Dragonfly Bones (12 page)

“And my daughter?”

“She's got to help me in another way. I've arranged to transfer her from the Perryville prison to a troubled teenager boot camp that's only a few miles north of the Florence complex.”

“That's ridiculous. That's not even close to what I'll allow.”

“Yes, you will,” he said. “You work the prison, your daughter will work inside this boot camp for me.”

“Why? What will she be doing?”

“I don't know.”

“You
do
know!” I shouted. “No deal.”

“We discovered all those bones because of a young girl who was in the camp. That girl was murdered yesterday in Tucson.”

“Whoa,” I shrieked, “just goddam whoa right there. If somebody from the camp was just murdered, you're not sending my daughter in there.”

“Only way,” he said. “You can come to it now or later. But until you get your head around accepting this agreement, your daughter stays in federal prison.”

“I'm going back to my house. In Tucson.”

“Think carefully about what I've said.”

“You're using me, Nathan.”

“Yes. I am. But just think about getting your daughter out of prison.”

Brittles told me of the bikers who killed Theresa Prejean and a U.S. Marshal, and connected the bikers somehow with the Rapture Warriors Camp. With the biker at my home.

“You can't put my daughter there now,” I said.

“
Got
to do it.”

“No way.”

“The only way.”

“Nathan, you're not putting my daughter in jeopardy.”

But he'd already made plans for the transfer and explained the details.

“A female U.S. Marshal is flying in from Denver. She'll take your daughter to the camp and sign her in.”

“No! I'll do it.”

“Laura, you're not thinking. Two different assaults by young bikers. Two different targets, who'd never met. I don't know the connection, but you've been identified. You go to the camp, they'll automatically tie you to your daughter. That puts her in even more danger.”

“You take her, then.”

“Think, think. The only place you've been, outside of the Perryville prison, is that housing development. Where the bones were found. The bodies. Women's bodies. I don't know the connection, but it has to involve somebody who knows I'm working the case and saw you there with me.”

“When will Spider be taken over there?”

“It's already being arranged.”

“Damn you!” I shouted. “You didn't even ask me first?”

“No time. You and I have to go to Florence.”

“The call center? That's not even on my radar anymore.”

“It's a contract,” he said. “With Aquitek. We can deal with it in one day, if you're half as good as Don says you are. By the time we've finished, your daughter will have been enrolled in the camp, and you'll get a full report.”

“I don't like it. I don't like it at all.”

“One more thing,” he said. “I want you to move into this house. For now. I'm somehow responsible for getting you in
volved with these bikers. I want to make sure you're protected.”

“I'll find a place of my own.”

“No, Laura.
This
is going to be your place. You can just call it home until I'm satisfied you're no longer in danger.”

Home. What a concept. And it wasn't even my choice.

“There's something else,” he said hesitantly.

Hesitation always drives me really nuts. Somebody's usually got bad news, doesn't really want to give you this news, but knows he has to be the messenger. But he hesitated, fiddled, walked in circles like Rich.

“What?” I said. “What else?”

“Don ran a trace on Abbe Consuelo Dominguez.”

“My daughter.”

“On the woman who
calls
herself your daughter.”

I fumbled out the only picture I had of her, the one Jonathan had given me two years before.

“It
is
her!”

“Don couldn't find any database records out there that link Abbe Dominguez with anybody named Spider Begay.”

“I've used a dozen different names over the last ten years.”

“Anything's possible,” he said slowly. “But…”

“But
what
?”

“Abbe Dominguez was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth for federal mail fraud. Dominguez was also suspected of involvement in a huge identity theft ring working out of New York City.”

“I want to see her. She called me Mom. I want her to tell me, to my face, that she's really my daughter. When I was fifteen, I ran away from the Hopi rez with this guy, Jonathan Begay. We had a baby. We drank a lot. We smoked a lot of pot, we did a lot of radical Indian stuff. AIM stuff. I was at Pine Ridge when the FBI men and Joe Stuntz were killed. When my daughter was two, Jonathan just…disappeared with her one day. We were in some motel, I don't remember where just now. I woke up, they were both gone. Now,
twenty years later, I'm not letting her out of my sight again.”

“You can't go near her,” Brittles said. “Somebody knows who you are. Knows who
I
am.”

I turned on my cell phone, but he put his hand around it, folding it shut.

“If you're going to call Don, he's with me on this. For now, Laura, we've got to consider the possibility that the Dominguez woman is not your daughter. That she's a convicted felon and is working a scam on us, on you, to get out of jail free.”

“Whatever makes you even say a thing like that?”

He hesitated. “Don checked her records, found nothing in her background before she wound up in the courtroom for sentencing. Don thinks…and I agree…Don thinks you have to look at the initials of her name. Abbe Consuelo Dominguez. A. B. C. D.”

“Ridiculous!”

But I trusted Don's intuition on things like this. And I'd
al
ways trusted his ability for data mining. If Don couldn't turn up any traces of that name before the prison sentence, it probably didn't exist.
She
didn't exist. It was phony ID.

“Okay,” I said finally. “But how about a close friend of mine taking her to the camp?”

“Who?”

“Veronique Difiallos.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“At least a week ago,” I said.

“Still…how about, for a few extra inches of protection for your daughter, or whoever she is, how about we disguise her somehow?”

“I've already thought of how to do that. Listen. Nathan. Let's be clear about something. What happened here, it's a one time thing.”

“If that's what you want.”

“I hardly know
what
I want these days. Except to get my daughter out of prison. Find a home for the two of us.”

16

“T
his will take most of the day,” Michael Craven said. “Right, Shelly?”

Michalle Sasha looked closely at Spider's hair, at the roots and ends. Michalle had cut my hair for years, although she lost interest in trying to persuade me to do something creative beyond L'Oréal coloring. A loud techno track came from the giant sound system and Michalle wiggled her hips slightly to the beat.

Spider slouched in the green leather chrome-armed chair in front of Michael's station. She fiddled with his tool case, slipping different kinds of scissors and combs out of it until he finally took the entire kit away from her.

“I'd give it four hours, tops,” Michalle told me.

“Bring it on,” Spider said. “Just do me. Get me outa here.”

“Great mood you got, missy,” Michael said.

“Yeah. Tickle me so I can die laughing.”

Brittles grabbed the back of her chair and swung her around to face him.

“Look, girl,” he said in a low, stern voice. “We've got a deal, right?”

Spider didn't answer.

“Right?” he said louder. She nodded. “Okay. Part of this deal is that you go into that camp, you try to find out anything that might help us. Right?”

“Yeah, okay, okay. Right, okay?”

“If anybody connects you with your mother, I mean very
bad
anybodies, you could be in serious trouble. So get this hair thing over with, then we'll buy you some different kinds of clothes. Right?”

He released the chair.

“I'll be back in three hours,” he said to me, and left the salon.

Spider jerked her body, like a child trying to get a swing started, and got the chair swiveled around so she looked at herself in the mirror. Michael arranged some Goldwell products on a side table.

“‘Oxycure Platin,'” she read. “Is this, like, bleach?”

“We call it stripping out color.”

“Bleaching my goddam hair,” she said. “B.F.D., dudes. Like I
really
always wanted to be a platinum blond.”

“Do mine, too,” I said to Michalle.

“Oh pu
leeze
!” Spider said.

But I settled into the chair at Michalle's station. Both Michael and Michalle mixed a scoop of the Oxycure with a careful measure of Topchic solution, twelve percent alcohol, it said on the container. They brushed the solution onto just the ends of our hair.

“I thought you'd cut it first,” I said.

“No way,” Michael answered, grabbing Spider's head at the top so she'd stop squirming. “We've got to let this stuff stay on until we've stripped all the color out, till there's no color on the ends.”

“Great,” Spider said. “How many times are you going to put this crap on?”

Michael yanked a plastic cap over her head.

“Just sit there for a while,” he said. “What kind of music you like?”

“Who cares?”

“Got any hiphop?” I said, as Michalle put a similar cap on my head.

Michael sorted through a few hundred CDs.

“Got some Scarface. Mystikal. Snoop Dogg. Boo Yaa Tribe.”

“Anything,” I said, and he sorted the CDs like a deck of cards, fanning them in front of me until I picked one at random. He slotted it into the player.

“Jesus Christ,” Spider complained. “Lemme hear some thug gangsta tracks if I gotta sit here all day.”

Michael picked out another CD.

A timer dinged. Michalle hit the Stop button on the CD player. She and Michael mixed a fresh batch of their goo, but this time applied it to the roots, snapped fresh plastic caps on.
We repeated the process one more time until both of them were satisfied.

“This is it?” Spider groaned. “This is
shit,
man.”

“Over here, kid,” Michael said, motioning for both of us to sit at the shampoo basins and lean our heads backward.

“Who you calling kid?” Spider said to Michael with some humor. “You can't be more than five years older than me. Six, tops.”

“All potty mouth brats are kids to me,” he said, spraying cold water on her head and rubbing in shampoo.

“Whoa,” she said, “that tickles.”

“You complain any more and I'll tickle you to death.”

Back in the chairs again. Delighted that Spider's mood had improved, I tried to get her to talk to me, but she focused entirely on Michael, with an occasional comment to Michalle that whatever happened to my hair it wouldn't improve my personality.

“So now, like, you gonna cut it finally?” Spider said.

“Nope. We're gonna give you some Ellumen.”

Michael showed her a platinum bottle with a red cap, spraying it on her head as Michalle did the same to me.

“Take out all your color, Laura?” Michalle said. “You going full platinum, like the girl?” I nodded. “Short cut?”

“Not too short,” I said. “I've always wanted to look like Annie Lennox.”

Once our hair was a brilliant platinum blond, the haircuts took very little time. Michael used both thinning and texturing shears and a clipper on top. Michalle used only a clipper. As Michael spun Spider's chair around, Spider caught my eyes in the mirror and she nodded to the techno beat as she checked out my hair. She grinned, gave me a thumbs up, then shut down the grin and cut her eyes away.

I savored that grin, that thumbs-up gesture.
A small thing,
I thought,
but even more than I'd hoped for. If it takes a simple haircut,
I thought,
to get me closer to my daughter, great.
I'd do more, I'd do anything.