The Searcher (17 page)

M
ULCAHY EASED THE
J
EEP TO A STOP SEVERAL HOUSES SHORT OF THE AD
dress the mayor had given him. He cut the engine and scanned the street through the rain. It was small-town Americana perfection with decent-size plots and double-car driveways with garages at the end. Only one car was parked in the driveway of Holly Coronado's house, but he could see a light in a lower window showing that someone was there.

He picked up his phone and studied the archived Web page of a local newspaper. The article had a picture of the other car that was usually parked here, all twisted up, like an empty beer can, at the bottom of a ravine. The headline above it read:

SHERIFF-ELECT DEAD IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT

He scrolled down through the article and found another picture, a photograph of the dead man and his wife standing in an old graveyard and smiling for the cameras. She was pretty. They were a handsome couple. They looked like they had it all worked out and everything going for them. Just goes to show.

He looked up again and studied the street. A single porch light was glowing weakly in the shade of a wide veranda a few houses down from the widow's home, but he could not sense any life behind the windows of the house. Probably just a sensor that had tripped automatically in the flat gray light beneath the storm clouds. Most of the townsfolk were still down at the control line. He figured they would stay there awhile, even with this rain. It wasn't every day you saved your town from destruction. If he lived here, he would want to stay there too, savoring every happy, noisy, back-slapping moment before he had to return to his nice house on a safe street like this where lights came on automatically to keep the darkness at bay.

This was the kind of street he had once imagined living on, before his life had veered off in a different and darker direction. For a long time, when the life he had left behind was still fresh in his mind, he had replayed certain events over and over like an armchair quarterback trying to win a lost game, thinking about how things might have turned out differently if he had made other choices, or been a better man, or a stronger man, or a smarter one. It was only over time he gradually realized that he had never had any choice in the first place. Nobody did, really. The truth of it was that if someone with power wanted to reach into your life and tear the heart out of it, there was nothing much you could do about it.

He attached the photograph he had taken at the crash site to a new message, pressed Send, and watched it go. It would get bounced around a few times before it got to Tío. Then things would get interesting. People would die because of what had happened here. Some of them would deserve it, but not all. He clicked on another message and studied the blurry photographs Tío had sent him of the pale man with pure white skin and hair, and a mark on his arm that may or may not have been a kill tag—the man who was in the house he was looking at.

He opened the glove compartment, took out his Beretta and the sunglasses case with the suppressor inside it. He replaced the partially spent magazine with a full one, checked his gun, then screwed the suppressor to the muzzle. Tío had said he wanted the man alive, but Mulcahy wasn't going to take any chances. He laid the gun down on the seat and looked back up at the house. The storm was easing now, the drumming of the rain on the roof of his car getting softer.

He would have liked it if his pop had lived somewhere nice like this instead of the ratty three-room apartment over the Laundromat. Then again, Pop didn't seem to mind where he lived. He had never been particularly good at holding on to money either. Easy come, easy go, that was the closest they got to a family motto. He remembered when he was eleven and Pop would return from his week-long trips to the exotic-sounding places, his car covered in road dust. It was only later in life, when Mulcahy had been to these places himself, that he figured out why Pop had sometimes returned happy and bearing gifts and other times quiet and broke.

He ran through the names in his mind now, a roll call recalled from his youth: Oklahoma City, Des Moines, Shakopee, Omaha, Kansas City. He went through it again, adding other names: Remington Park in Oklahoma City, Prairie Meadows in Des Moines, Canterbury Downs in Shakopee, Ak-Sar-Ben in Omaha, Woodlands in Kansas City. Racetracks. Every place had a racetrack.

He reached down and pulled the laundry sack out from beneath the seat, the sharp edges of magazine clips and gun sights stretching the plastic and poking through in some places. He picked out Carlos's Glock and a spare magazine, then stashed the bag back in the foot well. He tested the Glock's action and swapped the magazine for a full one. He would need a backup weapon in case the guy was cartel like Tío suspected. The Glock was reliable and had no safety, which made
it a good choice for a backup piece—you didn't want to be fiddling around with safety options in the middle of a firefight. It was also generic and untraceable. Carlos had done him the service of filing off the serial number. He laid it on the seat next to the Beretta and checked the street again.

If he had managed to buy a house like this for Pop, chances are he would only have remortgaged it on the sly for some up-front cash and lost it all at the track or in some back-room poker game. Just the way it was, no point in getting bent out of shape about it. If you started having issues with the bad things in people and trying to change them, you were in danger of losing sight of what was good about them too. And for all his faults, he wouldn't change Pop for anything. If it hadn't been for him, he might not even have made it out of childhood.

He picked up the Glock, slipped it into his shoulder holster, then took the silenced Beretta in hand. He owed him everything, could never repay him for what he had done, but right now, in the next hour or so, he was going to have to do whatever it took to try.

H
OLLY WATCHED
S
OLOMON MOVING AROUND THE STUDY, HIS HEAD TURN
ing slowly, taking everything in. He seemed unreal in some ways, his white skin and hair making him seem like a beautiful, classical, marble statue that had been brought to life and then dressed in ordinary clothes. He had an extraordinary stillness about him and she found it calming, like staring at the surface of a deep lake.

During her recent Internet trawls she had come across several accounts of potential suicides who had been saved by what one had described as a “familiar stranger,” someone who had just appeared and seemed to know them and understand their pain. Some described these strangers as angels, others as the spirits of loved ones—fathers, mothers, grandparents—who had come to stop them from crossing over to the other side. When she had read these stories, she had put it down to some kind of extreme mental and emotional state creating subconscious projections of the survival instinct. Perhaps that's what he was. Except in all the reported cases the stranger had dissuaded the witness from suicide whereas Solomon had given her specific instructions on how she might do it more effectively. Then again, that was exactly the slightly perverse, counterintuitive way
her subconscious would work, tell her to do something while knowing she was most likely to do the exact opposite.

He turned and looked at her, his pale, gray eyes so piercing she imagined he could read her thoughts. “What do you think they were after?” he asked.

“A file, something like that—I don't know for sure. I think Jim found out something about the town, something they didn't want getting out.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

“The town elders. The sheriffs. They run this place. Redemption is more like a corporation than a town, with members of the board instead of public officials. There's the mayor, who is the chief executive, then there are two sheriffs who answer to him, one for commerce and one for philanthropy. Jim had been elected sheriff in charge of philanthropy.”

“Seems a grand title for such a small town.”

“This whole place has delusions of grandeur. Have you seen the church? It's like they shipped a cathedral over from Europe and dropped it in the middle of the desert. Can you imagine what it must have looked like when most people here were still living in tents or one-room cabins? Redemption was built on Christ as much as copper, Mr. Creed, never forget that. And you can't win a fight against someone who thinks they have God on their side.”

“I thought God was supposed to be on everyone's side.”

“Not in this town. Here, if your name is Cassidy then you are God. Morgan and the other sheriffs, they're disciples. Except Jim wasn't. He was never part of their club. I think to them he was always going to be an orphan boy from The Cassidy who made good. But they needed him because of the trusts.”

Solomon nodded. “Morgan mentioned those. What are they?”

“They're the lifeblood of this town and also why the Cassidy family is so powerful here. Jack Cassidy set them up when he founded the town. They act like a localized welfare system, a large charity fund, run by his family, that supports the community. As long as a Cassidy lives here, they're protected and so is the town. But no more Cassidys, no more trusts.”

“And Mayor Cassidy has no children.”

“Exactly. As soon as he dies, the trusts will revert to the church. When Jack Cassidy set them up, this wasn't a problem because the church was part of the town. But now it's not, now it's part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. So when Cassidy dies the trusts will no longer be owned or administered by the town alone, they will be managed by the church, which means the funds could go anywhere in the state—and probably will. And most people here rely on subsidies from the trusts to keep going.”

“What about the mine? Morgan said it was still producing.”

“If it is, it can't be much. They had to close down production about fifteen years ago because of groundwater contamination. Bunch of people got sick from the chemicals they were using. Cost the town a fortune to clean it all up and pay damages. If it wasn't for the trusts, this whole place would have gone under. The trusts are where the money is, not the mine, not the airfield, and not the tourists. Jim's job was to try to find ways of securing them for the town. It was his area of expertise. That's why they needed him.” She spotted a card on the floor, picked it up, and gave it to Solomon:

Mayor Ernest Cassidy and the Sheriffs of Redemption request the presence of Mr. James Coronado at a formal dinner at the Cassidy residence to celebrate his election as sheriff.

“Jim got it the day after the election, an invite to sit at the big table. I teased him about it, saying he'd probably have to go through some kind of hazing ceremony where they'd paint him copper and get him to recite the Lord's Prayer while they smacked him on the ass with Bibles or something. He laughed, acted like it was no big deal, but I knew it was, the orphan kid being invited to dine at the Cassidy residence.

“Anyway, the day of the big dinner came and he had been studying hard for it, like it was the bar exam or something. He'd been going through the old town budgets, reading through all the trust paperwork going back years. The finances were in a worse state than he thought, I know that much.

“I remember kissing him good-bye and telling him not to worry, that he should enjoy the moment and that they should be glad to have him in their corner. He had his best suit on. He looked so handsome. And he was happy, nervous but happy. And I was so proud of him because he'd done exactly what he'd set out to do, and all he had in front of him was hard work and he had never been afraid of that.

“I suppose in some ways it was the last time I saw him properly, the last time I saw the Jim I knew. I went to bed that night hoping they were being kind to him and that he was having a good time. The bed seemed too big without him. I wasn't used to him not being there—I'm still not used to it. Anyway, I woke up just after dawn. The sun was coming up and the birds were getting noisy and the bed was still empty. I sat up and, I don't know why, but I could feel that Jim was in the house—you know sometimes when you can feel someone's presence, even if you can't hear them?”

Solomon nodded. He knew.

“I called his name but he didn't reply, so I got up and went to find him. I found him here, sitting in this chair. He had a bottle of whiskey
open and a glass that was half full. I could smell the alcohol before I even stepped into the room. There was something about the smell of it and the fact that Jim hadn't answered when I called that made me feel uneasy, like something terrible had happened, like someone had died and he didn't want to face me and have to tell me the news.

“He was pretty drunk, which made me think he must have been home for a while, because Mayor Cassidy is not a drinking man. He must have downed about half of the bottle, sitting in the dark on his own.

“I asked him what had happened, thinking it must be something terrible to have made him drink like that, but he wouldn't tell me. He just kept shaking his head and staring at the bottle. I was scared. I had never seen him like that before.

“I made him get up and walked him to the bedroom and put him to bed, thinking he would sleep it off and talk to me about it later. But he never did. Whatever had happened at that dinner, whatever they had talked about, whatever he found out, killed something inside him. I think it broke his heart.

“After that night I hardly saw him. He slept it off, got up, showered and changed then drove into town. He came back later with a trunk full of archive boxes filled with files and went straight to his study. The only thing he said to me was that there was something he needed to fix but he couldn't tell me what it was because he needed to protect me from it. That was the word he used—‘protect'—like he'd found something poisonous and was trying to keep it from me for my own safety.

“So I left him alone. He was unreachable anyway, so I kept away, figuring he would work through whatever it was, then come back to me. But he never did. Three days later he was dead.”

“What about the others who were at the dinner, have you spoken to them?”

“After Jim died the mayor called and offered condolences. I asked him about the dinner but he wouldn't talk about it, kept saying that I was upset and it was all a tragic accident.”

“But you don't think it was—an accident.”

“No. Something happened. I don't know if they killed Jim to silence him or whether whatever he found drove him off that road, but either way I blame them for it.”

“Have you talked to the other sheriffs?”

“The only other one is Pete Tucker, the sheriff for commerce. He's a big landowner around here, has a majority stake in the airfield because a lot of it is built on his ranch. I haven't spoken to him.”

“What about the coroner's report, have you seen a copy?”

“No.”

“It would be useful to see exactly what killed him, whether it was a car crash or something else. Though if your husband was trying to save the town, it doesn't make sense for them to—”

A loud knock echoed through the house, three raps on the front door.

“Stay here,” Holly said. “I'll go see who it is.”

She left the study and walked down the quiet halls of her house, thinking about the pale stranger in her husband's study and wondering if he was really there at all. She felt slightly panicked at the thought that she might return and find him gone, his mission to distract her complete. She didn't want him to go. Talking to him was comforting. She moved through the disordered mess of her living room and opened the front door. She saw the gun first. Then she saw the man who was holding it.