Healing Sands (17 page)

He hoped she'd come back, though. Because unlike “most people,” Ryan Coe risked losing everything if she didn't.

He turned to Olivia and Kyle, who was sitting in a client chair at Olivia's desk. Each of them seemed to be struggling for an appropriate facial expression. Sully parked his hands in his pockets and went over to them.

“So,” he said, “I know I don't have to remind you two that confidentiality applies to things that happen in the lobby.”

Olivia's eyes grew to saucers. “I'm not going to tell anybody. But can I just say I'm glad she won't be coming in here anymore? She's, like, not that nice.”

“Let's not write her off yet,” Sully said. “We'll give her a chance to calm down.”

Kyle was nodding. “I don't think she's done.”

Sully moved toward the hall. “I'm headed out in a few minutes, unless you need me for anything.”

“I'll walk you back,” Kyle said. He leaped from the chair and followed Sully across the lobby. “Do you have dinner plans?” he said. “I found this great place where they serve Ethiopian food.”

“Ethiopian food?” Sully said. “Isn't that an oxymoron?”

“No, man, it's great.”

Sully shook his head, hand on his office doorknob. “Can I take a rain check? I have plans for tonight.”

“I'm going to hold you to that,” Kyle said.

Sully pulled the voice recorder out of his pocket and said into it with a grin, “Have dinner with Kyle. No Ethiopian.”

“What is
that
?” Kyle said.

“It's a tape recorder.”

“How long have you had it? Since the Clinton administration?”

“What's the deal?” Sully said. “It works.”

Kyle shook his head and strolled off down the hall, arms dangling at his sides. For a moment Sully was reminded of himself, ten years younger and surer and worldlier. Funny how life itself made you so much less certain that you knew a dang thing.

Sully had barely pulled a Frappuccino out of the refrigerator on his office patio when he heard a prim tap on the door.

“Come on in, Martha,” he called with more enthusiasm than he actually felt. He wasn't up for another prepared speech outlining Kyle's shortcomings. Despite the confrontations in the break room between the two of them, which Olivia reported regularly, Martha obviously wasn't satisfied. She delivered a version of the outline to him every chance she got.

Martha shook her head when Sully held up his bottled Frap and again when he nodded toward a chair in front of the desk.

She remained standing and flipped open the ubiquitous leather portfolio. “I just wanted to update you on a few things.”

Sully leaned on the front of the desk and propped the bottle between his knees.

“Mr. Hillman has dropped his suit against us,” she said. “Another source reported abuse at his home, and this time CPS found evidence.”

“I hate to hear that,” Sully said. “But that probably works for everybody concerned. Especially the kids on the receiving end of whatever he was dishing out.”

“It doesn't hurt us either.” Martha ran her finger neatly down the page again. “And your instincts about Bob Benitez.”

“Is that Bob the Blabber?” Sully asked.

Martha almost smiled. “Just as you predicted, he's moved on to other things on his blog.”

Sully grinned. “So far you're batting a thousand here, Martha. What else you got?”

The potential smile faded. “I'm still having trouble locating any of the people who complained about Carla Korman. I keep getting disconnected numbers and bounce-back e-mails. I'll continue to work on it. I assume you don't want me to send in the paperwork to have her license revoked without corroborating all of this.”

“Right,” Sully asked.

There was no doubt that Martha had more integrity than any three of your average people put together. He probably ought to sit down with her and Kyle and mediate.

Sully grinned inwardly. Or he could just send Martha out to have Ethiopian food in his place and see what happened.

“That's all I have for now,” she said.

“You've gotten a lot done in a short period of time. I appreciate it.”

He expected the usual professional nod, the modest thank-you, but she lowered her eyes to the front of the portfolio she hugged to her chest as if she were looking for her next cue there. He was going to get the outline after all.

“I know I'm not the avant-garde psychologist you and Kyle are,” she said. “I am willing to learn new techniques, but I think I'll probably always be more traditional.”

She looked at him expectantly. Sully was, for once, clueless.

“Well, I just wanted to put that out there,” she said. “Have a nice evening.”

“You too,” Sully said, though by the time he got it out, she was already closing the door behind her with her usual flawless propriety.

He took a long draw from the Frappuccino. What had just happened? Did he miss something?

Whatever it was, tomorrow was going to have to be soon enough to find out—after he had his own next step behind him. He abandoned the bottle and headed for the door.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
couldn't go straight to Alex's soccer practice after my session. In fact, I couldn't think of a single place I
could
go where someone wouldn't call the cops to report a woman who was looking to commit assault and battery.

Hands still shaking on the wheel, I drove around, nowhere, anywhere, trying to scold my thrashing anger back into its cage. I thought the farther I got from the Healing Choice Clinic the more chance I'd have of regaining control.

But by the time I nosed into downtown Las Cruces in the middle of what they called rush-hour traffic, I was convinced Sullivan Crisp had somehow stripped me of control against my will and was holding it hostage in his yellow room while I rammed around, pounding my fist on my steering wheel and shouting at nobody.

Another surge of rage shot through me, and I had to jerk the Saab to the curb to avoid rear-ending the Harley in front of me. I turned off the ignition and threw the keys onto the floor on the passenger side.

What part of “I just want you to tell me how to control the anger I have every right to feel” didn't he understand? How much clearer could I make it?

Yet even as the ire continued to charge up my backbone, I knew it wouldn't do any good to find another therapist. It was therapy itself that wasn't for me. I'd already thought of all the stuff he said, long before he said it. Except for that psychobabble about my being conflicted between wanting control and resenting having to have it.
What?

I was going to have to navigate this thing myself—go with the only God-image I had—the one that had come back to me more than once since it had first formed in my mind when Alex told me Jake and Miguel were friends. Maybe starting right now was the only way I was going to get myself calmed down.

I rescued the keys from the floor and started to put them back in the ignition when I realized where I was. The Downtown Mall was a block away, three blocks from the scene of the crime. It was either a God-thing or pure chance—and I didn't believe in chance.

The sun slanted late afternoon rays over the low roofs as I hurried across the largely deserted mall. The temperature was only in the low eighties, but I could tell from my shadow that my hair was in sweaty spikes from sitting in the closed car, railing at the world. I was already feeling calmer, though. Having a plan, taking some action—that was the only thing that ever helped me. Not rehashing my marriage to Dan Coe.

I pushed through the glass door that said
Bienvenida!
in gold decal letters, some of which were peeling off. I hadn't noticed that the day I'd charged through there with my camera. A short Hispanic woman led me to a table in a front corner, where I could see everything— from the entrance framed in silk hibiscus and twinkly lights to the swinging kitchen door I had passed through to get to the alley.

I remembered little else about the place. It had been empty that afternoon except for the group of people I'd joined at the back door. I studied the woman who seated me, but I couldn't tell if she was one of them, or if she recognized me.

She brought me a basket of tortilla chips, shiny with grease, and a bowl of salsa with a fiery spiciness that singed my nose hairs from two feet away. I ordered an iced tea and nibbled at a chip.

I hadn't brought my camera in with me, and I felt naked without it. Still, as I tried to look like any hungry customer eager to try out the chimichangas, I collected images automatically:

The large-breasted girl with mocha skin at the cash register who was every bit as pretty as the woman on the Spanish soap opera on the TV above her head.

The family at the next table, parents focusing on their toddlers and forgetting they once had eyes only for each other.

The waiter wearing a long oven mitt up to his armpit, carrying a precarious row of plates heaped with beans and rice and bubbling cheese—his one claim to greatness.

But it was the busboy I framed in my mental lens. Something simmered beneath the skin of his studiedly bored face as he swept abandoned dishes into a plastic tub. It could have been hostility. Anger. Bitter frustration. Whatever it was, it was the thing I had come to see. If this was the life of Miguel Sanchez, it might lead me to what had happened beyond the back doors, in the alley, between two young boys who should right now be kicking a soccer ball back and forth.

My server was back. “You are ready to order?” she said.

“What do you recommend?”

“Everything is good. You like carne asada?”

“Love it,” I said, though I had no idea what it was. “I'll have that.”

She took hold of the menu, but I didn't let go.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't catch your name. I don't like to just say, ‘Hey, you!'”

“I am Vera,” she said.

Vera what?
I wanted to say, but that would have been too pushy even for me. “So, Vera,” I said as I let her have the menu, “is Señora Sanchez working tonight?” And please don't let her be you.

Her eyes clouded. “No. She is not working here anymore.”

“Oh. Because of her son?”

“Yes,” she said with a sigh she seemed to have been holding in for a long time. “Very sad.”

“It is. I'd like to go see her. Does she still live in . . .” I snapped my fingers as if I were trying to remember.

“El Milagro, yes.”

“Right. I can never remember that.”

Her eyes may have narrowed ever so slightly, or it could have been my guilty conscience mirrored there. But when she went off to put my order in, the next part of my plan fell into place.

It was close to 6:00 p.m. by the time Sully located the address Tess had given him.

Even then he drove around the block twice before he pulled into the driveway. She'd said he'd be coming to her office, not a home in a residential neighborhood. He checked his notes once more before he unfolded himself from the Mini Cooper and moved cautiously to the front door. Tess herself appeared in the storm-door glass, eyebrows in a quizzical twist.

“I sent the snipers home for the day,” she said. “It's safe.”

Sully grinned sheepishly. “I wasn't expecting a house.”

She opened the door and nodded him in. “I can't afford office digs, so I freelance from here. You're slumming today.”

He was far from slumming. The room he stepped into was sparsely furnished, but it was obvious every piece had been carefully selected—a basket, a clay jar, a replica of a Native American drum serving as a coffee table. Rich blue pillows on cream couches and chairs gathered on a bamboo mat invited him to join the scene.

“My office is in the back,” Tess said and led him through a sunny dining room.

Sully followed, eyes on the chestnut flow of hair that cascaded past her shoulders. She wore a loose pink sweater over jeans and a pair of straw flip-flops that snapped happily as she eased through the kitchen. Despite the brisk wit he remembered, she seemed softer in the light she'd invited into her home. And prettier.

Tess stopped in the dimly lit room off the kitchen and went straight to a tall desk that housed what had to be a twenty-four-inch computer monitor. A framed certificate hung above it, proclaiming that Tess Lightfoot was certified by the International Association for Identification as a Facial Identification Specialist. The one next to it added that the University of Montana had granted her a degree in forensic anthropology.

Tess patted the back of one of the high stools in front of the desk.

“Have a seat,” she said, “and we'll take a look.”

Sully sat after she did, but a new thought came to him that made him suddenly unwilling to move any further forward with this. Any minute that oversize screen was going to light up with an image of Belinda Cox, and true or not, it was going to throw him from distant memory into the raw reality of what he was about to do. Until now he'd always had the option of cutting his losses and moving on. Once he saw her as she might look today, that choice would be ripped away, no matter what his motive was.

“Are you okay?” Tess said.

Sully tried the default grin. “Could you have found a bigger screen?”

She gave him an appraising look and slid her glasses down from her head. “Any bigger and we'd have to back out of the room. You ready?”

Sully abandoned the grin and nodded.

Tess did some clicking as she talked. “I scanned your photo in, and the software used growth data to predict the structural changes that our subject's face would undergo between age thirty-five, you told me, and her current age, which would be forty-eight. The program re-created the photo for us according to the specifications I gave it, and—here we are.”

The screen filled with a face that beckoned Sully with the same patronizing expression he'd been searching out for a year. But the look came from an older, harder Belinda Cox, whose long, flat nose had lengthened toward thinner lips, whose upper lids had dropped beneath sparser eyebrows. Small, soft pouches had puffed the skin beneath eyes that were now a paler blue, and the pair of vertical lines between them had pinched tighter.