Santa Fe Edge (9 page)

“You’re very good, Charlie,” she said, kissing him.

“You’re not so bad yourself, Teri,” he replied.

“One question: I understand why you have to change your name, but why mine?”

“Holly knew you by your real name in Orchid Beach. Her people could trace us through you.”

“Sorry. That was a dumb question.”

“There’s a bio for you in the envelope, too. You have to memorize every detail, like your maiden name, your high school, your college—both of which have very good transcripts for you—your parents’ names—they’re both dead—and every other detail. You have a credit record under both your maiden and married names, too. If you memorize the bio perfectly, you could withstand a prolonged interrogation. You can make up your own details, as long as they fit. After all, there would be details of your childhood that even your husband wouldn’t know about.”

“How long have we been married?”

“Three years. Read the bio.”

“Teri” started reading while “Charlie” ordered breakfast and began calling realtors.

AT MIDAFTERNOONTHEY STOOD in the living room of the fourth house they had seen, while the agent waited outside to give them some privacy.

“You like it?” Teddy asked.

“I love it. Can we afford it?”

“We can,” Teddy replied. The house was in the East Side neighborhood of Santa Fe, on a quiet tree-lined street. It had a living room with a dining area, a kitchen, two bedrooms, two and a half baths and a study where he could work. It was nicely furnished. “Let’s do it.” He called the realtor back in and filled out the rental application.

“I’ll run this,” she said, “and assuming everything is confirmed, I’ll have a lease for you by six o’clock, and you can move in tomorrow.” Teddy gave her a check on the local account he had opened earlier that day.

They celebrated with a dinner at Geronimo, a restaurant on Canyon Road. The following morning they checked out of the hotel and moved into the house.

“I’m going to need a big safe,” Teddy said, looking for one on the Internet.

THAT SAME MORNING, Holly Barker and Todd Bacon sat in Lance Cabot’s office at the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Todd,” Lance said, “what I have to say to you—indeed, our entire conversation—is limited to the three of us. Do you understand?”

“Certainly,” Todd replied.

“We have reason to suspect that Teddy Fay may not be entirely dead.”

“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” Todd replied. “When I pumped those rounds into his airplane’s wing it occurred to me that he might be able to make an airport or a field, then disappear.”

“He must still have the airplane,” Holly said, “because I saw it at the Vero Beach Airport the first time I saw him.”

“Did you get the registration number?” Todd asked.

“No,” she replied, “because I had no reason to suspect him at that time. In any case, it would have been changed by now.”

“It’s a Cessna 182 RG, isn’t it?”

“I can’t remember whether it had fixed or retractable gear,” she said.

Holly told him of each encounter she had with Teddy in Orchid Beach, giving him every detail she could recall.

“Did anybody die while he was there?” Todd asked.

“There was a series of murders of women at the time,” Holly replied.

“That’s not Teddy’s thing,” Todd said. “He kills only for very good reasons—or what he believes to be good reasons.”

“I agree. There was one death with which he may very well have been involved. The victim was a retired army colonel named James Bruno, and Teddy’s girlfriend had once been a victim of rape by Bruno, so he had a very good reason to kill. He was fortunate that the death was declared a suicide.”

“He never bothered to make a killing look like a suicide before,” Todd pointed out.

“No, but in this case he didn’t want to run, so an apparent suicide was the best way to dead-end the investigation.”

“Give me the best physical description you can of Teddy,” Todd said.

“Six feet, a hundred and sixty pounds; wiry, athletic build; gray hair, probably bald or balding, but he wore a hairpiece when I saw him, and a very good one that I didn’t suspect. I don’t remember an eye color, and he had no other distinctive features. That’s why he’s so good at disguises.”

“Am I going to have any help?”

“No,” Lance said quickly. “Just Holly by phone. We’re going to carry you on the Agency’s rolls as active but on extended leave. You’ll have an Agency laptop and communications equipment and the usual access to our computers here in Langley. If there’s anything you can’t dig up on your own, Holly will do it for you.”

“All right.”

Lance handed him a slip of paper. “You can draw this in cash, and you can use your Agency credit cards.”

“I want a light airplane,” Todd said. “That’s how Teddy travels, and I want to travel the same way.”

“Holly will arrange that for you. No jets, however.”

“I’m not trained for jets,” Todd said, “but I’d like something fairly fast.”

“I can do that,” Holly said.

Lance stood up and offered his hand. “Good luck,” he said.

Todd shook the hand. “One thing: You didn’t tell me what you want me to do when I find Teddy.”

Lance walked him to the door. “I didn’t hear the question,” he said, closing the door behind them.

16

C
upie Dalton and Vittorio sat in Vittorio’s SUV down the street from the Inn of the Anasazi and waited for James Long to show. It was nearly nine A.M. when Long walked out of the hotel and into his car, a silver Lincoln Town Car that the valet had brought around.

“Well, at least he’ll be easy to follow,” Cupie said. “Let’s go, and keep well back.”

“Cupie,” Vittorio said, “I don’t have to be told how to run a tail.”

“Right.”

“You keep doing that, and I’m going to have to scalp you, as unrewarding as that would be.”

Cupie rubbed his bald head. “I like it where it is,” he said.

Long drove directly to the soundstage where Susannah Wilde’s film was being shot, parked in the parking lot and entered the building.

“He’s going to be there all day,” Vittorio said.

“Maybe not,” Cupie replied.

“So, where’s he going to go?”

“Maybe he’s going to have lunch with Barbara,” Cupie said.

“That would certainly make life easy for us, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure would,” Cupie agreed. “Vittorio … ?”

“What?”

“From my brief conversation with Ed Eagle about Barbara, I got a vibe that wasn’t there when we worked for him before.”

“What kind of vibe?”

Cupie sighed. “Have you ever killed anybody?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Because I think that’s what Eagle is going to want done.”

“Did he say that?”

“No, I told you it was just a vibe.”

“You want to kill somebody based on a vibe?”

“Oh, no. When he wants it done he’ll say so, or find some other way to make it perfectly clear.”

“Have you ever killed anybody, Cupie?”

“Twice, both times when I was on the force, with my service revolver. Both of them were shooting at me.”

“Anybody else?”

“No. All right, I answered your question, now you answer mine.”

“Yes.”

Cupie turned and looked at Vittorio. “Yes, you’ve killed somebody?”

“I’m not going to tell you again.”

“Under what circumstances?” Cupie asked.

“Which time?”

“When you were a cop.”

“I was never a cop, Cupie.”

“All right, the first time.”

“I was fourteen, and a man who lived with us was beating up my mother.”

“And?”

“And I took him by the hair, cut his throat with my hunting knife and scalped him.”

Cupie blinked. “You actually
scalped
a man? How did you know how to do that?”

“Cupie, I’m an Apache. You might call it cultural memory. Anyway, I’d seen it done a couple of times on the reservation.”

“I didn’t know that sort of thing was still being done,” Cupie said.

“It isn’t, much. I said I was fourteen.”

“How about other Apaches?”

“When someone wants to make a point, I guess.”

Cupie gulped. “How about the second time?”

“I shot a man in the face with a shotgun.”

“Why?”

“He was coming at me with a knife.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody else?”

“Two others.”

“Jesus, Vittorio.”

“Jesus had nothing to do with it.”

“Who were these people?”

“They were both white men. The first two were Apache.”

“Why did you do them?”

“They were both trying to kill me. The first one, I thought I might be a better knife fighter than he was. I was right.”

“And the other one?”

“That one was more complicated: I was sleeping with his wife.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Vittorio.”

“Ex-wife, actually.”

“Okay.”

“He put out the word that he was going to kill me. I was out behind the house, putting in some fence posts, and I heard his car drive up. He yelled my name and said something uncomplimentary. The back door was open, and I heard him kick the front door open. I was unarmed at the time.”

“What did you do?”

“I stood by the back door, pressed against the wall. I figured when he’d had a look around inside he’d see the back door open and come outside. He came out slowly. The first thing I saw was the gun in his hand. I let him take another step, then I hit him in the head with a fence post.”

“That’s a pretty good-sized piece of wood, isn’t it?”

“Bigger than a baseball bat. I caught him across the forehead—he was shorter than I thought—and that did it. I didn’t have to hit him again. Then I called the sheriff.”

“Why did you do that?”

“You ever tried to get rid of a body?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“It’s harder than it sounds. If you put it in a river or lake, it comes up, eventually. If you bury it in the ground, the coyotes dig it up. If you put stones on top of the grave to prevent that, then it looks like a grave, and that makes you look guilty. I was defending my life, so I called the sheriff.”

“What happened?”

“He’d already heard reports that the guy was looking to kill me, so I didn’t have to prove that. And the guy’s gun went off when I hit him, so you could say he’d shot at me. And the fence post had his blood and brains all over it, so my story was obviously true.”

“So, you walked?”

“He didn’t even run me in, he just told me to try to stay out of situations where I might have to do that again. And I’ve tried to take his advice.”

“So, what are you going to do if Eagle asks us to off Barbara?”

“I don’t know,” Vittorio said, sounding thoughtful. “God knows she needs it.”

“Yeah,” Cupie replied, “she does.”

17

C
upie and Vittorio sat in the car straight through lunchtime, and James Long never showed himself. Around two o’clock they drove to a sandwich shop and came back to the studio with their food. Long’s car had disappeared from the parking lot.

“Shit,” Cupie said. “We were gone, what, twenty minutes?”

Vittorio put the SUV into gear and drove away from the studio.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see if he went back to the hotel,” Vittorio said, “but …”

“Why would he go back to the hotel?”

“I don’t know, but where else are we going to look?”

“The airport, maybe?” Cupie offered.

Vittorio took a hard left and gunned it. “All right, the airport. Albuquerque or Santa Fe?”

“Long doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would fly commercial,” Cupie said. “Santa Fe.”

They drove to Santa Fe Airport, parked the car along the fence and looked around. “Where do they park the rentals?” Vittorio asked.

“I don’t know, but guys who fly in private airplanes drive their cars onto the ramp and abandon them.”

They walked over to the Santa Fe Jetcenter and peered through the fence and out onto the tarmac. The Lincoln was parked on the ramp, and the trunk was still open. A Citation was taxiing away from the FBO.

“He’s going back to L.A.,” Vittorio said.

“Does that mean Barbara is still in L.A.?” Cupie asked.

“Why would she be in L.A.?” Vittorio asked.

“I don’t know,” Cupie said, “but that’s the last place I saw her. I told you about seeing her in Venice.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make any sense, not if she wants to kill Ed Eagle.”

“Maybe Long’s not in touch with her,” Cupie said.

“I thought we’d already decided that Long is the only person in the world who would spring her from that prison. After all, he’s helped her before.”

“Maybe she’s staying at his house in L.A.,” Cupie said. “She’s done that before, too.”

“That might explain why Long is headed back to L.A.,” Vittorio said. “He wants to get laid.”

“If he wants to get laid, why did he leave her and come to Santa Fe?”

“I think we should operate on the premise that Barbara is in Santa Fe,” Vittorio said. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense, given what we know about her, and if she’s not here she will be, when she gets around to taking a shot at Ed Eagle.”

“Okay, I buy that,” Cupie said. “If you were Barbara, and you were lying low in Santa Fe, waiting for an opportunity to kill Ed Eagle, where would you lie low?”

“Not a hotel,” Vittorio said. “Too expensive. An apartment maybe, or a house, but something nice. After all, she’s been in prison for months. She’ll want some comfort.”

“If she’s in an apartment or a house, she probably found it in the
New Mexican
,” Cupie said.

“Why not one of those real estate magazines that are all over town?”

“She wouldn’t look there for a rental,” Cupie said. “Those are for sales.”

They got back into Vittorio’s SUV and drove to the newspaper’s office. Cupie bought ten days of back issues and took them back to the car. He handed Vittorio half of the papers. “Look for something comfortable, not too big and furnished,” he said.