So they’d tracked Nidia down, but before they could move, I’d come and gotten her. That had forced their hand. Almost on the fly, they’d put together their plan to kidnap Herlinda and find out where Nidia and I were going.
That worried me more than anything else. These guys could think on their feet. The way they’d extracted Herlinda from her house had been almost surgical, and that had been their Night at the Improv.
This was where I should have been saying, Imagine what they could do with a little lead time, but I didn’t have to imagine. I’d seen it, in the tunnel.
I didn’t learn anything else useful that day.
Serena called me and told me that no one had a line on Nidia’s cousin Lara Cortez, and that Nidia’s family was somewhere in California’s vast agricultural-worker community. That could have meant picking strawberries near Santa Maria or garlic in Gilroy. Though I would have liked to talk to them, when I thought about what had happened to Herlinda Lopez, I was glad Nidia’s family weren’t anywhere they could easily be found.
twenty-two
West Point prides itself on being a four-year university with a broad, well-rounded curriculum. But it’s also very much an Army post, and from your first day there, you’re a soldier.
That was why, when I surfaced from BART and walked up onto the campus of UC Berkeley the next day, I stopped for a moment to look around at the student body all around me. I’d gone to college in a sea of cadet gray, and after all this time, the sight of a civilian student body gave me culture shock. Some wore jeans and Cal-logo T-shirts or caps, like the model students in a course catalog, but many more wore clothing as diverse as costumes: motorcycle boots, skater motley, Buddy Holly glasses, Afros, Birkenstocks, minidresses. Some wore tank tops and cutoffs that showed amazing amounts of skin; others were swathed almost head to foot in flowing ethnic prints. They drank lattes on the steps of Dwinelle Hall and Web-surfed on their phones. I’d nearly forgotten that students lived this way.
I wondered what they would do if they knew the student with the blond ponytail and the birthmark on her face had a loaded SIG Sauer in her backpack.
I was here to look for an obituary, that of the mathematician whom Nidia had cared for until his death. I didn’t have a name, except Adriano, which Nidia might have Spanicized from Adrian. That would have made searching the Chronicle’s obits difficult. And if this guy hadn’t done anything of real note, his death might not have made the Chronicle at all. I was fairly certain, though, that the university paper would have covered it.
So that was how I ended up outside the offices of the mathematics department, looking at a glass case on the wall where news and events were posted. There it was, an obituary for Adrian Skouras. Both the Daily Californian and the Chronicle story were posted. When I saw the accompanying photo, I had a dawning sense of understanding.
All along, I’d made a sloppy assumption: that a professor dying of cancer would have been a white-haired old man. But cancer is indiscriminate. Adrian Skouras had died at thirty-three. The photo both papers used had probably been taken years before that. The young man the camera had captured had almost sensual features-he was obviously olive-complected, though the photo was black-and-white, and he had dark curly hair and deep-set eyes. The effect, though, was offset by the thin sharpness of his face and his wire-rim eyeglasses, and like many people unused to attention, his smile for the camera was almost a wince.
I read both obituaries. They didn’t disagree on any points. Adrian Skouras had been born and raised in San Francisco and had been fascinated with math and science at a young age. He’d graduated high school at fifteen and gone back east to study at Princeton. In his second year, he’d become a star in the world of mathematics by discovering a rare subspecies of prime number, now called a “Skouras prime,” the definition of which went over my head. After that, he’d gone overseas to Oxford for graduate work, then come home to settle at Berkeley, working among some of the leading lights in the field.
He had never married and left no children behind. Associates said that Skouras had been “married to his work, in the best possible way,” in the words of one. “When he was working on something that fascinated him, which was almost all the time, he’d forget to eat, much less to get out and have a social life. But if you knew him, you wouldn’t have any doubt that he was completely fulfilled.”
The best work of his career was undoubtedly ahead of him, they said, if only cancer had not stolen a fine mind from the world.
His father, Anton Skouras, was a San Francisco businessman and philanthropist; one brother, Milos, had preceded Adrian in death five years earlier. In lieu of flowers, donations could be made to the American Cancer Society.
I looked at his photo again. Adrian Skouras appeared shy, gentle, unsettled by the photographer’s attention, and impatient to step back into academic anonymity. This was no cliché-the graybeard professor. This was a real person. Looking at him, I thought I knew what happened between this man and Nidia Hernandez.
According to his colleagues, Adrian had been totally satisfied as a bachelor, living his life on the higher plane of numbers and ideas. Of course, that was what anyone would want to think about a newly dead colleague. Between the lines, Adrian had likely been one of those geniuses who would have been able to converse easily with Newton and Sagan-and hard-pressed to make small talk with real people at a cocktail party or a university mixer. Adrian had probably spent his weekend nights in the company of ideas, not women. Maybe, as his colleagues wanted to think, he had been satisfied with that. And then he got cancer, and his whole life became about the survival rate.
But Adrian had had just a little time, time he’d spent with a very lovely nineteen-year-old living in his house, a girl who had the same otherworldliness about her. He’d denied himself simple human warmth and pleasure for too long; she was recovering from a terrible loss. Put two people like that in close proximity alone for too long, and anyone could tell you the result.
What if that little potbelly she’d had, the one I’d assumed was puppy fat, wasn’t? What if it had been a baby, and Nidia had been going to Mexico to have her child away from the eyes of anyone who knew her?
It was a theory that made sense until the entrance of the seven armed men. That changed things. It said that Nidia hadn’t run to Mexico to escape gossip and character assassination. She’d foreseen the approach of the men in the tunnel, whoever they were. And she’d warned her family, who’d effectively disappeared into the migrant worker community, for once using poverty and anonymity to their benefit. Nidia could have gone with them, except that if these guys were determined to find her, that wouldn’t have been enough. A beautiful green-eyed redhead, and, if my theory was correct, increasingly pregnant? Anywhere she went, people would have remembered her.
So Nidia had 911’d cousin Lara, and Lara had called Serena, playing the card of loyal dead soldier Teaser. And Serena had called me, and that was how the only person without a stake in the matter nearly bled out in the mountains of Mexico.
I walked out into the midday sunlight. It wasn’t going to help me to talk to people who’d known Adrian in the math department. Whatever there had been in Adrian’s life that had involved him with men like the guys in the tunnel, his colleagues weren’t going to know about it. I needed the story behind the obituary, the whispers that had never made it to print.