Wayne said, “This is Mr. James Hutton. He found the car. Mr. Hutton, Deputy Rhoda Swift. Why don’t you fill her in on what happened.”
Wayne’s tone alerted her that something was irregular about the situation. He wanted the man to repeat his story so he could check for inconsistencies.
Hutton ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Well, the way it happened, I was driving down from Eureka to Mendocino. And I had to take a leak — excuse me, ma’am, relieve myself. So I pulled over here and went into those bushes. I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed the car, but one of my headlights is cocked from an accident I had last week, and it picked up the metal of the front bumper. So I climbed down there, and—” His voice broke and he swallowed before continuing. “Car’s upside down, roof’s flattened, and she’s in there. I checked for a pulse, but there wasn’t one, and she’s real cold.”
“What did you do then?” Rho asked.
“Ran up here and started flagging down cars.” He motioned to a Volkswagen Jetta. “That guy stopped first, and then the fellow in the Mustang came along. He drove to a house, used the phone to report it.” He paused, running his fingers through his hair again. “Jesus, she was a mess, all twisted and cut up from the broken windshield. Door was sprung open, she could’ve got out, but maybe she was gone before that happened.”
Rho glanced at Wayne, who nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Hutton,” she said and followed her colleague to the rear of his cruiser. “So what is it with his story that bothers you?”
“Nothing now. I believe him. But there’s a second set of footprints leading down to the wreck, and mud on the inside of the sprung door. And Samantha was robbed.”
“Robbed.”
“Yeah. Wallet’s empty of cash and credit cards. It and her purse were dumped next to the car. Diamond ring’s missing, as well as a Rolex watch that she never took off, even in—”
Rho regarded him steadily as she waited out his sudden silence.
He shrugged and looked away from her.
“You never cease to amaze me, Gilardi,” she finally said.
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t like I was a member of an exclusive club.”
“When did this happen?”
“Come on, Rho, you don’t need details.”
“We’ve got a dead woman down there—”
“An accident victim. Doesn’t give you the right to pry into private affairs — hers or mine.”
He was correct, of course. Samantha Lindsay had been doing exactly what she’d told her husband she would: driving straight home after shopping in Westhaven. For one reason or another she’d skidded off the road and died, and out of respect for the dead, private matters should remain private.
“So what d’you make of the robbery?” she asked.
Wayne shrugged. “Somebody saw the car go off the road and decided to take advantage of a bad situation.”
“Plenty of bad situations tonight. You catch the squawk on Virge Scurlock?”
“Uh-huh. What’s that all about?”
She explained about her conversations with Will and Clay Lawrence.
“You know, kiddo,” he said, “something’s bothering me. For years we had a pretty peaceable community here. Drinking, drugs, petty theft, domestic problems, yes. But that kind of stuff happens all the time in an area like this. So now in the space of three days we got a rape-and-murder, civil unrest, a disappearance, and a sort of ghoulish robbery. All that since one event: the arrival of this Guy Newberry. Is it possible he’s doing these things to stir up trouble, get publicity for this book he’s writing?”
“I sincerely doubt it. Even mystery writers only kill on paper.”
“Yeah, I’m clutching at straws, looking for somebody to blame things on. And since I don’t like the man...”
“Look, Wayne, if it would make you feel better, I’ll talk with him, try to find out what his plans are. In the meantime—”
“I know. I caught the call, I get the job of telling Alan Lindsay his wife is dead.” Wayne’s mouth was set in a grim line. Notifying the families of victims was a thousand times worse than dealing with the scene of a tragedy.
Guy took a sip of Jolt Cola — more potent than coffee and twice as tasty — and picked up the photograph of the last victim, Bernhard Ulrick. Pale, thin face, cleft chin, tight wiry blond curls. Gold-rimmed glasses made him look studious. It was his high school graduation picture, the only one Aaron had been able to dig up. At age thirty-two he’d died of multiple bullet wounds, his face a bloody hole, his body shattered. The vicious nature of the slaying and the fact he was killed in a prefab building tucked deep into the canyon, surrounded by chemicals and paraphernalia for manufacturing methamphetamine, had naturally led the authorities to label him as the primary target.
Ulrick was one of Mitch Blakeley’s friends from his days of drug dealing in Santa Cruz. Born into a large and insular German community in Chicago, he drifted west after high school, eventually ending up in the seaside college town. At the time of his murder, his family were all dead, but others in the midwestern working-class neighborhood remembered him as a youth of large dreams, all of them involving amassing great sums of money. The method of doing so mattered little to Ulrick; wealth seemed an end in itself. He was well versed in many scams — fencing stolen goods, running cons on the naive and elderly, selling drugs and firearms — but he was never once arrested. He had a sixth sense for when the law was about to close in, and would shut down his operations and run.
Ulrick was long gone from the central coast when the Blakeleys and Wynnes left Santa Cruz. Material on his next few years was sketchy, but he’d surfaced in such diverse places as Anchorage, New Orleans, Atlantic City, and Honolulu — always scamming and using whatever connections he possessed. When he turned up at Cascada Canyon some eleven months before the murders, his appearance probably didn’t surprise the residents. Ulrick was known as a man who had a way of finding people.
And also, Guy thought, of finding their weaknesses.
So what do I have here? he wondered, rubbing his eyes and taking another shot of cola. A toxic situation, for sure. Two naive families living an isolated existence. A predator with a plan for them.
Several substantial withdrawals from Susan Wynne’s trust fund contradicted the assumption that the families hadn’t known about Ulrick’s meth lab. Guy suspected that the money had gone for setting up the lab, and that the Wynnes and Blakeleys were living on the proceeds of drug sales. After the initial outlay for land and building supplies, the families had invested very little money in the canyon, and their living expenses could not possibly have been high enough to justify the withdrawals.
He scanned the summary of the sheriff’s department investigation, noting that deputies had acted upon rumors that another couple was involved with the canyon residents — streetwise people who were said to have the nerve and connections to distribute the meth. A cabin on the ridge was raided the day after the murders, but by then the occupants — who had been squatting there — had fled, leaving behind most of their household possessions but nothing to identify them.
To Guy the rumors seemed too vague to have justified the issuance of a search warrant. A man and woman with a young daughter were occasionally seen driving through the gates to the canyon in their shabby orange VW bus. People in town who claimed to have had dealings with them described them as poorly dressed and standoffish, paying for all their supplies in cash. But, Guy knew, rumors have a way of becoming everyone’s fact after a tragedy. The strongest connection that he could see between the squatters on the ridge and the canyon people was a deer track that led down from the cabin past a pond where the families had posted a sign that read “Ye Olde Swimming Hole.” The authorities had been unable to tell whether the track was also used by humans.