Strong Light of Day (6 page)

A Houston patrolman in uniform held up the crime scene tape at their approach, Caitlin watching it stiffen and then flutter in the wind above her.

“What do you notice, D.W.?” she said to Captain Tepper.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

“Right. No sleeping bags, backpacks, personal items. Whoever took them wanted to make it seem like they were never here. You ever know, seen, or heard of a kidnapping scene like this?”

Caitlin ran her eyes about, hoping to see something that had escaped her so far. The grass flattened or broke away under her boots, and the sound of the wind rustling through the trees that enclosed the field on three sides would've sounded even louder after dark last night. A few of the law enforcement types nodded toward Tepper and Caitlin as they passed, the crime scene techs paying them no heed at all.

“Not exactly,” Tepper said finally. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it. “Closest was a case I worked with your dad once. Couple kids got snatched from a playground. Whoever did it doused the scene in bleach. I could smell it as soon as I stepped out of my truck. I don't smell anything like that here.”

“What happened to those kids?”

“Found dead in the perp's trunk a week later. He'd pulled his car into the garage in midsummer. A neighbor called the locals when the stench got to be too much.” Tepper turned his face to the sun, then swung it away just as fast, as if that brief moment was all it took to burn his skin. “Guy takes bleach to a crime scene and then leaves the bodies to rot in the trunk of an old Chevy. Can you explain that to me?”

Caitlin couldn't, something else on her mind. “What kind of security they have at night here?”

“Couple rent-a-cops crisscrossing the roads, doing routine rounds. Only one of them was on duty last night. The other called in sick and is already in custody. Locals are sweating him, but so far they've got nothing except a trash can full of vomit. I guess he really was sick.” Tepper paused and felt about his pockets for his Marlboros, until he remembered he'd left them somewhere else. “Maybe we're thinking about this the wrong way.”

“How's that, Captain?”

“Maybe we should be focusing on how they got them out and away from here. Would have taken another bus or a truck, and the two-lane offers only two choices once they were off the grounds: right and left.”

Caitlin continued to survey the scene, picturing forty-one students and adults bedding down for the night, climbing into their sleeping bags, with some sweeping their flashlight beams across the night sky. “This all goes down and not one of the now missing managed to get any word out?”

“So?”

“Assume they were all asleep. Assume they all got snatched so fast nobody had a chance to make a call or send a text.”

“What we got is what you see,” Captain Tepper told her. “No footprints, tire tracks, socks, underwear. No evidence whatsoever anybody was ever here. Jesus H., Ranger, maybe those kids got sucked up into the sky by space aliens.”

“Or a team of professionals who'd done this kind of thing before, not necessarily in these parts.”

“Foreign terrorists?”

Caitlin shrugged. “Something we need to consider.”

“Then where's the ransom call, Ranger, or call to the press to claim credit?”

“Give it time. How long did it take when that nut job grabbed a school bus and buried it in the ground, kids and all?”

Before Tepper could respond, walkie-talkies started squawking across the field. The uniformed officers canted their heads toward their shoulder-mounted radios and the detectives jerked the handheld variety from their belts, one of them turning toward Tepper and Caitlin as he jogged past.

“Two of the missing kids just wandered out of the woods,” he said.

 

11

S
AN
A
NTONIO,
T
EXAS

Guillermo Paz leaned across the plank-wood table, his huge legs squeezed uncomfortably beneath it, with knees left to rub up against the underside. “Don't take this the wrong way, but I need to know you're not a fake.”

Madam Caterina narrowed her gaze at him. “Test me, child.”

“It's been a long time since anyone called me ‘child,'” Paz reflected, still wondering what exactly had attracted him to this storefront off East Houston Street in east San Antonio, which featured a sign outside that read, “Psychic Readings by Madam Caterina. Satisfaction Guaranteed.”

“We're all God's children, and God knows no age,” Madam Caterina told him.

She was a shapeless woman, her bulk concealed beneath a baggy black dress that looked more like a housecoat. Her face was patchwork of tone and texture, darker skin intermixed with lighter, as if her genes couldn't make up their mind which race actually claimed her for its own. Her eyes were light, almost silvery, a strange complement to her raven hair. But her eyes seemed to change color depending on how the light from the single lamp dangling directly over the table struck them, sometimes seeming as dark as her hair. The lighter patches of her complexion looked shiny, almost translucent, as if she was the result of an unfinished portrait. Her hair was tied tightly up in a bun, with a woven silk scarf concealing it tight against her scalp.

The plank table before them, Paz noted, was empty. No crystal ball, tarot cards—not even a Ouija board. Just a box of tissues.

“The last person to call me ‘child' was a priest back home in Venezuela,” he picked up.

Madam Caterina seemed to look at him differently, as if suddenly seeing someone else seated across from her. She reached across the table and grasped Paz's hands in hers, kneading them. “He's dead, isn't he?”

He resisted the temptation to pull his hands away. “Yes.”

“And you witnessed it, you watched him die, this priest,” Madam Caterina said, eyes straying off Paz as if surprised by her own words.

“Right again.”

“He was murdered. He was carrying something at the time. Two bags. He was walking back to the church with them. Something to eat.”

“Bread,” Paz said, louder than he'd meant to.

Madam Caterina looked into his eyes and something changed in hers. “Oh.”

“What?”

“You should leave,” the psychic said, letting go of his hands and pulling away.

“We haven't finished.”

“We haven't even started, and we're not going to,” Madam Caterina said, rising to her feet in an unspoken signal for the giant across from her to do the same.

But Paz stayed in his chair, his knee knocking up against the underside of the plank table. “You answered my question.”

“You didn't ask me one.”

“I meant about you being a fake. You're not. You're the real thing. That must've been what brought me here. Back in the La Vega slum where I grew up, the people thought my mother was a
bruja,
a witch. She had visions, saw things that weren't there. For a long time I thought she was crazy.”

Madam Caterina sat back down. “What changed, child?”

“A few years later, I found her crying when I got home. She knew what I'd done.”

“You killed the man who shot the priest.”

“He had it coming.”

“You did it with a knife,
his
knife, a knife you still carry.”

“How do you know all this? Who told you?”

“Would you like to speak to your mother?”

“I speak to her all the time.”

“You talk, but you don't hear what she's got to say. She's here now. Do you have something to ask her?”

“No,” Paz said, his voice taking on the sheepishness it always had in his mother's company as a boy, because he knew he could never lie to her. She could always tell and would scold him with her eyes that could pierce his soul.

“Then what did bring you here …
Mo?
”

“That's my mother called me. Short for Guillermo.”

“I know. She just told me.”

Paz suddenly felt very cold and realized he was trembling, an entirely foreign sensation for him. “I'm not the same person I became after killing the man who murdered my priest. I killed a whole lot of people after that—in service to my country, I told myself, but mostly because I enjoyed it.”

“Your mother says as much,” Madam Caterina told him. “But she also agrees you're not that man anymore.”

“You don't even know me.”

“Your mother does, and those were her words, not mine. You sure you don't want to talk to her? Maybe about these other paths you've taken in search of the truth?”

Paz found himself leaning forward, his chair creaking from the strain. “I audited college classes for a while, but that didn't work out too well. Then I tried teaching English to Mexican immigrants, but that worked even worse. I always end up back with my new priest at the San Fernando Cathedral near Main Plaza. Thought I was done seeking my answers elsewhere, until I showed up here.”

Madam Caterina seemed to study Paz briefly, then looked down at the plank table. “You came to this country to kill,” she said, eyes remaining poised that way. “And you've done plenty more killing since, but not toward your original purpose in coming.”

Paz nodded, even though she wasn't looking at him.

“Toward a different purpose entirely.” Madam Caterina looked up but squeezed her eyes closed. “I see a woman wearing a badge.”

“My Texas Ranger.”

“She's the one you came here to kill. I see you both with guns, aiming at each other.”

Paz couldn't believe what he was hearing. “That was a long time ago. I look in the mirror now, I see an entirely different man looking back. Still a work in progress, though.”

“How's that?”

“I want to see in my eyes what I see in my Texas Ranger's.”

“And what's that?” Madam Caterina asked, her tone different, the otherworldly forces that had grabbed her ear likely quieting themselves to listen as well.

“I don't know. I'm still working on that, too.”

“Now you find purpose in being her protector, in searching for the light you see in her eyes, Colonel.”

Paz found himself taken aback again. “How'd you know that?”

“Know what?”

“That I was once a colonel. My Texas Ranger calls me that.”

“You didn't tell me?”

“No.”

“Someone else did, then. Your mother maybe. Wait,” Madam Caterina signaled. “Something's wrong.…” Her eyes sharpened. “Does this Texas Ranger have children, a son?”

“Yes and no. Two boys.”

“One's in trouble. Danger,” Madam Caterina corrected quickly. “She's going to need you.”

“My Texas Ranger?”

Madam Caterina nodded. “And this boy.”

Paz started to rise, when Madam Caterina clamped a hand on his forearm from the other side of the table. He'd been captured by antigovernment rebels back home in Venezuela once, manacled to a tree while they tried to figure out what to do with him. That's what the woman's grasp felt like—a steel manacle fastened over his flesh, squeezing tight enough to shut off the blood flow until his fingers went numb.

“Wait,” she said again, “there's a light, a strong light, a blinding light. Everywhere at once, swallowing everything.”

“A nuclear blast maybe,” Paz reasoned.

“In my experience, it's more likely metaphorical, the strong light a sign of something that's coming.”

“In my experience,” Paz told her, as she finally released her grasp so he could rise as tall as the single light fixture dangling from the ceiling, “they're the same thing.”

 

P
ART
T
WO

One Ranger who has come to epitomize the Ranger service of the early 1900s was Bill McDonald, captain of Ranger Company B. One reason McDonald is still so well known today is that he had a knack for hard-boiled talk.… Perhaps less known is McDonald's statement to a large mob that confronted him as he left a jail with two prisoners in custody. “Damn your sorry souls!” growled McDonald as the men surged forward, intent on hanging the prisoners in his custody. “March out of here and get away from this jail, every one of you, or I'll fill this yard with dead men.” The mob quickly dispersed.

—Jesse Sublett, “Lone on the Range: Texas Lawmen,”
Texas Monthly,
December 31, 1969

 

12

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

The bright light shining on the stage kept Calum Dane from seeing the protester storm down the aisle and yank off his own leg. The move had the look of a performance to it, slapstick comedy maybe, until Dane saw that it was a prosthetic leg he was now trumpeting over his head like a flag, while the audience hooted and hollered.

“You did this to me, Mr. Dane!” the young man yelled up toward the stage, holding the leg still to keep himself from falling. “You just said you're in the business of giving back. How about it then, sir? Give me back my leg!”

Dane cupped a hand over his brow to shield his eyes from the lighting. He'd taken the stage just a few minutes earlier, the wires of the lavalier microphone threaded up under his shirt to emerge at his lapel like a clipped-on insect. He'd straightened it one last time in the mirror before he'd taken the stage. His own expression stared back at him, Dane amazed by how little different he looked from year to year. His coarse black hair showed barely a touch of gray, and his skin tone held just enough color and leathery stitching to capture his rough-hewn spirit and experience as a mere boy working farm fields and offshore oil rigs before he owned a damn thing.

Now he owned lots of things, though not this ballroom, where he'd taken the stage to give the keynote address to his company's shareholders and was greeted with hoots, hollers, and boos. Dane had just managed to get the audience to simmer down, just a few catcalls about the lawsuits and controversies in which Dane Corp was embroiled stubbornly shouted his way, when the kid holding his leg hopped up the center aisle, much to the angry crowd's delight.