Chapter 39

I drove faster than usual getting to the mission – I broke the speed limit most of the way, when traffic would let me, something I do only when things really are urgent. As a general rule I don't have to be anywhere that's worth a ticket or a wreck, but this time I did.

I parked sloppily in front of the building, and we charged inside. We didn't see Tarquitha, so we headed back to her office, where I saw that the papers had changed, but hadn't gone down in volume. "Okay, Tarquitha," I said, "what you got?"

She heaved herself out of her chair. "I got, I hope, the end of this mess." She headed for the door, and Cecelia got out of her way and then followed her – to the dorm, it turned out. A woman was sitting on one of the beds in the women's section, and I couldn't tell whether her dress was just as big on her as a tent would have been, or she just had so many clothes on it looked that way. I expected it was the latter, both from my knowledge of the fact that street people don't have closets into which they can put clothes, and from the killing reek that came off her. She smelled as bad as any of the people we'd talked to since November, and we'd encountered some fragrant specimens.

"Holly," Tarquitha said, "these are the detectives I was telling you about."

"They're not the cops?" I couldn't tell what she was – white, black, Hispanic, Indian, or something else, though the lack of an epicanthic fold ruled out oriental and probably Indian, and her speech sounded white.

"No, we're not cops," I said. "But we want to find whoever's killing y'all, and put him away."

"'Cause I don't talk to no cops."

Tarquitha stood over the woman like a storm cloud. "Holly, we don't want to hear about no 'I don't talk to cops' nonsense," though she didn't actually say nonsense. "You said you'd talk to these people, so just do it."

Cecelia sat down on the bed beside Holly, showing no sign of what the odor must be doing to her stomach – she'd learned, and anyway she's always been able to control her face and her emotions. I pulled up a folding chair that was by the wall – and which hadn't been there the last time we were in the dorm – and sat down on it. "What you got?" I asked her.

She turned to Cecelia instead. "Last night Chester got into this black Jeep or something, and he ain't here this morning."

"Who is Chester?" Cecelia asked.

"He's a friend of mine. I don't know any other name for him. He always comes here for breakfast, but breakfast is over and he hasn't come."

"And he was getting into some sort of dark vehicle, like a Jeep or a Chevrolet Blazer, a Ford Bronco, something of that nature?"

"Well, I thought it was black..."

"How was the light at that point?"

"Well, it wasn't too good. The sun was almost down, and the shadow of the building was over everything ... and I have to tell you, my eyes ain't what they once were."

"So you thought it was black, but it could have been dark green, dark blue, dark gray – any dark color. Is that correct?" Cecelia had taken Holly's look and run with it, and was doing a good job.

"Yeah."

"And it was an SUV – a large boxy vehicle, like a pickup truck without a bed, but rather an enclosed cargo or passenger area. It could have been a Jeep, correct?"

"Yeah, it coulda, but I didn't see the front so I can't swear to it."

"Did you see the license plate?" I doubted that Cecelia was expecting much with that question – bad light and bad eyesight would make it unlikely.

"I saw it, I read part of it." I controlled my face, and Cecelia controlled hers, but if I hadn't given up gambling years ago I'd have been willing to bet considerable money that she was as surprised as I was.

"What part did you read?"

"Well, it was one of them new blue plates – you know the ones I mean?" Cecelia nodded, and so did I. They're actually turquoise, and commemorate New Mexico's 100^th anniversary as a state, which will be in 2012. "Well, the letters and numbers are yellow, so they stand out, and I saw the letters." And she rattled them off. Cecelia had unobtrusively gotten out her notebook and now wrote the letters down. Maybe they'd be wrong, maybe they'd be right, maybe it would be a mixture. But it was better than we had so far, and her description of the vehicle, as vague as it was, did match the vague description we'd gotten from the Wal-Mart security camera.

"Did you see the driver of the vehicle?" Cecelia asked.

"Yeah. He was a Mes'can, I think." Now wasn't the time to point out that most Hispanics in the United States are natural born American citizens, and some come from families that were here before any of the founding fathers were born. Nor was it time to point out that people from Honduras, Argentina, Bolivia, and the rest of Spanish America aren't Mexicans and never have been.

"Can you say how tall he was?" Cecelia was driving ahead, never mind my private cogitations.