Chapter Thirteen
After his visit to the Bowles place, Buck returned to the Lavender house and spent the rest of the day there, walking it inside and out when the rain allowed, taking photographs and measurements. A crime scene team finally arrived, and he vacated long enough to let them do their work. Not hungry, he skipped lunch.
The other deputies from the Elfrida office showed up, one by one, to see the crime scene. He wasn’t sure how much their appearances had to do with professional curiosity, and how much with morbid fascination, but he was in no mood to press them about it.
Always, he was aware of the ticking watch on his wrist, the minutes slipping by. Lulu Lavender was out there somewhere, possibly getting farther away every moment, possibly closer to death. If there was anything he could find here that would point him in the right direction, he needed to look for it.
But the more he looked, the more he felt that nothing would do the trick. There was no road map with a route handily marked in yellow highlighter, no postcard saying “Wish You Were Here.”
He had talked to the couple of reporters who had shown up and asked them to hold the story. He hadn’t liked doing so. The cynical part of him thought the whole idea was a smokescreen. Maybe Ed just didn’t want to have two high-profile disappearances at once. The sheriff was an elected official, after all, and getting reelected was never far from his thoughts.
Of course, Buck didn’t know if the probable abduction of a mixed-race girl, of Hispanic and African American descent, would have the same grip on the television-viewing public as that of a pretty blond white girl. The savage nature of the murders might help, but then again, blacks and Hispanics died all the time in America without making the evening news.
Getting word out to the press sometimes helped in this kind of case, though. It brought in volunteers who could scour the surrounding countryside for clues. Instead of a volunteer search party, Scoot Brown and Carmela Lindo were on that, dressed in yellow slickers and rubber boots, walking the acreage of the Lavender place and the public lands beyond their fence. Publicity also brought tips, most of which were nonsense but had to be investigated anyway, wasting valuable person-hours. Sometimes a tip paid off, though, and as long as this case was shielded from the media, that wouldn’t happen.
Raul Bermudez was back at the substation, where he had taken Lulu’s personal computer. She had a Dell laptop, and Raul, their resident techie, was sure he could break her passwords. Maybe an e-mail from an admirer, or a stalker, would help identify a suspect. Buck had searched Lulu’s room for a diary, but hadn’t found one. Donna Gonzales was cataloguing Lulu’s personal effects—a few photos, a case of CDs and books, jewelry, makeup, her clothing. Clues could be anywhere, especially when you had no idea what you were looking for.
When it became apparent that the crime scene team would be working late into the evening, Buck called home and told his wife Tammy that he wouldn’t be there for dinner. “You need your strength,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m at a murder scene,” Buck replied. “It’s a bad one, Tammy. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I’d want anything to eat anyway.” Even though he had passed on lunch, he still didn’t have the slightest appetite.
“Well, you drive careful when you do come home. I’ll pray for you, Buck.”
“While you’re at it,” he said, “pray for the Lavender family. They need it more than me.”
“Well, I don’t know who they are, but I’ll do my level best,” she promised. Tammy had unending faith in the power of prayer, notwithstanding the fact that most of her prayers went unheeded. She prayed every day that Buck wouldn’t have an accident or die in the line of duty, and so far, he had done neither. But she also prayed for bigger things, like an end to abortion across the globe, death to all terrorists, most members of the media, all homosexuals, and assorted liberal figures who came into her crosshairs. Mostly Buck found her goals ridiculous, and was just as glad she didn’t have the direct pipeline to the Lord she wished for.
She was a good woman in a lot of ways: honest, hardworking, loving, kind to strangers and animals. She had taken most of the responsibility for raising Trey, their son, who had been killed six years before in the crossfire of a gang war in Phoenix when he’d gone to the wrong nightclub on the wrong night. As long as you didn’t cross her fairly arbitrary lines of decency, at which point loving turned to hating in a heartbeat, she was fine. It was that latter streak—judgmental, intolerant, happy to use her religion as a cudgel instead of a crutch or a foundation for a decent life—that scared Buck. He had found that he didn’t mind working long hours, sometimes seven days a week. The times he’d tried to talk to her about her intolerance she had turned angry, accused him of trying to lead her away from God.
Which had not been his intent. But each time he tried, she seemed to turn more and more to the cornerstones of her faith: her Bible, a couple of TV evangelists, and some right-wing websites she had found that buttressed her more extreme views. He had, after several nights spent on a couch in their living room, decided he considered peace at home more important than trying to interfere with prayers that had little effect anyway.
But watching the sun disappear in the west from the Lavenders’ front yard, he wasn’t sorry he was here instead of there.
Later, when exhaustion claimed Buck and he finally climbed into bed and drew the covers over himself, Tammy rolled to face him. “I prayed for you,” she mumbled.
“Better you’d prayed for the missing girl,” he said.
“But her family’s been killed? She’s better off dead.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Dead, she’s in the arms of our Lord,” Tammy said, sitting up in bed. “With her family, if they carried Jesus in their hearts.”
Buck had found her attractive once, a long time ago. When he’d met her, she’d had long dark hair and dark eyes that flashed with mischief, sensuous lips he’d loved to feel against his own. With her conversion to religious extremism, however, she seemed determined to erase everything any man would find desirable or sexy. She let her body go—she wasn’t fat, just flabby, with no tone, no shape to speak of. To bed, she wore an ankle-length cotton housedress, buttoned almost to her chin, with plain white socks on her feet. The outfit had all the sex appeal of a hospital gown, except it didn’t open in back. She had taken to cutting her hair herself, and it looked it—about chin length, all the way around. She wore no makeup, and she cried constantly, usually about the world of sin and wretchedness she inhabited, which left her eyes bloodshot and her nose chapped and red. “I know I’d want to die if you were gone,” she added.
He had often thought of leaving her. But then she said things like that, and he thought it was selfish to divorce a spouse because she had found a new way to live that he didn’t agree with. She was still the same woman, somewhere deep inside, the same Tammy who had loved laughter and children and puppies and sex and the wildflowers that bloomed twice a year, in wet years, after the winter rainy season and the summer monsoon.
It just seemed harder to find her now.
“She’s still alive out there, and I’m sure she’s terrified,” Buck said. He didn’t know that for a fact, still not certain she hadn’t done it all herself, but he dearly hoped it was the case.
“She’s young, right? She would most likely be in heaven if she had died too.”
“You can’t possibly think—” Buck didn’t end the sentence. Tammy could believe what she said. That was the whole problem. She had gone so far over the edge that she would rather see Lulu Lavender dead than rescued.
Buck couldn’t agree with that, couldn’t even accept that if God—the way Tammy thought of him—existed, he would let a family be slaughtered like hers had been. Where was the sense in that? What purpose could it serve?
By the same token, he didn’t hold the devil responsible either. Whoever had killed the Lavenders and taken Lulu was evil, but that evil lived within the murderer’s heart, not someplace deep under the Earth’s crust. No cloven hooves had marked the Arizona dirt that day, and the wounds Buck had seen had not been caused by a pitchfork.
Better that people take responsibility for their own actions, Buck thought, than try to pawn off their deeds on imaginary beings.
Tammy rolled away again. He reached out, put his hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. He would have liked to make love tonight, to try to salvage some bit of human connection from what had been a horrific day. He knew she wouldn’t have it, though. She wanted to less and less, it seemed. She had got it in her head that unless they were trying to have a baby—and they couldn’t, no more after Trey, the doctor had said—it was sinful, even if they were husband and wife. Once in a while he could convince her otherwise, but only through heroic effort, and he had to deal with the aftermath the next morning, when she knelt in prayer so long that her knees were rubbed raw, tears streaming down her face as if she had consigned herself, through that natural, marital act, to eternal damnation.
He closed his eyes and tried to will sleep to embrace him in her stead.