She shook her head. “They already suspect what me and Alex are doing. If I told them about the woman, they’d never leave us alone. We can’t stand them looking too close at us, especially now that he’s gone and done something really stupid that—” She bit her lip.
“What’s he done?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I won’t repeat it.”
“Oh, sure. You won’t repeat it, but you’ll put it in your book. No way I’m telling you. I got this philosophy of life: Don’t trust cops, don’t trust politicians, and don’t trust reporters.”
“What if you went to Rhoda Swift with the information? She’s a good cop. Look at the way she took up for you and Alex the other night when Wayne went after you.”
“So she’s an okay person. But she’s still a cop.”
“Cops have been known to make deals if they want information badly enough.”
Lily seemed to think about that, staring into her drink.
Guy added, “What if I talked to her, paved the way?”
For a moment she looked hopeful; then she shook her head again. “Rho’s only a deputy. She’d have to convince that Detective Grossman to deal, and he’s one hard-nosed son of a bitch. I can’t risk it, Mr. Newberry.”
“Sounds as if what you and Alex are into is serious.”
“Maybe not serious where you come from, but around here it’s pretty bad.”
“Drugs?”
She laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t I wish? That’s just business as usual here. Half the places up on the ridge got nice-looking marijuana gardens, and you can hear the meth cooking on a quiet night. The sheriff and ATF make busts, but nobody, including them, gets very upset about what goes on.”
“And they would get upset about this thing with you and Alex?”
“More like totally pissed. It’d go bad enough on Alex, but he’s kind of an outsider, has only lived here a couple of years. Me, though, I’m an insider. I’m supposed to know better. And now this other thing he’s gone and done, that’s just as bad in its own way. No, Mr. Newberry, I can’t risk it.”
Rho sat behind the wheel of her truck in the hotel parking lot, experiencing a strange kind of elation. It was all out in the open between Mimi and her now. No more need to ignore one another in public, cross the street if one saw the other coming. And no warm-and-fuzzy reconciliation, either. Mimi had done the unforgivable, and Rho had no intention of forgetting that. But the sense of betrayal on her part and the gloating triumph on Mimi’s were over.
It’s as if I’m coming alive again, she thought. As if facing the reality of what those murders did to me has set me free in all areas. I don’t even want a drink tonight, because I’m no longer afraid to look inside myself and make peace with what I see.
So now what? Ned Grossman had told her to talk with Will Scurlock, but it was far too late for that. As of the time she left the substation there had been no word from Nevada on Chrystal Ackerman, and there wouldn’t be till tomorrow. She knew she should go home to rest, but she felt edgy, unable to contemplate sleep.
Chrystal Ackerman: Why had she driven all the way from Las Vegas to Soledad County? Even in the brief glimpse Rho had caught of her, she hadn’t looked like the kind of woman who would visit this wild north coast without a good reason. Yet she’d died here, and while logic didn’t necessarily dictate it, Rho had a strong feeling that her death was not random, had to do with her purpose in coming.
But what purpose? Where had she been? Those were the critical questions.
Long blonde hairs caught between the floorboards at the Blakeley house. Coincidental?
I don’t think so.
Two sets of footprints going up canyon, one made by Virge and superimposed on the others. Virge’s prints veering toward the stream. The others going toward the waterfall.
Rho started the truck and pulled onto the highway, heading south.
Guy dropped Lily at the small house she shared with Alex on one of the northern side streets, accepting with a philosophical shrug her assurances that she’d be all right there. The young woman had asked that he not offer advice, and besides, as Rhoda Swift had told Wayne, Lily wouldn’t turn her life around until she was good and ready to. He’d keep the lines of communication open, be available to help should she make a decision.
The latter thought surprised him and he smiled wryly. In times past he’d have squeezed Lily for every drop of information about the Cascada Canyon murders, paid scant attention to her problems, and turned away without a qualm. He wrote about towns in trouble, but that didn’t mean he needed to get involved with people in trouble. But something about this particular place and its inhabitants, both living and deceased, had made him care.
“I’m changing,” he said aloud.
You’re becoming a mensch, Diana’s voice said.
“Why now, though?” he asked her.
Keep it up and find out.
He reached the highway and turned south. As he neared the hotel he saw Rhoda Swift’s pickup exit the parking lot and head south too. Odd. She’d described where she lived the night they had dinner; her turnoff was even farther north than where he’d dropped Lily. Out of more than idle curiosity he followed her.
She passed the closed-up business establishments and the sheriff’s substation; the yacht harbor where she’d mentioned her father lived, and the unfinished subdivision. When she also passed the B&B he felt an unaccountable twinge. Wherever she was going, it wasn’t to see him. Soon her taillights were moving through the heavily forested area outside the town limits, where fog boiled up from the coves.
After fifteen or sixteen miles her brake lights flashed and the truck veered across the centerline. In the wash of her headlights Guy recognized the collapsed gates leading into Cascada Canyon. That afternoon she’d told him she wasn’t certain she could bring herself to go there again, yet here she was.
He continued along the highway, U-turned, and parked where he had the first time he’d visited the canyon. Then he got out and walked back to the entrance. The truck was pulled inside the gates, where a plastic crime-scene tape stretched. Rhoda had driven in, and, judging from the way she’d positioned the truck, it wouldn’t be visible to drivers traveling either north or south. A secret visit, then, that she didn’t want the public, the press, or members of her own department to know about.
Guy stepped over the tape and took out his flashlight. Aiming it at the ground, he started up the driveway. Without the light pollution he was used to in the city, the night sky was brilliant with stars. A car sped by on the highway behind him, its tires thumping as it crossed the centerline on a curve. Wherever Rhoda was, her footsteps weren’t audible. He kept following the dirt track, past the Blakeley house, past the Wynne dome, toward Bernhard Ulrick’s shack and the bunkhouses.
Rho passed the bunkhouses without a glance, her battery-powered torch trained on the ground. Don’t look, she thought. Don’t remember. Concentrate on why you’re here.
She could hear the rush of the stream now, could smell pungent pine and tangy eucalyptus. The torch illuminated Virge Scurlock’s large footprints superimposed on the smaller ones. Instead of veering off as she had earlier, she continued up canyon, sweeping the ground with the light. The smaller footprints went straight ahead, but now she saw—
“Hoo, hoo-hoo!”
She started before she recognized the low, sonorous cry of a great horned owl that must be nesting nearby. Remembered how the birds’ hooting had frightened her as a child, realized it frightened her even now. An owl, symbol of death, in this place of death...