Then She Vanished Read online

  The brutal brother-on-brother violence had gotten my attention. “Is there anyone in your family who would abduct Natalie?” I asked. “Maybe to get at Dalton?”

  “Mr. Ford, the Straits may bicker a-twixt ourselves, but we prey on the world, not each other.”

  “Except maybe Kirby.”

  “Best leave Kirby out of this.”

  “You know what I think when I hear that.”

  “Think what you want. He’s hardly six months out of prison. Give the boy the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Do Dalton and Natalie have other enemies?”

  “Name me one consequential man or woman who does not.”

  “Then who are these enemies, Mr. Strait?”

  “You would have made a good bailiff in my court,” he said. “Beefy but polite.”

  I made a mental note of that evasion and sipped the bloody Mary. Looked past him to the clear spring day. Two vultures circled slowly in the eastern blue. A black SUV came slowly down a dirt road from Jacumba, dragging a cloud of dust behind. So far as current-day enemies went, I had Natalie’s divided into two camps: sexual hunters and enemies of her husband. They both sought to use her, in different ways and for different reasons.

  Tola strode back into the room now dressed in black and red motorcycle leathers and boots. Carried her helmet under one arm like a pilot. Her hair was pulled back and channeled through a long medieval leather-and-brass tube that rode to the middle of her back. She gave me a brisk smile. Reminded me loudly of Justine—the hair and eyes, the strength of presence. Quick and bright was the spark that flared up in me as I watched her.

  Next came a white-clad orderly pushing a hospital bed, half-reclined, in which a sixtysomething man lay peacefully, his head bobbing slightly with the motion of the bed. Eyes closed. The orderly was a large, muscled Anglo with a jarhead’s high and tight haircut.

  With a glance my way, Tola bent down to whisper in Virgil’s ear. The old man nodded and whispered something back, while beyond them the orderly steered the bed to a sunny window, got the angle right and pressed the foot brake.

  Tola kissed her grandfather’s cheek, then came my way, extending a hand and a card. “Don’t get up,” she said.

  I already was. I took the card.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ford. If you find yourself in need of peace or excitement, swing by one of my Nectar Barns and we’ll fix you right up. We’ve got some incredible edibles if you’re the type to be discreet about such things. You look like you may be.”

  Biker boots on tiles. The orderly followed her out. Then a small-toothed grin from Virgil and the distant slam of a door. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thirty-five, but not married yet,” he said. “Teamed up with the Indians and making money hand over fist but no bank will take it. Dangerous—all that cash in boxes. She’s still looking for Mr. Right, Mr. Ford, but she’s fussy, fussy, fussy.”

  I refrained from laughing at the prospect of joining the Strait family.

  Through the big window I saw the candy-apple-red and black Harley Davidson come slowly down the drive, flatulent and loud, a customized Sportster with dazzling paint and sleek saddlebags streaming leather pendants. It rumbled past. The pickup truck driver waved at her and followed her down the mountain.

  Virgil pointed a bent old finger. “Meet my firstborn son, Archibald. Archie, this is Roland. As you know, some years ago bandits shot up Archie for less than a thousand dollars in Better Burger money. Not one of them lives today. You may approach the bed.”

  I stood at a respectful distance. Archie Strait looked to be sixty or sixty-five, movie-star handsome, freshly shaven, with tanned skin and gray, razor-cut hair. He looked ready to throw back the sheets and get out, any second. Archie’s younger face had smiled down on motorists from Better Burger billboards across the Southwest for over three decades. In the billboard shot, Archie Strait wore his killer smile and a red bandana around his neck in the style of John Wayne. These days the signs were sun faded but seemed somehow eternal.

  Virgil silently appeared beside Archie, reaching out a hand toward his son. Trailed Archie’s cheek with the backs of his fingers; touched his thick, up-brushed hair; spread open Archie’s eyelids one at a time to reveal the clear gray eyes. The lids stayed parted, as if trained.

  “Hmm,” said Virgil. “They say brain damaged since that night. They say he doesn’t feel, think, or know much anymore. Tola’s got him doped up with that stuff of hers. Not the druggy version but the medicinal one. Seems to work. He’s peaceful, and I think his mind is sometimes alert. Chews his food now. Hums, too. Not a tune, just a humming sound. Hard for me to believe, when I look into those eyes, that nobody’s home. I think he’s aware of a lot. Aren’t you, son? I’m no fool, Mr. Ford. And I’m no crackpot. But I do believe in God and I think God is still inside this boy. Do you?”

  “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  He turned and looked at me as if I’d failed an important test. “If you stand in the middle of the road, you will be run over from both directions.”

  “Who’s standing in the middle of a road?”

  The old man’s look was quick, sharp, and satisfied. “Because of the lipstick on the back of Natalie’s car, we know she’s in serious trouble,” he said.

  “Narrow it down.”

  “This is about money. Not some rapist who’s seen Natalie on TV.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “The abduction was not impulsive, Mr. Ford. It was done with planning. Daylight. In public. A fit, spirited young woman. They took the extra time and risk of being seen, to get her into another car. To go where? Perverts would have done their deeds and killed her out in Pala. It was perfect—a private place and her own car. If that’s all they wanted, they’d have left her there. No. Dalton will get a ransom demand. They’ll want some kind of cryptocurrency through the Internet and the FBI will have almost nothing to go on.”

  “I thought that at first, too. But it’s been five days now.”

  Virgil frowned, lowered Archie’s eyelids both at once, with thumb and index finger. Walked slowly away, his body following his straining, tortoise-like head to the window. I got my first full view of him—shorter than I’d expected, thin and leaning as if into some private wind. Thermal long johns, a canvas barn coat, and calf-high shearling boots.

  He sat back down. Took off the knit cap, shook it once and rearranged it over his sparse white hair. Then turned to the window, giving me his back.

  “Your thoughts,” he said.

  “If it’s not sex and it’s not money, then another reason comes to mind,” I said. “Revenge.”

  “For what?”

  “I was hoping you may have some ideas, Mr. Strait. Now we’re back to the enemies question you didn’t answer.”

  He turned. “The Democrats of California hate him. They’re financing that awful woman against him.”

  “I doubt that the California Democratic Party had Dalton’s wife kidnapped,” I said.

  “Why not? How is my grandson to run a reelection campaign with this hanging over his head?”

  “Not to mention hers.”

  “Why do you think he’s hired you to find her, instead of trusting the police? Because soon as the media get into this, it will become a circus of fake news and speculation, and he’ll be in the middle of it. His opponents will find a way to use it against him. Isn’t that plain to you?”

  The old man had a point but it wasn’t sharp enough. “I mean vengeance for an action taken. Or perceived to have been taken.”

  Virgil locked his tiny, shiny eyes on mine. “Enemies. Vengeance. I like the way your mind works.”

  “Where were you set to meet Natalie for lunch on Tuesday?” I asked.

  “Vintana. It’s above the Lexus dealership near her work.”

  Stra
it told me he had waited there for forty minutes, made three calls to her but got no answer. Tried her boss, who said she still hadn’t showed up for work and hadn’t called. It wasn’t like her. Strait had lunch, two martinis, and drove himself home. Said he met Natalie for lunch twice a year unless there was some special reason they needed to talk.

  “Was there some special reason?”

  Virgil considered, his eyes hard upon me again. “Yes, there was. Want to see my scorpion collection?”

  “Of course.”

  SEVEN

  We climbed down the stairs to the basement. Cold rock walls, poor light, and the smell of earth. Virgil pushed through a rusted iron door on squeaking hinges and into a dark room. He flipped a wall switch but no light came. He pulled me in and shut the door. Before us, luminescent blue-green creatures scuttled and stopped, scuttled and stopped.

  “They’re most active at night,” said Virgil Strait. “So I keep it dark here during the day, hit them with the UV so I can see them frolicking.”

  As my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw the terraria built into the walls and the big desk in the middle of the room, stacked with books and papers, and a high-backed leather chair behind the desk and the two folding chairs opposite. The scorpions surrounded us in their glass cages, heavy armed and high tailed, all sizes, some small as a house key, some half a foot long at least.

  “I liked them as a boy and never outgrew the fascination,” said Virgil. “Carried them around in my lunch bucket at school. Used to keep a new specimen or two in my chambers, which had a distracting effect on squabbling lawyers. Scorpion venom is mostly overrated. Still, you don’t want an Arizona bark scorpion or a spitting thick-tailed black to get you.”

  “That’s a big one,” I said, nodding to a crawdad-sized scorpion eyeing us from a top-row cage.

  “Emperor scorpion from Africa.”

  “Why did Natalie want to see you?”

  Virgil regarded me in the near dark, though I couldn’t make out his face.

  “She wanted to talk about moving her family here. In with me—Dalton, her, and the younger boy.”

  “Why?”

  “Circle the wagons. Debt. Years of living beyond their means.”

  I thought of Dalton’s comments about his assemblyman’s salary of a hundred grand and change, coupled with that of a part-time car salesperson. They were not a money machine, but they made just enough to live a decent, frugal life. You had to factor in a son away at USC—one of the most expensive private colleges in the nation. You had to factor in a forty-grand gambling/shopping loss and the cost of Natalie Strait’s medical care. Which, my research had discovered, was only partly covered by the Straits’ State of California and Natalie’s BMW health plans. You had to factor in Dalton spending more of his own money on reelection than he’d ever spent before. And maybe the fact that he couldn’t even pay my up-front engagement fee.

  I watched the blue-green scorpions moving about, determined but defeated by glass. “Have Dalton and Natalie borrowed money from you?”

  “Those days are over.”

  “Were you going to let them move in?”

  “Sure, but it’s a crazy idea. Both boys in college. She works in Escondido and Dalton’s in and out of Lindbergh Field every other week it seems. This place is hours from everywhere they need to be. And look at it. Who’d want to live in this rock pile of hell in the first place?”

  “They must be desperate,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you dig a hole, you fall in. That’s what I used to tell the unfortunate souls who ended up in my court.”

  “Until you fell into your own.”

  “Who are you? Roland F. Christ?”

  “I’m just a PI, locally sourced and hopefully sustainable.”

  “Life is surprise.”

  Virgil hit the lights and the glowing arachnids receded into the pebbled flooring of their cages. Up close and in good light his face looked like a wrinkled map, cross-hatching and contradictory lines in all directions.

  “You want enemies of Dalton and Natalie?” asked Virgil. “You were right about Dalton’s older brother. Kirby’s the one who took up with her first. He never got readjusted quite right after she went with Dalton. Nobody falls in love like a Strait.”

  * * *

  I bumped down the mountain drive from Virgil Strait’s rock castle, followed by one of his watchdog trucks with the rifles in its window. Howard Wilkin, my contact and sometimes ally at the Union-Tribune, called, his voice cutting over the radio speakers loud and clear.

  “I’m working on a story about Natalie Strait,” he said. “But nobody knows how I can get in touch with her. Do you?”

  “I saw you out in Valley Center,” I said.

  “They’re treating it as a crime scene,” said Wilkin. “And asking me to stand down for now. Asking as a reporter, Roland, what were you doing there?”

  “I got a tip, Howard. Just like you probably did.”

  “From Dalton?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It would make sense, with him being in Sacramento.”

  “What did the crime lab find in her car?” I asked.

  “They won’t say anything. They won’t even confirm that the vehicle belonged to Natalie Strait. My contact at the DMV came in handy. Help me out here, Roland.”

  “They’re telling me less than they’ve told you,” I said.

  “But you got a lot closer to the crime scene team than I did. They must have shot two hundred pictures. What did you see in there?”

  “Nothing unusual that I could see. I can’t comment for publication, Howard. You know that.”

  “Do you have a number for her? For Natalie Strait?”

  “Talk to Dalton.”

  “He said talk to you.”

  I had expected more of Dalton. Maybe name, rank, and serial number. And some good old-fashioned political evasion.

  “I’ll ask her to call you when I find her, Howard. Let’s let the cops handle this for now. Give the Straits their privacy.”

  “He’s the assemblyman for the eighty-second district, Roland. People should know if his wife has been the victim of a crime.”

  “Nobody’s saying that, Howard.”

  “That’s what bothers me. I know something’s wrong here. The Straits have been living pretty big for years now. I’m the only media on this story, and this could be big with the election six months out. I need more than an abandoned car. You owe me from last year.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  I ended the call, turned the radio back on, made a fist and tapped it on the steering wheel. I called Dalton to find out why he’d handed me over to Wilkin, and to find out what, if anything, Lew Hazzard of the Special Enforcement Detail had told him about Natalie’s vehicle. The call went to message.

  Next I called Dalton and Natalie Strait’s three current credit card companies, gave Dalton’s account numbers, PINs, passwords and security codes, and the last four digits of his social security number. Yes, I was calling from a new phone number. Asked for balances and recent activity. The balances for April—the most recent full month of activity—were $5,705, $4,013, and $7,922, and all of the monthly minimums were past due. None of the credit cards had been used in the last four days. Would I like to speak to an account representative?

  I logged in to my mobile IvarDuggans account to pry into Dalton and Natalie Strait’s credit history. The security site doesn’t have access to current balances, but they do have a list of credit cards, both active and closed, that are “associated” with practically any individual who has ever used a charge card.

  Dalton and Natalie Strait’s information popped right up. I noted the card issuer and account numbers, logged off and started calling.

  By the time I hit Alpine, I’d come up with three more active credit cards not listed by Dalton but used by
both Straits and discovered balances totaling $37,039.

  I clicked off, wondering how Dalton’s hundred grand and Natalie’s up-and-down commissions in the fickle car market could cover mortgage, private college expenses, taxes, insurance, food, utilities, gambling, everyday expenses, and roughly $55,000 in credit card debt.

  A few minutes later the phone went off again, this time with a San Diego County Emergency Alert:

  An explosion has been reported at the San Diego County Administration Center downtown. Multiple injuries have occurred and first responders are on scene. Authorities are asking all citizens to stay away from the building, which is located at 1600 Pacific Highway . . .

  Which is about two blocks from the city building where the bomb addressed to the mayor had gone off five days ago.

  EIGHT

  By the time I got to the city, the waterfront was barricaded and the traffic was inching through downtown. I pulled into an airport parking structure on Kettner, paid the attendant for a few minutes on the rooftop, and wound my way up four stories to the top. Plenty of spaces. I stood with the breeze in my face, looking out at the airport and the tuna fleet and the county center. Raised my binoculars and saw the stately old building surrounded by emergency and media vehicles, SDPD prowlers, and fed and state vehicles of all description. Fire companies and medics still deployed, crews standing outside their engines and trucks. A helicopter hovered low. Various personnel came and went through the cop-clotted entrance, with attitudes of purpose but not emergency. Just doing their jobs now.