The Dark Country Page 4

  I managed a look at him. His face was leathery, but the skin around the eyes was still soft. He squinted, and a hundred tiny crinkles appeared.

  "Before you say any more," he said, "I ought to let you in on something. I guess I ought to tell you that I'm what they call a private investigator."

  I couldn't read his expression.

  "I also ought to give you a free piece of advice," he said. "You seem like a decent guy. Do yourself a favor. Drop it right now."

  "What?" I tried to get a fix on him. "Is she a client of yours or something?"

  "The husband, pal," he said confidentially.

  "I think you're trying to tell me something. So who is he?"

  He gazed off down the beach. He gave a nod, meaning, I figured, one of the big stilt houses, the ones with the floodlights aimed at the waves.

  Then I noticed something moving.

  It looked like a man. I watched as the figure passed between the pilings, laying a long, stooped, crooked shadow over the stones.

  "He looks old," I said.

  "And rich," said the detective, if that's what he was. "Filthy, like Midas. Otherwise I wouldn't be bothered. Domestic surveillance isn't my style. Can't take the hours anymore."

  "Wait a minute," I said. "The old man. The husband." It stuck in my throat. "He has a dog, right? And he takes it for walks. Same time, every night?"

  "Take a look. Christ, the mutt's only got three fucking legs. Can you beat that?"

  I couldn't.

  "He's got an idea she's a tramp, you get the drift? So I tail her. Everywhere. I should blush to tell you how much he pays me. But all I got to do is wait and watch. ..."

  "No, I can't beat that, man," I said. "I really can't."

  And started walking.

  And heard footsteps on the pier, footsteps echoed as from far below, my footsteps, saw shoes falling on the boards, my shoes when I looked for them seemed very far away my shoes, as I watched the water, then the sand under the pier, the cracks between the planks shuttering over the sand, and I saw as from a height, the distance growing, from all angles, directions, lengths, myself there, the sand pocked with breathing holes leading to sand crabs, remains of mussels, clams, oysters, lobster, squid, anemones, puffers, eel, sea snakes, sharks, rays, barracuda, lungfish, trilobites, sea spiders, spiny horrors, sentinels buried in the layered scape, as / approached the bar, footsteps passing the split moorings, the black layers on the roof, drying ropes frayed by the sojourns of rats from out the tumbling foundations, the high tilted windows, their panes pulsing with the passing of the tide, the frames beginning to crack, footsteps, giving in, giving out, my footsteps the laughter and the absence of laughter nearing the wooden buildings, the restaurant, the bar beating like wings against the glass.

  And I watched her.

  WE HAVE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE

  She sat in the concrete building, in an office with frosted glass partitions and barred windows, her fingers moving like praying mantises on the table. Her eyes half-closed, she saw:

  A body. The body of a woman. The nude body of a young woman, the shiny flesh slipping from its bones, floating face up in a swimming pool. What was left of the face.

  "Right," someone said, after she told them.

  Her eyes were still rolled up. She squirmed in her straight-backed chair, struggling against the rattle of typewriters from the next room, and said, "And there is another one."

  "That's news," said the Chief. To one of his men, a lieutenant, he said, "Better check it out. Ask Fitz to run the list again, will you, Billy? You never know." Then, "Where? Can you tell us that?"

  "I see . . . trees. A hill. A river. Stream. It was a stream, but now it's a river. The rains, yes. The rains. The rains did it."

  He leaned over her to see that the tape recorder was still on. "Isn't there something else, Polly?" he asked gently. "Take your time, now."

  "No." She began swaying. "Yes. A tower. Airport nearby. Yes. Control tower. ..."

  The Chief nodded, smiling. "Now tell us about the man, Polly. Tell me about the man who did it."

  "The man?" she said faintly. "Oh yes, the man. I see . . . red Pendleton shirt. Trousers filthy. Mud. Driving away. Old car, can't see . . .

  "Wait. Yes. Apartment. Two oak trees. Dead-end street. West side of town. Pink stucco building."

  She fell silent, breathing heavily, her eyeballs straining behind the lids.

  The lieutenant hadn't moved. He stood at the door, his hand frozen on the knob. The Chief jerked a thumb at him impatiently, motioning him out.

  "Blood," she said abrupdy. "Face. Skin." She scraped at her arms. "Washing the blood off. It won't ..."

  The Chief put a hand out to steady her.

  She stiffened, arching her back. "Branford Way," she said matter-of-factly. "Seventeen-something. Sixth door, on top. A black Toyota in the garage. No, on the street. Always park on the street. Kids play in the garage. The sixth apartment. Six. Six. . . ."

  The Chief looked at the other men. He winked.

  "She's got it," he said. "Just like she got the Valley Stran-gler and—what did the papers call the other one? That creep at the University, remember?"

  "The Library Rapist," said one of the men, snickering.

  "Right," said the Chief.

  He moved with them to a corner of the room.

  "Now go out and get on the horn—I want every available unit over there so fast he won't know what hit him. And get this. No leaks this time, understand? Tell the Information Officer that this investigation is strictly SOP. That's the official line, got it? We're pursuing leads, searching the area, blah blah. He can give the press the bit about the latent prints if he wants. C.I.D. says it can't be traced, of course, it's not clear enough, but don't tell Riley that. I don't trust that son of a bitch."

  "What do you want on the warrant?"

  "Shove the warrant! Go in on narco, traffic tickets, any damn thing, I don't care, but get in."

  Suddenly the woman slumped forward and rested her head on her wrists.

  "Wait," said the Chief.

  He hovered over her again, his tie flopping against the worn surface of the table.

  "Polly? Can you hear me?"

  She inhaled deeply. Then she sat up, blinking rapidly, as if awakening from a dream.

  "Hi, Jack," she said. "How'd I do?"

  "Like a top. You did it again, babe. How do you feel?"

  "Oh, I'm fine," she said. "Swell." She rubbed her eyes. "Hey, what're those two guys doing hiding in the corner?" She made a raspy laugh. "What'd I do, say something about their sex lives?"

  "What sex lives?" said the Chief. "You were right on the money, babe. You hit it. Didn't she hit it? Everything. The hill, the pool, the victim. And the creep. You're batting a thousand today, doll."

  "Don't I always? Hey, look at them. I must've popped their virgin ears. Who's got a smoke?"

  The men patted themselves down. The Chief tossed a pack of Viceroys onto the table. Then he took a disposable lighter out of his coat pocket and waited while she smoothed her hair and dug out one of the cigarettes with her fingernails. A tremor passed through her hands.

  "Oh, I can still see it," she said, shuddering. "The trees and the mud. The pool. And the body. How do you suppose it stayed in the pool for so long, Jack, without anybody noticing?"

  "You said it yourself, Poll, remember?" He reached for a file folder, removed a newspaper clipping which he handed to her. "It was the rain. The rain did it."

  She read the headline.

  47 Bodies Reburied

  ORPHANS OF THE STORM

  "Oh, I remember that," she said, scanning the article. "It was on the wire services, even back where I live." She tsked. "What a horrible, horrible story."

  "It happened over by the Point," said the Chief. "The February rains were just too much, apparently. After that last storm, forty-some bodies came floating up out of their graves—that's the estimate. Some slid down the hill next to the cemetery, into the road, into back y
ards, even into swimming pools like this one did. They came right up out of the mud that way, like earthworms, I reckon. Right out of their

  coffins and down the hill. They still haven't found 'em all. Grisly story, all right," he added with a chuckle.

  She made another sound with her tongue. "I still don't get it," she said. "How did your people know that the one in the pool hadn't just, you know, been buried up there like the rest?"

  "She had, she had," said the Chief. "But not as a certified interment, you see. Someone—our man in the red shirt now, thanks to you—murdered her, hid her along with the gun in one of the fresh graves sometime around Christmas. We were there when the Forest Glade people came in with their bulldozers for the mass reburial. The city ended up footing the bill for something like fifteen grand in mudslide damages, by the way. And while they were busy tagging the remains, they found a bullet hole in this one's skull. Polly, there's one more detail I—"

  The Chief turned, remembering his men.

  "So what are you two gawking at? Haven't you ever seen a real live psychic before?"

  As he snapped orders and sent them out, she dipped further into the news story. She didn't really want to read it, but she was both repelled and fascinated by the details.

  She hadn't known what she would be in for when she accepted the invitation to fly out this morning. She had worked with police departments all over the country in these last eight years, including the Chief's. Though more often than not it was work that involved missing persons or the like, she had had her fair share of homicides, including the bodies of those laborers up in Sonoma County and that little girl they had found stuffed into the storm drain in Los Angeles.

  But this case was beginning to get to her. And that was surprising. Because ever since that first story about her in the National Enquirer had started the flood of requests back in '71, after she had phoned in her premonition about the killer of the student nurses in Ohio, she had seen it all, every kind of crime, and all of it was distasteful.

  Yet . . . she wondered if she had been wise in picking this one, after all. There would be others in Santa Mara, other ways to help an old friend. A hit-and-run manslaughter, say. Or a gas station holdup, a liquor store shootout, a beating in the park. That sort of opportunity came up all the time.

  But this.

  There was, she couldn't help thinking, something truly nightmarish about it.

  "So what were you getting at, Polly," said the Chief, taking a seat across from her at the interrogation table, "when you said there was another one?''

  "Oh, there is," she said.

  "Same M.O.? I mean—"

  "I know what you mean," she said calmly. "Another body, female, buried in the same area. But he didn't use a gun this time. In fact, I'm not too clear on just how he did it. But she's in the same general location. You'll find her, I see it."

  "Well, if there was one more unidentified on the list, we'll know about it soon enough. Meanwhile, I'd better get another team over to the Point. Is it our friend in the red shirt again?"

  "Yes."

  The Chief sighed and leaned back, like a man who has done an honest morning's work, and lit up one of the Viceroys. "Polly, I just don't know. I don't know how you do it."

  "Neither do I, Jack," she said, reaching for the pack.

  "Maybe I should say I don't know why you do it. I mean, what's in it for you? You know I can't pay more than your plane ticket—the Commission won't go for it. Of course I could pay you out of my own pocket—"

  "Nonsense," she said. "I wouldn't hear of it." She frowned. "How can you smoke these, Jack?" She broke off the filter. "It does have its rewards, though."

  "What? Donations, that sort of thing?"

  "Oh, some of the families try to pay me, but I send it back. And some money does come in the mail. And if it doesn't have a return address, I guess I have to do something with it, don't I?'' She smiled and picked tobacco from her lip with a long red nail. "But it's not that much, really. Not as much as the magazines seem to think."

  The Chief shook his head. "So. How about some lunch for now, Polly?" he said.

  "Why certainly, Jack." She gave him a long stare. "As long as I'm here, I'm at your service."

  "Right," said the Chief. He stood. "There's a coffee shop on the mall, or—"

  "What's your office like?"

  "I could have it sent over, sure. But—"

  "I'd prefer it," she said. "That way we'll know as soon as anything breaks."

  Hl .studied her. "You're a pro, aren't you, Polly? A real pro."

  ' 'Why, thank you, kind sir. I guess I just like to be where the action is."

  "You'll get your action, all right," he said. "There'll be fireworks all over the place when we get him. //"we get him." "Oh, we'll get him," she said. "I can promise you that."

  The afternoon crept by.

  Then, a few minutes after four o'clock, the Chief shouldered his way into his office and locked the door. He turned to find her still sitting there, dragging on an unfiltered cigarette.

  "This one is going to be a tough nut to crack, Polly," he said. His voice was hoarse.

  She waited.

  He leaned over the chair, his heavy arms supporting his tired body. "How do you figure it?" "Figure what?"

  "We go through his apartment top-to-bottom—but there isn't a God damned thing, right? No bloody clothing, no muddy shoes, no diary, nothing. A big fat goose egg. So we're interviewing the people in the building, running the names in his little black book. But he's a smoothie, you know what I mean? One of those professor characters. Ronald Wilson Claiborn, Ph.D. Moustache, sideburns, you've seen the type. Lots of connections in the right places. Won't say word one till the ACLU gets here. The ACLU! Hell, he's gonna be talking false arrest, a press conference when he gets out, the whole bit." The Chief groaned. "Christ!"

  "You're not going to cut him loose, are you, Jack." She said it as a statement.

  There was an awkward pause.

  "I can't hold him more than seventy-two hours, doll, you know that. Not unless we get another break."

  "I'm sure this time, Jack," she said. "Don't look at me like that. What about the red shirt?"

  "I'm not looking at you any way," he said wearily. "Yeah, we found the shirt. So what? The lab won't get anything. It's

  been to the cleaners at least once—still in the plastic bag. Do you know how many red Pendletons there are in Santa Mara?" He shook his head. "So what else do I have? The way things stand now, I can't make a case. It's circumstantial. Or not circumstantial enough. Besides, no court in this country is going to swear in your testimony. I need this conviction, Polly."

  Yes, she thought. So do I. How lucky for you, then, and for me, of course, that I'm able to give you just the kind of man you've secretly despised for so long: a college professor, an intellectual. The kind of suspect you've always wanted so badly to nail.

  "I told you where to find the other body," she said with irritation.

  His head continued to shake as he rested his huge buttocks on the edge of the desk. "Billy's team turned it up, all right." "But what?"

  "But we can't make the ID. It's too decomposed. Hell, we can't even make the dental charts." "And why not?"

  "Because we can't find the head." "Okay, okay," she said sharply.

  Circumstantial, she thought. I should have known. You want circumstantial? I'll give you circumstantial.

  "Set up your tape recorder again, Jack. I'm going to give you what you need."

  A body. The body of a woman. The nude body of a young woman. The body quivering under the eucalyptus trees as the head is taken from it.

  "That's right," said the Chief, after she had told them. "Then what? What does he do with the knife, Polly? Hide it? Does he forget to wipe it off? Or drop something? Yeah, that would do fine. A button, keys—anything. And what about the gun from the first time? Try, baby. For god's sake, try!"

  She let his voice slip away in the mist and peered deeper into the
vision. A figure running at the edge of the scene, scudding frantically down an embankment slick with putrefying leaves. But that would do her no good now; she let go of the image.

  "The apartment," she whispered, trying hard to get there. The pink apartment. Number six. She searched, allowing her

  mind to drift above the floor, above the rug like a disembodied eye. "Yes, I see ..." The Chief breathed heavily.

  "I see ..." She forced herself to explore the dark corners and hidden places, directed by memory, though it had been such a long time. Then she said, "Yes. There, in the closet."

  "But we checked—"

  "Behind the paperbacks . . ."He used to do that years ago, toss his overshoes into the closet after a camping trip, and it was still there. "Mud. From his heels." The same kind? Yes, they would say that. They would be able to "prove" it somehow. Because they had to.

  The Chief positioned the microphone closer to her. He held his breath.

  "In . . . the alley. Empty cartons. Not empty. Yes. I see ... a shirt." It was another Pendleton, the one he had been wearing when he cut himself on a fishing trip, and he had finally thrown it out. And it was red. The only color he ever bought. She had been safe in saying that. She hoped the blood type would match. With any luck it would.

  "That's it, Polly! Talk to me, babe. We're almost home."

  The tape recorder hummed in the small room. Her hands tightened on the arms of the chair. She stiffened, pressing forward. The sounds in the next office, the rumble of traffic on the other side of the barred windows became the roar of the earth as it buckled under the rains and began to move, disgorging its dead, but she fought it back. Her hands went to her ears.

  "No," she said.

  Then her hands fell to the table once more, her fingers twitching. Slowly she regained control.

  "The car. Black. Under the floorboard. The mat. Look there. See ..."

  "What, Polly?"

  "Leaves." Yes. Only one, but it would have to do. A single eucalyptus leaf carried on his shoe from somewhere and knocked loose by the pedal, slivered there under the edge who knows how long ago. But it was the same kind. It would do.