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"Let me talk to him. I'll get the gun. It's not a problem."

  She hadn't thought it through, and she didn't have time to think it through right here, so she said what she thought was right. Hoped was right. Hope, now stretched out to the diameter of an opinion.

  "No. Not yet. I will if we need to. He couldn't kill her, Paul. I know that."

  "People get fooled all the time. Look at Aubrey."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She ran through the Cancun parking lot with a newspaper over her head but her shoulders and hair were wet by the time she got inside. She found her group in the back, seated in the usual big booth beneath the fronds of the mock palapa.

  Sheriff's Unsocial Deputies Society was Merci's gig all the way. She invited who she wanted, excluded others, served as hostess and MC, made sure the tab got paid and the waitress got tipped. It was a wholly self-serving venture, she admitted, a way of networking—a word she’d long mistrusted.

  She understood enough of office politics to know you had to play in order to get ahead, so SUDS was her handpicked team, the people who would rule the department someday: Merci's People.

  Her two hard rules for admittance were only that she like them and they like her, and they had to be good at their jobs. Beyond that, anything went. At first it was Ike Sumich, Lynda Coiner and a young deputy named Joe Casik. Then Evan O'Brien and one of the young burg-theft detectives—Ed Mendez. Kathy Hulet from vice was a welcome addition, though she was a draw for some unwelcome male deputies who learned about the SUDS from the unending department gossip. Merci didn't want a singles club, which is why she'd not included Mike. After a couple of meetings she had to add some oldsters, guys like Gilliam from the lab, Stu Waggoner over in Fraud and Ray Dunbar. Merci had actually had a few deputies ask if they could come. She'd let two out of three feel welcome, the other not.

  On a night like this, with her nerves rankled over Mike McNally's overtures to a high-line whore, Merci wished she could just go home to The Men. But if you started something you had to finish it, this was clearly evident.

  Merci slid into the booth next to Kathy Hulet. Attendance was light: Joe Casik, Evan O'Brien, Lynda Coiner.

  Tonight's topic seemed to be nature versus the new Orange County toll roads, which cut through thirty-something miles of unpeopled south county hills. Motorists had killed two mountain lions, a dozen deer, eight wildcats and countless rabbits and squirrels. Casik, an environmentalist, hiker, birdwatcher and photographer, was haranguing about the fate of a toll roads agency plan to include "wildlife corridors" under the road, to aid in the movement of deer and big cats.

  "The idea was okay," he was saying, as Merci nodded to the waitress for her usual Scotch and water. "But the trouble is, the deer are scared of the damned things. The corridors are just tunnels under a highway, with thousands of cars roaring up on top. So the bureaucrats try to lure the deer into the tunnels with something good to eat. Alfalfa. But they've got no idea that alfalfa is toxic to deer, so the deer that the cars don't hit are being poisoned in the wildlife corridors. We're growing some fat vultures, is all we're doing. I see 'em everywhere on my hikes."

  "Venison is delicious," said O'Brien. "They could give the deer meat to the poor. Issue them passes to prowl the corridors. Free forks and knives."

  "Napkins, too," said Coiner. "And they still charge three dollars and sixty cents to drive that thing out to Green River."

  Casik pointed out that nature had scored two human lives to balance the sheets: a late-night single-car colliding into a light stanchion because the driver was trying to miss something in the road—most likely a deer.

  "Too bad, though," said Coiner. "It was an old lady and her granddaughter."

  "They have deer sensors you can put on your car," said Evan. " let you know when ..."

  Merci tuned out. The bar music was loud and the lights were low and these faces—faces she usually liked seeing—just made her feel alien and irrelevant. She wished Hess was here. She wished The Men were here.

  Hulet touched Merci's arm while Casik and O'Brien talked about fire ants and killer bees. "You all right?"

  "Clobbered. Long day."

  Yeah, and you get those Africanized bees after you and it's all she wrote ...

  Hulet was a long-legged brunette who couldn't disguise her looks and never tried to. She was Vice Detail's best john-bait, and she had gotten herself into some hairy situations and never lost her cool, played second base on the deputies' slow-pitch softball team.

  "You look it," she said. "Go home, get some rest."

  "I'm going to, soon."

  "What's with Mike?"

  Got a brother in Texas who's got fire ants, they bite him and his, swells up for three days . ..

  "I got no idea," said Merci, though in fact she did.

  "Damn, he's been weird lately—stressed out and tired all the time. Looks like he's been awake for a week. Gone sometimes when he ought to be at work. Says he's been in church. Whatever. But this Whitaker thing really got to him. I've never seen him so . . . guilty. You know, for letting it happen. I mean, she was his girl and she was going to wear a wire for Moladan, and the next thing we know somebody's capped her right in her own apartment. But Mike was weirding out before that, so it's not just the Whittaker thing."

  Plus the fire ants eat a lot of bird eggs, just wiped out the quail in west Texas, where my brother lives . . .

  "I know," said Merci. "Believe me, I know. He's been leaning heavy on me this last month, too. Real touchy, real raw."

  "Well, he's in love with you, so that's all that is."

  "I guess."

  "You look thrilled."

  Collect a bunch for a fire ant farm, send it to my nephew up in Seattle .. .

  "Kathy, I wish I lived on a tropical island sometimes. Me and Tim and a thousand paperback novels. Rum and pineapple juice."

  "Obedient servant boys with tight brown buns?"

  "They come when you ring a bell."

  Tight brown buns? What the hell are you two talking about over there?

  "Try Club Med. I'll go with you."

  "Hey, I might take you up on that."

  So Merci stuck it out for an hour, the voices and faces blending and blurring as she sipped her Scotch.

  No, Glandis doesn't have the balls to challenge Brighton for office. That'd be like a pit bull biting his master.

  Glandis just plays dumb.

  Good actor, then. You ever met his wife? Looks like Cruella DeVille. But look, Glandis needs Brighton's backing. Nobody's going to be the next sheriff unless Brighton endorses. He's the machine.

  Either way, Brighton's gotta step down before too long, I mean he's what, seventy, seventy-one?

  Seventy-two. Glandis isn't any youngster. There's Vince Abelera in the marshal's office, he seems okay. But I'll be dipped in red ape shit if we get a marshal as sheriff. We need some young blood running this show. Some of our own blood.

  "Merci, why don't you just announce you're running for sheriff?" This from Joe Casik.

  "I'm not old and wrinkly enough yet."

  "I'll support you."

  "Me, too," said O'Brien. "The rank and file of SUDS will weigh in behind you."

  "You guys," said Merci, standing. "I'm sorry, but I'm definitely not running for sheriff, and I'm definitely over this one. I've got an early interview tomorrow—way up in Arrowhead."

  "Bring your chains," said Casik.

  "I'm planning on it. Sorry I'm such a dud tonight. 'Night, kiddies."

  " 'Night, Mom."

  " 'Night, Mom. Love to Timmy."

  Merci trotted through the rain to her Impala, checked the backseat with her penlight, swung open the door and checked the backseat again. She sat rubbing her hands together and flogged the pedal to get engine warm.

  She took Irvine Boulevard back to Tustin, back to her house in the orange grove. She slowed at Myford and looked at the tract houses. Rain came down in sheets, flooded the gutters, swamped up over sidewalks.

  Myford and F
ourth, she thought: Patti Bailey with her heart blow out, dumped on the side of the culvert. Back then it was nothing but groves. Now it's nothing but rain.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  White brilliance. Even her good sunglasses couldn't beat the blinding sunlight reflected off the snow. Merci felt the chains on her tires crushing the road ice, felt the cold on her face through the windows. Second gear and the big Chevy still wanted to slide.

  She hated snow, always had, but she couldn't believe how white it was, how perfectly, flawlessly white. The drifts beside the road looked ten feet high. Then the mountainsides—blankets of white, perforated by pines. And the trees themselves, heavy with snow and stunned by sunshine, stood motionless, like they were afraid to move.

  Roy Thornton's place was past the village, off a little road that dipped into darkness then rose again into the world of purest optics.

  When she stepped inside she smelled coffee, bacon and burning wood. Thornton was tall and heavy, plenty of gray hair, a shy smile. His eyes seemed small and a little sad, shaded by diagonal folds of skin, but they twinkled when he looked straight at her. He said to call him Roy. He introduced his wife, Sally, who was making breakfast in front of a window looking out on Lake Arrowhead.

  Thornton got two cups of coffee and led Merci back to the den. Merci got the couch. Thornton took a beat-up old lounger. Merci set the file on the coffee table in front of him, got out her blue notebook and a pen. The windows had curtains tied back for the view.

  "How's Orange County?"

  "Crowded."

  "Most densely populated county in the state now."

  "I read that recently."

  "Lots to do."

  "The murder rate's dropped in half over the last two years. We can’t explain it, other than lots of jobs and excellent police work."

  Thornton smiled. "It's nice to have citizens too busy making money to commit crimes. Still lots of gang stuff?"

  "Too much."

  "We didn't have that when I was there. Hardly any."

  Merci drank her coffee, looked at the trout mounted on the wall. There was a TV in one corner, one of the old RCAs with wooden and cabinet, cloth and wood stripping over the speakers. On top was an arrangement of plastic greenery with a small nativity scene the middle.

  "Sally and I went down for Tim's funeral."

  "Yes."

  "Good guy. Worked hard. One of the few guys I knew who live his job but wasn't an asshole. I liked him."

  "I did, too."

  Thornton's small sad eyes studied her, revealing nothing. Merci to fight herself to keep from wondering what he knew, what he'd heard. The answer was: It didn't matter.

  "Patti Bailey," he said, leaning forward, picking up the file. He set it on his lap and leafed through. "We never got a break. We did the groundwork, interviewed family and friends, some of her customers----nothing. There were some good angles. Drugs, bikers, her clientele. Maybe too many good angles. Lots of motive in a crowd like that, she talked a lot. Seemed to be in the middle of a thousand little intrigues. You know, biker mentality—who gets the speed market this side of the Ortega Highway, who gets the other side. And every grimy Hessian was trying to make every other grimy Hessian's girl. I remember two or three guys thinking Patti was all his. Mexican heroin. Some pot. Mostly speed and downers. She got herself into the transport side, made money. Ambitious, you could say. Thought for herself. How well she thought is another question."

  "You get as far as a decent suspect?"

  "No. Couple of the bikers made sense—the ones that thought she belonged to them. But we couldn't make anything stick. We looked at a couple of johns, guys with ties to Leary's Brotherhood down in Laguna, but nothing popped. Those guys didn't care about her enough to kill her. They were loaded, free-love guys, plying her with dope. She was one of hundreds. We got some shoe impressions out of the orange grove near the body, but the soil was so loose they didn't help much. Estimated a size nine, if I remember right. Guy took her clothes apparently. Nobody saw anything. She'd been dead for a day before we got to her. Large caliber handgun, likely."

  Merci looked down at her notes: sus—then a zero with a null slash through it.

  "What did your gut say, Roy?"

  "Yeah, guts. Well, two things. First of all, I don't think she was killed there. I think she was moved. We couldn't prove that—no drag marks, no witnesses. Hard to say how much blood soaked into the ground, or didn't. We dug in the right places but couldn't find any lead. I think the body was moved. What's that tell you? Means he killed somewhere incriminating, somewhere harder to clean up. But still somewhere he could get the body out without being seen. A car, maybe."

  "Did she turn her tricks nearby?"

  "She used a couple of different motels up in Santa Ana. Her address was a hotel called the De Anza, up Fourth Street. Old place, downstairs was a restaurant. There was some prostitution going on there, but Bailey wasn't using it for business. Mostly enlisted men from the Tustin air base or Pendleton. We didn't find much in her room. That wasn't where he killed her."

  "You were thinking john then."

  Thornton frowned and shook his head. "Yeah, at first. But it was careful, too. What struck me about the murder scene wasn't what we got, but what we didn't get—no prints, no bullet lead or brass, no tire tracks we could work with. We got some nice wide broom marks on the road shoulder. We could see where he'd kicked the footprints when he left the grove. Pretty clean work, for such an ugly homicide.

  "Merci thought, wrote: pains to cover tracks—calm and efficient. "Premeditated?" she said.

  "I still ask myself that question. You take a hooker and a gunshot wound and you don't get premeditated out of it, ninety-nine percent the time. But you factor in moving the body, sweeping up most of the prints, you get another dimension. What I thought at first was a pissed off john who didn't have the money, or couldn't get it up, she wouldn’t do what he wanted. Then I thought it had to be one of her biker Romeos, who thought she belonged to him. Then I wondered about the drug connections. And still, I still think those aren't it. I think those aren’t it because I worked them and got zip."

  "Why'd he take the clothes?"

  "I figured blood or semen. Nothing else made sense."

  "Some kind of predator then?"

  Thornton shook his head and leaned back. "No. Just guts again, to me it was too neat. And it didn't match up with anything else we had. You figure if a guy's bent that way he's going to do it again."

  He was quiet then. Merci looked at the snow outside, at pendants of ice hanging in the shade of the northern eaves. She could sense Thornton wanted to say something. It was the same silent notification that suspects gave under interrogations sometimes, when you knew were about to lay it all on you.

  "What?" she asked quietly.

  Thornton sighed. "That was a tough year, sixty-nine. Sheriff Owen just up and resigned all of a sudden. He said it was health reasons but he was healthy as a horse and we all knew it. We had a supervisor—the big guy, Ralph Meeks—resign over a payola scandal. Remember him? Most powerful guy in county politics, run out for taking bribes. We had an old Mexican farmer—Jesse Acuna—beat half to death, claimed it was racist cops trying to rid the county of minorities. Cesar Chavez, ACLU, got in on that; and, of course, the press love story. Had a New York Times reporter here for that one. Did a whole series on what a rich, white, racist county it was. And we had a bunch of deputies who were John Birchers, they were going into neighborhoods and starting up volunteer police departments—organizing right-wing groups to keep law and order in the land. Some people said they were vigilantes, some said they were old-fashioned patriots. Me, I think I'd go with the vigilantes. People liked to believe the Birchers beat up that farmer, but I don't think anything was ever proved. Vietnam just kept dragging on. The whole county was overflowing with dope—grass by the ton up from Michoacan and Oaxaca, LSD pouring out of the Brotherhood in Laguna, barbs and uppers plentiful and cheap. You know, high-school student body pres
idents caught with kilo bricks in their lockers. And all the parents in their flattops and bouffants, pissed off, voting hard-line Republican, guzzling their Scotch. But their kids with hair to their butts, quoting Marx, burning the flag, stoned on their dope. Everybody hated everybody else. Everybody got a divorce. My own kid joined some no-good religious cult and went to Guatemala for a year. We still hardly talk. Horrible time. The Black Panthers and the Black Muslims. Everybody waiting for the next Watts. Every week, the body count from the war getting higher. Nixon promising to win it. Young men coming home in boxes by the hundreds, like the government was sending them over so they could get killed, thin the opposition. Damned Manson and his clan—that was the week right after Bailey. All the horrible music. I felt like . . . well ... we had law, but no order."

  Thornton stopped, gazed out the window. Merci thought about that time, 1969, but didn't come up with much because she had been four. She vaguely remembered lots of hair, peace signs, psychedelia. Lots of heat coming off the TV screen: the war, Nixon and his twenty-four hour five o'clock shadow, Kissinger and his bloodhound eyes. She had loved Mod Squad and Mission Impossible. Didn't understand most of Rowan and Martin, though her parents laughed all the way through it. Merci remembered her mother wearing short skirts that showed off her legs, Clark with his regulation flattop and thin ties. She remembered some political meetings they went to—films on the Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia tragedies, the Congo tragedy, the Cuba tragedy, communists inside the United Nations.

  Sally Thornton brought in two TV trays and popped them open. Merci's had a depiction of a Fourth of July picnic on it, with flags and watermelon and a three-legged race going on. The breakfast was huge and fattening, just the way Merci liked it. She'd turn it to muscle in the gym.

  "And Patti Bailey?" she asked, when Sally was gone.

  He looked at her and shrugged. "Nobody cared. It didn't make much of a splash in the papers. Sheriff Owen never pulled out the stops like he used to on big murders. No reward organized, no extra dicks assigned. Just a routine case."

  To her mind, Merci had never had a routine case. She took each of them personally, which a cop wasn't supposed to do. Not so much victims, more the perps. She took them very personally. She wanted make sure they got a fair trial, then the needle, or thrown in a dungeon forever. It was a bad quality to have and she knew it. Hatred was a dirty fuel, but it was a fuel that burned hot and long.