Shadowfires Page 12

  He saw the old man in the yellow Banlon shirt and the cocker spaniel even before the car stopped bouncing on its springs. They had been crossing the street in the middle of the block when he had come around the corner like a fugitive from a demolition derby. He was bearing down on them at a frightening speed, and they were frozen in surprise and fear, both dog and man, heads up, eyes wide. The guy looked ninety, and the dog seemed decrepit, too, so it didn’t make sense for them to be out on the street at nearly two o’clock in the morning. They ought to have been home in bed, occupied with dreams of fire hydrants and well-fitted false teeth, but here they were.

  “Benny!” Rachael shouted.

  “I see, I see!”

  He had no hope of stopping in time, so he not only jumped on the brakes but turned across Palm Canyon, a combination of forces that sent the Mercedes into a full spin combined with a slide, so they went around a full hundred and eighty degrees and wound up against the far curb. By the time he peeled rubber, roared back across the street, and was headed north again, the old man and the cocker had finally tottered for the safety of the sidewalk—and the police cruiser was no more than ten yards behind him.

  In the mirror, he could see that the Caddy had also turned the corner and was still giving chase, undeterred by the presence of the police. Crazily the Caddy pulled out around the black-and-white, trying to pass it.

  “They’re lunatics,” Ben said.

  “Worse,” Rachael said. “Far worse.”

  In the passenger seat, Sarah Kiel was making urgent noises, but she did not appear to be frightened by the current danger. Instead, it seemed as if the violence of the chase had stirred the sediment of memory, recalling for her the other—and worse—violence that she had endured earlier in the night.

  Picking up speed as he headed north on Palm Canyon, Ben glanced again at the mirror and saw that the Cadillac had pulled alongside the police cruiser. They appeared to be drag racing back there, just a couple of carloads of guys out for some fun. It was … well, it was downright silly was what it was. Then suddenly it wasn’t silly at all because the intentions of the men in the Caddy became horribly clear with the repeated winking of muzzle flashes and the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire. They had opened up on the cops with a submachine gun, as if this weren’t Palm Springs but Chicago in the Roaring Twenties.

  “They shot the cops!” he said, as astonished as he had ever been in his life.

  The black-and-white went out of control, jumped the curb, crossed the sidewalk, and rammed through the plate-glass window of an elegant boutique, but still a guy in the back seat of the Cadillac continued to lean out the window, spraying bullets back at the cruiser until it was out of range.

  In the seat beside Ben, Sarah said, “Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,” and she twitched and spasmed as if someone were raining blows on her. She seemed to be reliving the beating she had taken, oblivious of the immediate danger.

  “Benny, you’re slowing down,” Rachael said urgently.

  Overcome by shock, he had relaxed his foot on the accelerator.

  The Cadillac was closing on them as hungrily as any shark had ever closed on any swimmer.

  Ben tried to press the gas pedal through the floorboards, and the Mercedes reacted as if it were a cat that had just been kicked in the butt. They exploded up Palm Canyon Drive, which was relatively straight for a long way, so he could even put some distance between them and the Cadillac before he made any turns. And he did make turns, one after the other, off into the west side of town now, up into the hills, back down, working steadily south, through older residential streets where trees arched overhead to form a tunnel, then through newer neighborhoods where the trees were small and the shrubbery too sparse to conceal the reality of the desert on which the town had been built. With every corner he rounded, he widened the gap between them and the killers in the Cadillac.

  Stunned, Ben said, “They wasted two cops just because the poor bastards got in the way.”

  “They want us real bad,” Rachael said. “That’s what I’ve tried to tell you. They want us so very bad.”

  The Caddy was two blocks behind now, and within five or six more turns, Ben would lose them because they wouldn’t have him in sight and wouldn’t know which way he had gone.

  Hearing a tremor in his voice that surprised him, a quavering note that he didn’t like, he said, “But, damn it, they never really had much of a chance of catching us. Not with us in this little beauty and them in a lumbering Caddy. They had to see that. They had to. One chance in a hundred. At best. One chance in a hundred, but they still wasted the cops.”

  He half wheeled and half slid around another turn, onto a new street.

  “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod,” Sarah said softly, frantically, drawing down in the seat as far as the safety harness would allow, crossing her arms over her breasts as she had done in the shower stall when she had been naked.

  Behind Ben, sounding as shaky as he did, Rachael said, “They probably figured the police had gotten our license number—and theirs, too—and were about to call them in for identification.”

  The Cadillac headlights turned the corner far back, losing ground more rapidly now. Ben took another turn and sped along another dark and slumbering street, past older houses that had gotten a bit seedy and no longer measured up to the Chamber of Commerce’s fantasy image of Palm Springs.

  “But you’ve implied that the guys in the Caddy would get their hands on you even quicker if you went to the police.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why wouldn’t they want the police to nab us?”

  Rachael said, “It’s true that in police custody I’d be even easier to nail. I’d have no chance at all. But killing me then will be a lot messier, more public. The people in that Cadillac … and their associates … would prefer to keep this private if they can, even if that means they’ll need more time to get their hands on me.”

  Before the Cadillac headlights could appear again, Ben executed yet another turn. In a minute he would finally slip away from their pursuers for good. He said, “What the hell do they want from you?”

  “Two things. For one … a secret they think I have.”

  “But you don’t have it?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the second thing?”

  “Another secret that I do know. I share it with them. They already know it, and they want to stop me from telling anyone else.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I told you, they’d have as much reason to kill you as me.”

  “I think they already want my butt,” Ben said. “I’m in too deep already. So tell me.”

  “Keep your mind on your driving,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Not now. You’ve got to concentrate on getting away from them.”

  “Don’t worry about that, and don’t try to use it as an excuse to clam up on me, damn it. We’re already out of the woods. One more turn, and we’ll have lost them for good.”

  The right front tire blew out.

  10

  NAILS

  It was a long night for Julio and Reese.

  By 12:32, the last of the garbage in the dumpster had been inspected, but Ernestina Hernandez’s blue shoe had not been found.

  Once the trash had been searched and the corpse had been moved to the morgue, most detectives would have decided to go home to get some shut-eye and start fresh the next day—but not Lieutenant Julio Verdad. He was aware the trail was freshest in the twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body. Furthermore, for at least a day following assignment to a new case, he had difficulty sleeping, for then he was especially troubled by a sense of the horror of murder.

  Besides, this time, he had a special obligation to the victim. For reasons which might have seemed inadequate to others but which were compelling to him, he felt a deep commitment to Ernestina. Bringing her killer to justice was not just his job but a point of honor with Julio.

  His p
artner, Reese Hagerstrom, accompanied him without once commenting on the lateness of the hour. For Julio and for no one else, Reese would work around the clock, deny himself not only sleep but days off and regular meals, and make any sacrifice required. Julio knew, if it ever became necessary for Reese to step into the path of a bullet and die for Julio, the big man would make that ultimate sacrifice as well, and without the slightest hesitation. It was something which they both understood in their hearts, in their bones, but of which they had never spoken.

  At 12:41 in the morning, they took the news of Ernestina’s brutal death to her parents, with whom she had lived, a block east of Main Street in a modest house flanked by twin magnolias. The family had to be awakened, and at first they were disbelieving, certain that Ernestina had come home and gone to bed by now. But, of course, her bed was empty.

  Though Juan and Maria Hernandez had six children, they took this blow as hard as parents with one precious child would have taken it. Maria sat on the rose-colored sofa in the living room, too weak to stand. Her two youngest sons—both teenagers—sat beside her, red-eyed and too shaken to maintain the macho front behind which Latino boys of their age usually hid. Maria held a framed photograph of Ernestina, alternately weeping and tremulously speaking of good times shared with the beloved daughter. Another daughter, nineteen-year-old Laurita, sat alone in the dining room, unapproachable, inconsolable, clutching a rosary. Juan Hernandez paced agitatedly, jaws clenched, blinking furiously to repress his tears. As patriarch, it was his duty to provide an example of strength to his family, to be unshaken and unbroken by this visitation of muerta. But it was too much for him to bear, and twice he retreated to the kitchen where, behind the closed door, he made soft strangled sounds of grief.

  Julio could do nothing to relieve their anguish, but he inspired trust and hope for justice, perhaps because his special commitment to Ernestina was clear and convincing. Perhaps because, in his soft-spoken way, he conveyed a hound-dog perseverance that lent conviction to promises of swift justice. Or perhaps his smoldering fury at the very existence of death, all death, was painfully evident in his face and eyes and voice. After all, that fury had burned in him for many years now, since the afternoon when he had discovered rats chewing out the throat of his baby brother, and by now the fire within him must have grown bright enough to show through for all to see.

  From Mr. Hernandez, Julio and Reese learned that Ernestina had gone out for an evening on the town with her best girlfriend, Becky Klienstad, with whom she worked at a local Mexican restaurant, where both were waitresses. They had gone in Ernestina’s car: a powder-blue, ten-year-old Ford Fairlane.

  “If this has happened to my Ernestina,” Mr. Hernandez said, “then what’s happened to poor Becky? Something must have happened to her, too. Something very terrible.”

  From the Hernandez kitchen, Julio telephoned the Klienstad family in Orange. Becky—actually Rebecca—was not yet home. Her parents had not been worried because she was, after all, a grown woman, and because some of the dance spots that she and Ernestina favored were open until two in the morning. But now they were very worried indeed.

  1:20 A.M.

  In the unmarked sedan in front of the Hernandez house, Julio sat behind the wheel and stared bleakly out at the magnolia-scented night.

  Through the open windows came the susurration of leaves stirring in the vague June breeze. A lonely, cold sound.

  Reese used the console-mounted computer terminal to generate an APB and pickup order on Ernestina’s powder-blue Ford. He’d obtained the license number from her parents.

  “See if there’re any messages on hold for us,” Julio said.

  At the moment he did not trust himself to operate the keyboard. He was full of anger and wanted to pound on something—anything—with both fists, and if the computer gave him any trouble or if he hit one wrong key by mistake, he might take out his frustration on the machine merely because it was a convenient target.

  Reese accessed the police department’s data banks at headquarters and requested on-file messages. Softly glowing green letters scrolled up on the video display. It was a report from the uniformed officers who’d gone to the morgue, at Julio’s direction, to ascertain if the scalpel and bloodstained morgue coat found in the dumpster could be traced to a specific employee on the coroner’s staff. Officials at the coroner’s office were able to confirm that a scalpel, lab coat, set of hospital whites, surgical cap, and a pair of antistatic lab shoes were missing from the morgue’s supplies closet. However, no specific employee could be linked with the theft of those items.

  Looking up from the VDT, gazing at the night, Julio said, “This murder is somehow tied to the disappearance of Eric Leben’s body.”

  “Could be coincidence,” Reese said.

  “You believe in coincidence?”

  Reese sighed. “No.”

  A moth fluttered against the windshield.

  “Maybe whoever stole the body also killed Ernestina,” Julio said.

  “But why?”

  “That’s what we must find out.”

  Julio drove away from the Hernandez house.

  He drove away from the fluttering moth and the whispering leaves.

  He turned north and drove away from downtown Santa Ana.

  However, although he followed Main Street, where closely spaced streetlamps blazed, he could not drive away from the deep darkness, not even temporarily, for the darkness was within him.

  1:38 A.M.

  They reached Eric Leben’s Spanish-modern house quickly, for there was no traffic. Night in that wealthy neighborhood was respectfully still. Their footsteps clicked hollowly on the tile walkway, and when they rang the doorbell, it sounded as if it were echoing back to them from the bottom of a deep well.

  Julio and Reese had no authority whatsoever in Villa Park, which was two towns removed from their own jurisdiction. However, in the vast urban sprawl of Orange County, which was essentially one great spread-out city divided into many communities, a lot of crimes were not conveniently restricted to a single jurisdiction, and a criminal could not be allowed to gain time or safety by simply crossing the artificial political boundary between one town and another. When it became necessary to pursue a lead into another jurisdiction, one was required to seek an escort from the local authorities or obtain their approval or even enlist them to make the inquiries themselves, and these requests were routinely honored.

  But because time was wasted going through proper channels, Julio and Reese frequently skipped the protocol. They went where they needed to go, talked with whomever they needed to talk, and only informed local authorities when and if they found something pertinent to their case—or if a situation looked as if it might turn violent.

  Few detectives operated that boldly. Failure to follow standard procedures might result in a reprimand. Repeated violations of the rules might be viewed as a dismal lack of respect for the command structure, resulting in disciplinary suspension. Too much of that, and even the finest cop could forget about further promotions—and might have to worry about hanging on to collect his pension.

  The risks did not particularly concern Julio or Reese. They wanted promotions, of course. And they wanted their pensions. But more than career advancement and financial security, they wanted to solve cases and put murderers in prison. Being a cop was pointless if you weren’t willing to put your life on the line for your ideals, and if you were willing to risk your life, then it made no sense to worry about small stuff like salary increases and retirement funds.

  When no one responded to the bell, Julio tried the door, but it was locked. He didn’t attempt to void the lock or force it. In the absence of a court order, what they needed to get them into the Leben house was probable cause to believe that criminal activity of some kind was under way on the premises, that innocent people might be harmed, and that there was nothing less than a public emergency.

  When they circled to the back of the house, they found what they needed: a broken
pane of glass in the French door that led from the patio into the kitchen. They would have been remiss if they had not assumed the worst: that an armed intruder had forced his way into the house to commit burglary or to harm whoever resided legally within.

  Drawing their revolvers, they entered cautiously. Shards of broken glass crunched underfoot.

  As they moved from room to room, they turned on lights and saw enough to justify intrusion. The bloody palmprint etched into the arm of the white sofa in the family room. The destruction in the master bedroom. And in the garage … Ernestina Hernandez’s powder-blue Ford.

  Inspecting the car, Reese found bloodstains on the back seat and floor mats. “Some of it’s still a little sticky,” he told Julio.

  Julio tried the trunk of the car and found it unlocked. Inside, there was more blood, a pair of broken eyeglasses—and one blue shoe.

  The shoe was Ernestina’s, and the sight of it caused Julio’s chest to tighten.

  As far as Julio knew, the Hernandez girl had not worn glasses. In photographs he had seen at the Hernandez home, however, Becky Klienstad, friend and fellow waitress, had worn a pair like these. Evidently, both women had been killed and stuffed into the Ford’s trunk. Later, Ernestina’s corpse had been heaved into the dumpster. But what happened to the other body?

  “Call the locals,” Julio said. “It’s time for protocol.”

  1:52 A.M.

  When Reese Hagerstrom returned from the sedan, he paused to put up the electric garage doors to air out the smell of blood that had risen from the open trunk of the Ford and reached into every corner of the long room. As the doors rolled up, he spotted a discarded set of hospital whites and a pair of antistatic shoes in one corner. “Julio? Come here and look at this.”