The Fault Tree

by Louise Ure

  He pulled me by the elbow and I tripped down the weedy path behind him. Teresa’s feet must have been untied as well, as she followed along with my shirttail wound around her hand. We crossed a clear, dusty area and I heard a fountain—two levels of cascading water—to my left. Dappled sunshine, then the full cool of a shaded entryway. The man knocked hard on a thin metal door—a trailer? The aluminum pop when the door opened a moment later confirmed it. The thick, waxy smell of air freshener and the peaty odor of cigars.

  “Hey, Gerry. I thought you were too good to mix with the family criminals.”

  “It’s Gerald…you know that. And I need help, Marty.” He pushed me up two steps and into the trailer. A wave of body odor came off this new man, dueling with my captor’s sickly sweet diabetic tang. “We need a place to stay. Not long. Just until the heat dies down.”

  “Can’t help you,” Marty replied. “Too many folks around here would see you.”

  “At least trade cars with us.”

  “Shit no. I don’t have a car, and you’re not getting your hands on the Harley.”

  “Please, Marty! We’re talking about my life here.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure Mom and Dad would be real broke up about that. Maybe crime really does run in the family, after all. Tell you what,” Marty continued, “you leave the little girl here. I can make good money off her, and I’ll send you someplace safe. One of my buddies has a house he’s not using near Casa Grande, about an hour from here. Not much there, but it’s private.”

  I almost gagged at the idea of leaving Teresa with this man and froze when I thought of the ways she could be valuable to him. He sounded like part of my captor’s family. A brother? An uncle? And which family? He’d introduced himself as Gerald. Was it Pickett, the nineteen-year-old who Dupree said had owned the burned-out Econoline van?

  “It’s a deal,” Pickett said, pushing Teresa forward. “Get some bandages first so I can take care of Bea’s arm.”

  Marty turned away. “So you got your girlfriend back too, huh?” Pickett’s grasp on my arm loosened as he turned toward the voice.

  I used the distraction to make a run for it.

  “Go, Teresa. Now!”

  Chapter 87

  Dupree sprang for the phone when it rang. Maybe this would be the call that would send them into action. He had to find Cadence Moran and the missing seven-year-old.

  “August!” He barely recognized his wife’s anguished voice. “It’s Bitsy. A motorcycle accident. She’s at TMC.” It took precious moments to calm her enough to get the story.

  Bitsy and Spider had been hit by a car, coming back from the grocery store. They didn’t know the extent of the injuries yet. “I’ll come get you,” Dupree said. “We’ll go to the hospital together.”

  He grabbed his coat, calling the news over his shoulder to Nellis. “I’ll be on the cell phone if you hear anything!”

  He picked up Gloria and still made it to Tucson Medical Center within a half hour. Bitsy was in the emergency room, loosely covered by a pale blue blanket and groggy with painkillers.

  “Baby,” was all he could say, cradling her head in his hands. Her teeth chattered like ghostly castanets.

  “We’ve taken care of the dislocated shoulder, but there are at least five broken bones that will need to be immobilized,” the doctor said.

  “Any internal injuries?”

  “We’re taking her upstairs for a CAT scan and X-rays now.”

  “Where’s Spider?” Bitsy asked, her voice an echo of the little girl he remembered.

  “Hush, they’re taking care of him.” Spider had taken the brunt of the force when the car hit. His head injuries were extensive and he was in surgery for a collapsed lung.

  Dupree held her closer against his chest. His baby. His life. Maybe not healthy, but alive.

  He hoped the same was true of Cadence Moran.

  Chapter 88

  Lunging to my right, I broke loose of Pickett’s hold and pushed through the doorway but tripped down the steep metal steps and landed in a garden bed planted just beside the front door. A six-foot bush with leathery, banana-shaped leaves broke my fall. I felt the crushed shrubbery with my bound hands as I lay there. The distinctive cockatiel shape of a bird-of-paradise blossom, and the sweet, strong smell of pineapple sage where I’d landed.

  Teresa screamed, “Let me go! Let me go!” Her freedom hadn’t lasted much longer than my own.

  “Take the lady too,” Pickett said, pulling me upright and shoving me back toward the trailer door. I prayed that trailer park Marty would take him up on the deal. I had to stay with Teresa.

  “I can’t get much money for her. Too old, and she looks like too much trouble. She’s all yours,” Marty said.

  My captor was silent, and I knew he was weighing whether to kill me now or later. I looped my tied arms around Teresa. “I’m not going anywhere without her.”

  Marty was stronger than I had imagined. His fist smashed into my jaw, sending me sprawling in the dirt. One man picked up my hands and the other my feet, and they carried me across the yard like a deer carcass.

  “I’ll hold on to the little girl until you get her back in the trunk,” Beatrice offered.

  Now I knew for sure that we wouldn’t be getting any help from that quarter.

  “Pickett! It’s not too late. Let me help you! Nobody else has to get hurt.” No response from either of the men dumping me into the trunk.

  Teresa’s cries rent the air and my heart. “Teresa!” I couldn’t manage any more reassurance. I had none left.

  I drew a mental map. We’d traveled a little more than two hours since I’d been put in the trunk. If Casa Grande was an hour away, and if we hadn’t been traveling in circles, that meant that we had gone north or east or west, not toward Mexico, since we hadn’t stopped at any kind of border inspection station. If my sense of direction was right, we’d traveled north and were now in Phoenix and not the desert or smaller burgs that the other directions would have given us.

  “Here’s the address,” Marty said. “Don’t call me for a while. Wait for things to die down.” I wished he hadn’t used the word “die” in a sentence.

  Pickett borrowed a Phillips head screwdriver from Marty, replaced the missing screws on the trunk latch, then slammed the lid shut again. Without my screwdriver, I had no hope of escape.

  But I did have a plan. I gnawed at the duct tape on my wrists.

  As we pulled away from the house, I eased the Elmer’s glue from my pocket. I started at my wrist, marking an L or an R every time the car turned, then a drop of glue for each thirty breaths I took. I didn’t know how fast the car was traveling, but when it reached and held a speed for a long period of time without turning, I dotted a wriggly line to indicate a freeway and speeds of seventy or more.

  Semi trucks roared past us and once I heard powerful car engines revving in the distance. Ignore them! Count the breaths! Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Oh, Teresa, please be brave.

  Concentrating on breathing kept me from thinking about other things. Things like not really believing that I could lead the police to Marty’s house at all. Things like wondering what the police would think when they found my glue-studded body in a ditch.

  Chapter 89

  Dupree was waiting for Bitsy to return from X-ray when his cell phone rang. “We found the pickup truck,” Nellis said without introduction. “The two hundred block of Christmas Street in Winterhaven.”

  “I’ll be right there.” Dupree turned to Gloria beside him. Her hair may have grayed just the tiniest bit more in the last hour. She worried a Kleenex between her hands, wet eyes focused on her lap. “Will you be okay here if I have to leave?”

  She nodded, eyes mirroring his concern. “We’ll be fine. Go.”

  He raced down the stairs to his unmarked car and sped across town.

  Three police cars, an ambulance, and the coroner’s van crowded the usually calm residential street. Afternoon shadows from the palm trees stretched long, creatin
g jailhouse bars of shade across the yards.

  “I told them not to touch anything in the house until you got here,” Nellis said. He and Dupree donned latex gloves and approached the open kitchen door.

  “Meet Mr. Whitman,” Nellis said, gesturing to the dead body of the elderly man on the kitchen floor. “A neighbor came by to check on him when he didn’t show up for his usual five o’clock sherry with her.”

  “Please tell me she didn’t…” Dupree gestured to the bloody footprints that led away from the body.

  “Yeah, the footprints are hers. She knelt down to see if he was still alive. At least she had the brains to go back to her house to phone it in.”

  “Anything taken?”

  “His car. A ’71 four-door black Mercedes sedan. They left the pickup truck hidden behind his RV. I’ve got the guys going over it now.”

  “Let’s get the word out.” And hope it’s not too late.

  Chapter 90

  When we reached the Casa Grande house, Pickett hustled me straight from the car and into the bathroom. I heard grunts and muttered curses as he shoved furniture against the door on the outside; when I tried to open it, it wouldn’t budge. I turned my attention to the small window. Security glass, woven with what felt like thin wire for reinforcement. I made no progress at all and retreated to the bathtub. I imagined that I could still hear Teresa’s sobs in the air.

  Twice, when Pickett or the girl shoved the furniture aside and came in to use the bathroom, I refused to turn my blind eyes away from them. I was done with pleading. “I will hunt you down and kill you,” I promised Pickett. He didn’t reply. The rotten-fruit reek of his piss was almost choking in the small room.

  When I realized they weren’t coming to feed me or allow me out, I propped myself up in the tub and used towels to cushion my shoulder and hip from the cold porcelain.

  I’d heard distant traffic sounds when we arrived. We were close to a freeway or major thoroughfare. But I hadn’t heard any friendly-neighbor televisions or radios during our transit from the car to the house. Screaming wouldn’t do any good.

  Darkness is my constant companion but not always my friend. I knew I wouldn’t sleep tonight. I would keep my eyes wide open and pinch myself to stay awake, as if a state of alert readiness would make any difference at all.

  When everything was quiet in the house, I groped around the walls and ceiling until I’d located and unscrewed all the light-bulbs. It wouldn’t do much good—I knew the light from the other rooms would flood in when the door opened—but I wanted at least a moment when I could see as well as my captors did.

  I stretched out on the floor across the doorway, doing sit-ups and leg lifts until I thought my muscles would snap. I chanted Juanita’s animal groups in time with the reps to stay awake.

  “A smack of jellyfish.” I lifted my legs and held them.

  “A parliament of owls.” Again.

  “A float of crocodiles.”

  “A descent of woodpeckers.” My muscles burned.

  “A cowardice of curs.”

  “A lamentation of swans.”

  I curled into a ball and wailed.

  Chapter 91

  Pickett’s history teacher, Mr. Janetos, had not been at school and had not responded to Dupree’s phone messages or the “Call me, URGENT” note he’d left on the teacher’s front door. After checking on Bitsy, Dupree was back at the teacher’s house before seven in the morning, pounding on the door.

  “Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night,” Janetos said. “I had a killer headache. Migraines, you know.” He was in his midforties and trim to the point of skinny, with a bristly mustache and Harry Potter glasses that rubbed against his eyebrows.

  Dupree stifled the urge to tell him about another kind of killer, one on the loose with hostages that included a seven-year-old girl. And how much he’d rather be at the hospital with his daughter right now than standing in the cool morning air mouthing platitudes to a man who didn’t even have the courtesy to call in sick yesterday so the school could schedule a substitute.

  “Tell me about Gerald Pickett.”

  “I think he’s a good kid, trying to find his way. It can’t be easy. Do you know about his family?”

  “Ms. Costova told me they were nothing to write home about.”

  “Unless you were writing a very sad letter. His brother, Marty, is only a couple of years older and belongs to a motorcycle gang. His father will be in prison for aggravated assault for another five years before the possibility of parole.”

  “I know about his emancipation. Were you the one who helped him with that?”

  “I did. The one thing about Gerald is that he always follows through. Always does what he said he’d do. That’s very grown-up behavior. I thought he’d be a good candidate for this emancipation law.”

  “Did he ever make any promises about following through with his attraction to Beatrice McDougall? Ever make any threats?”

  “No, but we didn’t really talk about that kind of thing.”

  “What stays most in your mind about him?” Dupree didn’t feel like he had a real picture of the kid yet.

  “It’s all or nothing with him. We were studying civil rights in class, and Gerald gave this paper about his grandfather.”

  “What about him?”

  “Gerald claimed that the old man was the one who tried to make Rosa Parks stand up on the bus that day.”

  The black man in Dupree bristled, but the cop in him was interested. “Was it true?”

  “I don’t know, but that’s what he had always been told. That was the legacy his family was proud of. It doesn’t matter if it was true; he believed it. And he thought those same genes were part of him. He even has diabetes like his grandfather did.”

  “How serious is his diabetes?” Dupree asked. Cadence Moran had been right again.

  “He’s not insulin dependent. It’s type 2 diabetes; he doesn’t need shots. But he needs to control his exercise and diet or he could be in serious trouble.”

  Dupree jotted a reminder to canvass all the pharmacies in the city. Maybe they could track down Pickett through his diabetes-testing supplies.

  “So what was it about this history paper he gave?”

  “I think talking about his grandfather really underscored for him all the reasons that he wanted to leave his family. That was the day he came and asked me about the new emancipation law.”

  A boy who wanted to divorce his family and free himself from a legacy of criminal behavior and racial intolerance. Maybe prove he wasn’t the “bad seed” he was accused of being. A boy who was organized and smart enough to use the legal system, to get a job and an apartment, and to graduate from high school without much adult supervision.

  How does that boy become a murderer?

  “We got some good tips on the Mercedes,” the communications officer said two hours later. “Three callers said the car is parked behind a house in Casa Grande. They didn’t see it until this morning.” Dupree arranged for his Highway Patrol brethren to keep watch on the house until he and Nellis could get there to coordinate the takedown. Their ETA was thirty minutes.

  They met the Highway Patrol car at the I-10 exit nearest the Casa Grande house and followed it west to the address where the Mercedes had been spotted. They stopped thirty or forty yards back from the building, hoping to keep the advantage of surprise.

  It was a compact house, as deep as it was wide, tucked into the shade of a massive cottonwood tree. The windows were barred, and a heavy wrought-iron screen covered the wooden front door. Nothing but sagebrush and knee-level prickly pear cactus for three hundred yards in any direction. Dupree sent officers around the back to cover that exit.

  “Any sign of them?” he asked the senior Highway Patrol officer.

  “We haven’t seen or heard anything from inside. But with everything closed up like that, I’m not sure that we would hear them at all.”

  “Have we confirmed they’re in there?”

  �
�We only got word about the car a couple of hours ago. They may have parked it and left, but none of the neighbors saw them.”

  Only one way to find out. Dupree picked up the amplified megaphone and approached the house.

  Chapter 92

  Maybe we’ve made it, Pickett thought, settling into the big chair in the living room. Maybe this is where our new life starts, right here in Casa Grande. No more hiding in the shadows from Lolly’s father. No more need to distance himself from his family. They could start over and be whatever they wanted to be. He arched his back against the deep leather chair but, too nervous to relax, his thoughts continued to roam.

  All those little decisions—thousands upon thousands—that we make every day that later morph us into the person we become. Pet a dog or pull its ear? Wear blue today or red? Steal a pencil or give it back to the teacher? Turn right or turn left? Tell the truth and take the punishment or cross your fingers and hope for the best?

  What was that first step he’d taken that led to becoming someone who could, without hesitation, plunge a knife into a beating heart? Maybe it wasn’t a decision at all. Maybe Lolly’s father had been right, and it was bred into his bones.

  In any case, he had willingly followed Lolly’s example: he’d learned to kill. And now he was the man everyone had always expected him to become.

  The Casa Grande place wasn’t as private as he’d hoped—there were houses visible in the distance on both sides—but he had pulled the car around back and drawn all the curtains.

  He and Lolly had warmed canned soup last night and tried to gather their energies with sleep. Not that he got much rest at all. His dreams had turned to horror flicks—knives slashing, guns dripping blood, a voice shouting, “Stand up, God damn it! Stand up!”—and he’d awakened with a half-caught breath of terror at least a dozen times.