Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  “That was thirteen years ago.”

  “Yeah, but in this canyon it feels like it was yesterday. Have you looked around?”

  “Some.”

  “Weird, isn’t it? Creepy. Nobody ever comes here, not even kids looking for a place to drink or screw.”

  Guy thought of the footprints in the dust at the Blakeley house. “You sure of that?”

  “Reasonably. Folks in town call it an evil place, when they mention it at all.”

  “What about you?”

  “Do I think it’s evil? As much as a place can be, I guess.”

  “No, I mean, do you come here often? Have you looked around?”

  “I did when I first moved into the cabin, back before I knew about those murders. But never again. No way.”

  “You go inside any of the buildings?”

  “Uh-uh. That’s criminal trespass.”

  “But you’re trespassing on the land now.”

  Lawrence shifted from foot to foot. “It doesn’t seem like it. I mean, land’s land. Houses, that’s personal.”

  “So why’d you follow me?”

  “I don’t know, I just did. After what happened today… You know we had another murder?”

  “The girl they fished out of Lantern Cove? Yes. Don’t tell me you thought I was the killer, hiding out where nobody ever goes?”

  “Look, man, I didn’t think. It just seemed like the thing to do. And if you find my behavior weird, you oughta take a look at what’s going on in town.”

  “What’s happening there?”

  “According to my girlfriend, Signal Port’s about to go nuts. She’s a waitress at the hotel, so she sees it all.”

  “Civil unrest?”

  “Could happen. This is a hard-drinking community, Mr. Newberry. A lot of the people’re hot-tempered because the local economy sucks. They use their fists to settle arguments, usually in the parking lots of the bars. And a lot of the pickups in those lots have gun racks. Draw your own conclusions.”

  “I’d say the town’s in for a rough night.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll tell you what—this canyon’s creepy, but at least it’s not dangerous. No matter what walks here at night, it’s a lot more benign than the folks in town.”

  “Yeah, that’s my car,” Sean Bartlow said. “Where’d you say it is?”

  Rho felt her heartbeat accelerate. She warned herself against becoming impatient with him. “Soledad County. It was abandoned on Highway One south of Signal Port.”

  “The bitch! I told her to take good care of it.”

  “Who, Mr. Bartlow?”

  “… Friend of mine. I loaned it to her.”

  “And her name is?”

  “Why d’you need to know?”

  “We’re trying to locate the driver on an unrelated matter.”

  “What matter? What’d she do?”

  “Please, Mr. Bartlow, her name?”

  “… Chrys.”

  “The full name, please.”

  “I don’t know her last name. She’s just somebody I met at one of the clubs on the Strip.”

  You’re lying, Rho thought. “You loaned your car to someone whose full name you don’t know?”

  “Right.”

  “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “Only that she… had to visit her sick mother.”

  Lie number two. “I see. Is this your license-plate number?” She gave that of the stolen tags on the Mercedes.

  “No.” He rattled off the number of the plates that belonged on the car. “You’ve got the wrong person. That’s not my car after all.”

  “It’s yours. The VIN matches. But someone’s switched the plates for stolen ones—”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Mr. Bartlow, we need your friend’s full name. If you don’t cooperate you could be charged with obstruction, maybe even as an accessory to a felony.”

  “Felony! Yeah, okay then. Her last name’s Ackerman. Chrystal Ackerman. C-h-r-y-s-t-a-l.”

  “And you know her from where?”

  “Is this gonna get back to my father? I mean, technically he still owns the car.”

  “There’ll be no need for that, providing you cooperate fully.”

  Silence, except for Sean Bartlow’s harsh breathing. “Okay,” he said, “I didn’t meet her at a club. Chrys is a sex worker. Phone sex. I’ve been calling her for about a year, and a few months ago I talked her into coming to my place. She’s been coming ever since, and last weekend she asked to borrow the car because hers isn’t reliable enough for a long trip.”

  “A trip to northern California?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not to visit her sick mother.”

  “… No. She said she had a business deal going, had to meet somebody up there to finalize it. She told me she’d cut me in if I let her use the Mercedes. I need the money. My father’s a tightwad.”

  “All right, Mr. Bartlow, do you have an address and phone number for Ms. Ackerman?”

  “I don’t know where she lives, but I have the number of her private phone.” He recited it.

  “Thank you. Only a few more questions. Will you describe her, please?”

  “She’s about five-five, long straight blonde hair, gray eyes, great body, butterfly tattoo over her right nipple.”

  “Her age?”

  “She said nineteen.”

  “Anything else about her that you recall?”

  “We talked fantasy, not reality.”

  “Think, Mr. Bartlow.”

  “Good Christ, what am I supposed to remember? She’s nothing but a whore!”

  Nothing but a whore. Nothing but a woman with a broken-down car. Nothing but a floater.

  But now Ms. Nothing had a name: Chrystal Ackerman.

  Chrystal: Before

  Friday, October 6

  11:19 A.M.

  There it is, the place Jude calls my legacy.

  Looks awful run-down, with those gates laying on the ground and monster weeds growing in the driveway. Funny, we must’ve driven through them dozens of times, but none of it looks familiar.

  Go north, Jude said, park at the wide place by the speed-limit sign. Follow the little stream uphill to the well house. Cross the footbridge, and you’re there. Get in and out quick.

  But Jesus, what if the stream’s dried up or the well house and the footbridge aren’t there anymore? I don’t remember them either.

  Big blank, that whole year, even if I was six years old. Like a hole in my memory. Good thing too. What Jude told me is too awful, too depressing. I got enough bad memories without carrying that one around with me.

  There’s the wide place. Pull in, get out, lock the car. Stream’s supposed to flow under the highway through a culvert. Yeah, I see it. Running downhill fast—clear, clean. There’s nothing like that in the desert. Or trees like these. And the air here—it almost hurts to breathe it.

  Okay, I’m following the stream, but I don’t see no well house. Maybe—Wait, there it is. Ancient shed with a big wooden tank that looks like a grungy hot tub. Newer cinderblock tank next to it, covered with moss. Me and Eric and Heath and Oriana, we—

  Oh!

  We used to play in the well house. Climbed into that slimy tub and pretended we were at some Hollywood party. Eric’s idea. His dad was gonna be a hot shit screenwriter as soon as he got something written. Everybody’s folks were gonna do something important, get famous. Even Jude and Leo. Well, we know how that turned out.

  Eric, Heath, Oriana. I remember them now. They’ve been dead longer than they were alive.

  No, not Oriana. She survived. She was the lucky one. Well, maybe not so lucky. She was the only one.…

  Sunday, October 8

  Evening

  You want to tell me what happened here, Mr. Jacoby?”

  Rho sat facing one of the proprietors of the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast in the inn’s high-ceilinged parlor. Kevin Jacoby was a slender, handsome man in his thirties, but at the moment his fe
atures were twisted in shame. Around them lay a scene of wreckage, and Jacoby’s partner, Brandon Fuller, was in the kitchen being treated by EMTs from the Life Support District for a broken arm and other less serious injuries.

  Jacoby glanced toward the hallway. “Is he going to be…?”

  “All right? Yes. And he doesn’t want to press charges against you, but I still need to hear in your own words what happened.”

  Jacoby expelled his breath noisily. “God, I’ve never done anything like that in my life. I just snapped. I feel terrible about it.”

  “I’m sure you do. What precipitated the snapping?”

  “Well, we’d been drinking.” He motioned at a silver cocktail shaker that lay on the oriental carpet, leaking liquid and ice. “But that wasn’t really the cause of it.”

  “What was?”

  “The guests leaving. They were the last guests we had booked through the end of the year, and they were supposed to stay till Wednesday. I could tell they didn’t really like it here, and this morning they went to the hotel for brunch and heard about that murder. Came back, packed, and left. Afterwards Brandon got quiet and moody. Tonight when I finally pressed him, he said he didn’t think we were going to make it with the inn.”

  That didn’t surprise Rho, but she asked, “You’re not doing well?”

  “Not at all. The place has great potential, and people stop here, but they don’t stay long, and they don’t come back. Tonight I told Brandon it’s this town. There’s not much to do here, and it’s kind of… demoralized. That was when he let me in on the secret.”

  “What secret?” As if I don’t know.

  “About those murders years ago in Cascada Canyon. Apparently he’s known about them for quite some time, but didn’t bother to enlighten me.”

  “And his withholding knowledge was why you snapped?”

  “Not exactly. I mean, I hated his keeping a secret from me, but I realized he did it so I wouldn’t worry about the inn any more than I usually do. No, what made me explode was that he didn’t find out about the murders before we sank our last dime into this place. You see, Brandon was responsible for the property search. He was supposed to check into anything that might have a negative impact on our investment. But he fell in love with the inn and went blindly ahead. Tonight he admitted it. And I just…” He motioned at the disorder around them.

  Rho studied Kevin Jacoby. In the year and a half he’d lived in Signal Port she’d never seen him display anything but courteous and mild-mannered behavior. “Well, Mr. Jacoby,” she said, “you and your partner are going to have to do some serious talking. Maybe make some hard decisions.”

  He nodded. “I feel awful about everything, including taking up your time when the sheriff’s department should be doing everything they can to find out who murdered that poor woman.”

  If only we had adequate staff for an all-out effort, Rho thought. “We’re working on it. We’ve put out an appeal, both by word of mouth and on the public-access station, for anyone who saw her yesterday afternoon at Point Deception turnout to contact us.”

  Jacoby’s face grew thoughtful. “Point Deception. This woman, what did she look like?”

  Rho described Chrystal Ackerman, and the Mercedes.

  “Oh my God! Brandon and I saw her twice. First at a little before three when we were going down to the lumber yard in Westhaven, and again on the way back at quarter to five.”

  “You’re sure of those times?”

  “Reasonably. We left here about two thirty, and I looked at my watch on the drive home.” A stricken expression spread over Jacoby’s face. “Oh God, what did I do? Brandon wanted to stop to help her, but I said we didn’t have time, we had to get back to pay Becca, the woman who cleans for us, before she left for her waitressing shift at the hotel. If I’d been less concerned with the damned inn and more concerned with helping somebody in trouble, that woman would be alive tonight!”

  How many times, Rho wondered, would she hear the same regret from others?

  As Guy shut the door of his motel room and started across the parking lot, a bottle smashed on the nearby pavement and a car loaded with teenagers sped south on the highway, burning rubber. A dozen beer-swilling young people sat on the tailgates of their pickups under the lighted sign of the supermarket. Rap and rock competed from two of the trucks’ radios. The kids yelled at friends in passing vehicles, made rude comments to shoppers pushing their carts. One old woman gave them a wide berth, the neon glare highlighting her apprehensive face.

  Small-town kids, Guy thought. Keyed up by the edgy atmosphere but too young to fully understand what had triggered it. For them the mass murder in the canyon was simply part of the local folklore, and this new murder an excuse to engage in antisocial behavior. They were just getting off on the breakdown of order, like teenagers in any town where there were few amusements.

  “Assholes,” a man’s voice said.

  Guy turned to face Hugh Dawson, proprietor of the Sea Stacks. “Those kids?”

  “Who the hell else. They’re laughing now, but they won’t be in a few minutes. I just called the sheriff.”

  Dawson was a balding, pinch-faced man who wore a perpetually sour expression. Probably had never done anything wild in his life, or if he had, he was determined no one else should share the experience. Guy said, “I think the sheriff’s department has more important things on its hands than a bunch of rowdy kids.”

  “Mister, they’re underage and drinking in public.”

  “But not really harming anyone.”

  Dawson’s narrowed eyes sized Guy up, and then he nodded wisely. “Of course, you’re from New York City. What goes on there, those kids must look like model citizens to you.”

  “Hardly. But—” A cruiser was pulling into the parking lot. It stopped near the kids, and Deputy Wayne Gilardi got out.

  Guy watched with interest as he motioned to one of the boys, clamped a hand on his shoulder as he spoke to him. The kid said something smart, judging from the look on his face, and Gilardi shook him, raising his voice. The other teens had tensed at the arrival of the law. Now they were scrambling for their vehicles and starting engines. As Gilardi slammed the boy against his cruiser and wrenched back his arms to cuff him, the others pulled onto the highway in a spray of gravel.

  “Damn,” Dawson said, watching Gilardi force the boy into the backseat of his cruiser, “he only arrested one of them. Scared the shit outta the rest, though. Wayne’s tough, and they know it.”

  “In what ways is he tough?”

  Dawson frowned. “Mister, you sure do ask a lot of questions about things that don’t really concern you.”

  And you, like your fellow townspeople, sure don’t answer them. “The reason I ask about Deputy Gilardi is that I had a run-in with him in the hotel bar last night.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Over his slut sister and her slope boyfriend. And then you had drinks and dinner with the lovely Rhoda Swift. How’d you manage that?”

  “I asked her.”

  “And she accepted. Amazing. There’re any number of men in this town who’d like to get next to that nice ass of hers, but she keeps them at arm’s length. How’d you rate?”

  “Maybe because I’m interested in more than her ass.”

  “Guess so. She know what you want is the inside dope on the Cascada Canyon murders?”

  Guy raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh yeah,” the motel owner said. “I know why you’re here. Maid got curious about your files when she did up the room this afternoon, took a good look at them. Then I took a look. We don’t much care for nosy reporters here. You better have yourself packed by checkout time tomorrow.”

  “I’ve reserved the room for two weeks—”

  “Sorry about that. Plumbing’s about to go on the fritz. And we’re full up.”

  Guy motioned at the lighted Vacancy sign.

  “So I forgot to turn on the No.”

  “Uh-huh.” He nodded, scanning the parking lot, empty exc
ept for two cars, including his own rental, and a press van from a Santa Carla TV station.

  Dawson grinned, enjoying himself. “Checkout’s at eleven. I’ll have your bill ready.” He turned and walked back toward the office.

  Guy watched the traffic move by, hands deep in his pockets. Being evicted from his motel room was an inconvenience, but there was always Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast. And if its owner was equally inhospitable, he’d make do somehow. He’d worked before under far worse conditions and come out intact.

  Yes, he thought bitterly, guilt and loss wrenching in his gut, he’d come out intact. And right there lay his problem.

  He’d come out intact, but Diana hadn’t.

  The haze of light from Deer Harbor vanished in the rearview mirror as Rho entered the hairpin turn by the campground north of the village. The inside of the cruiser was fogged, so she lowered her side window; the bark of seals on the offshore rocks mingled with the familiar mutter of the radio. Lots of calls during the past hour, and all time off for deputies had been canceled. Word of the rape-and-murder had spread up and down the Soledad Coast; a visible sheriff’s department presence was the first step in reassuring the uneasy populace.

  Her headlights moved over tree trunks, over the gated fences of the expensive properties that lined this dark stretch of highway. Most were second homes of affluent people from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond—used only a few times a year by their owners and frequently rented out by various local realties. Rho couldn’t imagine allowing strangers to occupy her precious space, use her things, and sleep in her bed, but she supposed if she were carrying a huge mortgage on pricey oceanfront property she wouldn’t be so fastidious. As it was, her little house on the ridge ate up a disproportionate chunk of her paycheck.

  After she’d driven for a few minutes it grew cold in the cruiser and she raised the window. The radio continued its drone, and the white lines of the highway threatened to hypnotize her. California Highway 1, which ran unbroken from the state’s northernmost town, Crescent City, to the Mexican border.

  The citizens of Soledad County had a peculiar relationship to Highway 1, she reflected, and in a way it was justified. The two-lane strip of pavement was dangerous: Vehicles spun out of control on its curves and crashed over the cliffs; pedestrians who crossed on the wrong stretch were frequently picked off by speeders and logging trucks; rock- and mudslides, thick fog, blinding rain—all did great damage. But the highway was also the artery that connected them and allowed the county’s lifeblood to flow from isolated ranch to small town, from primitive forest to tiny hamlet. In that way it also nurtured. When a mother warned her child, “Don’t you dare cross that highway,” or a seasoned trucker announced, “No way I’m driving that highway in this weather,” their voices held a curious combination of awe and affection.