu Lavender was no doper. Imagination, maybe, but this is a little beyond that.”

  “So what, you think she’s going crazy? Sudden onset of schizophrenia, she flips out, kills the family and runs away?”

  “That’s a possibility. I think maybe we should show this to a shrink, see what the verdict is.”

  “We can do that,” Buck said.

  Raul pursed his lips and stared at his fingernails, resting on the keyboard. Buck had the impression there was more he wanted to say, but he was hesitant to.

  “What is it?” Buck prodded.

  “Well, I did a little snooping around, Buck.”

  “That’s kind of your job.”

  “I know. But what I found is…disturbing.”

  “Raul, I was inside that house. I knew those people. You want to talk about disturbing?”

  “Okay, Buck. Here it is. I checked on a couple of those places in Mexico Lulu mentioned. Where the statue had been?”

  “And?”

  Raul tapped the keyboard quickly, and Lulu’s blog vanished from the screen. In its place Buck saw a newspaper site from Durango, Mexico. ¿Milagro En El Zape? the headline read. “I know you can read some Spanish, Buck. But because you are a redneck, it’ll take all day, so I’ll paraphrase. According to this story, a miracle occurred in a little town called El Zape last week. A flash flood threatened a small church in the center of town. But a statue of a young girl that no one had ever seen in the square before spoke to the flood, and it changed course, ran down a side street and out of town. A dozen witnesses saw it, the paper says.”

  “That’s pretty strange,” Buck admitted. “I don’t know what it has to do with our case, but it’s one for the record books, I guess.”

  “There’s more,” Raul said. The bantering mood of a few minutes ago was gone. He typed again, and once more the monitor changed, this time showing a news site from Ciudad Obregón. “This story,” he explained, “is about something that happened in the town of Yapachic. Three bandits attacked and shot two women running a bodega, escaping with all the cash in the joint. Before they made it a block away, they were stopped by what witnesses claim was the statue of a girl. This statue blinded the three, allowing authorities to capture them. At the same time, apparently, the statue appeared inside the bodega and healed the wounds of the two women there. The women saved the bullets from their bodies as souvenirs.”

  “So this is, what, some kind of Weekly World News type website you’re showing me?” Buck asked.

  “These are respected newspapers, Buck. They report things most U.S. papers wouldn’t touch, but that doesn’t mean they’re making it all up. There are two more similar stories too, from Bacanora and Moctezuma.”

  “I didn’t say they were making anything up. I just don’t see the connection. Maybe Lulu was reading these same newspapers, and the stories made their way into her dreams. Or she wasn’t having dreams at all, and the whole thing is some kind of put-on.”

  “Sure, that’s possible,” Raul admitted. “But it would take a lot of effort. See, the news stories are time-stamped when they’re posted online, usually in advance of the print edition’s release. And Lulu’s blog posts also show the time she posts them. And her dream posts, showing what she calls ‘she’ or ‘the girl,’ have always been posted at least twelve hours before the news stories have gone up.”

  Buck didn’t answer right away. What could he say to that? That he didn’t believe in miracles, UFOs, vampires or spirits? He didn’t, but it looked like maybe there was a little more going on here than he could readily explain.

  “I know it’s crazy, Buck. I hesitated to even bring it up to you. But I thought you should see it for yourself. You’re the senior officer here; you get to make the tough decisions. This is something you want to dig into more, let me know.”

  “This point, we can’t really afford not to follow up on anything, however ridiculous it looks. I’m just not too sure where we go with it from here. Ed’s not going to approve a trip to Mexico based on this, even if we thought there was something there. If I took him this, he’d have my badge.”

  “I understand that, Buck. I haven’t told anyone else about it. We can keep it between us if that’s what you want.”

  The space Ed had rented them had been a feed store once. A crew had gutted it and put in prefabricated cubicles, leaving only the front counter, where Donna Gonzales sat to answer the phone and talk to walk-ins. They didn’t have any cells—prisoners had to be hauled up to Bisbee or down to Douglas. Raul’s cubicle was just past the count
er on the left. After his came Carmela’s, then Scoot’s. Buck had an office at the back with a door that closed. They were still in Raul’s, but Carmela and Scoot were in the field and Donna never listened in on the others.

  “Let’s keep it quiet for now,” Buck suggested. He rose, peering over the edge of the cubicle to make sure no one had come in. “I’ll poke around some, see if I can find a way it figures in. And if you come up with anything else online, let me know.”

  “I will, Buck.”

  Buck stopped himself before leaving Raul’s side, as another thought came to him. “One more thing,” he said. “Can we find out who was reading her blog? If that’s how the killer found the Lavenders, maybe we can back our way into finding him.”

  “I’ll check on that, Buck.”

  “Thanks,” Buck said. He didn’t know if it would get them anywhere, but at least it was an angle. “And Raul?” he added. “That’s good work.”

  8

  “The point,” Oliver said, “is that the San Pedro is the only undammed river in Arizona. Now, there’s a reason it hasn’t been dammed—its flow has never been sufficient, or consistent enough, to generate electricity.” He stood at the front of a lecture hall. More than half its seats were empty, and the students in the remaining ones had scattered themselves throughout the hall. Behind him, a slide of the San Pedro River filled a pull-down screen. “But it’s still worth looking at, if only because there are no other free-flowing rivers in the state left to study. Cochise County, where we’re standing, has the second greatest diversity of mammals in the world, after the Costa Rican rain forest, and much of that diversity centers around the San Pedro, as well as on sky islands like the Chiricahua Mountains. Birds too and insects, reptiles…it’s an incredibly rich resource, and it’s right here. But it’s troubled. These last few years, as the growth of Sierra Vista and Fort Huachuca have drawn more and more water, the San Pedro’s flow has been affected. At one time last year, for the first time in recorded history, its flow was at zero. Nonexistent. Keep in mind, this is the state’s last un-dammed river, and even it’s drying up. So what lessons can we take away from this?”

  Oliver gazed out at the students. Blank expressions, a couple scribbling notes as if he had said anything in the last five minutes that should be new to them. Second row, third from the left, the seat that Lulu ordinarily took was empty.

  Fatigue battered him as suddenly as a flash flood. He raised a hand to cut off any responses that might have come. “You know what?” he said. “We’re done for now. I’m sorry, but there’s something going on that I can’t talk about and I just don’t have the energy for this today. Read the first section—that’s three chapters—of Bowden’s Killing the Hidden Waters, and we’ll talk about it next time. And keep this aphorism in mind: Turn off a light, and hear a river sigh.”

  He let the students file out as he packed up his slides and notes. No one seemed to mind the abbreviated class period. Thinking back on his own college years, Oliver knew that he would not have objected either. Love of learning sometimes took a backseat to love of leisure time.

  When the lecture hall had emptied, he slung his leather briefcase over his shoulder and walked out, flipping off the lights as he left. Outside, he paused for a moment, wondering if he should inform Franklin Hinckley that he had dismissed the class early and would be skipping his office hours. He decided that Franklin would figure it out if he needed him. The wind chilled him, and he rolled down the sleeves of his blue denim shirt, buttoning them at the wrists.

  In the Saab, he glanced at the empty passenger seat and slipped U2’s Joshua Tree into the CD player. The only radio station he could pick up here with any consistency was KDAP, and while he liked Howard Henderson’s voice on The Trading Post in the morning, he was not in the mood for country songs about liquor, loss and angels looking down from heaven. A peal of thunder accompanied the jangling guitars of the opening notes, and Oliver looked to the sky. The glowering thunderheads there reflected his emotional state.

  9

  Buck watched Oliver Bowles speed up Davis Road, too fast given the pounding storm, make a right onto the slippery muck of Larrimore Trail and approach the gate to his own property. Oliver noticed the sheriff’s vehicle then, and drove more slowly to his garage. Buck had parked near the house but hadn’t gone inside, and apparently Jeannie, if she was at home, had not heard his approach over the drumming of the rain on the house’s aluminum roof. Buck still wanted a look inside that shed, still considered Oliver the likeliest suspect he’d run across so far. But what Raul had shown him online had raised serious doubts.

  Stepping out of the garage, Oliver closed the door and started toward Buck. Buck left his vehicle at the same time, letting the rain pelt his hat and clothing. “To what do I owe the honor?” Oliver shouted over the racket.

  Buck waited until they were within reasonable conversational range to answer. “Dr. Bowles, I’d like to get a look inside your shed,” he said.

  “And you can’t wait until the rain stops?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  Saw that one coming a mile off, Buck thought. “No, sir. If you need me to get one then I’ll call over to the office and have one of the other officers round up a judge. This is a small community, Dr. Bowles. We can always find us a sympathetic judge when we need one. I’ll just sit there in my vehicle out of the rain until it gets here.”

  “I’d feel better if you had one.”

  “You have something to hide, Dr. Bowles?”

  “Of course not.” Oliver’s face seemed open, honest, but it was hard to read with water running down it. He wore a knit tie, loose at the throat, with the collar button of his shirt open. The rain plastered the shirt to him; it did the same to Buck’s uniform blouse, and he wanted to get under some shelter. “But I’d feel like we were playing by the rules.”

  “I’m all in favor of the rules too, Dr. Bowles. But under certain circumstances, they take a backseat to expediency, far as I’m concerned. I could have just looked before you came home.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because if I had, anything I found there wouldn’t have been admissible as evidence.”

  Oliver smiled. “Just what is it you think I have out there?”

  “Whatever you may have, sir, it’s staying dry while we’re getting soaked.”

  Oliver laughed at that. “Okay, help yourself. Take a look. Just one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stop calling me ‘sir’ and ‘Dr. Bowles.’ It makes me feel like I’m older than you.” Oliver was thirty-eight; he judged that Buck Shelton was almost a decade his senior.

  “I’m sure you’re not,” Buck replied. “But I’ll tell you what. After I look inside, I’ll decide what I’m going to call you.”

  “Fair enough.” Oliver led him around the house and back toward the shed, about fifty feet away. New brush and grass had grown up in what appeared to have once been a worn-down walkway between the house and the shed, no doubt due to the winter rains and the summer monsoon. At his own place, Buck would have tried to keep it clear, but he didn’t mind, as it gave him something to step on besides slick mud.

  When they neared the door, he could see that it was unlocked. Good sign, he thought. If Oliver had parked the girl in there, he’d have secured it somehow.

  Oliver flipped up the latch and pulled the steel door open, then stood out of the way. Buck shouldered past him, peering into the dim interior.

  A lawnmower, a weedeater, a few gardening tools. Three cardboard boxes stacked up in one corner. A gasoline can. Spiderwebs.

  “That what you expected to see?” Oliver asked.

  “Pretty much. But I had to look; you understand that.”

  “Not really. You think I’d kidnap my own neighbor?”

  “I don’t know, Oliver. I do know you have a bit of a history of getting involved with students a lot younger than you. Beyond that, I don’t know much about
you at all.”

  Oliver eyed him with a stern expression. “You could have asked. I’d have told you.”

  “I did ask about your relationship with Lulu Lavender,” Buck reminded him.

  “And I told you about it. Everything about it.”

  “Maybe so,” Buck said. “But I couldn’t know that, could I? Until I checked it out for myself.”

  Oliver’s intent gaze hadn’t wavered. “You want a cup of coffee or tea, Lieutenant Shelton? Since you’re soaked to the skin?”

  “If it’s quick,” Buck said. “I think maybe I’ve wasted enough time here already.”

  10

  Oliver didn’t quite know why he’d invited the lieutenant in. The man had, after all, practically accused him of murder and kidnapping.

  On the flip side, he seemed willing to admit that his suspicion had been mistaken. Either that or he’s trying to get me to drop my guard, Oliver thought, and reveal something. But there’s nothing to reveal.

  “I take it the investigation’s not going too well?” Oliver said when they sat down with their mugs at the pine kitchen table. Jeannie had come in to greet Buck, then gone back to what she was doing in another room.

  “Could be better,” Buck admitted. “I got to say, when I found out about your affair with a student back in California, I really thought maybe I was on the right track.”

  “Having an affair hardly makes someone a killer,” Oliver said.

  “I know that. But you know, you’re in a new house in a new state with a new job. Might feel like you have more at stake, more to protect. And if you fell back into old habits…”

  “Oh, I get it, Buck. I’m just saying, in this case that’s not what happened. My saying it doesn’t make me innocent, but I am, and I hope you believe that, because as long as you’re wasting time investigating me, Lulu’s real kidnapper is getting farther away.”