Текст книги "Dance of the Bones"

Автор книги: J. A. Jance

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER 18

IN THIS VILLAGE—THIS KIHHIM—LIVED A young girl who was always smiling and happy. For this reason she was called Tondam Ge:s—which means Shining Falls. She was a helpful girl who sometimes looked after the fires and sometimes played with the children. Shining Falls said that she was not afraid of the Evil Giantess, and so she was put in charge of the children of the village and told to keep them safe.

One day, when Shining Falls took the children up to play among the rocks, she slipped and fell. Shining Falls was badly hurt and could not walk. The children were frightened. When they saw the black cloud that was the hair of the Evil Giantess approaching, they began to scream.

Just then, Shining Falls saw a turtle, Large Old Turtle—Ge’echu Komikch’ed. Shining Falls called Turtle and asked him to take the children back to the village, but first Turtle needed to find someone else to send a message because he would have to go ever so slowly with the little children. Turtle called to the children and started with them down an easy way to the village.

AFTER BEING AWAKE MUCH OF the night, Ava Richland was still sleeping when her phone rang late that morning. “Did you catch the kid?”

“Yes.”

“And the shipment?”

“Got it,” Henry said, “but it wasn’t easy.”

“As much as I pay you, it doesn’t have to be easy. Where was it?”

“The kid had passed it along to a friend of his. I’ve got both of them stashed in a safe place. I won’t be able to take care of them until later tonight.”

“That is not okay, Henry. Tim José for sure knows who you are, and the other kid can probably identify you as well. They need to be gone.”

“I didn’t have time. I was working. I had to grab the second kid right in the middle of my shift, and I didn’t want to finish off the first one until I was sure he wasn’t lying to me about where he had ditched the diamonds. I’ll unload the two boys tonight.”

“Where are they? What if they get loose? How do you know someone won’t find them before you can take care of them?”

“They’re bottled up in the bottom of my truck, which is locked up tight in my garage out at the airport. Even if they managed to get loose from their restraints, they won’t be able to open the box. It’s padlocked shut.”

“But what if someone stops by the building? Won’t they be able to hear them?”

“Nope, no way.”

Ava wasn’t pleased with Henry’s answer, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. “All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “What about the shipment?”

“Drop it off at the usual place?”

“That’s probably best,” she said. “As long as the kids are safe where they are, come by as soon as you finish your shift. You probably want to be paid, and I’m feeling generous today. You’ve cleaned up what could have been a huge mess for me last night and today. You can expect a substantial bonus.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Henry said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. But what about Max? I’m worried about him. Once he hears about Carlos and Paul . . .”

“I already told you. Don’t worry about Max José. He’s handled. He’ll be gone tonight, too.”

“Okay,” Henry said. “The usual place, then. I’ll be there.”

That’s the wonderful power of greed, Ava thought as the call ended. It was the one constant in life. It worked like a charm, and it made people do stupid things.

Ava got out of bed and put on her robe. Then she went in search of Harold. She found him where she expected to, sitting in the sun on the back patio with his walker parked nearby. An untouched copy of the Wall Street Journal lay on the table next to him. They still subscribed to it. The paper came every day and Harold made sure that it went with him wherever he was, but he had long since stopped maintaining the fiction of pretending to read it.

It saddened Ava to realize that Harold was a doddering old man now, little more than a husk of the man he had been even as short a time as two years ago. His decline in the past few months had been surprisingly swift. Once she had supposed that she’d have to deal with him before she exited stage left, but that was no longer necessary. Even had he known something, he’d be of little use to any investigators. Besides, having him alive and unwell would give her flexibility in making good her departure with as little hue and cry as possible.

She walked over to the table, kissed Harold on the top of his bald head, and then poured herself a cup of coffee from the carafe on the cup-laden tray the housekeeper had left on the patio table. Then she sat down across from him.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Harold said.

That was a good start. At least he seemed to know who she was this morning; that wasn’t always the case. Not having to begin by explaining who she was made the coming conversation easier.

“I think I’d like to drive down to San Carlos later today,” she said. “It’s been months since I’ve been there. I want to look in on the condo and see to it that everything is in order. I need to make sure the housekeepers are doing their jobs.”

Harold frowned and seemed momentarily mystified. “You know,” she prompted. “Our place in Mexico—the one on the beach.”

Harold’s nurse came out then to escort him into the house lest he get sunburned. “I’ll be gone for a few days,” Ava told her. “I’m going down to San Carlos. If you need anything or if Harold does, Mrs. Sanchez, the housekeeper, can see to it.”

“Of course,” the nurse said. She didn’t wear a name tag, and Ava had no idea what her name was. A succession of home health nurses had come and gone with very little fanfare. There was no reason to try remembering who they were.

With Ava’s intentions clear to all concerned, she went about a leisurely job of packing. It wasn’t a matter of emptying her walk-in closet. She didn’t want to take too much. It was important that everyone believe she didn’t plan on being gone more than a couple of days. She did, however, clean out the safe, taking all her traveling money as well as her various forms of forged government ID. Those went into the false bottom of her midsize Louis Vuitton case.

Once she had the last shipment of diamonds in hand, the gems would need to be cleaned and dried. These days she could barely stand the smell of peanut butter, much less the greasy feel of the stuff, but after it was scrubbed away, the last of diamonds would go into that hidden compartment as well, beneath her casual beachwear clothing, underwear, and day-to-day makeup. The false bottom wasn’t good enough to pass muster with a TSA inspection at an airport, but she’d be able to breeze through the highway checkpoints with no problem.

The larger Louis Vuitton bag was loaded and ready to go. It contained her various costume changes—a collection of outfits, along with various wigs, scarves, and makeup. All those, taken together, created any number of disguises that coincided with each of her IDs. The woman who went through one Border Patrol checkpoint would appear to be someone else entirely when she arrived at the next one.

Ava had always known this day would come—a time when she would need to disappear. Now that it was here, she was both excited and wistful. She’d enjoyed living in this place at the top of the heap, but she was tired of having to look after Harold—not that she did the caretaking herself. She was tired of being responsible for him and for his caretakers.

If she’d had clear title to the house, Ava might have hung around long enough for Harold to die so she could inherit the place and live there from then on as Harold’s well-set widow. But Harold’s son, Jack, had queered that deal. Marital trust my ass! Nope, Ava Richland was leaving, and not on a jet plane, either.

Her intention was to drop her luggage off at the safe house, then drive across the border into Mexico at Nogales in broad daylight. Appearing as Ava Richland herself, she’d be thoroughly inspected and photographed at the border. After that, she’d abandon the car in Nogales, Sonora, with the keys inside. With any kind of luck, it would end up in somebody’s chop shop. After walking back across the border with a whole other set of ID, she’d meet a runner who would smuggle her back to Tucson.

As for Ava Richland herself? With the car gone or found stolen, she’d simply go missing. If the media could be believed, hapless American tourists went missing in Mexico all the time, and that’s where they would search for her—in Mexico. By the time the search started, she’d be back across the border into the United States, and dropped off at her safe house in Tucson. From there she’d be long gone.

Her unsafe safe house was situated in a dodgy neighborhood on the south side of town—a run-down place she’d picked up as a foreclosure during the real estate collapse. She had bought the place for a song and furnished it on the cheap with secondhand furniture from several of Tucson’s many resale stores. The person who had bought the house and the furniture—one of Ava’s many stand-in characters—was a frail little old lady named Jane Dobson.

Jane wore colorful muumuus, used a walker, and drove a ten-year-old Acura. She seemed to have serious health issues and never went anywhere without being hooked to a portable oxygen pack in the basket of her walker—one of Harold’s rejects. Jane had told both the real estate agent and the neighbors that she had an abusive husband. (Harold would have been so surprised!) That’s why she needed a bolt-hole if things ever got too bad at home. As far as the neighborhood knew, the lady in the late-model Mercedes and the Native American man who stopped by periodically and let themselves into her garage? According to Jane, they were her well-to-do younger sister and her nephew, both of whom came by now and then to check on the place for her.

Ava’s bags were packed and ready to be carted out to the car when she made one last trip through the family room. Pausing in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows, Ava stared down at the cityscape beneath her. She couldn’t help feeling a little sad, actually. She knew she’d never be coming back here. Tucson had been good to her—far better than she could ever have imagined—and she knew she would miss it.

Walking back across the room she passed the bar, and there was Fito. Poor Fito. How she wished she could take that lump of limestone with its toothy captive along with her. Jack and Susan would never be smart enough to sell the piece for what it was worth. Unfortunately, Fito was far too big for Ava to carry.

Then her eye fell on the pot—the tiny pot. Jack and Susan wouldn’t know what that was worth either, but what it meant to Ava was far more than any mere monetary value. It was a trophy—a reminder of her first kill, a kill she’d gotten away with then and would still get away with now.

When JFA’s attorneys had poked their noses into John Lassiter’s case, they must have hoped to have his life sentence reduced to something considerably less than that, but as of today, his life sentence would become a death sentence. Somewhere around five that afternoon, John Lassiter would be a thing of the past, and so would Max José. And once Henry Rojas was out of the way, too, there would be no one left to connect all those dots back to her.

As for Ava? With Jane Dobson’s aging Acura decked out in a new set of plates, she would drive to L.A. and to another equally unassuming safe house—a condo in a massive development not far from LAX. On the way she’d stop by a Postal Minders shop off Sepulveda and pick up the collection of packages she’d sent ahead to Jane Carruthers—another of her guises—from one of the shipping centers at the Gem and Mineral Show a few weeks earlier. Lots of people shipped their gem-show purchases home from there, and her packages of blood diamonds had no doubt blended in with the crowd.

Ava plucked the tiny pot from its place of honor on the shelf and slipped it into the pocket of her denim jacket. With all her ducks in a row, she had no reason to leave her good luck charm behind.

She turned down the hall to the guest wing where Harold spent most of his waking hours these days. He was in his easy chair, sitting in front of a TV set watching what appeared to be one of the many Judge Whatever shows. The shows were uniformly mindless and plotless and were enough to keep Harold occupied. The nurse was standing in the doorway as Ava leaned down to give him a quick peck on the cheek. From Ava’s point of view, nothing could have been better.

“I’m going now,” she said. “I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

Harold waved at her absently, without really looking away from the screen. “Drive carefully,” he said.

She smiled at him and nodded in the nurse’s direction. “I will,” she said. “I always do.”

LANI SHOWERED. THEN, WITH HER hair still wet, she lay on the bed and tried to sleep. Dan had taken the kids and gone off to help Leo look for Gabe. The house was quiet. She was weary beyond words, but sleep wouldn’t come. Like Gabe’s mother, Lani was appalled that Gabe could be involved in something like this and with people who were beyond dangerous.

Gabe Ortiz and Tim José. She remembered Timmy as a little kid, coming into the hospital because he’d been playing around his grandmother’s woodpile and had been bitten by a snake. He’d been cute back then, just as Gabe had been. She heard again the sound of that single early-morning gunshot and understood its heartbreaking significance. The first rounds of gunfire had brought down Carlos and Paul. The final one must have been for Tim—Timmy.

Lani had not yet dozed off when her phone rang. Leo’s name appeared on the screen. “Any luck?” she asked.

“Maybe a little,” Leo answered. “I’ve looked everywhere I can think of. I started out by stopping by the José place, thinking Gabe and Tim might have holed up there. Nothing, but I asked around. It turns out nobody’s seen Tim since early yesterday evening.”

Lani took a deep breath. Leo’s last words had just confirmed her worst suspicions about Tim José. “But you said you’d made some progress,” she managed.

“Yes,” Leo said, “just now when I stopped by the garage to get some gas, I talked to Martin Cruz and his father. Do you know them?”

“The old blind man with the drunken son?” Lani didn’t know the pair personally, but she had seen them often enough, always walking together on the shoulder of the road, the older man limping along with his hand resting on his son’s shoulder. Lani had been told that most of the pair’s walking trips involved going to or from their preferred bootlegger. “What about them?”

“A lot of the time Joseph and Martin come by the garage in the mornings and sit outside at the picnic table under that big palo verde tree. Martin said they were there today. He claims he saw a pickup—a black pickup—stop by our house. He says Gabe got in and rode off with whoever was driving.”

“Did he get into the vehicle under his own steam?” Lani asked. “Or was he forced into it against his will?”

“That’s what it sounded like, but I’m not sure how reliable Martin is. The old man is blind, and Martin smells like he’s blind drunk. He had no idea about the truck’s make and model and couldn’t identify the driver. I’m not sure what to do.”

“Have you told Delia?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Look, Leo,” Lani said. “If Gabe was forced into the vehicle, you and I both know that this is far more serious than Gabe just wandering off on his own. Are those FBI agents still in town?”

“As far as I know. The last I saw their Suburban was parked over by the café.”

“We need to report this,” Lani said, scrambling out of bed. “Has anyone reported Tim as missing?”

“I doubt it. Who would? Max is in jail. Paul and Carlos are dead. Their mother is in the hospital.”

“Then we have to,” Lani insisted. “The FBI agents need to know that both Gabe and Tim are missing and that, because of the note, we know Gabe may be tied in with whatever the José brothers have been up to. You go tell Delia. Don’t tell her over the phone. Talk to her in person. I’ll track down the agents and talk to them.”

“Wouldn’t you rather talk to Delia?” he asked.

“Sorry, Leo,” Lani said. “I’ll take the easy duty—Milgahn FBI over a pissed-off Delia Ortiz, any day. After you talk to Delia, you need to let Law and Order know about this, too.”

When Lani arrived at the café the Suburban was gone, and only one of the two agents lingered inside. Agent Howell was there; Agent Armstrong wasn’t. The first time Lani had met Agent Howell, she had been at a distinct disadvantage. Therefore, it was no accident that she showed up at the café in full M.D. regalia—a pair of scrubs topped by a lab coat and with her name tag fully visible. Clearly annoyed at the interruption, Agent Howell looked up from her computer and then closed the lid abruptly as Lani sat down at the table without waiting for an invitation.

“I came to talk to you about Gabe Ortiz,” she said.

“The boy from your campout?”

Lani nodded. “He and the youngest José brother, Timothy, are best friends, and as far as we can tell, they’re both missing. With Paul and Carlos dead, I’m worried about Tim. He hasn’t been seen since last night, and Gabe was seen possibly being forced into an unidentified pickup earlier this morning.”

Leaning back in her chair, Agent Howell frowned. “Just how is it that you happen to know the names of the two victims? That information has yet to be released.”

Lani stiffened. Clearly Agent Howell had focused on only one small part of what Lani had said. If that’s how the woman was going to play the game, Lani could, too.

“I’m not sure how the names came to my attention,” Lani answered with a shrug. “Smoke signals, maybe? The tom-tom telegraph? Does it matter how I know? The point is, I do. The real issue here is that Gabe and Tim are missing.”

“I’m assuming Gabe’s parents have reported the situation?”

“Gabe’s father is probably doing so right about now,” Lani answered. “I thought you should know as well, in case the two boys happen to be together.”

“That’s very kind of you, Dr. Pardee. We appreciate your assistance, and I’m sure the tribal police will be looking into the missing persons situation.”

Dismissively, Agent Howell made as if to reopen her computer, but Lani placed her hand on top of the lid. She had fully intended to go into detail about the bag and the note they had found in Gabe’s drawer. That was no longer the case.

“I’m not finished,” Lani insisted, still holding the computer shut. “Have you spoken to Lorraine José and done the next-of-kin notification?”

“We’re not in the habit of discussing investigations with civilians,” Agent Howell said icily. “You need to remove your hand from my computer.”

“And you need to get over yourself. You need to remember that you’re a guest of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and you need to start acting like it. Lorraine José is one of my patients. I’ll be seeing her in a few minutes, and I need to know what to expect.”

“Yes, the mother has been notified,” Agent Howell said.

“Good,” Lani replied. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

With that, Lani removed her hand, stalked out of the café, and drove straight to the hospital. In the convalescent wing she found Lorraine José, sitting in a chair next to her bed, weeping.

“They used to be such good boys,” she said brokenly as Lani sat down on the bed beside her. “What did I do wrong?”

“You did nothing wrong,” Lani murmured. “I’m sure you did the best you could.”

“Carlos and Paul are dead,” Lorraine added, “and now we can’t find Tim.”

“Does Tim have a phone? Have you tried calling him?”

Lorraine nodded. “We all have phones. Max bought them. When I dialed Tim’s number, he didn’t answer. I asked the FBI agents if they couldn’t trace his phone some way. Because I’m not a signer on the account, they couldn’t do it just on my say-so. The one agent, the man, said he’d need to go to town and get a warrant before they could do something like that. I don’t know how long that will take.”

“What’s Tim’s number?” Lani asked.

“There are so many, I can’t keep them all straight. They’re in my cell phone in the bedside table.”

“May I?” Lani asked.

“Sure.”

Lani retrieved the phone and scrolled through the recent calls list, jotting down numbers as she went—numbers for Carlos, Paul, and Tim. “What about Max’s phone?”

Lorraine shrugged. “He probably took it with him when they locked him away up in Florence. He’s the one whose name is on the account.”

“Has anyone gotten in touch with him about what happened last night?”

“After the FBI agents stopped by, I called Father O’Reilly. He said he’d go to Florence and tell Max. He’s probably on his way there now.”

Lorraine’s sister and brother-in-law turned up just then. Lorraine turned to them hopefully. “Any sign of Timmy?”

“Not yet,” the sister said.

Lani pocketed her list of phone numbers and took her leave. Out in the hallway, she used her phone to call the number listed as Timmy’s. Not surprisingly, there was no answer. It went straight to voice mail, and Lani knew there was no point in leaving a message.