The Jaguar (38 page)

A moment later he crossed the alley. There was a
panaderia
with big windows and he stood looking in for a while at the loaves and rolls and the marked-down pastries from the day. He turned casually and glanced across the alley: all four people had gone through. The gate was black wrought iron, round at the top to fit the archway. No number. The small courtyard was overgrown with ficus and hibiscus with small yellow blooms. Through the foliage Hood saw the crooked graying limestone steps leading up to a wooden front door. The door was closed.

He walked the alley back the direction he’d come, past M. Doblado. He came to a small cafe called El Canario. It was painted a pale lime green and there were larger-than-life canaries rendered upon the wall in bright yellow. They sat on branches with their beaks raised as if in song. Hood took a sidewalk seat where he could see the gate. He drank an
horchata
and waited and drank another. The waitress was pretty and smiled at him.

An hour later, just before eight, a black SUV pulled up near the gate. It was new and gleaming and the windows were blacked out and the header growled softly as the engine idled. Hood saw the novitiates step into the alley, followed by the gaunt priest. The girl got in, then the boy, the priest, and Mike. Hood watched the short leg and shiny little shoe pull inside, then the door clunk shut.

Hood ordered a beer and a shrimp cocktail. An hour and a half later he walked back toward his hotel.

For the next two days this pattern repeated: Finnegan and his guests arrived at Taberna Roja in the early evening. They left a little over one hour later and walked back to the alley off of M. Doblado. On the first of these two days Owens Finnegan was with them. She wore loose, unflattering clothes and she stayed close to Mike, holding his arm in a familial way, ignoring the priest and novitiates as if they offended her. On the second day she was gone.

Hood varied his surveillance as best he could and only once did Finnegan appear to look at him at all. This was on Tuesday, the second evening, on Victimas del 25 de Junio. The look was brief and from some distance, and Hood had his hat down low and his sunglasses on. A few minutes later Finnegan and the others went through the gate and Hood sat at El Canario and talked to Josie for one hour,
looking past her down the alley with a rudeness he could not avoid. The black SUV arrived at its usual time and Mike and his friends boarded. When it grumbled away down the alley Hood changed from
horchata
to beer and asked for another shrimp cocktail.

—Josie, do you know a good locksmith?

—I know one who is fast and cheap. I used him a year ago.

The next day when Finnegan and priest entered the Taberna Roja, Hood called Roberto Acuna, the locksmith, and explained that he’d somehow lost his keys and was now locked out of his own home. He said that Josie at El Canario had recommended him highly and he wondered if Roberto was available immediately, because he had an event to attend at the Naval Museum. Hood said he was already a little late. He described the alley off of M. Doblado, which Roberto was familiar with.

Twenty minutes later Roberto opened the gate with a universal key. They stepped into the courtyard and walked past the blooming hibiscus and the ficus and palms and climbed the rock steps. The big battered wooden door to the apartment proved more difficult but after a minute of patient exploration and repetition the door swung open.

Hood stepped inside and saw the hat rack in the foyer and he set his Panama on it with the others. The foyer light was on.

—Thank you. How much?

—Two hundred pesos.

—Here. And a few extra for you.

—Thank you. Do you want a receipt?

—No. I don’t need one.

—Where did you lose the keys?

—If I knew they wouldn’t be lost.

—This is very true! I can cut you new keys in just a few minutes. In case you don’t find the old ones. And if you don’t, perhaps it would be wise to have new locks.

—I have spare keys here at home. And I’m in quite a hurry. The event at the Naval Museum.

Roberto looked past Hood into the apartment. He picked up his toolbox and Hood shook his hand and shut the door and checked his watch: half an hour.

H
E STEPPED INTO THE MAIN
room. The floor tiles were worn and the area rugs were old and the tall windows stood open. Iron grates protected the windows from entry and the heavy faded drapes shifted slightly in the breeze. The ceiling was highand a fan moved slowly. On the walls were paintings, dark and important looking, of naval battles between sailing ships. There was a painting of the Taberna Roja. They were unsigned. An easel stood before one of the windows, a vertical canvas balanced upright. It was an unfinished view of Veracruz through that same window and its grate, with a broad thin swatch of the Gulf of Mexico in the background, and it made Hood feel imprisoned. Double louvered doors opened on a balcony and through the slats he saw the air-conditioning unit and the rain-stained stanchions of the parapet and the wrought-iron spikes arranged in a sunburst pattern to keep intruders out. The room smelled of standing saltwater and rock.

The kitchen was small and neat and sparsely equipped. In the small refrigerator he saw tortillas and fruit juices, eggs and paper-wrapped wares from a
carnicería,
and an open pack of peanut-butter crème cookies. On the counter was a somewhat dated cordless phone, no answering machine.

The hardwood flooring of the hallway creaked. He looked into a bedroom on the left. It was simply furnished with a twin bed and
chest of drawers, a wash basin with a mirror. A world map was tacked to one wall but that was the only decoration. The bed was unmade, with two pillows and the sheets thrown back. A tripod stood in the middle of the room, legs fully extended. There was nothing attached to it. He checked his watch.

The bedroom on the right was the master. Hood walked in and caught the scent of aftershave or cologne, faint and musky. The room was spacious and the shutters were closed and when Hood flipped the switch the lights fluttered on, but they were dim and weak against the evening. He saw the neatly made twin bed and the three stacks of books beside it and the nightstand with more books and a reading light. Hood glanced at the titles and recognized only some of the languages. The bath was small and beautifully tiled. The sink was a hollow oval carved from marble and set upon a limestone counter. Beside it stood a hair brush and a can of shave cream and a swank three-bladed razor and in a tall mug leaned an upright toothbrush. Hood broke off some toilet paper and wiped the razor cartridge and the toothbrush, then folded the paper on itself and pushed it into a pocket. In the wastebasket by the toilet he found a length of dental floss and this he looped into a neat coil and wrapped in toilet paper then put into his pocket also. He looked at his watch: twenty-six minutes to go.

The hallway ended at a stairway leading up. Hood climbed lightly on the stone until he was standing in the open doorway of a large half-story. He smelled the dank stink of birds and heard cooing and across the room saw the tall coop that stretched along one entire wall. The high casement windows over the birds were open for sunshine and ventilation and the waning daylight caught the dust motes. The pigeons studied Hood in their bewildered, one-eye-at-a-time manner. One of them sat atop the coop and Hood saw the canister affixed to its leg.

Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves heavy with volumes. The walls above the shelves were hung with swords and lances, clubs, battle knives, primitive firearms and instruments of torture. There were rusted rings bolted to the wall, laced with chains and shackles.

In one corner was a leather chair and ottoman with a reading lamp on a stand beside them. In the middle of the room stood a banquet-sized rough-hewn table with a laptop computer closed down and material strewn over every other available inch: printed papers, sketches, stacks of yellow legal pads, magazines, compact discs, magnifiers, stacks of maps, cans filled with pencils and pens and scissors. And of course more books in English and Spanish and other languages unrecognized by Hood.

Under the table there were half a dozen wooden orange crates with their trademark colorful labels. Some of the crates housed more weapons and dire instruments, and these looked more Mesoamerican than European—made mostly of stone and wood. Other crates contained yellowed rolls of paper, and others what looked like notebooks and scrapbooks.

He looked down at an old wooden chair on ivory casters and saw that the casters had ground a long shallow trough around the table. It was easy to picture Mike sitting there, rolling about from task to task, now to the computer, now around to the sketch of, well, what exactly was it a sketch of?

He sat down and turned on one of three green-shaded banker’s lamps spaced along the table. He looked down at the sketchpad and saw an accurate and accomplished portrait of a pigeon. Turning the pages he found another and another. The book was filled with them.

A different sketchpad offered variety: more pigeons, then several studies of Owens’s lovely face, and some sketches of the prison at San Juan de Ulúa. Hood closed it and set it down and tried another, which
was filled with drawings of Benjamin Armenta’s Castle. How did Mike manage that? From a visit? From a photo? Through Owens? Some pages were filled with tiny crosshatching patterns that weaved and wavered dizzily. A two-page diptych showed the planets of the solar system on their various orbits around the sun but the sun was a heart tilted at an angle, with the veins and arteries severed short and clean so that it appeared almost round. Hood opened the computer and turned it on and tried passwords based on Mike’s various names and wide interests. All failed.

His toe touched one of the orange crates under the table and looked down at it. The familiar graphics of the old California citrus industry caught his eye. Hood had always liked the bold colors and romanticized scenes of the crate labels. This label was for Queen of the Valley oranges in Valley Center, California. It showed a regal Indian woman holding a large orange, with a fruit-heavy grove and a perfect blue sky behind her. Valley Center, thought Hood: Bradley and Erin’s home. Where he’d first met Suzanne and later her son and his red-haired singer girlfriend.

He rolled closer to the crate, felt the casters following the gentle groove along the floor. The pigeon that was locked out of the coop stood on the mesh roof and looked at him, Hood thought, hopefully. Hood had always been intrigued by the fact that most domesticated birds preferred their cages to freedom. The others fluttered in half-alarm, then settled as he leaned over and pulled the crate closer and lifted another sketchbook from inside.

He opened it at about the halfway point and saw a hasty but identifiable image of Bradley’s Valley Center barnyard and the huge oak tree and the west side of the ranch house. The next page was a closer view of the same barn and tree. Distances between the tree and the house and between the tree and the barn were written in the neat hand of an engineer or architect:
“From center oak trunk to deck
steps of house 68m; from center oak trunk to east barn door 74m.”
Hood skipped forward a few pages to an interior drawing of the barn, depicting the old stalls that Hood had seen with his own eyes years ago, and the new ATVs and the John Deere and the walls of tools and false ceiling and hidden room over the bathroom where Suzanne had once kept the head of Joaquin in a jar of alcohol.

Hood’s heart was beating hard now and he turned the pages faster. There were sketches of the outbuildings on Bradley and Erin’s property, and of the hillsides around it and the creek on its southern border. And sketches of the only gate and the eight-foot-high chain-link fence that stretched up into a rocky escarpment in one direction and terminated at the densely wooded creek in the other. And of the well packed decomposed-granite roadway that led to the buildings. And specific measurements:
“Gate to barnyard .54km; south-southeast fence .93km to escarpment; south-southwest fence .65km to creek NOTE: gate secured with silent alarm (phone line run underground at some expense) but chain-link fence UNSECURED likely due to natural animal activity including Jones’s dogs…”
On another page Hood found a list of dogs by breed and size, twelve in all. Some were sketched on the facing page. Hood recognized the big husky–St. Bernard mix, Call, the unchallenged leader of Bradley and Erin’s pack.
“Dogs kenneled outside unless cold or rain.”
One of the last pages was a study of a wheeled measuring device of the type used by fence builders, leaning against the barn. The artist had taken the time to get the peeling paint and the shadows and the blades of grass. Hood could see small Mike rolling it from the oak tree to the house.

He turned back to the beginning pages and found macroscopic sketches of Southern California, San Diego County, North San Diego County. A simple map or two would have given greater detail and Hood realized that Mike had drawn these pictures because he liked drawing them. They had subtle shadings for mountains and crisply
outlined bodies of water. There was an overview of Valley Center, with S6 running through it and the recommended route to the Jones property highlighted with neat arrows.

Toward the end of the notebook were the details: drawings of each room of the house, rendered in an architect’s fine hand, and dimensions of the rooms and connecting hallways, locations of doors, windows, closets, right down to the his-and-her sinks in the master bath. The alarm pad in the foyer took up half a page, drawn to scale by the look of it, and beneath it was the
“deactivation code”
for the homeowner to use upon entering:
“BOACDM11.”
There was a sketch of an upstairs closet that hid a
“secret hideout,”
and the location of the switch hidden in the closet. The necessary distances and dimensions had been written in by hand, in metric measures. This is a playbook for what happened to Erin McKenna, Hood reasoned—everything, right down to the code that would let someone barge into her house and turn off the alarm and not bring the cavalry charging.