VI
When I woke up later, there was a familiar shape slouched in the chair next to the window, its feet up on the edge of the bed. The only light was a fluorescent spill from the bathroom.
“Dr. Livingston, I presume,” I said. My voice sounded dry and scratchy.
Hector got up to pour me some water from the pitcher on the bedside table. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been better,” I admitted.
He handed me the cup and stood next to the bed, watching me drink. “You’re lucky I saw the truck.”
My eyes met his over the rim of the cup, and I felt a tremor start deep in my solar plexus. I put the cup down on the side table with a shaky hand.
“I left you a note,” I told him.
He shrugged, shaking his head. “I decided you meant it, when you told me not to come by. I was just out for a drive.”
I lay back, forcing myself to breathe slowly. Learning that my survival was the result of sheer coincidence terrified me more deeply than anything ever had.
Hector motioned me to scoot over so he could sit on the edge of the bed, and laid a warm paw on my belly. “Connie’s in ICU,” he said, his eyes going sad. “She’ll be OK. Physically.”
The seconds before I’d passed out seemed very far away now, but I doubted anything would ever completely obliterate them. I knew that I’d dig them up and look at them later, when the brain stopped trying to keep me from doing it.
There was a small shuffling noise to my left. I was half turned on my right side, to keep the pressure off my shoulder, so I couldn’t see what had made the noise until a tan-hatted figure came around into my field of view.
“She’s not making a lot of sense right now,” Maines said, his spectacles glinting in the dim light. He brought out his small notebook. “Tell me what happened up there.”
I gave him the sheer factual data, leaving out the things Connie and I had said to each other. He listened without comment, making a note every now and then. When I’d finished, he said, “I still don’t get why she came after you.”
Hector started to say something, but Maines gave him a sharp look, and he held up both hands, pressing his lips together.
“Jealousy,” I said. “Hector and I weren’t exactly circumspect about our—activities, and she was in love with him.” Maines’s face remained blank. When the penny didn’t drop, I spelled it out: “Romantically. Not like a sister.”
He snorted. “That don’t make sense. How’d all the other girlfriends escape?”
“I didn’t have any,” Hector put in. “Not locally.” Maines and I both gave him a look, and he explained, “I knew that it bugged her, so I always kept my love life out of sight as much as possible.”
Maines made a tsking noise. “It never occurred to you it was weird your sister was jealous of your girlfriends?” Hector started to answer, but the sheriff closed his eyes and held up a hand. “Never mind. I just heard myself. Common as dirt.”
Hector got off the bed and took a walk over to the window. “I never thought she was dangerous.”
“Something pushed her over the edge,” Maines said.
“Yeah,” I said. “She came back to the bar late on Thursday night and walked in on Teresa assaulting Hector.”
Maines peered at his notebook. “What brought her back at that hour?”
I said, “Marie Hooks hit her up for a ride as we were leaving. Maria was pretty drunk, ranting about Teresa ruining her life—I guess because she’d fired her after she and Richard broke up. Connie took some time to talk to her before heading to her car, where she discovered she had two sets of keys.”
“Two sets of keys?”
“Yeah, she’d picked up Richard’s earlier in the evening, by mistake. She came back to put them in the lost and found. Mike found them in there the next day.”
Maines made another note, then asked, “Why’d she go upstairs after she dropped off the keys?”
I couldn’t tell Maines about the hands, so I just said, “Who knows?”
Hector made an impatient movement, and the sheriff glared at him. “Go stand over there,” he growled, pointing his chin toward the side chair, out of my line of sight. Hector huffed and moved out of view.
Now I realized what Maines was up to. With Connie in ICU and unavailable for questioning, he’d had to rely on Hector’s account of events, and he didn’t trust it. That’s why he’d been waiting in the room with Hector for me to wake up. He wanted to make sure we didn’t have a chance to compare notes.
Performing a wince, I laid my head back and closed my eyes to buy some rehearsal time. Telling what I knew without identifying Hector as the CIA’s Bolivian was going to be tricky, and I honestly didn’t know if I was up to it.
“OK,” Maines prompted. “Connie walks in on them. Sees what’s going on and loses it. Grabs a knife from the kitchen. Why didn’t she just kill the chief right there?”
I opened my eyes and gave him Connie’s story, minus the malquis, but Maines continued to look skeptical. He took his time updating his notes, then closed his notebook and cast an wry look over my shoulder, in Hector’s direction. “If she can’t make it convincing without your father’s hands, I sure can’t.”
My head whipped around before I could stop it, and I had to grit my teeth to keep from screaming while the throbbing in my shoulder subsided. I heard Hector get out of the chair and come over to the bed. I opened my eyes. He looked like he’d aged ten years.
“What do you know about my father?” he asked Maines. His breath was short and thick.
“I know that the CIA helped get him killed. As an American, I’ve never been particularly proud of that.”
The two men stared at each other across the bed for a while; then Maines stepped out of my line of sight and returned with a small blue case. He clicked the latch and passed it to Hector.
“Found that among Teresa’s things,” he said as Hector opened it and looked inside. “She wasn’t the kind of person to put off sending things to the lab. Unless she had a reason. So I hung fire and did a little research. There’s only one old open case that involves a pair of mummified hands.”
“You realize what they’ll do to me if they find me?” Hector said. “I can identify three CIA agents who killed a woman and two little girls in the most horrific way possible. Not to mention the other shit that bunch did, back home. I’d never see daylight again.”
“You guys want to tell me what the hell you’re talking about?” I interrupted.
Hector opened his mouth to answer, but Maines cut him off. “It’s safer for her if she doesn’t know. At least until you’ve cleared U.S. airspace.” He got a look at Hector’s expression and said, “A man’s remains belong with his family. Not in some museum, helping those clowns in the White House justify their foreign policy agendas. I don’t care what he did.”
Hector was staring at the sheriff with his dark eyes wide. “I can’t get them out,” he said. “Security is too tight now.”
“You leave the travel arrangements to me,” Maines drawled. “I’ve got friends in high places. We’ve gotta go now, though. Once Connie comes around and starts talking, all bets are off.”
Hector hesitated, then reached over and grabbed the notepad lying on the bedside table. “I brought your laptop with your stuff,” he said to me, writing something down. I craned my head toward the edge of the bed and saw my bag lying on the floor next to the chair. “Look this up after we’re gone. It’ll explain—well, not everything, but most of it.”
He leaned over and put his hands on the pillow on either side of my head, gazed at me for a few seconds with those beautiful eyes, then gave me a kiss. It didn’t feel like a permanent good-bye, but I wasn’t ready to ask questions like if or when he was coming back.
Maines extended a hand at me as Hector went around the end of the bed. “When this all hits the fan, I’m gonna be out of a job. I’m thinking about hanging out my P.I. shingle. Work with me for a few years, you’d qualify to t
ake the exam yourself.”
All I could do was stare as he nodded briskly, then turned and left without looking back. Hector gave me a complicated grin and followed.
When the amazement wore off, I rolled cautiously toward the side table and slid the notepad over. Hector had written down an Internet URL and a password.
Navigating slowly because of all the wires and tubes hanging off me, I sat up and slid my bag over with one foot. It took a minute to boot up and navigate the hospital’s Wi-Fi interface; then I typed in the address and found myself on a secure page from the Library of Congress. I entered the password and was forwarded to something that appeared to be a digest of information collected from recently declassified government documents, detailing the failed revolution imported to Bolivia in 1967 by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Puzzled, I scrolled down and hit a photo of the three CIA agents who’d been part of the group that had executed Guevara. The man I knew as Nick Olmos was standing on the far right, holding a rifle.
Below the photo, I found this:
Although the Bolivian peasants had treated Guevara’s presence in their mountains quite casually, the United States government feared that if the whereabouts of his body were known, La Higuera would become a pilgrimage site for his followers, keeping his legacy alive and perhaps leading to a backlash revolution. Therefore, the Bolivian president, acting on a recommendation from Washington, ordered that Guevara be buried in an unmarked grave.
Though all those involved in Guevara’s execution were sworn to secrecy, it was revealed in 1995 that Guevara’s body had been buried with six others under an airstrip in Vallegrande, about thirty miles from La Higuera. Guevara’s remains were ultimately repatriated to Cuba in 2001, but the location of the famous revolutionary’s hands, which were removed from the body shortly after death for identification purposes, is still the subject of intense speculation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
John Vehko, Patty Chappell, Janet Reid, Ed Ward, Jesse Sublett, Jessica Alvarez, Toni Kirkpatrick, Theresa Weir, J. E. Seymour, Jack Getze, Julia Stavenhagen, Tim Hallinan, and the rest of you. You know who you are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MINERVA KOENIG was born in California and raised in Texas, where she runs her own one-woman architecture practice. When not writing or drawing, she likes to sew, read, play chess, do yoga, dance, wrangle cats, and fight the patriarchy.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
NINE DAYS. Copyright © 2014 by Minerva Koenig. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph © John Finney Photography/Getty Images
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-05194-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-5266-2 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466852662
First Edition: September 2014
Nine Days: A Mystery Page 25