Light Before Day (42 page)

We got out of the Tahoe. When we were a block away, I saw that Claire Shipley's driveway was empty, the curtains drawn. I looked for movement behind them and didn't see any.

Caroline opened the front gate and walked straight through the leafy plants and down the side of the house. I followed her onto a concrete patio in back that had no furniture on it. A toolshed sat against the back fence. Caroline opened the screen over the back door and stopped. Her back was to me. She reached under her shirt and removed the Glock from its holster.

I said her name softly. Instead of responding, she gave the back door a gentle shove. It swung open onto a hallway lined with deep shadows. "Miss Shipley?" she called. No response.

Caroline stepped inside. I stood in the doorway, wondering whether or not I should clock her and pull the gun from her grip. She swept the kitchen on her left with a practiced stance and saw nothing of interest. She continued down the hallway. I stepped inside the house.

To my right, the door to Claire Shipley's bedroom was open. A large, unadorned crucifix hung above the bed, and a row of small ceramic statues crowded the windowsill. They were saints.

I turned and saw that Caroline had frozen in the doorway to the living room, the gun held in front of her with rigid arms.

"You want to put that away, honey?" an old woman asked her without the slightest trace of fear in her voice. Caroline didn't move. "Tell your precious little friend to come on in. Is he packing, too?"

Caroline kept the gun level. "No," I answered. "Miss Shipley, we just wanted—"

"Shut up now, honey," said the old woman with vicious politeness. "Your lady friend and I are in an interesting predicament. Come see."

I edged into the room. Sitting in a La-Z-Boy was an ancient-looking woman with a thick wave of wiry gray hair pinned to the back of her head. She had teardrop-shaped eyes that were mostly pupil, and sagging cheeks and jowls. Her fat mouth was an inverted U that stretched from one corner of her square jaw to the other. She held a sawed-off shotgun on us, with one meaty hand above the chamber and the handle resting against her stomach. The hand wrapped around the shotgun's chamber had red scars on it.

The only thing on the wall above her head was a larger version of the plain wooden crucifix in her bedroom. A tiny television was positioned on a shelf across from her that contained books with titles I could see all dealt with government conspiracy theories and imminent apocalypses.

An overflowing ashtray and a pack of Chesterfields sat on the end table next to her elbow. "I hear y'all have been asking questions about Corey McCormick," she said. She had a flat southern accent that sounded like it had softened over time spent in California. "I also hear y'all have been going around town telling people Corey was fruit. That true?"

"Watch your language," Caroline said. "Adam's a fruit, too."

Claire Shipley's eyes flicked sideways to meet mine. "Is your lady friend going to put that thing away or not?"

"You first," Caroline said.

"No thanks," she replied.

"Why don't we all count to ten," I said.

'Why don't both you jackasses count to a thousand and get the hell out of my house while you're doing it," Claire Shipley said. "I haven't seen Corey McCormick in years and I'm not real upset about it."

"Good," I said. "You won't see him again. He's dead." The news struck her visibly. I seized the opportunity. "How many years has it been since you've seen him?" I asked.

"Four," she said almost to herself, as if remembering. "Four, I think. He came back here . . ."

She realized she was speaking too freely and clammed up.

"Came back here to do what?"

"He was asking questions, just like you guys," she said.

"What kind of questions?"

"None of your business," she retorted. "Corey abandoned his grandmother on her deathbed.

He was tired of watching her die. So was I, but I stuck it out until the end. I don't have much respect for Corey's decision, and I told him so to his face."

"He was sixteen," I reminded her.

"Corey McCormick was
never
sixteen," she said. "He was never ten. He was never eight.

There was more of Corey's mother in him than his grandmother ever wanted to believe. I saw it.

The boy took what he wanted when he wanted it. If you caught him taking it, he would throw it right at your face."

"Why did he come back here four years ago?" I asked.

Claire Shipley's grip on the shotgun loosened and the barrel fell by a few inches. "He's dead?" she asked. "How? What hap—"

Caroline bolted across the room, her gun raised in both hands. At the very second that Claire Shipley attempted to raise the barrel of her shotgun, Caroline jammed the barrel of the Glock against the old woman's right temple. I found myself standing in the middle of the room, my hands raised in an attempt to quiet a sudden explosion that had made almost no sound.

Her shotgun slid to one side of her lap and tipped off her thigh. I sprang forward and grabbed the mouth of the barrel before it could hit the floor.

I was jarred again by laughter—the thick, fluid-filled sound of Claire Shipley's guffaws echoed in the room. "Town witch shot dead," she whispered. "Bobbsey Twins suspected. Film at eleven."

She lifted her eyes to meet Caroline's ferocious look. The old woman's features tensed.

"Hand me my glasses, pretty boy," she whispered.

I found them on the nightstand. She slid them on and studied the furious woman standing over her. "Caroline Hughes," she whispered. I felt Caroline tense. "I saw you in the papers.

That's a terrible thing that happened to your mother—"

I didn't believe the concern in Claire Shipley's voice was genuine, so I cut her off. "Four years ago, Corey came back here asking questions. What was he asking questions about?"

"An old friend of his," she said. "Reynaldo Reyez. He thought the guy might still be alive.

He had heard stories, stories about some assassin they called El Maricon. He thought it was Reynaldo."

In the aftermath of her revelation about Reynaldo Reyez, Caroline and I fought not to exchange a look. The same year Corey had met with Joseph Spinotta, he had returned to Visalia on the hunt for El Maricon. A major piece of my new theory had just been confirmed.

Adrenaline quickened my pulse.

"Why did he come to you?" I asked. "What would you know about Reynaldo?"

The old woman seemed to settle a debate within herself; I saw the resistance leave her body.

She ordered us to sit. I went to a high-backed chair on the other side of the room; Caroline stepped away from the woman, but she didn't lower the gun and she didn't take a seat.

"Corey came to me because he knew Reynaldo's father and I had a conversation the morning Reynaldo disappeared," she began. She paused, considering. Then she started talking.

Reynaldo's father, Jose, had been a handsome charmer, one of the most popular men in Visalia.

He spent most of his days driving around town, delivering bags full of his wife's authentic Mexican cooking to the women around town whom he wanted to befriend her. Lucinda

McCormick, Corey's grandmother, was one of those women. But Ruby Reyez was a recluse who spoke poor English, and even after Jose Reyez managed to get most of the women in town addicted to her cooking, none of those women was able to draw out his wife.

From the start, Claire Shipley saw Jose Reyez for who he was: a thug and an operator who used his charm and good looks to distract people from his real profession. When Claire asked him point-blank how he had been able to afford the brand-new pickup truck he drove around town, Jose told her that he had managed to save up money working various field jobs. In Claire's opinion, his answer lacked even the pretense of deceit.

Claire saw the relationship developing between Corey and Reynaldo's son and warned

Lucinda about it. But Lucinda paid no attention. One afternoon, Claire followed Reynaldo and Corey up to Lake Kaweah, where the boys had wandered off into the woods and done things to each other's bodies that boys sometimes did out of simple necessity. This information Claire had not shared with Lucinda.

By then, Lucinda and Jose Reyez had developed a friendship. Jose would often stop by the ranch out on Highway 198 and the two of them would sit on the porch watching the sun go down. Sometimes Claire would listen on the other side of the screen door. Lucinda McCormick was already showing signs of the cancer that would eat away her bones, but she listened patiently to Jose's long orations about the dreams he had for his family and his young son.

Claire was eavesdropping the night Jose finally came clean to Lucinda about what he really did for a living: running meth and the materials to make it for the Mexican nationals who had managed to organize part of the trade in the Valley. As usual, Lucinda had withheld judgment.

She had even offered Jose work on her ranch. Jose politely declined.

"See, manual labor—that kind of work was beneath a man like Jose Reyez," Claire Shipley told us. "Destroying families. Driving perfectly good women out of their minds—that was Jose's
speed,
if you know what I mean."

Jose stopped visiting after Lucinda’s cancer diagnosis. Then one afternoon word got out that Ruby Reyez, the shy shut-in, had been arrested stumbling down the highway in her slip, trying to explain in fractured English to anyone who would listen that the passing cars were

communicating with one another about her. When Claire heard the news, she realized that Jose Reyez had somehow brought his business home. She wasn't surprised. She had known the chickens would one day come home to roost for the Reyez family, but she had no idea what form God's retribution was going to take.

On an afternoon in February, Jose Reyez came to Lucinda's ranch. Lucinda had been upstairs in bed, with Corey at her side. Claire Shipley had forbidden Jose from coming inside even as he pleaded for Lucinda's help.

"He kept telling me over and over again that his family had been destroyed," Claire Shipley said to us. "I asked him what that meant. He told me he had driven Reynaldo that morning up into the woods past Lake Kaweah and told him to run away. He said the boy refused, so he pulled a gun on the kid and threatened him, told him to run into the mountains, to get as far away from Visalia as possible. Then he told me that Reynaldo had finally obeyed him. That Reynaldo had finally run off into the trees."

She gave us a dyspeptic face.

"You didn't believe him," I said.

"Reynaldo would never leave his family behind like that. I didn't care how bad his father scared him." A genuine and belated pain trembled beneath the old woman's words. "I drove up to the lake. I went to the parking lot where Jose told me he had taken Reynaldo. It took me three hours to find him. Reynaldo Reyez had been shot in the back. He was dead when I got there.

Jose didn't even know that he had killed his own son. He had fired a shot in the air to get the boy to run, and it had killed him."

"What did you do?" I asked the old woman.

"I buried him," she said. "I buried Reynaldo Reyez in the woods and I prayed over him. I even wept, God forbid I should admit that to the two of you."

Caroline let out a sharp breath. I studied the ruined old woman who had described her outpouring of emotion for a death she had concealed with a child's defiance.

"Four years ago," I finally said, "when Corey came to you—" "I told him!" Claire Shipley snapped. "I told him that I had buried his best friend. He asked me why I had kept it a secret from him. I told him the truth—his grandmother needed him, and I didn't want him grieving for the son of some drug pusher."

"Did it work? Did Corey stick by his grandmother's side until the end?"

Claire Shipley stuck out a furious lower lip.

Caroline cursed under her breath and turned from the room. It was clear that she believed my theory had been shot all to hell. She was wrong. I could feel the pieces realigning themselves into a new theory that was as simple and elegant as the ones James Wilton had come up with over the past week. I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't do it here.

"You be careful, Caroline Hughes," Claire Shipley said. Caroline stopped but didn't turn to face the old woman. "Grief fills the world with shadows, and when the world is full of shadows, it looks like there are no limits at all. All your old rules no longer apply. Isn't that right, missy?"

Caroline turned and gave the old woman a stare that had more pain in it than I had yet to see her display. Claire Shipley seemed to think her words had worked their intended effect. She sank back into her La-Z-Boy and folded her scarred hands across her lap, looking satisfied. The old woman's eyes shifted to me. "What did Corey do when you told him this?" I asked.

"He kicked over that chair you're in and left."

I looked at Caroline.

"Wash your hands in a child's blood and see what color your judgments turn out to be,"

Claire Shipley said.

As we drove away from the house, Caroline's knuckles were white against the steering wheel. I could see anger, even betrayal in the set of her jaw, and she wouldn't look at me. I reached into the backseat and brought the file on the four abducted young boys onto my lap. Someone had abducted them. Someone who had used the signatures that had been attributed to an assassin they called El Maricon.

"She's lying," Caroline said.

I ignored her. I studied the photos of a boy named Jim Clark and thought back to one of the other stories Martin Cale had told me. Jim Clark had been taken into custody by Joseph Spinotta and then placed in Billy Hatfill's care; two weeks earlier, that same Jim Clark had come off Martin Cale's yacht and Corey had reacted as if he had seen a ghost.

Four years earlier, Spinotta had asked Corey to set him up with Reynaldo Reyez. When Corey had set out looking for Reynaldo, he had discovered that Reynaldo had been dead for years, buried by his grandmother's best friend. But someone abducted the young boys whose pictures were spread across my lap.

I imagined Corey waiting on the dock as his uncle's yacht came into port two weeks earlier, saw his shock when a young man named Everett sauntered toward him. Corey had been stunned to recognize the boy. He had recognized the boy because he had abducted him.