The Exiled (13 page)

L
uisa Gonzalez was screaming from somewhere behind a burlap curtain when the phone woke him. The nightstand clock read 5:00 a.m.

“I'm sorry if you were asleep,” Clara said. “I'm watching the news. What in the hell is going on?”

Shit, Raney thought. They would have broadcast the same mug shot she'd been passing around the casino. Why hadn't he thought to warn her?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “No, I'm not okay.”

“I'll be there as soon as I can.”

She came to the door wearing a long nightshirt and ankle-high socks. Her hair was disheveled, her skin mottled. Raney reached out to touch her arm. She spun away, ran up the stairs. He found her sitting in front of the television, hunched forward, mechanically grinding a metal whisk through a bowl of thick batter. He sat beside her, let his hand rest on her back. Her skin felt cool through the thin cotton fabric.

“I couldn't sleep,” she said. “I thought I'd get a head start on Daniel's breakfast.”

The early morning news ran footage of the crime scene: forensics hoisting the Jaguar onto the flatbed, Raney and Bay crossing the arroyo, the ME and her team following with the body. A voice-over ID'd the victim as Kurt Adler, said the Jaguar belonged to Jack Wilkins. The police were as yet unaware of any link between the “Boston mobster” and the killings at the Wilkins ranch.

“What will it be tomorrow?” Clara asked. “Why stop at family? Why not kill her only employee? And her employee's ‘child'?”

“Because you have no connection to the drugs.”

“For God's sake, who's doing this?”

“I don't know.”

She shook his hand from her back.

“Then why are you here? Why aren't you out looking for him? How was he able to find Mavis's son before you did? How did he even know she had a son?”

“He's been planning this for a long time, Clara. We're playing catch-up.”

“You don't even know who you're looking for.”

“I have an idea,” he said. “An idea you gave me.”

“What's that?”

The news switched to a commercial break; the jump in volume startled her. She turned off the TV, set the bowl and whisk on the floor.

“You told me Mavis was seeing someone online,” Raney said.

“The schoolteacher. She mentioned him a few times. Why?”

“I'd like to talk to him.”

“She never used his name,” Clara said. “The more I think about it, the more I realize she hardly told me anything.”

“She thought of you as a daughter,” Raney said.

Clara dropped her head on Raney's shoulder, took his hand.

“I'm fucking hungry,” she said.

“Why don't I finish making you breakfast?”

He reached for the bowl and whisk.

“I have a better idea,” she said.

She took his face in her hands, brushed her cheek against his, let her lips rest on his chin.

“Before Daniel wakes up.”

He left with Bay for Albuquerque at a little after 11:00 a.m.

“I told the tech we'd be there at two thirty whether he was ready for us or not. I said if he wasn't ready, we'd sit with him in his cubicle until he was. I told him you had halitosis real bad. I probably should have mentioned you were county Homicide—might have carried more weight.”

“I doubt it.”

“You do smell different today,” Bay said. “Not bad, unless you think it's bad for a man to smell like flowers.”

He'd showered at Clara's.

“Hotel shampoo,” Raney said.

“You really ought to come stay at my place. I've got a nice A-frame by the creek. Wouldn't be any hassle at all.”

“You lonely, Bay?”

“Ain't you?”

Raney shrugged. He still felt Clara pressing against him.

“I guess you wouldn't be,” Bay said. “You're the type to get lost in your own head. But too much of that's no good for a man. Shit, you're still young, Raney. A year or two younger than I was when I met you. Now, there's a swift kick in the pants. We both been alone more or less this whole time. You get past a certain age, it's hard to find a woman out here. At least one that's not already found.”

“Are you going to run that siren all the way to Albuquerque?”

“You mean the siren or my mouth?”

Raney gave another shrug.

“All right,” Bay said, “I'll switch it off. Not much traffic here anyway. But if you want to shut me up, you're going to have to talk some yourself. You're too damn quiet, Raney. You could put a man to sleep at the wheel. Try being companionable once in a while. You might find you like it. It might even stick.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I've got to choose the topic now? You were undercover in New York City. Why not start there?”

“I didn't last very long.”

“Long enough to have one goddamn story worth telling.”

“You're a bull in a china shop, Bay.”

“Meaning you're the china? Shit, Raney, if there's a PTSD thing here then I'll shut my mouth and drive. You can nap if you want to.”

“No, it's okay,” Raney said. “Just give me a minute to get started.”

H
e leaned against the hood of his car, watched a bivouac of homeless men congregate under the awning of an abandoned supermarket, drinking and smoking and sniffing from a tube. They'd sized him up, decided he wasn't a threat. Otherwise, the lot was empty, dark. Someone had shot out the streetlights on the north.

A middle-aged black man in a dusty Toyota pulled up beside Raney at exactly 10:00 p.m. He rolled down the driver's-side window, smiled. He was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans.

“You said no flash, right?”

“Yeah, you look the part,” Raney said.

“I hear you're working a real solid case.”

“Thanks.”

“So where's our next stop?”

Raney handed him a piece of paper with an address scribbled on it.

“Dunham's playing it tight. We're supposed to wait here twenty minutes. Then you pull out and I follow. Once we get there, we wait another twenty.”

“This is a good spot he picked. You can see who's coming and going in three directions.”

“He's smart when he needs to be.”

“You've got him now, though. All you got to do is outlast him. When's the drive north?”

“We step on the shipment tonight,” Raney said. “It goes out tomorrow morning. He doesn't want the shit in his possession more than a day.”

“Long hours for you.”

“Yeah.”

“Wanna head out?”

“Let's wait the full twenty.”

The undercover grinned.

“Dunham ain't the only one who's careful.”

“I've got a lot riding on this. What should I call you, by the way?”

“Dizzy.”

“Dizzy?”

“Like Gillespie.”

“You and Dunham have something in common. He's a lunatic for jazz.”

“Yeah, well…I don't plan on getting cozy with the man.”

“Lucky you.”

“Just hang in there, son. You're almost home.”

Dizzy stuck to the speed limit, slowed at yellow lights, drove like a man with dope in his trunk. Raney stuck a car's length behind, followed him down side streets from East New York to Howard Beach. They pulled in front of a one-story warehouse with a side staircase and a bright-orange roll-up door. Dunham sat on the metal stairs, smoking. He nodded at Raney, checked his watch, went inside. Twenty minutes later, Raney gave two staccato honks, and the orange door lifted. Raney drove in, parked behind Dunham's Lincoln. Dizzy followed. The loading dock was large enough to fit two semis. Beyond the dock was a brick wall with a second roll-up door.

“They make glass here,” Dunham said. “High-end stuff. One of my fighters is foreman.”

He jumped down off the dock, his gun tucked in his front waistband.

“That sure was a lot of driving and waiting,” Dizzy said.

“Next year I'll have you over to the house for Thanksgiving,” Dunham said. “Right now, I don't know who the fuck you are.”

“Hey, I ain't complaining. Cautious is good.”

“I'm glad you feel that way. Deadly, give the man our standard greeting.”

Dizzy held his arms out to the sides. “Just don't let your hands linger nowhere,” he said.

“Normally I'd make you strip,” Dunham said. “But we're short on time.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. Wish you had it on film.”

“He's clean,” Raney said.

“Last thing,” Dunham said. “You have a tape deck in that jalopy?”

“Yeah.”

Dunham tossed him a cassette.

“Pop this in and crank the volume. A little Coltrane to set the mood.”

“At least you got taste.”

There was a long solo before the band joined in. The sax came out tinny through the car's old speakers.

“All right,” Dunham said, “let's do this.”

Dizzy opened the trunk. It was crammed full of brown paper bags teeming with canned and boxed food.

“You hid the coke in shopping bags?” Dunham said.

“Nah, these are honest-to-God groceries. No perishables. I don't want nothing spoiling while you got me touring the boroughs.”

“So where are the bricks?”

“Underneath. You help me unload, this'll go a lot quicker.”

They cleared the trunk down to a spare tire and a flathead screwdriver, then lifted out the tire and set it beside the paper bags. Dizzy peeled the carpet back, used the screwdriver to pry up the metal flooring.

“There she is,” he said. “Twenty keys, pure enough for you to fuck with all you want. You could step on this shit five times over and it'll still kick.”

Dunham pulled a knife from his back pocket, sprung the blade, took up a brick and poked a hole in the packaging.

“That's right,” Dizzy said. “Have a taste. I hope you got a ride home, though.”

Dunham drew a small mound of powder up into his nose, threw his head back, wiped water from his eyes. He stood for a beat, listening to the music.

“Was I lying?” Dizzy asked.

“No, you told the goddamn truth. Deadly, let's bag this shit.”

“Hold on, now,” Dizzy said. “There's a matter of payment first.”

“I gave your broker friend half up front. You get the second half after I've been paid.”

Dizzy waved his hands.

“You got it wrong, chief. Second half on delivery. I just delivered.”

“Check with Farlow. That ain't the agreement.”

“Shit, man, I knew this was too fuckin' smooth.”

“You'll get the rest in forty-eight hours. What could be smoother than that?'

“Putting the goddamn cash in my hand while I'm standing here would be a fuckload smoother.”

“Here's the problem,” Dunham said. “You and your DC pals are only half the picture. What if I get up north and the hillbillies don't check out? What if they snatch the shit at gunpoint and disappear into the woods?”

“That shit's between you and them. We got nothin' to do with those Marlboro Men.”

“Farlow's your broker, not mine. I need assurance. You'll get paid when I get paid. You have my word. If that's not enough, all you have to do is give me back what I already laid out. We'll just hang on to the product in the meantime.”

Dunham grinned. Dizzy rocked back on his heels.

“Well played, motherfucker.”

“So we're good?”

“Shit, man…in for a penny…”

“I thought you'd see it that way.”

“It's me in a garage with two strapped crackers. How else am I gonna see it?”

T
he lab tech led them into a cramped conference room, left them alone with Mavis's computer and a fifty-page printout listing sites visited, accounts and passwords, the title of every folder and document on her hard drive.

“Not bad,” Bay said.

“Not bad at all. Let's hope our guy is in here somewhere.”

“Where do we start?”

Raney scanned the icons on Mavis's desktop.

“Is there a password on that printout for something called FiftyPlus?” he asked.

“FiftyPlus? Sounds like a vitamin.”

Bay slid on his reading glasses, skimmed the top page.

“Goddamn,” he said. “She spent her life on that site. Let's see…Here it is. Oh, you're going to like this one, Raney.”

“What is it?”

“‘Screw Jack'—one word, all caps. And the
a
is an ‘at' symbol. Mavis sure was a pistol. That much of her was real.”

“Here we go,” Raney said.

A small blue banner at the top of the home page read
WELCOME BACK MAVISW
!
YOUR LAST LOG-IN WAS JULY
20
.

“Hard to believe she was alive just a few days ago,” Bay said.

Beneath the banner was Mavis's own profile, a large green Edit button positioned in the top right-hand corner. She described herself as
outgoing and vivacious…an artist in love with life…a successful businesswoman
. “I'm interested in people,” she wrote, “which means I'm interested in anything people do.” Her ideal man was “cultured and athletic…someone whose perfect day would include a hike in the morning, a museum in the afternoon, a concert in the evening, a glass of fine wine under the stars.”

“That describes exactly no one for about two hundred miles,” Bay said.

“I think Mavis was happy to travel.”

She'd shaved a few years from her age, trimmed off a pound or two, but the photo looked current. As a kind of flourish, she wrote: “I promise not to judge you. I don't care about your flaws, as long as you promise not to cover them up.” And then, the fine print: “If you do not already have a profile, please include a photo with your e-mail. E-mails with no profile link and no photo will be deleted.”

“She had a gift for irony,” Raney said.

“Or else she couldn't tell when the lies stopped.”

Beneath her profile were two columns: on the left, links to pages she'd visited; on the right, a short list of members recommended by FiftyPlus based on her recent activity.

“Let's see if Mavis reached out to any stocky bald men,” Raney said.

He started clicking. The photos were hard to read. Most of the men posted head shots that revealed little about their heft or height. The few who were bald gave specs that made them too tall or short, fat or thin.

“He could be wearing a toupee,” Bay said. “If Mavis went with Bob Sims, she wouldn't have minded a bit.”

Beyond their photos and occupations, there was little to distinguish one candidate from the next. They were divorced or widowed, had grown or almost-grown children, loved dogs and nature and good books. They were teachers, librarians, journalists, photographers. All vaguely literary or artistic. They were Jack's opposite: men who fit the life Mavis wished she'd had.

“Who knew there were so many of us out there?” Bay said.

“Us?”

“Single men over fifty living in the state of New Mexico.”

“You getting ideas?”

“Maybe.”

Raney navigated back to the home page. At the bottom right, beneath the column of recommendations, was another green icon labeled
MESSAGE CENTER
.

“How will we know it's him when we find him?” Bay asked.

“There were two coffee cups on the kitchen table the night Mavis was killed, two wineglasses in the sink. We know now that the second person wasn't Kurt. So it must have been our man. He wasn't hiding in the bushes. He was invited. He was lying in wait, but he was doing it in plain sight.”

“And he knew what he was lying in wait for cause he was the one who called the Mexies.”

“Must be.”

“You think he started this whole fucking thing? You think he planted the idea to kill Jack?”

“Planted it or made it seem like a real possibility.”

“Sounds like a lot of work. The guy knows how to handle himself. Why not just hijack the Mexie kids before they ever get to the bunker? Leave Jack and Mavis out of it.”

“There's something personal here. Something emotional.”

“Maybe it's got to do with the guy they killed in Boston.”

“Maybe.”

They read backwards from the morning of her death to the approximate date of Jack's entombment. She'd received more than a hundred messages from sixty different candidates. Most were easy to eliminate:

“I guess it beats sitting down with these guys,” Bay said. “Hell, I might look damn good in their company.”

“It's like applying for jobs,” Raney said. “The CV doesn't matter if you botch the cover letter.”

There were only six men Mavis corresponded with regularly in the period leading up to Jack's death. Four signed with their first names, two with their initials. Raney clicked back through the profiles Mavis had visited; of the six men on the list, one was Native American, another black. Only one taught art in an Albuquerque public school.

“We'll start with him,” Raney said.

“Joseph V.?”

“Mavis told Clara she was chatting with a teacher.”

“That would make for a nice cover,” Bay said. “You wouldn't expect your kid's homeroom monitor to turn special ops for a summer.”

“Do me a favor. Give your tech friend Joseph V.'s address and ask him to track down where his e-mails were sent from. Not just one of them, but as many as he can.”

“All right. But don't get too far ahead of me.”

Raney isolated the messages from Joseph V. in Mavis's in-box. There were eighty-five total, the oldest sent six weeks before her death:

Mavis's response:

It took a short exchange of messages to nail down a place and time. Then, a few days later, this from Joseph:

Bay sat back down beside Raney.

“The kid's on it,” he said. “I miss anything?”

“They met for coffee here in Albuquerque. He's working her pretty hard.”

Bay slapped Raney on the back.

“We're closing in,” he said. “I feel it.”

“Let's keep reading.”

Over the next few weeks, Mavis and Joseph V. e-mailed one another every few hours. They swapped love notes. He sent her a video of a tango lesson, an advertisement for a dance school in Buenos Aires. She sent him photos of paintings she claimed were her own, though Raney recognized them from Clara's studio. They made plans to spend a full weekend together. The following Monday, Joseph wrote:

Mavis's response:

“Trouble in paradise,” Bay said.

“He's turning the focus to Jack,” Raney said.

“If this is our guy.”

“If it is.”

Mavis and Joseph met at a Mexican bar in Santa Fe. Afterward, Joseph forgave her, turned apologetic:

“She told him,” Bay said.

“She told him something. Maybe some version of the truth. A parallel version.”

“Parallel how?”

“Maybe Stewart turned violent during sex. Maybe Jack saved her life, her dignity. They moved out here to heal. But they grew apart. Jack took to drink. He became mean.”

“So she's lying to him, and he knows she's lying, but he pretends not to know, which is another lie,” Bay said. “Makes you wonder if you ever heard a true word.”

There was a spate of forwarded articles and jokes, more sweet nothings, a promise to let Mavis visit one of his art classes. They spent a second weekend together. Both signed their e-mails “Love.”

And then, two weeks before Mavis's nine-one-one call:

“This is him,” Bay said. “It's got to be. He's on his way to blackmailing her—‘lock that bunker door or die in jail.' She half wanted to kill Jack anyway.”

“Maybe,” Raney said. “Let's see if the tech found any hits.”

“I'll go get him,” Bay said.

Raney searched “Joseph V” in the Albuquerque public school directory. Only one name came up: Joseph Vignola. He checked the White Pages, found a J. Vignola living on the outskirts of the city.

Too easy, he thought. Too easy by far.

He knew before he searched that he wouldn't find a single image of Joseph Vignola, art teacher, anywhere on the Web. The stocky bald man had grafted himself onto a faceless virtual imprint.

Bay came bounding back.

“The messages were sent from libraries all over town. Even a few in Santa Fe.”

“Makes sense,” Raney said. “Our man isn't dumb.”

“We got him,” Bay said.

“I'm not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's a real Joseph Vignola teaching art in Albuquerque, but he didn't send these messages.”

“You positive?”

“There's only one way to find out,” Raney said. “Let's go knock on his door.”