Desert Cut (11 page)
As soon as we finished our lunch, I paid the tab over Martha’s and Peggy’s protests and drove to Mendoza’s Mexican Pottery.
The store, only a few minute’s drive from the Nile Restaurant, was a large one, stocking not only pots of all shapes, sizes, and colors, but also Navajo rugs and groupings of hand-carved Mexican furniture. Among them I recognized the night stands in the Lazy M’s guest cottage and the large coffee table in Selma’s living room.
As I approached the counter, where several smartly-dressed customers stood filling out forms, I saw a sign announcing “SÍ! WE SHIP!” Another sign said that they were delighted to accept American Express, Visa, MasterCard, and out-of-state checks. Situated as it was on the tourist trail to Tombstone, Mendoza’s was doing a brisk business.
I waited until the customers were taken care of, then asked the middle-aged Hispanic woman running the register where I might find Raymundo. In unaccented English, she told me he was in the storage area out back, and how about a nice Navajo rug today? They’d just received a special shipment from their supplier in Window Rock. “We have a wonderful selection, including Teec Nos Pos, Two Gray Hills, and Raised Edge. And, of course, the usual Yeibichai. Commercial but lovely, and priced just right.”
Shopping sometimes lifted my spirits and I’d seen a beautiful red-and-black Klagetoh that would partner nicely with the Two Gray Hills rug I already owned, so after hauling it from the large pile it crowned, I handed over my Visa.
As she rang me up, I filled out a shipping label. Shipping arrangements completed, I stepped out to the storage yard, where a handsome young man who strongly resembled the woman at the counter was rolling a large terra cotta pot across the cement floor. He was Nicole’s age, sixteen, but his height and muscular physique made him appear much older.
“Raymundo?”
He turned around and threw me a dazzling smile that didn’t quite overcome the worried expression in his eyes. “How may I help you, ma’am? Are you looking for natural terra cotta like this or something more colorful?”
“Neither. I want to talk to you about Nicole Hall.”
The smile disappeared. “Don’t know where she’s at.”
“But you know she’s run away.”
He glanced around to make certain no customers were near by. “You a social worker or something?”
I showed him my I.D. card.
Disbelief showed on his face. “Oh, c’mon. I can’t believe that toxic father of hers went and hired a private detective! Don’t take this wrong, but even if he did, he’d hire a guy. Reverend Hall doesn’t believe girls have enough brains to come in out of the rain. Sorry. I mean
women
.” Someone in his family, probably his sales-conscious mother, had tutored him on political correctness.
“I don’t work for Nicole’s father, Raymundo. I don’t even like him.”
After giving me a piercing look, he nodded. “Okay. I believe you. But if you’re not working for Hall, why’re you here? Somebody else hire you? The sheriff, maybe?” He vented a snort of laughter.
“I’m the person who found Precious Doe.”
“Oh. The dead girl.” He swallowed hard. “That must have been rough.”
“It was. And now two more girls have disappeared. Aziza Wahab and Nicole.”
His eyes shifted. “I don’t know anything about that other kid, but you don’t have to worry about Nicole.”
Teenagers can be so transparent. “And I don’t have to worry about her because…?”
“Because she’s all right. I’ve just got a feeling.”
Like hell he had a feeling; he
knew
. I pulled the cell phone out of my carry-all, flipped it open, and pretended to punch in a number.
“Who are you calling?” Raymundo cried.
“The sheriff, of course. Since you won’t tell me, you can tell him.”
He reached out his hand and grabbed my wrist. A lot of strength there. “Nicole’s safe. She called right after she took off, but wouldn’t tell me where she was. All I know is that she said she’d contact me later. She had to do something first.”
I closed the cell but didn’t put it away. “When was this?”
“Yesterday, some time after eight. We’d just closed.”
Reverend Hall had told me his wife didn’t discover the girl was missing until this morning. Upon reflection, I remembered how much noise the gravel parking lot outside the parsonage made when cars crunched along it, so Nicole’s departure hadn’t been silent. Why had her parents waited until the morning to call the sheriff? Under ordinary conditions, I would have questioned Hall about this discrepancy, and at the same time, tell him his daughter had contacted a friend and was safe. But this situation appeared far from ordinary. Hall seemed more concerned for his missing car than his missing daughter.
“Did she say how long it would take, to do whatever it was?”
Raymundo shook his head. “Naw. When I tried to talk her into coming over here, she hung up on me.”
“You and Nicole had a baby together, right?”
His face turned defiant. “Everybody knows about that.”
“And the baby was adopted out.”
“Ancient history.” Sullen, now.
Time to unsettle him further. “How did you feel about losing your baby, Raymundo?”
“How do you think I felt?” He was as disdainful as only a sixteen-year-old can be.
I pushed again. “That first time Nicole ran away, she vanished for a couple of days before turning up at your house. Don’t tell me you didn’t know where she was during that time.”
His eyes shifted to the terra cotta pot. He leaned over and with a fingernail, flicked off specks of dirt. “Nope. I didn’t.”
He was smart, but a bad liar. “Maybe I won’t phone the sheriff.” I watched him relax. “Instead, I’ll just go talk to your mother, tell her you know where Nicole is, and that you’re hampering a police investigation.”
He straightened up, his face pale. “All right, but you’ve got to promise not to tell anyone else. I don’t want to get them in trouble.”
“If whoever she’s staying with has a record of endangering kids, I can’t do that.”
“Endangering kids? They
save
them!” He glanced toward the shop where his mother was working with another customer. “Follow me. I want to make sure my mother doesn’t hear what I’m about to tell you.”
With that, he opened a wooden gate and stepped onto a brick path which led toward a tidy adobe. La Casa Mendoza. To the side of the house, under a lush ironwood tree, stood a picnic table. No one seemed to be around. Presumably the younger Mendozas were in school, the older ones at work.
He waited until we’d settled ourselves at the picnic table before saying anything else. “That other time she ran off, she borrowed a friend’s cell and called me right away. She hadn’t told her parents yet about the baby because she was afraid what her father might do if he found out she’d been sneaking out her window at night to meet me down by the riv…well, at our regular meeting place. I swiped my father’s truck and picked her up. I drove her, well, I drove her some place.”
Driving around at fourteen, he’d been lucky not to get picked up by the cops, but where Nicole was concerned, he didn’t seem to worry about what was legal and what was not. I thought his admission might be all the information he was willing to give, but he added, “There’s this ranch, a big secret, but some of the guys at school know about it, kind of a safe haven for kids in really bad trouble. I mean,
really
bad, not just shoplifting or stuff. I figured this thing with the baby was really bad, so that’s where we went.”
When he ducked his head in embarrassment, he didn’t seem so mature any more. “She stayed with them two days then started feeling guilty, so she called me and had me pick her up. I didn’t know what else to do, so I took her to my house and asked my father if she could live with us and we’d all raise the baby.”
I told him I knew the rest, that her father had immediately called Reverend Hall. Any responsible parent would.
“Pop screwed up.” His voice was bitter. “The next day Reverend Hall shipped her off to Idaho and when she got back, it was all over between us. I’d go to where we used to meet and wait there for hours, but she pretty much stopped showing up. When she did, she wouldn’t let me anywhere near her. She never even called me again until yesterday.”
“Raymundo, where’s that ‘safe house?’ ”
Hope lit his face. “Do you think she’s there?”
There was a strong possibility, and I told him so. I dug into my carry-all and brought out a notebook and pen. “Write down the address and phone number.”
“I never knew the phone number, and the address won’t do you any good, ‘cause it’s way out in the boonies the other side of Sierra Vista.” But he drew a map and jotted down the directions. “When you get there, don’t tell them who told you, okay? And don’t tell anyone else. Swear you won’t! They help people, not hurt them.”
I gave him a conditional promise. “If what you say is true, I’ll keep quiet. But if there’s the slightest hint that kids are being exploited, I’ll tell every law officer in the state.”
He nodded. “You’ll see.”
Before I left, I asked, “Do you have a photograph of Nicole? I don’t even know what she looks like.”
He tugged a fat wallet out of his pocket and opened it. Several packets of plastic sleeves were filled with pictures of Nicole, both casual and posed. Here was Nicole as a freckled child of around ten, her glossy brown hair in braids. There was Nicole a few years older, in braids again but somehow much more mature, a secretive smile playing around her heart-shaped lips. Then Nicole as a middle-schooler, the freckles gone, her hair shorter, spirit evident in lively brown eyes.
The last few pictures were taken outside a supermarket as Nicole helped her mother load groceries into a car. Seemingly unaware of her photographer, Nicole, now around sixteen, wore a dress as shapeless as the older woman’s, and her beautiful hair was twisted into a severe bun. Her eyes were dull.
Peggy Binder had been right: Nicole’s light had dimmed.
“May I have one of these if I promise to bring it back?” I asked Raymundo, but he snatched the wallet away, as if fearing I’d run off with it. I told him I understood, then gathered my things.
The expression on Raymundo’s face just about broke my heart. “Ma’am, if you find her before she calls me again, tell her…” He stopped, as if he was having trouble expressing himself, then finished with a simple, “Tell her I still love her.”
***
When three o’clock rolled around, I headed over to Herschel Berklee’s house. As his Molson-drinking uncle had informed me, the medical examiner’s assistant lived in a tract of homes so alike only their inhabitants could tell them apart. Fortunately, Herschel’s house was situated on a corner, its address painted both on the curb and emblazoned in three-inch-high numerals on a front porch post. Like many savvy health care workers, he’d made certain the EMTs would find his house in case of emergency.
It took a while for Herschel to answer the door, and when he did, he looked like he’d just crawled out of bed. An even scrawnier version of his uncle, his hair stood on end, and rumpled pajamas peeked out from under a moth-eaten bathrobe.
His bleary eyes gave me a slow up-and-down. “Honey, if you’re sellin’, I’m sure buyin’.”
When I flashed my I.D. and told him his uncle sent me over, his leer faded. “You don’t exactly look like Mickey Spillane, but come on in. Just don’t expect any smarts on my part. I worked fourteen hours straight last night. I’m so damned tired I can barely think.”
Like his uncle, Herschel’s wolfishness was all talk, no action. With an almost formal politeness, he led me to a comfortable chair in a newspaper-littered living room, then offered me coffee. “Bought one of them new machines puts it on a timer, so when I crawl outta bed, it’s fresh ground and hotter’n a whore on payday.” He flushed. “Oops.”
To settle him down, I said coffee sounded fine, and when he hustled into the kitchen, I took a look around. Like most bachelor pads, the room was devoid of decorations except for the two photographs of a dark-complexioned little girl that rested on an end table. In one, she smiled in his arms. In the other, she wore a soccer uniform and a determinedly fierce expression. His daughter?
Shortly, Herschel returned with two steaming mugs. As I sipped, I tasted mocha hazelnut with a sprinkling of cinnamon. Quite the gourmet.
“What can I do for ya? Uncle Clive didn’t send you over just to say hi.”
After I explained my connection to the Precious Doe case, he said, “Musta been rough. Guy who did that to her, I hope he slow-boils in Hell.” Then his face changed. “Hey, wait a minute! You came over here to pump me about the autopsy, didn’t you? Dr. Lanphear warned me some nosy woman’s been asking questions around the hospital. Was that you?”
I admitted it. “Every killer, especially a child killer, has an individual M.O. that helps investigating officers link one crime to another.” Knowing there had been scant publicity about the Juarez killings, I filled him in on the hundreds of young Mexican women who had been mutilated and murdered in Juarez. There might be a link, I pointed out.
“You saying there’s hardly been any investigation over there?” He looked furious.
“Correct.”
“Let me guess. Nobody cares because the girls are just Mexicans, right?”
“That might have something to do with it.” To everyone’s shame, including even the Mexican government’s.
He muttered something about “damn racists,” then gestured toward the photographs. “Jewell, that’s my kid, she’s half-Black. Her mother and me, my hours and some other shit split us up. I get Jewell every single weekend. I painted up her room with that special pink she’s so crazy about and put a buncha Barbies in there. My ex-wife complains I’m spoiling her rotten, but that’s my job, right? If a daddy can’t spoil his little girl, he ain’t worth being called a daddy.”
He fell silent for a moment, then asked, “You’re trying to connect Precious Doe to that Juarez mess? Seems to me Doe’s the wrong race. Those women were all Mexican.”
“I’m also interested in ruling out the connection.”
He sipped absent-mindedly at his coffee. With one last glance toward his daughter’s photographs, he said, “The sheriff sure as hell hasn’t been getting anyplace with this, so I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just swear you won’t let on where you heard it, okay? You do and my ass is fired. If that happens, I’ll come hunting you, don’t think I won’t.”
