The strains of that trumpet still echoed in my head on Sunday morning.
I missed my friend Catherine like she was a country I could no longer visit. We’d met in college, swimming mile after mile in adjacent lanes at the university pool at dawn, the water—that most precious of commodities in the desert—cradling us, wrapping us, pushing against us as we swam. Then we’d move into lazy backstrokes, taking turns to tell our stories, our dreams. I stood beside her when she married Glen. I wept when I first held her baby girl.
It was beside another pool just three years ago that Catherine first told me about the abuse. Her marriage to Glen had disintegrated earlier in the year, leaving Catherine rudderless.
“For years, I tried to tell myself it was all innocent, that Uncle Walter didn’t know what he was doing and how it hurt me.”
“Are you saying your uncle abused you?” Catherine had only mentioned her aunt and uncle in passing, as the people who had raised her when her parents were killed. Good people. Churchgoers.
She nodded. “It started when I was six. Katie’s going to be six soon.”
How could I have known Catherine all these years and not known this? My stomach ached with the knowledge that she had kept the horror to herself for so long.
“You’ve got to go to the cops.”
Catherine shook her head.
“What does your aunt say? Does she know what a danger he is?”
“She never believed me. No one did.”
“I believe you.”
We’d go to the cops and to Children’s Services, I said. I didn’t know if they could charge Racine for molesting Catherine; it had been so long ago. At a bare minimum we could get their attention. They could put him on a watch list so that it didn’t happen again. Force the family to get him treatment.
None of that had happened by the time Catherine died.
Three weeks later, after I’d seen little Katie in Walter Racine’s arms, I did what Catherine would have wanted me to do.
I needed sunshine and caffeine to shake off the memories of my last days with Catherine. I did a quick workout in the backyard, then sat on the porch with a café con leche.
I was not ashamed of killing Racine, but doing it while Katie was there didn’t rest as easily on my conscience.
I’d gone to great pains to make sure I had an alibi. Signing up for that continuing education course in Phoenix. Making the supposedly boneheaded move of parking at a fire hydrant once I got there, and leaving my car in the police impound all weekend. Hitchhiking back to Tucson where I borrowed my brother’s car while he was out of town.
It was all the easier because it was Halloween. I’d worn a mask and a ghostly sheet over white jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t stand out from any other trick-or-treater on the street, even though I’d had to wait almost a half hour for Racine’s car to pull into the driveway.
I hadn’t known Katie was with him that night. She was tucked into the backseat when I approached the car. I made him kneel and I shot him twice in the back of the head. I was turning away when I saw the little girl, her eyes wide with fear.
She didn’t recognize me behind the mask and costume.
“It’s okay, honey. You stay put. I’m going to lock the door so you’ll be safe. And I’ll call someone to come get you,” I’d said.
“Are you an angel?”
“Sort of.”
I called the cops from a pay phone two miles away. The prosecutor, Ted Dresden, had tried to use that 911 tape against me at trial, but they couldn’t make a clear voice match so it didn’t do much damage.
The last time I’d seen Katie was in the courtroom. Under delicate questioning by Dresden, she’d still insisted that a guardian angel had come to help her when her great-uncle had been killed.
Katie would be almost nine now. Her father, Glen Chandliss, had moved to Colorado after the divorce and hadn’t interfered when Catherine’s aunt Elizabeth said she’d raise Katie. I wondered if she still lived out by Davis Monthan Airforce Base. It was midmorning on a weekend—they might still be home.
I stashed the little .38 in a bucket under the kitchen sink and piled rags and cleaning products on top of it. I didn’t want to be driving around with a gun today if Sabin was anywhere nearby.
Although I’d changed a lot in the last three years—the spiked blond hair, the tattoos, the muscles—I didn’t want either Katie or her great-aunt to recognize me today. I remembered all too clearly Elizabeth’s rage at me from the witness box. I put on running shorts, a baseball cap, and oversized sunglasses as a minimal disguise.
When I reached their neighborhood, I parked around the corner and jogged past the house. There was a five-foot stucco wall around the front yard; I couldn’t see much unless I got close to the property line and peeked in. I saw nothing on the first pass, so I continued down to the end of the block and circled back.
I jogged in place, this time hearing girlish laughter from the front yard. There was an inch-wide gap between the wooden gate and the wall, giving me a thin slice of the courtyard. I took off the sunglasses and pretended to clean the lenses on the hem of my T-shirt.
Two girls were drawing a complex maze of pathways on the sidewalk with colored chalk. One child, a blonde, was clearly the director of the drama, the other a passive but willing game player. The quiet girl looked up at the gate, and I saw Catherine’s eyes, recreated here before me in the body of a skinny, almost-nine-year-old girl. I started to cry.
“Are you okay?” Katie asked, approaching the gate. She put her face right up against the gap. “Do you want a glass of water?”
“I’m okay.” I sniffled and wiped my nose with the back of my hand.
“Why are you crying?”
“Don’t talk to strangers!” the other girl called, dropping the chalk and taking Katie by the arm, then stage-whispering behind her hand, “It’s not polite to ask people why they’re crying.”
“Lizzie!” Katie whined, drawing out each syllable.
“You can ask,” I said. “I was crying because you remind me of my friend, Catherine.”
“That was my mother’s name,” Katie said.
I nodded. “It’s a beautiful name.”
Guillermo’s call caught me at a red light.
“They found Carlos’s car.”
“Where? Is there any sign of him?”
“All I’ve got is a message that says they found the car at Greyhound Park.”
“I’ll meet you there.” I hung up, not giving him a chance to contradict me. It was a straight shot down Golf Links Road to the dog track on the south side of town. Twenty minutes later, I was there.
A loudspeaker boomed across the half-empty parking lot and cheers erupted from the tiered stadium to the west. Empty cardboard boxes and grimy, loose papers swirled and eddied across the asphalt.
I circled the eastern edge of the parking lot twice before I saw the tow truck and the South Tucson police car tucked behind a Dumpster on the other side.
What made them notice the car in the first place? Was it parked in an illegal space? Had it crashed into something? Maybe Guillermo had filed a missing person’s report and some sharp-eyed cop had spotted the license plate.
I didn’t have to get any closer to see the damage. The front and back bumpers were crumpled like blue wrapping paper and both headlights were broken out. One light dangled almost to the ground like some monster’s eye in a horror film, but it was clear that the damage hadn’t been caused by the Dumpster. I didn’t know how old the dents in the back were, but the front-end damage matched the collision Markson had described.
Guillermo pulled up alongside my car, got out, and approached the South Tucson cops.
“Tell them to call Detective Treadwell,” I said before he got too far away. “This may have been the car that hit Darren Markson that night.”
Guillermo grimaced and turned back toward the two policemen. One of the officers leaned into Carlos’s car and pulled a child’s car seat from where it lay on the floor of the back seat. I joined them next to the Dumpster.
“What would he have been doing with that?” I asked.
Guillermo shook his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t hooked in or anything. Just laying there.”
“My God.” There was a bloody handprint on the plastic seat, just below the soft yellow duck-patterned fabric.
It took Treadwell almost an hour to get there, and when he did he was quick to draw the same conclusion I had.
“Get this car towed to Forensics,” he said. “And have them dust the child’s car seat for prints right away.”
He turned to Guillermo. “Is your brother friends with anyone who would need an infant or toddler’s seat?”
Guillermo shook his head. “Not that I can think of. But there’s lots of kids in the family.”
The crowd roared from the stadium. It was either a close race or a big winner.
“We’ll check the paint—see if it matches what we found on Markson’s—” Treadwell was interrupted by the arrival of Len Sabin, bringing his sedan to a brake-destroying stop just a few feet from my back bumper. Sabin hitched up his pants and joined the group, turning his back to me and facing Treadwell.
“What are these two doing here?”
“They’re the ones who called us in. No sign of the car’s owner, but it looks like this could be the vehicle involved in the attack on Darren Markson.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” Sabin said, somehow suggesting that anything I was involved in must be nefarious.
I ignored him and turned toward Treadwell. “Did Emily Markson say anything about her husband having a child’s seat in the car?” A twenty-pound seat, plus the thirty or thirty-five pounds of a toddler, could have been the weight of that seat-belted something I’d seen on the HandsOn printout.
Treadwell said no, but made a note in a spiral-bound notebook.
If there had been a child in Markson’s car, who was it? And where was he now?
The police dismissed us and roped off the area around Carlos’s car. I leaned into Guillermo’s window as he clicked his seat belt into position. “Follow me back to my place.”
He started the car, the radio coming to life with the engine. An Amos Lee song was playing, the sad resignation in his voice asking, “What in the world has come over you? What in heaven’s name have you done?”
“Ah, Carlos.” He sighed, and his eyes filled with tears.
Guillermo parked behind my truck in Bonita’s driveway and followed me inside, his eyes taking in the shabby, impermanent condition of the living room.
“Are you moving in or out?”
“Neither.” I explained about my sister’s departure to South America.
I opened two beers and we tap-danced around the fear in the air for a few minutes.
“What do you think happened to Carlos?” I finally asked.
He hung his head. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t look good.”
I perched on the edge of the yellow chair and put my arm around his shoulders. He moved back against my body, muscles knotted by either training or tension. “Tell me about the last time you saw him.”
He told his story to the floor, as if I wasn’t even there. “He came by the rental yard to ask me to come work on his house. But he was really antsy, spacing out in the middle of the conversation, all wild-eyed, like somebody was sneaking up on him.”
“Was he back on drugs?” Drugs and the Braceros would be a bad mix. And could be reason enough for someone to have gone after Felicia.
“Just a little blow. Nothing like we’d been doing before.”
“Did he say anything? Was anything bothering him?”
“He was always talking about Felicia—how she was going to come live with him. He said he wanted to go back to school, maybe get into the construction business. He’d get quiet sometimes, but I didn’t get the idea anything was bothering him.” He hunched his shoulders, dislodging my hand.
I couldn’t let it go unspoken anymore. “Do you think Carlos is the victim here—or the killer?”
Guillermo bristled at the thought, then sighed.
“Maybe both.”
I heard the throaty roar of a big V8 outside, bragging on its horsepower and torque. I pulled the curtain to the side.
It was the black low rider again, this time the song blasting from the windows was about the hazards of smuggling: “They take the load to the border but they won’t be paid. They’ll only get stopped at the checkpoint.” The four bandanaed bobbleheads in the car nodded and swayed to the beat. The guy in the front passenger seat stared at Guillermo’s car, then finger-shot me the way he had at the intersection on Friday.
“Braceros. Did they follow us back here from Greyhound Park?” I asked Guillermo over my shoulder.
“Maybe. If they’re holding Carlos then they probably would have had a watch on where they dumped his car, too.” He tossed his empty bottle into a cardboard box in the corner, unphased by the appearance of the gangstas in the street. “They probably followed me from the house. I told you they know where I live.”
“Should we tell the cops?” I may have done jail time, but that didn’t mean that I was blasé about armed felons hanging around my house. In some ways, I was still a regular citizen.
“Tell them what? That the Braceros have moved their influence north to Tucson? They already know that. And I don’t come from a background that’s particularly comfortable running to the cops with information.”
Just like Raisa Fortas’s young Latina client who wouldn’t give up the names of the coyotes who helped her cross the border.
“Are the Braceros still bringing in illegals?”
He rolled his eyes at my naiveté.
“Anything to do with kids?” There had to be some reason that Carlos’s car had a child seat in it.
He grabbed my hand. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
“I’m serious. The Braceros bring across illegals. Carlos was hooked up with them again. And now there’s this bloody handprint on a child’s car seat.” This was a whole different kind of sin against children than I’d faced with Walter Racine, but it made my skin crawl just thinking about it. Kidnapping for ransom? Illegal adoptions? The child slave trade? Pedophile rings?
Guillermo took my face in his hands. “Listen to me. We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know where that car seat came from. We don’t know who last drove Carlos’s car. We don’t know if it had anything to do with Markson’s death or Felicia getting blown up. We don’t know if it has anything to do with children at all.”
“And we don’t know where Carlos is,” I finished for him.
“I’ll find him.” The screen door slapped shut behind him.