River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) Read online

  “It wouldn’t hurt us to have some more affluent readers,” Frank said. “But I don’t think that’s really the route you want to take into the story.”

  “The route into it?”

  “You know this instinctively. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.” He exaggerated; she hadn’t written a thousand pieces for the paper, and he hadn’t seen more than a handful of her student work or her earlier freelance stuff, just enough to offer her the gig. “You can always start a story any old way. The five Ws work as well as anything else. Who, what, when, where, why. But half the time—two-thirds, more like—your reader won’t follow you beyond those five Ws. That’s the whole point of them, isn’t it? To convey the bare facts to the reader in the shortest space so he can move on to the next piece that starts off the exact same way.

  “But a good writer—and Molly, you are a good writer—can find a path into a story that isn’t the expected way, that takes the reader by the hand and leads him along, feeding bits of story like bread crumbs, until he’s begging to be allowed to go all the way to the end. It’s not just in how the printed story begins, although that’s part of it. It’s how you, the writer, approach the telling of the story. You can go for the obvious way in or you can find the road less traveled, the way that makes your reader know you’re taking him—or her, no need to be sexist here—on a trip that she or he is going to appreciate.”

  “Okay,” she said, for lack of a more coherent response.

  “Talking about the rich folks and how they’ll decorate their holiday tables is one path into this story, but it’s not the only one.”

  “And you have a better idea?”

  “You’ve mostly been talking to growers and sellers, right? Not the ultimate customers. That’s where you need to stay, with the people whose lives are affected by how many plants they can sell to the wealthy, and for how much. People who need some rain this winter or they might not have a holiday at all, much less a big table laden with flowers.”

  She thought about what he was saying. Really, he was confirming her gut instinct, but she had been trying to deny this instinct, trying to find her way to those big tables. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed to hear that, I think.”

  “Then I’m glad I said it, Molly. But that’s not why we got out of the office.”

  “I figured that.”

  “I wanted to get you away from Oscar,” he said. “Because he wouldn’t want me to tell you what I’m going to tell you.”

  “Okaaay,” Molly answered. Wherever this was headed, it didn’t sound good. It no longer sounded like she was being fired. That didn’t mean it couldn’t be something worse.

  “We really didn’t intend to get your hackles up about Wade Scheiner, and I hope we didn’t,” he said. “I know he’s a family friend. I also know that your brother’s medical condition has to be your first priority. Oscar and I didn’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position, we just figured that if you were going to be spending time with Scheiner anyway, maybe he’d feel kindly disposed toward The Voice. Or maybe the subject would come up, and you could drop a hint or two. The intent wasn’t to pressure you.”

  “I respect that,” Molly said. “Thanks.” Certainly Oscar wouldn’t have a problem with that, so she waited for the real reason for this little junket to emerge.

  It didn’t take long.

  “You’ve been to Oscar’s house, right?”

  “Sure,” she said. There had been a couple of staff Christmas parties there. It was a tidy brick house, up Piedras, hard by the foot of the Franklin Mountains. “It’s nice.”

  “Yeah, it is. I don’t want him to lose it.”

  Oscar had made his early money in manufacturing, down in Mexico, then more in real estate on this side of the border. He had become a naturalized citizen thirty years earlier. He had funded The Voice almost singlehandedly, and had made that funding conditional on the paper’s also covering news from Ciudad Juárez and operating a website with a Spanish language version of the print edition. He called his baby the Voice of the Borderlands because he believed the border region was virtually a separate nation unto itself, neither fully of the United States nor Mexico, and Juárez and El Paso had more in common with each other than El Paso had with Chicago, say, or New York or San Francisco.

  She knew the history. Obviously there were aspects of the present she didn’t know anything about. “Lose it?”

  “He’s put everything he has into this paper,” Frank said. “For better or worse, at a time when a lot of indie papers are struggling and the Internet is sucking up readers, he risked it all to provide an alternative for El Paso. His house is mortgaged to the hilt. I’m sure he has a little money left in the bank for he and Sofia to live on, but I’m also sure it’s not much.”

  “That’s awful.” Her retort didn’t seem to carry the weight she wanted it to, but she didn’t know what else to add.

  “If he runs out of dough,” Frank continued, “The Voice goes away. We all lose our jobs. I could maybe go back to The Times. You could probably get hired there, too. Some of the others. But I put in twenty-two years at The Times, and I don’t really want to go back. I’m not sure you’d love it either.”

  “Not from what I hear.”

  “Right. I’m not trying to put it all on you, Molly. We’re doing whatever we can think of to get the paper in the black. Everything’s on the table. I’ve renegotiated our printing costs, and I’m considering different paper stocks and inks right now. We’re looking into increasing the cover price. We’re looking at cutting staff compensation. There’s no golden bullet that’ll take care of things, but we have to hope that the right combination of bullets will put us on the right track.”

  “Which is where I come in,” Molly said. The big picture was becoming clearer.

  “Right,” Frank said again. “Wade Scheiner’s exclusive story isn’t going to save the paper all on its own, no matter how great it is. But it could help. It might generate some national attention. Maybe even Pulitzer consideration. That kind of thing bumps circulation, and it sounds good when the ad reps go out to the clients. Not to mention that with Scheiner’s mug on TV every day for the last three weeks or so, the story itself would generate business on the street. Which, again, makes a better story for the sales reps.”

  Molly was still stuck a few sentences behind him. “Pulitzer? You think?”

  “It depends on what the story is, and how he tells it. If he tells it to you, or if he wants to write it up himself for us, Molly, I don’t care which, the news world will notice. If your byline ends up on the story, of course, it’s better for you. You’d be able to write your own ticket at The Voice, and if it gets enough attention, you could probably go to Los Angeles or New York or wherever else you’d like.”

  She had never lived outside west Texas. Palo Duro and El Paso, those were home. She had visited other cities, L.A. and New York and even London, once. She didn’t know if she would want to move to any of them, though. As awful, polluted, and congested as El Paso could be, it could also be beautiful and warm and colorful, and she had a sneaking suspicion that, if she let herself examine her feelings, she would discover that she was in love with the place.

  But her ambition wouldn’t allow her to stay there if those other cities beckoned. New York and Washington, those were where real journalism came from. If she had a shot, she’d have to take it.

  And saving the paper and her job all at once? That had a certain appeal, too.

  “I’ll try, Frank,” she said finally. “I’ll see what I can do, all right? No promises beyond that.”

  “I wouldn’t ask for any, kid. That’s all I want.”

  His smile was genuine, and she lost herself in it for a moment, enjoying its glow. Sainthood. If he ever really campaigned for it, he was a lock.

  SIX

  Lawrence Ingersoll had lived in a big house. James Livingston Truly, no stranger to big houses, was impressed. Truly’s father had been wealthy even before he’d been a sena
tor, and his father before him, and as far back down the Truly line as anyone cared to trace. There were investments, there were family businesses, there were extensive real estate holdings. Other things. One didn’t talk too much about it, except during political campaigns, when every effort was made to pretend that they weren’t really that rich after all, and even if they were, it didn’t mean they were unlike everyone else. It was almost funny to see the old man—patrician to the core—acting like a regular joe, a man of the people.

  Big houses had changed in these past couple of decades, though. The Truly homes, for the most part, had been older ones. Palatial for their times, perhaps, but except for the one they called the Lake House—his father’s primary residence now—they seemed modest. Today it seemed like everyone with some stock market success built a McMansion. Ingersoll’s place couldn’t have been more than five years old or less than seven thousand square feet.

  It was, almost literally, toast.

  Truly stood in the driveway, bundled against the cold, gazing at the remains of the once-grand mountain lodge. The heat of the fire had melted the snow around the house, but the ground had frozen again, hard and slick, around the building’s enormous footprint. Charred logs were strewn about like a giant child’s Lincoln Logs shaken from the box into a campfire. Thick pines surrounding the house were browned on their near sides. A couple of outbuildings stood amid the trees: a barn big enough to park a school bus in, and what must have been a storage shed, both constructed in the same log-cabin style, both coated with ash. Yellow caution tape had been wrapped around some of the pines and surrounded the entire scene. It fluttered in a stray breeze with a noise like a small fan. The acrid smell of ashes lay thick in the air.

  After Ronald Loesser had told him to leave the Ingersoll case alone, Millicent Wong had called Truly back. This time she had been insistent. “If you don’t do something, James, you’ll lose us. You don’t pay us, okay, we understand that. But you have always sworn that you would take care of us.”

  It had been Truly’s predecessor, or those before him, who had made those promises, but it was up to Truly to keep them.

  He understood that his assignment was meant to be punishment. During the days before the Iraq war, when the administration had claimed that intelligence indicated weapons of mass destruction in that country, Truly had argued that the intelligence was being massaged, manipulated. He had told his superiors that they had to speak out, in public, to prevent the country from going to war on the basis of information they knew to be incorrect. When they wouldn’t, he talked to a reporter—off the record, as deep cover, but in violation of orders just the same.

  He would have been fired the day the story broke, if not for Senator Willard Carsten Truly. The old man still had some influence on Capitol Hill, all these years after giving up politics. Influence on the Hill, apparently, translated into job security for his son. Truly had been marginalized, though, and then some evil genius had hit on the idea of marginalizing him entirely by putting him in charge of a program that barely existed, was a secret to most of the world, and had no hope of ever entering the mainstream.

  Truly had accepted the position heading up Moon Flash, since his only other option was to quit the agency. His first weeks there, he had read every file he could lay hands on, all the way back to the 1950s and Grill Flame, which had been started as a response to Soviet psychic experimentation. There had been years of ESP testing, in which subjects “read” the symbols on cards held by the researchers, “saw” the suits and numbers of playing cards, and the like. Eventually they had moved into remote viewing tests, in which the psychics were given coordinates and drew pictures of what they “saw” in those faraway spots.

  Even though he had been put in charge of Moon Flash, Truly had to dig a bit to find the records of the more controversial tests. Telekinesis, pyrokinesis, spiritualism, ritual magic, the summoning of demons—if it existed in the imagination, it had been attempted, and the records were buried in CIA files.

  Many of the tests—most, even—had been failures. Of course.

  What astonished Truly were how many had not.

  He had come into the job a confirmed skeptic. His skepticism was shaken by reading some of the reports, and watching video of some of the tests. He didn’t have any way to confirm that the events described in the files had happened the way they were written down, and even video could be faked. But seeing a demonic visage appear in a puff of smoke above a pentangle marked on the floor of a test room right there at Langley made an impact that couldn’t easily be denied. Looking at drawings of a power plant in Irkutsk, and seeing photographs of the same plant taken after the remote viewing that had generated the drawings, was also convincing. He had listened to a tape of a test subject who demonstrated such thorough knowledge of the tester’s private thoughts that the interview was cut short, the tester’s discomfort still evident on audio twenty-seven years later. He had heard recordings of mind-control experiments in which test subjects really did seem to have their consciousness taken over by someone sitting in a different room.

  These things couldn’t be easily explained away.

  So when Millicent hinted that the psychics and occultists he had inherited from Barry Winston might feel betrayed, Truly worried. He had come into the job thinking it was a joke, that he would put in his time until he either retired or was forgiven. Neither would happen anytime soon. Not yet convinced, he was at least willing to explore further, and he didn’t want to have his network torn asunder before he really learned what his people might be capable of.

  “Millicent, I’m not sure what I can do,” he had argued. “The agency has strict rules about what we can look into, domestically, and what has to be left up to local law enforcement or some other agency. I’m afraid this case is not in my jurisdiction.”

  “I hope you’re not telling me that you refuse to look into it, even informally, James. Because we would take that as an indication that you are not serious about working with us. That—how did Robb Ivey put it? That this is a one-way street for you. We help you, but you don’t help us. We’re still getting to know you, James. That would be a dangerous signal to send.”

  Ultimately, he’d had to agree. She had forced him into a corner, and he couldn’t get out of it without sending exactly the signal she had described.

  He had gone back to Loesser and told him that he was going to Colorado even if he had to pay for it himself. Money wasn’t a problem for him—what with the family wealth—but without Loesser’s approval, the whole situation could get ugly. After a testy exchange, Loesser had finally agreed that Truly could go, but only for the reason that Millicent had laid out. He should avoid taking any action, Loesser said—he should be there only as an interested observer. Local law enforcement had to take the lead on any investigation. Truly’s purpose was smoothing relations with his “psychic friends network,” nothing more.

  That was fine with Truly. He didn’t want to get that involved anyway. Ingersoll was one of the few members of the network he had met face-to-face, and he hadn’t particularly liked the man. He didn’t intend to go too far out on a limb for people who would never be allowed to participate meaningfully in any real intelligence work—people he would happily abandon whenever he was transferred again. Even if he believed Millicent’s doomsday warnings, there was nothing he could do to set things right.

  But it would get him out of Washington for a couple of days, give him something to think about besides missing Bethany. He had dialed her number at least twenty times, always managing to hang up before the call went through. He had thought he was keeping her at an emotional arm’s length. She was, after all, married, and she had never given any indication that she might want to change that status. Their breakup had hit him harder than he had expected, leading him to believe that he had misread his own investment in the affair. It would not have been the first time. He tried to keep tabs on his emotional state, but there had been occasions—and this seemed to be one of them—whe
n he realized that, while he was pretty good at reading other people, when it came to his own feelings, he was functionally illiterate.

  In Colorado, he had stopped at the Mineral County Sheriff’s Department, since they had jurisdiction over the fire scene. There, a deputy told him that Ingersoll’s death had already been ruled accidental. “No sign of foul play,” the man had said, running a finger across his thick white mustache. “We figure he fell asleep in a chair, knocked over a candle, and never woke up. There was candles all over the room, looked like. An accident waiting to happen.”

  The deputy let Truly read the file, which confirmed what he had already said. Arson investigators had concluded that the blaze began in a sealed interior room, spreading rapidly throughout the log structure. The sheriff had signed off on the report just that morning.

  With that seemingly settled, Truly drove his rented car up to the Arbor House Inn in nearby South Fork. He didn’t think there was much more he could learn on his own, but Millicent’s plea had given him an idea. She had mentioned Robb Ivey, a psychic who ran an occult bookshop in San Francisco. Truly hadn’t even bothered asking Ron for permission and he had used his own money for Robb’s expenses and fee. Robb had agreed to come out and take a look at the house, check the ley lines or whatever it was psychics did at this kind of scene. He picked Robb up at the hotel where he’d left him before visiting the sheriff’s office, and they drove to the house together, letting the car’s navigation unit guide him.

  An hour later, he watched Robb pick his way carefully through the rubble, in which seemingly random objects (a stainless steel refrigerator and matching stove, a plasma-screen TV, a single section of wall with a bookcase in front of it) still stood, buried in ash but intact. The psychic was a tall man, skeletally thin and with a shaven head. He looked unhealthy, but up close, an inner glow showed itself in his deep-set blue eyes and beneath his pale skin. In Washington, Truly didn’t meet many people who seemed utterly centered and at peace, but that was the impression he got from Robb the moment he shook the psychic’s hand in the terminal of the San Luis Valley Regional Airport in Alamosa.