In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  Reader touched the girl’s throat. In the soft flesh beneath her jaw, he saw the purple imprints of three letters. They were upside down: T-R-A.

  “Have a look here, Cecil,” he said.

  Cecil bent over Reader’s shoulder, a Nikon camera in one hand, a flash in the other. “Well. That’s new, ain’t it.” He fixed the flash to the camera.

  Reader sat back on the edge of the bed. He looked around the room and saw no photographs of parents or girlfriends set out in frames or tucked in the edges of the vanity mirror. Only an ID badge for a local shirt factory and a ring of keys on the dresser. A one-eyed teddy bear in a rocking chair, the kind won at a ring toss or shooting gallery.

  Cecil had Reader hold a ruler to the marks on the girl’s neck as he took his pictures. Both rangers were sweating in the warm trailer, and the girl’s body smelled gaseous and foul, despite the menthol.

  Cecil took swabs, vaginal and oral. He worked slowly, carefully, mouth thin and tight.

  “You finish up,” Reader said. “I’ll have a look elsewhere.”

  He went out of the room and stood in the doorway of the hall bath. The walls and toilet inside were cream-colored, the shower a walk-in stall. A naked bulb and pull cord over the sink. The mirror over the sink was broken, a spider-web of cracks radiating out from a crater. Someone’s fist. Reader felt a presence behind him and turned and saw the fat sheriff in the hall, chewing over a piece of some root he’d turned into a snuff brush.

  “Heard about those other two gals. Damn shame. Think it’s your boy?”

  The toilet seat was up, Reader saw. “Anyone here use the toilet?” he asked.

  “What you take us for, ranger.”

  Reader looked up at the ceiling. Down at the floor. “Say some kids found her this morning?”

  “Neighbor was fresh in from a graveyard shift out at the rail yards,” the sheriff said. “His boy woke him, said he and his brother’d seen ‘the pretty lady’ through her open window.”

  “You could have closed it,” Reader said. “The window.”

  The sheriff took his snuff brush out of his mouth and spat a brown stream of juice in the sink. “I’ll see you boys get everything you ask for. Again, we’re much obliged.” He turned and walked away down the hall.

  Reader ran water in the sink.

  He put his head into the bedroom and said, “I don’t know about you, Cecil, but I could drink me some coffee and eat me some eggs.”

  “Reckon we ought to talk to that neighbor first.”

  “Reckon we ought,” Reader said.

  Afterward, Reader flew the Bell back to Company F headquarters in Waco, and from there he and Cecil drove downtown for eggs at a coffee shop on the corner of Fifth and Austin. The day was bright and sunny. Many of the businesses were shuttered, For Rent signs in the cracked glass storefronts. They sat at a table on the sidewalk, in the long morning shadow of the Alico building. To the west beyond an empty lot, where once had stood a hardware store, sat the great white marble edifice of the courthouse. Reader ate chorizo and eggs and drank black coffee. Cecil had tacos and a slice of lemon meringue pie. They ate and watched the infrequent traffic, a handful of souls going into and coming out of the Alico.

  “They say she’d withstand a hurricane,” Cecil said of the building. He balled his paper napkin and dropped it on his plate.

  “Don’t get many of those in McLennan County,” Reader said.

  “They got chicken wire inside the glass of ever window.” The young ranger squinted up at the top of the building, where the red letters A-L-I-C-O stood half a story tall. “City had that tornado, back in fifty-three. Flattened the whole downtown. She made it through that.”

  “She’ll stand then, I reckon,” Reader said.

  “Saw Mary this morning. She said a box came from Cole County.”

  “Just one?”

  “Just one.” Cecil stirred sugar in his coffee. “You and me, we collected enough from that girl’s apartment to fill what, three, four boxes? And that was what, four, five days after it was fresh?”

  “It was.”

  Cecil tapped his spoon against the rim of his mug and shook his head. “Bet you this here star we commence to going through that box we’re gone find some A-1 shoddy police work.”

  “Best not bet your star, Cecil.”

  “They took their time cooperatin, too. Ask me, it just ain’t professional.”

  “It is not.”

  “What the hell is it about Texas?” Cecil said.

  “It ain’t Texas,” Reader said.

  The box from Cole County was set down and waiting in the middle of Reader’s desk. He sliced it open with an Old Timer pocketknife and went through it while Cecil, in the dark room down the hall, developed the pictures he had taken that morning. Out of the box Reader took several pictures of a dead woman, naked in her bed. He pinned the photographs to the roll-away bulletin board in the corner. They made a gruesome column of naked flesh and twisted bedsheets and red-burst eyes. Reader took an index card from a drawer in his desk and wrote Barbara Leeds/Grandview/9-25 on it. He pinned the card beneath the column.

  He looked in the box. All that remained were a single plastic evidence bag and four manila folders containing a typed transcript, a handwritten statement, two officer’s reports, and one phonebook-sized history of Cole County’s chief suspect.

  Reader grunted and shoved the box aside. “Much obliged,” he mumbled.

  He went rummaging through a stack of folders on his desk—his and Cecil’s own case files—and from the one at the bottom pulled six photographs of another dead woman. She lay naked on the carpet of a living room in a house trailer, mouth open in a silent scream. Her body sprawled without dignity on the carpet, one leg hiked on the cushion of a tribal-patterned couch. This had been the first scene Reader and Cecil had visited, assigned it less than twenty-four hours after Hays County had processed it. In the kitchen, Reader had seen a photograph of the woman on her refrigerator, she and a girlfriend at a table, both wearing sombreros, both smiling, the tabletop thick with beer bottles and margarita glasses and the two women looking for all the world, the ranger thought, like exotic birds in a feathered nest.

  He labeled this column Tanya Wilson/South of Austin/9-28.

  From his desk he took a gas-station map of Texas and unfolded it and tacked it to the right half of the roll-away board. He took three fresh index cards from the stack in his drawer and wrote one name on each: Barbara Leeds, Tanya Wilson, Iris Gray. These he pinned over three locations on the map. The first was the town of Grandview along the Brazos, thirty miles southwest of Fort Worth. The second was south of Austin, a little nowhere burg of day-laborers and white trash. The third was Fredericksburg.

  He traced the lines of the route with his eyes. “Go west, young man,” Reader said to himself. “Go west.”

  He looked at the box from Cole County and sighed, pulling it back to him across the desk. The lone evidence bag contained a photograph of Barbara Leeds dressed in a white tank top and pink cowboy hat. Reader held the bag and examined the picture through the plastic. It looked to have been snapped from beside her where she sat on the tailgate of a blue pickup. On the back of the photograph was a single hand-scrawled sentence: Dale took this, March 3.

  Reader took out two of the four folders. The witness statement was brief, a bartender’s. The second folder held a transcript of fourteen typed pages fastened by two brass prongs. The label on the folder read Dale Freelander Interview – 09/27/80.

  Reader sat down behind his desk and put his boots up and began to read.

  When Cecil returned, that morning’s photographs in hand, Reader said, without looking up, “Make us a third column.”

  Cecil did. “Iris Gray,” the junior ranger said, stepping away from the board. “Twenty-eight years old. No boyfriend. Employed at the American Tees shirt factory in Fredericksburg, Gillespie County. Victim numero three.”

  Reader looked up from the transcript to the photos pinned to the ma
p: three strangled corpses with the same wide band of bruises along their throats, all save Iris Gray’s, which also bore the inverted letters T-R-A. Reader looked down at the transcript, flipped a page, then looked back at the photographs. He closed the folder and tossed it to Cecil, who had just moved a stack of folders from a chair to sit.

  Cecil caught the pages, almost dropped them. He sat down and began to read. “Dale Freelander,” he said.

  Reader walked over to the board, where he examined the close-ups of Iris Gray’s throat, peering intently at the three inverted letters. He looked at the rulers positioned near each girl’s throat. “One-point-five inches,” he said to himself.

  “Pushed old Dale hard, didn’t they,” Cecil said.

  Reader turned to Cecil. “Hand me your belt,” he said.

  Cecil looked up from the transcript. “My belt?”

  “Your belt, boy, your belt.”

  Cecil set the pages aside and stood. He unbuckled his belt and slipped it free of his pants, and his revolver tumbled out of its holster and hit the floor. Blushing, he bent quickly to pick it up.

  “Cecil,” Reader said evenly, taking the belt, “you blow your dick off in company headquarters you ain’t ever gone make lieutenant.”

  The junior ranger set his gun carefully on Reader’s desk, along with his holster and keys.

  Reader examined the belt. A leather belt, CECIL imprinted on the band. Eagles and deer embossed along the edges. Cecil watched as Reader mimed pulling the belt from his own waist, then flipping it and looping it over an imaginary neck. He did it twice until satisfied that the positioning was correct. Sitting on the corner of his desk, he rolled up his shirtsleeve. He wrapped the belt around his forearm and took one end of the leather in his teeth. He reared back, tightening the belt. He spat it out and shook his head.

  “What’s up, boss?”

  “Come over here,” Reader said to Cecil. “Take both ends here and pull this son of a bitch tight as you can.”

  Cecil did as he was told.

  Reader’s face crimped as the belt tightened around his arm. “Tighter, boy, you ain’t gone hurt me.”

  Cecil took a deep breath and pulled.

  Reader’s mouth became a thin, straight line. “Okay,” he finally said.

  Cecil threaded the belt through his holster and resituated everything on his hips.

  Reader held up his arm and examined the indentation made by the letters and the eagles and the ducks. After the fashion of Iris Gray’s throat were the letters C-E-C-I.

  “Well, look-a-there,” Cecil said. “You reckon T-R-A is a first name or a middle?”

  “Safe bet it’s one or the other.” Reader rolled down his sleeve and stared at the bulletin board. “What you think of that interview?” he asked.

  “Reads like a farce.”

  “I believe coercion is the legal term,” Reader said. He reached behind him and out of Cole County’s box he took the last folder—Freelander’s criminal history, thick and heavy—and passed it to Cecil. “Meet Dale.”

  “Damn. Old Dale’s been busy, ain’t he.”

  “He is not the lawman’s friend.”

  Cecil leafed through the file.

  Reader pushed away from edge of his desk and stepped closer to the board, let his eyes play over the images, the map. Processing everything. “Nothing useful from neighbors at any of our three scenes,” he said. “Not a soul to give us make or model on a vehicle. Three dead gals, age and race commonalities. All poor. Weekend juke-joint types. Last seen alive in honky-tonks along three different state highways, each highway progressively farther southwest from the previous.”

  “If he went from Austin to Fredericksburg,” Cecil said, “he’s bound to hit El Paso sooner or later.”

  “Maybe. If not somewhere closer. He stays true to his timeframe, one girl ever few days, our next body could turn up any day now. Course, best picking’s on these roads here.” Reader took up a red marker from an empty coffee can on his desk and circled three major highways. “Most populated, which ain’t saying much. He picks her up at a honky-tonk, back to her place they go, chokes the life right out of her. No fluids or fingerprints, no evidence of any sexual contact with the victims. Least not with Ms. Wilson or Ms. Leeds, but I’m gone bet that holds true when the reports come back on Ms. Gray. No, just strangulation with a belt, our Mr. T-R-A. Why?”

  “Thrill of it?”

  “Cecil, what’s thrilling about not having sex?”

  “Point taken,” Cecil said.

  “No sex, no blood. No demonstrable grotesquerie. Hell, it’s almost modest.”

  “Any thoughts on the mirrors yet?”

  “We saw the one in Barbara Leeds’s apartment in Grandview. One in Ms. Gray’s trailer just this morning, too. Repetition suggests it was not related to a struggle. No busted glass in Ms. Wilson’s trailer, but she was killed in the living room, not the bedroom. Never made it to where the mirrors were. I don’t know. Maybe our boy just sees something he don’t want to.”

  Cecil closed Freelander’s record and got up and browsed the one witness statement Cole County had bothered to collect. “This bartender at Cowpuncher’s said Ms. Leeds left that night with a, quote, ‘tall cowboy couldn’t throw a punch to save his life.’” He flipped a page. “So Freelander’s the fella on the receiving end, Cole County tries to pin the body on him on account of his history with number one—” He shook his head. “A-one shoddy.”

  “Maybe more than shoddy,” Reader said.

  “Well, I’ll grant you, Cole County didn’t have any other crimes to draw parallels to at the time, but this here box does smell like grade-A chickenshit, boss. I reckon we ought to take a run at old Dale ourselves, don’t you?”

  “Son,” Reader said, “you ought to join the Texas Rangers.” He walked around behind his desk and opened his blinds. Outside, in the parking lot, two rangers were herding a group of sixth graders off a yellow school bus and into a straight line for a tour of company headquarters and the museum next door. “One box,” he muttered.

  “Like I said,” Cecil said. “Chickenshit.”

  “See, that’s how I know you’re from Arkansas,” Reader said.

  Cecil cocked his head. “How’s that?”

  “It’s horseshit in Texas.”

  Through the blinds, Reader watched one of the rangers outside drop his Stetson onto the head of a little girl with pigtails. “Yokels left the goddamn window open,” he said.

  The lunch crowd was heavy, and Annabelle was ringing up the first of several customers waiting to pay when Billy Calhoun walked in. The bell over the door gave out its jingle and Annabelle looked up and saw the silver-haired bartender, and she had to remind herself to make change for a farmer in a CAT machinery cap. Calhoun walked over to a booth along the wall and sat down. He looked at Annabelle and saw her looking back. He lifted a hand, and Annabelle closed the cash drawer and went on about her business. Rosendo took Calhoun’s order for two eggs sunny-side up, bacon, coffee. Ten minutes later, when Rosendo was about to take the plate from the short-order window behind the register, Annabelle touched her arm and said, “Let me,” and brought the plate and a fresh carafe over to Calhoun’s booth. Drugstore reading glasses perched on his nose, he sat working a crossword puzzle with a pencil that had been broken and taped back together. When she set his plate on the table, he looked up and removed his glasses and smiled, and fifteen years dropped away from his lined and craggy face.

  “Terrarium,” Annabelle said, pouring fresh coffee.

  He put his glasses back on and ran his finger across a row in his book. He penciled the word in, shaking his head. “You were always better at these,” he said.

  “Still, you don’t quit,” she said.

  “Made of wood,” he said and rapped the side of his head with his knuckles. He took up the sugar dispenser from the table and poured a white ribbon into his coffee.

  “Ain’t seen you around much,” Annabelle said.

  “I come and go.
Down to part-time at the bar. Hired this new kid. He’s a bright one, so I spend about three days a week on the river. Can’t catch a damn thing, but it makes the fish feel safe.”

  “Well, I went and got myself saved,” Annabelle said. She said it with the air of a woman who had gotten a manicure, as if it had been just the thing to brighten her week.

  Calhoun took off his reading glasses, folded them, and placed them in his left breast pocket. “Annabelle Gaskin, I never thought you needed saving.”

  “You’re the first man ever said that to me,” she said. “In so many words. I’ll take it as a compliment.”

  “Who’s your pool man?” Calhoun asked.

  She followed his nod through the garage door glass and saw the crown of Stillwell’s black hat moving in the deep end, his back to the restaurant. He worked a mop out of a five-gallon-sized bucket of bleach and soapy water. “Just some cowboy,” she said, wondering as she said it: what was different about Stillwell today? Something under his hat, which seemed tighter, lower on his head.

  “Broke out in those around here,” Calhoun said.

  “I’m thinking of filling the pool,” she said, turning her attention back to Calhoun. “For Sandy. Chemicals won’t be cheap, but it’s his birthday this month.”

  “He sleeping nights through now?”

  “Mostly. It’s better.”

  Calhoun said, “If I can help with the pool, money-wise—”

  At the same time, Annabelle said, “He’s showing them rabbits at the county fair this month—”

  Their eyes met. They laughed, each dropping their gaze.

  “You happy?” Calhoun asked.

  “Who needs happy,” she said. She touched her heart. “I’m redeemed.”

  He laughed.

  Annabelle peeled his check from the pad and placed it on the end of his table. “You set here?”

  “Call me ‘sugar’ and I’m good,” he said.

  She did not call him that. Instead, she simply lingered, watching him cut into his breakfast, the yolk running yellow across his plate. She felt the eyes of customers upon her back. “I best get back to the register,” she said. This was not what she had wanted to say but it was what she said, and her mother might have agreed, she thought, that it was just as well she had said it. There was, after all, nothing in it to regret.