Margaritas & Murder (13 page)

He already did,
I thought, thinking of the handkerchief.

“It’s more important for you to stay home, Olga,” I said. “You’re needed here in case anyone tries to contact you.”

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “I’ll stay here. Vaughan may be lost and trying to find his way back.” To Maria Elena she said, “Would you get me a sweater, please? It’s suddenly gotten very cold.”

I took her hands in mine. They were like ice, and she shivered despite the heavy blanket enfolding her. I realized she was in shock.

“Do you have any brandy?” I asked Maria Elena. “And something for her to eat?”

“I don’t want anything,” Olga said. “I want my mind clear in case I can help Vaughan.”

“You can help Vaughan by taking care of yourself and not getting sick,” I said. “You need to eat, and to rest.”

“I’ll be going now,” Rivera said, shrugging into his raincoat. He left a card on the table next to Olga’s chair. “A patrol car will pass by the house every half hour, just to keep an eye out. That’s my cell phone number. Call me if you hear from your husband or anyone else regarding this. If anything strikes you as being unusual or suspicious, call immediately. Don’t open the door for tradesmen or anyone else you don’t know personally.”

“All right,” she said. She looked up at Maria Elena. “Maybe a little brandy would be good.”

She looked exhausted. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her hair hung lank; the elegant coiffure the hairdresser had carefully created was now a casualty of Olga’s nervous hands. My heart ached for her.

“I’m going to walk the chief out,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“What am I going to do without Vaughan?” she said absently, more to herself than to us.

“Don’t give up on him,” I said. “We’ll find him.” I prayed I was right and that we wouldn’t be too late.

At the door I asked the police chief what I couldn’t say in front of Olga. “I know this is an unfair question, Chief, but please be candid with me. From what you know about this type of crime in Mexico, how often is a kidnap victim found alive?”

He ran his hand over the rough stubble of whiskers on his chin. “It depends. If you mean found alive without handing over any money? Rarely. If you mean released after a ransom is paid? I gotta be honest with you. That doesn’t always happen. But I’ll tell you this, Mrs. Fletcher. We’ll give it everything we’ve got. I’ll call in the AFI. That’s the Mexican FBI. I’ll drill my guys to work their snitches. We’ll comb the streets and turn over all the rocks.” He opened the door and pulled up the collar of his coat. “Really coming down now,” he said, peering into the veil of water sweeping over the courtyard stones. “Good thing we found the handkerchief before it got washed away.”

“There’s another good thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That they were taken near San Miguel. That means someone here might know something.”

He grunted. “If they’d disappeared out of my jurisdiction, I wouldn’t be much help to you. But if they’re in my backyard, we’ll find them. One way or another, we’ll find them.”

“What time should I be ready for you in the morning?”

He glanced at his watch. “You’re sure you want to do this? You’re not going to get much sleep tonight.”

“I wouldn’t anyway.”

 

“Good morning,” I said four hours later as I climbed into the backseat of Chief Rivera’s cruiser.

The morning air was sharp and clear, carrying the sound of church bells tolling all over the city. I knew they were a daily, in some cases hourly, occurrence, but the deep reverberations made me shiver. I hoped they weren’t an omen of things to come.

After the chief had left I sat with Olga for a long time. There was little more to say until circumstances became clearer, but I’d told her we were lucky to have Rivera working for us and that I would do everything in my power to help him find Vaughan and Woody.

Maria Elena had given Olga a snifter of brandy and coaxed her to eat some toast. She’d stayed with her through the night, dozing in a chair by the bed where Olga, curled in a ball, slept fitfully, waking with a start every few minutes at some sound, real or imagined.

Rivera drove. His second in command, Captain Gutierrez, whom I’d met at the police station, yawned loudly from the passenger seat and scratched his chest. He rattled off something in Spanish, causing Rivera to frown.

The car bounced over the cobblestones, making conversation difficult. Rivera gunned the engine and took the corners at what I considered an unsafe speed in light of the uneven road. If there were any springs left in the suspension of the cruiser, they didn’t have much “spring” anymore. Every jolt and thud threw me up to the roof and down again. I hung on to a strap above the window and tried not to fall off the bench seat, praying my breakfast wouldn’t make another appearance.

Away from the center of town the road smoothed out and I released my hold on the strap.

“You okay back there?” Rivera called over his shoulder.

“I am now. That was quite a bumpy ride.”

“There was a movement a while back to pave over those cobblestones,” he said. “All the ladies who want to wear high heels joined in, claimed the streets were unsafe for walking. They have to take cabs wherever they go downtown.”

I leaned forward. “What happened?”

He laughed. “The tourists objected. They didn’t want the city to remove any of the ‘charm.’ The preservationists had a fit, but you’d expect that. In the end, it was the taxi drivers who made sure the measure never got anywhere. Those cobblestones guarantee lots of business for them.”

“And for the owners of car repair shops, I imagine.”

“By the way, I learned a little something about you, Mrs. Fletcher, that you neglected to tell me earlier.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re a famous author. You forgot to mention that when you filed the report. You just said you were a professor at Manhattan University.”

“Actually, Chief, I
did
teach at the university when I lived in Manhattan. That’s true.”

“Yeah, but what you didn’t say is what you usually do for a living.”

“You didn’t ask.”

The high desert had swallowed up the rain from the night before. There was no trace of the torrents that had cascaded down the hills and across the road, except for a dusty residue that had already been kicked up by early-morning trucks bringing goods to town. At the site where Woody’s car had been abandoned, the ground was as dry as if the rain had fallen a week earlier rather than the night before.

Two men in khaki uniforms squatted by a small campfire they’d built a short distance from their official car. They stood and stretched when we pulled in.

“
Transito
police,” Rivera said by way of explanation. “They found the car. They’re not under my command, but I asked them to keep watch till I could relieve them this morning.”

The men exchanged greetings with Rivera and Gutierrez, kicked sand on the embers of their campfire, and left in their vehicle.

“Do you know this car at all?” Rivera asked, cocking his head toward Woody’s station wagon.

“The only time I saw it was when they left on their trip,” I said. “Three days ago.”

“Anything look different?”

I walked around the car and thought back to the morning Vaughan and Woody had started out, Vaughan eager for adventure and Woody proud to provide it. The rain had washed off the top layer of dust, but the faded blue paint was no brighter. I peered through the windows and saw the jumble of cartons that had been used to sort the mail of families with post office boxes in Laredo.

“Their luggage is gone,” I said.

“What did it look like?” Rivera asked, motioning to Gutierrez, who pulled a pad and pen out of his pocket.

Gutierrez had ignored me during the drive. I wasn’t sure if he was resentful of my presence or was simply an unpleasant person. I had tried to enlist his opinion on the incident, but he’d either refused to respond or glared at Rivera when the chief answered my questions. Now he listened.

“Woody’s bag was a military duffel, medium size, olive drab with nylon straps for handles and a metal zipper across the top,” I said. “It was pretty old, worn around the edges.” I waited while his writing caught up to my description. “Vaughan’s bag was a satchel, tweed with tan leather trim. The brand is Hartmann, I think.”

“Figures,” Rivera said. “That told them right away that the guy’s got dough.”

Rivera said something to Gutierrez in Spanish, causing the officer to pocket his pad and open the car’s front door.

“I told him to check the glove box and the floor of the car before the lab guys go over it,” Rivera said to me. “We’ve got to wait for the tow truck. Want to take a walk?”

The car had been forced off the road where the land was flat. About thirty feet from the roadbed there was a gentle slope, the land littered with scrub trees and brush, an easy place for kidnappers to hide while waiting for the arrival of their victims. The morning was quiet, except for the rustle of dried branches as they rubbed against each other in the breeze. The sky was a vivid blue, broken only by the dark silhouette of a bird of prey circling overhead

“When my driver and I were stopped by the bandit,” I said, “he’d placed a boulder in the middle of the road to force us to swerve to avoid hitting it. Do you think the kidnappers might have done the same thing?”

“Could be, but it would be easier just to put out a flare or something to indicate there was a problem ahead. Sometimes they have someone lie down in the middle of the road pretending to be injured, pour ketchup or salsa on him to look like blood. They leave a car on the side, like there’s just been an accident. Anyone coming on that would slow down. It’s human nature. That’s all they need to pounce.”

I paused next to a bush where several small branches had been snapped off recently. Cows wandered freely here. Did an animal do this?

“How many people might be involved?” I asked, extricating a few curly white hairs caught on the end of a broken twig.

“More than a couple, that’s for sure,” he said, walking ahead and turning to wait for me. “They never rely on even odds. It would be taking a chance with two men in the car. They’d want backup, want to surround them to keep them from escaping. I’d figure there were four, possibly five.”

“Maybe Vaughan and Woody tried to escape,” I said, catching up and handing him the white strands. “These didn’t come from a cow.”

“I’d say you’re right,” he said, pulling an empty plastic bag from his jacket pocket and depositing my discovery inside.

“The car had fake sheepskin covers on the front seats,” I said. “Do you think they might be from that?”

“Could be,” he said. He cupped his eyes and scanned the countryside. “If they tried to get away,” he said, “the only way they could run would be down this hill.”

We started walking again, down the hill, taking a route that wouldn’t even qualify as a trail. The terrain was rough, rocky, and unforgiving. We paused and looked back to where Gutierrez stood next to the car giving instructions to a tow truck operator. He glanced our way and shook his head.

“Do you think someone followed them from the hotel?” I asked, leaning against a boulder to shake a pebble from my shoe. “How else would they know about the luggage?”

The sun was getting higher now. I squinted against the glare. A second bird had joined the first and they floated over a stand of bushes in our path, their broad wings tipping from side to side in the air currents that rose from the hot earth. I walked ahead of Rivera.

“This type of crime is not spur of the moment,” he said, following me. “These guys plan it out, know where to make their move, do it at night when they won’t be seen or followed. They have to know their victim is worth the effort. And they may not even contact the family. They might just swim their fish to an ATM machine and hold a gun to his head, shoot off his fingers one by one till he empties his bank account. Buckley’s a prize. I don’t know how much they can wring out of Manheim.”

The birds were circling lower and I could see the red heads now and the wing tips spread like the fingers of a hand, the distinguishing marks of a particular kind of bird, a carrion eater, a vulture. Then I saw the object of their fascination. I gasped. My stomach dropped and my pulse quickened.

Rivera came up behind me. “They won’t be getting any money from that one,” he said.

Sadly I turned away from the body.

T
he house was bustling with visitors when I returned: Dina and Roberto Fisher, Sarah Christopher, Cathie Harrison and Eric Gewirtz, Guy and Nancy Kovach, one couple whom I hadn’t met but had seen at the party, and several others whose faces were new to me. They were gathered in the living room, chairs from the kitchen carried in to supplement the seating.

I left Chief Rivera in the vestibule and went in search of Olga. Maria Elena met me in the hall, balancing a tray of drinks and a bowl of cookies “Word travels fast, doesn’t it?” I said to her.

Her eyes flew to the ceiling and she blew a puff of air into her bangs, ruffling the wisps of hair on her forehead.

“Where is Mrs. Buckley?” I asked.

“Upstairs. She is packing.”

“Packing? Why?”

“She goes to get the money.”

“Hello, Jessica,” Sarah said, coming into the hall where Maria Elena and I were talking. She lifted the tray from Maria Elena’s arms. “I’ll take that in,” she said. “After all, we’re here to help.”

“Have you heard from the kidnappers?” I asked Maria Elena in a low voice after Sarah had returned to the living room.

The housekeeper shook her head.

“How did all these people find out?”

“From the papers.”

“The newspaper?”

She nodded.