Forty-One

“How am I supposed to drive all the way to the Johns’ ranch?” Danny asked. He’d located all four tires from Floyd’s truck and caught a cab home. The manager had assured him that Adam would verify the tires were the ones he was looking for as soon as he returned from a doctor’s appointment.

“Excuse me,” Arn said to Chief Oblanski as he stepped into the hallway to continue his conversation. “I’m at the station, Danny. I can’t go back out to the ranch right now—I’m downloading a picture of Eddie and the rest I took since going to Wooly Hank’s that morning. Oblanski’s sending photos to Sacramento. Maybe someone from the serial killer task force they formed some years ago will recognize him.”

“Nice try,” Danny said. “You calling me tells me you got your phone.”

“I’m using the chief’s phone while his tech guy has mine downloading the images. You have to go. To the Johns’ ranch.”

“Hello!” Danny said. “I don’t even have a driver’s license—”

“I know you can drive.”

“Of course I can,” Danny said. “I just chose to have you cart me around. It wouldn’t be legal for me to drive.”

“Like you’ve never done anything illegal before.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the phone. “So maybe I have. I still don’t have anything to drive.”

“DeAngelo’s beater truck is parked on the front lawn. Ana Maria finished the head job, and it runs just fine. Drive that out there.”

“You owe me for this,” Danny said and disconnected.

Arn walked back into Oblanski’s office as the police IT man returned and handed Arn his phone. “All the pics are downloaded. Even those ones with you parading around the house in just your underwear.”

“What?” Arn couldn’t recall a photo like that. But Danny wasn’t above pulling some prank like snapping a photo in him in his Fruit of the Looms.

“Just kidding,” the man said. Then, “I’ll send them off to Sacramento right away.” He shut the door after him.

“Still nothing on Ana Maria?” Arn asked. Since putting a BOLO out on her, he’d thought of every place she might be, but come up blank at those he’d checked. He hoped Beverly or Bonnie would have news for Danny, or at least a lead by now on where Ana Maria might be.

“Nothing on Ana Maria,” Oblanski said, “or on Eddie Glass, either. Sounds like the sheriff’s deputies stopped by their place and Karen wasn’t there either.”

Arn grabbed his briefcase and headed out the door. “Let me know if you locate her.”

“I will,” Oblanski said. “And I’ll let you know if someone can put Eddie’s face with Steve Campbell from when he was a patient at Napa Hospital. Where you headed?”

“Floyd’s father’s train is going to roll into the depot soon. He wants to give me some paperwork he found when he cleaned out the truck after Floyd bought it. Bunch of old maintenance receipts and crap to give back to Scott.”

“You work for UPS now?” Oblanski asked.

“At this point,” Arn answered, feeling wearier than he had for years, “I’d gladly take that job.’

He left the building and checked his watch: he had another forty-five minutes until Fred Pompolopolis was due at the depot.

By the time he’d fired up his Olds, all sorts of scenarios of what had happened to Ana Maria had run through his head. And the only one that stood out was that she’d gotten too close—like she often got too close to bad people—and Eddie had killed her. Or worse, he took her somewhere to draw out her misery. Arn found himself driving by the church his mother had attended. She hadn’t been Greek Orthodox, nor had she gone there all her life; she’d been about as conscious of her mortality as Arn’s drunken father hadn’t been while Arn was growing up. But one day she’d stopped in as she was walking by. The chanting, the songs—as she later told Arn—had beckoned her inside somehow. She walked in that Sunday and she never left.

Just like Arn found himself doing now. He’d parked and started up the long flight of steps leading to the front door before he realized it. He’d only been inside the church once before: at his mother’s funeral. An arthritically stooped old priest had performed the services, some in English, some in Greek; nothing that Arn could decipher.

The heavy front door opened, heavy like his heart since realizing he might never see Ana Maria again. He blamed himself for letting her get in over her head, like he blamed himself for not visiting his mother often enough when he’d lived in Denver. After all, it had only been an hour and a half drive, yet he came home to see her only two or three times a year. He hadn’t told her enough times how he loved her. And neither had he told Ana Maria.

He let go of the door handle and turned back to the steps, but something tugged at him and he went in. He recalled that icons of the saints lined the front of the church, and they still hung there. Now, perhaps, there were more, as if Arn needed the help of every saint that ever existed. Candles flickered, jammed in a bed of sand off to one side of the entrance, while an icon of the Virgin Mary occupied the space at the opposite side of the entryway.

He cautiously peeked in to where pews eight deep waited for parishioners, as if he were fearful someone might see him. But he was alone in the church. Again, he turned toward the door. He had Ana Maria to worry about, to find before something happened to her. But he had another half hour before Fred’s Union Pacific train arrived at the depot. Arn berated himself for wasting time here in church when—

The thought left his mind as quickly as it had entered, and somehow his guilt was taken from him. He had no other place to be right now, no place that was more important, nowhere to be looking for Ana Maria other than right here.

Among the saints.

He walked to the front of the church and sat in a pew directly under an enormous concave dome twenty feet overhead. Icons and images were painted within the dome, and Arn looked away as a man emerged from a swinging door to one side of the pulpit. He was tall and fit, sporting a well-trimmed beard and piercing eyes that belonged to a warrior. And he was, Arn concluded as the man adjusted his clerical collar and approached him. A warrior for God.

He introduced himself as Father Jason, and, without another word, sat next to Arn and quietly waited for him to begin speaking. Much like how Arn had often waited for criminals to begin spilling their guts. So Arn mentioned he was looking for Ana Maria; mentioned the intense danger she might be in. After he’d said these things, he suddenly thought it only natural to burden this man with his fears. “Will I find her in time?” he asked.

Father Jason shrugged. “I’m not a soothsayer. I cannot tell you if you’ll be successful. I cannot tell you if your friend is even alive as we speak.”

“Then what—” Arn broke it off.

“You were going to ask, ‘What good am I then?’” Father Jason smiled. “I can guide you if you wish to know your heart, and if you give your heart to God. Have you heard the parable of the mustard seed?”

“More times than I like to remember,” Arn said. “Whenever I doubted myself, my mother would bring that up. She’d say if I had enough faith, I could move mountains.”

“As did Jesus,” Father Jason said. “And the wisdom of that parable will always be with us.” He stood and smoothed his black shirt. “Feel free to remain however long you wish. And Mr. Anderson, remember that what happens is God’s will.” He made the sign of the cross to bless Arn and left through the door he’d come out of.

Arn sat alone, then, praying … to whom? He’d never been religious in the slightest, even with his mother’s prodding. But like the old saying that “there are no atheists in a foxhole,” there were no atheists when your friend’s life hung in the balance. Did the tears he shed sitting on that pew count as a contract between him and God?

Arn parked his car in the lot to one side of the Union Pacific building. He walked past the ten-foot painted cowboy boot and stood in awe—as he often did—looking at the red and tan sandstone structure. The stone blocks had been quarried in Colorado and laid by craftsmen so that the whole building had been proclaimed a palace when it was completed in 1887. The railroad had commissioned additions a couple times, all of which balanced out the magnificent edifice. Arn looked up at the clock tower three stories above him and wished he could turn the huge dial back. He would have shackled Ana Maria rather than let her go to meet Eddie Glass.

He walked into the bistro inside the depot, which also housed a craft brewery, and ordered coffee. He was sipping it slowly when he spotted a small, wiry man walking toward him in engineer bibs. The man—an older version of Floyd—shook his hand. “Damn, that Edgemont is a ways off,” he said, pulling a manila envelope from his lunch box. He handed it to Arn.

“I’ll see that Scott gets this,” Arn said. He stuffed the envelope inside his coat pocket just as his cell phone rang.

“Adam from Fat Boy’s,” the runny-eyed boy said. “I looked at those tires Danny left for me. I remember them like it was yesterday. They belonged to a rancher that needed new skins.”

“They weren’t from the truck Floyd bought?”

“No,” Adam said, and papers rustled on the other end of the line. “It was some real a-hole, pushy bastard. A guy named Glass.”