"Presumption Of Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Shaughnessy Perri)

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N INA AND PAUL BUMPED ONTO THE cracked asphalt driveway of the wooden bungalow in Pacific Grove on Pine Avenue. Aunt Helen had died years earlier and left the place to Nina, and the welcome mat in front and the rhododendron bushes on either side of the entryway dated from Aunt Helen’s time, along with one of the few pines left on Pine, an eighty-foot listing Norfolk pine that someday soon would fall on the neighbors’ roof and bankrupt Nina. But she couldn’t bear to cut it down yet.

Pacific Grove lay at the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, jutting right out into the Pacific, and never got hot. The sea breeze produced clean, tangy air.

Through the open shutters Nina could see someone walking back and forth, and her heart gave a lurch: Wish? Or one of the roommates?

To herself she called the twins who had originally leased the house from her the Boyz in the Hood. Dustin and Tustin Quinn both studied computer science at the California State University at the old Fort Ord and no doubt had a promising future, but after all, what she cared about was the present, and when they had come to Paul’s condo to talk to Nina about the rental ad, she had almost turned them down. She didn’t want a couple of scruffy male students, she wanted a sweet lady who looked like Aunt Helen, would cultivate an herb garden, and scrub the floor each morning in the predawn.

Unfortunately, only students wanted to rent the place. Built in the twenties, the whole house was heated by a single wall fixture in the living room. The stove had been old in Aunt Helen’s time, and there were no hookups for a washer or dryer. You had to cart the dirty clothes to the Washeteria in town. Apparently, elderly gardening ladies chose to live in more modern digs because none applied.

The Boyz had rented the place in May, hoping to stay through the summer and possibly fall. In early June Wish had moved in with them for the summer. Nina had suggested it, knowing the twins would welcome the help with the rent. Wish seemed to like them.

One of the Boyz now trotted out to meet them, shirtless, wearing baggy shorts and fat-tongued athletic shoes, no socks, a backward baseball hat on his head, a bottle of Gatorade in his hand. “My tenant,” Nina told Paul as he slammed the front door.

“Hey.” The young man nodded to them and blocked their way. He was stocky, buzz cut, and earnest, with a round pink face and round mouth. “How’s it going, Nina? Dus is just finishing up the sweeping. We wanted to clean up before you got here.”

So Dusty was dusting. “Hi, Tustin,” she said. “This is Paul van Wagoner.”

“Good to meet you. Any word about Wish?”

“No sign of him.” The fast swish of a broom mixed with the yelp of Eminem’s 2002 CD drifted through the open window. When Nina had lived there, right after Aunt Helen had passed on, it had been sea lions yelping from the kelp beds a few hundred yards off that she heard, but new millennia bring new kinds of song.

She had rented the house out ever since, and now she saw with landlord’s angst that the white paint was faded and peeling in places, and the roof was minus some shingles. “We’re sorry to raise up a storm if he’s just gone home to Tahoe or something…” Tustin was saying.

“No, you did right to call,” Paul said. “He hasn’t been home. We talked to his mother.”

Tustin really wanted to get the story out, or else he was delaying their entry while Dustin madly cleaned up, Nina couldn’t decide which. He launched into it, standing right there in the yard with the white picket fence.

“I don’t even want to think about him and that fire. We were watching TV when his buddy showed up. Gave him a beer, invited him to dinner. Danny is his name. He was dressed like he was posted on a mission to Iraq or something. He takes Wish aside to tell him something he doesn’t want us to hear, then he says to Wish, ‘Man, you want in or not? You wanna be broke forever?’

“Well, at the mention of money, Wish’s eyes lit up. I have to admit Dus and I wanted to know what was going on, but Danny and Wish went into his room. I heard him ask Wish, ‘You still got your camera?’ Wish said ‘Yeah, but I gotta go to Tahoe tomorrow. I don’t think this is such a good idea.’ He was reluctant, you know?”

“Wait a minute,” Paul said, holding up a hand to slow him down. “What’s not a good idea?”

Tustin shrugged. “Who knows? They shut the door. All I know is, he was pushing Wish to go somewhere. Told him he could be home that night-this was Tuesday-in plenty of time to pack for Tahoe.

“We could hear them arguing. Wish wasn’t up for it. And then Danny’s voice, loud, insisting, talking some more about money. He had an accusatory tone, like, ‘You turned on me, man, you’re such a wuss.’ Then it would get quiet in there, like they were whispering.

“My brother and I went into the living room and sat down to watch the baseball game on TV and eat our pot pies. Wish and Danny came out, and Wish acted embarrassed. He had his backpack and we said, like, where you headed, man? He just shook his head, but when Danny went into the can Wish motioned to me to come into the kitchen and said, ‘Listen. I’m going to Robles Ridge. Okay? Just in case anything happens.’

“‘What’s going to happen?’ I said, but he just shook his head.”

Dustin finally appeared at the front door. He gave some signal to his brother, who said, “We can go in now.” They mounted the three steps to the welcome mat. Dustin, in scruffy cutoffs and bare feet, held the screen open for them. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Inside, to Nina’s relief, aside from scuffs on the hardwood, dirty fingerprints around the light switches, and overlooked dustballs in the corners, the main room looked okay. However, closed doors to the two bedrooms beckoned. She resolved to have a look before they left. She sat down on the sprung couch with Paul.

Dustin, who acted the householder while his brother did duty as the greeter, went into the kitchen and she heard the fridge door open. In a minute he came back with Gatorade for all. Nina was hungry. Gatorade would do. She unscrewed the top.

“So what’s the news?” Dustin said, getting right to it after the introductions.

“No news,” Paul said. The Boyz looked at each other and shook their heads.

“Tustin was telling us about Danny’s visit,” Nina said. “Go ahead. But maybe you could turn down the music?”

Dustin went over to the stereo and Eminem stopped cleaning out his closet and dissing his mama over Dr. Dre’s menacing arrangement. She thought of Bob’s complaints when she made him clean out his closet. Maybe he too would become famous someday from telling the world about his mean mom.

“Yeah. So. Where was I? Right, Wish says, ‘Robles Ridge, just in case.’ ”

Dustin broke in, “So Tus says, ‘You better tell us more than that,’ just as this loser Danny came back into the kitchen, and this made Danny bullshit.”

“Told us to fuck off,” Tustin added, “only he was less polite.”

“What a poser,” Dustin said.

“Drugs?” Paul asked.

“He didn’t stagger or laugh a lot or smell funny and his pupils were normal-sized.”

“We looked,” Tustin added.

“I could see Danny and Wish went way back. At one point Danny was going on like, ‘See, the whole cop-school thing, that’s to prove you’re not afraid. But you are, aren’t you, Willis?’

“And then they left.” Dustin took a long swig of Gatorade. A few pounds heavier than his brother, he had apple cheeks and a more innocent air. Nina could see the Boyz in a few years in identical suits, staring at computer screens through identical glasses, juggling mortgages and families, saving consumer capitalism.

The Boyz came from Rhodes, Iowa. She wondered where they would end up.

Paul had been taking notes. He took over. “Describe what they were wearing.”

“Danny had on a camouflage jacket, like I said,” Tustin replied. “Jeans. He wore the shirt buttoned up, and I had the impression he had a lot of stuff in his pockets. I asked him if he was Army, but he said he got the jacket up at the Moss Landing military-surplus store. I didn’t really think he was even ex-military, not with the ponytail.”

“Shoes?”

“Sorry, I never noticed. Wish was wearing his Doc Martens, I remember that. The only reason I noticed Wish’s boots was he talked about buying them, how expensive they were. He thought about it for a long time…”

“What else did Danny wear?”

The twins looked at each other and shrugged. “I think the T-shirt under the jacket was white. I could see the neck part,” Tustin said.

“What did his teeth look like?”

“Teeth. He wasn’t a smiler. Why do you ask?” Dustin said. “Oh. Dental records. Damn. Of course. Danny’s missing too, is that it? And the firebug, it could be he’s the victim. But you only have the one victim. Well, Wish and Danny are both tall and skinny, although I’d say Danny’s more muscular. Both Indian-looking.”

“Native American-looking,” Tustin said.

“Danny’s hair is longer.”

“I don’t know where Danny is,” Paul said. “He may not be missing. Any idea where he lives?”

The Boyz shook their heads. Dustin said, “But they talked about Danny’s uncle. His name was-”

“Ben,” Tustin said.

“That’s it, Ben. He called him Tío. Seems like Wish knew him too.”

“Did you hear the last name Cervantes?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Still, that’ll help.”

Dustin and Tustin nodded several times.

Nina went on, “What kind of camera did Wish take with him?”

“A Canon. Digital, with a megazoom lens. He just bought it at Costco with some birthday money and his first paycheck.”

“What was Wish wearing?”

“Uh, denims. Denim jacket. I don’t know what underneath. Same old Bob Marley T-shirt as always, I guess,” Tustin said.

“He’s a good guy,” Dustin said. “Quiet and no creepy habits.”

“Let’s check his room,” Paul said, getting up. Tustin led the way down the short dark hall. Nina’s memories of the place flooded up, Aunt Helen and her mother cooking on Easter Sunday in the kitchen, Nina years later carrying Bob from the bedroom when he woke up coughing with a high fever one night, through that very hall, out to the rattletrap Chevy she drove then, and the doctor saying he had pneumonia… those had been desperate times. She put her hand on Paul’s broad back in front of her.

They crowded into the smaller bedroom at the rear of the house, Bob’s kindergarten bedroom. Wish had taken down the blinds over the window in back and left the window open. Sunflower heads waved through it from the tiny overgrown backyard and the room felt swept by air.

Wish’s bookshelf, full of the thick textbooks on criminal justice he had studied the previous year, sat in one corner. Aunt Helen’s old upholstered chair in a yellow-and-green flower pattern sat in the other, and there was just room for a conference table squeezed along the wall, stacked high with auto tools, comic books, CDs and DVDs and a DVD player under the tiny TV.

In the closet, T-shirts, ten or twelve of them, folded on the upper shelf, an empty duffel on the floor, and several plaid flannel shirts that Nina recognized from Tahoe.

The room smelled like Wish, a dusty outdoors smell, the scent of a living breathing person, and this even more than his shirts frightened Nina. Wish might really be dead. He had been her friend, a cheerful, innocent, eager spirit in her life, too young to be an equal, too old to be a son. Paul too seemed moved. He searched with irritable, feverish efficiency, running his hands over the shirts, checking pockets, unfolding cuffed pants, pushing behind baskets on the closet shelf, searching.

“Nothing,” he said.

Nina, at the conference table, said, “Here’s his organizer.” Sandy had given him one of those leather notebooks full of index tabs and pockets for his twenty-first birthday. In gold letters on the cover she read, “Willis Whitefeather.” She opened it. Tabs for addresses, calendars, notes, expenses. Flipping through it, she saw many small crabbed notes and doodles.

She turned to the addresses and looked under the C’s and D’s.

“Got it,” she said. “A phone number with the name Danny right beside it.”

Paul came over and wrote it down. He said to the Boyz, “We’re going to borrow this.”

“Paul, it might be evidence. Maybe we should just shut the door and leave it-”

“Put it in your purse,” Paul said. Nina opened her mouth and closed it. She put the organizer in her purse.

They said a few reassuring words to the Boyz and went outside. Nina held her heavy purse protectively, as though Wish’s life were in there. She was thinking that Sandy would want the organizer. Wish had left so little behind.

They stopped at the Bookshelf on Lighthouse for coffee. Nina leafed through the book.

“What else is in there?” Paul said, bringing coffees and a sandwich for Nina.

“Remember how he draws on his notes? He’s worse than I am,” Nina said. She showed him a penciled sketch of a sunflower. “He must have been lying on his bed and just picked up his pencil and drew this. I saw the flower outside his window. He can’t be dead, Paul.”

“He can’t. What else?”

“Well, on the calendar for this week, an eye appointment. I remember he was saying he thought he needed glasses. That’s it.”

“No girlfriend down here yet, I guess. I saw a photo of Brandy Taylor on the bookshelf.”

Thinking of Wish’s attraction to a young witness a few months before, Nina felt even worse. Wish had been downright noble about reconciling Brandy with her fiancé.

“He got pulled in casually by his friend,” she said. “He just went along for the ride. Who knows what Danny told him? He couldn’t have known there would be a fire.” She swallowed some of her tuna sandwich and opened the notebook to the tab marked Notes.

“Oh, Paul. He wrote down some self-improvement stuff here. He tried so hard.”

“Tries.”

“Tries. Listen to this: ‘Goals: B-plus average. Get a girlfriend. Note: must like hiking. Be cool with Mom, be patient. Show Paul’ ”-Nina faltered and her voice thickened-“‘show Paul I am the best.’ ”

There was a long silence.

“You know he idealizes you,” Nina said finally. “He jumped at the chance to come down here and learn from you.”

Paul’s jaw clenched. “Give me your cell phone.” He pulled out the note he’d made with Danny’s phone number.

Danny didn’t answer, and Paul didn’t want to leave a phony message. “We’ll try again,” he said. “Let’s go over to my office. Wish might have called or stopped by.”

“Good. I want to call Community Hospital.”

“Davy’s certainly already done that.”

“Well, I’m going to do it again. Then I’ll call the morgue and see if they’re finished.”

On the way back over the hill to Carmel, Nina said, “I hadn’t been in Aunt Helen’s house for a while. The cleaners are supposed to tell me if they notice any problems.”

“Looked okay to me.”

“I meant to check the Boyz’ bedroom, see what they chucked in there when we called and said we were coming.”

Paul pulled into the passing lane. “They rent the place. It’s theirs. Leave them alone.”

Nina had another moment of shock, the same shock she had felt when Paul told her to take the organizer. He was challenging her judgment, telling her what to do about her own business. Paul did it so naturally, assuming the role as if it were his…Was it his? He seemed so strong sitting there beside her. He never questioned himself, while her whole life right now was a question.

She didn’t even have a business card. Something gave way beneath her and she slid into doubt. “I don’t like you telling me what to do,” she said. It came out sounding whiny.

“Well, I like it,” Paul said. He laughed and zoomed beyond the speed limit past Junipero toward Ocean Avenue, though the right lane was choked with tourists.

The irritation swept over her again. She was sick with worry about Wish, but this person beside her suddenly annoyed her so much! It is hopeless, she told herself, angry and pained.

Paul, oblivious, drove on, and after a while her anger turned back into confusion. Sitting next to him, she struggled again to understand what was between them.

He bent forward, looking hard ahead into the traffic like Ahab eyeballing the foamy brine for his whale, joyful in the midst of tension, his eyes bright and intent. She experienced the heavy shoulders next to her, the capable hands, the solidity of his body, and she caught his happiness at being fully engaged and out on a chase, even a chase that might lead to tragedy. If he had let his tongue hang out, panting joyfully like Hitchcock, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

He’s a big yellow Lab! she thought.

His aggressive energy, his lack of subtlety, his disdain for people who live in their heads-of course, since he lived in his legs!-she could live with that, she could love that, if she could only remember this moment, when she was finally in contact with his powerful, furry, canine essence.

Guess I just like big dogs, she thought to herself.

She leaned her head back on the seat, closed her eyes, and told herself that it could be worse. Paul, better than any man she had known, focused all this energy and wholeheartedness and bright-eyed intensity on her at night.

He had his way of loving her. He would click the dead bolt downstairs, turn off the light, and come noiselessly into the bedroom in the dim light of the seashell night-light. He would look a long time at her lying on the bed, and at those moments she knew for certain that she was the only one he wanted, knew it right down to the marrow. When he lowered himself onto her, arms supporting his weight, eyes looking into her eyes, he was fully involved, fully loving her. Simple and wholehearted, no question about how he felt.

No, it’s not hopeless, not hopeless at all, she thought, her eyes still closed, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

With this comprehension, some worries about their incompatibilities fell away. Amused now, she turned her head to the left to see him and he looked back, winked, and got back to driving. As she let her hand move to his thigh and rub it, feeling the long muscle contract as he accelerated, she thought, he’s an experience I can’t imagine ever denying myself again.

“What?” he said, catching her smile.

“I was thinking about your song. About the love monster. May I add a verse?”

“Sure.”

“It goes like this”:

I am King Kong-you’re a skyscraper

I am King Kong-you’re a skyscraper

I’ll climb up your angles, and up at the top

I’ll swing and I’ll holler, till you beg me to stop-

“I like it. You have talent. We’ll see just how much tonight.”

They entered the quaint tourist town of Carmel-by-the-Sea. Taking a right on Ocean, Paul had to slow down for traffic. The sidewalks were choked with early-season tourists from Germany and France, meandering along among the flowers and antique stores. They took another right onto Dolores Street and pulled into a secret parking area behind the Hog’s Breath Inn and the Eastwood Building, where Paul had established his office. Clint Eastwood owned this brown rustic building with the jewelry store and Indian art emporium on the first floor, and once Paul knew that, he had told Nina, he knew this was the place for him.

Paul had met Clint once, while the actor was still mayor of Carmel. They had shaken hands and Clint had moved on, but Paul always said it zinged like God making contact with a mortal on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Was it the soft-spoken, menacing persona Paul liked? The disregard of authority? The Lone Ranger roles he always played? After a recent night curled up with popcorn in front of one of the DVDs, observing Paul’s grinning admiration as Eastwood got back at the bad guys, she thought she understood.

Clint wasn’t afraid. He’d gone through a long career in movies and television without once showing fear. When the situation called for fear, Clint’s eyes would squint and his lips would get snarly and he would get royally pissed off instead. Paul wanted to take on the world like that.

So renting the office in the Eastwood Building had pleased Paul deeply. They walked up the wooden stairway to Paul’s office, and he pressed the remote to unlock the door.

Inside, Tibetan rugs, Paul’s big desk with both a PC and an Apple sitting under a window that looked down at the outside bar area of the Hog’s Breath Inn, photos of the Himalaya by Galen Rowell and Paul himself on the walls-Paul had been in the Peace Corps in Nepal, not that it made him peaceful-a black leather couch, the small conference table where Wish worked, file cabinets, and a bar fridge in the corner where Paul kept beer and sundries.

In a pinch, he could spend the weekend there.

The soul of the office, of course, was invisible-the client files, his source lists, the search programs purchased from collection companies and process servers, all behind firewalls and passwords in the computers.

Nina went to the desk and looked out the window. Morning had segued into afternoon. Down below on the flowery patio of the Hog’s Breath, the vacation deity had granted permission to stop awhile, forget earthly cares, and sit holding a glass, talking about nothing much. Chatter and clinking drifted up to them.

“The permanent party,” she said.

“Right. The people come and go, but the party never ends.”

“He hasn’t been here.”

“No.”

Nina pulled out the Monterey County phone book and Wish’s organizer and began making calls. She called Community Hospital, the highway patrol, Danny again-no answer again-and Wish’s friends up at Lake Tahoe, where he usually lived. She didn’t like raising the alarm so loudly, but she had no choice. Paul worked the other line.

After a while, when they had run out of numbers, they paused. Paul looked at his watch. “You know what we have to do, don’t you? It’s three-thirty, and they’ll close by five.”

“Yes. We should go. It better not be him. What could have happened up there in the woods?”

“One step at a time. Lunch downstairs, then back to Salinas.”

In the heat of midday, they could identify some crops strictly by smell.

“Brussels sprouts,” Paul said. “I can’t stand ’em.”

“Mmm. Garlic. Fabulous.”

South Main Street still housed struggling secondhand stores, the shopping center that had never taken off, the Arby’s and Foster’s Freeze and the air of being lost in time that Nina remembered from childhood.

“I used to come here as a kid when the Northridge Shopping Center had the only good department stores in the whole county,” she said. “Then when I was clerking for Klaus, I would bring papers over to the courthouse for the lawyers. It looks just the same.”

“You still think of it as a sleepy agricultural town?” Paul said. “It’s changed. Silicon Valley is pressing down from the north. Executive homes are crammed together on small lots with high walls. A tired techie just snugs down in his concrete snail shell, never forced to meet a single neighbor.”

“We’re at least an hour to San Jose. They commute all that way?”

“Meanwhile, as the technical class hauls fifty miles between home in Salinas and work in San Jose, Mexico rolls up from the south and settles in the Alisal District. The population is eighty percent Latino these days. Did you know that?”

“Salinas has always been a tense place,” Nina said. “High crime rate for the population density. Part Okie, part Latino. Good fuel for writers like Steinbeck.”

“It does look sleepy, when you’re not here on Saturday night on the east side of town, when the bars get lively and the guns go off,” Paul said.

But no guns were in evidence on this sun-baked afternoon, just a few kids on bikes and moms pushing strollers past the thrift shops. Nina said, “Let’s stop at Foster’s Freeze for a dipped chocolate cone.”

“Right before the morgue?”

“Then again, maybe not,” Nina said. They drove through town in silence, each corner bringing Nina a fresh vista of memories. “You know, in front of the community center near the rodeo stands, there’s a giant sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Did you ever see that, Paul?”

“Really? That’s a surprise. No, I don’t go to the rodeo. I guess it’s un-American of me.”

“I’ll take you this summer.”

“No, thanks, I know how you and Bob love these spectacles like monster-car races and motocross and calf roping, but I don’t like the seats.”

“What’s wrong with the seats?”

“They’re concrete and usually beer spattered.”

“Does that mean you don’t like football games either?” Nina asked.

“I like tennis matches. Whap, headjerk, whap, headjerk. Tennis whites and women fanning themselves in the stands. That’s what I like.”

“But you like modern art, don’t you?”

Paul told her, “Look, if Oldenburg put up a giant sculpture in Salinas, of all places, let’s drive by it right now.”

“You can’t see it from the street.”

“Too bad. What’s it look like?”

“Three massive red metal cowboy hats. Each one about twenty feet across.” They turned onto Alisal Street.

Speaking of modern art, the concrete fiends of justice perched on each cornice of the Monterey County Courthouse hadn’t changed. These gargoyles, along with the white pillars casting sharp shadows and the deserted concrete courtyard within, still gave rise within Nina to a certain anticipatory dread straight out of an early de Chirico painting.

The dark-suited figures flapping like vultures up the hot street to make their cases inside added to the general air of malevolence, and the Honeybee restaurant, where many a sleazy legal deal had been cut over the decades, extruded more lawyers as they passed by. This courthouse had always felt foreign to Nina, so different from the courthouse on Aguajito in Monterey, which had been built in friendly hippie days in a vaguely Big Sur style.

“I always wondered why you didn’t take Klaus’s offer and join his firm after you passed the bar,” Paul said as they searched for a parking spot in back.

Nina said, “Compressed version. My mother died, that was the main thing. Dad got married again very quickly. I wanted to leave. San Francisco was a good distance, and then I married Jack and he was ready to leave Klaus’s firm too. Don’t we all grow up and leave town?” She took out her cream and rubbed a flare-up on her arm.

“Not at all,” Paul said. “In fact, I sometimes think the world is divided into those who go and those who stay. So off to the big city, then a few years in Tahoe. And here you are again.”

“I really, really hope it’s not Wish in there.”

They entered the dim courthouse hall and submitted to the metal detector. As they walked down the stairs toward the coroner’s office she firmed her jaw. It better not be him, she thought fiercely, and prepared herself.

Inside, they waited almost half an hour in an anteroom before they were allowed in. Some telephoning went on in the office as they were checked out one more time. Although a man in a lab coat was swabbing down the tables with Lysol, the morgue had that familiar smell of decay.

“Is the autopsy report completed?” Nina said to the female lab assistant accompanying them. She was realizing that, if this was Wish, Sandy would need help to call a mortuary and-surely she would want Wish sent back home?

Better not think about that now.

“This morning, but the report hasn’t been approved.” This small young woman had a Spanish accent, a large mole on her chin, and a businesslike attitude.

“Findings?” Paul said.

“I don’t know much. You’ll have to go through the channels for finals.” They came to the drawer. She unlocked it and Paul helped her pull it out in a blast of frigid air.

A long, blackened, naked body lay supine in the drawer like a specimen in some hideous experiment. Cracked-looking flaps of skin hung off the charred and blackened arms and legs. The arms were pulled up as if to protect the chest. The abdomen was concave, as though emptied of its contents. An acrid, wet-charcoal smell wafted up.

“Oh, God.” Nina looked away, then back at the body. She forced herself to look for some sign of Wish. Long bones, some burned black hair hanging lankly over the skull-the skull, oh, boy, the skull-

Nina walked off a few steps. Paul continued to look. “What else did they find?”

“The remains of a concho belt,” the lab assistant said, observing without emotion. “You know, leather with those silver things. We have partial black leather boots, Doc Martens. Laces burned off. Tatters of white T-shirt and jeans on the backside of the body.”

“A concho belt?” Paul said. “Nina, go outside and call the Boyz. Ask them.” Nina was staring at the skull, which still held on to the patch of long dark hair. DNA, she thought. They’ll find out eventually.

“I can’t tell if it’s him, Paul,” she blurted.

“Go on. I’ll talk to this lady for a minute.”

Nina went. In the bathroom outside, she rinsed her mouth and threw water on her face. She took a brush to her hair, sloughing off the black mask of death she had just seen. Outside, she breathed the blessed air, got into the hot car, and called the Boyz.

“This is Tustin.”

“Hi. It’s Nina. Tustin, will you please try to remember, and ask your brother-was Wish wearing one of those leather belts with silver conchos on it? You know what I mean?”

“Huh?”

“Silver decorative disks, engraved with designs. They attach to the leather of the belt. Was he?”

“Got me. Just a minute.” He was gone more than a minute. Paul came toward the car, worry lines etching his usually smooth forehead.

“Hey,” Tustin said into the phone. Nina held her breath. “Sorry, I don’t remember. Wish had on that denim jacket.”

“What about Danny?”

“He had that long-sleeved cammy jacket buttoned up pretty well.”

She punched off. “I need to call Sandy,” she told Paul. “It could be Danny.”

“Don’t tell her that. Just tell her we’re on it.”

“You’re not convinced?”

“We ought to wait until a final identification is made before we give Sandy hope that it isn’t Wish.”

“Where to now?” Nina said as she dialed Sandy’s number.

“Home. Regroup. We’re only human.”

“And we try to reach Danny again?”

“Right.”