“All right,” Guy said, “we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
Dun’s twisted face sagged with relief. “You’re going to do it.”
“I’m going to think about doing it.” But the prickle was back, stronger than before, and this time he did nothing to suppress it. How could he resist a story that had such power over a man like Dunbar Harrison?
He spoke with Marta before he left her party. Eight weeks later, more intrigued than ever, a contract signed with his publisher, he was on his way to Soledad County.
Rho propped her hip on the corner of Valerie’s desk and picked up the clipboard that held this morning’s faxes from Santa Carla — notices and memos that rolled off the machine in a steady stream from the Soledad County seat. As she paged through them she asked the clerk, “You know where Wayne went?” He’d left the substation after the last of the poachers were loaded onto the second van.
“On a four-five-nine up at Deer Harbor. Second home. Valuable jewelry and antiques taken.” Valerie smirked and picked up her knitting. “Now, I ask you, what kind of people leave valuables in a vacation home where they don’t even have an alarm system or a private patrol?”
“People who hope to defraud their insurance companies.”
“I tell you, you work in a place long enough, you see it all.”
“Yeah, you do.” Rho sighed, skimming a memo that said the department’s request for funds to hire two more patrol officers and a detective for the coastal substation had been turned down by the county board of supervisors.
The trouble with policing Soledad County, she thought, was that it was too damn big and diverse. You had national forest to the east; Santa Carla, Talbot’s Mills, and Cedar along the Highway 101 corridor; the coastal ridge; and the coast itself. The coastal area extended from Westhaven at the south to Oilville — whose now dry wells were among the first to be drilled in California — at the north. In between lay small towns, state reserves, large ranches, and wilderness.
This single substation served the nearly one-hundred-mile coastal stretch. Rho, nine other deputies, and Station Commander Iverson worked the facility, their territories overlapping with those of the inland cities. None of the coastal towns had its own police department, and even with the cooperation of the California Highway Patrol, the job was overwhelming.
It didn’t help that the department’s Investigations Bureau was located at the county seat. Should a serious crime occur on the coast, detectives were dispatched from Santa Carla, but more often than not they relied on patrol officers such as herself to do the real legwork. As a result, she and her fellow deputies were more skilled at investigation than their colleagues inland and their work was more interesting, but they performed detectives’ duties for patrol officers’ pay. Many of the deputies complained about that, but Rho didn’t care. Often, like today, she worked during her time off.
She set the clipboard on the desk and stood. “If you talk to Wayne,” she said to Valerie, “tell him I’m heading down to Point Deception to check on an abandoned vehicle.”
Valerie took her eyes off her knitting and regarded Rho with a keen, birdy gaze. It said that she pitied her for many reasons: for having no husband, no children, no life outside her job; for throwing herself into her work in an attempt to atone for mistakes that under normal circumstances rookies were expected to make; for having thirteen years ago stumbled into abnormal circumstances that continued to haunt her.
Or maybe Valerie didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe Rho simply pitied herself.
When Guy returned to his motel room at a few minutes after three, the door stood open. Late for the maid to be making it up, especially when it appeared that only two other units were occupied. He approached warily, ready for unpleasantness at the end of a frustrating and unpleasant day.
A woman with enormous buttocks — what one of his British friends called “posterial exuberance” — was bending over to put the final touches to making his bed. As he stepped through the door she straightened and whirled, one hand going to her throat as her face went pale. Then she flushed, muttered something about having to take her son to the dentist — presumably the reason she’d been late to work — and fled, leaving a caddy of cleaning supplies on the small table next to his laptop and file boxes.
The maid, Guy thought, was clearly as strange and unfriendly as all the other citizens of Signal Port whom he’d encountered that day. At the supermarket, the hardware store, the pharmacy, the small public library. Even the folks at the realty office, usually a place where newcomers were eagerly welcomed, had been distant and discouraging. In two bars where he’d stopped for a beer, he’d been on the receiving end of vaguely hostile glances. At the beach, the people he’d complimented on their dogs shied away from him.
An unfriendly town, yes, but there was more. Guy caught the scent of xenophobia.
He went to the table and picked up the caddy, intending to set it outside the door, and his gaze rested on the file boxes. The lid of one was askew. Setting the caddy down, he raised the lid. His files had been disturbed, no question about that.
By whom? Given her reaction to his arrival, the maid was the likely culprit. But there was also the unfriendly motel proprietor and his sour-faced wife. Or some unknown other party. Were strangers’ possessions routinely intruded upon in this town?
Or was the reason for the intrusion something unique to him? Unique because he intended to turn the spotlight on the thirteen-year-old unsolved murders in Cascada Canyon?
The black Mercedes was still parked at the turnout, its sheen dulled by salt cake, its windows misted. Rho pulled her truck over by the fence; as she started to get out, Cody yelped. She fixed him with a stern look and said, “Later.” The dog was well trained, but people drove fast on this stretch, and she didn’t want to take any chances with him, particularly on a blind curve.
Three other vehicles were parked in the turnout, two pickups and an old sedan. Fishermen, who went through the gap in the fence and across the grassy slope to clamber down the cliff to the cove. The land was owned by an old man who used to run sheep there — Gregory Cordova, the descendant of Basques who had migrated to the coastal region generations ago. He lived all alone in a ramshackle farmhouse at the south end of the property and didn’t care if people crossed for fishing access so long as they didn’t bother him or camp there. His hand-painted sign of a tent with a line through it was overgrown by gorse, but by and large his wishes were known and respected.
Rho approached the Mercedes cautiously, conscious that she was off duty, without the uniform and badge that gave her authority. Last night she’d thought it odd that the woman had gone off without lowering the hood, and she’d shone her flashlight through the windows to make sure she wasn’t asleep inside. Now she looked into the engine compartment to see if she could pinpoint the source of the trouble, but apparently it was beyond her expertise. She circled the car once, then tried the driver’s side door. Unlocked, and a cursory search of the interior turned up nothing but a couple of marijuana roaches in the ashtray; the glovebox held no registration, insurance card, or other identifying papers.
She backed out of the car and went to the trunk. Inside was a first-aid kit that looked to be standard equipment and a duffel bag whose contents had been dumped out and scattered across the compartment. Pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, blow dryer, a few changes of women’s underwear, toiletries kit. The kit contained the usual items, but no prescription medicines that would show its owner’s name.