Neffa finally obeyed the hairy eyeball her dad had been directing her way, and I put the brain on hold. I don’t like to think while I eat.
When I’d finished my sumptuous repast, I went back to the bar and updated my timeline:
May 1—Demonstration El Paso, Floyd sisters kill cop
Summer (date?)—Orson leaves for D.C. job
Jun 10—Jenny Floyd dead (find newspaper article)
Jun?—Mikela starts job at clinic
Dec 5—Rachael to clinic
Dec 10—Rachael dead
date?—Mikela plastic surgery
ca. Feb 15—Orson dead
Feb 13—Car at Ranch
Thinking about the previous winter took me back to the events immediately following Connie’s arrest and trial: the interminable wait while the lawyers played chicken with each other; moving out of my apartment and into Hector’s place when it became apparent he wasn’t coming home anytime soon; dealing with Tova and all the red tape that went with buying real estate from a convicted felon.
That made me remember that I’d taken the FOR SALE sign down the day Connie had accepted my offer, November 4. It was possible that what Neffa had seen was just a couple of local kids pulling off the road to get stoned, but turning into a driveway at night and not backing right out again is likely to get you shot at, around here. The visitor must have known the house was vacant or they wouldn’t have taken the risk. How did they know, if the sign was down? It must have been someone who knew the house had been for sale but wasn’t occupied yet. That probably ruled out strangers to Azula.
Unfortunately, it didn’t rule out much else. In a town this size, everybody knew everybody’s business. All the locals had probably heard I’d bought the place, and would know that I hadn’t moved in yet. That narrowed my field of suspects down to 5,412, give or take whoever had moved in or out since I’d checked the city population stats.
Stumped about where to go next, I got up and walked around the apartment, trying to think, but the brain wouldn’t cooperate. I don’t know what made Maines think I’d be able to solve his case by sitting down and meditating on it. If he wanted it solved that way, he should have hired someone else.
CHAPTER 40
It was slightly cooler in Gatesville; some kind of weather system coming in off the gulf. Even inside, the air felt like moist slices of bread sticking to my skin.
They put me in a private visitor’s room this time, and I had to wait five or ten minutes for them to fetch Connie. When she appeared, it looked like they’d woken her up from a nap. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and her hair was wilder than usual.
“Sorry for the short notice,” I said as she sat down.
She rubbed her eyes and frowned at me. I had my notepad with me and had sketched out a rough floor plan of the house, which I showed her now.
“This chase,” I said, pointing. “Did it have a hole in the floor above it when you owned the house?”
“Yeah,” Connie said. “The old furnace was in there. There was a—a thing, a thicker place in the floor, above the heater—”
“A plenum,” I prompted.
“Yeah, where the heat would go up into it and then through a grille in the floor above. Dad took the grille out after the heater was removed.”
“Did your dad put wood down to cover the hole afterwards?”
Connie nodded. “I was going to have it fixed to match the rest of the floor but I never got around to it.”
“When did the linoleum go in?”
“Some renters installed it when Dad was still alive,” she replied, her expression growing increasingly curious. “Is that where you found the body?”
I nodded. “I know that you just let people go out and look at the house on their own and that you left it unlocked so anyone could have gone in there and poked around, but who else besides me looked at it? Do you remember?”
She took a breath and gazed over my head. “Let’s see.… Well, Lavon, and Charlie Eames, who used to run the salon … Mr. Hu from the corner store, Missy Black, she works for the county clerk.…” Connie went on to name about a dozen more people I’d never heard of, then stopped. “I think that’s about it.”
I was writing the names down. “Did any of them specifically notice the hole in the floor, that you know of?”
Connie shook her head. “Like you said, I just let people go out there on their own, whenever.”
The high window in the glazed-tile wall behind her was open a crack, letting in the steamy weather. I gazed at the sky through it, thinking about what to ask next.
Finally, deciding that two noses were better than one, especially since I suspected that mine wasn’t working so well at the moment, I leaned forward and folded my hands on the table.
“OK, you know that thing we talked about before? About how you and I are alike, the whole kicked-dog thing?”
Connie didn’t reply, but her expression was affirmative.
“I’m going to ask you to rely on that thing to answer this question,” I said. “Rely on that instinct.”
“OK,” she said.
“Were any of the people who looked at the house the type who would kill somebody?”
“Ohhh.…” she breathed, her head tilting back. She sat frozen like that for a few seconds, then said, “You know, this is probably going to strike you strangely, but I’ve always felt like there was a lot more going on with Neffa Roberts than most people think.”
She was right; it did strike me strangely. “Neffa? Get real.”
“No, I’m serious. She has a certain lack of affect that I see a lot in people with Axis two disorders.”
“Axis?—”
“Axis two. Things like bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia. Which don’t necessarily predispose people to homicide, you understand. Just … I remember noticing it one day and thinking she’d make an interesting study subject.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “Are you on this Axis two?”
Connie smiled in her calm, sweet way. “No, I’m just a garden-variety psychopath, which isn’t really a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s more just sort of a handy catchall descriptor for a cluster of behavioral symptoms that don’t fit anywhere else.”
I pulled myself back to the subject at hand. “Why would Neffa want to kill Orson?”
“I’m not saying Neffa in particular. Just that of the people who’ve been in that house, she’s the one I could see killing somebody.”
“She did mention that he pinched her ass black-and-blue when he came into the cafe, but that doesn’t seem like grounds for murder.”
“Orson wasn’t well liked around town,” Connie said, tilting her head to one side. “Figuratively speaking, he pinched everyone’s ass black-and-blue. Perhaps that public behavior was the tip of a private iceberg.”
I was thinking to myself that if Neffa was my killer, her report of the car at the house might be a deviously placed red herring. She didn’t seem capable of that kind of subterfuge, but that’s why I’d come out here.
As if reading my mind, Connie said, “You drove up just to ask me that?”
“You’re the only other person I know with a radar like mine, and I’m not sure mine is trustworthy right now.” Connie’s face went quizzical, and I said, “I thought you might be able to give me some professional advice, as well.”
“In my capacity as a former psychiatrist-in-training, imprisoned psycho killer, or something else?”
It always surprised me when Connie poked fun at herself like that; she’d been so pin-eyed scary after trying to kill me that I’d forgotten how much I’d originally liked her on sight, and part of that had been her self-effacing wit. There’s a lesson somewhere in the fact that the person I thought the most sane of my social sphere in Azula had turned out to actually be the craziest.
“Maybe all of the above,” I said. I gave a few seconds’ thought to how much I wanted to tell her, then said, “That remark you made last time I was out here, about me not knowing myse
lf. Someone else said almost exactly the same thing to me a couple of days ago. Do you think there’s a relationship between that—whatever the hell you meant by it, and whatever the hell he did—and this dissociation thing that’s been going on with me lately?”
Connie’s face assumed the animated expression it always did when dealing with her favorite subject. “Well, all ‘insanity’”—she made air quotes around the word—“is a bid by the unconscious to make itself known to the conscious mind. In that sense, having less self-knowledge—that is, knowing less about where your emotional and psychological weak spots are—could certainly make you more susceptible to things like dissociation.”
“Weak spots,” I snorted.
Connie smiled at me again. “That’s what I meant about a lack of self-knowledge.”
“I’m not saying I don’t have them, but if you’d lived my life, you’d understand why they’re not up here floating around on the surface.”
“That’s how things like that cause trouble. When you get too good at repressing things, you stop recognizing them as part of you when they break through. That’s what causes that feeling of ‘otherness’ that’s so typical of dissociation.”
“It’s not ‘otherness,’” I said. “I go completely away.”
Connie’s interested expression intensified. “How so?”
“I’ll be in one place in a room and then the next thing I know, I’ll be on the other side of it. Like, bam.”
Connie’s face went from interested to concerned. “As if no time has passed?”
I nodded, and she crossed her arms, bringing one hand up to her chin. She sat like that for a few minutes, thinking, then said, “Have you seen a psychiatrist yet?”
“No. Liz Harman says she knows someone, but—” I lifted my shoulders, looking away.
“Certainly see the colleague,” Connie said quickly.
I looked back at her.
“Dr. Harman is a competent general practitioner,” she explained, seeing my expression, “but I wouldn’t see her for a mental health issue. She has a pronounced ideological bias in that area.”
“Ya think?” I laughed.
Connie smiled. “Just making sure you were aware.”
It felt a little theatrical to me and I wondered if Liz had diagnosed her prior to the breakdown last year, producing this possible crop of sour grapes.
“So why are you asking these sleuthlike questions about Orson?” Connie asked, deftly changing the subject. “Has Maines finally prevailed upon you to come over to the dark side?”
“Sort of, temporarily,” I allowed. “All things considered, I kind of feel like I owe him.”
Connie quirked at me again, and I realized that she knew nothing of what had happened in the last few days. I gave her the Reader’s Digest, watching her face grow solemn as I spoke.
When I’d finished, she slid her forearms across the table and put her small, cool hands on top of mine. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were full of feeling.
My phone rang on the drive back to Azula; her ears must have been burning, because it was Liz Harman, telling me she wanted to do a physical before she turned me over to her head-shrinking friend. We made an appointment for the next day.
CHAPTER 41
Something was going on at the courthouse when I woke up the next morning. Two big black SUVs with tinted windows were parked at the curb in the rear, and a caricature of an FBI agent stood outside one of them. Dark suit, Ray-Bans, buzz cut, earpiece, the whole nine yards.
I turned off the water I’d put on to boil for tea, and walked over to see what was happening. As I came around the building on the narrow concrete sidewalk, the door to the police station swung open, and two more feebs came out, with Mikela between them. The guy on the left threw up an arm. “Step back, ma’am.”
“If you’re going to call me ma’am, you might want to put a ‘please’ in there somewhere,” I replied, staying where I was.
One thing that’s always puzzled me about G-men is their lack of humor. Like the world’s going to come to an end if they crack a smile. This guy was no different; he gave me the blue steel and clenched up.
“I said, step back!”
Mikela’s face, beyond his shoulder, was calm. She almost looked happy. I got out of their way and watched them put her into one of the SUVs. Benny came out.
“What the hell?” I said to him. “I thought they blew you off.”
“Couldn’t be bothered when I really needed ’em, but they sure got the lead out when her arrest hit the database,” he said, looking pissed off. “Bet you a hundred dollars none of us gets credit for picking her up.”
“Did you ever get any kind of statement from her?”
“Yeah, after the lawyer showed,” Benny said, shooting a disgusted look at the SUVs as they pulled away. “But they took the goddamn tape.”
“You talk, I’ll write,” I said, moving toward the station door.
Benny had good recall, and the broad outlines of Mikela’s statement didn’t differ much from what she’d told me on the flight down. However, she’d filled in some details that made Benny a lot happier about what he had to prove.
She’d started work at the clinic on June 11, the day after reportedly seeing the newspaper article about Jennifer’s death, and had gone under Darling’s knife on December 13, the day after Rachael died. Darling had watched her like a hawk the entire time, right up until the day Maines and I had run into her on the street. Mikela said that Darling would vouch for the fact that she’d never been gone overnight, which would have been more or less necessary, given the time required to get to Azula, shoot Orson, dig out the bullets, drag his body to the Ranch, hide it in my floor, clean up the kill site, and then get back to Ojinaga. I wasn’t sure how much Darling’s word was worth, but Benny pointed out that giving someone an anonymous new face was an entirely different animal than felony identity theft. Darling was strictly a misdemeanor and malpractice man. He wasn’t going to risk major prison time for some woman he didn’t know from Adam.
“Mikela mentioned Rachael’s restraining order against Orson when we found her in Ojinaga,” I told Benny. “Did she go into any specifics?”
“No, but I was just fixing to look up the arresting officer’s report,” Benny said, dragging over his laptop, which had been sitting on the corner of the big desk.
“While you’re at it, will you see if there’s anything in your supercop database there about Jennifer Floyd? I can’t find the newspaper article that Mikela says she saw.”
Benny nodded without looking at me, tapping on the laptop keyboard. After a minute he gave a disgusted snort and turned the computer screen toward me so I could see the report. A crime-scene photo showed Rachael’s newish little red Toyota with the words “fat cunt” scratched across the driver’s-side door.
“Nice,” I said.
“‘Ridiculous’ is more the word for it,” Benny said, shaking his head. He went back to tapping.
“OK, Jennifer Floyd,” he said, after what seemed like a long time. “There’s a Mexican police report for June 8—the body they think might be Jennifer was found with seven others. It only made one paper, a local Socialist rag that follows the feminicidio thing, and they featured a picture because she didn’t spec up with the other bodies.”
“What was the difference? I mean, besides Jennifer being white.”
Benny read his screen for a minute, then said, “The other seven were classic feminicidio victims: no hair dye, no makeup, petite and slim with long dark hair. Jenny was blonde, taller, and kind of…”
His eyes wandered in my direction. I raised an eyebrow. He cleared his throat and went on. “None of the rest of the usual-victim profile fits Jennifer, either—she was thirty-six, educated, divorced. The feminicidios all tend to be country girls—single working mothers between sixteen and twenty-five.”
“That’s a pretty specific demographic,” I remarked.
Benny nodded solemnly. “And they are all, every
single one of them, maquiladora workers.”
“Did they work in the same one? Or factories owned by the same company? Anything like that?”
“No. Which drives me—and every other cop who sees this stuff—nuts.” Benny adjusted his belt, annoyed. “I mean, with a victim profile that specific, anybody with half a brain should be able to find a connection.”
It was making my brain itch, too, but probably for different reasons. “How’d Jennifer die?”
“Lead poisoning. Same garden-variety rounds as the cop they killed: Parabellum .38s.”
I put my pen down and sat back, thinking.
After a while, Benny made a “come on” gesture at me, and I said, “Baxter’s from El Paso and supports the border fence. He’s got to be the guy that Jennifer found the dirt on.”
“Why?” Benny said.
“Because he’s connected to this whole thing, through Orson.”
Benny snorted a short laugh. “You’re doing that backwards. You don’t decide who did what and then massage the evidence into place. You follow the evidence to the answer.”
“It’s a connection,” I insisted.
“No, it’s not. It’s a desperate investigator throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.”
“I’m not an investigator,” I shot back, my temper finally going nuclear, “and if you and Maines don’t like the way I do your jobs for you, you can fuck right the hell off.”
All this did to Benny was make him lean back and cross his legs, lacing his fingers behind his hedgehog head.
“You went after Mikela Floyd like a bulldog,” he said. “You’d have done it even if I’d said no.”
“So what?”
“So you are an investigator. Whether you like it or not, you’ve got the instinct,” he said.
“I’ve got the instinct to make people pay when they cross my personal lines in the sand. That’s not exactly what cops are supposed to do.”
South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) Page 19