The meeting with the locals didn't get under way until almost eleven. It was short and sweet. It was the kind of situation where the suitor asks the bride-to-be's father for approval of the marriage. Most of the time it doesn't really matter what the old man says. It's going to happen. In carefully chosen, friendly words Backus told the locals that the Big G was in town and was now running the show. There was a little bit of posturing and disagreement on some particulars but they rolled over with the empty promises Backus made.
During this meeting, I continued to avoid eye contact with Thorson. While driving over from the federal building Rachel had explained to me the reason for the morning's tensions between her and Thorson. The night before she had run into her former husband in the hotel hallway while leaving my room. Her disheveled appearance probably told him all he needed to know. I groaned when I heard, thinking about how it complicated things. She seemed to be unconcerned and viewed the situation as amusing.
At the end of the meeting with the locals, Backus divided assignments. Rachel and Thompson were given the Orsulak crime scene. I was to ride with them. Mize and Matuzak were to start backtracking on the interviews the locals had conducted of Orsulak's friends and try to reconstruct the dead detective's movements on his last day. Thorson and Carter were given the Little Joaquin case and assigned to re-cover the ground trod by the locals. Grayson would act as liaison to the Phoenix cops, and Backus, of course, would run the show from the field office, maintaining contact on other developments in the case in Quantico and the other cities.
Orsulak had lived in a small yellow ranch house with stucco walls in South Phoenix. It was a marginal neighborhood. I counted three junk cars parked on gravel lawns and two Sunday morning garage sales in full swing on the block.
Rachel used the key she had gotten from Grayson to cut through an evidence sticker spread across the front doorjamb and then unlocked the door. Before pushing it open she turned to me.
"Remember, they didn't find him for three and a half days. Are you up to this?"
"Course."
For some reason I was embarrassed that she had asked me this in front of Thompson, who smiled as if I were a rookie. That annoyed me, too, even though in actuality I was less than a rookie.
We were three steps in before the odor engulfed me. As a reporter I had seen plenty of bodies, but I'd never had the pleasure of entering a closed structure where a body had rotted for three days before discovery. The putrid odor was almost palpable. It was like the ghost of William Orsulak, haunting the place and all who dared enter. Rachel left the front door open to help air the place out some.
"What are you looking for?" I asked once I was reasonably assured that I had control of my throat.
"Inside, I don't know," Rachel replied. "It's already been gone over by the locals, his friends…"
She went to the dining room table in the room to the right of the door and put down and opened a file she had been carrying. She began leafing through the pages. It was part of the package the local cops had turned over to the agents.
"Have a look around," she said. "It looks like they were pretty thorough, but you might come up with something. Just don't touch anything."
"Right."
I left her there and started slowly to look about. My eyes first caught on the easy chair in the living room. It was a dark green but the headrest was stained darker with blood. It had flowed down the back into the seat of the chair. Orsulak's blood.
On the floor in front of the chair and near the wall behind it, chalk circles outlined two holes where bullets had been retrieved. Thompson knelt here and opened his toolbox. He began probing the bullet holes with a thin steel pick. I left him there and walked further into the house.
There were two bedrooms, Orsulak's and an extra that seemed dusty and unused. There were photos of two teenaged boys on the bureau in the bedroom the detective had used, but I guessed his kids never used the other, they never came to visit. I moved slowly through these rooms and the hallway bathroom but I saw nothing that I thought mattered to the investigation. I secretly hoped I would come upon something that would help and that would impress Rachel, but I came up empty.
When I stepped back into the living room I saw neither Rachel nor Thompson.
"Rachel?"
No answer.
I walked through the dining room to the kitchen but it was empty. I went through the laundry room, opened a door and glanced into the dark garage but saw no one there either. Coming back into the kitchen I saw the door ajar and glanced through the window over the sink. I saw movement in the tall brush at the rear of the backyard. Rachel was walking, with her head down, through the brush, Thompson behind her.
The yard was cleared for maybe twenty yards going back. A seven-foot-high plank fence ran down both sides. But at the back there was no fence line and the dirt yard dropped down into a dry creek bed where there was a lot of brush. Rachel and Thompson were on a trail moving through the brush away from the house.
"Thanks for waiting," I said when I caught up. "What are you doing?"
"What do you think, Jack?" Rachel said. "Did the Poet just park in the driveway, knock on the door and pop Orsulak after being invited in?"
"I don't know. I doubt it."
"I do, too. No, he watched him. Maybe for days. But the locals canvassed the neighborhood and no neighbor saw a car that didn't belong. Nobody saw anything out of the routine."
"So you think he came in through here?"
"It's a possibility."
She studied the ground as we walked. She was looking for anything. A footprint in the mud, a broken twig. She stopped a few times to bend and look at pieces of debris alongside the trail. A cigarette box, an empty soft drink bottle. She didn't touch any of it. It could be collected later if necessary.
The trail took us under a stanchion holding up high-tension power lines and into a stand of heavy brush at the back end of a trailer park. We reached a high point and looked down into the park. It was not well kept and many of the units had crudely fashioned add-ons like porches and toolsheds. On some of the units the porches had been enclosed with plastic sheeting and were being used as additional bedrooms and living spaces. An aura of crowded poverty emanated from the thirty or so dwellings jammed together on the lot like toothpicks in a box.
"Well, shall we?" Rachel asked, as if we were going for high tea.
"Ladies first," Thompson said.
Several of the inhabitants of the park were sitting on door stoops and old couches set in front of their units. They were mostly Latinos and a few blacks. Maybe some Indians. They watched us emerge from the brush with no real interest, which showed they recognized us as cops. We showed the same lack of interest in them as we started walking along the narrow lane between rows of trailers.
"What are we doing?" I asked.
"Just having a look," Rachel answered. "We can ask questions later. If we take it slow and calm, they'll know we're not here to kick ass. It might help."
Her eyes never stopped scanning the park and every trailer we passed as we walked. I realized that it was the first time I had seen her at work in the field. This wasn't sitting around a table trying to interpret facts. This was the gathering time. I found myself watching her more than anything else.
"He watched Orsulak," Rachel said, more to herself than to either Thompson or me. "And once he knew where he lived, he started planning. How to get in and how to get out. He had to have a getaway route and a getaway car, and it would not have been smart to park it anywhere on Orsulak's street."
We were coming down the main street, as narrow as it was, to the front of the park and the entrance off a city street.
"So he parked somewhere over here and walked through."
The first trailer at the entrance had a sign on the door that said OFFICE. A larger sign, attached to an iron framework on top of the trailer said SUNSHINE ACRES MOBILE HOME PARK.
"Sunshine Acres?" Thompson asked. "More like Sunshine Half Acre."
"Not much of a park, either," I added.
Rachel was off on her own, not listening. She walked past the steps to the office door and out to the city street. It was four lanes and we were in an industrial area. Directly across from the trailer park was a U-Store-It and on either side of that were warehouses. I watched Rachel look around and take in the surroundings. Her eyes held on the one streetlight, which was a half block away. I knew what she was thinking. That it would be dark here at night.
She walked alongside the curb, her eyes scanning the asphalt, looking for something, anything, maybe a cigarette butt or a piece of luck. Thompson stood with me, kicking at the ground with one foot. I couldn't take my eyes off Rachel. I saw her stop and look down and bite her lip for a moment. I walked over.
Glimmering like a cache of diamonds against the curb was a pile of shattered safety glass. She toed her shoe through the glass stones.
The trailer park's manager was already about three shots into the day when we opened the door and stepped into the cramped space advertised outside as an office. It was clear the place was also the man's home. He was sitting in a green corduroy La-Z-Boy chair with the feet extension up. Its sides were scarred by cat scratches but it was still the nicest piece of furniture he had. Other than the television. That was a new-looking Panasonic with a built-in VCR. He was watching a home-shopping show and it took him a long time to pull his eyes off the tube to have a look at us. The device being sold sliced and chopped vegetables without all the mess and setup time of a food processor.
"You the manager?" Rachel asked.
"That should be obvious, shouldn't it, Officer?"
A wise guy, I thought. He was about sixty and he wore green fatigues and a white sleeveless T-shirt with burn holes on the chest through which a crop of gray chest hair protruded. He was balding and had a drinker's red face. He was white, the only white person I had seen so far in the park.
"It's Agent," she said, showing him the inside of her badge wallet.
"FBI? What's the G care about a little car break-in? See, I read a lot. I know you people call yourselves the G. I like that."
Rachel looked at me and Thompson and then back at the man. I felt the small tingling of anxiousness.
"How do you know about the car break-in?" Rachel asked.
"I seen you out there. I got eyes. You was lookin' at the glass. I swept it up into a pile. Street cleaners only come 'round here maybe once a month. More in the summer when it's dusty out."
"No. I mean, how did you even know there was a car burglary?"
" 'Cause I sleep back there in the back room. I heard 'em break the window. I saw them messing about inside that car."
"When was this?"
"Let's see, that'd be Thursday last. I was wondering when the guy'd report it. But I didn't think no FBI agent would be coming out. How 'bout you two, you with the G, too?"
"Never mind that, Mr.-what is your name, sir?"
"Adkins."
"Okay, Mr. Adkins, do you know whose car got broken into?"
"Nope, never saw him. I just heard the window and saw the kids."
"What about a plate?"
"Nope."
"You didn't call the police?"
"Don't have no phone. I could see Thibedoux's over to lot three but it was the middle of the night and I knew those cops wouldn't come running on a car rob'ry. Not here. They got too much to do."
"So you never at any point saw the owner of the car and he never knocked on the door to see if maybe you heard the break-in or saw anybody?"
"That's right."
"What about the kids who broke in?" Thompson asked, robbing Rachel of the payoff question. "You know them, Mr. Atkins?"
"Adkins. With a D, no T, Mr. G."
Adkins laughed at his command of the alphabet.
"Mr. Adkins," Thompson said, correcting himself. "Well, do you?"
"Do I what?"
"Know who the kids were."
"No, I don't know who they were."
His eyes strayed past us to the television. On the program they were now selling a glove with small rubber bristles on the palm for grooming pets.
"I know what else you could use that for," Adkins said. He made a masturbation motion with his hand and winked and smiled at Thompson. "That's what they're really selling that for, you know."
Rachel stepped over to the TV and turned it off. Adkins didn't protest. She straightened up and looked at him.
"We're investigating the murder of a police officer. We'd like your attention. We have reason to believe the car you saw burglarized belonged to a suspect. We are not interested in prosecuting the boys who broke into the car, but we need to speak to them. You were lying just then, Mr. Adkins. I saw it in your eyes. The boys came from this park."
"No, I-"
"Let me finish. Yes, you were lying to us. But we're going to give you another chance. You can tell us the truth now or we'll go back and get more agents and police and we'll go through this dump you call a trailer park like an army laying siege. You think we'll find any stolen property in those tin cans? You think we might run across some people wanted on warrant? How about some illegals? What about safety code violations? We passed one back there, I saw the extension cord going out the door into the shed. They've got somebody living in there, don't they? And I bet you and your employer charge extra for that. Or maybe just you do. What's your employer going to say when he finds out? What's he going to say when the receivables go down because the people who are supposed to be paying you rent cannot because they've been deported or they're in lock-up on warrant holds for not paying child support? What about you, Mr. Ad-kins? You want me to run the serial number off that television on the computer?"
"The TV's mine. Bought it fair and square. Know what you are, FBI lady? Fucking Bitch Investigator."
Rachel ignored the comment, though I thought Thompson turned away to hide a smile.
"Fair and square from who?"
"Never mind. It was those Tyrell brothers, okay? They're the ones what robbed that car. Now if they come in here and beat the shit outta me, I'm suing you. Got that?"
With directions from Adkins we arrived at a trailer four units in from the main entrance. Word had spread that the law was in the park. There were more people on stoops and sitting on the outdoor couches. When we got to Number 14, the Tyrell brothers were waiting for us.
They were sitting on an old glider beneath a blue canvas awning extending from the side of a double-wide trailer. Next to the door of the trailer were a washer and dryer set beneath a blue canvas cover to keep the rain off. The two brothers were teenagers, maybe a year apart and of mixed race, black and white. Rachel stepped to the edge of the shade provided by the awning. Thompson took a spot about five feet to her left.
"Guys," Rachel said and got no response. "Your mother home?"
"Nah, she not, Officer," the older one said.
He looked at the brother with slow eyes. The brother started rocking the glider back and forth with his leg.
"You know," Rachel said, "we know you're smart. We don't want any trouble with you. Don't want to give you any trouble. We promised Mr. Adkins that when we went in there to ask where your trailer was."
"Adkins, shit," the younger one said.
"We're here about the car that was parked out on the road last week."
"Didn't see it."
"No, we didn't see it."
Rachel walked over close to the older one and bent down to talk directly into his ear.
"Come on now," she said softly. "This is one of those times your mother told you about. Think now. Use your head. Remember what she told you. You don't want trouble for her or for yourselves. You want us to go away and leave you alone. And there's only one way we're going to do that."
When Rachel walked into the squad room at the field office, she carried the plastic bag like a trophy. She set it down on Matuzak's desk and a handful of agents gathered around to look. Backus came in and looked down at it as if he were looking at the Holy Grail. Then he looked up at Rachel with excitement plain in his eyes.
"Grayson checked with the PD," he said. "No record of any break-in reported at that spot. Not on that day, not on that week. You'd think a legal citizen who gets his car broken into would make a report."
Rachel nodded.
"You'd think."
Backus nodded to Matuzak, who picked the evidence bag up off the table.
"You know what to do?"
"Yes."
"Bring us back some luck. We need it."
What the bag contained was a car stereo stolen from a late-model Ford Mustang, white or yellow depending on which of the Tyrell brothers had better eyesight in the dark.
It was all we got from them but the feeling, the hope, was that it was enough. Rachel and Thompson had interviewed them separately and then switched sides and interviewed them again, but the radio was all the Tyrell brothers could give. They said they never saw the driver who left the Mustang at the curb in front of Sunshine Acres and they took nothing but the stereo in a quick smash-and-grab. They never bothered to open the trunk. They never looked at the plate to see if the car was even registered in Arizona.
While Rachel spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork and preparing an addendum on the car to be transmitted to all field offices, Matuzak fed the serial number of the stereo to the Automotive ID unit at Washington, D.C., headquarters, then gave the stereo itself to a lab tech for processing. Thompson had taken prints of the Tyrell brothers for elimination purposes.
The lab got no usable prints off the stereo other than those left by the Tyrells. But the serial number was not a dead end. It came back to a 1994 pale yellow Mustang registered to Hertz Corporation. Matuzak and Mize then headed to Sky Harbor International to continue tracing the car.
The mood of the agents in the field office was upbeat. Rachel had delivered. There was no guarantee that the Mustang had been driven by the Poet. But the time of its being parked outside Sunshine Acres matched the time period in which Orsulak had been killed. And there was the fact that the break-in by the brothers had never been reported to the police. It added up to a viable lead and, more so, it gave them a little more knowledge about how the Poet operated. It was an important gain. They felt like I felt. That the Poet was an enigma, a phantom somewhere out there in the darkness. Coming up with a lead like the car stereo seemed to make the possibility of catching him more believable. We were closer and we were coming.
For most of the afternoon I stayed out of the way and simply watched Rachel work. I was fascinated by her skill, amazed at how she had come up with the stereo and how she had talked to Adkins and the Tyrells. At one point in the office she noticed my gaze and asked what I was doing.
"Nothing, just watching."
"You like watching me?"
"You are good at what you do. It's always interesting to watch somebody like that."
"Thank you. I just got lucky."
"I have a feeling you get lucky a lot."
"I think in this business you make your own luck."
At the end of the day, after Backus had picked up and read a copy of the alert she had transmitted, I watched his eyes narrow into two black marbles.
"I wonder if that choice of car was intentional?" he asked. "A pale yellow Mustang."
"Why's that?" I asked.
I saw Rachel nodding. She knew the answer.
"The Bible," Backus said. "Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death."
"And Hell followed with him," Rachel finished.
We made love again Sunday night and she seemed even more giving and needing of the intimacy. In the end, if either of us was holding back, it was me. While I wanted nothing more in the world at that moment than to surrender to the feelings I had for her, a low whisper in the back of my mind found just enough volume to question her motives. Perhaps it was a testament to my own precarious self-confidence, but I couldn't help but listen to the voice when it suggested that perhaps her aim was just as much to hurt her ex-husband as to please me and herself. The thought made me feel guilty and insincere.
When we held each other afterward, she whispered that this time she was going to stay until dawn.