I couldn’t go straight to Alex’s soccer practice after my session. In fact, I couldn’t think of a single place I could go where someone wouldn’t call the cops to report a woman who was looking to commit assault and battery.
Hands still shaking on the wheel, I drove around, nowhere, anywhere, trying to scold my thrashing anger back into its cage. I thought the farther I got from the Healing Choice Clinic the more chance I’d have of regaining control.
But by the time I nosed into downtown Las Cruces in the middle of what they called rush-hour traffic, I was convinced Sullivan Crisp had somehow stripped me of control against my will and was holding it hostage in his yellow room while I rammed around, pounding my fist on my steering wheel and shouting at nobody.
Another surge of rage shot through me, and I had to jerk the Saab to the curb to avoid rear-ending the Harley in front of me. I turned off the ignition and threw the keys onto the floor on the passenger side.
What part of “I just want you to tell me how to control the anger I have every right to feel” didn’t he understand? How much clearer could I make it?
Yet even as the ire continued to charge up my backbone, I knew it wouldn’t do any good to find another therapist. It was therapy itself that wasn’t for me. I’d already thought of all the stuff he said, long before he said it. Except for that psychobabble about my being conflicted between wanting control and resenting having to have it. What?
I was going to have to navigate this thing myself—go with the only God-image I had—the one that had come back to me more than once since it had first formed in my mind when Alex told me Jake and Miguel were friends. Maybe starting right now was the only way I was going to get myself calmed down.
I rescued the keys from the floor and started to put them back in the ignition when I realized where I was. The Downtown Mall was a block away, three blocks from the scene of the crime. It was either a God-thing or pure chance—and I didn’t believe in chance.
The sun slanted late afternoon rays over the low roofs as I hurried across the largely deserted mall. The temperature was only in the low eighties, but I could tell from my shadow that my hair was in sweaty spikes from sitting in the closed car, railing at the world. I was already feeling calmer, though. Having a plan, taking some action—that was the only thing that ever helped me. Not rehashing my marriage to Dan Coe.
I pushed through the glass door that said Bienvenida! in gold decal letters, some of which were peeling off. I hadn’t noticed that the day I’d charged through there with my camera. A short Hispanic woman led me to a table in a front corner, where I could see everything— from the entrance framed in silk hibiscus and twinkly lights to the swinging kitchen door I had passed through to get to the alley.
I remembered little else about the place. It had been empty that afternoon except for the group of people I’d joined at the back door. I studied the woman who seated me, but I couldn’t tell if she was one of them, or if she recognized me.
She brought me a basket of tortilla chips, shiny with grease, and a bowl of salsa with a fiery spiciness that singed my nose hairs from two feet away. I ordered an iced tea and nibbled at a chip.
I hadn’t brought my camera in with me, and I felt naked without it. Still, as I tried to look like any hungry customer eager to try out the chimichangas, I collected images automatically:
The large-breasted girl with mocha skin at the cash register who was every bit as pretty as the woman on the Spanish soap opera on the TV above her head.
The family at the next table, parents focusing on their toddlers and forgetting they once had eyes only for each other.
The waiter wearing a long oven mitt up to his armpit, carrying a precarious row of plates heaped with beans and rice and bubbling cheese—his one claim to greatness.
But it was the busboy I framed in my mental lens. Something simmered beneath the skin of his studiedly bored face as he swept abandoned dishes into a plastic tub. It could have been hostility. Anger. Bitter frustration. Whatever it was, it was the thing I had come to see. If this was the life of Miguel Sanchez, it might lead me to what had happened beyond the back doors, in the alley, between two young boys who should right now be kicking a soccer ball back and forth.
My server was back. “You are ready to order?” she said.
“What do you recommend?”
“Everything is good. You like carne asada?”
“Love it,” I said, though I had no idea what it was. “I’ll have that.”
She took hold of the menu, but I didn’t let go.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch your name. I don’t like to just say, ‘Hey, you!’”
“I am Vera,” she said.
Vera what? I wanted to say, but that would have been too pushy even for me. “So, Vera,” I said as I let her have the menu, “is Señora Sanchez working tonight?” And please don’t let her be you.
Her eyes clouded. “No. She is not working here anymore.”
“Oh. Because of her son?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh she seemed to have been holding in for a long time. “Very sad.”
“It is. I’d like to go see her. Does she still live in . . .” I snapped my fingers as if I were trying to remember.
“El Milagro, yes.”
“Right. I can never remember that.”
Her eyes may have narrowed ever so slightly, or it could have been my guilty conscience mirrored there. But when she went off to put my order in, the next part of my plan fell into place.
It was close to 6:00 p.m. by the time Sully located the address Tess had given him.
Even then he drove around the block twice before he pulled into the driveway. She’d said he’d be coming to her office, not a home in a residential neighborhood. He checked his notes once more before he unfolded himself from the Mini Cooper and moved cautiously to the front door. Tess herself appeared in the storm-door glass, eyebrows in a quizzical twist.
“I sent the snipers home for the day,” she said. “It’s safe.”
Sully grinned sheepishly. “I wasn’t expecting a house.”
She opened the door and nodded him in. “I can’t afford office digs, so I freelance from here. You’re slumming today.”
He was far from slumming. The room he stepped into was sparsely furnished, but it was obvious every piece had been carefully selected—a basket, a clay jar, a replica of a Native American drum serving as a coffee table. Rich blue pillows on cream couches and chairs gathered on a bamboo mat invited him to join the scene.
“My office is in the back,” Tess said and led him through a sunny dining room.
Sully followed, eyes on the chestnut flow of hair that cascaded past her shoulders. She wore a loose pink sweater over jeans and a pair of straw flip-flops that snapped happily as she eased through the kitchen. Despite the brisk wit he remembered, she seemed softer in the light she’d invited into her home. And prettier.
Tess stopped in the dimly lit room off the kitchen and went straight to a tall desk that housed what had to be a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. A framed certificate hung above it, proclaiming that Tess Lightfoot was certified by the International Association for Identification as a Facial Identification Specialist. The one next to it added that the University of Montana had granted her a degree in forensic anthropology.
Tess patted the back of one of the high stools in front of the desk.
“Have a seat,” she said, “and we’ll take a look.”
Sully sat after she did, but a new thought came to him that made him suddenly unwilling to move any further forward with this. Any minute that oversize screen was going to light up with an image of Belinda Cox, and true or not, it was going to throw him from distant memory into the raw reality of what he was about to do. Until now he’d always had the option of cutting his losses and moving on. Once he saw her as she might look today, that choice would be ripped away, no matter what his motive was.
“Are you okay?” Tess said.
Sully tried the default grin. “Could you have found a bigger screen?”
She gave him an appraising look and slid her glasses down from her head. “Any bigger and we’d have to back out of the room. You ready?”
Sully abandoned the grin and nodded.
Tess did some clicking as she talked. “I scanned your photo in, and the software used growth data to predict the structural changes that our subject’s face would undergo between age thirty-five, you told me, and her current age, which would be forty-eight. The program re-created the photo for us according to the specifications I gave it, and—here we are.”
The screen filled with a face that beckoned Sully with the same patronizing expression he’d been searching out for a year. But the look came from an older, harder Belinda Cox, whose long, flat nose had lengthened toward thinner lips, whose upper lids had dropped beneath sparser eyebrows. Small, soft pouches had puffed the skin beneath eyes that were now a paler blue, and the pair of vertical lines between them had pinched tighter.
“I’ve done multiple looks to account for possible weight gain and loss,” Tess said, “although she couldn’t have gotten too much thinner without becoming emaciated.”
She clicked a series of progressively bloated Belindas into view, then reversed the process until a skeletal version appeared. They all looked the same to Sully. All condescending. All dangerous.
“Now, I can use Photoshop to paint any changes right on the image,” Tess said. “I have it set up in grids so we can do specific areas at a time.”
Sully shook his head. He could feel Tess watching him, but he kept his own gaze riveted to the screen, unable to look away from the proverbial train wreck.
“You told me you don’t know anything about her lifestyle,” she said, “but if you’ve come up with any details since we talked, we can put those in.”
Her voice brushed against him, and Sully tried to focus.
“How about jewelry?” he said. “Someone told me she wears a lot of Native American stuff.”
“Good.” Tess’s fingers nudged the keyboard, and within moments Belinda Cox was adorned with clay beads and turquoise baubles. They were jarring against her too-white skin.
“Freckles,” Sully said.
Tess frowned. “Those usually fade with age.”
“Nobody told her that. According to my source, she’s still covered with them.”
“She should have worn sunscreen,” Tess said and sprinkled brown spots across the nose and forehead. “Anything else?”
Sully felt a small sizzle of energy. “How close do you think this is to what she actually looks like today?”
Tess pushed the glasses up and sat back in the chair, pulling her long legs up into a bow. She’d kicked off her shoes, and she curled her fingers around her toes.
“A computer can’t perform exact transformations,” she said. “The critical task is to maintain the look of the person.” She swept her hand across the screen. “Particularly around the eyes. Most things about our appearance do change with age, but we usually maintain a certain recognizable manner of expression.” Tess glanced at Sully and smiled with her lips together. “I’m not trying to skirt the question. This should make it possible for you to recognize this woman, if you don’t expect every detail to match.”
Sully nodded and went back to the screen. Tess was right. Belinda Cox still had the same manner of expression—the expression she’d shown his Lynn when she went to her in the agony of depression. The look Cox had when she told Lynn she needed to repent so she could be a good mother. The countenance that brought bile up his throat.
“I can give you an image with glasses, shorter hair, longer,” Tess said. “We can experiment as much as you want.”
She spoke with the calm of soft water, and she was watching him again, eyes exploring as if she were looking to see what her next words should be. Sully let go of a breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding.
“I think we’re good,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how much longer I can look at her.”
Tess unfolded her legs. “I didn’t think she was somebody you were crazy about. Shall I print this out for you?”
Sully nodded and watched her hands flow over the computer until a gentle whir signaled that Belinda Cox was coming out of the printer.
“Sun tea?” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Would you like some sun tea? It’s probably the last batch for the season.” Tess waited, eyebrows up.
“Do you have sugar?” Sully asked.
She got up and sailed across the office to the kitchen, hair swaying across her back as she moved. “Do we have a sweet tooth, Dr. Crisp?”
Sully followed her into the kitchen, where she waved him to a well-stuffed red-checked chair that would have seemed incongruous amid anyone else’s stove and refrigerator.
“How did you know I was a doctor?” he said.
Tess dropped ice cubes into two tall glasses that looked as slender as she did. “I checked you out. I wasn’t going to invite you into my home without making sure you aren’t a serial killer.”
In spite of his darkened mood, Sully grinned. “I don’t think most of them report that as their occupation.”
“You forget that I work with the police department.” Tess filled the glasses with a golden liquid that already had Sully’s mouth watering, and she nodded toward a set of French doors. “Let’s sit outside—there’s a heavenly breeze.”
Sully was ensconced on a sage green padded chaise lounge on a back porch drenched in sunset light before he fully realized that their business was complete and Tess had moved them seamlessly into a social conversation, complete with minty ice tea and a breeze that chattered in the cottonwoods. He was okay with that.
“What else did you uncover when you checked me out?” Sully asked.
Tess stretched out her legs on the chaise angled toward his and crossed her ankles.
“Actually, I already knew about you from your books and your radio show and all of that. I just didn’t realize you were working here now. Nice office, by the way.”
“We try,” Sully said. “This is great tea—and I consider myself a connoisseur of sweet tea.”
“Being from the bayou and all that,” she said.
She had a cute way of wrinkling her nose. Sully hadn’t noticed that before.
“I would think you would have to pay attention to the office environment when you’re counseling people,” she said. “That’s why I don’t see my own clients at the police station. They would let me, even if it’s not case-related, but the atmosphere isn’t conducive to interviewing distressed people.”
“I didn’t think about that,” Sully said. “You’re talking to people who’ve just witnessed a crime. I imagine they’re pretty upset.”
“To say the least.” She leveled her eyes at him. “When I have the option, I bring them here.”
Sully stopped in midsip. “Am I that transparent?”
“More like translucent.” Tess nudged an ice cube with her finger. “It’s obvious you aren’t trying to locate this woman so you can notify her about a high school reunion. And incidentally, you don’t have to tell me why you want to find her. I’m convinced you aren’t stalking her. I don’t think that’s your MO.”
Sully set his glass on the small stressed-wood table between them and resituated himself in the chair. “You do a lot of work with the police, right?”
“I actually work with fifteen different agencies, but yes, I do all the forensic art work for LCPD.”
“So—if a police detective were trying to find this woman . . .”
“Miss Freckles,” Tess said.
“Belinda Cox is actually her name.”
Tess put up her hand. “Wait. Now that I know, are you going to have to kill me?”
Sully felt his face relax into a grin. “No. You’re safe there.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
“What would the next step be?”
Tess gave a short laugh. “Whatever the police would do, it isn’t what you should do, trust me. But let’s see.” She brought her knees up and hung her wrists lazily over them. “You said she was going by Zahira?”
“That’s what she has printed on her checks, I was told.”
“Just Zahira?”
“That’s it.”
“Sounds like she’s trying to create an image.”
“Brilliant and shining.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Zahira means ‘brilliant and shining.’”
Tess laughed. “You don’t think it fits?”
“How did you know?”
Her laugh was longer and lighter this time. “That being the case, I wouldn’t just walk down the street flashing her picture around. But you could try the Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau . . .”
“You really think she’d be registered there?”
“If she’s the kook you seem to think she is, there’s more than likely been a complaint against her.” Tess shrugged. “You could pretend to file one yourself, and they might tell you she’s already been reported.”
“I don’t know if I could pull that off.”
“How badly do you want to find this woman?”
She was watching him again, and Sully did feel transparent.
“I’m not sure I can get on with my life unless I do,” he said.
“Then there you go.” She floated up from the lounge. “I’ll put that photo in a folder for you.”
Sully watched her this time. She padded softly across the porch and slipped inside and yet left herself lingering in the air. He drained his glass and decided to ask for a refill.