Rogue Wave (31 page)

Maureen Brant cocked her head. That noise in the distance, was it an engine? She looked out the front window into the milky dark.
Nothing to see. Of course. There wouldn’t be. Not yet.

Without releasing her gaze, she felt the rifle barrel, moving her fingers slowly, silently. Listening. What made that kind of sound? Straining engine, pulling a car out of one of the deep holes in the road? Engine shutting off? But no, the noise was gone from her mind now. She smiled to herself. Gone from her mind, just like things passed through Garrett’s, leaving no trail. She shook her head sharply.
I’m
losing it. Not enough sleep. Can’t lose it now. Not now, when everything is at stake.
Her second finger struck the rifle barrel. She wrapped her hand around the metal. Pressing her ear to the window, she listened for the rustle of underbrush.

The salty smell of the ocean mixed with the scent of junipers and redwoods as Kiernan drove south on Highway 1, peering into the fog for the road to the Brants’. The fog chilled her arms and legs, but sweat glued her shirt to her back. She clutched the wheel tighter and tensed her ankle to keep from pressing down on the gas as she thought of Robin Matucci waiting at the grocery this afternoon, waiting to follow her. “God, I hate to be used!”

Maureen stood by the window, her body so tense it felt like metal, old rusted iron ready to flake at the touch. How could she expect to hear the rustle of feet, carefully placed feet, when her heart was thudding so loud?

Garrett heard the studio door open. “Mau—” He turned around. “Oh? Robin. What are you doing here?” He stared at her in the open doorway. She didn’t look good, not like she had at the California Tavern. He didn’t remember lines like that in her face. She had always been smiling. She wasn’t now. Her red hair was dripping from the fog, and the weight of the water had pulled those lovely swaying waves almost straight. And those brown slacks she was wearing were too short. Odd. He’d never seen Robin Matucci when she wasn’t dressed just right. If he weren’t seeing it himself, he couldn’t imagine her wearing a baggy white sweater like that. And her makeup … “Aren’t you feeling well, Robin?”

“Garrett, I want the memo.”

He smiled. “No ‘Hello, how are you?’ After all the way you’ve come? You didn’t have to come here, you know. I would have been at Baker Beach tomorrow, like I said.”

Her eyes opened wide, like in slow motion, he thought. He watched, taken aback, as she just stood there and stared at him. She was a mover, always rushing here, jumping up to run over there; if she couldn’t leave, she’d be tapping her finger. He had a couple of sketches of her he’d done from memory; he’d wanted to capture that sense of motion.

She swallowed and moved toward him. “Garrett, the memo. Give it to me.”

He’d forgotten how tall she was. Not quite his height, but strong, too. All that work hauling in lines, being a deckhand.

“Garrett, I don’t have all day. Where is it?”

Now she looked more like her old self, as her eyes darted around the room, at the coat rack, the chairs. She didn’t even stop to notice his painting. He shouldn’t care about that, he told himself; most of it was still white; it wasn’t ready to be seen yet. But nonetheless it left him feeling exposed. He wanted to close the door, but he didn’t move.

He watched her look at the window behind him, and at the desk. Her eyes paused for the first time. She was staring at the handgun.

Garrett swallowed. He’d known it wasn’t going to be easy to deal with her. She wouldn’t like hearing that he had decided not to sell her the memo. He had qualms about that meeting alone, tomorrow, in the fog at Baker Beach. But this, here … He forced himself not to look at the Ruger lying there out of reach. He said, “Robin, I’m sorry you’ve come all this way for nothing. I’m a finalist for an award. So I don’t need to sell the memo now.”

“Garrett, we’ve been through all that. You told me all that on Baker Beach. For an hour!” The lines in her forehead deepened, then they eased as she smiled. That little tilt to the head. He’d tried to capture that. To capture the charm and the steel beneath. Red and gray. “Garrett, you gave me your word. I like to think of you as an ethical man.”

“I am. I’m giving the memo to a woman who’s working to save the shoreline.”

She moved in closer. Was she going to waft a hand across his shoulder, give him a playful kiss like he’d seen her do in the C.T.? A little encouragement? “Garrett, I need the memo. It’s very important to me.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve made my decision.”

She turned and picked up the gun.

Robin pointed the revolver. She’d heard, from that pain-in-the-ass environmentalist woman, that Garrett had some kind of brain damage. He looked all right. His hand was shaking and he seemed like he was in no hurry. But he looked a helluva lot better than she did! When she’d hit him, on the Great Highway, she should have crushed him into the sand, never let him recover and threaten her this way. As hard as she had worked. All those nights she’d slept on the boat, downed enough coffee to keep the entire fishing fleet awake, all so she could listen and relisten to those tapes of Dwyer Cummings and his buddies down in
Early Bird’s
salon drinking her liquor, describing her breasts, her butt, speculating on what kind of lay she’d be, and maybe once in twenty trips letting drop something like the specs on land they’d need for onshore support buildings when the offshore platforms were operational, or some other bit of information she could sell. She’d done well with what she’d gleaned. But nowhere near what she could get for that memo. She was no dreamer, like her father was. She’d used what she had and put out of her mind what didn’t work. She’d given up thinking about the memo until that environmental pest had started coming around. And then that damned Delaney! Momentarily she shut her eyes against the picture of
Early Bird,
shattered, by the explosion.

And all those years Garrett Brant was sitting on his ass out here in the woods, planning to give the memo to Jessica Leporek!

She could still see Delaney’s forehead wrinkling in shock when she aimed the chop at his neck. He hadn’t seen it coming, not until the last instant, then the bastard had ducked and she’d hit him too high. By then he was drunk. After the first swallow she hadn’t even needed to threaten him. She’d thrown the gun overboard halfway to the Farallons. She could still see Delaney falling, stunned from the blow, not out cold as she’d planned. She could feel the shock giving way to action as it always had for her. She could feel the muscles in her arms tightening as she’d grabbed the rope and bound his wrists and ankles. The storm had picked up then, bounced him around. He’d never gotten to his feet again. It had taken hours to get out past the Farallons, fighting the thirty-foot waves, waiting for the moment when she could leave the wheel long enough to cut him loose. Not too soon and have him get to his feet and be banging around in the cockpit, or trying to get at her in the wheelhouse. But she couldn’t let him be washed overboard still bound. If anyone found his body … That fear was a long shot. The whole goddamn Pacific floor for the man to settle on and he had to float up on the Farallons. It was her worst nightmare come true. Bastard! If he hadn’t floated up and been found, she could have come back to the wharf in two weeks, collected the insurance and gone on with her life. Goddamn bastard. Now she had nothing. She needed that memo.

“Garrett”—her voice was guttural—“I’m not fooling around with you. I’ve already killed one man.”

His smooth brow wrinkled lightly.

“Goddamn it, do you realize what I’m saying? Give me the memo now or I will shoot. You
and
your wife.”

Kiernan turned off Highway 1. Was that the Brants’ road? It didn’t look quite the same. But everything looked different in the white-out fog. She eyed the odometer. The pavement ended in about a mile. That would be the clue. If
all
the roads off the highway weren’t paved for an equal distance!

The pavement ended. She checked the odometer. One mile down, four to go. The Jeep bucked into a hole. There was no way to avoid them now. She pulled to the edge of the track, and kept going, watching the odometer, clutching the wheel, the Jeep slamming into holes and rocks and the bank of the road when curves came too fast. A mile to go. A half.

Maureen’s car was still parked under the redwoods. Kiernan pulled up. Grabbing the flashlight, she raced up the bluff, head down, straining to see as far as her stride, flashing the light back and forth to spot the abandoned swimming pool before she tripped over the edge and cracked her head on the cement.

The house was dark. Kiernan knocked. “It’s Kiernan!” No one answered.

She didn’t bother to knock again. Wound tight as Maureen was, she’d have heard the first time.

She made her way around the side of the house, stumbling over roots that hadn’t merited a thought in daylight.

A blur of light shone from Garrett’s window. She ran forward, across the bramble of grass, and peered in. The room looked empty.

She opened the door and saw the body.

It was a woman’s.

T
HE SMELL OF DEATH
—urine, excrement, blood, and ripped tissue—filled Garrett Brant’s studio. Automatically, Kiernan breathed through her mouth. The studio was empty but for the body on the floor. Robin Matucci’s body.

Kiernan shut the studio door and wedged one of the chairs against the handle. It wouldn’t keep out Robin’s murderer, but it would make any entry noisy.

Matucci lay facedown, her long red hair fallen over one shoulder, knees slightly flexed. Her feet faced the door, her body away from it, as if she had tripped in the doorway and hit the floor. But her right arm was flung over her head, her left out to the side, suggesting she’d twisted around on the way down. She faced to the left, toward Garrett’s half-finished canvas. One shot had entered through the bridge of her nose, rupturing the tissue and sending blood spurting out of her left eye socket.

Keeping clear of the windows, Kiernan bent down and rolled the body over, flinching instinctively, knowing how the local coroner would feel about her moving it.

She closed her eyes momentarily, shutting out the death of a woman she almost knew. The body was still warm, but already the cell walls were breaking down, allowing the bacteria to roam the corpse. This woman had killed a man and wrecked two lives; a decomposing pile of flesh was all it had come to.

A closer look revealed that lividity had already taken its toll—blood was settling in deep red bruises on the right side of Robin’s face. But the damage from the bullet was greater on the left. It had entered at an angle, she speculated. Three wounds to the chest, one near the sternum. Here the pattern with the face was repeated: lividity on the right shoulder, but tissue damage on the left. She lifted the shoulder to make sure. Yes, the wounds in the back were larger—exit marks. And they were more lateral—nearer the shoulder. The other shots had also entered at an angle and spun her around, or entered that way because she herself was turning.

Carefully, Kiernan backed away from the window and straightened up. The easel had been knocked over. A coffee cup lay smashed on the floor, both the director’s chairs were overturned. She looked at the wall opposite the door, expecting to find blood splatters and noted a wide red band feathering out to where the easel had stood. She picked up the canvas of the Alaskan mud flats and leaned it against the wall. The blood on the painting was thicker, the band narrower, indicating that the canvas had been closer to the body. The dark red splotches seemed eerily at home on the brown of the mud. Most of the canvas had remained white. But now, on the left side, it was decorated with a dark-gray flash mark, a V lying on its side like a deadly wind blowing toward the mud flats.

“Kiernan.”

She spun around. It was Maureen’s voice, slightly muffled. Coming through the intercom. She could hear Maureen’s panic.

“Kiernan, are you okay?” Her phrases were coming in anxious gasps. “Be careful. Don’t try to operate the intercom. The controls work from this side.” Her breath hit the speaker. “Garrett and I are in the house. We’re okay. Can you get over here? Be careful. I know the killer’s out there. I’ll watch for you and wait at the back door.”

Kiernan tapped her finger on the doorknob. Should she believe Maureen? Why trust a woman who’d lied throughout the case? Slowly, she opened the door, glanced in both directions even though the fog obscured all but the ground in front of her. Then she ran full out across the slick grass toward the house.

The lights were off. The kitchen was dark. She caught the scent of Maureen’s shampoo before she made out her taut face, then the rifle she was holding. “Where’s Garrett?”

“Asleep.”

“He went to bed?”

“Of course. He saw Robin get shot. He came close to getting shot himself. He was jittery afterward, but as soon as that faded it all became just another moment to him.”

Squinting into the gloom, Kiernan stared at Maureen in disgust. “Maureen, you lured Robin here. Did you kill her?” she added, knowing that Maureen had not.

She heard the other woman’s quick intake of breath, saw her shrink back against the kitchen counter.

“No.”

“But you called her, didn’t you? You’d gotten the number of her car phone from Olsen. Delaney would have found
that.”

When Maureen didn’t answer, Kiernan said, “There’s no other way Robin could have found Garrett. You called me with your fake emergency, then you called her and told her I’d be at Barrow’s late this afternoon. That was the call that faded, not your call to me, right?”

“If I could call Robin, why wouldn’t I just give her directions here?” She shifted the rifle, one hand on the barrel, the other near the firing pin.

“Because she’d have arrived whenever she felt like it. This afternoon, two in the morning, maybe not until tomorrow. The advantage of surprise would have been all hers. No, Maureen. You called me; you figured out just when I’d get here. You let Robin follow me. And once I was here you chased me off as soon as you could. Then you just waited for Robin to show up.”