Something about my suggestion seemed to shake him free, allow him to change tracks again. Not exactly what I had hoped for, but at least momentarily I felt the air between us settle.
“What was going on next door?” he asked. “Why all the cops? Nobody will talk to me. I can’t reach my lawyer.”
“I can’t say. The police asked for my help with something.”
“Is it about my daughter?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve promised them that I wouldn’t discuss it.”
“Is it?”
“Bill, I’m sorry. I can’t say what it is. I can’t say what it’s not. I’ve been told not to discuss it.”
“Doyle gave them permission to go into his house?”
Doyle’s dead, Bill. His giving-permission days are behind him, I thought as I replayed Bill’s question in my head, tasting for disingenuousness. I was wondering if Bill already knew that Doyle was dead.
“I’m sorry.”
“This is bullshit.” Bill’s voice suddenly became a hoarse whisper and the anger in it was unmistakable. “If this is the way it’s going to be, I’m not sure I can continue seeing you.”
If that was a threat, it was lame, like holding a rubber knife to my throat. “That’s certainly your choice, Bill. I’ll be happy to make a referral, if you would like.”
“Yeah,” he scoffed. “That worked out well last time.”
And what does that mean? Mary Black bent over backward to help Rachel.
“Mallory saw a therapist. Did you know that?” he asked.
I was startled. I managed a flustered, “What?”
“The woman who died. Mallory went to see her a couple of weeks before Christmas. She didn’t tell me; she left a note about it in her journal.”
I had a thousand questions. One of them was: Have you told the police about that journal? I chose a different one: “Why did she see a therapist?”
“I don’t know that exactly.”
“Do the police know? The therapist may have left some… records behind.”
He didn’t answer my question. He cracked open the door of the car and prepared to climb out, but stopped. “Do you know anything about her? Are you keeping something from me? You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
Now those were tough questions. I didn’t have an immediate answer for any of them.
“I’m talking father to father right now, Alan. Father to father.”
“I wish I knew something that could help you find your daughter. I’d tell you if I did.”
He considered my words, tasting them for the sweetness of truth. “You’re a father. You have a daughter, too. Imagine losing her. You have to understand the vulnerability I’m feeling.”
I swallowed. I didn’t want to be reminded of that vulnerability.
Bill went on. “A father would do anything to protect his family. Anything. You know that. The things that can happen to kids? Daughters. You wouldn’t wish that on me, would you? I wouldn’t wish it on you.”
I immediately began pondering the question of how truthful my answer had been. Surprisingly, I decided that, other than the existence of the tunnel, and the fact that I knew she’d seen Hannah for a single therapy session, I didn’t actually know anything substantive about Mallory. I really didn’t. How odd.
“You wouldn’t divulge our conversations to the police, would you?”
“Of course not,” I said. I wondered how much Bill really knew about Mallory’s situation. “What do you think happened to Mallory? Did she run? Was she abducted?”
“Those are the only options?” he said.
What? Was he taunting me? “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“Why would she run?” Bill asked.
“Kids aren’t always rational, Bill. Especially when they’re distraught.”
“She was distraught. Christmas was always hard for her,” Bill said. “Always. But I thought we were doing okay this year.”
That’s what Bob had said, too-that Christmas was hard for Mallory. Huh. I reminded myself that Rachel had deserted her family during the holidays years before, and that it wouldn’t be surprising that Mallory was suffering an anniversary reaction.
“You were doing okay, you and she?” I asked.
“What are you asking?”
“Nothing. I’m fishing.”
“Fishing?”
Bill hovered, half-in, half-out of my car for a long three-count before he stood. I sat frozen in place, still troubled by Bill’s admission that he possessed a diary from his daughter that he hadn’t shared with the police. “Let’s do this in the morning, Bill. At my office. Is ten okay?”
He held up his gloved right hand and extended two fingers. “Can’t do ten. I’ll be there at two,” he said before he slammed the door.
The bitter air had frosted the hairs inside my nose.
But I did notice that my ass was nice and warm.
58
The same night, at almost the same time, Raoul was still thinking about Diane and Canada.
He told me later that he was surprised to see how Las Vegas bleeds out into the northern desert. There is no natural demarcation, no river, no ridge, no rail at the craps table. There is no single line in the dirt and sand where a visitor would say, well, this here is Las Vegas, and that there isn’t. At some point you know you’ve left town, but even if someone offered you to-die-for odds, you couldn’t go back and find the precise spot where it happened.
Raoul looked back over his shoulder at the profile of the distant Strip that stained the near horizon with artificial vertical interruptions and radiating flashes of neon. He guessed that he and Tico were about five miles outside of town. It could have been seven, could have been three, but he was guessing five.
Tico had yanked the VW through a lot of turns to get where they were, many more than Raoul thought should be necessary to get from point A to point B across a landscape of flat, mostly barren land. But the turns had accomplished what Tico had intended: Other than being some number of miles out in the desert north of Las Vegas, Raoul didn’t know where he was.
Wide expanses of scruffy land separated the houses. In some other place, somewhere where the soil was arable, such distances between homes might make sense, but in the desert outside Vegas it seemed to Raoul that people lived as far apart as possible simply so that they could feel some separation. In Colorado’s mountains, a ridge or an outcropping of rock or a thick stand of lodgepole pine was enough to leave neighbors feeling distinct from one another. Out in this endless desert, though, the geography made no natural allowances for privacy, and separation apparently meant space.
Tico doused the headlights on the VW a few hundred yards before he pulled to a stop at an expensive wrought iron gate in an even more expensive high stucco wall. There wasn’t much of a moon and the desert was dark. Raoul couldn’t tell where Tico had taken him, but he was guessing the building was a residence. Tico waved casually toward a security camera mounted on the stucco wall, and seconds later the gates clanked loudly and started to swing inward.
The place wasn’t much to look at. It was a sprawling, low-slung ranch with long overhanging rooflines designed to protect inhabitants from the relentless Nevada sun. Raoul dated the construction from the ’60s or ’70s. Somebody had once tried to do some landscaping, but the effort had been abandoned a long time before. Tall, vaguely Greek planting urns sat forlorn and empty at intervals around the property. Adjacent to the crumbling concrete driveway a swimming pool shaped like a spade was a third filled with murky water. The front of the separate pool house was almost totally obscured by junk. The shadowed symmetry of the red tile roof on the shack was interrupted by broken and absent tiles and what looked to be an abandoned array of solar panels.