“No they wouldn’t,” Kate argued. “Not after …” She fell silent, unable to finish the thought.
Bob wavered, telling himself once more that the open gate meant nothing. The wind could have done it, or Mrs. Benson might have gone out herself and left the gate open. In fact, she might not even be home.
He made up his mind.
“Stay here,” he told Kate. “I’ll go see.”
He went through the open gate into the patio and looked around. The lights flanking the front door were on, and the white walls of the patio reflected their glow so that even the shadowed areas of the little garden were clearly visible. Nothing seemed to be amiss, and yet as he stood in the patio, he sensed that something was wrong.
Bob told himself the growing uneasiness he felt was only in his imagination. As soon as he rang the bell, Mrs. Benson would come to the door and everything would be all right.
But when he rang the bell, Mrs. Benson did not come to the door. Bob rang the bell once more, waited, then tried the door. It was locked. Slowly he backed away from the door, then hurried to the car.
“She’s not here,” he told Kate a few seconds later. “She must have gone somewhere.” But even as he spoke the words, he knew they weren’t true. He started the car.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to call the police, just like you wanted to. It doesn’t feel right in there.”
Fifteen minutes later they were back. Bob parked his Porsche behind the squad car, then got out and went to the patio gate.
“Stay in your car,” one of the cops at the front door told him. “If there’s a creep in here, I don’t want to have to worry about you.” Only when Bob had disappeared did Roscoe Finnerty reach out and press the bell a second time, as Bob himself had done only a few minutes earlier. “She probably just took off somewhere,” he told Tom Jackson, “but with these two, I guess we can’t blame them for being nervous.” When there was still no answer, Finnerty moved to a window and shone his flashlight through into the foyer. “Shit,” he said softly, and Tom Jackson immediately felt his stomach knot.
“She there?” he asked.
Finnerty nodded. “On the floor, just like the other one. And if there’s any blood, I don’t see it. Take a look.”
Tom Jackson dutifully stepped to the window and peered into the foyer. “Maybe she’s just unconscious,” he suggested.
“Maybe she is,” Finnerty replied, but both men knew that neither of them believed it. “Go ask the Lewis girl if she’s got a key, but don’t tell her what we’ve seen. And when you ask for the key, see how she reacts.”
Jackson frowned. “You don’t think—”
“I don’t know what I think,” Finnerty growled. “But I sure as hell know Alan Lewis didn’t do this one, and I keep thinking about the shit that came down in Marin a few years back when that girl and her boyfriend killed her folks, then went out and partied all night. So you just go see if she has a key, and keep your eyes open.”
“Is she all right?” Kate asked when Jackson approached the car.
“Don’t even know if she’s here,” Jackson lied. “Do you have a key? We want to take a look around.”
Kate fumbled in her purse for a moment, then silently handed Jackson a single key on a ring. “Stay here,” Jackson ordered. He started back to the house, wondering what he was supposed to have been looking for. Whatever it was, he hadn’t seen it — all he’d seen were two kids who’d had a horrible experience only a few days ago, and were now very frightened.
“Well?”
Jackson shrugged. “She just gave me the key when I asked for it. Asked if the Benson woman’s okay.”
“What’d you say?”
“I lied. Figured we should both be there when we tell them.”
Finnerty nodded, and slid the key into the lock, then pushed the door open and led his partner into the silent house. One look at Valerie Benson’s open eyes and grimace of frozen terror told him she was dead. He called the station and told the duty officer what had happened, then rejoined Jackson. “Might as well tell them.”
From then on, the long night took on a feeling of eerie familiarity, as Finnerty replayed the scene he’d gone through less than a week earlier when the same two kids had found the body of Martha Lewis.
The dusty road wound steadily up the hill, and Alex looked neither to the left nor to the right. He knew every inch of these hills, for he’d ridden over them with his father ever since he was a little boy. Now, though, he walked, for along with his father’s land, the gringos had taken the horses as well. Indeed, they’d taken everything, even his name.
Still, he hadn’t left La Paloma — would never leave La Paloma until finally the gringos had paid with their lives for the lives they had taken.
He came to a house, opened the gate, and stepped through into the patio. Not too long ago he’d been in this patio as an honored guest, with his parents and his sisters, attending a fiesta. Now he was here for another reason.
For a few centavos, the new owners would let him take care of the plants in their patio. Idly he wondered what they would do if they knew who he really was.
As he worked, he kept a watchful eye on the house, and one by one the people left, until he knew that the woman was alone. Then he went to the front door, lifted the heavy knocker, and let it fall back against its plate. The door opened, and the woman stood in the cool gloom of the foyer, looking at him uncertainly.
He reached out and put his hands around her neck.
As he began squeezing her life away, he felt her terror, felt all the emotions that racked her spirit. He felt her die, and began to sweat.…
He woke up with a start, and sat up. The dream ended, but Alex could still see the face of the woman he’d strangled, and his body was damp with the memory of fear.
And he knew the woman in the dream.
It was Valerie Benson.
But who was he?
The memory of the dream was clear in his mind, and he went over it piece by piece.
The road hadn’t been paved. It had been a dirt road, and yet it hadn’t seemed strange to him.
And he didn’t have a name.
They’d stolen his name.
He knew who “they” were, just as he knew why he’d strangled Valerie Benson.
His parents were dead, and he was taking vengeance on the people who had killed them.
But it still made no sense, for his parents were asleep in their room down the hall.
Or were they?
More and more, the line between what was real and what was not was becoming indistinct.
More and more the odd memories of things that couldn’t be were becoming more real than the unfamiliar world he lived in.
Perhaps, that very night, he had killed his parents, and now had no memory of it. He glanced at the clock by the bed; the fluorescent hands read eleven-thirty. He had been in bed only half an hour. There hadn’t been enough time for him to go to sleep, then wake up, kill his parents, go back to sleep, then dream about it.
He went back over the evening, step by step, and all of it was perfectly clear in his memory, except for one brief moment. He’d parked across the street from Jake’s when María Torres had spoken to him.
Spoken to him in Spanish.
The next thing he remembered was going into Jake’s, and that, too, was very clear: he’d gotten out of the car, locked it, and walked from the parking lot into the pizza place.
The parking lot.
He distinctly remembered parking his car on the street across from the pizza parlor, but he also remembered entering Jake’s from the parking lot, which was next to the restaurant.