Shadow Play Read online

  I shot thirty-five pictures of the room, but nothing matched the bluntness of the crime scene photos, these in more vivid color as though the tech had switched cameras or run out of Polaroid film. Leon’s skin peeled away from the skull, head the same as a hanging side of beef. Red marbled meat, orange-yellow spongy, fatty tissue, white cartilage and tendons and ligaments and bits of bone.

  I was surprised, as always.

  We never think of what our bodies will look like when we’re dead.

  Dressed only in jeans, nothing on top, his body extremely fit and muscular, six-pack abs, a big Navajo torso, but also that of a man in extraordinary physical condition. A muscles triangle up his waist. As somebody who worked out regularly with free weights, I could see the results of years of curls and crunches.

  “You got everything?” Nathan asked.

  “From this room, and the bedroom. Anything else?”

  “Medicine chests in the bathrooms.”

  I nodded. All kinds of things revealed by what’s in those bathrooms. But when I opened the mirrored doors, it was all ordinary. I shot both medicine chests, meticulously went through the kitchen and shot each cupboard. Shot the inside of the refrigerator, various juices, milk, cheeses, nothing extraordinary.

  The crime scene full-face photos. Like actors’ head shots, not a pun, I said to myself, really, they really are head shots. Something bothered me, dug at me, scratched the unconscious, semiconscious, enough of metaphors.

  Nobody ever bothers to clean up a death scene, unless the property is immediately resold or put up for rent. Even then, takes a lot of dedicated scrubbing to get rid of that coppery blood scent.

  Stared at the living room crime scene photos. Leon on the sofa, damaged head against the wall. I turned Leon’s picture over, in the bedroom I then laid out every shot of the teenager, working through her mind as Leon, or somebody, brings the shotgun into the room, he’s probably already pumped a shell into the chamber. What does the teenager see? Does she even see the shotgun?

  On her side of the bed. Several books stacked together, one open facedown. The Prophet, Gibran. Pages dog-eared, pencil and pen marks, notes, under-linings. A Michael Connelly mystery, half read and discarded. Headphones, a small portable CD player. I popped it open, read the CD. Ambient sounds of relaxation. Nothing eccentric. Surf, rain, wind, bubbling brook. Another CD of Yanni.

  Getting a sense here, a woman who mellowed out. Why? A teenager? On her side of the wide oak dresser, old pictures of a woman, probably Leon’s wife, Leon, and five somewhat younger people, obviously their children, two women and three men, three of them with spouses or partners, and nine, counting them, what had to be nine grandchildren.

  I stood directly opposite her body, represented by the photographs. I knelt, put my arms out, crawled closer to the photos, sat back, rump on my heels. The teenager’s last moments. Leon suddenly in the room, shotgun to her body. I stared at the bloodstains on the carpeting, pulled back my imagination, thought of the angle of the shotgun wound to her chest. The number-four buckshot angling down, thirteen pellets in her chest, removed during the autopsy, the rest of the twenty-seven pellets through and through, embedded in the mattress and the wall.

  Back to Leon. Trying to be in his head, what the hell was in his head, did he do this, loading an old shotgun with only two shells, walking into the living room, leveling the barrel at the teenager, pulling the trigger without hesitation. Trying to imagine the teenager seeing him and the shotgun, what was she thinking, he’s got the gun on her, she’s probably been around his guns all her life, she knows he means to pull the trigger on her, she can’t believe it, doesn’t know why. Fright, panic.

  No.

  I picked up the crime scene photo showing her face. Rictus of astonishment, horror, disbelief. What’s wrong with this picture? With the New-Age books, CDs, if it was Leon, the man she loved, trusted, would not her face be composed? What are you doing? I’d like you to take that weapon away. No, Leon, please.

  But if it was a stranger, somebody else with the gun, unsuspected, that’s the look of horror. And what if she was also a stranger?

  “Nathan,” I said, calling him into the bedroom. “What’s wrong in here?” He looked around carefully, he’d already looked three times, finally shaking his head. “Look at those things on this teenager’s side of the bed. Are they Leon’s? If not, are they hers? With all this stuff, she looks like she’s come to stay, or has been staying. But why is she sleeping in the same bed as Leon, if they’re not sleeping together?”

  “I don’t know. Got pictures of everything?”

  “Yeah. But taking pictures isn’t the same as getting answers.”

  “We’re done here,” he said finally.

  The monsoon thundered westward, wind whistling through mesquite and yucca trees, the rain finally stopping enough for us to go back to the Cherokee and drive to the Green Valley Mall. Raindrops scudding across all the Cherokee’s windows.

  He opened the passenger-side door, waited until I sat, stood holding the door half open, palms across the window ledge, both index fingers pointed at me.

  “Let’s set some ground rules,” he said. “First rule. Computers, your thing. Everything else? Mine.”

  “Everything else?”

  “You got a problem?”

  “What does that mean, everything? What are you saying?” I cocked my head, trying to look up into his eyes, but the sun sparkled indirectly behind him, prismed through raindrops. East, toward the Santa Ritas, I could see a double rainbow and on the edge, the faint color bars of yet a third rainbow. I’d never seen a triple rainbow in my life. “Why are you telling me this? What did you notice, that you’re saying this to me? Like we’ve never worked a case together, like we’ve never been partners?”

  “Division of responsibilities,” he said. “You check out all that computer gear. You check out their financials. Leon and the Patroon woman, you look at their digital records. I check out the real people involved. I interview witnesses, suspects. Whoever. Whatever.”

  “You don’t trust me around people?”

  “Laura.” He bent down, his face level with mine. “I trust you 100 percent. I trust you with my life.”

  “But?”

  “You got a history of getting near killed.”

  Irritated, I pushed the door against him, trying to swivel my legs out. He held the door firm, the physical control setting off a flood of anger.

  “Two people dead here, Laura. A murder-suicide, maybe, maybe not.”

  I pushed hard on the door, quickly pulled it to me and just as quickly pushed it out hard before he could adjust to the back-and-forth pressure. The door banged his right kneecap.

  “Okay. All right.” He grimaced, smiled, stood away while I struggled out of the car. “Let’s try this another way. It’s my thing, okay?” Rubbed his knee. “I saw your eyes light up, all that computer gear. You’re thinking, hey, you could be a real part of this. Here’s the deal,” Nathan said. “One. You don’t talk to anybody involved in this unless I say so. Two, you don’t come along when I talk to people, unless I say so. Don’t answer the phone until you run caller ID.”

  “I understand. You chief. Me just working Indian.”

  “Works for me.” Not missing my sarcasm. “Okay, tell you what. You want people? I give you that.”

  “Gee. Thanks, chief.”

  “So now we cool?”

  “Oh, dude,” I said. Smiling, laying my hand below his belt buckle, on top of the zipper. “Now you know that I’m cool.”

  “Not now,” he said, turning away from my hand.

  “What?” I said.

  “You see any TV sets here? Books? CD player?”

  “No.”

  “Lives by himself, doesn’t watch TV, read books, or listen to music. Look at the carpeting in that computer room, the wheel marks from his chair, back and forth. He spent a lot of time in this room, which means a lot of time at the computer.”

  “I’ll run the hard dr
ives up to Tucson,” I said. “Leave them with Alex after I talk with my daughter. C’mon. Let’s go, gotta be there.”

  “I want you to do something else first. That place we stopped? The house, nobody home? Go back there, see if the woman’s returned.”

  “Woman,” I said. “Aha. You’ll let me talk to ‘people’ long’s it’s a woman. Okay. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. All I have is the name and address. Antoinette Claw.”

  “Navajo? Where you get her name? Her address?”

  “A friend,” he said shortly.

  “Will I get to meet this friend?” Nathan considered, nodded. “What’s his name?”

  “Bob Good Fellow. He’s a Tribal Policeman. Staying at my place. Can you meet us tomorrow morning, at Casa Grande?”

  “Afternoon,” I said. “Alex and I will work on these computers. Two o’clock all right? I miss being with you, Nathan.”

  Another heavy blast of wind. Glass tinkled, probably from the sliding back door. He got that tight smile, nodding to himself as we went to check that the room was secure enough from more damage. Across the ravine, the golfer ducked his head at us, bent sideways for some shelter against the rain, then he swung again.

  “That’s odd,” I said. “Who hits golf balls into heavy wind and rain?”

  Nathan stared and stared, abruptly ran into the living room and returned with a pair of binoculars, focusing them on the golfer.

  “No ball,” Nathan said. “He’s not swinging at a ball. He’s looking at us, he’s got binoculars.” Nathan slipped between shards of glass, hurdled the row of oleander bushes, and sprinted down the ravine. The golfer backed up quickly to his cart, turned on the small engine, and swung through a wide U-turn toward the far end of the fairway. Nathan slipped on some wet leaves, climbed to the lip of the ravine just as the golf cart disappeared in a flurry of rain.

  “Who could that be?” I said ten minutes later, Nathan dripping all over the carpet. “Why was he watching us?”

  “Not us. Watching the house. Listen. I’m going to stay here. You go see if Antoinette is home. Take the computers. I’ll finish up.”

  “Finish up what?” He grabbed the G5 computer carrying handles, one computer gripped in each fist, carrying them out to the Cherokee.

  “Keep your cell on,” he said, disappearing back into the house.

  Back at the Green Valley Mall, a woman from the bookshop pushing the outside sale-book racks inside, closing up the store. I walked around his pickup, the far side window open several inches. Using my extra key, I opened the door and switched on the power long enough to roll the window completely closed. A catalog lay on the seat, addressed to me at Nathan’s address, the catalog creased open somewhere in the middle. Shoes by Jimmy Choo.

  This sounds so frivolous, wanting a pair of expensive shoes. Part of my new, social self was the realization that I had few good clothes. Absolutely no frivolous underthings, sports bras and Jockey panties, nothing frilly or suggestive, I usually slept with nothing on. My shoes? Nearly three dozen pairs of running shoes, some sandals and flipflops, a single pair of heels, low heels, practical heels. While Tucson isn’t a high-fashion shopping center, I could find nearly anything I needed, never thought of shopping in Phoenix for something expensive or seductive or even colorful. Figuring I’d start where I had the least, I began looking at shoe catalogs and after three months decided I wanted a pair of Jimmy Choo four-inch heels. Totally impractical, almost totally unobtainable, just a fancy, something out of reach.

  8

  People skills. A running joke between Nathan and me. In the past few months, more truth than humor, Nathan an old-fashioned cop, me one of the first of an entirely new breed of private investigators. The Internet barely ten years old, I’d been checking people’s identities for most of that, including the early years when databases were so new that getting into them was pretty much illegal.

  Now, my small business, created by Donald Ralph and managed by him until his Cessna 172 crashed and burned in a Kansas cornfield, we’d increased from nine people to nearly two dozen. Most of them young kids, a few with college degrees, two still in high school, all of them huddled over their laptops and wide display screens for long days, often curled fully clothed into sleeping bags under their desktops, crashing for an hour of sleep while computers crunched through powerful databases both online and owned by my company.

  I never cared if they had college or even high school degrees. With these kids, the personal interview pretty much started at a keyboard. I only wanted to find people with curiosity at solving puzzles, or even if they showed facility at such diverse things as computer games, crossword puzzles, nontraditional IQ tests, anything that made them eager to solve something, to provide an answer.

  Corporations now routinely ran background checks on some employees. First-time daters checked out financial, medical, or criminal pasts of their new companions. In addition to these jobs, we recovered data from suspect computers, rebuilding supposedly deleted email messages and personal files and address books. Thirteen of every hundred people had done something negative in their past. If criminal charges were filed, we almost always discovered what happened.

  Unlike the old-time PIs, like the Jake Gittes character played by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown and The Two Jakes, I refused what used to be the meat-and-potatoes jobs, uncovering sexual infidelities of husbands or wives. There’s just too much money to be made at a computer to bother with hours of fruitless surveillance. For a short time, I considered offering electronic surveillance, like those software programs where you can track keystrokes on a remote computer, or read your husband’s email from his office computer, to me that was too much like ambulance chasing, like sneaking long-lens pictures through a hotel window.

  Some of the kids working for me probably’d never had sex, anyway. What seventeen-year-old had time for cruising and telephoning when I paid nearly fifty thousand dollars a year for them to pry into databases and networks.

  Network hacking remained the toughest job. Any computer hooked to another computer is capable of being hacked. Any network, no matter how strong the security firewalls, can be probed for access, either from outside the physical premises or, occasionally, by paying an employee to provide information, something completely illegal that we didn’t encourage except in cases that involved whistle-blowing of some corporate misdeeds.

  Nine years ago, operating from my single-wide trailer in Tuba City, I’d dial up through an old-fashioned modem, taking hours to penetrate another computer miles away, once I’d solved the log-in identities and passwords, I spent hours on a single job. Now we had thirteen high-speed Internet connections, including access to satellite time if a client paid the expenses.

  So. People skills. Nathan insisted that any private investigator had to deal with people, it couldn’t be computers all the time. He got me to stop cursing like a sailor, I’d startled too many corporate suits with my potty mouth. And Nathan encouraged me to carry a gun in case my people skills didn’t keep somebody from trying to hurt me. I’ve got your back, he’d always say, unless I’m not there.

  I had all kinds of toys, sneaky cameras and recorders and microphones and wireless gadgets, usually I had time to pick and choose.

  This afternoon, none of them were available.

  I found the right neighborhood in a roundabout way, I followed a zone-tailed hawk circling a small ravine south of Green Valley. Looks like a turkey vulture, except this bird dove low over the roadway, almost filling my windshield with a blur of raptor-feathered wings and I saw the grayish-white band across the middle tail feathers.

  In the 1870s, so it’s told, Major Charles Bendire of the U.S. Army, climbed an old cottonwood tree to investigate a zone-tailed hawk’s nest. At the exact moment that he spotted an egg in the nest, from his high perch he saw a small band of Apaches, all of them surprised to see each other. Or so Major Charles’s writings seem to indicate. Yikes, he must have said, what comes first? Hawk or savages? Stuffing
the egg carefully inside his mouth, he got out of the tree and on his horse, riding five miles back to Fort Lowell in Tucson.

  Which gives a whole new ending to an old question. Which came first, the Apache or the egg?

  Looking back from the hawk to the road, recognizing the street, I went looking for the right house.

  9

  Somebody was home. Front door half open, an almost new Ford XLT SuperCrew pickup in the driveway, facing out to the street. I slowed beside the high curbing, then inched forward until I blocked the truck.

  Four full-size doors, split-bench seats in the front with a transmission console shifter, backseat bench loaded with boxes, more boxes in the stepside cargo bed.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  Short, squat, flat-nosed but a beautiful face. Greenish velveteen blouse hanging over extrawide jeans that almost hid her boots.

  “Nice truck,” I said. Moving behind it, the hinged tailgate hanging down over the license plate. Lifting the gate, I saw it was a Budget rental.

  “Move your car,” she said, laying another box in the cargo bed.

  “Are you Antoinette Claw?”

  “No,” the lie flickering across her eyes, “she left town.”

  “I thought this was her house.”

  “It’s not.”

  She went back to the house, closed the door carefully. Walking to the street, slowly, trailing my fingertips along the silvery sides, fingering the F-150 emblem and then moving quickly around the front to the passenger door. Keys in the ignition. I opened the door, yanked out the keys, shut the door with a solid click and waited.

  Five minutes. I went to the front door, pushed the bell button, knocked. Another few minutes. I rang the bell again, raised my hand to knock just as the door opened and she stood there with an old lever-action .30-30.