Valley of Bones (19 page)

“Not anything.”

“Everyone has a major. Where did you go to school?”

“Archbishop Curley High.”

“I mean college.”

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Really? But…how come…I mean…”

“How come a dumb-ass high school graduate cop can converse about clinical psych and spout modernist poetry?”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You did, but I don’t take offense. I have smarts but no patience for sitting in a classroom or taking tests. I resent tests. I have a good memory for what I hear, and I’ve picked the brains of a lot of smart people, mainly women. I get books recommended. Sometimes I even read them. I use a dictionary for the big words. You could say that I went to the University of Girl. For example, before this afternoon I didn’t know what Wilcoxon’s signed rank test was, and now I do. But to be
honest, I’m a mile wide and an inch deep. I don’t really know anything, alls I have are these bits and pieces, like one of those birds that collects shiny things, what d’y call ’ems…?”

“Magpies.”

“Magpies, right. And that’s okay in a way because it turns out that knowing a little bit about a lot of stuff is handy if you’re a detective. Because there’s really only one thing I have absolutely got to know.”

“Which is?”

“How to read people,” says Paz and shifts slightly in the water so that he is facing her, with the sun at his back and the dazzle of it coming off the water and forming a bright nimbus about his head.

He says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

She feels a pressure in her chest. An infarct? That Cuban sandwich? She takes a deep breath and another. “Sure,” she says.

“Why do you walk like you do?”

“What do you mean?” she asks, knowing very well.

“All slumped over with your shoulders rolled forward. Is this embarrassing? I mean you didn’t have some kind of tragic childhood disease?”

“No.” Floods of shame.

He slips behind her and puts his hands on her shoulders. His fingers probe, pull, gentle but insistent. “What is this in here, concrete?” he says. “Just relax, okay? Let me do this.” His left arm slides around the front of her and rests just above the line of her breasts and he pulls her into the pressure of his thumb, which now seems to be penetrating her body in a way that is both pleasant and slightly frightening. His hands move to the muscles around her neck. His thumbs press and move an inch, press and move on. It’s not at all sexy, but it’s not clinical either. She has been massaged before but nothing like this. She feels waves in her flesh. Control is slipping away, control she did not really know she was exerting. But now she exerts.

He feels the resistance and stops. She drifts a little away and says, “What was that?”

“Shiatsu. Your ki is blocked up big-time.”

“Thank you.” Coldly. “Did you learn that at the University of Girl?”

“I did.” Now she swims away from him, feeling anger. She is not sure she wants to join that faculty yet. She leaves the water and starts walking back to where they have left their blanket. She feels strange in her body, and at first she thinks it’s only because she’s been floating in salt water for so long, but then realizes that it’s not the usual heaviness and imbalance you get when you leave the support of the sea but its opposite. She feels lighter and more balanced on her feet. She is not slouching as much, her shoulders are back, her breasts seem to have filled with air.

They lie on the blanket at a respectable distance from each other. She has no idea what to say to him now. He is lying back with his eyes closed, a rolled towel behind his head.

“God, I’m really tired,” he says.

She starts to rub sunblock on her skin. “Take a nap,” she says. “Would you like me to put the handcuffs on you?”

“You’ve been dying to ask, right?”

“Busted.”

“The reason is because I’m a somnambulist.” He tells her about the egg-woman nightmare and his wanderings.

“Interesting. You’re being told that anonymous sex with eggheads is a room with no outlet. A closed hell.”

He laughs and says, “So no more sex with eggheads is the prescription for restful nights?”

“Oh, I think eggheads are fine. It’s the anonymity you have to watch.” Their eyes meet now and there is a silence that becomes uncomfortable. She looks away first.

“Have you tried pills?”

“No. Pills won’t help. What it is, to tell you the truth, I was sort of knocked out of the real world for a while. And some of that other…stuff stuck to me.”

“You mean that voodoo business?” Her eyes go to the thing around his neck.

“That voodoo business, yes.”

“But you don’t really, I mean
really,
believe in all that.”

His eyes open and his stare is flat and baleful. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. But I’m not as ready to call it bullshit as I used to be. And I got news for you: Our girl Emmylou in your nuthouse, she’s been there too. I can always tell.”

His eyes close again. A small cloud covers the sun now, and a little chill wind like a wraith speeds along the beach. She feels a shiver pucker her skin.

By the time she finishes with the sunblock, Paz is breathing deeply, fast asleep. She is actually glad about this, as she needs time to think. Lorna does not care much for violent amusement park rides, but she has been on a few, and this is what it feels like when the roller coaster is towing the car up the first steep slope: anticipation, and the desire to flee, and the expectation of the screaming rush of descent. She works on her breathing.

She lies back and turns her face toward him. His skin is four inches from her mouth and out of nowhere comes an intense desire to lick it, and the thought that it will taste like caramel. Now she actually smells caramel coming off him. Synesthesia? No thank you! She sits up, astounded, and says stern things to herself. It’s ludicrous, she hardly knows the man, and with all those other girls, probably has three or four on the string right now, she absolutely does not need this after Rat Howie….

As if propelled by something other than her mind she jumps to her feet and goes to the water’s edge. She looks out at the cut. There is a large white cabin cruiser moving slowly across her field of view. There is a man on the rear deck. He wears a ball cap, and now he removes it and wipes his face with a bandanna. He is very pale and his hair is flaming red. He replaces the hat and raises something black to his face, a long tube of some kind. A telephoto lens, she can see the glint of the glass as he trains it in various directions. He is at it for an oddly long time. She looks around to see if there is any spectacular wildlife
behind her, but there is nothing but mangroves and pines and a few gulls. The red-haired man turns to whoever is running the boat, and in the next moment the engine roars as the boat shoots away. It does not occur to her then that he has been photographing her and Paz and Paz’s boat, because why would anyone want to do that?

All that morning long the Prussian General von Steinmetz sent waves of young soldiers up the steep ravine of the Mance, where they were cut down in droves by the rifles of the French. Walking wounded began arriving at Bois Fleury shortly after Marie-Ange had settled the stricken peasants in her own bedroom, and when she saw these wretched men and realized that there would be many more in the same state or worse, she sprang into action with her characteristic energy and resolve. Marshaling the household servants and the farm workers, she had the carpets rolled, the furniture moved, lamps and candles arrayed, and pallets made of straw and the linen of the château. Maids were set to turning tablecloths and napkins into bandages. In short order, the German regimental surgeons learned what she was doing and set up their dressing stations in the grand ballroom.

Having seen to everything at the château, and having placed her steward in charge, the intrepid girl assembled some farmhands and wagons and made for the battlefield itself. There she directed the gathering of the helpless wounded onto carts and sending them back to Bois Fleury. She herself crawled through the thickets by the banks of the Mance to find wounded men caught there and then commanded terrified laborers and the few soldiers not engaged in the fighting to help drag them out while shells exploded and bullets snapped through the branches. By late afternoon, she had donned a cook’s apron and wound a large white damask napkin cloth around her head, but besides that she remained in the clothes she had put on that morning, under the cavalry cloak. Her house slippers were by then cut to rags and filthy, and a Prussian officer made her put on ammunition boots taken from the body of a French drummer boy. Those who recalled that dreadful day later described Marie-Ange as being everywhere at once, comforting the sick, collecting the wounded, lashing her people to greater efforts. Here she showed for the first time the remarkable powers of organization that would serve her well in later life. One Prussian officer reportedly remarked that “had this girl been our general instead of that old lunatic Steinmetz, half these poor devils would be walking still.”

Toward the end of the battle, the Prussians brought their heavy guns to bear and
blew the French lines to pieces, after which the stream of wounded pouring into Bois Fleury were French and not German. Of course, these were cared for equally with their enemies, and dying men of both nations had as their last earthly vision the sight of a young girl’s face, full of compassion, framed by a white headdress spattered with blood and a white cook’s apron. Thus was born in the ranks of both armies the legend of the Angel of Gravelotte.

—FROM
FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST,
BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.

P
AZ GOT HIS
shield back a week after the shooting, not a record for a shooting panel, but still pretty fast. Paz detected the hand of Major Oliphant in this and wondered whether he finally had a rabbi in the department, also whether he liked this or not. Lieutenant Posada, from whom he collected his shield and his service weapon that morning, was his usual morose self. He slid the items across his desk with the élan of a convenience-store clerk delivering a package of chewing gum, together with the information that the major wants to see you. Paz had never done a bad deed to Posada and didn’t know why the head of the assault and homicide unit disliked him. It could have been mere race prejudice, or the natural enmity of some dull people for some smart ones, or something more political. It did not keep Paz up nights. Tito Morales was standing in the squad bay when Paz left Posada’s office, and he got a thumbs-up and a grin from his partner, but not from any of the other detectives.

Oliphant poured him a ritual cup of coffee and sat him in a comfortable side chair. Paz noted that his cup was marked with the seal of the FBI Academy at Quantico; perhaps meaningful, perhaps not.

After the shortest possible interval of pleasantries, Oliphant said, “So, does it connect up?”

Paz was pleased with the shorthand. His old partner used to do that too, jump over the details and express the thought that two
equally smart cops ought to have been thinking at a particular juncture. Cletis would say stuff like “Where was the key?” and Paz would almost always know what key and where the key should have been, even though no one had mentioned a key before. He said, “It has to, sir. Dodo Cortez got no business burglarizing a South Miami home with a gun in his pants. He was a shooter, basically, and more than that, he worked for Ignacio Hoffmann, who also employed our suspect’s current employer, Jack Wilson.”

“Hoffmann?”

Paz recalled that Oliphant was still with the Bureau when Ignacio had his non-day in court, so he explained who Ignacio Hoffmann was, the dope running, the bail jumping.

“Interesting,” said Oliphant, “but of course I wasn’t thinking of that aspect.”

“No, it’s an extra. The real connection is between our original killing and someone burglarizing the home of Emmylou Dideroff’s psychologist. So I’m thinking, what’s the prize? Why kill a guy, why burglarize a shrink? The answer has to be information. Someone wants to know something they think our suspect knows and they’re willing to use violence to get it.”

“You’re saying they pressured the victim to tell something, it went too far and they killed him?”

“Maybe, but I have a feeling al-Muwalid was a rival for the same information. I’ve gone over my notes and talked to my partner and I think we had him wrong. He was hiring muscle around town and we assumed that he wanted to protect himself. What if he was hiring them to look for Emmylou? The oil guy he met, Zubrom, actually told us he was looking for someone, and I ignored it because I was only thinking about danger
to
Muwalid, not that he might be a danger to someone else. I mean,
he
was the one who got whacked. So the odds are that whoever killed Muwalid sent Dodo Cortez to find whatever it was Emmylou might have told her therapist.”

“I thought this Dideroff woman killed Muwalid.”

“That’s the official position.”

“But you no longer believe it.”

“I’m not sure what I believe, Major. It all depends on who Emmylou D. really is. People think she knows something, but does she know she knows it? Is she a player playing cagey? Or is she a victim?”

“What does she say in that confession she’s writing?”

“Not much. A lot of childhood memories and religion. We’re awaiting the later installments.”

Oliphant swiveled for a moment and sipped thoughtfully from his own FBI mug. “It doesn’t work.”

“I know,” Paz admitted. “The hole in it is that if they thought Emmylou knew something, why didn’t they just snatch her up and put the irons to her? Why all this rigmarole with framing her for Muwalid and going after the confession? Well, one possibility is she doesn’t know what she knows. She’s already been tortured once. Maybe that was their first shot at trying to get it.”

“Tortured?”

“Yeah, the docs say she’s got recent dislocations in both shoulders and whipping scars on her back and soles of her feet. Burns too. So maybe they think that in a situation she feels is safe, with a therapist who’s got no interest in any secrets, she’ll let something slip.”

“It’s plausible,” said Oliphant. “Barely. So…next move?”

Paz had prepared for this question, of course, and he answered fluently, although with more confidence than he actually felt. Since the early passages of this affair he had caught glimpses of a brewing chaos, weirdness, conspiracy in high places, international crap, the stench of Africa again. It was important to have a tale to cling to, as children do, and now he spun it out.

“Basic fact: Emmylou Dideroff, if she acted at all didn’t act alone…”

“Because of the missing cell phone.”

“Right. There’s no cell phone. Next fact: my partner talked to the late Dodo’s associates. About a week before the murder Dodo got a phone call that excited him. Apparently Dodo has not had an organizational home since the Hoffmann gang went down, but now he’s
talking about steady work. He was seen a couple of times by two different people getting into and out of a silver Lexus with a big Anglo guy at the wheel, always at night. According to the regulars at the lounge he hung out in, Dodo’s talking big, he’s got more money to spend.”

“You’re starting to like him for the hit on the Arab.”

“And Jack Wilson, who drives a silver Lexus. Look, Wilson knew that Emmylou was in the vicinity of a particular machine shop at a particular time, because he sent her there. There’s a phone booth across the street from this machine shop. We know that Muwalid got a cell phone call in Zubrom’s office and he took off like a bullet after it. Maybe the call said something like we have your information, go to such and such phone booth and wait. That second call both shows him to Emmylou and sets up a meet in his hotel room. He goes there, followed by Emmylou. Emmylou parks the car and begins her search for Muwalid’s room. But Cortez already knows the room. He picks up the connecting rod from Emmylou’s truck, goes to Muwalid’s room, kills him, dumps him over, and leaves. Emmylou arrives and is waiting like a patsy when we walk in.”

“Or Emmylou and Wilson are in it together. Maybe she fingered Muwalid for Dodo.”

“Then why wouldn’t she take off?” Paz asked. “Why was she waiting there praying, or whatever?”

“A deeper game? She wanted to be locked up in a nuthouse for some reason?”

“That’s pretty deep. Although, given that it’s Emmylou, we can’t rule it out.”

“Get more facts,” said Oliphant.

“Fine. The main fact I need is, do you know anything about the guy who owns her houseboat, David Packer, the man of mystery?”

“Why would you think that?” A little glaring here, which Paz ignored.

“Because you were with the feds and the feds are involved in this in some way, unless you think it’s a coincidence that the guy who
rented Emmylou her domicile has got the State Department covering up for him when a cop calls for information. I got the sense that there are calls whizzing back and forth between that phone there on your desk and Washington, D.C., and there’s a bunch of you watching me to see what I’ll turn up, like a bunch of kids watching an ant on a sidewalk, maybe poke it with a stick once in a while. Because if that’s the case then, with all due respect, sir, fuck it.”

They played eye games then for what seemed like a long while to Paz. He had been thinking about this aspect of the case, the week off duty had given him plenty of time to think, and about what Oliphant had said the last time they’d discussed it, and how unsatisfactory it had been even then. He had called David Packer a dozen times during that week and got his answering machine and left a message, but had not been called back. No big deal, it was not a crime to leave town, but still….

“Not whizzing,” said Oliphant, “I wouldn’t say whizzing. But I’ve gotten some calls. And made a few. And the fact is that you’re going to have to let me be the judge of what I can and can’t tell you, and the reason for that is that people I respect are feeding me information that they’ve got no legal right to release to me, they’re putting their jobs and pensions on the line.”

Oliphant leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands across his midsection, which to Paz looked about as soft as a steel-belted radial. “Let’s talk a little more about the intersection between national security and the work of the FBI. We’re interested in bad guys in that area just like we are in O.C., mail fraud, computer crime, and so on, and obviously the best way to penetrate the bad guys is to turn a bad guy. That’s how we got the Klan and the mob. Not so easy with terrorists, because the kind of terrorists we’re mainly interested in nowadays are pretty impenetrable by your average FBI-type person. So we look on the periphery. Terror cells need services like any other organized body. They need false IDs, they need money moved, they need transport and weapons and ammo. And there are, naturally, all-American scumbags who will supply this stuff for a price.”

“So you penetrate the scumbags.”

“We do. But you can see the problem. In order for your penetratee to work effectively, he has to continue with his scumbaggery, for which he now has effective immunity, because he’s been doubled. He keeps selling, let’s say, fake IDs, and even though he lets us know what he’s doing, we are still not going to pick up all the evildoers he’s selling to, because these guys are not dumb, they can figure out that if everybody who bought bad paper from old Charlie got busted, there must be something funny going on with old Charlie. And there you have the great conundrum: you’re licensing guys to commit criminal acts, in the hope that you can prevent even greater criminal acts. It’s inherently corrupting. Inherently.”

“So what do you do?”

“Well, it depends on whether you believe in our system,” said Oliphant. “If you believe that justice under law is essentially weak, then you’ll bend the law until it breaks. You’ll have killers and rapists and every kind of human garbage on the payroll of the United States. And you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. If you believe that justice under law is inherently strong, then you won’t license criminals. You might use them or squeeze them but you won’t fucking protect their criminal acts. And the result of this is that you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. Will you have more victims? Unclear. I tend to doubt it. You can stop ninety-nine percent of terror attempts just by taking your thumb out of your ass, like we could’ve stopped nine-eleven if we hadn’t been having turf wars and snoozing in our deck chairs. The rest of it is like lightning strikes or traffic fatalities, it’s part of life in any open society, get used to it, not that the attorney general is ever going to get up on the TV and say that. But if you play it straight, at least you won’t have blowback, you won’t have impunity, you won’t have the corruption of law enforcement.”

“This is why you left the Bureau,” said Paz; a statement, not a question.

Oliphant shot a hard look over, but Paz met it, and after a bit the
man nodded. They were in a new country now. “A guy in New Jersey snuffed a teenager he was fucking and we gave him a pass because he was buying air tickets for some al-Qaeda types. Maybe coulda-been al-Qaeda types, I mean they didn’t even fucking know! This was a high-level decision, by the way.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Very high. I thought of blowing the whistle, but I decided that at the end of the day…at the end of the day I’m not a whistle-blower, not that I couldn’t respect someone who was, but it wasn’t me. So I handed in my papers instead. My sad story, now you know, and if I hear it from anyone else, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your career guarding the concession stand at the Orange Bowl.”

A long uncomfortable silence followed this remark. “And yes, I am a fucking fanatic on this issue. And why?” Here he pointed to his face. “This. People like you and me, the law is all we got going for us. Corrupt as it is, unjust as it is, without the law we’d both still be chopping cotton.”

“Chopping sugarcane in my case,” said Paz.

“Chopping whatever, but not in a suit and tie in a nice office, with authority over white folks. No fucking way.”

“That was very inspiring, boss.”

“Fuck you, Paz,” said Oliphant without ill-humor. “I wasn’t trying to inspire you, I was trying to illustrate why I’ve been getting phone calls from pissed-off guys.”

Paz didn’t budge. “So who in the federal government is hiring bad actors? No, let me guess. David Packer?”

“The name came up. He was in Sudan, I hear. He was employed by SRPU. And now he’s here. And you are not to fuck with him.”

“Why not?”

Oliphant’s face took on a harder expression. “Two reasons. One is that I just told you not to and I’m the fucking commander of this organization. The other is if Packer yells to the people he reports to, all kinds of shit is going to hit the fan, and the helpful calls from Washington will dry up, and a big chunk of federal law enforcement will stop hunting bad guys and start looking for who leaked it. So follow
up on Wilson, follow up on Cortez and your suspect. Find out who killed Muwalid and why. That’s your job. Go do it.”

It was a dismissal. Paz got up and left and flagged Morales from his desk in the squad bay. Out in the parking lot, Morales asked, “What did the major have to say?”

“He said you’re looking sharper since you got some decent suits. He likes the Fendi.”

“Really.”

Paz told him really. Morales said, “Holy shit.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Paz, getting into an unmarked Chevrolet. “Let’s go see what Jack Wilson has to say for himself.”

But when they arrived at Wilson Brothers Marine they found not Jack but a smaller, stouter version, who greeted them at the door to the shop with an air of relief.

“That was fast,” he said. “I just called it in a couple of hours ago.”