emerged, holding a calfskin briefcase.
Lehman’s lawyer.
19
Tucson-Saguaro Auto & Body, near the corner of Palo Verde and 29th Street, was a cinder block building with three roll-up work bays, a parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain link fence, and a corrugated iron shed that served as the office. The traffic here was a six-lane river of cars and SUVs flowing past a median on which a person dressed like a chicken waved a sign for a fast food place called El Pollo Grande. Every car window was up, the air conditioning going, people with cell phones attached to their ears. All of them isolated from one another in their speeding steel-and- glass capsules.
The chicken looked jaunty, even though he must be smothering from the heat—a real trouper. Laura wondered how much he was paid.
As she stepped onto the curb, she felt that familiar tightening in her stomach whenever she notified people that their loved ones were dead.
She knew what it felt like. The memory was always close at hand, a penance of sorts. A counselor at the University had explained to her the concept of survivor’s guilt. It ran through her head like film: drifting off to sleep, her thoughts on Billy and the fun they’d had in Nogales, turtle soup at La Rocca’s, coming home late and not feeling like going to her parents’ house for dinner. Making love, Billy having to leave because he had to be at work early tomorrow. The stutter of the sprinklers outside the open dorm window. The bedclothes smelling of sex. That Last Happy Day.
Someone knocking on her door. She opens it to two men in suits, who look as if they’ve been lurking in the hallway trying to get their stories straight.
Knowing right then something is wrong.
The older one with the florid complexion clearing his throat—
She walked along the weedy curb to the shed. The heat was like a convection oven. The door to the shed was open and a table fan blew sporadically in her direction. It took her a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness of the shed after the blinding desert sun.
“Help you?”
The man sat at a metal desk facing the door. Graying ponytail, a red T-shirt washed so many times it had faded to pink. Behind him, a Tecate poster of a sweaty girl with a bare midriff and cutoffs was tacked to the faded wall.
The minute he saw her, his smile faded. She realized that he had been expecting this visit.
“Are you Beau Taylor?”
There was still a hopeful quality to his expression, as if there was a chance that there had been some kind of mistake. Laura remembered going through the same thinking process when detectives Jeff Smith and Frank Entwistle came to her door. It went like this: As long as nothing was said, you were all right. But the moment the words spilled into the air, there was no way to call them back. So the thing was to try and stop those words.
“If it’s about the Coupe de Ville—“
“No sir.” Best to tell him flat out, no ambiguity. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, sir, but your nephew Cary Statler was found in Bisbee yesterday morning, dead.”
His face crumpled. “I thought it was him. The news said they found a body, but they didn’t identify him.”
“Why did you think it was him, sir?”
“Jessica was killed and he disappeared. If he was missing, he was either hitchhiking his way here or someone got him, too. He didn’t show up, then they find a body right near her house. You might as well tell me what happened.”
She did.
“Do you think he suffered?”
She went for the white lie; for all she knew, it was true. “I don’t think so. It was a massive head injury.”
“Poor, sweet kid. He wanted to be a vet. His grades were piss-poor, he dropped out of school, but he was always talking about getting his GED and then trying to get into vet school.” He snorted. “Like he could get through a science degree in college. Didn’t talk about it so much lately, though. I grew up in a time when drugs were cool, but I tell you, I’ve seen more kids lose their ambition smoking pot …” He trailed off, looked down at his club-like fingers. “Probably never would have gotten anywhere.”
“Did you ever hear him talk about a neighbor, a man named Chuck Lehman?”
“Sure. He and Cary made kites. Kind of strange, a forty-year-old man and an eighteen-year-old kid.”
“Cary was a funny mixture of a kid. Never could stick with anything, had that attention-span problem, what do you call it? ADD? Plus, he got put off easy.”
The shack rattled—the thundering whistle of two A-10s from Davis Monthan on final approach. Laura glanced out the doorway and saw one of them over the strip mall across the way, a giant mosquito looking for a place to alight.
She wondered how Cary’s uncle could stand it, here in the flight path of the A-10s and C-130s—and worse, the F16s—just an iron shed between himself and the stifling heat that killed one or two illegal aliens a day a few miles south of here. He noticed her discomfort and aimed the fan in her direction. Must have been a floor model; it still had the streamers.
“You said he was put off easily?” she asked him.
