“Will,” Rho said, “get a grip.”
As she’d hoped, the words snapped him out of it. He sank onto the bed and put his hands to his eyes. “Jesus!”
“Will,” she said after a moment, “Virge isn’t the first woman to disappear tonight.”
“No? Who else?”
“Samantha Lindsay. Isn’t her husband a client of yours?”
“Yeah.”
“Does Virge know her?”
“Why, you think there’s some connection?”
“It had entered my mind.”
“Well, as far as I know they’ve never met. Or if they did, it was only in passing. Samantha’s... well, she and Virge don’t have much in common.”
Rho crossed to a door with old-fashioned glass panes; when she flicked the light switch beside it she looked out onto a patio. The door was latched but not locked. On the far side of the patio a flagstone path led away through a screen of rhododendrons.
“Where does that path go?” she asked.
“The greenhouse. Virge is... used to be quite a gardener.”
“Is it possible she went there?”
“No. She hasn’t bothered with it for years. Besides, there’s only one key, and it’s on the hook in the kitchen.”
“Anyplace else on the property she might’ve gone?”
“Well, the tenant’s cabin. Clay Lawrence. Sometimes she visits him, takes him baked goods and plays gin rummy. But only when I’m not home and she needs company.”
Rho knew Clay Lawrence by sight: a rustic type in his early forties who was often seen around town with Becca Campos, a waitress at the hotel and part-time house-cleaner. “You call him?”
“I tried, but his line was busy, and I didn’t want to leave the house in case Virge came back.”
“I’ll stop by there later. How do I get to the cabin?”
“Just follow the driveway. It ends there.”
Rho sat down beside Will. “Virge’s drinking today — what brought that on?”
“I’m not sure. I asked her, but she wasn’t making any sense. Kept saying she was the one deserved an explanation.”
“Of what?”
“Damned if I know.”
“You two have a fight beforehand?”
“No. We never fight. I can’t risk upsetting her.”
“Anything else you know of that could’ve set her off?”
“That murder, I guess. We saw the woman at Point Deception around six Friday night, but didn’t stop. Afterwards Virge felt bad about that, but even so, I don’t understand why she felt the need to drink. She isn’t much of a drinker. And why did she do it in public? We’ve got plenty of booze here in the house.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to drink alone.”
“Maybe.”
Rho hesitated, framing her next words carefully. “I’ve heard that Virge has become a little unstable.”
“A little?” Will laughed bitterly. “Try a lot. She’s afraid of everything. A windstorm, an animal prowling in the shrubbery, a car backfiring down on the highway — anything’ll set her off. She’s dropped all her interests except for food. Gardening, needlepoint, volunteer work. And in the food department she goes overboard. It’s like she’s eating to sedate herself.”
“How long has this been going on?”
He shrugged. “Years. A condition like hers progresses very slowly. At first you don’t notice it, then you normalize it, but finally one day you wake up and say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s not right here.’”
“Has she seen anyone about it?”
“No. She doesn’t think anything’s wrong with her. Claims she’s just being cautious. And as for the food, she says cooking’s her new hobby. I tell you, Rho, she’s running scared.”
“It’s hard to believe. She’s always been so strong. After the...” She hesitated, then strengthened her new resolve and gave voice to it. “After the canyon murders, she was a rock.”
Will raised his eyebrows. “Well, so you’re finally talking about them. You’re right, she was strong. And you, of all people, ought to know that.”
“I do. She held me together that night, and for days after. If it wasn’t for Virge, I’d’ve embarrassed myself in front of the department, the reporters, the TV people. She made me strong.”
“Yeah, she did. And what did you do to repay her? Crawled into the bottle, left the case to people like Wayne Gilardi, who couldn’t find their asses with both hands. Some thanks that was.”
Rho winced at the sudden attack — more so because what he said held some truth.
“There wasn’t anybody at the scene that night as smart as you.” Will added. “Nobody from here, none of the detectives they sent out from Santa Carla, either. If you’d tended to business, maybe my wife wouldn’t be the way she is today.”
Now he’d gone too far. In the years since the murders, many people had accused both her and the department of ineptitude, but never Will or Virge. It hurt and angered her to find he’d concealed his true feelings.
“Look, Will,” she said, “I screwed up, but you can’t blame one person for those murders going unsolved. And Virge is responsible for her condition — with a whole lot of enabling from you.”
“Where do you get off—”
She stood. “It isn’t helping your wife for us to sit here airing old grievances. I’ll be in touch when I know something.”
Guy turned to the first of the victim profiles: Claudia Robinson Blakeley.
She was thirty when she died. The daughter of a San Diego stockbroker, she’d displayed a talent for photography at an early age and later became interested in filmmaking. UC Santa Cruz was her second choice; she originally wanted to enter the prestigious filmmaking program at UCLA, but didn’t have the grades.
The accompanying photograph showed a young woman with a halo of frizzy blonde hair and a wide smile. Her eyes were her best feature, large and long-lashed. The photo had probably been taken in the canyon, judging from the pines in the background.
Claudia married Mitch Blakeley during her senior year in college, and their son, Eric, was born seven months later. At first the young family remained in Santa Cruz, but after two years they went to San Diego, where Claudia’s father arranged a job for Mitch in the trust department of a bank and Claudia took a sales position with a large real estate firm. In spite of two incomes, money was always tight, and several times Claudia’s father had to bail them out of debt. Two months before they had their reunion with the Wynnes, he told the couple that they could expect no further financial support from him.
Family and friends described Claudia as extroverted and fun-loving, but self-centered and unfocused. She was a natural at selling homes, but lacked attention to detail and often lost out on closing sales by failing to keep appointments. She banked part of her commissions, hoping to buy a house someday, but ran up large credit card balances that forced her to dip into her savings. Her marriage by and large seemed a happy one, but her parenting skills were below average and several times her mother spoke to her about neglecting Eric emotionally. Workers at the daycare center Eric attended noted that the grandmother was a more significant presence in the boy’s life than the mother.
Guy turned the page, removed the photo clipped to Eric’s profile. Taken the year he died, it showed an eight-year-old with a chipped front tooth, curly reddish-blond hair, and a scattering of freckles across his snub nose. He looked at the camera in a tentative way, as if unsure of his place in the world or his ability to fill it.
The little boy’s expression plucked at Guy’s emotions, set off chords of pity, because in it he recognized himself. His parents had been remote, wrapped up in one another to the exclusion of their only child, and he’d struggled to measure up to friends who were secure of their parents’ love. In his self-aware moments he realized that the arrogance he’d developed once he discovered the thing he could do and do well stemmed from that early deprivation. In his less aware moments he simply felt sad.