Silencer (11 page)

‘Well,' she said, and shrugged.

‘You sneaked off at dawn without saying where you were going. I can guess anyway.'

Amanda opened a closet door, rummaged around and said, ‘I thought we had some Grahams here. Polly might want a cracker.'

‘Unworthy scold,' Rhees said.

Amanda slammed the closet door shut. ‘She's young and she's like some goddess. Her hair goes all the way down to her ass, for Christ's sake. What planet's she from?'

‘Come here.' Rhees spread his arms and Amanda fell into them and shut her eyes. Rhees, her harbour. ‘Polly's mostly bubbles, you're more my ideal.'

‘How can I be anybody's ideal? Look at me.'

‘You get better all the time, Amanda. I have you up on a pedestal.'

‘I'm too heavy for your pedestal. I feel overweight and sluggish. And this.' She tugged at her brown hair, letting it slide through her fingers. ‘They didn't find Isabel, John. They looked and they looked.'

‘Maybe …' he said.

‘Maybe what?'

‘She's still out there somewhere.'

Amanda remembered the grains of dirt damp with blood. Rhees was trying to force open a little window of optimism in the face of evidence to the contrary. He was good at finding silver linings in the gloom. Please God let this be one of those silver linings. Let her be alive.

Rhees kissed her forehead. ‘I'll give Polly the benefit of my wisdom, which should take all of seven or eight minutes, then we're out of here and heading north. How does that sound?' He moved towards the kitchen door. ‘Before I forget, some reporter from the
Phoenix Gazette
phoned. Wanted to know if you had anything to add to the story of the Galindez discovery.'

‘I hope you told him I was incommunicado.'

‘My lips were sealed.'

Rhees left the kitchen.

Amanda's head hurt and she had an acid sensation in her stomach and a general sense of malaise, a weakening inside, as if her immune system was flagging. She looked out into the backyard. Neglected grass grew long in ragged brown stalks and butterflies flapped here and there, settling where the mood took them.

She watched for a time. She thought about Isabel. She couldn't cancel the thought out. She couldn't flutter away from it like one of those mercurial butterflies.

She walked into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, ransacked through a collection of bottles. Say hello to the old gang: ginseng, zinc capsules, iron, the whole spectrum of B-vitamins, garlic tabs, fortified C, some kind of painkiller. It was a regular health arsenal. She scooped out pills and downed them with water.

Then she put her hand in the hip pocket of her jeans and took out Isabel Sanchez's plastic hair-clasp and studied it. It caught the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window. There were people in the world reputed to be able to locate buried corpses by caressing their possessions, but she wasn't one of them.

She had a mechanic's eye, not a mystic's.

She walked up and down the kitchen for a time before she dialled Directory Assistance, and wrote down the number she was given by the operator. Then she dialled it.

A man answered and introduced himself as Donald Scarfe.

She said, ‘Don, this is Amanda Scholes.'

‘We-ell, Amanda,' Scarfe said, ‘it's been an age. What can I do you for?'

‘I need to come see you.'

Scarfe said, ‘You know the way.'

Amanda hung up. She left the kitchen by the back door, so that Rhees wouldn't see her. He wasn't going to be overjoyed about this stunt.

20

The window of Donald Scarfe's office in the Florence facility looked out over a hazy view of desert mountains in the distance. There was another vista directly below: the compound, watch-towers, barbed wire, high walls.

The compound was empty. Amanda glanced down, seeing shadows pressed against concrete. The watch-towers made her uneasy. Guards in shadows with guns. The penitentiary was a volatile place, heavy with violent potential.

‘So you think he contracted out a killing,' Scarfe said.

‘Everything points that way, Don.'

Donald Scarfe was tall and gaunt and his face had been hammered and dried by too much sunlight. He'd always reminded Amanda of a weathered fence post at the edge of a dry prairie. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a turquoise bola necktie, and looked more like somebody's idea of a middle-aged rodeo rider than an associate warden of a prison.

Amanda walked to the water-cooler in the corner of Scarfe's office and filled a dixie cup. She drank hastily. ‘Mind if I smoke?'

Scarfe pointed to a no-smoking sign. ‘Sorry.'

‘It's OK. More and more I feel like a leper anyway.' She crushed the dixie cup and dropped it inside a waste-basket. She looked at Scarfe for a time. She'd met him at various seminars on penal policy and law-enforcement strategies several times during the last few years, and she'd liked his attitude, which was liberal, compared to the prevailing hard-assed positions concerning the treatment of prisoners. Stick them in goddam tents and let them sweat and feed them pig slop.

‘I don't have any objection to this visit,' he said. ‘I don't know what you expect to come of it, that's all.'

‘I'm not anticipating a confession,' she said.

‘So what are you expecting?'

‘I don't know,' she said.

‘You think you can tune into him, is that it?'

‘I'm not sure, Don. Has anybody been to see him recently? Any visitors?'

‘He doesn't get visitors, Amanda.'

Amanda looked at her watch. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. She remembered what Willie Drumm had said.
We're gonna have US marshals from the Program coming in droves. Probably guys from Justice
. So why hadn't anyone arrived yet? Bascombe's first message to Arlington, concerning Galindez, had gone out twenty-four hours ago. His second must have been received around noon today Eastern Time. And what had Bascombe himself said?
Of course they'd act fast
.

Bureaucrats. They doodled while cities caught fire. They shuffled papers as volcanoes erupted. Perhaps they were still studying Bascombe's messages. Or perhaps somebody was in transit even now. She had no way of knowing.

‘Are you up for this?' Scarfe asked. ‘You look a little out of sorts.'

‘It was a hot drive down here,' she said.

Scarfe shrugged and picked up one of the two telephones on his desk. He pressed a button and spoke to somebody. ‘Chuck. Escort Prisoner eight eight sixty around to the interview room, would you? I'm bringing along a visitor. I want an armed guard in the room for the duration.'

Scarfe put down the telephone. He opened a drawer and took out a small laminated badge with the word ‘Visitor' on it. She pinned it to her shirt.

‘I'll walk with you,' Scarfe said. ‘I ought to warn you though. He's been trouble from the start. He attacked another inmate with a screwdriver, which of course can't be proved because nobody saw anything. Punctured one of the guy's lungs.'

‘He's a charmer,' she said.

‘And last week he torched another guy's cell. He thought it was funny.'

‘Offbeat sense of humour.'

‘Black, anyway. I guess if you're living where he's living, nothing matters a damn in the end.'

They left the office and stepped into a long chilled corridor. Halfway down, she stopped. She was approaching a transition here, a crossroads, choices. She had only to change her mind, turn round, walk back to the car, drive away and leave things be.

She moved forward.

The bridge was crossed and burning behind her and the fumes had a bitter-sweet smell, and she thought she detected in the smoke the strange scent of her apprehension at the idea of being in the company of Prisoner 8860.

21

The interview room, a table and a few chairs and a one-way observation window, smelled of floorwax. Overhead was a solitary fluorescent strip. Amanda, glad to see an ashtray on the table, lit a cigarette at once.

The door opened and Victor Sanchez, accompanied by an armed guard, a bullet-headed man with a long jaw, was led inside. The guard took up a position in the corner. Sanchez, with a slow motion imposed upon him by his ankle-shackles, shuffled to a chair and sat facing Amanda.

‘The lady prosecutor,' he said. ‘Life's all surprises.'

He was dressed in loose prison garb. He was sleek, muscular, handsome, more than 6 feet tall. He had long eyelashes that curled, and eyes the colour of a midnight with no moon. Girls would swoon and drown in those eyes. Isabel had.

‘Smoke?' Amanda pushed the pack across the table. Her hand shook a little and she tried to still it.

‘I conquered the habit,' he said. ‘This a social visit or what?'

‘No, not social.' Isabel had often referred to her former husband as Ángel, pronounced Anyel. It was a stretch to think of Sanchez as
anyelic
. He was spun out of darkness, a creature of vicious whim. If he had wings, they took him on flights into dismal regions of his own making. Celestial destinations weren't on Ángel's itinerary.

Amanda glanced at the guard, whose name tag identified him as Holland E. He was staring at a bare wall.

‘How's prison life?' she asked.

‘It's a ball. We got some real fuckwits there. Real clowns.' Sanchez gave her his withering look. She was determined to hold the gaze and not flinch, even though she was thinking about the border guards Sanchez had executed. He'd made them kneel and then shot them directly into their open mouths. Galindez, whose evasive manner in court had made him a less plausible witness than Isabel, had testified to this. Sanchez had ordered the guards to pray for mercy, then slaughtered them anyway.
Like a coupla lambs. Bleeding all over the place
.

‘I guess it's not easy stuck in here,' she said. ‘You appealing against the sentence?'

‘I'm appealing any way you look at it.' He was amused. His smile was lethal. The sculpted body and the bronze skin were just extra tinsel on the Christmas tree. In another reality he might have been a male model of the Latin variety, white linen suit and two-tone shoes, strutting his stuff on the catwalk.

‘What you here for anyway?' he asked. ‘Talk about my sentence? Hey, maybe you got a pardon tucked in your pocket. You got a chit from the Governor or what?'

‘No pardon, Victor. Just some loose ends.'

‘I'm a loose end, huh?'

‘Tell me how you got to them.'

‘Got to who? You talk in puzzles, lady.'

‘You don't have any idea what I'm driving at, I suppose.'

Sanchez laid a hand flat on his thigh. ‘I like puzzles. I got this book with all these scrambled words in them and stuff, also join the dots and get a fucking donkey or eagle. I do crosswords. It gets pretty damn thrilling, I gotta say.'

‘It's not crosswords I have in mind,' she said.

‘You know what I think of you?'

Amanda shook her head. ‘I don't read minds.'

Sanchez moved the hand on his thigh. ‘Kinda proper, kinda aloof. But hot in the sack. Whooeee,' and he waved his hand loosely, as if his fingertips had been scalded.

‘Games, Victor. I'm not playing.'

‘What are you? Fortysomethin'? Late thirties? A lady in prime time, ripe and ready for plucking.'

‘Is this the bit where you grab your crotch?' she asked.

‘I watched you in court. You gave me these looks.'

‘Chief among them was contempt.'

‘Contempt my ass.'

‘This may come as a surprise to you, but I don't see you as God's gift.'

‘Know how many women I fucked in my life? Running close to fifteen hundred.'

‘I bet you got testimonial letters from all of them.'

‘I got no complaints. Most came back for more of the same, and some screamed with pleasure,' he said.

‘Except when you were cutting off their nipples, I guess.'

Sanchez made a snorting sound. ‘You believe that cunt's story? She walks into court like a Madonna, and she sits there and every time she opens her mouth out comes another lie.'

‘She blackened your character, huh?'

‘She fucking charbroiled me,' he said.

Amanda was silent a moment. Sanchez had led her on a detour and she'd followed. She was being drawn into areas of no relevance. She said, ‘Let's backtrack, Victor.'

‘You were talking puzzles, I remember.'

‘You were the one talking puzzles. I was asking you how you did it.'

‘I heard that tune already. Did what?'

‘Galindez. Your ex-wife. You know what I'm talking about.'

‘Pair of fucking vipers,' he said.

‘How did you get to them, Victor?'

‘Get to them how?'

‘How did you have them killed?'

Sanchez pushed his chair back. ‘Killed? You're saying they're dead?'

‘Galindez for sure. He was shot through the heart. Isabel maybe. That's what I'm saying.'

Sanchez tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. He moved his feet and the shackles rattled. He laughed, then he slumped back in his chair and his arms dangled at his sides and he looked serious. ‘How do you mean Isabel maybe?'

‘Just what I said. Isabel maybe.'

‘Explain that to me.'

‘Your people might have slipped up with her, I don't know yet.' A slim prospect, she thought, but sometimes you grabbed at such things because you wanted to hold on to a belief, no matter how marginal.

‘My people? Meaning what?'

‘The guys you hired. How did you arrange it? That's what I want to know.'

‘Arrange it? That what you think?'

‘That's my general inclination, Victor.'

‘Look, lady, I sit in a cell and I do these puzzles in the book I got. It's a confined life.'

‘Somehow you got a message to somebody,' she said.