The Triangle Conspiracy

“He’s very proud of you. He probably never told you that. Wouldn’t be his style.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Faith said. Proud?

“He’s an alcoholic, you know.”

“I know.”

“A few months ago,” Helms said, “when he really started going downhill, Sonny-that’s Sonny Weller, our SAC-had him referred for counseling and AA. I even volunteered to take him to the AA meetings. There’s a meeting place just a few blocks from here. I dropped him off, I picked him up. I later found out that he’d sneaked out the back after I dropped him in front, then came strolling out the front an hour later when I came back to get him. What he didn’t realize was that I checked with the person who ran the meeting, and no one remembered him. It’s a small group, and Sean does tend to stand out in a crowd.”

Faith smiled. “That he does.” The smile faded. “Have you talked to him? I mean, recently.”

Helms fidgeted.

“Yesterday? Maybe you picked him up at the airport?”

Helms furrowed his brow. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m his sister. I’m worried about him. I want to talk to him.”

“And after that?”

Under the gangly, awkward exterior, A. J. Helms was extraordinarily perceptive, Faith realized. “I’m not sure,” Faith said. “So he did get in touch with you yesterday?”

“No.”

“He didn’t?”

“No, I mean he did get in touch, but it wasn’t yesterday.”

Faith sat very still.

“Let’s see, today’s Friday, so it would have been Tuesday. Tuesday night. And he didn’t fly in. He said he’d driven all day. He showed up at about ten o’clock that night at my house, driving a little Mazda Miata with Oklahoma plates. He just wanted to crash for a few hours, he said, so I let him. He was still asleep when I got up in the morning. When I got home from work in the afternoon, he was gone.”

Faith’s mind raced. If Sean was in Arizona two and a half days ago, he couldn’t have murdered Scott Hendler in Edmond at midday yesterday. The time frame fit. If he’d left Oklahoma City sometime after Daryn was killed, in the early morning Tuesday, and drove straight through, that could have put him at A. J. Helms’s door in Tucson at ten o’clock that night. If he stuck to interstate highways, the drive from Oklahoma City to Tucson was about fifteen hours.

She could almost hear Scott Hendler’s voice: Okay, I’ll play devil’s advocate here. He could have turned around and driven back. If he left Arizona, say, at noon on Wednesday, he’d be in Oklahoma City early Thursday morning.

In plenty of time to kill you, Scott, Faith thought, and for a moment her eyes clouded.

But it made no sense. If Sean murdered Daryn, why would he then leave town immediately, drive over a thousand miles, sleep for a few hours, turn around and drive back to commit another murder?

And now Faith knew something she hadn’t known until yesterday. The secret of the book. The secret of Franklin Sanborn.

Sean couldn’t have killed Hendler.

About Daryn, she was less sure. The issue was much less clear. Sean may have indeed been led to kill Daryn, fueled by his own obsessions, but also driven by the fact that he had been very carefully and skillfully manipulated.

You bastard, she thought. You may have manipulated Sean into committing one murder, and set him up for another.

She had to find her brother, and then they would hunt down the man who had called himself Franklin Sanborn.

“Is there somewhere he would go?” Faith asked. “Here in the area, someplace that was special to him. Somewhere…I don’t know, that he felt safe. Does that sound strange?”

Helms smiled. “Yes and no. Was he always so anal-retentive? A place for everything and everything in its place. Was he like that as a kid?”

“I guess he was,” Faith said. “I don’t think you notice such things for what they are when you’re a kid. He was always neat, I was always a slob. That’s the way we looked at it then.”

Helms was nodding. “Cleanest desk in our office. Organized, efficient. Until the bottle started getting the best of him, he was the most efficient agent I’d ever seen.” He leaned back against the booth. “There were only a few bars he used to go to. He had certain places he liked to go to drink. He knew what to expect there, places where nothing ever changed.”

“One of his e-mails a year or so ago mentioned a cantina in a town called-”

“Sasabe,” Helms finished. “Man, what a strange deal that was. With all the operations we did along the border, he got to like those little border cantinas. Sasabe is really remote. It’s the most desolate port of entry along the entire Mexican border. But Sean liked to go to that place anytime we were in the area. I went with him once and had a couple of beers.” He shook his head. “Not my kind of place. You felt like someone was going to jump you at any minute and if you didn’t have a weapon of some sort you might not make it out of there. But Sean never had any trouble there.”

“Can you give me directions?”

“Look, Faith, you don’t want to go there. I’m sorry, but with all due respect, the only women who go in those kinds of cantinas are women who are offering their services, if you know what I mean. You could get into real trouble.”

“No offense taken. But you don’t know me very well, either.”

“So I don’t.” He took a pen from his pocket and grabbed a napkin from the dispenser on the table. He drew a detailed map.

Faith stood to go and thanked Helms.

“Sure,” Helms said. “If you find him, tell him he’s welcome to crash on my couch anytime. Tell him AJ’s concerned about him.”

“I will.”

“Oh, and Faith?”

Faith had already taken a couple of long steps, and had to turn back to face Helms.

“Good luck with the whole Department Thirty thing. Senator McDermott’s a grade-A jerk, and his daughter was really screwed up. Most people in Arizona aren’t surprised she wound up getting herself killed. But watch your back. The senator doesn’t do anything if he doesn’t think it’ll benefit him politically.”

“You knew, the whole time we sat here and talked.”

Helms smiled. “You take care, now.”

“I will,” Faith said.

Clutching the napkin with the directions to Sasabe, she went back to the Suburban.

Sean didn’t kill Scott, she thought.

The thought gave her something to hold on to, something she could grasp. Her brother hadn’t killed her lover.

But Hendler was still dead. A gaping hole had still been seared into her life.

But now she knew who had done it-or at least who had seen that it was done-and she knew why. There were still puzzle pieces-mostly about Daryn McDermott-that didn’t fit, things about the girl that didn’t add up. There was no reason for her to have been a part of it. She shouldn’t have had to die.

But I’ll find out soon enough.

Directions in hand, Faith drove toward Sasabe and the Mexican border.

34

FAITH HAD NEVER REALLY SPENT TIME ALONG THE Mexican border, and certainly not in such a remote part of the world as Sasabe, Arizona.

It seemed an unforgiving landscape, cactus and sage and hard-baked desert ground. But there were always mountains on the horizon, seemingly unreachable, frowning down at the desert below. In some ways, Faith could see her brother in a place like this. Change would come slowly here, if at all. The desert and the distant mountains would always stand their ground, harsh and inscrutable. Sean would always know what to expect here, at least on the surface.

The cantina was hard to miss. As far as Faith could tell, it was the only place of business in the town of Sasabe. Her Miata, covered in dust, was parked squarely in front of it.

She parked the big Suburban away from the cantina’s door so that it couldn’t be seen from inside. She strapped her extra-large fanny pack, the one she used when she ran, around her waist. Her gun went inside it. She stepped out of the SUV, the stiff boots crunching gravel.

The cantina’s door was propped open with a trash barrel. Faith walked through it and stood for a moment, adjusting to the dim light. She saw the bar, two old men at the far end of it, smoking foul-smelling homemade cigarettes. There was the bartender with the droopy mustache, just drawing a beer.

One table was occupied by two Latino men in their twenties, each with a name across the left breast of his uniform shirt. They wore dark work pants and boots.

Everyone looked at her.

Sean had always been better at languages than she, and Faith suspected that seven years on the border had improved his Spanish, while her own was stuck somewhere in high school.

“Buenos dias,” she said.

No one spoke.

“Hablo Ingles?”

One of the old smokers snorted out a laugh, but otherwise the place was silent.

Faith walked slowly to the bar, feeling the eyes on her. She’d left her purse in the van-she wasn’t that crazy, after all-but transferred some money and Kimberly Diamond’s driver’s license to the front pocket of her jeans. She reached into the pocket, pulled out a hundred-dollar bill, and laid it on the bar.

The bartender spread his hands apart.

Faith placed a second hundred beside the first.

The bartender stared at her, eyes lingering on her breasts. He finally shook his head.

“Don’t get greedy,” Faith said, “or you won’t even get the two hundred.”

The bartender looked at her impassively. A voice from the table said, in lightly accented English, “Don’t worry about Juan. We don’t get many six-foot-tall redheads in here.”

Faith turned to look at the table. “I’m only five ten. Where’s the man who drove that gold Miata?”

“I just got here,” the guy said. The patch on his shirt read Bobby in ornate cursive lettering.

“Me too,” said his partner, whose patch read Ramon.