Jim pulled back and waited, looking into the deep brown of Becky’s eyes. It crossed his mind that Counselor Flynn was a little drunk.
“And?”
“Talk to me, Weir. Please come talk to me.”
He offered his arm, which Becky took, and they headed for the back door.
Chapter 21
They looped through the alley for a block, then came out on the sidewalk, past the reporters who were still hanging around outside the big house. Laurel Kenney stood on the seawall, looking down at the dead and dying fish that continued to float toward the shore.
For once, thought Weir, she looked questionless.
Becky aimed Jim onto the dock just short of her house, let him climb aboard her boat while she took off her heels, then steadied herself on his arm as he eased her aboard the Sea Urchin. It was a thirty-foot Bayliner that Weir had always loved — fast, eager, joyful in motion. They had bought it together when Becky got her PD job and Weir made detective, then she had bought him out before he quit the Sheriff’s and started outfitting Lady Luck, two years later. He noted with pleasure how well Becky had kept her up.
He climbed back out and untied the fines while Becky stripped the canvas cover and turned over the engine. A moment later, they were motoring into the bay, heading south toward the harbor mouth. Becky had put on an old pea coat to cut the breeze. Standing barefoot at the helm with her hair curling back and the black silk of her mourning dress protruding from beneath the tattered coat, she looked, to Jim, wonderful. He stood beside her and felt the reassuring vibration of the motor coming up into his feet.
“Who bought the roses?”
Becky spoke without turning her eyes from the yacht-littered bay in front of her. “They were bought by phone, on a company credit card on Saturday, the day before Mother’s Day. The florist was the Petal Pusher, way up in LA — that’s why it took so long to trace. The company was Cheverton Sewer and Septic of Newport Beach. The man who called it in was Dave Smith.”
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Talked to him yet?”
“No way. We’ve got some groundwork to lay.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Wait until we’re outside. I want to get past all this.”
A small sand shark floated by upside down, its pale belly glistening. Along the shore, the body count had grown; the smell on the water was stronger than on land, borne by onshore breeze. Sunlight struggled through a thick spring cloud cover, mixed with pollutants, cast a brownish pall over the city. Jim watched in rapt disbelief as a sea gull labored exhaustedly across this dire sky, then suddenly folded up as if shot and plummeted down into the water. A moment later, Sea Urchin slid by it — nothing but a lifeless mass of feathers with a wing protruding at an unlikely angle.
Becky turned to Weir, her face a mask of anger. “If we can’t turn this to our advantage, we’re the stupidest people I know,” she said. She sighed deeply. “It breaks my heart.”
“How’d you know I was looking at the cops?”
“Just put the pieces together. Ruffs statement, your early-morning visits from Dennison, all the personnel stuff you had up in your room.”
Virginia had provided the intelligence, thought Jim. Should he have assumed she’d spy on him? “How come you didn’t tip the papers?”
Becky glanced at Jim, the tiredness showing in her face. “Because you’d have been on the hot seat, Jim. I’m not without loyalty.”
She’d have put me on the hot seat in a second, thought Jim, if she thought I’d have sat still for it. Weir thought back to his days in the miserable Zihuatanejo jail, the long stinking hours he spent, marinating in the juices of his own regret over Becky. The feeling of being trapped in an eight-by-eight-foot cell while Becky lingered in freedom, unattached, lovely and perhaps even lonely, nearly drove him crazy. He imagined every pivot point he could as he lay there and watched the roaches trace frantic patterns on the walls, relived every moment when they had drifted further, entrenched deeper in opposing positions, or simply — as they had so often toward the end — hurt each other so as not to be hurt first. At each of these events, Weir had paused to imagine what he could have done better, but the sheer volume of those missed opportunities quickly overwhelmed and sunk him further into depression, fear, and hopelessness. In the end, sickness just burned it out of him. He lay trembling cold as the fever finally broke, realizing that he and Becky hadn’t made it because they were simply unable to make it — they were ill-suited, mismatched, star-crossed — whatever you want to call it. It seemed to Jim, in post fever clarity, that somewhere along the line, the trust had disappeared. Toward the end, it was an ugly little war. But the fever hadn’t burned out his desire; it simply had reduced it to elemental constituents. When he had come out of jail, rode the bus north, and finally stood on the ferry and watched the lights of the old neighborhood easing toward him, it was, with regard to Becky, a journey of strange new hope, of wild, impossible expectation. Neither he nor the fever had been able to change the fact that, in the center of his heart, he loved her and he always had.
Sea Urchin motored between the long rock jetties that frame the harbor entrance. The swell and chop met her as she crossed the visible border between bay and open sea, lifting her slightly, welcoming her into the maw of the Pacific.
Becky sat behind the wheel and Jim rested against the shining gunwale. She shook her hair against the wind and gave him a pressed, limited smile. “Cheverton Sewer is owned by Cantrell Development Group, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of PacifiCo. That’s what all the hugger-mugger was at the gathering. We had a couple of paralegals making the connections.”
Weir understood Becky’s smile now: She was trying to conceal her joy. If she linked David Cantrell’s company to Ann’s killer, he could suffer mightily. Becky Flynn and Slow Growth — both heavily opposed by Cantrell — could sail to victory, and Dennison would go down with the losers.
“Before you say anything, Jim, I want you to know we’re going to move very carefully on this. We’ll employ the press when we need them and not until. The way Virginia and I call it — it’s all or nothing.”
“Meaning?”
“We find out who killed Ann, then we use it to our best advantage. We don’t try to capitalize yet. If this Dave Smith killed her, we need him in the bag first.”
“So you offer to defend Goins now.”
“I need it. First, it will give the media something new to cover me on. The Times poll yesterday had me down thirty-nine percent to Dennison’s forty-three. I could use a nudge, two weeks before election. Second, if Goins needs a defense lawyer, he may as well get a good one. Third, if I’m Goins’s counsel, I can hire my investigator to gather evidence that will prove his innocence, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. It’s the only logical way to get to Dave Smith and PacifiCo while I’m a candidate.”
Weir saw it coming.
“Interested?”
“I’m interested in Dave Smith.”
“But not in helping my campaign?”
“As long as they’re one and the same.”
She cast him a long look, some slight amusement lingering beneath its surface. “I just told you they are.”
“Anybody with the number and a verified employee name could have used that card. It could have been stolen, lost, borrowed.”