What was it with him and the weeping women of Signal Port!
He patted her, murmuring hollow phrases — the sort of meaningless drivel that was one of the reasons he’d distanced himself from his friends after Diana died. Apparently Becca recognized it for what it was. She pushed away from him, fixing him with a cynical look, and stooped to pick up the linens. “Sorry,” she said as she brushed past him into his room.
Guy hesitated, then shrugged and went out to see how the other citizens were taking the news.
“That’s where it happened.” Gregory Cordova pointed down into Lantern Cove. “That Japanese freighter back in thirty-seven. High surf just picked it up and smashed it on the rocks.”
Rho didn’t try to steer the old man back to the business at hand. Like many of the descendants of Basques who had settled this part of the coast, he had a roundabout way of approaching a difficult subject.
“All those dead men,” he went on. “Some of them were no more than boys. I was practically a boy myself, and I learned a hard lesson from the shipwreck. We carried the bodies up and laid them out on this bluff. That was when I realized how unforgiving the sea is. How unforgiving death is. Of course, a few years later those dead boys would’ve been fighting against us. Strange to think how a person you feel no ill will toward can become an enemy in a very short time.”
As Wayne will become my enemy after today.
“Follow me.” Cordova set off at a surprisingly brisk pace across the bluff.
The fog was thick this morning, muffling the sound of the sea and cloaking the burned trees so they seemed gaunt figures holding a silent vigil for the sailors who had died on the rocks over sixty years before. Cordova set a course through them to the northeast. When he finally stopped they were at the upper corner of his property where it met the highway.
“Over there is where they’d meet,” he said. “The woman would come along the path by the stream, and the man would be waiting in his official car.”
“By the woman, you mean Claudia Blakeley?”
“I learned later that was her name, yes. And the man, of course, was your Deputy Gilardi.”
“And you observed this how many times?”
“Four, all told, over a period of a month before the killings. Maybe it had been going on for a long time before, I don’t know. But once I saw what was happening, I made it my business.” His dark eyes peered at Rho from their deep sockets. “Yes, I’m a nosy man. Always have been. I make up for what my own life hasn’t offered me by observing the lives of others.”
“Are you willing to give us an official statement about this?”
“Is your department going to do something about that man?”
“If we find he’s guilty of misconduct.”
“He’s guilty of being a menace to society and himself. I know. I’ve made a study of Wayne Gilardi in the years since those killings. Take your statement, but there’s something more I have to tell you. Something I didn’t tell that writer fellow, ’cause I was hoping he’d come back for the rest of the story. I enjoy his company.”
“And what is that, Mr. Cordova?”
“I know where Deputy Gilardi took the Blakeley woman.”
A prickling began at the base of Rho’s spine, radiated upward and outward to her limbs. Instinctively she knew the old man was about to reveal something she didn’t want to hear.
“Where?” she asked.
“Well, the last time they met before the woman was killed, I followed them. To the old filling station up the highway. I guess someone of your age would know it as Quinley’s. Most of it had burned down, but a good part was still standing. Gilardi and the Blakeley woman drove through the gate, parked behind, didn’t come out for nearly two hours. After they left I investigated. He had a nice little love nest fixed up in there.”
Cordova’s voice droned on, saying something about a mattress and empty wine bottles, but Rho barely heard it. Her ears were filled with the rush of her own blood, the accelerated beating of her heart.
The old man had told her something far worse than she’d feared.
The town seemed strangely quiet to Guy, with the exception of the sheriff’s substation, where a press conference was apparently being held. People drove along the highway, went in and out of the shops, conducting their daily business. But they didn’t speak more than was necessary and they avoided eye contact with him and each other. Instead of the rumor-mongering and possible unrest the sheriff’s department had feared, a near paralysis had set in with the news of a third death. To Guy it seemed more ominous than the violent acting out on Sunday night, an affliction from which Signal Port might never recover.
He went into the Oceanside and took a window table. He was the only customer. The waitress automatically brought coffee and took his order for tomato juice and a toasted bagel, but departed without her usual smile. Behind the pass-through window the cook’s off-key singing was silenced; when he finished preparing Guy’s food he didn’t give his customary shout for the waitress to hustle. She brought the order and placed the check beside his plate without looking at him.
After he’d eaten he walked up the highway to the supermarket and checked the headlines of the newspapers racked there. Speculation about the three deaths had made the papers as far away as San Jose and Sacramento. Although the Lindsay and Scurlock deaths were described as accidental, the stories hinted at some ominous, although obscure, link to Ackerman’s murder.
During the next half hour he dropped into several business establishments and observed the same dynamic: people avoiding each other and shying away from him as if they suspected he was one of the media people. Many seemed withdrawn and depressed. Even those who knew him casually wouldn’t take him up on his innocuous conversational gambits or even meet his gaze, and he sensed it had little to do with him and everything to do with their desire to avoid any human connection whatsoever.
Town in trouble. More trouble than it had seen in the worst days after the Cascada Canyon murders.
Rho tried to call Ned Grossman from Gregory Cordova’s house, but Valerie told her the detective had flown to Santa Carla on the department’s helicopter and hadn’t said when he’d return.
“A break in one of the cases?” she asked.
“I’d’ve picked up on something like that. They did recover Ackerman’s purse from that Dumpster up at Calvert’s Landing, and he took it along for Lily to identify.”
“Well, if he calls in, tell him I need to talk with him.”
On the way back to town she stopped to interview two people who had reported seeing Chrystal Ackerman at the turnout. Both said the woman was alone, both expressed regret at not going to her aid. Nothing new there. It was well past one o’clock when she reached the substation, and she felt a strong urge to keep driving when she spotted Wayne’s truck in the lot. But Valerie had also said the reports on the hair samples and Virge’s autopsy were in; she wasn’t going to allow Wayne’s presence to prevent her from going over them.
The big deputy was at the desk they shared, tapping furiously on the keyboard. He didn’t look up when Rho came in, but the stiffening of his spine when she took the reports from the inbox told her he was deliberately ignoring her. She looked around at the other unoccupied desks, then went down the hallway to the storeroom at the rear of the building. Surrounded by office and restroom supplies, ammo and extra weapons, she sat down on a stepstool and began reading.
The hairs were a match with Ackerman’s. She — or her body — had been in the Blakeley house at some point. Virge’s autopsy was inconclusive. She could have died in an accidental fall, or been pushed or thrown off the ledge, or been killed elsewhere and transported there. Photographs appended to the report showed that footprints in the mud matched the tread of Virge’s shoes, but not the prints inside the two houses.