So what was happening here? A random killer roaming the coastline? If so, had he struck elsewhere?
She went to her computer, accessed the records for other coastal counties. No recent unsolved murders in Humboldt. None in west Mendocino, Sonoma, or Marin. San Francisco showed a shooting outside a bar near Ocean Beach that in no way fit the pattern. San Mateo and Santa Cruz were relatively crime free.
Someone on the Soledad Coast, then. A stranger lying low in one of the area’s many motels? Not likely. Given the current atmosphere, any suspicious stranger would have been reported.
“One of us,” she said.
A familiar vehicle that passersby wouldn’t have given a second thought to. A stop to pick up the girl at Point Deception after dark. The driver would have had a place to take her, an isolated place. He knew Cascada Canyon, Quinley’s too. He could move freely, without attracting attention.
Chances were they hadn’t interviewed him. But if he were clever he’d have come forward claiming to have seen his victim. She began scanning the list, looking for someone who fit the criteria, and halfway down a name stood out. She flipped through the file to Grossman’s report of his interview with the man, read it. Innocuous as all the others, and yet...
She went to her computer, accessed her own report of an interview with him. Maybe. But maybe she only wanted to believe.
Allowing herself only a small degree of excitement, she began accessing other jurisdictions’ records, searching as far back as two years. The name appeared on unsolved casefiles in Bellingham, Washington, and Lincoln County, Oregon. As she made inquiries of colleagues in both places her excitement grew until, upon finishing her final call, she pushed back from the desk, leaped to her feet, and shouted, “Yes!” A startled Cody jumped up and began barking.
All she had to do now was wait on a felony warrant from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. While detectives flew down from Oregon to question her man in conjunction with a thirteen-month-old murder, she’d extract from him a confession in the deaths of both Chrystal Ackerman and Virge Scurlock.
Guy stepped into the parlor of the inn and interrupted a tender scene between Kevin Jacoby and a short man whose left arm was in a cast. Rhoda had told him about the altercation between Jacoby and his partner, Brandon Fuller, but now it seemed they’d patched up their relationship.
Jacoby turned, flushed, but with a smile on his usually melancholy face. Guy said, “I’d like to ask a favor. May I use your fax machine?”
“Of course. It’s on a side table in the office.”
He nodded his thanks, went out and around the reception desk, closing the office door for privacy. After locating the machine, he dialed Aaron Silber’s number. His assistant answered with the words, “Got it.” Guy read the fax number to him, hung up, and waited, surprised to find his palms were damp. The line rang and paper began to curl from the machine. He restrained himself from looking at it till the machine gave its final beep.
At first he was disappointed. This photograph was of no one he knew. Then he told himself to take it slowly and look at individual features.
When he’d done that and assembled the face whole again, his fingers convulsed on the edge of the desk. That face was the answer to what had happened in Cascada Canyon thirteen years ago tonight.
Rho listened to the rain smacking down on her roof. From somewhere came a persistent dripping sound. One of the gutters she’d neglected to clean this year was overflowing.
The solutions to Chrystal Ackerman’s and Virge Scurlock’s murders were mostly there now. She needed to calm down, order her thoughts, work out a progression while she waited on the warrant. The detective she’d spoken with in Lincoln County had said he’d call her before it was faxed to the substation.
It would have been good to have someone to bounce her ideas off, but Grossman and Shepherd had been called into Santa Carla to confer with FBI agents, and when she’d earlier called the Investigations Bureau and asked to speak with one of them, she’d been told both were unavailable. Guy had not answered his phone at the inn.
“Okay,” she told Cody, “I’ll just have to do this by myself.” He came over to her, nails clicking on the hardwood, and nosed her hand. She patted him absently.
A broken-down truck. Another borrowed for an aborted trip to Santa Carla. Aborted, because at Point Deception—
The doorball rang. Cody snapped to attention. Rho went to the window and looked out, saw Guy standing on the porch, his hair wet and plastered to his scalp. She opened the door, said, “Guy, I’m glad to see you, but what brings you out on a night like this?”
“I have something to show you.” He stepped into the house, dripping, and removed a curl of paper from inside his jacket and held it out to her.
It was a fax of a photograph. She stared at it in surprise. Even without the beard, skewed nose, and scar, she would have recognized the man by his deepset eyes. “Clay Lawrence. What’re you doing with this?”
“That’s not really Clay Lawrence.”
“I know. I’ve been talking with the authorities in Washington State and Oregon. I’m reasonably certain this man is our killer. How did you get this picture?”
Guy moved past her, toward the fireplace. “In a minute. First tell me what the people up north told you.”
“Okay. The real Clay Lawrence left Bellingham thirteen months ago on a two-week driving trip and was never heard from again. He was last seen in Depoe Bay, Oregon, in the company of a hitchhiker who looked enough like him to be his brother. His broken-down car turned up shortly afterwards in Brookings, and his remains were found in a shallow grave near Cape Perpetua, Lincoln County, just last week. They only got an ID on him three days ago. His neck had been broken.” She waved the facsimile photo at Guy. “So what’s his real identity?”
To her annoyance, Guy ignored the question. “Have you worked out a progression of events?”
“I was in the process of it when you arrived.”
“So tell me.”
He was opting for the methodical approach, and she’d do well to follow his lead. “Our man killed Lawrence, buried him, and stole his car. After it broke down, he hitched. When he was dropped off in Signal Port, he met Becca Campos and decided to stay on a while — he told me that himself. Will once said ‘Clay’ led a frugal, quiet life, mainly reading, meditating, and hiking on the ridge. The first Friday of every month he’d drive into Santa Carla to pick up supplies at Costco. But last Friday his truck was broken down — I saw it on Sunday, and it looked as if it hadn’t run for quite some time. I think he asked Virge if he could borrow Will’s truck for the trip.” Now Rho felt a little breathless.
Guy sat down on the hearth, waiting for her to go on, and after a moment she did.
“Will thought the truck was in his garage all weekend. If he’d’ve known Virge loaned it to Clay, he’d’ve been furious. But Virge had a soft spot for their tenant, so she covered. On his way to Santa Carla, though, Clay spotted Ackerman at the turnout, picked her up, took her back to his cabin for sex. Something went wrong, and he killed her there, probably on Saturday, given her autopsy results. He couldn’t keep the body at the cabin, because Virge had a habit of dropping in on him, so he stashed it where nobody ever goes — the canyon. Then, late at night when traffic was sparse, he retrieved it, drove it in Will’s truck to Quinley’s, where he put her into the sea. He never counted on having to kill Virge too.”
Guy nodded. “I’ve always suspected that wasn’t an accident. Why do you think he had to kill her?”
Rho began to pace, very excited now that she was able to put her theory into words. “Virge made a remark to one of the other patrons of the hotel bar on Sunday: ‘Don’t ever try to do someone a favor. You might end up owing more than you can handle.’ Doesn’t make a lot of sense until you consider that she was drinking, slurring her words. I think she meant to say ‘knowing.’”