Blinded (25 page)

Want to know dead? Dead is the downtown of any major midwestern American city on the eve of Thanksgiving Day.

If the whole center of Indianapolis erupted in a spontaneous conflagration and burned to the ground that night, it would have to be considered a cremation, not a fire; that’s how dead it was downtown.

If there were twenty people in downtown Indianapolis that evening, I somehow managed to miss fifteen of them. Even the faux-homeless guy with my money up his sleeve had packed up and gone somewhere for the night. Probably a suite in a fine hotel.

The clerk manning the desk at the motel where I was staying was a Sikh with a turban and an accent that made me smile. He suggested I try to find something to eat at the Marriott over by the RCA Dome. “Go there. They have to be open” was the precise nature of his melodic culinary recommendation. If he ever decided to change careers and shun all the opportunities available in the motel desk clerk business, I thought he had a promising future with Zagat.

I walked over to the Marriott, found an open restaurant inside, and got a table and a menu. A waitress wasted no time in ambling over and smiling a sincere midwestern smile. She asked, “You from out of town?”

I looked up and made good eye contact with her. “What, you get locals here? Like ever?”

She laughed.

“Didn’t think so.”

“Let me guess,” she said. “I’m bored, okay. It’s a slow day. Do you mind? I’m pretty good at this. Not as good as Wendy. She’s like a champion, but she’s off through Sunday. I’d say you’re from Wisconsin. Maybe… Michigan-but northern Michigan, like Traverse City.”

“Not bad, Christy.” Her name was written in capital letters on a plastic tag above her ample left breast. “Born and raised in Minnesota. But I’ve been in Colorado for a while now.”

She snapped her fingers. “That’s what threw me. The Colorado part.” She said “ColoRADo,” emphasizing the penultimate syllable in a way that made me want to grate my teeth.

Behind her a woman stood in the restaurant’s entrance craning her neck this way and that. I figured she was checking the room for her husband, or her date, or her girlfriend. I nodded in the direction of the foyer. “There’s somebody over there who needs your help. I’ll be ready to order in a minute, I promise. I’d love a beer when you get a second.”

“What kind?”

“Surprise me.” I’d already managed to forget that alcohol was on my post-MI do-not-consume list. Truth is, it wouldn’t have made any difference had I remembered.

“You’re nice,” she told me.

“Nah, I’m not really,” I said.

I could tell she didn’t believe me. A bad judgment on her part. I had no doubt that if I had a beer with Christy, the first thing I’d learn from her was that all her boyfriends had been assholes.

Growing up, my family always had soup the night before Thanksgiving. It was part of our tradition. My mother, bless her heart, could throw together a big pot of soup faster than I could say, “What’s for supper?” She considered soup a light meal that was appropriate in anticipation of the richness of the coming holiday feast. But Mom’s soups were never really light-she wasn’t a consommé kind of gal. Her soup was always something thick and chunky, hearty with sausage and white beans or kidney beans and plenty of rich cheese.

I endured a moment of sadness as I realized that all the love she’d put in her soups was now coating my arteries like spackling on a wall.

I’d returned my attention to the menu, looking for some soup not too much like my mom’s, when I felt the waitress approach again.

“Almost ready,” I said. “How’s the minestrone? Come from a can?”

She didn’t reply. I looked up.

The woman from the doorway stood with a hand on the top of the other chair at my table.

“May I?” she asked.

She was pretty. Well dressed. Polite. And tall. I was bumping into a run of tall women on my road trip. I thought of the Wolf sisters and the turducken that was about to begin roasting in their slow Georgia oven, and I lamented that not a single bite would cross my lips the next day.

I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times like I was some old fool who just realized he hadn’t remembered to replace his dentures, before I said, “Actually, I’m fine all by myself, thanks.”

She pulled back the chair and sat down.

Christy the waitress had a fresh place setting in front of her within seconds.

I stared. The pieces of the puzzle floated in front of my eyes. But they didn’t come together.

My uninvited guest said, “You’re having the minestrone?”

Two weeks ago I would have sent her packing. Two weeks ago I thought I had a healthy heart and a marriage that would survive until Christmas. Two weeks ago I wasn’t sitting alone in a restaurant in a faceless Marriott in Indianapolis. Two weeks ago I hadn’t met Gibbs Storey, and I’d never heard of a turducken.

“Have a seat, why don’t you?”

“You don’t know who I am, do you?” she said.

I hated questions like that-questions that taunted with I-know-something-you-don’t-know. I reconsidered my decision not to send the woman packing. To buy some time to contemplate, I answered her first question. It had been more civil than the second. I said, “I like minestrone.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Carmen Reynoso.”

I made a little
ptttt
sound with my lips. The sound was part of my recognition that I hadn’t made her as a cop. That troubled me. I thought I could make a cop in the fog with plugs in my ears and my hands tied behind my back. I didn’t shake Reynoso’s outstretched hand. Nothing personal to her; it wasn’t one of my things.

The waitress brought my beer.

Detective Reynoso said, “I’ll have one of those, too, please.”

“You here looking for Julie Franconia?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was my way of letting Reynoso know that I wasn’t a complete dummy. I added, “The case is closed. Body was found south of here near Martinsville. Looks like your boy Sterling did it. If you get up and hurry over to the airport, I bet you can be home in sunny southern California in time for your turkey.”

She nodded, so I thought she was going to agree with me. But she didn’t. She said, “Actually, I’m here looking for you.”

“Did I do something… particular… to interest the Laguna Beach PD?” I was thinking maybe surfing without a permit, or illegally parking my Range Rover, but I didn’t say it out loud.

Once, after Alan observed me talking to a citizen about a crime I thought she might have committed, he complimented me on my interrogation technique. I said something to change the subject, which he ignored. He ended up going on and on the way he does sometimes, and told me that where conversation was concerned, I was good at making repetitive move ones, not falling into the trap of making reactive move twos. He said it served me well.

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

He, of course, explained it all to me. His lecture boiled down to this: In order to maintain control of a conversation, psychologically speaking, a person needs to make repeated assertive moves, not merely reactive moves. If someone says, “How are you?” the other person doesn’t need to respond, “Fine,” the other person can say, “Where were you last night at eleven?” He said I was good at that, at keeping control of conversations, at not making move twos.

I’d never thought about the linguistic structure of it all before. But he was right. I am good at that. It isn’t tactical on my part. I just don’t like feeling that somebody else is running the show.

It turned out that Carmen Reynoso was good at that, too. She ignored my sarcastic question about why the Laguna Beach Police Department might be interested in finding me. Instead she chose a fresh move one. She said, “I came looking for you because people say you’re good.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes people are right.” That, by the way, was a classic move two on my part, which meant that Reynoso was firmly in control of this conversation.

It was okay with me for the moment. I was confident I could take back the wheel whenever I felt like it.

She said, “We’re the only two people I know who believe that Sterling Storey is actually still alive.”

“How do you know what I believe?”

“I’m a detective.”

She didn’t yield an inch of territory. I smelled Lucy. “My partner told you I was here?”

She smiled for the first time. Her lips were sealed during the entire grin. I was thinking she didn’t like her teeth. Yellow or crooked? I guessed crooked, then instantly reconsidered my conclusion. Maybe she was a smoker. I sniffed at the air, didn’t detect anything foul that wasn’t coming from the kitchen. Still, she struck me as someone who’d maybe once smoked.

She said, “I’m picky about revealing my sources.”

“You mean your snitches? What do you want with me, Detective Reynoso?”

“You Catholic?”

“I thought you were a detective. You should already know the answer to that.” I wasn’t sure whether my response had been a move one or a move two. But I thought it was pretty clever.

“I am. I’m Catholic. My father considers St. Peter’s-you know, in Rome-the holiest place in the world. Notre Dame-the university, not the cathedral in Paris-comes in a close second. In my family Saturday afternoons in the fall are just as holy as Sunday mornings. Fighting Irish football? Anyway, this is a roundabout way of wondering if you’ll accompany me up to South Bend.”

I’m not Catholic. To the contrary, I hate Notre Dame University with the same kind of passion that heretics despised the Inquisition. Why? Lots of reasons. But mostly because Notre Dame stole Lou Holtz from the University of Minnesota.

Some things aren’t forgivable. But I’d learned over the years that it wasn’t a safe area of discourse with Notre Dame fanatics, who tend to be about as rational about their beloved Fighting Irish as the real fighting Irish are about the British, so I kept my enmity to myself.

“Why?” I asked. My resolve about not revisiting the Coach Lou hijacking was weakening already; I was sorely tempted to go into my well-practiced Notre Dame harangue.

“If Sterling’s alive, I think that’s where we’ll find him.”

I left half my beer on the table. She left slightly less of hers. I never got a chance to taste the minestrone, but I suspected that it wouldn’t have satisfied like my mom’s bratwurst and cheese soup with ale. As Reynoso and I were walking out of the Marriott, I said, “There are three, by the way.”

“Three what?”

“People who think Sterling’s alive. His wife does, too.”

I had to hustle to keep up with her long strides. “Actually,” she said, “that would make four.”

“Four?”

“I’m thinking Brian Miles.”

Sterling’s pal in Georgia. Smart lady. I said, “Gotcha.”

Two more steps. “Gibbs is a piece of work,” she added.

To that, I thought,
Amen.

I was going to South Bend. That was the bad news. The good news? Carmen Reynoso had rescued me from my impulse to drive even farther north to Minnesota. Every objective part of my brain was telling me that the trip to see my family would have been a bad thing to do.

How did Reynoso convince me that going to Notre Dame with her on Thanksgiving was the right thing to do?

The Crime Stoppers tipster in Colorado had called again. People who listened to both tapes thought it was the same guy as the first call. This time he’d told the volunteer who’d answered the phone that if Sterling Storey had happened to survive his swim in the swollen Ochlockonee River, he might be going after another victim, a woman he may have been planning to kill all along. The tipster suggested that the next victim would be found in one of three towns: South Bend, Indiana, Flushing Meadows, New York, or Daytona Beach, Florida. The tip also revealed that the South Bend woman worked in the Sports Information Office at Notre Dame. Reynoso had already done the footwork necessary to identify her. There was only one woman on the Sports Information Office staff who fit the correct profile: twenty-five to thirty-five, pretty enough to turn heads, a widow.

“Why you focused on that one? She’s the only one at risk?” I asked.

“There’re two other women on the list. The one in New York does advance work for the women’s tennis tour. But we think she’s in Australia at the moment setting up a tournament, so we’re not as concerned about her. The other woman has something to do with Daytona Beach, Florida-maybe the car race-but so far we don’t know enough to figure out who she is. So I’m here.”

“The South Bend woman, what’s her name?”

“Holly Malone. Good Irish girl.”

I asked the obvious. “Isn’t it likely the tipster’s a crank?”

“He got the others right, didn’t he? The other three homicides after the one in Laguna?”

“Still.”

“Let’s be real. You doing anything else for the holiday, Sam?”

It was the first time she’d called me by my first name.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Me, neither,” she said.

“Why,” I asked, “doesn’t the South Bend PD take care of this?”

Reynoso was in the passenger seat of my Cherokee. We’d backtracked and dumped her rental car back at some no-name agency at the airport and had started driving north. Unless we got seriously distracted, we’d be in the hometown of the Fighting Irish just before we arrived at the Michigan state line.

Reynoso answered my question. “I called the local cops when I was still in Georgia, explained the situation real politely, and I requested some assistance. Hold on-let me try and get this next part exactly right.”

She took a moment to collect her thoughts, and then she adopted an accent that was part something and part something else. I wasn’t good with accents. It was one of my few liabilities as a peace officer.

“ ‘Ma’am,’ ” she said in character, then went back to her everyday voice and explained that “the detective I spoke with in South Bend called me ‘ma’am.’ I always find that improves my mood considerably, being called ‘ma’am.’ ” She resumed her soliloquy with “ ‘Ma’am, you want us to go out and protect a woman from a killer who’s already been declared dead by the Georgia authorities? You actually do that sort of thing regularly in southern California? Up here we don’t get a whole lot of spirit homicides. We actually haven’t had a good ghost killing in, dear Lord, aeons. And my memory is that the last one we did have got the death penalty. Well, we hanged him. Recall we had the darnedest time finding a good place for the rope. It got all tangled up in the sheets. But we managed.’ ”