Toby San Felipe was surprised to hear from him, and he was guarded when he said he wanted to talk to him but wouldn't be specific as to why over the telephone. He didn't want him to come to his home, didn't want to meet him nearby, and didn't want to leave the house until after the kids had gone to bed. Since his wife's death, he didn't like to leave the house at nights. They agreed on the 60 Diner on Northwest Yarrara Trace at MacGregor Drive, just off the Northeast Freeway at 11:00.620Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlEctqcxKWF
Noah gathered up the forms that he would have to fill out for the FBI and left the office. Even though the Audi had been in the shade of the motor pool parking garage, it was like an oven inside, and he rolled down the windows while he descended the garage ramp and exited out into the compound. He circled the headquarters buildings back to Wilford Route and turned right on Randell Circle, which took him across the northern end of downtown, past the courthouse and the criminal court building and under the East Freeway 60 where Randell Circle suddenly became Levingston Boulevard and ran an oblique course into the East End, following the general angle of Sitting Bull River just a few blocks away.
Noah's mother still lived in the same neighborhood where Noah had grown up, in a neighborhood where all the streets had English and Spanish names and the residents were a polyglot of Poles, Irish, Scottish, Latins and, of course, Jews. Previously, it had been a neighborhood where extended families often encompassed entire blocks of relatives or near relatives, and the grapevine was so rich that rebellious offspring were kept in check by the sheer fact that they couldn't find any privacy to work their mischief.
But Mara Bain had raised two sons and a daughter in this neighborhood, and she had buried a husband there. This was enough living to have given her title to the place. It was as much hers as the big stucco house that sat square in the middle of two lots that Noah's father, Edom, had purchased in 1942 from a cousin who was moving his family to California. It was as much hers as the catalpas and oaks and mimosas she had planted, as much as the garden and the lush plantains that cooled the walks in the dead heat of summer. Age, Noah had decided as he watched his mother grow old, carried a great entitlement. If you lived long enough, the things most familiar to you became yours by virtue of the worry you had invested in them. They were yours as surely as memories.
He parked underneath the row of Mexican plums that grew the length of the two lots and shaded the front of the dun-colored house from the afternoon sun. The trees still had a few of their white blossoms scattered among their new green leaves, and they reminded Noah of the numbers of springs he and his brother and sister dutifully had stood beneath the rich flourish of creamy flowers while their mother had taken pictures. How many photographs? How many springs? The children were gone now, Noah's brother to Phoenix, his sister to Denver, but the trees were still there, and Mara still took pictures of them every spring. And Ariel still came by to stand obligingly under their white efflorescence to be photographed.
Noah found his mother in the courtyard of the south side of the house, the afternoon sun low enough to cast long, ashy shadows from the massive pecan trees that towered over the opposite side of the house. Smaller than her son----Ariel had gotten his height from his father----Mara was a trim woman with small bones and a face the clearly demonstrated the strain of Russian blood in her background, a genetic inheritance that had been dying out for generations and made its final appearance in her handsome sharp features. None of her children carried the distinct characteristics of their mother's Slavic heritage. She wore her gray hair long, past her shoulders, and when she was younger she had tended to it with elaborate care, brushing it, braiding it, washing it, grooming it with a diligence that was almost feline. She had done it partly because she was a naturally fastidious woman and partly, perhaps mostly, because Noah's father had a special affection for his wife's thick, dark mane. Now she simply had it pulled back loosely and clasped behind her neck with an ebony wood clasp. It was the only clasp the old woman ever wore now. It had been carved by Noah's father, a little bit at time in the evenings during the course of one July when Noah was a little boy.
"Look at these," she said, holding up two clay pots, a hot-pink verbena and a sanchezia, as Noah came through the gate. "Daughters of daughters of daughters," she said. "I planted their great-grandmothers."
She was standing barefooted on a wet rock where she had been watering her flowers, her baggy gardening dress hanging almost to her dusky ankles, her smile as beautiful now as it had been when, as a child, Noah first had become aware that it was something of a gift. His mother smiled easily, the kind of smile that made strangers instantly comfortable with her, a disarming smile that told you she was not a complicated woman, a misconception you soon would learn to revise. Noah took a deep breath of the heavy air, the familiar earthy odors of damp plants and stones. He kissed his mother's cheek and smelled the faint waft of cheap lilac perfume the old woman bought in a neighborhood store.
"I got a new letter from Rachel," his mother said immediately, setting down the clay pots along the path and pushing back the wisps of gray hair from her temples with the backs of her wet hands as she preceded Noah to a long slatted wood swing that hung from an aging water oak just off the path near the back patio. Stopping at the swing, Mara bent down a little stiffly and took the hem of her dress and dried her hand. Then she reached into the torn front pocket of her dress and produced the letter, its well-worn envelope torn ragged on one corner, exposing an equally well-worn letter. She handed it to Noah.
"She's in Valverde now. In the mountains. She says she's volunteered to go up there, tired of the coast, tired of the lowlands. She's much happier in the high country. She says she had to deliver a baby, up----way up----in the mountains where everything is mist like rain. This delivery was a very delicate matter because this baby was turned. A kind of long story." Noah's mother nodded at the letter. "She tells it there, you'll see. Anyway," a sparkle of amusement began to pluck at her eyes, "after a long and tiresome night the baby is delivered. So. Everything is okay. The child is saved and the mother is saved----thank God. In celebration and to honor the good Peace Corps volunteer, the parents named the boy---Rachel."
Mara burst out laughing. "A boy named Rachel!" She shook her head, delighted by the whimsical ways of gratitude, and sat carefully in the tree swing which Noah held out for her. Then, joining her, Noah dutifully removed the letter from its envelope, unfolded it, and held it in his lap as if he were reading it while the swung drifted to and fro, the chain groaning softly on its leather guides above them.
He came by to see his mother three or four times a week, and tried to get over to take her to synagogue at least every other Saturday. Even though Noah was the only member of his immediately family still living in Tolumura, the old woman did not lack for companionship. A large and faithful group of older women, many of them widows, who'd raised their families in the neighborhood, looked after each other, old friends that Noah had known all his life and who knew how to get in touch with him if it was necessary. Even so, as his mother's mind began to show the inevitable signs of quirkiness, Noah found himself wanting to keep in closer touch. It was almost as though he could feel that the departure had begun, and as his mother began to slip away from him Noah himself felt the need to move with her, if not to prevent the inevitable then at least to defer it. He knew that this kind of slow separation was a part of the human condition, but to acknowledge that didn't make any less frightening, any less painful.
After Noah had listened to the groaning swing for a minute, maybe two, now and then turning the pages of the letter, which was written on both sides of three sheets, after she somehow had shifted the weight of sadness in his heart so he could carry it and fought back the tears that almost instantaneously sprang to his eyes when he took the letter from his mother, he folded the sheets, slipped them back into the envelope, and handed them back. It was the third time inside of a week that his mother had shown this "new" letter; the third time Noah had "read" it and listened to the story of the baby boy named Rachel.
"That's a good letter, Mama," Noah said. "I know you enjoy getting them." Mara smiled and tucked the letter back into her dress pocket and thought for a moment.
"I'd like to ask if she has ever regretted joining the Peace Corps," she said.
Noah looked at her. The question shocked him.
"I've always been curious," the old woman mused, shrugging. "She was so beautiful."
"You don't think the Peace Corps need a pretty volunteer in Peru?" Noah asked, watching his mother.
"She was the prettiest of all your cousins," his mother said, ignoring Noah's remark. "She could have been a movie star. A model."
"Would you have preferred that?"
"Oh, no. It's best that she's with the Peace Corps." She widened her eyes. "But I don't understand it." She waited a moment. "I'm sure it's hard for the priests, too."
Noah smiled. His mother was one of Yahweh's more straightforward creatures. Her faith that God's will would ultimately prevail was firmly grounded in a belief in miracles. It was her conviction that only the miraculous could save man from his considerably flawed nature. Man's only hope was in something greater than himself, something he didn't fully understand, but in which he had an unabashedly explicit faith.
"How do you think Rachel would answer your question, Mama?" Noah asked. A Spanish dove had settled in one of the catalpa trees and had started its languorous, two-noted cooing.
His mother didn't respond immediately, but stuck out one foot and let her big toe drag to and fro over the stones beneath the swing. Then she looked up toward the dove.
"I think she would say that she was sorry that being in the Peace Corps was the only thing she head ever wanted, would ever want."
"Ah, you're cheating. You're trying to have it both ways, Noah chided.
"Oh, no. That's an absolutely honest answer," his mother said earnestly, as if she were defending Rachel's actual words. "Maybe she feels something is missing, or that something might have been, but she doesn't know what it is. But she'd be curious about it, and sorry she doesn't understand. I'll tell you," she added, glancing casually toward the catalpa, pretending to have a casual interest in the dove. "There isn't a woman alive who doesn't wonder sooner or later if maybe she didn't take a wrong turn at a crucial moment in her past. It's in her nature to wonder about such things. Everybody does it. Maybe especially pretty little volunteers in the jungles of Valverde. "
Noah suddenly had the feeling that they weren't really talking about Rachel at all. He suspected that his mother had been thinking about her divorce again. Noah would never forget the anguished look on the old woman's face when she had to tell him that her marriage was over. The expression had had nothing to do with his mother's own disappointment. Mara knew her son too well, how long he had waited to marry, how much it must've hurt him when it came apart. Her expression had been one of complete, selfless empathy; her son's pain was instantly her own. Noah had never needed her more than at that moment and the old woman knew this, even through the thickening fog of her senility, and she gave her son everything she had from the heart. It'd been a crucial time for both of them, and it had been a lesson for Noah that even this late in their lives their relationship was still capable of becoming even richer than it was.
"Anyway," his mother said, "how's it going with you?"
Noah came from a family of interrogators. "I'm doing fine, Mama." He urged the swing with his foot against the stones.
The old woman nodded and let a hand go up to her hair, smoothing it back. "Good," she said.
They let the swung run its course from the push of Noah's foot, the leather groaning on the oak, the little speckled dove occasionally reminding them of its presence with a low, moaning whistle from the catalpa. Noah thought of the woman on the bed, the pale length of her, the mutilation. What was the perp doing now, in the afternoon, waiting out the heat? He knew the answer to that. But he shoved it out of his mind. He didn't want to think about it now, not here, not with his mother.
Noah asked a few questions about his brother and sister. They communicated mostly through Mara. It wasn't that they weren't close, but they just weren't involved in each other's lives. Noah himself rarely corresponded with them. They visited about Herbert's advancement in the Phoenix police department and about Ruth's children, who were now in junior high school. After Noah inquired about his mother's friends and they chatted about the neighborhood, Noah left her standing under the Mexican plums and returned back through the neighborhood to the expressways.
He drove with his shoes off, one of the air conditioner vents under the dash directed to the floor, his slacks pulled up to knee-high. How had it ever happened that men came to think that they were not decently dressed unless they were wearing Gitano or Giorgio Armani slacks? It had been a bleak day for men south of the 35th parallel. Pants were nothing less than torture instruments in Tolumura's hellish heat, and Noah had mentally threatened to adopt all kinds of alternatives, none of them acceptable, some of them indecent, but all of them considerably cooler. He hiked his pant legs a little higher and checked on either side of him for that urban specialist, the freeway voyeur, who rode the city's hot asphalt ribbons in a variety of high-riding trucks, vans, and pickups, keeping a keen eye out for members of the opposite sex in lower cars seeking relief from the thermodynamics of dress slacks.
he took a deep breath and flipped down the sun visor. The traffic on the Northeast Freeway moved like a sluggish equatorial serpent, worming east under the harsh glare of a moribund sun, a copper fire sinking through a dusty atmosphere of almost zero humidity.
Leaving the freeway at the Little Neck exit, he doubled back to the left under the overpass and within a few moments, he was entering Harrison Trail, a neighborhood of roughly two square miles that had been an incorporated city since 1926. Immediately west of the Oxway Collegiate Institute of Law, it was a village of older homes on quiet streets crowded with oaks, pecans, magnolias, cottonwoods, redbuds, and (occasionally) a fat palm. The street signs were blue instead of the Greater Tolumura green, and the streets themselves were patrolled by the Collegiate Institute's own police force. Though they accepted gas, electricity, and telephone service from Tolumura, Little Neck was otherwise fiercely independent, and whereas Tolumura was distinguished among American cities for having no building code at all, Little Neck was dictatorially vigilant in maintaining its village atmosphere. Fast-food eateries and convenience stores, in fact almost all commercial endeavors, were relegated to the streets that bordered the village, facing the metropolis like jealous sentries holding back the poor taste of commercial progress and town home mentality.
Noah lived in one of the better streets in Little Neck, one of the Yuppie streets where the older homes were being brought up and remolded or torn down and supplanted by larger "interpretations" of their styles. He sometimes felt a little out of place here, though he couldn't really put his finger on the why of it. He pulled into the small circle driveway of the two-story brick home, its front door protected from the street by berms of yaupons and scarlet crepe myrtles, its brick drive bordered with flowering clumps of mondo grass. The yard had been made maintenance-free by a solid covering of Asiatic jasmine and decorative clusters of lantana. He had to admit he liked the way the place looked. Besides grooming himself, it was the only thing Anna-Diana had done absolutely correctly.
But he had to admit, too, as he opened the front door, balancing an armful of files as he pulled the key out of the door and closed it with his hip that the place was too big to live in alone. He laid the files and keys on a hall table and walked into the living room where he lowered the temperature on the air-conditioning thermostat, hesitating a moment, listening for the compressor to click on. He turned on a few lamps, kicked off his shoes again, and picked them up with one hand as he loosened his belt with the other. He walked through the dining room unbuttoning his shirt, then back out to the stairway where he started up to his bedroom.
There were times now when coming home to the empty house was the hardest part of the day. He'd done it for many years because that was the way he wanted it. Educated and independent, he was very much aware of being a man in today's world, and even though he dated regularly he relished his independence and had never had a live-in girlfriend. The idea had never appealed to him, for a number of reasons. And then there was Anna-Diana and their marriage and those few good months together before everything turned absolutely wrong. That taste of shared life, of making a forever commitment to someone who loved you enough to make that same promise, of knowing that no matter what else happened in life that other person whom you held so dear would be there to help you endure it or celebrate it, the giddy pleasure of just being loved by someone who mattered to you more than anything else in the world----all of that had been dangled in front of him just long enough for him to realize it was something he desperately wanted.
And then it was gone. Now there was no hiding from the fact that he missed her----no Anna-Diana, but the woman she could have been, the woman she should have been. It was the most painful experience he'd ever been through. Jesus, just to have someone to sleep with, not even the sex, but just someone to be with when you curled up at night. He really missed that. And somehow he couldn't tolerate the idea of girlfriends. Not now, not yet, not for a while.
He bathed and washed his hair and put on a thin cotton shirt. He combed his hair but left it wet, and then went downstairs to the kitchen and poured a strong scotch and water before he walked outside to the backyard. It was actually a spacious brick courtyard with islands of yaupons, an abundance of rain lilies in clay pots, surrounded by a tall privacy fence, and totally shaded by a high canopy of oaks that let through dappled sunlight in the middle of the day. It was a refuge, and even when the weather was almost unbearably hot, he would sit out here in the late evenings dressed in practically nothing, sipping a cold drink. It almost made the loneliness tolerable.
Sitting in a lawn chair, he propped his feet up in another, and rolled his pant legs up to his knees. The drink was tall and had lots of ice in it. He sat a moment, thinking, before he picked up the packet of documents he needed to fill out for VICAP, the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a nationwide computer information center located in Quantico, Virginia, that collected, collated, and analyzed data on specific violent crimes. With a little luck, the data he fed VICAP regarding the San Felipe and Dowey killings might trigger a computer "hit" of similar kinds of homicides occurring somewhere else in the nation. If so, he and the detectives covering the cases could exchange information and possibly cut short the career of a serial murderer. It was a remote possibility, but one he couldn't very well afford to ignore.
Staring at the front of the blue printed crime analysis report form, he read from the first page, not bothering to respond to any of the nearly two hundred items of requested information. Most of the data were case specific, and he would have to refer back to the case report before he could complete it. But he wasn't at it long. When he came to Section VII: Condition of the Victim When Found," he stopped. Those were images that were unlikely to be far from Noah's consciousness for a long time to come. In fact, he could hardly keep them suppressed.620Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmASPn3J7RR
Suddenly he had no stomach for dispassion or objectivity. It seemed almost a crime itself to grasp these familiar reins of self-control, to use them as an excuse to avoid an emotional investment. He didn't even know why dissociation was a virtue in cases like this; he didn't think it was. Not this time, anyway, not when he was still numbed by the pale, naked image of a man hunched over Lauralee Dowey's stomach, his face and teeth buried in her naval, not when he could almost feel the lips around his own naval and could see the gnarled ripple of the man's curved spine as he curled in a fetal crouch, knees against her hips, sucking at her stomach with poisoned ardor.620Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ5TWEazzIBx
It was too dark to read by the time Noah shook himself loose from such thoughts. He'd forgotten his drink, and when he reached for it the tall, sweaty glass was standing in a puddle of its own condensation, the ice having long ago melted, leaving behind an unappealing, warm, off-color liquid. He heard the tremulous purl of a screech own somewhere in the dense trees of the neighborhood and swatted a mosquito on the side of his knee. He needed to eat something. In a few hours he would have to talk to Toby San Felipe.620Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYPkrfJbCtk
