Shadow Play Page 16

  “I thought they’d gone out.”

  “Bob’s pickup is here.”

  “I never saw them.”

  “So where are they?”

  “Sleeping, I guess.”

  “Did you look?”

  “No. He kept me in the living room all the time, I think he was just waiting for you to come back.”

  Taking the flashlight in his left fist, tucking the fist under the butt of the Glock, he opened the door and jumped inside. “Bob? Frank?” Nobody answered. “Stay here,” he said, duckwalking across the room and moving slowly down the hallway to the bedrooms. I stayed at the door, keeping it open, not knowing what I should do and then Nathan shouted or screamed, I didn’t know which, not saying a word just making a long drawn-out horrible sound.

  “Nathan? Nathan!”

  Appearing at the entrance to the hallway, supporting himself, propping himself up with one arm leaning heavily against the wall, not carrying the Glock as he staggered over to the sofa and slumped, head forward into his hands.

  “What?” I said, kneeling in front of him. “What’s happened?”

  “Call 911.”

  “Are they hurt, what, do we need an ambulance?”

  “Get the sheriff’s office.”

  “Nathan, what’s back there? Where are Bob and Frank?”

  “Laid out on my bed.”

  “Laid…laid out? What do you mean, laid out?”

  “They’re both dead.”

  “Twenty minutes,” I said, hanging up the phone. “A deputy will be here in twenty minutes.” I hadn’t gone into the bedroom, didn’t want to go into the bedroom.

  “I’ve got to ask you to do something.”

  “What, Nathan?”

  “Take pictures.” I bit a knuckle, sucked my breath in. “I don’t trust anybody else to take pictures. Can you do it?”

  I’d never met Frank, I’d never asked him about family lineages, about the Begay name and any possible connection to Jonathan Begay. Frank, I could maybe take his picture, but Bob Good Fellow, I’d just met him, he carried bullet wounds from thirty years before, how could I take a picture of his body, not thinking too clearly about any of this except thinking I really didn’t want to do it.

  “You’ve got to, Laura. We’re going to find whoever did this. Pictures might help. Once the crime scene techs get here, they’ll want us out of the bedroom, out of the house, out of our bedroom and our own house. We’ll never get another chance. After the screwup at Leon’s place, I want to be sure we’ve got pictures of everything we can see, things we might not even see when taking the pictures.”

  “All right,” trying to ready myself, “first I’ve got to see them, I can’t just go in there and look them over through my viewfinder, I have to see their faces with my eyes so I can, like, prepare myself, god, I never thought I’d have to take photos of a dead person that I knew.”

  “I’ll come with you, I’ll be beside you when you see them.”

  Fully clothed, Bob and Frank lay side by side, Frank on his back and Bob propped over halfway on his left arm, right hand clenched around his pistol, which lay across Frank’s chest, pointing at his head.

  What was left of his head.

  Both of them shot once, probably twice, all in the head.

  I grimaced, turned partly away, the room overlaid in shadows since only the bedside light was on. In this dim light, I couldn’t really see much of the bullet damage, I knew it was there, knew it had to bleed, those dark stains all over their bodies and the pillows and sheets.

  “Can you do it?” Nathan said.

  “Yes,” turning my back on them, “let me get my camera.”

  One of my last sets of crime scene photos happened by accident. Nathan was driving us back from a beach vacation at Rocky Point, we’d just passed through Sells on the Tohono O’odham rez and were some fifty miles west of the Baboquivary mountains. Lots of flashing cherry and turquoise lights ahead on Highway 86, all kinds of Law gathered where a drug smuggling bust had gone bad. Three drug mules were dead, all young men barely out of their teens. One Border Patrolman dead, another wounded. When a CSI unit got there from Tucson, their Polaroid didn’t work, nor did a drugstore throwaway Kodak. Disgusted, the bodies going into rigor, Border Patrol wanting to claim one of their own, Nathan told me to drive as fast as I could with an Arizona Highway Patrol car leading me, flashers and siren blaring.

  I’d just charged two sets of batteries for the Fuji S2 and Nathan had me shoot several hundred pictures. Don’t look at them as real people, he kept saying as he’d clamp his hands around mine to stop them shaking, I really need you to get these photos, to help me identify these men.

  Autopsies, I wouldn’t participate while the saws and knives worked. Taking pictures before and after, that’s all I could do.

  “Laura, I really need you to get the head,” he said. “Full frame. The whole head, the face. Straight on and whatever angles you can shoot. You ready?”

  I held the Fuji to my right eye, closed the left eye, nodded. I can pretty much deal with it, you see, if I look at it through a lens. A distancing kind of thing, I really tried not to think about it much.

  Nathan and the coroner stood back against a wall, but the room was small, I had to twist and bend a lot. The tables were fixed to the floor, with barely a foot between them so I had to squeeze sideways, facing either table, bend from the waist to take pictures. At one point, as the flash batteries wore down, the camera recharged slowly with a loud whine, wheeeeEEEE.

  “That’s enough?” I said. It wasn’t really a question.

  Thirty minutes later, when the deputy still hadn’t arrived, all pictures taken that I could bear, Nathan decided to go out to the main road and keep the patrol car there to avoid contaminating any possible tire tracks or footprints left by McCartney. I reheated some chicken breasts, nuking them while emptying a bag of store-bought salad greens into a wooden bowl. Poured on some Paul Newman’s Italian dressing, All profits donated to the needy.

  We ate on the patio. In the dark. Nathan picked at his food, finally gave up. I tried to kiss him, our lips greasy from the chicken, but neither of us was in the mood at all. I took his hand and we walked down the road for half an hour and then walked back. Three jackrabbits ran across the road, long ears erect in the moonlight. Mourning doves hoohoohooed when we flushed them, and a sage thrasher squawked continually until Nathan threw a small pebble into a bush, not meaning to hit the thrasher but just make it fly away.

  One of his dark moments. I never knew what to do with them, but at least I wasn’t terrified anymore. The first time, he came back from somewhere in the Sonoran desert, dirty, cleaned his Colt .44 magnum at the kitchen table, then brought out a Smith nine and cleaned it also. Didn’t say a word for two days, slept no more than an hour at a time, I’d turn, wake in the dark room, feel across the sheets, looking for him, the sheets not even warm, he’d been gone so long. Once, I heard him playing his shakahachi flute. I went outside, tried to find him, but he stopped playing, made no sounds, didn’t answer my shouts.

  He called the Arizona DPS, the Coolidge police, even the Casa Grande Monument rangers’ office, all of them involved with a seven-car smashup on I-10 because a milk tanker truck overturned and the cars slipped and skidded in the hundreds of gallons of white milk and caused at least five deaths.

  This time, when he let go of my hand to throw that pebble, he didn’t take my hand again, and I left him sitting on the patio. I went through my DVD collection, looking for one of Vincent Basaraba’s Westerns, couldn’t find any of them, spent half an hour online ordering every single DVD and VHS available. Not that many, two on DVD and three more on VHS. Back at the TV, I found my John Wayne collection, put the Fort Apache DVD into the system, muted the sound, and watched the entire movie looking for Vincent. I isolated all of the DVD chapters that had lots of Indians, began looking at the children. I paused the DVD finally, wrote down the exact play time, and took the DVD to my G5 computer. I brought up the movi
e scene, froze it, cropped and cropped and finally was able to save a frame that I could print.

  Vincent and Leon. With an older Indian, probably their father. Vincent couldn’t have been more than five or six, Leon noticeably older. Vincent flashed a grin toward the camera, Leon’s head was ducked partially away.

  I set the printout on the kitchen table and sat outside until the deputy finally came and the long night of floodlights and crime techs took away any chance of sleep.

  And then Alex called, and we caught our first real break.

  32

  “This is both simple and complicated,” Alex said. “We’ve finished sucking every last data byte out of those two hard drives.”

  “And?” I said.

  “I’ve got no news, good news, and bad news. How do you want it?”

  “In that order.”

  “No news, meaning, there are no complete files on either hard drive.”

  “That’s mostly bad news.”

  “Just wait. Whoever cleaned these drives, whatever software program they used to scrub data clean, Steffi and I figure that software made four passes.”

  “I’d use thirty or forty.”

  “Exactly. That’s a part of the good news. Except…the scrubbing was good enough to fragment all the data chains. Most of them are garbage. We’ve used every funky trick I know to recover the data, probably tricks you haven’t even heard of, since I wrote them myself in the last few months.”

  “So, no news means, nothing useable?”

  “Didn’t say that. Nothing complete, that’s what I said. But what wasn’t on those hard drives tells us a lot. I’d say that both computers were very new, that little more than the original operating system software was installed. Panther. The last upgrade Apple wrote for these Mac G5s. We didn’t even find traces of a sophisticated word processing program.”

  “That’s not very good news,” I said. “There’s nothing useable?”

  “Back up. That’s the last of no news. Good news. First, this is skimpy. We found fragments of the name Vincent.”

  “You told me that.”

  “We also found this connective, has to be the same file, the name Vincent is linked to the name Ruby. Is he married?”

  “Ruby, Ruby,” I’d heard that somewhere, but where, “it’s a ghost town.”

  “Cool.”

  “Down near the border. An old mining town, prosperous as late as the twenties, fell on hard times, now you pay ten or twelve bucks to get a tour.”

  “How do you know this? You been there?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Don’t give me a Hertz ad. Listen, here’s the rest of the good news. You know that any Mac can set up a public space, part of the computer that can, if the owner sets it up that way, this space can be accessible by anybody who has some simple log-in stuff.”

  “Somebody else is involved? Another computer?”

  “Another person, no. Another computer, yes. He wasn’t receiving data into his own computer’s public space. He was sending to another computer. What’s good news, extremely good news is that we’ve recovered almost all of that log. Enough to show that it’s another Apple computer.”

  “Where?”

  “Well, shit,” Alex said. “That’s the bad news. I have no idea.”

  “He didn’t use the standard ways of sending data? File transfer protocol?”

  “No. Very simple. To another computer’s public space.”

  “And where is it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Could be anywhere in the world,” I said finally.

  “Could be two hundred yards away. Don’t have a clue where. But, Steffi has this idea that maybe our Leon Begay had another computer set up in a rented space somewhere in this area, maybe here in Tucson, quite probably in Arizona, although it could be as far away as the Navajo reservation. Steffi’s checking Tucson.”

  “You’ll let me know?”

  “Yes. Where, uh, are you going back to, uh, Nathan’s house?”

  “It’s a crime scene. We’ve moved down here for a while, moved into my house. Nathan feels, we both feel, two people killed in our bedroom, killed in our bed, it doesn’t matter what cleansing rituals we go through, we’ll never be able to live there again.”

  “I’m just, I don’t know what to say.” Unusual for Alex to be tongue-tied. “I’ve never seen, I mean, you know, dead people. I can’t imagine…”

  “A sacred place for Nathan.”

  “Laura. What, I mean, like, what happened up there?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  “If you find that other computer’s location, I want to know.”

  “Ghost town?”

  “Ruby? Yes. It’s well known. Treasure hunters pick around there, looking for lost Jesuit gold or silver.”

  “Small world,” Alex said. “So. Want to see a movie?”

  “No, I’m, like, I want to stay here.”

  “Yeah. I’ve rented a movie. Special delivery from Chicago, cost me extra.”

  “No, Alex, no TV, no movies.”

  “You told me about this movie?”

  “Told you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What movie?”

  “The one I rented, you gave me the title.”

  “What movie?” Exasperated, frustrated, itchy, edgy, anxious.

  “Man of the West.”

  “That is so not a great flick,” she said. An hour later. We’d fast-forwarded through a lot of it, unable to watch half of it.

  “I used to like it. Thought it was an epic Western.”

  “Give me a break, Laura. Gary Cooper, come on. He’s a hundred years old in this, walks like he’s got arthritis, talks like it’s causing him pain and he’s got to bite his lip, keep in control.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And Julie London? I heard she was a great singer, but an actress? Why does this guy, Vincent Basaraba, tell me why he wants to remake this movie?”

  “I only know he does.”

  “Ghost towns, right? That’s the connection? Movie town named Lasso, real ghost town named Ruby?”

  “Has to be a connection.”

  “Probably just a good movie location. They’re hard to find, good locations. Ghost towns are dying everywhere.”

  “What time is it?”

  “One of these days, Laura, you’ll start wearing a watch. Here. I’m wearing three, take one.”

  “Noon,” I said, strapping on a lime-colored Swatch. “Time for lunch.”

  ruby

  33

  Marvin Katz squeezed a few drops of lemon on the plate of oysters Rockefeller, offered them to me again, and when I said no he manipulated the small fork to slide meat off the shell and into his mouth.

  We sat on the open patio outside the Arizona Inn’s main dining room. Very hot at twelve-thirty, the humidity unusually high because of the monsoons, but Katz claimed it felt just like Miami Beach.

  “Why should we be talking?” forking in another oyster, “I’m just wondering that to myself.”

  “It’s just routine,” I said. Dominique set a mixed green salad in front of me, light vinaigrette dressing on the side in a delicate china bowl.

  “You’ll excuse me,” reading my business card again, “Miss Winslow. My life is a routine. My wife and I get up in the morning, bagels and lox and sometimes onions and tomatoes. We go to the beach, she goes shopping, I read the Sporting News and the Miami dailies and the trades, like Variety, and every day it’s just like that. Me talking to you about Vincent, I don’t even know you, there’s nothing routine here at all.”

  “You know why people use lemon on oysters?” That stopped him for moment, finally cocking his head and gesturing with one hand, bring on the answer. “They’re not quite dead yet. The lemon juice stuns them.”

  “Close enough for me. Once in Tokyo, I’m there as line producer for some weird yakuza shoot-em thing, there’s this typhoon coming in so shootin
g’s cancelled for the day and we take a train over to Kyoto for a kaisecki meal, don’t ask from Japanese food, anyway, they got a lot of raw stuff, it comes and goes, I don’t know what most of it is, except the squid, ika I think they called it, whatever. So these are just the appetizers, of course over there, almost everything seems like an appetizer. Now my Japanese host tells me, say, you ever been to Japan?”

  Does he ramble out of habit? I thought, or is he trying to deflect my questions?

  “No,” I said. “But I like sashimi.”

  “That’s the word.” I was getting used to his way of gesturing, both elbows on the table, forearms straight up and palms flipped outward. “So, they bring the raw fish, excuse me, the sashimi, and the chef, he starts slivering off long, thin pieces for each of us. The only thing is, that fish is still alive. Until the eighth or tenth slice.”

  “I’m onto you,” I said. “You just like the taste of lemon.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Mr. Katz. The other night, you argued with Vincent?”

  “Vincent argues, I’m too old for that.”

  “A money problem.”

  “His casino’s doing good, no problems there I can see.”

  “Not the casino. Vincent’s personal money problems.”

  “You’ve been to his house, you’ve tooled around in his four-hundred-thousand-dollar car, you’ve seen his collections. No money problems there.” Savoring the last oyster, he stuck the small fork in his scotch glass and twirled the ice cubes around. “Old habit,” he said. “First time I had money to eat good food, I kinda forgot to forget my old habits. I’ve got others, you should see me cut up linguini with a knife, I hate those long strings hanging out of my mouth. You gonna eat that salad?”

  “About this movie.”

  “The movie.” Snorting, inhaling two ice cubes with the last of the scotch. Dominique slid out of nowhere to take the oyster plate. “Another single malt,” he said. “Make it a double. No water, just ice.”