First Grave on the Right

You’re not.” She paused to let her gaze bore into mine, to drive her point home. It was sweet. “And because of this false sense of security, you get yourself into the most … bizarre situations.”

“Bizarre?” I asked, pretending to be offended.

“Three words. Sewage plant disaster.”

“That totally wasn’t my fault,” I argued, balking at the very idea of it. As if.

She pursed her lips and waited for me to come to my senses.

“Okay, it was my fault.” She knew me too well. “But only a little. And those rats had it coming. So, what did you find out?” I asked, looking back at Reyes’s picture.

Cookie thumbed through the printouts and slid one out. “Are you ready for this?”

“As long it doesn’t contain nude pictures of elderly women, I’m good.” I kept my eyes locked on to Reyes’s, fierce and intense as they were.

She handed me the printout. “Murder.”

“No,” I whispered, as if the wind had been forced out of my lungs. It was a news article dated ten years earlier. No, no, no, no, no. Anything but murder. Or rape. Or kidnapping. Or armed robbery. Or indecent exposure, ’cause that’s just creepy. I scanned the article with a reluctant eye, like when you pass by an accident and can’t help but look.

ALBUQUERQUE MAN FOUND GUILTY.

Short. To the point.

A man with a past more mysterious than the circumstances surrounding his father’s death was found guilty Monday after three days of jury deliberation. The prosecution faced several unusual problems during the trial, such as the fact that Reyes Alexander Farrow, 20, doesn’t exist.

Reyes Alexander Farrow. I stopped a moment, tried to catch my breath, to slow my pulse. Even Reyes’s name gave me heart palpitations. And he didn’t exist? Heck, I could have told them that.

“Farrow has no birth certificate,” the prosecution stated after the two-week trial ended. “He has no medical records, no social security number, no school records beyond a three-month stint at Yucca High. On paper, this man is a ghost.”

A ghost. As Morpheus would say, fate is not without a sense of irony.

Farrow’s father, Earl Walker, was found dead in his car after a group of hikers discovered it at the bottom of a canyon five miles east of Albuquerque. Though his body had been burned beyond recognition, the autopsy concluded that he’d died from blunt force trauma to the head. Several witnesses saw Farrow fighting with his father the day before Walker was reported missing by his fiancee.

“Our hands were tied,” Stan Eichmann, the lead defense attorney for Farrow, stated after the verdict was handed down. “There is much more to this case than meets the eye. I guess we’ll never know how it could have turned out.”

Eichmann’s statement was only one of dozens of mysteries surrounding this case. For example, Walker has no social security number either and has never filed a single tax return.

“He had nothing that would establish him as a law-abiding citizen,” Eichmann said. “He seemed to be living under several aliases. It took weeks to track down what we believe was his real name.”

“This is actually more common than you might think,” the prosecution stated. “But it’s a choice career criminals make as adults. Farrow, on the other hand, has never existed. According to our records, he was never born, and DNA results conclude that Walker was not his biological father. Based on what we know about him, if I had to guess, I’d say Reyes Farrow was quite possibly abducted as a child.”

My breath caught in my chest. Could he really have been abducted?

I quickly scanned the rest of the article.

Farrow never took the stand in his own defense, leaving jurors hard-pressed to see past the circumstantial evidence despite the defense’s success at debunking several key theories pertinent to the prosecution’s strategy.

The article went on to talk about Walker’s fiancee, Sarah Hadley. She’d testified that Reyes had threatened Walker on several occasions — right — and that they were both in fear for their lives. Yet another witness, an associate of Ms. Hadley’s, refuted the statement, swearing under oath that Walker’s fiancee was secretly in love with Farrow and would have left Walker in a heartbeat to be with him. The witness stated that if Ms. Hadley was afraid of anyone, it was of Walker himself.

“This is a case about a broken heart and a broken mind,” Eichmann told the jury minutes before they broke for deliberation. “Walker’s criminal record alone casts numerous doubts as to the legitimacy of anything even remotely resembling a motive by his only child.”

His only child? But Reyes had a sister.

“The circumstances surrounding his death are about as transparent as I am,” Eichmann continued.

Farrow, who had been taking night classes with a stolen social security number before his arrest, ironically, toward a law degree, stood impassively, his head bowed slightly, as the verdict was read.

My heart sank in my chest with the image of Reyes standing in a courtroom, waiting for his peers to judge him, to find him guilty or innocent. I wondered what he felt, how he coped with their decision.

“The mystery that is Reyes Farrow deepens by the minute,” I said. Walker’s fiancee was, for lack of a better phrase, full of shit. Abused children rarely attack their abusers, much less torment them. And women were never secretly in love with someone who they believed might kill them at any moment.

“But murder, Charley.”

“Do you know how many people are in prison for crimes they didn’t commit?”

“You think Reyes is innocent?”

In my dreams. “I’d have to see him in person to know for certain.”

Her brows slid together. “Is that part of your ability?”

Though I’d never really thought of it that way, I said, “Yeah, I guess it is. I forget that not everyone can see what I see.”

“Speaking of which, you said you saw him again tonight? Were you talking about Reyes?”

“Oh, right.” I straightened then winced with the action and burrowed back into my seat, wondering where to begin. Better just to get it all out in the open, air my dirty laundry, so to speak. “You know how I’ve never told you certain things, because I didn’t want you to have to seek therapy?”

Cookie laughed. “Yes, but you know you can tell me anything.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a good thing, because you’re about to get a crash course in all things grim. I’m lost.”

“Aren’t you usually?” she said, mischief glittering in her eyes.

“Funny. I’m not talking about my usual state of confusion. This is different.”

“Different from utter chaos?” When I scowled, feigning annoyance, she shifted in her chair, and said, “Okay, you have my complete attention.”

But I was still stuck on the utter-chaos thing. Cookie was right. My life tended to be in either park or overdrive, careening through traffic with little thought to the cars around me or the destination. “I do just sort of stumble through life, don’t I?”

“Well, yeah, but that’s okay,” she said with a one-shouldered shrug.

“Ya think?”

“Sure. We’re all just sort of stumbling through life, if you ask me.”

“Still, this whole grim reaper thing should have come with a manual. Or a diagram of some kind. A flowchart would have been nice.”

“Oh, you’re right,” Cookie said with her supportive, I’ve-got-your-back head nod. “One with colored arrows, huh?”

“And simple, easy-to-read yes/no questions. Like, ‘Did death incarnate visit you today? If no, skip to step ten. If yes, stop now, ’cause you are so screwed, girlfriend. You may as well call it a day. Take a deep breath, because this is going to hurt. You might want to phone a friend about now, tell her to kiss your ass good-bye.…’ ”

I realized Cookie wasn’t doing her supportive, I’ve-got-your-back head-nod thing anymore. I glanced at her suddenly pale face. It was kind of pretty. Sure made the blue in her eyes stand out.