I’d read it before but I read it again. A little grandiose for a pipe bomber, but not unintelligent. Angry but reasoned. Nothing misspelled. A call for the end of the two-party system, the end of politics, the necessity of anarchy as a prelude to a new America. Familiar. The old Unabomber, eco-terror stuff. Death to technology. Back to nature and farming. Luddites with explosives.
“What about a signature in the device?” I asked. “Some kind of taunt or gamesmanship?”
“Good,” said Lark. “And you can’t know this but one of the end caps on the bomb wasn’t plastic at all. It was threaded metal, like they used for irrigation before PVC. ‘CC’ was carved into the top.”
Still on the screen: the indeterminate young woman apparently impatient to mail off a bomb to San Diego city hall.
I looked up to find Mike’s sharp eyes on me.
“So, Natalie Strait has been missing since Tuesday,” he said. “And it’s not the first time she’s gone missing like this.”
“No. She’s had some problems.”
“You could say they have had some problems,” said Lark. “You fought with him in Fallujah, didn’t you?”
“Concurrently. Not beside. Why?”
Mike gloved the mouse again, did his annoying ritual with the cursor. Closed in and clicked: two images side by side. One well-focused picture of Dalton Strait going through the Main Avenue door to my office, and another of him coming back out.
“We’re surveilling the politician, not you.”
“Looking for what?”
“Irregularities,” said Lark. “Sorry, but that’s all I can say right now. I suspect he hired you to locate his wife.”
I shrugged, countering his evasion with one of my own. The door opened and an older man in a gray suit leaned in. An outdoorsman’s craggy face and a crown of hair that matched the suit. He looked surprised.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said. “Ten minutes, Mike.”
Lark nodded irritably and the man vanished with a soft close of the door.
“Anyway, we’re taking a look at the Strait family businesses in East County,” he said. “The formerly Honorable Virgil Strait’s solar farms, crook Kirby’s possible cartel connections, Tola Strait’s stake in Indian reservation pot palaces. A wide net.”
“What’s Dalton got to do with any of that?”
“Damned little, he better hope.” Lark smiled. “How is he taking the disappearance of his wife?”
“Unhappily.”
“She’s done this before,” said Lark.
“That’s kind of an open family secret.”
“So you didn’t know Dalton in Fallujah?”
I shook my head, studied the pictures of him on the monitor again.
“Silver Star and Purple Heart,” said Lark. “I never served. I do have some regrets about not serving.”
“You all say that.”
“You’re right. I don’t have any regrets. I’m not so sure I could hobble around on one leg the rest of my life. Not sure I have the stamina for that.”
I asked Mike to get the post office woman back on the screen. He scrolled through the pictures and we studied her again in silence.
I looked at him and shook my head.
“Thanks for coming in and trying,” said Lark. “Old man Taucher asked about you. I told him you were fine.”
Old man Taucher was Joan’s father, and Joan was a woman who touched both Mike’s and my lives, in deep but different ways. Mike’s boss — and, as it turned out, his lover. But my responsibility. In my mind, at least. She’d died in the line of duty, in my arms, not quite a year and a half ago, a bloody and terrifying December for San Diego.
I glanced down at the just arrived message on my phone, a text from Dalton Strait.
Natalie’s car found off Valley Center Road. Am stuck in Sacto. SD Sheriff Lt. Lew Hazzard will take your call.
4:09 P.M.
“Tell old man Taucher hello from me,” I said.
Lark stared off as if through a window with an interesting view, but there were no windows in the room.
“I have to see a man about a horse,” I said, standing.
He came back from his reverie with a sharp-eyed stare.
“What’s going on?”
“Irregularities. Sorry, but that’s all I can say right now.”
Four
Natalie Strait’s BMW X5 was discovered at 3:15 that afternoon at about the time I was leaving Lark. Four days had passed since her disappearance.
Dust choked and somehow forlorn, it sat not far from the Tourmaline Resort Casino on the Pala Reservation, behind a cluster of small, now derelict homes set off the road behind a windbreak of towering eucalyptus trees. The surrounding meadow looked to have once been a commercial nursery but was now grazed to the nub by a heard of plump Herefords. The workers’ former homes stood naked of doors or window glass, some of them even without roofs, some of them only foundations.
A flotilla of San Diego sheriff vans, SUVs, and prowl cars was parked on one side of a yellow crime tape, and a Union-Tribune police reporter I recognized was quarantined on the other. The afternoon sun was high behind them, girders of sunlight through the empty window frames of the houses.
Sheriff Lieutenant Lew Hazzard of the Special Enforcement Detail led me through the dead little enclave to where Natalie’s car had been found. He was tight within his uniform, ham faced and blue eyed. He had been a sergeant during my SDSD days, a brusque cop’s cop who liked bodybuilding and flying model airplanes.
We walked past empty beer bottles and soft-drink containers, a fire ring, a plywood lean-to probably made by kids. Hazzard said that a ranch hand had seen the SUV parked here on Tuesday afternoon, and it was still here today, Friday, so he’d finally called it in. Which made Hazzard wonder what some people were thinking, if anything. He nodded toward a young man sitting on a eucalyptus stump. Nearby stood a small bay mare tied to a rusted transmission half buried in the ground.
Natalie’s X5 was last year’s model, a striking cobalt blue, now dust covered. Brawny tires and complex wheels. All four doors were swung open, and the lift gate, too. A tan leather interior trimmed in shiny dark wood.
A team of blue-gloved crime scene investigators moved patiently within and without: a videographer, a photographer, a sketch artist, two techs lifting latent prints with clear tape, another combing through the driver’s floor mat, wearing a hiker’s headlight on her head and magnifiers over her eyeglasses. I noted no blood or damage or other signs of mischief, and that the driver’s seat was much farther back than five-foot-four Natalie would need. An automatic exit convenience?
“Was it locked?” I asked.
“Un,” said the lieutenant.
“How much gas was left in it?”
Hazzard looked at me as if even this was highly sensitive information. “Half.”
“I appreciate this favor,” I said.
“Not yours to appreciate,” said Hazzard. “Dalton Strait’s.”
And walked away.
I loitered. Watched the tow truck rumble toward us on a dirt road. Soft, dry soil, I saw, poor for traction and retaining tire prints. I asked the hair-and-fiber collector if they’d checked the navigation unit for recent addresses.