Ah, Salvador thought. That sort of preoccupied. Is this an arson case or a bad movie? Sister catches her on the rebound from her brother, so brother burns the house down? Where do these sorts of people come from? Do they step out of TV screens or do the screenwriters know them and use them for material?
“You knew Adrienne Brézé socially?”
“No. I’d never seen her before. Didn’t even know Adrian had a sister.”
“Then how did you know the woman’s name?” he said.
An exasperated glance. “I asked the maitre d’hotel at La Casa Sena, of course! I’m a regular there. So is Adrian.”
He hid a smile. I think Ms. Demarcio is a nice lady. She’s concerned about Tarnowski. But I also think she’s a gossip of the first water.
“Thank you, Ms. Demarcio—”
“Well, aren’t you going to tell me anything?”
He sighed. Usually you didn’t, but he needed to develop this source.
“We’re investigating the circumstances of the fire at Ms. Tarnowski’s apartment, and trying to find where she is.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly; that meant We think it was torched, without actually saying it.
“And her disappearance?”
“Ah, yes. There’s no reason to suppose it’s anything but a sudden move—”
“And no reason to suppose it is. I talked to the Lopez family, and there was a man with a gun.”
He sighed. Santa Fe was a small town. “True. We’ve got Santa Fe and Albuquerque and the state police all looking. Here’s my card.”
He slid it across the low table. “Please let me know immediately if Ms. Tarnowski contacts you, or you get any other information.”
Outside, Cesar met him, and they walked down toward the end of Canyon, then turned right across the bridge over the small and entirely dry Santa Fe river with its strip of grass and cottonwoods. That led to Palace just north of the Cathedral, the reddish sandstone bulk of it towering over the adobe and stucco of the neighboring buildings. Salvador jammed his fists into the pockets of his sheepskin jacket and scowled, pausing only to give the finger to a Mercedes that ran the yellow light and nearly hit them. Right afterward, a rusting clunker with the driver’s door held on with coat-hanger wire did the same thing.
“This is screwy,” he complained, after he’d filled his partner in. “But at least we’ve got names to go with our composites. Adrian and Adrienne Brézé.”
“This is fucked up, amigo,” Cesar said cheerfully. “Because the databases are still not giving us anything even though we’ve got the names. They don’t have e-mail addresses, they don’t have bank accounts . . . You did send them out?”
“Yeah, local, state, Fart Barf and Itch, and Homeland Insecurity, which means the spooks. It can take a while, even now they’ve got the whole system cross-referenced.”
“It shouldn’t take a while to get something. Everyone leaves footprints. The question is, my friend, should we be thinking of this as an arson case, or some sort of kidnapping? Scorned boyfriend revenge thing, he burns the house and snatches her?”
“A little early for that.”
Cesar grinned and showed his notepad, a picture of an elderly but wellmaintained Prius. “Abandoned car on Palace, ticketed and towed about an hour ago. Registered to—”
“Ellen Tarnowski.”
“So maybe, it’s not so early.”
Salvador’s notepad beeped. “Well, fuck me. Take a look.”
The picture was from the security cams at Albuquerque Sunport, the airport in the larger city an hour’s drive south; the face-recognition software had tagged it.
“That’s Brézé and our mystery man with the gun, all right. Still in the black leather outfit. Nine thirty to San Francisco last night, just opened up and the request got it. Wait a minute—”
He tapped at the screen. “Fuck me.”
“What’s wrong?”