The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(51)

I looked up the drive at the Mara property.

The door of the L-shaped cinder-block house had been busted off its hinges. Several of the windows were broken. SWAT members stood on the porch, a uniformed officer leaning in the doorway writing up a report. There was a similar scene at the white mobile home. They must've smashed open Hector's chicken coops, too, because the fields were now overrun with poultry. Wild bantams were pecking around the base of the apple tree. A Rhode Island Red was perched on a broken tricycle seat. There was even a rogue peacock strolling down the driveway, dragging a strip of pink toilet paper in its plumage.

"Let me guess," I said. "You followed up on my message. Mara was gone."

DeLeon wore a navy blazer and skirt and a cream blouse. In the afternoon light, her face seemed softer, her eyes not quite so severe.

"Don't flatter yourself, Navarre. What got us out here was some work by the ATF. They finished tracing the Solidox in the pipe bomb — got it down to the exact hardware store, got an ID on the buyer from one of the clerks."

"Hector Mara."

"We just got through busting up his mobile home— found some things we missed on the first search. Or maybe they just weren't there the first time — some wiring. A timer."

"Pretty clear, then."

"The one thing we did not find is Mr. Mara."

I pointed toward the cinder-block L. "Can I take a look?"

"Nothing there. We went through it pretty thoroughly."

"May I take a look?"

DeLeon considered, then let her dissatisfaction with me collapse in a kind of tired apathy. "With me present, I suppose."

We walked up the drive, past the peacock, past a couple of uniformed cops complaining about the humidity and the woes of polyester uniforms.

"That friend we spoke about," I told DeLeon. "He could maybe track down Mara. If Mara's still in town."

"I'm not dealing with Arguello."

"You figure Lieutenant Hernandez will give you more time?"

DeLeon kept walking, occasionally slipping on the gravel in her heels. "Not likely."

"Because nothing here points away from Sanchez. It just means Hector was helping him out."

"Something like that."

"Nice and simple," I said. "And it stinks."

DeLeon stopped at the porch. The SWAT team had moved on. The bullet-riddled door lay flat across the entrance like a broken drawbridge.

DeLeon pushed her hair behind her ear, turned slowly, and looked out across the fields.

"You doing all right?" I asked.

She raised her eyebrows, gave me the little head shake women do when they're addressing a man who's acting like a three-year-old. "Just fine. And you?"

I watched two SWAT guys out in the field, trampling Hector Mara's tidy garden. They were kicking the heads off cabbages.

DeLeon smoothed her skirt. "I'm sorry. I'm on edge."

"Understandable."

In the main room, bedsheet curtains had been ripped down. Shafts of dust-moted light sliced across an old television set, a bare plywood bookshelf, a beanbag chair that had been cut open, its polyfoam guts spread across the cement floor. The tiny kitchen had been ransacked. Bathroom likewise, even the top of the toilet tank removed.

The first bedroom was filled with antique furniture too solid to destroy. Against one wall was a teak sideboard with the glass removed. A sewing table charred from the long-ago fire, an old foot-pedal Sears machine on top. A stripped bed frame. A basket of faded quilt remnants. Hung on the wall was a small cross studded with silver milagro charms. Men's clothing was heaped in the corner — sweats, tank tops, running shorts, the kind of clothes Hector Mara wore. The room smelled of old perfume and sweat. Neither the clothes nor the smell of sweat went with the rest of the room. It looked as if Hector had moved in after his grandmother's death and never bothered to redecorate.

There was a second bedroom down the hall at the end of the L.

Despite the police ransacking, I knew whose room it was the moment I entered — Sandra Mara's.

A young woman's clothes that hadn't seen the light of day in years were now disgorged from a closet in the corner — Jordache jeans, fuzzy sweaters, moccasin shoes, the kind of pastel tourist T-shirts you get from Solo Serve and La Feria. The upturned dresser drawers had spilled silver bangles, random stud earrings, a few sparse items of makeup. Not much for a teenage girl. There were no CDs, no magazines, few personal effects. Most notable was the ankle-deep pile of books and loose papers that had been swept off the shelves against one wall.

I toed through some of the book titles — Heller, Marquez, Vonnegut, Bronte. An African American poetry anthology, a Latin American one, Sylvia Plath. Good assortment. Very good for a high schooler.

I picked up the Sylvia Plath. The library pocket pasted to the inside cover said JUDSON ISD. The book had been due May 12, seven years ago. Hell of a late fee. Of course, before Sandra Mara had checked it out, the book had been borrowed exactly once, in 1975. Probably JUDSON ISD hadn't missed it yet. The loose papers looked like pages of high school essays — double-spaced cursive, most dated spring, 1992. One was on "The Wife of Bath." I scanned half a paragraph and was depressed to find it better than most of the college papers I'd been looking at that morning.