The sky and space here were infinite beyond imagining, and the stillness and harsh beauty were profound. I knew from the guidebooks that the park encompassed nearly a million acres, conjoining portions of the Mojave Desert and the Colorado, a subdivision of the larger Sonoran. Its protected wilderness stretched east in a jagged shape for sixty miles, measuring roughly half as wide, flanked all around by half a dozen mountain passes. It was a fantastic place, where great stands of Joshua trees grew wild, armed with stiff, daggerlike leaves, some trees rising more than three stories high. As I sped through the deepening dusk, I saw endless stretches of creosote bush, bur sage, Mojave yucca, ocotillo cactus. Now and then outbreaks of golden cholla cacti, their nubby branches festooned with steely spikes, bunched up to form fabulous gardens on the gravelly desert floor. Granite domes and arches, ground smooth by centuries of winds, rose up in dramatic, hulking shapes that startled the eye, suggesting other worldly terrain. There was immense life out here—coyotes, jackrabbits, tarantulas, tortoises, iguanas, snakes, spadefoot toads. More than two hundred species of birds had been counted, including the buzzards that circled overhead by day searching for any unlucky creatures that had found the great forest of the mighty Joshua Tree too challenging. You could find arrowheads if you looked hard enough, and ancient Indian rock drawings, and sometimes a human skull bleached white by the merciless Sonoran sun. Out here, after dark, a stranger who was smart kept to the main road.
*
I flicked on my headlights as I skirted the park until I was pointed east again and could see the sparse lights from the little town of Yucca Valley. I slowed as I entered the city limits, then spotted the Flying Pegasus of Ned Romero’s retro Mobil station rising heavenward on fluttering neon wings. I waited for a truck to pass, then turned left and pulled in to find Romero underneath an old pickup on a raised rack in the double garage. He was a big man who passed gas unapologetically as he came out from under the car before waiting silently to hear what it was I wanted.
I told him his sister had sent me out for directions to the Farthing place, and without a word he went to the office and drew me a map on the back of a greasy old flyer. I bought a cold soft drink and had him fill the Mustang’s tank and check the radiator while I fished around in my pocket for coins so I could call Templeton.
I reached her at the newspaper, where she was putting her story together.
“I’ve just hung up with a police detective, Justice. He wants to talk to you.”
“Did he say why?”
“Randall Capri was found dead this morning.”
“Just what we need, another body.”
“The detective wasn’t taking it so lightly.”
“I imagine not.”
“Capri’s throat was slit from ear to ear. The detectives who took the call found your name and number on a scrap of paper beside the phone.”
I asked a couple more questions, didn’t learn much that was useful, then inquired about the interview Templeton had completed with Chucho Pernales. Over the phone, she replayed sections of the tape in which Chucho’s voice shook badly and was sometimes barely audible. Now and then, he stopped to gather himself or take a drink of water.
He spoke of growing homesick after a while, of starting to feel bad about being used sexually, handed from one of Dr. Miller’s clients to the next. When he’d been at the compound for a year, shortly after turning fourteen, he began to realize that boys were leaving the group as they got older, made trouble, or came down with one infection or another. Over the next year, as his voice changed and he moved toward his fifteenth birthday, Chucho began to sense a pattern: Boys always left the group as they reached a certain age, matured physically, or started to ask questions or make demands that Freddie Fuentes and Dr. Miller didn’t like. The boys who did that would simply disappear, replaced by new and younger ones.
On the tape, Chucho’s voice trembled:
“One night, I could not sleep so good. I was missing my mama and I did not want the other boys to hear me cry, because I am afraid Freddie Fuentes will find out and I get into trouble and I have to go away also. I do not have my own room yet, so I get up from my bed and go outside to make my tears, out into the big place you call the courtyard. It is late, in the month called March, with the big moon. While I am out there alone, I see the big doors open at the other end and two cars come in. One is the long black car that took Ricky away that night, the blond boy who is the favorite of Mandeville Slayton, the singer. The car is smashed in front, like it has been in a crash, an
accidente.
Dr. Miller, he gets out of the car and he bring Ricky out with him. The other car, the one behind, is the big, black car they use to take people away when they die, if they have enough money to pay for it.”
Templeton’s voice: “A funeral car, a hearse.”
Chucho again:
“
Sí,
I think that is what you call it. A woman I never see before get out of that car and they all go inside the building, the part where they tell us we must never go. I am afraid, but I think I should go and see if Ricky is OK, because maybe he is hurt from the
accidente.
So I go around the swimming pool and across the stones very quiet, staying where nobody can see me, not even the guard. I see a light go on in the window, and I go up the stairs to that place without making no noise. I hear funny music playing that I hear sometimes in old American movies, coming from the room where they have Ricky. Then I look through the door and I see something I never forget from my mind, not until the day I go to be with Jesus.”
Templeton: “What did you see, Chucho?”
Instead of more words, I heard Chucho choking down sobs. Templeton put the tape on fast-forward, until I heard Chucho speaking again in a frail voice.
“I see Ricky with his clothes off, bent over on the bed. I see Dr. Miller having Ricky like that and this woman kissing Dr. Miller while he do Ricky this way. Then I see her get a needle, like to give somebody a shot, and she make it ready with something from a little bottle. When Dr. Miller get all crazy from the sex, this woman, she stick the needle into Ricky, into his neck. Ricky, he get very wild for not very long and then he stop moving, while Dr. Miller keep having his way, going all crazy, pushing into Ricky and making noises like he is coming. And I turn and run out because I feel sick and I am so scared and do not know nothing I can do. I go back to my bed and I do not tell nobody what I see, and we do not see Ricky again, never no more.
“I think maybe they kill Ricky because he is in the
accidente
and maybe they are afraid that will get them in trouble. But also I think they do it because Ricky, he is almost fifteen and they do not need him no more. And I know I must get away, because I am older now also, like all the other boys who go away and we never see no more.”
Templeton: “How did you get away, Chucho?”
“One night, they take me and some other boys for a party at a big house somewhere in the city, and when they are not seeing me I go over the fence and run as fast as I can. I go to Hollywood, and I hustle for maybe five months, six months. I get money from the men for the sex so I can eat, pay for the room. Then one day I see Freddie Fuentes drive by in his car, and he look at me and he stop and get out and come running to get me. I am more fast than him and I get away. But I am scared, and I go back to Mexico and I stay there, because I know they kill me if they get me, they kill me for sure, for what I know.”
Templeton shut off the tape recorder.
“Heard enough, Justice?”
“They’re killing the boys, one by one.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“Anna Farthing’s cremating them at the mortuary in Riverside. Making them disappear without a trace.”
“Eliminating the witnesses. No muss, no fuss.”
A shudder swept through me like a cold wind.
“My God, she’s probably out at the compound right now with her brother, finishing off the last of them, since she realizes how much we must know.”
I heard Ned Romero slam the hood of the Mustang.
“The Farthing place is about ten minutes up the road.”
“No, Justice—it’s too dangerous.”
“Save your breath, Templeton. Finish your story, make your deadline.”
I gave her the location of the compound as precisely as I could, and suggested she use me as bait to get a sheriff’s helicopter in the air.
“If the detectives in L.A. want me so bad, they know where to find me. Tell them what’s going on out here. They can get in touch with the San Bernardino sheriff and send a chopper out. If the motor court at the compound is as big as Chucho says, they can probably set it down inside the walls.”
“How do
you
plan to get in?”
“I haven’t figured that one out yet.”
I hung up, paid Ned Romero for the gas, tipped him a fifty for the map he’d drawn, and told him not to lose it all at the card tables.
“No chance of that,” he said. “I play the slots.”
Deadpan, just like his sister. Then I was back on Highway 62, pressing hard on the gas, following his greasy map into a landscape that became darker and more deserted with each passing mile.
*
I’d just passed Twentynine Palms and saw no more lights ahead when twin beams appeared in my rearview mirror, maybe a mile back. They came on fast, but that’s not unusual out in the desert where speed laws have about as much clout as warnings not to drink and drive.
When the driver was right on top of me, and neither blinked his lights nor attempted to pass, I started to get concerned. Then he was so close on my tail that I was able to recognize an SUV behind me that looked uncomfortably familiar.
We began to replay the chase scenario we’d shared in the mountains between Montecito and Ojai, only this time I was driving a Mustang with a new paint job and polished chrome, and I was damned if I was going to let the bastard mess it up. I pushed the needle to 110 on the straightaways, lifting off with all four wheels over the humps, barely slowing on the curves, taking them as fast as I dared, watching my rearview mirror to see how the driver behind me handled the road at that kind of speed. Not well, according to the way he let his tires slide and overcorrected on a number of turns. SUVs are notoriously top heavy, and a couple of times, he nearly lost control.
Then I saw a turnout ahead, off the shoulder to the right, the kind that’s covered with gravel and that you don’t want to enter too fast. The terrain was only moderately hilly here, with gentle, undulating rises and falls, but enough that the embankments on that side created drops into washes and shallow ravines that could be lethal under the right conditions.
I slowed just enough to let the SUV catch me again, then swung toward the turnout at sixty, raising dust and kicking up pebbles. A moment before I would have plunged over the edge, I hit the brakes and swung the wheel hard, spinning a one-eighty on my worn tires and ending up pointed back toward Twentynine Palms. The top-heavy SUV shot past me, flipping as the brake lights flashed, before hurtling over the brink. A moment after that, I heard the crunch of metal against stone and heard a horn blast that didn’t stop.
The Mustang had stalled when I’d spun around, and I sat there a moment listening to the horn wail in the empty night. Then I switched the ignition back on, pulled around and safely off the road, leaving my blinkers on in case another driver happened by. I got out, found a flashlight under the seat, looked over into the rocky ravine. The SUV lay on its right side, its two left tires still spinning, its front end crumpled against a boulder almost as large as the vehicle itself. I scrambled over the side, following the beam of my flashlight down through the rocks and cacti.
The seat belt was unfastened, dangling uselessly on the driver’s side. The collision had propelled the driver like a cannon through the windshield, leaving shards of glass around the edges that were covered with blood and bits of flesh and clothing. Forty or fifty feet beyond the vehicle, my beam found the mangled figure of George Krytanos, or whatever his real name was. He was on his back, up against the base of a thick Joshua tree. I heard him moan, so I knew he was at least alive.
When I got to him, his eyes were open but not blinking. His face was a horrible, bloody mess, all of Dr. Delgado’s careful work gone to waste. He was completely still, except for his shredded lips.
“I can’t move.”
“Don’t try.”
His voice was weak, small, like that of a frightened child.
“I’m paralyzed, Mr. Justice. I was bad, and now I’m being punished.”
With the back of my hand, I touched his bloody face, and felt his skin already growing cool.
“I’ll go back to Twentynine Palms, George. I can call for help from there.”
“No, don’t go—please.”
“What then, George?”
“I have to talk to you, Mr. Justice.”
“What do you want to say?”
“I know it was wrong to try to hurt you. But I had to stop you. Mommy and Daddy said so. They told me you were going to write bad things about Mr. Preston. That you were going to say I did bad things. They said people would come and take the horses away from me to punish me.”