“The people you’re talking about, Zeke, the events you’re talking about, don’t exist anymore,” Rory said as gently as she could. “There’s no shame in letting go of a pursuit that ended so many years ago. No shame—.”
Zeke was on his feet, glaring down at her, red-hot rage burning in his eyes. His reaction was so volatile, so unexpected, that she had to fight the urge to shrink back from him.
“Don’t you try tellin’ me what’s shameful and what’s not,” he seethed.
Rory rose and stood toe to toe with him. “You need to back away from me and calm down,” she said in the steely, measured tone she rarely needed to use in her capacity as a police sketch artist.
Zeke didn’t move. “I’m thinkin’ I need some ground rules of my own,” he said, anger still flashing like heat lightning in his eyes. “For starters, don’t you go meddlin’ in things that don’t concern you,
Aurora
. And don’t you ever talk down to me like I was your dotty old grandpappy.”
Before Rory could open her mouth to respond, he was gone.
“Disappearing is a great way to win an argument!” she shouted into the empty room. “And stop calling me Aurora!”
1878
The Arizona Territory
F
ive men drew their horses up short beneath an outcropping of rock that provided a small oasis from the withering glare of the Sonoran sun. The horses were blowing hard, lather rising on their flanks and sides like foam rising on a beach at high tide. Around them an army of saguaro cacti stretched across the desert scrub to the horizon, their limbed shadows too narrow to provide shade for all but the smallest creatures. The riders clothes stuck to their bodies in puddles of sweat, and their deep brimmed hats, broken and stained from past labors, slouched on their heads as if deflated by the heat. A tin star, dulled by layers of grit and dust, marked the only lawman in the group.
“There’s a creek a couple miles west,” the marshal said, plucking the bandana from around his neck and using it to mop the sweat from his forehead. “The horses won’t get much farther without water.”
“What makes you think that creek ain’t dried up like the rest of ’em?” one of the other men grunted.
Before the marshal could answer, the smallest man in the group stood up in his stirrups. The proprietor of Jensen’s Mercantile sat a horse as well as any of them, but he never seemed as comfortable in the saddle as he did behind the counter of his store.
“I still say Drummond here’s got us headed in the wrong direction,” he said, a tight desperation in his voice and eyes. “I’d bet my life Trask’s taken her to Goose Flats. It’s the kind of place that suits a man like him. Silver fever, guns and whores. The kind of place where people won’t pay him no mind.” He looked around at the other men. “I’m heading back that way. Who’s coming with me?”
“Hold on, Frank, just hold on,” the marshal said. “You all saw the tracks headed this way. You never saw any doublin’ back, did you?”
There was a moment of silence as they all chewed on that thought. “Those tracks played out more than an hour ago,” Jensen came back. “Ground around here’s so dry, it just won’t hang on to tracks for long.” This met with a chorus of grumbled agreement.
“I’m going to Goose Flats,” he added with finality. “The rest of you can come with me or not.” He wheeled his horse around and dug in his spurs. One by one the others turned to follow him, leaving Ezekiel Drummond alone in the shade. Muttering about fools and idiots, he retied the bandana around his neck and continued westward alone.
It was late afternoon by the time he reached the creek. An hour earlier, he’d given his horse the last of the water from his canteen, even though he knew the chestnut would slop more of it out of his cupped hand than he swallowed. So when he saw that the creek still carried a few inches of spring runoff, he closed his eyes for a moment and said a quick “thank you” to whatever angel was watching over them.
Once he and the horse had quenched their thirst, he filled up his two canteens and they set out again. They’d gone only a few yards when he pulled the chestnut up sharply and jumped down. A scrap of blue and white gingham was impaled on the needle of a barrel cactus off to his right. He tugged the fabric off, and clasping it in his fist, mounted the horse again. Eight-year-old Betsy Jensen had been wearing a blue and white gingham dress when she was abducted. His instincts hadn’t failed him. Somewhat heartened, he pressed on.
As darkness crowded daylight from the sky, he stopped at another small spring. His eleven-year-tenure as federal marshal for the southern Arizona Territory had etched in his head a pretty fine map of the region and it was serving him well this day.
Under any other circumstances he would have made camp there for the night, but the most he could do was allow the chestnut an hour’s rest before moving on. And even that was time they didn’t have. On the other hand, running the animal into the ground would only prove to be his undoing as well, since his own two feet were hardly adequate for the journey ahead. He unsaddled the horse and hand fed him the oats he’d brought along, since the desert scrub couldn’t provide any real nourishment for him.
The time passed with agonizing slowness. He checked his pocket watch often, squinting at the dial in the pale glow of the gibbous moon and wondering at times if it had stopped altogether. To distract himself, he took out the beef jerky he’d stowed in his saddle bag and gnawed off a piece. But he found that he had no stomach for food and ended up spitting the dried meat onto the desert floor.
Finally the hour passed. He hoisted the saddle back onto the horse. Surprised to feel the familiar weight again so soon, the animal did a little backward dance. But trusting the man, he quickly accommodated himself to the situation. Drummond promised him a full two days’ rest and an apple once their journey was over. The chestnut twitched his ears as if he were listening and seemed to move forward with a lighter step.
With only the moon to light the way, their progress was frustratingly slow and searching for tracks pointless. The marshal had no choice but to rely on gut instinct coupled with his years of experience crisscrossing the desert landscape. Trask most likely had a crude lair tucked away in the lee of a sandstone cliff or in a natural cave. A man kidnapped a little girl for only one of two reasons—to collect ransom or to satisfy some perverted pleasure. Since the Jensens were not people of great means, ransom wasn’t likely to be Trask’s purpose any more than it had been with the other girls he’d killed. As Drummond rode, he ran his hand over the vest pocket that now held the gingham fabric as well as his watch. It seemed like a talisman. He
was
going the right way. He
was
going to find her.
Weary as he was, he remained alert for movement of any kind, rattlers and scorpions being fellow travelers of the night. If the chestnut were bitten by either one, their trip would be over.
The first rays of dawn were peeking beneath the curtain of night when Drummond saw another piece of blue and white gingham sticking out from behind a good-sized boulder. Perhaps luck was with him after all. Had he passed this way any earlier, he would never have been able to distinguish the cloth from the other features of the desert. With a burst of renewed energy, he jumped down and ran over to it. What he saw when he came around the boulder caused him to sink to his knees. The breath left his body as if he’d been trampled by a herd of cattle.
Before him Betsy Jensen’s small body lay broken and battered. Drummond drew the child into his arms, cradling her, a cry of outrage caught deep in his throat.
Chapter 9
A
fter Zeke’s vanishing act, Rory stormed through the house, trying to whittle her own anger down to a manageable size. “How on earth is this insane arrangement ever going to work?” she muttered, circling through the first floor as if she were doing laps at a track meet. What could Mac have been thinking?
When she wasn’t feeling any calmer by her fourth pass through the entry, she grabbed the keys from her purse and stormed out of the house to vent her frustration outside. Having forgotten that the roads in the area formed a maze of sorts, she didn’t make it back to the house for forty-five minutes. By then she was winded and thirsty and feeling less self-righteous. At some point in her impromptu marathon, she’d started to realize that Zeke had not been entirely at fault. She’d pushed him too far under the guise of trying to be helpful, condemned him for overreacting when she had no way of knowing the true depth or nature of the pain he so clearly carried. She knew nothing about him beyond the brief words in Mac’s letter, and yet she’d fooled herself into thinking that she could judge him.
Once she was back inside, she called out to him in what she deemed a friendly, white-flag kind of tone. When there was no response, she tried again. Still no sign of him, no indication that he had even heard her. She wanted to apologize for her part in the argument, but she wasn’t going to apologize to an empty room.
She drank a cold glass of water without coming up for air. Then she heated a frozen mini pizza in the toaster oven and ate it standing over the sink, too unsettled to sit down. She followed that with half a pint of Chunky Monkey ice cream straight from the container, which somehow always tasted better that way. Her resolution to adopt a heart-healthy diet was failing miserably.
She tried calling Zeke’s name again later that evening as she clicked through all the channels that cable television had to offer—a couple hundred of them and not a single thing worth watching. At midnight she gave up on the television and on him. If he wanted to ignore her and stew in his anger, she couldn’t stop him. Unfortunately he had a distinct advantage over her. He could be watching her at any given moment, while she had no idea where he was or what he was doing. Like a suspect in an interrogation room, she felt as if she were on the wrong side of a giant one-way mirror. Well, she was not going to let him wage psychological warfare against her. It had been a long day and she was tired. She was going to bed. He could go about his haunting in whatever way he pleased.
Since she’d always slept in the guest room when she’d stayed overnight with Mac, she’d already decided to use that room until her new mattress arrived. She kicked off her shoes and slid between the covers without undressing. Zeke had promised to abide by her rules, but that had been before their argument. She couldn’t deal with that issue now. It would have to wait till morning. Right now all she wanted was the luxury of sleep. She closed her eyes and settled into the familiar comfort of the bed. But even as her muscles relaxed, her imagination kicked into overdrive and she couldn’t stop thinking about how far she was from the front door. She didn’t actually believe that Zeke would harm her, but lying there in the dark, the creative side of her brain was conjuring up one disturbing scenario after another.
At three a.m. she trudged down the stairs with her pillow tucked under her arm to try her luck on the living room couch. Although it wasn’t as comfortable as the bed in the guest room, it had the distinct advantage of being closer to the door. Only now she found herself constantly checking to make sure that Zeke hadn’t returned to occupy the chair across from her. She was on the verge of giving up and turning the television back on when exhaustion finally claimed her and pulled her into a deep but dream-tossed sleep.
As her eyes blinked open to the daylight, she made a mental note to buy some room-darkening shades in case she spent any more nights on the couch. She took a quick shower and changed her clothes. If the marshal was spying on her, he’d have himself a dandy show. She hoped it brought him a bushel of frustration.
Rory was ready for work two hours early, which was fine since she’d been wanting to take a look at the evidence in Gail Oberlin’s file at a time when she was less likely to be disturbed or questioned about her interest in it. That morning seemed like the perfect opportunity. Not only would she be glad to focus on something other than her enigmatic housemate, but she also knew that Jeremy was waiting anxiously for news about his sister’s death.
When she reached police headquarters, she bypassed the main building with its long, deep-set windows that had once seemed avant-garde and now just reminded her of an enormous accordion. She drove on until she reached the property unit where evidence from closed and inactive police files was stored. It was a large, featureless building with the charm of a concrete box. Due to the earliness of the hour and the fact that the repository wasn’t open to the public, the only car in the parking lot was a white and blue police cruiser. She pulled into the spot next to it and went inside.
The officer behind the desk was drinking coffee from a 7-Eleven cup and leafing through the newspaper. Since Rory didn’t know him, she produced her ID and badge. Once he’d checked them and she’d signed in, he buzzed her through the inner door.
She’d been there only a few times before, but it was as depressing as she remembered. Metal shelves reached from floor to ceiling on either side of the narrow aisles that stretched to the back wall of the repository. These were intersected by other aisles so that the layout was like a grid. Scarred wooden tables with mismatched chairs were situated at several of the intersections. Although the materials stored there were called files, what actually filled the shelves were storage boxes, each holding the evidence related to a single case. The paperwork that went with each closed case was stored in another facility out in West Hampton. To request a copy of those records required the filling out of paperwork as mandated by the Freedom of Information Act, followed by the inevitable wait associated with any bureaucratic transaction. Thankfully Mac had taken care of that before he’d passed away. A copy of the police report on Gail Oberlin was in the file that Rory already had. What she was interested in today was the evidence.
Since the boxes were arranged chronologically, with the oldest at the rear of the facility, Rory had no trouble finding the aisle marked “2008.” As she scanned the shelves for Gail’s name, it struck her that the place resembled a huge cemetery crypt with cardboard boxes instead of coffins, and names written in indelible marker instead of being etched in stone. In spite of the bright fluorescent lighting, the silence and stillness of the room only served to reinforce that perception, and she found herself thinking again about the murder of Marshal Ezekiel Drummond and wondering what had become of the evidence in that case. The odds were that it no longer existed; otherwise Mac would have found it. She shook her head as if that could dislodge the marshal from her mind.
He
was not the reason she was there.