“He was afraid they might okay the sale of some beach property to developers.” Tom managed to get the words out before blowing his nose. “But why is that important? On the phone you said Max had been kicked by a deer.”
“Just covering our bases,” she said. “Even in cases of accidental death, we try to puzzle out what happened. Actually, I’m going to that meeting myself. I’m very much in your brother’s camp. Earth Day every day, right?”
Nola could feel Tony rolling his eyes at her pants-on-fire pose as a hard-core ecologist. But she needed Tom to see her as an ally, someone he might confide in if he had any information tying Max and Gus together. Besides, it wasn’t like she was anti-green. She recycled and used canvas grocery bags, and no one wished they could afford a super-sexy Tesla more than she did.
Whether the ends of her small fib justified the means was a moot point. She could see Tom was barely listening now. It happened all the time with victims’ loved ones. The initial jolt of adrenaline that accompanied the shocking news of their loss would start to wear off, and they’d implode into their grief. Tom was collapsing in front of her eyes.
Tony caught the vibe, too. His last question was about Max’s military ID. With heartbreaking admiration in his voice, Tom explained about Max’s pro bono PTSD counseling up at Vandenberg. The more Nola heard about Max, the more she liked him. And the more she liked him, the more she was determined to solve the mystery of what had happened to him.
Tom was in no shape to drive, so Nola and Tony took him home to his wife, who thanked them politely before gently taking his arm and helping him into the house.
Back in the car, on their way to the university to interview Max’s coworkers, Nola put a call in to Vandenberg Air Force Base. VD? Maybe?
The base operator put her through to a public liaison officer, Captain Taylor. Taylor was shocked and saddened by the news of Max’s death and readily agreed to arrange an interview with Max’s therapy group. Nola assured him it was purely a matter of form. “Just hoping they might have some idea why Dr. Waxman was alone in the woods last night.” She didn’t mention the crushed fingers. It sounded too accusatory. Captain Taylor said he’d set up an interview and shoot her an email with the time. She clicked off and was filling Tony in on the conversation when an intriguing thought crossed her mind.
“I wonder if anyone at Vandenberg has a vested interest in the Wyatt Development deal.”
“Boy, you’re like a dog with a bone,” Tony replied as they cruised off the freeway and onto Sandspit Road.
“That’s why I’m so right for this job. And why I really hope you’ll come to that commission meeting with me tomorrow. Come on, Tony — two deaths, two opposing views on a highly volatile subject. It can’t just be a coincidence.”
“Sure it can,” he said as they headed toward the university gate. “I’ll go, but I seriously doubt we’ll establish a connection.”
“I bet Alexander Graham Bell’s buddy said the same thing when they tried out the first telephone. Hey, wasn’t his name Watson, too?”
“What do you mean, ‘too’?”
“Well, clearly I’m Sherlock, and you’re Watson.”
“Oh, you deduced that, did you?”
“Yep. You’re also the Watson to my Crick, in case you were wondering. You know, I never realized before how many partners have been named Watson. But I’m sure you’ll say that’s just another coincidence.”
“Shall we synchronize our watches?”
“Why?”
“So I’ll be sure of the exact time that you officially lose your mind.”
Seventeen
The University of California, Santa Barbara, is a renowned research center, one of America’s few “public ivies,” and ideally located right on the beach.
Tony and Nola parked in the visitors’ lot and strolled across campus, both secretly hoping they didn’t look like cops. A few days before her seventeenth birthday, Nola had arrived on campus as a freshman; a few months after her nineteenth birthday, she’d graduated as a junior. It wasn’t that she was any great genius, she just hadn’t seen the point of taking summers off when going to school felt like a learning vacation at a high-end resort. It had been a five-minute walk from her dorm room to the beach. Less on days when the sand was so sizzling hot she’d had to take it at a dash and plunge straight into the ocean.
Her mother, a former sorority girl at Berkeley, was appalled when she saw the tiny, drab cubical that was to be her daughter’s new home. “I feel like I’m leaving you in women’s prison.”
But Nola adored her tiny dorm room. She loved her classes and all her new friends, loved the lectures in the morning and the afternoons she spent studying on the beach. She even loved the tar that oozed up from the sand and caked her feet. But she especially loved the lazy Sunday-afternoon parties on the grass, listening to the Chili Peppers and Snoop, even old throwback Bowie. “Ch-ch-ch-changes . . .”
She was totally baffled when her friends claimed that being in their thirties was the best time of their lives. Having children seemed to produce some kind of memory-eating bacteria that made them forget what real fun was like. A little trick of nature to make toting snacks to soccer games, wiping runny noses, and scheduling carpool more palatable. Just thinking about a kid-centric life made Nola want to knock back a quick Drano and tonic. College had been bliss, and here it was still going on, only now it was going on without her.
The university’s motto was Fiat Lux — Let There Be Light. But Max’s fellow faculty members had very little light to shine on the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. The general consensus was that he was a brilliant therapist, a respected colleague, and not prone to go walking after midnight à la Patsy Cline.
It was late afternoon, and Tony and Nola had one last interview to go. They were meeting Max’s teaching assistants in his office near the dining hall. Walking past the familiar cafeteria with its rows of colorful bike racks, Nola was instantly trasnported back to the day she met Josh: her favorite eight-year mistake. Ponytail, glasses, worn jeans, and a flannel shirt . . . he’d been sitting on a patch of grass that was currently occupied by a couple of shirtless McConaughey wannabes playing hackysack. Nola had seen him around and liked what she saw, but he wasn’t in her circle of friends and wasn’t likely to be. He was reading a book in Russian. Not a language textbook, just a regular book, in Russian. No way a guy like that would ever be interested in her. He was so cool and cerebral. He was coolebral. He probably only hooked up with laconic brunettes named Sloane and Alexa who played Scrabble in Latin and rolled their own sushi. But to Nola’s astonishment, when Josh spoke to her, it wasn’t to complain that she was blocking his sun.
“You’re a friend of John’s, right? You were in our dorm room looking at his photographs.”
“Oh, yeah, John’s great. I love that shot he took of Cobain at the Bowl.”
The rest of their conversation was drowned out by her panicky inner voice. She wasn’t really John’s friend. In fact, she’d only spoken to him once. Walking by his open door, she’d noticed the photo of Kurt and popped in to ask who took it. Josh had come back from class just as she was leaving. Now when Josh saw John he’d say, “I ran into your friend Nola,” and John would say, “Who?” and her stupid nervous lie would be exposed. Her pheromone-rattled brain was IMing her mouth to “shut up and say goodbye,” when, in a crazy act of self-sabotage, she blurted: “So, are you a language major?”
WTF? She’d engaged when she should have been signing off. And now she had no follow-up. Abort. Abort. Abort. A few tortured minutes later, she babbled something about having a class, turned tail, and ran.
Somehow her attraction-based nervousness must have come off as cute, or maybe it was just Be Nice to a Nutjob Day, because later Josh appeared at her door with the photo of Kurt, claiming John wanted her to have it. Fortunately, once she stopped worrying about seeming smart, the fact that she actually was smart kicked in, and their romance was off and running. The f
irst few months they were like hibernating bears. Snuggled under blankets, talking all night, having mind-blowing sex, and hating to get out of bed. They even played chess under the covers. She’d been mad-embarrassed when John showed up to get his stolen Cobain photo back, but Josh had just laughed it off: “You ran away so fast, I had to have some excuse to see you.” And that had made her like him even more, and like turned to love, and love turned to graduating and moving in together and growing up together and then apart.
Their final breakup was so Zero Dark Thirty gut-wrenching that she was ready to pull an Anna Karenina every time she heard the 3:15 Surfrider passing by on its way to Los Angeles. Fortunately, her acceptance into the Police Academy, with Tony there to talk her down whenever she started hearing train whistles, had rescued her from the abyss. But now, seeing the exact spot where they’d first said hello. . .
“Get your mind out of the past.”
Tony had very little patience for wallowing.
“Geez, can’t a girl watch two cute guys play hackysack without being accused of wallowing?”
“You are the worst liar. He was a great guy, you were a great girl. Things change, people change.”
“Things change, people just get old.”
“Okay, understand I say this with deepest love. You need to get one of your colon peel — cellulite — potato cleanse — brain exfoliations or whatever it is you do to stay dope these days, because if you don’t step off this midlife crisis, I really will be forced to shoot you.”
“Actually, the latest thing is anal bleaching.”
“And to that let me add — no more watching Girls. In fact, no more HBO, period.”
“I dye mine to match my shoes.”
“Clearly, you think I was kidding about shooting you.”
“Are you talking to me? Because you seem to be staring at that Middle Eastern girl.”
“She looks like she might have some interesting tats.”
“Like what? A tramp stamp in Sanskrit?”
“You’re right. Let’s get these interviews over with before we both have to register as imagination sex offenders.”
Nola took a last look at the shirtless hackysack players and sighed. “Eighteen-year-old boys were just so much fun.”
The cutest of the two boys kicked the sack into the grass and shouted to his friend, “Screw this. If I don’t find some shawty and get laid, my fucking balls are gonna explode!”
Tony grinned. “You were saying?”
“Okay, I admit they have their drawbacks, but you really have to admire that kind of enthusiasm.”
Eighteen
Lisa and Jessica: the interview. There have been some groundbreaking advances in medical science throughout the years — penicillin, the polio vaccine, whatever’s keeping Ted Williams’s frozen head intact — but for all its triumphs, the CDC has yet to come up with a protease inhibitor capable of stopping beautiful young women from lusting themselves silly over handsome Italian men.
Tony may have been working hard to keep from crushing on the coeds, but there was nothing to keep the coeds from crushing on him. Though genuinely heartsick over Max’s mysterious passing, his two lovely teaching assistants couldn’t resist the urge to flirt just a little as they answered Tony’s questions. Once again, Nola was more than happy to let her partner foam the runway before she landed a few key questions of her own.
Lisa and Jessica echoed everything Tony and Nola had been hearing about Max all day: brilliant, intense, color-blind or laundry-challenged based on his often-mismatched wardrobe, and a dedicated ecologist who’d served on the board of Heal the Ocean long before celebrities made it fashionable with Save the Reef regattas and Casino Nights to save the monkey-faced eel.
Nola realized a real date with Max would have ended the moment she ordered her first bottled water. Being anti-fur and riding her bike when time and packages permitted wouldn’t have cut it. Max had been the real deal. The errant thought gave her an idea. On a hunch, she asked if he’d been a member of any less visible environmental groups. The two young women shared a wary look that spoke volumes. Tony instantly kicked the charm into high gear. As a woman, Nola found his patter patronizing; as a cop, she was grateful that it pretty much always worked.
“Come on, ladies, you can’t exchange a look like that and expect me to just let it slide,” he said with a George Clooney grin that could melt a polar ice cap.
Jessica lowered her eyes and stared into her lap. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I wouldn’t want to say anything that would hurt Dr. Waxman’s reputation.”
“I wouldn’t want that either, honest,” Tony replied. “Look, I promise whatever you say will be just between us. In fact, forget this is an interview. Pretend we’re just keeping it tight down at the Beachside Café, sipping mojitos, watching the sunset, every guy in the place jealous of me sitting with two gorgeous women, because obviously that’s happening.”
The two young women mock-rolled their eyes but were secretly flattered. In point of fact, if they had been down at Beachside, Jessica and Lisa would most definitely be turning heads.
“Not that you notice all the masculine attention . . .” Tony continued rolling out his silly story. “First, because the waiter just brought us a hella-huge order of mixed apps. . . ” He paused, then pressed on with all sincerity. “But mostly because you’d really like to help us find out why Dr. Waxman was in the woods last night, so maybe we can give his family a little closure. His brother’s pretty wrecked right now, and the strange circumstances are making it a lot harder for him. So anything you can tell us, we’d really appreciate it.”
Tony let the sad words settle. Nola admired his technique, but it wasn’t all Police Acting 101; she knew the sentiment came from a real place.
It wasn’t hard for her to guess which Phi Beta beauty would crack first. Jessica’s brand of smart came with a dash of cool reserve, Lisa’s with a hole in her tongue where a diamond stud no doubt appeared on non-school nights. Daring girls were chatty girls, at least as a rule of thumb.
“Okay, there is this one underground group on campus. They’re sort of ‘occupy everything that pisses them off,’ only they don’t actually occupy anything. They just launch these useless hit-and-run attacks.”
Yep. Lisa it was.
Nola knew Tony was as intrigued by this new bit of information as she was, but appearing too eager could spook a witness, so he held back a beat before asking Lisa the next logical question.
“Does this merry band of maniacs have a name?”
“They call themselves ROTC70.”
“ROTC like the military?” The George Clooney grin was back. “And, remember, a correct answer gets you most of the mushroom caps.”
“I only eat chanterelles, and it’s ROTC70 in honor of the students back in 1970 who burned the bank and peed on the ROTC building. Like that really changed the world. They use free servers to post a lot of social manifestos onto university websites. Lately, Dr. Waxman seemed to be getting into their quasi-violent ethos.”
“Lisa, you are making my day.”
Feeling left out, Jessica made a gracious but costly error. “If you’d like, I can go print out copies of their posts.”
“That’d be fantastic. Thanks, Jess.” Tony grinned.
Flattered by Tony’s flirty shortening of her name, Jessica didn’t realize till she was halfway out the door that she’d inadvertently given Lisa a one-on-one advantage until she got back.
With Jessica out of the room, Lisa felt freer to flirt. She crossed her legs, sending her sassy swing dress hiking up to DEFCON 5. She wasn’t new to the move or the dress, but she made it sound natural when she blushed and explained the Chinese character tattooed on her inner thigh meant “peace.”
Girl knows how to work it, Nola thought, hoping the tattoo artist had the right spelling and Lisa’s thigh wasn’t sending out a very different message of “piece” than she intended. Tony kept his eyes well above Lisa’s thigh line and tried to think of basebal
l. When he asked if she knew how Dr. Waxman might have made contact with the group, she didn’t have an answer, just a few best guesses.
While Tony and Lisa talked, Nola started an email to Sebastian, asking him to track down ROTC70 online. The minute she sent it, Lisa’s phone chirped. For a second, she thought her message had quantum leaped across the room.
Lisa explained that her chirp was an eco-alert. She and Dr. Waxman were on a list of people who were automatically notified by email of any impending threats to the environment. Then she made a sly attempt to scam Tony’s deets. “Are you into environmental issues, Detective Angellotti? Because I could put you on the list, too. I’d just need your email.”
“Sadly, Lisa, I had a traumatic experience with the environment as a child . . . I was whipped by a chilly wind. It . . . still hurts to talk about it. But my partner Nola here is all about eco-activism. How ’bout I give you her email?”
He was so obviously pleased with himself that Nola wanted to smack him. Before she could mount a protest, he was spouting out her Gmail address and Lisa was dutifully typing it into her phone.
A millisecond later, both Lisa and Nola got chirped. It was bad news about oil fracking in Virginia. Nola wondered how many other atrocities might be electronically headed her way.
“Ah, Lisa?” she asked with feigned enthusiasm. “About how many of these alerts will I be getting in a day?”
“About fifty to seventy-five.”
Tony grinned like a cheshire cat on ecstasy. “Sounds like the planet’s in big trouble.”
“It’s not the only one,” Nola replied with her best ‘love you now, kill you later’ smile.
Jessica returned with the printouts. Nola asked for the women’s phone numbers in case she had follow-up questions. The women asked for Tony’s card in case they thought of anything that might be helpful later. Everyone said goodbye, and the interview was adjourned.
As soon as Nola and Tony were out the door, she whacked him in the arm.
“What was that for?”
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