To Catch the Moon

by Dempsey, Diana

  She clambered to her feet. Her own office was nothing to write home about, but she was proud of it anyway. It was hard won. Like every other county civil servant’s office, it was small, fluorescent-lit, and generally depressing. Behind her desk was a single grimy window over which the shade was usually pulled, unless she wanted pedestrians on Alisal Street to peer in at eye level. She was convinced that if the prosecutorial workload didn’t kill her, the asbestos lurking in the ceiling would. The ill-assorted furniture might well have come from Goodwill. Her desk was scratched-up oak, her file cabinets beige metal. What desk space wasn’t occupied by phone and computer was taken up by canary-yellow felony case files and bulky black binders for those rare cases that actually made it to trial. The only decorative items were her beloved photographs.

  There were three, hung on the wall directly opposite her desk for maximum inspiration. Alicia figured in all of them, standing alongside Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez in one; next to Congresswoman Nydia Margarita Velazquez in another; and with Congresswoman Grace Napolitano in the third. Sanchez was the most daunting: she got elected to Congress at age thirty-seven, leaving Alicia only two years to catch up. Velazquez made it at forty. Napolitano was sixty-three. Thank God, Alicia always thought, for small favors.

  These women were her heroes. All her life, from as early as she could remember, she dreamed of going as far as they had. Thoughts of them got her through those exhausting years of college and law school, when she was working full-time to pay her way. Some mornings even now they inspired her to get out of bed. She figured they must have had times when they felt stalled, too. Maybe they still did. She hoped so. She hoped they were like her in lots of ways.

  On those rare occasions during her childhood when her father was home—when he wasn’t hauling produce along the nation’s highways—he told her there was nothing those proud Latin women had achieved that his Alicia couldn’t. She believed him then; she tried to believe him still. Yet it was no easy trick balancing her father’s ambitions on her shoulders. Though he never said a word, she knew he’d had his days when he wished she was a boy. She’d had her days when she wished she wasn’t the oldest, or the smartest, and that it was Carla or Isela who was earmarked to get the good grades and be the first Maldonado to make it through high school. And beyond.

  How her father fastened on law for her she never understood. Lawyers must have seemed the most powerful people to him; they must have seemed to understand how the world worked in a way he never did. Law, law, law was his constant refrain, and by the time she was ten she was singing the same tune. Now it was the only song she knew.

  On her way out of her office she lightly, ritualistically, touched each of the three photo frames, then headed out the door. Getting to Joyce Ching’s desk required her to navigate the narrow perimeter corridor past small D.A. offices on the exterior side and chin-high cubicle walls along the interior. The Monterey County district attorney’s office took up the first floor of the courthouse’s west wing and was full to bursting with about three dozen prosecutors. Most were two to an office; only senior D.A.s like herself got their own space. Alicia rounded the final corner, approaching Penrose’s office down the long hall, and then saw, through his open door, signs of life.

  Finally. Something must have happened. She quickened her step. Shikegawa was standing inside, with Niebaum and Bucky. Penrose suddenly came into view, bending to turn on a corner table lamp. Sunday or no Sunday, he was wearing a suit and tie. Knowing him, he probably wanted to be ready to go on camera.

  Also there, she saw now, was Louella Wilkes. Big, blond, curvaceous Louella, transplanted ten years earlier from her native Georgia. Alicia always thought Louella looked like Marilyn Monroe back in her Norma Jean days, before Hollywood buffed and polished her. Even after fifteen or so years in the business, Louella was about the most unlikely D.A. investigator you’d ever meet. And, Alicia thought, about the best.

  Alicia felt a stab of anger, directed entirely at Penrose. He hadn’t included her in this meeting, though he’d summoned all the other principals who had gathered the prior afternoon at the crime scene.

  Worry rapidly displaced anger. This was not a good sign. If Penrose intended for her to prosecute this case, she would have been the first person he called.

  He glanced over then, saw her in the corridor, and at least had the good grace to look embarrassed. She stepped inside his office without waiting for an invitation and immediately claimed one of the two upholstered chairs in front of his desk. It was no surprise that Penrose had the nicest furniture—genuine antiques—and the best wood paneling, oil paintings, and Oriental carpets taxpayer money could buy. The other decorations were photos of him shaking hands with every important person he’d ever been able to get on celluloid. It irked Alicia that they had that much in common.

  Louella plopped down in the other chair and grinned, cheery as ever. “Hey, Alicia. Glad you’re here.” She looked at Penrose, her blue eyes mischievous. “Wanna kick it off, Kipper?”

  Alicia knew he hated that but had long ago given up reprimanding Louella, who was a force of nature. “Right,” he said, then sat down behind his desk, which unlike every other horizontal space in the D.A.’s office was bereft of paperwork. Not surprising, since Penrose spent most of his time sucking up to higher-placed elected officials, which didn’t require much written documentation. He leaned forward, steepled his fingers, and looked over them at Niebaum, who was wearing a hole in the fancy carpet. “Let’s start with you, Ben.”

  The autopsy had been completed with remarkable speed, entirely because the victim was prominent and his murder a major news event. In death as in life, Daniel Gaines was getting VIP treatment.

  The pathologist continued pacing as he spoke, and kept his eyes trained on the carpet. “The arrow’s entry point was the left anterior sixth intercostal space. It lacerated the left main pulmonary artery and apparently caused a tension pneumothorax.” He paused and looked up at his listeners. “This wound was fatal in two respects. There’s no question that massive blood loss into the left thoracic cavity would have proved fatal within twenty minutes. But as it is, the victim died of asphyxiation in, I’d say, eight to ten minutes. Perhaps slightly less.”

  Alicia frowned. “Asphyxiation? Doesn’t that mean he suffocated?”

  Niebaum nodded. “That’s correct. The arrow created a vacuum hole that allowed the victim’s chest to fill with air, preventing him from taking a breath. The experience would have been like a slow drowning.” He shook his head. “With every breath he struggled to take, he sucked more air into his chest. His lungs collapsed more and more each time, driving him closer to death.”

  Shikegawa winced. “What a way to go.”

  Niebaum’s bearded face was thoughtful. “Indeed, if the killer wanted the victim to suffer, he, or she, succeeded brilliantly. Any arrow to the chest would cause massive damage, but this pinpoint placement, precipitating a tension pneumothorax, caused a particularly unpleasant demise.”

  Everyone was silent for a time before Louella spoke up. “When would you put time of death, Ben?”

  “Given that the body remained in a stable environment with regard to temperature, we can narrow the time frame to two hours. I would put death at between ten PM and midnight.”

  “Thank you, Ben,” Penrose said. “Andy?”

  The criminalist, in his uniform of beige corduroys and plaid flannel shirt, cleared his throat. “What we have here is an extraordinary compilation of evidence.” He spoke in his formal style, trotted out for momentous occasions like naming suspects and testifying in court. “All of which points in one direction.”

  You could have heard a pin drop. Alicia’s heart beat so hard against her rib cage she thought it might burst out and land on Penrose’s snazzy carpet.

  “There is no sign of forced entry,” Shikegawa went on. “The home is equipped with a state-of-the-art security system, which was not activated during the span of time in which Gaines was killed.


  “In the house, we have four distinct sets of prints belonging to someone other than the victim, his wife, and their housekeeper, an Elvia Hidalgo. Mrs. Hidalgo left the house Friday around six PM and had the weekend off.” He consulted his notes, printed neatly in a small, crimson leather-bound journal. “As for the prints, they were found on the exterior of the front door, on the arrow with which the victim was killed, on the hardwood floor next to the victim’s feet, and on the wall of the room in which the body was found.”

  Shikegawa then looked at each of them in turn. “All those prints belong to the same person.” He paused. “They match the prints of Treebeard.”

  “So it was Treebeard,” Penrose said immediately. Alicia let out a shaky breath. It was what she had thought, too, what for sure they had all thought, for how could they not, given how Gaines had died and the well-documented history between the men?

  “What about the arrow?” Louella asked. “You’re sure it’s Treebeard’s?”

  “It appears to be exactly like the arrows that Treebeard uses, and let me explain that,” Shikegawa went on hastily, as Penrose immediately objected to the word appears. He hoisted a silver metal briefcase onto Penrose’s desk and opened it, taking out a videotape. “May I?” he asked Penrose, then opened a tall cabinet to switch on the TV and VCR stored inside.

  Alicia thought this was yet another way Penrose was a jerk: he was in love with seeing himself on camera. Whenever he scored an interview with a reporter, he recorded the news to catch his performance. He went so far as to save the tapes and file them by case and date.

  Shikegawa punched a few buttons on the VCR remote. On the television screen rose images from the local Channel 8 newscast. Shikegawa fast-forwarded, then began to play on the thirty-something blond female anchor. “The environmental activist who calls himself Treebeard is back in the news tonight in yet another public confrontation with local timber executive Daniel Gaines. Sherry Li reports.”

  Alicia knew the story’s gist, mostly because she’d heard it so often. Treebeard’s band of activists was constantly trying to derail the felling operations of Headwaters Resources, Daniel Gaines’ timber company. At the tree-felling operations north of San Francisco in Humboldt County, Treebeard and his people would chain themselves to trees, throw animal blood on lumbermen, or lie across forest roads to keep the logged cargo from moving. Alicia sympathized with them to some extent. It bothered her, too, to hear that ninety-five percent of the virgin forest in the United States was gone, or that deforestation in the Northwest was worse than in the Amazon rain forest. But how could you not dismiss Treebeard as a kook?

  His name, first of all, ripped off from a character in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who both looked like a tree and claimed to speak for the trees. His extremism, which was of a whole different ilk than that of Julia Butterfly, who herself had gained national notoriety for living for two years in a giant redwood to call attention to their eradication in California. His always dressing in fringed rawhide skins and a coonskin cap, camping in the woods, and, most chilling now, hunting his own game with bow and arrow.

  Shikegawa spoke. “Look at this.” And there on the tape was Treebeard, a man whose fifty-plus years rode hard on his face. His hair dark and stringy, his skin hardened by wind and sun, he stood in front of Headwaters’ Monterey headquarters in his usual animal-skin getup. On a poster-board next to him was a hideous depiction of a wolf caught in a trap, and across it in jagged red letters, as if scrawled in blood, were the words Timber Companies Kill. And slung over Treebeard’s left shoulder was a quiver of handmade arrows.

  Alicia squinted at the image, as did everyone else. The arrows sure did look like the one that killed Daniel Gaines: roughly carved and with a distinctive treelike symbol cut into the wood near the rear feathers.

  On the videotape Treebeard screamed at the headquarters, though clearly he was performing for the cameras. “Will you destroy California the way you’ve destroyed our forests?” He was shrill and melodramatic, almost a caricature of an activist. “Will you kill habitat to enrich yourself and your pampered friends?”

  “Do we know where Treebeard is now?” she asked.

  Bucky spoke up. “He abandoned his campsite. Soon’s I saw the arrow I had the sheriff go check out where he was.”

  “They checked yesterday afternoon?” Louella asked. “But he was gone?”

  “He was gone,” Bucky repeated. “Campsite was cleared out. And who knows where he went?”

  The question hung in the air. Treebeard was famous for having no address, no phone. Unless he was incarcerated, which he was fairly often, no one knew where he was.

  “That’s it,” Penrose declared. “We’ve got more than enough to arrest him.”

  Alicia watched Penrose rise from his chair and puff out his chest. Slam-dunk, Shikegawa had said the prior afternoon. This could be a slam-dunk. In fact, most homicides were. Mystery fiction aside, clues in a homicide were usually obvious, the culprit most often sloppy. Yet still this bothered her. Treebeard might as well have left a calling card as kill Daniel Gaines with his own homemade arrow and leave bloody prints all over the scene.

  “I’ll place a personal call to the governor to tell him Treebeard is our man,” Penrose announced, “and that we will issue a nationwide APB.”

  Alicia said nothing, unable to shake a vague discomfort.

  *

  “Another one down, only one more live shot to go,” Milo heard the director say in his earpiece. “You’re doin’ great, buddy!”

  Milo clutched at his chest and performed a fake stagger for the camera, knowing everyone in the control booth back east was watching. Then he stepped away from the shot, pulled out his earpiece and mike cord, and bent to retrieve the foam cup of cooling coffee he had set on the asphalt.

  How the mighty had fallen. A mere twenty-four hours before he’d been fill-in anchoring the WBS Evening News, one of the network’s plummiest assignments. Now he was freezing his butt off in California and suffering the personal humiliation of standing in front of Joan’s property as if he didn’t know her from Adam, grinding out live shots for WBS’s sister cable network, which did news nonstop and on the cheap.

  At least he had the lead story. What with the macabre video of Gaines’ skewered corpse tumbling onto the pavement, aired over and over, usually in slo-mo, on every news outlet in the nation, this saga was far and away the airwaves’ hottest ticket.

  “I’m gonna go get some wide shots of the property,” Mac told him.

  “Great.”

  Mac McCutcheon, broadcast camera perched on his right shoulder, moved away trailing sound operator Tran Nguyen. The two made an incongruous pair, Mac blond and forty-five years old and built like Arnold Schwarzenegger; Tran a short, wiry fifty-seven, lifted by WBS out of Saigon thirty years before and employed in DC ever since. But they were killer, which was why they worked with Milo, and for Newsline.

  Milo rubbed his eyelids in a futile attempt to de-gum his contact lenses. It’d been stupid to put them in when he had left New York, nearly twelve hours before. Under his black overcoat he was still in the wool trousers and open-collared dress shirt he’d flown in, though he’d been able to sneak in a dry shave before the first live shot, sitting in the rented Ford Explorer they’d picked up at San Francisco airport.

  It would be grueling even without the emotional baggage Milo had brought on the trip. But this was downright embarrassing, him making hay out of Joan’s tragedy. His only consolation was his complete certainty that she was long gone. Even if her husband hadn’t died in the house, Joan would never linger in the eye of a media hurricane. She wouldn’t tolerate it. So there was zero chance she’d look out her front windows and see him among the horde of grasping, opportunistic newspeople, with their live shots and telephoto lenses and satellite trucks.

  His deepest desire was that he be able to leave the Monterey Peninsula without seeing her. He did not want to “renew their acquaintance,” as O’Malley so euphemistically
put it. He did not want a fresh reminder of his humiliation at being dumped. He did not want to be a shoulder to cry on. And he did not want to be compared to Daniel Gaines, god among men, of whom forevermore no unkind word could be spoken.

  Mac and Tran returned. Milo stomped on the ground, trying to warm up, the wind off the bay biting. During the winter months coastal Northern California could be as damp and bone-chilling as the shores of the Potomac.

  “Mac,” he asked, “when’s the last time we had to do back-to-back live shots?”

  Mac shook his head. Tran just laughed.

  Once a WBS correspondent and crew got to work for Newsline, which aired Tuesdays at the highly civilized hour of 9 PM, that kind of grunt TV labor was a thing of the past. Problem was that, thanks to O’Malley, Milo was now assigned to a breaking news story, and so was forced to feed run-of-the-mill news shows, even those on cable. And he had to do it cheerfully, despite his ego’s insistence that such work was beneath him.

  Mac spoke up. “After Evening, though, we should be clear.”

  “Should be.” Milo chuckled without humor. “Unless there’s a new development.” Which could happen at any time and, according to a perverse truth of the news business, was likely to happen at a bad time, like when they were sitting down to a meal or finally about to get some shut-eye. “You have an idea where you want to go to dinner, Mac?”

  He asked, though he knew. Like many network cameramen, Mac was a human Zagat guide. He obeyed his breed’s cardinal rules: Be fast, fast, fast. Always have your camera with you, loaded with videotape and ready to roll. When you’re not working, play. And know where to find pleasure, of both the food and female variety, in every corner of the planet.