Into Thin Air Read online

  Kurt ignored the couple and leaned back against the leather bumper, finishing off his drink. The Design Conference accounted for most of the clientele, a small but enthusiastic gathering. The dance floor writhed with snaky limbs, the music all bass and messy synthesizer, a painful, pounding throb. He watched the matches taking shape, the awkward flirtations, strangers meeting, dancing together, a momentary abandon in a far-off place. He couldn’t remember what his pathetic little pleasures were, or the last time he’d had any fun.

  A loud whoop went up at one of the tables, a gang of British rugby players in town for the regionals.

  “I hate these assholes,” Zack said, sauntering back to his seltzer hose. “They come in here and grope my waitresses and leave lousy tips. Look at those two over there,” he said, “hitting on that lady. I wish you’d let me carry a cattle prod, Kurt.”

  Beer steins in hand, two burly ruggers hovered over a booth near the stairs, speaking to the lone figure sipping a glass of wine. There was an alluring presence about the woman, her arm poised on the tabletop, smoke curling from her fingertips. A cluster of tiny plastic fruit dangled as ornament from each ear. She seemed to be staring at Kurt, imploring with lovely dark eyes. It took him several seconds to realize that the woman was Graciela Rojas.

  He walked over to the booth. “Hello, Doctor,” he said.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” she said, a sadness in her smile. The day had taken its toll on her.

  The two men weren’t happy about Kurt’s intrusion, but they heard who he was. “A bit unfair, in’it, mate,” one of them remarked, grinning, “you poaching all the local game?”

  Kurt was the only man in the club larger than these Piltdown knuckle-draggers. “Run along, boys,” he said. He wasn’t in uniform, but in his pants pocket he carried a container of pepper spray the size of a breath freshener. Enough to ruin their evening.

  “S’all right, Buff.” The second man clamped a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “She’s too sodding old to fuck, anyway.”

  Kurt gave him a nasty shove. “Hit the street, jerk,” he said. “I don’t want to see your ugly face around here again.”

  The rugger didn’t like the stiff jab to his solar plexus. He was thinking about doing something stupid, like throwing a forearm. Kurt gripped the container in his pocket.

  “C’mon,” the other rugger said, screening his friend away from Kurt. “We’re wasting good time here. Let’s go find us some real quim.”

  Kurt watched them leave the club. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Boys will be boys.” Graciela smiled.

  “I left a message for you at the Meadow.”

  “I went for a drive,” she said. “I couldn’t stop thinking of Omar.”

  She invited him to sit down.

  “They wanted to know his sexual preference,” she said, describing the interview with the FBI, her face sinking into the long grim countenance of grief. “They asked if he sometimes purchased drugs. I find it horrible that no matter the country, the secret police has the same obsessions.”

  Kurt told her he had picked up Omar Quiroga’s book and intended to read it.

  “Ahh,” she said, her face sparkling for an instant. “Omar’s book. It must be difficult for someone who lives in this country to understand the cruelty in that book. The official policy of torture and murder. I don’t think I understand it myself.”

  She told Kurt what had happened to her the first year of the junta. How thugs in plain clothes came to arrest her in the clinic where she worked, the slums of Buenos Aires. “My husband ran a bookstore,” she said. “That same day they closed his shop and took him away. Our daughters were four and two years old then. Someone phoned my husband’s parents to tell them to watch the children, we would not be coming home again.”

  Kurt thought about Lennon, safely asleep in his Roy Rogers bed. He remembered the agony without him, those months the boy lived with his mother in Telluride.

  “The soldiers kept us blindfolded, myself and many others, in a small compound that was once a primary school,” she said. “When they found out I was a doctor, they put me to work reviving those they had tortured nearly to death. The ones unconscious from electroshock, or bleeding in the kidneys. Once I delivered a baby,” she said, her mouth beginning to tremble. “It was to that school, maybe the third month, I cannot say for sure, that they brought Omar.”

  He had been beaten mercilessly, his teeth broken, his hair yanked out in patches. They strapped him to a chair, hooked his testicles to an electric generator, and questioned him about his associations, demanding that he name names.

  “He didn’t, of course,” she said. “And in the end they commanded me to administer a lethal dose of anesthetic.”

  Graciela lit another cigarette, her hands unsteady.

  “I gave him only enough to make him sleep. There was a small chance, you see, that somehow he might survive the Plata,” she said. “And he did. He woke when his body hit the cold water. God smiled on him and he lived.”

  She tapped a matchbook absently against the tabletop. “But not this time,” she said. “Not this river.”

  Kurt rubbed his beard, a nervous habit. He needed another drink. “How about you?” he said. “How did you get out?”

  She sipped wine and gazed off across the club. “They let me go,” she said. “After five months and ten days they let me go home. I don’t know why. No one will ever know why some lived and some disappeared.”

  “And your husband?”

  “My husband is another story,” she said. “The dear man was an incurable romantic. He believed that democracy would eventually prevail in our sad country. I am told he cried for our children night and day. They lied to him, you see, telling him the girls were given to another family to raise. In the end he broke down.” Her eyes roamed toward the bar. “I did not find out for a year—when one of his cellmates came to our house. My husband hanged himself with his belt in the prison toilet.”

  They sat together for quite some time without speaking. Kurt ordered another shot of tequila. Dancers paraded back and forth to the mirrored ballroom, drinking and laughing merrily. The music boomed louder and louder. He and Graciela made a curious picture, the only two people in Andre’s not having a good time.

  “Do you know that young woman?” Graciela said after several minutes of ruminating silence. She was staring at Jake Pfeil’s date, a stunning Mediterranean beauty dolled up in one of those coquettish off-the-shoulder party dresses. Her liquid brown skin was generously exposed—legs, shoulders, back—the way Jake liked it. “I’ve been trying to place her, but I cannot.”

  “I’ve never seen her before,” Kurt said. She was just another pretty appendage to Jake’s tailored sleeve. He collected them like cuff links.

  “Excuse me, please,” Graciela said. “I must speak to her.”

  She slid from the booth and walked to the bar. Kurt watched the languid movement of her body and realized how attracted he was to this woman. She introduced herself to Jake’s date and the young beauty smiled, shook her head, black curls brushing her bare shoulders. Jake looked amused. He stroked one end of his mustache, an old cocaine tic, and studied Graciela with lascivious interest. Calculating, Kurt guessed, how he could get them both in bed.

  “She is Italian,” Graciela said, returning to the table. “My mistake.”

  Kurt tossed down his drink. “I ought to be going,” he said. “I have a five-year-old at home with a baby-sitter.”

  Graciela smiled warmly. “You are married, Sheriff Muller?” she asked.

  “Divorced,” he said. “Lennon’s mother left him at my office one day, a couple of years ago, and went off to an ashram in Oregon.”

  He could see the confusion in Graciela’s face.

  “Yoga, curry, meditation,” he explained. “It’s an Eastern thing. She’s on the path to personal fulfillment. She calls every now and then, when the spirit moves her.”

  Something troubled her. “So many loves vanish fro
m our lives,” she said, looking into Kurt’s eyes. “Yet we go on.”

  Lately he had been thinking a lot about Bert. How much he missed him. The numbness had finally worn off and he was beginning to feel the loss.

  “Sheriff Muller,” she said, “do you think you will find out who murdered my friend?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She was sitting close to him now, her knee resting against his.

  “I bought a map,” she said suddenly, digging into the woven handbag on the cushion beside her; “I located those Grottos you were speaking about. Where Omar might have—”

  Unfolding the large, awkward trail map she knocked over her wineglass, spilling a trace of dark liquid across the table. “I want to see this place for myself,” she said.

  Kurt set the glass upright. She had had more to drink than he realized.

  “My deputies and I are going out there at daybreak,” he said. “I don’t usually invite civilians along, but in your case I’ll make an exception.”

  Graciela unfolded more squares, turning the map from side to side, trying to tell north from south. “Thank you, Sheriff,” she said, distracted by her effort, “but my flight back to Argentina is scheduled for tomorrow morning. My daughter is graduating from university at the end of the week. I’m afraid I do not have the luxury of time.”

  Kurt wasn’t sure of her intentions.

  “I have a rental car,” she said. “You’re welcome to come along.”

  “When?” he asked incredulously. “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  He laughed. “You’re joking, right?” he said. She was in no state to go anywhere except directly back to Star Meadow for a good night’s sleep. “The Grottos are not a place to wander around in the dark. Especially if you’ve never been there before.”

  “I am not joking,” she said, raising her chin defiantly, her eyes meeting his. “I cannot possibly return to my room and wait there all night, wondering if anything will be done for Omar after I am gone.”

  Kurt sighed. He was feeling the tequila buzz himself. “Dr. Rojas,” he said, “we can’t accomplish anything out there this time of night. Besides, the whole idea that he was…disposed of in those rocks is a long shot at best.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” she said, dropping her eyes to study the map. “I appreciate your caution. I will be careful.”

  “You’ve had too much to drink,” he said.

  “Claro,” she said, rattling the paper folds. “It is late and I am a bit out of sorts. But I will find these Grottos myself.”

  He was not happy that she seemed to be questioning his competence. “Let me do my job, Dr. Rojas,” he said. “I’ll get whoever killed Omar Quiroga.”

  A thick wave of hair veiled one eye. “You will not be terribly offended, I hope, Sheriff,” she said, “if I tell you that for many years now I have had little reason to trust men in uniforms.”

  He glanced down at his hands cupped around the empty shot glass. “You’re determined to do this, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I must know what happened to him,” she said. “His family will want to know.”

  He drove her southeast of town along the winding two-lane highway toward Independence Pass. The night was dark and moonless, the forest blacker than the sky itself. The Jeep’s headlights ranged into deep, cavernous gorges chiseled in the bedrock. They passed no other vehicles, an eerie sensation that they were alone and isolated on top of the world. Graciela slouched silently in her seat while Kurt considered the two dozen reasons he should turn the Jeep around and take her back to Star Meadow.

  “Look, is there any way I can talk you out of this?”

  They were pulling over onto an access road near the Grottos. Graciela sat up and took notice of the wooded darkness.

  “I see now,” she said, “why they brought him here.”

  Kurt parked the Jeep at the trailhead, his high beam illuminating the fractured cliffs above a rushing stream. Glacial meltwater had grooved the rock, leaving striations and a honeycomb of shallow caves.

  “I really don’t expect to find a smoking gun, Doctor,” he said. “Even in daylight it’ll take hours to cover that ground.”

  “Come,” she said, hopping from the Jeep. “Show me the way.”

  “Hold on a minute,” he yelled after her, opening the glove compartment to look for his flashlight.

  She ignored his warning and roamed out into the darkness. “It’s not so difficult,” she said, ascending a smooth whaleback ridge, Kurt’s flashlight beam chasing after her.

  At the crest they stood together, Graciela breathing hard in the crisp night air. She wasn’t used to the altitude. Kurt pointed the light through fir trees toward a rocky flume. Water hurled down the long ragged split of granite.

  “Is that where they pushed his body?” Graciela asked.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  She took the flashlight from his hand and made small quick steps down the ridge and across a deposit of chunky scree, her arms aloft, swaying for balance like someone treading over broken glass, the beam dancing wildly in the trees. Kurt trailed her to a scattering of boulders near the ledge. Graciela stepped up onto a mound of sandy shale and aimed the shaft of light into the deep shadows below, where darkness prevailed, ghostly stone silhouettes looming in the bottomless void. The summer runoff was so loud Kurt could scarcely hear his own voice.

  “Nasty drop!” he called out. “You don’t want to get any closer!”

  Graciela turned to look at him, loose stones underfoot skittering off into the abyss. She lowered the flashlight, resting it against her pants leg. Now all he could see was the strange glowing outline of her body.

  “Come on, Dr. Rojas,” Kurt said, holding out his hand. “Let’s go back to the Jeep.”

  “I couldn’t save him,” she said finally, her voice choked and distant. “I couldn’t save him this time.”

  He took a step closer, reaching out for her. “Here,” he said. “Let’s go talk about this someplace warm.”

  Graciela hesitated, then placed her icy hand in his and leaned forward, collapsing deadweight against him. “I’m sorry,” she said, her warm breath in his ear. “I have had too much to drink. Please let me sit down.”

  Her legs were unsteady and she stumbled, seizing his arm, sinking down awkwardly in front of him. “You were right, of course,” she said, hunching against the cold. “There is nothing to be done for Omar out here.”

  He draped his brown leather jacket around her shoulders. “Catch your breath,” he said, squatting down beside her, “and then I’m taking you back.”

  She clicked off the flashlight and they sat for several moments in silence. At ten thousand feet in the Rockies, the dead of night without enough clothing, he was beginning to shiver. A fine mist drifted from the waterfall, settling on his thick hair and beard.

  “He was my best friend,” she said softly. “I shall miss him.”

  “Your best friend,” Kurt said. “Was he also your lover?”

  Her body began to shake with deep laboring breaths and he realized she was fighting emotion.

  “It makes a difference, Graciela,” he said. “It makes a difference in the investigation. I need to know where you were, what you talked about, what you did, the last time the two of you were together.”

  He knew the questions were inappropriate now, at this moment, in this place, but he couldn’t restrain himself. He had to know.

  “I am wondering if I was right about you, Sheriff Muller,” she said in a husky voice. “If you are a good man who can be trusted.”

  Though they were only inches away, the darkness came between them like a sheet of black ice.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Graciela? Something about Quiroga?”

  She brought her knees to her chest and drew the jacket around her. “Many years ago,” she said, “yes, Omar and I were lovers. For a brief time before the junta. My husband was away in Paris.” She hugged her knees, rocking for w
armth. “That was another lifetime. After the loss of our loved ones we talked about marriage, but—but our hearts were not in it. Something could not be recovered between us,” she said. “For fifteen years Omar and I have been the dearest of friends. Political allies. And nothing more.”

  Her admission struck close to home. He still felt guilty about his own marital deceptions.

  “Have I been wrong about you, my friend?” she said to him. “I thought I could trust you. I have seen the loss in your eyes as well. A child without a mother. Loved ones gone. But now you are beginning to ask questions like all the others.”

  He thought he heard a crunch of rock, a footstep. The runoff spumed in a haze of steady white noise and he strained to listen. He thought he heard it again. Graciela took hold of his shirt and pulled him close. He could smell the sweet wine on her breath, the coconut fragrance of her hair brushing his face.

  “Someone is watching us,” she whispered in his ear.

  Suddenly a disk of light torched the blackness, blinding them both. Graciela gasped and clutched at Kurt, her long nails digging into his arm. He spun to his knees and raised a hand, shielding his eyes from the glare.

  “Turn that off,” he said, reaching for the pepper spray in his pocket.

  The blow caught him above the eye. The only thing he would remember later, in the many long nights of regret, was the shrill sound of Graciela screaming.

  Chapter six

  The cold brought him to. His head throbbed, his neck was stiff as a plank. Something sticky covered his face. Dizziness overtook him when he tried to sit up. He crawled on his hands and knees, searching for Graciela, calling out her name, his voice muffled by the waterfall. Pulling himself to his feet, he fought back nausea and waited for the liquid night to stop lapping at his ankles.

  He made his way back to the Jeep in the dark to find three of his tires punctured by bullets and the CB radio wires ripped loose. He flipped on the high beams and scanned the Grottos, calling her name again and again, desperate for some sign of her. There was no movement but the wind in the invisible spruce trees.