"Hearing footsteps" is not an empty sports cliché for women joggers in lonely places. Tess, who had been running for more than half her life, never felt as vulnerable as she did on a deserted path, an unseen runner closing the gap, breath ragged and hard, feet striking the ground harder still. Was it someone trying to pass you? Or someone trying to catch you? Fifteen years of uneventful runs didn't keep Tess from worrying about the worst-case scenario. Bad luck overtook most people eventually. She could only hope it wasn't coming up on her left flank as she pounded down a path in Brackenridge Park.
She drifted to the right, the protocol for allowing a faster runner to pass. But the unseen runner was slowing down now, content to stay even with her. In her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of a man just about her height, a little stocky through the torso, with short, thin legs working very hard to match her stride for stride. She was dogging it, running a nine-minute mile, but the pace was clearly taxing him.
"Mind if I join you?" he asked, and she had to make eye contact then. It was Steve Villanueve, the bouncer who was really a cop.
"Be my guest. You live around here?"
"No, but I like to run here in the mornings. In the summers it's worth the drive to have the shade. How much farther for you?"
She glanced at her watch. "At least twenty more minutes."
He tried to look enthusiastic. "Great."
"Let's pour it on."
She increased her speed, heading for the long steep hill she had noticed on her first day here, the one behind the curious Japanese-style garden.
"These are the Japanese Tea Gardens," Steve said as they climbed. Talking-while-running obviously wasn't easy for him, but he seemed determined to make the effort. "They've come full circle. They began as the Japanese Gardens, then the name was changed to the Chinese Gardens after Pearl Harbor. Then they were the Sunken Gardens, which really made no sense. They finally gave up and went back to the original name. Who knows, maybe"-a few quick, almost asthmatic pants-"Texas will be Tejas again in my lifetime."
Tess nodded. There's a school of thought that you should be able to hold a conversation while running, if only to prove you were working at an aerobic rate, instead of an anaerobic one. But it wasn't a mandate. For her, part of the pleasure of working out was the quiet, the time to think and recharge.
"They get good concerts down in the amphitheater sometimes." Another pause, another round of harsh breaths. "The first concert I ever saw was when I was just four years old. Some born-again Christian group with Little Ricky as the drummer. You know, Little Ricky from the old I Love Lucy show? Babalu!"
Tess tried to think of something to say, if only to be polite, but nothing occurred to her.
"They were probably awful, in…retrospect." He groped for that last word. There was a slight hesitation to his speech that couldn't be explained by his panting, an exaggerated deliberateness, like a cured stutterer. She wondered if English was his second language. Unlike glib Rick, whose self-mocking repetoire of accents ran from redneck hick to Frito Bandito, Steve tried to speak in a bland newscaster's tone. "But it was the first concert I ever saw, and I loved it. Got a guitar, of course, like every other boy in America, but I couldn't play a lick. Can't sing, either. Or dance. Born to be a fan, I guess. Someone has to be, right?"
They crested the summit. One of the great ironies in running is that going downhill simply punishes the parts of the body that had it easy on the ascent. Gravity pulled on her quadriceps, teasing them, testing them, setting her up for a fall. Gravity was a bitch, in Tess's opinion, a much bigger enemy than time. It was gravity that pulled the body apart, made everything droop and fall.
"So do you do security for the money or the access?" she asked Rick, trying to give him a chance to breathe.
"Both, I guess. I like the money. I like the music."
"Especially Emmie's."
She glanced at his face. The deep color in his cheeks wasn't purely from exertion. "Emmie's good."
A short silence, as they hit bottom. "Want to knock off early?" he asked. "We could grab breakfast on Broadway, near where you're staying."
Tess stopped abruptly. "I didn't tell you where I was staying."
"Sure you did-" He had stopped, too, and was bent over, his hands on his knees as he sucked in air greedily.
"No, Steve, I'm very careful about such things. My father's training. I've never listed my home address in the phone book, and I wouldn't casually broadcast my whereabouts in a strange city. I suppose you could have gotten it off the police report from this weekend-"
"Oh, were you down at the station?" he asked. His acting was on a par with his running.
"-but that still doesn't explain why you're here today, chatting me up, trying to get me to go to breakfast. Guzman's idea? Or is this a little ad hoc plan concocted by a patrolman who wants to move up to detective?"
"I don't want to write tickets forever," Steve said, straightening up. "Besides, Guzman has his ambitions, too. If I could help him solve the triple murders, everyone would get what he wanted, and that would be a good thing." The last sounded like a child repeating something an adult had told him. "Guzman was so close, until Darden turned up dead. Now the other one, Laylan Weeks, has vanished without a trace, and Emmie is missing, too. He thought…I thought…"
"He thought he could send you to spy on me, the way you've been spying on Emmie at the Morgue and Hector's. Did you work at Primo's, too? Didn't Emmie ever get suspicious, seeing you at every gig? But I guess that's what the whole lovesick-puppy thing was about. You pretended to have a crush on her because it made it plausible that you'd be hanging around, watching her every move. She thought you were a groupie. You're really a spy."
"Doing my job," he pleaded. "Just doing my job."
"Consider it done," Tess said. "I'll make you a deal-you stay away from me from now on, and I won't let Guzman know how badly you botched this particular assignment."
"You'd go to Guzman?" He was scared. The sweat on his brow was fresh, his round cheeks were flushed anew. She couldn't blame him. She wouldn't want to be on Guzman's shit list either.
"If I see you anywhere near me, I'm on the phone to him. But if you stay away from me, this will be our little secret. Now scoot. I still have a real workout to do."
He backed away from her, then turned and began sprinting toward the path that wound along the zoo. His bright white, perfectly plain T-shirt became smaller and smaller, until it was little more than a tiny flag of surrender, waving at her from a great distance. Tess felt like a bully. It wasn't the worst feeling in the world.
Chapter 20
A. J. Sheppard had agreed to meet her for lunch, once he determined she was paying. Apparently San Antonio Eagle reporters didn't have the kind of expense accounts taken for granted by those reporters at Baltimore's Beacon-Light. He named a place on San Antonio's River Walk, and when Tess demurred-she wasn't a tourist, after all-he had been insistent. "When you get home, it's all anyone will ask you, anyway. Did you see the Alamo? Did you go to the River Walk?" He was strangely emphatic on this point, in the manner of a person who is strangely emphatic about the smallest matters. In the end, it was easier to concede.
The little district of restaurants and shops, a flight of stone steps below the real city, was pretty and picturesque. A cleaner Venice, decided Tess, who had never seen the real thing. The Riverwalk had begun life as a one-time WPA project, according to an old travel guide she had found in the nightstand at La Casita, then been pulled back from the edge of ruin in the early sixties. Not unlike Baltimore and its Inner Harbor project. American cities seemed in a constant state of such rediscoveries, waking up again and again to the reality that the old downtowns were aesthetic marvels, well worth preserving. The only thing Tess couldn't understand was why such developments seemed predicated on having bodies of water nearby. Not that you could really call the San Antonio River a body of water. More like a small limb.