The Searcher

by Simon Toyne

  Mayor Ernest Cassidy and the Sheriffs of Redemption request the presence of Mr. James Coronado at a formal dinner at the Cassidy residence to celebrate his election as sheriff.

  “Jim got it the day after the election, an invite to sit at the big table. I teased him about it, saying he’d probably have to go through some kind of hazing ceremony where they’d paint him copper and get him to recite the Lord’s Prayer while they smacked him on the ass with Bibles or something. He laughed, acted like it was no big deal, but I knew it was, the orphan kid being invited to dine at the Cassidy residence.

  “Anyway, the day of the big dinner came and he had been studying hard for it, like it was the bar exam or something. He’d been going through the old town budgets, reading through all the trust paperwork going back years. The finances were in a worse state than he thought, I know that much.

  “I remember kissing him good-bye and telling him not to worry, that he should enjoy the moment and that they should be glad to have him in their corner. He had his best suit on. He looked so handsome. And he was happy, nervous but happy. And I was so proud of him because he’d done exactly what he’d set out to do, and all he had in front of him was hard work and he had never been afraid of that.

  “I suppose in some ways it was the last time I saw him properly, the last time I saw the Jim I knew. I went to bed that night hoping they were being kind to him and that he was having a good time. The bed seemed too big without him. I wasn’t used to him not being there—I’m still not used to it. Anyway, I woke up just after dawn. The sun was coming up and the birds were getting noisy and the bed was still empty. I sat up and, I don’t know why, but I could feel that Jim was in the house—you know sometimes when you can feel someone’s presence, even if you can’t hear them?”

  Solomon nodded. He knew.

  “I called his name but he didn’t reply, so I got up and went to find him. I found him here, sitting in this chair. He had a bottle of whiskey open and a glass that was half full. I could smell the alcohol before I even stepped into the room. There was something about the smell of it and the fact that Jim hadn’t answered when I called that made me feel uneasy, like something terrible had happened, like someone had died and he didn’t want to face me and have to tell me the news.

  “He was pretty drunk, which made me think he must have been home for a while, because Mayor Cassidy is not a drinking man. He must have downed about half of the bottle, sitting in the dark on his own.

  “I asked him what had happened, thinking it must be something terrible to have made him drink like that, but he wouldn’t tell me. He just kept shaking his head and staring at the bottle. I was scared. I had never seen him like that before.

  “I made him get up and walked him to the bedroom and put him to bed, thinking he would sleep it off and talk to me about it later. But he never did. Whatever had happened at that dinner, whatever they had talked about, whatever he found out, killed something inside him. I think it broke his heart.

  “After that night I hardly saw him. He slept it off, got up, showered and changed then drove into town. He came back later with a trunk full of archive boxes filled with files and went straight to his study. The only thing he said to me was that there was something he needed to fix but he couldn’t tell me what it was because he needed to protect me from it. That was the word he used—‘protect’—like he’d found something poisonous and was trying to keep it from me for my own safety.

  “So I left him alone. He was unreachable anyway, so I kept away, figuring he would work through whatever it was, then come back to me. But he never did. Three days later he was dead.”

  “What about the others who were at the dinner, have you spoken to them?”

  “After Jim died the mayor called and offered condolences. I asked him about the dinner but he wouldn’t talk about it, kept saying that I was upset and it was all a tragic accident.”

  “But you don’t think it was—an accident.”

  “No. Something happened. I don’t know if they killed Jim to silence him or whether whatever he found drove him off that road, but either way I blame them for it.”

  “Have you talked to the other sheriffs?”

  “The only other one is Pete Tucker, the sheriff for commerce. He’s a big landowner around here, has a majority stake in the airfield because a lot of it is built on his ranch. I haven’t spoken to him.”

  “What about the coroner’s report, have you seen a copy?”

  “No.”

  “It would be useful to see exactly what killed him, whether it was a car crash or something else. Though if your husband was trying to save the town, it doesn’t make sense for them to—”

  A loud knock echoed through the house, three raps on the front door.

  “Stay here,” Holly said. “I’ll go see who it is.”

  She left the study and walked down the quiet halls of her house, thinking about the pale stranger in her husband’s study and wondering if he was really there at all. She felt slightly panicked at the thought that she might return and find him gone, his mission to distract her complete. She didn’t want him to go. Talking to him was comforting. She moved through the disordered mess of her living room and opened the front door. She saw the gun first. Then she saw the man who was holding it.

  37

  MORGAN PUSHED THROUGH THE DOOR INTO HIS OFFICE AND CLOSED IT behind him, muffling the sound of ringing phones in the outer office. There was no one there to answer them, everyone was out in the field dealing with the aftermath of the fire.

  He dropped a plastic hospital sack on his desk, made his way over to a battered locker in the corner, and took out a fresh shirt. The locker had been in his life longer than most of the people he knew, a souvenir from high school he’d saved from the bulldozer when it closed its doors for the last time back in ’04.

  He shrugged out of his ruined shirt, his eyes fixed on the initials he had scratched into the locker door when he was eleven. There was something instinctive about making your mark on things. Some people scratched their names on lockers, others, like the Cassidys, carved them on the sides of buildings, but the impulse was the same; it showed that you had been there, it showed that you had existed.

  He dropped the ruined shirt in the trash can by his desk and studied the red spots on his chest where the salt crystals had hit him but not broken the skin.

  Goddamn woman. He knew she was upset, but Jesus! Did she have to go unloading shotguns on people? As if he didn’t have enough to deal with.

  He slipped his arms into the new shirt, his hands stinging inside the fresh dressings as he fastened his buttons, then he settled behind his desk in the same oak-and-leather chair that had been intimately familiar with the behinds of every single one of the town’s police chiefs. He tapped a password into his computer and opened up the National DMV database. Now that the fire was out, his mind had fixed on what would happen next. A firestorm of a different kind was heading their way and he needed to tread very carefully if he was going to survive it. He liked to be prepared and have all the information at hand and there was one variable he was increasingly unhappy about.

  “Okay, Mr. Creed,” he said under his breath, typing Solomon’s name into the search field. “Let’s find out who you really are.”

  He hit Return and got three matches, all African Americans with ages between fifty-five and seventy. Whoever Solomon Creed was, he wasn’t on this database, which meant he didn’t have an American driver’s license. He opened a new window and set up searches on all the other national and international identity databases he had access to—Social Security, passport agencies, Interpol—then he sat back in his chair and stared at the wall opposite while he waited for the searches to run.

  Sixteen faces stared out at him, portraits of every one of his predecessors stretching right back to a silver nitrate print of Nathanial Priddy, first police chief of the town of Redemption. He was a flinty character, stiff necked, impressive whiskers, and the flat eyes of a killer, which is
exactly what he was. Even with God on their side and Reverend Jack preaching love and understanding from the pulpit, Nathan Priddy had been a necessary evil. He was buried up on the hill in the old cemetery, along with several people he had personally put there.

  Simpler times. Direct solutions. No comebacks.

  Morgan traced the line of faces representing over 130 years of law enforcement in this town. You could see how things had softened over the years just by looking at them. They started with bony, humorless faces captured in stark black and white, their profiles strong, their eyes gazing past the camera as if something far more important was happening just out of the frame. Then, with each new photograph, the poses softened and the lean bones of harder times slowly disappeared beneath the padding of prosperity and easier lives. Smiles started to creep in, then color too. Any fool could keep the town running while a river of money flowed through it. But when it dried up and the earth started to crack, it took someone with real strength of character to keep it all from falling apart. Someone like Nathan Priddy. Someone like him.

  His computer chirped, telling him it had finished its search. He glanced at the screen—eighty-two matches—then opened the first and started working through them.

  He was convinced Solomon must be working for someone; he was too accomplished to be just some guy who had happened along—the way he had taken over at the fire line, the fact that he seemed to know more than the doctors, even the manner in which he had dumped Lawrence Hayes on the ground when he’d first appeared on the road. Lawrence had been all-state wrestling champion before becoming a medic and Solomon had tossed him on the ground like he was leaving a dollar tip for a diner waitress. And there was that burn on his arm, and the copy of Jack Cassidy’s memoir in his pocket with Jim Coronado’s name on it—far too many question marks to be hanging over a stranger’s head with things standing the way they were. But Morgan was also cautious. He was treading a fine line and couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong. He needed to know who Solomon Creed was before he threw him to the wolves, or decided which wolves to throw him to.

  It took him less than ten minutes to go through all eighty-two results and he drew a blank on every one of them. The Solomon Creed he had dropped off at Holly Coronado’s house did not appear to exist officially, which told a story in itself. People couldn’t not exist these days, it was almost impossible. So either he was some off-the-grid undercover operative—or he was using a false name.

  Morgan picked up the plastic sack he had brought from the hospital and took an evidence bag from his desk drawer. He carefully removed the baseball cap from inside the sack, holding it by the peak and turning it slowly until he found the single strand of white hair trapped in the seam of the headband. He held it over the opened evidence bag and squeezed his finger and thumb to nip the hair between the plastic then pulled the cap away to leave the single strand of hair inside. He sealed it and held it up to the light. The hair glowed. At one end he could see the bud of a root where it had been pulled from Solomon’s scalp, carrying a nice little plug of DNA-rich cells with it.

  He filled in the paperwork for the DNA sweep, clipped the evidence bag to the requisition form, and dropped the whole thing in his out-tray, ready to hand it to the feds when they took over the crash investigation. The presence of the NTSB would add some weight to things and speed up the paperwork. He would intercept the results before anyone else saw them and make them disappear, pass them up a different food chain, the one he was helping put in place.

  He opened the top drawer of his desk and reached to the back where he had taped a phone to the underside of the desktop. It was a cheap contract-free throwaway with Internet capability so he didn’t need to go through one of the networks to make a call. He switched it on and looked up at the wall of faces again while he waited for it to power up. He doubted any of them would have had the guts to do what he was about to do, except maybe Nathan Priddy, who’d put five people in the ground to protect the town. That was all he was doing, really—making sacrifices for a greater good.

  The phone finished its start-up routine and he dialed a number from memory.

  “Si?” someone answered after three rings and Morgan caught the sound of a busy street or café behind the voice.

  “Soledad,” Morgan replied, giving his code word.

  He heard handling noise as the middleman fumbled with another phone and called a different number. Then Morgan heard the sound of a phone ringing through the burble of conversation and clink of coffee cups.

  “Si!” someone answered.

  “The fire’s out,” he said, his hand stinging as it curled around the small phone. He didn’t need to identify himself. The phone had been given to him when he had brokered the deal beneath a star-spattered sky on a desert track running parallel with the Mexican border. They would know who was using it.

  “You all set at your end?” The voice was flat and cold.

  “Almost. There’s a guy here, an albino, showed up by the crash. Calls himself Solomon Creed. He anything to do with you?”

  “Never heard of him. He a problem?”

  Morgan shook his head. “Not anymore.” He looked up at Nathan Priddy, killer of five men, and wondered if he’d beat that number by the time this thing was over. “What now?” he asked.

  “Now we wait,” the voice on the line said. “The trap is set. We just got to see if we catch anything.” Then the phone clicked and went dead.

  38

  “MRS. CORONADO.” THE MAN HOLDING THE GUN IN HER FACE SOUNDED embarrassed. “I’m sorry to have to do this, but you’re going to have to surrender your firearm and come with me.”

  There were two of them, uniformed cops wearing flak jackets, sidearms drawn. Holly recognized the lead cop but couldn’t recall his name. His flak jacket was hiding his badge. He was Bobby or Billy, something like that. All the men in town seemed to have names that ended with an ee sound. Even those who didn’t twisted them around until they did, like Mayor Ernest Cassidy insisting everybody call him Ernie.

  “You need to surrender your firearm and come with us,” the cop repeated.

  Donny! That was his name.

  “We need to talk to you about what happened here.”

  Donny McGee—two ees for the price of one. Fairly new guy. One of Morgan’s men. The thought made her lips go thin.

  “I can give you a statement,” she said. “There was an intruder on my property. I asked him to leave and warned him that I would shoot if he did not. He did not, so I shot him—with rock salt. Then he left. The gun is legal and licensed to my husband at this address. That’s my statement.” She started to close the door but Donny stepped forward, planting his boot over the threshold to keep it open. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Coronado. I still got to take you in.” His voice dropped a little, as if the whole street might be listening and he didn’t want them to hear. “You didn’t shoot just anyone and we can’t let a thing like that slide, don’t matter what you been through.”

  “You mean the fact that I only finished burying my husband a couple of hours ago?”

  Donny lowered his gun a little. “Like I said, I am real sorry about this, but it’s for your own good as much as anything. You shouldn’t be left on your own with a loaded firearm, not at a time like this.”

  “She’s not on her own.” The voice made Donny look up.

  Holly turned and felt relief to see Solomon standing in the hallway. If he was a figment of her imagination, he sure was a persistent one. She turned back to Donny. “Can you see him?”

  He looked confused. “Sure!”

  “Then you can see that I’m not on my own, so thank you for your concern.” She attempted to close the door again but Donny’s boot still blocked it. He lowered his gun and slipped it into its holster. The cop behind him held his position. Holly was pretty sure he was called Tom, which inevitably meant he was known as Tommy.

  “Listen, Mrs. Coronado,” Donny said in his best “let’s be reasonable” voice. “I’m sorry we had to com
e knocking on your door like this, but you unloaded a shotgun into Chief Morgan’s chest. We were dispatched here to bring you in and make sure you were okay. That’s the full extent of it, for now. But if you don’t come voluntarily, then we’re going to bring you in anyway, which means we will have to arrest you. I don’t want to do that, but if you make me I will. I’m sorry.”

  “You keep saying ‘sorry,’” she said, listening to the water gurgling in the gutter. “If you truly are, then stop doing the thing you’re having to apologize for and leave me alone.”

  “Can’t do that,” Donny said as if the words caused him pain. “I hate having to do this, but I do think it’s for your own good. Where’s the shotgun?”

  Holly stared past him at the rain. It was easing now and the day beginning to lighten as the sun broke through the clouds. Raindrops fell through shafts of sunlight and shone like diamonds against the dark wet road and the houses opposite. There was probably a rainbow somewhere but she couldn’t see it from where she was standing.

  “Mrs. Coronado.” She looked back into the earnest face of the cop. “The shotgun?”

  She let out a sigh, then opened the door wider and pointed at the floor. “Over there by the couch,” she said. “The safety’s on.”

  Donny moved past her, nodding politely, like he was Sunday visiting, as he entered the house. He pulled a large evidence bag from his pocket and shook it out as he walked over to the shotgun. “What happened here?” he said, looking around at the disordered room.