I told the cops about Emily Markson’s bruises, about the anger on her face when she listened to the recording, and about seeing Paul Willard sneak out of her house at dawn. They took notes, but didn’t seem surprised by the information.
“My only association with Darren Markson was that phone call,” I insisted for the sixth time. “And the only person who knew my name was his wife.” Except for the 911 operator, and the cops, and my bosses at HandsOn, that is.
“Mrs. Markson has an alibi for the evening her husband disappeared,” Treadwell said.
“Who? Her lawyer?”
“We know who wrote that note,” Sabin said, unwrapping another butterscotch.
“Who was it?” And why the hell wasn’t that person sitting in this claustrophobic interview room instead of me?
“It matched the handwriting on that beer coaster you gave me,” Treadwell said. “We think Felicia Villalobos wrote it.”
“And there you were, right beside her when she was killed,” Sabin added.
“I told you about that. I met her out in the desert where Markson’s car was hit…I didn’t know her from Adam. She must have written down my plate number or something…got my name that way.” Much the same way I’d gotten her details when I called in for MVD information from Mad Cow at HandsOn.
“You don’t really think Felicia had anything to do with killing Markson, do you?” I couldn’t imagine the teenager shooting a man in the back of the head. On the other hand, three years ago I couldn’t have imagined myself doing the same thing.
“Still, it’s kinda curious,” Sabin said, ignoring my question. “First Walter Racine gets killed right after you’ve been going on about him being a child molester and all. Then you turn up around two more dead bodies and say you have nothing to do with them, either. Come to think of it, I’d call that more than curious—more like a pattern, don’t you think?” He’d twisted the candy wrapper into a tiny noose.
They let me go an hour later, finally coughing up the “don’t leave town” mantra. I drove back to Bonita’s house in a rage. What the hell were they thinking? I’d only come to town to help them with the recording from Markson’s car anyway.
At least I had an alibi for the time his car had been hit.
But Sabin kept hinting that Markson had died much later than that, and I could easily have driven to Tucson in that time. Treadwell didn’t stop him, but he didn’t push me on it, either. I was betting that the autopsy results weren’t in yet, and the whole thing was a game Sabin was running.
In any case, I wasn’t about to sit there like a lamb and wait for them to order chops. I needed to know more about Felicia, and who she might have passed my license plate number on to. The only person I could ask was her father.
He’d already seen me in the bar, so I had to come up with some logical reason for having been there. Something that also gave me a reason to keep asking questions about his daughter. For what I had in mind, I’d need to look fairly respectable.
Bonita’s boxed clothing wasn’t of much help—I’d look more like a teenager’s friend than an adult—so I went back to the newly rinsed-out tunic I’d worn yesterday and added a pair of pinstriped trousers that I’d last worn when I interviewed for the job at HandsOn.
Juan Villalobos probably wouldn’t be at the bar today, so soon after his daughter was murdered, but I swung past the building to make sure. There was a CLOSED sign on the door, so I continued on to the Silverlake address. The earth was scorched with a ten-yard black scar where her car had blown up, and crime scene tape was still tied to four wooden stakes in the ground. I parked well away from the blast area, unlatched the gate in the cyclone fence, and hooked it again behind me.
Juan Villalobos opened the door only a moment after I knocked, his eyes dull with pain. He looked past me to the blackened front yard. He didn’t say anything, but finally raised his eyebrows in question. A sad-eyed hound looking for a lost soul mate. What must it be like to imagine your daughter’s death every time you open the door?
“Mr. Villalobos? I’m…”
“I’m sorry. I’ve forgotten—”
So had I. My mind was slow in coming up with a name and a story. “I’m a substitute teacher at Cholla High School. Felicia was in my English class.” Cholla was the high school closest to their address. I hoped that she wasn’t busing across town to another one. In that case, I’d insist that I’d been covering classes there, too.
He searched my face for a souvenir of our meeting. “You look familiar, but…”
“Sorry I didn’t introduce myself when I saw you in the bar the other day.”
“In the bar? Oh, that’s right.”
I don’t think he made the connection to the bar at all. If he had, he would surely be worried about someone who had chased his child out the back door.
He ushered me in. It was dark with the curtains all closed, but no cooler than it was outdoors. Villalobos had either forgotten to turn on the air conditioner or he wanted his physical discomfort to match the emptiness and pain he felt inside.
The furniture was slipcovered with a light fabric, old pieces tarted up in their best finery. I sat on the edge of the couch.
“I saw the news about Felicia. I wanted to tell you how sorry we all are.”
“Licia was a good girl. Everybody loved her.” His eyes grew wet with the loss.
“She seemed so happy the last time I saw her.”
“Happy? I hope so. She had that internship. She was doing well at Cholla. Did you know she was going to be the first person in our family to finish high school?”
I nodded. The high school would be my next stop. Maybe someone there knew what Felicia had been up to.
“We’ll all miss her,” I said. “Especially her boyfriend…umm…”
He shook his head, but not in denial. “The Ochoa boy. I told the police that the bomb in the car would probably lead back to him. If he caused my beautiful girl to die…” The color drained from his face.
“Tell me about him.”
“Carlos Ochoa…from Nogales. He’s too old for Felicia, almost twenty-five. I never should have hired him.”
“He works for you?”
“He used to. When I caught him stealing, I got rid of him. But he kept seeing Felicia behind my back.”
An older boyfriend, especially someone your father didn’t like, was the kind of person you’d meet secretly out in the desert. But she must have been pretty desperate to tell him to come to her father’s bar. Maybe she’d been waiting for him outside, hoping that the father and boyfriend wouldn’t run into each other.
The trip to the high school could wait. I had to find Carlos Ochoa.
It wouldn’t be easy. There were lots of Ochoas in Nogales, and they were all one family. Even the first name and age wouldn’t help much. There were probably a half dozen twenty-five-year-olds named Carlos.
But I had an in. An old high school friend, Beverly Drackett, had married into the Ochoa family the year after we graduated. Last I’d heard, she was living on a ranch just north of Nogales, within spitting distance of the border.
A phone call confirmed her current address and her invitation to come down for lunch. “I’m tired of talking to the kids. It would be great to catch up.” We hadn’t really been close enough to have much dirt to dish, but I jotted down directions to her house.
I phoned the repair shop to approve the cost of fixing the truck. New tires all the way around and a new windshield would do for now. The paint job would have to wait.
The steering wheel on Bonita’s car was so hot that I wished I had oven mitts. It wasn’t supposed to be this hot in September. We should have been on Simmer by now, not Deep Fry. I guided the VW to the freeway with a delicate two-finger grip that would at least cut down on the number of blisters.
I passed the three-hundred-year-old Tumacacori Mission and cemetery forty miles south of Tucson—cream and white patched-mud walls partially hidden by the surrounding mesquite trees—then was stunned back to modern times by the Rio Rico resort a few miles farther on. The resort’s main building echoed the arches and shadows of the ancient church to the north, but the addition of palm trees and an impossibly green golf course gave it a Disneyland patina in this land of dun-colored hills and silver gray sagebrush.
When I spotted a highway patrol car behind me, I realized that Rio Rico would certainly be considered “out of town.” Was Sabin having me followed? The patrolman swerved around me and I breathed a sigh of relief.
Beverly’s turnoff was just past the resort, onto a paved, two-lane road that had opted for the pace of stop signs instead of traffic lights. It took another twenty minutes heading east through golden rolling hills before I spotted her mailbox.
She waved at me from a corral on the left side of the house. From a distance, she looked like the high schooler I’d last seen fifteen years ago. I turned the car in the direction of her wave, came to a stop, and shut off the engine.
“Gorgeous,” I said, gesturing to the palomino she was grooming. His back was as tall as my shoulder and his mane glistened in the midday sun. The horse eyed me with curiosity, but once he’d established that I carried no food, he lost interest.
“That’s Cochise. He’s too old for riding now, but I love having him around.” Beverly was still petite—soft, rounded curves and pouter pigeon breasts—but her face had become that of a disappointed adult, with a built-in scowl and the onset of gray where she parted her hair. It was like looking at those old amusement park photos where you stick your face through the oval on a cardboard dance-hall girl or gunslinger’s cartoon body. You recognize part of the photo, but know somehow that the pieces don’t fit.
Beverly returned the currycomb to a small tack room next to the corral and ushered me toward the house, a middle-class single-story ranch surrounded by enough acreage to call it a small kingdom. She ignored the laundry piled on the living room couch and led me through to the kitchen. I took a seat at the wooden plank table.
Beverly poured sun tea and we played the game of “what do you hear from so-and-so” for a few minutes. I lost. I’d never kept in touch with anyone from high school, but she seemed to delight in doing so. I nodded and smiled at all her passed-on news, often not even able to put a face to the name she mentioned, although her stories about Josh King, the guy I went to the senior prom with, made it sound like he was doing just fine without me.
“What about you?” she asked, after she’d shown me pictures of her children and husband, told me about her vacation to Rome two years earlier and her kids’ new school, and detailed her sister’s trials in adopting a child. She’d carefully avoided any questions about my incarceration and trial, although I’m sure I’d been a hot topic at the reunion that year.
I toyed with a bite of the salad she’d served for lunch, then set the fork back on the plate. “I’ve got my own business now. I track down missing persons. You know, people who have money coming to them, but they can’t be found to collect it.” You’ve got to say it slow and look straight at ’em. Liars look up and to the left when they’re constructing a lie.
“That’s so exciting.” Her tone suggested that it was anything but. I think she would rather have heard about what life was like three years after having been a murder suspect. Schadenfreude, my old English Lit teacher had called it. The glee in recognizing that while you may be working at McDonald’s, your classmate is flipping burgers behind bars.
I shrugged.
“How do you—?”
I interrupted her before the questions became too pointed and I had to come up with real answers about this supposed new business that would put the lie to my story.
“Anyway, that’s why I’m here. I’m trying to track someone down, and I heard she was last seen with Carlos Ochoa from Nogales.”
“Carlos the hothead? Or Carlos the gardener?”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much, does it? He’s about twenty-five, would have moved to Tucson in the last couple of years. Maybe worked at a bar up there.”
“Maybe Carlos with the mustache. Let me check.” She picked up a cell phone and dialed a number from memory. “Abuela? It’s Beverly. Tomas’s wife. Yes. Yes. That’s the one.” Her grandmother-in-law must have lots of relatives named Beverly. Or maybe lots of offspring named Tomas.
She gave the woman all the information we had on our Carlos.
“Anything else you can think of?” Beverly asked with her hand over the phone’s speaker. “There are so many Ochoas around.”
“He may be the kind of guy who would help himself to a cash drawer or help a few supplies go missing. And he might have been dating someone named Felicia…Licia.” I didn’t know how I was going to square those details with the notion of looking for a missing inheritor, and hoped I didn’t have to.
“Why didn’t you say so?” She thanked the woman on the other end of the phone and hung up. “I don’t know about the cash-drawer stuff, but Carlos-with-a-Mustache is definitely dating a woman named Felicia.”
“Who is he? How do you know him?”
“He’s my husband’s uncle’s cousin. So that’s…what? His second cousin? I’ve never been sure of that stuff. Anyway, he’s family. And he came to dinner a couple of months ago, just going on and on about the beautiful Felicia. He wouldn’t tell us who she was—said we’d meet her soon enough.”
“Do you know how I can get hold of him?”
“Sure.” She dug through some loose papers tucked under the telephone on the counter. “Here’s his Tucson address.”
I thanked her and picked up my keys.
“Jessie, don’t go so soon. I was going to ask—”
I cut her off with a hug and a wave good-bye. Three years was too soon to start reminiscing about murder trials. And I don’t know what I would have told her anyway.