Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  “Mr. Newberry?” she said. “We may as well talk about the bad things now. I loved and trusted Bernhard Ulrick. All we kids did. And he paid back that trust by molesting me on at least three occasions. On one occasion, two weeks before the murders, he beat me and said that if I told my parents he’d kill me.”

  “Did you tell?”

  “No. Heath did. He and Chryssie eavesdropped outside Bernhard’s laboratory that day. He was acting seductive, trying to get me to tell him where the money was—a large amount of cash my mother had hidden somewhere on the property. Heath and Chryssie ran away, making noise. That angered Bernhard, and when I insisted I didn’t know the hiding place, he beat me. He left marks, and I lied to my parents, told them I’d fallen.”

  “When did Heath tell them the truth?”

  “A week later. He asked me if Bernhard had ever done anything bad to me, and I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. He went straight to our parents, and my father got in a fistfight with Bernhard and made him leave the canyon that same day.”

  Bernhard had left a week before the murders? How could that be?

  Guy said, “He came back, though.”

  “Never.”

  “But he was killed along with the others.”

  “No he wasn’t. I saw him afterwards.”

  “Where?”

  “At the airport when I was boarding the plane to go home with Nana. I looked back and saw him standing in the crowd. He was wearing a hat and had grown a mustache, but he still had a bandage over the cut on his forehead from when he fought with my father. And his eyes: They were terrible. They looked at me like they did when he said not to tell or he’d kill me. I knew he was there to remind me of that. And I never did tell anyone about seeing him or what he’d done to me. Not until I told my therapist, and now you.”

  Rho pushed away from her desk, eyes burning. She’d gone over the old casefiles carefully, but nothing in them shed any light on Wayne’s last request that she think about what the missing blood samples might have told them. More wishful thinking on his part than anything else, she supposed.

  She put her feet up, closed her eyes. The image that appeared on her lids was of blood, bone, brain matter. Quickly she opened them and stared instead at the blackish window. Listened to the rain whacking down on the substation’s flat roof. Two prisoners in the holding cell were yelling at each other; she wanted to go back and tell them to shut up, but couldn’t summon the energy. Wayne would—

  Wayne. Fresh pain stabbed at her. His oldest daughter, Cindy, had come home from her maid’s job at a Westhaven motel just as the body was being removed, and gone into hysterics. Janie, when she arrived, was tearful but resigned. She’d probably realized she’d lost her husband long ago. God knew what was on the tape he’d made for her.…

  Rho stood, closed the heavy casefile. Wayne was wrong; the answer wasn’t in those missing samples, or anywhere else in the yellowing reports. Better to concentrate on the current case, although she had only this evening to do so. Tomorrow the FBI would arrive in town and take over. Tomorrow she’d feel as much of a failure as she had thirteen years ago.

  Guy went over his notes on the conversation with Oriana for a second time, then picked up the photograph taken of her at the airport and studied the child’s expression. What he’d earlier assumed to be anguish was actually fear. He’d missed its import, not being able to easily read children.

  Of course, Oriana’s insistence that she’d been looking at Bernhard Ulrick didn’t prove a thing. To a severely traumatized six-year-old, many adults could resemble the one she feared. And as for repressed childhood memory, Guy had followed several cases where the phenomenon had been debunked. False memories could be created out of therapists’ suggestions and adults’ desire to believe.

  Still…

  He picked up the receiver and dialed Aaron Silber in New York.

  The noise from the prisoners in the holding cell was grating on Rho’s nerves. Again she thought about telling them to shut up, again she couldn’t make the effort. After enduring it a few minutes more she decided to take her official vehicle home, go over the list of potential witnesses, select those who looked most promising, and later set out to talk with them.

  When she arrived at her house on the ridge, she fed Cody, made herself coffee, and curled up on the sofa with the list and reports on the interviews. Even the portion assigned to her was daunting. As she scanned it, one name after another provoked memories: Nella Samson was her fourth-grade teacher; she’d had her first beer when Doug Scallini stole a six-pack from his parents’ fridge; Harry Vincenzo had taken her to her first dance; she and Alice Worth had tried smoking behind Alice’s father’s barn and nearly set it on fire; old Mrs. York—my God, she was still alive!

  Friends, neighbors. Many she hadn’t stayed close to, but she knew their histories, what kind of people they were. And by and large the interviews with them revealed little. They’d seen Chrystal Ackerman and were sorry they hadn’t stopped to help.

  So what was happening here? A random killer roaming the coastline? If so, had he struck elsewhere?

  She went to her computer, accessed the records for other coastal counties. No recent unsolved murders in Humboldt. None in west Mendocino, Sonoma, or Marin. San Francisco showed a shooting outside a bar near Ocean Beach that in no way fit the pattern. San Mateo and Santa Cruz were relatively crime free.

  Someone on the Soledad Coast, then. A stranger lying low in one of the area’s many motels? Not likely. Given the current atmosphere, any suspicious stranger would have been reported.

  “One of us,” she said.

  A familiar vehicle that passersby wouldn’t have given a second thought to. A stop to pick up the girl at Point Deception after dark. The driver would have had a place to take her, an isolated place. He knew Cascada Canyon, Quinley’s too. He could move freely, without attracting attention.

  Chances were they hadn’t interviewed him. But if he were clever he’d have come forward claiming to have seen his victim. She began scanning the list, looking for someone who fit the criteria, and halfway down a name stood out. She flipped through the file to Grossman’s report of his interview with the man, read it. Innocuous as all the others, and yet…

  She went to her computer, accessed her own report of an interview with him. Maybe. But maybe she only wanted to believe.

  Allowing herself only a small degree of excitement, she began accessing other jurisdictions’ records, searching as far back as two years. The name appeared on unsolved casefiles in Bellingham, Washington, and Lincoln County, Oregon. As she made inquiries of colleagues in both places her excitement grew until, upon finishing her final call, she pushed back from the desk, leaped to her feet, and shouted, “Yes!” A startled Cody jumped up and began barking.

  All she had to do now was wait on a felony warrant from the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. While detectives flew down from Oregon to question her man in conjunction with a thirteen-month-old murder, she’d extract from him a confession in the deaths of both Chrystal Ackerman and Virge Scurlock.

  Guy stepped into the parlor of the inn and interrupted a tender scene between Kevin Jacoby and a short man whose left arm was in a cast. Rhoda had told him about the altercation between Jacoby and his partner, Brandon Fuller, but now it seemed they’d patched up their relationship.

  Jacoby turned, flushed, but with a smile on his usually melancholy face. Guy said, “I’d like to ask a favor. May I use your fax machine?”

  “Of course. It’s on a side table in the office.”

  He nodded his thanks, went out and around the reception desk, closing the office door for privacy. After locating the machine, he dialed Aaron Silber’s number. His assistant answered with the words, “Got it.” Guy read the fax number to him, hung up, and waited, surprised to find his palms were damp. The line rang and paper began to curl from the machine. He restrained himself from looking at it till the machine gave its final beep.

  At first he was disa
ppointed. This photograph was of no one he knew. Then he told himself to take it slowly and look at individual features.

  When he’d done that and assembled the face whole again, his fingers convulsed on the edge of the desk. That face was the answer to what had happened in Cascada Canyon thirteen years ago tonight.

  Rho listened to the rain smacking down on her roof. From somewhere came a persistent dripping sound. One of the gutters she’d neglected to clean this year was overflowing.

  The solutions to Chrystal Ackerman’s and Virge Scurlock’s murders were mostly there now. She needed to calm down, order her thoughts, work out a progression while she waited on the warrant. The detective she’d spoken with in Lincoln County had said he’d call her before it was faxed to the substation.

  It would have been good to have someone to bounce her ideas off, but Grossman and Shepherd had been called into Santa Carla to confer with FBI agents, and when she’d earlier called the Investigations Bureau and asked to speak with one of them, she’d been told both were unavailable. Guy had not answered his phone at the inn.

  “Okay,” she told Cody, “I’ll just have to do this by myself.” He came over to her, nails clicking on the hardwood, and nosed her hand. She patted him absently.

  A broken-down truck. Another borrowed for an aborted trip to Santa Carla. Aborted, because at Point Deception—

  The doorball rang. Cody snapped to attention. Rho went to the window and looked out, saw Guy standing on the porch, his hair wet and plastered to his scalp. She opened the door, said, “Guy, I’m glad to see you, but what brings you out on a night like this?”

  “I have something to show you.” He stepped into the house, dripping, and removed a curl of paper from inside his jacket and held it out to her.

  It was a fax of a photograph. She stared at it in surprise. Even without the beard, skewed nose, and scar, she would have recognized the man by his deepset eyes. “Clay Lawrence. What’re you doing with this?”

  “That’s not really Clay Lawrence.”

  “I know. I’ve been talking with the authorities in Washington State and Oregon. I’m reasonably certain this man is our killer. How did you get this picture?”

  Guy moved past her, toward the fireplace. “In a minute. First tell me what the people up north told you.”

  “Okay. The real Clay Lawrence left Bellingham thirteen months ago on a two-week driving trip and was never heard from again. He was last seen in Depoe Bay, Oregon, in the company of a hitchhiker who looked enough like him to be his brother. His broken-down car turned up shortly afterwards in Brookings, and his remains were found in a shallow grave near Cape Perpetua, Lincoln County, just last week. They only got an ID on him three days ago. His neck had been broken.” She waved the facsimile photo at Guy. “So what’s his real identity?”

  To her annoyance, Guy ignored the question. “Have you worked out a progression of events?”

  “I was in the process of it when you arrived.”

  “So tell me.”

  He was opting for the methodical approach, and she’d do well to follow his lead. “Our man killed Lawrence, buried him, and stole his car. After it broke down, he hitched. When he was dropped off in Signal Port, he met Becca Campos and decided to stay on a while—he told me that himself. Will once said ‘Clay’ led a frugal, quiet life, mainly reading, meditating, and hiking on the ridge. The first Friday of every month he’d drive into Santa Carla to pick up supplies at Costco. But last Friday his truck was broken down—I saw it on Sunday, and it looked as if it hadn’t run for quite some time. I think he asked Virge if he could borrow Will’s truck for the trip.” Now Rho felt a little breathless.

  Guy sat down on the hearth, waiting for her to go on, and after a moment she did.

  “Will thought the truck was in his garage all weekend. If he’d’ve known Virge loaned it to Clay, he’d’ve been furious. But Virge had a soft spot for their tenant, so she covered. On his way to Santa Carla, though, Clay spotted Ackerman at the turnout, picked her up, took her back to his cabin for sex. Something went wrong, and he killed her there, probably on Saturday, given her autopsy results. He couldn’t keep the body at the cabin, because Virge had a habit of dropping in on him, so he stashed it where nobody ever goes—the canyon. Then, late at night when traffic was sparse, he retrieved it, drove it in Will’s truck to Quinley’s, where he put her into the sea. He never counted on having to kill Virge too.”

  Guy nodded. “I’ve always suspected that wasn’t an accident. Why do you think he had to kill her?”

  Rho began to pace, very excited now that she was able to put her theory into words. “Virge made a remark to one of the other patrons of the hotel bar on Sunday: ‘Don’t ever try to do someone a favor. You might end up owing more than you can handle.’ Doesn’t make a lot of sense until you consider that she was drinking, slurring her words. I think she meant to say ‘knowing.’”

  “Knowing who killed Ackerman?”

  “Right. On Friday she did Clay a favor by loaning him the truck. She probably told him to have it back by a certain time on Saturday, in case Will wanted to use it for a business appointment he had scheduled on Sunday. If Clay was late bringing it back, she’d have gone to his cabin to check on him. And she might’ve seen Ackerman.”

  “So why didn’t she report it when she found out the girl had been murdered?”

  “Probably because she didn’t want to believe Clay was responsible. That was Virge: She always thought the best of people she liked, wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. She was making a decision in the bar, to confront Clay and give him a chance to explain. And sometime on Sunday afternoon or evening she slipped out of the house and went to his cabin.”

  Guy nodded. “It works for me so far. Did he kill Virge at the cabin? Persuade her he had nothing to do with the girl’s death and then agree to accompany her to the canyon, as she’d asked him to before?”

  “I’d say he killed her at the cabin, then took her body there, as he had Ackerman’s. Only this time he decided to stage an accident. Remember, there was only one set of footprints leading to the ledge, large ones made by Virge’s shoes. Virge had big feet; Clay could’ve put on her shoes, carried her there, and thrown her over.”

  “The prints were deep, consistent with someone carrying a heavy load.”

  “Right. Afterwards, Clay probably took a roundabout way down to the body, replaced the shoes, and made his way home across the stream on bare feet.”

  “Okay,” Guy said, “that works for me too. Most of it does, except for a couple of details. Clay didn’t settle here because he met Becca Campos. He didn’t spend all his time reading, meditating, and hiking. And he didn’t pick up Ackerman on a whim.”

  “Oh?” She realized she was about to hear something important, and sat down on the hearth beside him.

  He said, “Clay came here deliberately, although probably coincidentally, at the time the guards were taken off the canyon. He spent a good deal of his time in a methodical search for Susan Wynne’s hidden money. And he went after Ackerman because he saw her find it.”

  “But that would mean he knew—”

  “Yes. The man in that photograph”—he motioned at the fax she still clutched—“is no stranger to Cascada Canyon. It was taken about a year before he first came there.”

  “For God’s sake, Guy, who is he?”

  “Bernhard Ulrick.”

  Guy watched as Rhoda’s lips parted in astonishment. “But… Ulrick died with the others.”

  “No, he didn’t.” He explained about his conversation with Oriana Harrison. “After I talked with her, I considered the physical evidence: The body in the drug lab was so badly shot up that it was unidentifiable, and the blood samples had disappeared. Did your department try to make an identification from fingerprints or dental records?”

  “Yes. But Ulrick’s prints weren’t on file anyplace. And his teeth, well, there weren’t enough of them intact. We had to assume the body was his. If you’re right…
who do you think died in the lab?”

  “It’s always been taken for granted that there was more than one killer, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Suppose Ulrick lured his accomplice up the canyon on some pretext after the others were dead, and blew him away.”

  Rhoda nodded slowly. “One of his drug dealing associates, then. We’ll probably never know his identity, unless Ulrick talks.”

  “I think I know who the accomplice was.”

  She blinked. “How could you?”

  “Think about the things we felt in the canyon, Rhoda. We were so busy tapping into the victims’ feelings that we ignored the killers’ state of mind. But there is another strong emotion you feel there: anger. Ulrick was angry because the families had thrown him out when they learned he’d molested Oriana. Thrown him out before he could find the money. And the week before that, someone else left the canyon suddenly: Devon Wynne’s boyfriend. What if they threw him out too?”

  “Why?”

  “The biographical sketch of Devon that I have says she was addicted to abusive relationships. If this boyfriend beat her up while they were living with Forrest and Susan…”

  “Yes, of course. If they threw him out, he would have been angry enough to join forces with Ulrick. Of course, Susan’s money was the real inducement. They planned to coerce her into telling where it was hidden.”

  “Only Susan wouldn’t tell them. She knew she was going to die anyway, and she was buying time for her children. Ulrick probably never expected to wait all these years before he could look for it. But I wonder why he didn’t find it, in a methodical year-long search.”

  Guy shrugged. “He didn’t know or had forgotten about the oil sump. Ackerman knew where the money was from her mother, but before she dug it up, it was buried under thirteen years’ worth of pine needles.”

  Rhoda’s small face grew still and thoughtful. After a moment she glanced at her watch. “God, I wish Lincoln County would call about that warrant. I want Ulrick in custody tonight.”