“Please call,” Theo said. He left the EMTs and went out through the kitchen to his Volvo, where he switched the radio over to the frequency used by the San Junipero Sheriff’s Department, then sat there staring at the mike. He was going to catch hell from Sheriff Burton for this.
“North Coast is yours, Theo. All yours,” the sheriff had said. My deputies will pick up suspects, answer robbery calls, and let the Highway Patrol investigate traffic accidents on Highway 1, that’s it. Otherwise, you keep them out of Pine Cove and your little secret stays secret.“ Theo was forty-one years old and he still felt as if he was hiding from the junior high vice principal, laying low. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen in Pine Cove. Nothing happened in Pine Cove.
He took a quick hit from his Sneaky Pete smokeless pot pipe before keying the mike and calling in the deputies.
Joseph Leander sat on the edge of the bed. He’d changed out of his pajamas into a blue business suit, but his thinning hair was still sticking out in sleep horns on the side. He was thirty-five, sandy-haired, thin but working on a paunch that strained the buttons of his vest. Theo sat across from him on a chair, holding a notepad. They could hear the sheriff’s deputies moving around downstairs.
“I can’t believe she’d do this,” Joseph said.
Theo reached over and squeezed the grieving husband’s bicep. “I’m really sorry, Joe. She didn’t say anything that would indicate she was thinking about doing something like this?”
Joseph shook his head without looking up. “She was getting better. Val had given her some pills and she seemed to be getting better.”
“She was seeing Valerie Riordan?” Theo asked. Valerie was Pine Cove’s only clinical psychiatrist. “Do you know what kind of pills?”
“Zoloft,” Joseph said. “I think it’s an antidepressant.”
Theo wrote down the name of the drug on his notepad. “Then Bess was depressed?”
“No, she just had this cleaning thing. Everything had to be cleaned every day. She’d clean something, then go back five minutes later and clean it again. She was making life miserable for the girls and me. She’d make us take our shoes and socks off, then wash our feet in a basin before we came into the house. But she wasn’t depressed.”
Theo wrote down “crazy” on his notepad. “When was the last time Bess went to see Val?”
“Maybe six weeks ago. When she first got the pills. She really seemed to be doing better. She even left the dishes in the sink overnight once. I was proud of her.”
“Where are her pills, Joseph?”
“Medicine cabinet.” Joseph gestured to the bathroom.
Theo excused himself and went to the bathroom. The brown prescription bottle was the only thing in the medicine cabinet other than disinfectants and some Q-Tips. The bottle was about half-full. “I’m going to take these with me,” Theo said, pocketing the pills. “The sheriff’s deputies are going to ask you some of these same questions, Joseph. You just tell them what you told me, okay?
Joseph nodded. “I think I should be with the girls.”
“Just a bit longer, okay? I’ll send up the deputy in charge.”
Theo heard a car start outside and went to the window to see an ambulance pulling away, the lights and siren off. Bess Leander’s body riding off to the morgue. He turned back to Joseph. “Call me if you need anything. I’m going to go talk to Val Riordan.”
Joseph stood up. “Theo, don’t tell anyone that Bess was on antidepressants. She didn’t want anyone to know. She was ashamed.”
“I won’t. Call me if you need me.” Theo left the room. A sharply dressed plainclothes deputy met him at the bottom of the steps. Theo saw by the badge on his belt that he was a detective sergeant.
“You’re Crowe. John Voss.” He extended his hand and Theo shook it. “We’re supposed to take it from here,” Voss said. “What have you got?”
Theo was at once relieved and offended. Sheriff Burton was going to push him off the case without even talking to him. “No note,” Theo said. “I called you guys ten minutes after I got the call. Joseph said she wasn’t depressed, but she was on medication. He came downstairs to have breakfast and found her.”
“Did you look around?” Voss asked. “This place has been scoured. There isn’t a smudge or a spot anywhere. It’s like someone cleaned up the scene.”
“She did that,” Theo said. “She was a clean freak.”
Voss scoffed. “She cleaned the house, then hung herself? Please.”
Theo shrugged. He really didn’t like this cop stuff. “I’m going to go talk to her psychiatrist. I’ll let you know what she says.”
“Don’t talk to anybody, Crowe. This is my investigation.”
Theo smiled. “Okay. But she hung herself and that’s all there is. Don’t make it into anything it’s not. The family is in pretty bad shape.”
“I’m a professional,” Voss said, throwing it like an insult, implying that Theo was just dicking around in law enforcement, which, in a way, he was.
“Did you check out the Amish cult angle?” Theo asked, trying to keep a straight face. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten high today.
“What?”
“Right, you’re the pro,” Theo said. “I forgot.” And he walked out of the house.
In the Volvo, Theo pulled the thin Pine Cove phone directory out of the glove compartment and was looking up Dr. Valerie Riordan’s number when a call came in on the radio. Fight at the Head of the Slug Saloon. It was 8:30 A.M.
It was rumored among the regulars at the Head of the Slug that under Mavis Sand’s slack, wrinkled, liver-spotted skin lay the gleaming metal skeleton of a Terminator. Mavis first began augmenting her parts in the fifties, first out of vanity: breasts, eyelashes, hair. Later, as she aged and the concept of maintenance eluded her, she began having parts replaced as they failed, until almost half of her body weight was composed of stainless steel (hips, elbows, shoulders, finger joints, rods fused to vertebrae five through twelve), silicon wafers (hearing aids, pacemaker, insulin pump), advanced polymer resins (cataract replacement lenses, dentures), Kevlar fabric (abdominal wall reinforcement), titanium (knees, ankles), and pork (ventricular heart valve). In fact, if not for the pig valve, Mavis would have jumped classes directly from animal to mineral, without the traditional stop at vegetable taken by most. The more inventive drunks at the Slug (little more than vegetables themselves) swore that sometimes, between songs on the jukebox, one could hear tiny but powerful servomotors whirring Mavis around behind the bar. Mavis was careful never to crush a beer can or move a full keg in plain sight of the customers lest she feed the rumors and ruin her image of girlish vulnerability.
When Theo entered the Head of the Slug, he saw ex-scream-queen Molly Michon on the floor with her teeth locked into the calf of a gray-haired man who was screeching like a mashed cat. Mavis stood over them both, brandishing her Louisville Slugger, ready to belt one of them out of the park.
“Theo,” Mavis shrilled, “you got ten seconds to get this wacko out of my bar before I brain her.”
“No, Mavis.” Theo raced forward and knocked Mavis’s bat aside while reaching into his back pocket for his handcuffs. He pried Molly’s hands from around the man’s ankle and shackled them behind her back. The gray-haired man’s screams hit a higher pitch.
Theo got down on the floor and spoke into Molly’s ear. “Let go, Molly. You’ve got to let go of the man’s leg.”
An animal sound emanated from Molly’s throat and bubbled out through blood and saliva.
Theo stroked her hair out of her face. “I can’t fix the problem if you don’t tell me what it is, Molly. I can’t understand you with that guy’s leg in your mouth.”