The plank front door had an external padlock on it. Both men glanced to Joanna, who shrugged. “Do what you must.”
Sighing, Tiffany took a small leather case from his back pocket. “Wish you’d said that back at the chain across the road. It would’ve saved us a walk.”
“I like to walk,” she said distantly, as if her mind was far away.
A lock-pick set was not something a patrolman ordinarily carried, and the man reacted to Michael’s look of surprise by explaining, “More civilized than kicking in doors.”
“Who did your background check?”
The deputy just laughed.
Michael gazed off while Tiffany fiddled with the lock. It had started to sprinkle again, but the overhang of the cliff was their umbrella. To the north, Chimney Peak was veiled by rain that evaporated before hitting the earth, a common occurrence in this country. It acted like a watercolor wash on the granite promontory, making it a mountain in a dream. Michael could see why Kincannon had liked this spot. He glanced over at Joanna. Despite being older and looking a bit haggard today, she was as pretty as Dulcie, yet Michael felt far less attraction. There was nothing vulnerable about Joanna Wallace. Maybe that was it: He found vulnerability sexy. Perhaps Kincannon had as well.
“Voila!” Tiffany threw back the unlocked door just as thunder boomed from the far side of the ridge.
Although the single twenty-by-twenty room was spartan, Michael realized that this is where Kincannon had done most of his living. The June thirtieth issue of the Los Angeles Times was spread open on the wooden table in the galley of a kitchen. His unmade camp cot hugged the sloping back wall of the cave itself, the stone blackened by native fires that had burned hundreds, even thousands of years ago. A cereal bowl had filled with water in the galvanized sheet-metal sink, and every ten seconds or so a droplet plopped from the spigot into it with a sound that was almost lost in the gentle roar of the now steady rain outside. “Where’s the water come from?” he asked Joanna.
“Carl told me that it’s piped from a spring higher on the hill.”
“Have you been here before?”
“Once, long ago.”
“How long ago?”
“At least five years,” she said wearily. “Does it really matter?” But then her look softened as she glanced around the place. “He loves toying with these low-impact technologies—wind and solar for electricity, the self-composting toilet outside, systems that could revolutionize life in the Third World. That’s his aim—to make life better for ordinarily people, lift them out of their misery.” She must’ve said this with more emotion than she’d intended, for she smiled self-consciously. “And in answer to your question—six years.”
“How’s that?”
“I was last here six years ago, New Year’s Eve. It had snowed unexpectedly, so Carl arranged for snowmobiles to bring us up for drinks.”
“Us?”
“Yes, others from the institute, a few members of the board. I don’t remember who all exactly, not off the top of my head. But we thought it was a special treat for him to share this place with us.” Joanna smiled in recollection. “We ran out into the snow at midnight and fired a pistol to bring in the New Year.”
“Dr. Kincannon’s pistol?”
“No, mine actually. He doesn’t care for firearms.”
That made him the exception among people living in the desert. And most, like Joanna, owned a handgun. But what about her boss had made her pack heat to his New Year’s bash?
Michael started a clockwise search around the room, one he hoped would seem aimless to Joanna and perhaps even to Tiffany, for the deputy monitored every move he made, as if increasingly jealous of this out-of-county detective intruding on his turf.
As with Woody Bryant’s trailer, every niche was filled with books and periodicals. Under the cot, Michael found an over-sized National Geographic Atlas of the World with a paperback stuffed between the pages for the Caribbean region, a mass market Spanish-English dictionary.
Michael came full-circle, back to the newspaper that had first grabbed his attention. Before, he’d only glanced at the date, surmising that Kincannon had picked it up at a store in the valley below on the date of its issue and brought it back to his retreat with him. The man had rested his cereal bowl on the last section he probably read, as evidenced by a dried ring of milk that had wrinkled the page. The weather for the nation, plus the continuation of a story about Russia’s aid to Iran’s suspect nuclear industry.
To the left of the one and only door was a pair of well-traveled trunks, the old-fashioned steamer kind large enough to hold the clothes needed for a world cruise but shallow enough to fit under a berth. The lid to one had been propped open with a stick, and inside was a hodgepodge of dusty prospecting tools, hammers and chisels. The second trunk was filled with more of the same.
Joanna was retracing Michael’s circuit around the room—when she stopped at the work station at the foot of the cot. There, taped to the edge of the computer monitor, was a snapshot. It had caught Michael’s attention as well. He’d received a facsimile of Kincannon’s driver’s license from DMV, but this was a more revealing photo of the man’s craggy face—it caught him a moment of happiness instead of bored indifference. And, at first, Michael had believed the shot to be confirmation, how-ever circumstantial, that Dulcie was indeed married to him. But then he’d realized that the attractive brunette at Kincannon’s side was a younger Joanna. He was almost positive that the photograph had been taken at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.
The woman was so visibly moved by this discovery she had to turn away from Michael.
After a moment, he said to Tiffany, “Let’s lock up. Rain seems to be easing off. I want to check the grounds before we head down the hill.”
But the deputy felt like pontificating. “Can you imagine leaving that castle empty down below and hiding in this rat hole?”
“It’s called depth,” Joanna said, acidly.
Chapter Eleven
Jimmy Long Shore turned at the table in the visiting room and asked the detention officer, “McClusky, you mind if Mike and me talk Italian?”
“Name’s not McClusky.” Then the guard yawned and went back to his Shotgun News.
Jimmy faced Michael again across the barrier of the table-top and smiled. It was an old bit between the two brothers taken from scene in The Godfather in which Michael breaks bread with mobster Sollozzo and corrupt cop McClusky in the Italian restaurant, before shooting them both dead. It had a new spin for Jimmy and Michael since their own shooting experience near the reservation eight months ago. “Come siete stati, fratello maggiore?” How have you been, big brother?
“Busy, e voi stessi?” Busy, and yourself?
Jimmy hoisted his palms in an indifferent way that brought their mother back to Michael, painfully. “Cosi come puo essere previsto.” As well as can be expected. Then he went on in Italian, the private speech of their youth, about the two surgeries he’d already had and the third that was scheduled for mid-August. Michael realized something. That bullet, the slug from Jimmy’s own pistol, had left his brother prematurely old. He was talking like an old man. The medical ordeal had dropped a lot of weight off of his six-foot frame; he was swimming in his blue chambray shirt and denim pants. “You look good.”
“A little hungover, but fine…”
They were beginning to talk in circles. Michael hadn’t drunk that much last night but thought maybe the suggestion of a hangover would mask his discomfort. Leaving Indian Wells at two that afternoon, he had decided that it might be weeks or even months before he’d be this near the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi again. Horace Dock’s mention that Jimmy wanted to talk to him had stuck with Michael throughout his trip to Los Angeles and all of today while trekking around Carl Kincannon’s haunts. Joanna Wallace had mentioned nothing more about dinner, so instead of heading for Furnace Creek he’d swung southeast and covered the seventy miles to Tehachapi in less than forty-five minut
es. Visiting hours had ended at a quarter to three, but Michael used his badge to get a few minutes with his brother before supper.
Several seconds passed in which neither brother could think of anything to say. This was their first face-to-face meeting, their first communication of any kind, since that evening on the salt pan. They’d never met in court, a prospect Michael had dreaded. The fleeing and resisting arrest charges against Jimmy had been absorbed into a larger plea bargain to the narcotics indictment, and the Inyo County D.A. had found Michael justified in using lethal force, a decision that didn’t quite fit with the accidental discharge of the weapon.
But that was all the white way of looking at it.
The Shoshone way didn’t find Michael so blameless. It might even hold that Jimmy, wounded in the enforcement of white rules, was due some sort of compensation—in the old days, foodstuffs, rabbit-fur blankets or weapons. When the whites brought horses into the Great Basin, those were preferred for blood payments. But his brother had no use for horses. What he probably needed was a sticky favor. Michael had already tried to do one for his younger brother by keeping the warrant to himself, and that had nearly cost him his job. Or maybe Jimmy had summoned him simply to pile on the guilt.
Michael was getting tired of the suspense. “Horace said you wanted to talk to me,” he said in English, taking control.
Leaning back in his chair, Jimmy gave him a sloe-eyed grin. “What made you think I was trying to escape?”
“Are you talking about the evening you got shot?”
“You know.”
“What’re you talking about? Make sense, dammit.”
“Maybe I was just trying to disappear. Like Mama did. Capite?”
Michael came close to getting up and leaving. But then he reminded himself that, in his own way, Jimmy was a pro. He wouldn’t waste this opportunity to communicate with the outside on some cheap shots.
“The anniversary’s coming up tomorrow,” Jimmy went on, “or had you forgotten?”
“Never,” Michael said.
Strangely, Jimmy nodded as if the answer had satisfied him. “I’ve got a message I need to get out.”
Here it comes, Michael thought. “And who am I supposed to give it to?”
“Non sono sicuro,” Jimmy resumed in Italian, eyeing the guard. I’m not sure. “That’s the most frustrating thing about being locked up inside here. Something that would take me a couple of minutes to check up on the outside...” Again, he gave that fatalistic gesture so reminiscent of their mother. “But here’s my message anyways—don’t fuck with my big brother. He and I have had our differences, but don’t fuck with him or you answer to me.”
Michael went perfectly still while the warning sank in. “I need names, Jimmy. Give me names.”
“You listening? I’m cut off from my contacts, thanks to you. All I know is that a request for bids went out.”
“To do me?” Michael asked incredulously.
“Who else? You think I give a fuck about anybody else? That I’d risk this for a stranger?” Jimmy sat back again. “I have no idea who, if anybody, was awarded the contract.”
“How long ago?”
“I get only old news here. So figure weeks, maybe even a month ago. I’m surprised you’re still walking around, unless somebody wants it that way for time being.”
“What’s this related to?” Michael demanded under his breath.
“You mean like cases? How am I supposed to know what you’re working? Do I look like a cop to you? All I’m saying is trust nobody, man or woman, ‘til we get a fix on this.” With that, he stood and called for the guard. “Get me out of here, McClusky. This guy is breaking my balls.”
* * *
First light found Michael on the edge of the Great Salt Pan. To his back, the Amargosa Range was etched in yellow. Right in front of him, the bed of the ancient lake looked as smooth as porcelain, although it felt like a cat’s tongue to the touch. Yard by yard, the surface got rougher and rougher until finally the rock salt erupted into waist-high pinnacles, left by countless cycles of flooding and evaporation. Somewhere out among them Michael had shot his younger brother. And somewhere farther out there, he believed, his mother remained undiscovered after more than sixteen years.
Most often, Death Valley swallowed its dead whole and never let them go.
In darkness this morning, he had driven down from Furnace Creek and past the sleeping reservation to this spot. Parking, he strolled out through gathering light. He kept parallel to but slightly south of the track he’d taken while pursuing Jimmy. It was also roughly parallel to the path his mother had most likely taken away from their mobile home, the double-wide now occupied by Horace Dock.
Michael, Jimmy, their father called home from the nuclear test site, the tribe, the park service and even the sheriff’s department had made more methodical searches of the playa in the weeks and then months after her disappearance. But finding her was an almost impossible task. First, a cloudburst during the morning darkness of the following day erased the faint tracks she would’ve left on the summer-hard crust. And five hundred yards from his cruiser, Michael came across the second reason. An inconspicuous lump had caught his eye. He pried the object out of the salt with his fingers. It looked like a plaster of paris bird, an object d’art left behind by some eccentric wilderness artist. But once it had been a living bird, a raven —although none of its former blackness survived. Each of its cells had been invaded by and then replaced with salt, leaving a crusty fossil to memorialize the creature that had once flown over the gravel fans and roosted in the mesquite trees. Anything with moisture in it was swiftly mummified in this fashion, sometimes within hours. Only by chance had Michael noticed the lump. Out in the hummocky salt, even larger creatures melted into the pan and became an inseparable part of it, particularly if in the throes of death they crawled into the scant shade of an overhanging slab.
The chances of that happening today were far less. The park service had stepped up its air patrols, particularly in summer, to spot stranded motorists and collapsed hikers on the pan.
Had Nastour Razin’s killer or killers known that and opted to dump his remains underground? Something more to factor into this nebulous equation.
Michael had been twelve years of age and Jimmy ten the morning their mother vanished, this very morning sixteen years ago. At first, he reacted to the disappearance in a predictable way for a child: He believed that he was to blame. A counselor from the Indian Health Service tried to steer him away from that notion, but his guilt only metastasized into false hope. His mother had made it across the playa before the first crippling heat of the morning. Somebody had picked her up hitchhiking on West Side Road, spiriting her off to a more tolerable life. Eventually, when she felt better, she would return for her sons.
When she never materialized, Michael fell into a coldly rational attempt to understand her suicide. Death Valley was not the balmy idyll of a California she had envisioned or been promised by her American husband. Depression ran in her family. While the Shoshone can be warm and hospitable, they can also be clannish, and by all accounts Florence had never taken a liking to Michael’s mother.
He returned the raven to its grave of salt, then stood and scanned the flats again.
There had been only one witness to her final trek, a four-year-old boy, whose belated remark to his elders cleared up a misunderstanding that Michael’s mother had gone into the ranch to stroll up and down the grassy rows of date palms, as she sometimes did to ease her mind. This revelation came at three in the afternoon, when any chance of saving her was gone. A decade later, Michael checked with the Weather Service in Las Vegas for the Furnace Creek observations on that date. The low had been 86 degrees, Fahrenheit, about five degrees less than what it was right now. The high had been 126 degrees. Calm wind becoming south between four and seven miles an hour. The perfect meteorological recipe for turning the old lake bed into a broiler. This was not figurative. One hundred and twenty-five degrees did n
ot begin to describe the worst of it. That heat would get trapped down in the cavities among the hummocks and pinnacles and build to as much as 190 degrees.
They said you could hear your own skin cooking at that temperature.
But before that, heat cramps would paralyze you, and—
hopefully—you lost consciousness as your core fevered up to 108 degrees, the killing point.
The sun now crested the Amargosas and, in that first monstrous dazzle of the day, Michael was with his mother as she died. The light shot through him like the deadly radiation it truly was, but he pivoted and spread his arms in acceptance. Tabe di bellezza terribile. She’d once actually said that, using Tabe, the Shoshone word for sun, instead of il sole. Tabe of the terrible beauty.
Michael lowered his arms.
He was facing Zabriskie Point, already teeming with tour-ists, people from green lands with gray skies, up early to watch the sunrise sear the naked hills with color. Here too, Carl Kincannon and Joanna Wallace had asked a fellow visitor to take a snapshot of their love, while it was still fresh. What feeling had motivated Kincannon to tape this photo to his monitor sometime before he set out for Beatty and possible oblivion? A premonition of death often made a person dwell on past loves.
Michael wouldn’t go to Zabriskie Point today. He had a more pressing destination.
He ran his eyes over the playa once last time, then headed back to his cruiser.
Chapter Twelve
The only thing Carrara, Italy, and Carrara, Nevada, had in common was marble. Unfortunately, Nevada’s stone tended to fracture, and by the 1920s the quarry and the town that served it were abandoned. Michael approached the site on the same road Dulcie Kincannon had used to drive down off Chloride Cliff last Monday afternoon. This gravel byway ran into U.S. Route 95, the major highway between Reno and Las Vegas. Michael assumed that Dulcie had headed left toward Beatty, nine miles to the north, in whose vicinity she lived and worked.
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 9