Shadow Play Read online

  Who am I? We all do this, I tell you, we unexpectedly find ourselves in transition zones with no comprehension of how or why we got there, but we enter those sentimental, melodramatic places of the heart that no longer thrive.

  I am in my early forties. Married at fifteen, had a daughter within two years, my husband Jonathan abandoned me when my baby, Spider, was two years old. She lives with me again, having no other place and pregnant with an unnamed father.

  As a younger woman, I was active in Indian resistance movements, but drifted from this to live in one place or another, with a succession of unsatisfactory men. While Nathan Brittles has been my steady partner and lover for almost a whole year, we live in separate houses since both of us retain a private mystery of our past that leaves us not yet willing to commit to and share the same space.

  See? I told you this was melodrama, but I don’t understand why. Yet.

  I’ve broken a variety of laws within the past ten years, mostly because of illegal computer hacking. Even though I now own a legitimate business, I struggle to become a better person, not wanting to depend on something else or someone else to make me whole.

  My daughter is the exception to this. I want to share her pregnancy, I yearn to bear a child myself, or at least, I think so, I’m confused about this.

  Years ago, I called myself an information midwife.

  I found people who believe they’ll never be found.

  I never met them. I just sold their secrets.

  I didn’t ever want to meet them.

  Using computers, I cracked (hackers = good guys, crackers = black hats) into networked databanks, gleaning unlisted phone numbers, bank accounts, credit card histories, airline travel itineraries, telephone and medical histories, records of birth and death and marriage and divorce and supermarket shopping purchases, anything to compile in electronic dossiers and hawk to those willing to pay my fee. I could find almost anybody who thought they’d skip out and remain untraceable. I never advertised, never solicited work, rarely had an unsatisfied customer.

  Everybody leaves traces.

  You just have to know where to look.

  I’m confused about my current role as a private investigator, how I’ve gone from the privacy about living alone to meeting clients and suspected identity thieves, I’m concerned about carrying a gun, about photographing crime scenes and dead people. I don’t much understand why I do this. To counter this acceptance of violence, I work to heal myself holistically, I exercise with long runs and working out with weights.

  I fall into these sentimental moments too many times these days, sentimentality and melodrama are so seductive.

  Questions too often lead to betrayal of worth.

  6

  I sat sideways, legs outside the Cherokee while I fitted a wide-angle lens to my Fuji S2 digital camera and attached the flash package.

  Dirt over all cars nearby, sidewalks, windows, patches of pavement underneath the carport where rain couldn’t wash the dirt. Sand, actually, brought up by another monsoon a few days before. Wind bursts to eighty miles an hour. Rotation of the monsoon winds, snatching Sonoran desert sand, caliche, dirt of all manner and color, cradling the dirt two hundred miles north from deep inside Mexico.

  “What do you want me to shoot?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything in the house?”

  “Inside, outside. Set a procedure, don’t miss a thing.”

  “Nathan,” I said, “sweetie,” I said, “don’t miss a thing? Why?”

  “Because it won’t be here tomorrow.”

  Okay. A riddle. Answers only when ready.

  First rule of forensic photography. Get your perspective, look, and shoot.

  Don’t even go to the door until you’ve drawn all the exterior visuals into your gut, your head. You start the analysis right away by not taking anything for granted.

  A whole lot different than seeing everything on a computer monitor.

  Nathan didn’t want to get out of the Cherokee.

  Not saying anything, I checked my equipment.

  Flash memory card loaded in a FinePix S2 Pro digital SLR camera with a 6.17 megapixel proprietary Fuji advanced ccd, octagonal pixels for higher image quality than the standard ccd with square pixels. Built by Fuji on a modified Nikon N80 chassis, using all Nikon lenses and accessories.

  “Let’s get this done,” I said. “Before the monsoon hits.”

  He didn’t move except to finger a manila envelope.

  “Why are you sitting there? It’s gonna rain like hell, let’s do this.”

  Opening my aluminum carry case for lenses, taking out the 12mm to 24mm f4 Nikon G series zoom lens for interiors because it’s an ultra-wide-angle optic at the 12mm end, equivalent to 18mm on a 35mm film format.

  “Chindi,” he said finally. “It’s a Death house. Hard for me to go in there.”

  “It’s a modern, stand-alone, lower Arizona housing development. This isn’t the rez, Nathan. I’m ready,” I said. “If you’re not, just give me the keys, I’ll shoot whatever I see inside.” I took out the Nikon 28mm to 100mm f3.5 to f5.6 G series cheapie zoom lens for whatever general shots I’d need and snapped the hinges shut on the lens case. “Give me the keys. I’ll shoot the outside later.”

  Nathan pulled a key ring from the envelope and we walked to the front door. He tried a few keys until one slotted into the single lock. Inside the door I jumped, startled at seeing my reflection in a floor-to-ceiling mirror creating the illusion of a tiny entryway. Directly ahead, what looked like two bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen area with a counter and two high wooden chairs, a dining nook with a four-foot round fake oak table and two chairs.

  The whole place sized about eleven hundred, maybe twelve or thirteen hundred square feet, I guessed. Small. I’d lived in smaller, but this place had few windows, making it seem smaller than it was. Well lighted. At least two skylights, one in the hallway and another in the first bathroom. The master bedroom also bright, so there was either a window or skylight or both.

  In the living room, a too-long entertainment center crowded one wall opposite a sofa and matching chair, both heavy and inexpensively plush, dried blackish bloodstains mingling into the sofa’s fabric design, patterned in light and dark browns with reddish stripes and vaguely Indian-looking rock art shapes. Blood spatters up the wall, smaller ones like inverted apostrophes, with upper points as the splatter spread to the ceiling. Heavier spots with points top and bottom, splatter and drip.

  An intensely close atmosphere, a closed-up house smell. Mostly that dry, musty, hot-temperature smell of a single-level desert home that gets a lot of sun with closed windows. Underneath the sun smell, a heavy metallic dried-blood odor, coppery-smelling to some, but for me it smelled of zinc, mostly because when I bled, I used my fingers to rub blood off, then sometimes licked my fingers, it tasted of the zinc supplements I took every day.

  I swished the front door back and forth, trying to get some fresh air inside.

  “Back door?” I said.

  Nathan pulled photos from the envelope, held them up one at a time as he matched them to the living room. He pointed down the hall, jerked his chin at me.

  “End, to the right, should be a sliding door out onto a patio.”

  “All right to open it? I can’t hardly breathe in here.”

  He grunted, located the aircon control and turned it on. Passing the kitchen, my eyes to the right as I went down the hall under the skylight, I almost walked into the louvered doors at the end, next to a bathroom. Behind the louvers I could see a washer and a dryer. To the left, a king-sized bed and two dressers filled a room. To the right, drapes. I found a pull cord at the end, drew them back, unlocked and slid open a six-foot glass door. Went out on the small bricked patio to a small, intensely packed garden. Beyond, the ground sloped down into a ravine, mesquites partially blocking the view east of a golf course on the other lip of the ravine. A threesome putting on a green, a single player waiting behind them.


  Shafts of rain fanned out from the clouds, maybe five minutes away. Thunder rumbled somewhere to the southeast. Lightning flashed and veined in all directions, at times two or more strikes joining together. Switching to my zoom lens, I carefully bracketed the entire backyard, one hundred and eighty degrees of desert and mountains views. Across a thick row of pink-flowered oleander bushes, down thirty feet or so on this side of a ravine and up the other, lower side reaching to the golf course. Lots of bushes, branches, leaves, natural debris in the ravine, I wouldn’t walk down in there, I have a terrible fear of rattlesnakes. Finished, I went back inside and pushed open the door of the second bedroom.

  “Anything out back?” Nathan said.

  “Golfers. What next?”

  “Check those computers.”

  I looked inside the study. Nathan heard my gasp of amazement.

  “Your friend really into computers?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t know. Everybody’s got a computer these days. Play those games, surf those webs.”

  “Not you,” I said. “C’mere. Take a look.”

  We huddled together in the doorway.

  “That’s a lot of gear,” he said finally. “Looks like your office.”

  “Who was this guy? What did he do?”

  “Leon. He’s got a name, Laura. Use it.”

  Dead people, I don’t want to use their names. One way to keep yourself separated away from emotional attachment, shoot autopsy photos of somebody anonymous. It bothered me somewhat that Nathan knew this man.

  “So what this, what did…Leon…do?”

  “Coordinated other customs agents out walking the desert, looking for carpet walkers. Drug smugglers.”

  “Would he have used computers for his job?”

  “Unlikely. That stuff is coordinated by the Nogales and Tucson offices. This must have been just casual stuff. Hobby, game-playing, whatever.”

  “No way,” I said. “There’s at least ten thousand dollars worth of equipment in here. Computer, hub, router…he had a whole network in here. Two brand new Apple G5 PowerMacs. That looks like a thirty-two-inch flat display screen, that alone must cost five thousand dollars. Wait a minute.”

  I went outside, walked down the road backward, a few drops of rain splattering loud on the galvanized rooftops of the carports. I kept looking for something on the flat roof.

  “What?” Nathan opened the screen door.

  “You see a ladder anywhere?”

  The wind kicked up, nine veins of lightning zapped off the main plume dancing to the ground.

  “Come back in here,” Nathan said.

  “Got to see what’s on the roof.”

  “Get underneath something.”

  Nathan ran back through the house. I stayed where I was, waiting. The first rain hit the galvanized tin carport roof, one tink and another tinktink and suddenly fat raindrops plunked on and around me. I didn’t move, almost impossible to keep dry when the monsoon wind slapped the rain sideways, under the carport. Nathan suddenly appeared at the front of the roof, waving at me to go inside. A hard rain now, pushed almost horizontal by increasingly heavy winds. I ran to the door, stood under the front eaves, half soaked, but loving the clean ozone-fresh air. Thunder crashed every twenty seconds as the monsoon blew almost directly over the housing development. Two houses away, a huge multiveined lightning stroke smashed a big mesquite, knocking off a main branch twenty feet long, a huge chunk of wood flying across the road to partially crunch a parked Buick, thunder crashing right on top of us as the wind gusted well over fifty miles per hour and finally uprooted the mesquite, top branches just missing some windows, crushing the galvanized tin carport roof.

  “Get in here!” Nathan shouted.

  “What’s on the roof?”

  “Metal pizza-size dish,” he said. “Antenna?”

  “High-speed data uplink.”

  A heavy smash in the back bedroom, splattering tinkle of glass. Down the hallway, we looked cautiously into the room. A huge branch had blown off one of the mesquites down in the ravine, near the golf course, other smaller branches still flying around. Rain blew like shotgun pellets into the room, shredding part of the drapes and pushing the sliding-door metal frame out of alignment.

  Nathan nodded to himself, almost a tight smile on his lips for a moment.

  “Come on,” he said. “Shoot everything you see.”

  I went to Leon’s office, sat in Leon’s chair, started to inventory the room. I booted up one of the G5s, waiting to open the File Finder, waiting to check files, to see what applications were installed, especially what email program so I could look for traces of what he’d been doing.

  “This is a little weird,” I said. Calling Nathan back into the room, waiting for the G5 to boot up. “Equipment’s brand new, seems right out of the box. That’s pretty high-tech stuff.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m waiting to look at his personal files and email.”

  A brilliant lightning stroke flashed nearby. The air vibrated and a second later, my body throbbing as intense as standing near the transformers of a major power substation, except with lightning, everything throbs.

  The electricity went off a second later. We went to the back window of the bedroom, watched the lightning moving across the golf course toward us, wind whipping the mesquites to slant toward the ground. Down below, the lone golfer whacked a ball, got in his electric golf cart, and headed to the green.

  “One crazy bastard,” Nathan said. “Okay. Power’s off. Shoot pictures everywhere. Let’s do this, let’s finish this.”

  “What are we finishing?”

  He waved the manila envelope, pulled several large photos halfway out. Hesitant. He doesn’t want to do this, I thought.

  “What’s in those pictures?”

  “Computer room first,” he said. “Then we’ll go back to when it happened.”

  “You said these deaths happened a week ago?”

  “Eight days. Why?”

  “Look at the dirt. From that monsoon two days ago.”

  Dirt coated everything in the house, walls, floors, furniture, the coating thicker as we went into the back room. “Somebody’s been inside,” I said. “Just recently. And come look at in here.” Steering him to the computer room. “Look at that wall. Sideways, at a slant toward the light. See it?” A two-by-three-foot spot almost completely free of dirt, centered roughly at eye level. “Map? Chart?”

  “And look here,” Nathan said. Pointing at shelving underneath the window.

  “Picture frames,” I said, ducking as I focused the Nikon lens. “Four by six, five by seven. These had to be taken yesterday, or last night.”

  “Or this morning. How many shots can you take with that thing?”

  “A thousand or so. Plus I’ve got another high-speed minidrive out in the car. How many pictures do you want?”

  “Everything at least twice. And from different angles.”

  “The whole place?”

  “Here.”

  “If the windows stay closed, the dirt won’t blow away.”

  Paying no attention to me, he counted off marks on the shelving. “I figure, six or seven pictures are missing. Make sure you cover the pictures that are left.”

  “Ocotillos, saguaros, Mexican gold poppies. Flowers, landscapes,” shooting while I talked, “so what kind of pictures are missing?”

  “When you’re done,” he said, “come to the living room.”

  7

  But first, the master bedroom. Nathan removed three crime scene photos from the envelope. Polaroid digital photos, I couldn’t believe a crime scene tech didn’t shoot in digital, had to be a reason. Nathan laid the photos in a row, against the headboard.

  A dead teenager, no more than seventeen. If that.

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Jodhi Patroon. Arizona driver’s license in her handbag, also an INS card given only to Mexican nationals. Same name.”

  “Probably both f
ake IDs,” I said. “Patroon? What kind of Mexican name is that?” Got Alex Emerine on my cell, gave her everything else on the driver’s license so Alex could run it through all of our identity databases, not bothering with a description, we’d handle that with more complex software. “Young and poor,” I said to Nathan.

  Short cropped brown hair, blond highlights in two bunches sprouting from behind on either side, a strange haircut but nothing that teenagers did surprised me anymore. Streaks fading from a cheap cut and dye job, probably done by a friend. Wal-Mart stonewashed jeans pulled down to her knees, white panties with a lollipop pattern at midthigh, a TULANE GREEN WAVE tee hiked up past a red bra with the right side totally shattered by a shotgun round. Lower torso down to her thighs ripped by shotgun pellets, panties and bra so drenched in blood that the patterned and faintly red hibiscus flowers sewn into the bra barely registered because of the blood.

  Blood spatters up against her face, drops against the headboard and streaking the wall. In the photo, I saw the sliding glass door at rear wall, not smashed by the wind but locked with a foot-pedal bar and a one-inch-thick wooden rod lying in the slider track. Eyes open wide as double eagles in extreme surprise at what was about to happen to her.

  While looking at the pictures, another fierce gust of wind drove against the remains of the slider door, the drapes dropping occasionally when the wind slowed, only to shiver from the impact of rain slamming horizontally against them. Down on the golf course, his profile blurred through wet shards of glass, another lone golfer swung a club, got in his cart, and drove out of sight. Room closed, musty, thick blood and urine smells from the saturated mattress.

  I shot the entire room.

  “What next?”

  “In here,” Nathan said.

  Three crime scene photos laid on the blood-drenched leather sofa.

  Most of Leon’s head blown away by the shotgun round. His lower jaw was in two or three pieces, nothing north of his upper jaw. One eyeball rested on the back of the sofa, mired in a sea of blood and brain, and the remains of Leon’s head spread out like a flower, like a very, very large hibiscus, very dark red in color, hypnotic, the color Polaroids so vivid they drew you into the bloody face as though it was a flower, like Georgia O’Keeffe’s bright red poppies.