Point Deception Read online

  Yes, Guy thought, his instincts told him the same.

  “One more thing, Mr. Cordova,” he said. “Will you direct me to Cascada Canyon?”

  Rho sat with her feet propped on the desk, leafing through an old issue of Field & Stream without really seeing it. An hour had passed, and Mercedes’ emergency operator had yet to get back to her with information on the abandoned car. The door opened, slammed shut. She looked up. Wayne, red-faced and scowling.

  “Dammit, Rho,” he said, “Grossman may have tried to put a lid on the murder, but word’s all over town. The EMTs stopped in for coffee at the Oceanside earlier, and after they got through talking, we might as well’ve posted it on the Internet.”

  She dropped the magazine, lowered her feet to the floor. Now they had a potentially bad situation on their hands. Besides igniting the town’s collective paranoia, the nature of the crime might make people who had seen the woman on Friday reluctant to come forward. “What’s the reaction so far?”

  “About what you’d expect. Folks’re grim, and a lot of the women’re scared. I’ve canvassed half the town and only found two witnesses who’ll admit to seeing our victim at the turnout.”

  “There must be dozens.”

  “I know that, and I’ll keep canvassing till they own up.” Wayne paused, frowning. “People’re acting strange, and here’s one example: When I stopped in at the hotel, Virge Scurlock was in the bar watching the ’Niners game.”

  “What’s strange about that?”

  “She’s not a sports fan. Will usually comes down by himself to catch the games on the big screen, but today he had an appointment with a client up at Deer Harbor. Virge told the waitress—that Becca Campos—that he’d dropped her at the supermarket, but she decided to stop in for a drink before she did her shopping.”

  “So?”

  “She isn’t much of a drinker, but today she was getting shitfaced on stingers.”

  “When was this?”

  “Around one thirty, and she was well on her way. Becca said she came in about noon.”

  “You’re right—it is strange. You talk with her?”

  “Yeah, and she wasn’t making much sense, but I did find out that she’d already heard about the murder.” Wayne paused, thoughtful. “You know, a couple of years ago Will and I got drunk together. Right after Janie threw me out for those three months. He was supposed to be consoling me, but I ended up consoling him. He told me that every year since the canyon murders, Virge has gotten more and more squirrelly.”

  “I’ve heard the same.”

  “Well, she’s squirrelly as hell today, and I think maybe we should—”

  The phone rang. Rho said to Valerie, “I’ll get it.”

  Mercedes, with the current address and phone number of the car’s owner, one Richard Bartlow.

  “I’ve turned up something out here that’s raised an interesting issue,” Guy said over the phone to his research assistant, Aaron Silber, “and I need to check a fact with you. It’s probably in the material you gave me, but I don’t have time to plow through it right now. Who’s paying the taxes on the Cascada Canyon property?”

  Silence, except for the clicking of Aaron’s keyboard. Guy pictured him: wiry-haired, lean-faced, hungry eyes staring at the screen through tinted glasses, a smile on his thin lips. Nothing had pleased Aaron more than Guy’s call saying he was about to begin another book. He’d willingly set aside two potential clients—“Political analysis, advertising demographics. Who needs that?”—in order to return to Guy’s employ.

  “Damn!”

  Guy held the receiver away from his ear. “What?”

  “I didn’t run a check on ownership. Major oversight. Sorry, Guy.”

  “No harm done. But do it now. My source here thinks Dunbar Harrison’s family may still own it.”

  “Harrison? Fellow who talked you into the project?”

  “One and the same. I think his sister was one of the victims, and he wants me to play detective.”

  “Kind of bogus of him not to tell you.”

  “Well, it’s a complicated situation.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that. I put together those files.” More silence except for the keys tapping. “Son of a bitch! The database I use doesn’t cover that area!”

  Again Guy distanced the receiver from his ear as he looked at his watch. After two. He’d stopped for an early lunch at the bar-and-grill called Oceanside on his way back to the motel, and the conversations he’d overheard had prompted him to eavesdrop in a number of other establishments. The atmosphere in town was edgy and could verge on the dangerous after nightfall. If he was to visit Cascada Canyon and still be back to observe the public reaction to what was widely rumored to be a rape-and-murder, he’d better be going.

  “Listen,” he said to Aaron, “can you get me the information by tonight?”

  “Of course I can.” His assistant sounded a shade prickly. He didn’t like Guy to imply that anything was beyond his capabilities, and his professional pride had been hurt by his glaring oversight.

  “Then do that, and I’ll call you later.”

  “I can leave a message on your voice mail—”

  “The Sea Stacks isn’t the Hyatt Regency, Aaron. They don’t have voice mail, and I don’t want the clerk taking that kind of message. Besides, I may have questions. I’ll call you.”

  “I don’t own the Mercedes anymore,” Richard Bartlow of Santa Barbara said. “I gave it to my son when he went off to graduate school in Nevada.”

  Now we’re getting someplace, Rho thought. It had taken her over an hour to reach the car’s registered owner. “When was this, sir?”

  “Last summer, shortly before he enrolled at UNLV.”

  “That’s Las Vegas?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I have your son’s address and phone number?”

  “Don’t tell me he forgot to register it in his own name! He was supposed to take care of that immediately.”

  “Apparently he neglected to do so. If you would—”

  “That’s Sean. You give a kid a beautiful classic car, you’d think he could at least—”

  Rho noted the name. “Sean’s phone number, sir?”

  “What’s this about, anyway?”

  She stifled an impatient sigh. “The car was abandoned on Highway One outside of Signal Port and has been impounded.”

  “That can’t be. I spoke with Sean on Friday, and he said he had no weekend plans other than studying for an exam.”

  “Perhaps he loaned the car to a friend.”

  “He knows better than to do that. But when did any of my children ever follow their better instincts?” Bartlow gave her a number in the 702 area code and added, “When you speak with Sean, please tell him he owes his father an explanation.”

  Guy made a U-turn and pulled the car onto the shoulder some two hundred yards south of the dirt road leading into Cascada Canyon. This was a lonely stretch of highway above the turnout at what Gregory Cordova had told him was called Point Deception, near the upper boundary of the old man’s property. The land was thickly forested to either side of the pavement, and although the sky had cleared that morning, it now was overcast. When he got out of the car he felt the full blast of a chill offshore wind and turned up the collar of his down jacket before he began walking along the shoulder. Cars and trucks sped past, their occupants paying him little attention.

  The road into the canyon was more of a dirt track like Gregory Cordova’s driveway, weeds and thistle plants growing so high on the center hump that Guy could tell no vehicle had passed over it in years. Massive wooden pillars carved like totem poles stood to either side of the entrance, but the gates had fallen off and lay rotting on the ground. A NO TRESPASSING sign on one of the pillars was pitted with rust.

  He paused for a moment till he heard no traffic approaching from either direction, then stepped onto the property. Beyond the fence lay a gently sloping meadow covered by pines and high grass. It was even chi
llier under the trees and the wind came gusting from behind him, whistling as it penetrated the canyon ahead. He walked slowly to one side of the driveway, to avoid the prickly thistles. After about twenty yards the land rose steeply on his right, overgrown and topped by what he thought was a redwood grove. To his left he saw an old car tucked under an overhanging pine tree. A white Buick sedan blanketed in at least a foot of needles. He went over, squatted, and cleared the license plate. The last, barely readable registration sticker was for 1987.

  He straightened and circled the car, checking out the rotted interior through the broken side window and trying the trunk, which opened with a creak. Its only contents were some rags and a spare tire. Guy shut the lid and took out a point-and-shoot camera loaded with extra-fast film, then moved around the car, snapping various shots. On this second pass his foot banged against something, hard enough to smart. He looked down and saw a manhole cover, scanned the surrounding ground and located the hole, deep in the needles. A metal drum half full of liquid was buried there. Motor oil or other hazardous waste which a do-it-yourself mechanic had disposed of. Guy replaced the lid and photographed it.

  The driveway continued to curve uphill, more steeply under tall trees. A blue jay set up a racket in one of them, and he looked up. A cable was tangled in the branches and hung down. Utility line, its end raggedly broken or cut. Beyond the tree the line was still strung parallel to the driveway. Guy recorded it on film.

  Now he could make out a dark, boxy shape through the vegetation, and as he moved closer he saw it was a house. A plain, shingled rectangle with a shadowy front porch crowded with indistinguishable objects. He veered off the drive, pushed through waist-high grass, and stopped at the bottom of its steps. Wicker outdoor furniture, grayed and tattered by the elements. Wooden flower boxes, also gray, containing dead weeds. After taking several more photographs, he went up on the porch, rubbed grime from a window, and tried to peer inside. All he saw was the yellowed back of a shade. The screen door had been ripped from it hinges and leaned against the wall. Guy turned the inner knob and let the door swing open into shadow. Odors rushed out at him: musty, stale. This, he knew from Aaron’s summary, was the house where the first of the victims, the Blakeley family, had been found.

  He took a small, nearly flat square of plastic from his pocket and pressed its center. It emitted a bright, laser-like beam, the latest in featherweight but powerful flashlights. Moving it around, he saw cobwebs and spiders’ nests, great clouds that shifted in the sudden draft and let drop husks of dead insects. Dark curtains, in tatters where rats had gotten at them. The hulking outline of a woodstove. He stepped inside, snapped the window shade up, and filtered light rushed into the small room.

  It contained a scene of wild disorder: overturned chairs and lamps and end tables; a bookcase lying on its side, volumes spilling off the shelves; a smashed television set. Three fading white outlines were stenciled on the plank floor, one of them pathetically small. He shone his light downward, saw rodent droppings and dark stains that disappeared into the cracks between the boards. Shone the light upward and saw the blood-spatter patterns on the walls.

  Jesus, why hadn’t someone honored his dead by having this cleaned up? Or, better yet, razed?

  He’d moved to the center of the room now, and was taking in small, more ordinary, but no less gut-wrenching details: a vodka bottle and two glasses on the coffee table; a paperback lying facedown and broken-spined on the rat-gnawed couch; knitting needles and a half-finished garment protruding from a basket; two carelessly discarded sandals; a child-size pair of blue tennis shoes.

  The crime scene appeared to be exactly as it was thirteen years before, but Guy sensed a more recent presence. He shone the light on the floor again and spotted tracks in the dust that looked as if they’d been made by a pair of athletic shoes. They crisscrossed the room and entered what he now discovered to be two bedrooms, a bath, and a kitchen.

  A curiosity seeker? Someone with a taste for the macabre? Probably. When? Not recently, but perhaps within the past year.

  He went back to the main room and stood in its center. Soon he felt a sensation of the blood running slower in his veins. Time both shrank and telescoped: He was here at this very minute; he was here on the night of the murders; he was caught in between, as the years went by and nothing changed. Never had he felt so affected and vulnerable at a crime scene, and while it unnerved him, he decided to go wherever his emotions would take him.

  He closed his eyes to the terrible sights and opened his other senses.

  Hear: silence. Feel: cold. Smell: dry rot and the taint of old fires. Taste: dust.

  Try again.

  Hear: wind whistling. Feel: draft through leaky window frame. Smell: ashes stirred by downdraft in woodstove. Taste: ashes and dust.

  Go deeper.

  Hear: cries, faint. Feel: fear. Smell: fear. Taste: fear.

  Now you’re getting it. Once again.

  Hear: echoes of gunshots.

  Feel: panic.

  Smell: blood.

  Taste: my own blood where I’ve bitten my lip.

  He opened his eyes, moved swiftly toward the door, and stepped out on the porch, where he sucked in deep breaths of clean air. He’d been in the house longer than he realized, and dusk had fallen. Nothing moved there in the shadows, nothing made a sound except the wind whistling deep into the canyon. He wanted to follow it, visit the other scenes, but that was impractical and, besides, he’d always had the sense to know his own limits. Tomorrow he’d return, but for now he’d gotten far more than he came for.

  The fog ushered in the night, wiped out all traces of the fine weather. Rho switched on the cruiser’s headlights, and their beams hit a solid wall of white boiling up from Schooner Cove. Then, as the road curved inland, the fog was gone and every striation in the bark of the tree trunks stood out in sharp relief. She’d lived on this north coast her entire life, yet the patterns of the fog still fascinated her. Why, for instance, should Schooner Cove draw it in so heavily, while Pelican Cove did not? Why, even when the rest of the shoreline was socked in, were the coves north of Deer Harbor clear, almost tropical? She knew the scientific answers, of course, but she liked to think there were less understandable forces at work as well.

  Why did a young woman have to die?

  The question came from nowhere, so strident that she felt as if someone else had asked it out loud. She wanted to ignore it, concentrate on the mundane aspects of her patrol. But there was no ignoring it on what promised to be a dark, uneasy night.

  The radio calls she’d been listening to described the local population’s state of mind: nervous reports of prowlers and the discharge of firearms; two domestic disturbances; a 911 disconnect; two D&Ds; one DUI. A heavy volume of calls for any given time period, and particularly for Sunday. The citizens of Signal Port and environs were acting out their paranoia.

  Rho turned up the volume on her radio. She licked dry lips, wished she’d remembered to fill her water bottle. Then she thought, Stop kidding yourself. What you really want is a drink.

  She wouldn’t dream of drinking while on duty, of course. Even in her worst days she’d managed to abstain long enough to work her shift sober. Now when the craving came over her, she could usually ignore it and satisfy it later with a glass of wine or beer in good company. But tonight it demanded full attention, and she knew if she later gave in to it, she wouldn’t stop with one drink, and she’d take that one and the others that followed while alone.

  She tried to concentrate on how she would handle Sean Bartlow, the current owner of the Mercedes, when she reached him at his number in Las Vegas. She tried to think of ways the department could calm and reassure the area’s troubled populace. But the craving swelled, the prospect of a drink floating in her consciousness like a cloud that she could use to blot out everything, past and present.

  When he reached the tree where the downed utility wire was tangled, Guy stopped and listened. For half a minute he’d been aware of
sounds coming from the slope that led up to the redwood grove. Now he heard nothing but the wind. He went on toward the highway, hands deep in his jacket pockets.

  More sounds: crackling in the underbrush, then footsteps on the driveway behind him. He glanced back, but could see no one in the gloom. He rounded the curve where the old sedan crouched under its shroud of needles and moved to one side. The footsteps came on, and a tall figure appeared. Six foot four, maybe five, and slender. A man wearing a peaked cap.

  Guy waited till the man was abreast of him, then stepped forward and shone his flashlight on his face. “Hold it right there.” The air of authority in his voice—he might’ve hated shore patrol duty, but he’d acquired certain assets during his tour—brought his pursuer up short.

  “Jesus, man, you scared me!” the stranger exclaimed.

  Guy relaxed and took inventory of him: hiker’s clothing, complete with small backpack and knobby walking stick; neatly trimmed beard, dark brown shot with gray; small nose, slightly skewed as if it had been broken and not set properly; dark deep-set eyes; old scar over right brow; peaked wool cap covering the hair; startled look turning to a scowl.

  “You’re trespassing, man,” his pursuer added.

  Guy was prepared for such a challenge. “No, you’re trespassing.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  The scowl melted into bewilderment. “Who the hell’re you?”

  “Name’s Guy Newberry. I was sent out from New York by the owners to check on the property.” And in a way, he had been.

  “What owners?”

  “People name of Harrison. Now, who are you?”

  “Clay Lawrence. I live on the other side of the hill.” He motioned toward the grove.

  “I thought people name of Scurlock own that land.”

  “They do. I’m their tenant, rent a little cabin from them.”

  “And what’re you doing over here?”

  Clay Lawrence shrugged. “I like to watch night come on from the redwoods. Technically that grove’s part of this property, but there’s nobody here to care. I saw you walking along the drive and… Well, you must know what happened here.”