The Exiled (6 page)

W
ord spread once the road was closed off. News crews came from Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Bay kept them behind the yellow tape. He was content to play hall monitor, to bark orders at people who didn't matter while Raney investigated the deaths Bay felt he had caused or at least failed to prevent. He'd sent a child to protect a woman from a killer. He hadn't taken Raney seriously—or not seriously enough. The notion of a Mexican assassin prowling a remote county road seemed too far-fetched. He hadn't been able to make the image real, had thought Junior would be grateful for the easy overtime. He should have been parked out on that road himself, a shotgun across his knees.

“Don't make me tell you again,” Bay snapped.

The cameraman looked confused: Bay hadn't told him anything to begin with.

Raney walked back through the house, scrub booties on his feet, lab techs swarming, following his instructions to swab this, photograph that. There were two unfinished cups of coffee on the kitchen table, two wineglasses in the sink. He crouched over Mavis's body, tilted her head back with the eraser end of a pencil, just far enough to discern the trajectory of the blade. He had one of the techs take a Polaroid, then carried the photo out to the squad car, walking back through the pampas grass.

A lab tech was kneeling on the hood, photographing Junior through the windshield. Raney showed her the image. She climbed down, held it up beside Junior's neck.

“Do you see it?” Raney asked.

“A different angle from the others,” she said.

“Different angle, different blade.”

“It's too early to say for sure.”

“The deputy's cut runs straight across, and deep. The head is nearly severed. Mavis's wound is superficial by comparison. It's jagged, diagonal.”

“Maybe because she's a woman. Or maybe the killer was interrupted.”

“Maybe. But there were two men fighting in that living room. Both of them were wounded, and neither of them stuck around. Neither of them called for help.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I'm not thinking so much as wondering.”

“Wondering what?”

“How two separate knifemen wound up in the Wilkins home at the same time.”

Raney walked back toward the house, stopped to peer in the garage window. The Jaguar was gone. He went around to the front, found the roll-up door shut, the handle locked. He speed-dialed Bay.

“Come take a look at this, would you?” he said. “I'm by the garage.”

Bay crossed the gravel, his head hung low, as though he were searching the ground for clues.

“What is it?” he said.

Raney pointed to the garage door.

“No blood on the handle, no blood on the ground. No broken panels. Someone even took the time to lock it.”

“So?”

“Now look inside.”

They walked around to the window. Bay pressed his face to the glass.

“It's gone.”

“Uh-huh. The question is who took it and when. It had to have been gone before the fight or else the garage would look like another crime scene.”

“So someone drove the Jag right past Junior while he was still alive?” Bay said.

“Looks like it.”

“Someone who came back later and killed him?”

“Maybe. Or maybe that was someone else.”

“Shit,” Bay said. “This don't make a damn bit of sense.”

“Not yet, but it will.”

Bay nodded.

“This wasn't your fault,” Raney said. “None of it.”

“I'll tell that to Junior's folks.”

C
lara answered the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt, one hand clutching a wad of tissue. The hallway reeked of pot.

“It's all over the news,” she said.

“I should have called,” Raney said. “I'm sorry.”

“You have more questions?”

Her affect was numb, but her eyes were welling.

“No,” he said. “I just need to borrow the keys to the store.”

“Christ,” she said. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with that place?”

Mavis kept an office at the back of the shop, a converted storage space with no window. Her desk was overflowing with junk mail, the only bookcase in disarray. Stacks of paper teetered along the baseboards. Raney held this space up against a mental image of the Wilkins home. If he were going to hide something, he would hide it here, in the back room of an innocuous business, the disorder acting as camouflage.

He started at the desk. On one side sat a column of crisp-looking local newspapers, on the other a pile of crumpled invoices stamped
PAID
and
UNPAID
. Some dated back a decade, some were as recent as last week. The oldest and newest shared the same paper, the same watermark, the same bright ink. Raney slipped a small camera from his pocket, photographed every page.

The center of the desk was buried under a mound of unopened envelopes, crafts-related catalogs, expired coupons, dated flyers, glossy postcard advertisements. At the bottom of the heap he found what he hoped was pay dirt: a sleek laptop, recent model, plugged in and fully charged. He balanced it atop the newspapers, opened the screen, switched it on. A moment to boot, followed by a flashing demand for a password. He tried Mavis, mavis, Mavisartsandcrafts, MAVISARTSANDCRAFTS. Bay would have to call on the county techs.

He spent hours sorting through piles of paper, discovered a hoarding so random he felt certain it was a mask for something more deliberate. He found what she was concealing behind the bottom shelf of the bookcase—a single drawer built into the woodwork, blocked from view by a mismatched lineup of encyclopedias. He cleared the books away, pulled the drawer from the wall. Inside were two long, neat rows of envelopes, arranged chronologically and dating back to 1962. The address on the first was written in a child's scrawl, the address on the last in an adult-male hand. Hundreds of letters, carefully preserved, the envelopes cut open with scissors, the recipient's address always the same—Mavis Wilkins, c/o Mavis Arts and Crafts—the return address changing over the years, though usually attached to an institution: a home for children, a juvie center, a psychiatric ward, two different prisons, all in Massachusetts. The name of the sender was likewise always the same: Kurt Adler. The oldest letter came from an orphanage in Salem, the most recent from an apartment in Jamaica Plain, Boston. The orphanage letter was written in green crayon on a piece of orange construction paper:

The
k
came out like an
h
:
LOVE hurt
. The spaceship was more snail than turtle.

The final letter, written in May of 1996, was hardly longer than the first:

Mavis had a son. A son who predated Jack. A son she kept buried in a hidden drawer in a rat's nest of an office. In 1996 this son either died or opened an e-mail account. Raney hoped for e-mail. He sat in the wooden swivel chair behind Mavis's desk, called Bay.

“I need a background check on a guy named Kurt Adler. Chances are he's in Boston, if he's still alive.”

“Who is he?”

“Mavis's son.”

“You're big on slinging surprises, Raney? Mavis never had a kid. It was something she always regretted.”

“The regret part rings true. Adler will be about forty-five. And he'll have a record.”

“You know this how?”

“I found letters.”

“Where?”

“Her office.”

“We have a warrant for that?”

“An employee of the store gave me permission to search the premises.”

“Clara. All right, Raney. I'll get on it.”

“There's something else.”

“What?”

“We need the county computer geeks. Mavis had a laptop.”

“You're after that ledger?”

“Among other things.”

“I'll see if I can get one down here.”

“The sooner the better.”

Clara invited him up.

“You know, I used to work narcotics,” he said.

“Pot isn't a narcotic.”

“It isn't legal, either.”

“Then arrest me. I would have thought you had more important things to do.”

“I'm just returning your keys.”

Her tone softened.

“If I put this out, will you stay?” she asked. “Daniel's asleep. I don't smoke in front of him, if that's what you're worried about.”

Raney hesitated.

“I'll make us tea,” Clara said.

“As long as it isn't herbal.”

“I don't drink my herbs.”

He followed her upstairs. She'd changed into jeans but wore the same faded yellow T-shirt. The back read
NM ARTS FESTIVAL, 2000
above a blood-orange rendering of the Zia sun symbol.

“Did you grow up in New Mexico?” Raney asked.

“Outside Sacramento. You?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Two coasts, meeting in the middle,” she said. “Or somewhere near the middle.”

The apartment was a converted loft: kitchenette and bathroom cubicle along one wall, gypsum-board bedrooms off a slim back corridor. Television, couch, coffee table in the living space. An easel set on a canvas tarp facing the front window. The window was open, a pedestal fan blowing fumes and smoke out above the street. The painting-in-progress looked like a New Mexico vista if the colors from different times of day all bled together and the mountains turned flat. There were a dozen more paintings lined against the wall, each part of the same series.

“They're beautiful,” Raney said. “You're talented.”

“Whether I am or not doesn't matter today.”

“No,” Raney said. “But it will again.”

The TV was on. The screen showed an aerial view of the Wilkins ranch, the tagline
COUPLE KILLED DAYS APART
streaming across the bottom. Raney thought: What about Junior?

“They'll start calling it the murder ranch now,” Clara said.

Raney caught a snippet of the commentary: “Police claim to have leads but are refusing to release any information at this time.”

Bay was holding firm.

“Is it true?” Clara said. “You have leads?”

“We have a clear direction to look in.”

“The side business?”

“Maybe.”

“That's all you can say?”

“For now.”

The kettle started to rattle. She dropped tea bags into two oversize mugs, stirred in sugar and milk.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “I should have asked.”

“It's fine,” Raney said.

They sat at arm's length on the couch. Clara switched off the TV.

“Did you find anything in the shop?”

“I'm not sure. Let me ask you—how do you explain the difference between Mavis's office and home?”

“You mean the clutter?”

“That's a kind word.”

“The house was all Jack,” she said. “He wouldn't stand for a hair out of place. The office was compensatory. I think the real Mavis was somewhere in between.”

They were quiet for a moment. Then Raney said:

“What do you know about Mavis's life before Jack?”

“Not much. She'd been here so long that the early years never really came up. And I had the impression she didn't want to talk about it, like she was afraid of resurrecting some trauma.”

“What kind of trauma?”

“Family, I'm guessing.”

“Did she give you any details?”

“No. But she invited me over every Christmas and Thanksgiving. No one else came. No one called.”

And
your
family? Raney thought.

“What was it that made you so fond of her?”

“I don't know. She was a good person. She was kind. Protective.”

“Of you in particular?”

“Of anyone she cared about. But yes, of me in particular. And of Daniel. She brought Mrs. Hardin out of retirement, made her salary part of my stipend. Mrs. Hardin works with Daniel every day. There's no other resource for him here. How could you call that anything but pure kindness on Mavis's part? And she's never wanted a thing from me beyond what we'd agreed to at the beginning.”

“What was that?”

“She advertised a kind of fellowship or grant—I'm not even sure what to call it. She had this loft above her store in a small town in the New Mexico mountains. Whoever she chose could live there with free rent and a small allowance. In exchange, they'd give a few classes in the community and look after the store now and again. You had to submit a letter of interest and some slides. Mavis never said it, but I think I'm the only one who applied. It was supposed to be for the summer—June through August. That was three years ago.”

“Sounds like fate.”

“It was what I needed at the time. A clean break.”

“From?”

“My own drama. And Daniel's. Really, Mavis gave me what she wanted for herself. She had fantasies of starting over—selling the store, dumping Jack, moving to Buenos Aires.”

“She said that?”

“More than once.”

“Why Buenos Aires?”

“It's beautiful and cheap. And she spoke enough Spanish to get by.”

Raney made a mental note.

“What about the community service?”

“It was something she would have loved to do herself. She wanted to teach, work with children. But she had horrible stage fright. The thought of getting up in front of a group of people, even a group of toddlers, made her sick to her stomach. That might have been the saddest fact of her life.”

Raney tried to sound casual:

“She never had children of her own?”

“No. Jack couldn't. And he refused to see a doctor.”

No, Raney thought. He saw hookers instead. Mavis parsed out her secrets. She told her lover about her husband's penchant for whores, told Clara about the dreams she hadn't realized. Had she told anyone about her son?

“So she had you teaching classes at the store?”

“No—that was my idea. I did it to bring in a little extra money.
Very
little. Saturdays I teach kids up at the reservation, at the community center they built alongside the casino.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“Now I love it. At first it made me uncomfortable. I felt like a missionary, like a white girl putting a face on history. But Mavis kept saying: ‘No, you're sharing a skill with fellow human beings. That's all.' She donated thousands of dollars' worth of supplies to the center.”

Mavis was
compensatory
all the way around: desert a son, take in a grown daughter; make money trafficking, funnel some of it to the reservation.

“What about her mood? Any changes in the last few weeks?”

“I don't really know. She kept to herself more than usual. I hardly saw her. When she was at the store she spent most of the time in her office. And then there were those trips.”

“Trips?”

“She started going away overnight. Two, sometimes three times a week. Sometimes she was gone a couple of days.”

“Had that ever happened before?”

“No, never. She said she wanted to turn part of the store into a gallery. She told me she was scouting for talent.”

“What did you think of the idea?”

“Not much, to be honest. For a gallery to thrive, there has to be more than one. There has to be a scene. This is a place people come to when they want to escape a scene. But if anyone could have made it work, it's Mavis. And I'm not just saying that. She had to be a good businesswoman just to keep this place going.”

She found a way to subsidize, Raney thought.

A guttural scream reverberated from the back of the apartment.

“Shit,” Clara said.

She ran down the hall, shut Daniel's door behind her. The sound swelled, then subsided. After a while, Raney heard Clara singing, a nursery rhyme he didn't recognize or couldn't remember. He stood, thought maybe he should leave, decided to wait. He drifted over to Clara's paintings, ran his eyes across them, felt somehow comforted by the abrupt changes in color, the way she'd reduced the desert to its most essential hues. A mahogany storage unit sat beside the easel, a single horizontal drawer atop a long vertical cabinet. The cabinet door had been removed, the interior stocked with brushes, rags, tubes of paint, palette knives, cans of linseed oil. The top drawer was partially open. Raney peered inside, found a well-used rolling tray and a dwindling bag of weed. He glanced over his shoulder, slid the drawer all the way out. Pushed to the back was a .32 H&R revolver with a Crimson Trace grip. Raney palmed the drawer shut, then, remembering, tugged it partway open again. He felt certain the gun was a present from Mavis. Why? Why would Clara need a firearm in a town that until recently had no crime to speak of?