Belinda Cox’s house looked even more vacant in the dark than in the daytime. It struck Sully as he pulled the Mini Cooper as far off the road as he could that the place didn’t have a sense of evil about it—just a sense of nothing.
He rapped his knuckles on the orange door in the wall and got no response. The door was no more than a gate, so he gave it a push, and it swung open. He forced a grin. Holy crow—it wasn’t like he was doing a SWAT team bust.
The house was only about ten feet from the wall, so although no outside bulb illumined the weed-clogged stone path, he could see his way by a light that shone from inside somewhere. He stopped at the door, whose torn screen folded over itself as if it were ashamed not to have been ripped off and replaced before now. The confused panic he’d felt before he talked to Porphyria had been sweated down to a tight ball in his stomach. He could do this.
He raised his hand to ring the doorbell and realized the wooden door behind the screen was open. Odd, since the temperature had already dropped into the forties.
“Hello?” he said. “Anybody home?” He could hear music playing from the back of the house, so he shouted this time: “Hello? Miss Cox?”
Still no answer, and yet he knew the music wasn’t loud enough to cover his voice. An involuntary shudder went through him. He opened the screen door and called to her again. Nothing. He pushed the inner door and heard himself gasp.
Someone lay in a heap not five feet away, in the arch between the living room and the dining room beyond. The light Sully had seen from outside shone down the hallway, onto a mass of blonde hair, a ghost-white face, a freckled arm soaking in a pool of blood.
Sully tried to cross the room, but he couldn’t move. He knew it wouldn’t do any good anyway. It was clear that all of the life had ebbed out of her and onto the floor.
From someplace far away a siren wailed, and still Sully stood there, feeling as lifeless as the body he’d just discovered. If he had a pulse at all, it had thinned to a thread. He was still frozen when the siren screamed itself out beyond the wall, and urgent footsteps pounded across the stones and stopped outside the screen door.
“Sir, we got a 911 call. Is everything all right here?”
“Belinda Cox is dead,” Sully said.
Poco dropped off black bean soup for me that night. I drank it from a cup next to a fire in my kiva and stared at the blank legal pad in my lap. I’d had it in my mind before I talked to Sullivan to write down everything I knew about Jake’s situation and work on filling the holes. Crisp had reshaped my plan.
If, as he said, I was going to take the responsibility Jake couldn’t take, I was going to have to get into his head. And since he was too afraid to talk, the only way to do that was to become—him.
How hard could it be? I was used to seeing what was there, putting myself into it, framing it. And there was also God—who didn’t usually give me images on request, but I’d asked for that anyway.
I set the cup on the table and closed my eyes and tried to enter my son’s world. Then I picked up my pen and wrote.
• Me and Ian played league soccer at Burn Lake. I also know Ian because his mom and my dad are going out. He’s a cool guy. I look up to him.
• Miguel Sanchez showed up at Burn Lake even though he wasn’t in the league, and we’d mess around with him while I was waiting for Dad and Alex.
• He was good. Really good.
• I told him he should try out for the select team.
• He did, and we both made it. Ian didn’t.
• On September 10, somebody called Miguel’s house from my house. Everybody thinks it was me. I’m not saying one way or the other because ______________
• Like an hour later, I ended up in the alley behind the restaurant where Miguel’s mother works. I’m not saying how I got there or how I also ended up behind the wheel of Miguel’s mother’s truck with a threat letter on the seat beside me with my fingerprints on it. I’m also not saying how Miguel got run over. That’s because ______________
That left a hole so big I thought I’d fall into it. I forced myself to go to the next thought.
• Miguel was hurt bad. There was nobody else around, so I called 911. I’m not saying where I got the phone or what happened to it. I don’t have a cell phone myself.
So when did Miguel receive the note? Or did he?
• I wouldn’t get out of the truck until they made me because _____________
• When they took me to the police station, I wouldn’t talk to that detective who grilled me for an hour. I wouldn’t talk to my parents either. I didn’t say I did it. I didn’t say I didn’t. I was scared, but not scared enough to tell anybody anything—except that I wasn’t going home with my mom, and that was because _____________
• My mother kept bugging me every time she saw me. I asked my dad if I had to talk to her about it and he said no, which ticked her off. My dad didn’t ask me stuff like she did.
I paused again. Dan basically told me he thought Jake could have done it since, like me, he had a lot of anger stored up, most of it toward me. Had he ever told Jake that? How did Jake feel about Dan assuming he could do something like that?
I swallowed hard. Evidently Jake didn’t feel as lousy about that as he did about my assuming he couldn’t have. I was starting to get a headache—and it was Jake’s head I was in. I couldn’t start thinking about what else he was feeling at this moment.
• I wanted to go to Ian’s meet really bad, but Dad said I couldn’t because it was against the rules the cops gave me.
• I snuck out and went anyway because _______________
You would do anything for Ian?
• They caught me and took me to the police station again, and this time they wouldn’t let me go home with Dad. They said it was Mom or jail. I picked jail because ___________________
• It was bad in there. I didn’t tell anybody how bad, but I asked if I could go to my mom’s the next day.
• Mom didn’t ask me a bunch of questions anymore. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I went to work with her and got to take pictures. It freaked me out when I saw that detective, and when Miguel’s mother said he was going into like a nursing home. I knew he wasn’t ever gonna be the same again.
• The only time Mom asked me something was when she talked about the select team and Miguel. I let her know I didn’t want to discuss that—because ____________
• Miguel died. I lost it.
• That detective came for me and they took me back to jail and they wouldn’t let Mom and Dad pay bail. I freaked out about going back there.
• I was gonna tell Mom everything then, but that lawyer came to see me and told me about the explosion at the soccer field and the threat that got thrown at my mom’s windshield. That’s when I knew I couldn’t tell anybody anything because I know somebody else is gonna get hurt.
• My mom came to see me in jail. It’s the first time I ever saw her cry. She said she’d stand by me whether I ran over Miguel or not. She asked me if I did it for Ian. I told her I didn’t do it for Ian.
• I believe it when she says she’s gonna be there for me.
I almost crossed that last one out. It was, after all, only what I hoped he meant when he nodded to me as I left him at the jail. But I let it stay, because I needed for it to be true.
The list was achingly short, but it was all I knew about what my son was going through. I couldn’t ask any of the other players in this thing. I ran my finger down the pad. Dan said he didn’t know any more than I did. Who else . . .
I actually smacked the heel of my hand into my forehead. J.P. had even voiced it: All I could think about was how this is affecting Alex. He was dying of loneliness . . .
I unearthed a red pen and ran down the list again. Alex was the key to this somehow. I had thought that, back in the beginning, but all the trauma had pushed him into the background.
In red I wove in the Alex actions I knew about:
• Dad left me with Ginger when Jake first got arrested. When she went to the police station to see Dad, she left me with Ian.
• I told Mom I kinda didn’t want to help her help Jake because I didn’t want her and Dad fighting about it. I said I didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on.
• I didn’t tell Mom that Jake and Miguel were friends in soccer until she sort of asked me.
• When I did tell her, I also said I didn’t want Jake to know I told her because he doesn’t like people talking about him.
• I almost told her something else once, but then I didn’t.
• I asked Mom to tell me if Jake had to go to jail. She never did because of that bomb thing.
• I acted pretty cool up till then. But I guess Ms. J.P. caught me not looking cool, because I’m at her house now.
The list blurred in front of me. What had happened to our family? How had we become four lonely people who couldn’t trust anybody with our feelings? How was it that Dan and Jake could put their faith in Ian, and Ginger, who had enough issues to keep Sullivan Crisp in business for the rest of his life?
I blinked hard and touched the red places on the list. My precious Alex, with all his brown-eyed charm and little-boy resilience, was probably the most alone of all of us—alone with information I was now sure he had. Information I was going to get out of him, for his sake as well as Jake’s.
I was already reaching for the phone when it rang. Frances.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m not on call.”
“I know, but I want you on this one. Don’t say anything until you hear it.”
I glanced at my watch. Seven o’clock. Alex probably didn’t go to bed until nine.
“It’s a murder in Mesilla. A woman was killed in her home.”
“Frances, I think I’ve had about as much—”
“I wouldn’t ask you except this is going to require your kind of sensitivity.”
“Why? Who is it?”
“It sounds like it’s some controversial religious person. I’d just like you to go down there and see what you can shoot. It’ll take your mind off . . . things.”
“Right.” I sighed and went for my camera bag. “What’s the address?”
“Nineteen twenty-five Calle de Santo.”
Sully sat in the backseat of the patrol car with the door open, drinking the bottle of water one of the officers had given him when he told him to wait for the detective who would want to ask him some questions. After that they’d ignored him—the two original uniforms, the four others who joined them, the three people who emerged from a van with CSU printed on the side. He watched crime tape go up, saw the neighbors gather across the street, witnessed Angelina passing out paper coffee cups, which she filled from a Thermos.
It would all have been a fascinating study in human behavior if Sully hadn’t felt like someone had turned off all his nerves.
“Mr. . . . Crisp, is it?”
Sully nodded as he looked up into eyes he could see were green even in the dimness of the patrol car’s interior light. Their owner ran one hand over his receding crop of thick hair and put out the other for Sully to shake.
“Detective Levi Baranovic. You doing okay, sir?”
“No,” Sully said. “Not at all. I just discovered a dead person.”
The detective held out an arm. “How about if we talk in there,” he said, nodding toward the orange door.
It was the last place Sully wanted to go, but he followed him through it and over to a chipped wrought iron bench in the front yard. The detective stood, one foot up on the seat. “You knew the victim, Mr. Crisp?” he said.
“I knew of her. I never actually met her.”
“But you knew it was her.”
“Belinda Cox, yeah.”
The detective thrust his neck forward, eyebrows up.
“I’ve seen her picture. I knew this was her house. I assumed . . .” Sully felt a glimmer of hope. “Is it her?”
“She hasn’t been officially identified. When did you arrive?”
“Around seven.”
“Did you see anyone when you got here?”
Sully shook his head.
“Hear anything?”
“No—yes.”
“Which is it?”
“When I got up to the door, I heard music playing somewhere in the house. That was it.”
“How did you get in?”
“The door was open.”
“Which door?”
“All of them.”
“The one in the wall?”
“Right.”
“The screen door?”
“Yes, and the screen was torn. And the inner door was ajar.”
“Why did you go in?”
“I just felt like something was wrong.”
“Did you touch anything when you went in?”
Sully rubbed the back of his head. “No. I didn’t even move until the police officers came in. Then I—yeah, I touched the doorframe. I guess I needed something to hold me up. You don’t experience something like that every day.”
“So how long would you say you were here from the time you pulled up in your car until the police arrived?”
“Not more than five minutes altogether.”
The detective rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Would you be willing to come down to the precinct and give us an official voluntary statement?”
Sully was surprised, but he nodded. “Sure. Anything you need.”
Baranovic pulled his foot from the bench and looked at the house as if he were trying to make a decision. “Let’s go in my car,” he said. “I’ll have somebody bring you back for your vehicle when we’re done.”
“Can’t I just follow you?”
His green eyes swept over Sully. “You’re still pretty shook up. Let’s do it this way—for your own safety.”
Safety, Sully thought as Baranovic led him back through the orange doorway. Was there really any such thing?
A sizable crowd had gathered by the time I reached Calle de Santo. Nobody seemed too distraught—nothing there to shoot. Curious neighbors titillated by homicide didn’t make for good photographs.
What I wanted was somebody concerned. Somebody with a story. I squirmed under my camera strap. Or did I want that—now that I had been that somebody?
A high wall fronted the house, and there was going to be no getting past that from the looks of things—although when I got about ten feet from it, the orange door that hung in its center swung open. Even as I raised the camera, Ken Perkins from the Sun-News bolted from the crowd. I focused just outside the door so I could get whoever stepped out. I could hear Perkins calling out, “Detective Baranovic, can you tell us what’s happening?”
I kept the camera up. Didn’t matter if I couldn’t stand Baranovic. This was professional.
Or it was, until I saw who he had with him. The man Detective Baranovic was leading to his unmarked white car was Sullivan Crisp.
“Is this a suspect, sir?” Perkins yelled.
Baranovic just tucked Dr. Crisp into the car. I couldn’t take a single shot as I watched the car weave its way among the parked vehicles and down the street.
Perkins turned back to the crowd and called out, “Does anyone know that man?”
A large woman waved a Thermos at him, and Perkins went to her, pad in hand. Another man had also waved at him to offer information, and I was about to turn away in disgust—and find somebody who really knew what was going on—when I realized I recognized him. Slim, youngish, sharp dresser. I’d seen him at Crisp’s clinic, hadn’t I? Hanging out with that child at the reception desk?
Letting the camera fall against my chest, I went for him. He saw me before I reached the curb and pulled away from the crowd, who all seemed mesmerized by the story Thermos Lady was telling. As he got closer, I could see the sheen of shock in his eyes.
“Hi,” I said. “Look, forget the camera. I’m—”
“You’re a client of Dr. Crisp’s, I know.”
“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” I could hear my voice shaking.
“I just know Sully could be in trouble,” he said. “Looks like they’re taking him in for questioning.”
“About the murder? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.” He tilted his head at me, just the way Dr. Crisp himself did. I could see my own fear matched on his face. “I don’t know what you can do about giving him a fair shake in the paper.”
“What are you saying? They think he killed this person?”
“I don’t know, but they’re scaring me, taking him off like that. I just don’t want bad press for him—I mean, there’s no way he was involved in this.”
“Look,” I said, “if you talk to the reporter, tell him only what you know—don’t embellish. And say just what you told me, that Dr. Crisp couldn’t—”
“Okay, yeah. Good.”
He seemed so shaken, I wasn’t sure he could even do that much. We were both basket cases.
“Listen, thanks,” he said and started to move away.
“Wait,” I said. “Mr.—”
“Neering. Kyle Neering.”
“Can I take your picture—as a concerned friend? It could help.” He shook his head. “I’d rather not do that. I’ll just go talk to the reporter.”
“Well . . . please, if there’s anything I can do for Dr. Crisp—help with bail—anything, please call me.”
“I will.”
“My name’s Ryan Coe. He has my number.”
Neering came back and squeezed my hand with his damp one. “I’ll tell Sully,” he said. “That’ll mean a lot to him.”
I watched him go, my camera still motionless around my neck. All the pictures were in my head—the interview room at the police station—metal tables, fluorescent lights, Detective Baranovic slapping the table. I didn’t know how much anything I said or did could mean to Sullivan Crisp right now.