“Sergeant Mendez?”
It was shaping up to be one of those cases, the kind that brought you in on your days off and sat at the front of your mind when three a.m. came around on the bedside clock. What haven’t I seen? Sixteen-year-old babysitter Gloria Rivas, dead on arrival, of a gunshot wound to the neck. Twelve-year-old Enrique Escobedo, her charge, missing. Here on Sergeant Mendez’s desk, a sheet of lined paper with a series of apparently random notes: Friends of EE absent March 3 incl. Jasmina Torres, Ernesto Garcia, Todd Stevens, Crystal Pihalak, Gilberto Oliveras. The name “Jasmina Torres” is underlined, simply because it has come up twice. 11:14 p.m., Joseph “Taco” Alvarez $500 Shell ATM at the Shell station north of town – gas, gone. In translation, this means that local gangbanger Taco Alvarez withdrew money from the Shell station ATM, filled his tank with the same ATM card, and drove off into the night. This note was included because Mendez learned from two witnesses that Taco had threatened Gloria Rivas not only because she had refused to go out with him but because she was going out with his younger brother, and she had further compounded her insult by talking the brother into not going through with the gang initiation he was supposed to face.
The entrance of Taco Alvarez onto the scene had reduced the uncomfortable possibility that Enrique – twelve, a good student, with no record – had shot his babysitter and fled.
“Um, Sergeant Mendez? The telephone?”
Sergeant Mendez knew the name Taco Alvarez; she’d even arrested him once for tagging, back when he was a smart-mouthed fifteen-year-old headed toward his own gang initiation. She wasn’t surprised that he’d shot someone or that he’d successfully fallen off the map – Taco had a brain. What did surprise her was that he’d apparently snatched up Gloria’s charge, Enrique, as a hostage.
“Sergeant?”
“What?”
“There’s some wackjob on line two. I hung up on him once, but he called back. I thought maybe you could tell what he wants.”
Mendez stared at him for a moment, then flicked her eyes to the phone that lay half-buried by the Post-its, notebook pages, refolded California maps, and scraps of paper that covered her desk. The phone’s light was blinking, which meant the caller was safely on hold and couldn’t have overheard Danny Scarlotti’s insulting remark: it had happened before. She scowled at the uniformed boy in the doorway. “Why give it to me?” she asked, although as she said it, she knew it was a stupid question. She was the only detective dumb enough, or obsessed enough, to hang around the station on a Saturday morning.
“Because you’re here,” Scarlotti answered, sounding like a teenager – although he had enough sense not to roll his eyes while he was in the room with her. She wondered if uniforms were this casual in a big-city police department or if it was just her.
“I’m busy. And Paul’s the one on call today. Can’t you figure out how to transfer it to him?” She looked down at the stray scrap of paper in her hand, on which she’d noted: March 2, p.m., Mrs. Escobedo hysterical; March 3, phoned five times; March 4, not answering phone.
“Well, he’s at his daughter’s tournament today, and I sort of thought…” Scarlotti’s voice trailed off, and Mendez knew that the answer was no, he couldn’t figure out how to transfer the call. She sighed, knowing she was going to regret this, wondering why on earth they’d hired a kid who couldn’t speak Spanish and therefore interpreted the language as a lunatic’s ravings.
“Sergeant Mendez,” she snapped, in English, to see if she could unsettle the caller, maybe make whoever it was just hang up.
Instead, the voice that came into her ear was real English – the kind from England, like you heard on the television, and not the hard-edged regional accents either. A man; an older man; a voice deep and oddly melodic, as if its owner were reciting on a stage. “What am I? An infant crying in the night,” it said. Then it stopped.
Her head snapped up and her eyes grew wide, then narrowed. Danny boy’s diagnosis of “nutcase” might not be far off. “Sir, you have reached the Rio Linda Police Department. Do you have a crime to report?”
“Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
It was what her English teacher would have called a non sequitur, and what most people would call lunatic ramblings, but something in his voice, some pressing intelligence, kept her from hanging up the phone and going back to her fruitless perusal of the material related to the death of Gloria Rivas and the disappearance of Enrique Escobedo. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.”
She pinched her fingertips hard into the inner corners of her tired eyes. When did she last have a solid eight hours? The Rivas/Escobedo case had crashed down on them on the second, and it was now the fifteenth, with no arrest and no sign of the boy. Going on two weeks of gathering evidence; interviewing family, friends, and neighbors; getting alone with one after another of Gloria’s high school friends and trying to find a wedge to drive under those blank walls. Long, fruitless conversations with the police of Chiapas, where Taco Alvarez was from and therefore where he might be headed, and of Oaxaca, where the Escobedos had lived before they came north in the seventies. Dead ends for the murder, a complete puzzle for the boy’s disappearance, the weight of it settling heavily on all their shoulders. Hang up on this guy, Mendez. You’d do everyone a lot more good if you went home and got some sleep. But the caller’s voice had none of the slurred consonants of drink or the edginess of drugs. His brief statements, though nonsensical (and now rhyming), did not resemble the ravings of any lunatic Sergeant Mendez had met. He sounded polite and calm. Determined, almost. Maybe the English accent was deceiving her, but he sounded like a professor, one trying to deliver a particularly challenging lesson. Okay, see how he dealt with a bright student.
“Well, sir, you called me. If you want me to pick up the fruit of sense, you’ll have to drop it where I can find it.”
“Truth can never be told so as to be understood.”
“Yeah, ain’t that the pits? So, if you can’t tell me the truth, why are you calling?”
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face-to-face.”
This, anyway, was something she recognized, although what First Corinthians had to do with anything, she hadn’t a clue. “Sir, if you want to discuss the Bible, why don’t you go down to St. Patrick’s and have a nice chat with Father – ”
The man broke in, his voice forceful as he repeated his first words: “An infant crying in the night.”
Detective Bonita Mendez sat and thought about that for a minute. “Are you telling me that a child is in danger?”
The voice boomed into her ear, rotund with approvaclass="underline" “It needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!”
Something about that final word set off a tiny twitch in the back of Sergeant Mendez’s mind, a pulse of recognition, or apprehension. But a tiny twitch was all, little more than a faint aroma in the air, and it was gone. She looped back to her own beginnings: “I think you ought to come into the department and tell me all about it, sir.”
“So near, and yet so far.” He sounded wistful.
She looked at the number on the display, saw it was local in both area code and prefix, and knew he couldn’t be too far away. Maybe he was disabled somehow. Other than mentally, that is.
“You want me to come to you?”