Bernie thought about Chee and the photos as she walked to the lieutenant’s room. Louisa sat resting her head in her hands. Bernie touched her gently, and she startled awake.
“I’m happy to sit here awhile if you’d like to get some coffee or something to eat,” Bernie said. “Or if you want to stay here, I can bring you something and you can eat in the CCU lounge or out on the deck.”
“I’m fine for now,” Louisa said. She handed Bernie the drawing the lieutenant had made last night. “What’s this?”
“Earlier, we asked the lieutenant if he knew who shot him. Yesterday he made these marks. As a clue I guess.”
Louisa frowned. “W for white man? Or maybe it’s an M for mystery. Or a mountain with a deep valley? Did it help?”
“I’m trying to decipher it,” she said. “I promised the lieutenant I’d figure out who shot him.”
Bernie remembered Chee’s photo message and saw “Guess where I am.” She opened it to find a beautiful red peony in full bloom. Lovely, she thought. Why had he sent it? Then she remembered seeing the plant when it was in bud. How nice of him.
She turned to Louisa. “May I borrow your car? Chee turned his phone off. I just got some important information he needs.”
Louisa extracted a set of keys from her purse. “My Jeep is in the front row. There’s a handicapped placard hanging from the mirror. And a loaded pistol in the glove box.”
Bernie gave her a questioning look.
“Is that for the placard or the gun?”
“Both,” Bernie said. “The FBI searched the airport for your Jeep. Did you hide it somewhere?”
Louisa smiled. “A friend let me leave it at her house. Took me to the airport and picked me up yesterday. I didn’t know how long I’d have to stay at Anderson, and parking at the airport gets expensive.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Bernie said.
“You better be,” Louisa said. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
The Jeep started right up and drove smoothly. Bernie turned on the air-conditioning, even though it wasn’t hot yet, just because she could.
Bernie saw Chee’s truck near the visitor center. He’d probably gone to the museum, she thought. Got absorbed in the collections, forgot that he’d silenced his phone during the ceremony for Leaphorn.
But the museum was closed, lights off, not even a cleaning person. Bernie walked around to the back door. Locked. No cars. She saw a large dolly at the loading dock, deep tracks in the gravel, some cigarette butts.
She walked the grounds, searching for Chee, trying to keep worry at bay. She found Mark Yazzie near the administration building, rolling up the hoses. “My lucky morning,” he said. “Two officers of the law, and I’m still a free man.”
“So you saw Chee?”
“Fine-looking man,” Mark Yazzie said. “Even out of uniform.”
“I’m trying to find him.”
“Last I heard, he was headed to the museum.”
“I was just up there,” Bernie said. “It’s closed.”
“I told him to use the back door.”
“I tried that, too, but it was locked.”
“Guess she must have left already,” Yazzie said.
“She?”
“Dr. Davis. If I see Officer Chee, I’ll tell him you’re after him.”
Bernie walked to Davis’s office, noticing that her SUV wasn’t there. Knocked and got no response. She called Chee’s phone again. No answer.
She went to the administration building, where she found Marjorie watering the plants in the big office. Collingsworth had joined potential donors for breakfast, the secretary told her, and ought to be in around ten. Bernie was welcome to wait, have some coffee. And, no, she hadn’t seen Chee.
“What about Dr. Davis?” Bernie asked.
“Oh, she works off-site today. I can give her a message. She’s got a research project out on some ranch in southern Colorado.”
“The Double X Ranch?”
“Usually that’s where she is. Sometimes she goes to Chaco Canyon.”
Bernie said, “I need you to call campus security. I found my husband’s truck in the lot, but he’s missing. Doesn’t answer his phone. I’m afraid something has happened to him. The gardener said he went to the museum, but it’s dark and locked over there.”
“Why would he be here so early? It doesn’t seem likely—”
The expression on Bernie’s face stopped the monologue. Marjorie dialed, said a few words, hung up. “The guard will be here in a minute.”
Bernie sat still on a bench outside the administrative offices as she waited, repositioning pieces of the puzzle, remembering the lieutenant’s mantra: Nothing is a coincidence. A W for woman? Did a woman shoot him? Was it Ellie? If so, who killed her? Or an M, she thought, an M for Maxie? When she found Chee, she’d bounce that theory off him, after she teased him for getting locked up with the artifacts.
It was fifteen minutes before Security Man arrived, well-built, steel-haired, with the presence of a retired marine and a gun in his holster. From the tightness in his shoulders and the dour expression on his face, Bernie expected conflict.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I think my husband is locked in the museum. I need your help to—”
He cut her off. “No, ma’am. That can’t be. The alarm is on, and the motion detectors show there’s no sign of anybody there. I checked just before I walked over here.”
“What if he’s unconscious?”
Security Man made a clucking noise with his tongue. “Well, unless he’s on staff, he shouldn’t be there in the first place. The museum personnel will be here in another hour or so. I’m sure they’ll—”
She felt her anger rising. She took her wallet out of her backpack, showed him her official Navajo Police ID.
“My husband is a Navajo Police officer, too,” she said. “I’m here working on a case for Dr. Collingsworth, and he’s helping me. I don’t want to involve outsiders in this, but if I need to call the Santa Fe Police Department or the State Police, I’m sure they’ll respond.”
“Point made,” he said.
“Tell me about the alarm system,” Bernie said as they walked.
He explained that complicated electronics kept track of every building on campus, monitoring exterior doors and windows, with motion detectors in crucial areas. Key staff who had reason to work late or come in early knew the code to disable the system and reinstate it when they left.
“It works great,” Security Man said. “Hardly any false alarms. The only problem is human error, when people forget to activate it when they leave.”
He wanted to amble, but when she broke into a jog, Security Man kept pace. They reached the swipe box near the front door, and he slid a card in to open it.
“Wait here while I take a look.”
“I’m going with you,” Bernie said. “You know, two sets of eyes . . .”
She saw his face harden.
“Come on,” she said. “What’s the big deal? If he’s isn’t in there, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”
“It’s not . . . but what the hell?” he said. “I like pushy broads. Be my guest.”
They entered the empty reception area, with its deserted research tables.
“Chee,” she called. “Chee? You locked in here?”
They walked through the lobby to the research rooms, storage and office areas, places Bernie hadn’t visited on her first tour. In the pottery vault, she noticed the empty boxes, tape, the bubble wrap.
Security Man said, “Usually this room is perfect. Dr. Davis loves these old things like a family, more than some families I know. I’ve never seen her leave it disorganized, but she’s been working hard, packing up all this old stuff for storage so that fancy new collection can come in.”
“Was she here this morning?”
“Yeah. She disabled the alarm and then reset it when she left, half an hour ago. Maybe she let your hubby in and then they went out for breakfast or something. Seen enough? Do I get my coffee?”
“One more stop,” Bernie said.
The overhead lights came on automatically in the rug room, but in the split second before they did, Bernie noticed a little green flash blinking beneath the table.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Security Man retrieved it. “Looks like someone dropped a phone.” It came alive at his touch, showing a photo of Bernie and Chee in traditional Navajo dress. Their wedding picture.
Bernie squatted down, examining the carpet. She noticed a few spots of blood. The blood was damp.
“Can you check the surveillance cameras?”
He looked up at the video camera aimed at the rug room and shook his head. “This one isn’t taping. On my to-do list for today.”
“Call the police right now,” Bernie said. “Don’t let anyone in here, or in Dr. Davis’s office.” She raced out the front door, running back to Louisa’s car. She called Cordova as she drove, explained what she’d found.
“The security guard here is calling the local cops,” she said. “But I think we’re too late for that.”
“You’re sure she kidnapped him? From what I hear, she’s an attractive—”
Bernie cut him off. “I found blood close to where he dropped his phone.”
Cordova would alert the rangers at Chaco Canyon in case Davis was headed there, and put the New Mexico and Colorado State Police on alert for her car. The Colorado cops would also check the Double X, Davis’s other probable location. He would also call Largo with an update.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m headed toward Chaco, and if they aren’t there, then to Double X,” she said. “I can’t just—”
He interrupted. “Don’t be a hero. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Louisa’s Jeep surprised her with its responsiveness. It also, unfortunately, had less than a quarter tank of gas. That ought to get her to Cuba, Bernie thought, and that service station would be a fast in-and-gone. She turned off the air-con to save fuel.
Bernie drove south in traffic that grew lighter once she got past the La Cienega exit. Most vehicles were pointed toward Santa Fe, traveling the opposite direction. She concentrated on the road, kept the speedometer at 85, scanned her memory for every detail she could muster about Davis. Focused on staying calm. They’d found Chee’s phone in the rug room. Davis must have let him in, and before that, they probably chatted about the pots she was boxing up. Chee must have said something that made her feel threatened. But what? Davis was a smart woman. She wouldn’t risk abducting a cop unless there was a lot at stake, and unless she thought she could get away with it.
Bernie reviewed her impression of the woman. She loved her job. She’d loved her boyfriend, who had died mysteriously, kept his ashes on her desk in that cookie jar urn. She probably loved the pot he was in as much as she’d loved him.
Pots. Pot. Bernie flashed on Ellie and Slim smoking pot in their hippie hideaway, surrounded by Ellie’s boxes of potshards and junk.
She remembered the photo Slim had shown her. Remembered Slim saying Davis had taken the pictures for Ellie during her early appraisal work. Davis must have known about Ellie falsifying the values. In fact, Ellie probably used Davis’s photos to make the fakes. Leaphorn’s calling attention to the phony appraisals would have raised questions about a scam, implicated Davis. Chee must have figured this out, and Davis somehow knew that he knew.
Bernie thought about the scene at Ellie’s office and at her apartment. She’d assumed that Ellie was messy, was leaving town in a hurry, or had been looking for something. But what if Davis had been there, tearing the place apart, looking for the incriminating pictures?
The Jeep’s orange gasoline warning light began to glow beyond San Ysidro, catching her attention briefly. She drove on, trying to ignore it and the E on the gauge, because there was no place to stop for fuel. She rolled on fumes for the last ten miles, hoping, hoping, hoping the Jeep would make it into the gas station. She exhaled a percentage of the built-up tension when she saw buildings along the highway, the storage complex, and, finally, the Conoco station in the next block. She’d fill up and be on her way.
As she was about to pull up to the pumps, she remembered that Chee and she had decided that the rent-a-garage compound would have been the place for Ellie’s love nest and original office. Davis desperately wanted the pictures. Would she think to look for them here? What better place to dispose of Chee?
Bernie turned and drove to the storage yard entrance.
She parked, took Louisa’s gun from the glove box, and put it in her backpack. She shoved the car keys into her pants pocket. She hurried to the office, a small building just outside the fenced entrance. A ten-foot cinder-block wall topped with concertina wire surrounded the complex.
The young man at the desk turned his attention away from a handheld video game. The console behind him had four screens, three of which offered black-and-white views of the storage yard—toward the entrance, toward the highway, toward an empty field. One screen was black.
“Interested in a rental? We’ve got both sizes available, and a special deal through the end of the month.”
“No. I’m a Navajo Police officer, and I need your help,” Bernie said.
“Really?”
Bernie kept talking as she pulled her ID out of her backpack. “I’m tracking a missing woman who may have a locker here. Ellie Friedman, or perhaps she registered as Eleanor Friedman-Bernal or EFB Appraisals. Please check.”
“I don’t need to check,” he said. “You just missed her. She couldn’t remember the locker number. No wonder. She hadn’t been here for years. Pays the rent, though.”
“She’s here? You’re sure?”
“She showed me her ID,” the man said. “She’s a blonde now and used to be a brunette in the photo. You know how women are.”
He gave Bernie the number, told her where to find it.
Where did Davis get Ellie’s ID? she wondered. The obvious way would have been murder. Chee must have figured out that Davis killed Ellie. She’d learn the reason later. That was why Davis needed him out of the picture.
Bernie said, “She was driving an SUV, right?”
“Right,” he said. “Silver Lexus. Nice car.”
Bernie said, “You’re sure she hasn’t left already?”
“She’s here. Everyone has to go out the back. That gate sets off a noise up here. Drives me crazy.”
Bernie took the gun from the backpack and put it in her pocket. “I need you to call the local police. Tell them they need to provide assistance to me right now. You got it?”
“Wow,” he said. “But the phone—”
His words hung in space. Bernie left at a dead run.
The storage yard consisted of six long pods of lockers, each composed of smaller units with metal doors and larger units with garage-style access. Trailers and RVs had their own section on the north end of the lot; the entrance to Ellie’s locker would open to face them.
She slowed to a jog as she approached the lockers with the lovebird view. She’d seen other cars and a few people as she raced by, but no sign of Davis’s car, Davis, or Chee.
She reached the end of the row, flattened herself against the wall, and peered around the corner, searching for the Lexus. Bingo. Davis had parked the vehicle with its silver nose outward, driving about halfway into the garage-size locker.
Bernie felt the weight of Louisa’s pistol in her pocket, tried not to consider the idea that she might be depending on a gun she had never fired before to save her life and Chee’s. She crept along the wall toward the SUV, sticking as close to it as she could, skirting plastic bags and faded fast food wrappers that had drifted in against the doors. She heard the wind, the occasional rumble of distant traffic, and finally the high-pitched clatter of a radio coming from Ellie’s open garage door. She reached the edge of the open doorway and crouched beside the car, listening for signs of Chee or Davis. She slipped off her backpack and set it down in a pile of weeds, noticing the electrical outlet on the wall above. In case the worst happened, the backpack could be a sign to someone that something was wrong.
The clatter was classical music, violins broadcast over tinny speakers. She heard no talking or arguing, no moaning. She stood up slowly and peered in the car’s darkened windows. On the front passenger seat was a big turquoise purse, clearly not Davis’s style. A navy duffel sat on the floor. The rear seats lay flat, and the back hatch was open.
She squatted down again and moved enough to bring part of the garage into view—a long row of dark filing cabinets along the rear wall, brown cardboard boxes neatly stacked on top. A table covered with clear plastic held rags and a pile of loose papers. She found the source of the music, a small black cassette player. On the cement floor beneath the table were several buckets and boxes with dirt inside. Not dirt, she thought. Clay. A setup for pottery making.
Davis’s voice startled her. “I’m almost finished here, Handsome.” The woman herself came into view, a cigarette dangling from plump, lipstick-red lips. She had an armful of manila folders. She flipped the folders upside down, letting the paper flutter out and pile onto the worktable. “A few more of these. Ellie saved everything. Then I’ll box up the clay babies and we’ll be on our way.” She laughed. “Except, of course, we’re not going to the same place. You, my dear, are going to hell. What a waste of a sexy man.”
Bernie pulled Louisa’s pistol from her pocket and released the safety.
“I should have put you to work, big guy. Next time, I’ll have to think about that. Not that I plan a next time.” Davis glanced toward the car. Bernie froze. Then Davis turned her attention back to the table.
Bernie shifted, straining to find Chee. If Davis was talking to him, he must be alive. She saw a galvanized bucket full of broken bits of pottery. Green garden hoses neatly rolled. A black guitar case. An old sled with rusty runners. Two red gasoline cans in a corner. A yellow kayak. She moved farther from the car to take in more of the room. Now she could see the edge of a mattress and a boot and the shape of a leg in blue jeans. She shifted again and saw Chee on top of the mattress, lying on his back. A wide piece of black duct tape covered his mouth. Davis had wrapped more tape around his ankles. His arms were pinned behind him, fastened at the wrists. She noticed a bloody place on his left forearm. She willed him to open his eyes and look at her.
“Ah, Officer Manuelito.” Davis’s voice came from behind her about the same time Bernie felt something hard press against her ribs. “I have a weapon. Drop yours and walk ahead of me into the garage. Do it now.”
In one quick motion, Bernie turned toward Davis. But before she could shoot, Davis jumped back. Then hot pain knocked Bernie to her knees. She felt liquid fire spreading from her shoulder to her scalp and then to every molecule of her body. She recognized the Taser experience before she collapsed: she’d been shocked to a lesser degree in police training.
She heard Louisa’s gun skid across the concrete floor behind her, out the open garage door. Bernie’s nervous system, on overload from the electricity, ignored the command to rise and fight for her life.
Davis stood over her, pointing the weapon at Bernie’s chest.
“My ex loved this new three-shot Taser. One of the few good things that came from that relationship.”
Bernie heard the squeal of violins and willed her brain to focus on anything except the clamoring noise and the wave of raw pain. She knew she had to relax. Relax and wait for her nervous system to straighten out.
Davis walked closer, keeping the Taser pointed at Bernie’s chest.
She grabbed Bernie’s left arm and then the right and began to drag her farther into the garage.
“You’re lighter than I thought you’d be,” Davis said. “Just a slip of a girl. It would have been easier to shoot you, but I don’t want to disturb the neighbors.”
Bernie yanked her arms free from Davis’s grip and rolled, ready to rise from the floor. Davis jumped like a panther.
This time, the Taser sucked the air from Bernie’s lungs and every cell in her body, replacing it with sizzling agony, a searing river that started above her head and ran to below her feet. Bernie heard herself scream, then heard Chee moan. She willed the sound to stop, willed her eyes to open and stare at Davis.
“It took Handsome a while to understand the power of technology, too. Women’s bodies have less capacity for this sort of thing.”
Bernie felt a hard kick in the ribs, a new sensation of pain. “Roll over, facedown.” Bernie forced herself onto her belly and felt Davis roughly grab her, wrenching her arms behind her back. Davis pressed her wrists together, binding them with duct tape. Bernie saw the empty tape roll bounce along the concrete floor.
“Tasers are handy little items. I kept this in my car along with my gun and the demolition kit for the happy day when I could make sure none of Ellie’s phony appraisals were traced to me.”
Bernie tried to think, ignoring the pain from her ribs piercing her chest each time she inhaled. Demolition kit?
“That Ellie. She had everything except an extra roll of tape. But this will do.” Bernie stayed limp, nonresistant, as Davis looped a bungee cord around her ankles, pulling it tight.
“Roll over so I can see your face.”
The weight of Bernie’s body made the hands trapped behind her back hurt more than she imagined they could. She saw Davis walk to the improvised shelf and carefully peel back the tablecloth, rolling it to keep the dust from flying. Beneath it were four black-and-white pots, similar in style, different in decoration.
Davis stood admiring them as the violins wailed. She pulled a cigarette from her pack of Camels, lit it with a match from a paper book of matches, put the pack and matches back in her pocket.
“Beautiful,” Bernie said. Talking above the clatter of the music took effort. She felt as if someone had parked a car on her forehead.
“These are the real thing, honey,” Davis said. She looked down at Bernie, took a long draw on her cigarette. “Your lieutenant was the only one who realized there was a problem with how much Ellie thought the pots were worth. Her stupidity and his meddling gave me a chance to settle up with both of them for what they did to my Randall.” She took another deep lungful of smoke. “And then your hunky husband helped me figure out where Ellie kept the photos I took. Nice!”
Davis put down the cigarette and pulled a pair of black cotton gloves from her pocket. She picked up a pot and held it toward Bernie. Bernie noticed the hearts on her bracelet. The black gloves. The final pieces of the puzzle.
“Take a look at this beauty. It was the first one Ellie copied.” Davis laughed. “I haven’t seen it for years. Look at these tiny black stripes inside the triangles. Perfect. But Ellie’s copy was almost as good.”
“Like Acoma?” Bernie’s voice sounded far away. Speaking intensified her headache, but as long as Davis was talking about the pots, she wouldn’t kill them.
“Right,” Davis said. “I read once that some Indians consider pots living beings, the union of clay and water. The potter’s hands provide the magic, transfer life into the vessel. The firing gives them birth, and when they break, they return to Mother Earth.”
Davis carefully picked up the next pot.
“This dates to around 1100,” she said. “You can see why those greedy bastards wanted this. Exquisite. Archaeologists used to believe that the Indians used these as drums. Now we know that the women made them for drinking chocolate, beans brought all the way from Mexico. Ellie did well to save it, to save them all. When Leaphorn came sniffing around, I told her to ignore him, that I could use my pull at the AIRC to fix things. Just give me the old pots. I would have put these in the McManus collection when it got to the museum, given her the copies. Simple. But she’d changed. She wanted to keep these. I took her to Chaco to talk some sense into her, hoping that seeing the place where the pots were born would change her mind. I tried to get her to tell me where they were and where all the photos were, too.”
Davis looked at the pot. “I remember the day I met this one. It was the first time Ellie asked me to go along with her to take the pictures for the appraisal. It’s always been one of my favorites.”
Bernie forced herself to speak. “Bird?” She felt her stomach churning. If she had to throw up, she was glad Davis hadn’t taped her mouth.
“What? Hard to hear with this music. Oh, this?” Davis moved her gloved finger above a design. “Ellie and I decided it was a macaw. They traded scarlet macaws up from Mexico, too, raised them for their feathers at Pueblo Bonito. Archaeologists found their hollow bones, but never found any signs that they reproduced.”
Davis looked down at Bernie. “Even some of my colleagues argue against calling that design ‘macaw.’ Academics can be so closed-minded. But I don’t care. Once it’s in our collection, I can see it every day. Won’t that be wonderful?”
Davis wrapped the pot and boxed it, handling it as gently as a mother would an infant.
Bernie realized that if she turned her neck all the way to the left, she could see Chee. His skin had a grey hue, and droplets of sweat glistened on his face. She scanned the floor, looking for a tool, an idea, some way to get out of this.
“This is one of my favorites,” Davis said. She held the cylinder so Bernie could see the zigzags inside. “A classic rain design.”
“Acoma?” Bernie said. How odd, she thought, to spend her last minutes of life talking about pottery.
Davis sat down in the folding chair. “You are a smart one. Acoma potters use this quite a bit, and their variation is closer to the ancient ones than those you see at other pueblos. Take a look at these beautiful little handles.” She adjusted the pot so Bernie could see them. “Very rare. Ellie and I figured it must have been some sort of clan connection. Relatives teaching other relatives the technique. No way to prove it, but an interesting theory, isn’t it?”
Bernie felt a firm nudge in the ribs from the toe of Davis’s boot. The pain made it hard to speak, but she squeaked out, “Yes. Interesting.” She thought of the message she had given the attendant. Had he called for help?
Bernie watched Davis pick up two cardboard boxes and heard the dull echo of her boots against the hard floor during a pause in the music. Ten steps away. She listened to the scraping of the boxes against rubber mats as Davis pushed them into the back of the car. Bernie felt her chest tighten and fought the rising panic, shifting her focus to the dead numbness in her hands and agony in her side. She heard Davis’s footsteps again. Saw her gather up the final two boxes.
Bernie twisted to look at Chee. His eyes were open. He winked at her.
Davis returned with the turquoise purse and the duffel bag Bernie had noticed on the floor of the front seat. She put them down on the littered wooden table and picked up her Taser. “I’m glad I ran out of duct tape,” she said. “I enjoyed your questions.”
Bernie said, “Jackson’s car?”
“What?”
“For shooting.”
“Oh, that Benally guy with the sedan. Clever, wasn’t I?” Davis smiled. “Jackson offered to let me use his car at the ranch in exchange for gas money. I hated to drive the Lexus over those terrible roads, so I used it for errands, always with my researcher gloves. I made a copy of the key. I drove to Bashas’ on the day I knew he parked there. Left my SUV, borrowed Jackson’s car, and brought it back to the same parking place. I knew Ellie had been at the ranch, too, so I figured she would have had the same access I did to make her a suspect.”
Davis looked through some tools, placing a few in a box. She pushed a button to stop the screeching violins, put the cassette in a box, and examined the stack of tapes.
“By the way, letting Leaphorn suffer turned out to be better than killing him. Suitable punishment for what he did to Randall. Thanks for the updates on his condition, Bernie—you were a world of help.” She poked Chee in the side with the toe of her boot. “Thanks to you, too, Handsome. Without our conversation about Cuba, I wouldn’t have thought of this place. I wasted a lot of time looking at lockers in Farmington.”
Davis walked away again, and Bernie heard the Lexus start up and the sound of tires on cement as the car moved out of the garage. When Davis came back, she unzipped the duffel and took out an orange extension cord, a brown electric cord, and a white box. The box was a timer, Bernie realized.
On one end of the box, Davis plugged in an electric cord that looked as if it had once belonged to an old lamp. She had stripped the wire covering off the end and twisted several small strands of copper together. She plugged the long orange cord into the other side.
“I knew someday I’d find Ellie again, and then I’d find her records. When that happened, I knew I’d need a way to destroy all the old paperwork. So I fixed up this little igniter, kept it and the extension cord in my car. You cops aren’t the only smart ones.”
Davis fiddled with the dial. Then she picked up the Taser again and aimed at Bernie.
“Move yourself over, next to Chee.”
Bernie inched along on her back, noticing the way the bungee slipped slightly against her pants with the friction of the floor. She stopped at the edge of the mattress.
“Get up there.” Davis nudged Bernie in the ribs with her boot, finding the spot that hurt the most. “Quickly now. You know I’ll use this.”
Bernie maneuvered to lie next to Chee. Her ribs burned.
“How sweet,” Davis said.
She walked to the back of the garage, returned with the two red gas cans. Put them down.
“I could gag you, but you’ve been such a good girl, I’ll put on this old Janis Joplin cassette in case you get an idea about screaming for help. It was one of Ellie’s favorites from our Chaco days. Good music to die with.”
Davis punched the button. The scratchy sound of Joplin’s voice filled the room. She raised the volume until the music reverberated off the block walls and cement floor. Davis took a gas can to the table where she had piled up the papers, photos, old newspapers, and cardboard boxes. She put the turquoise purse in the middle of the paper pile, opened and poured gasoline inside, saturating the purse and the papers, letting the gasoline pool.
“Purse?” Bernie asked.
“You’re a cop to the end, aren’t you? I had Ellie leave her purse in my car when we got to Chaco. In case I had to kill her, I didn’t want to make things too easy for the cops. Her ID came in handy, and she had the key to the unit’s padlock on her key ring.”
Davis began to pour gasoline from the second gas can onto the mattress, on Chee’s and Bernie’s jeans and shirts. Bernie felt the moisture on her skin. The fumes stung her eyes and expanded her headache.
“Don’t do this,” Bernie said.
“I’ve set the timer to let me get the pots out of here safely and to give you both a moment or two to think about the havoc you’ve wrought. Think about how my Randall must have suffered because of your fine lieutenant. Think of how he forced me to kill Ellie. Not that she didn’t deserve it, too, for the lies she told about Randall hurting her.”
“Wait,” Bernie said. “Stop. Please.”
Davis stretched the extension cord out the garage door as she walked. “All that’s left to do is to plug in the cord and put on the padlock.”
Davis lowered the sliding door. The room grew instantly dark. Against the din of the music, Bernie heard Davis’s voice.
“Guess what, Bernie? Your backpack is out here. I’ll put it in the Lexus for safekeeping. Gives me a place to put your gun.”
Bernie listened to hear the car door slam and the tires rolling against the pavement.
“Use the toe of your boot to help get my legs out of the bungee. Then I can kill the timer.” She yelled over the music as she moved her legs on top of Chee’s, then scooted down. After three tries, she caught a loop of the bungee in the toe of his boot. As Chee pushed down, she felt him shudder with pain. The bungee moved, stopped. The cord tightened at the top, cutting into her calf like a tourniquet.
“Again,” she said. “Again. Again.”
She felt a loop slip off her shoe and the coils loosen. She squirmed her legs free.
Bernie lurched to standing, light-headed and queasy, hands still bound behind her back. She wished that Chee’s mouth wasn’t taped shut so he could speak, help her figure this out.
When the room stopped spinning, she moved through the darkness toward the timer. Something caught her right foot. As she fell, her shoulder hit the table and it crashed down on top of her. She landed sandwiched between it and the concrete, facedown. She tasted hot salty blood and the bitter gasoline, struggled to breathe.
Chee grunted.
“I’m okay.” The hideous Joplin tape blared on. The fall had cost her valuable time. She used core muscles she didn’t know she had to shrug the table off her back, then powered herself to sitting and, with more effort, maneuvered her aching body to standing again.
She remembered where the timer had been, but the fall had changed that. Where was it now? She would find the extension cord, let it lead her to the box, probably buried beneath gas-soaked debris.
Bernie tapped her feet, still numb from the bungee, like a blind person using a cane, feeling for the thick, rounded cord and wishing the soles of her shoes weren’t so firm. She listened for the timer’s ticking. Heard nothing over the whine of electric guitars and the pounding percussion.
She moved into the clutter that had crashed off the table. With her feet as probes, she discovered the box of clay, the bucket filled with potshards. The cloying, pungent smell of gas made her stomach churn. She pushed back against tightening terror.
Through the cacophony of the music, she heard something new, rhythmic bashing against the metal garage door. She couldn’t see him, but she knew Chee had shifted himself to the back of the room, doing what he could to keep them from going up in flames.
Then she felt something roll against the bottom of her right shoe. Lost it, found it again. Pressed against it, felt it move. The extension cord. She slid her foot over it, moving toward the timer quickly. Felt her foot slip off and lost time finding the cord again.
She realized that her eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness. Despite tearing from the fumes, she could see the cord, an orange snake on the floor against the lighter newspapers. She followed it to the white box and found it. Facedown in the gasoline. She used her feet to push the soaked newspapers off the box. They might live! She let the thought hang a split second.
Now, to unplug the power cord. Bernie lowered herself to kneeling and reached for it with the dead fingers behind her back. She couldn’t make them work. A third Joplin song had started. Eight minutes, more or less, since Davis left. Chee’s banging forced her to think.
The old lamp cord at the other end of the timer was smaller, more impossible to disconnect. Could she stomp the timer out of commission? Doubtful, especially with her unsteady balance.
Something tickled the back of her brain. She pictured the timer as Davis had pulled it from the duffel. It had a dial, which she had set to start the fire, and a switch to turn it on or off. Instead of trying to break it, she could turn it off. Or, if she guessed wrong, she could turn it on, creating the spark to incinerate them.
She sat and scooted through the gasoline and rubble. Used her foot to flip the box faceup. She could hear the timer ticking now despite the music and Chee’s racket. She moved her face close to the switch, straining to see if she should push up or down. But the writing was too small, her eyes too irritated by the fumes, the room too dark. The clicking had grown louder, as rapid as her heartbeat. Up or down? On or off?
The Joplin song blared toward its climax. She wrapped her lips over her teeth and grabbed the switch. She pulled down with all her strength.