Whatever Darling was hiding wasn’t worth fighting an American cop for. He motioned us to follow him out of the waiting room and down the hall, where he opened the door to a large, cold room lined with stainless steel. Without saying anything, he led us to a drawer and gave it a pull. A white-draped body on a slab rolled out. Darling folded down the sheet and stood back.
Despite the intervening months, the body was still in pretty good shape. I wondered if she’d been embalmed, and then realized that Darling must have been keeping her around as insurance against her doppelgänger trying to roll over on him. The resemblance was remarkable. He really did do good work.
Benny sighed and wiped one hand across his mouth. “You got a cause of death on her?”
“Blood clot,” Darling said, his eyes still lurking in my direction. “It’s not a common risk with lap-band surgery, but it does happen.”
“Notified her next of kin?” Benny asked Darling.
“She didn’t list any. That’s why we haven’t put her in the ground yet.”
I gave him a skeptical look, but he ignored it.
Benny thought it over, then said, “I’ll need a DNA sample.”
Darling stepped forward and rolled Rachael back into the cooler. The drawer closed with a soft click. “I’m sorry, for that you really will need a warrant.”
Benny said, “Pretty damned interesting, a patient dying and then you fixing up a second woman to look just like her.”
Darling gave him a surprised look. “Excuse me?”
“If you tell me why, I won’t shut you down,” Benny said.
The doctor continued to look at him with mute shock, not answering. It was pretty convincing, but my radar wasn’t buying. Darling was in this up to his neck, but felt confident enough about it to shine Benny on. It didn’t give me a good feeling.
The two men gazed at each other for a long couple of minutes, then Benny sighed and headed for the door.
Out in the hall, once we’d gotten out of eavesdropping range, I told him, “Rachael left some personal items out at the hot springs where Maines and I were staying. You might be able to get something off that.”
Benny made a dissatisfied noise as we got on the elevator. “Yeah, but I won’t know if it’s the real Rachael’s DNA or the stand-in’s.”
“It might still be useful,” I pointed out. “If you could find something of hers in Azula you could run a comparison.”
He thought about that as we walked down the white hallway and out to the parking lot.
“We gotta go out there to pick up your stuff before we head home anyway,” he said.
So, it was going to be the hard way. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.
CHAPTER 24
Benny’s cruiser was a much stiffer ride over the rough, narrow track leading down to the hot springs than Maines’s cushy Crown Vic was. I felt pretty shaky getting out. The young monk who’d signed me and Maines in on our first night came out of the office to greet us.
“I understand some belongings were left here last December by a woman name of Rachael Pestozo,” Benny said, showing the monk his badge.
The monk nodded and stood to one side, gesturing Benny to precede him into the office. Benny turned to me.
“Why don’t you pack up and wait for me in the car?” he said.
I looked at him. Our eyes met.
“Here’s the keys, in case you need to get into the trunk,” he said, holding them out.
I stepped over and took them. He continued looking into my face for a long minute, then turned and went into the office.
I didn’t hesitate. I walked straight to the cruiser, opened the trunk, and got out my ziplock bag of cash. There was a small pistol in a Velcro ankle holster lying there, and a half-full box of cartridges. I grabbed those, too. Then I closed the trunk, dropped the keys into the driver’s seat, and scurried up to the cabin where Maines and I had stayed. Shoved my stuff into my duffel bag, along with the gun and the money, then back out and quickly down the path to the campground.
I stopped at the edge of the canyon, wondering if I were walking into oblivion. It was at least five miles to the store where Maines and I had stopped for breakfast the previous morning, and the temperature already felt well over a hundred degrees, even though it was still early in the afternoon.
I looked back up the rise to the cabins. Benny was nowhere to be seen. He was taking his time, giving me a head start. I scrabbled down the canyon side, into the gravel wash below, and started walking south.
The canyon ran for what I guessed to be less than a mile before it flattened out into rolling desert again. The sun was merciless, but the scariest thing was the silence. It made the noise in my head seem deafening by comparison. After a while I wasn’t sure whether the voices I was hearing were inside my skull or outside it. I started to understand why people went nuts out here.
Just in case the voices were external, I stopped to get out the Glock I’d taken from Benny’s trunk, and loaded it. It was a subcompact .45 automatic, barely bigger than my hand. The sound of cartridges clinking quietly against each other in their stiff cardboard box was an almost physical relief. I stuck the gun in the back of my waistband and started walking again, carrying the cartridges in one hand. When I started thinking I was hearing voices again, I shook the box, to remind my ears what was inside and what was out.
That kept me sane until I came out onto the road again about an hour later and saw the Ruidosa store up ahead. My throat felt like baked sandpaper, but I wasn’t lying dead under the sun, feeding the buzzards. That was nice.
I stopped and dug through my stuff until I found the phone Hector had given me. It was a pretty nice one, a smartphone type with a decent-size screen. Scrolling though the contacts, I saw something called LANDLINE and touched it. It rang five times, then Hector answered.
“Thank God,” I said.
“Hey,” he said, sounding surprised. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Ruidosa. Can you come pick me up?”
“What, right now?” He sounded slightly breathless. “What happened?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
There was a muffled noise, as if he’d covered the mouthpiece, then he came back. “Be there in about an hour.”
I’d come up with an idea during my walk down the canyon, and now I found the Internet browser on the phone and looked up an e-mail address. It was risky, but I was already flapping in the breeze. If I was going to do this thing, I might as well go all in. I set up a free e-mail account and typed in a message that I knew the recipient, and no one else, would understand.
CHAPTER 25
“So you’re on the lam again,” Hector said, walking up to the picnic table where I was drinking iced tea. The dust was still settling around his Norton, which he’d parked in front of the store.
“Not technically,” I said, watching him swing one leg over the opposite-side seat of the picnic bench. “Do you know where I can buy a car around here?”
“Depends. You want a local clunker or something more roadworthy?”
“It needs to get me to Arizona.”
Hector paused halfway to sitting down. “Arizona?”
“Maines had a stroke in the hospital,” I said. My eyes blurred, and I had to take a couple of breaths before I could add the rest. “He’s going to be permanently disabled.”
Hector dropped onto the bench seat, looking like someone had just punched him in the stomach. I had the feeling that seeing me produce tears affected him more than what I’d just said.
“I’m going after her,” I told him.
Hector had put one hand to his mouth, and now he dropped it, releasing an incredulous sigh. “Jesus, Julia. Let the cops handle it.”
“By the time they sort out whose job it is, she’ll be in South America. Plus, I don’t know, I just—” I stopped, looking across the scrubby landscape behind him to the steel-gray fence in the distance. “I’ve been living on credit for
a long time.”
We sat there, not talking and not looking at each other, for several long minutes. Then Hector said, “You’ll never get her by yourself. Especially if you drive in there guns blazing.”
I opened my mouth, but he held up one hand. “Don’t bother telling me that isn’t the plan. No matter how you slice it, that’s where it will end up. You can’t help it. It’s in your DNA.”
“That’s pretty rich, coming from you,” I shot back.
Hector was thinking, only half listening to me. “I can probably help, if you’ll let me go with you.”
“How’s your wife going to feel about that?”
His eyes jumped up to my face. “My wife?”
“Yeah. The one who bailed you out of the Marfa jail.”
He looked away, smiling. “That’s Juan’s wife. Not mine.”
I’d hoped that springing it unexpectedly would make him give me something the radar could work on, but his reply felt genuine. For some reason that annoyed me even more. “I hope she knows that.”
His smile turned surprised, wrinkling his forehead. “You’re pretty possessive for someone I ain’t seen in almost a year.”
“That wasn’t my choice, if you’ll recall.”
He studied my face for a second, and I could feel his pride arm-wrestling his judgment. His judgment won. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”
The heat went out of my neck. “So who is this broad? You’re so jumpy about everything, I can’t believe you let someone else in on your situation.”
“I have friends here,” Hector said. “We don’t know everybody’s details, but we’re all on the same side. We cover for each other.”
“She’s a coyote?”
“Maybe you’ll understand why I wouldn’t want to tell you something like that,” Hector said, his eyes sharpening.
Any other day I might have kept at it, but John Maines’s bleak future was taking up a lot of space in my head. I took a breath and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Hector was on his phone, pacing back and forth a few yards from the picnic table and carrying on an animated conversation, but he was too far away for me to follow it. I cursed my hormones as I watched him move, the curve of his forearm bringing up a lump in my throat. The truth of the matter was that, beguiled as I was by his physical beauty, I knew very little about Hector Guerra, even though I was privy to his biggest secret. Our fling the previous winter had gone from zero to sixty in record time, and he’d disappeared before it could slow down and let me take a good look at it. I should be doing that now, instead of putting more gas in the tank.
He rang off and came back to the table. “OK, I got us transportation to Sells.”
I didn’t argue with the “us.” A second pair of hands wasn’t going to hurt a thing.
I grabbed my duffel and we got on Hector’s Norton, pulled out onto the road, and turned toward Presidio. Just before we hit town, Hector took an exit to the north, and about ten minutes later a pair of isolated steel buildings appeared up ahead, on the left. A sign at the entrance told us it was Lely International Airport.
I’d really like to know who names airports, because the only thing “international” about Lely was that the steel on the buildings had probably been manufactured in China. The hangar stretching out toward the south, behind the main terminal, looked the same as most of the agricultural buildings in the area, except that a row of overhead doors ran down the side facing the asphalt landing strip.
The door at the end was open, and Hector drove down and maneuvered the Norton inside, where a small, white plane stood at a jaunty angle. A figure in a floor-length dress appeared from the office at the rear as we dismounted. My eyes were still adjusting to the change in light, so it took me a minute to realize that it was Finn, the monk from the hot springs.
“You’re lucky you caught me here,” he said, shaking hands with Hector and aiming his bright brown eyes at me. “It’s about an hour and a half to Sells. If the wind is against us it could be more.”
“You own a plane?” I asked him, surprised.
“No, I just fly it. It belongs to the Sangha.”
“The sang-what?”
“The bunch who runs the hot springs,” Hector interjected. “That’s what they call their group.”
“I don’t see how this is any better than my plan,” I said to him.
“That’s because you don’t know all of it yet.”
I waited, but he just stood there looking at me.
“What about ground transportation when we get there?” I asked.
“Taken care of,” he replied.
Flying would certainly shave some time off my task, but Hector’s secrecy annoyed me. I gestured him over toward the open door of the hangar, out of Finn’s hearing range.
“Listen, does he know it’s aiding and abetting if we get caught? I doubt his buddies would appreciate being dragged into this.”
“They aid and abet me every day,” Hector pointed out. “They don’t care about that stuff. They do what they think is right, regardless of legalities.”
I looked over at Finn, who was doing his preflight check, carrying a small clipboard around the plane. The radar had apparently decided that he was OK, because it still wasn’t giving me any major warning signals. There was something not quite straight about the monk, but it felt harmlessly familiar, almost comfortingly so. I’d spent my life feeling that way about the people I lived and worked with.
That didn’t mean I’d turned stupid. I went over to the Norton and got my duffel bag, retrieving the little Glock. I walked back to the plane and handed it to Hector.
“Turn around and put your hands on your head,” I said to Finn.
His eyes widened, and he glanced over at Hector, who said, “Just go with it, man. It’s easier than trying to change her mind.”
Finn laughed and raised his arms, turning slowly. I gave him a good patdown and stepped back, satisfied at least that he wouldn’t be shooting at us in the air. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a plethora of other things that could go bad. I looked at Hector, who was standing with his arms folded, the Glock’s short muzzle protruding from his left armpit.
“What were you going to do if he jumped me?” I said. “Take pictures?”
“If I thought he would jump you, I wouldn’t have brought you out here in the first place,” Hector replied.
I looked at him a little longer, and he sighed and added, “Look, I know it ain’t easy for you, but at some point in your life you’re going to have to trust someone else’s instincts.”
“Why would I do that?” I snorted.
“Because yours aren’t always right.”
I raised my eyebrows at him.
“You’re sensitized to certain things,” he said. “You see trouble where there isn’t any, and miss trouble you should pay attention to, because you got bent a particular way by your life experience. No shame in it, that’s just how things go. But you don’t have to take that road every time.”
Finn was listening to this exchange with his hands folded across his midsection, leaning slightly forward and looking to one side.
Hector kept talking. “You know my story. I got the same shit. Seems to me our respective instincts could work kind of like a system of checks and balances, make both of them more accurate.”
“Thank you, Dr. Jung,” I said, holding my hand out for the gun.
Hector passed it over, making a noise that was half laugh, half sigh. I returned to the Norton and put the Glock back in my duffel bag, then hoisted the bag onto my shoulder. Finn and Hector were both watching me expectantly when I turned around.
“All right, let’s get this circus in the air,” I said.
The plane was quite roomy on the inside, and felt heavily smooth as we taxied out and accelerated down the runway, but once we were airborne, it jumped and slid around in the air like a paper kite. Finn seemed not at all bothered by this, maintaining a placid expression while we achieved altitude.
�
��I notice you didn’t put on your seat belt,” he said after we’d leveled off.
I’d flipped down a small jump bench directly behind him, and was now leaning into the cockpit doorway. “What, does it void your insurance or something?”
“It’s just an observation.”
I snorted derisively. “There’s no such thing as just an observation. Just say whatever’s on your mind, will you?”
The monk smiled. “You don’t waste much time on social niceties, do you?”
Hector had taken the copilot’s spot, looking out the window. Now he came around to the conversation. “Man, you don’t know the half of it.”
“Both of you can kiss my ass,” I said. Hector opened his mouth, but I pointed at him before he could speak. “Don’t.”
“Have you read Freud?” Finn asked me.
I looked at his ear. It was delicate for a man’s, with a small lobe.
“Only on the Internet,” I said.
“His ‘death drive’ theory has always interested me,” Finn said. “That unconscious thing that makes people do things like walk too close to the edges of cliffs, smoke, and not put on their seat belts.”
“I just consider that evolution at work.”
Hector laughed, exchanging a glance with the monk.
“The death drive is considered the opposite of the ‘pleasure principle,’” Finn went on. “Freud’s theory is that, without the death drive, the human race would just sit around eating cake and fucking all day.”
He’d turned his head another fifteen degrees so he could watch my face. I felt the blood rush up into it. He returned to watching his instrument board.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “Still some modesty in there somewhere.”
I enjoy being someone’s psychological guinea pig about as much as the next person, which is to say that it annoys the shit out of me.
“Modesty is overrated,” I said.
“Maybe,” the monk answered, adjusting something on the instrument pad, “but it’s natural to some people.”
South of Nowhere: A Mystery Page 9