“Drugs, fear, and hunger,” said Lark. “Throw in some expensive clothes and fancy restaurants and it will take the fight right out of her. Pimps ’R Us.”
“I don’t think these guys are sex traders,” I said. “They’re up to something else, but I don’t know what.”
We picked our way around a spit of boulders buffed to ovals by the centuries. A huge raven overtook us from behind, shadow first.
“Who do you believe?” Lark asked. “Penelope or Atlas?”
“Neither all the way,” I said.
“It’s a sad story, if what she says is true.”
“Oh, I think she’s telling mostly truth.”
He squinted to acknowledge the way I’d contradicted myself. “Then you’ll return Daley to her?”
“I believe so.”
“But she won’t allow a paternity test,” said Lark. “Which means you still won’t know who the mother or father are. That doesn’t sound like you, Roland, not getting to the truth. Good former lawman that you are.”
I knew he was right. And once again — for probably the thousandth time since that night in Penelope’s house, when she’d told me the story of the lovestruck girl and the lust-bitten preacher — I tried to weigh her story against Atlas’s.
“I’ll make sure to get a test,” I said.
“You can’t,” said Lark. “Only the court can order it.”
“I’ll find a way.”
Mike raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Unbelievable what some people will do. If Atlas did what she says, I mean.”
I had nothing to add.
“I wish Joan was here,” said Lark. “She’d have some choice words on Atlas. On human nature in general. Get into a lather over it. Then she’d say something critical of herself and make me laugh.”
I laughed softly, first time in a long time, knowing exactly what he meant. We continued north in a long silence, lost in separate remembrances. Taucher was a fierce cop. Devoted, indefatigable, principled, and resourceful. Haunted by an opportunity that her San Diego FBI had missed in the days before 9/11. That ghost seemed to swirl around her, and she made little effort to deny it. She told me once that she thought about the FBI’s having an informant living with two of the hijackers — but, thanks to CIA silence about these men, no knowledge that they had been linked to al-Qaeda — “every damned day of my life.” It showed on her face and in the way she spoke and in the ceaseless energy she brought to her work. She had loved her job and her city — she’d grown up here in San Diego — and the attacks on our republic had left Joan Taucher feeling like a mother whose children had been betrayed. She was ferocious and, somehow, I have come to believe, cursed. She left her dying blood on me. A lot of it. All I could do was try to talk her through the divide. But I had tried that in Fallujah and had already lost my faith in words.
Mike skipped another rock. Went three hops into the mouth of an oncoming wave. “This is what we do...”
“... and this is where we do it,” I said.
One of Joan’s favorite lines.
She made it sound comprehensive and sufficient. A simple reason for being. I’m not sure how it sounded from Mike and me. My mind is a looser thing. Private First Class Avalos died in a Fallujah doorway holding a small plastic cross in one hand. Titus Miller died pointing his wallet at me. My wife, Justine, told me once that she was not afraid of dying, but she was afraid of being forgotten. And I will not forget her. Nor the others. Taucher among them. This is what I do, in addition. Not forget. My private promise. Nonverifiably of use to anyone. Maybe Joan was expecting us to fill in the details. According to our own needs. How could she have not? If I’m not making sense, it’s because I sometimes can’t.
“SNR has four freezers full of wooden crates at Paradise Date Farm,” I said. “People coming and going all the time who have nothing to do with growing dates. They’re running a children’s school of some kind. Silver SNR vehicles everywhere. They beat me senseless just for being there and asking about the girl.”
“Slow down, Roland,” said Mike. “Start at the beginning. Crates in freezers? Crates of what?”
By the time we got back to my truck I’d told Lark almost everything I knew about Paradise Date Farm. I could see the concentration on his face as he tried to collate the strange intelligence.
“Can you feed that video live to me?” he asked.
“Can you give me what you have on Atlas?”
“FBI property is...”
“And call me immediately if Daley Rideout pops onto your radar?”
Mike frowned, following a squad of pelicans as they V-ed through the sky. “Joan said you always tried to get more than you gave.”
“I’m a sole proprietor.”
Lark considered me for a beat, then nodded. “Deal.”
“Thank you. I miss her.”
Lark inhaled deeply, looked toward the diminishing pelicans, then to me. Again, that moment we’d shared once before, at Joan Taucher’s funeral. He didn’t have to say the words for me to hear them: You were with her and I wasn’t and she didn’t make it but you did.
“I do, too, Roland,” he said. “I hope you find the girl. And I hope you get some payback from those guys who dinged you up like this.”
Nodded and smiled my anguishing little stitch-lipped smile. “Me too,” I said.
I sat in my truck and checked messages. Watched Lark pick his way out of the crowded parking lot in his assigned Bureau take-home, an unmarked white Chrysler with a not-quite-hidden light package built into the roof. Younger agents get the hand-me-downs. He stopped for a family of four scuttling from the lot toward the sand, bristling with beach chairs, towels, and toys.
Then a buzz of phone, and Penelope Rideout’s name on the screen.
“I found something of Daley’s that might help us,” she said. “When can you be here?”
28
She opened the door before I could knock, let me in with an appraiser’s squint and an air of conspiracy.
Her living room floor was strewn with school papers and art projects, girls’ clothes and toys and precarious stacks of CDs. Plastic horses. A plastic castle. The ceiling fan jostled papers and doll hair.
Two open toy chests — a pink Cinderella and a yellow Beauty and the Beast — sat on the coffee table in front of the plaid couch, some of their treasures relocated to the floor.
The boom box was now on the half-wall that separated the small living room from the kitchen. Penelope nodded me to the couch, sat in one of the director’s chairs, and aimed a remote at the player.
I sat as a young girl’s whisper came from the speakers:
This is a very dangerous thing to do. Penny is the world’s greatest sister, but she wants to know everything I do and say and even think. I need something that is just mine. She would totally destroy this CD if she found it. Penny’s always afraid. Of, like, everything, but especially men. I wish I had a mom and a dad. Alive, I mean. But I have only my sister. She loves me, but she smothercates me. I think she misses Mom and Dad more than I do because she was older. I was four. I remember the police and the woman coming to our door. It was raining.