Effigy

by Theresa Danley

  Zedilla.

  “Where have you been, Diego?”

  Diego gasped, fighting for air. “I can’t…breathe.”

  “But you can listen.” Zedilla turned back around and lowered the sun visor. He looked at himself in the small vanity mirror, then shifted it to get a better reflection of Diego.

  “You see, I have this problem,” he said, licking his fingers and stroking them across his hair. His eyes remained on Diego.

  “Your officers stopped one of my trucks last week. That truck was worth over two million American dollars. That’s a lot of pesos, my friend.”

  Diego struggled for more air, but the cord pulled even tighter.

  Zedilla was still watching him through the mirror. “The real stink of it is that while the AFI was seizing my shipment, a competitor drove right by, no molestado. Now, that doesn’t gain a lot of respect in my business.”

  He gave his hair one last pat and flipped the visor back up. “And it violates the terms of our agreement.”

  Diego felt nauseous and light headed. “It’s not—”

  Zedilla turned around in his seat once again. His coal-black eyes seemed to penetrate right through Diego, as if probing for a sign of weakness. He leaned over the leather seat just a bit, tilting an ear in. “¿Perdón?”

  “I can’t…”

  Zedilla watched him for a moment more and then, as though bothered by a fly, casually flicked a hand in the air. “Let him go.”

  The cord released from Diego’s neck and sweet air rushed into his burning lungs. The heat from his face was fading away with each strained breath when Zedilla reached across the seat and slapped him.

  “I believe you were addressing me,” he said.

  “It’s not my fault,” Diego gasped. “They assigned me to a homicide case.”

  Zedilla looked amused. “So what, you’ve turned murder detective now?”

  “For now. I have no control over the drug squads.”

  “And yet, we still pay you.”

  “I haven’t collected in three months,” Diego argued.

  “But we’ve paid you still.”

  Diego felt his anger mounting. A man like Zedilla might consider one payment sufficient for a lifetime of service, and anything above that might just as well be considered gratuity. Diego didn’t see it that way at all and they both knew full well the terms of their agreement, twenty thousand pesos for each month Diego diverted the AFI from the Zedilla cartel.

  Regardless, Diego was powerless should Zedilla decide to change the rules in the middle of the game. The leverage that he had in directing the AFI straight to the drug dealer’s door was trumped by bribes distributed to all levels of enforcement authority. For all Diego knew, Regional Director Escaban, the pious crusader of justice himself, was probably bought off with Zedilla money. There was no chance Diego was going to win this argument, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

  “Nobody has touched you until now, have they?”

  “Don’t play games with me, compadre. I expect to get what I pay for.”

  “And you have. You’ve paid nothing recently, so you received nothing recently.”

  Zedilla’s face turned sour. “Para el coche!” he ordered.

  The car swerved out of traffic and as soon as it came to a stop, Diego was thrown out onto the curb. He rolled with the momentum, half stunned and still feeling the sting of the cord on his neck. As he gathered himself, Zedilla rolled down his window and threw a wad of cash at Diego’s feet.

  “Find a way to take care of my trucks, Armando,” he said. “Or I’ll find a way to take care of you.”

  AFI Headquarters

  Regional Director Carlos Miguel Escaban was fuming by the time Diego shuffled into his office. He pointed at the door with a stiff finger and the agent obediently shut it behind him. “Sit down, Armando,” he ordered gruffly, taking note of his agent’s unusually heavy saunter. Without so much as the defiant sneer Escaban had come to expect, Diego collapsed into a chair. His face was pinched as though distracted by laden thoughts.

  “Where in the hell have you been?” Escaban pressed.

  Diego stiffened like he’d just been pounced on by a pit bull. The agent’s jaw set like a steel trap as he tried to stare him down, but Escaban wasn’t fazed.

  “I spilled coffee on my pants,” Diego explained. “I had to go home and change.”

  Escaban wasn’t buying it. “Are you sure you didn’t sleep in this morning?” he asked. “I hear you had a late night.”

  “¿Como?”

  Escaban propped himself assertively over his desk. “Don’t play dumb with me. That New Age leader was found dead in his cell this morning and a guard says he saw you bringing him in around three this morning.”

  Diego didn’t even blink. “Sí. I brought him in.”

  “And just how did he get out?”

  Diego shrugged. “He could have escaped any number of ways,” he said, coolly. “He was small enough to climb through a mouse hole.”

  “Don’t get smart with me. I know all about those tricks you played during the PJF days.”

  “Do you?”

  “All of them.”

  Diego crossed his arms. “If that’s so, then why do you bother to keep me on this case? I’m better off working the drug cases.”

  Escaban understood exactly where Diego did his best work. He may have taken over the Federal District six months ago, but that didn’t make him ignorant of his agent’s history. He knew Diego came out of the PJF. He was also aware of the former agency’s corruption, the very reason it was restructured in the first place.

  It may have been the degenerate nature of Diego’s former employment that tainted Escaban’s original impression of him. Regardless, there was something about the man that just didn’t set right. Maybe it had something to do with Diego’s hollow eyes. His lips were as thin as the moustache that never seemed to fill in, giving his expressions a coy appearance. That, matched with Diego’s “take it or leave it” attitude, lent a sly impression of a gambler assured by the cards hidden up his sleeve. Escaban wondered just what kind of game Diego might be playing.

  “I don’t keep you because I approve of your tactics,” Escaban said. “I keep you because you can be just as effective without them.”

  Diego didn’t offer a response. He simply watched and waited as Escaban stood and slowly paced around his desk. He stopped between Diego and the desk, keeping his back turned. He didn’t want to admit to his agent that he needed someone who knew how to get things done. Despite Diego’s wretched actions—which he’d never been able to prove until the death of Citlalpol—Escaban knew that it might take such deplorable efforts to bring in his nephew’s murderer.

  “I want this Equinox Killer,” he said wearily. “I can feel him slipping away with each day that goes by.”

  Escaban could feel the murderer slipping away with each suspect they released. In truth, he had nothing on the New Agers. It was strikingly clear the group was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. The AFI had held them far too long and to keep them any longer might stir protests from humanities groups, and Escaban could not afford that kind of attention. Not when his promotion to the Federal District was intended to bring justice in a judicious manner.

  Escaban slammed his fist onto the desktop and spun around. “Dammit, Diego!” he roared. “Citlalpol was the man I’ve spent the past two months looking for. We hadn’t finished questioning him and now you’ve hauled off and beat him to death!”

  “He resisted arrest and I did what I had to do to bring him back into custody.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.” Escaban paced before his desk like a lion trapped in a cage. “Citlalpol knew the Equinox Killer and he would have led us to him given a little more time.”

  Diego didn’t appear the least bit troubled. “You still have twenty or so New Agers in custody,” he reasoned in that slithery tone of his. “Use their leader’s death to get more information out of them.”

 
; Escaban crossed his arms. “A scare tactic, huh?”

  “Sí.”

  “Don’t you think spending two months in this hell hole has been tactical enough?”

  Diego shrugged. “We might have found your killer by now if you’d just let me work things out on my own instead of sitting in that damned interrogation booth. Hell, a ten-year-old could have taken the notes I got. I should have been spending that time out in the field.”

  Escaban hardened his glare. “Look here, you bastard. I don’t need your kind of interference when it comes to the handling of prisoners.”

  “As I recall, I wasn’t the one who asked to be assigned to this case,” Diego said. “You stuck me here.”

  “Don’t go thinking for a minute that your insolence will send you back to the drug cases. I’m keeping you on the Equinox Killer whether you like it or not. But if you pull another stunt like this I’ll not only have your job, I’ll throw your ass in a cell myself.”

  Diego’s eyes suddenly flared to life. “The hell you will.”

  “The hell I won’t!”

  “And just who do you plan on sending after your killer if you do?”

  “That won’t be your problem.”

  Diego sneered. He nodded his head in what may have been a strategic move toward a checkmate, but Escaban wasn’t about to go on the defensive.

  Diego slapped his hands on the armrests of his chair and sprang to his feet, coming chest to chest with him. Escaban faintly detected coffee and cinnamon on his breath. Evidently, the agent hadn’t spilled all of the coffee in his lap.

  “Well,” Diego said. “With any luck, your Equinox Killer’s already dead. In my experience, criminals such as this tend to die by their own hand.”

  Escaban wasn’t amused. “In the end I’m sure they always do.”

  Diego slipped toward the office door and flung it open. He took a step, but paused in the doorway.

  “Just keep one thing in mind.”

  Escaban tightened his arms across his chest. “What’s that?”

  “You know nothing about me. Nothing.”

  Salt Lake City

  Lori stepped out of the shower and winced when she found her reflection in the full-length vanity mirror hanging in Dr. Peet’s master bathroom. Even amid the thick, dripping steam there was no avoiding the sight of her battered arms. Despite the soreness in her left hip there was no bruise, but her legs were the color of over-ripe bananas. Her ankle was still swollen—walkable, but it pained her to carry weight.

  She looked like she’d been run over by a Mac truck. No, scratch that. She looked like she’d been run over by a black or blue Ford Taurus.

  Lori quickly dried and wrapped herself in the fresh towel Dr. Peet had hung on the hook behind the door. She spotted his combs and shaving cream on the counter by the sink and noticed his toothbrush, alone in a dual brush holder.

  She swiped the moisture from the mirror above the sink and scowled at the dark rings beneath her eyes. It had been a long night, one that felt like a hazy dream until she woke up on her professor’s couch this morning. Now, as she scrutinized herself before the misty mirrors of Dr. Peet’s bathroom, Lori’s mind was thinking clearly again. The lab storage was destroyed, the effigy stolen, and they had yet to solve the date of the Mayan hieroglyph.

  When she stepped out of the bathroom, she paused in the middle of Dr. Peet’s bedroom. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Earlier, she’d found him asleep at his computer. He must have succumbed to his exhaustion sometime after she’d crashed over his only volume on ancient calendar systems—sometime after he must have draped a blanket over her on the couch.

  She found his closet and opened the door. Long-sleeved cotton shirts and khakis were lined on wire hangers. She spotted three pairs of jeans and Dr. Peet’s multi-pocketed safari field vest. There were a couple t-shirts Lori had never seen him wear and a sport coat she never knew he owned. There were only two pairs of shoes on the floor, his leather everyday shoes and a pair of waterproof Gore-Tex boots that he wore in the field.

  It was awkward going through someone else’s wardrobe but Dr. Peet had insisted, and just as he’d said, she found three blouses hanging in the back of the closet. She picked one, a yellow and white summer blouse that looked her size, and took it off the hanger. Her jeans, now draped over a chair, had been washed of the dirt and blood and, except for a small hole in the left knee, were almost like new.

  As she dressed, Lori spotted a picture framed in rustic barn wood sitting atop the dresser. A younger Dr. Peet stood in the picture, his arm around a young woman and they stood amid the decaying remains of an abandoned mountain copper mine. The couple was smiling. Lori would have considered it a vacation photo were it not for the craggy, large-brimmed hat crowning the woman’s head, the tiny dentist’s pick in her hand, and the Gore-Tex boots on Dr. Peet’s feet.

  * * * *

  With a groan, Peet pulled the smoking pan of bacon and grease from the stove’s burner and dropped it into the sink. He opened the kitchen window to a cold drizzle outside. The air was refreshing and wet but he knew it would take hours to cleanse the house of the smell of burnt bacon.

  Ten years and he still couldn’t cook a decent breakfast. But then, he rarely had cause to try. He sighed inwardly as he pulled a coffee mug from the cabinet. At least he could still brew a palatable pot of coffee.

  He wandered back into his den where he’d removed layers of books, trade journals and various stray digging tools from the IBM he hadn’t looked at in years. The computer hummed as lively as ever with the calendar program pulsating on the screen.

  It occurred to him earlier this morning that if he searched the computer with fresh eyes that he might find the strange snake-like date symbol that had escaped him the night before. After less than five minutes of scrolling through the ancient Mayan calendar he realized that his eyes weren’t the problem. He hadn’t overlooked the symbol. It just wasn’t there.

  He took a sip of his coffee, still staring at the computer screen. As sluggish as he’d started the morning, he needed a jolt of caffeine to get his blood moving, and that’s when he heard Lori’s irregular footsteps shuffle into the doorway behind him.

  “How’s the ankle this morning?” he asked, noticing an untitled file on the computer screen.

  “Tight,” Lori said. “But it’ll loosen.”

  Peet clicked on the new file and another calendar spread across the screen. The data appeared curiously similar to the Mayan calendar, but it was incomplete. In fact, there was very little of it to look at.

  “There’s a few strips of drowned bacon briquets in the sink if you’re hungry,” he said, staring at the fractionate prelude of the mysterious calendar.

  Lori chuckled. “I think I’ll pass.”

  He closed the untitled file and when he turned around, he found Lori standing there, her hair wet and stringy from her shower. She had on her jeans that had somehow survived the night and managed to come out of the dryer in decent shape. Her sweater, however, had been a total loss.

  Now, seeing Lori standing there in that light cotton blouse, he remembered why he’d kept it. It had been Cathy’s favorite. Comfortably delicate and feminine. A closet hanger did nothing for it, but seeing it on a woman’s body with rounded breasts filling out the front, Peet felt his breath catch in his throat. He quickly turned back to his computer.

  “Is that your calendar program?” Lori asked, shuffling closer in her stockinged feet.

  He focused on the screen, trying to block out the blouse. “Yeah. It tracks ancient calendar systems against the Gregorian calendar we use today. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Greek—you name it, it’s probably in here.”

  “Really?”

  Lori removed a box of dirt pans from a nearby chair and took a seat beside him. She leaned in to get a good look at the computer screen, her movement casting the faintest scent of Cathy toward him. Peet turned away and closed his eyes. He suddenly felt Cathy’s presence again. In that moment, he was sitting
at her computer, listening to her explain the calendar systems she’d created, but the memory was quickly washed away, overpowered by the smell of his own shampoo lingering in Lori’s hair.

  “So this is the Mayan calendar?” she asked, apparently unaware of Peet’s lapse of concentration.

  “Yes,” he said, pulling himself back to his senses. “Well, one of them, anyway.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “There’s three actually.”

  “Oh.” Lori looked slightly amused and confused at the same time. “So is this the one that everyone’s afraid will end in December?”

  Peet smiled. “No. The one causing all the 2012 hype is the Mayan Long Count Calendar. That calendar doesn’t use hieroglyphic date symbols like their Tzolkin Calendar.”

  “So we’re looking at the Tzolkin Calendar.”

  Peet nodded.

  “How does it work?”

  “Well, I’m no expert, but if I remember right, the Mayans used a two hundred and sixty-day calendar, each day marked by a number and a symbol. The calendar cycle begins with One Ahau—‘Ahau’ meaning ‘Flower.’ The second day is Two Alligator, the third is Three Wind, and so forth.”

  “So, One Flower is sort of like our January first.”

  “For illustrative purposes, yes. When the numbers reach thirteen, they start over.”

  “But the next time there’s a one, it isn’t matched with Flower,” Lori observed.

  “That’s because there are twenty symbols, not thirteen. So the next time the number one rolls around, it is matched with the fourteenth symbol, Reed. It’s similar to the way that our months don’t always start on a Monday, although they do start on the first, or one.”

  “So the Mayans labeled their days with these hieroglyphs,” Lori said, pointing to the picture symbols tracking in the middle of the screen. “And the dots and bars beside them indicate the number of the day?”