VII
So far, Hadley hadn't found much in common between her old job guarding cons and her new job policing them, but working the crime scene was just like watching the cell block during open hour: a combination of detailed observation and mind-numbing boredom. Under Van Alstyne's direction, she squatted in the grass and scrub brush, parting saplings and peering under dock leaves for some bit of evidence. She worked her way up to where the chief stood, surmounting a heavily wooded rise. He did a 360, taking in the thick forest behind them and the fields spreading out below.
"Who the hell was this guy?" She didn't think he was speaking to her. "Damn, I want a look at the lost-and-missing file."
Across the stream, at the top of the bluff, the state CSI van had pulled in. A figure emerged from the driver's side. The chief pointed. "Knox, get over there and help Morin with his gear."
She thudded down the hill, picked her way across the stream, and climbed up to the van. Sergeant Morin of the NYSPD shook her hand, looked at her chest, stuttered a hello, and had her take one end of a footlocker-sized box. They staggered down to the stream, heels digging into the crumbling earth, the flesh at the back of Hadley's neck creeping and itching the closer they got to the body.
"Do you know if anybody moved him?" Morin asked.
Her eyes involuntarily went to the John Doe. "The chief thinks he might have rolled…" Her voice trailed off.
Dr. Scheeler glanced up at her. "Uh-oh," he said.
"No." She shook her head. "It's not that. His hand." She could only see one. The other was rubber-banded inside a brown paper bag. "The tattoos. The symbols on his fingers. I saw two guys with the same tattoo. Last night."
VIII
The barn was on the edge of a pasture ringed with woods, the last things left, he guessed, from a long-ago homestead that hadn't worked out. From his side, a half-hidden trail led down the mountain, over the stream, and onto the McGeochs' land. On her side, a rutted sheep-churned path broad enough to admit a hay cart. Leading, he guessed, to her home.
The barn stood beside an oval fire pond levied up around a creek some long-ago summer. From inside the open doorway, Amado watched the sluggish trickle, water in through one bank, out through the other.
The first time Isobel had brought him here had been a few hours before dawn, the night they met. She had left him there, to sleep away the morning, and when she'd returned that afternoon, they had found a fox skeleton against the cut-stone foundation. The skull, smooth and yellow-white, was their signal. Right now, it hung on a nail on the pasture-side door, letting her know, if she saw it, that he was here. Waiting for her.
It was a pole barn, straight up and down, designed for one thing: to store hay against the hard, long winter. The doorways, front and back, were set hay-wagon high, and he had to haul himself up to the edge and then climb a stack of square bales before getting to his feet. Then he could either climb again, to sit on one of the massive beams transversing the barn, or spread out the quilt she had left on the mound of loose hay in the corner. He usually chose the beam or sat cross-legged on the hard bales. The soft mow and the quilt were too casual, too… sexual. No need to chase temptation.
This had been her special place before she had ever shown it to him. She had a crate filled with books, CDs, a CD player, and water bottles. He knew she smoked here, too, though she never did so in front of him; there was a lingering smell of marijuana above the green and dusty scent of the new and old hay.
He balanced on the beam and peeked through the small off-center window that looked out over the pasture. His rib cage lifted, expanded, when he spotted her making her way across the field, stepping over sheep droppings and swishing at early daisies. It was stupid, he knew. Stupid and dangerous. At home, if she had been one of them, he could have courted her, met her brothers, taken her to his parents' home. Here, they couldn't even be seen together.
No, it was more than that. Here, he couldn't let himself think about her in that way. She was anglo, a North American, part of a family that owned, as near as he could tell from their halting conversations, an entire mountain and the rolling farmlands around it. And she was tangled in darkness and violence. If he hadn't gotten that message on the night they met, he would have figured it out today, when Raul had stumbled across a murdered man halfway between her property and the McGeochs'. No. She was out of bounds, for more reasons than he could count.
It wasn't as if she were a great beauty. She was too pale, the bones in her face too square. It was, he guessed, because she reminded him of girls he had admired at home. She was rounded, womanly, but tough. A hard worker. Quick to smile, but not cheap and available, like so many of the women up north. And she needed him, needed his strength, in some way he hadn't yet identified.
She vanished from his line of sight, to reappear in a moment at the back door, swinging a paper sack up onto the hay before lifting herself over the edge of the doorway. "Amado?" She blinked in the dimmed light. "I have lunch. Um, la comida."
He dropped down from the beam. "Oh!" She clapped her hand to her chest and said something in English too rapid for him to follow. He held his hand to his ear. "Eh?" he said.
"Eh?" She laughed.
"Lunch," he said. "I am hungry."
"¿Yo hambre?"
"Tengo hambre," he corrected. He grabbed the quilt and snapped it open, letting it float down on the hay bales to make a picnic cloth. She opened the sack and removed paper napkins and sandwiches and corn chips and apples. They sat on opposite sides. Not touching. The sandwich was delicious, real bread stuffed thick with meat and cheese. He wondered if she had made it for him or taken one that was meant for another of her family. He wondered if she felt the high, hard bars that kept them apart. He wondered what she thought of him when she was alone.
"Por qué… you… here now?" she said, around a handful of corn chips. "No work por la día?"
"Hide," he said. He swallowed the last of his sandwich. He didn't know if he was bringing trouble to her door, or if he was helping her avoid it, but he had to tell her about the dead man. It was too near to her land and too soon after her flight through the woods to be coincidental.
He spoke in Spanish, wanting to tell the whole story before trying to pick out the words and concepts he could convey to her in English. He told her about the smell, and the way it seemed to linger inside his nostrils all the way back to the barnyard. He told her about the surprise of seeing his brother Octavio's lady priest, and Mrs. McGeoch's near collapse, and about rounding up the men-again-and having to deal with their whining about the heat and boredom of the ancient farmhouse they bunked in. He told her about hiding in the woods until the last possible moment, watching the black truck roll up and disgorge two policía.