Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

The old man bowed his head toward Conrad and then the others. He was younger than Conrad by at least twenty years, but a life of hard work in the sun had knotted and aged him.

“ Buenos días, patrón, ” he said. “No — bueno, pos sí, patrón, encontramos un cadáver. Tábamos tirando la hojarasca en el bosque y vimos una mujer. Muerta.” He craned his neck in a funny direction, and I realized he was doing an imitation.

Paul said, “They found a woman’s body. In the woods.”

Paul stood up and said to the gardener, “ ¿Dónde exactamente? ” Where was this, exactly?

“Mero abajito de ’onde está la pared de piedra, ¿sí me entiende? Como que se cayó. Un accidente.” Just below where that stone wall is, you know? Like maybe someone fell. An accident.

“Oh, my God,” said Sukie. “It looks like someone fell. ¿Joven, vieja? ¿Le viste la cara?” Young? Old? Did you see her face?

“ Jovencita, ” the man replied. A young woman.

I had a bad feeling. I stood up and walked over to the gardener. “Muéstrame.” Show me.

Conrad said, “Now, hold on a minute here, Santiago. You stay right there.” He took out his phone and looked at it for a moment. He swiped and dabbed.

“Fritz,” he said into the phone, “I need you.” He wandered off, still talking, through another swinging door that probably led to the main dining room.

“I mean, who’s not here?” said Paul. “Where’s Natalya? I know Layla’s in bed, I saw her.”

I said, “Llévame a donde encontraste el cuerpo, por favor.” Show me where you found the body.

The gardener shrugged, shook his head. As if he didn’t understand or couldn’t disobey the boss.

The kitchen door from the outside opened, and everyone turned, and then Natalya entered. She was wearing a hunting jacket from Burberry or some such and a scarf around her head like a babushka. A babushka who liked to go fox hunting. As she took off the scarf, she said, “They found a body.”

At that point my mind was racing. I had a sickening feeling that I now knew why Maggie never came by my room. I wanted to race out right that second and make sure it wasn’t her. I’d last seen her at the side of the house at nearly four in the morning. She was going around to the back of the house, to her room.

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” said Sukie.

“Yes,” I said. I was still standing there with the reluctant gardener. I didn’t want to go back to the table. I wanted nothing more at that point than to see the dead woman and make sure it wasn’t Maggie.

“Someone should call the police,” said Natalya.

Conrad returned to the kitchen then and declared, “Okay, Fritz is calling the cops. He’s on his way over. Everybody just stay calm. Gracias, Santiago. La policía viene en camino.”

“ Vamos, ” I said to the gardener quietly. “Muéstrame antes de que llegue la policía.” Show me now before the police get here.

There was something about the way I spoke to him that made him respect me. Maybe it was the time in the military. He looked at Conrad, then back at me, and when he heard no objections from his boss, he looked at me again and began walking to the door. No one stopped him. I followed him outside.

We were at the back of the house. This was the first time I’d seen the property in the daytime. It was amazing. A rolling lawn and then gardens — I could see tall hedges. In that direction was the chess garden Maggie had taken me to.

“ Es un buen tramo, ” he said. “Sígame.” It’s a long walk. Follow me.

He walked slowly and carefully and said nothing. That was all right with me. My mind felt numb, dreading what he might be leading me to. I thought, hopefully, This probably has nothing to do with Maggie. Anyone could get into the forest that Conrad Kimball owned. This was some poor unfortunate girl from the town of Katonah.

I hoped. Maggie was upstairs at the house, asleep in her room, I told myself.

I was wishing death upon someone I didn’t know, which was strange.

We arrived at a series of beautifully manicured, hedged-in gardens. We passed a rose garden, another one that looked wilder, less tended, and then we came to an old, low stone wall on the ridge of a ravine. By that time I’d finally talked myself out of my darker theories about Maggie being the victim I was about to see.

Santiago looked at me, then waved me closer to the wall. It looked like it had been laid when the house was built. It was crumbling in places. It marked the end of the tended property. After this was acres of undisturbed forest.

He pointed at the top of the wall and mimed someone walking, until he remembered that I understood Spanish well enough. “Aquí merito. A lo mejor andaba caminando por aquí, trepada a la pared, y a lo mejor ’taba borracha y se cayó.”

Maybe she was walking here, on the wall, and she was drunk, and she fell.

“¿Dónde?” I said. Where?

He pointed at the ravine. I stood at the edge of the wall and looked down to where he was pointing.

I saw a body, its head twisted in the wrong direction. I couldn’t see the face, but I could see the jeans and the white sneakers.

Seven years ago

I was surprised when Major Margret Benson, a.k.a. Maggie, called me in to her shoebox-size office the next morning.

I’d been assigned to pore over records of orders processed through Harkins’s office. That was the guy she’d had dinner with the night before as the blowsy Texan. She’d completely snowed him. But now, instead of making an immediate arrest, she wanted to do a complete assessment of the extent of his possible criminality. There was a lot more, she was convinced.

“Sergeant Heller, you’ve driven Humvees, right?”

“In Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, ma’am.”

“I want you to go over these shipping records.” She indicated a mountain of banker’s boxes stacked four high. “Humvee parts. Check for anomalies.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, whatever you can find. I need someone who’s familiar with the Humvee, inside and out.”

I wouldn’t have considered myself an expert on Humvees, or military vehicles in general, but I didn’t object, because I couldn’t. Also I’d begun to figure out that after four years in the Special Forces, I’d actually learned a lot. And maybe I wanted to impress Maggie Benson. That could have been part of it.

“Okay,” I said.

She cocked her head, looked at me aslant, and smiled. “I just handed you the baton, sergeant. Your only job is to run like hell and bring it home.”

It was tedious work, scanning thousands upon thousands of pages of paper records. After two days I’d made no breakthroughs. She left me alone, didn’t check up on me. She expected a status update, and probably soon.

That night I stayed late. I was the only one in the office. The Pentagon never shuts down, but my section at the generic office building was quiet, all the other lights off.

At around ten o’clock something clicked in my head. I got up from the table of boxes and went over to my cubicle, signed into my email, and sent Major Benson a quick note telling her the good news.

Then I went back to my boxes of printouts and continued making notes on a legal pad. About half an hour later, Major Benson walked in. No more uniform. She was wearing a black leather jacket and jeans and a T-shirt, and she looked incredible. It was ten thirty at night, and she looked like she’d been out on the town. She smelled like patchouli and cigarette smoke even though I knew she wasn’t a smoker. Like she’d been hanging out with smokers outside a bar.