“Where?”
“Burned to shit in a ditch, a mile or so up Canyon Road. One of the plates is intact, but it’s a fake. From this side of the border.”
“How far is Canyon Road from the Wilkins ranch?”
“A healthy pair of legs could walk it in an hour.”
“And probably did,” Raney said. “Or else arranged a ride back.”
“I know it,” Bay said.
“Anything else?”
“I have a preliminary autopsy report. They said to stress the preliminary part.”
“What did they find?”
“All three had empty stomachs. They were badly dehydrated, most likely delusional by the end. No mystery as to the cause of death, but the morgue-like conditions make it impossible to pinpoint a time. No more than ten days, no less than seven.”
Raney looked over his shoulder, lowered his voice.
“Was the girl raped?”
“No, sir. Believe it or not, she died a virgin.”
“I guess she was as good a Catholic as she could be under the circumstances.”
Since he’d left New York, Raney’s professional life consisted largely of cases that solved themselves: meth lab explosions, domestics so routine he couldn’t remember which spouse went with which murderer. The past eighteen years were not the future he’d once imagined. He’d been exiled from the lives and the work he valued most, though exile wasn’t the right word: he’d long since stopped pretending he had no choice. With time, he’d adapted to his new home, found some meaning in his job and more outside of it, but still he felt, a little less keenly as the years passed, shrouded in defeat. This morning, he allowed himself to imagine the shroud lifting, if only for as long as it took to solve this case.
A trucker flashed his brights, the universal signal that a cop sat lurking around the bend. Raney pulled up behind Junior’s squad car, skimmed the bumper stickers advocating sobriety and offering rewards for solid information. The car appeared empty, or else Junior had fallen so deeply asleep as to have slumped all the way forward.
“Rise and shine,” Raney called.
He came up on the driver’s side of the squad car, coffee in hand. Flies darted in and out of the open window. Junior’s forehead pressed against the top of the steering wheel, his arms hanging limp, his gun in his holster. Blood spatter on the windshield, the dash. Blood soaking the floor around his feet. Raney tossed the cup, took the deputy by his shoulders and tugged him slowly back, revealing the same deep and sideways cut he’d seen twice before. Raney pulled his gun from its holster, ran across the two-lane county road, through a clutch of pampas grass and onto the Wilkins property. The front door stood wide open. There was a thick trail of blood beginning at the steps and leading across the gravel to the driveway exit. A second trail led in the opposite direction. Raney scanned the house windows, the garage windows, the sedge and scrub. He raised his gun in both hands, started forward.
There had been a hard-fought battle in the living room—glass coffee table shattered, love seat overturned, portions of the far wall caved in, blood marking every surface. In the kitchen he found Mavis lying faceup on the floor, a gash across her throat, one arm reaching, as though someone had posed her in imitation of her husband. Her blood pooled on the slate tiles, spilled across the floor.
He cleared the house room by room, found it undisturbed past the kitchen: no bloody shoe prints, no closets rifled through, nothing different from the day before save two large suitcases lying open on Mavis’s bed. One was crammed with women’s clothing. The other was empty.
Raney holstered his gun, waited for his breathing to slow, then called Bay.
He had time before the sheriff and his team arrived. He stood out front on the stone steps, eyeballing the blood trails. The shorter trail ended a few yards shy of the road, where the assailant must have climbed into a vehicle and driven off, or been driven off. The second trail exited the driveway and continued beyond Raney’s line of vision. He followed it onto the road, where the blood thinned, became more sporadic, most likely stayed by a makeshift tourniquet. It kept on around a bend, stopped abruptly in a bed of sorghum grass. Raney looked back: Junior’s squad car was hidden behind a stand of Douglas fir. There were tire tracks in the grass, solid imprints that might be used for comparison. Whoever drove this car came up on the Wilkins ranch, saw Junior, kept going, and stopped here. Sometime in the dead of night, when this part of the county was pitch-black and there would be no witnesses to begin with. And then? He snuck up on Junior and slit his throat.
Raney crossed the road, slipped through a parting in the scrub, serpentined his way through a maze of juniper until he was standing a few quick strides from Junior’s car. Junior would have been dozing with the window open. He never saw it coming. Raney doubled back, searching the dirt for prints that weren’t his own, looking for any scrap of fabric clinging to a branch or thistle. The earth here was hard and compact, but he found, in three separate places, boot prints marked by a heavy heel and faint toe.
He walked back up to the house, heard sirens bearing down.
11
Word spread once the road was closed off. News crews came from Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Bay kept them behind the yellow tape. He was content to play hall monitor, to bark orders at people who didn’t matter while Raney investigated the deaths Bay felt he had caused or at least failed to prevent. He’d sent a child to protect a woman from a killer. He hadn’t taken Raney seriously—or not seriously enough. The notion of a Mexican assassin prowling a remote county road seemed too far-fetched. He hadn’t been able to make the image real, had thought Junior would be grateful for the easy overtime. He should have been parked out on that road himself, a shotgun across his knees.
“Don’t make me tell you again,” Bay snapped.
The cameraman looked confused: Bay hadn’t told him anything to begin with.
Raney walked back through the house, scrub booties on his feet, lab techs swarming, following his instructions to swab this, photograph that. There were two unfinished cups of coffee on the kitchen table, two wineglasses in the sink. He crouched over Mavis’s body, tilted her head back with the eraser end of a pencil, just far enough to discern the trajectory of the blade. He had one of the techs take a Polaroid, then carried the photo out to the squad car, walking back through the pampas grass.
A lab tech was kneeling on the hood, photographing Junior through the windshield. Raney showed her the image. She climbed down, held it up beside Junior’s neck.
“Do you see it?” Raney asked.
“A different angle from the others,” she said.
“Different angle, different blade.”
“It’s too early to say for sure.”
“The deputy’s cut runs straight across, and deep. The head is nearly severed. Mavis’s wound is superficial by comparison. It’s jagged, diagonal.”
“Maybe because she’s a woman. Or maybe the killer was interrupted.”
“Maybe. But there were two men fighting in that living room. Both of them were wounded, and neither of them stuck around. Neither of them called for help.”
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m not thinking so much as wondering.”
“Wondering what?”
“How two separate knifemen wound up in the Wilkins home at the same time.”
Raney walked back toward the house, stopped to peer in the garage window. The Jaguar was gone. He went around to the front, found the roll-up door shut, the handle locked. He speed-dialed Bay.
“Come take a look at this, would you?” he said. “I’m by the garage.”
Bay crossed the gravel, his head hung low, as though he were searching the ground for clues.
“What is it?” he said.
Raney pointed to the garage door.
“No blood on the handle, no blood on the ground. No broken panels. Someone even took the time to lock it.”
“So?”
“Now look inside.”
&nb
sp; They walked around to the window. Bay pressed his face to the glass.
“It’s gone.”
“Uh-huh. The question is who took it and when. It had to have been gone before the fight or else the garage would look like another crime scene.”
“So someone drove the Jag right past Junior while he was still alive?” Bay said.
“Looks like it.”
“Someone who came back later and killed him?”
“Maybe. Or maybe that was someone else.”
“Shit,” Bay said. “This don’t make a damn bit of sense.”
“Not yet, but it will.”
Bay nodded.
“This wasn’t your fault,” Raney said. “None of it.”
“I’ll tell that to Junior’s folks.”
12
Clara answered the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, one hand clutching a wad of tissue. The hallway reeked of pot.
“It’s all over the news,” she said.
“I should have called,” Raney said. “I’m sorry.”
“You have more questions?”
Her affect was numb, but her eyes were welling.
“No,” he said. “I just need to borrow the keys to the store.”
“Christ,” she said. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that place?”
Mavis kept an office at the back of the shop, a converted storage space with no window. Her desk was overflowing with junk mail, the only bookcase in disarray. Stacks of paper teetered along the baseboards. Raney held this space up against a mental image of the Wilkins home. If he were going to hide something, he would hide it here, in the back room of an innocuous business, the disorder acting as camouflage.
He started at the desk. On one side sat a column of crisp-looking local newspapers, on the other a pile of crumpled invoices stamped PAID and UNPAID. Some dated back a decade, some were as recent as last week. The oldest and newest shared the same paper, the same watermark, the same bright ink. Raney slipped a small camera from his pocket, photographed every page.
The center of the desk was buried under a mound of unopened envelopes, crafts-related catalogs, expired coupons, dated flyers, glossy postcard advertisements. At the bottom of the heap he found what he hoped was pay dirt: a sleek laptop, recent model, plugged in and fully charged. He balanced it atop the newspapers, opened the screen, switched it on. A moment to boot, followed by a flashing demand for a password. He tried Mavis, mavis, Mavisartsandcrafts, MAVISARTSANDCRAFTS. Bay would have to call on the county techs.
He spent hours sorting through piles of paper, discovered a hoarding so random he felt certain it was a mask for something more deliberate. He found what she was concealing behind the bottom shelf of the bookcase—a single drawer built into the woodwork, blocked from view by a mismatched lineup of encyclopedias. He cleared the books away, pulled the drawer from the wall. Inside were two long, neat rows of envelopes, arranged chronologically and dating back to 1962. The address on the first was written in a child’s scrawl, the address on the last in an adult-male hand. Hundreds of letters, carefully preserved, the envelopes cut open with scissors, the recipient’s address always the same—Mavis Wilkins, c/o Mavis Arts and Crafts—the return address changing over the years, though usually attached to an institution: a home for children, a juvie center, a psychiatric ward, two different prisons, all in Massachusetts. The name of the sender was likewise always the same: Kurt Adler. The oldest letter came from an orphanage in Salem, the most recent from an apartment in Jamaica Plain, Boston. The orphanage letter was written in green crayon on a piece of orange construction paper:
DEAR mommy,
Thank you for writing me. I saw where you live on a map. It is far, but I don’t know why my letter can go there and I can’t. Here is a drawing for you. It is a turtle ship—a space ship that looks like a turtle when it is in its shell. Some day I will learn how to build one. Ms. Fox helped me write this letter. Her name is spelled like the animal.
LOVE kurt.
The k came out like an h: LOVE hurt. The spaceship was more snail than turtle.
The final letter, written in May of 1996, was hardly longer than the first:
Mother,
Happy to hear you are doing well. We don’t see many black bears in Boston. Maybe Jack is right—maybe you should carry a gun on your walks.
To answer your question—I’ve been clean for a year and plan to stay that way. My employer would not keep me on otherwise. I’m sorry to be vague about my work, but I promise I am doing very well—better than I could have hoped. You were right to push me to get my GED. I have a home here now and it will stay my home. Know that I am in good hands.
Kurt
Mavis had a son. A son who predated Jack. A son she kept buried in a hidden drawer in a rat’s nest of an office. In 1996 this son either died or opened an e-mail account. Raney hoped for e-mail. He sat in the wooden swivel chair behind Mavis’s desk, called Bay.
“I need a background check on a guy named Kurt Adler. Chances are he’s in Boston, if he’s still alive.”
“Who is he?”
“Mavis’s son.”
“You’re big on slinging surprises, Raney? Mavis never had a kid. It was something she always regretted.”
“The regret part rings true. Adler will be about forty-five. And he’ll have a record.”
“You know this how?”
“I found letters.”
“Where?”
“Her office.”
“We have a warrant for that?”
“An employee of the store gave me permission to search the premises.”
“Clara. All right, Raney. I’ll get on it.”
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“We need the county computer geeks. Mavis had a laptop.”
“You’re after that ledger?”
“Among other things.”
“I’ll see if I can get one down here.”
“The sooner the better.”
Clara invited him up.
“You know, I used to work narcotics,” he said.
“Pot isn’t a narcotic.”
“It isn’t legal, either.”
“Then arrest me. I would have thought you had more important things to do.”
“I’m just returning your keys.”
Her tone softened.
“If I put this out, will you stay?” she asked. “Daniel’s asleep. I don’t smoke in front of him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Raney hesitated.
“I’ll make us tea,” Clara said.
“As long as it isn’t herbal.”
“I don’t drink my herbs.”
He followed her upstairs. She’d changed into jeans but wore the same faded yellow T-shirt. The back read NM ARTS FESTIVAL, 2000 above a blood-orange rendering of the Zia sun symbol.
“Did you grow up in New Mexico?” Raney asked.
“Outside Sacramento. You?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Two coasts, meeting in the middle,” she said. “Or somewhere near the middle.”
The apartment was a converted loft: kitchenette and bathroom cubicle along one wall, gypsum-board bedrooms off a slim back corridor. Television, couch, coffee table in the living space. An easel set on a canvas tarp facing the front window. The window was open, a pedestal fan blowing fumes and smoke out above the street. The painting-in-progress looked like a New Mexico vista if the colors from different times of day all bled together and the mountains turned flat. There were a dozen more paintings lined against the wall, each part of the same series.
“They’re beautiful,” Raney said. “You’re talented.”
“Whether I am or not doesn’t matter today.”
“No,” Raney said. “But it will again.”
The TV was on. The screen showed an aerial view of the Wilkins ranch, the tagline COUPLE KILLED DAYS APART streaming across the bottom. Raney thought: What about Junior?
“They’ll start callin
g it the murder ranch now,” Clara said.
Raney caught a snippet of the commentary: “Police claim to have leads but are refusing to release any information at this time.”
Bay was holding firm.
“Is it true?” Clara said. “You have leads?”
“We have a clear direction to look in.”
“The side business?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s all you can say?”
“For now.”
The kettle started to rattle. She dropped tea bags into two oversize mugs, stirred in sugar and milk.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “I should have asked.”
“It’s fine,” Raney said.
They sat at arm’s length on the couch. Clara switched off the TV.
“Did you find anything in the shop?”
“I’m not sure. Let me ask you—how do you explain the difference between Mavis’s office and home?”
“You mean the clutter?”
“That’s a kind word.”
“The house was all Jack,” she said. “He wouldn’t stand for a hair out of place. The office was compensatory. I think the real Mavis was somewhere in between.”
They were quiet for a moment. Then Raney said:
“What do you know about Mavis’s life before Jack?”
“Not much. She’d been here so long that the early years never really came up. And I had the impression she didn’t want to talk about it, like she was afraid of resurrecting some trauma.”
“What kind of trauma?”
“Family, I’m guessing.”
“Did she give you any details?”
“No. But she invited me over every Christmas and Thanksgiving. No one else came. No one called.”
And your family? Raney thought.
“What was it that made you so fond of her?”
“I don’t know. She was a good person. She was kind. Protective.”
“Of you in particular?”
“Of anyone she cared about. But yes, of me in particular. And of Daniel. She brought Mrs. Hardin out of retirement, made her salary part of my stipend. Mrs. Hardin works with Daniel every day. There’s no other resource for him here. How could you call that anything but pure kindness on Mavis’s part? And she’s never wanted a thing from me beyond what we’d agreed to at the beginning.”
The Exiled Page 6