Then She Vanished

Thirty

Late that evening, Dalton’s black BMW X5 came barreling up the long drive toward my house. The Irregulars and I watched from under the palapa, where we were finishing dinner.

“I’ve never met my legislator,” said Dick.

“Corrupt,” said Liz. “He’s hiding behind his missing wife.”

“I feel that his wife will come to harm,” said Odile. “I see her slouching in the shadow of a dragon in the desert sun.”

Since the explosive debut of The Chaos Committee two weeks previous, Odile’s visions and prognostications had become more pessimistic. She told me that The Chaos Committee’s actions were affecting the behavior of almost every cognizant citizen who consulted her. Even children. Only the mad were immune. She was beginning to dread her consultations because of the “darkness of our times.” She asked me if I thought people would be better off not knowing their immediate futures. She could not change her findings, but she could pause or even cease her practice. Find a new calling. I didn’t have an answer for her.

As Dalton’s vehicle approached, Local Live! filled my enormous-screen TV with “Massacre Near Palomar,” in which three state-licensed marijuana grove workers were gunned down and burned with flamethrowers. And two more individuals — “possibly campers and not believed to be involved in the cannabis industry” — were apparently shot and killed. Evidence at the scene pointed to the deadly New Generation cartel, which was known to be battling the Sinaloa cartel. The massacre was seen as part of a larger New Generation strategy to control all drug distribution within the United States. Legalized marijuana was the Achilles’ heel of all the drug cartels, said Local Live!

Hours ago, when the news crews had been allowed in to see the Palomar crime scene, Tola had done her best to speak to the reporters. She said that all of her workers were U.S. citizens or legal immigrants working in a state-governed agricultural industry. One of the deceased was a Native American.

“And most importantly, they’re good people,” she said. “Good souls. Until the banks will take our legal money and cartel gunmen can’t cross our borders and get automatic weapons, this kind of thing will happen again.”

I couldn’t see through her sunglasses on the TV, but her voice was shaking with grief and fury. At the time of her interview I had been squatting down behind one of the sheriff vans.

Just as she finished on Local Live! Dalton clomped from the darkness into the patio light, out of breath and sweating hard, and slapped a nine-by-eleven clasp envelope on the picnic table in front of me.

“Hi, y’all,” he said to the Irregulars. Shook each of their hands and looked them in the eye. “Sorry to interrupt. Uh, Roland, this was in my mailbox when I came home an hour ago. I ripped it open and knew you should see it. Cut myself on the metal.”

He loomed over the table eagerly, showing us the blood-marked bandage on the side of a knuckle.

I noted the jaggedly torn envelope, the bent clasp still attached, the smear of blood.

The Irregulars crowded behind me as I slid out a sheet of printer paper and set it on the table. The message had been printed in a common roman font:

I upended the envelope and out slid a shirt, neatly folded and wrapped in plastic, as if fresh from the dry cleaner. Light blue and long-sleeved by the look of it. Blood on the plastic.

“It’s Natalie’s,” said Dalton. “I recognize the glass buttons. Damn the world, Roland — they’ve got her.”

Ash Galland, on what her sister had worn to breakfast the day she vanished: a light blue satin blouse the color of her eyes.

“Why did you open it?” asked Burt. “You must have seen how foolish that was.”

Dalton gave Burt a fuck you, little guy look but said nothing.

I righted the empty envelope before me and read the sender’s name and return address. Heard the catches of breath from the Irregulars behind me. Handwritten block caps, right slant, neat.

“What?” asked Liz.

Odile shook her head. “What does this mean?”

“Who did this?” asked Dick.

“Someone trying to get personal with Roland,” said Burt. “Someone trying to anger and distract him.”

A moment of silence fell over us as Natalie Strait’s image filled the TV, Local Live! updating us on week two of her disappearance, a sidebar to the Palomar massacre, as part of the Strait family misfortune that had seemingly followed them for decades.

All eyes on Dalton.

“Any dinner left?” he asked.

Burt and I sat up late in my upstairs office again, saying little while we viewed more hours of Mike Lark’s surveillance video on my desktop monitor. Some of it crisp and clear, and some of it muddy and useless. Jackie O? Nowhere to be seen.

I felt the anger creeping up on me. If none of Lark’s battalion of eager federales had been able to spot Jackie O, how could we?

What if someone else in The Chaos Committee had mailed the damned bomb? Lark had professed faith in my luck and eyesight, and in our friendship, but I sensed he’d recruited me less as an able-eyed volunteer than as an informant on the Straits.

I left another message for Tola. Rang off uneasily, the scar on my forehead tingling. I sipped bourbon against the bloodshed of the day.

“What worries me most about Dalton is how little he cares for Natalie,” said Burt. “And how much leverage and publicity he’s enjoying. All the while carrying on with big pharma’s dreamy lobbyist. Maybe the sheriffs are onto something. Maybe he’s behind Natalie’s absence. Look at the benefits — it frees up his love life, increases his sympathy votes in November, and makes it easier to blame her in court. She can’t even defend herself. What’s to keep him from hiring out the kidnapping, putting you between him and the cops, mailing himself Natalie’s blouse as a diversion? Invoking Justine as a way to confuse and divert you?”

I paused the video and thought about that. All of it credible and possible.

I asked the obvious. “Did he have her killed?”

“If he arranged her abduction, her death would solve certain problems.”

I grunted, stood, looked out at a western sky pricked with stars. Felt like I was trapped in a cage with high black walls and a faraway lid with little holes in it to give me air and hope.

“The question is, would he?” said Burt. “What kind of man is Dalton Strait at his core?”

“It depends who you talk to.”

“I’m talking to you, champ. You fought a war alongside him.”

I told Burt what I’d learned about Dalton’s behavior in Fallujah, regarding Harris Broadman and the burning Humvee. That his battlefield heroics were in question, and his alleged Silver Star heroism had left a man badly scarred. And that by one commanding officer’s account, Dalton’s Purple Heart was earned through bad judgment and reckless conduct.

“But if you sit down with him one-on-one,” I said. “When he talks about Natalie, you get a different version of him. He loves and adores her. They’ve spent well over half their lives together. She’s someone he… admired and wanted to be worthy of.”

“So, his love appears real,” said Burt. “Just as his heroism does.”

“I don’t think he’d have her abducted or killed.”

“Semper Fi, Roland.”

“Faith has nothing to do with it, Burt.”

I resumed the video, trying to concentrate on the surveillance footage, but my mind was picking back through every minute of the last two weeks that I’d spent with Dalton — reevaluating him, looking for a different angle or something I’d missed, re-vetting my own interpretations when Dalton had left me unclear or doubtful. I knew Burt was half right. The marine in me wanted Dalton not to have done such things.

Then I was back in the green meadow where Charity had died. And in the groves of cottonwoods where Kirby had been hanged and mutilated, and in Tola’s grow with the bullet-riddled, flame-thrown humans and plants left heaped on the ground with equal disregard, and the sliced panels of sun fabric fluttering in the breeze.

My eyes locked on the monitor, where another dark-haired woman mailed another package. UPS, Portland, Oregon, according to the footer. Not Jackie O.

And so on, into the late hours.

After Burt retired, I soldiered on, seeing no one very much like our prize.

I called and woke up both Dalton and Virgil with concern over Tola’s whereabouts and well-being. Dalton said he had no idea where she was and her grandfather said she could take care of herself. I reminded him of the lopsided slaughter on Palomar.

I finally crashed on the office couch, landing in dreams of Tola Strait and gunfire. I’d never been around Tola and gunfire at the same time and later I wondered if it was a premonition. I wondered a lot of things.

My phone rang loud in the timeless dark.

“I’m at your gate,” she said.