Swanburg shook his head. "Man, he was lucky that bullet in his neck stopped short of killing him."
"Nonsense, no luck at all," Connie said. "It was the will of God. Don't you think, Marlene?"
Marlene thought about how to answer. Her relationship with God had been improving of late, but it had taken a long downward turn before that and recovery was a long, slow process. She guessed that her current religiosity encompassed the reassuring rituals of the Catholic Church, but with a strong affinity for the nature-based spirituality of John Jojola. "I think that is as good a reason as any," she replied.
"Balderdash!" Swanburg replied. "As a scientist, it's as simple as somebody messed up-fortunately, I might add-at the bullet plant. It's nothing more than an equation: not enough force to move a certain amount of mass at a sufficient rate of speed to kill the man. Sorry, Marlene, your man was saved by physics, not mythology."
"How do you know that God didn't cause the machine at the plant to malfunction?" Connie countered.
"And that one very special bullet happened to end up in the clip of the assassin's gun in just the right order so that it would be the projectile that struck Butch in the neck, and not the one that passed through his leg?" Swanburg turned so that Marlene could see his face and rolled his eyes.
"God would know, he knows everything, that's what makes Him God instead of you, Jack Swanburg, and don't you dare roll those eyes again or I'll poke 'em out."
"Well, then, why not just stick out a big God finger and slow a sufficiently charged bullet?" Swanburg scoffed. "Why go through all that trouble starting at the plant and then selecting the correct bullet when the gun was being loaded?"
"My point exactly," Connie announced triumphantly. "God didn't need to cause the machine at the manufacturer to malfunction. Not unless that was part of the plan. But God works in mysterious ways, so who knows?"
"Ay-yai-yai," Swanburg cried out, wiping a plump hand over his hairy face. "See what sort of witchcraft and bah humbug I have to live with, Marlene?"
"For nearly fifty years, you old egghead," Connie retorted. "And I'm still trying to save your soul so that we can spend eternity together… What was that? Are you mumbling something under your breath again, Jack Swanburg?"
"No, my sweet," Jack replied innocently. "If converting to the Roman Catholic Church would assure me a spot next to you for all of time, I would confess my sins and, after I finished sometime in the next month, prostrate myself to the Holy See and become one of the pontiff's pious patrons. However, I am not yet convinced, though you are welcome to keep trying."
"And you better believe I will," Connie replied.
Marlene laughed, and when both Swanburgs turned with question marks on their faces, she explained. "Now I know how Butch and I sound when we're together."
Dropping Connie off at a local shopping mall-"I have no interest in Jack's macabre hobby, however noble it might be"-the other two continued to the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. Pulling into the nearly empty parking lot, Marlene smiled when she saw the truck with the New Mexico license plate.
Lucy and Ned made it, she thought. She hadn't seen her daughter since Christmas. She hoped that she'd be able to convince Lucy to return to Idaho with her so they could spend a little time together. Ned, too, if he wants, she thought. Can't imagine what cowboys do in the winter.
The young couple was waiting for her inside the lobby of the Douglas County Courthouse. Lucy was immediately in her arms for the enthusiastic hug that she'd demanded from her mother when she was a little girl but had seemed to not want anymore-until they'd traveled to New Mexico nearly two years earlier and reestablished their bond. She was hoping for a similar road trip, and if Ned had to get back to the ranch, she was prepared to rent a car and drive to Idaho.
Marlene was pleasantly surprised at how good Lucy looked. When she left New York, her daughter looked like a young woman who'd been crying and not sleeping for two weeks. But leave it to her cowboy and the New Mexican air to revive her spirits and console her. Grateful that he was so dedicated to Lucy, Marlene hugged Ned extra hard, which sent him into his usual shy mode, with red face and hands jammed in his pockets as he rocked back and forth on the heels of his cowboy boots.
When Marlene asked Lucy if she could meet in Denver, the idea had been to spend some time with her and maybe talk her into the road trip. Marlene hadn't encouraged her to come to the meeting with the 221b Baker Street Irregulars. Lucy had experienced enough of the dark side of human nature, she didn't need any more, Marlene thought.
However, ever since Christmas, when Marlene had talked about the man she knew then as Eugenio Santacristina, Lucy had been asking a lot of questions about the case. She seemed particularly interested in the fact that Santacristina was Basque.
When Marlene told her about the photograph handed to her by Maly Laska, Lucy had insisted on attending the meeting. "I don't want to explain it now, Mom, but I need to be there," she said. "I'm supposed to be there." And she was going to bring Ned if he could get off work.
There was no use trying to talk her out of it, either. Lucy could be as strong-willed as both of her parents, especially if she was convinced that God was directing her actions. Plus, Marlene didn't feel like getting cussed out in a few dozen different languages.
Marlene handed the envelope with the photograph to Jack Swanburg, who took one look at it and headed down the hall "to make a digital copy so that I can project it on the screen in the meeting room. You go on in and say hi to the folks you know and introduce yourself to those you don't."
The first person Marlene saw when she entered the room was Charlotte Gates, a petite but athletic-looking woman in her fifties with a face tanned to the color of mahogany by decades spent in the blazing sun of the American Southwest. With her opal eyes sparkling, Gates jumped up from her seat and ran up to Marlene for a Lucy-like hug.
Next in line to greet her was Tom Warren, a bloodhound handler she'd met before. He was a sheriff's deputy by day, whose dogs were renowned for finding human beings living and dead. "Hey, Marlene," he called out from the other side of the room. "The gang says hi-Buck, Little Sam, Annie, Ollie, and Wink."
There were also two new faces. One was Jesse Adare, a boyish-looking crime scene technician with a local police department, but his specialty contribution to the Baker Street Irregulars was as an aerial photography buff. As he explained, he used model airplanes-some with wingspans of eight feet-mounted with cameras, or infrared sensing gear, and even a system that could take what the camera lens saw and in real time create a three-dimensional contour map.
The other new face belonged to geologist James Reedy. With his grizzled salt-and-pepper beard and perpetually sunburned face, he looked more like an old-time prospector than a professor of geology at nearby Colorado School of Mines.
"Look out for that one," Gates said, pointing to Reedy. "He looks harmless enough, at least when he's had a bath after a week or so in the desert looking at rocks. But he's one of the practical jokers of this bunch. Nothing's safe or sacred."
Reedy narrowed his eyes. "I'll get you for that one, Gates," he sneered. "Would you prefer short sheets or a rattlesnake in your sleeping bag?"
"You forget, James," Gates growled back. "I know places where not even this macabre group could ever find you, not that they'd try."
When Swanburg returned to the room, he asked Marlene to stand "and tell us a story." She'd been through the group's briefing procedures before, but it always felt like she was having to recite in front of the nuns again.
Marlene decided to start by talking about how she met Santacristina, or Katarain, rather than just jumping straight into the case. However, she left out the part about him being a fugitive from Spain.