Dark Rivers of the Heart (36 page)

Frequently Miro asked her to replay a passage of the Grant-Davidowitz recording, as though it contained a clue that required pondering, but she knew that he had become preoccupied with her and had missed something.

For both Eve and Miro, Bobby Dubois pretty much ceased to exist. In spite of his height and physical awkwardness, in spite of his colorful and ceaseless chatter, Dubois was of no more interest to either of them than were the bunker’s plain concrete walls.

When everything on the recording had been played and replayed, Miro went through some shuffle and jive to the effect that he was unable to do anything about Grant for the time being, except wait: wait for him to surface; wait for the skies to clear so a satellite search could begin; wait for search teams already in the field to turn up something; wait for agents investigating other aspects of the case, in other cities, to get back to him. Then he asked Eve if she was free for dinner.

She accepted the invitation with an uncharacteristic lack of coyness. She had a growing sense that what she responded to in the man was some secret power that he possessed, a strength that was mostly hidden and that could be glimpsed only in the self-confidence of his easy smile and in those blue-blue eyes that never revealed anything but amusement, as if this man expected always to have the last laugh.

Although Miro had been assigned a car from the agency pool while he was in Vegas, he rode in her own Honda to a favorite restaurant of hers on Flamingo Road. Reflections of a sea of neon rolled in tidal patterns across low clouds, and the night seemed filled with magic.

She expected to get to know him better over dinner and a couple of glasses of wine—and to understand, by dessert, why he fascinated her. However, his skills as a conversationalist were equivalent to his looks: pleasant enough, but far from beguiling. Nothing that Miro said, nothing that he did, no gesture, no look brought Eve any closer to understanding the curious attraction that he held for her.

By the time they left the restaurant and crossed the parking lot toward her car, she was frustrated and confused. She didn’t know whether she should invite him back to her place or not. She didn’t want sex with him. It wasn’t that kind of attraction, exactly. Of course, some men revealed their truest selves when they had sex: by what they liked to do, by how they did it, by what they said and how they acted both during and after. But she didn’t want to take him home, do it with him, get all sweaty, go the whole disgusting route, and
still
not understand what it was about him that so intrigued her.

She was in a dilemma.

Then, as they drew near to her car, with the cold wind soughing in a nearby row of palm trees and the air scented with the aroma of charcoal-broiled steaks from the restaurant, Roy Miro did the most unexpected and outrageous thing that Eve had ever seen in thirty-three years of outrageous experience.

An immeasurable time after getting down from the Explorer and into the Range Rover—which could have been an hour or two minutes or thirty days and thirty nights, for all he knew—Spencer woke and saw a herd of tumbleweed pacing them. The shadows of mesquite and paddle-leaf cactus leaped through the headlights.

He rolled his head to the left, against the back of the seat, and saw Valerie behind the wheel. “Hi.”

“Hi, there.”

“How’d you get here?”

“That’s too complicated for you right now.”

“I’m a complicated guy.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Where we going?”

“Away.”

“Good.”

“How’re you feeling?”

“Woozy.”

“Don’t pee on the seat,” she said with obvious amusement.

He said, “I’ll try not to.”

“Good.”

“Where’s my dog?”

“Who do you think’s licking your ear?”

“Oh.”

“He’s right there behind you.”

“Hi, pal.”

“What’s his name,” she asked.

“Rocky.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“About what?”

“The name. Doesn’t fit.”

“I named him that so he’d have more confidence.”

“Isn’t working,” she said.

Strange rock formations loomed, like temples to gods forgotten before human beings had been capable of conceiving the idea of time and counting the passage of days. They awed him, and she drove among them with great expertise, whipping left and right, down a long hill, onto a vast, dark flatness.

“Never knew his real name,” Spencer said.

“Real name?”

“Puppy name. Before the pound.”

“Wasn’t Rocky.”

“Probably not.”

“What was it before Spencer?”

“He was never named Spencer.”

“So you’re clearheaded enough to be evasive.”

“Not really. Just habit. What’s your name?”

“Valerie Keene.”

“Liar.”

He went away for a while. When he came around again, there was still desert: sand and stone, scrub and tumbleweed, darkness pierced by headlights.

“Valerie,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“What’s your real name?”

“Bess.”

“Bess what?”

“Bess Baer.”

“Spell it.”

“B-A-E-R.”

“Really?”

“Really. For now.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

“It means that’s your name now, after Valerie.”

“So?”

“What was your name before Valerie?”

“Hannah Rainey.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, realizing that he was firing on only four of six cylinders. “Before that?”

“Gina Delucio.”

“Was that real?”

“It felt real.”

“Is that the name you were born with?”

“You mean my puppy name?”

“Yeah. That your puppy name?”

“Nobody’s called me by my puppy name since before I was in the pound,” she said.

“You’re very funny.”

“You like funny women?”

“I must.”

“‘And then the funny woman,’” she said, as if reading from a printed page, “‘and the cowardly dog and the mysterious man rode off into the desert in search of their real names.’”

“In search of a place to puke.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.”

She applied the brakes, and he flung open the door.

Later, when he woke, still riding through the dark desert, he said, “I have the most god-awful taste in my mouth.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bess.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Baer. Bess Baer. What’s your name?”

“My faithful Indian sidekick calls me Kemosabe.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” he said.

“Well, that’s what ‘Kemosabe’ means.”

“Are we ever going to stop?”

“Not while we have cloud cover.”

“What’ve clouds got to do with anything?”

“Satellites,” she said.

“You are the strangest woman I’ve ever known.”

“Just wait.”

“How the
hell
did you find me?”

“Maybe I’m psychic.”

“Are you psychic?”

“No.”

He sighed and closed his eyes. He could almost imagine that he was on a merry-go-round. “
I
was supposed to find
you.
”

“Surprise.”

“I wanted to help you.”

“Thanks.”

He let go of his grip on the world of the waking. For a while all was silent and serene. Then he walked out of the darkness and opened the red door. There were rats in the catacombs.

Roy did a crazy thing. Even as he was doing it, he was amazed at the risk he was taking.

He decided that he should be himself in front of Eve Jammer. His real self. His deeply committed, compassionate, caring self that was never more than half revealed in the bland, bureaucratic functionary that he appeared to be to most people.

Roy was willing to take risks with this stunning woman, because he sensed that her mind was as marvelous as her ravishing face and body. The woman within, so close to emotional and intellectual perfection, would understand him as no one else ever had.

Over dinner, they had not found the key that would open the doors in their souls and let them merge, which was their destiny. As they were leaving the restaurant, Roy was concerned that their moment of opportunity would pass and that their destiny would be thwarted, so he tapped the power of Dr. Kevorkian, which he’d recently absorbed from the television in the Learjet. He found the courage to reveal his true heart to Eve and force the fulfillment of their destiny.

Behind the restaurant, a blue Dodge van was parked three spaces to the right of Eve’s Honda, and a man and woman were getting out of it, on their way to dinner. They were in their forties, and the man was in a wheelchair. He was being lowered from a side door of the van on an electric lift, which he operated without assistance.

Otherwise, the parking lot was deserted.

To Eve, Roy said, “Come with me a minute. Come say hello.”

“Huh?”

Roy walked directly to the Dodge. “Good evening,” he said as he reached under his coat to his shoulder holster.

The couple looked up at him, and both said, “Good evening,” with a thread of puzzlement sewn through their voices, as if trying to recall where they had met him before.

“I feel your pain,” Roy said as he drew his pistol.

He shot the man in the head.

His second round hit the woman in the throat, but it didn’t finish her. She fell to the ground, twitching grotesquely.

Roy stepped past the dead man in the wheelchair. To the woman on the ground, he said, “Sorry,” and then he shot her again.

The new silencer on the Beretta worked well. With the February wind moaning through the palm fronds, none of the three shots would have been audible farther than ten feet away.

Roy turned to Eve Jammer.

She looked thunderstruck.

He wondered if he had been too impulsive for a first date.

“So sad,” he said, “the quality of life that some people are forced to endure.”

Eve looked up from the bodies and met Roy’s eyes. She didn’t scream or even speak. Of course, she might have been in shock. But he didn’t think that was the case. She seemed to want to understand.

Maybe everything would be all right after all.

“Can’t leave them like this.” He holstered his gun and pulled on his gloves. “They have a right to be treated with dignity.”

The remote-control unit that operated the wheelchair lift was attached to the arm of the chair. Roy pressed a button and sent the dead man back up from the parking lot.

He climbed into the van through the double-wide sliding door, which had been pushed to one side. When the wheelchair completed its ascent, he rolled it inside.

Assuming that the man and woman were husband and wife, Roy planned the tableau accordingly. The situation was so public that he didn’t have time to be original. He would have to repeat what he had done with the Bettonfields on Wednesday evening in Beverly Hills.

Tall lampposts were spaced around the parking lot. Just enough bluish light came through the open door to allow him to do his work.

He lifted the dead man out of the chair and placed him faceup on the floor. The van was uncarpeted. Roy was remorseful about that, but he had no padding or blankets with which to make the couple’s final rest more comfortable.

He pushed the chair into a corner, out of the way.

Outside again, while Eve watched, Roy lifted the dead woman and put her into the van. He climbed in after her and arranged her beside her husband. He folded her right hand around her husband’s left.

Both of the woman’s eyes were open, as was one of her husband’s, and Roy was about to press them shut with his gloved fingers when a better idea occurred to him. He peeled up the husband’s closed eyelid and waited to see if it would remain open. It did. He turned the man’s head to the left and the woman’s head to the right, so they were gazing into each other’s eyes, into the eternity that they now shared in a far better realm than Las Vegas, Nevada, far better than any place in this dismal, imperfect world.

He crouched at the feet of the cadavers for a moment, admiring his work. The tenderness expressed by their positions was enormously pleasing to him. Obviously, they had been in love and were now together forever, as any lovers would wish to be.