Reilly 13 - Dreams of the Dead (21 page)

“You buried him all the way out here?” Nina said, pulling on her ski gloves. She grabbed her parka from the backseat and buttoned it up, then covered her head with a wool cap. “A lonely place.”

“So you knew.”

“Where else could you be taking me? I’m ready.”

Paul got himself suited up, then stepped outside the car, clicking the door shut behind him. Nina followed. He looked around and listened to the melting snow, the two of them breathing, cars a dull roar on the highway a quarter mile away.

“Stop for a minute.”

They stood together in the cold, breath making clouds.

He saw and heard nothing unusual. Cars made sounds interrupting the silence of the night. Wind breezed softly through the trees. He ferreted out Nina’s shovel and a pick and locked the trunk.

“I’m amazed your car made it up this road,” Nina said, looking downhill, stomping around the car to stand beside him.

“It’s a Mustang. Mustangs are the princes of the car world. Snow tires help, of course.”

The last time he had come up here, he had been seized by
adrenaline fury and energized with purpose. This time, he felt reluctant and nervous. He handed Nina the pick and shouldered the shovel himself.

He walked toward where he thought he needed to go, memories dropping hints, leading him like old bread crumbs. Nina followed close behind. Everything appeared the same as he remembered except for a uniform layer of fresh snow. Along the edges of a clearing not too far from the Mustang, thick pines loomed like border guards. They made their way with difficulty, breaking through the hard crust of snow, falling a few times.

“How can we find him up here?” Nina said as they stared out over the clearing, and Paul heard the fatigue in her voice. “Snow. Trees. Piles of stuff. Miles of this.”

“He’s close by.”

Pushing branches aside, he entered the dusky underbrush, looking for—ah, there it was, the huge treefall. Two years later, the trees had decomposed somewhat, but Paul felt it immediately.

Jim’s body.

The unholy grail.

He approached the treefall, Nina right behind him, and began to remove the rocks in the pile.

Nina did what she could with the pick.

They worked for over an hour before the first faint signs of a grave showed.

“Here lies Jim Strong, murderer,” Paul said, hoisting a rotten log off the spot, sitting in spite of the freeze. “These trees are his coffin, better than he deserved.”

“After two years, nobody has disturbed his grave?”

“So it appears. Well, I feel grateful for that.”

“Let’s finish. I need to look at him and realize he’s gone. He’ll never come back to threaten me or Bob or my family. Seeing him might end my nightmares,” Nina said. “And then I can finally believe everything you said. Sorry about needing proof.”

Paul laughed slightly. “You’re the lawyer.”

After they had almost given up several times, had a spat, rested, and tried again, they saw it, a bit of cloth or something. Paul got down on his knees and reached in with gloved hands and touched it. A torn piece of tarpaulin pulled out easily. He shone the flashlight, turned it over, and thought about many things, some things that he regretted now.

The tarp was still there. The earth continued to rotate at its usual speed and angled around its axis; his life was not upside down. Should he go any deeper? Why? The thing wrapped in the tarp was also still there, or the tarp would not remain. And he was getting cold now, his seat drying fast and chilling him, and getting spooked in this starless place, the way the shadows seemed to be moving in on him, bringing memories.

He pulled the heavy thing out, grunting, and shone the flashlight on the wrapped remains of Jim Strong.

“Pull the tarp away a little,” Nina said. Her voice did not shake.

“You sure?”

“I need to see him.”

Paul didn’t want to do it, but he did. In the dry climate, buried in snow, even after two years, Jim’s body was remarkably preserved. You could recognize his hair, the cut of his athletic body, even see long bits of skin. Decomposition had proceeded to the point where several of the limbs had disarticulated at the joints.

He was part bone, part flesh, the flesh mottled and greenish. He stared from his half-skull vacantly at Nina. His eyelids seemed to have disappeared. The upper lip, what was left of it, was pulled back from the white teeth.

Horrible. They had interrupted a quiet, eerie process. No one should see a human being like this, but it had been necessary.

Nina stared at Jim’s corpse under the cold light of the flashlight for a long time. She said with remarkable composure, “Question. What are the chances of them tracing the tarp back to me?”

“Them? There is no them. Nobody, I mean nobody, knows this place. Where’d you get the tarp, though?”

“Some painters left it behind when I had the living room done. Bob put it in the storage area.”

“You want me to take the tarp? I very much doubt you or Bob could be connected to it at this point.”

Nina looked at the corpse of her tormentor. “Never mind. Where’s his wallet?”

“I threw it over a cliff at Twin Bridges. To complicate things.”

“Was his driver’s license in it?”

“Don’t remember.”

Paul pushed the piece of tarp back into the vacancy he had made underneath the treefall and hastily filled it in, working fast. Nina helped load rocks and branches back on.

Then Paul shone the light around again.

The grave had sunk back into the forest. Here lay Jim Strong, murderer, desolate, shaded by tall trees and washed over by clean mountain air.

Paul pulled himself from the nest of branches, breathing hard. Seeing the remains had shocked him. A man amounted to nothing more than this, a jumble of bones in dirt. What remained of Jim Strong? Paul’s mother used to say what remained lived in the memories of the people who loved you. Where did that leave Jim Strong? Nobody had loved him. Even his father had hated and feared him. If any small awareness of the being that once hosted Jim Strong lived on, it dreamed alone and unremembered, unloved.

The sky clouded over. Another light drift of snow would arrive, covering over their activities. Good. Paul laid the remaining branches haphazardly over the log and examined his handiwork.

In the daytime, it would be unfindable by anyone who didn’t know what to look for.

He took out his portable GPS. He noted the spot’s coordinates.

As they hiked back to the Mustang, Nina asked, “Have you ever thought about the moment of death, what you feel?”

“Yes.”

“I think you go back to all the wrong things you did. We all do wrong things. You make them right. You come out okay.”

“You have a religious background.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think, for a few moments, it’s like a dream, a crazy drama. Then you recede. You find yourself moving backward from all that. Finally you turn around and see what was really going on back there. Hey, you’re shivering.”

“He’s haunting us.”

“You saw him. That’s all there is of him now. Look, you wanted to be sure. Are you sure now?”

“I guess so.”

“You believe in ghosts. I should have known. Up the Irish.”

“I’m more afraid than I was before,” Nina said. “It’s uncanny, the harm the dead can cause.”

“Especially when money’s involved.”

“Secrets come alive themselves, maybe. They want to come out.”

“It’s not him. It’s us. I don’t like carrying his fucking body in my heart everywhere I go. I don’t. I have to find a way to get rid of it for good.”

“We feel guilt, Paul.”

“I never thought I would when I did this.”

E
ric Brinkman called Nina from the San Francisco airport at 8:00 a.m. on Monday and asked for a meeting in four hours at her office. Speaking in a hoarse voice, he kept the arrangements short. He had spent a long few days in Brazil and in the air, and he would be coming straight from the trip.

Philip and Nina waited for him in the conference room.

Paul had asked to come. Not an official member of the team, he had promised to participate only as a friend to Nina. He arrived shortly before noon, shaved, showered, and full of energy. The little conference room immediately began to feel crowded. He shook hands with Philip and sat down.

Moments later Nina and Paul heard Eric Brinkman come in and greet Sandy. She brought him in and took her own seat, shutting the door behind her. With the blinds drawn, the room felt tight and secure.

A place for secrets and straight talk.

“Hi, all,” Eric said. He looked awful, as awful as he could look, anyway. He hadn’t shaved for a day or three—long enough to have developed a lush stubble. Puffy red streaks struck out from his irises. Nina imagined the jet lag he must be suffering. Let’s see, Brazil was five hours ahead of California, and with the planes to and from southern Brazil, the trip had taken almost seventeen hours with layovers. His fatigue made him look younger. His face
was thinner than Paul’s, bones standing out in high relief. He wore a black T-shirt with a light gray jacket that had obviously gone to a foreign country and back.

Everybody shook hands some more. Eric accepted a cup of espresso, loading it with sugar. “I came straight here from the airport.”

“We appreciate that,” Nina said. “Now sit.”

He sat across the conference table from Paul, looked at him, drank, and put his empty cup on the table in front of him, next to his briefcase. “It’s hot down there. End of summer. I forgot how hot it gets.” He accepted the bottle of water Sandy offered. Snapping open the case, he pulled out a file full of thin, stapled-together paper stacks. He passed them around, all brisk business.

“Copies of a new affidavit,” he said. “One I got down there.”

Nina glanced at her copy, then set it down. “Let’s get to this in a minute. Did you see him? Did you see Jim Strong?”

“No. Got a lively song and dance from the lawyer about how as a fugitive he had changed his appearance and didn’t want to give up his disguise. She said he has a right to contest the sale even though he won’t show his face. She says she has never met with him, only talked with him on the phone. Her English is excellent, by the way. She’s a solo practitioner with a fancy office in a downtown office building. I don’t know how solid she is. Lawyers are experts at hiding their financial status and how they’re doing.” Eric rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Excuse my fatigue, Nina. Ordinarily, I don’t make foolish generalizations. Let’s just say she looked legitimate, and I didn’t turn up anything to contradict that.”

“Did you see video of him?”

“Nada,” Eric said. “Same story. He can’t let his new face be seen or he’ll be caught and extradited.”

“A tape?”

“The claim is that the voiceprint would give the authorities too much to look at.”

“Fine, then,” Nina said. “The fraud will be obvious to the court.”

“Not so fast, Nina,” Eric said. “Take a look at the attachment to this affidavit.”

They all flipped to the last page, which held a copy of a California driver’s license with a picture on it Nina recognized.

“It’s Jim’s license,” Philip said. “My God, it’s still valid! I’ve seen him flash it a million times. That sure looks like his signature.”

“Must be forged,” Paul said.

“But where would they get this?” Philip studied it, his jaw working nervously back and forth. “Unless—someone took it from him?” He shook his head. “He wouldn’t give it up voluntarily.” He held on to the license so tightly, his fingers whitened. “No, but this sure is an exact duplicate of the original. I remember because he weighed one ninety-five, he was always complaining about it, and he gave his weight on the license as one-eighty.”

Eric said, “We can put a handwriting expert on it. And the other ones on the affidavits.”

“Do you know if this is a duplicate or the original license?” Paul asked.

Eric shook his head. “I was handed these papers, which Michael Stamp, on Jim Strong’s behalf, is going to file in your case tomorrow, Nina. About all I got you is one day’s notice. At least it won’t come as an awful shock in court.”

“The lawyer down there must be in on it,” Paul said. “What else did you find out about her?”

“No complaints against her. The local Guardia has nothing but praise. They aren’t aware Strong may be living in their town either, at least so they say.”

“This Brazilian attorney,” Nina said, “I assume from what you’ve said so far she was not Marianne’s mother.”

“She was too young. No name match. Never lived in Rio.”

“Did you talk to the notary?” Nina asked.

“Of course. He’s a bank officer two blocks from the lawyer’s office. Said a guy with a beard and glasses and a baseball cap showed up at his bank to have this document notarized. He says he
examined a passport in the name of James Philip Strong for identification. He claimed the picture looked like the guy in front of him, as far as he could tell.”

Paul said, “Bull.”

“It’s kind of a big bull though,” Sandy said. “The horns are kind of sharp. Time to bring out the really good picadors.” Having said her piece, she disappeared back to the front office.

“How will this new information affect our case?” Philip asked.

All eyes swung to Nina.

“I haven’t studied the affidavit,” Nina said, “but it reinforces the claims that have already been made. Eric, what did you find that would add force to an argument that this is a fraud?”

“I can testify that the notary’s statements to me indicated he hadn’t really established the identity of the man who notarized this document.”

“The lawyer’s in on it,” Paul said.

“Maybe not. No more than Michael Stamp. She’s practiced law for twenty-five years and appears very matter-of-fact about the whole thing.” Eric stroked his stubble. “I couldn’t crack her façade, if that’s what it was.”

“I would have,” Paul muttered.

“What?” Eric demanded.

“You came back with squat.”

So much for Paul staying low-key, Nina thought, tapping her pencil, eyes locked at the image on Jim’s license, now lying on the table, face-up. A grin on it.