It was the third or fourth day of his trip, and he was in Arizona. He had visited the Grand Canyon and Sedona, and he now planned on driving across the desert from Phoenix to Los Angeles, then up the coast to San Francisco. As he drove, he played desert music on the car stereo through his iPod adapter, or what he thought of as desert music: Captain Beefheart, Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and Dylan’s soundtrack from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He also played a lot of Handel oratorios very loud. Somehow they seemed to chime with the sense of the place for him.
He had driven a meandering course on and off Interstate 10, stopping occasionally to visit various attractions. Here he had experienced the desert landscape the way he had always imagined it. Mile after mile of nothing but sagebrush, tumbleweed, clumps of prickly pear and and tall, gangly saguaro cacti; unrelenting dry heat. In the evening the long range of jagged peaks that never seemed to get any nearer caught the fading light, all earthy shades of terra cotta, red and brown.
That night he had found a motel off the beaten track. It wasn’t quite the Bates Motel, but it had a similar creepy, run-down atmosphere about it, fortunately without the big eerie house on the hill behind. The desk clerk was sixty if he was a day, a bald Mexican with a paunch, a Pancho Villa mustache and a case of five o’clock shadow so advanced it was probably six or seven o’clock on his face, though it still stopped short of a beard. When the clerk smiled, Banks noticed that he was missing his two upper front teeth. At least he didn’t resemble Norman Bates in the slightest, and there wasn’t a stuffed animal in sight. The room Banks took was clean and quiet, and the small friendly diner next door served a good steak, though he would probably have had to travel a long way for a decent bottle of wine to accompany it. Instead, he settled for a jug of cheap California burgundy.
Around two in the morning, unable to sleep, Banks got up and walked outside. The desert nights were cool, but in August that meant the temperature went down from about anywhere between 85 and 100 to 75 or so, still T-shirt weather for a British tourist. Even so, Banks found he needed his light wind cheater that night as he struck out from the motel across the road into open desert. The stars shone bright and clear, more than he had ever seen before, so close he felt he could reach out and grab a handful, along with a yellow sickle moon. Not for the first time Banks wished he could recognize more constellations than Orion and the Big Dipper. He could see the Milky Way and trails of distant nebulae between the stars. Was that the Crab Nebula overhead? In front of him he could just make out the saw-toothed silhouette of a mountain range in the far distance.
He hadn’t really known what to expect from his journey, but that night he realized there was something he wanted, something ineffable, inchoate, and suddenly it didn’t seem so unbelievable that he might get it from a place such as this. He felt an odd tingle of anticipation, as if he was on the verge of what he had been waiting for, his revelation, his epiphany.
Someone had once told him that there were places you could go that would change you, which was probably why so many kids in the sixties set off for India or Kathmandu. It might be a country, a culture, religion, or perhaps a certain kind of landscape-the ocean, mountains, a desert. It might be a place associated with a powerful childhood experience, or with a dream. Sometimes, perhaps, you just didn’t know. But it changed you.
Banks had been having a dream from time to time since his childhood, and it stayed with him. He was swimming underwater through waving fronds that tried to grab him and pull him down. The dark rocks below terrified him with their shifting shapes, and with the thought of what lurked in the depths between them, through underwater tunnels that led to other tunnels, narrower, deeper and darker. He was running out of air, his lungs straining, his strength failing, when he finally broke the water’s surface and found himself on the edge of paradise. The damn thing was that he couldn’t remember anything about it. It was a special place, he knew that much, one that had the power to change him and heal him, but all he remembered was the journey, the darkness, the fear and agony of his bursting lungs, and that blissful moment when water ceased to be water and became air, when darkness became light and the white sand led…somewhere green and pure.
For so long he seemed to have been struggling in the dark, and in that desert night, when the motel’s blinking red neon was nothing but a dot on the horizon, he found an epiphany of a kind. But it was nothing momentous. No road to Damascus, no lightning strike of revelation or enlightenment, as he had hoped for. First, he was aware only of the silence when he stopped, a silence unlike any he had ever known-nothing rustling, no animal sounds, no birdsong, no distant cars or lorries. Nothing. Just the smell of dry earth and the tall, still silhouettes of the saguaro cacti, arms reaching out and up, all around him.
The epiphany, when it came, was nothing more than a simple fleeting ripple of happiness that went through him as a light cool breeze might brush one’s skin on a hot day. He felt as if something had clicked into place, like the final number of a combination lock, the tumblers finding their positions. That was all. He wasn’t even sure whether it was something opening or closing, but he knew that he would be okay, that he was okay, that he could deal with things. His problems didn’t matter in the midst of the desert night-the myriad stars above and grains of sand under his feet. He would still hurt. He would still carry the burden of his past mistakes. He would still feel the deep ache of loss and betrayal and guilt and horror. Paradise would always remain just beyond his reach. But he would go on somehow. Perhaps not in the same way he had been, doing the job he did, but somehow. Future uncertain. Prospects unclear. End always near. He remembered thinking that he was a long, long way from home, but, oddly enough, he didn’t feel so far away at that moment.
Banks took one more look at the dark range of peaks on the horizon, then he turned and walked back to the blinking pinpoint of light. He slept like a baby until the blinding sunlight found him through a chink in the curtains at nine o’clock the following morning. After a huge breakfast of eggs and ham and hash browns at the diner, he checked out and headed for the interstate to Los Angeles with Vieux Farka Touré’s “Slow Jam” playing loudly through the car stereo.
THE SATNAV got Annie to Leeds easily enough after work on Tuesday, but it had a difficult time negotiating the twists and turns of Headingley, once off Otley Road, and she found herself getting more and more frustrated. That it was the tail end of rush hour didn’t help, either, but she wanted to time her arrival for roughly that period between when people get home from work and before they go out again for the evening. She knew that Tracy Banks worked at Waterstone’s on Albion Street, in the city center, and that her hours were probably irregular, but she didn’t think the shop stayed open particularly late.
The preliminary gun report hadn’t told them much except that they were dealing with a 9-mm Smith & Wesson automatic, over twenty years old, and the serial number had been filed down. There were ways of recovering it, of course, but they would take time. As yet, too, there was no record of a registered owner. It would also take some time to run the weapon through the National Firearms Forensic Intelligence Database and check it for fingerprints to run through IDENT1.
If they wanted to know whether the gun had been used in the commission of a crime-which, of course, they did-it would have to be fired under controlled circumstances, and the bullet compared with the information in the Integrated Ballistics Identification System. If the result was positive, to be absolutely certain the bullet would then have to be compared with the actual bullet and/or cartridge casing fired during the crime. Rush or not, this would all take time. There was no explanation yet of how the gun had come into Erin Doyle’s possession, and Erin still wasn’t talking. A boyfriend was everyone’s natural assumption. Juliet Doyle had mentioned someone called “Geoff,” but Rose Preston had told the Leeds police that Erin’s boyfriend was called “Jaff.” An easy mistake to make if you didn’t see it written down. Whoever he was, they hadn’t got a line on him yet.