Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  Catherine had to look away. Finally she turned back to Norman, who had the same transcendent expression on his face, the dark, shadowed eyes looking at something that wasn’t there. “I want an interview with Arcott,” she said.

  Norman snapped his head around and blinked at her, as if he were trying to reconcile whatever images he’d been watching with the woman beside him. He made a rasping sound in his throat. “He doesn’t give press interviews,” he said.

  She looked back. Arcott jogging across the stage, arms still flying overhead. The crowd clapping and shouting. He lowered his arms, made a fist, and jabbed at the air before he ran down the steps. The two white men fell in beside him and in an instant the SUV began moving through the crowd, the doors still closing, Arcott barely visible in the rear seat.

  She had the picture now. Of course Norman—an Arapaho, a brown face—had to be the public spokesperson demanding justice for his people. And Peter Arcott—the white face—had to stay behind the scenes. If the public was to support the tribes—and wasn’t that the idea behind the rally?—it couldn’t look as if the whole scheme had been concocted by a white man at the head of a company that built and operated casinos for Indian tribes.

  “You can arrange an interview.” Catherine watched the crowd flow behind the SUV. It headed toward the parked vehicles, then swerved right, leaving the crowd behind, and tore across the plains. Dust swirled around the tires and rose over the vehicle until it disappeared into a brown cloud.

  Catherine waited for Norman to say something. He remained silent, and she said, “You owe me.” He kept his gaze in the direction of the SUV, and she studied his profile—the hooked nose, the self-contained expression, like a mask pulled over whatever he was thinking. “You know that I’m going to get to the bottom of this story. I’ll find out who’s going to benefit from a casino, the tribes or Arcott and whoever he’s in bed with. I’m going to give the public the kind of information they’ll need to understand what is really going on.”

  Norman took a step forward, then turned toward her. Something sad in his eyes, she thought, something believing and disbelieving at the same time. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.

  Catherine followed him around the stage, where the other reporters encircled him. She kept going, past the dancers posing for the television cameras, past the groups of people moving toward the parked trucks and cars, dragging along folded aluminum chairs. She was behind the steering wheel of the convertible when she spotted Marcus Henning yanking his camera bags out of the rear of the Journal van. Engines sputtered into life around her. She pulled into the haphazard line of vehicles crawling forward, then turned into the row where Henning was parked and stopped next to the van. “You can still get the dancers in their regalia,” she said.

  He slammed the rear door and walked over, shouldering the strap on the black case that hung at his side. He squinted against the sun. “Gonna be any problem with taking their pictures?”

  She wanted to laugh at that. The rally was all about pictures and newspaper articles and television news. “No problem at all,” she said.

  She drove down the row and turned into another line of traffic snaking toward the road. She dug her cell out of her bag with one hand and punched in the number for the office. The receptionist’s voice sounded muffled and far away: Journal. “Hey, it’s me,” Catherine said. “Let me talk to Violet.”

  For a moment, she thought the call had been dropped; the cell felt lifeless in her hand. Then Violet Henderson’s voice: “Catherine? What’s up?”

  “Listen, Violet,” she said. “There’s a 500-acre tract out by the airport, south of I-70.” Then she gave Violet her password and told her the map showing the location was attached to an e-mail from Norman Whitehorse. “Can you get me the name of the owner?”

  “I can try,” Violet said. “Where can I reach you?”

  Catherine let the silence hang between them a moment. God, was there no one she could trust? No one who should know where she was going?

  “You have my cell number,” she said.

  7

  Denver Health was a sprawling redbrick fortress in an old part of the city, traffic rushing past on Speer Boulevard, downtown skyscrapers shimmering in the distance. Catherine rode up the escalator in the cavernous atrium and watched people in the lobby below moving about like animated figures in a slow-motion video game, reluctant to head toward whatever destiny might await them.

  At the top of the escalator, she walked along the balcony, trailing the tips of her fingers on the icy metal railing, still watching the people below. She felt cold, as though she’d stepped into an invisible blizzard. This was a mistake, coming to the hospital. Erik knew her life; he would know she would come to see Maury. He had only to wait for her here—dressed in green scrubs or a white nurse’s uniform or the blue jeans or cutoffs and tee shirts of a hundred visitors. No one would know he was a killer.

  She gripped the railing hard and waited a moment until she felt steadier before she headed down the wide corridor to the intensive care unit. A couple of green-clad staff members spilled out of a door and hurried ahead. Faint antiseptic odors hung in the air. There was no one at the desk next to the metal swinging door that led to wherever they had taken Maury. The waiting room on the right was like a cave excavated into the center of the hospital, lit by the dim flare of reading lamps on the little tables arranged among plastic chairs. An elderly woman with white hair and a gray sweater draped over her shoulders occupied one of the chairs. Two men were seated a few feet away, leaning forward, arms propped on thighs, hands dangling between knees, the perfect picture of despair.

  She spotted Philip sunk into the chair in the shadows of the far corner. His head was tipped back against the wall, his eyes closed behind wireless glasses tilted to one side. She recognized the couple seated next to him, peering down at magazines: Nancy Jameson, Maury’s law partner, and her husband, Don.

  Catherine walked over and was about to take the vacant chair on the other side of Philip when he lurched awake and shook his head. His reddish hair looked dark and matted; there were bluish smudges under his eyes. He fiddled with his glasses until they were straight. “Why are you here?” he said.

  “I love him, too,” she said. She glanced at Nancy and Don, who had closed their magazines and were staring up at her, the stranger crashing a private gathering. They knew what had happened. They had heard the whole story, wrapped up in Philip’s bitterness.

  “Right,” Philip said.

  Catherine perched on the chair. “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself.”

  “You should’ve just called the cops.” Philip gave a grunt of dismay. “You didn’t have to drag Maury into your problems.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry.” On the drive over to the hospital, she’d been thinking about the hike they’d taken a couple of weeks ago, she and Maury and Philip and the couple that hadn’t taken their eyes from her. They’d left their cars in Georgetown, the old mining town with gingerbread houses and wooden sidewalks sprawled in a valley between I-70 and the mountains, and hiked up Argentine Pass through a forest of pines and scrub brush and yellow and lavender wildflowers. Far below, Georgetown looked like a miniature town of dollhouses with sloped roofs and cupolas. Clear Creek shone like a silver ribbon flung along the highway, white caps bursting over the boulders and sparkling in the sun. On the far side of the highway, Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep grazed on the mountain slope.

  Maury had climbed ahead, higher and higher, and she had tried to catch up, lungs bursting. She could hear the others groaning and thrashing below, boots scrunching the brush. At one point, Philip had yelled, “Wait up,” but she and Maury had kept going, gaining altitude on the others. Then she’d tripped on a rock and slid down slope a little ways, finally grabbing hold of a tree limb to stop herself. In an instant, Maury was there, helping her back to her feet, brushing at her backpack and the torn knees of her jeans, pressing a handkerchief against the s
cratches on her arm.

  And now he might be dying. She squeezed her eyes shut a moment against the tears that were starting.

  “They let me see him,” Philip said.

  “They did?” Catherine shifted toward him, ignoring the couple who had gone back to thumbing through the magazines. The sound of turning pages rustled in the quiet. “How is he?”

  Philip shook his head, gulping in air. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his thin neck. “I think he’s going to leave us.”

  “They didn’t say that, did they?” The knot inside her was so tight, she thought she might throw up.

  “They said he’s holding his own. It’s too early to tell.”

  “Why don’t you go home and get some rest,” Catherine said. He looked terrible, shoulders rounded and chest sunken, shirt collar standing out from his neck. He clasped and unclasped his hands as if he weren’t sure what to do with them. “I can stay here.”

  “We didn’t think you’d bother to come back.” He nodded at Nancy and Don, immersed in the magazines. They wanted no part of this, she thought.

  She told him she’d seen Detective Bustamante, and she’d had to go to work. There was a story she was covering.

  Philip stared into the middle of the room. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said, leaving the rest of it hanging in the air—Maury was here because of her, yet she’d had more important things to do than to stay with him.

  “Do you think I can see him?” she said.

  “Up to you,” he said.

  Catherine got to her feet and walked back through the waiting room. A heavyset nurse, encased in white, sat ramrod straight at the desk outside the metal door. Her chest ballooned over the belt cinched at her waist.

  “May I help you?” she said. She had short, dark hair and hooded, gray eyes.

  “I’d like to see Maury Beekner.”

  “Your name?”

  Catherine gave her name and waited as the nurse ran her index finger down a column of names on a sheet of paper. The finger stopped on the last line. She hesitated a moment, then set both hands against the top of the desk and pushed herself to her feet. “I’ll take you to him,” she said, brushing past her and pushing through the metal door.

  Catherine followed the woman into a corridor suffused in white light that glistened on the cream-colored tile floors and bounced off the beige walls. Detective Bustamante worked faster than she’d expected, she thought. She would have to remember to thank him. There were no sounds apart from a faint electronic buzzing noise somewhere and the clack of their footsteps on the hard floor. Past a series of wide doors: one opened into a darkened, vacant room. Past the nurses’ station with TV monitors on the walls between cubicles of file folders. A man with a bald head and the face of a thirty-year-old, wearing the white shirt and pants of a male nurse, rummaged through sheets of paper spread on the counter. He didn’t look up. The smell of hot, sudsy water hung in the air, as if the floors had just been scrubbed.

  The nurse swung left across the corridor, opened a door, and, flattening herself against it, nodded Catherine into a narrow room with a metal-framed bed in the middle and cabinets lining the walls. “Five minutes,” she said.

  Catherine stood at the foot of the bed, unable to take her eyes from the figure covered with white sheets. It couldn’t be Maury. Maury was full of life, hands and arms flailing the air as he talked, feet dancing about as if there weren’t enough space to contain all of him. It was as if Maury had gone somewhere else and left behind a lifeless shape with rubber tubes running into inert arms stretched on top of the sheets, face drained of color, eyelids closed, and lips clamped around a white plastic tube.

  “Oh, God,” she said, making herself move along the side of the bed. She brushed the tips of her fingers on his arm above the tape that held the needle in his vein. It was like touching dried leather. “I’m so sorry, Maury,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She had to look away for a moment, let her eyes rest on a cabinet door, the shiny metal handle. She wanted it to be yesterday again, when everything was normal and ordinary, because, if it could be that time again, she would change things. Everything would be different.

  She looked down at Maury. She felt as if they were underwater, the sheets and tubes and the room blurring together, forming and re-forming into different shapes. She could feel the salty moisture on her cheeks. “Don’t leave us, Maury,” she said, running both palms across her face. Her hands felt cold and wet. So many people had gone, fallen out of her life. Dad, then Lawrence. Oh, Lawrence reappeared now and then. Still he had gone from her. So many things gone: her marriage, the life that she had thought was hers. And something else, something vague that had slipped away long ago and left nothing in its place except a blank longing.

  She bent close to his ear. “Stay, Maury,” she whispered.

  She straightened herself, aware of the white nurse floating past the little window in the door, hovering outside in the corridor. Catherine brushed Maury’s arm again, told him that she loved him—that she and Philip loved him. Then she let herself into the corridor, exchanged a quick glance with the nurse, who darted into Maury’s room, leaving her to retrace her steps through the ICU and out into the waiting room.

  She intended to tell Philip that Maury was still the same, but Philip was asleep in the chair, head propped against the wall. The coldness hit her again—she was shivering, she realized—as she walked down the corridor to the escalator.

  Erik Bolton drummed a pencil on the edge of the steering wheel. He’d folded the section of the Journal around the crossword puzzle and set it over the center of the wheel. Four down, six-letter word, “1B Rockies.” That had stumped him, but he’d learned to go on, work around the blank spaces until the word became obvious. A bit like life, he thought. Adjust, improvise, remain flexible. Sometimes you had to move sideways in order to go forward.

  He’d been parked in the lot next to Denver Health for three hours and sixteen minutes—the branches of an elm offered a little shade in the bloody heat—when she’d finally arrived. Traffic on Speer Boulevard had roared past in a steady stream, the noise punctuated by that of engines throttling down, brakes squealing. He’d finished off a bottle of water and worked three puzzles that he’d saved to hold off the boredom in times such as this. Waiting was part of the job, a minor inconvenience you had to accept because the rest of it was . . . The truth was, the rest of it was damn exciting. It required all of his skills—the ability to read people and understand what made them tick, the expertise to get the most out of a firearm, and, most of all, the timing and physical coordination to handle the job.

  He’d seen the silver convertible the moment it had come off Speer Boulevard and turned into the lot. She had driven past the brown Ford as if it were just another random vehicle taking up space and parked about thirty feet away. Oh, it was beautiful. He’d lifted the corner of the Journal that he’d laid over the Sig on the passenger seat and tried to contain the eagerness welling inside him, the first rush of adrenaline. “Today is a good day to die,” he said out loud. His voice was low, musical, he thought.

  He watched Catherine get out of the convertible and make her way across the lot to the covered walkway that reminded him of the cloister he had once seen at a church in Mexico. She walked fast; she was always in a hurry—he’d learned that about her. It had intrigued him, but he hadn’t been able to figure out the reason, what it was that drove her on. Now that she was going to die, he realized he would probably never understand, and that bothered him a little. He liked to know the victim’s life so well that it gave him the pleasure of thinking that it belonged to him, something that he possessed, before he actually took it.

  He didn’t take his eyes off her until she’d walked through the glass doors at the entrance and disappeared past the brick wall into the swarm of patients and visitors he’d tracked entering the hospital.

  He had a little time. He pulled his cell out of the case on his belt, pressed a key, and listened to the r
hythm of the phone ringing on the kitchen wall. Four rings, damn. It would go to the answering machine, and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to call home again. Then Deborah’s voice, a half second before the answering machine would have picked up.

  “Hey, honey,” she said. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Ran into a little snag yesterday. Meeting had to be postponed.”

  “That means you won’t be home tonight?”

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart. Depends upon how the meeting goes today. I’m waiting for it to get under way now. Lot of money riding on this sale. Wish me luck.”

  “You don’t need luck, Steve. You’re too good for luck. You’ll knock ’em dead.”

  “Right,” he said. He felt a prick of uneasiness at the way her words crowded the truth. “How are the kids?”

  “Took Jamie to the doctor today. Strep throat. He was up crying most of the night. I wish you were here.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Seems better now he’s on the antibiotic. Try to wind things up and come home, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best. I love you, Deborah. Kiss the kids for me.” He pressed the end button and watched the word flash in the readout: Disconnected.

  He had the plan in place. Erik Bolton would kill her when she came back to her car. Erik Bolton. He liked the name. He liked the way it looked on the driver’s license and passport that he’d had his contact in El Paso make before he’d left for Colorado. Erik Bolton, it said on the car rental agreement and the motel registry. Erik Bolton on the credit card he’d applied for and gotten with ease. Of course it was easy; it was perfect. Erik Bolton had lived to be four years old, according to the marker on the gravestone in the big cemetery in Dallas, which meant he had no debts, no bad credit history. But—God love the little fellow—his parents had gotten him a social security number, and he thanked the parents for that, even if the little fellow hadn’t gotten around to voicing his gratitude. After he’d obtained a copy of the birth certificate from the Texas Department of Vital Statistics, it had been easy to get the social security number. The little fellow’s life was a blank sheet, which he— the new Erik Bolton—intended to fill in. Give the poor kid a life, you might say, filled with adventure, at least for a few months.