Dead Aim

by Thomas Perry

  Mallon stood and looked away for a moment, then looked back and noticed the gun pressed into the sand. The sight brought back his confusion. At first Mallon had been sure that the man had been bringing the gun around toward Mallon’s chest when the rifle shot had killed him. Maybe he had been wrong. Had the man seen the rifle appear on the boat and tried to defend himself by firing a few rounds at it? And who was he? Why had he been carrying a gun on the beach? Mallon stepped closer to the body, then dropped to his knees on the sand again. He took two deep breaths and began to search the body. He patted the pockets of the man’s shorts, and then the jacket pocket, and reached inside to be sure. There was no wallet. There were no keys.

  Mallon stood and looked out at the ocean again. Far off, nearly at the horizon line, there were tiny white specks that he knew were boats. Probably one of them held the woman and the man with the rifle. He had to get to the police. Mallon turned and began to run back up the beach toward the city.

  When he reached the turn around the point, the tide had already come in far enough to have completely covered the sand. Now the waves were breaking against the big rocks at the base of the cliff. He ran into the surf and came to the curve. The next swell was bigger, and it came at him from a different angle, whipped by a strong west wind. It lifted him off his feet and pushed him sideways into a rock. He took a step ahead as it receded, and felt it tugging hard at his legs, drawing him out to deeper water with it. The second wave collided with him and tumbled him over so that he sat down and rolled once as it hissed and sizzled over his head. He held to the cliff and waited, then lunged forward around the point.

  The going was easier now, and the waves hit him from behind, propelling him more quickly up onto the wet sand at the high-water mark. He broke into a run again, staying on the hard, wet stripe where he could run without digging in and fighting loose sand. The tide was coming in fast. At the next curve, when he ran down into the surf the water reached his chest, but he pushed off, let the first wave float him, and swam around the point, then sloshed out and resumed his run.

  He reached the wide, dry section of beach. Ahead of him and to the right he could see the volleyball nets, and beyond them, the cars gliding along Cabrillo Boulevard. He turned toward them and strained to keep up his speed, trying to reach the grassy area near the road, where there were people. But now he was winded and the sand was loose and dry. Running on it was harder and slower. Once his foot didn’t clear the sand and he tripped, but he got up and ran on.

  He came to the volleyball nets. He shouted, “Hey! I’ve got an emergency,” as he came to the back foul line, but his voice was breathy and strained, and it sounded to his own ears like a casual comment rather than an alarm. The young man who had just served stole a quick glance in his direction, but his eyes did not seem exactly to see Mallon, only to note his position as a possible obstacle, then return to the ball. The other team tipped the ball up once, then again, this time lofting it above the net to set for their center forward man to spike.

  Mallon kept going. At the edge of the grass along the road, he saw three young women getting out of a car. He was afraid to run at them, because he knew he must look wild and deranged. He walked toward them and said, “Please, if one of you has a cell phone, please call the police. I’ve just seen a murder.”

  CHAPTER 20

  One of the cops was about forty, and the other was in his twenties. Mallon had seen him before, a blond man riding a bicycle on State Street in a uniform with short pants and short-sleeved shirt that showed chunky reddish forearms and calves covered with fuzzy blond hair. The purposeful way they got out of their car and stepped toward him, fiddling with the gear on their black leather belts, made it look as though they were preparing to subdue him.

  They both stood close to him and the older man said, “Did you place an emergency call, sir?”

  “Yes,” Mallon answered. “I asked this young lady if I could use her phone.” He turned to indicate to her that she should join them, but he didn’t see her. “She must have left.”

  The two cops looked around them, and seemed to notice the volleyball people who had gathered on the grass nearby. The older cop put a big hand on Mallon’s shoulder and conducted him closer to the police car, while the younger cop took a step toward the gaggle of young people, not saying anything, just swinging both hands, palms upward, in a sweeping motion. They turned and walked off toward the volleyball court marked on the sand, having understood from the young cop’s signal that order had been restored and nothing else of interest was going to happen.

  Mallon fought to overcome the air of imperturbability that he sensed in the police officers. “I was walking on the beach, maybe half a mile up that way. A man—an older guy—and a young woman were coming toward me from the other direction. The man pulled a gun out of his jacket. There was a boat offshore, and somebody with a rifle shot the man. He fell down, and the person shot him again. The woman ran to the water, swam out to the boat, and they took off.”

  “Why?” asked the older cop. “What was going on?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mallon. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  “Is the man who was shot alive?”

  “No,” said Mallon. “Not alive. He’s definitely dead. There’s a big hole through his back and out his chest.”

  “Where’s the body now?”

  “I left it there. He was dead, and I knew you wouldn’t want a murder victim moved.”

  “Let’s go take a look.” He opened the back door of the car.

  Mallon stood still and shook his head. “It’s down there. On the beach.”

  “We can get there from above.”

  Mallon got into the car. The older policeman drove, and the younger one sat half-turned in his seat to stare at Mallon. He had a pen and a small notebook. “Let’s get some preliminaries while we’re on the way. Your name, sir?”

  “Robert Mallon. M-A-L-L-O-N.”

  “Address?”

  “It’s 2905 Boca del Rio.”

  “That a house or an apartment?”

  “House.”

  “Age?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “Phone?”

  When Mallon gave him the number, he asked, “That home or work?”

  “Home. I’m retired.”

  The young policeman moved down his dull list, merely extending it into the crime seamlessly. “And you did or didn’t know the victim?”

  “Didn’t. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “A jacket. Like a windbreaker. It was tan, that material they make trench coats out of. Khaki shorts. A pair of sneakers.”

  “What about a hat?”

  “Yes. A baseball cap, with a crown that was made of netting. It’s white.”

  “And you said he had a companion?”

  “A young woman. Twenty-five, thirty at most. Maybe five feet three. She was wearing a black bathing suit. It was a two-piece, but not like a bikini. There was a little more to it.”

  “Can you describe her?”

  “Yes. Dark hair with sort of a curl to it, so it wasn’t quite frizzy, but kind of stuck out. It was about to her shoulders when she was in the water and it was wet.”

  “How old was the victim, again?”

  “I don’t know. At least fifty-five, but I would guess closer to sixty-five.”

  The older policeman had driven them up along the road beside the cemetery, and now he slowed down and turned into it. He said, “We can see down to the beach from up here.”

  They got out of the car and walked past gravestones toward the trees at the end of the last row of graves. Mallon oriented himself by the sun, and marveled at his not thinking of this. Of course the beach would be somewhere beyond the edge of the cemetery. The ocean didn’t stop because there was a cemetery, and then resume later along the road near the Biltmore Hotel. They reached a bluff above the ocean. The older cop said, “Watch your step.”

&nbs
p; Mallon walked up beside him and they approached the edge together.

  “Tide is way in now,” said the older cop. Mallon looked down. The tide had risen, and seemed to have eaten up the rest of the beach.

  “Is this about where you left the body?” the younger one asked.

  Mallon did not like the question, but he was aware of seconds passing, and insisting on certain ways of saying things was not going to help him with these two men. “Things look different from up here.” He stepped closer to the edge and looked along the shore toward the city, then in the other direction. “I think this was about it, though.”

  “Where do you suppose it went?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably under the water.”

  The young cop turned and trotted back toward the car. The older cop stayed with Mallon. “There’s no chance he just got up and walked off?”

  “No,” Mallon insisted. “No chance.”

  “You ever see anyone shot before?” He was staring hard into Mallon’s eyes.

  Mallon returned his gaze. “Not close up. I never saw anything like this.”

  “What did the wound look like?”

  “He was shot through the back. It was a hole in his jacket, and his chest was blown open right here.” Mallon touched his own chest at the sternum. “And there was lots of blood, and more stuff from inside that came out with it. It looked like pieces of the heart or something. I tried to feel a pulse, and couldn’t. I think he was hit twice, because there were two shots, and he kind of jerked at the first one and fell down. The second was the one through the back, after he was on the ground.”

  The older cop nodded and they walked back into the cemetery, toward the police car. The younger cop was standing beside it, still talking into the radio microphone. He ended the call and said to his partner, “We’re going to have some help looking. They’ll be here in a few minutes.” He turned to Mallon. “What we need to do is get a really good description of the boat. Did you see the registration number?”

  Mallon stopped for a moment, and tried to bring it back. He could see the boat, but the numbers he knew had to be painted in black letters at the bow were just not in the memory. “I should have looked for it. I just didn’t.”

  “Any name painted on the stern?”

  “I didn’t see one.”

  “Any commercial number along the hull near the stern?”

  “No, there wasn’t. It was a pleasure boat, like a small cruiser. About twenty feet long, at most. It was white, low near the stern, high at the bow. There’s a closed cabin, but low, so the guy steering the boat was standing and he was looking over the top of it. As he was coming in, I could see his head over it.”

  “What did he look like?”

  Mallon shrugged helplessly. “Just a head. He had sunglasses on, a black baseball cap. And his hair was—I guess—reddish, but mostly hidden by the cap. I didn’t notice much about the clothes. They were dark, maybe jeans and a sweatshirt or jacket.”

  “So let’s put this together,” said the younger cop. “Small private cruiser, twenty feet, white hull, low cabin. Two males and a female. That’s all we’ve got.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “I was scared, and it was so confusing and weird that I didn’t think to look for more. I don’t know what happened, really, or what it was about. I didn’t know where to look.”

  There were engine sounds, and two police cars pulled into the entrance to the cemetery, then up the drive to join them. The two police officers conferred with the newcomers for a few seconds, and then both of the cars drove out of the cemetery and off toward the east. When the two cops returned, the younger one said, “Let’s go.”

  Mallon got into the back seat, and the older policeman drove them to the stretch of road just west of the Biltmore Hotel, and parked behind the others. There were already a paramedic truck and a red utility vehicle from the fire department. Down on the beach, there were policemen and firefighters forming a line.

  Mallon said, “Can we help?”

  The older cop said, “You’d better leave that to the people who get paid for it. If they find him they’ll let us know at the station.”

  Mallon had no idea when the next low tide would come, and it surprised him. He was amazed at himself for not knowing, not having bothered to pay attention to something so big and fundamental that he saw twice every day. It was a few minutes later, after he was at the station, that he heard another cop say it was over four hours until the next low tide.

  After a while, Mallon called Diane. He simply asked the older cop if it was all right if he used the telephone, and the cop nodded. Diane’s machine answered, and he left a message for her, then returned to waiting for the police to announce that they had found the body. Just as he was getting restless, another police officer came to the bench where he was sitting, invited him to a back office, and asked him the same questions the first two had asked. Then he too went away. Mallon felt like a person at a party who didn’t know anyone. People talked to him until they simply ran out of questions to ask and then drifted off.

  After three hours, a policeman wearing a tan blazer came to his office and stood in the doorway. “You’re the same guy who saved the woman on the beach and then found out she killed herself.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Long. What else haven’t you said?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mallon. “Have you found the body?”

  “Not yet. The ocean sometimes drags things out from shore for a while, if there’s a big tide. But they come back. They get washed up somewhere.”

  “The gun. The man had a gun. When he was shot—the first time—he fell down on it. When I was alone I rolled him over, and I didn’t pick it up. The ocean shouldn’t have moved that.”

  The detective expressed no opinion. “Do you want to go home?”

  Mallon said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what happened. I still can’t be sure I know what was going on. But I think that I might be in danger.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I think the older man on the beach was trying to shoot me. Or maybe the one in the boat was. I don’t know. But I can’t see how this can possibly not be related to the death of Catherine Broward.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I have no enemies. There’s no other reason for anybody to try to harm me.”

  Detective Long looked unconvinced. “I don’t understand what you think this has to do with a suicide.”

  Mallon took a deep breath, released it, and said, “I kept Catherine Broward from drowning herself. Then she went off, and the next day I learned that she had shot herself with a pistol a couple of hours later. It seemed odd to me, but it didn’t bother any of the people who know more than I do about such things: Lieutenant Fowler, the coroner’s office. So I accepted that version of what had happened. But I couldn’t get her out of my head. I wanted to know what had made her do it. I hired Lydia Marks, a private detective I’d known for years, to help me find out.”

  “How did she go about that?”

  “We investigated, interviewed people—Catherine’s older sister, whom she had visited in Pittsburgh only a month or so before, a woman who had known Catherine and her boyfriend, the L.A. police detective who had looked into the boyfriend’s murder, the owner of a self-defense school she had gone to just before the boyfriend was killed. I don’t even know who else Lydia talked to, because when I wasn’t with her, she was often on the telephone or on her computer finding things out. After we had completed an interview, she left me here and drove back to L.A. to do some more digging. A couple of nights ago, Lydia was in a restaurant late in the evening, and she was murdered.”

  “That’s quite a story,” said Detective Long. “Do you know what she was doing there? Was she alone?”

  “I’m almost positive she was working. When she was killed, so were a bartender, some customers, and a waitress.
I’ve been trying to figure out what the connection would be, and I just don’t know enough. Maybe it was a place where Catherine and her boyfriend used to go. Or maybe the waitress was a friend of hers. Catherine used to work as a waitress. I just don’t know. But I think that’s what got Lydia killed.”

  “How do you know the Catherine Broward investigation was what she was working on?”

  “She had just formed a new theory, and she said she was going back to L.A. to find out more, so she would know whether or not it was the right one. I think somebody she talked to led her into an ambush.”

  “Okay,” said Long. “Then what? They waited a couple of days after they killed her, and then set up a second ambush on the beach in Santa Barbara to kill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “If they lured her to a restaurant and killed her to keep her quiet, why not kill you too? Why not lure you both to the place? Or maybe kill her and then drive up here to kill you the same night? It’s only a two-hour drive.”

  “I don’t know,” Mallon answered. “We had been interviewing people together. Maybe they thought I’d be there with her.”

  “But waiting all this time to find you gave you the opportunity to tell the LAPD everything, right?”

  “I suppose it did. My lawyer told them everything we know.”

  “So whatever damage you could do to these people is already done.”

  “Maybe they don’t know that,” said Mallon.

  Detective Long leaned against the wall near the door. “It occurs to me that what they know might be a subject worth thinking about. Do you always walk along that same beach at the same time each day?”

  “I walk almost every day, but usually not there. Until recently I’ve usually headed in the other direction, toward Hope Ranch and Goleta. I suppose they could have simply been watching me, and waiting for a time when I was really alone. I can’t really even say I know that they were trying to kill me. The man on the beach may have been planning to shoot at the man on the boat. It’s possible that the man on the boat was aiming at the man on the shore all along, and never at me. I grew up with rifles. I could easily have hit what I was aiming at from that distance, but he was trying to fire while the boat was moving, coming up over waves and slapping down again. It must have been hard just to stand on the deck. I don’t know what he was trying to do. I just think it’s extremely unlikely that suddenly, after all these years, people should begin shooting that close to me, and it would have nothing at all to do with the death of Lydia Marks, or that her death had nothing to do with Catherine Broward’s.”