Just as she finished on Local Live! Dalton clomped from the darkness into the patio light, out of breath and sweating hard, and slapped a nine-by-eleven clasp envelope on the picnic table in front of me.
“Hi, y’all,” he said to the Irregulars. Shook each of their hands and looked them in the eye. “Sorry to interrupt. Uh, Roland, this was in my mailbox when I came home an hour ago. I ripped it open and knew you should see it. Cut myself on the metal.”
He loomed over the table eagerly, showing us the blood-marked bandage on the side of a knuckle.
I noted the jaggedly torn envelope, the bent clasp still attached, the smear of blood.
The Irregulars crowded behind me as I slid out a sheet of printer paper and set it on the table. The message had been printed in a common roman font:
I will tell you how to save your wife. Until then, suffer quietly as America suffers. Your last full measure of devotion will be required. If you show this evidence to law enforcement, you will never see Natalie again except in your memories.
I upended the envelope and out slid a shirt, neatly folded and wrapped in plastic, as if fresh from the dry cleaner. Light blue and long-sleeved by the look of it. Blood on the plastic.
“It’s Natalie’s,” said Dalton. “I recognize the glass buttons. Damn the world, Roland — they’ve got her.”
Ash Galland, on what her sister had worn to breakfast the day she vanished: a light blue satin blouse the color of her eyes.
“Why did you open it?” asked Burt. “You must have seen how foolish that was.”
Dalton gave Burt a fuck you, little guy look but said nothing.
I righted the empty envelope before me and read the sender’s name and return address. Heard the catches of breath from the Irregulars behind me. Handwritten block caps, right slant, neat.
“What?” asked Liz.
Odile shook her head. “What does this mean?”
“Who did this?” asked Dick.
“Someone trying to get personal with Roland,” said Burt. “Someone trying to anger and distract him.”
A moment of silence fell over us as Natalie Strait’s image filled the TV, Local Live! updating us on week two of her disappearance, a sidebar to the Palomar massacre, as part of the Strait family misfortune that had seemingly followed them for decades.
All eyes on Dalton.
“Any dinner left?” he asked.
Burt and I sat up late in my upstairs office again, saying little while we viewed more hours of Mike Lark’s surveillance video on my desktop monitor. Some of it crisp and clear, and some of it muddy and useless. Jackie O? Nowhere to be seen.
I felt the anger creeping up on me. If none of Lark’s battalion of eager federales had been able to spot Jackie O, how could we?
What if someone else in The Chaos Committee had mailed the damned bomb? Lark had professed faith in my luck and eyesight, and in our friendship, but I sensed he’d recruited me less as an able-eyed volunteer than as an informant on the Straits.
I left another message for Tola. Rang off uneasily, the scar on my forehead tingling. I sipped bourbon against the bloodshed of the day.
“What worries me most about Dalton is how little he cares for Natalie,” said Burt. “And how much leverage and publicity he’s enjoying. All the while carrying on with big pharma’s dreamy lobbyist. Maybe the sheriffs are onto something. Maybe he’s behind Natalie’s absence. Look at the benefits — it frees up his love life, increases his sympathy votes in November, and makes it easier to blame her in court. She can’t even defend herself. What’s to keep him from hiring out the kidnapping, putting you between him and the cops, mailing himself Natalie’s blouse as a diversion? Invoking Justine as a way to confuse and divert you?”
I paused the video and thought about that. All of it credible and possible.
I asked the obvious. “Did he have her killed?”
“If he arranged her abduction, her death would solve certain problems.”
I grunted, stood, looked out at a western sky pricked with stars. Felt like I was trapped in a cage with high black walls and a faraway lid with little holes in it to give me air and hope.
“The question is, would he?” said Burt. “What kind of man is Dalton Strait at his core?”
“It depends who you talk to.”
“I’m talking to you, champ. You fought a war alongside him.”
I told Burt what I’d learned about Dalton’s behavior in Fallujah, regarding Harris Broadman and the burning Humvee. That his battlefield heroics were in question, and his alleged Silver Star heroism had left a man badly scarred. And that by one commanding officer’s account, Dalton’s Purple Heart was earned through bad judgment and reckless conduct.
“But if you sit down with him one-on-one,” I said. “When he talks about Natalie, you get a different version of him. He loves and adores her. They’ve spent well over half their lives together. She’s someone he… admired and wanted to be worthy of.”
“So, his love appears real,” said Burt. “Just as his heroism does.”
“I don’t think he’d have her abducted or killed.”
“Semper Fi, Roland.”
“Faith has nothing to do with it, Burt.”
I resumed the video, trying to concentrate on the surveillance footage, but my mind was picking back through every minute of the last two weeks that I’d spent with Dalton — reevaluating him, looking for a different angle or something I’d missed, re-vetting my own interpretations when Dalton had left me unclear or doubtful. I knew Burt was half right. The marine in me wanted Dalton not to have done such things.
Then I was back in the green meadow where Charity had died. And in the groves of cottonwoods where Kirby had been hanged and mutilated, and in Tola’s grow with the bullet-riddled, flame-thrown humans and plants left heaped on the ground with equal disregard, and the sliced panels of sun fabric fluttering in the breeze.
My eyes locked on the monitor, where another dark-haired woman mailed another package. UPS, Portland, Oregon, according to the footer. Not Jackie O.
And so on, into the late hours.
After Burt retired, I soldiered on, seeing no one very much like our prize.
I called and woke up both Dalton and Virgil with concern over Tola’s whereabouts and well-being. Dalton said he had no idea where she was and her grandfather said she could take care of herself. I reminded him of the lopsided slaughter on Palomar.
I finally crashed on the office couch, landing in dreams of Tola Strait and gunfire. I’d never been around Tola and gunfire at the same time and later I wondered if it was a premonition. I wondered a lot of things.
My phone rang loud in the timeless dark.
“I’m at your gate,” she said.
Thirty-One
The next morning, Lieutenant Hazzard and Detective Proetto sat in their Valley Center station interview room, Natalie Strait’s blue satin blouse in its blood-touched plastic wrapper on the table before them. Beside it lay the torn envelope and the sheet of paper.
“Why didn’t Mr. Strait bring this to us himself?” asked Hazzard.
“Off to Sacramento early this morning,” I said.
“Convenient, like the video of his shackled wife that only he has actually seen. Because it self-destructed on his phone.”