Fear Collector

CHAPTER 9

Tavio Navarro knew he’d had too much to drink and was never going to make it home from a landscaping job in Puyallup, just east of Tacoma. He’d been crewless that afternoon as he worked on a small rock wall that he’d been hired to build. The rocks he’d been moving into position were known as “two man” rocks and he could surely understand that they were aptly named. His shoulders ached and his forearms, unprotected by long sleeves, were beat up. All afternoon, he’d been guzzling sweet tea from McDonald’s. Not because he loved it so much, but because it only cost a buck. Tavio wanted to save every penny possible for his family-both in Spanaway and back home in small village south of Guadalajara, Mexico. He’d been in the United States for more years than he had spent growing up in Mexico. And yet, even though he’d earned a green card, married, and started a family, he still kept his distance from some things American.

The law was one of them. It wasn’t about him or his papers, of course, but about the extended family that lived in and around the mobile home he rented at the end of a dusty lane in Spanaway.

Tavio’s legs started twitching as he drove and he winced. He’d missed his last chance to take a leak at the McDonald’s he’d passed ten minutes ago as he drove the long stretch of flat roadway along the Puyallup River. It was dusk, the end of the day, and he knew when he pulled off the roadway to relieve himself, he’d be able to do so in complete privacy. It was a familiar place to him. He and his brother Michael had often stopped there on their way to and from the Indian smoke shop where they bought discount cigarettes.

Tavio parked his battered Ford pickup and looked up and down the riverbank. He could see a couple of white guys hooting it up as they fished about fifty yards away. Other than that, the coast was clear. The truck still running, mariachi music playing, he widened his stance and assumed the position and unzipped. Ah, relief!

As the stream of urine weakened and he shook off the last drops and zipped up, something in the grass caught his eye. For a second he thought it was a child’s toy, or maybe even a photograph from a magazine.

It looked a little like a hand.

Tavio, curious more than anything, swung the truck’s door closed so he could walk past without stepping off the narrow pathway through the bramble of blackberry vines and the scourge of the Northwest, Scotch broom. He wanted to see just what he was looking at. The hand. The photograph. The doll.

Whatever it was.

As he inched forward, a smell, a hideous odor, wafted into Tavio’s nostrils and he pinched them shut with his grimy fingertips.

Three steps closer and he knew what he was looking at something very, very wrong. His heart rate quickened and he knelt down a little, his eyes following the hand up a slender arm attached to a girl’s body. She was lying facedown and he noticed that it appeared that an arm, maybe a leg, was missing. Her dark hair was tangled around her neck. He captured what he needed. Nothing more. Tavio knew she was dead. He knew that because of the smell, but also because of the peculiarity that comes when a living thing is no longer so. It was strange, scary, and he wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could.

By his feet he saw a crushed cigarette pack. Its brand was familiar. Too familiar. He bent down and picked it up, his heart rate accelerating by the nanosecond. Tavio spun around and ran for his truck. As he backed out, he told himself to do so slowly. He didn’t want those white guys fishing and drinking beer to notice him. He knew that the girl had been murdered and hidden there, but he didn’t want to be the one to tell the police. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel frightened and sick for the girl and her family, because he certainly did. He remembered how his young brother, Juan, had been killed coming across the border between Nogales and Tucson when they were boys. No one in his family could say a word because no one wanted to be face-to-face with the authorities. Tavio knew that sometimes silence was an awkward protector.

His right to be there, to be a responsible young man in world of possibilities-all of it would come into question. Back then, there was no doubt that he’d have been deported to Mexico. That couldn’t happen now, but even so there was always the risk. They’d question him. Why were you there? They’d want to see his ID. They’d ask his wife all sorts of questions he didn’t want asked. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want Mimi to know that his papers were forgeries.

Instead, Tavio drove home as carefully as he could. He didn’t want to be stopped. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He rolled his window down low and hoped that the stink that had coated the inside of his nostrils hadn’t found refuge on his clothes.

Tavio hadn’t seen the girl’s face, but he had an idea who she might be.

The night before, he’d seen her mother on the news. She was a nice-looking older white woman with the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. She looked like she was middle class or better, the kind of person who would hire him to work in her yard. She looked kind. But more than anything, the mother of the girl he’d seen on TV was very frightened.

“If anyone knows where she is,” she had said, tears rolling down her smooth cheeks, “please help the police. Please help bring our daughter home.”

Tavio remembered thinking as he watched that the mother did not seem very hopeful that her daughter would be coming home anytime soon. Or at all.

As he pulled into the driveway in front of the trailer he and his wife rented in Spanaway, Mimi emerged from the open door. As always, she was a vision. Her black hair tied back, her brown eyes accented by a pale cocoa eye shadow, and her full lips, red. The instant he saw her, he knew that she was, as he always called her, his “angel.”

“Dinner’s ready,” Mimi said, calling from the front steps as her husband emerged from his truck.

“Hungry,” he said, unconvincingly.

Mimi picked up on that. “You all right?” she asked

Tavio shrugged a little and rubbed the back of his neck. “Hard day,” he said.

“I’ll make it better,” she said, putting her arms around him and planting a kiss on his lips.

“I probably smell like manure,” he said, though he hadn’t touched the stuff all day. It was that other smell and though he doubted that it clung to him, he felt he needed to lie. Make an excuse. It felt funny that he didn’t want to be close to his wife. Tavio didn’t like holding back, but he knew that Mimi would tell him to go to the police. He knew she’d be right, too. He didn’t want to tell the police because they’d question him, but something more was weighing on him, heavier than an anvil laid across his throat.

It was Michael, his brother.

“Michael home?” Tavio asked as they walked up the narrow concrete pathway to the front door.

“Nah. He’s out again. Seems like he’s always out now.”

“I thought he was sick.”

“Must be better now. He left just before you got here.”

“I haven’t talked to him for three days.”

They went inside; the wonderful smells of his wife’s cooking-a roast chicken and vegetables-would have brought a river of salivation from his mouth down his throat on any other day. Tavio had no appetite. None at all.

“I’m going to shower before we eat,” he said. “Need to get the stink off me.”

Mimi patted her abdomen.

“Baby kicking today?” he asked.

She smiled and nodded. “Your son is a future soccer player.”

“Baseball,” Tavio said.

He turned and went toward the bathroom, his heart pounding and the look on his face far from the joy of the moment. He pulled the cigarette package from his jeans pocket and proceeded to tear it up into little pieces. He lifted the lid to the toilet and the confetti of paper and cellophane fluttered into the bowl.

He flushed and the bits of paper swirled downward. Tavio was shaking then, hoping and praying that what he was thinking would not be true.

Could Michael have done this?

That night Tavio Navarro couldn’t sleep. With Mimi curled up next to him, he tried to stay still and not wake her. She was a light sleeper and needed her rest. Every day she woke up at 4:30 to make her husband’s lunch before she left for the school cafeteria where she worked preparing breakfast and lunch, then off to classes at Tacoma Community College. Mimi Navarro worked hard. They all did. As Tavio stared at the ceiling, he reminded himself that there was nothing but worry to be gained by making assumptions about someone. Although he’d never had the kind of brush with the law that his brother Michael had experienced, he’d been looked at with suspicious eyes in the past. He figured it was always the other guy’s problem, not his. If they wanted to think poorly of him because of his light brown skin, black hair, the accent in his speech, so be it. He could not stop them. He couldn’t explain what they could never understand: He was just like them.

And yet he was thinking the worst of his brother. He was thinking, just maybe, he had had made a terrible mistake, a mistake like he’d made once before… times one million. A mistake that would send them out of the country

That summer there had been several high-profile cases in nearby Seattle in which illegals had committed some crime only for the authorities to discover that they’d already been deported once. One man ran over a girl pushing a grocery cart across a busy roadway. Another man had raped a woman. Both cases had drawn considerable fire and ire from anti-immigration proponents because the offenders had used the legal system for nothing short of a ride back to their homeland after committing a serious crime. They barely even waited for the dust to settle before they’d returned to the U.S.

Tavio wanted only to raise his family in a place of opportunity. He followed all the laws, he paid his taxes, and he even employed other workers. He was living the American dream.

Michael, he feared, was another matter. Michael was six years younger, had a slighter build, and was different from his brother in every other way. Tavio thought hard work was the answer to every problem. Michael wanted to party and live a life of no responsibility. He liked hip-hop, not mariachi. He liked tequila, not beer. He liked girls who were younger than him-girls who were lithe and pretty.

Like the one Tavio had seen on TV.

“I’d like to get me some of that, bro,” he said when they were watching a news report about a missing Tacoma girl.

“She’s too young,” Tavio said.

“Young feels good to me, Tav.”

“You said you were going to date someone your own age.”

“Those girls are all used up.”

Mimi came in the room just then.

“You are a pig,” she said, giving her brother-in-law a cold look. She put down the laundry basket and started folding hand towels. “Pig,” she repeated.

“I don’t get many complaints,” Michael said, almost at once knowing that he’d said the wrong thing.

“What about Catalina?” Tavio asked.

Michael jumped up from the sofa. His jawline had tightened and his eyes flashed anger.

“Are you always going to bring that up? When am I going to be able to put that behind me?”

It was a fair question, but Mimi didn’t bail him out by saying so. She continued to fold the laundry, barely glancing at her husband.

“You want to talk about it, do you?” Tavio asked Michael.

“I want you to forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. You know that. I am your brother. You are supposed to be on my side.”

Tavio reached for the remote control and turned off the TV.

“I will always be on your side,” he said. “Even when you are wrong. You are my blood, Michael. But that doesn’t mean I won’t worry about you and worry about the things you have done.”

Mimi looked up. “Yes, Catalina will always be a worry.”

Michael put his hands up in the air and stomped out of the room.

Tavio nodded at his wife.

“You said what needed to be,” he said, turning the TV back on. “Catalina was a good girl.”

There were dozens of photos pasted on a board in the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case room. Grace Alexander wasn’t officially part of the cold case unit. But she found herself in that space whenever a conference was called on a major case.

Her eyes always landed on the board, first on her sister’s high school portrait, and then up two rows to the picture of the little girl who was the first of the many unsolved cases that would forever hold the attention of the department.

Ann Marie Burr was her name. Ann was just nine. She vanished in the night from her Tacoma home a half century ago and was never seen again. Just gone. It was as if the little girl had gone to answer the door and just followed her abductor into oblivion willingly.

Grace didn’t want to be the sister of a Bundy Girl-the cop with something to prove. Though that’s just what she was. She never said a word and she never allowed her eyes to linger on that scoreboard of unsolved homicide. She refused to remark upon the juxtaposition of Tricia’s photo and little Ann’s.