Guy set his laptop in the trunk of his rental car under the watchful gaze of Hugh Dawson. He slammed the lid shut and turned to face the motel owner.
Dawson smirked and said, “Guess you’ll be heading back to New York now.”
“Just because you kicked me out of your motel? Hardly.”
“No place else to go. Fags that own the B and B had a big fight, closed it down. Guess they’ll be going back to San Francisco where they belong.”
“There’re other towns and places to stay along the coast,” Guy said. “Besides, I like it here.” To prove his point, he took a deep breath of fog-damp air, raised his eyes to the ridge, where the sky was already turning blue.
Dawson’s smirk faded.
Guy asked, “You say the owners of the B and B might be moving?”
“Probably.”
“That means they’ll be selling the place. Maybe I’ll buy it.” Dawson’s face pulled into deep, sour lines. Guy gave him a jaunty wave as he got into his car.
Sometimes, he told himself, he displayed sheer genius when thinking on his feet.
Rho was on her way out the door when Cody barked and met her gaze with soulful, pleading eyes. “Okay, come on,” she said, “but expect to spend a lot of time in the truck today.” The Lab shot through the door ahead of her and was already waiting at the carport when she got there.
Maybe, she thought as she belted him into the passenger’s seat, it wasn’t fair to keep such a big, active dog when she was gone so much. If she wanted companionship, perhaps a cat would be better. She’d had several and knew they didn’t suffer as much as dogs from their owners’ absence. But when she’d bought up here on the ridge it had seemed too isolated and a dog seemed like a good idea. Now that she was comfortable in her surroundings she’d become much too attached to Cody to give him up.
“And I never would, I promise,” she told him.
Cody cocked his head and regarded her as if he understood.
She’d decided to stop by the substation before she headed to the Sea Stacks to talk with Guy Newberry. There she ran into Detective Grossman, who was on his way out to interview a potential witness in the Ackerman case.
“CJIS check came back negative for a record on her,” he told Rho. “I expected as much, since she lived out of state. Nothing from NCIC yet. The feds’re slow. And no autopsy results, either. By the way,” he added, “you and Gilardi’re relieved of patrol duty till further notice. Keep on the case, and we’ll meet here this evening at nineteen hundred hours.”
No one was at any of the desks when Rho entered the building, but as she checked her inbox she heard Valerie coming down the hallway that led past the interrogation room and holding cell to the rest- and supply rooms. “Good morning,” Rho said.
“What’s good about it? At six o’clock the Santa Carla TV station did a news segment on the murder and public reaction to it. And they rehashed the other. San Francisco and Sacramento papers have already called. Grossman ducked them, had me refer them to our public information officer, who you and I know is an idiot. Other cities and the TV stations are now getting into the act, and fifteen minutes ago Gregory Cordova called to tell us that a film crew from Santa Carla just started setting up at Point Deception turnout.”
Valerie’s voice sounded strange, congested. Rho looked up, saw she was red-eyed and blotchy-faced. “Hey, you been crying?”
“Oh...” Valerie sat down at her desk, sighed heavily. “I can’t help it. It’s Virge. She’s still missing. Will and their tenant, that Clay Lawrence, are organizing a search party. They’ll meet at the Scurlock place at one, fan out over the whole area. I wish I could help, but my arthritis won’t let me.”
Valerie looked so downcast that Rho ran through the schedule she’d planned and readjusted it. Until she heard more from Clark County or saw the autopsy results on Ackerman, there was little to do of urgency. “I’ll go in your place,” she told the clerk.
“Would you? Thanks.” Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them back. “Poor thing. She must feel so alone and scared.”
Unless she had gone off voluntarily or met with foul play, Rho thought, but didn’t voice it. “You two are good friends, right?”
“We used to be, before.”
There it was, another euphemism. “You mean before the canyon murders.”
Valerie stiffened. “Do you have to...?”
“Like I told you last night, it’s time we started calling them what they were.”
“...I don’t know. Maybe.”
Rho sat down on her desk, facing Valerie. “Tell me about your friendship with Virge.”
“We were best friends from kindergarten on through high school. She married Will right after graduation, I married my husband a few months later. We stood up for each other. Our babies were born three weeks apart.” Valerie smiled at the memory.
“We used to take them to the playground and the beach together. Called ourselves ‘blue-jean mommas,’ because we didn’t think having babies meant you had to get old and dowdy. When my husband left, Virge was there for me. When Will got hurt falling off some scaffolding and couldn’t work for six months, I was there for her.”
She paused, her gaze somber and distant. “Those babies — her Rick and my Joe — were best friends too. Should’ve been as many years as we were. But then my Joe was killed by that drunk driver, and Rick drowned in that high surf the next year. Those were things the blue-jean mommas didn’t count on. We outlived our own children.”
Rho closed her eyes, and the image of Heath Wynne’s dying moments appeared as if her lids were a projection screen. Quickly she opened them.
“You know what hurts?” Valerie added. “Those children in the canyon, they shouldn’t’ve died either. But everybody made such a fuss over their deaths. Nobody except for really close friends made much of Joe’s or Rick’s.”
“Valerie, that’s not so.” Rho could remember the shock waves that had spread through the community after the accidents.
“Oh, people were nice. They brought food and said all the right things and came to the services. But nobody was... horrified like they were about those children in the canyon. Virge’s and my boys, their deaths were just... ordinary.”
Rho understood what she meant, felt her pain. No death should be ordinary.
“Rhoda?”
“Yes?”
“Your father called again.”
Oh hell. “I’ll stop by there before I go up to the Scurlocks’.”
“I know he’d appreciate the attention.”
She didn’t reply.
“Rhoda?”
“Yes?”
“Take it from me: Don’t neglect the people you love. Every minute is precious.”
The woman who answered Guy’s knock at the door of the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast was at least six feet tall and wore her dark brown hair in a knot that was secured to her head by what looked to be a pair of chopsticks. She hugged a bundle of flowered sheets to her ample breasts, and her glare bored into him on eye level.
She said, “What’s the matter, you can’t read the sign? We’re closed.”
He put on the smile he used with reluctant interviewees, what he called boyish and disarming, and Diana had called an ass-kissing grin. Apparently the woman was on Diana’s side; the lines between her eyebrows deepened.
He said, “I was hoping you might take on a guest anyway. It would be long-term, and I don’t require frills. I’d be glad to pay your highest rate—”
“I told you—”
“For God’s sake, Becca, don’t turn away a paying customer at this juncture!” A man’s voice spoke behind her.