Guy wondered what Eric might have been like had he reached his own age. A fiercely driven overachiever like himself? A total loser? Mr. Average? No use in speculating. The boy who was described as an avid reader and clever storyteller had died along with his parents in the living room of the small canyon house Guy had visited that afternoon. A bullet from a semiautomatic weapon seemed a brutal fate for an eight-year-old whose worst crime had probably been to sneak a puff off one of his parents’ marijuana cigarettes when no one was looking.
And then there was his father, Mitch Blakeley. The face in the photograph Guy next looked at showed a thirty-year-old man with rough-hewn features, unkempt dark hair and beard, and small eyes whose faraway gaze said his thoughts were elsewhere. According to those who knew him during his childhood in the Central Valley town of Fresno, Mitch had always been a dreamer. He read voraciously: during and after school; in the library and at the dinner table; through television shows and family gatherings. His mother despaired because he “always had his nose in a dirty old dust-catcher,” but Mitch ignored her. When he wasn’t reading, he enlisted his few friends in acting out parts in dramas he created: Amazon boatmen battling piranhas; rebel soldiers in the hills of Cuba; crew members of a spaceship under attack in a faraway galaxy.
Eventually Mitch raised his nose from the “dust-catchers” long enough to discover the movies, and from then on his spare time and allowance were consumed by trips to the theaters. He began his first screenplay when he was fourteen, learning the format from a library book, and had completed over a dozen by the time he graduated high school. His English teacher deemed them “technically competent.”
UC Santa Cruz offered Mitch a scholarship, but once there he became more interested in drugs and women than in studying. After two years he dropped out and moved to an apartment near the waterfront, supporting himself by dealing marijuana and working part-time delivering pizzas. But he returned frequently to the campus in the hills, because he’d become intrigued by a young woman named Claudia Robinson.
For two years after his marriage to Claudia and the birth of their son, Mitch worked full-time as an assistant manager at the pizza restaurant and wrote like a demon in his spare time, but his screenplays were ignored or rejected. When the pizza franchise folded and Claudia’s father offered to set him up in a career in banking, he reluctantly packed up his typewriter and moved the family to San Diego. The life of a struggling artist, he told friends, was not his thing.
Neither was banking. According to colleagues in the trust department, Mitch hated his job. He put in the bare minimum of hours and often left early, asking others to cover for him. His salary was good, but he spent all of it, and whenever he managed to get ahead he’d make a trip to Las Vegas and blow the money at the blackjack tables. The trips, he told one of his coworkers, were the only way he could cope with the mediocrity of his existence.
Apparently the mediocrity had persisted until his death, Guy thought. Investigators had found no completed screenplays in the canyon house, only a fifty-page fragment that had been penciled over and over until it was barely readable.
As she left the Scurlock house Rho noted that both vehicles — Will’s big white superaccessorized Dodge Ram, and Virge’s little blue Toyota pickup — were in the driveway. If Virge had left voluntarily, she’d gone on foot or caught a ride with a friend. But what friend? As Will had indicated, his wife had gradually closed off to others during recent years. Rho could remember a time when Virge’s friendly smile would welcome you to the hospice thrift shop and the volunteer fire department spaghetti feeds, but the memory was dim at best.
She started the cruiser and continued up the driveway. It was paved only to the house, then turned into your standard dirt ranch road. To either side lay softly sculpted meadows where Will’s father used to run dairy cattle. Will, however, had no love of ranching and sold the herd after he inherited the property.
Up here on the ridge the fog had receded. Cold moon-rays highlighted details: a eucalyptus tree split by lightning many years before; a downed rail fence; a rocky outcropping from which Will’s dad used to fly the flag for the family’s Fourth of July barbecues. Rho and her father had attended all of those gatherings, and if Jack Antolini drank more than most others, his daughter understood. Her mother’s leaving had been a bitter blow to them both.
Dad, Rho thought, assailed by guilt as she remembered his earlier phone call to the substation. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her father or want to see him, but she would’ve liked to see him under normal circumstances, and those didn’t prevail anymore. Jack had been forcibly retired after being badly injured in a high-speed chase near Calvert’s Landing only two months before the canyon murders. He’d chafed at his inability to take part in the investigation, tried to orchestrate Rho’s every move, and ultimately became her harshest critic. If she thought Will had been rough on her tonight, she had only to remember the things her own father had said.
The cabin came into view, and now Rho recognized it as the place teens would sneak off to during the parties: brown-shingled, with small, high windows and a flat roof topped by a rusted stovepipe. To one side was a ramshackle shed and a big stump with an axe stuck into it; a neat stack of firewood leaned against the cabin wall, tarped against the coming winter rains. An old pickup near the woodpile was jacked up as if Lawrence had been working under it. Light glowed from behind the cabin’s drawn curtains, and as she approached the door, it opened and a tall, thin man peered out at her.
“Mr. Lawrence?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Deputy Rhoda Swift—”
“Ah, yes, I’ve seen you in town. You belong to the handsome Lab, Cody.”
“How d’you know his name?”
“I made his acquaintance outside the post office one day. I was admiring him and a passing gentleman introduced us.”
Rho was standing on the doorstep now, a round of tree trunk embedded in the earth and slick with moss. Clay Lawrence towered over her, his head nearly touching the doorframe. His lips, in a nest of gray-brown beard, were smiling, and laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his deep-set eyes. In spite of the lateness of the hour, he looked fully awake.
She said, “You must be a dog person, if you know I belong to Cody and not the other way round.”
“Actually I’m an animal person. I like all kinds.” He motioned for her to come inside.
The cabin was tiny, with a galley kitchen on one wall and a woodstove in the corner. Single bed with a shelf above it holding dozens of paperbacks. Broken-down easy chair upholstered in lurid purple flowers that matched the fabric of the curtains — Virge’s taste. Nothing else, but where would he put it? Rho couldn’t imagine living in such a small space.
As if he knew what she was thinking, Clay Lawrence said, “The rent is very cheap,” and motioned for her to take the chair.
She sat, unable to avoid a mental comparison between it and the white leather chair at the Lindsay house. Lawrence added, “I’d offer you something, but I’m short on supplies.”
“That’s quite all right,” she said. “I only want to ask you a few questions. When was the last time you saw Virge Scurlock?”
He sat on the bed, eyebrows knitting as he thought. “Friday morning, before I made my monthly trip into Santa Carla. I dropped off my rent money and we talked. What’s this about?”
Rho ignored the question. “You’re sure you didn’t see her on Saturday or Sunday?”