He forced himself to sit up and behold the day.
Mid-morning, at least.
He was in the backseat of his Expedition, looking out through his open side windows at a virtually identical Ford SUV that had just parked parallel to him. The door decal said it belonged to the Kern County Sheriff’s Department. So he wasn’t quite home. The cruiser’s door glided open and out stepped a uniformed deputy, the modern law enforcement ideal —a square-jawed body-builder with a crew cut. He appeared to be in his early forties but still very fit. As he leaned against Michael’s Ford, the deputy’s shirtsleeve rode up, revealing a tattoo that girdled his massive right bicep. A pattern of interlocking Mojave Greens, a local rattlesnake that happened to be one of the most toxic in the North America. Cute.
“You must be Investigator Long Shore,” he said.
“I must be Investigator Long Shore,” Michael replied, as if saying it out loud would help him recall the string of events last night that had left him on the side of State Route 14 in eastern Kern County.
“You feeling all right?” the deputy asked.
“I guess,” Michael replied. He’d had a couple drinks at a club on Sunset Boulevard, mostly to mull over his encounter with the man calling himself Carson. But before he got serious about night-clubbing, he decided that what he really wanted to do was pin down Dr. Kincannon’s whereabouts once and for all. Not for Mr. Carson’s boss, possibly the governor of Nevada. But for himself. And maybe Dulcie Kincannon. Speeding north across the Mojave Desert—it all came back to him now, suicidal jack-rabbits hurling themselves beneath his front tires as if they had been waiting despondently beside the highway all evening for his headlights to appear.
Okay. Up to speed. Sort of.
“Did you radio our dispatch, requesting a meet with me?” the deputy asked irritably.
“Yeah, yeah—about three this morning.”
“I got tied up assisting CHP on a multiple fatal down in Red Rock Canyon. Supposed to have gotten off at eight. No sleep now in two days. SWAT training the day before at Fort Irwin.”
“No need to apologize.”
“I’m not,” the deputy said.
Michael stretched and took stock of the local geography. He was close to the granite knob of Robbers Roost, where highwaymen used to lie in wait for the Wells Fargo stagecoaches. That meant he was a few miles south of Indian Wells, where Dulcie had last met with the geophysicist in that big empty house, and a few miles southwest of the Inyokern airport, where Alternative Energies Institute was based. He’d radioed Kern dispatch, asking for this meeting with the beat deputy out of professional courtesy. “In another ten minutes,” Michael said, rubbing his sore eyes with fingers, “I’ll probably be able to read your nameplate. Mind saving me the trouble?”
Through Michael’s open window, the deputy handed him a Styrofoam cup he’d just retrieved from the holder on his dash. “I’m Scott Tiffany.”
“Related to the glass and lamp family?” Michael asked, accepting the cup.
“I wish. I could use the money. Three divorces—that means I’ll get about twelve bucks a month after my retirement is divvied up. How about you, Long Shore—got a front handle?”
“Michael.” The coffee was barely warm, but he sipped it appreciatively.
Deputy Tiffany was already late getting off duty and undoubtedly wanted this wrapped up quickly. “So you’re working a missing on Dr. Kincannon?”
Michael nodded. “Know him very well?”
“Met him twice, maybe three times. Nobody knows him very well.”
“Ever met his wife, Dulcie?”
“Never even heard of her.” Unequivocally.
Michael sprang the door latch and crawled outside. His pillow of the night, his day-pack, spilled to the ground at his feet, and he had to toss it back inside.
“You must’ve been comfortable,” Tiffany said, smirking.
“Just ducky.” Michael looked the man squarely in the eye. “Dulcie Kincannon, or somebody claiming to be Ms. Kincannon, told me she tried to report her husband missing and you guys brushed her off.”
“No fucking way. We’ve already taken our share of heat about this. As I understand it, your sheriff called my sheriff, accusing us of just that. I’ll tell you what all of us in the substation swore to the old man—a woman by that name never contacted us, nobody ever tried to file a report with us. Nothing like that happened. And we were unaware Kincannon might be missing until the sheriff coptered out here from Bakersfield and rattled our cage.”
“Okay, okay,” Michael finally cut him off. “I just need to look inside his house.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—maybe Kincannon hung himself inside a closet. I seem to be lucky lately finding cadavers.”
* * *
The sun was at its zenith when Michael and Tiffany pulled up in the Kern County cruiser to a massive forged-iron gate. Beyond it, the driveway continued up the bluff. No structure was in sight. Both men got out of the unit, and the deputy went to the intercom box. He thumbed the call-button several times but got no response from the residence that apparently stood on top of the heights. “Let me try AEI to get somebody to come up,” he said, flipping open his cell phone.
While Tiffany talked to somebody at the institute, Michael strolled out into the rabbitbrush. AEI’s converted hangar of a headquarters lay directly below, distorted at this hour by the first heat waves of the day, as if the building were constructed of gelatin. A small Cessna was lifting off one of the runways. To the west, a thunderhead, brilliant white, was beginning its slow build over the southern Sierra.
The deputy tromped through the brush to Michael’s side, his large boots flattening branches. “AEI will send somebody to open the place for us.”
Michael still wasn’t convinced how sincere Joanna Wallace’s offer of assistance had been. “Any trouble getting them to do that?”
“Not really.” Tiffany yawned. “Where you stationed—Independence?”
“Death Valley.”
Tiffany raised an eyebrow at this unusual posting for a detective. Apparently, he was one of the few cops in the region not to know about the fiasco over Jimmy’s warrant. “Who’d you piss off?”
“Myself, mostly. But I’m okay with the desert.”
“Well, I’m sick of it.”
“How long have you been here at Ridgecrest Substation?”
“Little over two years. Before that, thirteen years with Las Vegas Metro, and before that four years with L.A. Sheriff, two of them up in the desert at Lancaster Station. I’m sick of it. Give me some goddamned greenery.”
“Any of the guys at Lancaster Station ever mention a homicide involving an Iranian named Nastour Razin?”
“Nope.” Tiffany checked his watch. “You come by way of Panamint Valley?”
“Yeah, two days ago.”
“How they doing on that big IED test track they’re building out there?”
“Apparently still waiting to pour the concrete.” Thinking of Carson, Michael asked, “Has anybody from another agency asked you about Kincannon’s disappearance?”
“Like your outfit?”
“Any outfit.”
“No.” But then after a moment, Tiffany added, “Our dicks are starting to ask me about it, but that’s only because the old man lit a fire under them to come up with some answers. As far as we’re concerned, Inyo is the lead agency.”
“Thanks,” Michael said disingenuously. The bottom line was that Kern County was kissing this off. Dulcie might well have been right.
They both turned at the sound of a Hummer with AEI markings nosing in behind Tiffany’s cruiser. It was lime-green, which meant AEI vehicles would stand out like beacons against the desert, most of which was drab. Joanna Wallace got out of it, dressed in what now seemed her uniform of a white cap and khaki jumpsuit. She was beginning to show dark circles under her eyes. Once again, Michael was struck by her almost older-sister resemblance to Dulcie. “Michael,” she greeted him as
the two men joined her on the driveway. Then she seemed to think better of being so familiar. “Is it all right to call you Michael?”
“Sure.”
“Had I known you were going to be in the area, I would’ve brought along Carl’s Yucca Mountain report. My assistant shipped a copy off to your Furnace Creek address yesterday.”
“Look forward to reading it, thanks. You must know Deputy Tiffany.”
She scanned his face before saying tentatively, “Yes, I’m sure we’ve met a time or two.”
“Quite a few times, Ms. Wallace.” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe he made anything but a sterling impression.
“How was your date in Sacramento, Michael?” she asked, alluding to his postponement of their dinner engagement.
“Everything I thought it’d be.” Michael didn’t correct her that his meeting with the FBI in Los Angeles.
“Ordinarily...” The woman punched a code into the digital pad on the intercom box. “I’d hesitate doing this.”
“Doing what?” Michael asked.
“Carl’s very protective of his privacy. But he has to understand that we’re all worried sick. I hope he has some idea what he’s putting us through. So....” As if on cue, the gate swung back. “...I see no other choice.”
They convoyed up the driveway to the top of the knoll, Tiffany leading the way and Joanna following. Both drivers parked again in front of the mansion. Michael decided that its dominant style was Southwest, this from the pueblo-like stucco on most of the exterior surfaces, although the roof bristled with bold steel elements in disharmony with a backdrop of round, burlap-colored hills.
Joanna had the key to the front door. Once inside, she hurried to a console in the entryway closet and disabled the alarm system. “There’s a fine for false alarms, isn’t there?” she asked Tiffany.
“Sad but true.” Pivoting around, the deputy whistled in admiration of the cathedral-like great room.
Meanwhile, Michael had drifted over to a battery of tall windows. Through them, he had a panorama of the Indian Wells Valley that faded into hazy echelons of mountains in the distance. Kincannon had applied a defensive logic to his estate: He could see could trouble coming miles away while his own house was blocked from view by the brow of the bluff. Often, the Shoshone had done the same when choosing the sites for their camps. They had feared Mojave Indian raiding parties. Who had Dr. Kincannon feared?
Michael might have been more impressed with the big rooms, which he wandered through under Joanna’s watchful eye, had he found a stick of furniture in any of them. The closest he came was a sleeping bag spread out on the carpet in the master bedroom. No pillow, no candles, no empty wine bottles. However, he couldn’t help but wonder if Dulcie and Kincannon had slept together here at their last face-to-face meeting a month before he vanished. “Is the property for sale?”
“No,” Joanna said.
“Any idea who used the sleeping bag?”
“Sorry.”
“Was this house ever furnished?”
“I haven’t seen any here.”
“Are you telling me Dr. Kincannon never occupied it?”
She took a second to frame her answer. “It’s like Carl to undertake some huge project, only to lose interest as soon as it’s almost done. He can change his mind in the blink of an eye, which can really exasperate people. I don’t think he trusts permanence.”
“What do you mean by that?” Michael asked.
“His mother disappeared when he was very young.”
“How?”
“His family lived on Catalina, and the authorities think she was swept out to sea while swimming.”
Michael couldn’t see how the man’s distrust of permanence had resulted in an aversion to furniture. Unless, something had made him, emotionally at least, write off this entire house. That Kincannon’s mother had gone missing would be tucked away for later reflection. Might the mansion’s emptiness be chalked up to the impending divorce, and Joanna was simply helping Kincannon hide his assets, including any collectible or antique furniture? Michael saw that Tiffany, who was drooling over the city plunge-sized tub in the master bath, was out of earshot for the moment. He lowered his voice to Joanna: “Have you been approached by another investigator in regards to this case?”
“Yesterday, a detective from Kern County phoned, asking me the same things you did at the geothermal plant.”
“Any others at any time?”
“No.”
“That day at the plant, were you telling me the Dulcie Kincannon I met in Furnace Creek is misrepresenting herself as Carl’s wife?”
“I’m not privy to his private life.”
“What about a will or trust?”
“The board and I weren’t aware that Carl’s been declared dead. As long as he’s alive—and we have every reason to hope he is—we have an obligation to safeguard his privacy. The law’s on our side in this matter.”
“You’re not helping me, Joanna.”
“Wrong, Investigator Long Shore,” she said evenly. “I’ll help you any way I can. But I won’t violate Carl’s legal right to privacy. Nor can I tell you things I don’t know for myself. Everything I share with you, I imagine some future day when I could be repeating the same thing under oath. I, as an attorney, know the hearsay rule. Personally, I detest hearsay because it’s no more than gossip. If that makes me sound evasive, I apologize. Am I making myself clear?”
“Quite,” Michael said. “It’s refreshing to deal with somebody who understands the penalties of perjury. With that said, do you mind telling me where the hell Carl Kincannon actually lived?”
She looked to Scott Tiffany, who had just stepped behind Michael. “Am I interrupting something? he asked.
* * *
The three of them continued on in Tiffany’s cruiser. Michael took the backseat in the prisoner cage. Joanna Wallace sat beside the Kern deputy in the front, stone-faced as if she felt coerced in showing the two cops the four-wheel-drive road that took off from the rear of the estate and wound up into the foothills. Michael noticed that, as much as possible, she avoided glancing at the local deputy and kept her gaze trained on the rutted track. Maybe she didn’t care for Tiffany’s Teutonic looks and swagger. Why else would she pretend not to recall him from what, according to the deputy, had been several meetings? Michael, on the other hand, had always benefited from the fact that he didn’t look much like a cop. Civilians tended to trust him, even when that greased the chute to conviction.
On they climbed up the steep road, the cruiser rocking and pitching beneath them. Michael was treated to a symphony of sounds, all evocative of desert patrol: the squeal of a dusty fan belt, the chatter of the shotgun slide from the road vibration, and behind it all the murmur of radio traffic. As was the case throughout much of the Great Basin, that parched sink at the heart of the West, a rise in elevation brought pinyon pine and juniper. This was a pygmy forest, seldom crowning more than thirty feet above the rocky slopes it preferred, and the conifers themselves were shaped like apple trees. But it was the zone of comfort and plenty to the native peoples of the desert, a refuge from the heat of alkali basins, like Death Valley, and the most abundant source of protein, in the form of the peanut-sized nuts of the pinyon.
Ahead, the first signs of habitation in over two miles showed in solar panels that jutted above a wooded ridge. They weren’t glinting, for the deputy had driven into the shadow of the thunderhead that continued to swell over the crest.
“There’s an even worse road that peels off to the left,” Joanna instructed him. “Take it.”
Tiffany did so, and within yards the pinyons hemmed in the cruiser even more tightly, the tips of their pruned branches screaking against the sides of the Ford like claws. Michael scooted over so he could look between the front bucket seats. Down the tunnel through the trees created by the road, a wind turbine was visible, one of the kind that dotted Tehachapi Pass forty miles to the south. In the last few minutes, a breeze from the impendi
ng storm had kicked up, and the rotors to the turbine were spinning briskly.
Tiffany braked. A locked chain strung between two posts barred further progress. “I don’t have the key,” Joanna said. “No one but Carl does. We’ll have to walk from here.”
As they set out from the cruiser, raindrops splattered against the ground. Michael braced for a downpour, but the drops slowly dwindled, and soon the only sound was that of the wind in the conifers. Wide-set tire impressions had left two compacted ribbons in the road grit, leading to a sandy clearing. “Were you able to find out what Dr. Kincannon was driving the day he left for Beatty?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, it slipped my mind,” Joanna answered, “though I’m sure it was one of the Hummers or Hummer pickups from our motor pool. I’ll get right on it.”
The question was more for the report. Of itself, a lime-green Hummer would be distinctive enough anywhere near Death Valley.
The eastern edge of the clearing ended in a steep drop-off, offering an even more dramatic vista of the valley and mountains beyond, all the way to the Amargosa Range on the Nevada border. Here the wind turbine stood, busily whirring. Opposite it was Kincannon’s private dwelling, situated much as the mansion below, with broad views from its front but shielded from any prying eyes down in the canyon. Michael wasn’t quite sure what he had expected of the place, certainly not something inspired by an Anasazi ruin. That ancient culture hadn’t extended this far west, but Kincannon had walled off a shallow cave in an over-hanging rock face with adobe bricks. Narrow slits with darkly-tinted glass served as windows. The dwelling itself was small, almost dwarfed by its natural setting, but in that Michael noted the progress the geophysicist had been making from the excess so obvious in the estate below toward what Schopenhauer would have called the renunciation of all we consider worthwhile in practical life. A baby step toward enlightenment. Kincannon was becoming more interesting.
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 8