Dark Rivers of the Heart (40 page)

Key in hand, on his way to his rooms, whistling softly, Roy looked forward to a hot shower, a shave, and a lavish room-service breakfast. But when he opened the gilded door and went into the suite, he found two local agents waiting for him. They were in a state of acute but respectful consternation, and only when Roy saw them did he remember that his pager was in one of his jacket pockets and the batteries in another.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you since four o’clock this morning,” said one of his visitors.

“We’ve located Grant’s Explorer,” said the second.

“Abandoned,” said the first. “There’s a ground search under way for him—”

“—though he might be dead—”

“—or rescued—”

“—because it looks like someone got there before us—”

“—anyway, there are other tire tracks—”

“—so we don’t have much time; we’ve got to move.”

In his mind’s eye, Roy pictured Eve Jammer: golden and pink, oiled and limber, writhing on black rubber, more perfect than not. That would sustain him, no matter how bad the day proved to be.

Spencer woke in the purple shade under the camouflage tarp, but the desert beyond was bathed in harsh white sunshine.

The light stung his eyes, forcing him to squint, although that pain was as nothing compared with the headache that cleaved his brow from temple to temple, on a slight diagonal. Against the backs of his eyeballs, red lights spun with the abrasiveness of razor-blade pinwheels.

He was hot as well. Burning up. Though he suspected that the day was not especially warm.

Thirsty. His tongue felt swollen. It was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His throat was scratchy, raw.

He was still lying on an air mattress, with his head on a meager pillow, under a blanket in spite of the insufferable heat—but he was no longer lying alone. The woman was snuggled against his right side, exerting a sweet pressure against his flank, hip, thigh. Somehow he had gotten his right arm around her without meeting an objection—
Way to go, Spence, my man!
—and now he relished the feel of her under his hand: so warm, so soft, so sleek, so furry.

Uncommonly furry for a woman.

He turned his head and saw Rocky.

“Hi, pal.”

Talking was painful. Each word was a spiny burr being torn out of his throat. His own speech echoed piercingly through his skull, as though it had been stepped up by amplifiers inside his sinus cavities.

The dog licked Spencer’s right ear.

Whispering to spare his throat, he said, “Yeah, I love you too.”

“Am I interrupting anything?” Valerie asked, dropping to her knees at his left side.

“Just a boy and his dog, hangin’ out together.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Lousy.”

“Are you allergic to any drugs?”

“Hate the taste of Pepto-Bismol.”

“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?”

“Everything’s spinning.”

“Are you allergic to any antibiotics?”

“Strawberries give me hives.”

“Are you delirious or just difficult?”

“Both.”

Maybe he drifted away for a while, because the next thing he knew, she was giving him an injection in his left arm. He smelled the alcohol with which she had swabbed the area over the vein.

“Antibiotic?” he whispered.

“Liquified strawberries.”

The dog was no longer lying at Spencer’s side. He was sitting next to the woman, watching with interest as she withdrew the needle from his master’s arm.

Spencer said, “I have an infection?”

“Maybe secondary. I’m taking no chances.”

“You a nurse?”

“Not a doctor, not a nurse.”

“How do you know what to do?”

“He tells me,” she said, indicating Rocky.

“Always joking. Must be a comedian.”

“Yes, but licensed to give injections. Do you think you can hold down some water?”

“How about bacon and eggs?”

“Water seems hard enough. Last time, you spit it up.”

“Disgusting.”

“You apologized.”

“I’m a gentleman.”

Even with her assistance, he was tested to his limits merely by the effort required to sit up. He choked on the water a couple of times, but it tasted cool and sweet, and he thought he would be able to keep it in his stomach.

After she eased him flat onto his back again, he said, “Tell me the truth.”

“If I know it.”

“Am I dying?”

“No.”

“We have one rule around here,” he said.

“Which is?”

“Never lie to the dog.”

She looked at Rocky.

The mutt wagged his tail.

“Lie to yourself. Lie to me. But never lie to the dog.”

“As rules go, it seems pretty sensible,” she said.

“So am I dying?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s better,” Spencer said, and he passed out.

Roy Miro took fifteen minutes to shave, brush his teeth, and shower. He changed into chinos, a red cotton sweater, and a tan corduroy jacket. He had no time for the breakfast that he so badly wanted. The concierge, Henri, provided him with two chocolate-almond croissants in a white paper bag and two cups of the finest Colombian coffee in a disposable plastic thermos.

In a corner of the hotel parking lot, a Bell JetRanger executive helicopter was waiting for Roy. As on the jet from L.A., he was the only person in the plushly upholstered passenger cabin.

On the flight out to the discovery in the Mojave, Roy ate both croissants and drank the black coffee while using his attaché case computer to connect to Mama. He reviewed the overnight developments in the investigation.

Not much had happened. Back in southern California, John Kleck had not turned up any leads that might tell them where the woman had gone after abandoning her car at the airport in Orange County. Likewise, they had not succeeded in tracing the telephone number to which Grant’s cleverly programmed system had faxed photos of Roy and his men from the Malibu cabin.

The biggest news, which wasn’t much, came from San Francisco. The agent tracking down George and Ethel Porth—the grandparents who evidently had raised Spencer Grant following his mother’s passing—now knew, from public records, that a death certificate had been issued for Ethel ten years ago. Evidently that was why her husband sold the house at that time. George Porth had died, too, just three years ago. Now that the agent couldn’t hope to talk with the Porths about their grandson, he was pursuing other avenues of investigation.

Through Mama, Roy routed a message to the agent’s E-mail number in San Francisco, suggesting that he check the records of the probate court to determine if the grandson had been an heir to either the estate of Ethel Porth or that of her husband. Maybe the Porths had not known their grandson as “Spencer Grant” and had used his real name in their wills. If for some inexplicable reason they had aided and abetted his use of that false identity for purposes including enlistment in the military, they nevertheless might have cited his real name when disposing of their estates.

It wasn’t much of a lead, but it was worth checking out.

As Roy unplugged the computer and closed it, the pilot of the JetRanger alerted him, by way of the public-address system, that they were one minute from their destination. “Coming up on our right.”

Roy leaned to the window beside his seat. They were paralleling a wide arroyo, heading almost due east across the desert.

The glare of sun on sand was intense. He took sunglasses from an inner jacket pocket and put them on.

Ahead, three Jeep wagons, all agency hardware, were clustered in the middle of the dry wash. Eight men were waiting around the vehicles, and most of them were watching the approaching helicopter.

The JetRanger swept over the Jeeps and agents, and suddenly the land below dropped a thousand feet as the chopper soared across the brink of a precipice. Roy’s stomach dropped, too, because of the abrupt change in perspective and because of something that he had glimpsed but couldn’t quite believe that he had really seen.

High over the valley floor, the pilot entered a wide starboard turn and brought Roy around for a better look at the place where the arroyo met the edge of the cliff. In fact, using the two towers of rock in the middle of the dry wash as a visual fulcrum, he flew a full three-hundred-sixty-degree circle. Roy had a chance to see the Explorer from every amazing angle.

He took off his sunglasses. The truck was still there in the full glare of daylight. He put the glasses on as the JetRanger brought him around again and landed in the arroyo, near the Jeeps.

Disembarking from the chopper, Roy was met by Ted Tavelov, the agent in charge at the site. Tavelov was shorter and twenty years older than Roy, lean and sun browned; he had leathery skin and a dry-as-beef-jerky look from having spent too many years outdoors in the desert. He was dressed in cowboy boots, jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and a Stetson. Although the day was cool, Tavelov wore no jacket, as if he had stored up so much Mojave heat in his sun-cured flesh that he would never again be cold.

As they walked toward the Explorer, the chopper engine fell silent behind them. The rotors wheezed more slowly to a halt.

Roy said, “There’s no sign of either the man or the dog, so I hear.”

“Nothing in there but a dead rat.”

“Was the water really
that
high when it jammed the truck between those rocks?”

“Yep. Sometime yesterday afternoon, at the height of the storm.”

“Then maybe he was washed out, went over the falls.”

“Not if he stayed buckled up.”

“Well, farther up the river, maybe he tried to swim for shore.”

“Man would have to be a fool to try swimming in a flash flood, the water moving like an express train. This man a fool?”

“No.”

“See these tracks here,” Tavelov said, pointing to tire marks in the silt of the arroyo bed. “Even what little wind there’s been since the storm has worn ’em down some. But you can still see where somebody drove down the south bank, under the Explorer, probably stood on the roof of his vehicle to get up there.”

“When would the arroyo have dried up enough for that?”

“Water level drops fast when the rain stops. And this ground, deep sand—it dries out quick. Say…seven or eight last night.”

Standing deep inside the rock-walled passage, gazing up at the Explorer, Roy said, “Grant could’ve climbed down and walked away before the other vehicle got here.”

“Fact is, you’ll see some vague footprints that
don’t
belong to the first group of my hopeless asshole assistants who tramped up the scene. And judging by ’em, you might make a case that a woman drove in here and took him away. Him and the dog. And his luggage.”

Roy frowned. “A woman?”

“One set of prints is of a size that you know it’s got to be a man. Even big women don’t often have feet as big as would be in proportion to the rest of ’em. The second set is small prints, which might be those of a boy, say ten to thirteen. But I doubt any boy was drivin’ on his own out here. Some small men have feet might step into shoes that size. But not many. So most likely it was a woman.”

If a woman had come to Grant’s rescue, Roy was obliged to wonder if she was
the
woman, the fugitive. That raised anew the questions that had plagued him since Wednesday night: Who
was
Spencer Grant, what in the hell did the bastard have to do with the woman, what sort of wild card was he, was he likely to screw up their operations, and would he put them all at risk of exposure?

Yesterday, when Roy had stood in Eve’s bunker, listening to the laser-disc recording, he’d been more baffled than enlightened by what he’d heard. Judging by the questions and the few comments that Grant managed to insert into Davidowitz’s monologue, he knew little about “Hannah Rainey,” but for mysterious reasons, he was busily learning everything he could. Until then, Roy had assumed that Grant and the woman already had some kind of close relationship; so the task had been to determine the nature of that relationship and to figure how much sensitive information the woman had shared with Grant. But if the guy didn’t already know her, why had he been at her bungalow that rainy night, and why had he made it his personal crusade to find her?