Silencer by Campbell Armstrong Page B

give Polly the benefit of my wisdom, which should take all of seven or eight minutes, then we’re out of here and heading north. How does that sound?’ He moved towards the kitchen door. ‘Before I forget, some reporter from the Phoenix Gazette phoned. Wanted to know if you had anything to add to the story of the Galindez discovery.’
    â€˜I hope you told him I was incommunicado.’
    â€˜My lips were sealed.’
    Rhees left the kitchen.
    Amanda’s head hurt and she had an acid sensation in her stomach and a general sense of malaise, a weakening inside, as if her immune system was flagging. She looked out into the backyard. Neglected grass grew long in ragged brown stalks and butterflies flapped here and there, settling where the mood took them.
    She watched for a time. She thought about Isabel. She couldn’t cancel the thought out. She couldn’t flutter away from it like one of those mercurial butterflies.
    She walked into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, ransacked through a collection of bottles. Say hello to the old gang: ginseng, zinc capsules, iron, the whole spectrum of B-vitamins, garlic tabs, fortified C, some kind of painkiller. It was a regular health arsenal. She scooped out pills and downed them with water.
    Then she put her hand in the hip pocket of her jeans and took out Isabel Sanchez’s plastic hair-clasp and studied it. It caught the sunlight streaming through the bathroom window. There were people in the world reputed to be able to locate buried corpses by caressing their possessions, but she wasn’t one of them.
    She had a mechanic’s eye, not a mystic’s.
    She walked up and down the kitchen for a time before she dialled Directory Assistance, and wrote down the number she was given by the operator. Then she dialled it.
    A man answered and introduced himself as Donald Scarfe.
    She said, ‘Don, this is Amanda Scholes.’
    â€˜We-ell, Amanda,’ Scarfe said, ‘it’s been an age. What can I do you for?’
    â€˜I need to come see you.’
    Scarfe said, ‘You know the way.’
    Amanda hung up. She left the kitchen by the back door, so that Rhees wouldn’t see her. He wasn’t going to be overjoyed about this stunt.

20
    The window of Donald Scarfe’s office in the Florence facility looked out over a hazy view of desert mountains in the distance. There was another vista directly below: the compound, watch-towers, barbed wire, high walls.
    The compound was empty. Amanda glanced down, seeing shadows pressed against concrete. The watch-towers made her uneasy. Guards in shadows with guns. The penitentiary was a volatile place, heavy with violent potential.
    â€˜So you think he contracted out a killing,’ Scarfe said.
    â€˜Everything points that way, Don.’
    Donald Scarfe was tall and gaunt and his face had been hammered and dried by too much sunlight. He’d always reminded Amanda of a weathered fence post at the edge of a dry prairie. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a turquoise bola necktie, and looked more like somebody’s idea of a middle-aged rodeo rider than an associate warden of a prison.
    Amanda walked to the water-cooler in the corner of Scarfe’s office and filled a dixie cup. She drank hastily. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
    Scarfe pointed to a no-smoking sign. ‘Sorry.’
    â€˜It’s OK. More and more I feel like a leper anyway.’ She crushed the dixie cup and dropped it inside a waste-basket. She looked at Scarfe for a time. She’d met him at various seminars on penal policy and law-enforcement strategies several times during the last few years, and she’d liked his attitude, which was liberal, compared to the prevailing hard-assed positions concerning the treatment of prisoners. Stick them in goddam tents and let them sweat and feed them pig slop.
    â€˜I don’t have any objection to this visit,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you expect to