“Makes me realize why they wanted me as acting sheriff,” I said. “I’d be a chump who would be easily thrown off the track, and could be killed if he stumbled onto something.”
Lindsey tightened her grip on my hand. “Well, those assholes guessed wrong.”
I was finally tasting the beer. It was good to be alive.
“We’ve got to find the common thread,” I said, feeling my linear brain start to kick back in as my survival brain went back into standby. “Peralta and Nixon.”
“They can’t help us.”
I added, “Leo O’Keefe.”
“Also out of the picture.”
“What about this Jonathan Ledger?” I asked. “We’re sure he’s dead?”
“If not, he fooled a lot of obituary writers,” she said. “He didn’t have children. An irony there. We could try to run down ex-wives, that kind of thing.”
Lindsey read my expression. She said, “Marybeth.”
“Exactly,” I said. “She was involved with Leo. She got off and he went to prison. Now we know she was involved with orgies at Camelback Falls, and so was Dean Nixon. She’s the key. Can you find her?”
Lindsey smiled, her sensual lips curling. “I can find anybody, Dave. Certainly somebody who’s been in the system. Just get me a computer.”
I thought about that. It’s not like we could go back to the office and act like nothing happened. The jukebox started playing. It was a reggae version of “I Shot the Sheriff.” I let out a long sigh.
“We left the scene of a crime,” I said.
“Do you want to go back?” she asked.
I shook my head.
Lindsey said, “I never did like that BMW.”
When I was eight years old it was important to know all the secret back routes through the neighborhood. We made a map of holes that cut through hedges, trails that ran behind overgrown gardens. The alleys were our Ho Chi Minh Trail on the way to assorted rock fights, trash picking, and other mischief. We guarded our secrets jealously from adults and outside kids.
So it was old memory that led us up the alley between Cypress and Encanto Boulevard. It was pitch dark, and the gravel crunched under our feet. With her black turtleneck, black jeans, and dark hair, Lindsey just disappeared into the night. Only the whiteness of her hands beckoned me. And her breathing-the night was just that still. Mercifully, no dogs barked. Over the back hedge, the house looked just as we left it. A light was on in the kitchen. I had forgotten to start the dishwasher before we left. The ornamental lights in the courtyard were out. The timer shut them off at midnight, and it was closing in on 1 A.M. We crept around the side of the house, between the screened sunporch and the oleanders, where we could peer out onto the street. We had our guns drawn.
It was just early Sunday morning on Cypress Street. Lights were out. Neighbors were asleep, having spent their evenings in activities other than gunfights in downtown parking garages. Lindsey pointed down the street to a darkened van. I hadn’t seen it on the street before. The moonless night and the distance made it impossible to see if anyone was inside. We retreated back into the bushes, then went in the courtyard door into the sunporch.
Inside the house, we kept the lights off and didn’t speak. We made a quick sweep of the rooms-safe, for now. Lindsey closed herself in Grandfather’s office while I sat in a chair and looked out the picture window, the reloaded Python sitting heavily on my lap. A sheen of frost was marching up the windshield of the van. A distant streetlight made it glimmer silver-white. Otherwise, nothing moved.
Around me, the house breathed and creaked in all its familiar old sounds. I could even hear Lindsey’s hands doing their warp-speed typing on her laptop. If I thought hard enough, I knew I could have heard Peralta’s respirator. The darkness of the living room suddenly reminded me of the night Grandfather died, and how Grandmother and I sat up talking in the dark until the sun finally refilled the room with light. That had been a night in 1976, when I was a rookie deputy and the word of a death in the family had been passed down by the watch commander to my partner. Peralta came back from the phone, gave me the news simply, and drove us back to the station so I could go to the hospital.
I felt a stab of guilt, for leaving the scene of a crime, for endangering Lindsey, for leaving this house, the only material touchstone of my life, so vulnerable. We couldn’t stay here long. The BMW’s license tag would be run through DMV, and my name and address would scoot across the computer screen that sat on the console of a patrol car. And our only hope seemed to be finding a woman who had watched the carnage at Guadalupe twenty years ago.
The door to the office opened. Lindsey said, “Got her.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Kimbrough answered his phone on the third ring. A child was crying in the background, plates were banging, Sunday morning chaos. But after he recognized my voice, I heard a door close and the background noise went away.
“Where the hell are you, Sheriff? Are you OK?”
I just listened for a minute, trying to get a reading on his voice. What did he know? What was he hiding? I was no good at that kind of thing. What I did know was something about Sunday morning chaos. This Sunday morning, I hadn’t slept in twenty-seven hours. I knew-I’d counted them. My body ached with cold exhaustion, that peculiar feeling of being disconnected from real life, floating in a sea of disembodied pains and fatigue. I was just tired enough that every fear seemed magnified, and every certainty seemed at risk.
“I’m OK,” I said.
“PD found your car downtown,” he said. “It looked like it fell out of a parking garage, fifty feet to the street. Tell me you weren’t there, and that this was some car theft gone wrong.”