Shadowfires

“Keep your mind on your driving,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Not now. You've got to concentrate on getting away from them.”

“Don't worry about that, and don't try to use it as an excuse to clam up on me, damn it. We're already out of the woods. One more turn, and we'll have lost them for good.”

The right front tire blew out.

10 NAILS

It was a long night for Julio and Reese.

By 12:32, the last of the garbage in the dumpster had been inspected, but Ernestina Hernandez's blue shoe had not been found.

Once the trash had been searched and the corpse had been moved to the morgue, most detectives would have decided to go home to get some shut-eye and start fresh the next day — but not Lieutenant Julio Verdad. He was aware the trail was freshest in the twenty-four hours after the discovery of the body. Furthermore, for at least a day following assignment to a new case, he had difficulty sleeping, for then he was especially troubled by a sense of the horror of murder.

Besides, this time, he had a special obligation to the victim. For reasons which might have seemed inadequate to others but which were compelling to him, he felt a deep commitment to Ernestina. Bringing her killer to justice was not just his job but a point of honor with Julio.

His partner, Reese Hagerstrom, accompanied him without once commenting on the lateness of the hour. For Julio and for no one else, Reese would work around the clock, deny himself not only sleep but days off and regular meals, and make any sacrifice required. Julio knew, if it ever became necessary for Reese to step into the path of a bullet and die for Julio, the big man would make that ultimate sacrifice as well, and without the slightest hesitation. It was something which they both understood in their hearts, in their bones, but of which they had never spoken.

At 12:41 in the morning, they took the news of Ernestina's brutal death to her parents, with whom she had lived, a block east of Main Street in a modest house flanked by twin magnolias. The family had to be awakened, and at first they were disbelieving, certain that Ernestina had come home and gone to bed by now. But, of course, her bed was empty.

Though Juan and Maria Hernandez had six children, they took this blow as hard as parents with one precious child would have taken it. Maria sat on the rose-colored sofa in the living room, too weak to stand. Her two youngest sons — both teenagers — sat beside her, red-eyed and too shaken to maintain the macho front behind which Latino boys of their age usually hid. Maria held a framed photograph of Ernestina, alternately weeping and tremulously speaking of good times shared with the beloved daughter. Another daughter, nineteen-year-old Laurita, sat alone in the dining room, unapproachable, inconsolable, clutching a rosary. Juan Hernandez paced agitatedly, jaws clenched, blinking furiously to repress his tears. As patriarch, it was his duty to provide an example of strength to his family, to be unshaken and unbroken by this visitation of muerta. But it was too much for him to bear, and twice he retreated to the kitchen where, behind the closed door, he made soft strangled sounds of grief.

Julio could do nothing to relieve their anguish, but he inspired trust and hope for justice, perhaps because his special commitment to Ernestina was clear and convincing. Perhaps because, in his soft-spoken way, he conveyed a hound-dog perseverance that lent conviction to promises of swift justice. Or perhaps his smoldering fury at the very existence of death, all death, was painfully evident in his face and eyes and voice. After all, that fury had burned in him for many years now, since the afternoon when he had discovered rats chewing out the throat of his baby brother, and by now the fire within him must have grown bright enough to show through for all to see.

From Mr. Hernandez, Julio and Reese learned that Ernestina had gone out for an evening on the town with her best girlfriend, Becky Klienstad, with whom she worked at a local Mexican restaurant, where both were waitresses. They had gone in Ernestina's car: a powder-blue, ten-year-old Ford Fairlane.

“If this has happened to my Ernestina,” Mr. Hernandez said, — 'then what's happened to poor Becky? Something must have happened to her, too. Something very terrible.”

From the Hernandez kitchen, Julio telephoned the Klienstad family in Orange. Becky — actually Rebecca — was not yet home. Her parents had not been worried because she was, after all, a grown woman, and because some of the dance spots that she and Ernestina favored were open until two in the morning. But now they were very worried indeed.

* * *

1:20 a.m.

In the unmarked sedan in front of the Hernandez house, Julio sat behind the wheel and stared bleakly out at the magnolia-scented night.

Through the open windows came the susurration of leaves stirring in the vague June breeze. A lonely, cold sound.

Reese used the console-mounted computer terminal to generate an APB and pickup order on Ernestina's powder-blue Ford. He'd obtained the license number from her parents.

“See if there're any messages on hold for us,” Julio said.

At the moment he did not trust himself to operate the keyboard. He was full of anger and wanted to pound on something — anything — with both fists, and if the computer gave him any trouble or if he hit one wrong key by mistake, he might take out his frustration on the machine merely because it was a convenient target.

Reese accessed the police department's data banks at headquarters and requested on-file messages. Softly glowing green letters scrolled up on the video display. It was a report from the uniformed officers who'd gone to the morgue, at Julio's direction, to ascertain if the scalpel and bloodstained morgue coat found in the dumpster could be traced to a specific employee on the coroner's staff. Officials at the coroner's office were able to confirm that a scalpel, lab coat, set of hospital whites, surgical cap, and a pair of antistatic lab shoes were missing from the morgue's supplies closet. However, no specific employee could be linked with the theft of those items.

Looking up from the VDT, gazing at the night, Julio said, “This murder is somehow tied to the disappearance of Eric Leben's body.”

“Could be coincidence,” Reese said.

“You believe in coincidence?”

Reese sighed. “No.”

A moth fluttered against the windshield.

“Maybe whoever stole the body also killed Ernestina,” Julio said.

“But why?”

“That's what we must find out.”

Julio drove away from the Hernandez house.

He drove away from the fluttering moth and the whispering leaves.

He turned north and drove away from downtown Santa Ana.

However, although he followed Main Street, where closely spaced streetlamps blazed, he could not drive away from the deep darkness, not even temporarily, for the darkness was within him.

* * *

1:38 a.m.

They reached Eric Leben's Spanish-modern house quickly, for there was no traffic. Night in that wealthy neighborhood was respectfully still. Their footsteps clicked hollowly on the tile walkway, and when they rang the doorbell, it sounded as if it were echoing back to them from the bottom of a deep well.

Julio and Reese had no authority whatsoever in Villa Park, which was two towns removed from their own jurisdiction. However, in the vast urban sprawl of Orange County, which was essentially one great spread-out city divided into many communities, a lot of crimes were not conveniently restricted to a single jurisdiction, and a