Again Guy distanced the receiver from his ear as he looked at his watch. After two. He’d stopped for an early lunch at the bar-and-grill called Oceanside on his way back to the motel, and the conversations he’d overheard had prompted him to eavesdrop in a number of other establishments. The atmosphere in town was edgy and could verge on the dangerous after nightfall. If he was to visit Cascada Canyon and still be back to observe the public reaction to what was widely rumored to be a rape-and-murder, he’d better be going.
“Listen,” he said to Aaron, “can you get me the information by tonight?”
“Of course I can.” His assistant sounded a shade prickly. He didn’t like Guy to imply that anything was beyond his capabilities, and his professional pride had been hurt by his glaring oversight.
“Then do that, and I’ll call you later.”
“I can leave a message on your voice mail—”
“The Sea Stacks isn’t the Hyatt Regency, Aaron. They don’t have voice mail, and I don’t want the clerk taking that kind of message. Besides, I may have questions. I’ll call you.”
“I don’t own the Mercedes anymore,” Richard Bartlow of Santa Barbara said. “I gave it to my son when he went off to graduate school in Nevada.”
Now we’re getting someplace, Rho thought. It had taken her over an hour to reach the car’s registered owner. “When was this, sir?”
“Last summer, shortly before he enrolled at UNLV.”
“That’s Las Vegas?”
“Yes.”
“May I have your son’s address and phone number?”
“Don’t tell me he forgot to register it in his own name! He was supposed to take care of that immediately.”
“Apparently he neglected to do so. If you would—”
“That’s Sean. You give a kid a beautiful classic car, you’d think he could at least—”
Rho noted the name. “Sean’s phone number, sir?”
“What’s this about, anyway?”
She stifled an impatient sigh. “The car was abandoned on Highway One outside of Signal Port and has been impounded.”
“That can’t be. I spoke with Sean on Friday, and he said he had no weekend plans other than studying for an exam.”
“Perhaps he loaned the car to a friend.”
“He knows better than to do that. But when did any of my children ever follow their better instincts?” Bartlow gave her a number in the 702 area code and added, “When you speak with Sean, please tell him he owes his father an explanation.”
Guy made a U-turn and pulled the car onto the shoulder some two hundred yards south of the dirt road leading into Cascada Canyon. This was a lonely stretch of highway above the turnout at what Gregory Cordova had told him was called Point Deception, near the upper boundary of the old man’s property. The land was thickly forested to either side of the pavement, and although the sky had cleared that morning, it now was overcast. When he got out of the car he felt the full blast of a chill offshore wind and turned up the collar of his down jacket before he began walking along the shoulder. Cars and trucks sped past, their occupants paying him little attention.
The road into the canyon was more of a dirt track like Gregory Cordova’s driveway, weeds and thistle plants growing so high on the center hump that Guy could tell no vehicle had passed over it in years. Massive wooden pillars carved like totem poles stood to either side of the entrance, but the gates had fallen off and lay rotting on the ground. A NO TRESPASSING sign on one of the pillars was pitted with rust.
He paused for a moment till he heard no traffic approaching from either direction, then stepped onto the property. Beyond the fence lay a gently sloping meadow covered by pines and high grass. It was even chillier under the trees and the wind came gusting from behind him, whistling as it penetrated the canyon ahead. He walked slowly to one side of the driveway, to avoid the prickly thistles. After about twenty yards the land rose steeply on his right, overgrown and topped by what he thought was a redwood grove. To his left he saw an old car tucked under an overhanging pine tree. A white Buick sedan blanketed in at least a foot of needles. He went over, squatted, and cleared the license plate. The last, barely readable registration sticker was for 1987.
He straightened and circled the car, checking out the rotted interior through the broken side window and trying the trunk, which opened with a creak. Its only contents were some rags and a spare tire. Guy shut the lid and took out a point-and-shoot camera loaded with extra-fast film, then moved around the car, snapping various shots. On this second pass his foot banged against something, hard enough to smart. He looked down and saw a manhole cover, scanned the surrounding ground and located the hole, deep in the needles. A metal drum half full of liquid was buried there. Motor oil or other hazardous waste which a do-it-yourself mechanic had disposed of. Guy replaced the lid and photographed it.
The driveway continued to curve uphill, more steeply under tall trees. A blue jay set up a racket in one of them, and he looked up. A cable was tangled in the branches and hung down. Utility line, its end raggedly broken or cut. Beyond the tree the line was still strung parallel to the driveway. Guy recorded it on film.
Now he could make out a dark, boxy shape through the vegetation, and as he moved closer he saw it was a house. A plain, shingled rectangle with a shadowy front porch crowded with indistinguishable objects. He veered off the drive, pushed through waist-high grass, and stopped at the bottom of its steps. Wicker outdoor furniture, grayed and tattered by the elements. Wooden flower boxes, also gray, containing dead weeds. After taking several more photographs, he went up on the porch, rubbed grime from a window, and tried to peer inside. All he saw was the yellowed back of a shade. The screen door had been ripped from it hinges and leaned against the wall. Guy turned the inner knob and let the door swing open into shadow. Odors rushed out at him: musty, stale. This, he knew from Aaron’s summary, was the house where the first of the victims, the Blakeley family, had been found.
He took a small, nearly flat square of plastic from his pocket and pressed its center. It emitted a bright, laser-like beam, the latest in featherweight but powerful flashlights. Moving it around, he saw cobwebs and spiders’ nests, great clouds that shifted in the sudden draft and let drop husks of dead insects. Dark curtains, in tatters where rats had gotten at them. The hulking outline of a woodstove. He stepped inside, snapped the window shade up, and filtered light rushed into the small room.
It contained a scene of wild disorder: overturned chairs and lamps and end tables; a bookcase lying on its side, volumes spilling off the shelves; a smashed television set. Three fading white outlines were stenciled on the plank floor, one of them pathetically small. He shone his light downward, saw rodent droppings and dark stains that disappeared into the cracks between the boards. Shone the light upward and saw the blood-spatter patterns on the walls.
Jesus, why hadn’t someone honored his dead by having this cleaned up? Or, better yet, razed?
He’d moved to the center of the room now, and was taking in small, more ordinary, but no less gut-wrenching details: a vodka bottle and two glasses on the coffee table; a paperback lying facedown and broken-spined on the rat-gnawed couch; knitting needles and a half-finished garment protruding from a basket; two carelessly discarded sandals; a child-size pair of blue tennis shoes.
The crime scene appeared to be exactly as it was thirteen years before, but Guy sensed a more recent presence. He shone the light on the floor again and spotted tracks in the dust that looked as if they’d been made by a pair of athletic shoes. They crisscrossed the room and entered what he now discovered to be two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen.