A Grave Talent (4 page)
Authors: Laurie R. King
Trujillo did not seem entirely encouraged by this response, thought Kate, straight-faced, but any answer was cut short as the wagon turned a hard corner and juddered to an abrupt halt that had all but the driver off their seats.
"Brakes work fine," was Detweiler's phlegmatic comment. The car face-to-face with their very bumper, filled with white-faced passengers, reversed into a wide spot a hundred yards up the road. It was the county's shiny new four-wheel-drive car, and it contained three women, two men, and a gaggle of excited children, all of whom watched the procession in wonder. The uniform of the man behind the wheel did not look entirely fresh, Kate noticed, and she had a sinking feeling that her own khaki trousers would soon look the same.
"That'll be the second bunch, coming down," said Trujillo. "Like I told you on the phone, I don't know how many of them we'll persuade to come down to Tyler's, but we'll get as many as we can. This third body will shake them, especially the ones with kids, and they'll cooperate more than they might otherwise. Some of them, though, you'll have to just go see. There's six or eight who are real hermits. You'd need a court order to pry them out, and even then they might just walk into the woods for a couple of weeks."
"A nice, straightforward investigation, I can see now."
"It is a bit different from San Francisco. Sir."
"It's a bit different from anywhere."
"That was Tyler's original idea."
"Well, it succeeded."
Samantha Donaldson was small for her age, forty-two pounds at her last checkup, but she looked even smaller now, her thin body huddled into the rotten log that had stopped her from rolling down into the creek that ran, at this point, about fifty feet below Tyler's Road. Kate's hands wanted to reach out and brush the leaves from the tumbled hair, wipe the dirt from the surprised little mouth, close the puzzled eyes, but instead she took out her notebook to record Hawkin's remarks and allowed her eyes to avoid the child's neck.
A couple of hours later they stood watching as the lifeless object that had been Samantha Donaldson, hands wrapped in bags against any evidence her nails might be hiding, covered in dirt and leaves, having been prodded, examined, and photographed in ways it never would have been in life, was folded into the anonymity of a body bag. The men moving the tiny burden onto the stretcher were well used to death, but there was none of the customary easy black humor here.
"You okay?" asked Hawkin as the disturbingly small parcel was carried past them.
"I'm not about to faint, Al," she snapped. "I've seen dead bodies before."
"Yes," he said, responding not at all to her tone. "But a dead child is a terrible thing."
"Yes." And because his voice was honest and his own loathing lay openly on his face, she answered in kind. "Yes, it's pretty awful. I probably would feel sick if it didn't make me so angry."
"You wouldn't be the first. The first dead child I had, I couldn't keep anything down for two days. Better to stay angry. Now, tell me where you think the murderer stood to throw her down there."
They found one vague ridge of mud that might or might not have been from the side of a shoe, braced to hurl forty pounds into the air. It was so beaten down by rain that it was impossible to define and could easily have been pushed up by a horse's hoof some days before. Other than that, there was a depressing similarity to the sites where the other two bodies had been found, and by the time the wet, aching team had finished their backbreaking examination of the hillside, they had accumulated a number of rusty tin cans; one broken Coke bottle, old; two buttons, one very old; a handful of odd bits of machinery; a half-buried car tire; a short length of ancient chain with a stub of leather dog collar attached; one cheap ballpoint pen, almost new; and an assortment of paper scraps, including a soggy matchbook from a bar in San Jose.
All that was much later, though. The doors slammed shut on the ill-filled bag that contained what had once been a little girl, the stoic team started down the hillside with their own, smaller, evidence bags, and Kate and Hawkin ducked under the yellow tapes and climbed back into the wagon.
"Back to home base?" inquired Detweiler.
"No, not much point in it yet." A couple with baby, child and dog trudged by, all in bright nylon ponchos. The woman smiled shyly, the child stared from the man's back. "They'll be drifting in for another hour or more. I want to see the Road again, up to the top, if this thing'll make it."
"No question about that," said the driver, sounding hurt. "She may be slow, but she's sure."
"Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It'll make things easier when we get back to Tyler's. Now, whose house is that?" Hawkin pointed past the driver's nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.
"That ain't a house, that's Jenny Cadena's goat shed." Kate wrote in the name. "Only now Harry Gustavson's using it to store the window glass for his house." She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. "Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he's still there?" He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.
Kate looked at the map and sighed. "Anybody have pencil?"
Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car's flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road's summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler's shoulder.
"Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey."
The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.
"That's where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother's lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill."
The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn't move.
"What is he after?" he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. "What is he doing?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
"Neither do I. Neither do I." He suddenly looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence, and began dutifully to explain.
"The bodies are unmolested; he's not the more obvious kind of pedophile. It isn't money; there's no ransom. He just picks them up, so carefully that so far he's been invisible, and strangles them. After that he removes their clothing and leaves them on or near Tyler's Road. Why here, a hundred miles from where he's picked them up? Why is he doing this?"
He cocked one eyebrow at her and turned back to the waiting behemoth, and though she knew he wasn't expecting an answer, she wished she could give him one. All that came to mind was, "So maybe he's a nut case," and that was so obviously inadequate that she said nothing and followed him meekly back down the rough surface that passed as Tyler's Road.
Five minutes later Detweiler stopped the wagon on a hilltop at a wide, clear area with, incongruously, a picnic table. The temporary, enthusiastic sunshine illuminated glimpses of the Road below them and revealed a wedge of the distant, turgid sea. A scattering of roofs and cleared fields peeped from the vista of dark redwoods. The occasional gleam of solar panels and two high-tech wind-powered generators were the only indicators of the twentieth century.
"Nice, huh?" grunted Detweiler. "Tyler says he's going to build up here when he gets old and gray. I doubt it. He likes to be in the middle of things. Always will." He put the wagon back into gear and they lurched downhill, the engine whining now as it kept the ex-fire truck from flinging itself down to the sea. "Oh, yeah, I forgot old Peterson's place. It's up there, see the flag?" The flag was an old scrap of torn sheeting. "Up along that pathway. No, he doesn't have a drive. When he built the place he carried everything in by foot."
Kate wrote in the name Peterson and reflected that a housing inspector would have a grand time with the violations on this hillside. She said something of the sort to Detweiler, careful to avoid the impression that she was in any way connected with such a low breed of bureaucrat.
"Oh, yeah, well, what they don't know won't hurt them. Actually there's been an ongoing war between Tyler and the county over the building regulations. At first they said that all the houses had to be wired for power, even if there wasn't any for miles. So there's half a dozen places with wall plugs and empty light fixtures, and kerosene lamps. Right now he's trying to get around it by having the whole Road made into an experimental, non-profit organization. Has a state senator on his side; he may do it yet. That's Riddle's place, do you have that?" he asked Kate.
"Yes, Ben Riddle, whose brother Bob may or may not be there or in the Cadena-Gustavson goat shed-storage barn."
"Clear as mud, eh?" He laughed heartily, and Kate wondered if he ever ran out of cliches.
The litany continued to wind with the Road.
"That's Brother Luke's place. He and Maggie've lived there since Tyler first got the idea. He used to be a monk somewhere. Not now, though. They've got five kids. The Dodsons live there, funny place, real dark. Nice clearing in back for the ponies, though. Angie's little girl Amy loves her pony. And I told you about Vaun, way up there? She's an artist, real good one." Visions of castles and maidens with starry-eyed unicorns danced in Kate's head. "The Newborns--those little house things are for the pigs. And Tommy Chesler you know."
Coming down the mountain they stopped to pull the county car out of the creek bed into which its four driven wheels had taken it, and as they continued down, they picked up several parties of chattering hill folk who might easily have been going to a hoedown rather than to a murder interrogation. (What is a hoedown, anyway? wondered Kate.) Kate found herself wedged between Hawkin and a very large, damp young man who smelled of dog, and with an even damper and more fragrant baby on her lap. After ten minutes a high voice from somewhere in the front asked if anyone had Ivanhoe.
"Is that a disease?" wondered Kate aloud.
"It's my baby," the voice answered.
"Is it hairless and wet?"
"Probably."
"Then it's here."
"Oh, good. I just wanted to make sure he got in. You can keep him until we get to Tyler's."
"Thank you," said Kate gravely, and tried to decide whether the bouncing was from the ruts or from Hawkin laughing, and if the latter, what she should do about it. In the end she did nothing.
The multicolored crowd that whirled in and out of the rooms in Tyler's house was like something from another world, or perhaps several worlds--part Amish, part Woodstock, part pioneer. Children ran yelling and shrieking among the knees and the furniture, dogs wandered in and were thrown out into the rain, the smells of bread and spaghetti sauce and wood smoke mingled with wet clothing, underwashed bodies, and the occasional aura of stale marijuana. Tyler had given the police three rooms downstairs, furnished with a motley collection of tables and desks, where they prepared to take statements. Kate stood in the main room--the hall-- with its fifteen-foot ceilings and the floor space of an average house, and wondered how Hawkin intended to proceed with a murder investigation in this chaos. For the first time she was very grateful that he, not she, was in charge.
As if he had heard her thoughts Hawkin appeared at her elbow.
"As I said, a nice straightforward investigation. I'm going to talk with them, and I want you with me. Over at the fireplace." Within two steps he had disappeared, and Kate pushed through the throng in his wake, wishing that her mother had married a taller man. At the massive stone fireplace, beneath a display of broadswords that fanned out in a sunburst, they stepped up onto the high hearthstones and stood looking out over the sea of heads.
"May I have your attention, please? Please, may I have your attention, there are a few things I need to say." He was not shouting, but he pitched his gravelly voice with a sharp volume that filled the room and reached into the adjoining doorways, and gradually faces turned in their direction and the battering pandemonium began to die down. Children were hushed, kitchen pans stopped crashing, and the assembled residents of Tyler's Road turned to hear what this necessary evil, this representative of oppression, wanted of them.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alonzo Hawkin. This is Casey Martinelli. As I'm sure you all know by now, we were sent down from San Francisco to coordinate the investigation into the murders of the three little girls whose bodies have been found in this area. I'd like to thank you all for coming down to Tyler's. I know--I have seen--what an inconvenience it is for some of you to get down here, but it is saving us a great deal of time, and after all, time saved may mean a life saved."
He had their full attention now. A small baby began to whine, and the mother settled it to her breast without taking her eyes off Hawkin.
"We are here to take statements from you in hopes that the pieces of information you give us can be put together and lead us to the killer. I don't need to tell you that the murderer is somehow connected with your Road. You all know that, and I expect that's why a lot of you are here. It is not nice to think that one of your neighbors might be linked to the murder of three children. Might even be that murderer." Eyes dropped, lips smiled nervously, and fear turned a crowded room into a lot of people trying not to edge away from each other.
"We are not here, I will say now, to worry about drugs, housing code violations, or who is sleeping in whose bed, unless of course any of those things are related to the murders. We may ask you about drugs or violations, but it's not what we're after. Any of you are free to choose the police officer you want to take your statement. Because there are so many of you to keep straight we'd like to take your photograph with an instant camera and attach it to your statement. This is only to make things run more smoothly. You will be asked a series of questions, some of which may sound unnecessary or rude or just plain silly. Please answer them. None of us are playing games, and we're every bit as anxious to finish here as you are. From the looks of it," he added with a smile, "perhaps more so."
There was a mild commotion in one corner, and a little voice piped up, "--to have games, Mama? Is that what he said?" Grateful, nervous laughter skittered through the room, and Hawkin's smile broadened.
"That reminds me, you see that little man in the corner over there?" Heads craned, and an enormous man with extremely black skin and an inadequate uniform lifted an identifying hand. More laughter, now uncertain. "That's Sergeant Fischer. Bob Fischer hasn't seen his own kids for two whole days now, and if you want to send your kids to talk to him while you're giving your statements, he'd be absolutely overjoyed. He'll show them all his walkie-talkie and his handcuffs, but, uh, Bob? Try not to lose the keys this time, okay?" Relaxed laughter now, which Hawkin gathered up in his final words.
"One last thing. I know it's a bit late for saying this, but I'd appreciate it if you'd not talk to each other about what you may have seen, or what someone else thinks they saw. Your statement needs to be yours, and yours alone. We'll sift it over, and if we need further information about something, we'll come and find you. There are seven of us here to take your statements, if you would please begin at that end of the room, take one set of forms for each adult. We'd better get started." He held them for a moment with his eyes. "Thank you for your assistance. There's some bastard out there murdering babies. I think you can help us find who it is. Thank you."
"Ever coach a football team, Al?" Kate murmured in his ear as the meeting broke up.
"What do you think I was doing just then?" he replied. "Take a desk. I'll let you know when I'm going to talk with Tyler."
The morning wore on, with the painstaking business of names and numbers, photographs with the instant camera, locations on the map, questions: Where do you work? Have you ever been arrested? Where were you on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, on the twenty-fourth of January, yesterday afternoon? Did you see anyone yesterday afternoon? Did anyone see you yesterday afternoon? Did you see or hear a car on the Road yesterday evening? Do you smoke anything, use matches, go into bars, own a car, drive a car, have any other pieces of information that might possibly be related? On, and on, and on.
Answers were recorded, reactions to certain questions were noted, voices dropped, and tempers flared. Hawkin moved in and out of the rooms, chatting, encouraging, defusing hot spots, disappearing to walk through the mud to speak with the newsmen. Gallons of coffee and herbal tea were drunk, children were laid down for naps, a hugely pregnant woman began to look pale and was sent off to an upstairs room. At one point a plate of vegetarian spaghetti and hot bread appeared in front of Kate, and she and her interviewee slurped at each other and got sauce on the forms.
At one o'clock Kate found herself in one of the more difficult interviews of the day. Not that Flower Underwood wasn't cooperative--she was, and friendly and intelligent besides. It was her child who created the problems.
The child was a boy, or at least Kate assumed it was a boy, for the woman didn't correct her when she asked how old he was. He was an utterly irrepressible two-year-old who took her pens apart, ate one of the forms, emptied her purse three times (wallet and keys went into her pocket after she pried them from his inquisitive fingers), and climbed up onto his mother's lap to nurse five times, the last time squirting Kate with milk from the unoccupied breast. Deliberately. Into this stepped Hawkin, who put his hand on her shoulder as she was writing.
"Pardon me, Casey, but when you're finished you might like to join Tyler and me upstairs. All the way to the top of the stairs, third door on your left."
Kate nodded her agreement and looked up to catch the tail end of an extremely odd expression on the woman's face.
"What is it?"
"Nothing, really." She was stifling amusement.
"Something about upstairs? Was that it?"
Flower Underwood's lips twitched, and finally she burst out laughing, which caused her son to pull back and stare at her, milky mouth agape.
"Well, you know," she said helpfully, "the downstairs of this place is pretty public. Everyone on the Road uses it like a living room."
"And upstairs--the top floor--is not public, you mean? Quite private, in fact?" The woman's eyes were sparkling, those of her son drooping as she caressed his back. "By private invitation only, that sort of thing, yes?"
"That sort of thing," she agreed.
"Have you been up there, to the top of the stairs?"
"Not in quite a while, though I don't imagine it's changed much. Or Tyler either, for that matter." It seemed a good memory, thought Kate, judging from the face across from her.
"Would you say that many of the women on the Road have 'been upstairs'?"
"A fair number. Probably most of the single women at one time or another, maybe, oh, a third of the attached ones."
"I would have thought that would cause a lot of trouble."
"Not here. In suburbia, perhaps, but not here. And Tyler's very careful not to get too close if there's another man involved who would object. He's a good man, very caring, very generous."
"With money?"
"With everything." Again the amused, fond smile crossed her face.
"He only invites women upstairs?"
"Oh, no, men too. Not to bed, of course." She giggled at the absurdity of the thought, and Kate was struck dumb by this outcrop of conventionality. "He takes guys up there to play chess, I know, or just to have a drink or a smoke if something's happening down here and he wants some quiet."
"But you're sure it's no more than that?" Kate persisted.
That gave her pause, and Kate had her turn to be amused, to see that Flower Underwood was troubled by this idea, whereas Tyler's wholesale hetero relationships had fazed her not at all.
"No, he invites a lot of people up to his rooms, not just to sleep with them. I've never heard of him sleeping with a man. I'm sure I would have. There's no hiding anything on the Road, not for long. No, I'm sure Tyler's a normal man," she said, firmly rejecting the possibility.
" 'Normal.' "
"Well, straight, anyway. At any rate, he is very sweet. In bed, I mean."
This interview is getting out of hand, thought Kate, and tried to pull it back to earth.
"Does he have any children?"
"A couple for sure. He has a wife, or an ex-wife, I guess, who lives in L.A. with their daughter, who's ten or eleven. There's also a little boy here on the Road who's probably his, though it's hard to be sure because he's only three. There's a couple other possibilities, but the mothers aren't sure."
Kate's eyes involuntarily strayed to the sleeping blond terror, and the mother's eyes followed.
"No, not this one. You'd only have to see my old man to be sure about that. She looks just like him. Say, if you want to know what the men do--" Her voice faltered as a thought struck her and strengthened again as she pushed it away. "If you want to hear about Tyler's rooms from a man, you could talk to Charlie. Charlie Waters is my old man. He's down here all the time, playing chess with Tyler." Her voice trailed off and her eyes rose to search the room beyond, and Kate thought it a good time to call the session to a halt.
"Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Underwood. I really appreciate your coming down today," but the woman had already risen with her groggy burden and headed for the hallway.
Kate scribbled her signature and dropped the papers on the next table--where Bob Fischer was talking to a man, with three peaceful children distributed over their two laps--and sprinted for the stairs.
