Ahua watched the door close behind Cully. He believed the man had just told the truth. He just didn’t believe that he had told all of it.
Cully was holding something back. Maybe it was something that he thought would incriminate him or somebody he cared about. Or maybe he thought it wasn’t pertinent to the case and therefore it was none of the FBI’s business. But there were times when the things he wasn’t saying were louder than the things he was.
This was the art of Ahua’s work that someone like Faye would never understand. She was a scientist, always looking for inarguable evidence. This was what made her such a useful consultant and it was the reason that Bigbee had urged him to hire her, which was not an obvious thing to do when he had a small army of trained FBI agents at his disposal. As it turned out, Bigbee was right. Faye would have made an excellent agent.
Ahua doubted that she’d consider dropping the archaeology and the business she’d spent years building to join the agency. Still, he doubted she would balk at the chance to do more work along the lines of what she was doing now. Maybe he would recommend that the bureau train her for that. Ahua would dearly love to be a fly on the wall, watching the people at Quantico put Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth through her paces.
And now here she was, bringing her own special energy into the command center and well-nigh burbling with excitement over what she had to share.
“Alba Callahan knew Alonso Smith. You need to get a trained interviewer over there to talk to her, but here’s what we have now. The man was married to a woman named Janet. Alba heard about a later wife named Sandra, which tracks with the newspaper article from Kingfisher County, but she doesn’t know whether there was a divorce or whether Janet died. Janet and a baby—Alba says she was a girl—are in the picture from 1986 and Alba knew of one more child who died at birth before that time, also a girl. She says that Alonso and Janet Smith and their baby girl dropped out of sight in the late 1980s, and she hasn’t heard anything about them since.”
“Good to know,” Ahua said, neglecting to mention that he had successfully hustled Cully in and out while she was gone. “Progress on finding out about Alonso Smith is progress on finding his accomplice in the bombing. I wish I could say that we knew anything at all about why Stacy Wong is still missing, but I’ve got nothing. I’m sure you can imagine how many agents we have at our disposal, and a lot of them are looking for Stacy Wong. She’s disappeared without a trace.”
“Do you think that Liu is right that Stacy left the hotel because she wanted to get a look at the underground rooms by way of the storm sewer?”
“It’s conjecture, but yes. I do think that Liu may be right. She’s the one who gave Stacy the information to find that back door in the storm sewer, and she knows her pretty well.”
* * *
Faye agreed with Ahua, but there was another option and she felt compelled to put it on the table. “It’s always possible that she got sick of her life and walked away. It happens.”
“Yes, it does.”
Faye was a scientist, so she was uncomfortable with squishy data and conjecture. Faye liked to prove things with numbers and photographs and, when absolutely necessary, with eyewitness reports that were confirmed by multiple people. Preferably crowds. She steered the conversation to data that was incontrovertible because it came with the blessing of a laboratory scientist.
“What about the bombing? You’ve got lab data there, and your evidence people are still working.”
“Yes. They could crack it open tomorrow. But now? Objective evidence? We haven’t got much. We have DNA results that tell us that the children left in the painted room are the bomber’s sons. They also tell us that the boys had hemophilia, which the bomber did not have, meaning that their mother was a carrier.”
“That’s almost always the way it works.”
“True. Footprints found in that room match the boots on bomber’s body. A gasket for a pressure cooker like the one used for the bomb was shipped to an address where Alonso Smith was known to work and to receive mail. The signature on the walls reads ‘Lonnie,’ which is often a nickname for Alonso, so we believe the bomber and the painter are the same person, but this takes us out of the land of hard evidence and into a soft circumstantial place.”
“And there’s no evidence to tell us who defaced the paintings? No footprints, no fingerprints, no anything?”
“None. The room was accessed from the storm sewer and the vandal splashed paint on the floor on the way out to cover any footprints.”
Faye’s head was full of images—the painted psychedelia of the room that connected to the storm sewer, the memory of a tremendous blast that turned her world inside-out, and the heartbreaking sight of three blanket-wrapped bodies.
“We’re getting nowhere,” she said, “and I can think of no reason for you to be paying me to sit here while we chase our tails.”
“I can.”
Puzzled, she said, “What do you need me to do?”
“I want you to look at the photos of the paintings again, now that we have a photo of Alonso Smith and his first wife, Janet.”
Ahua pulled up the photos on the workstation in front of him, rose, and gave Faye his chair. “Now I need to go light a fire under some forensics people. They just might be able to get me some evidence that’s not based on conjecture.”
“Even better—maybe they can get you some evidence that isn’t squishy.”
* * *
Faye was beginning to appreciate the artistry of “Lonnie,” and she was now pretty sure that he also went by “Alonso.” The portraits that he had painted appeared to be hardly more than cartoons until she looked closer. Now that she’d seen a photo of Alonso and Janet Smith, she saw that Alonso Smith had painted the people in his murals as individuals.
In just a few brushstrokes, he had captured his own image, time and again. Every man’s painted face was framed by a distinctive receding hairline. Beneath each wispy brown beard was a similarly receding jawline. The gray eyes of every male face were set deeply into their sockets. All of those faces looked like the newspaper photograph of Alonso Smith.
Faye could see now that he had painted the women as two distinct individuals, and only two. Janet and Sandra resembled each other, to be sure, but only superficially. Lonnie/Alonso had a type, and that type was women with long, dark hair and swelling hips. When magnified as far as possible, Faye could distinguish the individual brushstrokes that made up their faces and bodies. It was almost like reading the artist’s intent.
A straight line along one woman’s jawline made her look younger and thinner than the soft curve of the other’s jaw. The younger woman’s breasts sat higher on her chest and her waist was narrower. After all, a man knew the shape of his wife’s body. No, make that his wives’ bodies.
The older woman’s eyes were a lighter shade of brown and her lips were thinner. Stippled shading over her cheekbones suggested the freckles that she’d seen in Janet’s photograph. Her skin was more pale than Sandra’s, paler even than Lonnie’s. It was possible that Sandra was Asian or Latina or Native American, but not Janet.
Now that she could distinguish the adults, she understood the groupings of the family scenes better. In two of the scenes, she counted five children. Lonnie held a baby and a young child leaned against his leg. Another child sat on Sandra’s lap. Janet held a second baby, and an older child stood to the side, leaning against a tree.
But these couldn’t be all of Lonnie’s children, because three swaddled bodies had been left in the painted room and the three older children were bigger than those little boys ever got. The list of Lonnie’s children included these five, plus at least one more baby boy and the baby girl who had died at birth. This scene must have been painted before the boy was born or after the missing boy died.
That made seven children total. There could have been more, but not fewer. Faye wanted to believe that some of them had survived to adulthood. If any of them were girls, they had a reasonable shot at survival. Any boys would have had a fifty-fifty shot at avoiding hemophilia, which would make them far more likely to survive. Their mothers, too, could still be alive.
It seemed critical to Faye that at least one of the people in the paintings be found. All of the women and children had dark hair, but how many brunette men and women between the ages of about twenty-five and seventy could there be in Oklahoma? And who was to say that they were still in the state?
In just a few days, Faye had met so many people who fit that description. Ben McGilveray and his wife, Gloria, were brunettes. So was Cully. Stacy. Kaayla. Sadie. Dr. Dell. Dr. Althorp. Grace. Lucia. Agent Goldsby. Even Agent Liu. There was no reason to expect that she was looking at painted images of any of these people, but Faye’s intuition—which she would never admit that she trusted—was telling her that the answer she sought was nearby.
A quarter-century or more had passed since the artist named Lonnie captured two dark-haired women and their dark-haired children on four blank walls. He had walked away from those paintings so long ago that a mat of dust had collected on the floor beneath them. During that time, he had gone underground.
While she stared at the photos, Ahua called to say that Alonso Smith had never been legally married, despite telling people that Janet and Sandra were his wives. Only one of the children existed on paper, a little girl born in 1985 and named Lonna, because of course Alonso Smith would name his daughter after himself.
Other than the lucky strike of finding the man who had sold him a pressure cooker gasket and the woman whose lawn he had cut, they’d found no trace of Lonnie/Alonso Smith since the 1990s. He had filed no tax returns since then and he’d held no job traceable by the IRS. He had no credit history at all. They knew that he had let his driver’s license lapse in 1996 and had owned no registered car since then. He’d never been arrested. And that is all that they knew.
The answer to the mystery of Alonso Smith would not be found by computers. It lay in long-held human memory.
Her hand went to her phone and pressed speed dial.
“You want me to do what?” Carson asked.
“Get your mother to look at the pictures on your conference website. Ask her if she recognizes any of the faculty. Then take her walking through the hotel but don’t act like you’re looking for anything special. Just walk around and let her look at the employees and guests. Heck, tell her to look at all of the FBI agents running around. Bonus points if you can find Agent Goldsby and Agent Liu.” She almost said, “Try to find Cully, Ben, and Gloria,” but that would have been silly. Alba knew Ben and Gloria, and everybody knew what Cully Mantooth looked like.
“And if we find them, then what?”
“Ask her if she recognizes any of them from a long time ago. That’s all. If she recognizes them well enough to know their names, even better. But don’t tell her why.”
Carson laughed for a long time. “You want me to tell my mother I won’t answer her questions? That’s funny.”
“Tell her you’re doing a favor for me and I didn’t tell you why I needed it done. Because I’m not going to tell you, so don’t ask me.”
* * *
Faye’s second attempt at tapping long-held cultural memory came up dry. A phone call to her father-in-law Sly was as entertaining as usual, full of snide political commentary and sparked with filthy jokes, but Sly knew nothing about Alonso Smith and his family or separatist cult or commune or whatever it was.
It made sense that Alba Callahan had been more tapped into Smith’s world in her younger days than Sly. She, like Alonso Smith, had been a fervid political activist. Even opponents know each other. Sometimes they understand each other better than their friends do.
Sly, like Alba, had been born in Sylacauga but he had never lived anywhere else. He had married young and started driving trucks right afterward. Joe had been born right after that. Sly had no reason to know Alonso Smith. From what Faye knew of Smith, not knowing him was a very good thing.
As she said goodbye to Sly, she cast about for other people with long histories in Oklahoma who might be able to help. It hurt her heart to think that the next person she would have called was Stacy, whose life work was Oklahoma history.
Joe had been a kid when Alonso Smith and Alba Callahan had been raising hell, and so had Carson. The only other people she knew in Oklahoma City were associated with the conference and, among them, only Cully was a native Oklahoman. But how could he be any help when he left the state while Alonso Smith was just a child?
But maybe Angela Bond didn’t. She, too, fit the too-broad-to-be-useful profile of an adult between twenty-five and seventy-five with dark hair.
If her stepfather was telling the truth when he said that the body found in the Oklahoma River in 1962 wasn’t hers, she would have been about the right age to be Alonso Smith’s older wife, the one whom Alba knew as Janet.
Faye’s loaner phone wasn’t capable of downloading the photos of Alonso Smith’s paintings, so she went old-school and printed some of them on the command center’s printer. She put the one that gave the best view of the older woman right on top and folded the printouts before putting them in her back pocket. She placed a call to Cully and, when it went unanswered, she decided to corner him in his palatial suite. It was time to go to Cully and get some answers.