South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery)

by Minerva Koenig

  Benny was in his office at the back of the low stone courthouse basement, the cast-iron pipes gurgling overhead as always. He had a folder open on the big oak desk in front of him and was looking at it like he’d just bet the farm on what it contained, and lost.

  “Is that Liz’s report?” I asked, pulling over the wood side chair. The noise it made sliding over the concrete floor caught my ear. Unfamiliar but remembered.

  Benny nodded, pinching his lower lip. He did a little more reading, then closed the folder and creaked back in his chair. “Liz narrowed Orson’s time of death down to roughly four months ago, so he croaked around February 15.”

  “OK,” I said, waiting for him to tell me why that was making him look like he’d just seen a bad movie.

  He closed the folder. “I was kind of hoping Rachael had killed him, just for simplicity’s sake.”

  “You don’t like Mikela Floyd for it?”

  Benny pressed his fingertips into his eye sockets, then ran his hands down his cheeks, looking tired. “I just don’t want to have to try and prove it.”

  He sat there for a minute, looking at the rough plaster ceiling, then sat up and went on. “If we buy her story, Mikela had no motive to kill Orson in February. The May Day protest hadn’t happened yet, so the sisters were still ostensibly law-abiding citizens at that point. But this thing with Jennifer finding out something about the border-fence legislation—that happened before May. There could be a motive in there that’s related to this job in D.C. that Orson took.”

  “What was the job?”

  “Don’t know yet, I’ve got a guy working on that now.”

  Benny looked at me for a minute longer, then said, “Maines wants you to run this case.”

  My chest contracted. A smart remark rose up into my mouth, but I swallowed it.

  “I don’t think it’s a bad idea,” Benny went on. “At this point, you and him know the salient details way better than me, and I don’t have to pay either one of you.”

  I gave him the look that deserved. He got up and shut the door to his office. When he was back in his chair, he leaned forward and said earnestly, “Look, I know what I’ve got out there: high-school graduates who’d be working at Whataburger if they hadn’t watched too many cop shows when they were younger. Nothing wrong with that, they’re good kids, but none of them is a Merit scholar. Forget detective grade.”

  I continued to gaze at him with undisguised skepticism.

  “You know how many murders we had on my beat before you arrived last fall?” he asked me, sitting back. He held up a zero sign. “We’re not equipped to deal with stuff like this unless it’s really simple—and I mean smoking-gun simple. Well, hell, you should know,” he said. “We had our heads up our asses on your case last year, the whole time.”

  I liked him for admitting it, but I’d have liked him better if he’d done it nine months earlier.

  “That ain’t pretty,” he went on, “but it’s the truth. When Maines got his PI license, I saw a light at the end of that tunnel. Well, now that light has gone out.”

  I caught his eye across the desk. There was some pain there, which surprised me. Benny and Maines had always seemed like two tomcats fighting over the same territory. I didn’t figure there was much love lost between them.

  “So, anyway—” He held a flattened hand out toward me.

  “I’m glad you guys have my future all planned,” I said, “but as soon as you get what you need from me to put Mikela Floyd behind bars, I’m out of here.”

  Benny looked at me for a while, then lifted his shoulders and got up. He went to the office door, opened it, and called out into the squad room, “Hey, Stella?”

  The young Latina who usually occupied the dispatch desk appeared in his office doorway.

  “Set up the interview room, will you?” he said. “I want to go ahead and get Julia’s statement.”

  She nodded and disappeared.

  “I’ll talk to Mikela after I’m done with you,” Benny said. “That way I’ll have a better idea of how much bullshit she’s trying to feed me.”

  I was still trying to process my unexpected promotion from bad guy to good guy. I wished I knew what it was that Maines and Benny saw in me. I certainly didn’t see it.

  “When do I get my gun back?” I said.

  “After you get a legal-carry permit.”

  “You seem to forget that I was in WITSEC for a couple of minutes,” I said, “which makes me worry about your memory. I’m not allowed to carry a gun.”

  “Sure you are,” Benny said. “You’re just a plain old American citizen now.”

  “Not according to my record,” I said, remembering the Presidio cop looking me up in her database.

  “Yeah, it’ll show in the secure history, but there’s no endorsements on it now. Your record was wiped clean by your deal with the feds, so you’re free to do anything any other normal noncriminal person can do.” He gave me a look. “That’s not an invitation.”

  Stella poked her head into the doorway. “Ready for you, Chief.”

  We got up and went into the interview room, which was just outside Benny’s office, tucked into the northeast corner of the basement. It was low-tech all the way: no windows, a couple of plastic chairs, and a folding table with a reel-to-reel tape recorder on it. Benny turned this on and gave the date, time, and our names. Then he hitched up his gun belt and sat down.

  “Just go ahead and tell it from the beginning,” he said. “I’ll ask questions if I need to.”

  I got all the way up to Nalin’s capture of Finn before he had one: “Why’d these Kokoi broads grab the monk? He doesn’t seem like a valuable enough target to drag a hundred miles.”

  “Hector said the same thing,” I replied. “I don’t know the answer, either, and I’m kind of getting tired of the question. Why does it matter?”

  “I dunno,” Benny said, pulling at his lower lip. “But the fact that Hector picked up on it too makes me want to look at it a little more closely. Hold that thought.”

  He got up and turned off the recorder, stepped out, and came back in with a laptop computer.

  “Finn what?” he asked me while it booted up.

  “That’s a nickname,” I said. “I don’t know his real one. Hector didn’t, either.”

  Benny made a face. “Well, gimme what you got.”

  I relayed what Finn had told me about his record, his involvement in the death of the Mexican woman, and the approximate dates. Benny tapped as I talked, hit “enter,” and grimaced. “Thirteen hundred hits and change.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot of dead broads,” I murmured.

  Benny nodded, pressing his lips together.

  “He must have a pilot’s license,” I suggested. “And if you can narrow by current residence location, he’s been at the hot springs long enough to have formed some sort of working relationship with Hector.”

  Benny put that into the search filter, which reduced the field to sixteen. He turned the screen toward me, changed the list to include mug shots, and started scrolling.

  Finn was the seventh one down. Real name: Travis Morse. He looked completely different with hair, but those wide owl eyes were unmistakable. Benny clicked on Finn’s file and turned the laptop back toward himself, but I’d seen a disturbing factoid before he did so.

  “Does that say the victim was nine years old?”

  Benny was tapping and clicking, but he flicked an affirmative glance my way. My stomach turned over.

  “Hmm, El Paso,” Benny said, after a minute. “The Floyd girls’ hometown. That’s kind of interesting.”

  He finished reading, then took a deep breath and said, “This fucker is a pedophile, all the way down. A groomer for the trade—procures and traffics, but he’s never been convicted of contact.”

  “He must have good lawyers,” I said.

  Benny shifted his mouth to one side and shrugged. “Meh, some of these guys, they don’t need to actually touch the kids. They get off on being pr
oviders for other ’philes. Some of ’em are voyeurs; some stick to the hands-off thing so they can tell themselves they’re not really doing anything wrong.”

  I felt a little nauseous. Also slightly terrified. My radar had settled somewhere between “OK” and “slightly weird but not dangerous” regarding Finn. I’ve been wrong about people before, but never that wrong. I started to wonder if the dissociative episodes I’d been having were affecting my radar, which did nothing to settle my stomach. I couldn’t imagine navigating reality without my secret weapon. I’d relied on it for so long that life without it would be like starting over from day one.

  “She was working in a whorehouse down there,” Benny was saying, shaking his head. His deep eyes under their heavy brows had lost their sleepy look.

  The remark brought me back into the room. “As a prostitute? The nine-year-old?”

  He nodded.

  I swallowed my nausea and asked, “Was she one of Finn’s—‘products’?”

  “Hard to say. It ain’t like these pendejos keep records. They’re opportunists—they just grab the most easily accessible kid and work with whatever angle they can find. My experience, they have a genius for finding a child’s weak spot, psychologically, and then exploiting it.”

  “When was his last run-in with the law?”

  “That was it. He’s been clean since he got out of prison.” Benny gave me a look. “That don’t mean he’s gone straight. It just means he’s gotten better at not getting caught.”

  I took his point, but couldn’t decide whether Finn being vague about the victim’s age qualified as a lie or not.

  “Pedophiles don’t reform,” Benny continued. “It’s a permanent personality trait. The only way I’ve seen any of ’em stay out of trouble is keeping themselves away from kids entirely.”

  “Shit,” I said, remembering the couple I’d seen coming up the canyon with Hector. The woman had been carrying a baby.

  I stood up, getting my phone out. Benny showed me the palm of one hand. “Hang on there, Trigger. We ain’t done with your statement yet.”

  “Morse has access to a more-or-less steady supply of children with a built-in angle,” I said. “Half an hour could mean the difference to one of them.”

  “What do you mean? Those Buddhist guys don’t take kids. Said so on their website.”

  Benny and Hector had surely gotten reacquainted by phone when Hector had called him to try and track me out in the desert, but I doubted that Hector had told him what he was doing for a living. Benny and I were getting along fine, but he was still a cop, and coyote work was still illegal.

  “Could you just take my word for it?” I said.

  Benny put his head back, regarding me with a conflicted expression. “One of these days I’m gonna strap you in a chair and feed you some sodium pentothal. Then I’m gonna retire on all the dirt you have stored up in there.” He pointed at my head.

  “OK, but until then, I’m still free to make a goddamn private phone call, right?”

  He made a reluctantly affirmative gesture, and I strode out of the interview room and onto the courthouse lawn, where no one could overhear me. I found a phone number for the hot springs and dialed. A young man’s voice answered.

  “I need to get hold of Hector Guerra,” I told him. “It’s kind of an emergency.”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice rising at the end of the word, as if it were a question. Slightly disoriented by the inflection, I said, “Would you have him call me back at this number, as soon as humanly possible?”

  “Yes,” he said again. Same questioning tone.

  “Also, who’s in charge of the Buddhist group there?” I asked him.

  “No one,” the man said, a laugh in his voice, “but we are expecting a new abbot shortly. May I help in the meantime?”

  I hesitated, then said, “There’s a monk with you, a guy who goes by the name of Finn. He’s not telling you the whole truth about his past.”

  “Ah!” he said. The exclamation managed to contain both curiosity and a sort of world-weary humor.

  The man didn’t say anything else, so I went ahead and relayed the facts as I knew them.

  When I’d finished, there was a short silence at the other end of the line before he said, “I thank you for this information. I will contact Hector right now and ask him to call you.”

  He didn’t sound shocked or even very interested. I told him he was welcome, but the line had gone dead. No good-bye or anything.

  Back inside, I picked up where I’d left off with my statement. When I was finished, Benny clicked the recorder off and sat back in the plastic chair with a sigh. I thought he was going to rag me about something, but he said, “I dunno how you did it without getting shot, but nice work.”

  CHAPTER 36

  I made sure my ringer was set as loud as it could go before I headed out, so that I’d hear it when Hector called me back. Maines had been transferred to Memorial Hospital on Tuesday night, and the information desk told me he was in the gym, which occupied one large corner of the first floor. There were maybe a dozen people in it, most of them elderly except for one young amputee and a middle-aged guy who looked like he’d recently been run over by a truck.

  It took me a while to spot Maines because he was practically unrecognizable. They’d cut off his springy strawberry curls, and the short brush of hair that was left was steel gray. He was at a large folding table, in a wheelchair, and he sat rigidly upright with his chin pulled in, his high-shouldered stoop a thing of the past.

  A freckled youngster who looked like he’d been born too recently to have a job was helping Maines assemble some wood blocks on the table in front of them, and stood up when I came over. He introduced himself as Maines’s physical therapist, then stepped over to help the amputee with some weights.

  Maines couldn’t raise his head, so I sat down next to his wheelchair. He had a slight tremor, and when he saw me, he gave a grin that only moved the left side of his face. It wasn’t the paralysis that made my heart ache, it was the grin. Maines wasn’t a smiler.

  “I got her,” I told him.

  It took some doing for him to get turned in my direction so he could look at me.

  “Good,” he said.

  The look in his eye was still Maines, which tempered my sudden urge to put my head down on the arm of his wheelchair and sob. The man was still in there somewhere.

  “What else can I do?” I asked him. “Do you need anything?”

  “An op,” he said, with some difficulty.

  I paused to get hold of my temper. The man had been through enough. He didn’t need me yelling at him.

  “Yeah, Benny told me you wanted me running the case,” I said. “I’ll do what I can while I’m here, but after we get Mikela Floyd sorted out, I’m going back to Mexico.”

  A quizzical look came over him, and I realized he knew nothing of what had happened in the last forty-eight hours.

  “That’s the woman’s name who took over Rachael’s identity,” I told him. “She did it so she could join a Native women’s militia based in Sells. It’s kind of a long story.”

  I didn’t want to weigh him down with too many facts, but he kept looking at me with those water-clear eyes of his, so I gave him a short version.

  “She and her sister killed a cop during a demonstration against the border fence in El Paso last year,” I said. “The sister went missing, turned up dead, nobody went to prison for it. Mikela wanted to join the militia to try and avenge the sister, as well as hide out from the cops.”

  I stopped. Maines had pulled his chin farther in, letting his bushy eyebrows drop.

  “What?” I said.

  He half shook his head, turning it to one side quickly, and gestured at his physical therapist with a hand like a club. “Room, please.”

  The young man came back over to us, and wheeled Maines out into the beige-carpeted hall. I followed them to the cleanest-smelling elevator ever, which took us to the third floor. A gaggle of nurses g
reeted Maines as we passed their station, on our way to his excessively cheerful private room. There, he dismissed the therapist and pointed at the bedside table with his eyes. A business card was lying there. I went over and picked it up.

  “My kid,” he said. “Call her. Has all my notes.”

  I sighed. “For God’s sake, Maines—”

  He was making that jerky head-shake motion again, trying to communicate something. I stopped talking, and he said, “Notes. My notes. About Greenlaw. Political.”

  I took the Naugahyde chair next to the side table so that I could be at his level.

  “Connection,” Maines said. His eyes were alive, radiating the energy his body could no longer express. “That’s it.”

  “What, politics?”

  “Notes,” he said again.

  “I’ll look at them,” I promised reluctantly.

  “More than look,” he said.

  My hackles were starting to get vertical. I tried to keep my voice calm, but I wanted to make sure he understood where I was coming from. “Maines. I hate cops. As a species. I always have. I don’t want to be one.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, but he wobbled one arm over and tapped his fist on the card in my hand. A brief filmstrip of those freckled, broad-palmed hands before I’d destroyed them—passing me things, gripping the steering wheel of the Crown Vic, stroking Steve—played through my memory, making my chest flex painfully again.

  “OK, look, I’ll play ‘op’ for you as long as I’m here,” I said. “But you know my methods, so no crying when you and Benny have to clean up the mess.”

  “New method,” he said, lifting his arms and dropping them into his lap again slowly. “Settle. Think.”

  “If I had a year I might try that,” I said, getting up. “But it’s a lot faster to light a fire and jump whoever runs out of the burning building.”