Spiral (31 page)

Stang Street was one of the thinly populated ones that ran into a desolate little field with brittle coastal grass, and an occasional chinaberry or mesquite tree. Haydon slowed and checked the numbering system. Waite's house stood off by itself where the pavement stopped and the street continued as a crushed-shell road around a sandy hump of dune grass. As Haydon approached, he was unsure of how to present himself. Then he remembered he had forgotten to call Nina.

The far side of the house was protected from an open expanse that reached toward the freeway loop by a thick house-high hedge of junipers planted so close together they formed a solid green wall. On the near side, a clapboard garage was offset thirty yards from the house, one of its double doors folded open to reveal the rear end of an old pickup sitting on cement blocks. A fishing skiff sat on a rusty boat trailer in the drive. A battered Evinrude outboard mounted on the skiff's stern looked as if it hadn't run in years. One of the trailer's tires was flat.

The yard had no curbing, and the Bermuda grass, looking pale from too much sun and too little water, simply grew in uneven margins out into the crushed shell. A sidewalk ran straight out from the front porch. There was a beaten rut in the grass at the end of the sidewalk where someone habitually parked a truck or car. The house was covered with white asbestos siding, and the green aluminum awnings on its front windows had been bleached pale by years of the southerly angle of the summer sun.

Seeing no vehicles that seemed currently in use, Haydon pulled up to the side near the boat trailer so his car wouldn't be visible from the intersection at the end of Stang. He turned off the motor, opened the glove compartment, and took out a thin leather pouch, which he slipped into his jacket pocket.

The heat had not yet begun to recede, and the traffic coming off the long fall of Sherman Bridge on the Loop glittered like a string of sequins reflecting the last sharp rays of the July sun. Haydon lowered the driver's window on the Vanden Plas and got out. A hot breath moved over the mounds of sand and clumpy dead grass, bringing with it the shuddering rasp of grasshoppers in the fields.

He walked around to the front of the house, stepped up on the prefabricated cement stoop, and knocked on the door. To the right of the porch a spray of oleanders defended the front windows, and the rear end of a sleeping German shepherd peeked out of its shade.

Suddenly Haydon was bathed in the cool, rippling wave of premonition, his eyes locked on the motionless flanks of the reclining dog. He slowly back down the steps, and saw the chain locked to a steel stake at the side of the porch. It snaked around the back of the oleander to the dog. Haydon crouched and pulled the chain, taking up its slack until it stopped. He tugged firmly, and kept it taut as he concentrated on the oleander. The blood was almost perfectly camouflaged until he saw a single splash of it, and then all of it became instantly visible as if he had finally identified the telltale pattern of the leopard's spots in the dappled shadows.

He went ahead and pulled the dog out until he saw the mess of its head. Then he dropped the chain, drew his Beretta, and moved around the side of the house to the junipers.

The Venetian blinds on the front two windows were closed, and the stained shades on the back two were pulled all the way down. In the back it was the same way. There was another dog chained at the back door, its head hidden under the wooden steps. Haydon didn't even bother to look. He went to the side of the house where the boat trailer stood, looked toward the street, then returned to the wooden steps. He mounted the steps over the body of the second dog and opened the back screen. He held it open with his foot as he gently leaned against the door. It was not locked. Slowly he put his ear next to the wood door and listened. Nothing. The muscles on the sides of his neck were tight as he slowly pushed open the door.

It was the kitchen. A thin naked woman in hair curlers and a stocky man in a port authority uniform with the sleeves rolled tightly over bulky muscles sat on opposite sides of a wooden table in the middle of the room. They were gagged, and tied to their chairs. Their hands were flat out in front of them on the table, palms down, a big nail in the center of each hand keeping them in place. Each had been shot in the right ear, and they were covered with as much blood as their hearts could pump in the convulsive seconds that followed the explosions. The woman had suffered a dozen or more cigarette burns around her breasts. Only four of her ten fingernails were painted with a fresh coat of nail polish, but two fingers on each hand still had needles rammed under their nails. Some of the needle points had exited out the flesh behind the nail roots. The man's fingers had been treated differently. They had been twisted at the joints, skewed at impossible angles, the ends pulverized. Haydon recognized the technique, and remembered the John Doe in the morgue. The man and the woman had both vomited on themselves sometime during their ordeal. The surface of the table was horrifying.

Haydon fought light-headedness, but couldn't bring himself to take a deep breath because of the stench. He moved around the table, his eyes suddenly jerking to the door that led to the rest of the house. From the kitchen door he could see into the living room, its furniture in tumbled disarray. He jerked left to a bedroom. A tall, thin young man in jeans and a black T-shirt was sprawled face up on the floor, his shoulders and head in a darkening pool. In the bathroom: a mirror broken with such force that glass was scattered all over the room and into the hallway, commode overflowed, shower curtain ripped off it; clips. Another bedroom, empty. A small house.

He returned his Beretta to its holster and took out the latex gloves again. He didn't know what he was looking for, didn't know what they had been looking for, but soon saw they already had beei through every drawer in the house. They had looked under every cushion, under every mattress, turned every picture, searched ever; pocket in every article of clothing in every closet. And, of course they had talked to these people, and had probably learned something

Walking back into the kitchen, Haydon stopped inside the door way near the refrigerator. His peripheral vision caught something a eye level, and he reached on top of the refrigerator beside a Sony radio and took down an open wallet. The picture of the man nailed to the table was on the driver's license: Lawrence Tucker Waite. Th wallet had been rifled. There was no money, but the credit cards wer still there.

Haydon looked up, thinking, and it was then he noticed th woman was not so much in her chair as out of it, her back awkward! arched. His eyes followed the line of her naked body to the floor where he saw the mop head under the table, its handle angling up between her legs. From where he stood, her forward-stretched arm accented the narrowness of her waist and the flared bellows of he rib cage. It didn't matter who she was, they had taken more from her than her life. He moved mechanically around the edge of the kitche and out the back door, fighting the constriction in his chest.

Standing in a patch of bare ground under a leaning salt cedar at the foot of the wooden steps, he spat and sucked in air, unable to get the odor out of his nostrils, the taste out of his mouth. He wiped at the perspiration pouring off his forehead, recoiled at the touch of the latex, and tore at the gloves, snatching them off in a frantic effort to free his hands. His legs wobbled, and he wondered if he was going to faint. What an absurd picture that would be, him falling away cold in the dirt outside a house full of bodies, a few feet away from a dead dog, all of them lying silently in the day's late heat, only Haydon breathing, and only Haydon eventually to open his eyes to realize how bizarre it all had been.

He moved to the Vanden Plas and leaned on it, his hands on th roof, his arms straight out, his head slumped between his arms until he felt the tendons stretching to the bursting point at the back of his neck.

It was Cordero's list. A
teco
list. Not an intended hit list. Then why had Ireno Lopez—if John Doe was Lopez—and Tucker Waite turned up dead? Had they been
teco
contacts or resources who, once they had served their purposes, were then dispensed with for security reasons? If so, why was Lopez found lying at the gates of their own safe house? It didn't seem to fit together. Nor did it seem like a reasonable scenario in light of the torture evident in all the killings. Why would the
tecos
do that to their own resources?

The people who had done what Haydon had found in the house were looking for answers, and they had been looking for answers from John Doe/Ireno Lopez, too. What Haydon needed to know was: What were the questions, and who was asking them?

He straightened up from the car and turned to face the house. The shadows were long now, spreading, blurring into one another like a growing stain. He had left the back door open, a sinister rectangle in the white cube of the house, a doorway to a despicable scene. There was very little to be learned about the investigation from seeing the two bodies in the kitchen, but if you had the strength, if you had the courage to look at them long enough, you would learn something about the darker corners of human nature.

Haydon walked back to the wooden steps and pulled the kitchen door closed, using the rubber gloves on the doorknob. He walked over to the salt cedar and broke off a leafy branch, which he used to obscure his footprints at the back of the steps. He got into the Vanden Plas and backed away from the garage and onto the pavement. Leaving the motor idling, he got out and made sure none of his tire tracks were left in a dusty pocket of the coarsely crushed shell.

He drove back to Clinton Drive, and decided against using the cubicle telephones at the Athens Bar and Grill. He would look for a booth as he returned on Wayside. The city was beginning to glisten as late afternoon slipped into evening and the light in the barrio faded into blue. Not far from Harrisburg, he saw a booth at a small convenience store near a gas station. He pulled off the street, parked to one side of the store in front of the booth, and got out. A yellow neon sign that ran the length of the front of the store threw a jaundiced glow over the parking area, turning Haydon's linen suit a bright gamboge. He called Nina.

"I was beginning to wonder," she said. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. Were there any calls?"

"Celia Moreno, about half an hour ago. She wants to talk to you."

"She didn't say why?"

"No. I told her you were out, but I was expecting you to check in anytime. She said she would call back in an hour. That would be around eight-thirty, I guess."

He looked at his watch. "She didn't leave a number?"

"She wouldn't."

"If she calls again before I get back, try to get a number from her. Ask her if she's at home."

"Are you on your way home?" Nina asked.

"Just about. I've got to make another call. Maybe two."

"Is everything all right? You sound . . . you sound a little tense."

"I'm fine. I'll get back to you."

He hung up and put in another quarter. When information answered, he asked for Celia Moreno. No listing. He asked for C. Moreno. No listing. He hung up. He couldn't think of her mother's name, but he remembered the address. He reached down for the telephone book, knowing it wouldn't be there, and found only the dangling chain.

Cursing, he put another quarter into the telephone. When the dispatcher answered, Haydon identified himself and asked for Lieutenant Dystal. He said he knew Dystal was out on a scene, but it was important that he talk to him. He gave the number at the booth and said he would wait ten minutes. He opened the folding door to ventilate the suffocating air inside and stood looking through the wash of yellow light at the cars on Wayside. A couple of kids on bicycles coasted up to the store from the street and went in. Yellow Chicanos, smiling yellow smiles. A yellow woman in a sagging print dress plodded across the stretch of yellow caliche carrying a paper sack loaded with empty soft drink bottles and holding the hand of a yellow child. The little girl stared at Haydon standing silently in the booth until she disappeared into the white fluorescence of the store. The woman never saw him.

When the telephone rang, Haydon quickly closed the door.

"Well, we found the place," Dystal said. Haydon could hear the static from the radio cars in the background.

"There's something else."

Dystal waited. The strain of his predicament filled the silence between them. Haydon wasn't the only one having to pay for what he was doing, but Dystal was handling it stoically.

"There are three bodies at 1119 Stang Street, over in Port Houston. One white male in the back bedroom. A white woman and a white man named Lawrence Tucker Waite in the kitchen. Waite's driver's license is in a wallet on top of the refrigerator. I don't know who the other two are. It's a bad scene, Bob. They've all been shot, but the two in the kitchen have been tortured."

"God a'mighty."

"Bob, when I was in Cordero's office, I copied an address book I found in his desk. I thought Lapierre's people would find it, but I guess Cordero came back and got it before he disappeared. At the back of the book were four coded names. When I finally deciphered them, they turned out to be the telephone numbers of four people: Valverde, Ireno Lopez, Lawrence Waite, and someone named Daniel Ferretis. I don't know anything about him, but his address is 2855 Dumfries in Meyerland."

"I'll get people over there right now," Dystal said. "You got any more surprises?"

"No. But I think Celia Moreno knows something. She's been trying to call me, but won't leave her number with Nina. I'll be trying to get in touch with her."