Point Deception Page 21

  She shrugged. “That’s not the point. We were down there at dawn on Sunday, and that’s when we found it.”

  “Found what?” Guy heard a note of impatience in Rhoda’s voice now.

  “Chrys’s purse and sweater. I guess the guy who killed her tossed them off the cliff after her body and didn’t notice them get hung up on a bush. Everything was still inside the purse: money, credit cards, cell phone. When I saw it I knew something had happened to her, and I wanted to turn it in to the substation, but Alex…” She bit her lip.

  Guy said, “Alex wanted to keep it.”

  “Yeah. We left the sweater.”

  Rhoda flashed him a warning look: This is my interrogation. He moved his hand in an apologetic gesture.

  She asked, “How much money was in the purse?”

  “Sixty-seven dollars and eighty-one cents. She wouldn’t’ve gotten far on that. And her credit cards… the one for Chevron worked, but when I tried the Visa it was turned down for being maxed out.”

  “You tried to use it?”

  “Alex made me.”

  Guy watched Rhoda’s lips tighten. She was getting as tired as he of the Alex-made-me routine. Alex may have been the abuser, but basically he and Lily were both predators, feeding off others’ misfortunes.

  “What else was in the purse?” Rhoda asked.

  “The usual crap we drag around with us. One thing was weird, though: Her Triple A card was in some guy’s name.”

  “Sean Bartlow?”

  “Sounds right. Oh, and there were these handwritten notes, looked like directions. Go north so many miles from Westhaven, park here, go there.”

  “D’you still have them?”

  “No. Alex tossed everything we couldn’t use into a Dumpster up in Calvert’s Landing where they’re building the new community center. The cell phone, too. Turned out her service provider doesn’t have sites up here, so it wouldn’t work.”

  Rhoda made a note on a pad. She asked, “You see any evidence that somebody had been at the Quinley property before you?”

  “Well, the gate wasn’t latched like it usually is.”

  “Anything else?”

  Lily thought and shook her head. Rhoda sighed and turned the recorder off. She said, “I’m going to have to place you in custody, Lily.”

  Panic flooded the young woman’s features. She turned, open-mouthed, to Guy. He said, “It’s for the best.”

  “But what about my deal?”

  Rhoda said, “I’ll try to work that out for you, but till I can, I want you to be safe.”

  “Safe?” Her voice rose an octave. “Safe from who?”

  “Alex, if he makes bail. His poacher buddies from Oakland. Wayne.”

  At the mention of her brother’s name, Lily’s face twisted. She leaned forward, breathing hard and clutching at her stomach. Guy squeezed her shoulder, trying to comfort her, but she didn’t seem to feel his touch.

  He looked grimly at Rhoda and she nodded. For now, both predators would be caged.

  First light, and the fog drifted up from the cove behind the ruins of Quinley’s. Ned Grossman’s car was pulled nose-in to the chain-link fence near the rusted realty sign. Rho parked her truck next to it and got out, shivering in the damp, chill air.

  Instead of getting out of his vehicle, Grossman swung open its passenger-side door and motioned her inside. He handed her a white foam cup and said, “Let’s give ourselves a chance to wake up while we wait for the others.”

  She accepted the container gratefully, prying off the plastic lid and miraculously managing not to spill any coffee. Processing Lily Gilardi and finding someone to transport her to jail in Santa Carla, plus briefing Grossman on recent developments, had taken most of the night, and she’d had only a few hours’ sleep on top of a grueling day.

  She sipped the coffee, willing it to take effect, and stared at the charred ruins behind the fence. They were overgrown by vegetation that twined up the supports of the gas-station canopy and crawled across the peaked roofline. She pictured the place as it must have appeared in the fifties: a welcome oasis beside a much narrower strip of highway. Its proprietor would have dispensed snacks and soda, beer and bait, and warnings about the hazards of traveling this remote stretch of coastline. The hotel in Signal Port had still functioned then, but there were no other lodging places except small auto courts at Westhaven and Calvert’s Landing. Sheriff’s patrols were infrequent and emergency care nonexistent. The scattered homes between the towns relied on kerosene lamps and propane, unless their owners had installed costly electric generators; hand pumps on sinks and outhouses in the woods were common. People lived and died here without ever traveling farther than Santa Carla, and that journey was time-consuming and difficult.

  “What’re you thinking?” Grossman asked.

  “About how it must’ve been here back before I was born. My dad’s told me stories.”

  “It was pretty primitive. My grandparents had a cabin near Deer Harbor that they built in the forties. Even when the utility lines were extended north from Signal Port in the early sixties, they never took advantage of the service. Said it didn’t matter, and they were right. We had woods full of deer and owls and woodpeckers. A sand beach. A great view of Goat Rock. Some of my happiest times were spent there.”

  “What d’you remember best?”

  “The day the bear stole a blueberry pie my grandmother had cooling on the windowsill. Peach ice cream made in a hand-cranked machine. Corn popped over the fire and soaked in butter. Freshly caught fish frying in the pan, with onions.” He paused, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “I guess I don’t have to tell you what I focused on during childhood.”

  “Not a bad focus.” She sipped coffee, feeling strangely at ease with her superior officer. “How’s Everett doing?”

  “What made you think of him? Of course—food. Well, the neighbor who’s taking care of him says he and the dog’re getting on famously. Trouble is, old Ev’s developed a fondness for hamburger—cooked hamburger. Kind of pricey on a cop’s salary.”

  Rho grinned. “To say nothing of an extra cooking chore—” She broke off as a cruiser pulled up beside her truck. “Wayne’s here.”

  “Wayne? Dammit!” Grossman tossed his empty coffee cup into the backseat. “He’s supposed to be establishing the route Ackerman took to get here. What the hell’s he doing? He shouldn’t be on the scene anyway, since his sister’s a material witness. Goddamn it!” He threw open his door and got out of the car. Rho followed at a cautious distance.

  Grossman walked toward Wayne in the gait of a big cat stalking its prey. Although the deputy had two inches and more than fifty pounds on him, his was the more imposing presence. He said, “Did I request you to be on the scene, Gilardi?”

  “No, sir, you didn’t, but I thought you could use some help. Besides, I’ve got a vested interest—”

  “Which is precisely why I don’t want you here. I have technicians coming from Santa Carla, and when they arrive Deputy Swift will show me where your sister described finding the victim’s personal effects, and they’ll comb the area. I don’t want anyone with a vested interest involved in that process.”

  Wayne flushed.

  Grossman added, “Have you submitted your report on Ackerman’s route north yet?”

  “I traced her as far south as Sonoma County, to the Ocean Cove store—”

  “Put it in writing, Gilardi.”

  Rho saw Wayne’s hands fist at his sides and his shoulders bunch as he prepared to take a swing at Grossman.

  Don’t, for God’s sake, Wayne!

  Grossman saw it too. “I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he warned. “Go back to the substation and write your report. Then take the day off. You need it.”

  Wayne regarded the detective with a flat, hot stare. Then he pivoted and went to his cruiser. As he turned onto the highway he sprayed Rho’s truck with loose gravel.

  “Thanks, Gilardi,” she muttered.

  Grossman was watching the
departing car with narrowed eyes. “Our boy’s got a temper.”

  “Yes.”

  “He always been that way?”

  “No.”

  “What changed him?”

  She compressed her lips. Guy had told her about Wayne’s affair with Claudia Blakely before he left her house in the early hours of the morning. She was duty bound to report the information, yet she’d withheld it in her earlier briefing of Grossman. To tell him seemed a betrayal of the man who had mentored her.

  “What is it, Swift?”

  “… The change in Wayne has to do with the Cascada Canyon murders. They changed us all.”

  Grossman waited.

  She moved to the fence, her back to him, fingering a late-blooming rose that felt like tissue paper. “Wayne’s got a reputation as a… I guess you could say a ladies’ man.”

  “The reputation consistent with fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  God, she wished Guy had never shared what he knew! She could single-handedly be responsible for destroying Wayne’s career. “At the time of the murders he was involved with one of the victims, Claudia Blakeley.”

  “You mean romantically involved?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know about it at the time?”

  “No. I only found out early this morning.”

  “Can you substantiate it?”

  “There’s an eyewitness to Wayne picking Blakeley up on the highway, necking with her in his car—his patrol car, I guess.”

  “Get a statement.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it after I leave here. But do you really think it’s evidence of official misconduct on Wayne’s part?”

  Grossman seemed to weigh his response carefully. “Necking in your patrol car isn’t acceptable behavior, but I’d be willing to overlook that. What bothers me is we’re talking about an officer who misplaced evidence in the case. And let you take the blame.”

  “I don’t see what misplacing those blood samples has to do with—”

  “Don’t you?”

  “You’re saying that he might’ve deliberately misplaced them? Or tampered with other evidence?”

  “I’m saying that he may have been involved in the murders.”

  When Guy stepped out of his room at the bed-and-breakfast at nine that morning, he came face-to-face with Becca Campos. She clutched an armload of sheets and towels to her breasts as if for comfort, and her eyes were red from crying.

  “Becca,” he said, “what’s wrong?”

  “Virge Scurlock’s dead. They found her day before yesterday, and the sheriff’s department tried to keep it quiet, but everybody was talking about it to those rotten reporters, and now it’s on the news and in all the papers.”

  “Did you just find out about it?”

  “No, my boyfriend told me right after, but I just can’t stop crying. I loved Virge, she was the nicest person I ever worked for.” Her tears spilled over and Becca dropped the linens and buried her face against Guy’s shoulder.

  What was it with him and the weeping women of Signal Port!

  He patted her, murmuring hollow phrases—the sort of meaningless drivel that was one of the reasons he’d distanced himself from his friends after Diana died. Apparently Becca recognized it for what it was. She pushed away from him, fixing him with a cynical look, and stooped to pick up the linens. “Sorry,” she said as she brushed past him into his room.

  Guy hesitated, then shrugged and went out to see how the other citizens were taking the news.

  “That’s where it happened.” Gregory Cordova pointed down into Lantern Cove. “That Japanese freighter back in thirty-seven. High surf just picked it up and smashed it on the rocks.”

  Rho didn’t try to steer the old man back to the business at hand. Like many of the descendants of Basques who had settled this part of the coast, he had a roundabout way of approaching a difficult subject.

  “All those dead men,” he went on. “Some of them were no more than boys. I was practically a boy myself, and I learned a hard lesson from the shipwreck. We carried the bodies up and laid them out on this bluff. That was when I realized how unforgiving the sea is. How unforgiving death is. Of course, a few years later those dead boys would’ve been fighting against us. Strange to think how a person you feel no ill will toward can become an enemy in a very short time.”

  As Wayne will become my enemy after today.

  “Follow me.” Cordova set off at a surprisingly brisk pace across the bluff.

  The fog was thick this morning, muffling the sound of the sea and cloaking the burned trees so they seemed gaunt figures holding a silent vigil for the sailors who had died on the rocks over sixty years before. Cordova set a course through them to the northeast. When he finally stopped they were at the upper corner of his property where it met the highway.

  “Over there is where they’d meet,” he said. “The woman would come along the path by the stream, and the man would be waiting in his official car.”

  “By the woman, you mean Claudia Blakeley?”

  “I learned later that was her name, yes. And the man, of course, was your Deputy Gilardi.”

  “And you observed this how many times?”

  “Four, all told, over a period of a month before the killings. Maybe it had been going on for a long time before, I don’t know. But once I saw what was happening, I made it my business.” His dark eyes peered at Rho from their deep sockets. “Yes, I’m a nosy man. Always have been. I make up for what my own life hasn’t offered me by observing the lives of others.”

  “Are you willing to give us an official statement about this?”

  “Is your department going to do something about that man?”

  “If we find he’s guilty of misconduct.”

  “He’s guilty of being a menace to society and himself. I know. I’ve made a study of Wayne Gilardi in the years since those killings. Take your statement, but there’s something more I have to tell you. Something I didn’t tell that writer fellow, ’cause I was hoping he’d come back for the rest of the story. I enjoy his company.”

  “And what is that, Mr. Cordova?”

  “I know where Deputy Gilardi took the Blakeley woman.”

  A prickling began at the base of Rho’s spine, radiated upward and outward to her limbs. Instinctively she knew the old man was about to reveal something she didn’t want to hear.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Well, the last time they met before the woman was killed, I followed them. To the old filling station up the highway. I guess someone of your age would know it as Quinley’s. Most of it had burned down, but a good part was still standing. Gilardi and the Blakeley woman drove through the gate, parked behind, didn’t come out for nearly two hours. After they left I investigated. He had a nice little love nest fixed up in there.”

  Cordova’s voice droned on, saying something about a mattress and empty wine bottles, but Rho barely heard it. Her ears were filled with the rush of her own blood, the accelerated beating of her heart.

  The old man had told her something far worse than she’d feared.

  The town seemed strangely quiet to Guy, with the exception of the sheriff’s substation, where a press conference was apparently being held. People drove along the highway, went in and out of the shops, conducting their daily business. But they didn’t speak more than was necessary and they avoided eye contact with him and each other. Instead of the rumor-mongering and possible unrest the sheriff’s department had feared, a near paralysis had set in with the news of a third death. To Guy it seemed more ominous than the violent acting out on Sunday night, an affliction from which Signal Port might never recover.

  He went into the Oceanside and took a window table. He was the only customer. The waitress automatically brought coffee and took his order for tomato juice and a toasted bagel, but departed without her usual smile. Behind the pass-through window the cook’s off-key singing was silenced; when he finished preparing Guy
’s food he didn’t give his customary shout for the waitress to hustle. She brought the order and placed the check beside his plate without looking at him.

  After he’d eaten he walked up the highway to the supermarket and checked the headlines of the newspapers racked there. Speculation about the three deaths had made the papers as far away as San Jose and Sacramento. Although the Lindsay and Scurlock deaths were described as accidental, the stories hinted at some ominous, although obscure, link to Ackerman’s murder.

  During the next half hour he dropped into several business establishments and observed the same dynamic: people avoiding each other and shying away from him as if they suspected he was one of the media people. Many seemed withdrawn and depressed. Even those who knew him casually wouldn’t take him up on his innocuous conversational gambits or even meet his gaze, and he sensed it had little to do with him and everything to do with their desire to avoid any human connection whatsoever.

  Town in trouble. More trouble than it had seen in the worst days after the Cascada Canyon murders.

  Rho tried to call Ned Grossman from Gregory Cordova’s house, but Valerie told her the detective had flown to Santa Carla on the department’s helicopter and hadn’t said when he’d return.

  “A break in one of the cases?” she asked.

  “I’d’ve picked up on something like that. They did recover Ackerman’s purse from that Dumpster up at Calvert’s Landing, and he took it along for Lily to identify.”

  “Well, if he calls in, tell him I need to talk with him.”

  On the way back to town she stopped to interview two people who had reported seeing Chrystal Ackerman at the turnout. Both said the woman was alone, both expressed regret at not going to her aid. Nothing new there. It was well past one o’clock when she reached the substation, and she felt a strong urge to keep driving when she spotted Wayne’s truck in the lot. But Valerie had also said the reports on the hair samples and Virge’s autopsy were in; she wasn’t going to allow Wayne’s presence to prevent her from going over them.

  The big deputy was at the desk they shared, tapping furiously on the keyboard. He didn’t look up when Rho came in, but the stiffening of his spine when she took the reports from the inbox told her he was deliberately ignoring her. She looked around at the other unoccupied desks, then went down the hallway to the storeroom at the rear of the building. Surrounded by office and restroom supplies, ammo and extra weapons, she sat down on a stepstool and began reading.