Body of Truth (4 page)

“I didn’t call Germaine Muller right away. I thought I’d meet with the girl one more time, get a better feel for how it was going to go. To tell you the truth, Stuart, I kind of liked the girl right off the bat. She seemed like a good kid. I didn’t want to just leave it cold. Then the next morning I’m sitting in the shop by a window so I can see the street. She’s twenty minutes late. I was about to give her up when she comes running into the shop, tells me to come with her, throws down some money, and we hurry out to the street where we jump into a car. Me in the front, her in the back. There’s John Baine, driving. We ride around, and Baine begins grilling me, like he’s checking me out, maybe I’m not who I say I am, and he’s grilling me to get to the bottom of it. Lena keeps turning around and looking behind us, and Baine is always flicking his eyes at the rearview mirror.

“Anyway, after a while they unwind a little. I tell them they’re obviously in some kind of trouble and they ought to go to the American embassy. Baine starts swearing, and Lena says, no, no, that wouldn’t be good at all. The embassy would be a mistake. Whatever I do, don’t go there and mention them. Do not do this, she says. I said I didn’t have any intention of doing that. I was suggesting they should do that. They’re the ones with a problem, not me. No, they say. That wouldn’t be good. We kept driving.”

Though Fossler was talking in his usual deliberate manner, rather slowly, steadily, he was betraying himself. Jim Fossler was never loquacious. If anything, he tended toward the other extreme. More often than not you had to pull information out of him, a trait that was maddening if you were trying to work with him in a high-pressure case that needed to move quickly and relied on a rapid, free-flow of information among several cooperating teams. On the other hand, you never had to worry about him gossiping away more than you wanted other people to know. A loose-tongued detective was one of Haydon’s pet peeves.

But Fossler always addressed the business at hand, if a little too slowly, and yet here he was saying more than he needed to, failing to edit himself. He could have summarized what he had said so far in four or five sentences, but he was dragging it out inefficiently—slowly, to be sure—but dragging it out nonetheless. He was displaying an agitation Haydon had never witnessed in him before, and it made Haydon’s stomach tighten.

“We drive around. More questioning,” Fossler continued, “until they seemed to be satisfied I wasn’t whoever the hell else they thought I might have been. But they didn’t seem to want to turn loose of me. Baine asked me if I knew anybody at the embassy. I told him no, which was true. I didn’t check in with the embassy when I got here because I didn’t want to worry if maybe somebody was watching me. Baine said that was a good call, because the embassy sucked. Baine, he’s maybe twenty-seven, twenty-eight, has been wandering around down here, all over Central America, six or seven years, so he’s no kid. I didn’t feel too bad about him.

“So after a while they dropped me off three or four blocks from where they’d picked me up. Lena said they’d get back in touch and let me know what to tell her mother, what she was going to do.”

“So she knows where you’re staying?” Haydon asked.

“Yeah, they know.”

Fossler waited again for another surge of traffic to subside. Haydon still didn’t know why Fossler had called him, except to inform him that the Muller girl was indeed alive. But there was more to it than that, Fossler just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He was about to.

“Something else,” Fossler said. “There’s a guy down here says he knows you. Taylor Cage.”

Haydon sat forward in his chair. His memory of Taylor Cage was as sharp as if only a minute had passed instead of a decade. Haydon would never forget the hot, humid night he last had sight of him, his barrel chest thrust forward as he swaggered toward the rank hold of a cargo ship berthed in the Houston ship channel. Cage was alone, and even the jaundiced glow from the dock lights deserted him as he approached the pitch-black margin that marked the belly of the tanker and into which he disappeared without hesitation. Haydon had been sure he was watching a man stroll to his execution. He had never met another man who would have done it. But Cage had done it, and because of the nature of the operation, Haydon had had to live with the silence of the unknown denouement that followed. Then five weeks later, late at night, Haydon received a collect telephone call at home from a Father Guillen in Barranquilla, Colombia. Haydon didn’t know anyone named Guillen, but when you dealt with the variety of people he dealt with, you never rejected a collect call simply because you didn’t recognize a name. He accepted the call and immediately recognized Cage’s voice: “It was a hell of an ugly trip, but I made it. I’ll be in touch.” That was it. Haydon never heard from him again, except as an item of gossip among the right kind of people, once every two or three years.

“You do know him, then?” Fossler asked.

“Yeah, barely. You spoke to him?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What’s he got to do with any of this?” Haydon asked.

“Damned if I’m sure,” Fossler said. “But he knows everybody I’ve mentioned. I only had a short meeting with him. Unexpectedly.”

“Where did you find him?”

“He found me. Came to the place where I was staying. A different place. I’ve moved. Several times.”

“What did he want?”

“This was before I found Lena, about five days ago,” Fossler said. “I was sitting in my room, by an open window, trying to get some air—it’s the dry season down here, summer, for Christ’s sake—and there’s a knock on the door. I get up and open it, and this guy just shoves his way in, you know, like a bulldozer, barrel chest first, and we’re in the middle of the room before I know what’s happening. Scared the shit out of me. This country, Stuart, it’s full of things that’ll scare the shit out of you. No rules down here. Everything’s negotiable—or not. Anyway, I see right off he’s American, and he starts shooting the questions. Some of them didn’t make any sense to me, and I guess he saw this. So I explain myself, straight on—the truth. He looked at me. Do I know anybody at HPD? I tell him I used to be in homicide. No shit, he says. Do I know Stuart Haydon? Of course. So I tell him about you and this case.”

A car, its horn blaring, faded in and out of the background sounds. Fossler continued.

“He asks a few questions about it, and I answer them. He seems satisfied. He gives me a couple of names and leaves, telling me to watch my ass and telling me to be sure and say hello to you. And that’s how I came onto Lena. The names take me right to Janet Pittner.”

“And you haven’t seen him since.”

“That’s right.”

“You said he was ‘involved.’”

“My gut tells me he’s got something to do with the reason the kids are scared. It’s just my gut, okay? And since he stumbled in on me I’ve picked up a tail. Maybe coincidence, but I don’t think so. It’s a woman, a girl. Guatemalan girl. She’s good. In fact she may have been on me a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t always spot her even now, but if I work at it I can find her. She’s very good.”

“You think Muller and Baine are trafficking?”

“No. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s like that at all.”

“Then, what?”

“I don’t know. Look, I’m getting off this phone in twenty seconds. This conversation is not private, Stuart, remember that. Look, if you can’t justify coming down here on this case, you know, coming down to verify the girl’s alive so you can close the book on it, then take a day off. I’m asking for a favor here, Stuart. I’ll owe you one. Come down here, give me twenty-four hours of your time. You’ve traveled around down here. You know how it is. I can’t go into it anymore over the telephone, believe me.”

This was extraordinary. Jim Fossler did not operate like this. The cloak-and-dagger business was alien to his nature. His investigative procedures were as down to earth as his steady diet of meat and potatoes, nothing fancy. He didn’t see ghosts; he didn’t let his imagination run away with him. And he didn’t ask for favors.

“What do you say?”

“I’ll talk to Dystal tomorrow.”

“Look,” Fossler said, “I’ve got to know before we get off this phone. Can you do it or not? There’s one flight out of Houston every day. Continental. It’ll get you here just after dark. I need to know now. It’s important that I know now.”

Listening to a man like Fossler, a self-controlled, unflappable veteran, forced by events to betray his nervousness, was an odd experience. It was like communicating in code. On the surface of things, Fossler never broke character, but his urgency was telegraphed in nuance and subtleties. He wasn’t going to hit you over the head with it. When you communicated with Fossler, more than half the burden fell on the listener.

“Okay,” Haydon said. “I’ll be on tomorrow night’s flight. You want me to get in touch with Mari, see if she has anything to send down?”

“No, no need for that. I talked to her just before I called you. I’ll pick you up at the airport.” He hesitated. “I appreciate this, Stuart, I’ve got to go.”

In an instant, Haydon was listening to a dead line.

CHAPTER 4

“G
et a little chilly?” Nina was walking into the library with the coffee service on a tray. Haydon was back in front of the fireplace, holding one foot up to the fire and then the other. Nina’s feet were never cold. In fact, she was so warm natured that she seemed never to feel the effects of winter at all. She wore only cotton sweaters, and her big concessions to winter dress around the house were long pants—she rarely wore them otherwise—and socks without shoes. Usually she wore sandals or was barefooted.

After setting the service on a low rosewood table in front of the sofa, she poured each of them a cup. Taking hers, she settled back where she had been before, turning sideways and tucking her feet under the cushion again.

“Better get it while it’s hot,” she said.

Nina drank her coffee black and scalding, nothing complicated about it. Haydon, on the other hand, added one spoon of cream—not milk—and, when he could get it, a few shavings of bitter chocolate. As for the temperature, he liked it hot to very warm, not scalding.

He bent down and turned off the gas jet in the fireplace. The logs were burning on their own now, giving off a soft crackling sound and a sweet, spicy scent.

“Ramona’s having a good semester,” Nina said, watching him as he came over and sat on the edge of the sofa and pulled his coffee over in front of him. “I was afraid for a while that all the madness at home was going to distract her. She was getting a lot of letters from the family after her cousin was killed in Medellin. I don’t know how she kept her mind on school with all that going on.”

“She’s lucky,” Haydon said, taking the paring knife and the wedge of Lindt bitter chocolate off the tray and shaving fine curls of it into his coffee. “She could be trying to get through school in Bogota.”

“I guess,” Nina said. “What a mess all of it is.”

Haydon added cream to his cup and stirred the coffee, staring out the French doors to the deepening gray afternoon. He thought about Modesto Solis, who had made it possible for his niece to get out of Colombia. It was a mistake to believe the entire country was paralyzed by the narco wars. There were millions of people it seemed never to touch directly, though it was a growing menace and probably affected them in ways they never knew. But for the men and women like Modesto who were in law enforcement, it had been a nightmarish decade. It had changed their lives, changed the way they viewed the world, and even themselves. The good-natured Modesto that Haydon had known in the past had, in recent years, become a serious man, suspicious and distrusting. Modesto’s own brother, Ramona’s father, Rene, had been dead almost eight years. He also had been a Bogota detective, one of the early casualties of the narco wars. It had been a long run, and there was no end in sight.

“Gabriela called while you were out this afternoon,” Nina said. “She’s going to stay another week.”

Haydon nodded, still looking past the French doors. The ageing Mexican housekeeper, who had been with Haydon’s family since before he was born, was visiting her family in Mexico City. It was an annual trip that usually lasted several weeks.

“I’m going to go ahead and ask Lydia if she’d like to stay on full time,” Nina added, musing to herself as much as to Haydon. “Ramona can’t be expected to do much around here this semester. Not while she’s taking eighteen hours.”

As Gabriela had grown older, the large home, which she once had run with the discipline of a family doyenne, gradually had gotten to be too much for her. Nina and Ramona had taken up the slack when they could, and what they couldn’t do was taken care of by another Mexican woman, Lydia Quiroa, who came in part time. Lydia, who was in her late forties and always wore her jet hair in a single long braid hanging down her back, had the disposition of an angel and had made herself indispensable. All of them, even the increasingly eccentric Gabriela, who had a critical eye for human foibles, had grown fond of her and considered her a member of the family.

“And I’ve got to start putting in more time at the studio, too,” Nina continued. “The new commission in Careyes is getting increasingly demanding…”

One of the things that made a man like Fossler so valuable was his experience. Though he had taken an early retirement from the police department four years before, he had seen eight or nine years more mayhem than Haydon himself. A man who had seen that much didn’t get too excited when he encountered something out of the ordinary. He had been through so much, seen so many things he had never seen before only to learn that he eventually would see them again, or see variations of them, that it was hard to get worked up about anything. Yet here was Fossler, calling from Guatemala City, acting against the grain of his own character, Fossler putting the pressure on Haydon to make a decision. And then, in the retrospect of the last few minutes, there was one thing that Fossler had done that bothered Haydon. He had not explained why he had given him the names and addresses. Surely it had not been necessary for Fossler to have taken the time to give them to Haydon if he was going to be seeing him the very next night.