Dragonfly Bones Read online

  Brittles nodded.

  “Oh.”

  “How did Sean know the spot?”

  “Work crew.”

  “What kind of work?” Brittles said patiently, wildly impatient inside but working hard not to show it and spook her.

  “Clearing brush.”

  “Here? In the housing development?”

  “Nah. Out in the desert. You know, we chop and pull weeds, uh, pick up plastic bags and bottles and trash.”

  “And is Sean still at this…what is the Rapture Warriors Camp anyway?”

  “Enforced residence for troubled teenagers,” she said by rote.

  “Sean is still there?”

  “Was at breakfast.”

  “Okay, Theresa. Thank you. I’ll send you back to jail with the deputy.”

  “No!” Shouting in alarm, fear bugging out her eyes. “I can’t go there. I told, you know, I told you, about the burial, if I go to that jail, I’ll never leave.”

  Thumb heard her shouts and came over. Opened the rear door of the Tahoe. Brittles saw a D-ring welded to the floor, knew that Theresa would be chained to it.

  “I’m not going back!”

  “Why?” Brittles said.

  “I’ll never leave. They’ll never ever let me leave.”

  Brittles went for his suit coat, pulled it on slowly, bent to brush off his boots, trying to find the right decision, but in the end shrugging his shoulders.

  “Miss Prejean, sorry, but I have no authority to keep you here.”

  Thumb tried to pull her into the Tahoe’s backseat. She raised her hands, clanked the wrist chain and cuffs on the roof again and again, digging through the white paint, sparks flying as she flailed to keep Thumb from pushing her inside.

  “I’ll have somebody at the jail to talk to you this afternoon,” Brittles said.

  Thumb dug a knee into her back, then kicked her legs out from underneath her. As Theresa lost her balance, he shoved her into the seat, in the same moment reaching for the open end of the handcuffs on the D-ring and snapping the cuff around her wrist chain. She spat into his face and spewed curses, but he slammed the door shut just in time, her face pressed against the window, distorted with rage.

  “I apologize,” Thumb said to Brittles. “We ain’t never had to deal with somebody thisaway before. You say somebody will pick her up at the jail?”

  “Sometime today.”

  “Piece of work,” Pardee said from behind as Thumb drove away.

  “She’s afraid of something,” Brittles said.

  “Didn’t mean her. What do we do now?”

  They watched the Tahoe go around a bend, dust devils lingering in the air.

  “You call the forensic anthropologist?”

  “On his way. Sounded kinda excited, said we’d have to stop digging, lots of political problems involved with old Indian bones.”

  “Keep that backhoe working. I’ve got to go to Perryville prison, that job’s got priority. You handle these bones okay?”

  “Just us dragonflies here, boss,” Pardee said without smiling. “Just one thing.” He held out two Baggies. “We’ve got something that sure doesn’t come from an old Indian.” He pulled on a clean pair of latex gloves, held up the first Baggie. “Some kind of bone. But there’s still shreds of flesh on it.”

  “What’s in the other Baggie?”

  Pardee reached inside, took out several small colored objects.

  “Is that nail polish?” Brittles asked, astonished.

  “Yup. Fingernails. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Nathan.”

  “Stop digging until the anthro guy gets here. While you’re waiting, get a federal warrant out for Theresa Prejean. Find out where that place is, Rapture Warriors Camp. Get her into protective custody, have them take her to that safe house we use in Tucson.”

  Pardee pushed the nails into a straight line on top of the Baggie. There were nine fingernails, the polish chipped on some and undisturbed on others. Five had color variations of brilliant red, another was black, another pale lavender, and two more had a French manicure.

  “You figured out my bad feeling yet?” Pardee asked.

  Brittles grimaced.

  All the nails were different sizes.

  Nine different women, nine different bodies.

  And they’d only begun to dig.

  laura

  1

  Badwater. Death Valley, California.

  The three of us gathered at six in the morning around a small pool of saltwater, the lowest place in the United States.

  “Ready?”

  Rich held up a hand with fingers cocked like a starter’s pistol.

  Veronique Difiallos laughed.

  I grinned.

  “Bang!” Rich Thompson shouted.

  Veronique coaxed her ancient VW camper van to life. She’d follow me, Rich driving his pickup ahead toward Furnace Creek Ranch. It was June twenty-third, the temperature already one hundred and seven degrees. Veronique’s tape player started blasting an old Bink Dog rap.

  I settled my lightweight headphones, turned on my iPod to get adrenaline ramped up with a Mad Squirrel rap, and started running.

  Sunlight sometime, Moonlike Sunshine

  Moonlit nighttime, raccoon get in backroom fight time

  Mad Squirrel writes and recites rhymes

  Freestyle, written and, Laura Winslow high off the Ritalin

  You’re in for dope rhyme spittin and

  No I’m not kiddin

  Mile three. These first few miles were fun miles. Long-before-dawn miles. Juiced-up, hydrated, pumped, before-you’re-dry, ready-to-fly miles.

  Veronique pulled alongside in the VW van.

  “You okay?” she shouted.

  I nodded without speaking.

  “I can’t hear you, lady.”

  She muted her CD player, leaned over to shout out the window at me.

  Ring ring ring ring ring on my celly

  Peeped the number was my homeboy Nelly

  Askin, Girl, where you at?

  I’m puffin on this twamp sack in the back of my man’s Cadillac

  Why you ask?

  Cause them punk mothafuckas that we thought was gone

  They back in the hood and once again it’s on.

  I shouted back.

  Disrespectin women it’s beginnin to get a little old

  Like them tales that’s ten times told

  To your ten men friends on the same night

  Your life’s all fucked up and you’re rappin like your game’s tight.

  “You’re cooking,” she shouted, dropping the van behind me.

  Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.

  I’m nuts to be running so far in this brain-frying heat, but I’m fine.

  Left big toe blistering in the heat, my foot probably another twenty degrees hotter inside the running shoe. Right hamstring twingeing now and again, protesting and I’m wondering, Why am I doing this? Like, remind me again, dear body?

  The Death Valley Badwater Run starts very early on a July morning. You run around the desert here and there, finally heading, uphill, a long way uphill, one hundred and thirty-five miles gradually uphill, climbing over eight thousand feet to the finish line, which was a third of the way up Mount Whitney.

  It’s the toughest extreme sports run in the U.S., and I loved it. The actual Badwater Run wasn’t scheduled for another two weeks, but Rich and I had already made reservations that weekend down at Rocky Point on the Sea of Cortes.

  So why exactly was I running?

  I hadn’t snorted Ritalin in months. I’d changed my addiction to long distance running. Extreme long distance. Plus hand weights. Rich had been my live-in partner for two months. We’d met one night at Nonie, downing Susie’s dirty martinis and rubbing elbows until I decided it was time to end my long celibacy.

  Rich made me conscious of my forty-six-year-old body to the point where I sought muscle definition, stamina, energy—oh, hell, let’s be honest, I sought something more permanent th
an a methamphetamine addiction. When you’re running, those fantastic endorphins kick in after a few miles. You get high. You don’t get strung out, just really tired, and I had an ability to run farther and farther every week.

  Veronique lived with a Tewa who’d given up his fiddle for a three-stringed cello to accompany her on homemade rap albums, which she sold on the Internet. She was somewhere in her fifties, he was ancient, their blissful lives a constant wonder. Veronique knew me at my down and out worst, when I’d first tried to kick Ritalin and wound up liking too many martinis. Veronique was half Venezuelan, half African-American. Slim and beautiful, she tattooed her lips and eyelids with impermanent ink that lasted two or three months. I’d thought it was a beauty thing, but she insisted that the tattooed lines made it easier to avoid daily makeup. She didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs, but brewed whole kettles of bancha tea every three days and infused my spirit with her energy, along the way teaching me hiphop and alternative rap. I loved rapping, and once I got past thug rap and the constant gangsta and ho routines, I gradually wrote my own raps, which the two of us would exchange in a weekly shoutdown.

  She pulled alongside me again and motioned that we had a scheduled stop.

  Mile six.

  Gasping a bit, more from the heat than the physical exertion, hands on knees, greedy with the water bottle she handed me, greedier to sit in shade against the side of the van on the cardboard she laid out. We’d discovered early on that the pavement was hot enough to burn my thighs if I wasn’t careful. But water loss was the death threat. Oceans of sweat poured down my face, my arms, under my running bra, into my shorts, down my thighs to soak my socks. We figured I had to drink a minimum of one gallon of water every hour, just to keep basically hydrated.

  “What’s my time?”

  “Twenty-two minutes a mile. Not bad.”

  “I’m dying, Veronique. That works out to running the whole thing in about forty some hours. I’m gonna cut back.”

  “You can drive awhile. I’ll run. Nobody will know the difference.”

  “Nobody but me.”

  I spritzed a whole water bottle on my ponytailed hair and shoulders, adjusted the loose fitting cotton blouse, and fastened my hat with sun-protection tenting at the back. The fresh water seemed to evaporate on contact.

  “I’m not going much farther with these soggy socks, so get the next pair ready when I wave at you.”

  “Blisters?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “You change your socks, we check for blisters. When we get to Furnace Creek Ranch, we decide how much longer you want to prove to yourself that you can do this crazy business.”

  She handed me a large paper cup full of some mineral-enhanced orange juice, then another eight ounces of water. I stretched, got out of the shade of the van, and started a slow jog after I got Mad Squirrel going again.

  I keep it proper like the pop star

  Trying to act hard all chillin in the backyard

  Villain please,

  Conservative Individual Wannabes

  Get brushed back all up on my trees

  And heed the Weasel and the Dingo

  Sing your pop rap jingle at the “casingo”

  Bump the single, learn the lingo

  And then go back to grade school and try to play cool

  Gringo, or speaker of the Latin lingo

  African-American grow, Asian grow

  Where’d the half-breed Indian go?

  After stopping to rest for an hour at Furnace Creek Ranch, I decided I’d do the next major leg and quit there. I’d run seventeen point four miles, and I told Rich and Veronique I’d quit at Stove Pipe Wells, which would be about fifty miles total. We could eat something at the restaurant, maybe Rich and I could spend the night at the small motel. So we started off again, but it wasn’t much fun anymore.

  Until I saw the six-foot-long green caterpillar.

  Somewhere along the route the actual physical effort of running becomes automatic, runners pulled along with a tractor beam right out of Star Trek, a magnetic force-field bubble that encases them with mystic energy. Some endurance runners take the stress and fatigue mainly so they’ll move way beyond endorphin rushes into hallucinations. Runners from previous races reported seeing such things as a Boeing 747 taxiing alongside, nude men and women rollerblading with them for company.

  I had no more hallucinations that day, but when my iPod quit working I chanted some of my latest rap, modifying some lines to fit this run.

  I’m alone on my own

  On a road with no map to where I’m goin

  But my ambition’s growin

  No knowin where I’ll end up but welcoming adventure

  And free from dependence indenture

  Free from that affliction

  Ritalin addiction

  I center my mind on steps, not sure what I’m gonna find next

  As I climb this hill I’m resigned to let

  Things unfold, unsure of some of the things I’ve been told

  Or what the future might hold.

  I found myself repeating the last four lines again and again, gradually reducing it to the phrase “resigned to let things unfold,” and that got so unsettling I slowed my pace. Veronique pulled alongside and asked if I was okay, why was I just walking, was I tired?

  “Radio ahead to Rich,” I said. “I’ve had enough of this. Let’s drive home.”

  2

  Resigned to let things unfold.

  That bothered me for several days after the Death Valley run, because I was weary of unfolding past events, weary of reading those events like tea leaves, like I Ching stalks. Enough unfolding, I finally said to myself, but what I mostly thought was that I wanted to fold up my life and move on somewhere.

  Not just anywhere.

  Somewhere permanent.

  A home I could live in for years, for decades.

  Most of all, a home where I could live beyond haunted memories.

  After San Carlos, after Meg killed the man and I took her home, I had to clean up my entire life and it took me several weeks just to work out how to begin.

  Months before, my best friend Meg Arizana arranged for me to accompany her on a drive from Perryville prison down to Nogales. At the border crossing, several people died in a monster shootout, Meg was kidnapped and held hostage in the Sonoran desert by the brother of a woman Meg had killed with a shotgun in my old Tucson house. I spent two weeks fulfilling my shouted promise that I’d come find her. The farther I got into Mexico, the more people died.

  In the process, I wound up totally estranged from my second-best friend, Rey Villanueva, Meg’s ex-husband, and thought I’d found my ideal man in Kyle Callaghan, a kidnap-rescue negotiator from New Zealand. Like Russell Crowe, in that movie Proof of Life. Except Kyle had a young daughter and still loved his dead wife.

  Meg and Rey remarried, got divorced again after just a few months. Meg went to Alaska, the coldest place she could think of where she might forget being kidnapped and held for ransom in the desert. Rey moved on…somewhere. I’d not heard from him since.

  I knew I also had to move somewhere.

  But where?

  I knew I had to leave my house, leave all those visual memories of life, but where should I go? What should I do?

  With no goals in mind yet, I started by cleaning out the room I used for my office. This took several weeks; actually, the last week was when I did things, the first ten days I had to decide what to keep and what to throw away. I keep few mementos, souvenirs, reminders. But I don’t discard things easily.

  Most of my life I’ve been an outsider to my community, my few friends, myself. Be prepared, that’s Laura’s marching song. Prepared to move on when trouble happens. When Law gets too close, especially when Law gets in your face even if they don’t know what they’re staring at.

  But like all people, I do have my souvenirs. My remembrances, memorabilia, mementos. So I had to sort through stuff carefully, had to form a willingness to thro
w it all out and just move on.

  No. That’s wrong.

  Tired of moving on, I wanted to settle down, find a home. A real home. A permanent home. A symbolic and physical place I could call Home. Most people have that all their lives, even when they move, they just pick up their sense of home and take it with them. When I’ve moved on, at the back of my head I already knew the move was temporary even before I made it.

  So I sorted out my office things with a deliberate sense of importance, no matter how slight or peripheral to my past. Searching, I guess, for those things which had true importance. Oh, hell, let’s face it, I tell you, I wasn’t really searching for bits of the past, I was looking at all my stuff and wondering why I’d even bothered to save it.

  I moved piles into my living room, other piles onto the kitchen table and counters, still more stuff into my office and bedroom. Piles of stuff right on the floor. On carpets, tiles, wood, bricks, even on top of clothing, because I was sorting all that, too. Gradually, I saw a pattern to the sorting according to which room I was in. Listen, you’ve all moved a few times in your life, some of you have moved on, a few of you know the sudden panic of not even being able to go home, you had to move on so fast you just left everything behind. Or you ran away from it.

  Living room.

  Books in a corner, CDs in another corner.

  Office.

  Paper trails of a few hacking solutions. A few photos, none of them showing people, just computer and networking hardware. Some hard copy of special hacks I’d done, software scripts I’d written, printouts of downloaded website articles.

  Kitchen.

  My DVDs. I had hundreds of them. I wanted to sort them into piles, wanted to classify them, you know, noir, classics, kung fu, romantic comedies, whatever. Maybe they were in the kitchen because I spent most of my time there, I wasn’t sure about that, but I loved my DVDs, knew I’d be taking pretty much all of them. No way I’d even begun to figure out where I’d be taking them. But I knew they’d come for the ride.

  Bedroom.

  All kinds of storage devices. A few old floppies, a lot of data CDs, some zip drives that I couldn’t even play back with my new iMac. At least a dozen hard drives. Firewire stuff, probably a few hundred gigabytes of important hacking scripts and locations and contacts. Everything of value I’d already backed up through the Web onto many servers, some at Don Ralph’s new company in Phoenix, others parked on remote computers in Asia.