That shithead Brice, Merci thought, even as she was dialing the reporter's home number. Brice had located Wildcraft but not bothered to call her, not even after he'd gotten his interview. She got the machine and tried his Journal, cell and CNB numbers but got machines for those also.
"Maybe he was calling here to tell you," said Clark.
"Unbelievable."
Tim looked at her hopefully. "Awchie throws the flowers?"
"Yeah. Right."
She stood abruptly and walked into the kitchen, her bare heels heavy on the hardwood floor. Tim thumped in behind her, still in his rubber mud boots. His brow was furrowed, his eyes wide with alarm.
"You are mad?"
"I'm not mad at you."
He looked away from her and his bottom lip swelled, then trembled. She picked him up but it was too late. The tears jumped from his eyes like living diamonds. Plenty of volume to his wail. She hugged him and told him over and over that she was mad at Gary not at Timmy and after a while this worked. She silently cursed her temper and her selfishness. She felt her heart beating against his little pot belly. He stopped crying as quickly as he'd begun, pushed away and looked her very seriously.
"Why did Awchie throw flowers?"
"Because he loved Gwen."
"Loved Gwen?"
"Yes."
"I down, please."
She set him on the floor and watched him pad purposefully along the hallway toward his room. Another mission. When she got back the sofa Michelle was interviewing the Kuerners and the Wildcraft;
"Tell me how Archie and Gwen first met. Mrs. Kuerner, was it love at first sight? "
Why, thought Merci. She tried the CNB after-hours number but the receptionist wouldn't say whether Brice was in the studio or not. She tried his cell and Journal numbers again but there was still no answser. Zamorra answered and she gave the news to him.
She tossed the phone into the sofa cushion and paced while she watched, too rattled to sit. Earla Kuerner had tears in her eyes. Natalie sat still and sharp-eyed as a kestrel. Lee talked about his daughter falling in love with a college ballplayer, smiling at the memory while his hands wrung themselves in a dissenting agony. George Wildcraft; stared at the floor.
"Watch," said Clark. "Here comes the grave.
"Merci saw the cars filing into the memorial park, then longshots of the mourners disembarking for the chapel. She had not been aware of the CNB van coming up behind them and it angered her now that she hadn't thought to look for them. But what would she have done? It wasn't Michelle Howland's or Gary Brice's fault that Wildcraft had put on a show. Maybe Archie enjoyed the attention, she thought, maybe he was courting public opinion like everyone else on Earth.
Take a deep breath, she told herself. She took two. Didn't help, never did.
She heard Tim pulling his wheeled suitcase down the hallway. It was one of his favorite things, easily transporting small toys, snails, fallen oranges. Or the heavy newspaper, which he would roll right up to the kitchen table and deliver to Merci on Sunday mornings. Then the kitchen slider rasped open and slammed shut. Merci saw that the patio lights were on, noting that she'd need to look out on Tim in a minute, two at the outside.
On-screen the helicopter lowered and sent some of the mourners running. The deputies drew down and hats flew and the orange dirt dusted up around the blue tarp. Then the first faint bomb of color burst in the air and Archie Wildcraft waved down at the crowd. Merci hadn't seen him do that. Gwen's music kicked in and the flowers fell and Archie was back at the open cargo door of the chopper disgorging an entire bedsheet full of blossoms.
"Incredible," said Clark. "Look at that."
Thanks to the beauties of zoom and stop-action the incident was more detailed on video than it had been live.
"Natalie Wildcraft, what did you think when you saw that? "
"1 thought, get 'em, Arch. Show 'em what you 're made of. "
"What is he made of, Mrs. Wildcraft? "
"Guts and flowers, lady. "
Clark turned and smiled back at her. Merci caught the pride of fandom in it and she realized that Clark was pulling for Archie the way he'd pull for the Angels or the Dodgers or the Lakers.
The TV picture changed to the back view of the Wildcraft property.
Merci went to the window and saw Tim out on the edge of the patio, trying to catch the moths that rose up from the margarita daisies whenever the back lights were on. The suitcase lay behind him, zippered open and waiting for the treasures he might find.
"But is Archie Wildcraft truly the wounded hero he appears be?"
Then came the video footage of Archie and his twelve-gauge a Gary Brice. Merci watched again as Wildcraft, unshaven and bandaged, the head wrap dirty and bleeding, his clothes wrinkled and his eyes furious, leveled the big barrel at the reporter's chest and hiss out something about killing himself or killing them himself or whatever it was. Try as she could, Merci couldn't make out his words because of Brice's near fall and the air crackling around the mike. Then the press conference in which Michelle Howland tried to pin Merci on the specifics of the physical evidence:
"Can you tell us why Deputy Wildcraft is not a suspect in the death of his wife if his gun was used to kill her, and his fingerprints were on that weapon, and a test for gunshot residue came up positive?"
Merci listened to her reasoned, slightly condescending answer:
"Because there's more to a homicide case than fingerprints and gunshot residue."
A shot then of a dapper, gray-haired man sitting in a law library, with Michelle Howland's voice-over.
"But is there? Attorney Giles Newman has prosecuted scores murder cases, and defended hundreds more. As a private attorney now working in Denver, Colorado, Newman is immersed in the details homicide virtually every working day of his life. "
Dapper gray: "Fingerprints and residue tests positive? Suspect apprehended at the scene with the weapon in his hand? That's powerful evidence in a courtroom. I'm not going to comment on this case any other, but generally, when a prosecutor gets his hands on that kind of evidence, you 're looking at a conviction. "
Merci shook her head and looked back through the window. Tim was over by the roses now, suitcase still open. It looked like he was brushing ladybugs off into his luggage.
Then a forensic expert from Washington, D.C.; a psychiatrist from Los Angeles; a neurosurgeon from Baltimore. Michelle explained that
neither Assistant DA Ryan Dawes, Sheriff Vince Abelera nor Dr. John Stebbins were able to go on record for this CNB report.
"And what does Archie Wildcraft have to say? He requested an interview with CNB just a few hours after showering his wife's grave with flowers. ..."
Merci took a deep breath as Archie appeared on the screen. Free of the gauze turban, his head was close-shaven and somehow vulnerable rather than menacing. His eyes were pale and he looked exhausted. He wore a shortsleeved white shirt buttoned all the way up, like a youngster. There was a big beige bandage over his wound, the kind you can get at a drug store. Merci tried to make out the background but all she could identify with certainty was a brick wall. They were outside.
"1 want to tell Mom and Dad and Lee and Earla that I'm fine. I'll have this case wrapped up pretty quick now. Just don't worry, guys. "
He smiled a smile such as Merci had never seen: innocence, cunning, danger and serenity all in one brief flash.
"And everybody? Gwen says hello. She's just fine. I promise you that."
"Deputy Wildcraft, did you murder your wife? "
The same perfectly contradictory smile.
"After reviewing all the evidence, I'm now certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I did not. Turn off the camera now. That was the agreement. Now."
"Oh wow," said Clark.
Back to Michelle in the studio, sitting with, of course, Gary Brice.
"Gary, what do you make of Deputy Wildcraft's strangely unemotional and less-than-positive defense? "
Merci shook her head and lo
oked back outside. Tim had zipped up the little suitcase and extended the handle, which he now used to pull it across the patio toward the slider.
"I think he's delusional. And he's probably an extremely unreliable witness to the events of that night. I don't mean to condemn him, but the man has a bullet lodged in his brain. "
"Why isn't he in custody?"
"I think what's really interesting here is the way the Sheriff's Department moved so slowly to question and arrest him. Now he's out there, maybe a danger to others, certainly a danger to himself.
"It's a heartbreaking story. "
"Yes, it is, Michelle. And it's far from over. "
"What were you thinking when he had that shotgun aimed at you?
"To be honest? I thought I'd be meeting my maker in about two seconds."
"We're glad you're still with us, Gary. "
"I am, too."
"I'm not," said Merci.
She called Zamorra.
She read Tim Cars and Trucks and Things that Go and let him find the Goldbug character hidden in the vehicles. He knew exactly where Goldbug was on every page, but pretended to be uncertain. She put him in bed. He was quiet, perhaps still mistaking her anger at Brice for anger at him. She sat down in the darkened room and watched the light from the hallway softly illuminate her son's face.
"Lay down here," he said.
Sometimes she lay beside his little bed and talked to him through the mesh of the safety rail. She understood that he wanted her to be closer tonight, so she lay down on her back and looked up at him.
"Stay," he said.
He climbed out of bed. She heard him extend the handle of his suitcase and roll it over beside her. She heard him zip it open. By the time she'd turned her head to see what he was plotting he was standing beside her, dropping little handfuls of damp cool flowers onto her body. She caught a few in her hand and tilted them toward the hall light: rose petals, margarita daisies, dandelions from the lawn, geranium.
"I love you," he said.
She couldn't speak.
Late that night she poured another scotch, got a flashlight and went out to see Frank.
She walked across the back patio, then the lawn, then through the gate to the far side of the garage. The orange trees made shadows in the moonlight. She stood before the pile of cinder blocks and tumbleweeds then set the light and her tumbler on the ground. Squatting, she pulled away the cinder blocks. She tilted up the plywood planks one at a time, dragged them over to the garage wall and propped them against the stucco. The tumbleweeds, tethered to the plywood with dental floss, remained fixed to the wood. She brushed off her hands and went back to the trench. She pulled away the bubble wrap then sat down cross-legged on the ground and shined the light in.
There was Francisco. Ancient and still, a startlingly small human skeleton with a conquistador's helmet over the skull. The front of the helmet swept up like the prow of a tiny ship. From deep within its recess Francisco's bottomless eye sockets looked back at her. His teeth were enormous. His hands were monkeylike but his sword was huge. Beneath the chest plate and the Spanish armor his bones were brown and helpless.
"Hello, Frank," she said. She'd named him Francisco out of general probability. She'd discovered him here one day while trying to locate a leach line, and had no idea what to do with him. She felt possessive and protective. She'd fashioned the cinder-block-plywood-tumbleweed-bubble-wrap security system to protect him from dogs, kids, coyotes. She had only shown him to one other person—Hess, of course—who had pronounced him "alone."
She sipped her drink, then ran the flashlight beam over Frank's skeleton. It bothered her that she couldn't determine his eye or hair color, what kind of mustache he might have worn, the shade of his living skin. She harbored a baseless hope that Frank had been in law enforcement of some kind. The badge would have rusted away by now, right? Even the big sword was half eaten by decay.
Every time she decided to call the university and rat him out, she'd think of them dismantling and cataloguing him, taking their instruments to him, touching him.
So he remained here, where he had been buried some five centuries ago.
She never actually said much to him. What could you? But she found something inspiring in him, in his literal embodiment of the idea, of a life, of action. She loved it that even after death, Francisco remained suited up, armed and ready. Talk about eternal vigilance. She had read about the ferocity of the Spanish conquerors and admired him for it. And she understood something of what Francisco's sword had cost his soul.
She thought about Mike and Hess and Evan O'Brien, but mostly about Hess.
She sipped, checked the moon, turned to see the dark treeline against the sky and the orange fruit surprisingly clear in the darkness Then back to Frank. She wondered if, after Francisco's death, someone had willed him back to life the way Archie had willed Gwen. The way she tried to imagine Hess back but never could, except that one time in the dream when he came into her bedroom while she was sleeping to tell her everything was okay.
She looked down again at the conqueror and felt comforted by his patience.
"You know Archie didn't do it. Don't you?"
Just before midnight Merci dumped the contents of the La Quinta Inn trash bag onto the floor of her garage and rummaged through it in the bright fluorescent light: wadded tissue, some of it stained with bloody discharge; used bandages, folded into quarters; two days' worth of newspapers; fast-food bags and cups; a plastic bag from a pharmacy and one from a market; balls of lined yellow paper three of the little waxy sacks used to cover hotel water glasses.
In addition to the long, sword-shaped swatch of blue tarp that she had noted earlier she found several smaller scraps of the same material. There were also six short lengths of one-inch PVC pipe—four of them jointed together with dark blue pipe cement—and dozens of wilted blossoms and flower petals.
She separated the pipe and the tarp fragments and considered them. Something to do with the flower drop? Maybe. But what? Archie
hadn't used anything but what had looked like a bedsheet. It certainly wasn't a blue plastic tarp. Something to do with transporting the flowers? Something to do with Gwen? With his wound? With snaring Vorapin and Cherbrenko? With .. . what?
It was the same material used to hold down the earth from Gwen's grave, she thought. She pictured the burial scene, the orange dirt and the unnaturally blue tarp covering it, and the black mourners against the green grass.
She picked up one of the tarp scraps and saw the darker blue of PVC cement stuck to one of the straight sides. One of the pipe pieces had glue along its length also, and the telltale blue plastic debris where the tarp had been affixed, then torn off.
She tried to arrange the PVC into a meaningful shape but could not. Ditto the scraps of material. She thought they looked like the remnants of some sixth-grader's science project, but what was he trying to make? Had he completed or abandoned it?
The balled-up legal sheets were all pencil drawings, apparently made by Archie. Most were childishly inept renderings of Gwen. One sketch showed a latticework of some kind—a long rectangle cross-hatched with short support beams. For all Merci could tell it might have been anything from a retaining wall to a new board game.
She spiked the sketches to a nail in the drywall and turned her attention to the largest piece of tarp. Shaped roughly like a sword. Or a wing. Or a surfboard skeg. Or a jib. The long rectangle again, but with one end sharpened.
She pulled out a dusty old folding chair, whacked it open and sat. She stared at the potential evidence. A few minutes later she moved the chair, and a few minutes after that she moved it again.
But it didn't work. No matter what angle she looked from, nothing about the pipe and the glue and the tarp suggested anything she could use to figure what Archie Wildcraft was up to.
Half an hour later she put everything back in the bag, tied it shut and leaned it in the corner before turning off the lights.
She called
Brice on his cell phone and he answered, slurry with drink.
"Where was Wildcraft when you saw him?" she demanded.
"Up against the wall, Sergeant."
"What wall and where, Gary? I can't believe you wouldn't tel! where he was."
"I called you four times, Merci. I tried to tell you where he was.
"You could have tried Zamorra. Or the watch captain. You could have called Vince, for that matter."
"I wanted you to get the exclusive."
Merci heard a female voice in the background, teasing and chipper.
"Where was he?"
"He sent me to a pay phone in Santa Ana, then to another Then to a closed-up body shop down on First Street. When he saw I hadn't brought along any company—such as you, Sergeant—he led me around to the back and let me shoot him. He said if I told anybody where he'd been, he'd never call me again with an interview. He took off real fast when it was over."
Giggling in the background, the sound of a slap.
Rayborn felt her anger abating, replaced by curiosity over the condition of Archie Wildcraft.
"He looked a little ... unbalanced on the TV," she said.
"Unbalanced? Merci, that guy's crazier than a shithouse rat. Tell me about the Russians."
"What did he say?"
"Said he'd be taking care of them real soon. What gives? Do you have some suspects I should know about?"
"Abelera's on at noon. Pictures, everything."
"Shit, no kidding? Fucking ROC in OC? That's a story I'd like to run with."
"Too late for the morning final," she said. "You'll have to break along with everybody else."
"You could really help me out here."
"I was saying that to you two minutes ago."
"Forgive me. Forgive me, and when we meet again, punish me severely. In any way you want. Whip me. Beat me. But until then give
me the names of the suspects and some of the evidence you've got against them. E-mail me the pictures and I'll get them into the Art Department ASAP. Give me just a two-line statement I can use. Please, please, please help me get this story out before the Times and Register do."
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