“Rox, last night—”
“I know,” she said, holding my hands so tight it hurt. “But we can’t go there now, understand? There isn’t time. We’ll talk later. I know we have to talk. I’m not trying to duck the Philadelphia thing, Blue. It’s tearing me apart. We’ll work something out. I don’t know what. But right now—”
“It’s not about Philadelphia and you leaving or me staying, it’s way beyond that. I learned to trust you last night,” I went on determinedly. “Now I’m asking you to trust me.”
She shook her head and her beads rattled with impatience. “I do, Blue, but—”
Taking a deep breath, I launched into the defense of a decision that hadn’t existed three minutes earlier.
“I’m asking you to trust me, trust the way I am and think, even though it’s not your way,” I said. “I’m asking you to trust me out of the dark, out of bed, away from each other without this thing that pulls us together and blinds us to everything else. There are some things I need to do today and they aren’t ‘rational,’ but I think they might have something to do with Sword. I don’t even know why I think that, I just do. But I can’t defend my thoughts in your terms, so I don’t want to talk about them. I just want you to trust me. Will you?”
There was a long silence in which I could hear my stomach reducing bran flakes to chemical gruel.
“Okay, yes,” she said somberly. “Girl, I do trust you.”
I hadn’t planned on getting married in my kitchen with two armed FBI agents in camp chairs outside the window, but that’s what it felt like.
We decided that I’d brief the agents on the desert terrain from which Sword might reappear, since Roxie knew nothing about the area except that it was hot and short on buildings. The two men sat on my couch happily perusing maps of the AnzaBorrego Desert and asking questions about what they called the “plate drops.” What time, where, and did I understand the significance of the plates, the blue willow pattern? The FBI is not without impressive resources, but I was still stunned when one of them unfolded a large diagram of a blue willow plate on my coffee table. Somebody, I knew, had been up all night drawing it on a computer.
“I don’t know what the plates are about,” I told them, “although I do know a lot about the plates. The design reflects an Asian story, but it was first used on plates in England. It is …” I said, pausing dramatically, “the most popular china pattern in the world.” I was sure Hutton Pierce, the curator, would have been proud.
“It’s real popular with us right now, too,” one of the agents growled amiably, pointing to the three little figures on the bridge. “You’re a psychologist, right? One of our guys at Quantico is guessing the perp has had some problem with authority figures, maybe an abusive mother since the victims are women, and feels trapped like the characters in the story.”
“I’m a social psychologist,” I replied, wondering how many more times I would have to explain this before I died. “I analyze tons of data and draw conclusions based on it. I can only talk about the likelihood that a certain proportion of a defined population will do or not do a particular thing. I can never talk about individuals. I have no idea what motivates the perpetrator of these crimes.”
“So what proportion of a population defined as ‘blue-willow-plate-nuts’ is likely to kill women in positions formerly reserved for men?” the other one asked.
These guys weren’t dumb, I realized. It was a good question. And I’d walked right into it. I could feel Roxie smiling beside me even though I didn’t look at her.
“I talked to a woman in Phoenix who’s something of an expert on these plates, and she said—”
“Name?” the first guy interrupted, grabbing a pen from the cargo pocket of his tan shorts. “We’ll need her name and phone number.”
“Um, Lauer. Jackie Lauer. I didn’t keep her number, but you can find her on the Internet. Look under either ‘blue willow’ or ‘Crankshaft Car Club.’ And what she told me is that blue willow collectors break down into two categories—people who want the plates for their potential monetary value and those who are attracted by the design. One’s purely practical, the other is emotional. The second category is comprised primarily of women. I’d say Sword is attached to these plates emotionally rather than practically.”
“So you think our guy’s a girl?”
“I think the gender markers are inconsistent,” I concluded, wishing I didn’t sound like a pompous windbag.
“Yeah,” they both said.
“So what are you going to do if the perp shows up out here with another plate?” Rox asked them.
“Capture him or kill him.”
“What if it turns out to be a woman?”
“Capture her or kill her.”
I’m always impressed by solid priorities, even though they often fail to provide for the unforeseen.
“Um, Sword isn’t likely to come anywhere near here,” I mentioned. “Your camp is sort of noticeable.”
“Meant to be,” the first one said. “Our expert agrees with Dr. Bouchie here. The guy expects to get caught. If he’s out here he’ll regard our presence as inevitable and come in for the showdown. And of course we won’t be at the camp. It’s only a lure. We’ll be nearby, though. We’ll get him.”
With that they strode out the door and into dusty glare that was already hot.
After Roxie left I packed some jeans, a sweatshirt, and tennis shoes in a duffel and threw it on the floor of the truck cab. Wrapped in the sweatshirt was my little snub-nosed Smith and Wesson, now an illegal “concealed weapon.” Then I called Brontë to take her seat on the passenger’s side and slammed the door. It was going to be a long day, I thought. Already the FBI agents were invisible, holed up behind boulders somewhere with gallon jugs of water and binoculars, watching. They’d watch all day and all night, I realized. They knew what they were supposed to do.
I didn’t, exactly. But at least I had a plan.
First I gassed up the truck in Borrego, then headed over the mountains to Julian, where I took State Road 79 to State Road 371. The route was the long way from my place to the little town of Anza, where 371 became the main street. There wasn’t much there. Just a gas station, two roadside hamburger joints, and a convenience store that seemed to do most of its business in video rentals. Then I saw what I was looking for. A Realtor’s office. I parked the truck under a sign reading PEACEFUL DESERT HIDEAWAYS—RENT OR BUY—EASY TERMS and pushed open the glass door.
“Hi,” I said to a huge blond man with a curly beard and mischievous blue eyes. “I’m curious about that old adobe line shack on Coyote Road where Nance Canyon comes out. Do you know anything about it?”
“County declared it a hazardous structure and boarded it up years ago,” he answered. “It’ll collapse any day now. Even the teenagers don’t sneak in there anymore. Why? If you’re interested in some nice desert property with a view, I can show you—”
“No, I’m, uh, doing some research for an art exhibit. Photographs. You know, ‘Desert Legacy, Places Time Forgot.’ An old photo of that building was recently featured at a San Diego gallery, and it got me to thinking. There are so many stories out here. Prospectors, ranchers, mule trains, and the Pony Express. Do you know if anything interesting ever happened there?”
He grinned, showing white and charmingly crooked front teeth. “Well, some kids knocked one hell of a wasp’s nest off the side of the chimney a few years back. Got stung so bad one of ’em had to be hospitalized. Miracle the chimney didn’t fall on ’em while they were at it. But you’re looking for history, right?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Is there any?”
“Let me call my mother,” he answered. “This is her agency. I’m just here helping out. Got me a place in Warner Springs, little apple orchard. My wife loves it. But mom, she thinks the boom’s going to be up here. People from L.A. and San Diego buying land to get away from the city. She’s probably right. She’s always right.”
“Is your mother from here
?” I asked as he dialed the phone.
“Nah. Kansas City. I grew up there, was stationed here with the Marines. Loved it, moved out here when I got married. So after my dad died mom just packed up and came out, too, eventually started the agency up here. She’s already worth six big ones, but she says she wants to die rich and leave my kids enough money to support me.”
This wasn’t what I’d been fishing for.
“Mom,” he said into the phone, “lady here wants to know about the old line shack on Coyote Road. History stuff. Anything ever happen there?”
I admired a changing display of color photographs on the agency’s computer monitor as he said nothing, apparently listening. All the photographs were of bleached-out desert “hide-aways” that might have been the same hideaway photographed from different angles. At least one tumbleweed appeared in each.
Then, “You think I should send her to Waddy? Jeez.”
“Waddy?” I said when he’d hung up.
“Old guy, hangs out at the Hamburger Corral or else you can find him at home. I’ll give you a map. But let me try the Corral first.”
After another quick phone call he said, “Nope, he’s at the Corral. You can go on over there. He’ll talk to you, let me tell you. He’ll talk your arm off. Waddy Babbick’s lived here since dirt. Used to run some cattle in the old days, I guess. He and his wife raised six kids up here when there was just a one-room schoolhouse, back in the fifties. Had to build a school just for the Babbicks. Mom says she thinks Waddy said something about that line shack being used for a diner a long time ago, if that’s any help.”
Diner.
“Thanks,” I said with feeling, and gunned the truck three stops up the road to a place called Hamburger Corral.
Waddy Babbick had the leathery skin of a desert rat and narrow gray eyes under his bifocals. He wore an old-fashioned white dress shirt, starched and ironed to a shine, with mud-caked jeans and cowboy boots.
“I’m eighty-seven years young and I know more about this place than God,” he informed me when I joined him at the Corral’s Formica counter. “Lotta people don’t know this whole valley was a big Indian city before the white man came. Winter city. Summers, they’d go to the mountains, of course. They moved around, the Indians did, left pots and arrowheads, flint knives, bone fishhooks, all over. I’ve got a whole collection—”
“I hear you might know something about the old line shack on Coyote Road,” I interrupted. “Was it used as a diner at one time?”
“That place? Yeah, it was a diner here about thirty years back. The Desert Diner, it was called. Some woman ran it for a while. Her and her daughter. My wife was still alive then, bless her heart, so I never ate there. Heard all they served was cheese sandwiches and the like, anyway. Ate right at home, I did, unless I was out runnin’ the cows to pasture or bringin’ ’em down to the railhead at Temecula before the spur went in. But let me tell you about these flint arrowheads. See, I’ve got about four hundred in museum condition, and they tell a tale, they do.”
“I’m afraid my current research involves only the line shack,” I insisted. “What else do you know about it? And is there anybody else around here who might know anything about it?”
“There’s nobody else around here who knows as much as I do about anything,” Waddy Babbick told me, chuckling. “I’m the oldest s.o.b. in the valley! Now, Reed McCallister, me and her used to fight for the title, you know? Reed’s damn near as old as I am. She and her husband Bill had a spread over by Bucksnort, ran sheep. Hell, Bill died from a rattlesnake bite twenty years ago, but Reed, she stayed on out at their place until, let’s see, five years ago? Fell and broke her hip, had to have the replacement surgery. Now, her son Bill, Jr., he lives in San Diego, came up here and took her down to some ‘retirement village’ down there in Carlsbad. Sagebrush Resort, it’s called. I go on down to see her couple times a year, Christmas and all. Now, Reed, she had an interest in Indians, too. Used to make these baskets like they did, and—”
“When did the diner close?” I interrupted, beginning to feel irrational, foolish.
“Like I said, close on thirty years ago. Something happened, the law was involved. I think that woman that ran it turned out to be some kind of criminal hiding out up here, and they come after her. The wife and I, we’d gone back East so she could help one of our daughters with a new baby, so we wasn’t here when they come after that woman. People talked about it for a time, but I didn’t pay no attention. Now, my wife, she coulda told you. You know how women are.”
“Yes,” I answered, and slid off my stool. “Thanks so much, Mr. Babbick.”
“Just call me Waddy,” he said, waving a leathery hand. “And come on back when you wanna see those arrowheads!”
It was only four more miles to the line shack, so I drove up there and let Brontë run while I stared at it. In the bright sunlight I could see bare spots where the adobe had crumbled away, exposing rotted boards beneath. No one had been there since I kicked the door in. Everything was as I’d left it. In the light it looked like nothing in particular, just a crumbling shack that could fall in on itself and vanish by tomorrow. It meant nothing, told me nothing, and I felt like an idiot for imagining that it would. Still, I thought, it had been a diner, and diners used blue willow plates … but no, it was far-fetched. I’d asked for Roxie’s trust in the middle of a serious professional obligation involving both of us. It was time to earn it.
“Come on, Brontë,” I called. “We’ve got real work to do.”
21
Bones
From Anza the quickest route down into San Diego is I-15, which descends through broken granite foothills and fields of huge, pale boulders. I was in a hurry, so I took that route. Advertising is not permitted on interstate highways, but a sign announcing a large shopping mall in one of the suburban communities was nonetheless visible, perched on a hill. And a large shopping mall would have what I needed. Ten minutes later I stood in an electronics chain store overflowing with unidentifiable merchandise.
“I want to buy a cellular phone,” I told a young woman with seven earrings in the cartilage of her left ear. She was reading Moby Dick and seemed delighted to put the book down and tell me about the differences between analog and digital.
“Just something cheap and serviceable,” I told her as though I were buying shelf paper. “I don’t expect to use it very much. In fact, I may never use it again after today.”
“Oh, you’ll use it,” she said knowingly. “They’re addictive.”
Twenty minutes and a lot of paperwork later I showed Brontë a tiny phone with a flip-down mouthpiece. I grew up watching Star Trek. I knew what I had.
“Beam me up, Scotty,” I said to a Doberman, and then headed south toward Jeffrey Pond’s low-rent apartment.
He wasn’t there but his mother was, and she was asleep. Or had been until I woke her.
“I told those FBI men when they came in the hospital last night,” she said through the three-inch gap allowed by the chain lock, “we don’t know nothing about whatever it is happened at Jeffrey’s clinic. Now my husband went in the hospital yesterday afternoon with a heart failure from pulman eneema, they said, and Jeffrey and me, we been there straight through since four o’clock. That’s four o’clock yesterday. Jeffrey, he’s still there, but I come on over here to get some sleep since I been up all night. We sure would appreciate it a lot if you people would just go on and leave us alone, you understand? We got our hands full here without all this trouble.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the sleep-creased face regarding me with firmly controlled hostility. “Please tell Jeffrey that Dr. McCarron sends best wishes for his father’s recovery. You go on back to sleep now. I won’t bother you again.”
I had lapsed smack into the heartland behavior that is my birthright. Nothing is dearer to the soul of a Midwesterner than saying something polite and then getting the hell out of other people’s business. It occurred to me that as a model for human interaction it wasn’t
half bad.
It also occurred to me that Jeffrey Pond was one of those people who appear to be cursed. Disaster upon disaster. An ugly divorce, false accusations of rape that destroyed his right to be comfortable with his daughter. Financial ruin, suspicion of serial murder, the loss of his job with the closing of the Rainer Clinic. And now the additional burden of his father’s serious illness. I hoped he had his Silly Putty with him at the hospital.
In the truck I made the first of twenty free cellular calls that came with my sign-up package. The call was to the Rainer Clinic, and Jennings Rainer answered.
“It’s Dr. McCarron,” I said. “Is Dr. Bouchie there?”
“She’s right here,” he answered, sounding a little better than he had when I last saw him. “I do appreciate your help in referring me to Dr. Bouchie,” he added. “This situation is terrible, but somehow I don’t feel as crushed by it as I did. I’ve already seen the psychiatrist she recommended, and just having someone to talk to has helped, although he did prescribe a medication for me, which I will take until my life is under control again. And I do feel that I’m helping the authorities now. I feet that I’m doing what I can to help right this horrible wrong.”
“I was worried about you,” I admitted unprofessionally. “This must be the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“No,” he answered thoughtfully, “that was losing my wife. This was just a business and I was about to retire in any event. What’s terrible is that someone I know and worked with every day has taken other men’s wives, other men who must now feel as lost and alone as I’ve felt. And I didn’t even see it. Neither did Megan. We were responsible here. This was our clinic. Yet we saw nothing and now three women are dead and one of my employees has threatened to kill a vice presidential candidate. It’s really more than I can comprehend. Oh, here’s Dr. Bouchie.”
“Rox, I’ve just been by Jeffrey Pond’s apartment,” I began. “Do you have any idea what a ‘pulman eneema’ might be?”
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 23
