“Where’s your uncle?”
“He had to go back to the station. We just solved a pretty big case, and he’s taking statements.” He was also going to let Cookie know what happened. She’d be glad we found Reyes.
“Well,” Neil said, handing me a cup and frowning at the blood still on my hands, “the way I see it, Reyes woke up in that long-term-care unit with amnesia. He was in a coma, after all, with a head wound. Didn’t know who he was, much less where he was. Can’t possibly be held accountable for escaping when he had no idea he was doing it.”
I gaped at him. With a grin, he reached over and closed my mouth.
“You would do that?” I asked, appreciation evident in my voice.
“I would do that.”
I sighed a breath of relief. “Neil, thank you so much.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, taking a sip. “No, really, don’t mention it. I like my job.”
I smiled. “Oh, hell yeah. Now I have something to blackmail you with. Hmmm,” I said, taking a long sip of hot java, “what do I need?”
“Your head examined?” he asked. “Which, by the way, you don’t have to resort to blackmail to get. I know some people who know some people.”
“If I want my head shrunk, I’ll talk to my sister.”
“Oh, dude, your sister is so hot.” He sat back, his expression full of reminiscent thought.
“Ew.” She was beautiful, but still. Neil Gossett? With my flesh and blood? Not likely. “I have to tell you something.”
He straightened. “Sounds serious.”
“It is. I bound him.”
“What?”
With a heavy sigh, I said, “I bound him, like tied him.”
He leaned toward me and asked under his breath, “Should you be telling me this?”
“Not like that.” After a backhand to his shoulder, I lowered my eyes, ashamed at what I was about to tell him. “I bound his incorporeal self to his corporeal body. He can’t leave it. He’s bound to it.”
“You can do that?”
“Apparently. It just kind of came to me.”
“Wow.”
“No, what I mean is, he’s mad.”
He paused and leveled an astonished stare on me. “What?”
“He’s kind of furious,” I said, shrugging one corner of my mouth.
Neil worked his jaw a moment, as if trying to figure out what to say. “Charley,” he said, apparently decided, “I’ve seen Reyes furious once, remember? It left an impression.”
“I know and I’m sorry. He was going to essentially commit suicide. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“So you infuriate him then send him back to prison?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper.
I cringed. He made it sound so bad. “Pretty much.”
“Holy shit, Charley.”
“What’d she do now?”
We both looked up. Owen Vaughn, the guy who tried to maim me in high school, stood over us in his black police uniform. Shiny badge and all.
“Vaughn,” Neil said by way of a chilly greeting.
Owen tapped his badge. “Officer Vaughn,” he corrected. “I need to know what happened in that basement.”
Oh, for the love of Pete’s Dragon. “I gave my statement to Detective Davidson,” I said, challenging him with my eyes.
“Don’t you mean Uncle Bob?”
“That’s the one.”
Owen looked down the hall each way, then leaned down to me. “Would you like to know what I think of you?”
“Um, is that a trick question?”
“Never mind,” he said, straightening. “I’ll save it for a more appropriate time.” He smirked in anticipation. “Like the day I haul your ass to jail.”
As he stormed off, Neil asked, “Seriously, what the hell did you do to him?”
“You were his danged friend,” I said, throwing a palm up. “You tell me.”
Neil stuck around awhile; then Cookie showed up with food and a change of clothes. She tried to get me to go home, but I just couldn’t leave, not before knowing Reyes’s condition. Dad came and went. Gemma came and went. A doctor finally came out, his eyes weary. Reyes was in ICU, but he was doing remarkably well, all things considered. Still, I couldn’t leave. Angel showed up around dark and stayed the entire night with me. He sat on the floor beside my head as I laid claim to a small padded bench and slept as well as could be expected on a small padded bench.
Uncle Bob came back early the next morning, a little annoyed. “Why didn’t you go home?”
“’Cause.” I rubbed my eyes then my back, glancing over at Angel. “Did you stay here all night, babe?”
“Of course,” he said. “That guy over there was eyeing you the whole time.”
“Who, that man?” I asked, pointing to the guy asleep across from me. “I think he just sleeps with his eyes open like that.”
“Oh. That’s just wrong.”
“Yeah. So what’s up?” I asked Ubie.
“We’re going to Ruiz. We were granted a permit to exhume the body of one Mr. Saul Romero.”
“Oh, good. Who’s Saul Romero?”
“The guy Hana Insinga is allegedly buried under.”
“Oh, right. I knew that.”
“So, you in?”
I offered a weak shrug. “I guess. The state won’t let me see Reyes anyway.”
“Then why the hell did you stay here all night?”
I shrugged again. “Glutton. I need a shower.”
“Come on, I’ll take you. We have to pick up Cookie, anyway, and meet the sheriff up there.”
We pulled into the Ruiz Cemetery right behind Mimi and Warren Jacobs. Kyle Kirsch was already there with his father. From the crimson lining their eyes, I’d say neither got much sleep. Kyle’s mother had been picked up in Minnesota and was awaiting transport back to New Mexico. And, sadly, Hy Insinga was there as well, her face the definition of agony. My heart ached for her.
“It’s that one,” Mimi told the Mora County sheriff, pointing to Mr. Romero’s grave. “The second one on the left.”
Two hours later, a team from the Office of the Medical Investigator from Albuquerque was lifting out the twenty-year-old remains of Hana Insinga. The pain on her mother’s face was too much to bear. Grateful she had a friend with her, I went back to Ubie’s SUV and watched as Hy Insinga walked up to a trembling and sobbing Mimi, worried what the outcome of that reunion would be. They hugged each other for a very long time.
Three days later, Reyes Farrow, after showing remarkable and unexplainable improvement, was released into the care of the Penitentiary of New Mexico’s medical team. I drove to Santa Fe to see him, literally quaking in my boots as I stood in line with the other visitors, waiting my turn to be ION scanned for drug residue. But a guard pulled me out of line and told me Deputy Warden Gossett wanted to talk to me first.
“How you holding up?” Neil asked when the guard showed me into his office.
I was getting used to the organized clutter and sat across from him. “I’m good,” I said with a shrug. “Taking a little break from the PI business at the moment.”
“Is everything okay?” he asked, alarmed.
“Oh, yeah. Just nothing too pressing. So what’s up? Can I see him, or is he still in the medical unit?”
Neil glanced down before answering. “I wanted to tell you this myself instead of them telling you in the visitation area.”
