He reaches for the woman. His mouth is a thin line, his dark eyes cruel. “Mister,” the woman says, “you’d better let us both go or there’s going to be trouble, I already called the—”
Cops, she would have said, or police, or sheriff. But she doesn’t get the word out before his strong hands reach her head, one of those knuckle-less hands twining in her hair and the other grabbing her chin, and he brings his knee behind her back, she’s still sitting on the floor, and he twists. The woman gets out a scream, but it’s cut off by a loud snap, and then her body slumps, the air fills with the smells of her body voiding into her pants, and he releases her. She collapses to the floor. He has, Lulu knows, just killed again, right in front of her.
He closes the door now. Turns that horrible gaze on Lulu.
“When is she coming?”
18
By the time Gina Castaneda’s van arrived, trucks and SUVs had started to clog the narrow dirt lane that led past the Bowles place to the Lavender ranch. The van had to weave its way between the parked vehicles. When Buck saw it coming, he pulled Humberto Rojas, one of the volunteers, aside. “Make sure everyone has a flashlight,” he said. “And some water. They’re going to be on their feet a long time.”
Humberto hurried to pass the word, freeing Buck to greet Gina. He did so with a friendly handshake when she stepped from the van. She returned it, adding a warm smile, then excused herself while she consulted with her cameraman. Buck watched them examine the grounds, check out the exterior of the house. Finally she situated the man so that the gathered search party members would form a background, lit by the last golden rays of the setting sun.
That settled, she turned her full attention to Buck, and the effect was like having a laser beamed at him. “This is where they lived?” she asked. She held a little leather-bound notebook and a pen, and jotted notes as they talked.
“That’s right.”
“And they were murdered inside the house?”
“Four of them were,” Buck said. “Hugh Lavender, his wife, Manuela, and their boys Kevin and Neal. Like I said, the fifth, Lulu, is missing. She’s eighteen. We think she was taken by whoever killed the rest of the family. These people behind us are here to scour the area for any clues that we might have missed initially. There’s anything out there, they’ll turn it up.”
“But you don’t think they’ll find the missing girl?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you called me, Buck. If you thought these people would find her, you’d be just as happy to keep the media out of it. You need more eyeballs on the problem.”
He gave her a grin. “I guess people in the media aren’t as dumb as folks say they are.”
A furrow marked her brow for a second, then vanished as she got the joke. She laughed and touched Buck’s arm. “Gee, thanks for your support,” she said. “Nice to know I’m appreciated.”
“Oh, you are,” Buck said, lowering his voice a notch. In his left hand, he held a framed picture of Lulu at the County Fair with one of her market hogs. It had been taken two years before when she was with the 4-H, but she still looked more or less the same. “You’re exactly right too. The more people looking for her, the better at this point.”
Gina studied the photo. “That’s her? How long has she been missing?”
Buck didn’t have to think about his answer. “Somewhere over thirty-six hours,” he said. “Every hour that goes by, she’s in greater danger. I want this girl found.”
“Well, let’s get to it,” Gina said. “I’ll put you on camera and you can make your case.”
Buck should have known he’d end up on the screen, but he hadn’t really thought things through that far. Too late to get out of it now. Old Ed would really have something to fume about when this aired.
Gina rehearsed her opening a couple of times. Buck, nervous, barely heard her. It wasn’t until she was holding the microphone before her and he caught a slightly different, crisper inflection in her voice that he realized they were shooting a take.
“Tragedy shook the rural community of Elfrida, in Cochise County, yesterday, when it was learned that Hugh Lavender, his wife, Manuela, and sons Kevin and Neal had been murdered during the night, and eighteen-year-old daughter Lulu has apparently been kidnapped from the family home. I’m here with Lieutenant Buck Shelton of the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office, the detective in charge of the investigation. Lieutenant, in the background we can see people preparing to search the property. Can you tell us about that?”
She held the microphone toward Buck, who cleared his throat before responding. “Well, umm, they’re volunteers with our Search and Rescue Team. We’ve covered the property before, but not with so many people. If there’s any clue to her whereabouts, we’ll find it with all this help.”
Gina held the photo toward the camera, and the cameraman zoomed in on it. “Here’s a photo of Lulu Lavender. As soon as we’re back in the studio we’ll get this up on our website, but in the meantime, Lieutenant, if anyone sees this girl, what should they do?”
“They should call 911 or their local law enforcement personnel,” Buck answered. “I’d really appreciate it if everyone could keep their eyes open for her. Lulu has suffered enough, and we need to get her home safely.”
“I’m sure our viewers will do what they can, Lieutenant Shelton. And I know that Lulu Lavender has a dedicated champion working day and night toward her safe return.”
The cameraman lowered his camera and Gina dropped the mic at the same moment, practiced and professional. “Thank you, Buck,” she said. “I appreciate the call, and I really hope this helps.”
“Can’t hurt,” Buck said. He knew, however, that Ed Gatlin would disagree with that assessment.
Watching Gina get back into the van and drive away, Buck felt a fervent desire to leave town with her.
19
Oliver tried to focus on a paper about the San Pedro River’s contribution to migratory bird routes, but though he had done the research, he couldn’t seem to get the words to flow from his brain to his fingers. This was what he had looked forward to the most, trying to turn the humiliation of being fired into a positive. With his real estate–swollen savings account, he could teach part-time and put some serious effort into writing. He had in mind a book about the San Pedro combining the latest scientific data with the natural history and human history, all the way back to the Coronado expedition, which had followed the river’s path into what had become the United States, in search of legendary cities of gold.
But he kept thinking about Lulu, and Lieutenant Shelton’s certainty that he had her locked up in the shed—a certainty that seemed to have originated in his distaste for the decisions Oliver and Jeannie had made about their marriage. Yes, I took those decisions a step too far, he thought, when I slept with a student. But is that the part Shelton objected to? Or simply the idea that I would fuck someone to whom I wasn’t married? No good way to tell, he knew, short of asking the lawman, and that wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have.
Finally, he shut down the computer, convinced that nothing good would come of his efforts today. He walked into the kitchen, poured a glass of iced tea. As he stood there, absentmindedly sipping from it, Jeannie came in. “Heard all the racket?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Guess I was in my own world. What racket?”
“Something’s going on at the Lavenders’,” she reported. “A bunch of trucks have been going by for the last hour or so.”
“Wow,” Oliver said, surprised that he’d been so oblivious. “I wonder what’s up.”
“No clue,” Jeannie said. “I’ve been working, but when I heard the noise I peeked out the window. There are a lot of lights down there, but that’s all I know.”
Curiosity overcame Oliver’s desire to avoid Buck Shelton. “Guess I’ll go check it out,” he said. “If I get arrested, call my lawyer.”
“You don’t have a lawyer,” she reminded him.
“You’re
right. Find me one, and then call. Spare no expense, as long as it’s cheap.”
Jeannie laughed. “Okay,” she said. “But try to stay out of trouble.”
“No guarantees,” Oliver said on his way out the door.
The evening was warm, with the fresh, slightly musty smell of the high desert after a rain. Spadefoots, desert toads that lived underground and only emerged when the rain had pounded on the earth with enough force to rouse them, sang out their mating cries with a sound like hundreds of mutant ducks. A few clouds remained in the sky, and in the spaces between, stars glittered by the millions. He knew that as the night wore on, the starscape would only become more and more impressive.
From his gate to the Lavenders’ was almost half a mile of dirt road, and Oliver enjoyed the crunch of the hard-packed earth beneath his boots, the rhythm of his arms and legs. Since early adulthood, hiking the West had been one of his abiding pleasures. This hardly qualified as a hike, but it still beat sitting in his home office or standing before a classroom. He listened to the calls of the spadefoots and the resounding buzz of cicadas, locusts and their giant cousins the horse lubbers, until the scattered voices and rustling brush from the Lavenders’ ranch drowned them out.
Jeannie was right; a lot of trucks had passed by their house. They were parked all along the road, most of the way to the Bowles’s gate. Around the Lavenders’ ranch house, Oliver could make out people with flashlights, spreading away from the house. A search party of some kind, he assumed. Maybe it meant there was some new lead. He didn’t hold out much hope that they’d ever find Lulu alive—not after what had been done to the rest of the family—but he couldn’t bring himself to imagine her any other way.
At the house he found a kind of mini command center. Buck Shelton sat in his white Yukon, surrounded by the staticky crackle of walkie-talkies. Buck held one in his hands, another resting on the seat beside him, and the vehicle’s radio squawked as well. He acknowledged Oliver with a raised eyebrow, and Oliver waited until the detective had issued a stream of commands into one device after another.
“What’s up?” Buck asked when he had lowered the last walkie-talkie.
“I was going to ask you,” Oliver said. “We saw all the trucks going by.”
“That’s our volunteer Search and Rescue Team,” Buck said. “They’re locals who take time out to help us when we’ve got to find someone.”
“So you think Lulu is still here on the property?”
Buck shook his head. “I think there might be a clue somewhere that we missed,” he admitted. “Maybe she was hauled out in a vehicle, but maybe not. At this point I can’t afford to dismiss any possibilities, no matter how remote.”
“So this is a long shot.”
“It definitely is. You just missed a TV truck—my mug will be on the air tonight asking for help finding her. The newswoman promised to try to get the story onto the network feed, so it’d go out nationwide instead of just southern Arizona. I’d keep away from the TV if I were you, unless you like horror shows.”
“That’d be good,” Oliver said, dismissing the self-deprecating comment. Buck Shelton looked tired. Oliver didn’t know the man well, but didn’t remember him having such dark, heavy bags under his eyes the first time they’d met. Even his manner was less alert than it had been earlier. “Since by now she could be anywhere.”
“Could be.” Buck gazed out at the searchers beyond. After a long moment, his attention returned to Oliver. “Can you do something for me?” he asked.
“I can try,” Oliver said. “As long as it doesn’t involve confessing to any crimes I didn’t do.”
“Not that,” Buck said, smiling for a change. He reached into the vehicle and brought out a file folder full of white paper. “Lulu had a blog,” he said. “One of my guys went through and printed all the entries, and I’ve been going through ’em. Mostly the recent ones, but even back a ways.”
“You think it has something to do with what happened?” Oliver asked.
“Like I said, I can’t afford to dismiss anything. And it just might. She wasn’t stupid enough to put her address or phone number online, but if you read her blog carefully enough you could maybe figure out where she lived. She wrote about some of the landmarks, the view from her room, the fact that there were only your two properties on her road, that sort of thing.”
“Seems like a supremely bad idea.”
“Lulu’s a smart girl but she’s still just a teenager,” Buck said with a weary sigh. “She doesn’t always make the most sensible decisions.”
“I suppose that’s true of all of us.”
Buck regarded Oliver closely, as if he had just revealed something significant. “What?” Oliver said. “You never made a mistake?”
A smile crinkled the corners of the lawman’s eyes. “I wouldn’t go that far.”
“So what is it you want me to do?” Oliver asked.
The lieutenant blinked, as if he had forgotten all about his request, and the papers in his hands. “That’s the thing,” he said. “There’re some things in here that I don’t get, and maybe it’s just because I’m not well enough educated. I wonder if you could take a look at it for me, and see if you can’t make some sense out of it.”
“What is it?”
“In the last few days before she disappeared, Lulu wrote about these dreams she was having,” Buck said. “Strange dreams, you ask me, about this white statue of a girl, traveling north through Mexico, performing miracles at just about every stop.”
“Does sound a little strange,” Oliver agreed.
“Thing is, my guy Raul, who reads Spanish better than me, checked on some Mexican newspapers online. According to those, the miracles were happening, in the towns she named, just the way she described. And before you ask the next question, she posted her entries before the newspapers posted their stories.”
Oliver felt a tickle at the back of his neck, like an ant crawling up him. He rubbed at it but found nothing there. “There’s no independent verification of these so-called miracles? No confirmation of what’s in the newspapers?”
“Not yet. Raul’s making some phone calls down there. What were you thinking?”
“Well, without knowing what Lulu’s involved in, it’s hard to know anything for sure. But it seems possible that the newspaper sites are taking information from her blog, then making up stories to fit. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of code. She wasn’t involved in drug trafficking or anything like that?”
“First thing I think of around here when something terrible happens is meth,” Buck said. “It’s the drug of choice for rural communities, and it’s a slow-motion disaster in the making, a plague.”
Oliver paid attention to the news, and he had heard the same thing. He had never sensed that Lulu used, and she’d certainly never mentioned it, but he had to ask.
“As close to the border as we are,” Buck continued, “I also have to guess that cocaine might be involved, or marijuana. The drug trade with Mexico contributes more to their economy than oil, tourism and Mexicans here sending money home combined. It’s huge business and it hits this area hard. I haven’t seen any indication that Lulu, or any of the Lavenders, are involved with the drug community, though. No paraphernalia in the house, no drugs either. Everyone I talk to says she was clean and sober. So I have to think it’s not that.
“But there is something else. Lulu is a volunteer for a humanitarian group offering aid to illegals. So even if it’s not drug-related, it’s still possible that it has to do with border crossing. Code telling when certain areas will be free of Border Patrol, something like that, maybe.”
“How would she know that?”
“I don’t have any idea. Don’t see how she could. I’m just offering ideas, because I don’t like the first one I had.”
“Which was?”
Buck shifted his gaze to his dashboard. “Which was that she really was just describing dreams. And the dreams were of things that were happening, but that
she couldn’t have any way of knowing were.”
That tickle again.
Oliver didn’t believe in anything supernatural. He claimed to keep an open mind about such things, willing to be convinced by hard evidence, but so far nothing he had seen or heard about fell into that category. He had only heard Buck Shelton’s description of Lulu Lavender’s blog—far from evidentiary in any way—but the whole idea creeped him out.
“What is it you want me to do, exactly?” he asked, dreading the answer. “Miracles are definitely outside my field of expertise.”
“Mine too,” Buck admitted. “What I was hoping you might be able to contribute was academic. You teach at a college; you were at a big university before that. Maybe along the way you’ve met someone who could tell us what this statue is all about, if anything. I mean, I don’t even know if it’s real or not, but maybe it has some kind of history, right?”
“Could be,” Oliver said.
Buck drew a paper-clipped stack of papers from the folder. “These pages are the ones that refer to the statue,” he said. “You can have these copies, and just let me know if you learn anything.”
Oliver took the pages, feeling as if he’d been trapped into something he hadn’t meant to agree to. No turning back now, he thought. Trapped or not, I have to at least make an effort.
“Thanks, Dr. Bowles. Oliver. I really appreciate this.”
“Hey, if it might help find Lulu, I’m happy to do it,” Oliver said. “Happy” might have been too strong a word, but he was willing. That was the main thing. He would do anything he could for Lulu.
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