The Replacements (9 page)

“Brilliant observation,” said Mary. She smiled again at Mack, and this time I read the look. Her eyes said she possessed a desire she couldn't have. Mack had turned her down recently and she still felt the rejection. That wasn't like Mack, to bypass a pretty woman. Something was going on with him.

Willard, the rat man, said, “Don't go away mad, just go away.”

Outside the motel room, we moved down the walk a few doors to Room 136. Mack took out a key and handed it to me. “This is you.”

I took it and opened the door.

He said, “You have two hours, then I'll be back to pick up your happy ass.”

I needed to know what was going on but was too tired to argue. I went in, closed the door, and fell on the bed.

Two minutes later I woke to pounding. I got up and stomped to the door. That sorry son of a bitch. Why did he have to play these silly, childish games? I opened the door to bright morning light and brought my arm up to shield it. John Mack shoved his way in. “I said two hours. That meant you were to be up, showered, and ready to go. I gave you an extra hour and this is the way you treat me?”

“Good morning to you too. Any contact yet?”

“No, I'll go get some coffee and doughnuts, you hop in the shower.” He turned to leave.

“Hey,” I said. He stopped.

“How come the FBI doesn't just set up another camera in this parking lot to watch their cars?”

Mack smiled. “And that's all you got after three hours of quiet time thinking about this case? I thought the great Bruno Johnson would have this thing solved by now.”

I waited for the right answer.

“Okay, their boss is a real ballbuster and two agents on the team are off the grid, while the others cover their shifts. They're out there trying to track down their stuff so they won't have to formally report it to the ballbuster. Back in the day, you and I would have done the same thing. These guys aren't like the regular FBI. They're okay.”

“You go get the coffee. I'll think on our case in the shower and have it solved by the time you get back.”

He laughed. “You have any cash?”

“Come on?”

“No, really, I'm a little tapped out until next payday.”

I pulled out a money clip, peeled off three twenties, and handed it to him.

He handed back two twenties. “No man, I said coffee, not the buffet at the Hilton.”

Thirty-five minutes later, we rolled out of the parking lot in the T-Bird and onto Valley Boulevard. I opened the cup of coffee and sipped it. Mack handed me a paper bag. He'd picked
up four Sno Balls. When I saw them, my stomach gave a little lurch. I needed some protein, not more sugar. “Can you drive through someplace and get me something healthy, like a fried egg sandwich with some of those deep-fried hash browns?”

I might as well live it up. When I returned to San José, Costa Rica, Marie would put me back on vegetables and fish.

Mack held up a Sno Ball. “You had these last night, I thought you liked 'em.”

“Get back on the freeway and head east to Yucca Valley.”

Mack shrugged. With his free hand, he tore open the Sno Balls and stuck half of one in his mouth and mumbled, “This one of those leads we're going to track down?”

I nodded. From Valley he turned south on Citrus and pulled into an independent taco place called Albertos. “This okay?”

Ten minutes later we hit the freeway, with the fat “kitchen sink” burrito in both hands. The beast had everything but the kitchen sink in it, double wrapped in tortillas, and large enough for two men and a boy. I took the first bite, closed my eyes, and savored the warm greasy taste.

I hadn't noticed the heat the day before. This was summer in SoCal and, at seven in the morning, the warm air blew in the open windows. In less than twenty minutes' time, we reached Whitewater, where windmills, scattered for miles across desert hilltops, rotated slowly in a warm, lazy breeze. I could only finish off a third of the burrito before my stomach surrendered. Too bad—the greasy food tasted fantastic and was now determined to make me sleepy. “Okay,” I said, “tell me about this Karl Drago thing.”

Mack shook his head. “First, tell me where we're goin'. Why Yucca Valley?”

“Barbara told me the suspect was Jonas Mabry.”

“Yeah, we know that already, and we can't find him. You know where he is? Is he in Yucca Valley?”

“How do you guys know it's Mabry? Did you get confirmation on the note? How do you know for sure?”

“You're not going to answer any of my questions, are you?”

We were both alpha dominants vying for who would be in control of this little two-man operation, a game neither of us would win. The last time we'd worked together, I'd been in custody and in handcuffs as he drove us around searching for the murderer Ruben the Cuban. The circumstances differed this time. I waited for him to give in.

He finally smiled. “Both girls were snatched right out of their homes without one iota of evidence left behind. Nothing.

“Before the crime was discovered, and right after it happened, an LASO deputy made a car stop on a green Ford Escort a few blocks from the location. The driver handed the deputy ID in the name of Alex Jessups, City of Industry. A residence not all that far away from where Jessups was stopped. The car was immaculate, without one mechanical violation. The deputy filled out a field interrogation card and sent Jessups on his way. At the time, no one put it together. Later, after we got the traffic cam photo from the Montclair snatch, we figured Elena Cortez was in the trunk when the stop had been made.

“With Sandy Williams, the City of Montclair has a state-of-the-art traffic control system with cameras at every intersection. Three blocks from Sandy's house, at Central and Buena Vista, we got lucky. The cam caught the same green Escort. They isolated and enhanced the driver. They entered the photo in the facial recognition system and didn't get a hit. Then they tried it the old way and made copies and sent them around to every law enforcement agency. A parole agent in El Monte recognized Jonas Mabry.”

Every time someone said that name it took a little chunk out of me. Could I have saved these two little girls all this hardship had I merely acted like a big brother to Jonas Mabry all those years ago? “He's on parole?” I didn't need to ask.

“Yeah, twenty-five years old and he's been to the joint twice. First time for two-to-four, out in four. The second time he got the aggravated term five-to-ten. He did seven.”

My throat turned dry and made speaking difficult. “What for? What did he do his time for?”

“Violence. Four cases, the first two he was given probation. First incident, age twelve, he stabbed his foster father with a screwdriver he'd sharpened for just that purpose. Got his foster father five times quick, before the father turned around and clocked him, knocked little Jonas out.”

“Do you have the file?”

“Sure, a copy's on the backseat.”

“Why didn't you say so?”

“Take it easy, big fella. Sounds like you haven't had enough sleep.”

“Sorry.” I reached in the backseat and found a fat manila folder under a blue windbreaker. I pulled it up front and set it on my lap.

Before I opened it and got started, I needed to call Marie. I needed to hear her voice.

Mack said, “I doubt if you're going to find anything in there. A dozen detectives from three agencies have been through it, and every possible lead was run down. Now, you going to tell me why we're going to Yucca Valley?”

“Jonas Mabry's father lives out there.”

Mack veered across two lanes, going over the painted divider to make the off ramp.

“What are you doing?”

“Old man Mabry's dead. It's in the file.”

We sat on the off ramp as cars zipped by. The file on my lap resembled a murder book in a homicide investigation, but this one was for the kidnappings. All the supplemental reports to the investigation had been added, updated, and, within the last twelve hours, collated and indexed. I flipped to the tab marked “Jonas Mabry.”

I read while Mack talked. “Mark Wayne, a box boy at the Mayfair Market, discovered Micah Mabry dead behind the wheel in the grocery store's parking lot in Montclair.

“Micah had dropped out of society and had been invisible for years. We couldn't find any property in his name, he didn't have a driver's license, no history in Social Security, which means he did not have a legal job. Nothing. A ghost.”

It happened that way with folks who witnessed something so heinous that their minds can't comprehend life's complex and sometimes violent ways. He'd merely retracted from life, pulled away, and lived on the fringe of society.

“What now, oh great Carnac?” asked Mack.

“Keep going. Head out to Yucca Valley.”

He jerked his head to the left to check for an opening in traffic. “Bruno, that's a long damn way to go for nothing. What's out there in that pisshole of a desert?”

“Maybe nothing, but we got nothing.”

From the beginning, I had tried to forget about Micah, his family,
and their house. All those years ago. Now, when his name had come up again, the time frame wasn't clear in my head. I'd gotten a postcard in the mail maybe two years after the event. The standard plain white card came to the Sheriff's main headquarters, and interoffice forwarded it onto Violent Crimes Division. In crooked little letters from a shaky hand, the card read:

I never had a chance to properly thank you. Please come and see me. Soon. It's real important
.

Micah Mabry

The return address: 12635 Old Woman Springs Road, Landers, California.

All those years ago, I fought for weeks whether to go or not to go. The card remained on my clipboard in plain view, where I couldn't help but see it all day at work. At night, the card brought back nightmares of dead children in an ugly house that bled.

Without trying, I became obsessed. I didn't want to go. I wouldn't go under any circumstance. One night after the Violent Crimes Team took down a bank robbery in progress, we conducted our usual victory dance with lots of beer in the closest store parking lot. I drank more than normal and shouldn't have been driving. I drove in a trance, but snapped out of it as I transitioned from the 10 Freeway onto Highway 62, subconsciously making the drive to the desert. I checked the map book and found Landers, a little no-account town outside a larger one called Yucca Valley. I drove out Old Woman Springs Road as the sun peeked over the horizon to paint the desert hot in yellows and oranges. For as far as the eye could see, Landers and Johnson Valley rolled in empty desert, spotted with sage and Joshua trees and salt cedar and small, one-room shacks. I stopped a quarter mile down the dirt road and watched with binoculars.

Parked out in front of Micah Mabry's shack was a broken-down GMC pickup, the black and gray paint splotched and ruined from the unrelenting desert sun. I didn't put my Toyota Camry in park and kept my foot on the brake, ready to flee at any moment. I watched a long time until the muscles in my foot
cramped, the car interior turned claustrophobic, and the sides and roof closed in. Still, I waited. Off in the corner of my mind, I realized I had a subpoena for court and was already late. Robby would be looking for me, calling, sending a cop car by my house to wake me up. When that didn't work, Robby would check the jails for a drunk driver. Then the hospitals.

And, still, I waited.

Sweat rolled down into my eyes, burning. I changed feet on the brake over and over. I tried to analyze why I didn't want to see him and came up with the only logical reason: I didn't want a reminder of what he and I had gone through. I didn't want images so difficult to suppress, again laid bare to raw, emotional wounds.

Three hours into my vigil, a decrepit old man, slump-shouldered, gray hair, eased out the door of the shack. A man without motivation, without spirit, nothing more than an empty husk. I recognized him and received a jolt of an image: this same man on his knees in bloody water holding a dead child as he keened in grief. He'd aged so much in such a short period of time. He'd given up on life and life had not hesitated to run him over.

My breath came quick. My stomach heaved. I let my foot off the brake and drove away.