Back Track (17 page)

‘Well, you look human again,’ Vallejo said. ‘You want something to drink? I got white wine, Diet Cokes or water in the fridge. Take your pick.’

‘Thanks.’ Bishop got up, opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a half-full bottle of Santa Margherita. He took a tumbler from the top of the TV, poured some of the wine into it and took it back to one of the chairs. He sat down, took a swallow and said, ‘You know, I could throw more questions at you, but I think it would save us both a lot of time and effort if you just told me what you’re doing here.’

Vallejo leaned back until her head touched the wall. ‘I’m here for the same reason as you, Bishop. Searching for a missing woman.’

‘But not the same woman.’

‘No, not the same. But similar.’ She smiled. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Samantha Mathison.’

‘Mathison,’ he said. ‘So she’s not a relative?’

‘No.’

‘And how long has she been gone?’

Vallejo sighed. ‘Almost three months now.’

‘That’s a long time.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ She finished off her wine and made a face. ‘I can count, too. You think I don’t wake up every morning wondering what the hell I’m doing here when Sam could already be . . .?’

Vallejo closed her eyes and banged her head lightly against the wall. Getting control of herself again. She got off the bed, walked over to the fridge and took out the wine bottle.

Bishop watched her, thinking. Quietly, he said, ‘This Samantha sounds like more than just a friend.’

‘That obvious, huh?’ Vallejo took her refilled glass back to the bed. ‘And thanks for using the present tense. Yeah, Sam’s a
lot
more than a friend to me. That surprise you?’

‘Nothing surprises me.’ Bishop shrugged. ‘We are who we are.’

Vallejo raised her glass to him. ‘That’s a great philosophy to have. I just wish more people shared your view.’

‘I thought Corvallis was a college town. Aren’t kids pretty open-minded about that kind of thing these days?’

‘Not if you’re a cop with an image to protect. People expect you to act in a certain way. Anything less is considered a weakness, and you know how kids love to jump on weaknesses. My fellow officers aren’t much different. They all tend to see things in black and white, especially when it comes to women. All of which means I’ve learned it’s safer to be circumspect about my private life. You’d probably be the same in my position.’

Since Bishop had never much cared what people thought of him, he doubted it. But he let it slide and said, ‘So tell me why you’re out here on your own, when you could be running things through official channels with the full weight of the law behind you.’

Vallejo looked at him. ‘Because everyone else believes Samantha died three months ago, in the same fire that killed the rest of her family.’

Bishop sat back in the chair and said, ‘I think you’d better start at the beginning. How long have you known Samantha?’

Vallejo drank some more wine and said, ‘I first met her two years ago. My partner and I were assigned to check out complaints of a suspicious character lurking around one of the wealthier neighbourhoods. My partner checked the area while I went in to get a description from the resident who called it in. That was Samantha.’ She shrugged. ‘What can I say? I liked her and I could tell she liked me, even though she was married with a kid.’

‘And things progressed between you two from that point on.’

‘Right. But on the quiet. She was only twenty-four and wasn’t ready to leave her husband just yet and I loved being a cop. And of course, she absolutely
adored
her boy, Mark. Neither of us wanted to screw things up, so we just enjoyed our time together for what it was. And we always made sure to stay clear of Corvallis for our liaisons.’

‘Okay. So fast forward to three months ago.’

Vallejo gazed at the moving pictures on the TV and rubbed her eyes. ‘It was March 17. About three in the morning. We were on the other side of town when we heard it on the scanner. A 911 call reporting a house fire on Samantha’s street. I remember telling my partner we should get over there to help with crowd control, but by the time we arrived it was all over. There was almost nothing left. Just a black, smoking husk of a building where Sam’s house used to be. Tell the truth, I can’t remember much else of that night. I must have been on autopilot or something.’ She closed her eyes. ‘God.’

Bishop gave her a few seconds, then said, ‘How many died in the fire?’

‘Three. They found the burnt remains of a man, woman and child upstairs, all in the same room. And before you ask, the medical examiner identified all three as the Mathisons.’

‘But you don’t believe that.’

‘Well, I can’t comment on the husband as I never met him, and little Mark was usually out at kindergarten. But I know for a fact the third victim wasn’t Samantha.’

‘Tell me how,’ he said.

‘Well, you know how we usually identify fire victims when they’re too badly burnt for normal identification.’

‘Usually from dental records.’

‘Right. So I saw the photos the medical examiner made of her teeth, okay? And they weren’t Sam’s. I knew them like my own, believe me, and if she had a gap between her front upper incisors before that night I would have noticed. Yet there it was, in black and white. A little gap about a millimetre wide. Not only that, but it seemed she’d grown three new wisdom teeth overnight.’

‘You’re saying Samantha had three of her wisdom teeth extracted?’

‘Either that or they never erupted. The two upper ones were missing and so was the lower one on the left side. Yet the female corpse had all four of hers still in place.’

Bishop rubbed a palm over his scalp. ‘And you’re absolutely sure Sam was missing those three?’

‘Well, we both enjoyed kissing, you know what I mean?’

‘Fair enough. So I take it they checked against the family’s dental records and found a perfect match against all three?’

‘Yeah.’ Vallejo brought her eyebrows together. ‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘Let’s just say I’ve had some first-hand experience at this kind of thing. So did you tell your captain about it?’

‘How could I? Nobody even knew Samantha and I were friends, let alone lovers. I brought up that gap in the front teeth, saying it wasn’t there when I went to her house two years before, but he just said she must have been wearing caps that melted in the fire.’

‘What about the fire? Did the investigators determine the cause?’

‘Accidental, if you can believe that. They traced it all back to some faulty wiring on the refrigerator. Said it could easily have sparked off late at night and just spread through the house in no time. Apparently it’s one of the most common causes for house fires every year.’

‘So at that point you decided to follow things up on your own.’

‘Well, I had to. Nobody else was gonna do anything about it. Besides, I knew how weird it sounded. Once you accepted the basic premise that it wasn’t Sam, you had to accept the fact that somebody had gone into her bedroom in the middle of the night, killed the husband and son, replaced Sam with a freshly prepared corpse and then set the place alight before taking off. And it had to be more than one person. Maybe two or three. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in places like Corvallis. Or most other places, to be honest.’

Bishop looked down at his glass, rotating it slowly between finger and thumb. He was thinking of the similarities between his missing person and Vallejo’s. Especially the time of the disappearance. 03.00 or thereabouts. Similar MO, except in this case the kidnappers were willing to sacrifice a father and his son to get what they wanted. Either chloroformed or smothered them while they were asleep. And both women were about the same age, early to mid-twenties. Both beautiful, too. Some coincidence. If you believed in that kind of thing.

He said, ‘Somebody saw an ambulance outside the house that night, didn’t they?’

Vallejo stared at him, a small upturn at the corner of her mouth. ‘How’d you guess?’

‘You’re here, aren’t you? And I imagine the witness was somebody not too reliable, or your fellow officers would have followed up on it. Probably a homeless guy or a neighbour coming back from a late night poker game, smashed out his skull.’

‘You’d have made a pretty good detective, Bishop. It was option one: the homeless guy. I was becoming a real pain in the ass around that neighbourhood, let me tell you. I was convinced somebody saw something, but nobody did. Got to a point my captain was getting so many complaints about me, he threatened me with suspension if I didn’t lay off. Like
that
was gonna stop me. So I started hanging around the area in the early hours of the morning to see what turned up, and one time I saw this homeless man going through the trashcans.

‘He wasn’t too friendly at first, but once I bought him a bottle of Mad Dog, I couldn’t shut him up. He finally admitted he’d been in the neighbourhood that night when he saw this ambulance pull up outside Sam’s house. This was about an hour before the fire, he said. He didn’t think anything of it and moved along. But when he passed by about half an hour later the ambulance was still there, backed up against the garage with the rear doors open.’

‘He notice any details?’ Bishop asked.

‘Well, he said the licence plate had a cactus on it. Which narrowed it down to a single state, at least. Couldn’t make out the registration, but he said it was one of those boxy ambulances with an electronic heartbeat on the side.’

‘Sounds familiar.’

She smiled. ‘Doesn’t it. And that was all I could get out of him. But I thought I had enough to take back to my captain and get the case reopened. Which was probably a mistake, in hindsight.’

‘He didn’t take it too well, huh?’

Vallejo sighed. ‘Accused me of wasting everybody’s time and obsessing over something that was dead and buried. We had a heated argument about it and I ended up slugging him.’

Bishop raised an eyebrow. ‘You punched out your
captain
?’

‘Right on the jaw. He got a beautiful purple bruise out of it. I got a one-hundred-and-twenty-day suspension, effective immediately.’ She shrugged. ‘What can I say? Sometimes, my impulses get the better of me. But the upside was that I had time to do some travelling. I drove out to Arizona the next day and started checking out the hospitals for similar ambulances.’

‘Arizona’s a pretty big state.’

‘Don’t I know it. I started at the north-east corner and kind of worked my way across, then down. After three weeks without any luck I ended up here in Saracen. I’d just crossed the town’s medical centre off my list when I decided to stop for lunch at Tod’s Café. So I sit in a booth and this waitress with
Selina
on her nameplate walks up and hands me a menu. And right then, it was like all the air in my lungs had just
gone
.’

‘Yeah, you mentioned there were similarities between the two women.’

Vallejo shook her head. ‘You don’t get it, Bishop. I swear to God, I thought I was actually looking at
Sam
.’

Bishop stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m telling you, Bishop, I thought I’d found Samantha Mathison in this little diner in the middle of nowhere. It was like a scene out of
The Twilight Zone
.’

‘But it wasn’t her,’ he said. ‘It couldn’t have been.’

‘Of course it wasn’t. But the eyes and some of her facial characteristics threw me for a moment there. It was only when she asked if I was all right that it kind of broke the spell. Selina’s voice was much softer than Sam’s. And then I started noticing all the other differences between them. For a start, Selina’s nose was much shorter and she had a wider forehead, plus her shoulders were smaller than Sam’s. Also, Sam wasn’t as fair-haired as Selina. I could go on, but still . . .’

‘You mention any of this to Selina?’

Vallejo ran her fingers through her hair. ‘Well, I told her I knew somebody who looked a lot like her and she just smiled. That was another thing that was different. Selina’s smile didn’t feel natural. Almost like she’d forgotten how to do it, you know what I mean?’

‘Yes. So what happened then?’

‘Well, she was pretty busy so I just ordered something and let her go. I gave her a good tip when I left and then drove off. But when I got back on route 60, I spotted this motel and took a room for the night. Seeing Selina there gave me a faint connection to Samantha and I wanted to prolong it for a little while longer. It felt like an omen or something.’

‘That’s understandable.’

Vallejo smiled. ‘I guess I just wanted to speak to her again, even if it was just to hear her voice. So I napped for a few hours, watched some TV, then went back in the evening. But her shift had ended so I knew I wouldn’t see her until the next morning.’

‘You remember what day this was?’

‘Sure. May 15.’

Bishop nodded. ‘Selina was snatched that night.’

‘Yeah, I guess she must have been. She wasn’t there the next day. I just figured she was off sick, and that it was another sign that I should move on, so that’s what I did.’

‘But Garrick’s less than fifty miles away. You telling me it took you four weeks to get from here to there?’

‘Hey, give me a break, huh?’ Vallejo got up off the bed, stretched, then came over and sat in the chair opposite. ‘Life doesn’t always go the way you planned, okay? One reason I remember the date so well is because on the 17th I was called back to Corvallis. The department’s public affairs division decided my case was to be reviewed. They actually wanted to extend my suspension to six months, which meant I had to go and fight my corner and be on call any time the bastards wanted to interview me. That was a whole three weeks before I could get back on Sam’s trail.’

‘Okay. So when did you make the discovery at Garrick Medical Center?’

‘Two days ago. After I spotted one of their ambulances, I came back here, got a room and tried to think about what to do next. It’s not as easy for me as it is for you, Bishop. I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place. I’m still a cop, so I can’t just do what I please. But I’m also suspended, which means I only have limited resources available to me.’