Forcing Amaryllis

by Louise Ure

  I pushed all four electric window buttons at once, jabbing and slamming my hand into the controls in frustration. Nothing. I had waited too long, and now the car’s electronics were shorted out.

  I didn’t know if I had enough time for any rescuers to get to me. The water was halfway up the windows, leaking into the passenger compartment. The Jeep drifted toward the deepest area. I tried smashing the glass with anything I could find: fists, shoes, even my cell phone, which splintered and flew apart after the first impact. Nothing.

  I scrambled into the rear cargo area and kicked and smashed at the rear window. There was no interior release, and the windows held through the pummeling. My panic rose.

  Then a tapping on the passenger-side window. I saw strong sunbrowned hands and pearl snaps on a long-sleeved shirt. The water was at his chest level, and he held a crowbar. I made a lunge for the passenger seat, but he made a “go away” motion, and I scooted back to the cargo area, which was now six inches deep in water. With two shoulder-numbing swings of the crowbar the window exploded and those hands cleared the remaining cubes of glass from the frame. Strike bent down and extended both arms across the seat to lift me out.

  Strike arranged for my car to be towed when the water level in the underpass receded. I shivered and apologized for dripping all over the passenger seat of his car. He’d been two car lengths behind me but clearly more alert than I had been because he managed to avoid the flooded area. I’ll bet he was rejoicing that he’d had the forethought to borrow Enrique’s van today and hadn’t put the Mustang at risk.

  It must have been eighty degrees, but I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering. When we reached my house, I leaned on Strike and let him open the door.

  My glasses had been lost to the swirling water, and I felt a stranger in my own house. Everything was softened and blurred except my nerve endings, which shrieked with delayed adrenaline.

  “Come on, out of those wet clothes,” Strike said. I let him lead me by the hand like a child. He sat me on the toilet seat while he drew a warm bath, then left the room while I stripped off the soaked business suit and underwear and lowered myself into the tub.

  He returned with a glass of red wine and a shy smile. “Here, drink this. A big gulp first. Then you can sip more slowly.” The wine worked its magic, calming and warming me. My teeth had almost ceased their staccato complaint.

  Strike soaped a washcloth and rubbed my back. I felt like one of Lola Uribe’s Pantene babies, so peaceful and safe that I didn’t even react to the fact that I was sitting naked in the tub with this man at my side. It felt good to let someone else take control. It had been so long.

  “Lean back,” he said, bracing the back of my neck with his hand. He let the washcloth wring out over my forehead and hair to get rid of the silty residue from my dunking. A warm flush started in my stomach and moved to my chest. I sat up with a start.

  “I think I can take it from here.” I grabbed the washcloth with unnecessary urgency. “Go pour yourself a glass of wine, and I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I finished rinsing the dirt away, wrapped myself in a long white seersucker bathrobe, and dug out an old pair of glasses from a bathroom drawer. They were oversized, salmon-colored frames, and I winced when I looked in the mirror. I looked like a hoot owl. When I reached the living room, the sight that greeted me shook away the rest of the shadows, and I started laughing.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Strike said, gesturing to the sweatpants he’d borrowed from the hook on the back of my bedroom door. He was bare chested, and the sweatpants reached only to mid-shin on his long legs. He looked like a testosterone-riddled teenager whose parents were too cheap to buy new clothes for every growth spurt.

  I had forgotten that he, too, would be wet after wading chest-deep in the water to rescue me. “Let’s put your clothes in the dryer. That way you’ll be able to get back into something that fits you a little better.” I stifled another laugh and went to gather his clothes and refill my wine.

  I pondered the options of what to do with a half-naked man in my house but ultimately decided just to enjoy the view. It had been a long time since I had sampled even that kind of comfort, since I had thought of someone’s skin as anything other than a place to start an IV or watch for signs of bedsores.

  We talked about Strike’s surveillance of Red Blanken. Strike had tailed him last night to a strip club on Benson Highway and now looked much the worse for those hours of lost sleep.

  “He’s a real loner when he goes out,” Strike said. “Doesn’t bring a friend, doesn’t start up a conversation with anybody.”

  I wondered if Blanken had started a conversation with Amy seven years ago. Maybe she had seen his familiar face at the rodeo and let him walk her back to her car. Maybe a high school friendship let him get close enough to turn a chance meeting into a rape.

  Was Blanken the one who made my sister want to take her own life? Was it Cates? Maybe it was a man who hid behind the anonymity of a friendly highway patrolman’s badge. For all I knew, it was someone who had moved to Detroit or Timbuktu years ago.

  23

  The morning after the flood I realized that the videotapes and all my notes from Cates’s mock trial were ruined, now lying muddy and sodden on the floor of the towed Jeep. I would have to rely on my memory and on other people’s notes to re-create the discussion. I took the bus to work.

  When I got there, I called my insurance agent, who said he’d send someone out to look at the car later in the day, but it sounded like a total write-off to him. I didn’t think submersion in freshwater would do such damage. I was going to miss that Jeep—dents, tired engine, and all—and the insurance settlement wasn’t going to be enough to buy much of anything to replace it.

  The lady at the eyeglass store said she could duplicate my last pair and have them ready by midafternoon. More good news for my Herculean credit card.

  I phoned Giordano and told him about Blanken’s high school affiliation. Could he do anything to find out where Blanken had been on Halloween night seven years ago? Maybe credit card receipts or telephone logs? His response: “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  I didn’t tell him about the resemblance of a highway patrolman’s belt to the belt I was looking for. Until I found someone on the Highway Patrol who looked like a real suspect—someone with a snake knife or something noticeable about his fingers—it would sound too much like the rantings of a paranoid. I had enough trouble getting Giordano to take me seriously as it was.

  Tuesday brought the first news of results from my own sleuthing. The first call was from the DNA lab. They had finished the comparison of the cigarette butts I’d lifted from Cates’s house and the strips of Amy’s denim skirt from the night of the rape.

  “Was there enough DNA on the cigarettes to test?” I asked.

  “The samples were fine. Saliva is a great source of DNA, and that’s what we found on both the cigarettes and the cloth.” The woman’s voice was tinny and high pitched over the phone. “There was no match.”

  “No match?”

  All my work to get those cigarette butts was for nothing. Was it even Cates’s saliva on the cigarettes? If it was, and it didn’t match the saliva on the denim strips, what would that mean? Maybe Cates wasn’t the man who attacked Amy. I had to find a way to get a sample of Blanken’s DNA.

  The second piece of news was better. The Nogales hospital where I’d taken Amy the night of the rape confirmed that a partial rape kit had been done, and Dr. Sanji, the attending physician, was willing to meet with me. I arranged to be there at three o’clock and hurried to get my recommendations for the Cates trial completed. I called Giulia to see if I could borrow her car and hoped Jessica wouldn’t notice another afternoon absence.

  Giulia’s old Buick wheezed and rattled as I eased it up the freeway on-ramp. Like those shopping carts that freeze up when you take them across the yellow lines that define the parking lot, the Buick didn’t like leaving the city limits.

  Fat r
aindrops were falling by the time I reached the Nogales hospital. In the desert, if the drops are big, it means it won’t rain for long, but you still get just as wet. I pulled my suit coat up around my ears and ran for the front entrance. The receptionist at the information desk paged Dr. Sanji, who told her he’d need fifteen minutes to finish with a patient and then he would come down.

  I settled onto an olive green vinyl bench to wait. Two highway patrolmen lounged against a pillar across from the Coke machine. I checked to see if there was anything remarkable about their hands. Maybe I had the “dedo” part right, and the belt had belonged to a highway patrolman.

  A siren wailed, and the two patrolmen moved toward the ambulance entrance off the lobby. They looked happy to be wading into an emergency or disaster.

  I’ve never been comfortable in hospitals. There is an implacable coldness about them, the doctors and nurses steely-eyed in the face of pain and misery. Amy had felt differently about them. For her, the hospital was a door to a new future. She said it made her feel good to help people when they were so scared and alone. I had seen her calm a frightened six-year-old Mexican child by reciting “Este Cochinillo” as she counted “This Little Piggy” on his toes. She would have made a great nurse.

  I reached into my pocket and caressed the silver-and-turquoise ring I’d found in Amy’s box in the carport.

  Intercom announcements paging doctors to various wards brought me out of my reverie and back to the hospital lobby. Dr. Sanji arrived at a racewalker’s pace. I reminded him of our meeting seven years ago, and we agreed to get a cup of coffee. I followed him down a long hallway decorated with children’s oversized, unframed watercolors. Sanji hadn’t changed much over the years. He was still squat, round, and brown—a toasted marshmallow of a man. He had graceful hands and thin fingers that fiddled with any tool that came to hand: a stethoscope, a pen, and then his spoon once we reached the cafeteria and sat down.

  I told him about Amy’s suicide attempt and her current comatose state. He shook his head in commiseration.

  “I am so sorry to hear this about your sister.” If his accent had become more Americanized since I first met him, I couldn’t hear it. “I felt that a great evil had been done to her that night. I am sorry we could not help you more at the time.” He tapped his spoon on the Formica tabletop in a burst of unexpended energy. I didn’t think Dr. Sanji often sat down just to relax.

  “It’s been seven years,” I said, stirring cream into my coffee. “You must have seen thousands of patients since that night. Why do you remember Amaryllis?”

  “The name, of course. I had never heard this name before.” He smiled. “But I had also just finished my residency, and this was my first month at this hospital. Everything was new to me. I did not know the procedures and protocol. I did not know if it would be proper to authorize a rape kit when the victim did not say she had been raped. I took a chance.” His voice was apologetic, but his eyes shone with pleasure at having done the right thing.

  I relived the panic and disorganization in the emergency room that night. It was a surprise that he remembered anything about that shift. I took a sip of cold coffee. It hadn’t been very hot to start with. “What did you do, specifically?”

  “We took vaginal, anal, and oral swabbings, of course, and scraped under her fingernails prior to cleaning her up and suturing her wounds. I did not know if she would later want to press charges, but I wanted to give her that option. We preserved the evidence, but did not send it out for DNA typing. I am only sorry that we did not insist upon photographs and a police report as well.” His spoon beat a fox-trot against the saucer while he reviewed his handwritten notes from that night in the emergency room. “There was severe bruising and evidence of ligature around her wrists and ankles. Wounds on her stomach—that U-shaped slash and two puncture wounds. Apart from the broken collarbone, the dislocated shoulder, and the vaginal wounds, of course.” He nodded to confirm his recollection, and his knee jittered a faster tempo.

  “The cuts on her stomach,” I said, picturing the almost Smiley Face gash I had seen, “were they made with the same weapon as the vaginal wound?”

  “Yes, I believe so. There was just one knife. I don’t know if I made it clear to you that night, but based on the blood smears and tearing of the uterine wall, it appears that your sister was raped after she was assaulted with the knife.”

  “Afterwards?” Someone stabbed her in the vagina with a knife and then raped her? I couldn’t imagine the rage—or the fetish—that would have been required to perform that act. And even if Amy had gone willingly to the motel room, her willingness ended soon after she got there. There had been no consensual sex. There had been a knife.

  I gave him the address of the DNA lab for testing and told him to have it billed to my overburdened credit card. Maybe I could make a partial payment on the card before their charge came through.

  Now I needed to find out whose DNA it was. I had an idea about how to get a sample from Blanken.

  And there might be one more piece of potential evidence I could lay my hands on while I was this far south. I took Highway 82 northeast toward Patagonia and the Cates family ranch.

  As I traveled through the ranchland toward Patagonia, the landscape changed from barren piles of rock to rolling hills with verdant groves of tamarisk and cottonwood following the wet streambeds. The tamarisks grew close together, almost leaning on each other. I had been tempted to lean like that on Tonio these last few weeks. It felt as if I’d known him a lifetime already.

  I slowed and turned at the arched, wrought-iron entranceway to the Cates ranch and inched my car over the cattle guard and up the rutted dirt road that led to the main house.

  George Cates must have heard my approach; he came out from the barn to investigate. He whacked a straw cowboy hat against his leg as if to brush off both accumulated dust and inquisitive callers.

  “Hello, Mr. Cates!” I yelled from where I’d parked by the main house. “Remember me? I’m Calla Gentry. I work with Ray’s lawyers.”

  I saw a spark of recognition in his eyes, but not enough to ignite a pilot light. If he recognized my name, it was probably because he remembered telling Salsipuedes to kick me out of Ray’s house in Tucson. He lit a cigarette and squinted at me through the smoke. I bet it was a Camel, just like the cigarettes I found at Ray’s house. If I had mistakenly sent the lab a sample of the father’s DNA, wouldn’t it have shown some sort of parallel or overlap with his son’s? I thought that the lab would have told me that. Did that mean that Ray Cates was completely innocent of Amy’s attack?

  “Kevin McCullough sent me down to pick up some files Ray thought he might have left here or sent here.” And I’d love to know why you gave an employee a fifty-thousand-dollar truck, I didn’t say.

  “Ray hasn’t been here since he got arrested. And I don’t remember any files.” He continued to squint even though I was the one facing the sun.

  “It’s not a big box or anything. Just two thin files that Ray might have sent. Do you mind if I take a quick look?”

  He walked past me and up the two steps to the porch without looking at me.

  “There’s nothing here, I tell you.” He gestured to the spartan surfaces in the living room. I turned a complete circle, taking in the heavy, planked coffee table, the dark leather couch, and the faded Navajo rugs on the floor.

  “Maybe they’re in his room,” I suggested. At that first meeting at the jail, Ray said he often stayed in his old bedroom at the ranch.

  Cates senior huffed once but decided to humor me. I followed his broad back down a dark hallway and into Raymond’s room. “See for yourself,” he said. “Ray hasn’t been here since the day they picked him up.” The room looked tidy and impersonal.

  He had started to close the bedroom door when the phone rang. Cussing under his breath, the elder Cates returned to the front of the house to answer it, unhappy with yet another interruption to his day.

  I hurried into Raymond’s room. A co
lorful serape was draped over the bed, and I saw the scars that years of kicked-off cowboy boots had left on the legs of the bed and the bottom of the dresser.

  I pulled out the top drawer of the dresser and rummaged through bolo ties, a plastic cup full of Mexican pesos, and a pile of unused matchbooks. The lower drawers yielded only T-shirts, underwear, and jeans. Everything looked washed and fresh; I didn’t know if it would be worth swiping something and retesting it for Cates’s DNA.

  I turned my attention to the closet. Worn denim shirts, khaki pants. A fancy Western suit with curlicues embroidered on the lapels.

  A nail stuck out from the back of the closet door with belts hung on it. The bottom one was black leather, three fingers wide, with a radiant silver sun for a buckle. I dropped all the other belts on the floor in my hurry to get at it.

  George Cates’s heavy footsteps approached. I slung the black belt around my own waist, shifted the buckle to my spine and held my jacket closed over it.

  “What are you doing in there?” he asked, seeing me at the open closet door.

  “I’m sorry. I must have knocked these loose when I opened the door.” I bent to pick up the pile of leather at my feet.

  “Leave it,” he said. I didn’t argue.

  I offered him my business card at the front door. “In case you need to get in touch.” In truth, I wanted Raymond Cates to know I’d been there.

  “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Cates, how did Ray hurt his finger?”

  “I slammed the car door on it when he was six.”

  So he definitely had a mashed finger seven years ago. One more piece of evidence.

  Cates’s belt was still around my waist when I got in the car, and the buckle dug an arrow of pain into my spine. I didn’t adjust it. It would be a long drive, and I needed the painful reminder to keep me alert. I had one stop in Tucson, then I was heading another two hours north to Phoenix and Miranda Lang.

  I made sure Amy’s ring was still in my pocket. I was going to need it.