Thomas Blackhorse's Arc

Chapter 2 of 17

Thomas walked back from the car wash along the shoulder of the county road. The sun cooked the asphalt. He carried the folder under his arm and a short list in his head. Four names. People who had talked to the first detectives eight years ago. He needed one of them to talk again. Without a witness, the file in his hand was just paper. He started with the phone. From a pay booth outside a feed store, he called the two neighbors who lived closest to where the girl was found. The first number rang dead. The second picked up, heard his name, and hung up before he finished the sentence. He called the janitor who had cleaned the school the night of the crime. The man's daughter answered. She said her father had moved to Yuma in the spring and did not want calls. She hung up too. One name left. Pablo Delgado. The father. Thomas had avoided him for eight years because he had nothing to give him. Now he needed to give him a question instead. The Delgados lived in a trailer at the back of a small park arranged in a half circle. Tidy homes, potted flowers on the steps, trucks in the drives. Thomas walked in past the mailboxes. He kept his hands loose at his sides. Pablo was under the hood of an old pickup, sleeves rolled, a wrench in one hand. He looked up. The lines in his face deepened. He set the wrench on the fender. "You," Pablo said. That was all. "I'm looking again," Thomas said. "I need the names of anyone your daughter talked to that last week. Anyone who came around. Anyone she was afraid of." Pablo wiped his hands on a rag. His mouth worked before words came. "I was in Oklahoma. Sulfur load. Maria was home. She told the police everything then. Nobody listened." "Tell me one thing they didn't write down." Pablo looked past him at the road. "Ask my wife. She teaches at the school. I don't go there." The screen door of the trailer opened. Maria Ruiz-Delgado stood on the top step in a gray cardigan, a coffee cup in her hand. She had heard enough. Her eyes moved over Thomas the way a person checks a stove they already know is cold. "Get off my step," she said. Her voice was flat. "Eight years. You come now." "Mrs. Delgado —" "There was a man at the school that week. Talking to Martin. I told the police. It went nowhere." She sipped her coffee. "Go ask Martin. He remembers. He just won't say." She stepped back inside and shut the door. Pablo picked up the wrench. He did not look at Thomas again. Thomas walked out of the park with one name he had not expected. Not a witness. A gatekeeper. Martin Talltree had been at the school the night the girl died, and Maria had just told him the principal had been lying for eight years.