“We owe it to him to give him all the information we have,” he said. “Maybe he can figure out the significance of the snake head.”
I had asked both Mike and the police to check out R & J Car Leasing, and had told them I’d gotten the name from a telephone tipster. It hadn’t seemed prudent to mention that the tipster was a psychic.
“He’d laugh in my face,” I said. “He’s a newspaper reporter.”
“Give him a chance,” Don said. “He might surprise you.”
The next time I talked with Mike, I casually asked him how he felt about the use of psychics in criminal investigations.
“They’re useless,” he said. “All they’re out for is money and publicity. I’ve never known one to turn up anything of value.” He changed the subject. “I’ve heard an odd story about Juve. The last time anybody talked to him, he was on the phone with his girlfriend after the warrant was issued, and he told her, ‘Well, the police are outside now. The next time I talk to you, I guess it will be from jail.’ At that point he just disappeared, and nobody’s seen him since.”
“Is his family worried?” I asked.
“Apparently so.”
“Is it true the police were outside when he was making that call?”
“I can’t find that out,” Mike said. “APD won’t answer questions, but his girlfriend seems to think that there was foul play involved.”
If it hadn’t been for Mike we wouldn’t have known anything, since the police wouldn’t answer our questions or share information with us. Betty’s statement that there would be “a certain advantage in the media system” had certainly proven accurate, as had many of her other predictions. But though I now accepted the fact that it was possible for a medium to channel information from the dead, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could foretell the future.
Don surprised me by saying he had no problem with that.
“In the context of eternity time doesn’t exist,” he said. “That means that, on a plane where things are not bracketed by beginnings and endings, it should be just as easy to look forward as it is to look backward.” He saw my look of confusion and attempted to elaborate. “Think of it this way—you make a videotape of your child’s birthday party, and the next day you play it back and watch her spill her ice cream. You don’t find that strange, because you know that it happened; you’re watching a rerun of something that’s already taken place. Now, what if you’re able to see that video ahead of time and watch your child spill her ice cream the day before the party? If the video was created in a realm where time, as we know it, doesn’t exist, it would be just as easy to view it before the fact as after.”
“But that would mean we have no free will!” I objected. “If our lives are all mapped out for us before we’re born, then none of us is responsible for anything we do.”
“Of course we’re responsible,” Don said. “If the child is careful with her ice cream, the video shows she keeps her dress clean. The video doesn’t make things happen, it simply records them, and a psychic like Betty Muench, who has extrasensory abilities, can zero in on the tape before the events on it take place.”
I tried to translate that concept into something more familiar. Our three oldest children had been involved in community theater, and I had spent many hours rehearsing them in their lines. Occasionally during a performance an actor would forget his lines and start to ad-lib, which would force the other actors to ad-lib also, and the scene would become so chaotic that the story line was lost. What if our years on earth were scripted ahead of time, but, because we did have free will, we could write our own scripts, based upon the lessons we needed to learn and the lessons we agreed to help others learn? Although we had no conscious memory of those commitments, each person’s script would be imprinted on his or her soul. If we “forgot our lines” and didn’t play the scene as it was scripted, we could blow the whole play, not only for ourselves, but for everybody.
That raised a possibility I found terrifying to contemplate. Might a person who was involved in a creative career—who drew, day after day, year after year, upon information stored in the depths of the subconscious—inadvertently pull up fragmented flashes of material from scenes that were in the script but had not been played out yet?
“This is going to sound crazy,” I told Don, “and I feel silly even mentioning it, but some of the things in my books seem to have been prophetic.”
“Like what?” he asked.
“Well, take Ransom, for example, about a group of students who were kidnapped by the driver of their school bus. I wrote that story when I lived in Livermore, California. Soon after the book was published, a school-bus driver in Livermore kidnapped a busload of students and held them for ransom. The crime was so similar to the one in my book that the parents of one of the children wanted to have me arrested.
“There are also disturbing things in Don’t Look Behind You. I modeled my heroine, April, on Kait’s personality, and in the story April was chased by a hitman in a Camaro. One month after the book was published, that happened to Kait. In the book April’s family was forced into hiding because of death threats, and the same thing’s happened to us.”
“Life is filled with coincidences,” Don said.
“That’s what I’ve been telling myself.”
Glad that he hadn’t been eager to pursue the topic, I made an effort to focus my mind on more practical matters, such as how to find out if Miguel Garcia did, as Betty’s reading seemed to indicate, have relatives in L.A who might be performing as flunkies for the Vietnamese.
An idea occurred to me as I was standing in line at the post office, waiting to turn in a change-of-address card. I knew Miguel Garcia’s address because it had been printed in the newspaper. What if I turned in a change-of-address card for the Garcia family, so, for a short time at least, we would get their mail? Of course, it wouldn’t be long before somebody caught on, but in the meantime a letter might arrive from Uncle Gonzales or Gurule or Gutierrez out in Orange County, wanting to know if a date had been set for the trial. In fact, if I timed things right, I might even receive the Garcias’ phone bill and discover that they made frequent long-distance calls to California.
I tossed the idea around all the while I was in line, and even went so far as to pick up a second change-of-address card. Then, I lost my nerve and didn’t fill it out. To tamper with the U.S. mails was a felony, and I knew I would probably get sentenced to more years in prison for reading the Garcias’ mail than Miguel Garcia could get if he were convicted of blowing my daughter’s brains out.
14
AT LEAST WE KNEW the whereabouts of Miguel Garcia; he was tucked away in jail, out of reach of “The Snake.”
That was more than could be said for Juve Escobedo. Everybody took it for granted that Juve had fled back to his native Mexico, but what if he hadn’t? What if Juve’s last words to his girlfriend had been spoken in all honesty—he did hear people outside, and he thought they were policemen, and he did, in fact, believe that the next time he phoned her it would be from the jailhouse. He had been there before, and he knew he would be allowed to use the telephone.
But what if the men he had heard had not been who he thought they were?
My experience in creating fictional scenes made this one easy for me. The setting: the Escobedo home in the armpit of Martineztown.
Action: There is a knock at the door, and Juve hangs up the phone and goes to open it. To his surprise he finds Vietnamese on the doorstep. “We’ve come to save you!” they tell him. “We’re going to take you across the border! You and Miguel did a wonderful job getting rid of that bothersome Arquette girl, and now we feel it’s our duty to help you escape.” “Gracias! ” Juve cries gratefully, and leaps into their car, without even stopping long enough to pack a suitcase or to leave his family a note to say where he is going. They take the highway south in the direction of El Paso, and after a hundred or so miles, when they reach the wide open spaces south of Socorro, they pull over to the side o
f the road, and Juve becomes history. Now there is one less suspect to break under pressure and give away the fact that Kait’s shooting was premeditated. No one will question Juve Escobedo’s disappearance, since everyone will assume he’s holed up in Mexico.
The more times I played this scenario out in my head, the more convinced I became that it was exactly what had happened. I phoned Betty and told her, “I think Juve’s dead, but I need to have that verified. Do you think you can do that?”
“Probably,” she said. “I’ll see what I can get for you.” While I waited for her to call back, I organized my game plan, pleased that my day would be filled with purpose and activity. I knew the police would have problems accepting my theory, and in order to convince them I would have to present them with Juve’s body, which was bound to be buried somewhere between Albuquerque and El Paso. With Betty as a guide it shouldn’t be all that hard to locate, but would the two of us be able to dig it up by ourselves? I considered the question and decided that probably we wouldn’t. I’d never been very well muscled, even in my younger days, and lately I’d lost a lot of weight and had been getting no exercise. Betty was a few years younger and was in better shape than I was, but since it wasn’t her daughter who was dead, I didn’t feel I had the right to ask her to do the brunt of the heavy work while I just stood there and supervised. I decided that the best thing to do would be just to drive south with her until she pointed out the grave site, and then to drive back to Socorro and find someone to do the digging. Maybe one of those men who stood on street corners holding signs that said I WILL WORK FOR FOOD would be up for the job.
An hour passed, and Betty still didn’t call back. To keep myself occupied I fixed a lunch to take with us and went out to the garage to see if I could find something to put it in. In one of the boxes Don had brought over from the house, I discovered a picnic basket. At first I couldn’t figure out where it had come from, but when I opened the lid and saw the red checkered cloth inside, I remembered all too well. On Kait’s last Halloween she had been invited to a party, and she and I had spent most of one Saturday dashing from store to store, assembling her costume—a basket from one place, red-and-white checkered napkins from another, a cape from a third, so she could go as Little Red Riding Hood.
I closed the basket and stuck it back in the box, knowing there was no way I could ever pack a lunch in it.
When I went back into the house, the phone was ringing. It was Betty, calling to tell me Juve was alive.
“Are you sure?” I couldn’t have said if I was disappointed or relieved. “I’d been planning that you and I would go hunt for his body.”
“Are you out of your mind?” exclaimed Betty. “There’s no way I’d do that.”
“I didn’t expect you to do all the digging,” I assured her.
“I told you before, I don’t like to do crime,” Betty said. “I can’t think of anything more revolting than digging up dead bodies.”
“What do you normally do if you ‘don’t do crime’?” I asked. “What other kinds of readings do people ask for?”
“A lot of them want to know what their purpose in life is and what their true relationship is to other people.” Betty paused. “Aren’t you interested in hearing the stuff I got about Juve?”
“You told me he’s alive,” I said, “so I presume he’s in Mexico.”
“No, he’s here in Albuquerque,” Betty told me. “Hang on to your hat, because this is one weird reading”:
QUESTION: WHAT MAY WE KNOW AT THIS TIME ABOUT THE PERSON JUVE ESCOBEDO … IS HE ALIVE OR DEAD … WHERE CAN HE BE FOUND … WILL HE AND CAN HE COME FORTH?
ANSWER: There is a desire to look to the point where Juve would communicate from the other side, but the head is pushed down and this is not possible, for he is in the body.
“If the spirit is not in the body, I will usually see a misty image to my left up by the ceiling,” Betty said. “When I looked up there for Juve, I didn’t find him.”
ANSWER: There is this which will show that he is seemingly in a state however that would resemble a kind of dying. He will seem to be desperate, and it is as if he is trying to pull himself up out of something and that he is unable to be free. There will be in this then this energy which will show that he will be left alone and that he will be in some place which confines him and that he is not attended to. There is a sense that this confinement is not something to do with this case. It will be as if there is this which is felt like a kind of vendetta and that there will be this which he seemingly is not aware of, as if some revenge is being taken upon him but he does not know why. There will be in this then this energy which will show much confusion in him and he will be unable to explain any of this to anyone. It is beyond him.
“This feels like some sort of vigilante activity,” Betty said.
ANSWER: There will be in this one Juve that which is not totally aware of his surroundings, but he even knows now that this situation in which he finds himself will not be right and normal even under forms of vendetta. There is a sense of some secret force at work here and that there will be those who want to hold him and he does not even himself know who they are or what they are doing. They do not talk to him, and this causes him great fear.
This is some force acting unofficially but somehow felt to be connected with some kind of official work. There is a great fear at being found out in all this, but there is seemingly a plan which can then be instigated which would diffuse any suspicion on them. Two others are felt in this, and thus then some kind of conspiracy. There is not felt any energy of the foreign in all this, and it is as if this force would seem to be the authorities themselves.
“I don’t get a sense that he’s being held by the Vietnamese,” Betty said. “It sounds like somebody in authority is acting independently without the people he works with knowing what he’s doing.”
ANSWER: There is a sense of this being like an old garage, and there is a pit in the ground, and he is seemingly kept there. This would be in this city of Albuquerque. It is as if he will suddenly become rearrested and will come forth in due time with all manner of confession. This is a clean place and it is as if it only recently has been emptied.
“He’s in a garage?” I asked doubtfully.
“It has that sort of feeling to it. It seems to be a place with something like a grease pit. He’s very frightened, but I don’t think he’s going to die there, or else this wouldn’t say he’s going to be recaptured. If you’re going to go out looking for him, count me out.”
“I’m not going to do that,” I said, but, of course, I was. The moment I was off the phone I had the directory out and was opening the yellow pages to “Automobile Repairing and Service.”
There were twenty-six pages of listings under that category. The obvious way to find out which garages had been vacated was to phone them all and see which numbers had been disconnected. With just three of us living at home we didn’t make many phone calls, so when we moved into the town house, Don had subscribed to an optional billing plan that charged for each call individually. In the normal course of things this was saving us money, but now I realized that if I called every number on over two dozen pages it would cost us a fortune. The only solution I could come up with was to make the calls at night when nobody would be at work to answer the telephone. Knowing that Don would attempt to discourage this endeavor, I waited until he was asleep before I slipped out of bed and got busy on the telephone. The businesses that had answering machines were an irritant, but luckily there weren’t too many of them, and I ended up with a list of twenty-three defunct garages with phones that were no longer in service.
By the time I made my last call, the sky was paling in the east, and faint strips of color were beginning to bring life to the clouds. I went back to bed for an hour, got up when the alarm went off at six A.M., fixed breakfast, and packed Donnie’s lunch with the sandwiches I had made to take on the search for Juve’s body. Then, as soon as I had the house to myself, I got out a notepad caption
ed “Dumb Things I Have to Do Today”—a Mother’s Day gift from Kait the previous spring—and started making a list.
Kait and I had always been the list-makers in the family—she, because she was organized, and I, because I wasn’t. My list of chores for that day differed only slightly from my usual lists:
Buy groceries—eggs, tomatoes, chicken, Kleenex, milk, bread, Tylenol, and remember to take coupons
Take Don’s pants to cleaners
Buy stamps
Stock up on fish food
Find Juve
Make appointment with chiropractor
I studied the list and decided to rearrange the items on it, giving top priority to the chiropractor appointment, since tension had caused my neck to freeze into place. I then elevated finding Juve to the second slot, because I had no idea how long that might take me, and if necessary, mundane chores like buying stamps and fish food could be shoved over to the following day.
The chiropractor’s office wasn’t open when I called, so I left a message on their machine to set me up for a late-afternoon appointment. Then I went out to the car and sat for a while with my list of garages, arranging them in groups according to location. Two were situated in Little Vietnam, which was where instinct would have taken me first, but since Betty had felt so strongly that Juve’s captors were not Oriental, I decided to begin my exploration on the west side of the city, which encompassed the original Albuquerque and the tourist-centered “Old Town” area near which Kait had been killed.
Starting close to the center of the downtown area, I drove systematically up and down streets, checking out addresses. Several of the vacated buildings appeared to have been taken over by other businesses and were sporting signs that identified them as print shops, tile and lighting companies, and plumbing supply stores. One vacant building stood next to a busy shopping center, which was the hub of so much traffic that it didn’t seem possible Juve could have been smuggled into it without detection. Another was part of a complex of auto-related businesses, a risky place to try to stash a captive who might spit out his gag and start yelling for help.