The Salt Maiden (12 page)

As the passing hours slowly dragged the day toward darkness, Dana felt her heart pulled toward an even blacker chasm. Jay had wanted her taken somewhere more comfortable, but she’d refused to leave, thinking that at any moment she would get out of his Suburban and insist on seeing Angie’s body. Instead she struggled to find her way past his warning that she wouldn’t want to remember Angie as she was now. But as the minutes ticked down, Dana couldn’t force herself to move, and finally the van left for El Paso with its somber cargo.

Sometime later Jay opened the driver’s-side door and climbed inside, the last to leave the scene.

“How are you holding up?” he asked her, and reached over to pull off her sunglasses and brush a stray lock from her eyes.

His kindness cracked the shell of her inertia, and she sagged into his arms and exhaled. “I know you’re not glad she’s gone. I’m sorry if I lumped you in with Abe Hooks and those others. I’m sorry—you’ve been nothing but kind to me from the start.”

He stroked her back. “No apologies needed. It’s been a rough day for you—a lot of rough days strung together. If snapping at me could make it any easier, I’d volunteer for a hell of a lot more than you dished out.”

She dredged up what she hoped would pass for a smile. “I can’t stop thinking about Angie, about the way she was when she was younger. She wasn’t always…troubled. Not until the summer she turned sixteen.”

“Did something happen that year?”

“We lost Dad that June. It was awful.” Even now, so many years later, her eyes stung at the memory. “He was so young, only forty-three. A cardiologist who liked to set a good example for his patients. He didn’t smoke or drink. He ran at least five days a week, no matter what the weather. It was misting rain the day a lady cutting through our subdivision
hit him with her minivan. His head slammed down on the concrete—it was very quick.”

“I’m sorry. That must’ve been tough on you.”

She nodded. “Brutal. I was thirteen at the time, and I thought my daddy was—how’s that song go?—ten feet tall and bulletproof. And my mother—she was devastated. Dad was the only person she ever really opened up around. Afterward she withdrew from Angie and me almost completely. And that’s when Angie started getting into trouble. I think at first all she really wanted was some attention. When that didn’t work she seemed hell-bent on punishing Mom for not caring.

“I tried everything I could to save what family I had left,” Dana went on. “I told Angie she was wrong about Mom. She did care—
does
care. She just doesn’t show it the same way most mothers do. She can’t—Oh, God, I don’t know how to tell her. I should have called already, but how can…?”

His calloused hand cupped her chin, while his thumb caressed the line of her jaw. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. Let me make the phone call. That’s part of my job.”

Though she felt like a coward for grasping at his offer, she dug her phone out of her purse and gave it to him, then turned her face away to press her forehead to the window glass. “Just hold down the number one. I’ve got her programmed on the speed dial.”

Outside she watched the dimming sky and picked out the first few bright stars.
I wish I may, I wish I might, disappear for this one night,
she thought as the knowledge of her failure and its consequences pounded at her temples.

“Mrs. Huffington?” Jay asked, using that grave calm that so often presaged bad news in lawmen’s voices.

Dana closed her eyes and pinched her lower lip between her teeth.

“We’ve recovered human remains from a location in the desert,” Jay said. “We have no way of knowing how long they might have been there or whether the body has any
connection with your daughter’s disappearance. But if we want to rule that possibility out, we’ll need you to gather a few items and get them to us as soon as possible. We’re looking for dental records—even old ones—names, dates, and locations of medical procedures you’re aware of.”

Dana remembered Angie’s appendectomy in Santa Fe, the fractured wrist she’d suffered while living near Phoenix, and several rounds of residential rehab—all cut short when she’d prematurely checked herself out and taken off for parts unknown. Though her sister had refused for years to see their mother, she had never hesitated to list Isabel under the “responsible party” section of her admittance papers. In spite of her husband’s disapproval, Isabel had paid each bill without complaint…

Except, Dana realized, her mother had never gotten any statements related to Angie’s prenatal care or labor and delivery. Angie might have turned to a charity that helped unwed mothers or to the adoptive family themselves, if she’d had any involvement in choosing who would raise her child. Dana was seized with an impulse to ask Laurie Harrison about it, though she had no idea why the question felt so critically important.

“Yes,” Jay said into the phone, “Dana’s here with me. She’s a little shaken, but she’s strong. Would you like to speak to her now?”

After a slight delay to listen, he added, “I’m sure she’ll understand you need a little time first. I’ll contact you as soon as I can with details about where your courier can bring those records.”

He ended the call a moment later and laid a hand on Dana’s shoulder. “Your mother’s a strong woman, too. She’s going to get through this. She wanted to compose herself before she spoke to you.”

Dana nodded, understanding her mother’s need to regain some semblance of control. “Thank you. Thank you for being so…You handled that far better than I could have.”

“Unfortunately, I have experience.”

Despite the lump thickening her throat, she changed the subject. “So what’s next? Do you have to go to your office?”

“I do, but first we’re stopping back by my place. I’m making us some dinner, and we’re going to get you packed.”

“I told you, I’m not hungry, and what do you mean, packed?”

“You’ve been through a shock. Your body doesn’t know what it needs. You wouldn’t eat the sandwich Estelle brought earlier, and I see you’ve only had one bottle of water the whole day. You need decent food, drink, and sleep tonight—in Pecos. I’ll drive you there myself if you’re not up to it.”

“But why? Can’t I stay with you again?”

He shook his head. “As much as I’d like that, Dana, we can’t do it. I need to keep my head clear and my mind focused, without risking any bias. Even if I felt sure you would be safe in Devil’s Claw, there’s no fit place for you to lodge.”

“I don’t want to sit in some hotel room an hour away waiting for the phone to ring.”

“And I don’t want to have to worry about you every minute while I’m doing my job.”

“So take me with you.”

He shook his head, his expression regretful but unyielding. “No, Dana. This isn’t Nancy Drew. It’s an investigation into a suspicious death, one that could turn out to be a murder. Do you know what a defense attorney could do with the fact that the sheriff was sleeping with the victim’s sister while looking into this? Not to mention what the FBI would make of it.”

“The FBI? Why would they be involved?”

“I can’t give you any details, except to say they’ll be looking into this because of a related investigation.”

She stared a hole into him. “You can’t do this now, Jay. You can’t cut me off like this, treat me like I’m just anybody, as if last night we didn’t—”

“Last night meant a lot to me.” He met her gaze directly. “But I can’t let it mean more than justice for the woman we found.”

She turned away to stare back out the window, where a few more stars had joined the evening offering. She understood what he was saying, even respected his professionalism. But that didn’t stop the hurt—and the feeling of rejection—from welling up like blood out of a fresh wound.

“Fine,” she said. “Just take me back to your place to pick up my rental. Then I’ll gather up my sister’s things and—”

“Your sister’s belongings have to stay for now. I’ve already sent Wallace to secure the adobe, and I’ll be taking her journal into evidence as well.”

“I want that journal, Jay. It’s mine and my family’s. I’m the one who found it, and we both know it could end up in custody pretty much forever if I let you take it.”

“I’ll make you a copy, all right? It’s the best that I can offer.”

When he touched her shoulder she shrugged off the contact. So without another word he put the Suburban into drive.

As Dana glanced back one last time toward the lonely hillside, the bright streak of a meteor caught her attention. But almost before she recognized what she was seeing, it faded out against the blackness of the summer sky.

The Hunter should have ended it last night, while he had her all alone. Should have taken out the damned dog and overpowered her quickly, before she’d had the chance to call for help.

Instead he’d backed off, overwhelmed by the dog’s noise—the barking that would carry for miles in the silence. Worried that, with such a warning, Dana Vanover would produce a weapon; that cornered, she might try to fight him hand to hand.

If the desert had taught him anything, it was that even the most formidable predator had to choose his opportuni
ties, to minimize the risk of an injury that might slow him. And if the desert hadn’t convinced the Hunter, Angelina had certainly driven home the point by demonstrating that even the weakest prey could inflict one hell of a lot of damage when struggling for its life. He’d been afraid to take the chance that her sister might as well.

But fear was just another word for weakness, a weakness that must be faced and conquered if he meant to survive.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies…

—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
from “Ozymandias”

Tuesday, July 3, 4:37
P.M.

99 Degrees Fahrenheit

Jay glowered at his ringing office phone and swore. Within hours of the first reporter—a fox-faced, forty-something brunette out of Houston—breaking the story of Dana Vanover’s “heroic quest” to find her missing sister and save a dying child, other members of the press had clogged his phone lines in an effort to get his take on the search. And when word got out about the partially mummified female recovered from the salt cavern they’d gone absolutely ape shit, racing one another to get here first and sniff out even juicier details.

But ignoring the call was not an option, so he picked up and said, “Sheriff’s office.”

“Jay? Is that you?”

“Dana.” He wanted to say more—wanted to pull her into a hard hug and stroke her sleek blond hair while he kissed away her grief. But the chances of that were right up there with the likelihood of snow in the day’s forecast. For one thing, Dana was staying in Pecos.

It hurt to remember her driving away last night, taking little more than her purse and the photocopy of her sister’s journal. He’d kept a second copy for himself before leaving
the original in FBI hands, for whatever good they’d get out of it. He had called Dana later to make sure she’d gotten safely to the motel, but she’d seemed both guarded and distracted. Understandable, considering the circumstances.

Still, he hated the distance between them, as well as the chasm that had opened with their discovery in the cavern.

“Are you all right?” he asked her. “The reporters haven’t found you, have they?”

“It’s not that. It’s…Did you see the news this morning—that FBI press conference?”

“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Estelle dragged me over to her office. She keeps a TV over there to catch her soaps.”

It pissed him off that the damned feds couldn’t have given him a heads-up, though he had spoken personally with the pair of special agents who’d arrived just after dawn to stake their claim on his investigation. Tomlin had been a little on the officious side, but he and Petit had been polite enough—clearly well trained to minimize friction with the locals. Yet neither one had warned him that their boss, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Albuquerque field office, was about to publicly announce the arrest of two individuals involved in a scheme that bilked investors out of millions.

“Haz-Vestment was the outfit that got Angie so upset, right?” Dana asked. “The same people she was threatening to shut down.”

“I see where you’re heading with this”—as would any reporter worth his daily java—“and believe me, it’s an angle that’ll be fully investi—”

But Dana went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “What if those people killed her? That Roman Goldsmith and his wife? They still haven’t been caught, have they?”

“The FBI’s made finding them a top priority.” Not that they’d seen fit to confide in him, but along with the rest of the country, Jay had heard the announcement that Roman Goldsmith and his wife, whose most recently reported alias was Miriam Piper-Gold, remained at large. A substantial re
ward was offered for information leading to their arrest, and a poolside photo was flashed on screen of a leather-skinned, tanned fifty-something male wearing a man-thong below a slight paunch and a set of polar-white capped choppers. At his side was a much younger redhead looking hotter than the record high in a lime-green string bikini. Reporters had already caught onto the fact that Piper-Gold’s last known appearance was in Rimrock County, where a hazardous-waste-storage scheme was under way, and they were breaking their necks in the race to put together the connection to the body presumed to be that of the missing heiress.

“Listen, Dana,” he warned, “maybe you should think about going back to Houston. It’s only a matter of time before the media figures out your sister was the only real opposition to the salt-dome project—and then you’ll get no peace.” Already three network news vans had collected outside of the courthouse, and he’d had to tape a sign reading, absolutely no press—this means you! beneath the word sheriff on the smoked glass of his door, or he’d spend the whole of his day telling the idiots, “No comment.” He hoped to God the round of thunderstorms the weather people were predicting washed the streets clean of the pests and all their interruptions.

“You want me to go?” she asked, though they both knew she was gone already. The brief respite they’d shared was finished, never to be repeated.

“Hell, no,” he said honestly, for there was nothing he’d rather have than the privilege of one more chance, one more night to get to know her better. “But the last thing you need is to be stranded an hour away in Pecos, bein’ pecked to death by vultures.”

“I can handle a few reporters,” she said. “What I can’t handle is the idea of my sister’s killer or killers running around loose while she’s—”

“The FBI’s on this case.
I’m
on this case, and Wallace,
too. With that reward and the nationwide publicity, we’re going to find them, Dana. It’s okay for you to trust us.”

She was silent for so long that he wondered if something had gone wrong with the connection. “Are you still there? Dana?”

From across the miles he heard tapping.

“Sorry,” she said. “There’s someone at the door. Probably the maid. I forgot to put out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.”

“Check the peephole,” he warned, unable to get the attempts on her life out of his mind. Though the incidents had occurred here in Rimrock County, Pecos was only an hour away. “You’ve got the chain on, don’t you?”

There was another pause, followed by the muffled sound of voices, as if she’d covered up the phone with her hand. Anxiety bored holes in him. “Dana.
Dana?
”

“Just housekeeping,” she reported. “I sent her away. Listen, Sheriff, just because we’ve been…been together, I’m not your responsibility. But Angie is, and she’s still mine, too. And that’s an obligation I mean to see through.”

A few minutes later he was still pondering their conversation—and stewing over the fact that she had called him
Sheriff
instead of using his name—when a sharp rap at the door made him jump. Probably some jackass reporter who hadn’t bothered to read his sign. Though he hadn’t peered out through his window lately, he suspected they were coming close to outnumbering the residents of Devil’s Claw.

He dreaded the moment when one showed up to confront him with his own recent history. More than likely,
he’d
be history once that happened and the leeches slimed him in the cesspool of insinuation. Rimrock County voters might be a fiercely independent lot, but they’d be looking for someone to hang for this debacle. Why not a long-absent prodigal who’d hidden psychiatric trouble in his past?

But when the door flew open it was Estelle Hooks, her
face flushed rosy pink and an iron-gray escapee from her upswept hair bouncing girlishly about her shoulder. “You have to see this. Hurry, Sheriff. My boy’s on the television.”

Jay’s stomach plunged into his boot heels. Of all the harebrained…What the hell was Wallace doing yapping to reporters?

He followed Estelle back into her office, where the set usually devoted to
Days of Our Lives
instead showed Wallace Hooks on CNN. He looked happier than Jay had ever seen him, with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt and his broad-brimmed hat cocked rodeo-stud style. Clearly the deputy was making the most of his moment in the spotlight. But before Jay could catch much more than the word
body,
Estelle drowned out his voice.

“Doesn’t he look
tall
on TV?” she asked as she pressed her hands together. “Why, Wallace looks as tall as anybody.”

Instead of risking life and limb to shush her, Jay simply turned up the set’s volume. If he was going to put Mr. media’s ass in a sling, he needed proper ammunition.

“It was like half a mummy, dry and shriveled, with salt crystals sticking to the skin,” said Wallace, above a graphic that incorrectly identified him as the Rimrock County sheriff. “Long blond hair too, though it was comin’ out in big clumps.”

“Jesus,” Jay fumed. What if Dana was watching the live broadcast? What if her mother or the adoptive parents of Angie’s daughter saw it? When he had called her, Isabel Huffington had immediately seized on the sliver of hope that the remains belonged to some stranger. But if she heard Wallace’s description…

As the reporter, a serious young man wearing an early Dan Rather-style safari shirt with a panama fedora, began wrapping up the segment, Wallace—his face lighting—burst out, “It was kinda like that lady she was carrying on about at the town meeting. That Salt Maiden we was supposedly raping with our project.”

The reporter looked momentarily annoyed at the unexpected interruption, but, recovering quickly, he asked, “What do you mean, the Salt Maiden?”

The Salt
Woman,
you moron
, Jay thought. Bad enough Wallace had to spill his guts; he could at least be accurate. And grammatically correct, while he was at it.

Wallace nodded vigorously. “Some Indian thing, I guess. Maybe some kind of a spirit. Ms. Vanover started yelling during the Haz-Vestment meeting that using the salt domes to store hazardous wastes was
defiling
the Salt Maiden. And now she ends up getting turned t’one herself.”

“And he’s so well-spoken, too,” Estelle gushed as the reporter regained enough control to wrap up the segment. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if those casting people from
Law & Order
call the woman who used to be his agent.”

Too bad he couldn’t act, because once Jay got finished with him, Wallace was going to
need
a new job—perhaps something set up through the Witness Protection Program, to keep his former boss from hunting him down to wring his neck. “Wallace has no business insinuating that we have an ID on that body. Until the ME makes the call, we can’t—”

“She’s a Jew, that agent,” Estelle went on, “but perfectly nice. I talked to her once when she called for Wallace not long after he left New York City. She wanted him to read for a part on one of the soap operas. She was so disappointed I didn’t have a number for poor Wallace at the time. He was chasing around the country somewhere—looking for community theater work, I think. If he’d come straight home like he should have—or at least told me how to reach him—that could have been his big break, don’t you think?”

“I’ll give him a big break,” Jay growled, though his gaze was glued to the screen again, which had erupted with a news flash.

In the heart of Baghdad another suicide bomber had blown up twenty in a marketplace. Jay leaned in close to scan the littered street and the grieving faces of Iraqis. At the
sound of gunfire somewhere offscreen he saw a soldier spin, his blue eyes ablaze with terror. The soldier looked exactly like PFC Mike Daugherty, who had been killed on his watch. And the smell…the smoke and burning flesh were—

“Sheriff…Sheriff—
Jay.
” The alarm in Estelle’s voice finally reached him where he crouched behind her metal desk. When he blinked in her direction she shook her head at him. “My goodness. Maybe you should go home and lie down with a cool washcloth for a while.”

What he really wanted was to crawl into a hole and die. “I’m sorry,” he said, rising. He wanted to say more, to explain away his actions somehow, but anything he could think of would sound ridiculous, even worse than cowering and shaking like a frightened child.

The sympathy in Estelle’s eyes somehow made it harder. “War’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? My father was in Normandy during the Second World War. Mercy, how that man suffered with his nightmares—disrupted the whole house with his shouting. He wanted to move us to a bigger city, somewhere there’d be more opportunity for my brothers and me. But any little thing could set him off—a car backfiring or a big crowd—”

“I can’t talk about this,” Jay said miserably, avoiding her gaze. “It’s just…it’s hard to watch the news, that’s all.”

As traumatic as he found the war coverage, the rest was equally disturbing. On nearly every channel, nearly all the time, Americans went in for entertainment as usual: chittering along with laugh tracks from old sitcoms, hawking gaudy jewelry, stalking vacuous celebrities like rare game, and advertising fat-soaked fast foods while, half a world away, children starved and bled as bombs blew apart their schools and parents. He’d put a foot through his TV set the week after he had come home, and he hadn’t yet bothered to replace it.

But he had dared to hope that he could, had dared to believe that he was getting better.

Estelle shook her head and told him, “I understand, dear. He couldn’t talk about it, either. But don’t worry. I won’t tell a soul about this.”

Since secrets were the highest form of currency in this town, he wasn’t sure how long her promise would hold. Yet Jay thanked her nonetheless before excusing himself to find her camera-hungry son—who was about to have another sort of worry altogether.

An El Paso meteorologist led the evening newscast with a warning that the moisture streaming across Mexico, where a Pacific tropical storm had landed, could spark not only thunderstorms but possible flash flooding. According to “Doppler Dave,” over three inches of rain were possible in some locations, and clips were played of last summer’s devastating mudslides.

Accustomed to coastal Houston’s legendary “toad stranglers,” Dana decided it was another example of TV hype gone wild. As was the story that followed on the latest developments in tiny Devil’s Claw.

“If I ever get my hands on you, Regina Lawler,” said Dana as she paced the narrow confines of her hotel room, “I’m going to suture your mouth shut.”

Oblivious to the threat, the reporter whose narrow face filled the TV screen went on speaking to the camera.

“I’ve been a close friend of Mrs. Smith-Vanover huffington for years.” Regina had plastered on her stoic look, with crocodile tears gleaming in her brown eyes. “It breaks my heart to see her family coping with this tragedy.”