days. Bright blue eyes, white-blond hair, broad shoulders, a gravelly voice. There was no way anyone would confuse him with an Arab. If the man in prison was called the Arab, he couldn’t be Haden. At the same time, the picture Dean had given her of Brad Prescott had shown a fairly young man with light hair and green eyes. His features hadn’t been dark enough to give the impression of a Middle Eastern heritage, but maybe his skin could have burnished under the Mayan sun. “Is he Arab?” she asked.
The woman shrugged again, this time with a casualness that tried Meredith’s patience. “I don’t know.”
“What does he look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he speak English?”
“I don’t know. Look, are you gonna pay me now? I have to get my money—”
Meredith waited a beat, then she leaned closer, her voice a fraction lower, her face expressionless. “I want you to try real hard to remember what your friend told you,” she said quietly. “So far, I haven’t heard anything that’s worth a single quetzal, much less the hundred dollars you demanded.”
The woman inched backward on the bench as a soft drizzle began. The rain hit the leaves on the tree that sheltered them. “I—I don’t know what else to tell you. That’s all she said.”
“Try harder,” Meredith pressed. “What color is his hair? What color are his eyes? Which cell was he in?”
“I—I don’t know—” She stopped abruptly, her hand going to the base of her neck. “No, no…she did say something about his eyes, I remember now.”
Meredith waited.
“My friend, she say they were vacíe.”
“Empty?”
“Sí, sí. That’s right. Emtie, yes.” She stood and held her hands up, palms out. “That’s all I know, señorita. There’s nothing more, I promise.” A second later, she was gone.
For another ten minutes, Meredith sat under the tree in the falling rain and considered her options. Then she got up and started walking.
Her feet didn’t head the direction she ordered them to, though. They started down Calle 6b and fifteen minutes later, she found herself outside Jack Haden’s home.
CHAPTER THREE
STANDING IN THE SHADOWS across the street, Meredith stared at the house then closed her eyes for half a second. She could envision Haden inside, tracing the patterns on tiled floors with his toes, trailing his fingers over the polished wood banisters, leaning against the stuccoed wall. Haden was the kind of guy who liked to touch things he was familiar with—it gave him a sense of comfort, she’d decided after watching him one day. He liked to reassure himself that he was where he thought he was and the things around him were his own. He’d touched her that way, too.
She opened her eyes and studied the home a little closer. Built like the others around it, nothing about the building stood out, which was probably one of the reasons it appealed to him. Two stories with a red tiled roof, the place was surrounded by a painted wall that looked to be about ten feet tall. The top of it was decorated with bits of colored broken glass, the jagged edges pointing straight up. Anyone trying to boost themselves over would end up with a bloody gash across the palm.
A black iron gate was set in the stucco and through the bars, she could see a small garden. The front door opened to the patio. There was no garage and reminding her of her own home, all the windows faced the interior courtyard. A dim reflection ricocheted off the glass of the nearest one but there were no lights on inside.
She glanced down the street. Haden could have afforded a better colonia, but he’d obviously chosen this one for a reason. She wondered if his selection had had anything to do with the lack of vehicles parked outside. If your neighbors were too poor to have cars, then you heard one when it came down the street in the middle of the night. Here, in times past, the sound of a car drawing near after dark was one people dreaded. They’d lock their doors and hide, praying no one would knock. In the morning, they’d get up and surreptitiously check their neighbors to see who had been taken away.
Things were supposed to better now, but who could say for sure? Haden would have been cautious regardless.
She edged down the calle toward a patch of darkness that spread all the way across the street, then she crossed, the smell of fried tortillas filling the air, the sound of a distant radio coming with it. She’d planned on walking by and nothing more, but when she was even with the gate, she couldn’t resist. Her hand reached out and touched one of the bars and the whole thing drifted backward without a sound.
She froze.
Haden would have never left the gate open if he’d gone out of town and if he was home, he would have been even more careful about checking it.
She looked over her shoulder in both directions, then glided inside the walled enclosure, her steps muted. No moon lit the sky but there was enough ambient light to make out the bushes and plants in pots around a central fountain. Edging around the perimeter, she headed for a door set between two of the windows.
The taste of fear filled her dry mouth and suddenly she realized her knife was in her hand. She didn’t remember pulling the weapon from her boot but her fingers were wrapped around it so she must have. When she reached the door, she used the tip of the blade to press against the wood and swing it open. The slab of heavy mahogany complied with a soft creak.
She wished it had stayed shut.
The room before her had been destroyed. There were holes in the stucco where things had been thrown and most of the furniture was upside down. A brown couch lay on its side, its ripped cushions scattered from one end of the room to the other. Two small chairs had been pushed over, too, their arms sticking uselessly into the air. The coffee table was the same way, but it only had three legs. One had been broken off with a savagery that made her swallow, a jagged piece of wood sticking out from the frame like a broken bone. The leg that had been ripped off lay near the shattered television set. The tip had been dipped in something brown and sticky. Her eyes backtracked the trail leading up to it. The line was long and ropy. On the wall where it began was a smeared handprint.
She stepped inside the room, avoiding a stain on the tile floor at the threshold to close the door behind her. Standing quietly, she listened to the flies buzz nearby, then she moved down the hallway on her left in a quick but silent stride. Within minutes, she knew the house was empty.
She returned to the den and surveyed the destruction again. Whatever had happened here had happened several days before, but the echoes of violence left behind could still be felt. Suppressing a shudder, Meredith tried to concentrate but it was almost impossible. Death had been here.
The heavy silence was broken with the incongruent sound of a baby crying. Meredith blinked twice, then realized the noise was coming from next door. She glanced at the house in time to see a light come on behind a open window on the second floor. Had they seen anything? Had they heard anything? The outline of a small lamp wavered behind a filmy curtain. It threw enough illumination over the stucco fence that when she turned back to the den, some of the details she’d missed before came into clearer view.
The first thing she noticed was the wall behind the front door. The pale yellow paint was marked with the scuff of a shoe. It looked as if someone had stood there
