Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  “And then?”

  “And then Will came in and started fussing over her like she’d been soiled by the bad company she was keeping and took her home.”

  Mimi’s bitter tone alerted Rho. It was the same way she’d spoken during their one and only confrontation about Zach, when Rho had gone to her house in a drunken rage and demanded she stop seeing him. Then she’d said, “I’m surprised he’d tell you about us, given the way he tries to protect you from every little thing. God, he even acts like you’re being victimized by the booze, instead of doing it to yourself.”

  “You’re seeing Will, aren’t you?” Rho asked.

  Mimi’s eyes widened, but she recovered quickly. “‘Seeing.’ What a quaint term.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “This is an investigation of a suspicious death. Answer it.”

  “All right! Keep your voice down. I was seeing him, but only sporadically, and it’s been over for more than a year now.”

  “So why’d he call you after he found out Virge was dead?”

  “I told you—”

  “The truth this time.”

  “Jesus! He… Oh hell, he was scared. He wanted to warn me not to tell anybody about us.”

  “Why would he worry about that if it had been over for a year?”

  Mimi’s fingers tapped on the rim of her glass and she ran the tip of her tongue over her lips. “All right, but this can’t go any further. Promise, Rho.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Promise you’ll at least try to keep it to yourself.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Okay. That policy on Virge, I talked Will into it. She was getting crazier and crazier. She’d had some minor accidents, one with the truck, another by falling from a ladder at home, another while hiking on the ridge. He said it was like she was living so much inside herself that she couldn’t look out for the hazards outside. He knew it was only a matter of time till something major happened, so I told him to upgrade their hospitalization insurance and suggested a ten-year term policy with double indemnity.”

  “And he liked the idea?”

  “No. But I convinced him that he deserved to be compensated for what she was putting him through.”

  Rho thought back to when she and Mimi had first become friends. The Griggses had lived in the big Victorian that now was the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast. Mimi’s room was the one with the turret that Guy Newberry currently occupied, and she had a canopied bed and a beautiful doll collection and a closet full of clothes. For her tenth birthday her father bought her a horse that was boarded at a stable near the beach, and he’d promised her a sports car when she got her driver’s license. Mimi was generous with what she had, but Rho was still wildly envious of her.

  But then it came out that Charlie Griggs, a local manager for the state highway department, had been taking kickbacks from their subcontractors, and he’d gone to prison. Mimi’s mother was forced to sell off everything to pay the attorneys’ fees, and she and Mimi went to live in the trailer park. Suddenly instead of envying her friend, Rho pitied her. Still, they’d remained close till the night Zach confessed to his affair.

  All that loss, of course, accounted for Mimi’s drive to succeed, and she’d built her insurance agency into the most profitable on the Soledad Coast. But loss had also created a need that she couldn’t possibly fill. Rho could imagine her writing the policy on Virge while contemplating a future with Will, high on the ridge with two million dollars as a cushion.

  She said, “So you were only concerned for your client’s interests when you made those recommendations.”

  “Of course.”

  “You gave no thought to how you eventually might benefit?”

  “Aside from my commission, no.”

  “Aren’t there regulations against writing a policy on your lover’s wife? And on writing that kind of policy on an emotionally disturbed woman? Weren’t there things about the situation that you were bound to disclose to your company?”

  “So I looked the other way, presented it in a more positive light. It’s done all the time.”

  “Is it?”

  “Jesus, Rho, why’re you badgering me? Does this have to do with Zach?”

  “Zach?”

  “We’ve never talked about him. Not since the night he told you about us.”

  “There’s no need to talk. It was over years ago. For all three of us.”

  Rho stood and regarded her former friend. Mimi looked tired, too thin, and deeply discontented. The life she was leading was taking its toll; in a few more years she’d be a desperate, worn-out woman, grasping at whatever man came her way. Rho wished it were otherwise, but there was nothing she could say or do to help her.

  “I’ll try to keep what you’ve told me to myself,” she said. “But if I ever hear that you’re looking the other way and bending the rules for one of your clients again, you’re busted.”

  “Come on, Lily,” Guy said. “You and Alex can’t have done anything so bad that Wayne would kill you.”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “True.” He signaled for another round of drinks.

  “Well, I do, and he scares me.”

  “You weren’t too scared to go over to his house tonight.”

  “I only go there when I know he isn’t home.”

  “In what way does he scare you?”

  “He gets really violent. You think Alex is bad, you oughta see what Wayne does to Janie. Used to do to me when I lived with them.”

  “He always been that way?”

  “No. When I was a kid he was real gentle and protective of me. The same with Janie when they first got married. She says something went wrong in him around the time of the Cascada Canyon murders, and he’s never been himself since.”

  “It all keeps coming back to those murders, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  Guy waited while the waitress placed their fresh drinks on the table and departed. “Wayne’s violent streak aside, if you know something about that woman who was murdered, you really ought to tell the sheriff’s department.”

  She shook her head. “They already suspect what me and Alex are doing. If I told them about the woman, they’d never leave us alone. We can’t stand them looking too close at us, especially now that he’s gone and done something really stupid that—” She bit her lip.

  “What’s he done?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “I won’t repeat it.”

  “Oh, sure. You won’t repeat it, but you’ll put it in your book. No way I’m telling you. I got this philosophy of life: Don’t trust cops, don’t trust politicians, and don’t trust reporters.”

  “What if you went to Rhoda Swift with the information? She’s a good cop. Look at the way she took up for you and Alex the other night when Wayne went after you.”

  “So she’s an okay person. But she’s still a cop.”

  “Cops have been known to make deals if they want information badly enough.”

  Lily seemed to think about that, staring into her drink.

  Guy added, “What if I talked to her, paved the way?”

  For a moment she looked hopeful; then she shook her head again. “Rho’s only a deputy. She’d have to convince that Detective Grossman to deal, and he’s one hard-nosed son of a bitch. I can’t risk it, Mr. Newberry.”

  “Sounds as if what you and Alex are into is serious.”

  “Maybe not serious where you come from, but around here it’s pretty bad.”

  “Drugs?”

  She laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t I wish? That’s just business as usual here. Half the places up on the ridge got nice-looking marijuana gardens, and you can hear the meth cooking on a quiet night. The sheriff and ATF make busts, but nobody, including them, gets very upset about what goes on.”

  “And they would get upset about this thing with you and Alex?”

 
; “More like totally pissed. It’d go bad enough on Alex, but he’s kind of an outsider, has only lived here a couple of years. Me, though, I’m an insider. I’m supposed to know better. And now this other thing he’s gone and done, that’s just as bad in its own way. No, Mr. Newberry, I can’t risk it.”

  Rho sat behind the wheel of her truck in the hotel parking lot, experiencing a strange kind of elation. It was all out in the open between Mimi and her now. No more need to ignore one another in public, cross the street if one saw the other coming. And no warm-and-fuzzy reconciliation, either. Mimi had done the unforgivable, and Rho had no intention of forgetting that. But the sense of betrayal on her part and the gloating triumph on Mimi’s were over.

  It’s as if I’m coming alive again, she thought. As if facing the reality of what those murders did to me has set me free in all areas. I don’t even want a drink tonight, because I’m no longer afraid to look inside myself and make peace with what I see.

  So now what? Ned Grossman had told her to talk with Will Scurlock, but it was far too late for that. As of the time she left the substation there had been no word from Nevada on Chrystal Ackerman, and there wouldn’t be till tomorrow. She knew she should go home to rest, but she felt edgy, unable to contemplate sleep.

  Chrystal Ackerman: Why had she driven all the way from Las Vegas to Soledad County? Even in the brief glimpse Rho had caught of her, she hadn’t looked like the kind of woman who would visit this wild north coast without a good reason. Yet she’d died here, and while logic didn’t necessarily dictate it, Rho had a strong feeling that her death was not random, had to do with her purpose in coming.

  But what purpose? Where had she been? Those were the critical questions.

  Long blonde hairs caught between the floorboards at the Blakeley house. Coincidental?

  I don’t think so.

  Two sets of footprints going up canyon, one made by Virge and superimposed on the others. Virge’s prints veering toward the stream. The others going toward the waterfall.

  Rho started the truck and pulled onto the highway, heading south.

  Guy dropped Lily at the small house she shared with Alex on one of the northern side streets, accepting with a philosophical shrug her assurances that she’d be all right there. The young woman had asked that he not offer advice, and besides, as Rhoda Swift had told Wayne, Lily wouldn’t turn her life around until she was good and ready to. He’d keep the lines of communication open, be available to help should she make a decision.

  The latter thought surprised him and he smiled wryly. In times past he’d have squeezed Lily for every drop of information about the Cascada Canyon murders, paid scant attention to her problems, and turned away without a qualm. He wrote about towns in trouble, but that didn’t mean he needed to get involved with people in trouble. But something about this particular place and its inhabitants, both living and deceased, had made him care.

  “I’m changing,” he said aloud.

  You’re becoming a mensch, Diana’s voice said.

  “Why now, though?” he asked her.

  Keep it up and find out.

  He reached the highway and turned south. As he neared the hotel he saw Rhoda Swift’s pickup exit the parking lot and head south too. Odd. She’d described where she lived the night they had dinner; her turnoff was even farther north than where he’d dropped Lily. Out of more than idle curiosity he followed her.

  She passed the closed-up business establishments and the sheriff’s substation; the yacht harbor where she’d mentioned her father lived, and the unfinished subdivision. When she also passed the B&B he felt an unaccountable twinge. Wherever she was going, it wasn’t to see him. Soon her taillights were moving through the heavily forested area outside the town limits, where fog boiled up from the coves.

  After fifteen or sixteen miles her brake lights flashed and the truck veered across the centerline. In the wash of her headlights Guy recognized the collapsed gates leading into Cascada Canyon. That afternoon she’d told him she wasn’t certain she could bring herself to go there again, yet here she was.

  He continued along the highway, U-turned, and parked where he had the first time he’d visited the canyon. Then he got out and walked back to the entrance. The truck was pulled inside the gates, where a plastic crime-scene tape stretched. Rhoda had driven in, and, judging from the way she’d positioned the truck, it wouldn’t be visible to drivers traveling either north or south. A secret visit, then, that she didn’t want the public, the press, or members of her own department to know about.

  Guy stepped over the tape and took out his flashlight. Aiming it at the ground, he started up the driveway. Without the light pollution he was used to in the city, the night sky was brilliant with stars. A car sped by on the highway behind him, its tires thumping as it crossed the centerline on a curve. Wherever Rhoda was, her footsteps weren’t audible. He kept following the dirt track, past the Blakeley house, past the Wynne dome, toward Bernhard Ulrick’s shack and the bunkhouses.

  Rho passed the bunkhouses without a glance, her battery-powered torch trained on the ground. Don’t look, she thought. Don’t remember. Concentrate on why you’re here.

  She could hear the rush of the stream now, could smell pungent pine and tangy eucalyptus. The torch illuminated Virge Scurlock’s large footprints superimposed on the smaller ones. Instead of veering off as she had earlier, she continued up canyon, sweeping the ground with the light. The smaller footprints went straight ahead, but now she saw—

  “Hoo, hoo-hoo!”

  She started before she recognized the low, sonorous cry of a great horned owl that must be nesting nearby. Remembered how the birds’ hooting had frightened her as a child, realized it frightened her even now. An owl, symbol of death, in this place of death…

  Concentrate!

  To the right of the path was a second set of footprints. The same size and tread as the others, but going down canyon. They cut deeper into the earth than the others and were erratically angled. As if the person had been running from something.

  When Guy passed the bunkhouses he saw a glow through the trees. Soon after, the path turned and Rhoda came into view. She was squatting down, studying something intently. After a moment she stood and moved along a few yards. Stopped and squatted again, shining her light around. Repeated the procedure twice.

  Then the light stopped moving. She set it down and fumbled in her pocket. Pulled something out, a sack of some kind, and plunged her hand into it. Plucked at a bush whose branches hung low over the path.

  Evidence bag. She was now inverting it and holding it up to the torchlight. Guy moved forward eagerly and—

  Fell on his ass in the mud.

  A thump and a yowl of pain made Rho drop the evidence bag. She twisted, still squatting, and clawed at her slingbag for her revolver. Fear shot through her as she thought of what Wayne had impressed upon her from day one: “An officer who goes into a potentially dangerous situation without backup is just plain stupid and can wind up just plain dead.”

  Gun out and ready, she shone her torch on the target.

  What she saw made her fear evaporate and a mixture of anger and mirth replace it. Guy Newberry, her favorite city slicker, lay in a sinkhole next to the path, thrashing about and smearing himself with mud. He struggled to a sitting position, shielded his eyes from her light, and laid a track of Soledad County’s rich soil across his forehead.

  “Jesus Christ, Rhoda, turn that thing away!”

  “I will if you stop shouting. What the hell’re you doing here?”

  “Following you.” He reached out a hand for her help, and she pulled him to his feet, but not before she retrieved the evidence bag.

  He said, “I thought you had a problem with coming back here, but now I find you traipsing around in the middle of the night.”

  “I do have a problem.” She scowled at him as she replaced her .357 in her bag. “I was so spooked by your graceful arrival that I nearly shot you. Don’t you know better than to follow
somebody in a place like this?”

  “Okay, I’m sorry. Why’d you come?”

  “An idea I had. And you know, on the way down here I realized something: After thirteen years with the department, the solution to a case is more important than my own emotional baggage.”

  “You’ve solved the case?”

  “Not hardly. But I’m on my way.” She held up the bag and shook it at him.

  Guy moved closer and squinted at the contents of the bag. “I can’t see.”

  Rhoda positioned it against the palm of her hand and shone the light closer. The object inside was a slender curl of gold chain, broken near its clasp, the two halves linked by filigreed letters that spelled out the name CHRYSTAL.

  “A bracelet?” he guessed.

  “More likely an ankle chain. The branch where it was caught is low enough.”

  “Who’s Chrystal?”

  “The murder victim from Point Deception.”

  “I thought she hadn’t been identified.”

  “No, we’re withholding her name till we can locate next of kin. Look here, Guy—this is really interesting.”

  Guy studied the two sets of footprints she indicated with her torch. “She went up the canyon walking normally, but came back running.”

  “Right.”

  “Why didn’t anybody notice that this afternoon?”

  “Because the Soledad County Sheriff’s Department screwed up once again on evidence collection in this canyon!”

  Rhoda’s tone was raw and bitter. Quickly Guy said, “Not for long they didn’t.”

  “… No.”

  He was silent, thinking about the hairs he’d found in the Blakeley house. They must have been left there after Ackerman was dead, but…

  “So she was here in the canyon before she was grabbed at the turnout?” he asked.

  “Either that or the person who grabbed her brought her here and she escaped.”

  “But only briefly.”

  “Yes.”

  Their eyes met and after a moment he realized they were thinking the same thing.