"No question about that," said the driver, sounding hurt. "She may be slow, but she's sure."
"Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It'll make things easier when we get back to Tyler's. Now, whose house is that?" Hawkin pointed past the driver's nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.
"That ain't a house, that's Jenny Cadena's goat shed." Kate wrote in the name. "Only now Harry Gustavson's using it to store the window glass for his house." She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. "Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he's still there?" He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.
Kate looked at the map and sighed. "Anybody have pencil?"
Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car's flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road's summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler's shoulder.
"Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey."
The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.
"That's where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother's lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill."
The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn't move.
"What is he after?" he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. "What is he doing?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"Neither do I. Neither do I." He suddenly looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence, and began dutifully to explain.
"The bodies are unmolested; he's not the more obvious kind of pedophile. It isn't money; there's no ransom. He just picks them up, so carefully that so far he's been invisible, and strangles them. After that he removes their clothing and leaves them on or near Tyler's Road. Why here, a hundred miles from where he's picked them up? Why is he doing this?"
He cocked one eyebrow at her and turned back to the waiting behemoth, and though she knew he wasn't expecting an answer, she wished she could give him one. All that came to mind was, "So maybe he's a nut case," and that was so obviously inadequate that she said nothing and followed him meekly back down the rough surface that passed as Tyler's Road.
Five minutes later Detweiler stopped the wagon on a hilltop at a wide, clear area with, incongruously, a picnic table. The temporary, enthusiastic sunshine illuminated glimpses of the Road below them and revealed a wedge of the distant, turgid sea. A scattering of roofs and cleared fields peeped from the vista of dark redwoods. The occasional gleam of solar panels and two high-tech wind-powered generators were the only indicators of the twentieth century.
"Nice, huh?" grunted Detweiler. "Tyler says he's going to build up here when he gets old and gray. I doubt it. He likes to be in the middle of things. Always will." He put the wagon back into gear and they lurched downhill, the engine whining now as it kept the ex-fire truck from flinging itself down to the sea. "Oh, yeah, I forgot old Peterson's place. It's up there, see the flag?" The flag was an old scrap of torn sheeting. "Up along that pathway. No, he doesn't have a drive. When he built the place he carried everything in by foot."
Kate wrote in the name Peterson and reflected that a housing inspector would have a grand time with the violations on this hillside. She said something of the sort to Detweiler, careful to avoid the impression that she was in any way connected with such a low breed of bureaucrat.
"Oh, yeah, well, what they don't know won't hurt them. Actually there's been an ongoing war between Tyler and the county over the building regulations. At first they said that all the houses had to be wired for power, even if there wasn't any for miles. So there's half a dozen places with wall plugs and empty light fixtures, and kerosene lamps. Right now he's trying to get around it by having the whole Road made into an experimental, non-profit organization. Has a state senator on his side; he may do it yet. That's Riddle's place, do you have that?" he asked Kate.
"Yes, Ben Riddle, whose brother Bob may or may not be there or in the Cadena-Gustavson goat shed-storage barn."
"Clear as mud, eh?" He laughed heartily, and Kate wondered if he ever ran out of cliches.
The litany continued to wind with the Road.
"That's Brother Luke's place. He and Maggie've lived there since Tyler first got the idea. He used to be a monk somewhere. Not now, though. They've got five kids. The Dodsons live there, funny place, real dark. Nice clearing in back for the ponies, though. Angie's little girl Amy loves her pony. And I told you about Vaun, way up there? She's an artist, real good one." Visions of castles and maidens with starry-eyed unicorns danced in Kate's head. "The Newborns—those little house things are for the pigs. And Tommy Chesler you know."
Coming down the mountain they stopped to pull the county car out of the creek bed into which its four driven wheels had taken it, and as they continued down, they picked up several parties of chattering hill folk who might easily have been going to a hoedown rather than to a murder interrogation. (What is a hoedown, anyway? wondered Kate.) Kate found herself wedged between Hawkin and a very large, damp young man who smelled of dog, and with an even damper and more fragrant baby on her lap. After ten minutes a high voice from somewhere in the front asked if anyone had Ivanhoe.
"Is that a disease?" wondered Kate aloud.
"It's my baby," the voice answered.
"Is it hairless and wet?"
"Probably."
"Then it's here."
"Oh, good. I just wanted to make sure he got in. You can keep him until we get to Tyler's."
"Thank you," said Kate gravely, and tried to decide whether the bouncing was from the ruts or from Hawkin laughing, and if the latter, what she should do about it. In the end she did nothing.
4
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The multicolored crowd that whirled in and out of the rooms in Tyler's house was like something from another world, or perhaps several worlds—part Amish, part Woodstock, part pioneer. Children ran yelling and shrieking among the knees and the furniture, dogs wandered in and were thrown out into the rain, the smells of bread and spaghetti sauce and wood smoke mingled with wet clothing, underwashed bodies, and the occasional aura of stale marijuana. Tyler had given the police three rooms downstairs, furnished with a motley collection of tables and desks, where they prepared to take statements. Kate stood in the main room—the hall— with its fifteen-foot ceilings and the floor space of an average house, and wondered how Hawkin intended to proceed with a murder investigation in this chaos. For the first time she was very grateful that he, not she, was in charge.
As if he had heard her thoughts Hawkin appeared at her elbow.
"As I said, a nice straightforward investigation. I'm going to talk with them, and I want you with me. Over at the fireplace." Within two steps he had disappeared, and Kate pushed through the throng in his wake, wishing that her mother had married a taller man. At the massive stone fireplace, beneath a display of broadswords that fanned out in a sunburst, they stepped up onto the high hearthstones and stood looking out over the sea of heads.