We sat on the off ramp as cars zipped by. The file on my lap resembled a murder book in a homicide investigation, but this one was for the kidnappings. All the supplemental reports to the investigation had been added, updated, and, within the last twelve hours, collated and indexed. I flipped to the tab marked “Jonas Mabry.”
I read while Mack talked. “Mark Wayne, a box boy at the Mayfair Market, discovered Micah Mabry dead behind the wheel in the grocery store’s parking lot in Montclair.
“Micah had dropped out of society and had been invisible for years. We couldn’t find any property in his name, he didn’t have a driver’s license, no history in Social Security, which means he did not have a legal job. Nothing. A ghost.”
It happened that way with folks who witnessed something so heinous that their minds can’t comprehend life’s complex and sometimes violent ways. He’d merely retracted from life, pulled away, and lived on the fringe of society.
“What now, oh great Carnac?” asked Mack.
“Keep going. Head out to Yucca Valley.”
He jerked his head to the left to check for an opening in traffic. “Bruno, that’s a long damn way to go for nothing. What’s out there in that pisshole of a desert?”
“Maybe nothing, but we got nothing.”
From the beginning, I had tried to forget about Micah, his family, and their house. All those years ago. Now, when his name had come up again, the time frame wasn’t clear in my head. I’d gotten a postcard in the mail maybe two years after the event. The standard plain white card came to the Sheriff’s main headquarters, and interoffice forwarded it onto Violent Crimes Division. In crooked little letters from a shaky hand, the card read:
I never had a chance to properly thank you. Please come and see me. Soon. It’s real important.
Micah Mabry
The return address: 12635 Old Woman Springs Road, Landers, California.
All those years ago, I fought for weeks whether to go or not to go. The card remained on my clipboard in plain view, where I couldn’t help but see it all day at work. At night, the card brought back nightmares of dead children in an ugly house that bled.
Without trying, I became obsessed. I didn’t want to go. I wouldn’t go under any circumstance. One night after the Violent Crimes Team took down a bank robbery in progress, we conducted our usual victory dance with lots of beer in the closest store parking lot. I drank more than normal and shouldn’t have been driving. I drove in a trance, but snapped out of it as I transitioned from the 10 Freeway onto Highway 62, subconsciously making the drive to the desert. I checked the map book and found Landers, a little no-account town outside a larger one called Yucca Valley. I drove out Old Woman Springs Road as the sun peeked over the horizon to paint the desert hot in yellows and oranges. For as far as the eye could see, Landers and Johnson Valley rolled in empty desert, spotted with sage and Joshua trees and salt cedar and small, one-room shacks. I stopped a quarter mile down the dirt road and watched with binoculars.
Parked out in front of Micah Mabry’s shack was a broken-down GMC pickup, the black and gray paint splotched and ruined from the unrelenting desert sun. I didn’t put my Toyota Camry in park and kept my foot on the brake, ready to flee at any moment. I watched a long time until the muscles in my foot cramped, the car interior turned claustrophobic, and the sides and roof closed in. Still, I waited. Off in the corner of my mind, I realized I had a subpoena for court and was already late. Robby would be looking for me, calling, sending a cop car by my house to wake me up. When that didn’t work, Robby would check the jails for a drunk driver. Then the hospitals.
And, still, I waited.
Sweat rolled down into my eyes, burning. I changed feet on the brake over and over. I tried to analyze why I didn’t want to see him and came up with the only logical reason: I didn’t want a reminder of what he and I had gone through. I didn’t want images so difficult to suppress, again laid bare to raw, emotional wounds.
Three hours into my vigil, a decrepit old man, slump-shouldered, gray hair, eased out the door of the shack. A man without motivation, without spirit, nothing more than an empty husk. I recognized him and received a jolt of an image: this same man on his knees in bloody water holding a dead child as he keened in grief. He’d aged so much in such a short period of time. He’d given up on life and life had not hesitated to run him over.
My breath came quick. My stomach heaved. I let my foot off the brake and drove away.
My mind kicked back into reality and my attention returned to the car with Mack. Mack kept his foot on the accelerator, passing all the other cars. They’d found Micah dead in a car about eighteen years after I’d seen him out in front of that shack in the desert. Eighteen years without a spirit was a long time to spend in hell.
“You read this entire file? The car they found Micah in two years ago, was it a black and gray GMC?” My voice came out in a croak.
“Don’t remember.”
I went back into the file and found it. A rental. A cherry-red Rent-a-Wreck Toyota Corolla.
“He died two years ago of natural causes,” Mack said, “cardiac infarction according to the medical examiner. Positive ID with fingerprints.”
The man died of a broken heart.
“Don’t you find it odd that the car was found in a grocery store parking lot in Montclair? The same city Sandy Williams was taken from?”
Mack took his eyes from the freeway and glanced at me. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Nobody thought to look into that. It was a natural death, for crying out loud.” He took his foot off the accelerator, looking to change lanes, get off, and turn around to go back to Montclair.
“No,” I said, “Keep going. We’ve come this far, let’s check it out.” He looked at me again, this time not questioning my judgment, and put his foot back on the gas pedal.