“I understand. Wish me luck,” I said.
She chortled. “You’ll need it. I was lying about her aim.”
“Thanks,” I said with a final wave before bursting through the door. Something flew past my head. I stumbled over piles of junk and dived behind a decrepit couch just as another can was launched across the room. It crashed through the drywall and into the next room. “Miss Faye, damn it,” I called out from behind the arms covering my head as I cowered behind the couch. “Don’t make me call the police. I’m a friend. We met a few years ago.”
The aerial assault stopped, and I peeked over my elbows. Then I heard a creaking sound along the floor as she drew closer and I suddenly felt like I’d landed in a horror movie, waiting to be pummeled to death by soup cans.
“I don’t know you.”
I jumped and raised both the flashlight and the tire iron to defend myself. Considering she only had a flyswatter, I figured my chances were pretty freaking good.
“How do you know my name?” Her voice was a cross between a bulldog and a cement mixer. She’d clearly led a rough life.
“Tennessee told me.”
She frowned and studied me. I kept the light just close enough to her face to see her without blinding her. Since Miss Faye was still alive, I needed some kind of illumination to make out her features, unlike Tennessee.
“What’s your name?” she asked, turning toward a kerosene lamp and lighting it.
I switched off my flashlight when a soft glow filled a room that smelled like dirty ashtrays and mold. “Charley,” I said, glancing around at the piles and piles of magazines, old newspapers, books, and other nonessential paraphernalia. The place defined use extreme caution when lighting a cigarette.
“She never mentioned you,” Faye said. She stepped to an aging recliner and crouched into it.
“I remember your hair.” I searched for a place to sit and decided on a stable-looking stack of newspapers—thank god I didn’t wear white—before turning back to her in all her bleached-blond glory. “I met you a few years ago.”
“You don’t look familiar,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
I cringed. It was a wonder the place still stood at all. “I was here about ten years ago, looking for a family that had moved out during the night. They’d stiffed you for two months’ rent and a broken window.” I turned toward it. Its replacement now stood cracked, taped, and boarded.
“That was you?” she asked.
In shock, I refocused on her. “You remember me?”
“I remember the family. You, not so much, but I do remember a kid coming the next day. I had a migraine, and you wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Oops. “I’m sorry. I thought you had a hangover.”
“I did have a hangover. Hence the migraine.” Her tone softened as she thought back. “Did you ever find them?”
“No. Not back then.”
She nodded, then turned her attention to the window. “I was hoping you would. I was hoping anyone would.”
I sat my weapons on another stack of papers and asked, “Do you know what happened to them? Where they went?” When she took another draw off her cigarette and shook her head, I added, “I need to find the man, Earl Walker. It’s terribly important.”
The pleading tone of my voice must have convinced her to at least try to offer more. “I don’t know where they went, but I remember those kids. Like it was yesterday. The girl so thin, I worried she’d break in a soft breeze. The boy so beaten, so hardened and fierce.”
My chest tightened, and I shut my eyes a moment to get the image her words had instilled in my mind.
When I opened them again, she turned a passionate gaze to me. “That wasn’t no man. That was a monster through and through.”
I inched closer, sat on a stack of magazines a few feet from her. The low light cast hard shadows over her features, but the wetness shimmering in her eyes was unmistakable. Her empathy surprised me more than I would’ve liked to admit. I expected a stereotype. I did not get one.
“Miss Faye—”
“Nobody calls me Miss Faye but Tennessee,” she said, interrupting, “so she must’ve sent you. That’s the only reason you ain’t bleeding to death from a head wound right now.”
“Fair enough.” I wiped my palms on my pants, wondering if she knew Tennessee had passed, and wondering how far to push her. “Ma’am, do you have anything at all that might help me find Earl Walker? I know this is asking a lot, but did they leave anything behind? A suitcase or possibly—”
“He left stuff in the walls.”
I blinked in surprise. “Earl Walker?”
After an almost imperceptible nod, she said, “Harold, Earl, John … take your pick.”
Earl had assumed several identities. She obviously knew a few. “What did he leave in the walls?”
She pressed her mouth together hard. Her breath caught in her chest. “Pictures.”
I stilled. Kim had said that very thing, that Earl had left pictures in the walls. “Pictures of what?”
She shook her head, refusing to answer.
“Were they of Reyes? Were they of his boy?”
Her chin rose visibly, and I knew I’d nailed it. Why would Earl do that? What would he have to gain? The idea was utterly foreign to me, and I quickly scanned through the massive amounts of information I’d gleaned in college for an answer. Or at least, as much as I could recall offhand. Oftentimes criminals liked to keep trophies. Did the pictures represent trophies to Earl? And if they did, wouldn’t he have kept them?
He was all about control. Maybe they were a way to control Reyes, to keep him under his thumb. Still, I just couldn’t grasp why Earl would leave them. Kim had said there were pictures in the walls all over. Did she mean all the places they’d lived? They’d moved from place to place all over New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma, or so the police reports had said.
As bad as I hated to ask, I asked. “Faye, do you still have them?”
She wiped her eyes with the fingertips of one hand.
“They could have a clue. Something. Anything. I must find him.” My mind conjured scenes from a murder mystery where something seemingly mundane in the background of a picture offered the clue that solved the case. Like I could get so lucky.