"But – "

"No, Doug. Sleep, then ape. Or no ape." And if you throw that bimbo Kristie in my ear I'll reach through the phone and rip your tongue out.

"Whoa, whoa, calm down. Annja, sweetie, would I do that to you?" Doug said.

Did I actually say that out loud?she wondered. She almost cared.

"We're all good. Go get some sleep, Annja, honey. Then the ape. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Still friends?"

"Still friends, Doug. If you hang up now," Annja said.

The phone line went dead.

Chapter 16

Albuquerque

"Please don't take this the wrong way, Annja," Byron Mondragón said, squeezing a teabag into his cup by holding it in his spoon and wrapping its string around it. "But you look as if the world is weighing you down."

She showed him a wan smile. "That's the nicest way anybody's ever told me I look like hell, Byron. Thank you."

She took a tentative bite of her chile relleno.It was a whole roasted green chili pod, stuffed with cheese and batter-fried. It was very good.

"So tell me something, Byron," she said when she finished a mouthful. "How is it possible for the infant Jesus to be wandering the Southwest helping out Japanese tourists? Even if it is his ghost, he was a full-grown man when he died."

"You have to consider the notion of timelessness.It holds that spiritual elements, just like God Himself, are timeless. So Jesus is at one and the same time everything he was – an infant, a child, a man crucified, a man-god resurrected. He's just as much an eight-year-old Jewish kid as he is sitting at the side of God the Father. I admit, I do have to wonder about Jesus appearing in costume from twelve hundred years after he died," he said.

"Still – " He gave a little laugh. "You really have to figure that if Jesus is what they say he is, he can appear any way he likes."

"True." She stirred her refried beans meditatively with her fork. There was something in the notion of refried beans that struck her as somehow just wrong. It didn't mean they didn't taste good, though.

"Of course," he added, "that doesn't mean the Santo Niño everybody's seeing is actually Jesus. I'm just pointing out that in Catholic belief Jesus exists outside of time. So it could be him, sure. I'm not saying that it is."

"Who or what do you think the Holy Child is, then?"

He only smiled.

"Are you a Catholic?" she asked, to mask her frustration.

"I was raised that way. It doesn't mean I'm one now. Or that I'm not." He grinned mischievously. It struck her that if she was going to paint a faun, he'd be her model.

"But your paintings are mostly on religious themes," she said.

"That's an idiom I know. If anything, it's a sign of laziness, not anything profound."

"Why the Santo Niño in particular?"

"He seems handy for me to use to say some things about mankind, his relationship to the universe, the infinite. That kind of thing," he said. "Not that what I'm doing has any direct connection to what's going on in the state right now. Or anybody else's concept of the Holy Child, really. He's my current favorite subject, not necessarily what the paintings are about."

"What are they about?" Annja asked.

He shrugged. "Sorry. I don't feel comfortable talking about it any more than that. I feel like, if my paintings don't speak for themselves, I'm not doing my job. I'm not that good with words, anyway."

He's so innocent, she thought.

Outside the window a guy in a worn olive-drab army jacket, with a brown weed-patch of hair, stood with his back to one of the big windows and slowly raised hands in fingerless gloves out to his sides. He looked as if he were either supplicating Heaven or mimicking crucifixion. Neither the cars zooming past on Central nor the students eating at the tables on the other side of the big window paid him any heed. For some reason it gave Annja an eerie feeling.

Things just have me susceptible, she thought. She still had no idea who was after her. Besides Father Godin, she thought. And maybe Garin Braden. And perhaps even Roux. She shook her head. She had other mysteries to solve at the moment.

"How about these other sightings?" she asked him. "All these bizarre creatures. Do you have any insight on them?"

He turned sideways in the booth seat and crossed his legs. The question seemed to agitate him. "Why would you think I would?" he asked.

She shrugged. "I don't necessarily think you do," she said. "I'm just grasping at straws here. I wanted to get your, you know, your unique perception."

"I don't really know much about it. I don't really pay much attention to the news. I know from listening to my friends that people are seeing some scary things. And that poor kid got killed in the mountains north of Santa Fe, and now there seems to be some kind of media blackout about it."

That was, Annja thought, perhaps putting it mildly.

After getting back to her motel room not too long before midnight the previous night, she had collapsed straightaway into bed and slept almost around the clock. When she woke she couldn't tell from the media that anything resembling Doug's phone account to her of the evening before had ever happened at all. The local TV news program Annja put on talked about the death of the snowboarder as an accident.

When she logged on to her computer, after a shower and a restorative cup of coffee brewed in the little machine by the sink in the bathroom, she found a site linked to by Google News that spoke in terms of the state police investigating what they called "possible foul play." Yet when she clicked back to it several minutes later to recheck some details she found a new story claiming an accident.

Interesting.

Only by turning to alternative new sources was she able to find any mention at all of the killer-ape theory. It seemed a party of four – three young men and a woman – had been about to call an end to a day's snowboarding in the vicinity of an eleven-thousand-foot Sangre de Cristo peak called the Dome when something set upon them and killed one of them. Though none of the others was within a hundred yards of the victim when the attack occurred, at sunset with windblown snow screening the scene, all apparently agreed the attacker was an eight-foot-tall being, black, shaggy and vaguely humanoid. Despite the distance all three of the survivors spoke of seeing its horrible red eyes as it looked at them. Two of them recounted hearing its cry, which one described as sounding like screams and another like a baby crying.

The three survivors apparently fled several miles on foot before finding a signal to call 911 on their cell phones. Santa Fe County sheriff's officers who responded said the snowboarders were pale, hyperventilating and almost unable to speak from terror. The initial investigation was complicated by the fact that the attack seemed to have taken place just across the county line. After some back and forth between the neighboring sheriff's departments, the New Mexico State Police were called in.

The afternoon was actually warm as Annja walked back to her car. The only free parking space when she'd arrived to meet the artist had been a block and a half south of Central on Cornell Drive. The street was lined with little shops and apartments in somewhat shabby Southwestern stucco. And parked cars.