Extreme Denial (22 page)

“Well, I think it’s a complication more than a help,” Sanchez said.

“Damn it, what did you learn?” Decker stepped closer. “What are you trying to hide from me?”

“Down on Fort Connor Lane, the street below and behind these houses, a woman was looking for a lost dog. Just before the explosions, she was startled by someone hurrying down through the trees and bushes on the slope.”

“Whoever set off the bombs,” Decker said. “Does the woman remember well enough to provide a description?”

“Yes. The person she saw was another woman.”

Decker felt as if he’d been jabbed.

“Carrying a suitcase,” the policeman said.

“What?”

“Attractive, in her early thirties, with long auburn hair, wearing jeans and a pullover. Her right arm was under the pullover, as if the arm had been injured.”

Decker put a hand against the paramedic truck. The ground seemed to shift. He felt dizzy, his legs unsteady, his sanity tilting. “But you just described ...”

“Beth Dwyer. That’s right,” Sanchez said. “The woman looking for her dog says there was a car parked on Fort Connor Lane. A man was inside. When he saw the woman with the suitcase, he hurried out, put her suitcase in the trunk, and helped her into the car. That’s when the bombs went off, when they were driving away.”

“I don’t understand,” Decker said. “This doesn’t make sense. How could ...?”

A fireman came over, taking his wide-brimmed metal hat off, dripping sweat from his soot-smeared face, reaching for a bottle of water a paramedic offered him. “There’s still no sign of a victim,” he told Esperanza.

Decker’s heartbeat became sickeningly fast. His mind swirled. “But why would ...? Beth’s
alive
? What was she doing on the slope? Who the hell was in the car?”

2

It seemed impossible. Beth hadn’t been killed! A welter of relief and hope coursed through him. But so did confusion and dismay about her mystifying behavior.

“How did you meet Beth Dwyer?” Esperanza asked. They faced each other in Decker’s living room.

“She came to my office. She wanted to buy a house.” This can’t be happening, Decker thought, slumping on his sofa. “When was this?”

“Two months ago. In July.” I’m losing my mind, Decker thought.

“Was she local?”

“No.”

“Where did she come from?”

“Back east.” Decker’s headache was excruciating.

“Which city?”

“Some place outside New York.”

“Why did she move to Santa Fe?”

“Her husband died in January. Cancer. She wanted to get away from bad memories, to start a new life.” Just as
I
wanted to start a new life, Decker thought.

“This is an expensive district,” Esperanza said. “How could she afford to buy her house?”

“Her husband had a sizable life-insurance policy.”

“Must have been hefty. What was his occupation?”

“I don’t know.”

Esperanza looked confused. “I assumed you were intimate.”

“Yes.”

“And yet there are several basic things about her past that you don’t know.”

“I didn’t want to ask too many questions,” Decker said. “With her husband dead less than a year, I didn’t want to raise disturbing memories.”

“Such as where she used to live? How disturbing would that have been for her to tell you?”

“I just didn’t think to ask.” It was another lie. Decker knew exactly why he hadn’t asked. In his former life, he had made it his business to elicit every possible scrap of personal information from people he had just met, never knowing when that information might prove useful. But from the moment he had arrived in Santa Fe, beginning his new life, reinventing himself, he had been determined to shut out his former calculating ways.

“Was the husband’s insurance policy large enough to support her after she bought the house next door to you?”

“She earned a living as an artist,” Decker said.

“Oh? What gallery?”

“In New York.”

“But what name?”

“I don’t know,” Decker repeated.

“Imagine that.”

“I met the man who runs the gallery. He came to visit. His name is Dale Hawkins.”

“When was this?”

“Thursday. The first of September.”

“How can you be so specific?”

“It was only nine days ago. I remember because that was the day Beth closed the deal on her house.” But Decker had another reason for remembering so quickly—that night, he and Beth had first made love. Beth! he mentally screamed. What in God’s name is going on? Why were you running down the slope in back of your house? Who was the man waiting for you in the car?

“Mr. Decker.”

“I’m sorry. I...” Decker blinked, realizing that his attention had drifted, that Esperanza had continued speaking to him.

“You said someone with a remote-control detonator must have been watching the house.”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t that person set off the bombs when you were with Ms. Dwyer outside her house?”

“Unless I went inside, it wouldn’t have been one hundred percent certain that the bombs would have done the job.”

“So the spotter decided to wait until you left before setting off the bombs?” Esperanza asked. “Does that tactic make sense?”

Decker felt a chill.

“If you were the target,” Esperanza added.

“Beth
was the target?” Decker’s chill became so intense that it made him shiver. “You’re saying that this afternoon and last night, they weren’t after me?”

“She was obviously afraid of something. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been running down the back slope of her house.”

Decker’s face tingled. “They were after
Beth
? Jesus.” Nothing in his experience—not in military special operations, not in antiterrorist intelligence work—could compare with what he was going through. He had never felt so emotionally threatened. But then, until he came to Santa Fe, he had never put down his defensive mechanisms and allowed himself to be emotionally vulnerable.

“A while ago, you spoke about the radio frequencies used to set off bombs by remote control,” Esperanza said. “Where did you learn so much about how to blow up a building?” Decker wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy analyzing implications. For over a year, he had been in a state of denial, convinced that all he needed to be content were a total unsuspicious openness to the present and an equally total rejection of the calculating habits of his former life. But now he embraced those habits with a resolution that startled him. He picked up the telephone book, found the listing he wanted, and urgently pressed numbers.

“Mr. Decker, what are you doing?”

“Phoning St. Vincent’s Hospital.”

Esperanza looked baffled.

When a receptionist answered, Decker said, “Please put me through to whatever nurses’ station is responsible for room three one one six.”

When someone else answered, Decker said, “You had a gunshot victim, Beth Dwyer, who was just released. I’d like to speak to any of the nurses who took care of her.”

“One moment.”

Someone else picked up the phone. “Yes, I helped take care of Beth Dwyer,” a pleasant-voiced woman said. “Of course, I didn’t come on duty until seven. Other nurses would have taken care of her before that.”

“This is one of the police officers investigating her shooting.”

“Hey,” Esperanza demanded, “what do you think you’re doing?”

Decker held up a hand, gesturing for Esperanza to give him a chance. “Did she have any visitors?”

“Only a male friend of hers.”

That was probably me, Decker thought. But he was finished taking things for granted. “What did the man look like?”

“Tall, well-built, around forty.”

“Sandy hair?”

“As I remember. He was good looking in a rugged sort of way. I didn’t see anybody else.”

“What about phone calls?”

“Oh, she made plenty of those.”

“What?”

“She received several, too. The phone was ringing constantly for a while. If I was in her room, she wouldn’t speak to whoever was calling until I left.”

Decker’s chest felt heavy. “Thank you,” he managed to tell the nurse. “You’ve been very helpful.” Pensive, he set down the phone.

“What was
that
about?” Esperanza asked. “Do you know the penalty for impersonating a police officer?”

“Beth made and received several calls. But to my knowledge, I’m the only close friend she has in town. So who was she calling, and who was calling her?”

“If her calls were long distance and she didn’t reverse the charges, there’ll be a record of the numbers she called,” Esperanza said.

“Get it. But I have a suspicion the calls were local—that she was talking to the man who was waiting on Fort Connor Lane to pick her up. When I brought her some clothes so she’d have something to wear when she left the hospital, she told me she felt so grungy that she was embarrassed to get dressed in front of me. She asked me to wait outside in the corridor. Given her injury and the fact that she might have needed help, I thought it was an impractical time to be modest, but I let it go. Now it’s my guess she took the opportunity to make a final call to the man and tell him she was being released—to confirm what time he’d be waiting for her. But who the hell
was
he?”

In addition to Decker’s other confusing, overwhelming emotions—relief that Beth was alive, bewilderment about her behavior—a new one suddenly intruded: jealousy. Dear God, is it possible? he thought. Could Beth have had a secret lover? Could she have been seeing someone else all the time I knew her? Questions tumbled frantically through his mind. How would she have met him? Is he someone who followed her from back east? Someone from her past?

“The man who was waiting in the car—did the woman who saw him get a good-enough look to provide a description?” Decker asked.

“Sanchez would know.”

As Decker started toward the front door, in a rush to get outside to where Sanchez was guarding the house, the front door opened abruptly.

Sanchez appeared, startling Decker. “Two men who claim to be friends of yours want to see you.”

“Probably neighbors or people I work with. Tell them I’ll talk to them later. Listen, there’s something I need to ask you.”

“These men are very insistent,” Sanchez said. “They emphasized that they’re
old
friends of yours, very old friends. They say their names are Hal and Ben.”

3

“Hal and...?” Decker tried not to show his surprise. “Yes.” His reflexes tightened. “I know them. Let them in.”

Hal and Ben were the two operatives who had taken him into custody in the St. Regis lobby after his bitter resignation the previous year. They had questioned him about his motives, had finally decided that he wasn’t a threat to security, and had allowed him to proceed to the sanctuary of Santa Fe—with an implicit warning that his anger about what had happened in Rome had better not prompt him to tell tales out of school.

Now he had to assume that they were the investigators his former employer had sent in response to his emergency telephone call about the attack on his house. As they appeared in the doorway, Decker noted that they didn’t look much different from the last time he had seen them—trim and tall, about six feet, 190 pounds, close to Decker’s age, forty-one, their features hard, their eyes wary. They wore jackets, khaki pants, and sturdy street shoes. After scanning the living room, they assessed Esperanza and focused on Decker.

“What’s going on?” Hal asked. “Why the policeman outside? What happened down the road?”

“It’s a long story. This is Sergeant Esperanza. Sergeant, meet Hal Webber and Ben Eiseley.” The last names were fictitious, matching false identification that Decker knew they customarily carried. “We hung around with each other when I worked in Virginia. They told me they planned to come out this way one of these weekends, but I guess it slipped my mind that it was going to be Fiesta weekend.”

“Sure,” Esperanza said, obviously not buying the story. He shook hands with them, comparing their trim-hipped, strong-shouldered build to Decker’s similar physique. “Are these more real estate, salesmen who know about setting bombs off by remote control?”

Hal looked puzzled. “Bombs? Is that what happened next door? The place exploded?”

“Sergeant, would you give me a moment to be alone with my friends?” Decker started to guide Hal and Ben toward a door that led to a small barbecue area off the kitchen. “No,” Esperanza said.

Decker stopped and looked back at him. “Excuse me?”

“No. I
won’t
give you a moment to be alone with them!” Esperanza’s weathered face hardened. “From the start, you’ve been evasive and uncooperative. I won’t tolerate it any longer.”

“I thought you said you’d been asked by the FBI to stay away from the case.”

“The attack on your house. Not the explosions next door.”

“The FBI?” Ben asked, puzzled.

“Whatever you need to tell these men to bring them up to speed, you tell them in front of me,” Esperanza said. “Bring
me
up to speed.”

“The FBI?” Ben said again. “I don’t get it. What does the FBI have to do with this?”

“Sergeant, I really do need to speak to these men alone,” Decker said.

“I’ll arrest you.”

“On what charge? A good lawyer would have the charges dismissed by tonight,” Decker said. “At the very least, I’d be out on bail.”

“On Saturday of Fiesta weekend? Your lawyer would have a hell of a problem finding a judge to listen to him,” Esperanza said sharply. “You wouldn’t be out of jail until tomorrow, maybe Monday, and I don’t think you want to lose that much time. So pretend I’m not here. What do you want to tell these men?”

Time, Decker thought, anxious. I’ve got to start looking for Beth right away. I can’t afford to lose two days. Frantic, he felt tom between conflicting motives. Until now, he had been determined to protect his former employer from being implicated in the investigation, but other, more urgent priorities now insisted—he had to find Beth; he had to find out who wanted to kill her.

“I used to work for the U.S. government.”