Santacristina glared at the two men. “I will leave,” he said. “But I will never stop haunting you until justice is done.” He turned to go but hesitated when he saw Marlene looking at him. His eyes narrowed as if sizing her up; then he headed for the exit, with the police officer following to make sure he left. Huttington and Barnhill glanced once more in their direction before walking into the president’s office.
“What was that all about?” Marlene asked.
“Well, it was pretty big news here for a little while when Maria Santacristina disappeared late last spring,” O’Toole said. “But that’s the first I’ve heard that she was having an affair with Huttington.”
“Do you believe it?” Marlene said. “Or is…what’s his name—Santacristina?—a desperate father grasping at straws?”
O’Toole shrugged. “Believe what? That good ol’ Kip was having sex with a student? What’s not to believe? She was a lovely girl; he’s a good-looking, well-spoken older guy. But I’m sure he wouldn’t want that to get out. Sawtooth is a pretty small, conservative town—screwing students, excuse the imagery, would not go over well. Plus, he married into big local money, and knowing his wife, Suzanne, she’d leave him penniless. But the part about Huttington knowing what happened to her? That’s not something I’ve heard about, either.”
“Do you know the father?” Marlene asked.
“Not really. His name is Eugenio Santacristina,” O’Toole replied. “He’s one of our local Basque sheepherders, but well respected in their community from what I gathered from the news reports when Maria disappeared. Otherwise, quiet, keeps to himself like a lot of the other Basques.”
Marlene recalled seeing a group of swarthy, mustachioed men standing outside the Navarre Restaurant in Boise wearing white leggings beneath red skirts and red berets. Willis had pointed them out and said they were Basque dancers taking a break from a festival taking place at the Basque Cultural Center on West Grove Street.
Marlene followed the other two out into the cold and headed for the Basque coffee shop. Several inches of snow had fallen since they’d gone into the university building, and Marlene was shivering by the time she spotted the sign for the restaurant. She stepped inside, gratefully basking in the warmth and the smell of fresh roasted coffee. However, as they made their way to the counter to order drinks, she noticed that the other patrons and waitresses were nervously eyeing four young men sitting in a corner booth.
What made them stand out was the “uniform” that, as much as their shaved heads, identified them as either skinheads or neo-Nazis. They wore baggy jeans held up by red suspenders over white T-shirts emblazoned with the Iron Cross, and completed the ensemble with heavy, steel-toed Doc Martens boots. They’d piled their long wool coats, which looked like German army issue from the Second World War, on a table next to them.
“If I’m not mistaken,” she said, “that’s Rufus Porter sitting over there with several of his friends.”
Meyers didn’t turn to look. “You’re not mistaken, that’s him, but best we ignore him.”
However, as if he understood that he was the subject of their discussion, Porter and his friends got up and walked over to where they stood. “Well, well, if it isn’t my dear old coach, Mikey O’Fool,” Porter sneered. “I’m looking forward to getting back on the field this spring, but guess you won’t be there.”
“Don’t count on it, Rufus,” O’Toole replied. “The only way you’ll get back on that field is if you get a job mowing the lawn.”
Porter’s eyes blazed at the insult and then noticed Marlene’s smirk. “What are you smiling at, bitch?” he snarled, and started to poke at Marlene with a finger.
A moment later, Porter was yelping in pain as she grabbed his index and middle fingers and bent them backward, locking his elbow and forcing him up on his toes. With her attacker off balance and unable to do anything except respond to the pain, she propelled him back into his friends, silently thanking Jojola for the jujitsu training.
Porter’s face changed into a mask of rage. He’d been humiliated and now he and his friends intended to settle the score, but their attention was diverted when the front door opened and Eugenio Santacristina walked in.
The Basque’s dark eyes immediately took in the situation. He strolled over, placing himself between the skinheads and the others.
“You and your friends are not welcome here,” Santacristina said calmly.
“Fuck off, spic,” Porter spat.
Santacristina’s face grew grim as he gripped his wooden cane around the middle and tapped it lightly into the palm of his free hand. “Say that again,” he replied. “And I promise that you will not walk out of here on your own. I will break both of your kneecaps, and those of any of your friends who interfere.”
“And I’ll be glad to help,” O’Toole added.
Santacristina glanced at the coach and smiled before turning his attention back to Porter and his friends. “Now, what is it to be? A future as a cripple, or merely a moron?”
Porter seemed to be weighing his options. His former coach was a big man, and even the small attorney looked pretty tough. The woman knew some sort of trickery, too. But it was the Basque and his stick that worried him the most.
“Let’s go, Rufus,” one of the other skinheads suggested. “We’ll settle this some other day when there’s not so many witnesses.”
“I will look forward to that,” Santacristina said.
Porter did his best to look tough and as though he would have still preferred to battle. But he said, “You’re right. Too many witnesses.” He stepped back from Santacristina and snapped a Nazi salute with his right hand raised, exposing a tattoo on the inside of his right bicep that appeared to be some Aryan symbol. “Death to niggers, kikes, spics, and race traitors.”
“Get out,” Santacristina said, infuriated by the salute but still keeping his cool.
“Got to get our coats,” Porter said.
“Esteban,” Santacristina said to someone behind the skinheads, who turned to see that four other Basque men had emerged from a back room and had positioned themselves behind them. “Bring these dogs their coats.”
The youngest of the Basques responded by grabbing the coats, which he held at arm’s length as though they smelled, and tossed them to the skinheads. “Now leave,” Santacristina ordered, “or I will beat you like the mongrel dogs you are.”
The skinheads made their way to the door and left. Porter, who was the last to leave, shouted an epithet but fled as the Basque men moved toward him.
When they were gone, Santacristina introduced himself, extending a hand to Coach O’Toole. “I was sorry to hear what happened to you. I do not believe these things they say.”
“Thank you,” O’Toole replied. “We’re planning to fight back.”
“So I have heard,” Santacristina said. “I hope you win.”
On impulse, Marlene asked, “Would you care to join us?”
Eugenio Santacristina inclined his head slightly and flashed a smile that looked all the brighter for his tan skin and created a whole series of smile lines around his mouth and eyes. “I would be delighted.” He turned to the other Basque men, thanked and dismissed them in their language, and they left for the back of the restaurant again.
Some shepherd, Marlene thought. There’s a man used to giving commands and being obeyed out of respect. “I noticed that you don’t need the cane to walk,” she said.
Santacristina held up the four-foot-long piece of gnarled but polished oak. “This? No, this is not a cane,” he said. “I am a shepherd. This is a walking stick I use to keep up with my charges on the steep hillsides. However, I admit that at nearly sixty years old, I lean on it more than I used to.”
“You’re sixty?! I would have guessed much younger,” Marlene said.
“Chasing sheep keeps one youthful,” he replied with a laugh.
The three men and one woman were soon talking over steaming cups of rich, dark coffee, which Marlene would later sw
ear had the consistency of motor oil but was the richest, smoothest, most flavorful coffee she had ever tasted.
Santacristina signaled to the waitress and ordered something. The language sounded similar to Spanish, or perhaps Portuguese, but with some other intonation—more like what she’d heard once on a visit to Romania.
A few minutes later, the waitress returned with a plate of cheese, bright yellow in color but streaked with blue veins.
When Marlene asked about the cheese, Santacristina replied, “This is Onetik, a traditional type of Basque cheese made from sheep’s milk. It is best with a red wine, but seeing as how I am with another man’s wife, and tongues may wag, we will stick with coffee.” He laughed and said something to the hovering waitress, who laughed, too.
“Are all Basque men so charming?” Marlene asked.
“It is ingrained in us by our mothers from the day we are born,” Santacristina said, and smiled.
As Santacristina and the other two men chatted, Marlene used the opportunity to study his facial features, which were strong—a prominent nose between deep-set eyes that flickered with intensity below thick, dark eyebrows. His tan face was framed on the bottom by a five o’clock shadow that she suspected might be permanent. But his most striking physical characteristic was the color of his eyes, almost amber against a darker background. When he turned to meet her gaze, she noticed a jagged white scar that started just below the hairline on the left side of his forehead and disappeared into his full head of jet-black curls.
Marlene hesitated, not wanting to be rude, but then asked, “If I’m not being too nosy…we saw your confrontation with Huttington and Barnhill today. What happened to your daughter?”
Santacristina’s smile fell from his face, and he hung his head and appeared to be studying the depths of his coffee. “It is not a pleasant story,” he replied. “I may not show it always on my face, but my heart is broken. I do not wish to burden you with my tears.”
“I’m a good listener,” Marlene answered.
Exhaling, Santacristina explained why he’d confronted Huttington. Indeed, why he’d been asking the same question of the man for the better part of a year, ever since his Maria had disappeared without a trace.
“She was a good girl,” he said. “An angel given to my dear wife and me. She was attending the university and majoring in early childhood education. All of her life she wanted to be a teacher. But I am a poor man and unable to pay for her education, so she made her own way through work-study programs, including as an administrative assistant for that sasikumea Huttington.”
Huttington had begun his pursuit by lavishing praise on her for her work and then finding reasons to keep her after hours and reward her with dinners. “I started to notice that she was spending more and more time with him, and then he started taking her on these little trips. She told me they were for ‘university business,’ but I could see that she had fallen in love, and my heart ached for her. He was a married man and twice her age. But she was as head-strong as her mother—who married me against the wishes of her family—and would not listen to me.”
“Where is her mother?” Marlene asked, though she suspected the answer already.
Santacristina shook his head sadly. “She died four years ago, when Maria was seventeen,” he said. When he looked back up at Marlene, his eyes were shiny with tears. “It was ovarian cancer. I was, of course, devastated. But it was even harder on Maria. Her mother doted on her, and they could talk about anything. Maybe if Elena had lived, she could have talked sense into our daughter. But I would not have wanted Elena to have the pain that I endure now.”
“I’m so sorry,” Marlene commiserated. “Was your wife Basque, too?”
“Yes,” Santacristina replied. “I met her shortly after I arrived in this country and came to Idaho, which you may have heard has a large Basque community. My Elena was much younger than me and very beautiful.” He stopped and pulled out his wallet, from which he produced photographs of two strikingly beautiful women. “This is my Elena and my Maria.” He replaced the photographs. “They were my reasons to live. But now they are both gone, and I live only to find my daughter so that I may lay her to rest beside her mother.”
“And you think Huttington has something to do with Maria’s disappearance?”
Santacristina nodded. “I last saw her two days before she disappeared. I dropped by unexpectedly and it was evident that she had been crying. But she assured me it was nothing, and that soon everything would be all right. The next day, I called to check in on her, but there was no answer. And there was no answer the next day or the next, either…. It was not like her. She called me almost very day. She knew how lonely I was without Elena.”
He’d driven to his daughter’s apartment and talked the landlord into letting him in. “All of her books for school were piled neatly on her desk, ready for class,” he said. “Even her clothes were laid out and waiting. Everything you would expect of a young woman going to school. But the most important clue that something was wrong was that her cat was almost crazy for want of food and water. She loved that cat and would have never left it to suffer like that.”
“Did you go to the police?”
“Yes,” he replied. “They were polite and took my information down. But they seemed to think that she was just a silly college girl who ran away from home.”
“Did you tell them your suspicions about Huttington having an affair with your daughter?” Meyers asked.
“No,” he said. “I was sure he had made her pregnant. But I did not yet suspect him. I was afraid that he had spurned her and…and she had, perhaps, harmed herself. Or maybe let her guard down in her grief and was attacked by a stranger.”
“Have the police done anything?” Marlene asked.
Santacristina nodded. “Yes,” he said. “As much as they could. When Maria did not return, a young detective was assigned to her case. He filed a report with the FBI and registered her with a national crime computer in case someone saw her, or she tried to leave the country, or…or a body was found that matched her identity.”
The Basque stopped talking for a moment to compose himself, then smiled at some memory. “Her mother was always afraid of losing her, so she had Maria fingerprinted when she was a young child when the police were promoting such a program. But there was nothing.”
Santacristina said he began to wonder more about Huttington. “I called and asked to meet privately with him. I wanted to ask him when he had last seen her and what had happened. But he would not see me without his attorney present, and there is something about that man, Barnhill, that makes my skin crawl. I did not want to discuss my daughter’s sexual life in front of him.”
Marlene frowned. “But what makes you think Huttington was responsible for her disappearance?”
Santacristina was silent for a long moment. “I believe that she was pregnant,” he said. “I found a box for a pregnancy test kit in her bathroom trash can. There was a positive result on the indicator strip. I think that the child was his. But he is a married man, an upstanding—oh, what is the term?—pillar of the community. Getting a young college girl pregnant would have been a great embarrassment, and maybe cost him his job. I think this is why my Maria is…she is gone.”
He’d crashed a university dinner party and attempted to talk to Huttington, but Barnhill had him thrown out and arrested for trespassing. “The charges were dropped, but I was told to stay away from him or go to jail. This seemed to me to be the acts of guilty men, so I went back to the young detective and told him what I believed.”
“Did he look into it?” Meyers asked.
“Yes, or at least that is my understanding,” Santacristina said. “He told me he talked to Huttington—though Barnhill had insisted on being present—but the sasikumea…”
“What is sasikumea?” Marlene interrupted.
“Bastard,” Santacristina replied. “And he is one and worse. He did not show the slightest concern about Maria’s disappearance, not even
the sort a university president would for his intern. All he ever said to the press was that he hoped she was all right and had simply ‘moved on.’ Anyway, Huttington denied having an affair—saying that I had jumped to conclusions—and that he had not seen Maria for more than a week before she disappeared. He said he assumed she had quit.”
“Did you ever tell the press about your theory?” Marlene asked.
Santacristina shook his head. “There is no proof,” he said. “And if I made it public, Barnhill would go after me, and as you may have guessed from my conversation with them this afternoon, my immigration status is somewhat questionable. I would not care about that if it would help find my daughter, but I fear that if I am deported, there will be no one here who will remember Maria and seek justice for her.”
“But what I don’t get is why Barnhill hasn’t carried out his threat to report you,” O’Toole said.
“They are not anxious for the publicity,” Santacristina replied. “So far the newspapers and television stations have not caught wind of this, but if I was arrested, they would pay attention to what I said. So we have this stalemate.”
Santacristina hung his head and his shoulders shook. When he brought himself back under control, he apologized for crying. “It is a sign of weakness.”
“No, it’s not. It’s a sign of love and heartbreak,” Marlene replied. “But we can change the subject if you like.”
Santacristina nodded. “Yes, please,” he said with a weak smile. “Tell me why you are here with these gentlemen.”
Marlene smiled at the gallantry, but let Meyers and O’Toole talk to him about the lawsuit. “So I guess we both have problems with Huttington and Barnhill,” O’Toole said when they finished. “But unlike you, I don’t know why they turned on me.”
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