Two more cars arrive and park on either side of the Corolla. A Chevy Malibu and an old Dodge Magnum. Three young men and a hefty chola get out and head straight for their homies, all fist bumps and signs, no smiles except Flaco and Jesse, just tough salutes before getting down to serious business here, whatever that might be.
They set off across the lot for the grassy slopes of the park, the chola carrying a plastic Vons grocery bag that looks heavy. Cell phones, Daniela reasons, based on her El Jardin restaurant stakeout.
Which of course makes her wonder if Bishop Buendia is going to show, or if he’s too busy rescuing the troubled boys of Camp Refuge.
And lo, she thinks, as if on cue, here comes Buendia’s ’55 aqua-on-white Bel Air, lowered and gleaming, the chrome moons bright as mirrors, fuzzy fucking dice dangling from the rearview. To Daniela it’s funny but gorgeous. She’s always known that whatever it is in Mexican-American blood that so adores old American cars altered to scrape the asphalt, grumble and hop and raise and lower — well, she’s got it, too.
Bishop Buendia, portly and white-suited and cherub-faced, his hair pomaded and his priestly purple stole proclaiming his favor in the eyes of Christ, exits the Bel Air with an air of untroubled authority.
Through her field glasses, Daniela watches him follow the seven youngsters across the broad grassy park. Then he veers away from them, takes a few long swallows from a drinking fountain, and sits on a green bench in the shade of a white gazebo.
The magnificent seven now huddle in the grass, gathered in a loose circle around the drone. Only Lulu remains standing, probably to keep the grass off her legs.
The chola hands Jesse what looks like a cell phone from her bag. Jesse flips the drone onto its back in the grass and it looks to Daniela that he’s attaching the phone to a gimbal.
To use as a camera, she thinks. Seven little spies, with Bishop Buendia in supervision. Shooting pictures of who? What?
You can probably buy a setup like that for three hundred bucks, camera included.
Then the spies take off, leaving Jesse standing alone in the middle of the park with the drone resting upright on the grass and the controller in his hands. He seems to be toggling and adjusting the settings; hard to tell from here.
Bishop Buendia observes from the shade of his gazebo.
Daniela watches the young spies split up and head around the park’s structures — an auditorium, an amphitheater nestled in the trees, the staff and security buildings.
They’re out of her sight now, and Daniela checks in on Buendia again, then lowers her binoculars. The sun is low still and casts a soft orange light.
Daniela watches the drone wobble into the air, gets her binoculars up fast, and sees the spindly thing climbing and heading toward the buildings. No sound, and its four propellors and landing legs are hard to make out against the background of trees.
A moment later it’s above and beyond the trees, and Daniela thinks she wouldn’t be able to describe it if she didn’t already know what it was, the Raptor TX-395 camera drone, red and black just like the box it came in. And she thinks: Come on, baby, do your job. Shoot that video, send it back to base camp by satellite or internet. Pinpoint where the bad guys are. Show the target house is empty and safe for entry. Or maybe, if gunmen are standing by.
Checks her watch and three minutes later, here comes the Raptor back her way, already over the amphitheater, the six merry spies running hard to catch it, looking up and laughing.
Jesse stands in the green grass, a rail of a boy with a newly shaved scalp and a smile on his face, and Daniela tells herself she can never, never lose him.
As the drone lowers toward Jesse, Daniela sees that the phone is no longer attached. Accidentally dropped in flight? Dropped on purpose by Jesse like a bomb? Pried off by one of the spies?
Suddenly the Raptor slows, hovers, and climbs away, headed toward Bishop Buendia.
Jesse pivots with little steps, still smiling, working the controls, piloting the Raptor toward Buendia, who stands, looking up as the drone hovers not ten feet above him.
Buendia softly claps.
The hell is going on, Daniela thinks. What is this, like, a jamboree for wannabe bangers?
The six spies converge on Jesse, with Lulu in the lead, brandishing a cell phone that she hands over to Jesse. They circle him, shadow-jabbing and feinting kicks like UFC fighters warming up, some of them shooting the action on their phones, Jesse watching them from the center of things, a man in charge.
He holds up the phone that Lulu brought from beyond the amphitheater buildings, which Daniela decides is the same one that the Raptor took off with.
Not a spy drone at all, thinks Daniela, returning her magnified gaze to her proud-looking son.
A delivery drone, just like Amazon.
He raises it high, turning in Bishop Buendia’s direction.
Daniela glasses the portly, white-suited Bishop Buendia, who remains seated in the gazebo, facing his neophytes with an approving smile.
37
Gale takes the bone shards from his pocket and lays them on Bachstein’s stainless-steel examination table. It’s got a basin on one end, faucets with hand-held sprayers on the other, a swing-out magnifier and strong LED lights overhead.
Mendez upends an evidence bag and adds more pieces of bone to the table.
“What happened to you?” asks the coroner, eyeing Gale’s bandaged nose.
“Hit a tree. It hit back.”
Gale pictures Geronima, nursing his ragged little wound in the bright light of her bathroom.
Bachstein is tall, slender, and pale, with a domed forehead, thinning brown hair, and heavy glasses. A UCLA PhD in chemistry. He spreads the bones with an index finger, taking his time. Finally picks one with a round edge, rinses it off, and sets it on the table.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Out at the Wildcoast site.”
“Underground?”
“Two hundred feet down,” says Gale. “In a beach-sand slurry of some kind, in a cavern full of gigantic crystals.”
Bachstein gives him a skeptical look.
“You must have felt like Indiana Jones.”
“No snakes or monkeys.”
“Adventurous, attractive women?”
“Two, actually.”
Eyes bugging behind thick lenses, Bachstein looks to Mendez, waits for clarification, gets none, then swings the magnifier, turns on the circular light, and lowers his big forehead.
“Definitely a bone,” he says. “Mammal, probably vertebral. Maybe human. Maybe deer or cow. Given the depth underground and undersea seismic activity, maybe a very young whale. Although, as they say, the contents may have shifted. Maybe a dog or coyote or a big cat. Were these pieces near each other or spread out?”
“I saw them in the beachy-looking sand,” says Gale. “I kneeled down and picked up two or three, then ran my fingers through and came up with a couple more. So, yeah, near each other.”
“A possible burial site. I’ll carbon-date this, but to the eye, I’d say five hundred to seven hundred years old, maybe more. That liquid slurry has smoothed it. Buffed out the venous grooves and the superficial pores, which has helped preserve it. Cleaned off the burn marks, if any. Animal bones are less porous and greater density than ours. Here, take a look.”
Gale steps up to the magnifier, peers down at the brightly lit shard.
“Lunar,” he says.
“Let’s run it through the electron scope. See if we can humanize this thing.”
In the crime lab, Bachstein greets the techs with a wave of his hand, introduces Gale to them.
“We’re going to get this Tarlow guy,” says one of the coroner assistants, a petite Chinese woman. “I looked at what the lion did to his face and almost fainted. I’ve never fainted in my life.”