Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Later, they spread out among the trees and set up their tents and shelters, building fires from fallen branches. The Indians who bore Estevan’s wagon that day—what would they give to have a horse? Alvar wondered—had left it off by itself, at the base of a rocky rise. Alvar guessed they had put it there intentionally, so that Estevan and Akta could find some privacy for their evening’s activities, which Alvar knew often began with art but ended with copulation.

  Outside the circles of light cast by the fires, the grassy fields were dark, moonlight barely sufficient to silver the tips of the grasses Alvar walked through. He had left the companionship of his fellow Spaniards as well as the Indians—whom God loved but who became wearisome with their constant pleas for healing and for Alvar and his fellows to bless their food and drink and nearly every activity—in quest of quiet contemplation.

  As he walked through the tall grass, however, he caught a glimpse of Ukuka, stealing toward the secluded outcropping behind which Alvar knew Estevan and Akta had gone. At first, he thought to call out to the Indian, but thinking better of thatimpulse, he decided to follow, to see what Ukuka might do. In days and years to come he would regret that decision.

  Ukuka wasted no time. Alvar guessed, later, that his mind had been made up and he had been looking for the right opportunity to act. Alvar waited until Ukuka would not see him before following the Indian behind the rocks. He had barely reached them when he heard Akta cry out in surprise and alarm.

  At that Alvar hurried his pace, scrambling up and over the rocks that separated him from the open space where the wagon had been left. He had just cleared the top of the outcropping when he heard Estevan shouting. In the dim light, for a moment Alvar wasn’t sure he truly saw what he thought he did, but in seconds he realized that his worst fear had come true.

  Ukuka had twined Akta’s long hair in his fingers. As Alvar watched, unable to help, Ukuka threw his weight from his right leg to his left, swiveling at the hip. Pulled off-balance, her mouth open in agonized terror, Akta stumbled toward him. Ukuka kept twisting, and her ankles caught each other. She fell, and with him tugging, her head slammed into the side of the wagon. Alvar heard a sickening crack, and blood spurted into the wagon, spraying onto the ribs and breast of the white statue. Ukuka slammed her head down again. When it hit the wagon this time, her muscles went slack. More blood sprayed the air, the wagon and the statue.

  Estevan had watched the whole thing as if frozen in place. When Akta’s limp body fell to the grass, he was released from the spell that bound him and he lunged at Ukuka. The Indian was tall and muscular, but still off-balance from killing Akta, and Estevan drove into him, spurred by fury. Alvar scrambled down the rocks, lost his footing, and fell sprawling into the tall grass. When he pushed himself to his knees, Ukuka’s lifeless body drooped in Estevan’s hands, the Moor’s hands around the Indian’s throat.

  Estevan dropped Ukuka on the ground beside Akta. His dark eyes were swollen with tears, which left silver traces down his cheeks. “Alvar, I…”

  “I saw how it happened, Estevanico,” Alvar said. Helurched to his feet unsteadily, as if the earth had tilted beneath him. “But I fear the Indians will not believe us. They know you wanted the girl, who was pledged to another.”

  “And they know I had her,” Estevan protested, his forehead creased, lower lip trembling.

  “Not under God,” Alvar pointed out. “In sin, not in holy covenant. Which you could never have, as long as Ukuka lived.”

  “But Alvar…”

  “There is nothing for it, Estevan. Much has happened on this long journey of which we may never speak. If we told the truth about our healing magics to other Christians, we would be burned as witches. This is but one more secret we must keep until the day we die, from the Indians as well as our fellows.”

  “The bodies…?”

  “We’ll bury them under these rocks,” Alvar suggested. “Tomorrow we move on from here, so they don’t have to stay hidden for long. When it is noticed that Akta and Ukuka are both missing, we’ll speculate that they ran away together.”

  Estevan’s head swung around toward his sculpture. “My statue?”

  “You will abandon it, out of your sorrow that she did not tell you she meant to run off with her lover.”

  “Her blood is all over it!”

  “Is it?” Alvar asked. “Where?”

  Estevan took a faltering step toward the wagon, then another. He stopped, gripping its side in quaking hands. “Alvar, it was! I saw it.”

  “I saw it too, Estevanico. But I see it no longer.”

  “How…”

  “This is a strange land we cross, my friend. I have stopped asking ‘how’ when I see miracles in it. I fear the answers.”

  “Alvar, wise father, how can we—”

  Alvar didn’t let him finish. “We have much to do, Estevan, and precious little time to get it done.” He bent to the nearest of the rocks lying on the ground, wrapped his fingers around it and tossed it to one side. “Best we get to work.”The two of them labored through the night, mostly in silence. In the morning, the absence of Akta and Ukuka was noted, and Akta’s father surmised just what Alvar had hoped. Alvar backed his theory, as did others. Within an hour it was accepted as fact. Estevan didn’t have to pretend to his grief—the tears everyone saw in his eyes were real. He left wagon and statue where they were, without a look back.

  Alvar did not know—would never know—that the spot on which the wagon had come to a rest that night, and on which the wagon was abandoned by the procession, was on top of the line that would be drawn across the continent, hundreds of years hence, to mark the boundary between what was Mexico and what would become the state of Arizona.

  To him it was just another square of earth that had to be left behind to get to where he wanted to go: back into the embrace of Mother Spain, of king and country and God.

  DAY THREE

  1

  Buck chased his light breakfast with three cups of strong coffee, hoping the caffeine would replace the sleep he hadn’t been able to get. Before he was out of the house, he had a call from Ed Gatlin’s office instructing him to report there before continuing on to Elfrida. This was unusual in itself—it being Saturday, the call was more than just unusual, it was downright unique in Buck’s experience. The sheriff had been working weekends for these last couple of weeks because of the national focus on the Elayne Lippincott disappearance, but for the most part that work had been limited to making TV appearances and being available for interviews.

  Depending on what route he chose, Bisbee could be between Buck’s place and his office out in Elfrida, so it wasn’t too out-of-the-way to drop in. He took Highway 80 south, through the Mule Pass tunnel. Bisbee clung to the hills on his left. Past old Bisbee, he swung around the huge Lavender Pit mine, remnant of Bisbee’s mining heyday, and around the traffic circle out toward Douglas for a couple of miles, until the turnoff for the Cochise County Justice Complex. Not yet on duty, he played a Flying Burrito Brothers CD as he drove, sometimes singing along. He was a country boy through and through, he figured, but the sixties had happened even out in the sticks, and his taste for folk-rock and country-rock had never left him.

  At the justice complex, he parked in the lot and walked inside through tinted glass doors. The reception area was quieter than on weekdays, but Buck nodded hello to a few folks on his way back to the sheriff’s office.

  Ed waited for him behind an expansive wooden desk free of paperwork. A closed laptop and a telephone had been pushed to the far right, and a mound of file folders looked precarious on a credenza behind the sheriff. The United States and Arizona flags stood in one corner, poles crossed, next to a glass-fronted display case containing trophies, commendations and awards along with a couple of antique pistols. One, Ed had told him, had belonged to John Slaughter, who had been sheriff of Cochise County in the late 1880s and had owned a ranch near the border, outside Douglas, that was now a museum.

  Ed’s vulture-like head w
as hairless except for a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and thick eyebrows. He put both eyebrows and ’ stache into play, helping to express his unhappiness. “You fucked me,” he said before Buck had even settled into a visitor’s chair. “You fucked me, you fucked this department and you fucked your own investigation.”

  “The investigation, Ed, was already pretty fucked, you may recall. We’re fresh out of leads, and if going public might generate some then I had to do it.”

  Ed’s elbows rested on his desktop, sleeves neatly buttoned. His meaty hands wrung each other like he wanted to squeeze all the moisture out of them. His uniform shirt bit into his thick, veiny neck, but he kept it crisp and his tie neatly knotted, and he looked every inch the law enforcement professional, as if he expected a camera crew from CNN at any moment. His blunt-featured face had a wide mouth and oddly feminine eyes. Usually florid, now it verged toward eggplant, as if he’d spent his whole morning working himself into a rage while he waited for Buck.

  Ed took a deep breath, as if willing himself to be patient. “It almost sounds, Buck, like you’ve become…confused…about who’s the sheriff here. You aren’t confused, are you?”

  “Not at all, Ed,” Buck said. He tried on a smile, attempting to defuse the tension in the office without making Ed think he didn’t take the situation seriously. “But you said yourself it’s my investigation, right?”

  “It is,” Ed said. “And if you’ve guaranteed that little girl is killed, it’s on your head. But it’s my department, and as you may or may not be aware, we’ve got a lot of media scrutiny on us right now. A fucking ton of it.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Presumably, then, you’re also aware that press contacts are supposed to be run through this office.”

  “I’m aware.” Buck said again.

  “And yet you chose to disregard that rule.”

  “I know you’re very busy, Ed. I know what you’re going through. And I was desperate. If there’s a way to find Lulu Lavender, I want to do it. I took a calculated risk that a little regional coverage might turn up a lead that I couldn’t find any other way, and I didn’t want to have to take you away from the Lippincott case to do it. Obviously, I miscalculated. If you want my badge over it, just say the word.”

  Ed regarded him carefully, his right eyebrow arching up like a furry tent roof, as if considering it. “That can wait,” he said finally. “If you killed the girl, you can bet your ass I’ll have your badge. But if somehow you accidentally managed not to, you might be able to keep it.”

  Thanks for the vote of confidence, Buck thought. Remembering that he didn’t want to piss off Ed Gatlin any more than he already had, he kept his mouth shut and simply nodded.

  After another few minutes of being dressed down, Buck got back out to his Yukon. He peeled out of the lot and continued east on 80, turning off at Double Adobe Road, where the drop into the vast Sulphur Springs Valley began just past High Lonesome Road. The day’s clouds hadn’t started to build yet, and the sky was a deep, clear blue. Halfway down the valley, someone drove over a dirt road, and in the still air the dust plume hung suspended for at least a mile. Over it, a trio of buzzards inscribed lazy circles in the sky.

  Buck’s favorite entrance into the valley was from just below Tombstone. There Davis Road wound through some of the area’s finest ranchland before uncoiling into an arrow-straight eight-mile stretch that dropped steadily until it reached the valley floor, where the straight line continued, level now, for another seven miles before it started curving again, back toward the mountains on the eastern edge. Larrimore Trail was there, and that was where he believed the truth about Lulu’s disappearance had to be found.

  On the way into Bisbee, Buck had mulled over how to tell Gina that he wasn’t happy with the previous night’s broadcast. She had kept the story focused on Elayne Lippincott, adding Lulu only as an afterthought. That had not been his intention when he’d fed her the information. He had hoped to put Lulu Lavender on at least equal footing with the Lippincott girl. Elayne’s family had not, after all, been murdered. So far no evidence showed that anyone had died in that case. In spite of his decades of law enforcement experience, Buck liked to think the best about people. He wanted to believe that the media wouldn’t choose to ignore the deaths of four people simply because they were black and Latino. Maybe once, but not in the twenty-first century.

  His conversation with Ed, however, had made it clear that complaining about it would be professional suicide. Ed had been a cop once, but now he was a politician and he played a different game than Buck. He was the boss, though, and he made the rules, which Buck had already broken in public. Ed wouldn’t allow that to happen many more times.

  Which raised a question. Buck had heard that people needed to try to keep the number of major stressors in their lives to a minimum at any given time. If you’re moving, don’t change jobs. If you’re moving and changing jobs, don’t adopt a child or get a divorce. Too much at once resulted in depression, sometimes suicide.

  So if his marriage was falling apart, which seemed a distinct possibility, could he risk getting fired?

  Maybe that wasn’t even the right question. If he determined that it was necessary to the investigation—if it seemed the only way to find Lulu—he would go back to the press, and keep going, until he had turned it into the same kind of media attraction that the Lippincott case had become.

  Which made the real questions: Could he keep the marriage together through it all? And if not, what else he could do to mitigate the damage to his life?

  He felt a little ashamed of worrying about his own problems with Lulu still out there somewhere, no doubt terrified and praying for rescue. Regardless of what happened with Ed and with Tammy, nothing could happen to Buck that would come close to her ordeal.

  Thinking along those lines brought another realization. Buck pulled the Yukon over to the grassy shoulder and executed a three-point turn. He had just passed through Bisbee, but now he headed back that way.

  The one time he had talked to Jace Barwick, Lulu’s boyfriend, had been by telephone, on the day she had disappeared. Jace had been broken up, genuinely distraught. Buck had met plenty of liars in his years wearing a badge, and he believed that Jace was not pretending.

  But a couple of days had gone by. Jace was, no doubt, still in shock. Buck had new information—not much, but a little—and maybe the elapsed time would have allowed Jace to consider things a bit more carefully. He glanced at his watch—not even nine yet. Jace was only twenty, so chances were good that he’d wake the boy up. Sometimes catching a person off-guard like that worked out well, he knew. He didn’t doubt Jace’s honesty, but even so, it wouldn’t hurt to get him at a vulnerable moment. You never knew what someone might recall at a time like that.

  2

  He did, in fact, wake Jace up.

  The young man lived in an old mining cottage off Tombstone Canyon, painted purple with metallic gold trim. It had been painted at least a quarter century before, maybe longer, and time and weather had aged it so that it didn’t stand out from the other houses around it as much as it might have. It had a tin roof, which Buck had seen from the highway, so rusted and corroded that he was surprised it kept out the rain at all. The forty-six-step climb from the street had winded Buck, leaving him red in the face and hoping Jace wasn’t the kind of kid who ran when he saw a badge.

  The front door of the cottage had been painted orange, also faded now. It didn’t look too bad with the purple, but contrasted horribly with the metallic gold trim around it. Buck could have done without the stars and moon too—decals applied probably around the time the building was painted but peeling and flaking except where they were gone altogether, leaving behind discolored spots in the orange, vaguely shaped like celestial objects.

  Bisbee had once been the biggest city between St. Louis and San Francisco, when the Copper Queen mine had been producing like mad. Miners had thrown structures all over its steep slopes, especially up Tombstone Cany
on from downtown. Some were grand homes; most were considerably smaller and less impressive. In the 1970s, after the mines started to fail and the miners abandoned the town, Bisbee’s economy collapsed. Hippies and artists moved in to take advantage of the cheap real estate. This home, Buck figured, could probably have been had for a thousand dollars or less. The paint job had no doubt happened during that period.

  He rapped on the ugly door, his right hand resting on the butt of his service weapon. No one answered so he pounded again, louder. The door rattled, and he worried briefly that he would knock it down. This time, however, he heard movement behind it. He waited another couple of minutes, and then the handle turned and the door swung open. A young man stood inside in red and black plaid boxer shorts, scratching his pale chest. His hair was thick and dark brown, his eyes puffy with sleep, and his mouth hung open as if closing it was just more trouble than he could manage. “Crap,” he said.

  “You Jace Barwick?”

  “Yeah—oh, are you the guy who’s looking for Lulu?”

  “That’s right, Jace. Were you expecting someone else?”

  “No, it’s just…Cops don’t visit often, you know, and the couple times they have it wasn’t to collect for disadvantaged children.”

  “You’ve had some run-ins with the law?”

  Jace shrugged. He stopped scratching his chest but moved his hand around behind his back and started in on another spot. “Hasn’t everybody?”