Valley of Bones

Twenty

They were both naked in Lorna’s bed, but neither of them could recall getting there. Lorna threw a thigh over him. She wanted more. She regretted waking up, she wanted that blotting out, she was counting each fuck as her last, who knew when the disease would render her disgusting or incapable?

He said, “Look, we have a problem.”

“You don’t vant me anymore?”

“No I vant you a lot. But we have to spring Emmylou. They’re going to come for her and she’ll disappear.”

“They can’t do that.”

“They can. They can call her a terrorist because of that drugs and guns thing she was in. Plus, she had some kind of connection with that Sudanese, and Sudan is a terrorist center, and they can make up any story they want. This is the new USA, and fuck habeas corpus. So we have to get her out.”

“Jimmy, that’s crazy.”

“Is it? Wait here.”

He slid out of bed and left the room. In a few minutes, he was back, dressed in his trousers and a T-shirt, barefoot. He had a manila envelope in his hand.

“Oh, God!” she cried when she saw them.

“Yeah. This is not good. This is a message that they can whack us anytime, and what I can’t figure?”

“I saw the man who took those. At the beach. You were sleeping and I saw a man with a telephoto lens on a boat.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“Maybe…probably…he had red hair. Oh, God, Jimmy! What are we going to do?”

“We’re going to find these guys, find out what this whole deal is about, why they killed the Arab and Wilson, and why they want the confessions of Emmylou Dideroff so bad. And if possible, pull them in. You’re going to come with me.”

“Come with you? Where?”

“Grand Cayman for starters. We need to find out what happened in that hotel room when the Arab went out the window. I guess we should check out her native land, too, Caluga County.”

“They won’t have anything to add that’s germane, and besides who cares? The key to what makes Emmylou tick is her religious life and she got that in St. Catherine’s.” To his inquiring look, she added, “It’s a priory in the Virginia panhandle. Where she converted. Or so she told me.”

“Okay, we’ll tour the Blue Ridge, too. But first we have to get her out. Is there any way she can get off the locked ward? Special treatments or whatever?”

“She’s scheduled for an MRI. It’s in another building. I could go over there and say it was today.”

“Perfect,” said Paz, and together they worked out a plan, after which Lorna said, “You know, if someone had told me a month ago that I would be conspiring to kidnap a ward of the court from medical custody, I would have told them they were crazy.”

“They would have been. You’ve changed.”

“Yes. Your bad influence.” She looked him in the eye. “How did you sleep?”

“Like a baby.”

“The power of the voodoo mama.”

“No,” he said. “The voodoo mama says it’s mainly you.”

Lorna finds she is a natural conspirator and she knows why. She has been thinking about her mother a lot since the events of the previous evening and she understands that much of her up-bringing has involved training herself to keep some personal space free from the didactic intrusions of her father and the demands of her big brother. Silences, false agreement, blandishments, and naked lies had been the essence of their family life. She thinks more kindly of Emmylou?sisters beneath the skin actually. Thus she has no trouble faking an appointment at the MRI center, or obtaining a set of pink scrubs, a pair of Nikes, a clipboard, cheap steel-frame reading glasses and a blond wig. She also contributes an expired Jackson ID card to wear on a chain. Emmylou is instantly with the plan. She asks where she will be staying, and Lorna has to tell her she doesn’t know. Paz has not contributed that part yet.

Darryla accompanies the two women for the short van ride across the Jackson campus to Building 403, where the magnetic resonance imager lives. They arrive at the suite. Darryla argues with the receptionist that yes they do have an appointment. Emmylou asks to visit the bathroom and Lorna volunteers to accompany her and stand outside the door. She passes her large handbag to Emmylou as she goes in. A few minutes later this obvious hospital employee, a blond woman with glasses and pink scrubs, walks out of the ladies’ room, moving swiftly as such people do, consulting the papers on her clipboard. Darryla doesn’t give her a second glance. She is on the phone with the scheduler for ten minutes, then slams the phone down, curses mildly under her breath, and goes into the ladies’, where she finds Emmylou’s hospital clothes in a heap. The alarm is given but Emmylou Dideroff has left the building.

Paz was behind the wheel of the rented white Taurus, driving fast and north up the center of the state. Lorna for some reason had climbed into the backseat, leaving the shotgun seat for Emmylou, who was wearing sunglasses, a Marlins ball cap, T-shirt, and shorts. Paz occasionally glanced her way and thought she looked like she had dropped ten years. She had one of her notebooks on her lap and occasionally scratched in it, otherwise she stared out the window with a contented smile on her face. Paz felt a certain discomfort. He liked a well-ordered life and, like many young men reared hardscrabble, was ordinarily a friend of discipline. He was conscious of going off the map now, not to mention all that wacko business at thebembe. He was doing his usual thing, replaying the memory tape in his mind and reinterpreting all the things he had seen and felt in terms more suitable to what he imagined was real life. He also occasionally glanced in the rearview at Lorna, another problem child. Paz was no enemy of hot sex in quantities, but he thought Lorna was a little strange in that department too. Something not right there, a fear there, she was using sex to drown something. He wondered when, if ever, she would tell him what it was. In fact, he now thought, really who gave a shit? He hardly knew the woman, and here he was dragging her over half the country to try to find out why this maniac next to him was a maniac. Was that what he was trying to do? He tried to recall why he had just torpedoed his entire career and set himself up for a stiff prison term…what was hethinking?

The road stretched out a dark two-lane ribbing through utterly flat greenness, tedious to get through, like his life, he thought, stupid and tedious, like this car ride to nowhere with a Jesus fruitcake in front and a fat, neurotic nympho in the back. A little roadside shrine whipped by, a white cross and some plastic flowers, and he thought there was someone with the right idea, he wished he had something to drink, rum or even vodka, but really he didn’t need it, all it would take was a little flick of the wheel and why not, what was the fucking point anyway? A big semi appeared out of the heat shimmer, rushing closer, all it would take was a little twitch to the left, was a little…

An air horn, loud, and Emmylou’s scream in his ear and then she had the wheel and they were rattling and jumping over the right-hand shoulder.

Paz brought the car to a stop, shaking and sweat-faced. “Holy shit, I must’ve gone to sleep. Christ…”

“No, you didn’t,” said Emmylou. “You were wide awake and in control. I was watching you. You steered us right at that truck.”

“Oh, for crying out loud! I did not! Why the hell would I do a thing like that?”

“What were you just thinking about?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, “just, you know, driving, the time, scenery…” Her eyes stopped the easy fabrication well before he could convince himself that he hadn’t really tried to crash the car.

“You’re not crazy,” she said. “It’s him doing it, and I don’t know why. You had this kind of thing before, yes? Dreams, seeing things that weren’t there, thoughts coming that weren’t really you?”

Paz hesitated, then nodded and said, “That first time, in the interview room…your face changed. I mean Isaw it.”

“Yes, that’s what’s strange,” said Emmylou, nodding. “Somebody said that the devil’s greatest trick was convincing everybody he don’t exist, and here he is popping up like a jackrabbit. She seen it, too”?looking back to where Lorna sat pale and twitching?”but she’ll never say.” Paz turned and searched Lorna’s face, but she wouldn’t meet his eye. He said, “So, Emmylou, we got any angels in there, any heavy hitters, or are we on our own?”

“Yes, everyone thinks it’s a battle between good and evil, but the fact is there neverwas a battle. That’s what omnipotencemeans. The devil is an employee.”

“So what’s going on, Emmylou?”

“I don’t have an idea in the world,” she replied blithely. “We’re being used to some purpose and afflicted for some purpose, but we can’t know what it is. It’s like where the crust of the earth is weak and volcanoes shoot out? For some divine reason the stuff of nature is being penetrated by spirit around the three of us and God knows where it will lead. The main thing we’re told is not to worry and have faith.”

“Uh-huh. And that means we’re going to be okay, right?” Paz was talking slowly and carefully, as to a child or someone with a lot of hostages and a big bomb.

“Oh, heavens, yes! All will be well and all manner of thing will be well.”

Paz started the car. “You’re sure about that? The three of us, we’re cool as far as, you know, this crazy stuff, demonic, whatever…”

“Us? Oh, I didn’t mean us as individuals. I meant the human race. The three of us aredoomed for all I know.” And she gave him one of those face-lighting smiles.

No body said much during the remainder of the ride. Twice Lorna asked him to pull off so she could be sick. Carsick, she said, although he had not noticed that as a problem the last time they had been this way. His cell phone sang several times, and twice he made calls. There were a number of arrangements to be made, and by the time he pulled into Cletis Barlow’s driveway all of these had been handled. That was something at least.

He turned Emmylou over to Edna Barlow, declined an offer of lunch, and got back on the road, driving west across the state and then north on 75. By late afternoon Paz and Lorna were at Tampa International. They turned in the car, checked into the airport Ramada. He paid for the room with a credit card belonging to Cesar Somoza, the chef at the restaurant. Meal in the room and several drinks beforehand. He heard her crying in the bathroom. When she came out, dressed in the hotel’s robe, he asked her what was wrong. She said, Nothing, just thinking about my mom. Really? No, she said, those were tears of sexual frustration. It’s been hours. And dropped the robe.

The next morning they were on the early US Airways flight from Tampa to Georgetown, Grand Cayman, arriving just past noon on the vacation and corruption paradise. A huge black man in a safari suit met them and drove them to a substantial peach-painted villa, with grounds protected by high walls topped with glass shards sparkling in the bright sun. Their driver took them through a cool and shuttered house to the rear patio. There, seated in a wicker chair under an umbrella, was a bulky man in his midsixties, with a face a scant shade lighter than Paz’s, a large fleshy nose shaped like an immature papaya, and curly pepper-and-salt hair combed straight back. The man stood. He was wearing a gleaming white guayabera shirt, fawn slacks, and woven leather sandals. He appeared to be a typical Cuban businessman, Paz thought, until you looked into his eyes. These were yellowish, bloodshot, pouched, and gave you a pretty good idea about what untypical kind of business he was in.

But Paz and Lorna were greeted cordially, seated, offered drinks and Cuban hors d’oeuvres. They admired the view. Ignacio Hoffmann kept his eyes on Paz; Lorna might not have existed.

“So, little Jimmy Paz. I remember you when you were busing tables at your mother’s place, not the new one, the old joint, the hole in the wall on Flagler. Your head, you could barely see your head above the table, you know?”

“Long time, Ignacio.”

“Yeah, and now you’re a cop.”

“Miami PD.”

“Yeah. You know your mother and I go back a long way. We floated in about the same time.”

“So I heard.”

“I owe her my life. Did you hear that?”

“That I didn’t hear.”

“No. And you won’t hear about it from me. Has to do with thebrujeria.” Here Hoffmann made an odd gesture with his hand and a toss of his head. “Anyway, that’s why I agreed to see you. Not that I don’t always want to see an old friend, except, you know, I’m trying to keep a low profile here.”

“Well, I appreciate that, Ignacio, and I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. I’m interested in Jack Wilson and Dodo Cortez and why they whacked a Sudanese guy named Jabir Akran al-Muwalid.”

“Hey, you get right to the point,” said Hoffmann with a big gold-flecked smile. “Okay, first of all, this was Jack Wilson’s deal, not mine. Totally. He came over here, what was it, maybe three months ago, and says he’s got a business opportunity. He wants me to lend him some of my boys. I’m retired, you know? But I still got people want to do me favors. What’s this for, I say, and why should I be interested? He says this is the feds, they want to do a black bag job, and if I go with it, I might get the heat off me a little, maybe even get this bullshit indictment they got on me lifted. So I’m interested, but I’m not going to make a move on the say-so of Jack Wilson. I mean, a nice guy, but he fixes boats. He’dlike to be a player, but basically he’s a mechanic. So I say, I’ll talk to somebody and if I like the deal, we could make something happen.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“Following. Looking in bags, drawers. Maybe distracting bodyguards in the process. He didn’t say nothing about no killing, though.”

“This was on al-Muwalid?”

“There were no names mentioned at the time. So I call my lawyer and he calls back and says he talked to the feds, and the word is I need to talk to a guy name of Floyd Mitchell, and whatever he needs I should give him, because he’s connected up to the top. This is terrorism bullshit, or something, he wasn’t all that clear on it, you know? Okay, so a couple days after that, Wilson calls and says a Mr. Mitchell and him will call on me. And they do.”

“What did Mitchell look like?”

Hoffmann shrugged. “A white-bread American. Chunky build. Blue eyes.” Hoffmann touched the top of his head. “That kind of short haircut, like the astronauts. But not a hard guy, you know what I’m saying? I’m a hard guy, and you’re a hard guy, but this guy was a papers guy, a phone call guy. Anyway, we sat down. He told me this Arab was going to be in Miami, and he was going to be raising money for terrorist activity over there in the Middle East and they wanted to watch him, maybe break into his room, go through his stuff. I say, what’s the matter you don’t have people who do that working for thefederales anymore, and he says yeah, but they don’t want to go for a warrant because they think there’s leaks somewhere, they don’t want to spook this guy, they want to see where the money goes and so on and so forth. Bullshit, I’m thinking, but I listen and after he’s done I say, well, no problem, Mr. Mitchell, but what’s in it for me, does Uncle Sam have a present for Ignacio? He says there’s money available, but I say I got plenty of money, what I need is some help with my legal problems and there he says, I’m not sure we have the pull to get that fixed. And then Jack jumps in and he says, ‘Come on, you’re saying Serpu can’t get an indictment dropped?’ And Mitchell gives him a look, I swear you could’ve fried a steak in it and Wilson goes all pale, and at this point I’m kind of amused by this pair ofpendejos and I say, well why don’t we call Mr. Serpu and find out, and Mitchell gets real calm and says, well, thanks for your time, we’ll get back to you. And that was it.”

“That wasit?”

“Yeah. I never heard from them again. But before they left, while the bigguapo was taking a leak, I said to Jack, listen what the fuck is the matter with you? You don’t want anything to do with thiscagada. But it turns out he didn’t take my good advice.”

“You’re saying he was freelancing with Dodo Cortez?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They fucked with the bull and got the horns.”

“Uh-huh. You know they whacked the Arab.”

“I heard. Popped on the head and out the window. A little show-off, if you ask me. You got the whole Glades and the ocean you want to get rid of someone.”

“Who’d you hear that from?”

“What? He got whacked? It was in theHerald. “

“Not the part about him getting clubbed over the head. We kept that close. Dodo called you, didn’t he?”

Hoffmann’s genial mien evaporated. “What is this, Jimmy, you’reinterrogating me? In my own home, where you’re a guest?”

“Ignacio, this’s got nothing to do with you. You tell me Dodo paid you a piece of what he got, I’m cool. You tell me you whacked Hoffa, I’m still cool. But I have to know what went down in that hotel room and why, and you’re the only one standing who knows.”

“Jimmy, it’s been nice. Give my very kind regards to your mother.”

Paz took out his cell phone. “You can do that yourself. She said to me, ‘Ignacio will help you, and if he gives you any trouble, you’ll call me, we’ll straighten it out.’ ” Paz punched buttons, waited. “Hello, Donna? Jimmy. My mom around? Uh-huh, well put her on…”

Hoffmann was waving his hand, as if to distract a charging bull. He said, “Come on, Jimmy, don’t bother the lady with this crap.” Paz said, “Hey, Donna? Forget it. Just tell her I’ll call her when we get back.” He put the cell away and turned expectantly to Hoffmann, who cleared his throat and said, “I’m only doing this because your mother, she’s like family to me. I don’t want you to think you can take advantage, you know?”

Paz agreed that he would never.

“Okay, then. Dodo calls me up, a couple of days before it went down. They had a meeting: him, Wilson, and another guy, who was running the whole thing.”

“This was Mitchell?”

“No, another guy. Harding, Hardy, something like that. Tell the truth I didn’t pay that much attention. Anyway, it was fifty K straight up, but they had to do it a certain way. This guy had it all figured. They had this woman they were going to pin it on, she worked for Wilson at his shop.”

“Why? Why her?”

“Hey, how the fuck should I know? Is it my operation? So Wilson sends the woman to a parts place for an engine part, long and heavy, like a club, and then they call this Arab and tell him to wait by a phone booth right near the parts place. They want the woman to see him and follow him back to the hotel. They call him at the phone booth?go back to the hotel and we’ll meet you there. It turns out the guy wants information about this woman. So that goes down, and Dodo and Wilson are at the hotel. Wilson calls 911 and says there’s a disturbance at the hotel. Dodo has this monkey jacket like a hotel waiter. He waits for her to leave her truck, he opens the truck and gets the fuckin’ rod or whatever and goes to the guy’s room. He’s a waiter, says he’s got a basket of fruit, the guy lets him in. Bang over the head, and out the window, he leaves the part out there, and he splits. The whole thing took half a minute. He leaves the door open and hangs around until he sees the woman go in. A couple of days after it went down, my lawyer calls me with good news. Justice is making nice in ways they never did before. That’s it, the whole thing, all right?”

Again high over the spangled sea, Lorna said to Paz, “You can’t say I haven’t been patient.”

“You’re right, I can’t say that. But I didn’t want to get into it until we were off the island. Call me paranoid, but…”

“I would never.”

Paz explained what he’d learned in his Spanish conversation with Hoffmann.

Lorna said, “So this Mitchell guy is Mr. Big?”

“His name’s David Packer. Or who the fuck knows what his real name is? And who’s Harding or Hardy? Packer rented Emmylou her houseboat. I was ordered not to go near him.”

“What about this Mr. Serpu?”

“There is no Mr. Serpu. ‘Serpu’ is how you say the acronym for Strategic Resources Protection Unit. Packer works for them. He’s the last actual government employee before you get to the criminals. He ordered the murder of al-Muwalid and concocted this whole scheme to get Emmylou working for Wilson and framed for the crime, so that…so that…” Paz stumbled. It was hard to keep the mind on all the facets. Perhaps this too, this oily, murky confusion, was part of the plot.

“She would reveal this great secret,” said Lorna in a tired voice. “Which Muwalid was also after and which has to have something to do with oil.”

“You forgot the dope lord’s hidden gold.”

“Oh, right, that too. And there’s the mysterious jade idol and the Nazi diamonds and the missing Rembrandt.” Lorna lay her head back against the seat and looked down at the distant ocean. “It’s so boring. How can people spend their lives this way, plotting and killing and stealing? What’s the win for them? After everything works out perfectly and all the people who need to be dead are dead and the treasure is in the safe, what happens? Nice vacations? Wristwatches? A slightly larger office? A promotion to GS fucking fifteen? What?”

“It’s the oil,” said Paz. “This whole things smells of out-of-control bureaucrats. They’re protecting strategic resources. It’s a dangerous world. The bad guys play rough, and so the good guys have to play rough too. That’s the theory.” Paz thought back to his conversation with Oliphant, and about how easily Oliphant’s passion and outrage had been derailed by the threat of a lost job and pension. He wondered briefly what would derail him from this strange wild-goose chase he was on. Not the job and pension anyway. “It’s just a guy thing, I think. There’re people like that on the cops too. They like to get away with stuff, and they want a small group of players to know it too. Shooting drug dealers and taking their cash, inventing evidence, lying to make a case. They like the wink, they like thinking they’re inside something and everyone else is on the outside looking in. Hell, you’re the psychologist, you explain it. But it has fuck all to do with national security. All that kind of shit is personal.”

Lorna heard what he was saying, and it made sense, but she lacked the energy to follow on with the discussion. What did it matter after all? She squeezed his hand and settled more deeply into her seat. Her head felt hot and she rested against the cool of the glass. She never slept on planes, she was a white-knuckle flier usually, but now she could not keep her eyes open. Yet another upside of dying, she thought as she dropped off.

From Tampa they fly to Atlanta and then to Roanoke, arriving that night and checking into the airport Holiday Inn. She sits on the bed, staring at the floor while he goes out to get some ice, and when he comes back she is in the same position.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and she gives her usual answer, “Nothing.”

He feels her forehead. “It’s not nothing. You’re hot and you’re always tired and you’ve thrown up about ten times since we left Miami.”

“It’s just a flu,” she says. How tedious, she thinks, to be fussed over. She wishes he was a brute, an animal, who saw her merely as a set of warm, slick orifices.

“Do you want to cancel out on the trip? You could crash here while I go.”

“No. I’ll be fine. It’s just some bug.” She hates lying to him. Worse, she now feels too miserable to contemplate sex. Galloping lymphoma. Is there such a thing? She recalls that lymphoma is one of the slower cancers and relatively easy to treat, but she also recalls that there is a wide range of types within both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s. She will have contracted the worst type, or maybe it’s a new type, violently metastasizing, they’ll be amazed at the autopsy, faces will grow pale, oncologists will scurry to their terminals to get the news out, her cells will be preserved for research, she will live forever in tiny tubes all over the world. Someday, maybe, when science advances far enough she will be cloned and wake up on a table in a white laboratory. Of course, she will have superpowers then….

“What’s so funny?” he asks in response to the sound she now makes.

“Oh, just thinking about the peculiar life I seem to be leading.” He mixes drinks, vodka tonics, they click glasses, she looks him in the eye and says, “You’re really nice to me, Jimmy Paz. Is that ‘cause you like me, or are you this way with everyone?”

“I think I’m marginally nicer to you than I am to most people.”

“You don’t seem to have many faults. Is that the case, or are you just good at concealing them?”

“The latter. It’s just because we’ve been working together plus socializing that it hasn’t come up, but when I’m on a case, I mean forget it, I get totally lost. That might be something you should think about. I mean missed dates, no calls for days. Often you might have to take little Jason or Jennifer to soccer when I promised I would. Like that.”

“It’s something to consider,” she says, looking away. “I appreciate being told in advance.” She gulps the rest of her drink. “Excuse me,” she says and goes into the bathroom. She turns the water in the sink on full force and by wrapping her head in the bath towels and lying on the floor with her face jammed into the corner near the tub, she is able to weep hysterical tears for a good long time without Paz the detective detecting anything.

In the early morning they drove south out of Roanoke on 81 with the mountains ghostly on their right hand. He was worried about her. The ravening desire mixed with an obvious debilitation, something he had not experienced before in a partner, but he did not pry. Margarita Paz’s little boy, although a professional detective, had a horror of personal prying.

“This is nice country,” he said after an hour or so of silence. “The Blue Ridge is actually blue. It’s nice to know you can trust something nowadays.”

She looked out the window. “They probably spray it so the tourists don’t complain,” she said, and then gave him a weak smile. Her eyes were red, and he almost confronted her, he almost said, Oh fuck this, Lorna, the next time I see a hospital sign we’re going to the emergency room, but he didn’t. The moment passed and he started playing with the radio.

He had called ahead and explained briefly what they were about, and made an appointment with the prioress at St. Catherine’s. They drove through an ornate iron gate and up a graveled road and parked in a corner of a pleasant quadrangle made by solid bluestone buildings. A group of sisters dressed in blue overalls were playing a vigorous game of volleyball on the lawn behind a large statue. A tiny brown-skinned sister in full habit greeted them solemnly and ushered them up to the office of the prioress, Sr. Marian Dolan.

They were offered seats and coffee. Small talk before the coffee arrived, the pretty country, something about the history and operations of the priory. Sr. Marian talked a little about the background of the Society and then asked, “So, how can we help? You say you’re from the Miami police?”

“I am, Sister. Dr. Wise here is a therapist attending Emily at Jackson Memorial Hospital.”

“She’s mentally ill, is she?”

Lorna said, “Officially she’s remanded by the court to Jackson until she’s fit to answer the indictment against her.”

“This murder of this Sudanese Mr. Paz mentioned on the phone.”

“Yes.” Lorna found she could not bring herself to use the title.

“Is she in fact mad?”

“We’re still determining that.”

“She was prone to visions. Is she still?”

“To an extent,” said Lorna. And drives out demons, she thought, except for the one living in her. She shuddered involuntarily.

A silent young sister brought in a tray and left it. The coffee was in a filter pot, and excellent, as were the madeleines. Paz and Lorna shared a glance over these, which made him feel better than he had in some time.

Sr. Marian said, “I was subprioress at the time, and I had some contact with this person. What exactly did you want to know about her?”

Paz explained: subject originally a suspect in a murder, now not so sure, a conspiracy about some information held by Emily Garigeau, now Emmylou Dideroff; the necessity of tracking down all leads, tracing back along the course of subject’s life.

Sr. Marian’s eyeglasses glinted, reflecting the light from the window so that it was hard to gauge her expression. Paz imagined that the desk and chairs had been set up with just this in mind. He certainly would have done so.

“Well, you seem to know the woman better than we do. She wasn’t here very long and I’m afraid she didn’t make much of an impression. I guess you know this is a training facility, and I guess you know that the Society has a somewhat unusual means of seeking women with vocations. A good number of the women who pass through here are damaged or marginal in some way. Most of them decide the religious life is not for them and they leave here, certainly with no hard feelings on our part. On the other hand we do receive some really remarkable women, very tough, self-reliant, seasoned, the kind other religious foundations would never see. So it evens out, or it has in the past. She came in as a patient. A gunshot wound according to her records, and exposure. We patched her up and she was here for a little over a year, doing routine maintenance. Then she left.”

“Did you know there was a felony warrant out on her?” asked Paz. “I mean you knew she was involved with that drug operation over on Bailey’s Knob, right?”

“Detective, this Society is something like the French Foreign Legion. In fact, our foundress was a keen admirer of that organization. People come here looking for peace and a chance to serve the helpless victims of conflict and we don’t ask questions about their former lives. Obviously, as good citizens we cooperate with the authorities. But certainly no official agency ever served such a warrant on Emily while she was here.”

“Um…Emmylou tells a story about being sent to Sudan,” said Lorna, “of fighting in the civil war there, on behalf of the Dinka tribe. She had the use of some kind of cannon…”

“Well as to that, I’m afraid Emily’s unfortunate background gave her the sort of personality that plays a little fast and loose with the truth. I would be astounded if anything like that actually happened, and, in fact, we have no record of anyone named Emily Garigeau or Emmylou Dideroff serving the Society in Sudan, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m sorry, Detective, and Dr. Wise. I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for very little.”

“I’m sorry for taking your time, Sister,” said Paz, in his best parochial school manner.

They walked out of the building to their car.

Paz said, “You get the impression we’re getting the bum’s rush here?”

“Maybe they know we’re unworthy.”

“No, then they’d be bending over double to be nice. It’s something else. What did you think of the boss lady?”

“Very smart. She managed to seem cooperative and yet convey no real information, while at the same time avoiding actual lies.”

“Yeah. She would be really astounded. I bet she was, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen the way Emmylou said it did.”

“No, but she also could’ve made the whole thing up.”

“Uh-uh,” said Paz. “We got what we came here for. I was worried that Emmylou had manufactured her past totally in her head, but now we know she really was shot on Bailey’s Knob and was here. That woman we just saw was shining us on, and that suggests to me that Emmylou is telling the truth. What is it?”

Lorna had staggered and caught the side of the car for support. She opened the door and sat down.

“You’re sweating,” said Paz.

“It’s hot.”

“It’s not hot, it’s cool. It’s September in the mountains. Why aren’t you telling me what’s wrong with you?”

Lorna was silent. Somewhat to her surprise, she found herself incapable any longer of the lie direct.

He said, “If you tell, I’ll tell you what happened to me at thebembe.”

A long pause. They heard shouts from the volleyball game and the soughing of the wind through the old trees planted on the grounds, horse chestnuts, pin oaks, and pines.

“All right,” she said. “You first.”

“They washed my head,” he said. “Like at a haircut place when you get a shampoo, they sat me in a chair and leaned my head and neck back above the sink. They washed my whole head, though, not just the hair, with something that smelled like coconut. And they were burning something that smoked, incense I guess, the place was filled with smoke, I could barely see what was going on with the smoke and the water in my eyes. And Yemaya and the other two women, Marta and Isabel, were chanting?”

“Yemaya…you mean your mother?”

“I mean Yemaya. The thing was seven feet tall with a voice like a two-hundred-watt woofer. It picked me up like I was a little kid. Anyway, that went on for a while and then they smeared some kind of oil on my head, and the chanting got louder, and then…I realized there were more than the four of us in the room.”

He stopped and had to swallow. She could see sweat beading on his forehead, although the afternoon was growing cool. “What do you mean, more?”

“They came through the smoke. I couldn’t see their faces too good, but I knew who they were. Dodo Cortez and the other one, Moore. The Voodoo Killer. So, the theory is when you kill someone your spirit is tied to theirs and you kind of take on the evil they did in life and carry it. I mean spiritually. And before you can get free you have to experience it, what it means to kill someone, and after you do that they can wash it away. So I did and they did. Oh, the cherry on top was that there’s a demon after me, but it’s got nothing to do with Santeria. Not their department, sorry, and I should be careful. Thank you very much, Emmylou Dideroff. End of story. Now, what’s the matter with you?”

She pretended she hadn’t heard this last. “I don’t understand. You already experienced killing when you shot them.”

“It’s the wrong word, then. Ikilled two human beings. It doesn’t matter that they were a couple of warped sons of bitches, or that they deserved it, or it was self-defense, or any of that legalistic bullshit. The theory is each person is a piece of Olodumare, the creator, and when you kill you disturb the order of heaven and you have to be cleansed. You have to experience the sadness of God. I was crying like a baby and I puked my guts out.”

“But people kill hundreds, thousands even, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Why did you have to go through all that? It doesn’t seem fair.”

“Santeria isn’t about fair. It’s about balance and walking with the saints. Christ, Lorna! Do you think Icomprehend what the fuck is going on here? What my mother is up to with me? I just keep my head down and do what I’m told. And it works. I felt clean and I still feel clean. Except for the occasional demonic attack, there’s less buzzing shit in my head. Things look brighter, I mean things in the world, like those flowers.” He pointed to a bush of hydrangeas. “And your eyes.” He stared into these. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”

“I’m dying of cancer.”

His face contorted into that ridiculous monkey expression we all wear, with the semismile, when we have heard impossibly bad news. “What do you mean you’re dying of cancer? When were you diagnosed?”

“I haven’t been yet. But I have all the classic symptoms of lymphoma.”

“Oh, please! What is this, the do-it-yourself school of cancer research? Lorna, they have machines now, microscopes, chemicals, whatever….”

“But I know. Iknow, Jimmy. My grandmother died of cancer, my mother died of cancer, and now it’s my turn. I have enlarged lymph nodes, sweats, weakness, weight loss, skin itching. I feel nauseated all the time, which means it’s really locked in there, it’s spread to my internal organs, maybe even the pancreas.”

Paz cursed in Spanish under his breath and hung his head like a boxer who’s taken one hit too many. Time slowed down a little in the car; even the wind seemed to die. He asked, “How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know. Months maybe, but I’ve been in denial about it. It got so obvious recently that I couldn’t do that anymore.”

Paz started the car and tore down the priory drive in a spray of gravel. He was surprised at himself. He was usually a really focused guy, he prided himself on it, in fact, and the other parts of his life he kept in neat pockets?life as a fishing vest, a tackle box. He was on a case now, certainly the most difficult case of his career, with no backup, with no support above him, confronting forces of unknown dimension, not all of them in the material world, but certainly malign, and nothing else should have mattered very much. But now he found that this did matter, Lorna being sick, and it occurred to him as he barreled along the mountain roads that this was a real difference. He told himself he hardly knew the woman, sad sure if she was dying, but people die, and anyway the whole thing was a rebound from Willa, he needed something and she was it. Sorry, so sorry and good-bye. No! He caught that line of thought and strangled it in its cradle. And then he broke the speed limit more than he usually did driving to Roanoke, and bullied her into going to the emergency room, and he completely abandoned the tempo of his investigation to sit in waiting rooms in hospitals in Roanoke and then Washington while they looked at her and he pretended to be her husband and got in the faces of doctors and nurses to ensure that they treated her like a human person and not a diseased lump of meat.

Lorna wonders why he’s doing this. She wonders why she has relaxed so entirely into the hands of a man she hardly knows, why her will, which she had thought was of steel, has proved in these last weeks to be taffy. She allows him to move her around like a mannequin, she submits to the probing and questionings and procedures, although previously she would never have allowed a doc to touch her without the most elaborate investigation of her background and record. It is very strange, and in a peculiar way, it contents her. She has never allowed strangeness to enter her life, and now she is with this strange man, who lights up her (unfortunately dying) body as it has not ever been lit up before, who defies her lifelong understanding of what a suitable mate ought to be, who participates in voodoo, sorry, Santeria, and kills people. From time to time she finds a foolish grin arriving on her face, startling the oncology nurses. The tests take a good long time, days and days. She is in the hospital, the hypochondriac’s wet dream, but she finds she has become passive about the practice of medicine on her body. Paz will take care of everything. He is in and out, seeing people in Washington offices. He tells her things he’s learned, things he suspects. There really is an outfit called SRPU, it’s part of the Department of Homeland Security, and they never heard of Floyd Mitchell or David Packer and they really can’t tell him anything else, he doesn’t have the clearances.

Now she is looking at a doc, whose name (Waring? Watson?) has slipped her mind, although she is certain Jimmy knows and has checked him out like a murder suspect. He is kindly and has a full head of gray hair, like the men on TV who sell drugstore remedies, and he tells her from a long distance away that she has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage four, based on the biopsy and her symptoms, and that it may have metastasized to other organs, and that they would like to check her into George Washington University Hospital for more tests. She feels, oddly enough, not the horrified sense of denial that is usual in such interviews but a rush of something like satisfaction. She wants to tell the world,See! Not a crock. She looks over at Paz, the pseudo-husband, and sees his face, his eyes. No, she tells Waring or Watson, I think I’d like to go back home to Miami.

But first they fly to Orlando, and rent another Taurus, because there is still Emmylou to consider. This is Lorna’s idea, Paz wants to go immediately back to Miami and get her started on therapy, but now she digs in her front paws and hunches her back and will not budge. She is not much interested in the criminal case per se anymore, but she desperately wants to talk to Emmylou Dideroff again.

Paz knew he was driving like a maniac, weaving in and out of the interstate traffic, drawing outraged honks and hoots from the 18-wheelers he challenged. He told himself that it was because he wanted to resolve this whole thing so he could get Lorna into treatment, but at some level he knew it was not the real reason. Dangerous driving occupied his mind as ordinary freeway cruising did not; it blanked thought. Had it not been shut out he knew it would turn toxic. He would start asking the why questions, the gut rippers. He would have to think about his life and about his connection with the woman sitting quietly beside him. He would have to admit he’d lost control of his life, that he was scared to death, frightened that she’d die, frightened that she wouldn’t and that he’d have to admit to love, the kind his mother was talking about when she’d yelled at him about Willa, crazy love. And what if she said get lost, bub, no high school grad need apply?

He exited onto the state road and drove toward Clewiston. At the little county two-lane he had to pull over for an ambulance and a state trooper, screaming by with lights and sirens. When they got to the Barlows’ yard and he saw the cars from the state police and the county sheriff, his heart froze.

Sometime later they found Cletis Barlow in a waiting room at Community Hospital in Clewiston, sitting calmly and reading a Bible.

“How is she?” asked Paz.

“Oh, she’s hurt, but she’s a tough old lady,” said Barlow in a tired voice. “You don’t last long around a cattle ranch if you’re any kind of fragile. She came to in the ambulance, and the first thing she asked was if Emmylou was all right. She didn’t see their faces. Three of them, masked with cartoon masks, Porky Pig, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Bugs Bunny. They pistol-whipped her for no reason when they took Emmylou. She’s getting x-rayed and some other tests now.”

“My God, I’m sorry, Cletis. If I had any idea something like this was going to happen…”

“It ain’t your fault, Jimmy. We can’t be constrained in doing good because evil might take advantage of it. The devil’d be the winner then for sure. What did you learn on your trip?”

Paz told him. Barlow was silent for a while, and Paz had the strange feeling that time had run in reverse, that he was still the junior partner on the detection team. Surprisingly, he felt relief rather than resentment. One of his virtues was that he knew when he needed help. Barlow was staring at a poster on the wall, the usual cheery art show thing.

Then he turned his tin-colored gaze onto Paz, with an expression that Paz had rarely seen in it, more Old than New Testament, and Paz felt the hair bristle on his neck.

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay,” said Barlow. “But I’ll have their blood for this.”

“What’re you talking about, man?”

“Where you’re going with it now. I figure you got one more card to play and I want to be in on the deal.”

“Packer.”

“Him. I’m coming with you. You’ll wait while we make sure Edna’s all right and then we’ll go together.”

“I don’t know, Cletis…”

“Yeah, you do. We’ll go after him together, only this time y’all’re going to be the good cop.”