River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (14 page)

It had only been a sensation, he realized, nothing he could see with his eyes or hear or smell or taste. But bad enough, for all that.

He left the ritual space at once, passing through a silent, book-walled library and into his living space. He kept these rooms modern, and as he entered he clicked on some lights, grabbed the remote control for a state-of-the-art stereo system and turned on the radio. An advert for laundry soap came on, conjuring a feeling that the world continued to spin in its place, inhabited by people who could never begin to understand, much less survive, what he had just experienced.

When the White Stripes started playing, Simon picked up his phone and dialed a number he knew by heart. The telephone rang three times, clicked, and then Robb Ivey’s voice came on the line. “Ivey’s,” he said, as Simon had dialed the shop.

“Robb, it’s Simon.”

“Is everything okay? You sound—”

“Everything is bloody well not okay. Everything is bollocks up, it seems to me.”

“What?” Robb asked. “What’s the matter?”

“I just spent the worst few moments of my life meditating. Hoping that I could ascertain just what the hell went on the other night.”

Robb, he was certain, knew the “other night” that was under discussion. Everyone in the community had taken to calling it that. “What happened?”

“Fuck if I know. Nothing good, though.”

“Simon…”

“I can’t describe it, Robb. It was just this horrible feeling, like when you’re watching election returns and the wrong damn bloke is pulling ahead. Only a thousand times worse. Fraught with cosmic significance, and just unbearable fucking dread. My ear and nose were literally bleeding when I was finished, and I was afraid I’d shat myself, too.”

“That might be a little too much information, Simon.”

“Like I fucking care, Robb. I’m the one who went through it. I’m just telling you—”

“I was at his
house
, Simon. Ingersoll’s house. I felt it, too, or something very much like it. And I don’t mind telling you it scared me.”

“I’m not scared, mate, I’m fucking terrified.”

“What do you want to do about it, then? Anything?”

“Not sure yet. Something, though. I’m thinking maybe I’ll summon someone who can tell us what’s going on.”

“Someone? Like a demon?”

“That’s what I do, right?” Simon asked. “And yes, at this point I think a demon might just be the thing. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

“Simon, if you can do something about whatever it is out there, I don’t care if you call up Satan himself.”

“Right, then.”

“As long as you keep him on a tight leash.”

“No worries, Robb. I’ll let you know what happens.” Simon put the phone down, and when he did, the sensation of dread returned, almost as if the simple act of speaking to another human being had held it at bay for those few moments.

He needed to get some sleep. Preparing for a ritual summoning was a long, hard slog, and the ritual itself would be wearying and difficult. He couldn’t go into it rushed or tired, not if he hoped to live through it.

And living, really, was the whole point.

THIRTEEN

“Molly.” Frank Carrier beckoned from his office.
“Pronto, por favor.”

Molly put her purse and laptop down on her desk and hurried to Frank’s office, raising her eyebrows at Suzi McKellar on the way. Suzi gave a tiny shrug in return. By the time she reached it, he had settled in behind his desk, and was perusing a printout of some kind. “Yes, chief?”

“What kind of newspaper are we, Molly?” he asked. He didn’t suggest that she sit, so she stayed put.

A trick question? “Umm…independent? Honest? Struggling?”

“All of the above. What we aren’t is the kind of paper that jumps on sensationalistic stories for no reason. We leave that to
The
Times
. By the time we hit the streets, the real juicy stuff isn’t even news anymore.”

“Right.” She began to wonder if she had lost the ability to understand him. More and more, everything he said came couched in riddles.

“You want to know why I’m telling you things you already know.”

“Pretty much.”

“I’m telling you this so you know that when I ask you to cover a murder, you’ll know it’s an anomaly.”

“A murder?”

“That’s right.”

“Why would we cover a murder? What’s special about it?”

“In a lot of ways, it’s not special at all. A thirty-four-year-old white woman was killed near Sunland Park last night. Strangled and brutalized. TV’s been all over it this morning, and I’m sure
The
Times
will be, too.”

“Then why us?”

“I guess just a hunch. From what I’ve seen on TV, and what I believe about
The
Times
, I think they’ll focus on the brutality and the whodunit aspect and ignore the question of who this woman is. Was. Her name was Gretchen Fuchs. She worked at a travel agency—one of the last ones in town, thanks to the Internet—and she didn’t have a lot of money. Middle-class all the way. Contrary to popular opinion, El Paso is one of the safest big cities in the country, so why did violent death choose this person? I think maybe this is an opportunity for us to show how real journalists can approach a story like this and make it mean something, by exploring the victim. Maybe when, or if, there’s a suspect, we can get deeper into his story, too.”

“I’m still on that flower thing, Frank.”

“I know. Back-burner that.”

“Why not give this to Bill?” Bill Dallek covered El Paso politics for the
Voice
, but his burning interest was crime, particularly those shady areas where crime and politics came together.

“Bill’s busy. Anyway, it’s not his kind of caper.”

“And what about Wade’s story?”

“Did he spill anything earthshattering last night?”

“No.”

Frank handed her the paper he’d been looking at. “Then you don’t have anything in the way today. Here are the details. Tell me who this woman was and why she died. If you can tell me what the rest of us can learn from her story, so much the better.”

“I’ve never covered a murder, Frank.” Amado Suárez Cardona and Jaime Espino covered the Juárez beat and had reported on plenty of murders, but she couldn’t suggest bringing one of them across the line for this. She was on her own.

“Then you don’t have any bad habits to overcome,” Frank said.

Molly started for the door, but he stopped her with a word, a look. “So. How was it, anyway? Seeing Wade?”

“It was…it was fine.” It had been fine. Comfortable. Surprisingly so, she had thought in retrospect, because it had been so long and the circumstances of their reunion were so trying. “Good. We didn’t talk about…you know, what happened to him.”

“I’m sure he’s talked about that plenty in the last few days. He was probably relieved to have some normal interaction with friends without thinking about it.”

“That’s how it seemed to me.”

“And your brother? Byrd?”

The answer to that one didn’t come as easily. “Still dying,” she said at last, and then she hurried from his office, nearly forgetting to stop at her desk to pick up her purse.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Molly parked in front of a red-brick ranch house on the west side of El Paso, about a mile from the Sunland Park Mall, where she’d had dinner with Wade the night before. Sunland Park was a New Mexico community that jutted underneath El Paso, straddling the Rio Grande before the river became the international boundary line, and the Sunland Park Mall was up the road from that, on the Texas side.

The house was on Palo Alto, between Cabrillo and San Saba. The front yard wasn’t actually xeriscaped, but the lawn sloping toward the street hadn’t been watered in so long that it might as well have been. Yellow police tape had been strung across the door and the driveway, and a bored-looking cop sat in a cruiser on the street. When Molly approached the house, he perked up fast, practically springing from the car and intercepting her.

“You can’t go in there,” he said. “This is a crime scene.”

She showed him the plastic press pass that she wore on a lanyard around her neck. “I’m with
The
Voice
,” she said, aware of her statement’s redundancy as he studied the card.

“Didn’t recognize you, ma’am,” he said. He was a beefy guy, practically still a boy, with a youthful face and short, dark hair. He looked like he’d been shaving for about three weeks and still had problems with it.

“I’m not usually on this beat,” Molly admitted. “So that’s probably why. Can I take a look inside?”

“If you want to, I guess,” he said. His name badge said Kozlowski. “But the homicide was out in back.”

“Can you tell me what happened?” She flipped open a spiral notebook so she could jot down anything that hadn’t been in the police report Frank had given her.

“She was in her backyard. Someone must have come in through the alley. There was a fence there once, but not anymore, so whoever it was had no problem getting into the yard. The suspect choked her, bashed her head against some concrete steps several times, cracked open her skull. Blood and brains everywhere. The suspect left her there, didn’t go into the house that we can tell. No sign of robbery, sexual assault or anything else.”

“You keep saying ‘the suspect.’ Is there a suspect?”

He twitched a bushy eyebrow. “Nobody in particular yet. But when there is, he’ll be the suspect until he’s convicted.”

“Cop talk.”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

Molly suddenly felt old, hearing this baby cop calling her “ma’am.” At thirty-three, she couldn’t have been that much older than him. He had to have graduated from high school, at least, and then the police academy or whatever they called cop school. She didn’t know if the term “police academy” was used outside of the comedy movies she had loved as a teen, but she figured if Frank was going to assign her to a lot of crime stories, she would have to learn.

“Can you show me where it happened?” She wasn’t sure she really wanted to look. From his description, it sounded awful, and chances were it hadn’t been cleaned up yet. She didn’t think she could count on a neat chalk outline, like in the old movies. More likely, from the sound of things, a bloody gorefest, like in the new movies. And no doubt accompanied by smells that moviegoers never have to deal with.

“I just need you to sign in,” he said. “Wait right here.”

He went back to his patrol car and returned a moment later carrying a clipboard. Molly signed with trembling hands. She was surprised by how nervous she felt about this—nervous, yet at the same time, she couldn’t deny that a thrill of anticipation coursed through her. There might have been some twisted excitement about the fact that she had been less than a mile away, sometime around the hour of the murder. Wade, who hadn’t been to the mall in years, had parked on the wrong side. After dinner, she had helped Wade buy a few groceries at the upscale market attached to the restaurant. They had carried them to Molly’s car (really Byrd’s Nissan Xterra, which he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell even though he couldn’t drive it), parked by the Macy’s that had been a J.C. Penney the last time Wade had been there, and she had driven Wade around the mall to his rental. He had parked at the northeast corner of the mall, the end closest to where Gretchen Fuchs had been murdered. For all they knew, the killer might have been stalking her while they chatted in the SUV.

After she signed his list, Officer Kozlowski escorted her under the tape and up the driveway. A narrow gate opened into the backyard. He hung back a little and let her go in first.

The backyard was even less impressive than the front. Yard work apparently wasn’t very high on Gretchen’s list of priorities. The back didn’t have grass she could kill, although she had been doing a pretty good job of destroying the row of saplings that partially blocked the view of an unpaved alleyway. Mostly, it was concrete, cracked and dry.
Like the skin on my legs this morning,
Molly thought, remembering how they had itched.

She was stalling, inspecting the yard as if she were house-hunting instead of looking at the actual crime scene. She made herself face it. Four concrete steps led up to a solid back door. Blood coated the lower two steps, as thick as paint in places. More had spattered the upper steps and even the bottom half of the door. Embedded in the blood, in spots, were chunks of some thicker, meatier material. Molly’s stomach lurched when she realized they were probably bits of brain and bone.

“That’s it?” she asked after regarding it for a minute or two. “Nothing inside?”

“Like I said, there’s no evidence that the suspect ever went in. We believe he came and left through the alley.”