Brontë trotted beside me, almost invisible in the gloom. Twice I tripped over unseen rubble, the second time falling painfully on my left knee. I didn’t want to switch on the flashlight, making myself a well-lit spectacle for anybody who happened to be watching. And I didn’t want to go back. Not yet. Then through the grit blowing in my eyes I saw something familiar in the middle of the trail ahead. Something that did not belong in Alcoholic Pass.
Nothing is perfectly round in the desert, and nothing is white. In other areas of the Anza-Borrego there are cannonball-shaped concretions of mineral in the rock, but they only look round from a distance. Up close their surfaces are lumpy and uneven. And while the desert palette contains infinite gradations of beige ranging to the palest creamy ecru, nothing is bleached to real white. Yet there was something perfectly round and white on the trail ten feet ahead, reflecting the minimal light like a beacon.
Brontë loped closer to the object, sniffing the air and then the ground as if she were a bloodhound. Then she stopped. I could hear her low growl as I caught up with her. The thing on the narrow, desolate trail was a blue willow plate.
Quickly I pulled Brontë into the dense shadows beneath a tilted slab of granite that probably had broken away from Coyote Mountain long before any human eye had evolved to see it. The Smith and Wesson tucked in the waist of my pants gouged my side reassuringly, and I curled my hand over its grip but didn’t pull it up to firing position.
There was nobody in Alcoholic Pass but me and Brontë, and I knew it. No sense of another presence, no sense of danger. Brontë, tense and alert beside me, seemed to know it, too. Her growl had been in response to a visual anomaly. Round white thing where there have never been round white things before. Dog version of my own reaction.
“Brontë, stay,” I commanded. Then I walked to the plate and picked it up.
It was one of the old restaurant blue willows, divided into three sections by raised ridges. In a diner the three sections would have held a main course and two vegetables. Meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and corn, maybe. Now it held nothing but wind.
“Come on, girl,” I called, tucking the plate under my left arm and switching on the flashlight. “Let’s go home.”
Against my ribs the plate was a not-uncomfortable burden, like any awkward thing we nonetheless carry around. Like the clutter of awkward things we eventually carry home. Cuckoo clocks, pressed flowers in frames, sorrows.
The prowler had been Sword, I realized, but the purpose of the visit had not been to harm me. Despite my precautions I’d been an easy mark for anyone waiting in Alcoholic Pass. The purpose of the visit had been a child’s game of hide and seek within the corridors of this ruined cathedral few visit and fewer love. Nothing more. A strange night game in a place where nobody goes.
I thought about that as Brontë and I made good time getting home. Sword had come out there twice, each time leaving a gift. Blue willow plates. The first a cheap contemporary product, the second more valuable. Was I being rewarded for something? I wondered. Or was I being given clues I was expected to understand? That sense of childlike desperation followed me like a ghost in the wind.
Play with me, it demanded. I know a neat game. Come on, play.
The lights from my place cast a hazy yellow bubble that didn’t move in the wind. In minutes we were inside and it felt good to be safe, have some coffee, take a bath. But I couldn’t shake a sense of inexplicable sadness that seemed to lash about outside in the wind. It felt like the sadness of a child who cannot understand what’s happened, why no one wants to play. And I wondered if there would be a third plate, and what that would mean. In the chants of childhood games, three is a final number. Everything ends after three tries. The third time, I remembered, is the charm.
17
Saints Fallen and Intact
It was nearly eight when the phone rang. It would be Roxie, I thought, feeling a little guilty for not having called her earlier. She’d want to hear my take on the interviews, having no doubt already received a report from BB.
“Hi, hon,” I answered.
Wes Rathbone didn’t even chuckle at the gaffe. “Get a cell phone tomorrow, Blue,” he ordered. “Rox and I have been trying to reach you since you left Christopher Nugent. Why haven’t you picked up the messages on your machine? Bettina Ashe died this afternoon. Her husband authorized an autopsy, which was performed immediately. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”
“Oh, my God,” I breathed into the phone. “Wes, did somebody send a deli tray? Did somebody send fancy food to her house today? She should have been warned about that, but—”
“Nobody sent anything to the Ashe mansion, and the staff would have thrown it out in any event. Her husband, John Harrington, had been warned about the possible connection to unusual foods. He’d also hired a squad of security guards to patrol the place and never let Betsy out of his sight. He was with her when it happened. Her head was still wrapped in bandages from the surgery yesterday, but they’d uncovered her eyes so she could watch a video. He said they were watching Dr. Zhivagowhen she complained of a terrible headache, became dizzy, then collapsed on the floor of their bedroom. Death was apparently instantaneous.
“I don’t have to tell you he’s beside himself, threatening to sue everybody including us, and I don’t blame him. I’ve already talked to Berryman about your interviews today, but I want a written report from you tomorrow morning. Right now I just want to know what you think. Which one of them is doing this, Blue? If you’ve got a good idea I’ll have whoever it is brought in and interrogated. Keep him in a tank all night with some undercovers who’ll scare the shit out of him. We can break him, Blue. But who the hell is it?”
The words pushed me against a wall. The words and the panic behind them.
“I don’t know, Wes,” I said. “I need to look at some data on behaviors connected to grief, also rape victims and divorce, before I can sort any of it out. Isadora Grecchi’s a time bomb, but it’s men she can’t stand. I’m almost certain she’s been the victim of some kind of sexual assault. But that shouldn’t pre-dispose her to kill women. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“Berryman pegged Grecchi, too,” Rathbone said. “We’ve got a subpoena to get her juvenile records from Colorado, but it’ll take weeks. All we know is that she was made a ward of the court in 1958. Everything else is sealed. It’s not enough to bring her in, but I’ve got a surveillance team watching her house.”
Brontë was lying on the floor beside me, licking the scratches on her chest.
“Wes, Sword was out here again tonight and left another blue willow plate. Has Grecchi been home tonight? Say, for the last five hours?”
“Not for the last hour and forty-five minutes,” he answered dismally. “Surveillance was set up by six-fifteen, and the house has been dark since then. She’s not there. But it’s still not enough to pick her up. Blue, did you see her out there? Did you see anything?”
“Just footprints, then the plate on the ground. The footprints are about the same size as mine.”
“Which is?”
“Nine and a half. I’ve got huge feet.”
“Great. So how big are Grecchi’s feet?”
I felt inadequate, sloppy, a bad detective. “I didn’t look at her feet,” I admitted, then remembered she’d been barefooted when BB and I arrived. “Well, actually, I guess I did. She didn’t have any shoes on, and she was painting. The place smelled like oil paint.”
“Her feet, Blue,” he insisted. “Did she have big feet? Could those have been her prints you saw?”
“Wes, I didn’t notice,” I apologized. “I didn’t know I was supposed to look at feet. I just can’t answer. Feet all look the same to me.”
His sigh was irritable and tired. “What about Megan Rainer? Berryman wasn’t with you for that one, so I haven’t heard anything. What was your take?”
“She wasn’t home,” I answered. “Their daughter had been stepped on by a horse and Megan took her down into San Diego to hav
e her foot X-rayed. I talked to the husband, Chris—”
“Did you confirm that?” he interrupted. “Where did she take the daughter? What hospital? What time? All you have is the husband’s word on it. Maybe the daughter was at a friend’s and there was no horse. Maybe Megan was someplace else, like out at your place strewing plates around. Maybe Nugent’s lying to protect his wife.”
I remembered Christopher Nugent, stuck for years in a trap usually reserved for women. He wanted out, wanted to move to Northern California and grow things. If Megan was the perp in this string of murders, then he was doomed to domestic slavery forever. Megan would go to prison for the rest of her life and he’d have to raise two children alone. Good-bye, dream. It dawned on me that Chris Nugent had some very good reasons for lying.
“I hadn’t thought of it, but you may be right,” I told Rathbone. “He wants to get out of here; they both do. Move up north and do something with sustainable agriculture. Trees and herbs. They’d planned on leaving in two years, anyway. Megan would work at the clinic until they had enough of a nest egg that they could live frugally off their investments. That was the plan, except they were both tired of waiting. But Wes … ?”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t believe Chris Nugent would look the other way if he knew his wife was killing people. He’s an intelligent, thoughtful man. Who could pretend not to see something that serious?”
Wes Rathbone sighed. “You’d be surprised at how easily people don’t see what they don’t want to see. Nugent may not ‘know’ Megan’s the perp, but maybe he senses something’s terribly wrong with her. He thinks she’s just nervous, unhappy. He thinks whatever’s wrong will go away when they get out of here, when they get to their dream. That’s all he can let himself think. It’s not unusual; people are like that. Cops call it ‘blind in both ears.’”
“He was pretty defensive about her concealed weapon arrest,” I agreed. “He showed me her paint ball gun and a big plastic jar of paint balls. He said they have a friend who’s a nun and she likes to play paint ball because it relieves her anger over a school massacre she was involved in. Guatemala. It made a sort of sense.”
“Megan Rainer hasn’t been in Guatemala,” Rathbone said. “And her husband knows there’s something not quite right about her passion for shooting at people, or he wouldn’t have been defensive. What about these damn plates? See any of ’em anywhere?”
“No,” I answered. “But Jeffrey Pond used a lot of religious language and he’s just been through a nasty divorce. Hates his ex-wife, who set up a friend to accuse him of rape. I’d say he’s got some motivation to hate women.”
“Yeah, we checked that thing out. It was a setup. Goes on all the time in divorce cases. The guy got royally screwed.”
“So has he been home for the last five hours?” I asked, trying to imagine muscle-bound Jeffrey Pond lumbering around the desert in order to leave a blue willow plate on the ground.
“None of them are home, haven’t been since we got word of Bettina Ashe’s death. Or else nobody’s answering the phone. The only house we’ve got surveillance on is Grecchi’s. So what’s your take on Eldridge?”
“Strange as the rest of them,” I told him. “Stuffy. The wife seems odd, too. Something out of Stepford Wives. She lets him interrupt everything she says, and at one point it seemed like he didn’t remember their daughter’s name. He called her Ann and then later Kara called the girl Namey.”
“Namey?”
“Yeah. Wes, I haven’t had time to organize anything from today. I need to look at some stats before I can give you anything usable. If you can just wait—”
“Betsy Ashe is dead, Blue,” he said. “One of the most prominent women in San Diego, as well as one of the wealthiest, and a good friend of this police department. We knew she was in danger and we let her die. The next one could be your friend Kate Van Der Elst. She’s the last of the Rainer patients known to have received a threat. We can’t wait.”
His voice sounded like a mooring cable groaning against an enormous burden. Wes Rathbone hadn’t wanted to be a cop’s cop anymore, just wanted to enjoy life with his Annie. Circumstances had pulled him back to that earlier persona. I could tell he didn’t like it, but I knew he didn’t have any choice.
“I’m going to help you with this thing,” I told him. “Just give me time to talk to Rox, look at some data, pull it together. What we need to know is right in front of us. We just can’t see it.”
“Yeah, right,” he answered. “Now, what about the old guy? Do you think he could have done it, done something that’s killing these women?”
I continued to feel pushed, unprepared. I didn’t know what I was talking about and yet I knew at least as much as anybody else. It felt silly until I realized the silliness was just a skin over my fear. Three women dead now, no end in sight, and the killer luring me to play a child’s game amid prehistoric rubble. The killer leaving me gifts in the dark.
“Rainer had the same opportunity as everybody else, Wes,” I said. “And he’s depressed over his wife’s death and Megan not wanting to run the clinic, and now having to close it. But of all of them I think he’s the least likely. He’s just an old-fashioned guy, a traditionalist. His life’s in shambles and he doesn’t know which way to turn right now. He’s afraid to get rid of his wife’s computer, you know? He’s lost.”
“Probably our man,” Rathbone said bleakly. “In the movies it’s always the one you least suspect.”
“This isn’t a movie,” I said unnecessarily. “Tell Annie hi for me. I want to call Rox now, go over the interviews. If we come up with anything I’ll call you back.”
“Do that,” Rathbone said tersely, and then hung up.
I phoned Rox, who didn’t answer. Probably in the bathroom, I thought, and left a message asking her to call right away. Then I listened to the messages on my answering machine.
The first was from my brother, David, nothing but a taped female voice saying, “This is a collect call from a prisoner at … the Missouri State Penitentiary. The prisoner placing the call is …” Here I heard my brother’s voice saying, “the Apeman of Alcatraz,” a joke about my doctoral dissertation, which had been a failed endeavor to explain David’s self-destructive behavior by comparing human males to other male primates. I learned a lot about apes and still don’t know why my twin brother chose to behave like one.
Prison phone systems are automated so that if you’re willing to accept the call you have to push a number. Even if you don’t, you’re billed for the call. One of the thousand ways everybody makes money off people who have no choices. I hoped David would call back. He might, I thought, have some insights into Sword. After all, he lived with killers.
The next message was from Kate Van Der Elst, who seemed to be crying.
“I need to talk to you as soon as possible, Blue,” she said. “I just heard about Betsy Ashe’s death. It was on the six o’clock news. They didn’t say anything about the link to the Rainer Clinic, but I’m sure that’s where Betsy would go for that kind of thing, and I’m sure that’s what happened. Just like Mary Harriet and Dixie. Somebody at Rainer did something to all of them that killed them. And I may be next.”
Here she breathed a shuddering sigh and then went on.
“When Pieter heard about Betsy Ashe, he gave me an ultimatum. Either I withdrew from the race or he’d leave me. I refused to withdraw. He’s gone. Moved into a hotel downtown. He said he was flying back to Amsterdam tomorrow if he could make the arrangements. He said he didn’t want to stay just to watch me commit suicide. Please call no matter what time you get in. I don’t know what to do. I’m scared.”
So Pieter Van Der Elst wasn’t the saint I’d imagined him to be, I thought. Nobody ever is. But what could he be thinking, leaving Kate alone now? That she’d knuckle under to his demands, crumble under the terrible weight of his love for her? Did he think he could preserve her life by breaking her spirit? Why couldn’t he see that what would remain of Kate afte
r he broke her would be worthy only of his contempt? Yet I’d seen it before. Couples, parents with grown children still under their control. One broken by the exertion of the other’s will, the other now bored and bitter and trapped. Pieter Van Der Elst, I realized, had just made an epic mistake that could cost him what he valued most.
The rest of the messages were from Rox and Rathbone, frantic to reach me. As I erased them the phone rang.
“I’m at a pay phone in Borrego,” Roxie’s voice told me without preamble. “Unlock your gate.”
Rox does not come out here unless she has to, and she’s never come alone. Even the little desert town near my place feels like Mars to her with its easy-going middle-class assumption that we all know the rules. And in reality, we all do. From the tanned and lusty golf pro at Borrego’s big resort to me, the reclusive social psychologist who lives in a half-built desert motel with her dog, everybody here knows exactly what to say when bumping into the Methodist minister at the grocery store. And exactly what not to say when bumping into the minister’s wife with the golf pro in her car behind the same grocery at midnight. The rules of white middle-classness are invisible but as dense as a web of lead.
“Okay, I’ll see you in a few minutes,” I agreed. No questions. But something was wrong. Seriously wrong. I felt a tidal wave of uneasiness as I drove out to unlock my gate.
“What?” I asked through her car window as Roxie navigated the bumpy entrance to my property. In the dark she looked angry. Or determined. Or sad. I couldn’t tell which.
“I need to talk to you,” was all she said.
So I relocked the gate and followed as her car bounced along the damp road. In my living room she flung herself on the couch and looked distraught.
“What?” I asked again, pacing beside my desk.
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 19
