“What is it?” Winston asked.
“Nothing. I was just thinking.”
He decided not to tell Winston his hunch yet. He would check it out himself. It would give him a reason to break his promise not to call Graciela. He could make it an official call.
“So,” Winston said. “Where do you think he is?”
“Crimmins?” He hesitated. “In the wind, I guess.”
Winston studied his face a moment.
“I thought you might have an idea.”
He looked away from her and down at the desk.
“Well, the wind doesn’t blow forever,” she said, letting it go. “He’s got to come down somewhere.”
“Hope so.”
They were silent then, finished with each other except for the formality of the statement he would have to tape.
“It may be none of my business,” Winston said, “but how are you going to deal with this?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Well, if you ever need somebody to talk to…”
He nodded his thanks.
“Okay, then should we go get this over with?”
An hour later McCaleb was alone in the interview room. He had told his story to Winston and she had left with the tape to get it transcribed. She had given him permission to use the phone that was on the table and told him he had the room for as long as he needed it.
He composed his thoughts for a few moments and then punched in the number for the nursing station in the emergency room at Holy Cross. He asked for Graciela but the woman who answered said Graciela was not there.
“Is she on break?”
“No, she’s not here today.”
“Okay, thank you.”
He hung up. He guessed that she had called in sick. He couldn’t blame her. Not with the news he had delivered the night before. He punched in her home number. But after five rings the call was picked up by an answering machine. After the beep he fumbled through the message he wanted to leave.
“Uh, Graciela, it’s me, Terry, you there?”
He waited a long moment and then continued.
“Um, I just wanted… they told me you weren’t at work and I, uh, I wanted to say hello and there’s a couple of questions I need to ask you about things. Loose ends mostly… but it would help to-anyway, I’m gonna go and I’ll probably try to call you later on. Um, I’ll probably be on the road so you don’t have to worry about calling me back.”
He wished he could erase the message and start over. He cursed to himself and hung up, then wondered if the curse had been recorded. He shook his head, got up and left the room.
IT TOOK HIM two days to find the picture that Daniel Crimmins as James Noone had drawn during the hypnosis session. McCaleb started at Rosarita Beach and then worked his way south. He found it between La Fonda and Ensenada on a remote stretch of the coast. Playa Grande was a small village on a two-tiered rock flow overlooking the sea. The village mostly consisted of a motel with six small detached bungalows, a pottery store, a small restaurant and market and a Pemex station. There was also a small stable for renting horses to ride down on the beach. The commercial core, if it was big enough to be called that, was at the edge of a cliff overlooking the beach. On the stepped bluff above it was a wide scattering of small houses and trailer homes.
What made McCaleb stop was the stable. He remembered Crimmins describing horses on the beach. He got out of the Cherokee and walked down a steep trail cut through the rock outcroppings to the beach. The wide, white beach was a private enclave about a mile long and enclosed on each end by huge, jagged rock flows into the sea. Near the south end, McCaleb saw the rock overhang that Crimmins had described during the hypnosis session. McCaleb knew that the best and most convincing way to lie is to tell as much truth as possible. So he had taken his subject’s description of the place at which he felt most relaxed in the world to be a true description of a place he knew. Now, McCaleb had found it.
He had arrived at Playa Grande through simple deduction and legwork. The description Crimmins had given during the session had obviously been the Pacific Coast. He had said he liked to drive down to this place and since McCaleb knew there was no California beach south of L.A. as remote as he had described or with horses on it, that obviously made the destination Mexico. And since Crimmins had said he drove there, that pretty much eliminated Cabo and the other points far south along the Baja peninsula. It took two days to cover the coastline that was left. McCaleb stopped at every village and every time he saw a cutoff from the highway to the beach.
Crimmins had been right. It was a truly beautiful and restful spot. The sand was like sugar and a million years of crashing waves had carved a deep bite into the cliff face, creating the overhang that resembled nothing so much as a rock wave, curled and about to break over the beach.
McCaleb was the only person on the beach to be seen in either direction. It was a weekday and he guessed that this stretch of sand lay largely unpopulated until the weekends. That was why Crimmins had liked it.
Three horses were on the beach. They milled around an empty feed trough while waiting for customers. There was no need to tie them. The beach was completely enclosed by water and rock. The only way off it was the steep trail back up to the stable.
McCaleb wore a baseball cap and sunglasses as protection against the power of the midday sun. He wore long pants and a windbreaker as well. But, entranced by the beauty of the spot, he remained on the beach long after he determined Daniel Crimmins was nowhere to be seen. After a while a teenager wearing shorts and a sweatshirt with no sleeves came down the trail and approached.
“You would like horse ride?”
“No, gracias. ”
From the pocket of his coat McCaleb pulled the folded photos Tony Banks had made from the videotapes. He showed them to the boy.
“You seen? This man… I want to find.”
The boy stared at the photos and made no indication he understood. Finally he just shook his head.
“No, no find.”
He turned and headed back to the trail. McCaleb returned the photos to his jacket and after a few minutes headed back up the steep incline himself. He stopped twice on the way up but the climb still left him exhausted.
McCaleb ate lobster enchiladas at the restaurant for lunch. It cost him the equivalent of $5 American. He showed the photos a few more times but got no takers. He walked to the Pemex station after lunch and used the pay phone there to check the machine on his boat for messages. There were none. He then called Graciela’s number for the fourth time while he had been on the road and once again got her machine. He didn’t leave a message this time. If she was ignoring his calls, it was probably because she simply no longer wanted to talk to him.
McCaleb checked into the Playa Grande Motel, paying cash and using a phony name. As an afterthought he showed the photos to the man behind the counter in the small office and got another negative response.
His bungalow had a partial view of the beach below and a wide view of the Pacific. He checked what he could see of the beach and it was still empty except for the horses. He took off his windbreaker and decided to take a nap. It had been a wearying two days of driving bad roads, walking on sand and climbing steep trails.
Before lying down, he opened his duffel bag on the bed, put his toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom and then arranged the plastic vials containing his medicines and the box of disposable thermometer strips on the bed table. He took the Sig-Sauer out of the bag and put it on the table as well. It was always a marginal risk taking weapons across the border. But at the crossing, as expected, McCaleb had been simply waved through by the bored Mexican federales.