Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (32 page)

Interlude : 1986

“Cheer up, sir.
This is what you wanted.”

Crewes stood in my doorway, arms crossed, watching me toy with the plastic alligator, staring pensively at the clock on the wall. More time had passed, and after the first morning neither of us spoke about Magnum or the dead girl again. It was Major Shattuck who issued the orders. The unnamed suspects in the girl’s death had all left the country—they’d been spirited away before Magnum even summoned the
MP
s—but he had been given assurances (presumably by Magnum) that the incident would be reported to the appropriate authorities in their home country. And that was that. On the sly, Crewes informed me that a little rough justice was in the cards. On the flight home, one particular cabana boy would be making an unexpected snorkel dive in the Gulf.

I pretended to believe him, because it seemed to make him feel better. But I remembered what Magnum had said. Seeing the body, he’d thought,
This is the one
. There was no way he’d lift a hand against that particular killer. César. He had high hopes for the man back home.

Besides, what I’d said to Magnum the night of the murder was right. He might think César was his puppet, but César had other ideas. The ease with which he’d done the deed, knowing he was under surveillance, knowing I had seen him with the girl, made that perfectly clear.

So the clock ticked down, my enlistment ran out, and before long I was sitting with a plastic gator in my hand, pondering the whole course of my life up to that moment. Ironically, during my whole hitch with the
MP
battalion, I’d never once considered a future in law enforcement. The uncle who’d raised me was a cop, invalided out in a wheelchair, making his living by running a Richmond Avenue gun shop where he cut all his
HPD
buddies a good deal. That was never a life that appealed to me.

Now I rarely thought of anything else. That feeling of being in the right, of being the only person left to stand up for the dead—I liked it. It suited me. Though it would be a while before I’d see another corpse, and a long while after that before I’d be responsible for bringing a killer to justice. I had found my purpose.

I made the first phone call from my desk at Ft. Polk, first to my uncle and then to his old commander, who by then was a shift lieutenant in the patrol division. After my discharge, I took some time off, did a little traveling, spent a few weeks on the Gulf with some fishing buddies I’d stayed in touch with off and on since college. Then it was back to Houston, the academy, the badge, and the mean streets.

———

The last time I saw Magnum was the day of my discharge. On base, we assumed he was long gone after the night of the murder. Maybe it was just convenient to tell ourselves that. I’d already taken care of business at Ft. Polk. All that was left was wedging the last of the things at my off-base apartment into an already-packed car, then driving the four hours to Houston.

Before I left town, I stopped at the cemetery where the dead girl was buried. All that my heroics had managed was to ensure that her headstone bore her name. That she didn’t just disappear without a trace. Maybe that was enough. I crouched down beside her grave and tried to remember everything about her. I’d only spent a few minutes in her presence, so it didn’t take long. If I had realized she was only the first, one of a long line of victims, mostly women, whom I would mourn without knowing, whose killers I would hunt and sometimes catch but never bring to justice in any ultimate sense, my intention to become a cop might have ended right there. Nicole Fauk, stabbed to death by her high-flying husband. Hannah Mayhew, killed for staying true to her friend. Evangeline Dyer, whose body rests in the unfathomable depths of the Gulf, and Simone Walker, copycat victim of a psychopath whose career was nipped in the bud.

There are so many, some without names, and behind them all, haunting my sleep, the little girl I could never save, my own daughter, Jess, taken by chance while I was miles and miles away. Hunched beside that grave in Leesville like Atlas taking on the first of his weight, I had no idea what was in store for me or I would have run.

Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. This is the way I was made. I came from the factory with a sense that time was out of joint and had no Shakespearean qualms about being the one to set it right. Righteous indignation ran in my veins long before I had any reason to feel it. All that’s happened since has only confirmed what I knew from the cradle. The world had long since fallen into the ditch, but that didn’t mean we belonged there, caked in mud.

As I walked back to the car, I found Magnum leaning on the bumper.

He had his arms folded, the right hand tucked under his suit jacket casually. Probably gripping the butt of a pistol.

I stopped.

“I could kill you from here, if that’s what I wanted,” he said, flashing his grin.

“All right, then.” I closed the distance between us, pausing a few yards off. “You’ve got a gun under that coat, and this here’s a cemetery, but I’m not to read anything into that?”

“Read whatever you want into it.”

“You’re just here to say your goodbyes.”

“Is this goodbye? What makes you think that?”

“For one thing, I’m leaving. For another, I’m gonna be a cop. Since you’re an accomplice to murder and probably a murderer in your own right—”

“Hold on, there, partner. There’s no need to get worked up. You’ve got the wrong idea about me entirely. I’m on the side of the angels. The world’s just not as black and white as you seem to think.”

“That girl out there,” I said. “Maybe you ought to pay your respects while you’re out here. Didn’t see you at the funeral.”

“The thing is, March, I was telling myself there was still hope for you. The way you handled yourself that night . . . I was impressed. I know a lot of guys with resumés that would put yours to shame who couldn’t pull off what you did. What I’m saying is, I think we ought to have a talk.”

“I think we already did.”

“Don’t blow this off. That would be a mistake. There are opportunities that come only once in a lifetime. I’m talking about the major leagues here. The big show. There’s no glory in it, no recognition to speak of, but that kind of thing doesn’t matter once you’ve looked behind the curtain.”

“I already got a peek back there. Didn’t like what I saw.”

“Come on, now. I’m not going to throw myself at you—”

“Is that what all this is about? You’re trying to recruit me? This is how it works?”

He wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked at me with a strange fierceness. “This is my core,” he said. “This is my inner sanctum I’m opening up to you. You have no idea what I’ve seen. No idea what’s happening all around you every day. Men like you sleep at night because men like me don’t. All I’m saying is, you made a bad move back there, but it revealed something about you I hadn’t seen before. Now I know.”

“Now you know what?”

“I know I can make something of you, March.”

“No thanks.”

The suddenness of my answer surprised him. It surprised me, too. There was a time not long before that I would have jumped at the offer. To hear a man like him saying these things about me would have galvanized me. Now it meant nothing. I’d seen his world for what it was, and I couldn’t unsee it.

“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you’ve seen. I don’t care what’s behind your curtain. If we cross paths again, I’ll put you in cuffs as an accessory to murder.”

“That’s not even an option,” he said. “Those rules don’t apply.”

“We’ll see,” I told him.

I opened the driver’s door and got inside. He motioned for me to roll down the passenger window, then leaned in for a final word. His hand wasn’t under the jacket anymore. And he was smiling like his usual self.

“I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he said. “Maybe I’ll drop in and see how you’re doing from time to time. This isn’t goodbye. I’m taking the long view when it comes to you.”

I waited for him to pull back so I could roll up the window.

“You ever read Conrad, March? Joseph Conrad. You should. I told you I was more of a literature man. There’s a book of his—it’s great. It starts with a guy blowing up some Russian aristocrat’s carriage; then he hides out with this second man, more of a law-and-order type like yourself. And he can sense the judgment coming from your guy, just like I can sense it from you. So I’m gonna tell you what he tells the guy in the book.”

“Fine, go ahead.”

“Here’s what he says: ‘Men like me are necessary to make room for self-contained, thinking men like you.’ You understand? Say what you want—and believe me, I’ve heard it all before—but men like me are necessary. But maybe men like you are necessary, too. I’m keeping an open mind about you, March. One of these days, maybe I’ll find a use for you after all.”

And then he was gone.

In the end it is politics
, not virtue, that saves me. Even as the surgeons perform their ethered miracle inside my chest cavity, a narrative begins to take shape. Bea Kuykendahl tells the story in the presence of Federal agents as they number the bullet wounds in Brandon Ford’s recovered corpse. According to this account, Ford died in the line of duty, and so did I nearly. Though I don’t remember it this way, I am later told that when the
Federales
burst into the apartment, they found me bleeding out with a pistol in one hand and the scruff of drug lord César Soto-Andrade in the other.

I am a hero.

Not only that, but at the time I was apparently operating with the blessings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in full knowledge of the Mexican authorities, who not only sanctioned the operation but played a significant role in its accomplishment. The first photo of me to hit the wire is snapped at my bedside with my torso swathed in bandages and my chin covered in stubble. I’m shaking hands with a uniformed Mexican military official while members of Bea’s team, including the old-timer who’d warned me off, look on in stony silence.

There would be many more photos, many hospital-room interviews, many tight-lipped congratulations from law enforcement officials who had a good idea what had really gone down. But politics is politics, and none of them could deny the bounty: a high-profile cartel boss, a thwarted arms shipment, and a dead
FBI
rogue contractor in need of posthumous apotheosis. Is there any other kind? All the bent and broken rules, all the red tape, all the fodder for an international incident—with the wave of the political wand, it all just vanishes.

All that’s required of me is to keep my mouth shut. For once, I do. Whether Bea is a snake or not, I can’t tell, but if so, she’s the snake that saved me.

The real story goes something like this. When they found me, I was short of breath and coughing up a fine mist of blood. The bullet had entered my chest and collapsed a lung, which made my blood pressure drop rapidly. Keller put pressure on the wound to try and stop the flow of blood, but by the time the paramedics reached me, I had slipped into shock.

Bea says I was rambling incoherently, that I mistook her for a boy at one point, and for my deceased daughter at another. It pains me to hear this.

After they stabilized me, I was rushed into surgery, spent the night on a ventilator, and woke up with a blank space where my memory of the night before should have been. I was flown back to Houston and discharged after a week free of complications. The doctor who signed off on my papers told me I was lucky.

He had no idea.

While I was in the hospital, Charlotte posted herself beside me, scrutinizing everyone who came in. Officials in search of photo ops she sent packing unless I insisted, not realizing that after my string of misdeeds, nothing but a dam of publicity was holding back the tide of consequences. Cavallo came, paving the way for a state visit by Wanda Mosser, who poured on a treacly layer of kindness for the cameras before giving an interview out in the hallway, stressing her commitment to interagency cooperation. Before she left, Wanda conveyed her thanks to Charlotte and whispered in my ear that from now on I should direct any inquiries from reporters to her desk. I agreed wholeheartedly. Cavallo stuck around awhile after she was gone, angry with me for what she called my “rampage,” but grateful and teary-eyed that I was still alive.

One evening after visiting hours, Charlotte managed the thing I wanted most.

After disappearing for half an hour, she returned with Gina Robb holding a swaddled baby in the crook of her arm. Carter came in behind them, looking askance at my chest tube, almost afraid to come close. I beckoned them forward. Their baby girl was pink and translucent and beautiful in every way, with a downy cap of dark hair on her crown and a pinched little face. Gina bent low and offered to let me hold her, but I was afraid. It didn’t feel right somehow, touching such innocence with these hands. I stared at that little girl, and when I looked up, all three of them were gaping at me, triggering a memory of Keller’s exclamation of shock when he saw the ragged hole in my chest.

But it was my eyes that set them off, my eyes goggled with tears.

———

A secret world had opened up to me, sucking me down through its many layers, and instead of swallowing me at the last moment, it coughed me up.

The official record had been not only tidied but heavily redacted, leaving behind a series of notable omissions. Jeff’s body must have been recovered from the barn out on the highway—I’d seen the column of police heading in that direction with my own eyes, and it was common knowledge that the van full of M4 carbines was recovered—but in the official version, he never existed.

All that’s left of the killer I brought to Mexico with me is a tattered copy of
The Foxhole Atheist
.

The murder of Chad Macneil remains unsolved, as it was in the beginning, and the headless victim he left in the park with its ominous finger pointing to the place Nesbitt died is still identified for the record as Brandon Ford. The man I knew as Ford was buried with honors under the name of Robert Johnson—the idea being, I suppose, that false identities are interchangeable.

The last time I saw Reg Keller was in his apartment in Matamoros. He is no longer a part of the story, either. As obliging as Bea proved in the aftermath of my shooting, whenever I brought up Keller’s name, she cocked her head in incomprehension. There will be no more confidences, she told me, never saying a word.

———

The week after my release from the hospital I eat a burger at Five Guys before driving out to the cemetery where Jerry Lorenz is buried. A riding lawn mover whirs in the distance, and I have to hold my breath to walk through a cloud of gnats. All the trees have been planted on the perimeter, leaving the cemetery grounds to bake and boil in the Texas sun, and me along with them. I press my hand to the back of my neck and it comes away damp. I’m cold-blooded by nature, and even in high humidity it takes more than a stroll across a gently rolling graveyard to raise a bead of sweat on my skin.

Either the heat is astronomical or what’s changed is me. I’m not the man I was, not so resilient. The ice water in my veins is starting to melt, and maybe I should take that as a sign.

The tombstone lies flat on the ground, a gleaming black slab incised with an ancient tablet and the inscription
BELOVED HUSBAND
,
FATHER
,
FRIEND
. I kneel down at the edge of the still-fresh grave, feeling a slice of pain through the back of the thigh. My old companion making an unwelcome return.

What do you say to a fallen partner? What do you say to a man you started off despising and came to grudgingly respect, whose death is on your conscience and whose absence you’re only beginning to feel? I’m not a good mourner, despite all the practice.

I press my hand flat on the granite, leaving a fleeting impression behind on the stone.

His last thought was for his kid, as mine would have been, as mine
was
in the confusion of shock when I mistook Bea for Jess. It was Lorenz who first thought that the finger must be pointing, Lorenz who later worked out what it was pointing at. And I’ve come without even a conclusion to offer him, no killer behind bars, no clearance on record. Just death. At the end of the day, Lorenz and the man he was hunting are both equals in the grave, their differing moral weight apparently balanced in a zero-sum game of nonexistence.

If there’s anything in religion I want to believe, kneeling beside this beacon in a sea of markers, serving no ostensible purpose but as a focal point of memory and remorse, as a blaze cut into the bark to let us know something’s rotting underneath, it’s that the dead and disembodied will rise again before the cosmic judge, that the zero-sum game will give way to the balance scales of an unblindfolded justice. That a cool psychopath like Jeff will be weighed and measured and found wanting, and someone will tell Jerry Lorenz that he didn’t die for nothing after all. Which is more than I can do, hovering without words over the silent grave.

———

At first I fear the ripping sound signals some new injury of the flesh, that I’ve popped some stitches in my chest or my taut sciatic nerve has finally snapped asunder. But the gashed seam isn’t inside me; it’s between my legs. The seat of my pants has snagged on the fence around Jeff’s vacant garage, the threads giving way. On the ground I make a quick inspection. An inch or so of frayed fabric gaping wide, nothing more.

The desiccated hulks of the once-treasured muscle cars haven’t moved at all since the last time I was here. Everything’s the same. There are no migrants congregating in the parking lot across the street, but otherwise the clock could have reset to the moment before my ill-judged southward journey. When we left, we were both in a hurry, and I distinctly remember Jeff pausing at the door only long enough to lock one of the dead bolts. With that lock in mind, I’ve brought along a crowbar. In thirty seconds I’m inside the garage.

I turn on the window unit A/C and the upright fan. The stifling heat doesn’t abate one bit. If anything, the thin sliver of refreshing air makes the rest of the space burn hotter. My shirt sticks to me, my imperviousness gone.

From my jacket pocket I remove
The Foxhole Atheist
, setting it on the table. Then I snatch it up again and start ripping the pages apart. It’s a fat little book and the dismemberment takes some effort, leaving me with an ache in my chest and the usual prickling along the sciatic line. The book’s pieces lay clumped around my feet. The idea of stomping them comes to mind, but my anger has already run through me like a fever and is gone.

My footsteps slap against the concrete. My soles stick a little before lifting. The surface is tacky with grease. I pace around the reclaimed corner of living space, noticing a film of dust over everything. It wasn’t so different before. Though the garage was fitted out for primitive occupation, were there signs that Jeff was really living here? Try as I might, I can’t recall. Looking at it now, the place seems long unoccupied, more of a clubhouse than a bedroom. Things were not as they seemed. If I’d been looking closer, I might have realized.

The gaping hole in the floor left by the removed lift is rimmed with oil-blackened track and random debris. I bend down to examine the abyss, which gives off a smell not unlike an overheated engine when you first lift the hood. At the bottom of the hole, jutting up from the floor, there’s a metal remnant of the lift, a shaft maybe four feet tall that splits into two arms at the top, like a gently curving iron T. When I slide down into the hole for a closer look, marking my pant leg with grease, I find the shaft is socketed into the floor but jiggles around freely in its mount. Cords dangle loose at the end of each arm, secured at one end by complicated-looking seaman’s knots.

I don’t try it out, not wanting to mark my shirt, but I can imagine a man leaning forward against this shaft, his arms stretched just as I saw Brandon Ford’s arms back at the barn in Matamoros, wrists secured at the end of the metal arms. Remembering Jeff’s makeshift dissection, I feel light-headed. Queasy.

Removing my flashlight, I peer along the grimy floor for any signs of blood, but if they’re here, they are hidden from the naked eye. A forensics team could find them, I’m certain of that, and they’d match the telltale grease stain on the back of the corpse’s leg to some piece of railing in the pit. He would have been filthy from dying down there. Jeff would have had to drag him up, then over to the bathroom for a wash. I look for an axe, just in case, but there’s no sign of one.

Climbing up to the floor, I retrace his probable steps, ending in the small, dank restroom. The sink is gray from oil. The trash basket beside the basin bursts with fetid gray rags.

The night he rescued me from Ford’s men, it wasn’t home base Jeff brought me to, not his refuge. He brought me to his killing ground, his carefully appointed torture chamber, then spun a story so he could gauge my reaction and determine how much I knew. I’d felt so grateful to him for the unexpected deliverance that I wasn’t really on my guard. Not psychologically, and certainly not physically. If he’d wanted to, if he’d decided I could be of more value to him down in the pit than up here on the surface, I have no doubt Jeff would have killed me. After seeing him standing over Ford with the glistening knife, I have no doubt at all.

I spin and stumble, reaching for something to steady myself on. My hand rests on the edge of the table where Jeff stacked his many books. His books. I’d imagined him reclining on the army cot, reading his paranoid literature until the wee hours of the morning, unable to sleep. Now I can picture him coming up out of the hole for a break, a little rest and relaxation, leaving his victim down below to linger in agony. I see him reading while a moan ascends from the abyss, a private smile on his lips.

I don’t rip the books apart or even lash out at them. All I do is push them one by one, with the slightest pressure of my fingers, over the edge and onto the floor. Each one drops with a satisfying impact that sends a thud reverberating through the garage. I move the books over the edge like so many beads across the wire of an abacus, counting an arithmetic of hidden shame. The whole place should burn. It should be razed to the ground. But it’s not up to me to see this done. None of it is up to me anymore. I was not born to set this right. Not this.

The last book left is a thick old paperback with a creased black spine. The pages curl upward from repeated reading, their edges brown with age. On the cover is a detail from a medieval painting, a horned demon with serpents projecting from his head, the bare legs of a half-consumed man dangling from his mouth. All around him, naked bodies writhe in bubbling oil vats. They are stoked by pitchforks, their bone-white faces twisted in pain. This is a thousand-year-old vision of the depths of hell, affixed to the front of Dante’s
Inferno
, a place Jeff didn’t believe in but brought to life.