The Devil Went Down to Austin (33 page)

Cameramen clambered around, knocking over air tanks and pup tents, setting up portable generators and satellite dishes and tripod lights. Reporters fussed with their makeup, lamented their winddestroyed hairdos, and forcefed microphones to anyone and everyone coming up the ladder from the water.

Maia and I got through the gauntlet only because Vic Lopez was right behind us.

"Detective!"

And the feeding frenzy began. The reporters' questions told me that every important fact had already leaked out. A woman's body had been recovered from one hundred feet of water. She had been stabbed, weighted down. Had she been dumped overboard? Had the body been positively identified as Ruby McBride, exwife of the recently murdered Jimmy Doebler? Was it true her former business partner Garrett Navarre, already a suspect in Doebler's murder, was still at large?

As Maia and I were leaving, the PR director for the Sheriff's Department was trying to organize the chaos into a formal news

conference. He got a lieutenant and a couple of sergeants to line up on one side of him, Lopez on the other side.

From the expressions of the brass, I got the feeling Lopez would've gotten chewed into catfish bait had the press not been present. But the press was present, so Lopez was the star of the moment.

I gave Maia the keys to my truck. The rain started to fall.

While Maia drove, we listened to the news conference live on an AM station. The police refused to release the identity of the victim. They refused to speculate on suspects, though they promised they were "actively pursuing leads." I tried to focus on the hills, the trees, the arc of rain outside the sweep of the windshield wipers—anything but what had happened at the bottom of the lake.

The anger had left me. Nitrogen was venting from my system, sapping every bit of energy my body had left. I drifted in and out of sleep.

When Maia and I got back to Jimmy's dome, my need for a scuba nap overrode all other concerns. I crawled up the ladder to the sleeping loft and passed out.

I'm not sure how long I was unconscious. When I opened my eyes the daylight was gone. Rain pounded steadily on the roof of the dome.

Maia's voice said, "I was about to put a spoon under your nose, check if you were still breathing."

I looked toward my feet. She was sitting on the corner of the bed, Robert Johnson pacing back and forth on her knees, purring smugly.

I grabbed an extra pillow, stuffed it behind my head. "News?"

"Not much. Lopez called, said he was taking a lot of heat. Said he should have the ME's report by morning."

"Garrett?"

"I'm sorry. Nothing."

I studied the Beatles poster on the ceiling. The Fab Four looked mad at me.

"It isn't your fault," Maia said. "If nothing else, it got Lopez on your side."

"Yeah, the minute I punched him."

"He knows Garrett couldn't do . . . what you saw down there. There's no way. Lopez got a revised statement from Dwight about

Adrienne Selak's drowning. He's talking to SFPD. Momentum is starting to shift."

The rain kept drumming on the roof. The only one comfortable in the loft seemed to be Robert Johnson, now snugly nestled in Maia's lap, getting his ears scratched.

"Ruby wanted to fix things," I said. "She met with Pena, tried to reverse her deal with him. But she wasn't any use to him anymore. So he killed her. Just like Adrienne."

Maia picked at a fold in the bedspread. "We don't even know it's her yet, Tres. The condition of the body—"

"Yes, we do."

"We'll bring Pena down."

"You were right. It would have been better if I'd stayed out of this, let you handle it."

"No," she said. "That was my bitterness talking."

She slid Robert Johnson out of her lap, scooted onto the bed, lay down next to me.

She put her arm across my chest, her chin resting on my shoulder.

We lay like that, the fan at the top of the dome pin wheeling shadows across the ceiling, for a long time. I thought about dark green water through the branches of frozen pecan trees.

She kissed my neck. "Stop, okay?"

"Stop what?"

"Thinking."

She slid the sheet down, away from my chest.

"You're running up a bill at the Driskill," I said. "For a room you aren't using."

"Mmhmm."

She put a finger on my chest, ran it up to my collarbone, traced the starburst of pink scar tissue just below my right clavicle. "What's that?"

"Gunshot."

"I can see that." Three fingers now, tracing the skin. "But it's new. How?"

"An old friend. He gave it to me last spring."

She exhaled a laugh against my shoulder. "Figures."

I kissed her and she didn't object. Then another kiss—longer, more earnest.

I looked in her eyes—amber, bright, defying me to stop.

"I'm pretty sure this is a reaction to trauma, here," I warned her.

"So react," she said.

She shifted her weight onto me.

I crossed my arms around her neck, pulled her face down to mine.

Robert Johnson murred, protesting an obvious error in the direction of our affections. I nudged him with my foot, as gently as I could, to the edge of the bed, and then thump.

After that I didn't care much what the cat did all night. And he extended us the same courtesy.

I awoke in full daylight. The house was silent. The two notes I found pinned to my covers made me feel like a piece of transfer luggage.

The first note said, Gone to chase Garrett. No regrets. Call you later. —M.

The second note said, PS. Aren't you late for class?

I looked at my watch, then practiced my Middle English expletives as I disentangled myself from the sheets, got dressed, and ran to my truck to make the fortyfiveminute drive to UT in half an hour.

I walked in so late Father Time had already done one warmup story and was now starting the second. I thanked him, apologized to the class, then adlibbed a lecture on the Wakefield Crucifixion. We skimmed through the Croxton Play of the Sacrament—just enough to introduce the Jewish communionwafertrampling villains who would prefigure Barabbas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. We spent the rest of our time talking about antiSemitism. Your basic uplifting English lit session.

By the time we adjourned, West Mall foot traffic was starting to pick up outside. The air smelled of clove cigarettes and the eggroll vending carts on Guadalupe. The cute Asian girl with the Henry James novel had staked out a bench in the shade by the entrance to the Student Union.

Down at the crosswalk, Vic Lopez was talking to a street musician.

Lopez was dressed in fatigue pants, combat boots, tight blue shirt. His face was pasty and grim, his sunglasses reflecting the sidewalk.

The musician wore a poncho instead of a shirt, pants the colour of bread mould. He had one Birkenstock planted on a small amp, a harmonica holder and a Gibson acoustic strapped around his neck. Written in black across the face of the guitar was Australia or Bust.

As I walked up, the musician was telling Lopez, "Yeah. It's really nice down there this time of year."

"Barrier Reef?" Lopez asked.

"Dude!" To emphasize his excitement, the musician sucked a few notes out of his harmonica. "I'm telling you, this friend of mine—his first nightdive and shit, they told him to watch for green eyes. And he gets down there and this Great White glides past him not five feet away. Oh, man. A little more spare change, and I'm there!"

I thought of green eyes underwater, tried not to shudder.

Lopez patted the musician on the shoulder. Dust poofed from the poncho. "You take it easy. Professor Navarre and I—we got to talk, now."

The musician wagged all his fingers at me. "Yeah, you're that new dude. Yeah. My friend said your class is fucking awesome."

"Fucking Awesome 301," I said. "That's me."

"Teach it again next summer so I can audit, okay?"

"You promise you will?"

"Hey, man, right after Australia, I'm there."

Lopez grabbed my shoulder. "Let's talk."

We followed a herd of pigeons toward a table under a live oak.

"Nice fatigues," I told Lopez. "Expecting a war?"

He leaned back in his chair, picked his sunglasses off, hung them from the collar of his Tshirt. "In one already. I've been put on paid leave."

"For finding Ruby?"

Seeing Lopez without his usual smile, I realized how big he was. I felt like I was back in high school varsity, looking across the scrimmage line at a fulltackle behemoth patiently waiting for the signal to pulverize me.

"We don't have a positive ID, Navarre. I want you to hear that. The brass—they're willing to assume it's Ruby McBride, but things were done ... I don't know how much you noticed underwater, but

things were intentionally done to the body to make the ID hard. It'll be days before we get enough medical records together, call in the forensic anthropologists to be sure."

"You can't have any doubt," I said. "You saw the way she was. Right at the base of that tree. She was . . . placed. Displayed. And you know Garrett didn't do that."

"Which is why I'm on leave," Lopez said. "I told my bosses we were chasing the wrong guy."

"You told the truth."

Lopez laughed without humour. "Good old truth. Ain't what the brass wants, especially when they've got a fugitive suspect with no alibis, solid ballistics work to place him at at least one homicide. Good motives for both homicides. A friend that works the docks for McBride, could give him access. The DA likes all that just fine. His point of view—it doesn't take much to dump a woman's body overboard. Even a guy in a wheelchair could do it. Especially with the drugs in her system. It would look very bad on the Channel 4 news if the department backed down, reconsidered pressing charges."

"Drugs."

Lopez brought out a sheaf of papers.

"I wasn't even supposed to get these. A guy I know in Toxicology, he ran me a copy."

He flipped a few pages, handed me one. "Check the spike graphs."

I couldn't tell much about the chemical names, the abbreviations, the numbers, but one thing was clear. "They're the same."

Lopez nodded. "The one on the left shows the levels of the alcohol and tricyclic antidepressants in Jimmy Doebler's blood. The one on the right shows the levels in the female victim. They match. Now check the next page."

Another match. The date on this one was much older—May 1995.

"Clara?"

"I had my friend pull that out of the archived records. That's her tox report."

"Three people," I said. "Virtually identical graphs."

Lopez nodded. "Taken separately, they can be explained. Jimmy and Clara both were on medication. If victim three is Ruby, she was on the same stuff. But taken together—we've got a poisoner. He's doing an extraction process with the amitriptyline, dissolving it

down to lethal concentration, mixing it with alcohol for quick dissemination. These three people were poisoned with the same recipe. Ninetynine to one—by the same person."

I looked across the plaza. The musician was playing Pete Seeger. Even the pigeons made a wide arc around him.

"Jimmy's past," I said. "Clara's missing child."

Lopez stared at the pigeons. "I don't know, Navarre. I still don't like it. But let's say the killer uses drugs to make the victims pliable. They get sleepy, almost comatose—they follow simple instructions. He can manipulate them. My bosses would tell you this explains a lot about how your brother could do this. Me, I'd agree with your friend, Miss Lee. I think this bastard wants to talk with his victims. He wants to get intimate before he kills them. I think the old guy in Waco, Ewin Lowry, I think that was our boy's first attempt. It left a bad taste in his mouth, didn't satisfy his urges. So he refined his strategy."

"He started drugging them."

The musician kept playing his harmonica music.

"W.B. Doebler," I said. "Has anyone interviewed him since Jimmy's death?"

"No need," Lopez said. "W.B. calls the sheriff every other day for updates. I don't know what gets said. I know Sheriff's an honourable person."

He didn't need to say more. We both knew the reality—a rich family, heavy political connections. Getting the Sheriff's Department to expand a criminal investigation to include W.B. Doebler would take incontrovertible proof and signatures in triplicate from God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.

"Something else, though," Lopez said. "Pena's girlfriend, the night she drowned. We know now that his alibi is for shit. One thing the witness statements all agreed on: Adrienne Selak had had too much to drink. She kept slurring her words, losing her balance. Pena himself stated that he had to support her several times to keep her from falling over. She got very drunk very fast."

"As if Adrienne Selak had been given an amitriptyline cocktail."

Lopez nodded.

"But it's all still speculation," I said. "Garrett's been missing over twentyfour hours. I have to find him before your colleagues

do. If he could trace the Techsan sabotage to Pena—it's a long shot, but it might be some leverage."

Pena picked at the knee of his camouflage pants. "Which brings me to my last point. I put out feelers on Garrett's whereabouts early yesterday. This morning a CI of mine, local biker—he gave me a tip where your brother might be. Of course, he didn't know I'd been pulled off the case. Ethically, I should hand the information over to my superiors."

"Ethically."

Lopez's eyes glittered like a crocodile's. "My CI tells me your brother's hiding out with the Diablos. They got a whole network of safe houses. As of this morning, they moved him into a place where they figured nobody will look for him—the marina."

"You must have that place under surveillance."

"Boats go in. Boats go out. You know the guy who runs the docks, it would be pretty easy to come and go unseen. We can't search every boat, not without cause. I should tell my sergeant what I know, let him make the call."

I thought about what Travis County would do, how they would proceed against a suspected murderer hiding out with a motorcycle gang. They would activate SWAT.