"Whatever. Call me when you come up with something better."
After I hung up, I came to terms with the fact that Jimmy and I could do no more than circle our target until I met Martin Cale. Corey had blackmailed Billy Hatfill. Now Billy was leading me to a man who could have provided Corey with the information he had needed to do the job.
Central Coast Ranges Same Night
Deputy Amy Stahl drove west on Highway 198 into the mountains just west of Coalinga. Her father had been an amateur geologist, and she distracted herself from the fact that she was carrying stolen evidence in the trunk of her Ford Escape by thinking about the landscape she was passing through.
The Coast Ranges had surfaced only a million years earlier. Their interior rested atop a giant platform of granite that had been carried north from below the Sierra Nevada range by the San Andreas Fault. Before they surfaced, the ocean waters carved them with inlets and bays that were now home to cattle ranches and grasslands. None of the peaks were high enough to block out the night sky, but in some places they were rough and jagged, their granite flanks exposed and flaking. In other places, they were round and smooth, as if God's hand had favored some parts of the landscape and not others.
Caroline Hughes had given Amy directions to a road that didn't exist on any map. After twenty minutes on Highway 198, Amy saw the pair of valley oaks that Caroline had told her about. They were huge trees, their branches touching the ground as if their crowns had been split down the center by a giant axe.
Even though she couldn't see the road, Amy made the turn and drove over a sweep of grassland dotted by tumbles of chaparral. To the west, she could see the fence of a neighboring cattle ranch. Far ahead, there was a gentle slope curtained by dense stands of valley oaks with leaves that turned the color of ash in her headlights.
She almost drove right into the fence. It was fifteen feet high and its slender posts were painted black. There was no moon to light the coils of razor wire that ran along the top. Instead of slats or chain link, it had thin strands of something that looked like airplane cable. No sign warned trespassers to keep away.
Amy stepped out of her car and studied the fence. She picked up a stick and hurled it at the thin cables. The collision made a sound like the snap of a giant guitar string. Caroline Hughes had told her that this property used to belong to her father. She had said nothing about why her father had needed the protection of an electrified fence.
Suddenly an entire section of the gate swung inward, just enough for Amy to fit her truck through. The minute she drove through it, the gate swung shut behind her. She kept her Escape at ten miles an hour as she crossed the expanse between the fence and the dense stand of valley oaks that ascended the gentle slope up ahead.
Amy had been a deputy with the Kings County Sheriff's Department for five years. In that time, she had never planted or stolen evidence. The evidence she carried in her truck had lain untouched for over a week, but that did little to stanch her guilt. She knew the reason for her breach of ethics was not a simple one. The Valley was infected by a virus that was being brewed on the stovetops of trailers across the state of California.
The virus was crystal meth, and it killed most of its hosts by setting them ablaze, sometimes igniting explosions so white it looked like heaven had sprung a leak—an explosion that had killed an entire family as well as an innocent schoolteacher who had taken her last breath in Amy's arms.
Two security lights flicked on amid the trees up ahead. The lights guided her into a clearing.
The house was a long one-story log cabin with a small front porch. A short chimney rose from the broad sloping roof. From the treetops behind the house, an antenna that looked like it could pick up TV signals from Asia thrust itself into the night sky.
Caroline Hughes was waiting for her on the front porch. She was not the same kind of beauty her mother had been. Janice Hughes had moved through the world with unassuming grace.
Everything about her daughter was thick and rigid, from her sculpted arms to her muddy sheen of freckles that almost looked like a coat of war paint, to the way she could make a simple question sound like a command.
Amy opened her trunk and pulled out the box that contained the remains of Tonya McCormick's pit bull. Caroline accepted it in both arms without bending under its weight. "What condition are they in?" she asked.
"Bones, mostly," Amy answered. "There's some skin left too. You going to put them back together?"
"I might not have to," Caroline said.
"You some kind of doctor or something?" Amy asked.
"First-year surgical resident," Caroline answered. She turned and headed toward the cabin.
Amy took note of how Caroline's clipped response didn't tell her if she had any plans to return to her studies. Maybe she planned to stay in this cabin forever, hunting the man she believed responsible for her mother's death.
Amy followed her inside. The cabin had a ten-foot ceiling. Vague lamplight came from a loft that extended out from a flimsy plywood wall that separated the galley kitchen from the common room. A giant circular rug displayed the outline of a deer leaping through a yellow egg yolk of sun. In the cast-iron stove, the last embers of a poorly tended fire were dying. A ratty sofa was pushed against one wall, covered with bright, hand-sewn bed quilts. Next to the sofa was an old schoolteacher's desk, its pockmarked wood losing its dark stain. Caroline gathered a mess of what looked like news clippings off it and shoved them inside a drawer. She dropped the cardboard box on top of the desk, angled the desk lamp over it, and peered inside.
"You said this was your father's place," Amy said.
"It was."
"Your father didn't want a place closer to the coast?" Amy asked. Caroline didn't respond.
"I'm just curious. Your mother never talked about him."
"Did you have a lot of conversations with my mother?" Caroline asked in a flat voice that sounded somehow accusatory.
"Enough to know that she was a remarkable woman," Amy said.
Caroline removed a pair of salad tongs and several paintbrushes from her desk drawer. Then she squeezed her hands into a pair of latex gloves.
Amy inspected the map of California taped to the wall beside the desk. Thumbtacks had been pushed through several small towns throughout the San Joaquin Valley. They covered an area that went as far south as Bakers-field and as far north as Visalia, the Tulare County seat nestled against the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
"What are these?" Amy asked.
"Home meth lab accidents," Caroline answered. "Just like the one that blew apart Tonya McCormick's trailer. Flash fires started all of them. Some of those flash fires were triggered by the same type of white phosphine refuse they found under Tonya's trailer."
"What did the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement have to say about these accidents?"
"The same thing they said about Tonya McCormick's trailer." She began removing the charred bones from the box and putting them on the desk. "Meth addicts turn into very bad people who start very bad fires."
"Meth labs go up all the time in this state, Caroline."
"Not like this!" she snapped, jerking her head up to glare at Amy. Amy bowed her head and raised her palms. Caroline took a deep breath. "There was a boy involved in all of those as well.
Thirteen or fourteen years old. Less than partial remains found. Just like Caden McCormick."
Amy didn't protest. She trusted the BNE's working theory about the explosion of Tonya McCormick's trailer as little as Caroline did. She couldn't believe that a thirteen-year-old boy would start a fire that hot, an explosion that powerful, and then head for the hills out of guilt or shame or whatever convenient psychological excuse the arson investigators felt like using that day. In the weeks since the explosion, Amy had done enough research to know that fires in excess of a thousand degrees still left some human remains, more than those traces of Caden McCormick that had been gathered from the wreckage of his former home.
Amy turned away f
rom the map as if it was giving off a hot glare.
"Can I trust you?" Caroline asked.
"I don't know what trust means to you, Caroline."
"It means that when you come to me and tell me that my mother's last words were about a dog, you let me do what I have to with that information."
Amy felt the reflexive maxim of a law enforcement officer forming in her chest: Civilians, especially the grieving survivors of a crime victim, should never, ever be allowed to . . .
"Amy, when I told you what Lucy Vernon said to me at the gas station, you looked like I had busted your kneecap!"
Amy realized her hands were fists and deliberately uncurled them. "It's a scary story, Caroline. But that's all it is. I've heard it before. Everyone out here who's ever wondered why every Mexican national who tries to take over the meth trade either goes missing or dies has heard that story. It still doesn't mean there's some rogue assassin at work."
Caroline squinted at her, then at the bones spread in front of her. "You wouldn't have brought me this if you didn't believe me."
Amy didn't respond because the other woman was right. "This is going to take a while,"
Caroline finally said. Amy stayed put. "There's something else, Caroline." Amy saw that she had her full attention. "I made some calls. Just to see how the task force was doing with its report on the explosion."
"They think he did it on purpose, don't they?" "Yeah."
"They're going to say Caden McCormick started the fire deliberately," Caroline continued.
"A thirteen-year-old boy who couldn't even raise his hand in my mother's classroom. And they're going to say he burned his parents alive. You know that's bullshit." Caroline waved at the map above their heads. "The same bullshit they said about those meth lab accidents, too."
"What do you need me for?" Amy asked. "Sounds like you've got it all figured out on your own."
"I need you because Caden McCormick is alive," she said. "He didn't start that fire. He didn't leave that trailer on his own."
Instead of going home, Amy found a hole-in-the-wall bar in Coalinga where she was the only white face and the jukebox played an endless stream of Marc Anthony and Celia Cruz.
After three beers and a few strange looks from the bartender, Amy closed her eyes and traveled back to the front porch of Janice Hughes's tiny house in Avenal. The night a month before she died when Janice had called to report a prowler, she came to the door with a polite but tense smile on her face, holding the flaps of her robe closed over a V-neck T-shirt. Was Avenal's newest schoolteacher really a lesbian, as Amy had heard? Sometimes one rumor was all your fantasy life needed to get to work.
That night Amy had searched Janice's property and turned up no evidence of a prowler.
Janice apologized and gave Amy an apologetic but worried smile, running one hand through her hair in a gesture that Amy watched raptly. When Janice offered her coffee, Amy's heart pounded.
A few moments later, when Janice had squeezed past Amy to get to the kitchen counter, the tip of Amy's nose had brushed against Janice's hair. Janice froze and Amy raised one hand against the woman's side, maybe to steady her if she tripped or maybe so she could slide one arm around Janice's stomach and fold her into an embrace, one slow enough to give Janice time to pull away, if brushing up against Amy's body didn't quicken her breaths the way it seemed to.
The encounter lasted only a second before some imperative of forward motion set in. Before Amy had time to recover, the two of them were sitting at the kitchen table, Janice listening politely as Amy stammered her way through a story about a nature walk she had taken with her father in the Diablo Range just before he passed away. After fifteen minutes, Janice yawned and Amy was on her way, hoping that Janice would report a prowler again some time soon. But the next time Janice Hughes called 911, she reported something far worse.
Amy's cell phone rang in her jeans pocket. She answered it.
"The dog's jaw was crushed." There was a tense energy in the other woman's voice. "Not the kind of fractures you would expect from an explosion. We're talking about an equal upward and downward pressure on the jaw. The only thing I can think of is some kind of animal trap."
The bartender noticed the expression on Amy's face and furrowed his brow.
"The surfaces of the fractures are as badly burned as the rest of the jaw," Caroline continued.
"The dog's jaw was crushed before the explosion."
"What does this mean?" Amy whispered.
"It means this guy wanted to sneak up on two meth heads around midnight and he had to get rid of the dog first. How was he supposed to do that? Shoot it and wake up the whole neighborhood? No. He set a trap. He got the fucker by the jaws so it couldn't make a sound."
Amy's racing heartbeat flushed the shivering from her limbs.
"Do you get it, Amy?" Caroline said, her voice rising in pitch. "My mother was trying to tell you that this dog was dead by the time she got to the trailer. She was trying to tell you someone had killed it."
The music in the bar was suddenly piercing. Several feet away, a woman erupted with laughter that sounded tinged with malice. The bartender was still staring at Amy and she saw nothing but evil intent in his narrow eyes.
"She was trying to tell you someone took Caden," Caroline said.
"What are you going to do?" Amy heard herself ask.
The girl took a long time to respond. "Do I really have to tell you?"
Chapter 9
When the phone rang, I was dreaming of a marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady. I was sitting beside him in the cockpit. The windows filled with blue water rippling with the sun's reflection, and I realized he was flying us straight into the Pacific Ocean. I tried to convince him to pull up, but the words that came out of my mouth were lines from the episode of Everybody Loves Raymond that was playing several feet away from my sleeping body.
Suddenly I had the phone to my ear. Nate Bain said my name in a tense voice. I buzzed him in. He walked into my apartment with his head bowed, holding the straps of his backpack. He wore a white tank top that clung to his chest and a pair of baggy gym shorts. He wouldn't look at me directly. The only smell he gave off was the vaguely floral scent of his hair product and the sharp odor of pure sweat. Not the noxious stench associated with crystal meth or the sickly sweet smell of alcohol.
"Were you asleep?" he asked.
"Barely," I said. "What's wrong?"
"Can I hang out here for a while?"
I gestured to the love seat and got him a Diet Coke without asking whether he wanted it. For a while he stared through the flickering television. I studied him. He was a winded and sagging version of the guy who had tracked me down at The Abbey on Friday night. It was late, and he was dressed to get undressed; I was fairly sure he had chosen my apartment over the bathhouse and didn't want to admit it. Now I would do the same thing for him that his sober neighbor had done for me.
He looked up. "Someone's following me."
"Who?"
"I don't know," he said. "I went to a meeting tonight and I saw him sitting in the back. He didn't talk to anyone. I was kind of checking him out."
"Describe him."
"Tall, built, but a young face. He was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. In the meeting.
Most people don't do that except in movies about AA. He followed me when I was walking home. When he saw I saw him, he disappeared. Then later he was outside my apartment building." He didn't like the look he saw on my face. "I'm not making this up, Adam."
"I didn't say you were. You're kind of high profile around here, Nate. You have fans."
He shook his head. "This guy wasn't a fan."
I thought of the two kids I had seen in Scott Koffler's Jacuzzi the day I had dropped in on him. Hard bodies and young faces. "Why don't you stay here tonight?" I said.
For a second, I thought he might cry. Instead, he said sure and returned his attention to the television.
I didn't think it would be of any use
to call Scott Koffler and tell him that I had dropped the Daniel Brady story. If I had wanted to conclude things between us, I should have endured his comments about my mother instead of breaking his nose. I was willing to bet that the guy who had tailed Nate was one of Scott's young charges. If that was the case, Koffler was trying to even a score that would never be settled with lukewarm intimidation. Respond, and I would only crank up the heat.
Nate nodded off after a while. I stayed up another few hours, checking the street outside for any suspicious shadows. There were none. I double-checked the locks, threw a blanket over Nate, turned out the lights, and crawled into bed.
I awoke to the feel of Nate's hands on my bare chest. I opened my eyes and saw that he had shoved my T-shirt up over my chest. He was shirtless, and the sight of his bubble butt in his white underwear did to me what Nate knew it would. His mouth met mine and at first I gave in, ready to use his body to escape my own head.
But Nate's kisses were too urgent and desperate. He rubbed against me with exaggerated movements that seemed more about displaying his body to the rest of my apartment than uniting it with mine. I brought my hands to the sides of his face and gently pulled our mouths apart.
"Let's not," I whispered.
"Why?" he whispered. He had heard an insult, and his face was scrunched as if in pain. He wanted to give me something, and he believed his body was all he had to offer.
"Because you don't have to," I said.
This didn't please him. He pushed himself off me and got to his feet. "Whatever. I'll just go,"
he said, his voice shaky with anger and embarrassment.
I got out of the bed and gestured to it. Nate stared at me for a few seconds through the darkness. "Take the bed," I said.
"You think I'm positive, don't you?"
I tried to keep my voice steady. "I think that you're just off crystal and I'm barely a week off alcohol and cocaine. We have enough in common, all right? You don't have to sleep with me to make me your friend."
Nate looked surprised. He cocked his head. "If you're going teach me a lesson, you can at least turn me over your knee first."
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