Borderline (34 page)

Not confusion, Anna guessed. “What are you thinking?” she demanded.

“Nothing.”

“No woman is ever thinking nothing,” Anna said.

“It has nothing to do with Freddy.”

Anna tried to stare her down but it was clear this was the sort of secret Gerry had decades of practice keeping from more persistent and alarming inquisitors than Anna.

Giving up with good grace, Anna leaned back in her chair. The coffee cup tempted her for a moment but one could only drink so much of the stuff before it warped the taste buds. “The article says Freddy stayed up seventy-two hours, then attacked a border guard,” Anna said. “You don’t hear a lot of reports of ranger brutality. We are a peaceful people for the most part, trained to use our radios rather than our guns, teach bad people to be good conservators of the wilderness and campers to work and play well together. Yet this river ranger with a nice wife and a kid at home drives himself to the edge of his endurance on a body recovery, then punches out the first border patrol agent he sees.”

Gerry raised her eyes from the computer screen where she’d already clicked onto another train of thought.

“Freddy knew the woman killed in 2002,” Anna said. “Don’t you figure? Why else all the dramatics?”

Gerry glanced back at the laptop. Anna didn’t know if it was merely a habit that gave her time to think or if she’d continued the research while Anna deliberated the old-fashioned way.

“The article didn’t say he did,” Gerry replied.

“Freddy hasn’t said he did either. He hasn’t mentioned the case at all. The two mirroring each other so closely, wouldn’t you think he’d have brought it up, told the story of when he stayed up for three days running? Most people would have.”

Anna stopped talking and let her gaze wander back out the window. The mountains were compelling, ever-changing as the angle of light changed. For a while now she’d not felt like herself, or like the self she remembered. The pit was new, the fear of spiraling down until she was everybody’s albatross and nobody’s friend. Or wife.

But the pit wasn’t the whole of the difference in her internal landscape. Mindscape. Fog was a part of it. She’d always been good at multitasking. For the past week even mono-tasking had been an effort. Part of it was this was not her park, not her crime to solve, not her evil to root out. Most of her consciousness wanted to pull away, go to the movies—if there were any movies within a day’s drive of Big Bend—sit in the desert sun and watch lizards. She would have, too, she told herself, if there was anybody trustworthy to look after Helena, if Cyril’s cow was found safe and growing fat on beaver tail cactus, if Freddy would shut up and keep his job.

“Would you?” Gerry’s voice brought her back into the dining room.

“Maybe,” Anna said. “I’m getting tired of fighting the good fight. If it is a good fight. No. I wouldn’t,” she said with sudden determination. “Good or bad, this isn’t my fight.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth she realized Gerry had not been listening in on her thoughts and then questioning her about them. She was referring to whether Anna would speak of the old case when it was reenacted years later.

“Yes,” Anna said. “Sorry. My mind has been wandering of late.”

“Ahh,” Gerry said knowingly. “The Change.” She said the phrase the way Rod Serling used to say “The Twilight Zone.”

“Jeez,” Anna said. That was all she needed at the moment. “I’m not even fifty.”

Gerry looked at her over the top of her leopard-print half-glasses, one eyebrow lifted high. “But I expect you have always been precocious, haven’t you?”

T
he itching under Darden’s armor was getting worse. If he could have peeled off the skin of humanity and left it lying in the dirt, he would have. Over breakfast, the way Judith was, the women discussing the corpse in the strainer, the baby, all of it grated against the speculations he’d been avoiding. Judith was different. She’d changed, and recently. Since they’d come to this godforsaken waste-land of gray rubble the state was so proud of. Even as a girl she’d been a creature of extremes, and she had grown into a woman who seemed capable of molding those extremes into visions, of holding opposites within her whose opposing natures would have destroyed a lesser woman: fragile and unbreakable, wise as a crone and innocent as an eight-year-old child, mean as a snake and capable of great kindness.

Stomping down the uneven natural stone steps that led from the lodge to the parking lot below, Darden startled a herd of deer no bigger than Great Danes and they scattered onto the pavement, their tiny hooves making a faint clipping sound.

Darden never saw them. He was looking for the city SUV his security men were driving. Where in the hell were Kevin and Gordon? Automatically he reached for his cell then stopped, snorting his displeasure like an old and angry bull. Why did anybody live in these primitive places? Cell phones were useless. Nothing to look at but snakes and spiny plants that would kill a man as soon as feed him.

And Judith hissing that Charles would never have kids, that he would never marry his girlfriend. Not saying it the way any woman would but spitting it like a curse or a promise. A line had been crossed and he hadn’t been paying attention at the time. Probably lost in one of his furry old-man dreams. Damn it!

His little mayor had that look that said she’d crossed a personal Rubicon and there was no going back for her. Darden had seen the change before a couple of times. Once when an agent he was working with had made the decision to kill his wife and himself because she was running around. They’d been on assignment together, Darden remembered. Out of the country for two weeks while the president made the rounds of the Middle East, for all the good it did. Terry, the guy’s name had been Terry, Terrance Clark or Parks, a short name full of barking. They’d been standing around doing what they were paid to do, looking for trouble, and Terry had been out of it, not paying attention, caught up in whatever he was playing in his head. Then his face firmed, a sucking in like skin being shrink-wrapped to bone but subtle, a thousand tiny muscles and sinews tightening up a fraction. Terry had changed himself with the decision, Darden was sure of it. From that minute on he’d been a little different. He said things that didn’t make sense until after he committed the murder-suicide, cryptic comments about his wife doing or not doing a thing again, about what he would or wouldn’t need in a couple weeks. Little things that nobody commented on. They were just weird. Off.

Judith was weird and off. The fixation on the baby. She’d been upset when he’d told her on the way to breakfast that Anna didn’t have the kid with her.

Her and Charles and kids and divorce, that had to be it. The worm turns and Judith falls apart. Darden had never asked her but he knew she never thought Charles would leave her. Never. She was aware on whatever level she allowed herself to be that he had had a couple of affairs. She didn’t like it but they hadn’t seemed to worry her, not in the sense that she felt she was losing her husband to another woman. For a man like Darden it was hard to see how a woman, especially a woman like Judith, who could have pretty much any man she wanted, could love a man at the same time she believed him to be such an utter coward that he’d never get up the gumption to walk out of a marriage he hated.

Well, now he had. Was that enough to bring the whole house of cards she’d so painstakingly erected down around her ears?

He caught himself fumbling for his cell again. He wanted to make a Goddamn phone call. Was that too much to ask?

Wanting to give Judith time to get herself together, they’d walked down from the cabins to the dining hall, not more than a few hundred yards, but Darden wished they’d driven. Too ornery and set in his ways to listen to the voice of reason, he’d brought his usual shoes, black leather lace-ups with leather soles. He hadn’t been standing long enough for his feet to hurt, but the leather clapped against the asphalt with each step. The racket jarred him. A fat squirrel, dun-colored with a white stomach that hadn’t gotten so round gathering nuts, sat on a flat-topped rock at the side of the lane. It sat up and pressed a paw to its white chest and chittered at him as he neared it.

“What are you looking at?” he snarled. The creature dropped to all fours, twitched its tail, and vanished off the far side of the stone. No phone, no television and glamour rats mocking the paying guests, Darden thought.

The itching was killing him. Where the hell was Gordon?

A car was coming up behind him too fast. Needing to have a place to put his anger, Darden swung around to glare at the driver.

“About damn time,” Darden muttered, and pointedly looked at his watch. They weren’t late; in fact they’d turned the job around in record time. Darden wasn’t appeased. He would have liked to have an excuse to ream somebody out.

Gordon let down the window.

“Hey, boss.”

“Meet me at my cabin,” Darden snapped, leaving his subordinate wondering what he’d done to deserve it.

It crossed his mind to ask for a ride the rest of the way, or pull Gordon out through the side window, Eastwood style, and drive the last forty yards himself, but he did neither. The first was embarrassing, the second was no longer possible, maybe never had been possible, only a trick for stuntmen and actors.

Standing close to attention, Gordon and Kevin were waiting outside his room. Thin cool air and a hot desert sun at high altitude left Darden feeling overheated and chilled. He was also out of breath but he would die before he’d puff and pant in front of these two.

“Kevin, the mayor wants to see you,” Darden said.

“Where is she?” Kevin asked.

“How the hell do I know? Find her. There’s only about three places she can be in this hellhole.” Darden was being unfair but that was the breaks. He didn’t want to see Kevin’s face for a while. Didn’t want to hear his voice or smell his aftershave.

“Come on in,” he said more kindly to Gordon. Now that relief was in sight he could afford to slow down and be civil. Sitting in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs, he gestured Gordon to take the other. When the man was settled, Darden said: “Tell me what you found.”

“Lajitas Resort is quite a setup. I sure wouldn’t mind being shunted off to cool my heels there for a week. All the bells and whistles. It must be setting the mayor back four hundred a night easy. That’s if our friend leaves the minibar alone.”

Darden knew it was a luxury resort. That’s why he’d picked it. That and it was close. He would have preferred to set the woman up in a five-star hotel in Tai Pei or Queensland but she wouldn’t budge farther than Lajitas.

Gordon seemed to be enjoying sitting inside with the boss but Darden didn’t have the patience to let him come to the news in his own time. As he was about to ask, he realized he was scared; he was afraid the answer would not be the one he wanted.

Ashamed of the weakness, Darden spat it out: “And Miss Emerson, is she doing okay there?”

“I guess,” Gordon said. “She hasn’t checked out or anything. I went up and knocked on the door to her room but she was out by one of the pools. Kevin was walking the grounds and saw her. He said she acted happy enough, like she was going to stay put for a couple more days. He said she got snippy when he asked if she’d gotten in touch with Charles but other than that she seemed to be going along with the game plan.”

Relief hit Darden like two scotches on an empty stomach, he was so giddy with it. Miss Emerson was alive and well and had apparently kept her promise and not called Charles or accepted any calls from him. Otherwise the fool wouldn’t be walking around punching numbers on his phone and scowling.

“Great,” Darden said, and laughed. “Good work. That’s just great.”

“Thanks,” Gordon said. Puzzlement shivered down one side of his face but he wasn’t stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. If the boss wanted to commend him for driving to a fancy resort to see a woman and back again, he would take it and be glad.

That made Darden laugh as well. Giddy.

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off, Gordon? The mayor is . . . occupied. I doubt she’ll need you this afternoon.” The specter of Judith parading Kevin in front of Charles in an attempt at revenge or to spark jealousy flitted darkly through his mind. Behavior like that anywhere was a huge no-no for female politicians. Doing it anywhere within a ten-mile radius of Gerry Schneider was political suicide.

“If you see Kevin, tell him to take the day off, too, go hiking.” Hiking very far away, Darden thought.

“Will do, boss. Thanks.”

Gordon rose gracefully from the hard niggardly chair. He’d shown no emotion at the mention of Judith being occupied, though Darden had put it in such a way that he could have read a lot into it, and he hadn’t smirked when Darden had suggested he tell Kevin to go take a hike, literally as well as figuratively. Maybe things hadn’t gone as far as he’d thought. If Judith was having a fling with her security guard, the other guard was seemingly unaware of it. There was hope for discretion and therefore avoidance of detection.

If they stayed clear of Gerry.

A
nna and Gerry spent a fruitless hour or two trying to track down Martinez’s connection—and Anna was positive there was one—with Gabriela, the woman who drowned trying to cross the border eight months after 9/11.

They learned a lot about Freddy Martinez. His continuing agitation to reopen the border between the park and Mexico had landed him in the news several times, cost him promotions and nearly gotten him fired more than once. His mother and father were Mexican, from the village of Boquillas, just over the river from Rio Grande Village in Big Bend. Freddy’s mother made the crossing when she was eight months pregnant and stayed with relatives in Alpine, a college town in the mountains that formed the spine of west Texas, so her son would be born on American soil.