Читать книгу Demon Dancer - Alexander Valdez - Страница 8

Chapter 3

The Police

I guess she assumed that I had escaped from police custody. When she saw me in the squad car earlier, she did call headquarters to see what I was being charged with. Of course, they didn’t know my name yet or that I was even with the police.

I ran to answer the door and asked the officer in. My mother was petrified and close to a faint, but she gained back some sense of composure as the officer started asking me questions. Listening in, my mother started believing in the tale I had spun a few minutes earlier.

The crime unit had identified the girl as one who went missing seven years prior. Her dress and other items were identified by her father. Distraught over the loss of her daughter, the mother had committed suicide two years after the disappearance. My mother seemed to be relieved, as only I could detect in her facial expressions as she did the math. I would have been four years old when the girl disappeared.

Thank God he’s not a suspect.

My mother knew deep down that I could never commit such a crime, but she would never be surprised by anything involving her son. I guess I really was a hellion, but causing pain to another soul? Never. What a mother, I swear. God bless her though.

My aunts were around all the time it seemed, and they just loved me and the antics I would provide. The neighborhood women were glad that I belonged to my mother and not to them. They only had gossip and rumor to fill their lives, no e-mail or Internet. Their children just weren’t as smart as me, so tales of Alex and what he was up to on any given day were plenty. The telephone, with a nice party line, would fill an otherwise boring evening and load ’em up for the following day’s across-the-fence bullshit among the hens.

I think many of the surveillance, black ops tactics, and disinformation techniques used by the CIA are a result of observing women in their everyday lives, all the way back to the days of the cave.

The police officer told me that I had provided all he needed and thanked me once again as he made his way out to his car.

My father came home and saw the calm in my mom’s eyes, so for now, his prepared tirade had to be put on the back burner. His comment, though, gave me a start.

“This girl was from seven years ago?” he asked.

My father had recalled an incident seven years ago that involved the disappearance of a young fourteen-year-old girl. The more he thought about it, the closer it began to hit home. There was a man he had worked with back then at the flour mill who had lost his teenaged daughter under mysterious circumstances. The man had quit within the year, and my father lost touch with him, never giving him a second thought. My dad asked me where we had discovered the body, and I told him that it was in the bank of the riverbed just past the St. Mary’s street bridge.

Now I could sense the wheels starting to turn in ole pop’s brain. He then told me that seven or so years ago, coming home late one night, driving over the St. Mary’s bridge, he saw a man carrying something draped over his shoulder jump over the side of the bridge. That would be about a thirty-foot leap onto the sand. He promptly stopped the car and got out to look over the edge. There was a small amount of moonlight, just enough to see that there was nothing there. I pressed him on as he further recanted.

“I don’t care who you are. That high jump will break something,” he stated.

The next morning, he decided to go and give a look down in the sand for obvious prints that should be there. As he walked around the approximate spot where the person would have landed, he saw no interruptions in the sand, with the exception of hoofprints, which could have been from a deer. The vision always perplexed him until eventually, he gave it no more thought.

Now I asked him for specific details about what he saw and to give his first gut-feeling response to the question of who did it.

Dad was a pretty sharp fella who came over from Mexico as an orphan. Upon his arrival in this country, he determined the most important thing upon getting here was to master the King’s English.

He told his children, “If you can erase the Spanish accent, you will be taken seriously and have a better chance of melding right into the gringo’s society.” He did just that, and all his children did as well.

“Now what was it you saw that night? Were you drinking?” I asked.