Solomon's Oak (14 page)

Suddenly it was all too much for Joseph to be explaining this every month. He turned his back on the pharmacist and pulled his shirt out of his jeans and bared his shoulders. Spinal disk C4-5, that had left the worst scar, twisting like a centipede from his neck to his shoulder blade. Below that, thoracolumbar 10 wasn’t much prettier. “I’m not an addict.”

“Of course you’re not, sir. I apologize. We get so many people abusing this drug we have to be hypervigilant … ”

As the man’s voice trailed off, Joseph’s hard feelings increased. Did they think he was too stupid to read the information sheets they stuffed in the bag with his pills? “I’ll take this, too,” he said, placing one of those nutritious meal bars on the counter. The clerk took his money and asked if he wanted the bar in another bag. “Not necessary.” Then he said, “Thank you,” because if he hadn’t, his mother would have been ashamed of him.

He got into his car and sat in the parking lot while the blinding rain beat down like fists. The first bite of the nutrition bar tasted like dirt. So did the second. He ate it anyway. Then he leaned his head against the steering wheel and cried. This day was done. No way he was taking pictures of redwoods in a mood like this.

The following week it rained every day. Going stir-crazy in the leaky cabin, Joseph drove to the Woodpecker Café five miles north of the cabin in the town of Lockwood. They had fourteen red leatherette booths and six tables. Wagon-wheel light fixtures hung low over booths that were usually occupied by locals. Every time Joseph walked into the restaurant, it seemed as if the same five guys were having the same argument in the booth by the window. The café stayed open year-round and was near enough to the Mission San Antonio de Padua that customers included lost motorists.

Sixteen days from Christmas, though, and twenty miles from shopping, there were plenty of empty seats to choose from. The locals had checked Joseph out the first time he’d come into the restaurant and dismissed him as a fool who couldn’t read a map. Each time he returned, though, a few more people nodded hello, especially women. He figured the Lorna Candelaria grapevine was responsible for that.

Single ladies take note: Divorced Latin male, owns a cabin on the lake (for a while, anyhow). Nice guy. Comes from good people. Has some money. Artistic. Check out the fancy camera.

He sat in a booth and opened the newspaper while he waited to place his order. Page one: A Los Angeles school district let eighty teachers go. Senator Barbara Boxer advocated a new tax on businesses that polluted the environment. Magic Mountain theme park announced the opening of their sixteenth roller coaster. On page two, out of habit he checked the weather in Albuquerque, a surprisingly warm fifty degrees. He couldn’t break the habit of reading missing-children stories and obituaries. How Rico lived with that day in and day out, Joseph did not know. The lab was bad enough. It killed him to ID bodily fluids on kids’ clothing.

After an especially hairy case, Rico had confided in Joseph over a beer at the Zinc Bar. “Some nights I can’t sleep. Their faces haunt me. You were smart, dude. Wish I had a job where I put in my hours and go home at the end of the day.”

Joseph’s department had no openings, and even if there were, Rico would take an enormous pay cut and need to go back to school to qualify. “You have seventeen years in,” Joseph told him. “Retire and become something else.”

“On a pension so small I can’t support my dog? I might as well go work at Starbucks.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, man. Places like that have health insurance. What’s the worst that could happen to you? Spill coffee on somebody?”

“When we make a major bust, the rush is incredible,” Rico said. “If I transfer to another department, everyone will call me a wuss.”

“Come on, Rico. Isn’t that like the old saying ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me’?”

The conversation ended when Rico got a call. Two weeks later both Rico and Joseph ended up in an auto-salvage-yard crime scene south of Duke City. It turned out that the industrial building off SR 47 wasn’t culling and selling usable car parts; it was meth lab central. Satellite labs were dotted throughout the city, in mobile homes advertising new housing developments. These weren’t the work of gangs or wannabe gangsters, but of serious manufacturers dealing product, going after young people with potential and leading them to addiction. The warehouse lab was the brain that organized the moneymakers. It was typical to find assault weapons at the scene of a drug operation, and even bomb-making materials. Protocol was rigid and followed for good reason. CI had pronounced the warehouse clear an hour before Joseph arrived. Rico was celebrating the bust with his new partner, Isaac, and several other detectives who’d been involved. Joseph was on-site to record evidence with his Nikon D80, and the atmosphere was intense, like American Indian night at UNM when the Lobos were on a winning streak.

Somehow between all of them and the bomb squad, though, they had missed a guy hiding in a cupboard, and he had a gun.

“Afternoon, Katie Jay,” Joseph said to the waitress, a natural blonde of average height in her twenties wearing a Christmas-tree pin next to her name tag. She was a sophomore at San Luis Obispo, studying environmental science, and always had a ready smile for Joseph.

She got out her order pad and pen. “Let me guess. BLT on rye with extra mayo?”

“Yes, please.”

“Joseph,” she said, filling his coffee cup, “you really ought to try something else on the menu. We have a great tri-tip on sourdough, chicken salad to die for, and the tuna melt’s all those knuckleheads ever order.” She pointed with her pen to the cattlemen squished five to the booth. “Do you think they ever work?”

Joseph laughed. “They’re probably cattle barons. Someday I’ll take you up on the menu recommendations.”

“Just not today,” she said, shaking her head.

“Nope. Today feels more like a BLT day.”

The Woodpecker was for BLTs. The King City Truck Stop was for breakfasts, 24-7. Butterfly Creek was for turkey on sourdough and pizza. Chicken salad was for women.

“Coming up,” she said, and took his order to the cook.

Joseph waited until she brought his sandwich before popping the cap on his pain meds. He shook out his lunchtime pill. If he took it now, he had thirty minutes before it kicked in, and he could be home by then. Outside the rain continued to pour.

Katie came by with the coffeepot again. “You got a headache today, Joseph?”

“Something like that. Thanks for asking.”

She laid his check facedown next to the salt and pepper. “Have a good one. Stay dry if you can.”

So much rain fell that December that the earth couldn’t absorb it all. On his forays out for food, Joseph watched roads flood that had been bone-dry when he arrived. One morning he woke up and decided the heck with waiting for nice weather. He’d make the rain work for him. A single drop of water pooled on a leaf created a second camera lens, a natural magnifying glass. Veins, pores, pigment, and stem sharpened to hair-thin detail played a trick on the eye. A leaf, or abstract art? Set the shutter speed down to one eighth, depress and pan left to right over wet leaves, and the result was motion and color so complex that it would have taken an artist’s paintbrush to reproduce it.

Chapter 5

R
AIN FOLLOWED
J
OSEPH
down Highway 1 toward Big Sur. Between the sheer cliffs and narrow road, he tensed his hands on the steering wheel. He drove directly to Julia Pfeiffer State Park, parked in the visitors’ lot near the lodge, and began walking, his windbreaker hood over his head and his camera cloaked in its own raincoat. Signs indicated trails in every direction, the river, the beach, lookout points, the waterfall, and the groves. Back the other way was the albino redwood he didn’t want to miss. He opted for the canyon trail marked
EASY, ONE-QUARTER MILE, GENTLY ASCENDING PATH TO THE FALLS
because it was lined with towering, cinnamon-colored redwoods. Underfoot, the rain matted the thick forest duff, making his steps springy. Green ferns, bent by the rain, lined the trail. He planted his feet carefully and kept track of his time so he didn’t get caught in a deluge when he drove the coast highway on his return home. When he crossed the footbridge, the noise of the waterfall was deafening. He leaned against the handrail, waiting for the strain in his back to pass, and studied the trees.

His grandmother had taken him here several times. They’d stood on an earlier version of this bridge to look at the towering giants. She pointed out “goose pens,” openings at the base of a redwood where fire had hollowed out the trunk, but the tree continued growing. Some of them were five feet across. “A long time ago,” she told him, “settlers housed their livestock in those pens. A few cows, goats, and geese. I heard a story that a hermit made his home in a pen so big he had three stories, a woodstove with a chimney, and a front door.”

“Was he a kid, like me?” Joseph asked.

“No, he was an average grown-up man.”

“Didn’t his family miss him?”

Grandmother Penny laughed. “Maybe so. You know, Joseph, even with all their college degrees, scientists don’t know what causes the cones to release their tiny seeds. But I know the secret.”

Anything mysterious had Joseph’s name on it. “Tell me,” he said.

She took his hand and they went off the cut trail to stand beneath one of the giants. Grandmother placed her hand on the tree’s spongy bark and began to sing a wordless song he knew he’d never be able to repeat, so he listened with his whole heart. When she finished, she smiled down at him.

“The tree can tell from a woman’s song that it’s a time to let the seeds go.”

Joseph hoped to hike until he reached the falls. He wanted silvery water traveling ninety miles an hour to spray his face and jacket, but he couldn’t make it to the top. He took pictures of trees growing horizontally out of the rocks before he started down. On the way back to his car, he photographed smaller redwoods growing in a circle surrounding a single large tree. They reminded him of Pueblo storyteller dolls, children circling a grandmother. Between the dripping rain, forest scents, and the age of the redwoods, he felt as if he were standing in a cathedral. A Steller’s jay broke the silence with his scolding. After that, he heard the trill of a winter wren and watched a six-inch yellow banana slug cross his path. He took a picture and tried to imagine the sense of touch in the creature as it rolled its body over the forest floor. From the parking-lot turnaround, he saw the Big Sur River thrashing its way through boulders the size of Volkswagens.

He drove to the Fernwood Campground down to the Old School House to photograph the albino redwood. The twelve-foot tree depended on a host redwood for survival. He knew the scientific reasons behind it—it didn’t process chlorophyll—but the longer he stood there, the more it seemed like an unhappy ghost, so he returned to his car.

Because that dreadful nutrition bar was a memory now, he stopped at the Big Sur Bakery before heading home up Highway 1 to buy a Danish and coffee for the long drive home. He tried not to stare, but the woman at the counter had long, silver hair like Glory Solomon. He had no intention of cashing that check she sent him. It was only a couple dozen pictures, paid for with the leftovers. Cut, dried, connection ended. But as he drove up the highway, finished with the redwoods, her oak tree was on his mind. With luck, she had a day job that left the place deserted for a few hours while the daughter was at school. He could pop in, take pictures, pop out, and no one would be the wiser.

A minor mudslide across the highway forced Joseph to keep his speed at twenty-five miles per hour. At this rate, he’d arrive home well after dark. It had been hours since his last pain pill, and if there was ever a reason not to take one, driving in these conditions was it. Joseph wadded up his jacket and stuck it in the small of his back up against the seat. When after a few miles he came to the backed-up traffic jam before the Bixby Creek Bridge, he wondered if there’d been a car accident. The two-lane road had been no problem on the drive down. After five minutes and no movement, Joseph turned his engine off. The car behind him pulled a U-turn and headed south, toward San Simeon. Since there was no radio reception, Joseph waited, feeling sorry for the Department of Transportation worker standing out there next to such a sheer drop on this cold day. The trademark fog was rolling in. It started to rain, making it difficult for drivers to see each other, let alone the DOT worker’s fluorescent vest, sign, or the orange traffic cones set in the lane. While Joseph waited, he thought of how Rico often used his detective status to get out of traffic jams on Menaul Boulevard. The guy loved taking chances.

During Joseph’s brief time on the force, he ticketed dozens of drunk drivers every week. But no amount of fines, suspended licenses, or DWI blitzes stopped them. Every year some fool drove drunk the wrong way on the highway and took out an innocent family, a carful of teenagers, or an elderly woman minding her own business. Those wrecks stayed in his mind, adding up.

When Rico was assigned to the Exploited Children division and, later, Missing Persons, he was so hopped up on adrenaline that at times he seemed manic. “This is it,” he told Joseph, “the most important kind of police work there is. Dude, come back to the force.”

Was Joseph a coward for keeping his distance from all that ugliness? He told Rico, “If it wasn’t for us microscope jockeys, you wouldn’t have the necessary evidence to convict those
cabrones
.”

When Rico went to Missing Persons, he confided, “I’m not sleeping much. Fidela and the boys don’t know, but some nights, after they’re asleep, I walk the dog a couple miles to tire myself out.”

Even when the odds were against the detectives, the work was addicting. You mainlined stress. Solving cases depended on timing, paying attention to inventory, and things could change in a second. A hiker finds a missing person’s necklace and provides a grid to search. A construction site comes to a halt with the discovery of a single human rib bone.

The DNA identifications Joseph performed allowed detectives to close cold files open for decades. To narrow the age of a human bone to within ten years, prove the gender of even a partial skeleton, gave detectives a better chance of identification. Joseph’s work was nothing like that television series with the ridiculously dim set. The techs wore polo shirts and lab coats, not skintight T-shirts cut to reveal six-packs or movie-star cleavage. Most of them were underpaid working stiffs with more tasks to do than a day allowed. DNA results took months, not moments.

Missing Persons located wandering elderly people and guided them home. Runaway teenagers turned up. But when a child went missing, no matter which division you worked, everyone hustled, because there were two golden time frames, two chances for a positive outcome.

The “golden hour” was the optimum time allotted to find a missing child alive—sixty swiftly ticking minutes. She could be at the neighbor’s without permission, at the school playground dawdling on the swings, or hiding from her parents in a closet while they hollered themselves hoarse so she could punish them for denying her cookies before dinner or the all-essential cell phone. The “golden day” was the block of twenty-four hours during which the Amber Alert went into effect, and organized searchers might be able to find the body of the missing child. It was imperative that family stay by the phone because there might be a call, either from someone with knowledge or rarely, but it did happen, the child herself. But family wanted to post flyers, make pleas on television, offer rewards; basically do anything other than sit there waiting for the inevitable, and who could blame them? Yet the worst was actually a positive outcome because finding the body at least provided the family closure. A body had a face to kiss good-bye. Having a body to place in a grave was ecstasy compared to wondering the rest of your life. Could she be alive? Was she cold, hungry, afraid, injured, lost? Rationalizations took over logic. She was a tough kid and could survive just about anything. They’d recover as a family. If it was a one-in-a-million chance that she’d return, that meant it had happened once; therefore it could happen to them, too. Whatever horrible experiences she’d had could be a turning point, not an end.

Rico told him, “There’s nothing worse than delivering the news.”

Joseph watched Rico’s career take its toll on his face. His friend had switched from beer to whiskey shots. “How much weight have you lost? You’re starting to look haunted. If it’s this hard on you, I bet it’s affecting your kids and Fidela.”

“Their little bodies,” Rico said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Why didn’t you find me sooner, before he did this to me?’ ”

“You’re human, Rico. A person can only take so much before he has to look away. Maybe it’s time to ask for a transfer.”

Albuquerque was laid out like a Scottish-clan plaid, busy streets crossing each other, pausing to erupt in strip malls and newly gentrified neighborhoods such as Nob Hill, where old storefronts were going condo. The city had turned into a business hub, not just because of the new hospitals or the undeveloped land or even the arts for which the state was famous. Casinos were the draw. Tourism went steadily up. Chain hotels quickly moved in, Doubletree, Marriott, and the Hilton. But look up and the blue sky still went on forever. Every day, cloud formations called up Peter Hurd’s paintings. From Bosque del Apache’s annual bird migration to the Bandelier ruins to the sold-out, ten-days-long balloon fiesta, the state had as much beauty as it did grittiness.

One of New Mexico’s abundant natural resources was the year-round wind that traveled at face height filled with grit and prairie dust. The wind covered tracks, ruined crime scenes, and scratched camera lenses. It made winter colder. In spring, it tossed juniper pollen like confetti and provoked bad behavior in a city full of allergy sufferers. Recovering alcoholics fell off the wagon. Rehabilitated burglars found other people’s wide-screen televisions and iPods irresistible. Auto smash-and-grabs tripled. Graduates of anger-management class relapsed and domestic calls rocketed. Registered sex offenders kept a lookout for the solitary kid taking a shortcut, and though such acts were unacceptable in every way, to work in law enforcement you had to be realistic. Rico Torres had never broken down on a crime scene that Joseph knew of. He could not say the same for himself. Their business had plenty of happy endings, but the losses were devastating.

Suddenly the cars in front of Joseph began to make U-turns, heading south. When Joseph reached the orange cones, he saw why. Just over the bridge Jack Kerouac had made famous, and around a steep curve, a quarter of the highway had tumbled down the cliffside into the ocean.

When he reached the DOT worker, he said, “What happened?”

“Same thing that happens every year,” the man in the fluorescent vest said. “Too many vehicles on a road that wasn’t designed for heavy traffic. Rain plus hillside equals landslide equals road closure. You’ll have to turn around and go the other way.”

“But I’m trying to get back to Jolon.”

“Look for the turnoff to G18. It’s kind of a twisty road. Dumps you out near the mission. Go slowly and you’ll be fine.”

Joseph stopped in Big Sur to gas up. Finding some minute area of coverage, his cell phone bleated. While he filled his car, he listened to the voice mail from Lorna Candelaria, inviting him to the upcoming Christmas party at the store. “I won’t take no for an answer,” she said, and coughed. “I know where you live, buster,” she said when the coughing fit ended. “It’s potluck, so bring something, even if it’s just crackers.”