The Searcher (16 page)

C
ASSIDY WATCHED THE CHARCOALED WORLD SLIP PAST HIS WINDOW AND
despaired. It was going to cost a fortune to fix all this, let alone replace the amount of lost revenue that would come from having major roadworks on the main highway into town.

“Looks like ground zero up ahead,” the NTSB agent said.

What was his name again? Not like him to forget a name. Shows how distracted he was. His daddy had taught him the value of remembering a man's name when he was still a boy. “They'll know yours,” he'd said. “Everyone knows a Cassidy in this town, so it's up to you to even the score and put people at their ease. You shake their hand like you've been waiting all your life to meet that person and you repeat their name twice while staring them straight in the eye. Nothing wins respect more than remembering someone's name. You forget someone's name, you might as well spit in their face.”

And he'd forgotten the agent's name.

They cruised to a bumpy halt twenty or so yards short of what was left of the plane. The fire had burned away everything but the metal;
the road surrounding it looked like a puddle of boiling tar had been dumped on the ground and left to set.

“I'm going to take a look,” the agent said. “Stay in the car if you want.”

“I'd like to see what nearly destroyed my town, if you don't mind.”

—
What might still destroy it.

“Suit yourself,” the agent said—Davidson, that was his name. “Just stay back from the wreckage and don't touch anything.”

Mulcahy could have done without the mayor tagging along but he couldn't do much about it. He opened the trunk and sheltered from the rain under the tailgate as he gathered what he needed from his own kit bag—a pair of nitrile gloves, some evidence bags, a Maglite. He had learned that the best way to remove something from a crime scene wasn't to sneak in and try to smuggle it out, it was to walk up as if you belonged there, put it straight in an evidence bag, and carry it away. It helped to get there fast, while the local cops were still in charge and the situation was fluid. Like now.

“Okay, let's go take a peek,” he said, closing the trunk and opening his umbrella with a sound that reminded him of a silenced weapon being fired. The mayor joined him beneath the umbrella and they moved forward together, picking their way across the melted road.

Mulcahy could feel trapped heat radiating up through the soles of his shoes. “Some fire here, huh?” he said, trying to relax the mayor and soften him up a little so he might talk. “Looks like the road boiled.”

The mayor nodded. “You must see things like this all the time,” he said.

“Nope,” Mulcahy said truthfully. “Truth is, planes don't usually crash on roads.”

“What about runways?”

“Runways are not like roads. They're much tougher—usually paved concrete or a concrete-asphalt mix—so they tend to hold up better in a fire,” Mulcahy said, reciting some, quite possibly bullshit, WikiFacts Siri had read out to him on the drive over. “Most planes crash at sea. Actually, most planes don't crash at all, it's still the safest form of transportation. Even when they do crash, it's not always fatal. You had someone walk away from this one, didn't you?”

“Yes. Well, he walked away from the crash site, but he says he wasn't on the plane.”

“We'll need to talk to him, get an official statement.” He stopped and turned to the mayor. “I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to stop here, sir.”

“Of course.”

“I need to take the umbrella with me.”

“That's okay, you do what you gotta do.”

Mulcahy turned and moved on alone, picking his way carefully through the rising forest of jagged aircraft parts and steam toward the large mess of twisted metal in the center of a crater. He pulled out an evidence bag and the Maglite from his pocket and squatted down at the edge of it.

The rain thrummed on his umbrella and made pinging sounds as it struck metal inside the twisted structure. He shone the Maglite through the blackened ribs into the dark center, picking up details of what lay inside. The asphalt had melted here and various heat-damaged objects were embedded in it. He swept the torch beam over them, recognizing very little of what he was seeing but searching for something very specific.

Once, back when he was still working homicide, he'd been called to a warehouse fire set to hide evidence of a triple murder. He'd seen
plenty of death in his career, but the blackened pile of bones he had seen in that warehouse had made a deeper impression on him than anything else. There were the remains of three people lying on that warehouse floor, three people who had woken up that morning, kissed their wives and kids or whatever, and ended the day as nothing more than a pile of blackened bones. There's not much of a human body that won't burn if the temperature is high enough. Hell, even bone will crumble to nothing if it's hot enough, and this fire must have been like a furnace.

He was starting to wonder whether all of this was a waste of time and he should get back to the mayor and start pumping him for more information about the survivor. Then he saw something in among the wreckage.

It was sticking up from the melted road and lying in a spot where the rain ran off the tangle of metal in a steady stream. It was a human bone, a femur, the longest bone in the whole body. He changed his position, moving around to where he imagined the front of the aircraft might have been, probing the twisted metal with his flashlight. Beneath one of the thicker metal bands he spotted the jagged edges of a couple of shattered ribs. He traced backward and the flashlight picked out a blackened jawbone embedded in the surface of the road, then a little way up from the jawbone he found what he was looking for. The skull was lying on its side, mostly crushed by a large metal strut with rain running over it, making the white bone easier to see. A small rectangle of metal was fixed to it with surgical screws, about an inch or so above what was left of the right eye socket.

“There you are,” Mulcahy murmured, putting the flashlight in his mouth. He shone the beam at the skull and took several photos on his phone.

“You found something?” the mayor shouted, his voice cutting through the thrumming rain.

Mulcahy pulled the flashlight from his mouth. “Human remains,” he called back.

He stood and slipped the phone in his pocket to protect it from the rain, then turned away and headed back to the car. The real feds would be here soon. He needed to stay out of their way if he wanted to remain useful and keep his father alive.

“I've seen enough,” he said, walking straight past Mayor Cassidy and toward the car. “The crash scene investigators can take it from here.”

He got in the car, fired up the engine, and started backing away before the mayor even had a chance to buckle his seat belt. “I'll drop you at the control line,” he said, turning around and driving as quickly over the ruined road as he dared. “If you could keep this road clear until the main unit arrives. I'll call in what I've seen to get them up to speed. They'll do everything they can to get the road open as soon as possible.”

The mayor nodded. He seemed distracted and Mulcahy could guess why.

They drove in silence and Mulcahy dropped him at the billboard, where people were still celebrating. The mayor peered out anxiously at the crowd, checking for faces he didn't recognize.

I'm here already
, Mulcahy thought.
You'
re looking in the wrong direction.

“Thanks for your help,” he said, eager for the mayor to get out.

“You're welcome,” Cassidy replied, still scanning faces. “If there's anything else you need . . .”

“Actually, there is,” Mulcahy said, pulling his phone from his pocket and opening up the map application. The Jeep had built-in GPS, but he never put information into a car he might have to dump. “The survivor you were talking about. If you could tell me where I might find him, I sure would like to talk to him about what happened here.”

H
OLLY LED
S
OLOMON THROUGH THE QUIET HOUSE, THE ONLY SOUND THE
rain on the roof above them.

“This is Jim's study,” she said and pushed open a door into a room that looked like a tornado had ripped through it. Every drawer had been pulled out, every filing cabinet opened and emptied. Financial documents carpeted the floor, along with leather-bound legal books that had once lined the walls, their covers lying open like the wings of dead birds. A computer monitor sat in the middle of a desk that had been swept clear, the screen lighting up the devastation in the room.

Solomon stepped inside and breathed in, catching the musky scent of the room, leather and wood. The smell of engine grease and hay was here too, lifted from the skin of the man who had trashed it by the heat of his efforts.

“You say you want to find out who you are.” Holly moved over to the far wall. “Well, so did Jim.”

The wall was entirely covered with file cards, scraps of paper, maps, photographs. There seemed to be two distinct columns of information; on the left was a large map of the area covered with old
photographs and photocopied pages from a journal written in old-style copperplate that reminded Solomon of the dedication in his copy of Jack Cassidy's memoir. On the right a column of dates ran from floor to ceiling—1850 at the bottom to the present at the top—with names written on separate cards next to various dates in between. A copy of the page of an old Bible had been pinned at the top between both columns. It was from Proverbs. A section had been underlined: “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and golde.”

“This is Jim's family tree,” Holly said, pointing to the right-hand side of the wall. “As far as he'd managed to trace it. He'd been contacting all kinds of people recently in connection with it. Perhaps you were one of them.”

Solomon stepped closer, his blood humming in his ears at the thought that the wall might contain a clue to who he was. Some of the names had photographs next to them, the more recent ones mostly, but there were also a few steely tintypes capturing the firm jaws and faraway stares of folks long dead. Solomon's eyes picked hungrily at it all, sucking in the details, but his name was not there, his face did not stare out at him from the jumble of images.

He turned to the maps and documents filling the left-hand side of the wall. “What's this?”

“Research for a book Jim was writing about the lost Cassidy fortune—you know what that is?”

Solomon recalled all the books and treasure maps he'd seen in the souvenir shops that referenced it. He had also read something in Jack Cassidy's memoir that had hinted at it. “‘I have become famous in my lifetime,'” he quoted from memory, “‘for finding a great fortune out in the desert, but in truth there is another treasure far greater than the first, that I discovered late in my life after a great amount of study.'”

“You've read his memoir.”

“Yes.”

“So have lots of people. Ever since it was first published, people have been coming here looking for it. They still get busloads of folks turning up to search for the lost fortune.”

Solomon studied the maps, the documents, the photocopies of Bible pages with notes scrawled on them. “Was your husband searching for it too?”

Holly shrugged. “Maybe. I don't know if he actually believed in it. He liked the idea of it, he was a romantic that way, but he kind of abandoned writing the book once he got a lead on his real family.”

Solomon turned back to the column of dates and names. “How long had he been working on his family tree?”

“Not long. Only since he got elected, a month maybe. As sheriff elect he got access to the town's confidential records so he could start familiarizing himself with the finances and all the charitable trusts he was going to be managing. But it also gave him access to other parts of the archives, including the admission papers to The Cassidy.”

“The Cassidy—what's that?”

“The orphanage. It closed about ten years ago when money started getting tight. Jim grew up there. He was an orphan.”

The word was like a bright lamp that shed new light on everything: the white picket fence outside, the white gables, the rocker on the porch—it was all a projection, a child's idea of a perfect family home, imagined and then created by someone who had never had one. It also explained James Coronado's obsessive need to find out where he was from and who he was. Solomon understood that well enough.

“One of the things Jim campaigned on was reopening The Cassidy,” Holly continued, “putting the heart back into the community, he called it, returning the town to what Jack Cassidy had always intended
it to be, a place of charity and Christian goodness. Jack Cassidy originally set it up as a home for abandoned women and children, but over the years it became an orphanage. It was Jim's home for the first seventeen years of his life, the closest thing he ever had to a family. But the admission files opened a door to his real family.” She took a photocopied form from the wall and handed it to Solomon. It detailed the admission of the infant James Coronado. There was a girlish, looping signature at the bottom of the page in the section for next of kin: Carol Nielsen, then, in parentheses (mother).

“Jim managed to track her down to a trailer park north of Nogales. She'd been living there for years with some guy. He was still there, but she had died of cancer a few years back. He had a bunch of her stuff and was more than happy to get rid of it.” She looked up at a bookcase that had been swept clean, then down to the pile of things on the floor below it. She crouched and retrieved a clear plastic bag from the pile and handed it to Solomon. “He found this among her things.”

The seal at the top of the bag had been opened then folded back over again, presumably when it had been found not to contain whatever the intruder had been searching for. Inside it was a small black book. He opened the bag and a smell of old cigarettes billowed out like a foul genie escaping a bottle. He pulled the book out and turned it over in his hand. It was old and worn and bound in thin leather that might have been pale blue when it was new but had gone a mottled, greasy bluish gray from years of being handled by unclean hands. The spine had started to crack and the gold lettering was mostly worn away, leaving only the outline of the words
HOLY
BIBLE
stamped into the leather.

He opened the cover and saw tiny writing inside recording a family's history stretching back to the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the same list of names pinned to the wall in front of him, only with one significant difference. In the Bible the family tree ended at Carol Nielsen's name. She had not recorded the birth of her son.

“Look at her birth date and then Jim's,” Holly said. “She was sixteen when she had him. We thought maybe she'd gotten pregnant and either the father didn't want to know or wasn't around, so she took him to The Cassidy and left him with nothing but a name she'd borrowed from her oldest relative.” She pointed at the first name written in the greasy Bible—James Coronado (b. 1857—d. ?).

“She was so young and she must have been so scared. I can't imagine how awful it must be to walk up to a building with your baby in your arms and walk away again without him.”

Solomon caught a glimpse of how enormous Holly's loss had been. When James Coronado died she had lost more than her husband, she had lost her own future as well, the years they would have spent together, the family they'd planned on having. He looked up at the top of the wall where a card with five blank spaces marked on it was pinned next to James and Holly's names.

“That was kind of a joke,” Holly said, following his gaze. “Jim always said he wanted enough kids to form a junior soccer team.”

“How about you, how many did you want?”

She looked at the empty card and her eyes misted over. “One would have been fine.”

Solomon felt her sadness deepen and wondered whether he should move away from this tender subject. He glanced down at a small square of paper he had spotted when he first stepped in the room, half-buried in a pile of papers by the desk. Maybe it was nothing to do with him, but he felt, somehow, that it might be.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

Solomon stepped over to the desk, picked up the square of paper, and handed it to her. “What happened to the baby?”

Holly caught her breath when she saw what it was. She took it and crumpled slowly down into the chair by the desk. “I didn't know
he'd kept this,” she said, her finger tracing the lines of the barely formed nose and chin picked out on the ultrasound scan. “This is the twelve-week scan. We lost him a week later.”

“Him?”

A single tear dripped down her cheek. “Jim Junior, we called him, though I don't think he would've ended up being called that. We thought we had plenty of time to come up with another name.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Turns out we didn't.”

“How did your husband take it?”

She let out a long sigh. “Like a man, and by that I mean he was strong and stoic and supportive but kept his own feelings hidden. He did that a lot, it seems, more than I knew.” She turned in the seat and moved the mouse across the screen. “I found this the other day.” She clicked on an icon with “For JJ” written beneath it and a screen popped open showing a still of a man sitting in the chair Holly now sat in.

“Hi,” the man said as the clip started playing and Solomon felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten when he realized who it must be. “I just found out you were coming and felt like I wanted to talk to you, so here I am. I never had a dad when I was growing up, so I don't really know how this works. I always wished I'd had one, so I could talk to him, ask him about stuff. So that's what I want to say to you, little man, that I was thinking about you and wanted to talk to you before you were even born. So remember that, if you ever feel like you can't tell me anything. Because you always can. I'll always be here for you. You'll always have me and your mom. And I can't wait to meet you. Take care, little man.”

The picture froze and Solomon studied the face of James Coronado, the man he had come in search of, the man he was here to save. He looked up at the wall behind the screen and the same face stared
out of a series of framed photographs showing a group of five boys standing by a campfire and in front of what appeared to be a house with no walls and a woven, wooden roof.

Ramada
—the word floated up in Solomon's mind—
Hohokam Indian word for a shelter.

The landscape beyond the ramada was prehistoric, unchanged since before the Hohokam or anybody else had stood there. An escarpment rose behind them on the horizon, a deep
V
-shaped niche cut into it by an unseen river.

Solomon studied the boys' faces, frozen in time by flashbulbs that had charted their childhood in yearly increments. Each year they grew a little more, until the last picture showed men in their twenties, some fatter, some with hair that was starting to thin, but still recognizably the same boys who had posed for that first photograph. James Coronado stood at the center, a little taller than the rest and with a gravity to him that seemed to pull the others in. If this group of boys had a leader, it was him.

Solomon studied his face, willing it to be familiar. But he didn't recognize him. James Coronado, the man who had recorded this message for the son he would never see, the man he was here to save, was a stranger to him.