Point Deception Page 12

“Chryssie, please! Promise!”

  Of course I didn’t understand any of what was going on then—or maybe I did, sort of like animals do—but the way Heath yelled at me, I promised. And after I promised, he did too.

  I’ve kept that promise to this day. Yeah, and so has Heath. That was in September, and two weeks later he was dead.

  Monday, October 9

  Morning–Afternoon

  Rho wasn’t scheduled to work Monday morning, but she didn’t intend to run her usual errands or clean house. Things went on hold when she assisted on an investigation. She put in a quick call to Detective Grossman to inform him of what she would be doing, then phoned the Clark County detective who had visited Chrystal Ackerman’s apartment building. He confirmed the facts in his message and added that he was waiting on a court order that would allow him to enter the apartment and search for information on the victim’s next of kin.

  Rho said, “If you run across anything linking her with anyone in my jurisdiction, will you let me know?”

  “Sure thing. By the way, this morning I spoke with the woman who owns the service Ackerman worked for. She called in on the weekend, said she was taking a few days off. Woman thinks the mother may be in a nursing home, but she doesn’t know where.”

  “Ackerman operated out of a service?”

  “Yeah, Dial-a-Pal.”

  “How does that work, exactly?”

  “Service has a nine-hundred phone number, and calls’re switched to individual lines in the employees’ homes. Charges—two-fifty to three bucks a minute—go on the customers’ phone bills. Service collects from the phone company, then pays the worker her cut, which isn’t much more than minimum wage. The idea is for the worker to keep the client on the line as long as possible; they say an average hold time of eleven minutes makes it profitable.”

  “This stuff must be regulated. Are there restrictions as to what the workers can say or do?”

  Stevens laughed. “I hear they use a lot of euphemisms. Things like ‘melons’ for ‘breasts,’ ‘globes’ for ‘buttocks.’ You ask me, there’s not much difference.”

  “What about soliciting?”

  “Service prohibits it, but that doesn’t stop them. There’s nothing to keep a worker from giving her private number to a client, like Ackerman did to Sean Bartlow.”

  “You have any idea what kind of women do this work?”

  “They seem to be all across the board. A lot of housewives stuck at home with small kids. People with few skills. Anybody who has a good telephone voice and isn’t squeamish. It’s a good deal for people like that—as bona fide employers, the services’re required to pay into Social Security, issue IRS forms. Some of the better ones even offer benefits.”

  You learn something every day, Rho thought. “Did the owner of Ackerman’s service tell you anything about her?”

  “Yeah, and it’s kind of interesting. Ackerman was an artist, drew while she talked on the phone.”

  “While she was having sex?”

  “For these workers, it’s not sex. Most of them have been at it so long that the fantasies’re scripted, they can just reel them off the tops of their heads. So Ackerman drew—charcoal sketches. She gave one to the owner of the service, who thinks it’s very good.”

  After Rho ended the call, she sat at her desk for a while, staring into the dregs in her coffee cup and contemplating the contradictions that could exist side by side within an individual. Chrystal, crafting her drawings while titillating men on the phone. Rho, controlling herself rigidly while entertaining her demons. On the surface, their lives would have seemed to be polar opposites, but hadn’t they really been sisters under the skin?

  Guy set his laptop in the trunk of his rental car under the watchful gaze of Hugh Dawson. He slammed the lid shut and turned to face the motel owner.

  Dawson smirked and said, “Guess you’ll be heading back to New York now.”

  “Just because you kicked me out of your motel? Hardly.”

  “No place else to go. Fags that own the B and B had a big fight, closed it down. Guess they’ll be going back to San Francisco where they belong.”

  “There’re other towns and places to stay along the coast,” Guy said. “Besides, I like it here.” To prove his point, he took a deep breath of fog-damp air, raised his eyes to the ridge, where the sky was already turning blue.

  Dawson’s smirk faded.

  Guy asked, “You say the owners of the B and B might be moving?”

  “Probably.”

  “That means they’ll be selling the place. Maybe I’ll buy it.” Dawson’s face pulled into deep, sour lines. Guy gave him a jaunty wave as he got into his car.

  Sometimes, he told himself, he displayed sheer genius when thinking on his feet.

  Rho was on her way out the door when Cody barked and met her gaze with soulful, pleading eyes. “Okay, come on,” she said, “but expect to spend a lot of time in the truck today.” The Lab shot through the door ahead of her and was already waiting at the carport when she got there.

  Maybe, she thought as she belted him into the passenger’s seat, it wasn’t fair to keep such a big, active dog when she was gone so much. If she wanted companionship, perhaps a cat would be better. She’d had several and knew they didn’t suffer as much as dogs from their owners’ absence. But when she’d bought up here on the ridge it had seemed too isolated and a dog seemed like a good idea. Now that she was comfortable in her surroundings she’d become much too attached to Cody to give him up.

  “And I never would, I promise,” she told him.

  Cody cocked his head and regarded her as if he understood.

  She’d decided to stop by the substation before she headed to the Sea Stacks to talk with Guy Newberry. There she ran into Detective Grossman, who was on his way out to interview a potential witness in the Ackerman case.

  “CJIS check came back negative for a record on her,” he told Rho. “I expected as much, since she lived out of state. Nothing from NCIC yet. The feds’re slow. And no autopsy results, either. By the way,” he added, “you and Gilardi’re relieved of patrol duty till further notice. Keep on the case, and we’ll meet here this evening at nineteen hundred hours.”

  No one was at any of the desks when Rho entered the building, but as she checked her inbox she heard Valerie coming down the hallway that led past the interrogation room and holding cell to the rest- and supply rooms. “Good morning,” Rho said.

  “What’s good about it? At six o’clock the Santa Carla TV station did a news segment on the murder and public reaction to it. And they rehashed the other. San Francisco and Sacramento papers have already called. Grossman ducked them, had me refer them to our public information officer, who you and I know is an idiot. Other cities and the TV stations are now getting into the act, and fifteen minutes ago Gregory Cordova called to tell us that a film crew from Santa Carla just started setting up at Point Deception turnout.”

  Valerie’s voice sounded strange, congested. Rho looked up, saw she was red-eyed and blotchy-faced. “Hey, you been crying?”

  “Oh…” Valerie sat down at her desk, sighed heavily. “I can’t help it. It’s Virge. She’s still missing. Will and their tenant, that Clay Lawrence, are organizing a search party. They’ll meet at the Scurlock place at one, fan out over the whole area. I wish I could help, but my arthritis won’t let me.”

  Valerie looked so downcast that Rho ran through the schedule she’d planned and readjusted it. Until she heard more from Clark County or saw the autopsy results on Ackerman, there was little to do of urgency. “I’ll go in your place,” she told the clerk.

  “Would you? Thanks.” Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked them back. “Poor thing. She must feel so alone and scared.”

  Unless she had gone off voluntarily or met with foul play, Rho thought, but didn’t voice it. “You two are good friends, right?”

  “We used to be, before.”

  There it was, another euphemism. “You mean before the canyon murder
s.”

  Valerie stiffened. “Do you have to…?”

  “Like I told you last night, it’s time we started calling them what they were.”

  “… I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Rho sat down on her desk, facing Valerie. “Tell me about your friendship with Virge.”

  “We were best friends from kindergarten on through high school. She married Will right after graduation, I married my husband a few months later. We stood up for each other. Our babies were born three weeks apart.” Valerie smiled at the memory.

  “We used to take them to the playground and the beach together. Called ourselves ‘blue-jean mommas,’ because we didn’t think having babies meant you had to get old and dowdy. When my husband left, Virge was there for me. When Will got hurt falling off some scaffolding and couldn’t work for six months, I was there for her.”

  She paused, her gaze somber and distant. “Those babies—her Rick and my Joe—were best friends too. Should’ve been as many years as we were. But then my Joe was killed by that drunk driver, and Rick drowned in that high surf the next year. Those were things the blue-jean mommas didn’t count on. We outlived our own children.”

  Rho closed her eyes, and the image of Heath Wynne’s dying moments appeared as if her lids were a projection screen. Quickly she opened them.

  “You know what hurts?” Valerie added. “Those children in the canyon, they shouldn’t’ve died either. But everybody made such a fuss over their deaths. Nobody except for really close friends made much of Joe’s or Rick’s.”

  “Valerie, that’s not so.” Rho could remember the shock waves that had spread through the community after the accidents.

  “Oh, people were nice. They brought food and said all the right things and came to the services. But nobody was… horrified like they were about those children in the canyon. Virge’s and my boys, their deaths were just… ordinary.”

  Rho understood what she meant, felt her pain. No death should be ordinary.

  “Rhoda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your father called again.”

  Oh hell. “I’ll stop by there before I go up to the Scurlocks’.”

  “I know he’d appreciate the attention.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Rhoda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take it from me: Don’t neglect the people you love. Every minute is precious.”

  The woman who answered Guy’s knock at the door of the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast was at least six feet tall and wore her dark brown hair in a knot that was secured to her head by what looked to be a pair of chopsticks. She hugged a bundle of flowered sheets to her ample breasts, and her glare bored into him on eye level.

  She said, “What’s the matter, you can’t read the sign? We’re closed.”

  He put on the smile he used with reluctant interviewees, what he called boyish and disarming, and Diana had called an ass-kissing grin. Apparently the woman was on Diana’s side; the lines between her eyebrows deepened.

  He said, “I was hoping you might take on a guest anyway. It would be long-term, and I don’t require frills. I’d be glad to pay your highest rate—”

  “I told you—”

  “For God’s sake, Becca, don’t turn away a paying customer at this juncture!” A man’s voice spoke behind her.

  The woman called Becca half turned and directed her scowl at the speaker. “You said—”

  “Never mind what I said. I’ll handle this.” A slender man with wavy dark hair and finely chiseled features stepped around the woman. In spite of his good looks his skin had an unhealthy pallor and there were pronounced purplish shadows under his eyes. “Go finish the laundry,” he added.

  “It’s finished.”

  “Then go do… whatever it is you do.”

  Becca made a snorting sound and moved away.

  The man said to Guy, “I’m Kevin Jacoby, one of the owners. Did I hear you mention a long-term stay?”

  Guy nodded and introduced himself. “I had a room at the Sea Stacks, but the proprietor took a dislike to me.”

  “Oh, that old fart. He dislikes everybody. I can fix you up with a room, Mr. Newberry. In fact, you can have your pick of all ten.”

  Guy followed him into a high-ceilinged foyer with a massive oak reception desk, where Jacoby produced a guest register and proposed a surprisingly modest weekly rate. “I can’t in good conscience charge you any more,” he said. “It’s not feasible to provide you with breakfast since we have no other guests, and it won’t take Becca long to make up your room. By the way, don’t mind her. She’s in a bad mood this morning because I told her I’d have to let her go. She’ll be bringing you fresh towels by the armful once she realizes you’ve temporarily saved her job.”

  The corner room that Jacoby showed him to was spacious, with a fireplace and a turret window overlooking the highway and the sea. The decor was what he’d come to expect from B&Bs, floral prints and dried flowers and bowls of potpourri and an overabundance of throw pillows. But he supposed he could put up with froufrou in exchange for privacy and the absence of old man Dawson. He made two trips to his car, left his things unpacked, and was on his way out when Jacoby stopped him.

  “I couldn’t help but notice your laptop and file boxes,” he said. “Are you some kind of writer?”

  “Yes, freelance.”

  “Well, if it’s a quiet place to encourage your muse that you’re after, you’ve found it. The town’s half dead. Even my partner’s decamped. But that’s another story.”

  Guy waited, but the story didn’t materialize. After more small talk, he said good-bye to Jacoby and left the inn.

  Becca was leaning against his car, clad in a windbreaker and smoking a cigarette. As he came toward her she dropped the butt to the ground and toed it out. “I want to apologize for being rude before,” she said.

  “No apology necessary. I understand you were upset about losing your job.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for saving it. It’s not much, but it fits easy with the rest of my schedule.” She sighed. “This is sure one of those Mondays.”

  “Something else wrong?”

  “Besides my boyfriend being about to dump me and a million other things? Nah.”

  She was so downcast that Guy tried to cheer her. “I can’t believe any sane man would dump a pretty woman like you.”

  “Oh, it’s not dumping, not exactly. He’s just decided to go back to his old life in Seattle. Which leaves me here, in my old life that wasn’t so hot.”

  “I’m sorry, Becca.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Newberry.” She smiled wanly at him and walked toward an old Honda that was parked at the side of the building.

  Guy had always been the kind of man to whom total strangers would confide their most intimate secrets. It was a gift that sometimes involved him in superficial and inane conversations, but went a long way in developing useful sources.

  Guy Newberry had checked out of the Sea Stacks over an hour before.

  “Did he say where he was going?” Rho asked Hugh Dawson.

  “Mentioned the B and B, but it’s closed. Don’t think we’re gonna get rid of him anytime soon, though.”

  “If not, why’d he leave here?”

  “I threw him out.” Dawson nodded proudly, as if he’d performed a patriotic act.

  “And why’d you do that?”

  “Bastard’s gonna write about them murders, stir up a hornet’s nest. You ask me, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lay.”

  Rho never would have thought that an allusion to the Cascada Canyon murders could make her smile, but Dawson’s mixed metaphor actually caused the corners of her mouth to quirk up.

  He noticed and frowned. “What the hell’s so funny?”

  “Maybe it’s time we wake up those dogs, Hugh. Stir up those hornets. Follow them and see where they lead us.”

  “You gone crazy?”

  “No, I think I’m about to go sane.”

  She left the motel keeper w
ith his mouth agape and went out to her truck. When she drove by the B&B she saw only Kevin Jacoby’s Ford Escort parked there. Newberry could have gone north to find a room at the Deer Harbor Inn or one of the more luxurious establishments at Calvert’s Landing, or south to one of the numerous motels at Westhaven. She called Central Dispatch and put out a BOLO on him. Then she headed for the defunct yacht harbor where her father lived aboard his old cabin cruiser, the Rhoda A.

  “Suspected you’d be back.”

  Gregory Cordova motioned at the rocker by his woodstove where Guy had sat the day before and brought him a mug of coffee without asking if he wanted any. As he sat opposite him, the old man added, “I hear from my mailman that things’ve been lively in town.”

  “Lively’s a good word for it. What did he tell you?”

  “Well, folks’ve been acting up. And Samantha Lindsay was killed in a car wreck last night.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Beautiful blonde-haired woman. Married to a handsome fellow who looks like he plays a lot of golf. Second-home people.”

  “I think I’ve seen her a couple of times in the hotel bar.”

  “Let me guess: At least one of those times she was with somebody besides her husband.”

  “Correct.”

  Cordova shook his head. “Sad thing when a woman—or a man—strays like that. Makes you wonder what’s lacking there. Me, I always looked but I never touched. Used to tell Felicia—my wife—that the day I stopped looking she might as well plant me six feet under. Hell, the other day I even gave a good once-over to that woman got herself killed.”

  “You saw her at the turnout?”

  “Sure. Cutoff jeans riding up over a nice curve of ass. What the hell else was I supposed to do?”

  “But you didn’t stop?”

  “No. Me and a whole lot of other folks.” The old man shook his head regretfully. “The way of the human animal these days, I guess. But these young people, they seem so capable. And I was tired from my shopping and not thinking clear. But you know, while I was carting my groceries into the house, I had a feeling, was like a goose walking across my grave. Her grave, probably. It’s not my time yet. Now and then I wish it was. I’ve outlived my usefulness, would gladly trade places with that girl if I could. And now another woman, Virge Scurlock, has gone missing. Only hope it’s not more of the same.”