Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  Rho reached for her, lifted her from the bunk. Wayne held out his arms, but before she could hand her over, the little girl burrowed against her, locking her arms around her neck and her legs around her waist in an unbreakable hold. She remained that way as Rho carried her down the canyon to safety.…

  Chrystal: Before

  Friday, October 6

  11:57 A.M.

  What’re those things? Oh my God—Bernhard’s shack and the kid boxes. It’s all coming back now.

  Bernhard built them for when the grown-ups partied, so us kids could sleep there and not get in the way. Tiny bunkhouses, one pink and one blue. Gray now.

  The grown-ups partied a lot—and hard. They had white Christmas lights strung in the trees and stereo speakers mounted on poles. Nobody from outside got invited, except for Jude and Leo, and that was on account of Leo and Bernhard being tight from way back. Come to think of it, nobody but us ever came to the canyon.

  Loud music. Weird food experiments. Running around in the woods after dark. The smell of weed. Ghost stories in the kid boxes. And Bernhard.

  We called him “uncle.” He paid us more attention than any of our folks did. He was supposed to be some kind of inventor, had his lab hidden way back in the canyon where it gets real narrow. But he wasn’t no inventor, that was just a story the grown-ups made up for us. What he was doing back there was cooking meth.

  Jude told me the papers said Bernhard was who the killers were after, the others were just innocent victims of a drug deal gone bad. But the papers got it wrong. Leo and her were in on the dealing, and the Wynnes were bankrolling Bernhard. The stuff in the papers, that was a whitewash on account of the others came from good families.

  What’s a good family, anyway? People with money and college educations, like them? People who stick together through all kinds of shit, like me and Leo and Jude? People who have a good time together, like us kids and Bernhard?

  The cops found Bernhard dead in his lab. Prefab shed like you buy at a lumberyard. He wouldn’t let nobody go near it, had barbed wire strung so thick across the path, you wondered how he got in and out.

  There’s the path. I could—

  Don’t do it, Chryssie. Fast in, fast out.

  But it’s so quiet here. There’s nobody around. Nobody’s been here since it happened.

  Dammit, the time I spent on this place is the only time I remember being a kid—and I didn’t remember it at all till I came back here. Bernhard was a big part of that. I got a right to see where he died.

  Monday, October 9

  Early Morning

  When Rho entered the substation at ten minutes after midnight, Valerie—who had stayed late to field any phone calls concerning Chrystal Ackerman—handed her two message slips and began to explain what they were about before Rho could read them.

  “Detective Grossman said to tell you he and his partner are at the Sea Stacks if you need him. They contacted the Clark County, Nevada, department about Ackerman, and they’re cooperating. They’ve already located her apartment from the personal phone number the Mercedes’ owner gave you. Took a run by there and spoke with the manager, who said when Ackerman moved in two years ago her mother was living with her. The mother was sick, and the manager hasn’t seen her in months, assumes she died. Ackerman lived quietly, and the manager and other tenants didn’t really know her. Your contact at the department down there is Detective Ronald Stevens.”

  Rho glanced at the slips, saw they contained an abbreviated version of what Valerie had just told her.

  Valerie was scowling now. “Can you imagine it? Having phone sex in an apartment you shared with your mother?”

  “It’s a living.” Rho couldn’t imagine doing anything in proximity to her mother, who had abandoned the family when she was only eight. “Any further responses to our requests for sightings of Ackerman?”

  “Finally, yes. Everybody who called saw her at Point Deception. All of them drove past. All of them feel guilty about not stopping to help her. Have you located Samantha Lindsay?”

  “No. There’s a be-on-lookout on her.”

  “She’s probably just up to her usual tricks.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Valerie shrugged, her expression indicating that it would take a great deal to convince her of a different scenario. “By the way, your father called earlier this evening. He wants you to stop by.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to talk.”

  Which meant he was sitting around with too much time on his hands and drinking. Jack Antolini was long retired from the department on disability. He missed the job and had too few interests to keep himself occupied, so he drank, quizzed Rho about every aspect of her work, and generally was critical of her performance. By now he’d heard she was assisting on the Ackerman case, and must be chomping at the bit to hear every detail.

  “If he calls again,” she told Valerie, “tell him I’m very busy, but I’ll try to stop by this week.”

  “He’s your father and a lonely man, Rhoda. How much trouble would it be?”

  “I said I’d try, didn’t I?” She set the message slips in the box she shared with Wayne, and when she turned saw Valerie watching her with an analytical expression. “What?” she snapped.

  “Well, don’t bite my head off!”

  “Sorry. It’s late and I’m tired.”

  “I guess you are. How’re you holding up otherwise?”

  “Fine. I’ve been taking my vitamins like a good girl.”

  “I don’t mean physically.”

  “How, then?”

  “Well, this is the first murder of a non-domestic type you’ve had to handle since. It must raise some painful memories.”

  Since. Spoken as if the word were capitalized, no further explanation needed. Valerie, like the rest of them, couldn’t put a name to what had happened thirteen years ago. Rho felt a sudden emotional shift. No, something more akin to an emotional earthquake. She was sick of the euphemisms and evasions. Possibly had been sick of them for a long time.

  “Why don’t you just come out and say it?” she asked.

  “Say what?”

  “Since eight people were slaughtered in Cascada Canyon.”

  The harshness of the words echoed off the institutional green walls. Valerie put a hand to her lips. When the phone rang, she stared distractedly at it before picking up.

  “Yes, Will,” she said. “… Oh no!… Deputy Swift’s here. I’ll send her… Yes, I’ll be glad to.” She replaced the receiver and spoke to Rho without meeting her eyes. “That was Will Scurlock. Virge is missing too.”

  The knot of anxiety that had been present in Rho’s stomach since early morning gave a painful tug. “Since when?”

  “He’s not sure. He fetched her from the hotel around two. She’d been drinking heavily, so he took her home, poured her into bed. Checked on her at four, and she was asleep. Then he worked on some plans, had supper, watched a couple of movies on TV, and fell asleep in his chair. When he went to the bedroom a few minutes ago she was gone, and one of her jackets was missing from the coatrack. Poor man’s beside himself.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Guy set his file box on the motel room bed and pulled out the one labeled “Victims.” Then he sat down with it at the table in front of the glass door leading to the small balcony. Although it was well past midnight, he wasn’t tired. An earlier conversation with Aaron Silber had, in fact, invigorated him. Aaron confirmed that Susan Harrison Wynne’s mother had been paying the taxes on the Cascada Canyon property until her death late the previous year, when her son, Dunbar, took them over. That issue—and Dun’s motives—clarified, Guy decided it was time that he became better acquainted with those who had died there.

  He paged through Aaron’s summary of the bare facts. The two couples who lived in the canyon had become friends while students at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an innovative campus employing such practices as giving written evaluations, rather than
grades, for course work. Members of a clique who all had artistic aspirations, they thrived in the sheltered atmosphere of the wooded hills above the midstate coastal town, but not in the real world they faced after graduation. Their chosen fields were tough to break into and highly competitive; graduate schools looked askance at transcripts that could not be boiled down to a standard grade point average. Even mundane jobs were hard to find, and, having been raised in well-to-do households where their every need was catered to, they lacked the drive to pursue them.

  Several years after graduation Susan and Forrest Wynne got together with their best friends, Claudia and Mitch Blakeley. The purpose of their reunion was serious: They’d all concluded they were dissatisfied with how their lives had turned out. Susan and Forrest were struggling to no avail at their professions. For Claudia and Mitch, real estate and banking had grown tedious, as had juggling their employers’ demands with raising their young child. But now Susan Wynne had a solution to these problems.

  Susan was about to come into control of a substantial trust fund established for her by her paternal grandfather. She proposed that the four of them find a large tract of country property, which she would buy as a retreat where they could live and pursue their artistic endeavors. She would pay for putting in a septic system, well, and whatever other utilities were necessary, and they would help each other build their homes. The Blakeleys would only be required to contribute their labor and the materials for their house.

  Claudia and Mitch loved the plan. They’d been saving toward a home of their own, but real estate prices were rising faster than the amount in their passbook. Materials for a small house were within range, however, and the idea of forming an artists’ colony with their best friends intrigued them. Of course, the land would have to be in an area where both property prices and the cost of living were low, and even then money would be tight, as the terms of the trust stipulated Susan could only withdraw so much cash per year. But the two couples—who held an exalted opinion of their own talent—assured one another that once they got on with their real work, fame and fortune would not be far off.

  Claudia, a real estate agent, was put in charge of a statewide property search, and three months later she reported that she’d found the perfect place, a secluded tract in Soledad County called Cascada Canyon.

  Will Scurlock had always impressed Rho as a man who preferred to think before he spoke and consider the consequences before he acted. But tonight—or this morning, as it was now nearing one o’clock—he was anything but self-contained. As she examined the bedroom from which his wife had vanished an indeterminate amount of time before, Will babbled and ranted and occasionally smacked his big fists against the wall.

  Virge, he claimed, had been forcibly taken from their bed.

  Then why, Rho countered, was her down jacket missing from its peg on the hall coatrack?

  Well, maybe it wasn’t missing. Maybe it was in one of the trucks or at the dry cleaner.

  But hadn’t Will said earlier that Virge had been wearing it when he brought her home from the hotel? And that he’d hung it up himself?

  Okay, maybe whoever took her had sneaked into the hall for the jacket. He’d been watching TV, napping. He wouldn’t’ve noticed. Besides, Virge would never have gone out at night by herself—not with a killer on the loose. Someone had taken her, and he—

  “Will,” Rho said, “get a grip.”

  As she’d hoped, the words snapped him out of it. He sank onto the bed and put his hands to his eyes. “Jesus!”

  “Will,” she said after a moment, “Virge isn’t the first woman to disappear tonight.”

  “No? Who else?”

  “Samantha Lindsay. Isn’t her husband a client of yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does Virge know her?”

  “Why, you think there’s some connection?”

  “It had entered my mind.”

  “Well, as far as I know they’ve never met. Or if they did, it was only in passing. Samantha’s… well, she and Virge don’t have much in common.”

  Rho crossed to a door with old-fashioned glass panes; when she flicked the light switch beside it she looked out onto a patio. The door was latched but not locked. On the far side of the patio a flagstone path led away through a screen of rhododendrons.

  “Where does that path go?” she asked.

  “The greenhouse. Virge is… used to be quite a gardener.”

  “Is it possible she went there?”

  “No. She hasn’t bothered with it for years. Besides, there’s only one key, and it’s on the hook in the kitchen.”

  “Anyplace else on the property she might’ve gone?”

  “Well, the tenant’s cabin. Clay Lawrence. Sometimes she visits him, takes him baked goods and plays gin rummy. But only when I’m not home and she needs company.”

  Rho knew Clay Lawrence by sight: a rustic type in his early forties who was often seen around town with Becca Campos, a waitress at the hotel and part-time house-cleaner. “You call him?”

  “I tried, but his line was busy, and I didn’t want to leave the house in case Virge came back.”

  “I’ll stop by there later. How do I get to the cabin?”

  “Just follow the driveway. It ends there.”

  Rho sat down beside Will. “Virge’s drinking today—what brought that on?”

  “I’m not sure. I asked her, but she wasn’t making any sense. Kept saying she was the one deserved an explanation.”

  “Of what?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “You two have a fight beforehand?”

  “No. We never fight. I can’t risk upsetting her.”

  “Anything else you know of that could’ve set her off?”

  “That murder, I guess. We saw the woman at Point Deception around six Friday night, but didn’t stop. Afterwards Virge felt bad about that, but even so, I don’t understand why she felt the need to drink. She isn’t much of a drinker. And why did she do it in public? We’ve got plenty of booze here in the house.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to drink alone.”

  “Maybe.”

  Rho hesitated, framing her next words carefully. “I’ve heard that Virge has become a little unstable.”

  “A little?” Will laughed bitterly. “Try a lot. She’s afraid of everything. A windstorm, an animal prowling in the shrubbery, a car backfiring down on the highway—anything’ll set her off. She’s dropped all her interests except for food. Gardening, needlepoint, volunteer work. And in the food department she goes overboard. It’s like she’s eating to sedate herself.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  He shrugged. “Years. A condition like hers progresses very slowly. At first you don’t notice it, then you normalize it, but finally one day you wake up and say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s not right here.’”

  “Has she seen anyone about it?”

  “No. She doesn’t think anything’s wrong with her. Claims she’s just being cautious. And as for the food, she says cooking’s her new hobby. I tell you, Rho, she’s running scared.”

  “It’s hard to believe. She’s always been so strong. After the…” She hesitated, then strengthened her new resolve and gave voice to it. “After the canyon murders, she was a rock.”

  Will raised his eyebrows. “Well, so you’re finally talking about them. You’re right, she was strong. And you, of all people, ought to know that.”

  “I do. She held me together that night, and for days after. If it wasn’t for Virge, I’d’ve embarrassed myself in front of the department, the reporters, the TV people. She made me strong.”

  “Yeah, she did. And what did you do to repay her? Crawled into the bottle, left the case to people like Wayne Gilardi, who couldn’t find their asses with both hands. Some thanks that was.”

  Rho winced at the sudden attack—more so because what he said held some truth.

  “There wasn’t anybody at the scene that night as smart as you.” Wil
l added. “Nobody from here, none of the detectives they sent out from Santa Carla, either. If you’d tended to business, maybe my wife wouldn’t be the way she is today.”

  Now he’d gone too far. In the years since the murders, many people had accused both her and the department of ineptitude, but never Will or Virge. It hurt and angered her to find he’d concealed his true feelings.

  “Look, Will,” she said, “I screwed up, but you can’t blame one person for those murders going unsolved. And Virge is responsible for her condition—with a whole lot of enabling from you.”

  “Where do you get off—”

  She stood. “It isn’t helping your wife for us to sit here airing old grievances. I’ll be in touch when I know something.”

  Guy turned to the first of the victim profiles: Claudia Robinson Blakeley.

  She was thirty when she died. The daughter of a San Diego stockbroker, she’d displayed a talent for photography at an early age and later became interested in filmmaking. UC Santa Cruz was her second choice; she originally wanted to enter the prestigious filmmaking program at UCLA, but didn’t have the grades.

  The accompanying photograph showed a young woman with a halo of frizzy blonde hair and a wide smile. Her eyes were her best feature, large and long-lashed. The photo had probably been taken in the canyon, judging from the pines in the background.

  Claudia married Mitch Blakeley during her senior year in college, and their son, Eric, was born seven months later. At first the young family remained in Santa Cruz, but after two years they went to San Diego, where Claudia’s father arranged a job for Mitch in the trust department of a bank and Claudia took a sales position with a large real estate firm. In spite of two incomes, money was always tight, and several times Claudia’s father had to bail them out of debt. Two months before they had their reunion with the Wynnes, he told the couple that they could expect no further financial support from him.