River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  With a leap, Ginny made the slope and started up toward the sitting woman. Because of her long strides, she covered faster ground than the guy, probably in his fifties, who was trying to descend without falling himself. When Ginny was a dozen feet or so away, the woman heard her and turned.

  “Are you okay?” Ginny asked. “Did you fall?”

  The woman looked at her with wide eyes, as if Ginny were an apparition, and not a particularly welcome one. Maybe she hit her head, Ginny thought. Suffering from shock.

  “Can you call for an ambulance?” the man called. He had almost reached the woman, who was trying to regain her feet but looked as if the rock slope might be spinning beneath her. “She fell quite a ways.”

  Ginny pulled her cell from her backpack and glanced at the screen, but as usual, she had no service. “Sorry,” she said. “I can drive into Palo Duro, but we’re too far out here to get a signal.”

  “I’m all right,” the woman insisted. “Never mind an ambulance, I’ll be fine.” Other members of the group came down the slope and surrounded her, helping her to her feet. If she were in shock, that might be a bad idea, but after a couple of minutes they let go of her and she seemed able to keep her balance. Color had started to return to her cheeks. She was probably a couple years younger than Ginny, maybe twenty-five. She kept shooting Ginny uncertain sideways glances, as if uncomfortable with her around.

  Relieved, Ginny put the phone away and caught the eye of the older man in the group, the one who had hurried down after the woman (the only other man was a short, pudgy guy who had been the last to reach her). “Thanks anyway,” the man said. “Damnedest thing.”

  “What happened?”

  The man had the look of a Midwestern merchant, a grocer or a hardware store owner, with an open, friendly face, short hair the color of dry straw, and a smile that flashed even when it wasn’t appropriate. Caucasian, like his companions. He grinned as he began to answer, then seemed to think better of it and showed a more solemn face halfway through. “We were all up looking at those faces,” he said. “We read about ’em on the Internet when we were plannin’ our trip. We’re headed to the Alamo, down there in San Antonio. Anyway, Juliet there was lookin’ at that one on the end, kind of angry-lookin’ fella with a mask over his eyes. She was by herself at the end and all of a sudden she screamed. When I looked up, she was airborne, like she’d been hit with an electric shock. She hit the ground and rolled down to where you saw her when you showed up.”

  “Electric shock? From a rock?”

  “I guess she was touchin’ it. I don’t know if there’s some kind of security deal or whatnot, but—”

  Ginny couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She worked to keep her incredulity from her voice. “There’s no security system here, and the rocks aren’t electrified.”

  “Well, I don’t know what did it, then. Juliet says that face glowed when she touched it, like it was white-hot. Then she got that shock and it just blew her right down the slope.”

  Ginny didn’t know how to respond. None of these people looked like they’d been drinking or using hallucinogens.

  “Mandy went over and touched it after,” he said, nodding toward a white-haired woman who could have been Juliet’s mother. “She said it was still warm then.”

  “I’ve been around these for days, and hundreds of others at different sites,” Ginny said. “And I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

  “Well, we by God hadn’t of or we wouldn’t even have come.”

  “I’m sure. I’ll just take a look, if that’s okay.”

  “Just be careful, miss.”

  “I will.” Ginny climbed the rest of the way up the slope, to the wall where the masks had been painted. There were nine of them here, grouped in threes. The “angry” one was on the far left. An overhanging boulder that had fallen from above slanted near it, and if you ducked beneath that overhang, you entered a little sheltered area where there were more drawings, including some that seemed to represent a river, clouds, some warriors, and a huge, vaguely malevolent being. Most visitors never made it that far.

  Ginny touched the image that had supposedly shocked Juliet, pressing her palm against rock smoothed by centuries of wind and rain and other people doing this exact same thing. There might have been some trace warmth coming off it. She touched bare rock nearby, to see if it was just radiating sunlight, but that surface was cool against her hand.

  On the off chance, she crouched and crab-walked under the overhanging slab. The images there were just three feet off the ground, but the ceiling was low, too. On her knees, Ginny pressed her hands to the river and the warriors.

  Also warm. Direct sunlight hadn’t fallen on these paintings for hundreds of years, if not thousands, depending on when that slab had fallen and blocked in this little depression. She moved her hands over the unpainted rock, over the clouds and the unknown creature looming over the scene. Cold rock, maybe a degree or two warmer where the paint had stained the wall.

  Could it be a chemical difference, the virgin rock and the painted rock radiating at different temperatures? She would have to do some research. It had to be something like that, some obscure bit of geological trivia she had never encountered, because any other explanation was too bizarre to consider.

  Suddenly, Smuggler’s Canyon had added a new mystery to the one that overarched her life. In the cool shade of the overhanging slab, Ginny shivered.

  TWELVE

  It had taken Simon Winslade decades to acquire his property in Bath, close to the hot springs dedicated by the Celts to the goddess Sulis. Once he bought several old houses and tore out the walls between them, renovating the interior into big living and ritual spaces, he decided the wait had been worth it. Years of pagan worship had permeated the place with occult power, and he made the most of it. Within a year, he discovered that his powers and abilities had expanded geometrically as a result of his proximity to such a special place.

  He lived in the house alone, although at any given time one of a number of girl- or boyfriends might be spending the night. None had stayed over the night before, and none were expected today. Simon’s libido was the source of considerable gossip and speculation throughout the city, but at the moment he had other things on his mind.

  Today he wasn’t actively trying to summon a demon or perform a particular spell. Instead, he was casting about for information. He wanted to know what had caused the disturbance in the ley lines the night that Lawrence Ingersoll had died in the U.S. He had been in touch with Millicent Wong and knew that Robb Ivey had met with an American intelligence agent at Ingersoll’s place, but he had been unable to reach any solid conclusions.

  Instead of relying on his specialty, which was ritual magic, he had spent the day in quiet meditation, secluded in an inner chamber with a few candles lit. This was, from all reports, similar to what Ingersoll had been doing when he’d died. This fact caused him a certain trepidation, but he went ahead with it just the same. Any information he could glean would help the entire community, and it was worth whatever risk might be involved.

  He cleared his mind of extraneous clutter and tried to open it to the forces that swirled around the universe, out of sight and awareness for most people. After some time had passed, he began to hear the soft tinkling of distant bells. A spicy aroma, like mulled cider, wafted to his nose. He couldn’t see anything but color—now a wash of peach, which changed to eggshell and suddenly flooded with scarlet.

  As the red darkened toward purple and then black, the ringing sound raced faster and faster, like chimes in a strong wind. Simon felt cold, too, a bitter chill that seeped into his bones, as if he were outside the house naked and not snugly ensconced within its reinforced, insulated walls.

  The cold, the dark, the raucous din of the once-soothing bells…it all made Simon too uncomfortable to continue. He opened his eyes and snapped his consciousness back to the present, to the house in Bath with its views over the tops of the houses and old Roman ruins
out toward the Cotswolds. His heart hammered like it wanted to break free of its fleshy cage. Blood trickled from his right ear and nostril.

  There at the last, just before his panic got the better of him, he had…no, not seen, but sensed, something awful, terrifying even to a man who had faced Asmodeus and foul-breathed Ashtaroth, crouching Nergal, Balam with his three heads, riding the back of a bear, and more.

  It had only been a sensation, he realized, nothing he could see with his eyes or hear or smell or taste. But bad enough, for all that.

  He left the ritual space at once, passing through a silent, book-walled library and into his living space. He kept these rooms modern, and as he entered he clicked on some lights, grabbed the remote control for a state-of-the-art stereo system and turned on the radio. An advert for laundry soap came on, conjuring a feeling that the world continued to spin in its place, inhabited by people who could never begin to understand, much less survive, what he had just experienced.

  When the White Stripes started playing, Simon picked up his phone and dialed a number he knew by heart. The telephone rang three times, clicked, and then Robb Ivey’s voice came on the line. “Ivey’s,” he said, as Simon had dialed the shop.

  “Robb, it’s Simon.”

  “Is everything okay? You sound—”

  “Everything is bloody well not okay. Everything is bollocks up, it seems to me.”

  “What?” Robb asked. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just spent the worst few moments of my life meditating. Hoping that I could ascertain just what the hell went on the other night.”

  Robb, he was certain, knew the “other night” that was under discussion. Everyone in the community had taken to calling it that. “What happened?”

  “Fuck if I know. Nothing good, though.”

  “Simon…”

  “I can’t describe it, Robb. It was just this horrible feeling, like when you’re watching election returns and the wrong damn bloke is pulling ahead. Only a thousand times worse. Fraught with cosmic significance, and just unbearable fucking dread. My ear and nose were literally bleeding when I was finished, and I was afraid I’d shat myself, too.”

  “That might be a little too much information, Simon.”

  “Like I fucking care, Robb. I’m the one who went through it. I’m just telling you—”

  “I was at his house, Simon. Ingersoll’s house. I felt it, too, or something very much like it. And I don’t mind telling you it scared me.”

  “I’m not scared, mate, I’m fucking terrified.”

  “What do you want to do about it, then? Anything?”

  “Not sure yet. Something, though. I’m thinking maybe I’ll summon someone who can tell us what’s going on.”

  “Someone? Like a demon?”

  “That’s what I do, right?” Simon asked. “And yes, at this point I think a demon might just be the thing. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

  “Simon, if you can do something about whatever it is out there, I don’t care if you call up Satan himself.”

  “Right, then.”

  “As long as you keep him on a tight leash.”

  “No worries, Robb. I’ll let you know what happens.” Simon put the phone down, and when he did, the sensation of dread returned, almost as if the simple act of speaking to another human being had held it at bay for those few moments.

  He needed to get some sleep. Preparing for a ritual summoning was a long, hard slog, and the ritual itself would be wearying and difficult. He couldn’t go into it rushed or tired, not if he hoped to live through it.

  And living, really, was the whole point.

  THIRTEEN

  “Molly.” Frank Carrier beckoned from his office. “Pronto, por favor.”

  Molly put her purse and laptop down on her desk and hurried to Frank’s office, raising her eyebrows at Suzi McKellar on the way. Suzi gave a tiny shrug in return. By the time she reached it, he had settled in behind his desk, and was perusing a printout of some kind. “Yes, chief?”

  “What kind of newspaper are we, Molly?” he asked. He didn’t suggest that she sit, so she stayed put.

  A trick question? “Umm…independent? Honest? Struggling?”

  “All of the above. What we aren’t is the kind of paper that jumps on sensationalistic stories for no reason. We leave that to The Times. By the time we hit the streets, the real juicy stuff isn’t even news anymore.”

  “Right.” She began to wonder if she had lost the ability to understand him. More and more, everything he said came couched in riddles.

  “You want to know why I’m telling you things you already know.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I’m telling you this so you know that when I ask you to cover a murder, you’ll know it’s an anomaly.”

  “A murder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why would we cover a murder? What’s special about it?”

  “In a lot of ways, it’s not special at all. A thirty-four-year-old white woman was killed near Sunland Park last night. Strangled and brutalized. TV’s been all over it this morning, and I’m sure The Times will be, too.”

  “Then why us?”

  “I guess just a hunch. From what I’ve seen on TV, and what I believe about The Times, I think they’ll focus on the brutality and the whodunit aspect and ignore the question of who this woman is. Was. Her name was Gretchen Fuchs. She worked at a travel agency—one of the last ones in town, thanks to the Internet—and she didn’t have a lot of money. Middle-class all the way. Contrary to popular opinion, El Paso is one of the safest big cities in the country, so why did violent death choose this person? I think maybe this is an opportunity for us to show how real journalists can approach a story like this and make it mean something, by exploring the victim. Maybe when, or if, there’s a suspect, we can get deeper into his story, too.”

  “I’m still on that flower thing, Frank.”

  “I know. Back-burner that.”

  “Why not give this to Bill?” Bill Dallek covered El Paso politics for the Voice, but his burning interest was crime, particularly those shady areas where crime and politics came together.

  “Bill’s busy. Anyway, it’s not his kind of caper.”

  “And what about Wade’s story?”

  “Did he spill anything earthshattering last night?”

  “No.”

  Frank handed her the paper he’d been looking at. “Then you don’t have anything in the way today. Here are the details. Tell me who this woman was and why she died. If you can tell me what the rest of us can learn from her story, so much the better.”

  “I’ve never covered a murder, Frank.” Amado Suárez Cardona and Jaime Espino covered the Juárez beat and had reported on plenty of murders, but she couldn’t suggest bringing one of them across the line for this. She was on her own.

  “Then you don’t have any bad habits to overcome,” Frank said.

  Molly started for the door, but he stopped her with a word, a look. “So. How was it, anyway? Seeing Wade?”

  “It was…it was fine.” It had been fine. Comfortable. Surprisingly so, she had thought in retrospect, because it had been so long and the circumstances of their reunion were so trying. “Good. We didn’t talk about…you know, what happened to him.”

  “I’m sure he’s talked about that plenty in the last few days. He was probably relieved to have some normal interaction with friends without thinking about it.”

  “That’s how it seemed to me.”

  “And your brother? Byrd?”

  The answer to that one didn’t come as easily. “Still dying,” she said at last, and then she hurried from his office, nearly forgetting to stop at her desk to pick up her purse.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Molly parked in front of a red-brick ranch house on the west side of El Paso, about a mile from the Sunland Park Mall, where she’d had dinner with Wade the night before. Sunland Park was a New Mexico community that jutted undern
eath El Paso, straddling the Rio Grande before the river became the international boundary line, and the Sunland Park Mall was up the road from that, on the Texas side.

  The house was on Palo Alto, between Cabrillo and San Saba. The front yard wasn’t actually xeriscaped, but the lawn sloping toward the street hadn’t been watered in so long that it might as well have been. Yellow police tape had been strung across the door and the driveway, and a bored-looking cop sat in a cruiser on the street. When Molly approached the house, he perked up fast, practically springing from the car and intercepting her.

  “You can’t go in there,” he said. “This is a crime scene.”

  She showed him the plastic press pass that she wore on a lanyard around her neck. “I’m with The Voice,” she said, aware of her statement’s redundancy as he studied the card.

  “Didn’t recognize you, ma’am,” he said. He was a beefy guy, practically still a boy, with a youthful face and short, dark hair. He looked like he’d been shaving for about three weeks and still had problems with it.

  “I’m not usually on this beat,” Molly admitted. “So that’s probably why. Can I take a look inside?”

  “If you want to, I guess,” he said. His name badge said Kozlowski. “But the homicide was out in back.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?” She flipped open a spiral notebook so she could jot down anything that hadn’t been in the police report Frank had given her.

  “She was in her backyard. Someone must have come in through the alley. There was a fence there once, but not anymore, so whoever it was had no problem getting into the yard. The suspect choked her, bashed her head against some concrete steps several times, cracked open her skull. Blood and brains everywhere. The suspect left her there, didn’t go into the house that we can tell. No sign of robbery, sexual assault or anything else.”