“Is it a kidnapping?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m thinking.” He turned to Olga. “But there’s no way to confirm it unless they contact you, Mrs. Buckley.”
Maria Elena took the blanket from her own shoulders and wrapped it around Olga, rubbing her hands up and down Olga’s arms. She’d been roused from her sleep by the sound of voices in her kitchen and a flashing red light from the police car in the street sweeping over the walls of her room. She’d entered just as the police chief pulled the bloody handkerchief from his pocket. She was visibly upset, but she focused on the needs of her employer, wiping away her own tears while trying to comfort Olga.
“Will they deliver a ransom note?” Olga asked.
“More likely a telephone call. They’re not going to want to be seen near the house. Sometimes they even e-mail these days. I would’ve expected to find something in the car. My guys gave it a thorough going-over, but there wasn’t any message, nothing at all, other than a bunch of boxes of magazines and catalogs and a few stray pieces of mail.”
“Wasn’t there more mail than that?” I asked.
“No. They probably took it to rummage through for checks or cash.”
“Where did you find the handkerchief?” I asked.
“Under the front of the car. Someone may have deliberately placed it there to keep the rain from washing away the blood. It looks to me as though they wanted it found to make their point.”
Olga shivered.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked the police chief.
“We can’t do anything tonight. It’s pitch-black out there, and the rain has already washed away any evidence we might have found at the scene—footprints, stains, things like that. I’ve posted two men to stay with the car to make sure it doesn’t disappear. I’m surprised they didn’t take it along with its occupants.”
“What’s the next step?” I asked.
“I’ll go back out first thing in the morning to see if there’s anything we might have missed.”
“I’d like to go with you,” I said.
“I don’t see the point, but if it will make you feel better, all right.”
I thought back to my introduction to him. He’d indicated he wouldn’t mind enjoying the sort of challenges the police in Mexico City regularly confront. But the events of this evening made changing jurisdictions unnecessary to satisfy his thirst for action. He was faced with the likely kidnapping of two American men—and, I had to silently add, the possibility of murder—which was undoubtedly more challenging than logging the lost belongings of a tourist from the States who’d been the quarry of a highway bandit.
But his expression said that he wasn’t enjoying this. The thrill of working on a serious case had a dark side—the necessity of dealing with victims or, in this case, the family of victims. It meant delivering bad news and watching people suffer. Chief Rivera obviously took no pleasure in such tasks. But he was a professional, and I was certain he would do what was required of him. He knew the ins and outs of law enforcement, spoke the language, and had been in Mexico long enough to have developed contacts. I hoped that he could put those attributes to good use and would find Vaughan and Woody—alive.
“I should go with you, shouldn’t I?” Olga asked. “Vaughan might have left me a clue that no one else would recognize. It would be just like him to do something like that.”
He already did, I thought, thinking of the handkerchief.
“It’s more important for you to stay home, Olga,” I said. “You’re needed here in case anyone tries to contact you.”
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “I’ll stay here. Vaughan may be lost and trying to find his way back.” To Maria Elena she said, “Would you get me a sweater, please? It’s suddenly gotten very cold.”
I took her hands in mine. They were like ice, and she shivered despite the heavy blanket enfolding her. I realized she was in shock.
“Do you have any brandy?” I asked Maria Elena. “And something for her to eat?”
“I don’t want anything,” Olga said. “I want my mind clear in case I can help Vaughan.”
“You can help Vaughan by taking care of yourself and not getting sick,” I said. “You need to eat, and to rest.”
“I’ll be going now,” Rivera said, shrugging into his raincoat. He left a card on the table next to Olga’s chair. “A patrol car will pass by the house every half hour, just to keep an eye out. That’s my cell phone number. Call me if you hear from your husband or anyone else regarding this. If anything strikes you as being unusual or suspicious, call immediately. Don’t open the door for tradesmen or anyone else you don’t know personally.”
“All right,” she said. She looked up at Maria Elena. “Maybe a little brandy would be good.”
She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair hung lank; the elegant coiffure the hairdresser had carefully created was now a casualty of Olga’s nervous hands. My heart ached for her.
“I’m going to walk the chief out,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“What am I going to do without Vaughan?” she said absently, more to herself than to us.
“Don’t give up on him,” I said. “We’ll find him.” I prayed I was right and that we wouldn’t be too late.
At the door I asked the police chief what I couldn’t say in front of Olga. “I know this is an unfair question, Chief, but please be candid with me. From what you know about this type of crime in Mexico, how often is a kidnap victim found alive?”
He ran his hand over the rough stubble of whiskers on his chin. “It depends. If you mean found alive without handing over any money? Rarely. If you mean released after a ransom is paid? I gotta be honest with you. That doesn’t always happen. But I’ll tell you this, Mrs. Fletcher. We’ll give it everything we’ve got. I’ll call in the AFI. That’s the Mexican FBI. I’ll drill my guys to work their snitches. We’ll comb the streets and turn over all the rocks.” He opened the door and pulled up the collar of his coat. “Really coming down now,” he said, peering into the veil of water sweeping over the courtyard stones. “Good thing we found the handkerchief before it got washed away.”
“There’s another good thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That they were taken near San Miguel. That means someone here might know something.”
He grunted. “If they’d disappeared out of my jurisdiction, I wouldn’t be much help to you. But if they’re in my backyard, we’ll find them. One way or another, we’ll find them.”
“What time should I be ready for you in the morning?”
He glanced at his watch. “You’re sure you want to do this? You’re not going to get much sleep tonight.”
“I wouldn’t anyway.”
“Good morning,” I said four hours later as I climbed into the backseat of Chief Rivera’s cruiser.
The morning air was sharp and clear, carrying the sound of church bells tolling all over the city. I knew they were a daily, in some cases hourly, occurrence, but the deep reverberations made me shiver. I hoped they weren’t an omen of things to come.
After the chief had left I sat with Olga for a long time. There was little more to say until circumstances became clearer, but I’d told her we were lucky to have Rivera working for us and that I would do everything in my power to help him find Vaughan and Woody.
Maria Elena had given Olga a snifter of brandy and coaxed her to eat some toast. She’d stayed with her through the night, dozing in a chair by the bed where Olga, curled in a ball, slept fitfully, waking with a start every few minutes at some sound, real or imagined.
Rivera drove. His second in command, Captain Gutierrez, whom I’d met at the police station, yawned loudly from the passenger seat and scratched his chest. He rattled off something in Spanish, causing Rivera to frown.
The car bounced over the cobblestones, making conversation difficult. Rivera gunned the engine and took the corners at what I c
onsidered an unsafe speed in light of the uneven road. If there were any springs left in the suspension of the cruiser, they didn’t have much “spring” anymore. Every jolt and thud threw me up to the roof and down again. I hung on to a strap above the window and tried not to fall off the bench seat, praying my breakfast wouldn’t make another appearance.
Away from the center of town the road smoothed out and I released my hold on the strap.
“You okay back there?” Rivera called over his shoulder.
“I am now. That was quite a bumpy ride.”
“There was a movement a while back to pave over those cobblestones,” he said. “All the ladies who want to wear high heels joined in, claimed the streets were unsafe for walking. They have to take cabs wherever they go downtown.”
I leaned forward. “What happened?”
He laughed. “The tourists objected. They didn’t want the city to remove any of the ‘charm.’ The preservationists had a fit, but you’d expect that. In the end, it was the taxi drivers who made sure the measure never got anywhere. Those cobblestones guarantee lots of business for them.”
“And for the owners of car repair shops, I imagine.”
“By the way, I learned a little something about you, Mrs. Fletcher, that you neglected to tell me earlier.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re a famous author. You forgot to mention that when you filed the report. You just said you were a professor at Manhattan University.”
“Actually, Chief, I did teach at the university when I lived in Manhattan. That’s true.”
“Yeah, but what you didn’t say is what you usually do for a living.”
“You didn’t ask.”
The high desert had swallowed up the rain from the night before. There was no trace of the torrents that had cascaded down the hills and across the road, except for a dusty residue that had already been kicked up by early-morning trucks bringing goods to town. At the site where Woody’s car had been abandoned, the ground was as dry as if the rain had fallen a week earlier rather than the night before.
Two men in khaki uniforms squatted by a small campfire they’d built a short distance from their official car. They stood and stretched when we pulled in.
“Transito police,” Rivera said by way of explanation. “They found the car. They’re not under my command, but I asked them to keep watch till I could relieve them this morning.”
The men exchanged greetings with Rivera and Gutierrez, kicked sand on the embers of their campfire, and left in their vehicle.
“Do you know this car at all?” Rivera asked, cocking his head toward Woody’s station wagon.
“The only time I saw it was when they left on their trip,” I said. “Three days ago.”
“Anything look different?”
I walked around the car and thought back to the morning Vaughan and Woody had started out, Vaughan eager for adventure and Woody proud to provide it. The rain had washed off the top layer of dust, but the faded blue paint was no brighter. I peered through the windows and saw the jumble of cartons that had been used to sort the mail of families with post office boxes in Laredo.
“Their luggage is gone,” I said.
“What did it look like?” Rivera asked, motioning to Gutierrez, who pulled a pad and pen out of his pocket.
Gutierrez had ignored me during the drive. I wasn’t sure if he was resentful of my presence or was simply an unpleasant person. I had tried to enlist his opinion on the incident, but he’d either refused to respond or glared at Rivera when the chief answered my questions. Now he listened.
“Woody’s bag was a military duffel, medium size, olive drab with nylon straps for handles and a metal zipper across the top,” I said. “It was pretty old, worn around the edges.” I waited while his writing caught up to my description. “Vaughan’s bag was a satchel, tweed with tan leather trim. The brand is Hartmann, I think.”
“Figures,” Rivera said. “That told them right away that the guy’s got dough.”
Rivera said something to Gutierrez in Spanish, causing the officer to pocket his pad and open the car’s front door.
“I told him to check the glove box and the floor of the car before the lab guys go over it,” Rivera said to me. “We’ve got to wait for the tow truck. Want to take a walk?”
The car had been forced off the road where the land was flat. About thirty feet from the roadbed there was a gentle slope, the land littered with scrub trees and brush, an easy place for kidnappers to hide while waiting for the arrival of their victims. The morning was quiet, except for the rustle of dried branches as they rubbed against each other in the breeze. The sky was a vivid blue, broken only by the dark silhouette of a bird of prey circling overhead
“When my driver and I were stopped by the bandit,” I said, “he’d placed a boulder in the middle of the road to force us to swerve to avoid hitting it. Do you think the kidnappers might have done the same thing?”
“Could be, but it would be easier just to put out a flare or something to indicate there was a problem ahead. Sometimes they have someone lie down in the middle of the road pretending to be injured, pour ketchup or salsa on him to look like blood. They leave a car on the side, like there’s just been an accident. Anyone coming on that would slow down. It’s human nature. That’s all they need to pounce.”
I paused next to a bush where several small branches had been snapped off recently. Cows wandered freely here. Did an animal do this?
“How many people might be involved?” I asked, extricating a few curly white hairs caught on the end of a broken twig.
“More than a couple, that’s for sure,” he said, walking ahead and turning to wait for me. “They never rely on even odds. It would be taking a chance with two men in the car. They’d want backup, want to surround them to keep them from escaping. I’d figure there were four, possibly five.”
“Maybe Vaughan and Woody tried to escape,” I said, catching up and handing him the white strands. “These didn’t come from a cow.”
“I’d say you’re right,” he said, pulling an empty plastic bag from his jacket pocket and depositing my discovery inside.
“The car had fake sheepskin covers on the front seats,” I said. “Do you think they might be from that?”
“Could be,” he said. He cupped his eyes and scanned the countryside. “If they tried to get away,” he said, “the only way they could run would be down this hill.”
We started walking again, down the hill, taking a route that wouldn’t even qualify as a trail. The terrain was rough, rocky, and unforgiving. We paused and looked back to where Gutierrez stood next to the car giving instructions to a tow truck operator. He glanced our way and shook his head.
“Do you think someone followed them from the hotel?” I asked, leaning against a boulder to shake a pebble from my shoe. “How else would they know about the luggage?”
The sun was getting higher now. I squinted against the glare. A second bird had joined the first and they floated over a stand of bushes in our path, their broad wings tipping from side to side in the air currents that rose from the hot earth. I walked ahead of Rivera.
“This type of crime is not spur of the moment,” he said, following me. “These guys plan it out, know where to make their move, do it at night when they won’t be seen or followed. They have to know their victim is worth the effort. And they may not even contact the family. They might just swim their fish to an ATM machine and hold a gun to his head, shoot off his fingers one by one till he empties his bank account. Buckley’s a prize. I don’t know how much they can wring out of Manheim.”
The birds were circling lower and I could see the red heads now and the wing tips spread like the fingers of a hand, the distinguishing marks of a particular kind of bird, a carrion eater, a vulture. Then I saw the object of their fascination. I gasped. My stomach dropped and my pulse quickened.
Rivera came up behind me. “They won’t be getting any money from that one,” he said.
Sadly I turned away from the body.
Chapter Twelve
The house was bustling with visitors when I returned: Dina and Roberto Fisher, Sarah Christopher, Cathie Harrison and Eric Gewirtz, Guy and Nancy Kovach, one couple whom I hadn’t met but had seen at the party, and several others whose faces were new to me. They were gathered in the living room, chairs from the kitchen carried in to supplement the seating.
I left Chief Rivera in the vestibule and went in search of Olga. Maria Elena met me in the hall, balancing a tray of drinks and a bowl of cookies “Word travels fast, doesn’t it?” I said to her.
Her eyes flew to the ceiling and she blew a puff of air into her bangs, ruffling the wisps of hair on her forehead.
“Where is Mrs. Buckley?” I asked.
“Upstairs. She is packing.”
“Packing? Why?”
“She goes to get the money.”
“Hello, Jessica,” Sarah said, coming into the hall where Maria Elena and I were talking. She lifted the tray from Maria Elena’s arms. “I’ll take that in,” she said. “After all, we’re here to help.”
“Have you heard from the kidnappers?” I asked Maria Elena in a low voice after Sarah had returned to the living room.
The housekeeper shook her head.
“How did all these people find out?”
“From the papers.”
“The newspaper?”
She nodded.
The phone rang and Maria Elena went off to answer it.
“I think I’d better go find Olga,” I said aloud to no one.
She was talking on the phone when I knocked, a valise open on her bed and a pile of clothes beside it. She motioned me into her room, pointed at a chair, and waved her hand in a circle as if to speed up the caller.
“Carter, don’t argue with me,” she told the man on the other end of the line, who I assumed was Vaughan’s attorney, Carter Baker. “Just make sure the stock sale goes through and the money is put in our account. I’ll sign the papers tomorrow.” She paused. “No. I’m flying out of León in about three hours. Have a car waiting for me at the airport. That you can do.”
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