"Are you having an affair, you and Seliah?"
"No, Doctor."
"It's not my business but it could be a factor. Don't you think that loneliness and alcohol and a strong attraction to a friend could explain the sexual advances?"
Hood shook his head and looked to the closed door of the examination room. "I don't think you know how sick she is."
"No, I truly don't. But I'm going to find out how sick she is, Deputy Hood. And how well she is. I'm going to do everything in my power to make her better."
He took a card from his wallet and wrote on the back. He was handing Hood his card when the exam room door opened and Seliah's head poked out. "You didn't forget about me, did you, guys?" On his way back to Buenavista Hood called Soriana, who listened to Hood's story and request without interruption. Twenty minutes later he called back to say that with the ATF budget down to a trickle he couldn't approve international travel to interview a relatively minor background witness. He apologized and said the priest could be back in Ireland for all they knew. State could send someone out from the consulate, he said, and talk to the priest, though that would probably take some time.
Hood said he understood and he'd need a few days off. Soriana wished him luck. Hood booked the LAX-to-San Jose flight for the next morning on his own credit card. It was fabulously expensive this late in the game, and his modest frequent-flier miles did not apply to the non-reclining middle seat.
At home he packed up four days' worth of clothes and toiletries and his laptop. A lady friend, Beth Petty, had left him a message to say she missed him and looked forward to their "next couple of seconds together, whatever century that might be in." She was an ER doctor at Imperial Mercy Hospital here in Buenavista, and between their two demanding careers, hours together were rare. She was beautiful and unfettered and Hood missed her pointedly. She was often in his thoughts. Sometimes he would pretend she was watching him doing whatever he was doing and this made him proud and want to do it even better. His dreams were comfortable with her. When he read Sean Ozburn's hot letters to Seliah, they made him think of Beth. He checked his watch: She was working the graveyard shift at Imperial Mercy.
He looked at a framed picture on his kitchen counter of them together at a Bradley and Erin's wedding. Beth was wearing a beige knit dress with glints of mother-of-pearl worked into it, and her dirty-blond hair was up and her eyes were chocolate brown. She had on a sapphire necklace and earrings. Beth and Hood were relaxed and leaning into each other. She was almost as tall as him. She was smiling. To Hood she had been heart-stopping that day, and she was heart-stopping in his memory and in the picture, too.
He double-checked to make sure he had his passport and the U.S. Marshal's badge that would allow him to carry on his gun and a spare magazine. He wrote Beth a blunt note as was his style, and found a very nice piece of quartz outside. The desert around Buenavista was filled with rocks that during the day would twinkle like lights across his field of sight, all the way to the great curving end of his vision-miles of sparks and jewels. He and Beth went on excursions to collect them, sometimes tracking a particular bright beacon across the rough desert, then lugging it and others in Hood's SUV for use on his walkways and in Beth's abundant cactus and succulent garden.
At his kitchen sink Hood rinsed and sponged the rock until the clear crystal facets shone. They were pink. He shut down the house, left on a couple of lights and hit the road for L.A. It was two in the morning, which would put him at the terminal on time for the 7:10 flight. He was exhausted.
But he swung by Imperial Mercy anyway and plucked a few humble gazanias from the planter outside and left them with the note and rock at Dr. Petty's station in the ER. She was nowhere to be seen. Hood waited a few minutes in hope of glimpsing her for just a moment, but she did not appear. He saw that Beth's world was badly in need of her at this hour as he waded back out through the ocean of the sick and injured and the halt and lame, the terrified and stupefied and, rising among them like swollen islands, the destitute pregnant, solid evidence that life goes on.
24
Hood set down his bags and looked out at the volcano. It was green and verdant around the base, tapering into a bare lava cone that ended in a ragged maw. Wisps of smoke rose into the blue sky while orange-tinted lava crawled down the blackened tip.
The Arenal Volcano View lobby had been busy when Hood checked in. There were German birders, serious and well organized. The quetzal, Hood gathered, never found in zoos, was the hot bird. The trogon ran close second. There were French butterfly fanciers and two California frog and toad hunters on their way to Monteverde to find the golden toad in its only habitat on earth.
While checking in, Hood had met the owner, Felix, and his son Eduardo, the boy with the monkey and the half middle toe visible through the sandal on his right foot. The primate was a local squirrel monkey whose father had been killed by a car. Eduardo had found the baby clinging to its father's back, miraculously unhurt. It was now nearly eight inches tall, Hood estimated, and had a wide-eyed, can-do expression. It roamed a decorative wrought-iron birdcage in the lobby when it wasn't mounted on Eduardo's shoulder. Eduardo had named him Pepino.
Now through his screened window Hood watched the volcano for a few more minutes but he didn't unpack his bags. Instead he went back down and convinced Felix to let him see the registration forms for July. He showed his U.S. Marshal's badge but said he was on a mission of friendship. He sat in the fan-cooled lobby and drank a cold beer and easily spotted Father Joe Leftwich's signature. July eighteenth, seven nights, room twenty-four. He found Ozburn's Sean Gravas on July twentieth for four nights, room seven.
Hood handed the forms back to the owner and asked if he could move into room twenty-four. Pepino eyed him with a bright curiosity, cracked a seed in his teeth and dropped the shells to the cage bottom. His hands were tiny, perfect, black. The owner checked his computer and said he would be happy to make the room change for Hood.
"Thank you very much, senor," said Hood.
"It is not a problem."
"Do you know Father Leftwich?"
Felix worked the registration slips back into the rectangular cardboard box. He looked at Hood dubiously. "Yes, of course. Why?"
"I'd like to meet him. We have mutual friends."
"He left here in July."
"Where did he go?"
"He said nothing to us. We were relieved that he finally left here."
"Why?"
"He enjoyed provoking trouble. He inflamed our Germans with stories about Hitler. And the French with comments about Vichy. Once, he caused a fight between Spanish and Mexican businessmen, right in our dining room. There were two large beautiful Americans who bought him far too much alcohol and they shouted and argued and laughed very loudly for two straight nights. This hotel is for ecotourism, not fighting and drinking."
"Was he belligerent?"
"No. Always polite. Always happy. Never having the appearance of the drunken man. It was always the people around him who suffered most."
Eduardo ran into the lobby and swung open the cage, and Pepino crawled up his arm to his back. The monkey looked wide-eyed at Hood.
"Nobody understood Father Joe," said Eduardo. "He is a good man and interested in everything."
"But you are eleven years old," said his father. "So you don't see how he makes people angry."
The boy shrugged and the monkey picked at something on the back of its tiny paw. "You and Itixa are superstitious about him because he's a man of God."
"I am not superstitious, Eduardo," Felix said with a smile. "I am realistic about unhappy guests. This is our business. This is what pays us for your food and clothes and your TV."