A Grave Talent km-1

by Laurie R. King

  The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o'clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o'clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor's badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.

  At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler's Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.

  At three o'clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler's Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o'clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.

  Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.

  At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.

  "Martinelli," she answered through clenched jaws.

  "Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road's out, and it'll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we'd spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together."

  "Good morning, Inspector Hawkin."

  "What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?"

  "What time do you get up, anyway?"

  "I don't. Get here when you can."

  "Seven-thirty." She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.

  At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.

  "What's that?"

  "Breakfast. There's one for you, if you want it."

  "Did you bring me a coffee?" He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.

  "You have a machine."

  "I'm out."

  She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.

  "Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee."

  "Aren't you glad you're not a secretary? No sugar?"

  "Aren't you glad it's not goat's milk? No sugar."

  She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhom-boidal ones), some of which had red check marks in them. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.

  "Why?"

  "Why what?" Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.

  "Why all this fuss? I've got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it."

  "I hate computers," he said absently. "Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don't think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It's limiting, and it's no way to catch a murderer."

  "Is that—" Kate bit her tongue.

  "Speak, Martinelli."

  "Well, you have to admit it's unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it."

  "It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don't be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn't a phobia, it's common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other," he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, "I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you're not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee."

  "What are the red check marks?" she asked, peering at his wall collage.

  "When I'm satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check."

  "And the green looks like it marks evidence." She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler's. His pieces of paper included a note of two years' residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom's mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson's neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word keys, circled in green, and the note Jag—hairs, similarly colored.

  As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate's back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo's indistinct voice.

  "That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It's actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I've been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won't be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They're working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What's that? I couldn't hear you."

  "I said," she shouted, "what about from the upper side, through the reserve?"

  "Even worse, apparently. There's a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly me
ss. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you'll need to use the radio. I'll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao."

  Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man's up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?

  "That Trujillo?" Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.

  "None other. The Road's out until at least tomorrow."

  "Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren't any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I'd have to have somebody go in and haul her out." By the way he said her, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. "Let's take a break, I'm seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch."

  Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for the telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.

  "Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this." She waited until he picked up the other extension. "Go ahead, start again."

  The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.

  "Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I've got it. I'm sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child's school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to the girl who was Tina's best friend. She gave me the address, and the child's mother said it looked like one her daughter had been given for her birthday last November, but she thought the kid had lost it. So we talked to the girl—she was scared, thought I was going to arrest her I guess—and she finally told me that she'd given it to Tina on her last day in school. Tina told her that it was a magic ring and that she was going to use it to fly to Never-Never-land—their teacher had been reading them Peter Pan, you see—and this kid was convinced that's where Tina was, in Neverland. She wanted—" His voice broke, and Kate realized how young he sounded. "She wanted to know when Tina was coming back. If you talk to Trujillo tell him I'm home getting drunk." The line went dead, and Kate slowly hung up, watching Hawkin do an imitation of a stone.

  "That's it, then." He hung up his receiver.

  "Are you going to have Trujillo pick her up?"

  "No, damn it, I'm not. If she hasn't made a run for it by now, she's not going to, and I want to see her face when she hears about the ring."

  "If you go like that, you'll ruin a nice suit," Kate noted mildly.

  "Hell, you're right. We'll have to go by my place on the way. What about you?"

  "Al, the last few days have turned me back into a Girl Scout, always prepared. I have a bag in the car."

  12

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  Tyler's Creek runs year-round. Ten months out of the year it is a tidy, attractive, well-behaved little stream where salamanders creep and damselflies skip. On a lazy August afternoon, when the kids laugh and haul rocks for a dam and the deepest pools are barely waist-high to an adult, it is very difficult to visualize the process by which that snarl of tree roots ten feet up the bank came to be wedged there or to imagine the force that caused the convenient sunning spot of a flat granite boulder to come to rest half a mile downstream from the nearest granite outcropping. Moss turns sere and brown, tadpoles become frogs, water bugs dimple the surface on a hot August afternoon.

  Kate stood well back from the gaping edge of Tyler's Creek and realized that living in San Francisco, with the occasional power outage and blocked storm drain, did not fully prepare one for this. The image that had come to mind with the phrase "the road is out" combined a deeper degree of rutting, a lot of mud, and a bit of a gap across which some boards could be put; certainly nothing like this.

  Tyler's Creek was a ravening, greasy gray monstrosity, thirty feet of grasping, hungry, primal power. It thundered like Niagara, pulling bits of the hillside, roadway, and vegetation into itself with its strong greedy fingers and eying its human audience hungrily. Kate swallowed, mute, as a piece of the opposite bank the size of a small car suddenly broke away and slithered down into the muddy torrent. A good-sized tree came washing around the turn, its naked roots twelve feet across. The waters rammed the roots into the soil. They stuck for a long moment before the bank gave and tossed the tree back into the center of the flood, where it whirled around crosswise in a fast, ponderous spin before being caught on a cluster of boulders, snapping instantly with a crack that momentarily silenced the constant roar, and folded itself in a streamlined fashion for the flume to run it to sea. All in barely thirty seconds.

  She turned to Hawkin and raised her voice.

  "We'll never get across that, not for days."

  He shook his head, thin-lipped, his eyes on the boiling, white-capped demon that was Tyler's Creek.

  "Any chance of a chopper?" she asked.

  "Not until these gusts die down."

  "Which won't be until after dark, if then. Al, I want to go around, find a place to cross."

  "No, Casey, we'll just have to wait until they can rig a sling across."

  "Tomorrow? Look, we've got an hour and a half of light, maybe more, and I can cover a lot of ground in that time. The creek isn't that long, according to the map. Let me try it. Please?"

  He looked at her, at the waters, at the small group of people who stood well back from the opposite bank. His eyes traveled back to her, to Mark Detweiler and Tyler where they stood talking, and on to Tommy Chesler, who sat on a rock and watched the waves go past like a kid at a space movie.

  "Tyler?" He had to shout, but the man looked up and limped over to them.

  "Inspector Martinelli is thinking of taking a walk upstream to visit a friend on the other side. Is that practical?"

  Tyler looked astonished, then even more so.

  "You mean—?"

  "I mean we should have someone over there to keep an eye on things. Can she get over there before dark?"

  "It'd be a near thing, but it wouldn't be the first time someone's gone around—this section's been washed out before. There's even a sort of a bridge about a mile up, if it hasn't gone. It's hard to find, though," he said doubtfully.

  "Could someone go with her, as far as the bridge?"

  "I know where it is, but I'm not the fastest thing on two feet. Mark might, or, no, what about Tommy? He knows these hills better than anybody."

  "Tommy Chesler?"

  "Yes. I'm sure he'd jump at the chance to help."

  "Casey?"

  "Fine with me. I'll need a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. And a plastic bag if they're not waterproof."

  The flashlight was waterproof and clipped onto her belt. The radio was not, and went into a pocket of her jacket, inside a doubled-over garbage bag from one of the cars. She settled her gun under her arm, zipped up the front of the jacket, and turned to Tommy, who was looking self-important and a bit nervous at his assignment.

  "Let's go, Tommy."

  A light hand touched her shoulder, and Al murmured into her ear.

  "You don't have to put her under arrest unless you think it's best. Just keep an eye on her. And, Casey? Watch yourself."

  "Thanks, I'll try. I'll give you a buzz on the radio from her house."

  It was nearly impossible to make any kind of speed, but they tried. Kate was faster than Tommy, but he knew where to put his feet, which leaves were most slippery, what branches most likely to drench a passerby. Kate went down three times in the first half mile, once gouging her thigh badly on the exposed end of a broken branch. Tommy led, Kate scrambling in his wake, along the ridge of the hills over Tyler's Creek. Once when Kate looked up, she caught sight of a
house on the opposite ridge, a mile off, that looked like that of Vaun Adams. She peered through the wet trees, trying to see if there was any movement, and her foot hit a slick smear of leaf-covered clay that threw her ten feet down the hill to fetch up hard against a tree trunk. She lay on her back for a moment, eyes closed, chest heaving, until the stab of the flashlight into her spine forced her to sit up. Tommy stood looking down at her, a worried expression on his young face.

  "You okay, Inspector Martinelli?"

  "Oh great… and to think… some people… do this… for fun."

  "You're bleeding, Inspector Martinelli."

  "Not much… Call me… Casey."

  She accepted his hand to be pulled back onto her feet, clapped him on the back, and gestured that he should lead on.

  What are you trying to prove, Martinelli? she berated herself. Trying to prove they didn't make a mistake, choosing you for the wrong reasons; watch that slippery bit, that's better, you're learning. Wonder if the damn bridge is there, what'll we do if it isn't? I don't much care for the idea of coming back this way by flashlight, but if the other choice is sitting under a tree with Tommy Chesler until morning, well, I hope the bridge is there. How could she have done it? How could she have done it, my God, with talent like that—could she have thrown it away, of course she could if she's crazy, that's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? All artists are a bit crazy, but no, please God no, don't make me have to arrest That One for strangling little girls. Oh come on, Martinelli, isn't that what you're fighting your way across this goddamn hillside for the privilege of doing, hurrying to arrest her because of a ring and an alibi that isn't, and what—oh Christ, nearly lost it that time, pay attention, Martinelli, a broken leg won't do anyone any good. Damn it, my leg hurts, probably get a fine infection in it, please God hold the sun up for a while, I can't get across that vicious bastard of a creek— "creek"? ha!—in the dark, how much farther, couldn't be too much, we've been going downhill for a long time, and it sounds loud now, there's Tommy, can we stop for two minutes, for one, just one…