“What’s going on, Don?” The sandy-haired man at the sizzling barbecue was pasty skinned—a complete contrast to Farley’s sunburn-like complexion. “Who’s this?”
”This is Dr Heston, Gordon. I told you about her. We’re going to have a little talk.”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard all about you.” Gordon’s nose twitched, as if it itched. He tittered like a nervous geek clumsy around women and waved a barbecue utensil. “Anything I can do?”
“Just keep an eye on those steaks and let me be, Gordon.” After taking a seat on a low, stone wall, Farley sighed. “I don’t know how it happened,” he said. Clay pots with dead chrysanthemums were on the wall, just to his left. He began to pick off bits of the spent foliage and drop it on top of broken pieces of terracotta on the ground beneath their feet.
“Sometimes things just happen.” Willa sat beside him. “I’m flattered. You’re a very sweet man and you’d make some woman very happy with that kind of attention. I’m sorry I’m not interested, and I’m sorry Agent Mitchell embarrassed you. I wanted to handle this so differently.”
Browned bits of mums sprinkled the tips of Farley’s shoes. “I would have done this all differently. I was ready to tell you, I wanted to do it right, but Gordon was worried about Dad. Dad does so much better at home than when he was at the Aspen Ridge Lodge. We argued about it. I thought he would be better at home. We had Jay, but Gordon didn’t see it that way.”
“Jay, would that be Jae Sun Carl, the nurse who looks after your dad?”
“Yeah. Jae Sun. Dad calls him Jay. Treats him like a son.” Farley sighed again, sadly, with a heavy tone of resignation. “It never mattered to him. It never matter to me that he was my stepdad. Not to me, not to him. He’s been a real father to me as much as he is to Gordon. I would take care of him. I’d take care of them both.” Farley’s sad, watery eyes lifted from the chrysanthemums to traverse her face. He said, “It’s not that I think the color isn’t attractive on you, but I prefer your hair as it was. It was so striking.” His gaze dropped back to the flowers. “I really don’t know how it happened, and when it did, it happened so fast. It sort of took my breath away.”
Willa thought of John, of the way he’d taken her breath away, and she sighed as well, with the same doleful resignation as Farley’s. “It’s funny. You hear people say that all the time, and it’s not until you experience a moment where something, or someone, surprises you and truly draws your breath right out of you.”
“I didn’t know what to do.” Farley hugged the pot. “It’s hard, you know, juggling so much, trying to look after my dad, and this thing with you. It was such a surprise. It was all such a surprise.” He glanced up at his brother. “Gordon didn’t leave me much choice. Did you Gordon?”
Gordon’s narrow shoulders twitched along with his nose. “You’re always so over-the-top. You think it’s all about big, grand gestures, when simple things always work best.”
“I’m over the top?”
“Well, what would you have done differently, Don?” Gordon turned over two T-bones with a pronged instrument, nose twitching a few times.
“I would have talked more, found out more. Waited a little. Been honest.”
“Sometimes talking makes it all more confusing.” Gordon wandered over and paused in front of his brother. “You have to act.”
Willa wanted to move beyond discussing Farley’s crush on her, which was getting rather awkward, especially since Gordon offered his opinion and made the situation more uncomfortable than it had to be. She circumnavigated the unwieldiness of the moment and brought the discussion back to a subject that had an ending more tragic than unrequited love. “Dr Farley, Mr Ivers, did Mr Carl ever ask you for money?”
”Jay asked us both,” Gordon said, taking the pot from Farley’s hands, tittering like a shy little girl, “but Don believes it had nothing to do with Christmas cards and the laptop at all.”
“It was about his girlfriend, not about Christmas cards or my laptop. You put me where I am now! You overreacted!”
“Gentlemen, would you mind if we—”
“Actually, Don,” Gordon sniffed and twitched, “you said I panicked. I resent that.”
“I always look out for you, Gordon. I look out for you and for Dad, and if you’d just taken a deep breath—”
“I was looking out for you, Don! For once, you needed me!”
“But look at how it’s turned out, look how it’s such a disaster!” Farley clambered to his feet. “It’s humiliating! Look at the position you put me in!”
Nose twitching, Gordon Ivers wheezed beneath his older, taller brother’s glare.
Willa perused the broken bits of terracotta at her feet. Then she cleared her throat. “I apologize if I’ve made this so difficult, so awkward.” She reached out and laid a reassuring hand on Farley’s arm. “Sir, I need you to come inside with me and tell your fath—”
Something exploded beside her left ear and she was falling, rolling, thumping into rocks. She saw flashes of sky blue, patches of snow, brown grass, and the deep green of piñon until she struck something solid and made of metal. There was dirt in her mouth, her head was wet and on fire.
Spitting, hands shaking, she grabbed hold of a fencepost and pulled herself up, slowly. Head screaming, Willa looked up a steep slope, back to the stone wall and the rear of Farley’s house. She just caught sight of Gordon as he ran inside. Farley took off to the right and sprinted through the neighbor’s backyard. He ran remarkably fast for a man so big.
21
The day he and Ishimaru had been here before, Benny had been eating his lunch in the Miami Vice kitchen. This time he sat in a recliner in the living room. He had a paper napkin on his lap and a dishtowel tucked into his pale yellow golf shirt, which was good, considering half the contents of his peanut butter and jelly sandwich had oozed out of the wheat bread and onto the green-striped dishtowel. Oil and purple jelly had begun to bleed through. The dog, an Australian Blue Heeler, sat at the elderly man’s feet and gobbled any crumb that fell his way.
“Sorry, Mr Ivers, it’s not Jay. It’s Detective Tilbrook and Officer Ishimaru.”
“I thought he was Jay. He looks a little like Jay. Were you here the other day?”
“Yes, sir.” Ishimaru waved.
“Those other two over there, are they cops too?”
“More or less.”
“Tilbrook … Tilbrook … Ah! I read about you in The Monitor. You’re the guy they want to throw out of the police department for excessive force. I say, do what you gotta do to get the job done. You’re here about the car vandalism, aren’t you? Kid next door had something stolen out of their station wagon and—” He was interrupted by the dog’s sudden bark. “Hush up, Lawrence, it’s only Gordon.” Benny twisted and waved. “What did you think of Donnie’s girlfriend, Gord-o?”
Turning at the same time, Ishimaru and John watched the pale, sandy-haired man they’d frightened the other day speed towards the foyer. “I’m just going to the store, Dad. Keep an eye on Lawrence.” He brushed past Mitchell and Adams and let the front door slam behind him.
Benny shook his head. “What do you bet he burned the steak again? His brother hates when anything is well-done. They probably had a big fight about it. Those boys … So, Officer, uh, Ishihara is it?”
“Ishimaru,” he said.
“Officer, is your work ever like the crime stuff you see on Cops? All those drugged up kids and hookers?”
“Sometimes.”
“Are people really that stupid?”
“Yes,” Willa rasped from the doorway of the dining room. “People are all kinds of stupid. Which way did Gordon go?”
All eyes swiveled her way, except for Benny’s. He’s started telling Ishimaru why Law & Order was better than Law & Order SVU.
Amid ‘Jesus Christ, Willa’ and ‘Agent Heston are you okay,’ John moved. He snatched the dishtowel from Benny’s chest and pressed it to the bleeding gash on Willa’s head. “Anything feel broke
n, Willa? You light headed? Are you going to be sick?” he said, his face grave. Gently, he pushed sticky, bloody hair from her cheek. Their eyes locked for a moment. Then she looked off towards Mitchell and Adams.
Rather than sag against him, like she wanted to, Willa waved John and the other approaching men away. “I’m okay. I’m okay. Crap, what the hell is all over this thing?” She jerked the towel from hair that was now pastel purple streaked with dirt, scarlet, and green pine needles. She sniffed the dishcloth. “Peanut butter and jelly,” she muttered and pressed the fabric back to her head. “It’s Farley. Farley’s run off through the neighbor’s yard, north. He’s not going to get far. Which way did Gordon go?”
“Gordon?” Benny said, pausing in the middle of his recitation of the Law & Order opening. “You want Gordon? He went to the store.”
“Right.” Willa gave an absurd laugh and turned to her FBI colleagues. “Before Gordon hit me, Farley said something about his laptop and Sunny. Call Kinsale. Have him find out if Farley was issued a laptop from the Lab and the level of his security clearance. Then call Dokowski and have him start running a trace on Farley’s office computer. It’s not Grafton or Buck or Chandra. It’s Farley and his brother. Go. Go.”
Mitchell hesitated for a second and gave John a solid scowl. “You take care of her, Detective,” he said and shot out the front door a step or two behind Adams.
John called in the incident. Four more patrol officers and Cuthbert, the Field Deputy Medical Investigator, would arrive in five to six minutes. He glanced back at Ishimaru and the older man, who was happily engrossed in a chat about TV police shows. Benny’s shirt was spotted with tan smears and purple splotches. The dog was licking blobs from the carpet. John shifted his gaze to Willa, the towel at her head, and back to Benny and the dog and the goop on the floor. The goop turned into funny little doodles that took shape and became a Korean tattoo on skin that had been smeared with gooey, sticky evidence, evidence that had been everywhere, from victim to Willa. It had been on everything. It had been right in front of him, over and over again. How had he not seen it? “The fucking peanut butter,” he said. “Farley killed Sunny Carl.”
The rag came away from her head. “Nope. I’m pretty sure it was Gordon. Farley only tidied it up. But that’s not all he did. Your investigation is my investigation. Farley was headed towards Deer Trap Mesa. Let’s go get him.”
“I don’t think so. A: you’re injured, and B: no way in hell are you running across the top of a mesa in shoes like that.” He pointed to her scuffed, patent leather Mary-Jane heels. “Additional support will be here soon. You wait for them. Have that wound looked after. Ishimaru and I will go after Farley.”
“I don’t think so. A: it’s stopped bleeding. Mostly. And B: I have other footwear in the car.” Willa pulled car keys from her pocket. She’d landed on them after Gordon Ivers had hit her with a potted dead chrysanthemum and knocked her off the wall. She felt the bruise on her hip as she aimed for the direction of the front door.
His hand was on her elbow. “C: you’re not carrying a weapon.”
“D: you are.” She called out past his shoulder, “Excuse me, Officer Ishimaru?”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“Please stay with Mr Ivers. He seems to like you.” She shoved the bloody, peanut buttery dishcloth into the pocket of her stained jacket and turned back to John. “Come on, Detective Tilbrook. Let’s go run over big rocks. It’ll be just like North by Northwest.”
“Except, you’re not Cary Grant.”
“And you’re not Eva Marie Saint, but I’m sure you do a great impression of her.”
Outside, a few minutes later, feet clad in the hot pink canvas Converse, the ones she’d kept in the small bag she transferred to Alicia’s car, she and John stood at the tip of the trailhead on Deer Trap Mesa. The wind had picked up. A serious chill had crept into the once sunny day. The air smelled like snow. “Farley’s not going to get very far,” she said.
“There are three ways he could have gone. Around towards Rendija Canyon,” John tipped his head towards the left, “straight out the mesa, or to the right, but those last two ways mean he would have had to climb down the stone staircase and back up the other side. Or he could have tried to go all the way down to the bottom of Barrancas or Rendija Canyon, which would really slow him down. You right to do some climbing?”
She started jogging straight ahead. “I’m not concussed, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He fell into step beside her, over the flat tuff, around the higher and lower and pot-holed surface of the mesa top. “You look like something out of a Zombie movie, only without brains.”
She felt like a zombie as she lurched around a clump of chamisa.
There was a dark squall in the east towards Santa Fe. Sunlight streamed down into the valley where the Rio Grande ran, the heavy grey-blue clouds a contrast against a backdrop of reddish mesa walls and the rest of the bright blue sky. “We’re going to get a few inches tonight,” John said.
Willa exhaled sharply. “Why would you think that?”
“The cloud build-up over the Sangre De Cristos and north towards Truchas.”
“I meant why would you think I’d slept with Dominic.”
“Oh. That.”
“Why the hell did you think that? Why did you think that, automatically?”
“Maybe because you said grief can make a person act in ways they usually wouldn’t. Maybe because you didn’t want to talk about your number three. Maybe because Lesley burst in screaming for you to stay away from her husband. After that, it was a logical connection to make. In my mind, Dominic was your number three. Who’s your number three, Willa?”
“No one you know. And I thought you were mad.”
“I am mad.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?”
“You started it.”
“I did not, and you’re about to step in coyote poop.”
John hopped left and barely cleared a little mound of crap. “Do you love me, Willa?”
She said nothing and picked up her pace, jogging a little faster towards the end of the mesa, where ancient steps had been hand-hewn from the soft tuff. It would be a short, steep climb down to a flat gap between both sides of the mesa. Animals crossed between two canyons there ,and early man had carved out a small game pit in the level passage. Willa felt like an unfortunate deer caught in that animal trap. She had nowhere to hide, but she was done talking. She was far enough ahead of him now. In another two minutes, she’d be down beside the old pit and up the staircase on the other side. If she were fast enough, and lucky, John would never see her cry.
“It’s a simple question, Willa. Do you love me?” he said, right behind her.
“Yes, dammit! I love you!” she spat out the words without turning around and hurried to scuttle down the narrow stone rungs. “You want to know how miserable that makes me? Do you want to know how shitty I feel that I’m in love with a man who’s blinded by jealousy, a man who can’t trust me any more than I can trust him? So yeah, John, I love you. Is that what you want to hear?”
He caught her wrist and hauled her up and backwards, turning her to face him. Tears had made little trails on her bloodstained cheeks. “That’s exactly what I want to hear!”
She sniffled. “I never thought you’d be possessive or vindictive or into torture, but if it works for you, if knowing that makes you feel better, then have at it,” she said, shuddering. “I deserve it.”
“Yeah. Maybe you do. And maybe I’m not such a nice guy after all.”
She slipped free from his grasp and a keening sob cut through her next sniffle. When the yowl came again they both realized it had come from the animal trap carved into the rock about twelve feet below where they stood.
Willa swiped her nose on her blood-crusted sleeve. Moving with John, they peered over the side of the steep, stone stairs, down to the flat, natural crossing and the animal trap carved into the rock. Shadowed from sunlight, patche
s of snow and ice sat upon ground littered with pine needles. The pit was half-hidden by a clump of chamisa, a tall ponderosa, and a fat tree trunk that had fallen years before.
“Oh, Dr Heston,” Donald Farley’s big red face gawped back from the trap, “thank God you’re all right!” Like Willa, he had a cut on his head. Unlike Willa, he’d broken his nose and it appeared he’d dislocated his left shoulder. There was a small twig sticking out of his chin. “It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me! I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Gordon panicked and hit him. I tired to help, but it was too late. I tried to help. Get me out of here. Please. Get me out of here!”
With an irritated shake of his head, John sighed. “I like this suit. And now I’m going to ruin it. You watch.” The steep angle necessitated using one’s hands to descend the awkward, narrow steps. He climbed down the wet and dusty rock staircase, toward the trap that held Farley, getting whitish dust on his sleeves and the seat of his trousers. Willa followed him, the powdery dirt dulling the bloodstains on her jacket.
The pit wasn’t very deep. It would have been easy to climb out of, but the edges were coated with ice and that, combined with Farley’s injuries, made it impossible for him to scale unassisted. John removed his belt. “My shoulder’s not strong enough to take the weight. I’ll need your help on this, Willa,” he said and lowered the makeshift rope into the trap. She shifted into place at the edge to assist him.
Farley began a howling mantra of “Please get me outta here, please get me outta here, please get me outta here…”
“Dr Farley!” Willa shouted over his yowl. “Dr Farley, look at me. Donald, look at me!”
Farley stopped for a moment and gazed up.
“Take a deep breath and calm down. Relax. Relax. We’ll get you out.”
For Your Eyes Only Page 34