The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(52)

I picked up another book — this one with a gold marbleized cover, no title. A writing journal. The first half of the book was filled with tiny cursive handwriting, distinctly feminine. I read a line or two.

When I looked up again, Ana DeLeon was standing at the window.

On the sill next to her were three porcelain mugs, all shaped like grotesque sailors' faces with long noses and cherry cheeks and glazed rum-sodden smiles. Ana DeLeon was circling her finger absently around the rim of one.

"Mind if I check this out?" I asked.

It took her a while to focus on me. "What?"

"This journal. Hector's sister's. I thought I would borrow it."

"Let me see it."

DeLeon flipped some pages. She looked at the words without reading them, traced the edges of the cover.

She handed the journal back to me. "I should tell you no. But I can't see that it'll be missed."

"No photographs."

"What?"

"No photographs anywhere," I told her. "None of Sandra. None of anybody else, for that matter. Did you find any during the search?"

"I don't recall any."

I looked out the window. Under a stand of cedars, half a dozen chickens were clucking and pecking around the feet of some SWAT guys.

One of the men, an assault rifle on his knee and greasepaint under his eyes, glanced in my direction. I smiled. He didn't smile back.

I looked down at the grinning sailor's-head mugs. The mugs didn't offer any advice.

I looked toward the closet.

"What?" DeLeon asked immediately.

I walked over to the closet, crouched down, tugged the tiny glinting piece of red and gold paper from the crack in the cement.

DeLeon stood over me. "What is it?"

I kept the paper wrapper curled in my palm while my finger traced the almost invisible seam on the closet floor — the square outline I would've missed if not for the paper. "Trapdoor."

DeLeon said, "Stand back."

DeLeon yelled out the window for some assistance, somebody with a crowbar.

Thirty seconds later the little room was filled with cops.

A minute after that the excitement was over. DeLeon and I were alone in the room again, staring down at a crawl space that smelled of cool damp earth and was absolutely empty.

"So much for that," she said.

"Let me call Ralph."

"No."

"In another twenty-four hours, Mara will be gone. An APB won't accomplish anything and you know it."

"I said no, Tres."

The use of my first name caught me off guard as much as the tone of her refusal.

"Ana, I want to see you win on this. Let me help."

She turned away. After a ten-count she surprised me. She said, very softly, "Let me think about it."

I didn't push it. I walked to the window and looked out at Hector's smashed garden, the apple tree with the muddy tracks of his Ford Galaxie still fresh underneath, the white mobile home in the field of spear grass. I tried to imagine a young woman, Sandra Mara, at this bedroom window every day — looking up from a book of poetry or from a journal she was writing in, being surprised every time that the scene outside was not the asphalt-and-brick housing of the Bowie Courts.

I flicked a slip of paint off the window ledge, watched it helicopter into a sailor's-head mug. "I could maybe get used to it here. The quiet. The country."

DeLeon met my eyes. She looked surprised, momentarily vulnerable, as if I'd intercepted one of her thoughts.

I said, "If I grew up where Hector and Sandra grew up, I might not want to leave this place once I'd dug in."

She nodded. "I suppose."

"You want to plant tomatoes this fall?"

Grudgingly, Ana smiled.

Then Kelsey's voice called her name from down the hall. My reward evaporated. Ana kept my eyes a moment longer, then left without a word, leaving me in Sandra's room, staring at the hole in the closet floor, crumpling a red and gold George Berton cigar seal between my fingers and wondering about a lot of things.

TWENTY-FIVE

I spent the rest of the afternoon by the phone at 90 Queen Anne, waiting for calls back from my contacts with the local press. I wanted anything on the he**in trade from the last seven years, any articles that might mention the Brandons, the Maras, Zeta Sanchez, Chich Gutierrez, or Detective Thomas Kelsey of the SAPD.

By the end of the day, my contacts hadn't returned my calls, and I'd been forced to actually grade a set of papers for UTSA. Robert Johnson, the lazy bastard, helped not at all.

Over dinner of homemade dolmades and spanakopita, my weekly allotment from Erainya, I read Sandra Mara's journal.

Sandra's cursive was flawless — delicate loops, perfectly slanted, page after page written in the same golden brown ink. It was the kind of cursive that would drive handwriting analysts crazy because it was completely devoid of anomalies. Sandra didn't believe in beginnings. No Dear Diary or I haven't written in a while or Today I have something special to tell you. No dates on the entries or signatures at the end. It was difficult to tell where one entry started and the next stopped. Sandra merely indented for the next paragraph and started writing.

This to Sylvia Plath.

I want to cut your thumb a few more times.