The Blue Religion

The Fool by Laurie R. King

Sergeant Mendez, there’s some nutcase on line two. Can you figure out what he wants?”

Bonita Mendez did not reply, so deep in the maddening details of the Rivas/Escobedo case that she didn’t notice the uniformed officer in her doorway. For the twentieth time that morning, she read the note: 8:35 p.m., March 2, Mrs. Claudia Padilla (821 Pacific Circle) hears a bang and, a few minutes later, a car accelerating. She picked up the second page, torn from her notebook, to read: 8:49 p.m., 911 call. Young, panicky voice reporting shooting at 814 Pacific Circle (cell phone/Mrs. Adriana Torres/used by daughter, Jasmina, 13). Stuck on to this page were two Post-it notes with related information: Jasmina (Mina) says phone was lost the week before (phone records requested). Then, added the day before: Calls thru March 1 match usual pattern – ask? The two pages lay on either side of the laconic Patrol car arr 9:04 – Gloria Rivas (16) babysitter 814 Pacific, doa/gsw.

“Sergeant Mendez?”

It was shaping up to be one of those cases, the kind that brought you in on your days off and sat at the front of your mind when three a.m. came around on the bedside clock. What haven’t I seen? Sixteen-year-old babysitter Gloria Rivas, dead on arrival, of a gunshot wound to the neck. Twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo, her charge, missing. Here on Sergeant Mendez’s desk, a sheet of lined paper with a series of apparently random notes: Friends of EE absent March 3 incl. Jasmina Torres, Ernesto Garcia, Todd Stevens, Crystal Pihalak, Gilberto Oliveras. The name “Jasmina Torres” is underlined, simply because it has come up twice. 11:14 p.m., Joseph “Taco” Alvarez $500 Shell ATM at the Shell station north of town – gas, gone. In translation, this means that local gangbanger Taco Alvarez withdrew money from the Shell station ATM, filled his tank with the same ATM card, and drove off into the night. This note was included because Mendez learned from two witnesses that Taco had threatened Gloria Rivas not only because she had refused to go out with him but because she was going out with his younger brother, and she had further compounded her insult by talking the brother into not going through with the gang initiation he was supposed to face.

The entrance of Taco Alvarez onto the scene had reduced the uncomfortable possibility that Enrique – twelve, a good student, with no record – had shot his babysitter and fled.

“Um, Sergeant Mendez? The telephone?”

Sergeant Mendez knew the name Taco Alvarez; she’d even arrested him once for tagging, back when he was a smart-mouthed fifteen-year-old headed toward his own gang initiation. She wasn’t surprised that he’d shot someone or that he’d successfully fallen off the map – Taco had a brain. What did surprise her was that he’d apparently snatched up Gloria’s charge, Enrique, as a hostage.

“Sergeant?”

“What?”

“There’s some wackjob on line two. I hung up on him once, but he called back. I thought maybe you could tell what he wants.”

Mendez stared at him for a moment, then flicked her eyes to the phone that lay half-buried by the Post-its, notebook pages, refolded California maps, and scraps of paper that covered her desk. The phone’s light was blinking, which meant the caller was safely on hold and couldn’t have overheard Danny Scarlotti’s insulting remark: it had happened before. She scowled at the uniformed boy in the doorway. “Why give it to me?” she asked, although as she said it, she knew it was a stupid question. She was the only detective dumb enough, or obsessed enough, to hang around the station on a Saturday morning.

“Because you’re here,” Scarlotti answered, sounding like a teenager – although he had enough sense not to roll his eyes while he was in the room with her. She wondered if uniforms were this casual in a big-city police department or if it was just her.

“I’m busy. And Paul’s the one on call today. Can’t you figure out how to transfer it to him?” She looked down at the stray scrap of paper in her hand, on which she’d noted: March 2, p.m., Mrs. Escobedo hysterical; March 3, phoned five times; March 4, not answering phone.

“Well, he’s at his daughter’s tournament today, and I sort of thought…” Scarlotti’s voice trailed off, and Mendez knew that the answer was no, he couldn’t figure out how to transfer the call. She sighed, knowing she was going to regret this, wondering why on earth they’d hired a kid who couldn’t speak Spanish and therefore interpreted the language as a lunatic’s ravings.

“Sergeant Mendez,” she snapped, in English, to see if she could unsettle the caller, maybe make whoever it was just hang up.

Instead, the voice that came into her ear was real English – the kind from England, like you heard on the television, and not the hard-edged regional accents either. A man; an older man; a voice deep and oddly melodic, as if its owner were reciting on a stage. “What am I? An infant crying in the night,” it said. Then it stopped.

Her head snapped up and her eyes grew wide, then narrowed. Danny boy’s diagnosis of “nutcase” might not be far off. “Sir, you have reached the Rio Linda Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”

“Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”

It was what her English teacher would have called a non sequitur, and what most people would call lunatic ramblings, but something in his voice, some pressing intelligence, kept her from hanging up the phone and going back to her fruitless perusal of the material related to the death of Gloria Rivas and the disappearance of Enrique Escobedo. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”

She pinched her fingertips hard into the inner corners of her tired eyes. When did she last have a solid eight hours? The Rivas/Escobedo case had crashed down on them on the second, and it was now the fifteenth, with no arrest and no sign of the boy. Going on two weeks of gathering evidence; interviewing family, friends, and neighbors; getting alone with one after another of Gloria’s high school friends and trying to find a wedge to drive under those blank walls. Long, fruitless conversations with the police of Chiapas, where Taco Alvarez was from and therefore where he might be headed, and of Oaxaca, where the Escobedos had lived before they came north in the seventies. Dead ends for the murder, a complete puzzle for the boy’s disappearance, the weight of it settling heavily on all their shoulders. Hang up on this guy, Mendez. You’d do everyone a lot more good if you went home and got some sleep. But the caller’s voice had none of the slurred consonants of drink or the edginess of drugs. His brief statements, though nonsensical (and now rhyming), did not resemble the ravings of any lunatic Sergeant Mendez had met. He sounded polite and calm. Determined, almost. Maybe the English accent was deceiving her, but he sounded like a professor, one trying to deliver a particularly challenging lesson. Okay, see how he dealt with a bright student.

“Well, sir, you called me. If you want me to pick up the fruit of sense, you’ll have to drop it where I can find it.”

“Truth can never be told so as to be understood.”

“Yeah, ain’t that the pits? So, if you can’t tell me the truth, why are you calling?”

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face-to-face.”

This, anyway, was something she recognized, although what First Corinthians had to do with anything, she hadn’t a clue. “Sir, if you want to discuss the Bible, why don’t you go down to St. Patrick’s and have a nice chat with Father – ”

The man broke in, his voice forceful as he repeated his first words: “An infant crying in the night.”

Detective Bonita Mendez sat and thought about that for a minute. “Are you telling me that a child is in danger?”

The voice boomed into her ear, rotund with approval: “It needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!”

Something about that final word set off a tiny twitch in the back of Sergeant Mendez’s mind, a pulse of recognition, or apprehension. But a tiny twitch was all, little more than a faint aroma in the air, and it was gone. She looped back to her own beginnings: “I think you ought to come into the department and tell me all about it, sir.”

“So near, and yet so far.” He sounded wistful.

She looked at the number on the display, saw it was local in both area code and prefix, and knew he couldn’t be too far away. Maybe he was disabled somehow. Other than mentally, that is.

“You want me to come to you?”

“Come before his presence with singing.”

She hoped this didn’t indicate that her caller thought of himself as God; she really didn’t have time to get involved with a psychiatric hold. The paperwork alone would sink her little boat. Damn it, she wasn’t even on call today. “So where are you located?”

“Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

Her cop’s mind snagged for a moment on the word “pain” before it moved on to the possibility that “tell my story” might be where the man’s emphasis lay. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t think…” She stopped, only half-hearing the sounds coming down the line: the faint crackle; the build and fade of a diesel engine in the background; the voice of a child giving forth a long, unintelligible Spanish monologue. When she was a child, not much older than the owner of that piping voice, she’d had an aunt who lost both sons to a drunk driver and who responded to her agony by joining a church. The aunt’s church was one of those that lived and breathed the Bible, that consulted Proverbs and Job for advice and to make sense of daily life, that referenced any decision, from ethical action to what to have for breakfast, by summoning a verse. Some verses were strikingly apt – the Bible is, after all, a large and diverse book – but for other references, meaning was stretched past the snapping point, leaving the aunt and her audience staring at one another, dumbfounded. Rather as she felt with this man on the telephone, in fact. “Are you by any chance talking about Felicia? The elementary school?”

“My library was dukedom large enough,” he responded, with faint stress on the second word.

“You’re at the Felicia library?”

“I give you a wise and understanding heart,” the Englishman said, in an approving voice that made her feel oddly warm.

“Okay, it’ll take me maybe fifteen, twenty minutes to get there. Will you wait for me?”

The phone went dead, which she guessed meant yes.

She sat for a minute, tapping her middle fingernail on the desk, wondering what the hell she’d just been listening to. There remained the tiny, faraway sense of familiarity in the back of her mind, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tease it forward. Something years back and not here, but an echo… The Bible, snippets of poetry, Shakespeare – she’d caught both Hamlet and The Tempest there – it was an odd conversational form, to be sure. But conversation it appeared to be, albeit of a convoluted and inadequate style. She felt a stir of interest at this welcome distraction from frustration – and then caught herself.

She had to be careful. This thespian-voiced Englishman could be some honest-to-God nutcase setting a trap for a cop. A small backwater town like Rio Linda might not shelter as many purely vicious individuals as a big city, but that didn’t rule viciousness out.

When in doubt, take backup.

And always be in doubt.

Mendez closed the Escobedo file on her computer and hunted down the location of the number the Englishman had been calling from. Yes, a public phone, located at the little Felicia Public Library, as he’d said. Or sort of said.

She shut down the computer and began shoveling the stray papers back into their file. “Scarlotti!” she shouted.

“Yeah?” came the formal answer.

“Yes, Sergeant Mendez,” she muttered, locking up her desk.

“What?”

“Nothing. Who’s on patrol down in Felicia?”

“What, you mean now?”

She looked at him from the doorway where she was standing, adjusting her gun for comfort.

“Yes, I mean now,” she told him.

“Um, let me see.” He pawed through the mess before him, came up with the right piece of paper, and read from it. “Torres and Wong.”

“Patch me through to them, will you?”

It took him only two tries to do so, and when she had Jaime Torres on the line, she asked if the two patrolmen could swing by the front of the library in fifteen minutes, just to provide a little backup, in case.

There was a pause before the puzzled voice responded, “That’s where we are now.”

“What, at the library? Why?”

“Someone called in a report of a suspected terrorist in Arab robes hanging around out front.”

“An Arab terrorist? In Felicia, for God’s sake? Hey – I don’t suppose it’s a guy with an English accent?”

“Don’t know about the accent. We just pulled up, but there’s an older white-haired male sitting on the bench near the phones. He’s got a knapsack on the ground next to him, but I’d have to say he looks more like a monk than an Arab. Doesn’t have a turban or anything.”

“Look, would you mind not approaching him until I get there? Unless he’s actively causing problems, that is. I’m just at the station.”

“Sure, he’s just sitting there, looking pretty harmless. You want us to watch him from the car or from the café across the street? There’s a clear line of surveillance from there.”

“Why don’t you go ahead and take your break, sit where you can keep an eye on him? I’ll be there in twelve minutes if I make both signals.”

“Take your time. Wong’s got the prostrate trouble – he’s happy to piss for a while.”

The line cut off but not before she heard the beginnings of an outraged partner’s voice. She smiled, figuring that Wong had no “prostrate trouble” at all but that Torres had heard that Detective Mendez was unattached again, and was pulling his unmarried partner’s leg.

The Felicia library was a tiny building with a few thousand books, two computer terminals, and one part-time librarian. It survived on the goodwill of a small army of largely Hispanic volunteers and had to argue its budget to the city almost every year. But since the Felicia District of Rio Linda, surrounded by fields of strawberries and lettuce, was the kind of neighborhood where few houses had computers (or books, for that matter), and the only other forms of entertainment in walking distance were the roadside bar a mile south and the dusty general store/café across from the library, it made the Felicia Public Library the place to go for homework, after-school gatherings, job searches, ESL classes, and visiting-nurse clinics. It also made for some great numbers to show the state auditors, and the low-income patrons had justified a regular trickle of state and federal grants. Without a doubt, the people here adored the place and kept it both busy and spotless.

Which might explain why some concerned patron had called in a stranger hanging around the public phone out front. As Mendez pulled into the pitted surface of the small parking area, a young mother and her two young kids were coming out the door, and all three patrons gave the man a wary look. He lifted one hand, two fingers pointing skyward like a benediction; when the woman came down the steps, she was smiling.

Mendez got out of her car and could understand why the woman had smiled. The figure in the brown robe – which was no more Arab than the shirt and khaki pants she was wearing – resembled a tall, thin, brown-clad Father Christmas, down to the twinkle in his eye. There was, as Torres had told her, a battered blue nylon backpack tucked under the front edge of the bench, and a walking stick, tall as a man, leaning against the far armrest. His skin was weathered, although he was clearly Anglo. A pair of nearly white running shoes peeked out from the hem of his robe.

The man saw her, and he made her instantly for a cop, but he watched her watching him with no indication of the wary or defiant manner that brought a cop’s reflexes to attention. She half-turned to look over her shoulder, wondering if Torres and Wong had been paying as much attention as the skinny Father Christmas had.

In perhaps thirty seconds, the two uniforms came out of the onetime garage that was now plastered with neatly painted signs advertising strong hot coffee, breakfast burritos all day, and menudo thursdays. The two men hitched up their heavy belts as they crossed the deserted side street, not needing to look for traffic. They joined her at the car, taking their eyes off the man for only the brief moment necessary to greet her.

Torres, she had known for years, and she’d met Wong (who couldn’t have been more than thirty, further marks against the prostate story) a couple of times, although she’d never worked with him.

“He’s just been sitting there,” Torres told her. “Occasionally says hi to someone going in or out, but otherwise just cooling it.”

“Okay, I don’t think there’ll be a problem here, you might as well go back to work.”

“We’ll hang on for a minute,” Torres said firmly. Jaime Torres was a few years older than she was, and she’d been friends with his sister in high school: this was a brotherly thing. She wouldn’t even try to argue him out of it.

“Okay,” she agreed, and led the way up the library’s walk.

The bearded monk rose as she approached, not like a wary suspect but like her maternal grandfather, who’d been incapable of sitting when a lady entered the room. The resemblance ended there: her grandfather had been shaped by a lifetime of work in the fields, but even if he’d lived a life of leisure, he wouldn’t have been much more than five and a half feet. This man was well over six feet and of a willowy build that wasn’t far from gaunt, creating hollows in the cheeks above his beard. She figured him for a homeless man, what with being a stranger in the area and carrying that worn knapsack, but if so, he was a very clean and tidy homeless man. He reminded her of a portrait of a saint in church school.

“Sir, I believe you called the police department?” she said.

“When constabulary duty’s to be done,” he replied, one eyelid drooping infinitesimally in a near wink.

“Could we have your name, sir?” she asked.

Instead of answering, his right hand went toward the side of the brown robe, where a pocket might be; instantly, both men at her side leaped forward to seize him, yanking his arms around and making him stagger back with a grimace of pain.

“Wait, wait!” she told them. “Don’t hurt him. Sir, do you have any weapons in your pocket? Anything sharp?”

He shook his head.

“Do we have your permission to check for ourselves?”

He nodded.

“Would you please lean with both arms against the back of that bench? Let him go,” she told the two uniforms.

The old man turned and leaned his arms onto the bench, automatically spreading his feet apart as he did so: he’d been patted down before. Then again, anyone who looked like this would have been picked up regularly, no matter his behavior.

His pockets, accessible through slits in the seams of the brown robe, held no gun or knife. Some coins, a pencil stub and folded sheets of paper, and a nearly flat wallet. She held out his wallet to him. “Is this what you were after?” she asked.

In answer, he took it from her and opened the billfold portion. There was no money that she could see, but he took out a piece of folded newspaper and offered it to her.

“You want us to look at his pack?” Torres asked her.

She met the brown eyes above her. “Sir, do you mind if we take a look at your belongings?”

“What’s mine is yours, and what is yours is mine,” the monk said, extending one hand in a sweeping gesture toward the beat-up rucksack on the ground. Torres picked it up and unbuckled the top, while Mendez picked apart the ancient folded square of newspaper.

It was the upper half of a front page, seven-year-old San Francisco Chronicle. In the center was a photograph showing four people, standing in conversation.

Although the page was all but worn through on its fold lines, she recognized the figure with the white hair, the dark robe, and the long walking stick with the knob on top that was currently leaning against the end of the bench – in the grainy newsprint, the stick was tucked against his shoulder as he leaned forward to listen to a dark-haired woman not much taller than Mendez herself. To the woman’s left stood the familiar image of a black man wearing a dashing hat who could be only the then mayor of San Francisco. Next to the man in the robe was the fourth figure, a middle-aged man whose face was vaguely familiar.

When she read the caption, she realized why:

“Mayor Willie Brown and Inspectors Martinelli and Hawkin of the SFPD talk with the self-styled ‘Brother Erasmus’ at the funeral of homeless woman Beatrice Jankowski on Saturday, St. Mary’s Cathedral.”

Hawkin, she knew that name. And Martinelli – they’d been involved with a couple of cases that got a lot of press.

The faint bell of memory rang slightly louder. Hadn’t one of those cases been something extremely quirky to do with the homeless population of San Francisco? A murder case in which a sort of patron saint of the homeless population had played a part? One Brother Erasmus?

She opened her mouth to ask him about it, but suddenly Torres exclaimed and thrust out the object in his hand. It was a small, thick leather-bound book with onionskin pages, closely printed in some heavy writing.

“Arabic!” he exclaimed. “And it’s got notes to himself in the same language!”

For a moment, just an instant, it crossed Mendez’s mind that there might be a terrorist cell here in Rio Linda, the world’s least likely place. She shot a glance at the accused man’s face, but the old bearded man had one white eyebrow raised in a look that was more quizzical than guilty. Of course, it was possible that terrorists had now started enrolling in acting school…

“Let me see that,” she said. Torres gave her the book and transferred his hand to the butt of his gun, flipping off the snap to be ready when the old man reached for the trigger of his vest bomb. She opened the book and immediately shook her head – she had no idea what the words said, but she’d watched enough television news to know what she was looking at.

“This isn’t Arabic, Torres, it’s Hebrew. And for heaven’s sake, take your hand off your weapon.”

“Hebrew?”

“Sure, it’s all square and boxy – Arabic is all curves and curlicues. Haven’t you ever noticed the banners and signs on the news?”

“So… what? A Jewish terrorist?”

“This is a Bible,” she said. “No, look, don’t bother going through the rest of his pack. I know who this is. You’re Brother Erasmus, aren’t you?” she asked.

“A muddled fool, full of lucid intervals.” His smile was like a beatitude as he held out his hand to her.

“Er, right,” she said.

She gave him her hand and felt it wrapped in a smooth, strong, warm grip that again evoked her grandfather, who had grasped the wooden handle of a hoe until the last day of a long life. But this man’s fingers were long and thin and considerably less bashed about, and reminded her of that Dürer engraving of praying hands that used to be so popular when she was growing up. “Sergeant Bonita Mendez,” she told him.

He held her hand a moment, then let her go.

“Thanks, Torres, you and Wong can get back on patrol. I’m fine here.”

Reluctantly, and not without protest, the two patrol officers separated themselves from the library forecourt and returned to their car. Watching the two men swagger off, Mendez regretted, not for the first time, that a uniformed officer’s equipment belt encouraged such a gait.

She turned to the man at her side and said, “Sir, I’m going to need to make some phone calls. Do you mind coming with me to the station house? You could have a cup of coffee or something,” she added, lest he think of it as an arrest.

He stretched out a long arm for the rucksack Torres had abandoned, half-searched, on the bench, retrieved the carved staff, and walked beside her to the unmarked she’d driven there.

She put him in the front, threading the staff over the seat back, and pulled out of the library parking lot. Neither of them spoke on the drive into town, although it was not an uncomfortable silence, merely restful. At the station, she helped him get his walking stick out and led him inside.

“Sir, I’m going to put you in an interview room for a few minutes, and I’ll be with you as soon as I’ve made my calls. Is there anything you need? Coffee, soft drink, something to eat?”

“I am glad I was not born before tea,” the old man remarked.

“Tea? I’ll see what we can do. Officer Scarlotti, would you please make a cup of tea for the gentleman in Interview Room One?”

“Tea?”

“Yes, there are some bags in the cabinet. And take him the milk and sugar, in case he wants them.”

“Milk and sugar?”

“And offer him the package of cookies,” she added, and closed the door before he could repeat that as well.

It took four calls to track down Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department, but eventually Mendez reached her at home. A woman answered; a child was talking in the background; Martinelli came on the line; and the background noise cut off.

Mendez began to explain: odd phone call; enigmatic remarks; the caller tracked to a local library; seemed to match the identity of the man known as Brother Erasmus; and she wondered -

“Our Holy Fool is there? In Rio Linda?” the detective interrupted.

“Apparently.”

“Good Lord, I’ve often wondered what happened to the old man. How is he?”

“He looks fine. Thin but healthy.”

“If I wasn’t in the middle of ten things, I’d be tempted to drive down and say hello. Tell him hi from me, would you?”

The affection in Martinelli’s voice was not the usual reaction of a Homicide detective to a witness and onetime suspect, Mendez reflected.

“I wanted to ask you about him, whether you’d say he was reliable, but it sounds like you’ve already answered my question.”

“I don’t know about reliable, since Erasmus might well have his own agenda, but I’d say he’s the most honest man you’ll meet.”

“If you can figure out what he’s saying,” Mendez said.

“Does he still talk that way? Everything in quotes?”

“Are those all quotes?”

“That’s how he talked then. It took us forever to figure out what he was trying to say.”

“Why does he talk that way?”

Martinelli was silent for a moment, then said, “He would probably call it penance for his sins. He lost his family, years ago back in England, in a way he felt responsible for. Personally, I thought he was trying to keep his mind so busy, he didn’t have energy left over for his own thoughts. He is actually able to speak directly, in his own words – he finally did when he was helping us with our case – but it seemed to be very hard on him. I think you’ll find that, if you listen carefully, his meaning becomes clear. Have you figured out what he’s after?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said he called you and said something about an ‘infant crying in the night.’ Has he suggested yet how he can help you?”

“You think he knows something about one of my cases?”

“People open up to him, even the most unlikely people.” Something about the way the detective said this made it sound like an admission. “And if he didn’t know anything, why would he have called? Do you have a case involving a child?”

Mendez was silent, picturing the abandoned bedroom of twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo: neatly made bed, rock poster on the wall and a Lego spaceship below it, bulletin board pinned with drawings of friends and celebrities, dozens of science-fiction books on the shelf unit. “I might.”

“Well, he had some reason to come to you. You might start there.”

Mendez thanked her, repeated the promise to pass her greeting on to the old man, and hung up. She then phoned the priest at the Catholic church downtown – not her own parish priest, but she knew him. He knew immediately whom she was talking about.

“The kids call him St. Francis, because he has a way of coaxing birds into eating from his hand. He’s been at Mass a few times over the past few weeks. I’m not sure where he lives or how he supports himself, although I’ve seen people slip him money, and they often bring him something to eat.”

“Elijah’s ravens,” she commented.

“Exactly. Nice fellow, odd, but a calming influence. There was a scuffle in the food line one day, and he stepped forward and put his hands on the two men’s shoulders, and they calmed right down. What’s more, he had them eating lunch together afterward, talking up a storm while he sat with them and nodded.”

“Have you talked with him?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it talking with him, but I’ve sat and talked to him several times myself. Very restful kind of fellow. Knows his Bible better than I do.”

“But you’d say he’s a trustworthy sort?”

The priest did not hesitate. “I’d say he’s a saint of God.”

When she hung up, she sat tapping the desk for a while, then returned to the interrogation room. When she glanced through the door’s small window, she could see the old man, long hands tucked together in his lap, gazing in silent contemplation at his staff, which was leaned in the corner. She turned the knob and stuck her head inside.

“I need some lunch. You want to join me?”

He rose and picked up his knapsack and staff, and followed her out of the station.

They walked down the street to the take-out burrito stand, which was doing brisk business with an assortment of children in soccer uniforms, the playing fields being just two blocks away. They waited their turn, the old man ordered by laying a finger on the vegetarian option, and two minutes later they had their fragrant meals before them on one of the stand’s heavily scarred wooden picnic tables. She peeled back the paper and bit in; Erasmus was of the fork-and-knife school, taking a fastidious surgical approach to the object with his plastic utensils. His staff lay stretched out on top of a low concrete-block wall, and for the first time, she noticed that the fist-size swelling at the top was not an amorphous knob of wood but a heavily worn carving. Studying it, she realized that when it was new, it must have resembled its owner – beard, flowing hair, hawklike nose. She smiled.

“I spoke with Inspector Martinelli in San Francisco,” she said.

“Subtle and profound female,” he murmured.

“Yeah, she seemed to admire you as well, and asked me to say hello. She also said that you might have some information regarding an active case. That it might be the reason you called.”

He put his fork down and reached through the pocket-slit of his robe, pulling out a folded scrap of newsprint that was considerably fresher than the one she had found in his wallet earlier. He laid it in front of her, resuming his fork as she picked up the clipping.

The Escobedo boy’s grinning school picture looked out at her.

She knew what the article said without having to look – she felt by now that the words had been carved on her heart. It had been published on March 9, one week after Enrique Escobedo had vanished from his house, and his babysitter, Gloria Rivas, had been gunned down on the front walkway of the home. When the article was written, Rio Linda was still quivering with apprehension; they were now coming up on the two-week anniversary, and Detective Bonita Mendez hadn’t slept an eight-hour night in thirteen days.

“You have information about this?” she demanded.

He frowned at the rice and beans spilling out of their wrapper, and she could see him decide on an appropriate quote. “Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.” The stress placed on the final word suggested the direction of his meaning.

“Look, sir, can’t we just drop this whole quotation business? This isn’t a game.”

He raised an eyebrow in sympathy and said, “The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.” He chewed a mouthful, watching her intently. She propped her head in her palms and shut her eyes.

“You’re telling me that you don’t actually have any direct knowledge that could lead me to Enrique Escobedo,” she said. “You have only guesses, except that I have to jump through hoops to try to figure out what you mean, when I’m so tired that even if you were talking sense, I’d have problems sorting it out. I have to say, if you’re trying to help, I wish you wouldn’t. You’re wasting time that I don’t have.”

She felt his touch then, the dry firmness of his skin as his fingers wrapped around hers, gently pulling her hand from her face. She looked into his eyes, dark into dark, and saw her torment reflected there.

“To every thing there is a season,” he stated, as if the words had never been said before. “A time to weep, and a time to laugh. A time to keep silence, and a time to speak. There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.” The repetition of the word alone was soporific; Mendez wanted to lay her head onto her arms right there on the picnic table. “Take up thy bed. And if we do meet again, why, we shall smile.”

“You’re telling me to go home and have a nap.” His eyes crinkled: Yes. “You’re probably right. But you haven’t told me what you wanted me to know, about Enrique Escobedo.”

“Those that have eyes to see, let them see.”

“Do you have any idea how irritating this is?” she snapped.

“The discourse of fools is irksome,” he agreed.

“So why do you do it?”

The crooked smile he gave her was filled with apology and empathy. He said, “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a beggar’s rags,” she told him.

But Brother Erasmus merely said, “Like him that travels, I return again.” He set the tip of his first finger against the table: Here. Then he spread both hands out on the dented wood, all fingers outstretched except the thumb of his left hand, tucked under the palm.

“You want me to meet you back here at nine o’clock?” she interpreted. “Tonight?”

By way of answer, he folded the paper around his half-eaten burrito, tucked it and the plastic fork and knife into his knapsack, and walked away, his staff beating a syncopation to his steps. The carved head was pointing backward; it seemed to watch her as it rose and fell.

She shook her head to get the ridiculous notion out of her mind. But in one thing, the man was surely right: she did need some rest if she wasn’t to be utterly useless. She phoned the station and told Scarlotti that she was going home and wasn’t to be disturbed for anything short of a catastrophe. Inevitably, he wanted to know what she meant by “catastrophe,” but she slapped her phone shut and tossed her debris in the trash.

She drove home, fed the cat, kicked off her shoes, and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up over her head. And although she expected perhaps twenty minutes of fitful rest, Bonita Mendez slept like a babe in its mother’s arms, her dreams filled with the warm brown eyes of wise old men.

When she woke, it was dark, and the bedside clock told her it was nearly seven. She fried up some eggs, onions, and jalapeños, wrapping them in some of the tortillas her mother had made, topped with her sister’s fiery homemade salsa. Rested, fed, and warm inside, she then took a long, hot shower, washed her hair, dressed in plain clothes with a jacket to cover her gun, and went by the station in the vain hope that something – anything – had come to light in the case. There was nothing.

Mendez had no intention of meeting the old man. It was ridiculous, to waste her time listening to his colorful but meaningless talk, when she could be out reinterviewing the friends of Gloria Rivas she’d suspected hadn’t told her everything they knew, or -. That reminded her. She called the Torres number, got Jasmina’s mother again, and was told that no, Mina wasn’t home that day. She had been in earlier and went out again with friends to a movie. Did Sergeant Mendez have Mina’s new cell phone number? Yes, Sergeant Mendez had it, and now tried it, but the phone was either turned off or in one of the county’s numerous dead zones.

Mendez looked at the clock again: 8:52. Oh, hell, why not?

When she turned down the alleyway near the burrito stand, it appeared empty, until the old man stepped out of the shadows, a swirl of dark robes and a gleaming staff. He pulled open the car door, slid the stick inside with the ease of long habit, tucked himself into the passenger seat, and had the door shut again before the car had settled into stillness.

“Where are we going?” she asked, reaching up to flick on the overhead light.

He held out a scrap of paper, a torn-off section of the local AAA map, showing Rio Linda and the outlying countryside. Near the upper right corner, twelve miles or so from the center of town, was a penciled circle.

“You want me to go here?” she asked, tapping the circle.

In response, he pulled his seat belt around him.

She put the car into gear and drove off.

She didn’t have to check his map again – one thing Bonita Mendez knew, it was this valley. She had been born in the Rio Linda community hospital, had attended schools here, had gone to college just over the range of coastal hills, and had come home, after a brief fling with the bright lights of the Bay Area, to work and live. She’d learned how to drive on the roads near the map’s circle, remote farm lanes where a beginner could learn the intricacies of the stick shift without endangering the driving public; she’d patrolled there when she began at the police department; and she’d helped dismantle a meth lab a little farther along the road, five years later. Before that, she remembered, the INS had raided a farmworkers’ camp, carved into the hills by undocumented workers desperate to save every dollar to send to their families back home.

It was dark out there, miles from any streetlamp. When she let the car slow, the last house had been nearly a mile before; the last car they’d passed, ten minutes before. Even the headlights behind them had turned off at the final junction, when they’d left the main road.

“Okay?” she said, making it a question.

The old man’s hand moved into the glow from the dashboard, one long finger pointing straight ahead. She gave the car some gas, and in a hundred yards, when his finger shifted to the right, she steered down a gravel track between fields.

They went on that way for about a mile in all, gravel giving way to dirt, then ruts. Eventually, his hand came up, and she stopped.

She would’ve had to stop even without the signal, because she had reached the end of the road. The fields on either side came to an end at a creek with a cliff on the other side, thrust up by an underground fault line. Her headlights illuminated a dirt turnaround and a wall of greenery. The camp of illegals had been very near here, as she remembered – the men had used the creek for water, the hills for shelter, and the trees for concealment. In the end, it had been the smell of the cook fire that had given them away.

Just as the smell of smoke as she got out of the car gave this encampment away.

She had her hand on the weapon at her side, easing the car door shut with the hand that held the big Maglite. The old man, however, had no such urge to silence, and before she could stop him, he had slammed his door with a bang that could be heard for a mile.

The very air seemed to wince. Her companion walked toward the turnaround and spoke over his shoulder. “Venga.”

She was already moving before the implications of his command struck her. Unless he’d come up with a very short quotation from some Spanish book, he had just addressed her directly. She trotted after him, switching on her flashlight as they plunged into a shadow of a space between some bushes.

Yes, there was a creek here, with stones laid across it to ensure dry feet. And yes, the smell of wood smoke grew, as did signs of human occupation – a pair of folding chairs that looked as if they’d literally fallen off the back of a truck, with duct tape and a stick holding one leg together; a full black garbage bag with its neck tied shut; a heap of empty plastic gallon-size milk jugs. At least the place doesn’t reek like a toilet, she thought, grateful that she wasn’t picking up disgusting substances on her shoes.

The ground under their feet began to rise, and Mendez thought they were coming near the sandstone cliff in which the illegals had carved their dwellings. The trees grew thin, the path more defined, and suddenly Erasmus came to a halt before her.

“Hola, niños,” he called. “’Stoy aquí con mi amiga. Permiso?”

There followed a long and tense silence, during which Mendez’s fingers worked at the strap on her gun, and then an answer: “Vengan.”

She nearly dropped the flashlight in surprise: the voice was indeed that of a child, although she’d thought Erasmus had used the word as a priest would have: “my children.” She took her hand off her gun and warily followed the shifting outline of his robes.

A barrier had been constructed, jutting out of the sandstone cliff in an L-shaped wall made of splintered pallets, tree branches, and a sheet of warped plywood with tire tracks down its length, the whole held together with duct tape and twine. Just past the end of the patchwork barrier stood the smoking circle of a burned-down campfire; around its back lay the entrance to a cave dwelling, one that either had gone unnoticed when the previous lot had been destroyed or else had been carved anew. Light came from within, and the hiss of burning propane. Erasmus started forward, but she held his shoulder and pushed past him, peering cautiously at the hole hidden by the barrier. Her hand on her weapon again, she peered inside.

The cave’s three occupants, adolescents all, were standing in an apprehensive half-circle, separated from the adult intruders by an upended plastic milk crate draped with a square of cloth that had once been a pajama shirt. The girl on the right, tallest of the three, was Jasmina Torres. The boy on the left, small and dark, was Ernesto Garcia, a friend of Enrique Escobedo’s whom she’d interviewed along with two or three dozen other middle school students.

The boy in the middle, clothes dirty but chin up, was Enrique Escobedo himself.

The woman in Mendez wanted to vault the plastic crate and seize the boy in ecstatic relief, then turn on the other two and deliver a tongue-lashing they would not recover from fast. She wanted to dance and sing and yank out her cell phone to tell all the world he was safe, but the cop in her nailed her boots to the ground and sent her eyes traveling across the contents of the cave, to keep the kids dangling. It was, she had to admit, dry, neat, and surprisingly well equipped. Half a dozen of the plastic milk jugs, filled with water, were stacked against the wall, along with a plastic storage bin showing the gaudy wrappers of packaged food within. A stack of neatly folded bedding – a wool blanket, a mover’s pad, and a sleeping bag patched with duct tape – leaned against the storage bin, with a second propane camp light. Thought had gone into the hideout, and care – most kids would have dumped a pile of charcoal in the middle of the cave and lit it, suffocating to death by morning.

Mendez studied the impromptu tablecloth and wondered if it had been put there, and the cave tidied, just to impress her. A demonstration of their responsible behavior, perhaps.

Not going to work.

“You guys having fun here?” she said in a hard voice. “You playing at Peter Pan or something? The city’s spent a fortune looking for you, half of us haven’t slept in two weeks because we’ve been searching for your body, and your family is going nuts.” At the last accusation, the boy’s defiance hardened, and he glanced past her shoulder at the old man. His lack of guilt confirmed a suspicion.

“Your mother knew, didn’t she? That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That’s why she stopped phoning me every couple of hours, two days after you disappeared.”

“Mina told her,” the boy confirmed, gesturing at the girl. “I didn’t want her to worry.”

At that, Mendez lost it. “Why the hell didn’t you come to the police?” she shouted. “Why are you hiding out – ”

Click, as the penny dropped.

“You saw it, didn’t you? You saw Gloria die, and you’re afraid her killer will come after you.” It really wasn’t much of a leap of inspiration – this sort of thing happened all the time, in a community dominated by gangs, where one crime, or even an accident, could lead to an escalation of violence and retribution until eventually the police managed to wrap official hands around it all and smother it.

The boy nodded. His defiance suddenly melted away, and he looked small and scared. Mendez sighed, rubbed at her face, and decided to start over again.

“Okay, let’s sit down and talk about this.”

The three kids looked hugely relieved and settled onto their dusty pads. Mendez took the camp light off the table and put it on the ground, pulling the table back toward the entrance as a chair. She glanced around to see what the old man would sit on, but he was not there – leaving the police to their work, or maybe just a recognition that the cave would be stifling with one more body in it. Or perhaps he had some kind of Zorro complex, so that when his job was done, he would fade into the night.

“Digame,” she said. The boy was so eager to do so, his words tumbled in a rush of Spanish and English, with his friends contributing the occasional comment or clarification.

The first thing he wanted Mendez to know was that Gloria hadn’t really been his babysitter, although his mother paid her for staying with him when she was working nights. He was twelve and didn’t need a babysitter. But Gloria’s family was large and she was serious about getting into college, and she could work more easily in the silence of the Escobedo house, so they all pretended she was a babysitter.

Mendez blinked at the boy’s sense of priorities but decided to let him tell it as he wanted. She nodded solemnly, and he went on.

“So anyway, a little after eight, Gloria got this phone call on her cell. She got all funny when she heard who was on the line and took the phone outside so I wouldn’t hear, but she didn’t talk for long and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Then a little while later I was upstairs, getting ready for bed, and I heard this knock on the door, and I looked down from the window and there was this guy there, and I figured it was the same guy who’d called.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Well, she was angry when she saw him, and she wouldn’t let him in, and they went out in the yard and talked for a while, angry but in low voices.”

“Did you know him?”

“I’d seen him around once or twice. He’s big in one of the gangs, or at least that’s what someone told me. They call him Taco.”

“Go ahead.”

“Like I said, I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, not without opening the window and hanging out of it, but it looked like he wanted her to do something, and she wouldn’t. After a while, he got really angry and he hit her – not with his fist, with his hand, like a slap, but he knocked her back, and I was going to go down and make him stop, but he turned and walked away. But Gloria went after him and grabbed his arm just before he got to the car, and then he turned around really fast and I heard this bang, and Gloria fell. It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and I just stared at Gloria lying there and this Taco guy looking down at her. It was… I kept waiting for her to stand up, you know?”

The boy’s stricken expression, the tears in his eyes, were strong reminders of the first time Mendez had seen a dead person, the unreality of it. She nodded again, with no humor this time.

“And then he looked up and he saw me in the window. He started running toward the house, and I could see the gun in his hand then, and I got the hell out of there.”

“How?”

“Out the window. You can climb out onto the porch roof and down the whatchacallit, the trellis, but I sort of shot off the roof and hit the ground and ran. I was down the street before I heard his car take off, but I was afraid to go home again. I mean, I saw him, and he’s got a lot of friends.”

“So what did you do?”

“I sneaked down to Mina’s house, and she gave me her phone, and she and ’Nesto and I hid out at her house until morning. ’Nesto had a cousin who’d lived down in these caves for a while, before La Migra deported him, but he said there wasn’t anyone using them right now, so we figured I could hide out here until you guys had arrested Taco.”

“That was your plan?”

“If I led you to Taco, his homeys would come after me, maybe even my mom. But I thought that if everyone knew you couldn’t find me, they wouldn’t go blaming me when Taco got arrested.”

In the backward logic of the gang world, it made sense. “So why did you have Brother Erasmus bring me here?”

Enrique’s defiant look wavered, and his gaze dropped. “I realized I was just thinking about me. Me and my mom. But then Erasmo asked about Gloria, and so I told him about her and how she was really nice and she really wanted to go to college and all, and when I was telling him about her, I began to think that I wasn’t being much of a friend to her. I have a responsibility to her too.”

The trio across from Sergeant Mendez seemed to sit a little straighter, either shouldering their responsibility or squaring off for the firing squad. Two twelve-year-old boys and a girl who’d just turned thirteen, facing her as if prepared for the fate she would march them to.

Must’ve been some conversation with that old man, she thought.

“Thank you for being willing to come forward,” she said. “It would have saved us all a lot of grief if you’d called me ten days ago, but you’ve done so now, and that lets me get on with my responsibility, which at the moment includes protecting you.” For a second, just a flash, she felt a powerful urge to stand up and walk away, to leave these kids to the safety of their hideout, far from vengeful gangbangers and the inadequacy of the legal system. But she couldn’t do that – they were lucky they hadn’t run into some adult animal out here before now. Or been inside when an earthquake collapsed the cave. Time to bring them home.

She told them to gather their things, a process that consisted of picking up two already full backpacks and standing expectantly. She stuck the flashlight in her belt and exchanged it for one of the propane lamps, running her eyes across the sanctuary. How much of the organization had the girl been responsible for? she wondered. Young Jasmina showed signs of becoming a formidable woman. Mendez was smiling to herself when she ducked her head through the entrance of the cave, but the moment she was out, standing between the sandstone cliff and the wood-and-duct-tape wall, she heard a noise that wiped away any thought of a smile, a sound that froze the blood in her veins and made her hands shoot out to block the children behind her.

“Back!” she ordered. “Get back!”

A shotgun, racking its shell into place.

She was blind, with the lamp in her left hand dazzling her sight of the darkness beyond, but she knew that sound, oh yes, and although it set her guts to crawling and the impulse to fling herself to the ground was almost more than she could resist, she was not about to let these three children walk into it.

The kids hesitated in confusion, then to her relief she felt them retreat, back into the dark and inadequate depths of the cave. She kept her hands outstretched, her face and chest crawling with the anticipation of the deadly blast. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away, no one could miss at that range, but if she turned her left side toward the gun, she might live long enough to get out her weapon and take him down as he climbed past her into the cave. She straightened slowly, leaving her hands out but shifting a fraction to the right as she moved.

“I want the kid,” said the voice from the night.

“You don’t want those kids. They’re just vagrants camping out here. I’d suggest you leave before my partner arrives.”

“You don’t have a partner. You left the station by yourself.”

Which was true, although he’d missed her brief stop to take on Brother Erasmus. It was also worrying. “You’ve been following me?”

“Just the last couple of nights. One of my boys heard you were on to the kid. He was right.”

“Those were your headlights I saw behind me, on the road.”

“Didn’t need to follow you closer. I could see where you were coming. Now, get out of the way.”

“I can’t do that,” she said. “And whoever you are and whatever you’ve done, you really don’t want to shoot a police officer.” If he thought she had no idea who he was, he might possibly be more inclined to back off, leaving Enrique for another day.

She heard a step, then another, and braced herself for action – throwing the lamp, dropping to the ground, or just dying, she didn’t know.

Then came a sound that didn’t fit: a patter of rainfall on a dry night, off to the side. She knew it had to be Erasmus and drew breath to shout a warning, but before the words could leave her mouth, there was a scuffle and a thump beneath a sudden exclamation. Then came the huge noise that she had been dreading and the brilliant flash that lit up the hillside.

What seemed a long time later, Mendez lifted her head off the ground. She was blind. And half-deaf, but over the ringing in her ears she could make out a high-pitched noise, a chorus of noises – screams – the kids, in the cave! She scrambled to her feet, vaguely grateful that she could move, that she hadn’t been cut in half by the shotgun blast. She staggered, crashing into something that gave way and bit at her hand: the pallet wall. She reached out more cautiously, then remembered the flashlight on her belt. She yanked it out and thumbed it on, and over the noise in her ears, the screaming voices seemed to diminish slightly.

Two steps took her to the cave entrance, and a quick sweep of the light showed the three kids wrapped in one another’s arms against the back wall, terrified but unharmed. Ernesto was the only one still screaming, his eyes tight shut, but the other two blinked against the light, and the girl’s mouth moved in speech: no blood, no shooter.

Mendez ducked back out the door, shining the beam along the path: nearly collapsed patchwork wall, smashed propane lamp, near-dead fire circle, path along the cliffs, a pair of feet.

Taco Alvarez lay stretched out with his feet toward the cave, blood on his forehead, hands empty of weaponry, one hand beginning to stir. The beam continued on and came to another pair of feet, white sneakers beneath a dark-brown robe.

Brother Erasmus stood, wooden staff in one hand, shotgun in the other. He blinked when the beam hit his eyes, but the smile on his face was beatific.

“Was he alone?” she asked. First things first.

“Alone, alone, all, all alone.”

She took the gun from him, peeled the shells out of it, and laid the empty weapon to one side. As she knelt to slap the handcuffs onto the groaning Taco Alvarez, the old man went past her to the entrance of the cave. When she looked up, all three children were wrapped around him like limpets on a rock, weeping.

Her cell phone, of course, couldn’t get a signal.

She was not about to leave these three kids out here while she went to summon help, and she was loath to put them into a car with their would-be murderer. In the end, she left Taco, cursing in two languages and with his feet bound by lengths of duct tape, in the gentle care of Brother Erasmus.

“I’ll send someone as soon as I get in range of a cell tower. You sure you’ll be okay with him? I could just leave him tied to a tree.”

“Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art… watching, with eternal lids apart.”

“I don’t think it’ll be anywhere near an eternity. Maybe twenty minutes, half an hour.”

By way of answer, he placed his hand on her shoulder and smiled down on her.

She glanced around at the children, who had passed through the terror phase and were now beginning to talk madly about the adventure, words tumbling over themselves. She looked back at him and said, “Thank you. He’d have shot me for sure. I should have been more cautious, coming here.”

“There is no fool like an old fool,” he said, as if to excuse her.

She laughed. “You’re right there. The last thing he could’ve expected was an old man with a cudgel.”

“Every inch that is not fool is rogue,” he said, his eyes sparkling.

“Well, I thank God for that. Okay, I’d better get these kids home. I’ll see you at the station.”

He merely smiled and leaned on his staff. She gathered up Enrique and his pair of protectors, got them across the creek dry-footed and into the car.

When she turned back, she saw Erasmus still standing there, outlined by the glow from the second propane lamp. “I met a fool in the forest,” she murmured, as a line from one of the summer Shakespeare productions percolated into her mind, “a motley fool.”

She got a signal for her phone two miles from the cave and called in her report. As she made her calls, she was dimly aware that the kids had moved on from reliving the moment of the gun going off to speculation about Erasmus. Enrique thought he was a hero in disguise. Ernesto wondered if he’d just dyed his hair and painted lines, to make himself look old. But Mina, with the superiority of age and the wisdom of her sex, said he was an angel, and that shut both the boys up until they reached the station.

Bonita Mendez thought all three might be right.

Of course, she could never be sure, because when the police arrived at the turnaround and followed the light to the thoroughly trussed Taco Alvarez, Brother Erasmus was no longer there.