CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I picked up one of the photos that had been taken of John Doe at the morgue, and added it to the stack I had collected of Carl Spinell and his two colleagues, Ducktail and Bullet Head the ex-con. I slid them into the pocket of my shirt, locked the door behind me, and headed down the sidewalk toward Mother Nature’s Sandwich Shop.

The place was done up in tongue-and-groove paneling from wall to wall, adorned with shelves displaying makeshift artwork made from driftwood, and posters with idealized images of pine forests and mushrooms and sylvan waterfalls that seemed to vibrate inside their black-light display frames. Three teenage local girls sat near the window awaiting their lunch orders, smiling and bobbing their heads along with the rock music that blared out from inexpensive stereo speakers that had been braced between the ceiling and the rafters. The afternoon sunlight reflected off their faces as they laughed together in anticipation of an uncomplicated summer afternoon.

I recognized the girl standing behind the order window as the sylph with the heart-shaped face and gold curls who had first welcomed us to the Rainbow Ranch the day of the field trip. I leaned an elbow on the ledge and searched my memory for her name.

“Late lunch, Sheriff?” she asked, smiling.

“Your name is Dawn, right?”

“You remembered.”

She withdrew a pencil from where she had tucked it behind her ear and tapped absently on a blank order pad. Behind her, one of the other girls I’d seen at the commune, but whose name I didn’t recall, was busy piling tuna salad, sliced cucumbers, and other greenery on top of inch-thick slices of brown bread.

“I have some bad news for you, Dawn,” I said. “You lost a friend today.”

“Excuse me?” she said.

I dragged one of the photos from my pocket and placed it on the counter.

“This young man died early this morning,” I said. “Smoke inhalation and third-degree burns over three-quarters of his body.”

“I don’t want to see that.”

“He needs you to, Dawn. Nobody ever came to visit him. Not a soul the whole time he was in the hospital.”

I studied her expression, watched the flicker in her eyes as she looked at the photograph. An involuntary shiver wracked her body and she pushed the image toward me with her pencil.

“I was a soldier once,” I said. “One thing I learned is that you never let someone you care about wake up alone in a hospital bed. That’s exactly how this young man died. Alone. He deserves a name, at the very least, Dawn. Tell me who this is.”

Dawn threw a glance beyond my shoulder toward the girls who sat waiting beside the window. Then she locked eyes with me and shook her head, no.

“I know that you recognize him,” I said. “I can see it in your face.”

“Please leave me alone,” she repeated.

“Who is this man, Dawn?”

“I told you I don’t know. Take it away.”

A new song burst through the speakers and I felt my pulse pound behind my temples.

“Can you please turn that down?”

Dawn reached into a cabinet beside her and twisted the dial on a stereo receiver. When she looked up again, I saw that all the color had drained from her face. The girl making the sandwiches stopped her work, joined Dawn at the counter, and glared hard at me.

“Are you always this angry, Sheriff?” the girl asked.

“Lately? Every goddamned day.”

The wordless moments stretched between us as we waited one another out.

“How about you?” I asked the sandwich girl. “You want to take a look?”

“Leave us alone,” she said and returned her attention to the cutting board.

I fanned the rest of the photos across the countertop, the ones of Spinell and his two associates. Dawn looked as though she was about to be ill.

“How about these guys?” I asked. “Have you seen them before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No, I don’t think I have seen them.”

Dawn’s workmate came to her rescue again. This time she shouldered Dawn off to one side and leaned across the counter, her face only inches away from mine, her eyes wet and glassy with anger.

“What is the Rainbow Ranch’s relationship with Doc Brawley?” I pressed.

“You need to leave, Sheriff,” the girl said. “You need to leave now.”

In the absence of the music, the teenagers at the table near the window had begun to stare at us. I took a step back from the counter and drew a deep breath.

“I know you don’t believe me,” I said, more quietly now. “But I can help you if you’ll let me.”

“It’s you who needs help, Sheriff.”

She pulled away and dismissed me with a shake of her head, pursed her lips, and studied me with an aspect that had spent all of its rage and now overflowed with something resembling pity.

“Why are the words ‘I’m scared’ so difficult for men to say?” she asked.

I collected the photos from the ledge and slipped them back into my pocket. When I looked up, Dawn had withdrawn completely, leaning silently on the worktable behind her and staring at the floor between her sandals.

“You tell Deva Ravi to come see me at my office tomorrow,” I said to the second girl. “I want him there first thing in the morning.”

She tipped her head and gazed at me with an expression so vacant I could not even guess at its meaning.

“The Deva never leaves the compound.”

“You tell Deva Ravi what I said,” I repeated. “If I have to drive all the way out to your place to drag him back here, I swear to God I will lock him in a cage and toss the key in the river. That is what you kids would call a stone fact.”

When I returned to the substation, Jordan Powell was sitting on the corner of the table in the interview room talking with a barefooted young man wearing dungarees and a long-sleeved cotton shirt over a T-shirt with the words Blue Cheer scrolled in neon lettering across the front. His stringy hair was sopping wet, his clothing spotted with dampness where the moisture had soaked through.

“I found this lovin’ sunshine brother under the trestle bridge,” Jordan Powell said to me when I walked into the room. “He’s been living in a lean-to in the gully.”

“Why’s he all wet?”

“He was nekkid as a newborn, washing his danglies in the river when I found him.”

“Am I under arrest?” the hippie asked me.

He looked as though his head was balanced on a swivel, squinting back and forth between Powell and me while he twisted a loop of braided leather between his fingers. He behaved as if a grounding wire had pulled loose inside his skull.

“Not if you level with me,” I said.

“About what?”

“Everything I’m about to ask you, starting with your name.”

“They call me Corncob.”

Powell laughed aloud and walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him. The kid’s face was long and narrow, almost equine, with wide-set eyes and a sharply pointed nose and the worst case of buck teeth I had ever seen.

“I was referring to your real name,” I said. “The one that your momma gave you.”

“Steve.”

“Is our entire conversation going to be like this?”

“Like what?”

I snapped my fingers about three inches from his nose.

“Focus,” I said. “What’s your last name, Steve?”

“Beck. Steve Beck.”

“How long have you lived at Rainbow Ranch?”

“About a year, maybe a little longer.”

“How many of you live out there?”

He shrugged and bit his bottom lip.

“There were about thirty of us when I first got there. But a bunch of ’em booked it out. There’s probably only fifteen or so of us left. And that was before Deva told all the guys to boogie on down the road.”

“Why’d they leave?”

“What?”

“Goddamn it, Steve. You’ve got to keep up with me, son. Why did everybody leave, where did they go?”

“I don’t know, man,” he said, and combed a hand through his hair. “I mean, I don’t know where they went, but I figure I know why.”

“Tell me.”

He hooked an index finger into the collar of his T-shirt and tugged at the fabric.

“It started getting real uptight, you know? Deva and his two pet freaks were acting totally bizarre. The rest of us were mellow, but those dudes were eating mandrakes and black beauties by the handful and they started copping some very heavy attitudes.”

He looked away from me and began to chew a hangnail on his thumb.

“Did you ever meet Doc Brawley?”

“Who?”

“The man who was murdered here two days ago.”

He shook his head and pushed himself back from the table.

“I don’t know anything about that kind of shit, man.”

I studied his expression for signs of deception and detected none. I switched up on my line of inquiry again to keep him off the beam. It is much more difficult to fabricate a lie when you don’t know where the questions might be headed.

“Why did Deva send the men away from the commune?”

“The sojourn? I don’t know. He says it’s like some kind of ritual, but I think it’s cause he wants all the chicks to himself. Like I said, he and the freaks started to get very weird and paranoid.”

“About what?”

He pinched his lower lip between his fingers and turned his attention to the floor tiles.

“I’m not digging this scene at all, man,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about this shit anymore.”

I leaned back in my chair and slipped a pack of cigarettes from my shirt. I shook one out and offered it to Steve. The expression on his face was wary, but he finally took it and drew deeply when I lit it for him. We sat in silence for several seconds while he watched the silver smoke rise from the tip.

“Tell me about the airplanes, Steve.”

His head whipped around and he locked eyes with me for a moment before he crushed the barely smoked cigarette into the ashtray, and the color drained from his face.

“No, no, no,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about that.”

“I’m guessing you do. You look like somebody just walked across your grave.”

“No, man,” he said. “Nobody out there knows nothing about planes. Nobody’s allowed anywhere near them except for Deva and the freaks. And a couple of the chicks, of course, right?”

“Why not?”

“I told you I don’t know, man. It’s not my bag.”

“Gimme names, Steve.”

“Who? The freaks?”

“Sure,” I said. “And Deva Ravi.”

Steve rocked forward on his chair and began twisting the leather braid again. He looked to me as if he were about to throw up, so I nudged the trashcan closer to him with the toe of my boot.

“We just call ’em Scary Larry and Mac Nasty. I have no idea what their real names are, and I don’t want to know.”

“And Deva? Do you know his real name?”

“I super don’t want to know that.”

“Do you think they’d do harm to you?”

He looked at me from the corner of his eye and squeezed out a laugh.

“I saw what they did to T-wolf, man.”

I was about to ask him what he meant when I heard the phone ring on the other side of the wall. A few seconds later, the door to the interview room flew open.

“We’ve gotta ero, Sheriff,” Jordan Powell said.

“What’s up?”

“Shots fired at the motel.”

“The Cayuse?”

Powell nodded and strapped his gun belt around his waist.

“Guess we’re finished here,” I said to Steve. “For now.”

“Okay,” he answered, but made no effort to leave.

“Can I trust you to come back in here tomorrow morning so we can finish our chat?”

“You want me to leave now?”

“Most people prefer to leave on their own,” I said. “Besides, I can’t let you stay here all by yourself, can I? Come back at noon. Deva Ravi should be gone by then.”

Steve stood and began rocking his head from side to side, his eyes darting in a kind of panic, failing to find purchase as he pressed himself into the corner of the room.

“What did you just say?” Steve asked. “You’re gonna be talking to Deva Ravi?”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Aw, shit, man,” he said. He began chewing at the loose skin on his thumb again. “He’s gonna know I talked to you. He’s gonna think I told you stuff.”

“I won’t mention anything about you,” I said. “You have my word on that. Now you have to get out of here, Steve. My deputy and I have got to go.”

“Deva Ravi’s gonna know, man. You gotta let me stay in here, at least until it’s dark. You can’t let ’em see me.”

The terror in his eyes appeared genuine, at least it appeared extremely real to him. I was no closer to knowing what they were up to at the Rainbow Ranch, but I suspected that something had gone sideways and the utopia these kids thought they’d found had devolved into the forced perspective creation of a narcissist: an image tattooed onto the collective consciousness of the very people who had freely bound over their trust.

“If you can’t leave me here alone, then lock me in a cell ’til you come back,” Steve begged. “It’s okay with me, I swear to God.”

I didn’t have time to argue with him anymore, and in truth, I felt more than a little sorry for him. I grabbed a couple cans of orange soda from the refrigerator, took a bag of jerky from the cabinet, and handed all of it to Steve.

“Jordan!” I hollered through the open doorway. “Run this guy upstairs. He wants to be locked up until we get back.”