“Maybe a small wrinkle.” Jesky cleared his throat. “Detective Temeke called this time. Said a theory had surfaced within the last twenty-four hours. He seemed quite fascinated by it.”
“What did he want?”
“Didn’t go into detail.”
“Is that it?” Flynn asked.
“You was on the news again, son. Something about a stolen bike.”
“I didn’t steal it. I bought it with hard cash if you must know. Some guy on the side of the road with a motorcycle business.”
“Does it go fast?” Jesky asked.
“Like the wind.”
“Are you going to give it back?”
“And lose three grand?”
“You’ve lost your mind. Who gives cash to a complete stranger?”
“Apparently an intelligent and rather desperate person who’s been running for a week. And quite frankly I’m done.”
The fog must have lifted when Jesky heard Flynn’s resolve. “Good to know ’cause that pretty young detective was snooping around my truck.”
“What was she looking for?”
“My phone. It’s in the gnome. She’s expecting you to call her.”
Flynn’s mind was swimming with visions of the gnome with a red lid for a hat but it was short-lived. A bolt of alarm ripped through him at the thought of calling her. He repeated the number Jesky gave him, wrote it on the back of his hand. “Does she have email?”
“Text.”
Text was no good. Flynn wanted email. “I might need an attorney.”
“You might need several. You can’t keep running forever. Where does it all end?”
Sounded like Jesky’s tired old brain had gone into overdrive and Flynn felt a pang of guilt. It wasn’t fair to involve him and his mom in all of this. “Can you meet me tomorrow?”
“Where?”
“The street I mentioned before. Same time.”
“What changed your mind?” Jesky asked.
“Better to face the music on home turf.”
“I’ll be there.”
Flynn hung up. He knew his phone number was likely compromised and if not, it would be after the second call he had to make.
There were no more blisters on his feet even though they were still inflamed at the heel. He stripped naked, walked out to the backyard and washed himself under the spigot. He was shivering by the time he pulled out a pair of black jeans and a green sweater. It had been a long day and his stomach was screaming for food.
He hadn’t enabled his location settings on the cell phone but as far as he recalled there was a Mexican restaurant on South Second Street. After a twenty minute walk there was no fanfare when he arrived, nobody gave him a second glance, post memorial crowds drowning their sorrows in plates of enchiladas. The newspaper draped over the hostess desk showed the headline; Runaway Makes Mad Dash For Freedom On A Stolen Bike and a picture showing a man dressed in a khaki jacket and black jeans, wearing a biker helmet. Faceless. There’s always safety in anonymity, Flynn thought.
He ordered a takeout, sat on a wheel stop behind a large SUV in the parking lot and filled his belly until it hurt. He tried to ignore the jangle of nerves as he took the phone out of his pocket and dialed the number.
THIRTY-THREE
Flynn had a tough time trying to visualize Malin Santiago, the person. The image he did conjure was a young Hispanic woman with midnight black hair and tapering eyes. If he wasn’t a wanted man, the attention she gave him would have been flattering.
“Detective Santiago?” he said at the end of the third ring.
There was a pause before Malin responded. Her tone seemed bright, but the words sounded strained as if she was trying to be perky and failing. “Flynn? How are you?”
“A mess, to tell you the truth.”
“I wondered when you’d call.”
He picked up on the when rather than if, hoping his lazy charm would work on a female detective. “I’m coming back. I’ll let you know when I get there. And by the way, I had no idea the bike was stolen when I bought it.”
“Who’d you buy it from?”
“A guy in Gallup. The specialty license on his truck was E-P-I-C-F-A-I-L. Colorado plate, if you’re interested.”
“I am interested. Where’s the bike now?”
“I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
“Are you doing OK?” she asked.
“Yeah. I wanted to... I wanted...”
“Take your time.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“Where you finish is more important than where you start.”
Flynn could take the hint, only giving himself in wasn’t what he had in mind. He could almost imagine the faint smile Malin had, revealing a slit of white teeth.
“I knew when I met her something was wrong. I should have told the wedding guests, ‘Enjoy the party, this won’t last more than a couple of years’ because that’s how I felt inside.”
“That you’d made a mistake?”
“I thought happy endings were the result of good choices?”
“You have to know what’s real and what isn’t.”
“I thought it was real back then,” Flynn said. “She couldn’t have done enough. She said she loved being married. Loved being my wife. We made love all the time. Anywhere. Everywhere. She was so much fun. At least that’s how I pictured it.”
“And you’ve no idea what changed?”
“Cliff Jaynes is what happened. It was like she got in too deep. Came up for air too fast and got the emotional bends. I shouldn’t have followed her but I had to know.”
“How long had they been seeing each other?” Malin asked.
“It all started two years after we got married. We were supposed to be meeting a few of her friends at Las Ristras. I say her friends because she didn’t like mine. I was at work and I called her a couple of times to tell her I was going to be late. It kept going through to voicemail so I left a message. To be honest, I wanted to dodge that bullet. Didn’t feel like being on display. So I stayed at work. Tarian wasn’t there when I got home. She wasn’t there when I woke up. I tried calling her before I left for work. I knew she was mad.”
“Did you keep trying?”
“Yeah,” Flynn said. “She picked up finally and threatened to do some crazy shit if I followed her.”
“Followed her where?”
“Cliff Jaynes’.”
After that, Flynn felt like the cartoon roadrunner trying to escape every Acme explosion Wile E Coyote tried to rig. If it wasn’t dust and skin scales on the mantel in the living room, it was magazines thrown on the island where the bowl of fake fruit was supposed to be. He couldn’t live up to her pressed and shined standards of living. So why bother?
“A month before the restraining order she hit me,” he said. “Took a swipe while I was cooking. The burner was up too high and there was fat all over the stove.”
“She hit you with her hand? A frying pan? What?”
“A baseball bat.” Flynn remembered a momentary spurt of rage and his body went rigid. “Maybe I had the type of face she wanted to punch, maybe I stirred the food the wrong way. She said I didn’t love her enough if I kept dirtying the house. So she made me sit in a chair while she took off her clothes and started cleaning. She was cussing, kept saying stupid bitch over and over. I didn’t know if she was talking about me or her.”
“She was naked?”
“Yeah. Didn’t want chemicals on her clothes. I asked her if she wanted me to help. She said I was incompetent. She said the fridge was always empty, there wasn’t enough food. Wasn’t enough of anything. I could have done more. But I worked twelve hour shifts, sometimes eighteen. She’d blame me for that as well. The old Tarian became somebody else; dried up and moody.”
“That can drive you mad if you’re not that way. Make you feel inadequate,” Malin said.
“All that cleaning worried me. Even the toaster was buffed with Starbrite.”
“So you foun
d her difficult to live with?”
“I found it hard to breathe. She’d curse and fuss and there was this angry fog about her. When I look back there were things in the beginning. I ignored them, thought there was good reason for it.”
“They say the most destructive lie is the one you tell yourself.”
Flynn felt like his ears were stuffed with cotton wool and his mind kept scrabbling back to earlier times. Justifying any form of manipulation was, as Malin said, an insidious form of self-delusion. It started with something small and somehow the truth got all twisted.
“I could see the signs, but I rationalized it so easily I had no idea how pathetic I became.”
“No one’s immune,” Malin said. “Do you miss her?”
Do I? Flynn knew the words were empty, didn’t belong in the context of a telephone interrogation. And while he dreamed of two naked bodies writhing on a bed he realized Tarian was no longer the spontaneous lover he had once obsessed over. What was there to miss?
“Would it surprise you to know she was sleeping with Cliff Jaynes?” he said.
“Nothing surprises me.”
“It was the meth. Binge and crash. Binge and crash.” Shame crawled up the back of Flynn’s throat mingled with a brief burst of anxiety. He didn’t want to dirty Tarian’s image but he knew it would look better if he offered the information before the police did. “I asked her for a divorce. She didn’t think that was the right way to go. No one got divorced in her family. Tarian wasn’t the type to agree to disagree. She had to be right about everything, had to be the one who thought it up first. She could crush you with one word and after years of the bullying I lost the will to be with her. That night... I don’t remember much about that night, except when she tied me to a chair in the shed.”
“You were found in the kitchen. So someone must have untied you?”
Fury now wrestled with Flynn’s pride. Malin could only probe and speculate about his ordeal, but she would never truly understand. For all he knew Tarian’s kicking had made him impotent. He’d grasp himself and sometimes get an ice pack from the freezer and wrap it in a towel. Only that night his hands were tied to the chair and there was nothing he could do about it.
“I put everything into that relationship,” he said. Maybe it was the attention or the sense that he was part of something far greater than himself. But Flynn knew without any hesitation that he should never have gone back to Tarian. “She accused me of having an affair.”
“Were you?”
“No. It was over between Rosie and me. I love her, but not like that.”
“Maybe staying with Rosie was the wrong thing to do. She was your ex, after all.”
“Why would Rosie want a dirty, two-timing bastard like me?”
“I was talking about Tarian,” Malin said. “How she must have felt.”
Flynn had no idea how Tarian felt. To the outside world she was the wife without a stain, without a grudge. Never the bad guy. Until she couldn’t hold it in any more. And the cussing? He’d never heard her cuss at him like that before. It came out so naturally he wondered if she’d been thinking it for years.
“Tarian wasn’t the point,” Flynn said. “Getting away was. Next you’re going to ask me if I killed my wife.”
“I was going to ask you what size feet you have?”
“Eleven. Why?”
“There were footprints in the back yard. Since you say you were tied up in the shed and somehow ended up in the kitchen we assume they’re yours. It’s OK. Just tell me,” Malin said. “Tell me what happened.”
Flynn felt the adrenaline rush, the shivering that came when his mind was on the verge of exploding. He listened to the gentle chatter of guests from the restaurant as they wandered outside, heard the rattle of a car engine. He chose to stay silent.
“Flynn... are you there?” she asked.
He wasn’t. His mind began to hare through the years and he had to ask himself, was it all real? Tarian was like a puzzle to solve, a network of dark tunnels he had to navigate. An illogical game. For some reason the dark tunnels became filled with orange, a heat so extreme it had become one of immeasurable pain and horror and he wondered briefly: Was it as terrible for her as it was for me? How could he put all of it in simple terms? He couldn’t begin to describe the last few hours before the fire.
“Do you have any recent scars, Flynn? Bruises? Anything to corroborate this story.”
Story? This was no story. The very word got under his skin and started to burrow around a little. He glanced around the parking lot for somewhere to toss the new phone and settled on a dumpster.
“Gotta go, Malin. You’re breaking up.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Malin felt her lungs pressing against her ribs and her heart raced like a rabbit in her chest. She placed the phone back on the desk and stared out of the office window. Gusts of thirty-five miles per hour caused a trash bag to float into the floodlit parking lot and wrap itself around the antenna of Fowler’s unit.
“That was McCann,” she said to Temeke, as if he hadn’t already guessed. She did her best to give a concise report without giving her opinion. The last time she offered one Temeke gave her a verbal slap on the wrist.
“Did he say he had scars?” Temeke asked, eyes flicking to the photographs he’d pinned on the corkboard. Three of Tarian and two of Flynn.
“He said the line was bad and hung up.”
Temeke shrugged a ‘sorry’ and checked his watch. There was a feral sensuality to him that Malin was hopelessly attracted to and, at the same time, in awe of. He was the pluckiest man she knew. A salty veteran, who wasn’t worried about getting shot by a killer in the street. It was a risk he was at peace with. What kept him up at night was what would happen to him if he killed that man first.
“Any news on the Walley-Bennetts?”
“Fowler said they were still upset. I don’t think he’s pushing hard enough,” she said.
“I don’t give a crap about how upset they are. This is a murder enquiry. How politically correct do we have to be? He won’t get any brownie points by avoiding the issue.”
Malin patted the air. “I’ll see what I can do, sir.”
“Violet Chavez returned my call,” Temeke said, as if there were some results worth celebrating. “It’s all on tape.”
Malin heard the voice, strong one minute and sobbing the next, an intangible clutter of emotions too hard to control. Temeke’s gentle voice eased out the sting question by question and there was no denying how much she wanted to talk. It had to have been cathartic for her.
Want to know about Tarian? It went something like this: Richard and Miley Walley-Bennett had two daughters until the eldest died in a drowning accident. Olivia was nine at the time, a gifted student Tarian couldn’t help comparing herself to. Vacations never involved swimming pools, or the ocean and Tarian was stifled from day one. Couldn’t wear what she wanted to wear, could go anywhere without them giving her the nth degree. I don’t remember one squeak of approval from her dad and her mother wasn’t given to over-the-top praise either. Tarian had a lot to be angry about.
Temeke asked her about Tarian’s friends. Was she popular?
Popular is a hard word to define. Popular because she had money. Not because she was nice. The few friends she had she manipulated. She couldn’t keep a friend for long. With me she could be herself and not worry about what other people think. Yeah, we smoked. A lot of things actually. Boyfriends? Plenty. Men liked her. Women hated her.
The subject of Cliff came up, especially the part about him running off with Tarian.
He was broke. She had money. They fed each other’s addictions, I guess. So, no, I wasn’t upset when Cliff left me. More relieved, actually. Rosie? I never really knew her. Well educated. Liked to read. I respected her loyalty. No, I didn’t see Tarian again, nor did I call her. Sometimes stealing your boyfriend does that to a person.
Malin heard Temeke read out the poem they had found and Violet’s comments
were casual, not a trace of deception.
You got me there. I’ve no idea. No, I won’t be coming back for the funeral. I’m pregnant. Mom didn’t think it was a good idea to fly. Yeah, I miss Tarian. How it used to be. There’s not a day... not a day when I don’t think about her.... She was my best friend.
After the tape ended, Malin shifted position in her chair and directed her gaze at the corkboard where a copy of the poem stared back at her.
I want to tell you how I feel. So there won’t be any doubt. You’re so dead cold to think of. And so hard to live without.
“Even during her teenage years,” Temeke said, “those times of self-examination and experimentation, Tarian was never free like other kids.”
His words floated around in Malin’s head like the trash bag outside. The one thought on permanent rewind was the intimacy between Tarian and Cliff. It was nothing like the cruelty she had inflicted on Flynn.
Their conversation was slashed to pieces by an incoming call on Temeke’s phone. Malin listened to his voice drifting across the gap between them and a pencil tapping against a 7-Up can. Two wide eyes quickly replaced a frown.
“Is the witness sure it was Flynn McCann? Mexican restaurant on South Second Street... You found what?” Temeke listened for a minute and then covered the mouthpiece. He nodded at Malin, “Hammond found a phone in a dumpster. He said it was ringing off its sodding rocker. When he picked it up guess whose number showed up on the screen? Mr. Jesky. Evidently they had a nice chat until Jesky realized he was talking to the cops.”
“Hammond’s not technically the police, sir.”
“No, but poor old Jesky doesn’t know that, does he?” Temeke took his hand off the mouthpiece and went back to Hammond. “Short gray hair... if you say so. Any sign of Suzi Cornwell... not a sniff? Excellent. Keep on his tail. I’ve got a nice, fat check waiting for you when you get him.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Flynn heard the sirens as he walked between a busload of tourists and a café on South 2nd Street. Might have been an accident or a DWI car chase, either way he wasn’t taking any chances. Pedestrians paid no attention, heads bent over their cell phones as they dragged their feet to work on a Thursday morning. Why the hell weren’t they alarmed at a squeal of squad cars? The noise was deafening.
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