Borderline (33 page)

Stunned by these conclusions, Anna ate mechanically while the conversation clattered around her. Helena’s mother, nine months pregnant, had a bikini wax. That bit of information should have screamed louder than it had. To have that bit of vanity attended to in the late stages of pregnancy didn’t suggest poor Mexican girls keeping up with the latest trends. It spoke of pampering and spas and a social stratum where services could be bought at exorbitant prices. According to Chrissie, and she had been confident of her observations, the dress was a cheap rayon number from Wal-Mart.

The woman had been taken, forced to change into cheap clothes, transported to the mouth of the canyon and dumped in the river, possibly after knocking her unconscious for good measure. The water provided a cause of death—drowning—wreaked havoc on trace evidence and, if the perpetrator was lucky, obscured identification of the body. Heavy rains and the river rising had been icing on the cake, stealing the body away before it could be autopsied.

“Homicide,” Gerry said, and though Anna suspected she was not a ghoul at heart, she heard the glee in the reporter’s voice. This was a story worth hanging around for.

“Looks like it,” Anna said.

Gerry started scribbling on her yellow legal pad. Anna paid no attention; she was interested in Darden, sitting across from the reporter. He’d been the one to call this meeting of sorts, and now it was clear he wanted to get away as soon as he could. His physical self was shrinking away from the mayor as if his body was not waiting for his mouth to make the excuses before it removed itself from the premises.

Judith must have sensed the incipient exodus as well. She laid her fine-boned hand on his beefy arm to pin him down. Darden flinched and Anna wondered what sort of relationship the two had. It was more than professional, that much was clear, but the mayor didn’t touch him like a woman touched a lover.

“This homicide sounds convenient,” Judith said. “The ranger you are staying with, Frederick Martinez, is speaking to the convention today on the evils of the border closing after nine-eleven and continuing to keep it closed today. Handy that such a tragedy happens at the moment he needs to highlight his argument with an emotional appeal none of us can help but identify with.”

“Freddy can’t speak at the convention—” Anna began but stopped mid-sentence. That was what Lisa’s cryptic statements about unemployment referred to. Freddy was a government employee. As an employee, and therefore a representative of the government, he was not free to express his political beliefs. The Park Service cut rangers a lot of slack on this issue, but to fly in the face of the rule in one’s own park on topics under debate by local politicians that affected that park would probably get Freddy fired. He could lose his retirement. Anna marveled at the good face his wife had been able to put on what had to be a family disaster.

“Originally he turned the invitation down,” Judith said. “I had my secretary keeping tabs on who was to be here and what their arguments were likely to be. It was my guess that he had turned the invitation down because his arguments for opening the border were threadbare. His premise about the death of the little border towns and the vacuum it left to be filled by crooks and drug dealers was old news from before the Mexican drug wars broke out.”

Gerry looked up from her pad of paper. “Are you saying this park ranger murdered a pregnant woman and tried to kill her fetus to get the border reopened? Is this guy a fanatic or a lunatic or a psycho or what?”

“All I am saying,” the mayor stated quietly, “is that it looks as if Ranger Martinez has decided he now has an argument worth making.”

Darden eased his arm out from under Judith’s and glanced at his watch. “If you ladies will excuse me,” he said as he pushed back his chair. “I’ve got to meet Gordon and Kevin in a few minutes. Don’t worry about the check.” He winked at Gerry then smiled to include Anna in the gesture. “I’ll have it put on the mayor’s tab.”

“Darden—” The mayor said his name with a desperation that startled Anna. The fragility that had vanished while she listened to the story of the river incident and discussed Freddy’s nifty new argument was back. For the briefest of moments she sounded like a little girl afraid of being left alone in the dark.

“You’ll be listening to this Martinez?” Darden asked her.

“I guess.” The childlike quality was fading but not yet gone.

“I’ll see you there,” Darden said with a depth of reassurance that only served to confuse Anna further. Maybe they were family, niece and uncle or cousins. They looked nothing alike and the vibe between them wasn’t that of father and daughter, not quite.

In the few seconds the exchange required Judith Pierson’s expression had hardened, matured. “When you see Kevin, tell him I need to see him, will you?”

Darden didn’t answer right away and Gerry’s eyes took on a predatory gleam. Maybe this was the scandal she’d sensed brewing. “What about the Martinez thing?” Darden avoided the request.

“Tell Kevin to come and get me out,” the mayor said, and smiled. She may have thought the smile was seductive or suggestive. To Anna it was snaky, no lips and all fangs.

“Ladies,” Darden said by way of excusing himself, and walked away.

“I’m disappointed you didn’t bring the baby,” Judith said to Anna. “I only got a glimpse of her last night but I would love to see her again. Is she staying with you at the Martinezes’ place? Where is that, Terlingua?”

There was no need for the mayor of Houston to ingratiate herself with an out-of-favor ranger from a park not even in her state, so Anna figured the interest was genuine and answered.

“For now,” she said. “At some point the child-care people will take over.”

“And you don’t want that,” the mayor said. The woman had more insight than Anna had been prepared to grant her. That or Anna was more transparent than she liked to think she was.

Anna didn’t say anything. She stirred her coffee so she’d seem to be doing something and stared out the window. Judith could help Helena; Anna wasn’t fool enough to think she couldn’t. Had Judith Pierson not been the mayor of a huge and rich city she would have been able to help Helena. Judith was a woman who knew her way around the system, Anna guessed. The woman sounded sympathetic and Anna’s first impression of her as a person who might kill and eat the children was undoubtedly off base. Still, she didn’t want Judith’s help with placing Helena and she didn’t know why. Gerry’s help she’d solicited, bartered for, and Gerry, well connected as she might be, probably didn’t have the clout Judith had to cut through red tape.

“That’s an area I’m familiar with,” Judith said gently. “Just let me know if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Anna said. “I will—and I will need something.” She pushed as much gratitude into her tone as she could. Because she had taken against the mayor was not reason enough to turn away anybody who might be in a position to make Helena’s life better.

“I do believe it’s time,” Judith said, and Anna was glad of a change of subject. “Are either of you going to come see what Ranger Martinez will make of this unfortunate circumstance?”

Anna thought three murders rated more than “unfortunate circumstance,” but being a woman who could enjoy understatement in better circumstances she mustered a smile. “I think I’ll pass,” she said. “I expect I’ve heard most of it before.”

Judith left Anna and Gerry sitting at the table nursing their third cups of coffee. Anna had the day to kill before she met Cyril, Steve and Chrissie for dinner at a place in Terlingua they had raved about. The Starlight Theatre on the Terlingua Porch; at least it should be colorful.

After a moment she poked the disreputable leather satchel at Gerry’s feet with her toe. “What else have you got in there?”

“The rest of my life,” Gerry answered. “What do you need?”

“Do you have a laptop and satellite hookup?”

“Does the Pope like long dresses? Of course I do.”

She lifted the shapeless sack and plopped it on the table between the salt and pepper shakers and the crumby toast plates. Having cleared a place in front of her, she set up her laptop and phone. “What are we looking for?”

“Bernard, or maybe it was Jessie, said this had happened before. That a woman trying to cross the Rio Grande to get medical treatment had been carried downriver and drowned. Can you find something on that, if it happened?”

“Nothing easier,” Gerry said. From one of the satchel’s many zipped pockets she took a pair of reading glasses, the frames a tiger print with sparkles at the temples, and put them on the end of her nose. “Okay.”

While Gerry searched new databases for stories that related to what they were after, Anna watched three vultures drying their wings on the top of a mountain, a small mountain from where she sat but big enough if it were to be measured from the ground up. Black and wide-winged, the center bird on a high finger of rock, the two flanking on slightly lower crags, they put Anna in mind of the thieves on either side of Jesus at Golgotha. That put her in mind of Helena’s mother crucified on deadwood and garbage. Had she been sacrificed on the altar of Freddy Martinez’s belief that the greater good would be opening the border between Big Bend and Mexico, that the new and better life breathed into Boquillas and San Vicente and Santa Helena—villages where the economy had been all but shut down with a single stroke of a pen—would balance out the evil of two murders?

Anna couldn’t imagine Freddy in that story. A man with a wife and children, a man with a family he appeared to love, might kill other men or even women, but a pregnant woman? Anna doubted it. Unless she was more to him than a symbol, unless she posed a threat to the life he had or wanted, then this hypothetical dad could do it. Kill for personal reasons and pose the body for political reasons. Was this woman blackmailing Freddy, threatening to tear his family apart, take from him all he had? Was she carrying his child?

That wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility but, even with the proposed obliteration of his world, Anna couldn’t see Freddy killing the fetus. Racism was a wretched thing, the putting on of individual traits to an entire race of human beings, but in Anna’s experience, Mexican men loved kids, venerated mothers-to-be. Not that one didn’t get knocked off now and then for the usual reasons, but she felt it would be a harder murder for them than for people raised in certain other cultures.

Had another person killed the woman and Freddy helped dispose of the body in such a way it would look like an accidental death? That didn’t work, not unless Freddy and the supposed murderer were such dimwits they hadn’t known the woman was alive when they put her in the water. Particularly since it would seem one of the major motivations for putting her into the river while she was still alive was so the corpse, when it was found, would attest to death by drowning.

Regardless of Anna’s continuing belief in Freddy’s intrinsic humanity, she wasn’t as comfortable leaving Helena in the care of his wife as she had been when she left that morning. That was another point in Freddy’s favor: if he’d wanted the baby dead, why had he asked his wife to feed it? To get his hands on it before child services whisked it away? To kill Helena before a DNA test could prove she was his daughter?

That was a little draconian, Anna thought. With the mother dead, who would be demanding the DNA test? And, in this day and age, outside of his own family, it wouldn’t have much in the way of repercussions if it was Freddy’s child. Lisa might forgive Freddy an affair, but she would never forgive him for murdering a baby to hide it from her. At least Anna didn’t think she would.

Two anti-Freddy facts were inescapable: Freddy knew something about the drowned woman and Freddy was sitting pat in the shooter’s seat when Anna and Paul had climbed out of the canyon.

“Well, that didn’t take long,” Gerry said.

“What’ve you got?” Anna hitched her chair around to the end of the table so she and the reporter could both see the computer screen.

“An article written eight months after nine-eleven, about the time when the border was closed between the park and the villages.”

They read together and silently. The article was short. Two days after the border was closed a young mother, the wife of one of Big Bend’s Mexican firefighters, the Diablos, had been stopped by Border Patrol while trying to cross the river with her mother and mother-in-law. In the confusion of the border patrolman trying to turn the women back and the anxious women, one of whom was in labor, trying to explain their predicament, the pregnant woman had fallen. The river wasn’t at flood level, but it was high enough she couldn’t regain her footing and drowned.

The surviving women, mother and mother-in-law, had never been told the border had been closed.

After three days of searching, a young river ranger named Freddy Martinez found her body in a strainer. The body was recovered and taken out by way of Rio Grande Village. The ranger who had found the dead woman attacked a border guard and had to be pulled off by his fellow rangers. The Park Service attributed the uncharacteristic behavior to fatigue and stress. Martinez had refused to be taken off the search. Another ranger told the reporter that Martinez had been without sleep for close to seventy-two hours.

The border guard did not press charges.

“Poor Ranger Martinez,” Gerry said. “The worst kind of déjà vu all over again.”

“That or revenge,” Anna said. “Re-create the crime but this time the victim is ‘one of theirs’?”

“I thought the woman you found was Mexican?”

“Hispanic,” Anna said, and: “Maybe. Her baby has hazel eyes.”

Gerry suffered a moment’s confusion, her sharp eyes clouding till Biology 101 came to her rescue. “Right,” she said. “Dominant gene.”

“Nobody in America is all of one thing or all of another anymore,” Anna said. “But it’s interesting.”

“It is interesting,” Gerry said. Her eyes were again going out of focus.