Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  At this point the material in the profile grew thin, because of the isolated lifestyle the residents of the canyon adopted. Susan worked on the cookbook, as evidenced by stacks of files filled with recipes, text, and notes. She and Forrest also home-schooled the three children; investigators found workbooks and teaching aids in the geodesic dome. Layers of primitive, blood-spattered drawings were tacked to their refrigerator door by magnets.

  The man with whom Susan had chosen to spend her life had little by way of appearance to recommend himself. The photograph attached to Forrest Wynne’s profile showed him to be tall and thin, with a concave chest and a small round head covered with hair that stood up in wispy tufts. As he posed on a downed tree trunk in the woods, he looked ill at ease and humorless.

  The son of a Marin County attorney and his artist wife, Forrest sculpted from early childhood in sand, mud, modeling clay, and any other material that could be molded to the highly original and sometimes unrecognizable forms that peopled his imagination. Although his father disapproved of his plans to study art, his mother—a painter—encouraged him.

  In Santa Cruz, Forrest blossomed. He’d been the odd duck in the elitist confines of Marin, but at college he found acceptance. And he found success in the form of a showing at a local gallery and the commission of the courtyard sculpture for the restaurant where he met his wife. He told friends that in Susan he’d found a soul mate: a woman who understood his work, overlooked his flaws, and would always be there for him. At first the years the Wynnes spent in San Francisco were good ones; he began to gain recognition and to land commissions. But then disaster struck.

  One of his sculptures was accepted by the city arts commission for the lobby of the Moscone Convention Center—an interlocking series of arcs rising high, which he titled Hope. Unfortunately, an art critic for the Chronicle and not a few outraged citizens noticed its uncanny resemblance to an upended eggbeater, and the subsequent outcry over the squandering of public funds on something that looked better suited to the kitchen than to the convention center forced the commission to reverse their decision. It didn’t help when the newspaper revealed that Forrest’s wife had trained as a chef.

  Devastated by the ridicule, Forrest sank into depression. Toward Christmas of that year he made a suicide attempt—half-hearted, but Susan knew that any attempt should be taken seriously. It was time, she told him, that they leave the city. He agreed; he had frightened himself and didn’t want to further hurt his wife and children.

  The profiles contained very little information on those children. Because they were home-schooled they had no classmates or teachers to provide detail, and no one from the immediate area really knew them. Susan’s mother had only met her grandchildren once, at a stopover at San Francisco Airport. Dun Harrison never laid eyes on his nephew, and Oriana was a stranger to him when she came to New York after her parents’ death. Forrest’s father died long before either child was born, and his mother moved to an artists’ colony in Vermont. Friends and neighbors of the family in San Francisco described Heath as “serious” and Oriana as “sweet.”

  Heath’s photograph confirmed the description. Facially he resembled his mother, but in expression he took after his father. He posed in front of the family’s geodesic dome, thin arms folded across the chest of his striped T-shirt, fine brown hair dusting his forehead, mouth set in a grim, straight line. The picture was dated only a few days before he died at age nine, and the boy looked as if he already knew the world to be dangerous and cruel.

  There was a wire service photograph of Oriana. An older woman in a fur coat—presumably her grandmother—was ushering her toward a jetway at San Francisco International. The six-year-old had turned her head and was staring behind her, big anguished eyes peering from under their uneven thatch of bangs as life as she’d known it receded. It was the last photograph taken of Oriana Wynne; once she arrived in New York, she legally became Oriana Harrison, and the doors of wealth and privilege closed against the curious.

  There was one other victim at the geodesic dome that night, Forrest’s younger sister, Devon. Twenty-five years of age, and described by friends as being addicted to abusive relationships, she’d been drifting around the country since she left college at nineteen. Her last trek had taken her across the country from Vermont, where she’d paid a visit to her mother. Devon—whose photograph showed a thin young woman with lank blonde hair and an old bruise below her left eye—would have done well to stay in the Northeast.

  Rho had just radioed in a be-on-lookout on Virge Scurlock when Central Dispatch announced, “All units, vicinity Highway One and Point Deception, ten-five-zero-Frank. Repeat, all units—”

  The Scurlock property was only a few miles from the scene of the fatal traffic accident, so she put on her pulsars and headed north. Virge, she thought. No, not Virge. Couldn’t be. Both trucks were still at the house.

  The fog was thick by the sea, and it diffused the lights from the vehicles pulled onto the western shoulder, about half a mile south of the point. A pickup, two cars, a cruiser, no ambulance yet. Neither the pickup nor the cars looked as if they had been involved in the accident. She parked, got out, and hurried toward the cruiser. Wayne had been first on the scene. Like herself, he was giving his all to the job tonight, working—by now—a triple shift. The cruiser’s headlights revealed his sagging facial skin and reddened eyes. He hadn’t much more to give.

  Wayne was talking with a man who leaned against the back of the pickup, ashen-faced and looking sick. Rho put her hand on the deputy’s arm. “What’ve we got here?”

  “You still working, kiddo? Well, what we got is Samantha Lindsay. Her car skidded across the centerline, went into the ditch. It’s not a bad drop, but she rolled, and the convertible top was crushed. She probably died instantly. Tow truck and ambulance’re on the way.”

  Rho nodded, noting the gouges the tires had cut into the damp earth beyond the shoulder. Her mind superimposed on them the image of Samantha’s perfect face. One careless moment at the wheel…

  Wayne said, “This is Mr. James Hutton. He found the car. Mr. Hutton, Deputy Rhoda Swift. Why don’t you fill her in on what happened.”

  Wayne’s tone alerted her that something was irregular about the situation. He wanted the man to repeat his story so he could check for inconsistencies.

  Hutton ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Well, the way it happened, I was driving down from Eureka to Mendocino. And I had to take a leak—excuse me, ma’am, relieve myself. So I pulled over here and went into those bushes. I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed the car, but one of my headlights is cocked from an accident I had last week, and it picked up the metal of the front bumper. So I climbed down there, and—” His voice broke and he swallowed before continuing. “Car’s upside down, roof’s flattened, and she’s in there. I checked for a pulse, but there wasn’t one, and she’s real cold.”

  “What did you do then?” Rho asked.

  “Ran up here and started flagging down cars.” He motioned to a Volkswagen Jetta. “That guy stopped first, and then the fellow in the Mustang came along. He drove to a house, used the phone to report it.” He paused, running his fingers through his hair again. “Jesus, she was a mess, all twisted and cut up from the broken windshield. Door was sprung open, she could’ve got out, but maybe she was gone before that happened.”

  Rho glanced at Wayne, who nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Hutton,” she said and followed her colleague to the rear of his cruiser. “So what is it with his story that bothers you?”

  “Nothing now. I believe him. But there’s a second set of footprints leading down to the wreck, and mud on the inside of the sprung door. And Samantha was robbed.”

  “Robbed.”

  “Yeah. Wallet’s empty of cash and credit cards. It and her purse were dumped next to the car. Diamond ring’s missing, as well as a Rolex watch that she never took off, even in—”

  Rho regarded him steadily as she waited out his sudden silence.

  He sh
rugged and looked away from her.

  “You never cease to amaze me, Gilardi,” she finally said.

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t like I was a member of an exclusive club.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Come on, Rho, you don’t need details.”

  “We’ve got a dead woman down there—”

  “An accident victim. Doesn’t give you the right to pry into private affairs—hers or mine.”

  He was correct, of course. Samantha Lindsay had been doing exactly what she’d told her husband she would: driving straight home after shopping in Westhaven. For one reason or another she’d skidded off the road and died, and out of respect for the dead, private matters should remain private.

  “So what d’you make of the robbery?” she asked.

  Wayne shrugged. “Somebody saw the car go off the road and decided to take advantage of a bad situation.”

  “Plenty of bad situations tonight. You catch the squawk on Virge Scurlock?”

  “Uh-huh. What’s that all about?”

  She explained about her conversations with Will and Clay Lawrence.

  “You know, kiddo,” he said, “something’s bothering me. For years we had a pretty peaceable community here. Drinking, drugs, petty theft, domestic problems, yes. But that kind of stuff happens all the time in an area like this. So now in the space of three days we got a rape-and-murder, civil unrest, a disappearance, and a sort of ghoulish robbery. All that since one event: the arrival of this Guy Newberry. Is it possible he’s doing these things to stir up trouble, get publicity for this book he’s writing?”

  “I sincerely doubt it. Even mystery writers only kill on paper.”

  “Yeah, I’m clutching at straws, looking for somebody to blame things on. And since I don’t like the man…”

  “Look, Wayne, if it would make you feel better, I’ll talk with him, try to find out what his plans are. In the meantime—”

  “I know. I caught the call, I get the job of telling Alan Lindsay his wife is dead.” Wayne’s mouth was set in a grim line. Notifying the families of victims was a thousand times worse than dealing with the scene of a tragedy.

  Guy took a sip of Jolt Cola—more potent than coffee and twice as tasty—and picked up the photograph of the last victim, Bernhard Ulrick. Pale, thin face, cleft chin, tight wiry blond curls. Gold-rimmed glasses made him look studious. It was his high school graduation picture, the only one Aaron had been able to dig up. At age thirty-two he’d died of multiple bullet wounds, his face a bloody hole, his body shattered. The vicious nature of the slaying and the fact he was killed in a prefab building tucked deep into the canyon, surrounded by chemicals and paraphernalia for manufacturing methamphetamine, had naturally led the authorities to label him as the primary target.

  Ulrick was one of Mitch Blakeley’s friends from his days of drug dealing in Santa Cruz. Born into a large and insular German community in Chicago, he drifted west after high school, eventually ending up in the seaside college town. At the time of his murder, his family were all dead, but others in the midwestern working-class neighborhood remembered him as a youth of large dreams, all of them involving amassing great sums of money. The method of doing so mattered little to Ulrick; wealth seemed an end in itself. He was well versed in many scams—fencing stolen goods, running cons on the naive and elderly, selling drugs and firearms—but he was never once arrested. He had a sixth sense for when the law was about to close in, and would shut down his operations and run.

  Ulrick was long gone from the central coast when the Blakeleys and Wynnes left Santa Cruz. Material on his next few years was sketchy, but he’d surfaced in such diverse places as Anchorage, New Orleans, Atlantic City, and Honolulu—always scamming and using whatever connections he possessed. When he turned up at Cascada Canyon some eleven months before the murders, his appearance probably didn’t surprise the residents. Ulrick was known as a man who had a way of finding people.

  And also, Guy thought, of finding their weaknesses.

  So what do I have here? he wondered, rubbing his eyes and taking another shot of cola. A toxic situation, for sure. Two naive families living an isolated existence. A predator with a plan for them.

  Several substantial withdrawals from Susan Wynne’s trust fund contradicted the assumption that the families hadn’t known about Ulrick’s meth lab. Guy suspected that the money had gone for setting up the lab, and that the Wynnes and Blakeleys were living on the proceeds of drug sales. After the initial outlay for land and building supplies, the families had invested very little money in the canyon, and their living expenses could not possibly have been high enough to justify the withdrawals.

  He scanned the summary of the sheriff’s department investigation, noting that deputies had acted upon rumors that another couple was involved with the canyon residents—streetwise people who were said to have the nerve and connections to distribute the meth. A cabin on the ridge was raided the day after the murders, but by then the occupants—who had been squatting there—had fled, leaving behind most of their household possessions but nothing to identify them.

  To Guy the rumors seemed too vague to have justified the issuance of a search warrant. A man and woman with a young daughter were occasionally seen driving through the gates to the canyon in their shabby orange VW bus. People in town who claimed to have had dealings with them described them as poorly dressed and standoffish, paying for all their supplies in cash. But, Guy knew, rumors have a way of becoming everyone’s fact after a tragedy. The strongest connection that he could see between the squatters on the ridge and the canyon people was a deer track that led down from the cabin past a pond where the families had posted a sign that read “Ye Olde Swimming Hole.” The authorities had been unable to tell whether the track was also used by humans.

  Rumors, Guy thought, rubbing his eyes again.

  What had Gregory Cordova said to him that morning? I know as much as anybody does. More, maybe. The old man struck him as a deliberate sort. If he’d been talking about mere rumors, he’d’ve said “I’ve heard.”

  Tomorrow he’d find out what Cordova meant by “more.”

  Chrystal: Before

  Friday, October 6

  12:02 P.M.

  There’s Bernhard’s lab. Door’s open and the whole thing’s leaning funny. Jesus, these rocks’re wet and slippery. Why’s there so much water…?

  Oh yeah, stream’s changed course, flooded out this end of the canyon. I don’t want to wade through it. What did I expect to see, anyway? Bloodstains, bullet holes, chalk marks like on TV shows? Nah, I hate that shit. I guess I was just curious because I never came here before.

  Never?

  Of course not. Bernhard wouldn’t let nobody—

  Oh God! Once…

  I remember it all so clear now. Me and Heath daring each other to sneak up the canyon. Then going together ’cause neither of us had the guts to go alone. Was September, hot. I could smell dry grass and pine needles. The air was dusty. We were sweaty.

  The lab’s door was open, like now. There was a bunch of stuff on a table, I don’t know what, but I suppose it looked like the kind of stuff an inventor would have. Me and Heath, we squatted down behind the bushes. We could hear Bernhard talking inside, and that was funny because he must’ve been talking to himself. We couldn’t tell what he was saying, and after a few minutes Heath gave me a come-on sign and we snuck around to the side where there was a little window. The grass rustled and I started to sneeze. Pinched my nose hard. After a few seconds the sneeze went away.

  Bernhard’s voice, real clear now: “You know where it is, honey. Tell me.”

  Somebody said something, real low.

  “Oh, sure you do. Tell Uncle Bernhard.”

  Uncle? Heath looked at me and I looked at him. None of us kids were allowed here, so who was Bernhard talking to?

  “Please, honey. If you can’t tell me, show me.”

  Bernhard’s voice was funny. I’d heard Leo talk to Jude like that late at
night when they thought I was asleep in my curtained-off corner of the cabin. I didn’t know what it meant exactly, but now I didn’t like it. I tugged on Heath’s arm, wanting to run away from there. He snuck closer to the window.

  I went after him, tugged again. He was going to look inside and I knew if he did, things would change in some awful way.

  Heath slapped at my hand and went up on his tiptoes. Looked through the window.

  Bernhard said, “Please, honey. Show me. Uncle Bernhard’ll be real good to you if you do.”

  Heath dropped down on all fours. His face was scrunched and red, and he looked so silly that for a second I almost forgot I was scared and started laughing. But then he grabbed my hand and we ran, not even caring if we made noise, all the way down to Bernhard’s shack and past the kid boxes and through the woods to the well house.

  We flopped on the ground, leaning against the holding tank and panting. I asked, “What did you see?”

  “Uncle Bernhard and Oriana.”

  “What were they doing?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Heath!”

  “Look, Chryssie, we can’t ever tell anybody what we did today.”

  “Uncle Bernhard and Oriana know. We made a lot of noise getting outta there.”

  “They won’t tell.”

  “Why not? He’s gonna be mad at us—”

  “Chryssie, shut up and listen to me!”

  Heath was older—nine. I did what he said.

  “They won’t tell, and nobody’ll know if we don’t. But from now on you’ve gotta stay away from Uncle Bernhard. You understand?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, you’re too young to understand. Please just do what I tell you.”

  “Why?”