Shadowfires Page 10

  Now, after arriving with the technicians from the Scientific Investigation Division more than an hour ago, and after fruitlessly questioning Percy while the SID men strung their cables and switched on their lights, Lieutenant Verdad saw another rat explode in panic from the garbage as the coroner’s men, having overseen the extensive photographing of the corpse in situ, began to haul the dead woman out of the dumpster. Pelt matted with filth, tail long and pink and moist, the disgusting rodent scurried along the wall of the building toward the mouth of the alley. Julio required every bit of his self-control to keep from drawing his gun and firing wildly at the creature. It dashed to a storm drain with a broken grating and vanished into the depths.

  Julio hated rats. The mere sight of a rat robbed him of the self-image he had painstakingly constructed during more than nineteen years as an American citizen and police officer. When he glimpsed a rat, he was instantly stripped of all that he had accomplished and become in nearly two decades, was transformed into pathetic little Julio Verdad of the Tijuana slums, where he had been born in a one-room shack made of scrap lumber and rusting barrels and tar paper. If the right of tenancy had been predicated upon mere numbers, the rats would have owned that shack, for the seven members of the Verdad clan were far outnumbered by vermin.

  Watching this rat scramble out of the portable floodlights and into shadows and down the alley drain, Julio felt as if his good suit and custom-made shirt and Bally loafers were sorcerously transformed into thirdhand jeans, a tattered shirt, and badly worn sandals. A shudder passed through him, and for a moment he was five years old again, standing in that stifling shack on a blistering August day in Tijuana, staring down in paralyzed horror at the two rats that were chewing busily at the throat of the four-month-old baby, Ernesto. Everyone else was outside, sitting in patches of shade along the dusty street, fanning themselves, the children playing at quiet games and sipping at water, the adults cooling off with the beer they’d purchased cheap from two young ladrones who had successfully broken into a brewery warehouse the night before. Little Julio tried to scream, tried to call for help, but no sound would escape him, as if words and cries could not rise because of the heavy, humid August air. The rats, aware of him, turned boldly upon him, hissing, and even when he lunged forward, swatting furiously at them, they backed off only with great reluctance and only after one of them had tested his mettle by biting the meatiest part of his left hand. He screamed and struck out in even greater fury, routing the rats at last, and he was still screaming when his mother and his oldest sister, Evalina, rushed in from the sun-scorched day to find him weeping blood from his hand as if from stigmata—and his baby brother dead.

  Reese Hagerstrom—having been partners with Julio long enough to know about his dread of rats, but too considerate ever to mention that fear directly or even indirectly—put one of his enormous hands on Julio’s slender shoulder and said, by way of distraction, “I think I’ll give Percy five bucks and tell him to get lost. He had nothing to do with this, and we’re not going to get anything more out of him, and I’m sick of the stink of him.”

  “Go ahead,” Julio said. “I’m in for two-fifty of it.”

  While Reese dealt with the wino, Julio watched the dead woman being hauled out of the dumpster. He tried to distance himself from the victim. He tried to tell himself she didn’t look real, looked more like a big rag doll, and maybe even was a doll, or a mannequin, just a mannequin. But it was a lie. She looked real enough. Hell, she looked too real. They deposited her on a tarp that had been spread on the pavement for that purpose.

  In the glare of the portable lights, the photographer took a few more pictures, and Julio moved in for a closer look. The dead woman was young, in her early twenties, a black-haired and brown-eyed Latino. In spite of what the killer had done to her, and in spite of the garbage and the industrious rats, there was reason to believe that she had been at least attractive and perhaps beautiful. She had gone to her death in a summery cream-colored dress with blue piping on the collar and sleeves, a blue belt, and blue high-heeled shoes.

  She was only wearing one shoe. No doubt the other was in the dumpster.

  There was something unbearably sad about her gay dress and her one bare foot with its meticulously painted toenails.

  At Julio’s direction, two uniformed men donned rubber boots, put on scented surgical masks, and climbed into the dumpster to go through every piece of rubbish. They were searching for the other shoe, the murder weapon, and anything else that might pertain to the case.

  They found the dead woman’s purse. She had not been robbed, for her wallet contained forty-three dollars. According to her driver’s license, she was Ernestina Hernandez, twenty-four, of Santa Ana.

  Ernestina.

  Julio shivered. The similarity between her name and that of his long-dead little brother, Ernesto, gave him a chill. Both the child and the woman had been left for the rats, and though Julio had not known Ernestina, he felt an instant, profound, and only partially explicable obligation to her the moment he learned her name.

  I will find your killer, he promised her silently. You were so lovely, and you died before your time, and if there is any justice in the world, any hope of making sense out of life, then your murderer cannot go unpunished. I swear to you, even if I have to go to the ends of the earth, I will find your killer.

  Two minutes later, they found a blood-spattered lab coat of the kind doctors wore. Four words were stitched on the breast pocket: SANTA ANA CITY MORGUE.

  “What the hell?” Reese Hagerstrom said. “You think someone from the morgue cut her throat?”

  Frowning at the lab coat, Julio Verdad said nothing.

  A lab man carefully folded the coat, trying not to shake loose any hairs or fibers that might be clinging to it. He put it into a plastic bag, which he sealed tightly.

  Ten minutes later, the officers in the dumpster found a sharp scalpel with traces of blood on the blade. An expensive, finely crafted instrument of surgical quality. Similar to those used in hospital operating rooms. Or in a medical examiner’s pathology lab.

  The scalpel, too, was put in a plastic bag, then laid beside the lab coat, which lay beside the now-draped body.

  By midnight, they had not found the dead woman’s other blue shoe. But there was still about sixteen inches of garbage in the dumpster, and the missing item was almost certain to turn up in that last layer of refuse.

  9

  SUDDEN DEATH

  Bulleting through the hot June night, from the Riverside Freeway to I-15 East, then east on I-10, past Beaumont and Banning, skirting the Morongo Indian Reservation, to Cabazon and beyond, Rachael had plenty of time to think. Mile by mile, the metropolitan sprawl of southern California fell behind; the lights of civilization grew sparser, dimmer. They headed deeper into the desert, where vast stretches of empty darkness opened on all sides, and where often the only things to be seen on the plains and hills were a few toothy rock formations and scattered Joshua trees limned by frost-pale moonlight that waxed and waned as it was screened by the thin and curling clouds that filigreed the night sky. The barren landscape said all that could be said about solitude, and it encouraged introspection, as did the lulling hum of the Mercedes’s engine and the whisper of its spinning tires on the pavement.

  Slumped in the passenger’s seat, Benny was stubbornly silent for long periods, staring at the black ribbon of highway revealed in the headlights. A few times, they engaged in short conversations, though the topic was always so light and inconsequential that, under the circumstances, it seemed surreal. They discussed Chinese food for a while, subsided into a deep and mutual silence, then talked of Clint Eastwood movies, followed by another and longer silence.

  She was aware that Benny was paying her back for her refusal to share her secrets with him. He surely knew that she was stunned by the ease with which he had disposed of Vincent Baresco in Eric’s office and that she was dying to know where he had learned to handle himself so well. By turning cool on
her, by letting the brooding silences draw out, he was telling her that she was going to have to give him some information in order to get some in return.

  But she could not give. Not yet. She was afraid he had already been drawn too far into this deadly business, and she was angry with herself for letting him get involved. She was determined not to drag him deeper into the nightmare—unless his survival depended upon a complete understanding of what was happening and of what was at stake.

  As she turned off Interstate 10 onto State Highway 111, now only eleven miles from Palm Springs, she wondered if she could have done more to dissuade him from coming with her to the desert. But upon leaving Geneplan’s offices in Newport Beach, he had been quietly adamant, and attempting to change his mind had seemed as fruitless as standing on the shore of the Pacific and commanding an incoming tide to reverse itself immediately.

  Rachael deeply regretted the awkwardness between them. In the five months since they had met, this was the first time they had been uneasy with each other, the first time that their relationship had been touched by even a hint of anger or had been in any way less than entirely harmonious.

  Having departed Newport Beach at midnight, they arrived in Palm Springs and drove through the heart of town on Palm Canyon Drive at one-fifteen Tuesday morning. That was ninety-nine miles in only an hour and fifteen minutes, for an average speed of eighty miles an hour, which should have given Rachael a sense of speed. But she continued to feel that she was creeping snail-slow, falling farther and farther behind events, losing ground by the minute.

  Summer, with its blazing desert heat, was a somewhat less busy tourist season in Palm Springs than other times of the year, and at one-fifteen in the morning the main street was virtually deserted. In the hot and windless June night, the palm trees stood as still as images painted on canvas, illuminated and slightly silvered by the streetlights. The many shops were dark. The sidewalks were empty. The traffic signals still cycled from green to yellow to red to green again, although hers was the only car passing through most of the intersections.

  She almost felt as if she were driving through a post-Armageddon world, depopulated by disease. For a moment she was half convinced that if she switched on the radio, there would be no music—only the cold empty hiss of static all the way across the dial.

  Since receiving the news of Eric’s missing corpse, she had known that something terrible had come into the world, and hour by hour she had grown more bleak. Now even an empty street, which would have looked peaceful to anyone else, stirred ominous thoughts in her. She knew she was overreacting. No matter what happened in the next few days, this was not the end of the world.

  On the other hand, she thought, it might be the end of me, the end of my world.

  Driving from the commercial district into residential areas, from neighborhoods of modest means into wealthier streets, she encountered even fewer signs of life, until at last she pulled into a Futura Stone driveway and parked in front of a low, sleek, flat-roofed stucco house that was the epitome of clean-lined desert architecture. The lush landscaping was distinctly not of the desert—ficus trees, benjamina, impatiens, begonias, beds of marigolds and Gerber daisies—green and thick and flower-laden in the soft glow of a series of Malibu lights. Those were the only lights burning; all the front windows were dark.

  She had told Benny that this was another of Eric’s houses—though she had been closemouthed about the reason she had come. Now, as she switched off the headlights, he said, “Nice little vacation retreat.”

  She said, “No. This is where he kept his mistress.”

  Enough soft light fell from the Malibu fixtures, rebounded from the lawn and from the edge of the driveway, penetrated the windows of the car, and touched Benny’s face to reveal his look of surprise. “How did you know?”

  “A little over a year ago, just a week before I left him, she—Cindy Wasloff was her name—she called the house in Villa Park. Eric had told her never to phone there except in the direst emergency, and if she spoke with anyone but him, she was supposed to say she was the secretary of some business associate. But she was furious with him because, the night before, he’d beaten her pretty badly, and she was leaving him. First, however, she wanted to let me know he’d been keeping her.”

  “Had you suspected?”

  “That he had a mistress? No. But it didn’t matter. By then I’d already decided to call it quits. I listened to her and commiserated, got the address of the house, because I thought maybe the day would come when I might be able to use the fact of Eric’s adultery to pry myself loose from him if he wouldn’t cooperate in the divorce. Even as ugly as it got, it never got quite that tawdry, thank God. And it would have been exceedingly tawdry indeed if I’d had to go public with it … because the girl was only sixteen.”

  “What? The mistress?”

  “Yes. Sixteen. A runaway. One of those lost kids, from the sound of her. You know the type. They start doing drugs in junior high and just seem to … burn away too many gray cells. No, that’s not right, either. The drugs don’t destroy brain cells so much as they … eat away at their souls, leave them empty and purposeless. They’re pathetic.”

  “Some are,” he said. “And some are scary. Bored and listless kids who’ve tried everything. They either become amoral sociopaths as dangerous as rattlesnakes—or they become easy prey. I gather you’re telling me that Cindy Wasloff was easy prey and that Eric swept her in out of the gutter for some fun and games.”

  “And apparently she wasn’t the first.”

  “He had a thing for teenage girls, huh?”

  Rachael said, “What he had a thing about was getting old. It terrified him. He was only forty-one when I left him, still a young man, but every year when his birthday rolled around he was crazier about it than the year before, as if at any moment he’d blink and find himself in a nursing home, decrepit and senile. He had an irrational fear of growing old and dying, and the fear expressed itself in all sorts of ways. For one thing, year by year, newness in everything became increasingly important to him: new cars every year, as if a twelve-month-old Mercedes was ready for the scrap heap; a constant change of wardrobe, out with the old and in with the new …”

  “And the modern art, modern architecture, all the ultramodern furniture.”

  “Yes. And the latest electronic gadgetry. And I guess teenage girls were just another part of his obsession with staying young and … cheating death. I guess, in his twisted mind, being with young girls kept him young, too. When I learned about Cindy Wasloff and this house in Palm Springs, I realized that one of the main reasons he’d married me was because I was twelve years younger than him, twenty-three to his thirty-five. I was just one more means of slowing down the flow of time for him, and when I started to get into my late twenties, when he could see me getting a little older, then I no longer served that purpose quite as well for him, so he needed younger flesh like Cindy.”

  She opened her door and got out of the car, and Benny got out on his side. He said, “So exactly what’re we looking for here? Not just his current mistress; you wouldn’t have rocketed out here like a race-car driver just to get a peek at his latest bimbo.”

  Closing her door, withdrawing the thirty-two pistol from her purse, and heading toward the house, Rachael did not—could not—answer.

  The night was warm and dry. The vault of the clear desert sky was spangled with an incredibility of stars. The air was still, and all was silent but for crickets singing in the shrubbery.

  Too much shrubbery. She looked around nervously at all the looming dark forms and black spaces beyond the glow of the Malibu lights. Lots of hiding places. She shivered.

  The door was ajar, which seemed an ominous sign. She rang the bell, waited, rang again, waited, rang and rang, but no one responded.

  At her side, Benny said, “It’s probably your house now. You inherited it with everything else, so I don’t think you need an invitation to go in.”

  The door, ajar as it wa
s, provided more invitation than she would have liked. It looked as if it were the open door on a trap. If she went inside in search of the bait, the trap might be sprung, and the door might slam behind her.

  Rachael took a step back, kicked out with one foot, knocking the door inward. It swung back hard against the wall of the foyer with a shuddering crash.

  “So you don’t expect to be welcomed with open arms,” Benny said.

  The exterior light above the door shed pale beams a few feet into the foyer, though not as far as she had hoped. She could see that no one lurked in the first six or eight feet, but beyond lay darkness that might shelter an assailant.

  Because he didn’t know everything she knew and therefore didn’t appreciate the true extent of the danger, because he expected nothing worse than another Vincent Baresco with another revolver, Benny was bolder than Rachael. He stepped past her into the house, found the wall switch in the foyer, and snapped on the lights.

  Rachael went inside and moved past him. “Damn it, Benny, don’t be so quick to step through a doorway. Let’s be slow and careful.”

  “Believe it or not, I can handle just about any teenage girl who wants to throw a punch at me.”

  “It’s not the mistress I’m worried about,” she said sharply.

  “Then who?”

  Tight-lipped, holding her pistol at the ready, she led the way through the house, turning on lights as they went.

  The uncluttered ultramodern decor—more futuristic than in any of Eric’s other habitats—bordered on starkness and sterility. A highly polished terrazzo floor that looked as cold as ice, no carpet anywhere. Levolor metal blinds instead of drapes. Hard-looking chairs. Sofas that, if moved to the depths of a forest, might have passed for giant fungi. Everything was in pale gray, white, black, and taupe, with no color except for scattered accent pieces all in shades of orange.