Hailey's War

red brake lights flaring and fading. I said, “Maybe it’s best they know I’m out there looking for her.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I have no idea who these guys are,” I said. “I could look for them the rest of my life and not find them, but if they come looking for me, that’ll streamline things, if nothing else.”

“Don’t streamline yourself into an unmarked grave, prima.”

twenty-one

What little there was to know about Herlinda Lopez’s disappearance, I learned from the San Francisco Chronicle.

She was apparently taken from her own garage, in her own car. The garage had a back door that opened directly onto the Lopezes’ small yard, and then another into the house. The investigating officers found that the door leading into the yard had been pried open, its cheap lock broken. A short time after that, Herlinda’s old crimson Toyota was found in a parking lot in a quiet, light-industrial area. The implication was that whoever had taken her had broken into the garage in the small hours of the morning via the yard door and simply waited for her to come through the house door to her car, which she’d done at five that morning, on her way to her bakery job. She had raised no cry when confronted, probably intimidated by a gun and aware that her children were still sleeping in the house. She apparently let her attackers drive her away in her car, then they transferred her to a second car in the parking lot, where the trail stopped.

There had been an unfortunately long lead time on the case, because her coworkers at the bakery had been patient with her failure to show up, assuming that responsible Herlinda must have had a good reason to be tardy. They didn’t call her home until ten, long after her kids had left for school through the house’s front door, never going into the garage or seeing the broken door there. No one knew she was missing until her daughter played the answering machine message at four that afternoon.

The accounts of Herlinda’s disappearance shed new light on the men who’d taken Nidia. My theory had been that they had waited to take Nidia in Mexico because it was too risky to try to kidnap someone from a dense urban area with lots of potential witnesses. That was true enough; the neighbor lady who caught me looking through the garage windows was proof of that. But with Herlinda, these guys had proven themselves capable of an urban kidnapping. That suggested that they hadn’t known where Nidia was until just before I came to get her. If they’d had time, they would have done the same job on Nidia that they’d done later on Herlinda.

So they’d tracked Nidia down, but before they could move, I’d come and gotten her. That had forced their hand. Almost on the fly, they’d put together their plan to kidnap Herlinda and find out where Nidia and I were going.

That worried me more than anything else. These guys could think on their feet. The way they’d extracted Herlinda from her house had been almost surgical, and that had been their Night at the Improv.

This was where I should have been saying, Imagine what they could do with a little lead time, but I didn’t have to imagine. I’d seen it, in the tunnel.

I didn’t learn anything else useful that day.

Serena called me and told me that no one had a line on Nidia’s cousin Lara Cortez, and that Nidia’s family was somewhere in California’s vast agricultural-worker community. That could have meant picking strawberries near Santa Maria or garlic in Gilroy. Though I would have liked to talk to them, when I thought about what had happened to Herlinda Lopez, I was glad Nidia’s family weren’t anywhere they could easily be found.

twenty-two

West Point prides itself on being a four-year university with a broad, well- rounded curriculum. But it’s also very much an Army post, and from your first day there, you’re a soldier.

That was why, when I surfaced from BART and walked up onto the campus of UC Berkeley the next day, I stopped for a moment to look around at the student body all around me. I’d gone to college in a sea of cadet gray, and after all this time, the sight of a civilian student body gave me culture shock. Some wore jeans and Cal-logo T- shirts or caps, like the model students in a course catalog, but many more wore clothing as diverse as costumes: motorcycle boots, skater motley, Buddy Holly glasses, Afros, Birkenstocks, minidresses. Some wore tank tops and cutoffs that showed amazing amounts of skin; others were swathed almost head to foot in flowing ethnic prints. They drank lattes on the steps of Dwinelle Hall and Web-surfed on their phones. I’d nearly forgotten that students lived this way.

I wondered what they would do if they knew the student with the blond ponytail and the birthmark on her face had a loaded SIG Sauer in her backpack.

I was here to look for an obituary, that of the mathematician whom Nidia had cared for until his death. I didn’t have a name, except Adriano, which Nidia might have Spanicized from Adrian. That would have made searching the Chronicle’s obits difficult. And if this guy hadn’t done anything of real note, his death might not have made the Chronicle at all. I was fairly certain, though, that the university paper would have covered it.

So that was how I ended up outside the offices of the mathematics department, looking at a glass case on the wall where news and events were posted. There it was, an obituary for Adrian Skouras. Both the Daily Californian and the Chronicle story were posted. When I saw the accompanying photo, I had a dawning sense of understanding.

All along, I’d made a sloppy assumption: that a professor dying of cancer would have been a white-haired old man. But cancer is indiscriminate. Adrian Skouras had died at thirty-three. The photo both papers used had probably been taken years before that. The young man the camera had captured had almost sensual features-he was obviously olive-complected, though the photo was black-and-white, and he had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes. The effect, though, was offset by the thin sharpness of his face and his wire-rim eyeglasses, and like many people unused to attention, his smile for the camera was almost a wince.

I read both obituaries. They didn’t disagree on any points. Adrian Skouras had been born and raised in San Francisco and had been fascinated with math and science at a young age. He’d graduated high school at fifteen and gone back east to study at Princeton. In his second year, he’d become a star in the world of mathematics by discovering a rare subspecies of prime number, now called a “Skouras prime,” the definition of which went over my head. After that, he’d gone overseas to Oxford for graduate work, then come home to settle at Berkeley, working among some of the leading lights in the field.

He had never married and left no children behind. Associates said that Skouras had been “married to his work, in the best possible way,” in the words of one. “When he was working on something that fascinated him, which was almost all the time, he’d forget to eat, much less to get out and have a social life. But if you knew him, you wouldn’t have any doubt that he was completely fulfilled.”

The best work of his career was undoubtedly ahead of him, they said, if only cancer had not stolen a fine mind from the world.

His father, Anton Skouras, was a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist; one brother, Milos, had preceded Adrian in death five years earlier. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the American Cancer Society.

I looked at his photo again. Adrian Skouras appeared shy, gentle, unsettled by the photographer’s attention, and impatient to step back into academic anonymity. This was no cliche-the graybeard professor. This was a real person. Looking at him, I thought I knew what happened between this man and Nidia Hernandez.

According to his colleagues, Adrian had been totally satisfied as a bachelor, living his life on the higher plane of numbers and ideas. Of course, that was what anyone would want to think about a newly dead colleague. Between