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“No.”

  “You leave before she got off?”

  “Yeah. Ten or so. What’s wrong?”

  “She’s not home. She’s always home when I get here. I went by the restaurant again and they said she left at ten-thirty—half an hour early. She’s not here. So I thought—”

  “Maybe she’s at the Locker, maybe she took a walk,” grumbled Jim, his stomach in revolt. Raymond was always worded too much about something. He seemed to need it.

  “A two-hour walk around the peninsula in that outfit they make her wear? The fog’s in, too. I’ll try the Locker.”

  “I don’t know, Ray.” What Weir did know is that the first time Becky Flynn had not come home to him, she was out with another man. She had actually gone on, after the breakup, to marry this third party, but Weir could never figure out whether that was a consolation or not, Jim said nothing, silently cursing himself for projecting his own romantic disappointments onto his sister and friend.

  But there was a moment of silence when he sensed that Raymond was doing it, too. “Well, she’s never done this before.”

  “Try the Locker, Ray.” Jim had always thought Raymond tried to keep too tight a leash on things, Annie included. It was typically cop, and understandable.

  “Sorry. Get some sleep.”

  “Night, Ray.”

  Raymond called back an hour later, at 2:05 A.M. “Jim, she’s still not here. Not at the Locker, either. Her car’s gone. You sure she’s not with Virginia or something?”

  Weir had been dreaming of his Zihuatanejo jail cell. He was so deep into it, he could smell the rotting walls, feel the roaches scratching across his feet. “Lemme check downstairs.”

  Ann’s old room was empty. So was the living room, the den, Jake’s old room. Virginia slept heavily in the master, a rectangle of soft light from the streetlamp lying upon the floor. For a brief moment, he thought back to the old days, when Jake and his father were alive and the house always seemed so busy and disheveled and stuffed with life.

  He even looked in the garage, but all he saw were his pickup truck, Virginia’s old VW, her collection of clutter. His stomach rumbled as he walked back upstairs to his room. “No. Not here.”

  “It’s after two, Jim.”

  “You call patrol?”

  “Yes, nothing. I might cruise myself.”

  “Just stay by the phone. She knows where you are, Ray; she’ll call.”

  “I got a bad feeling.”

  The same feeling lapped at Weir, then retreated. “Don’t feed it. She’ll be back.”

  “Sorry.”

  Weir couldn’t sleep. At 3:25, the phone rang again. “Still not here, Jim.”

  “I’ll be over in five minutes.”

  Jim dressed in the darkness and went downstairs. His mother was sitting in her favorite living room chair, both arms extended along the rests, her back straight, head erect. She looked like Lincoln. She asked Jim what was wrong and Weir told her Ann wasn’t home yet.

  “Call the Whale’s Tale and the Locker,” she said.

  “Ray did.”

  “Try Sherry, from the restaurant.”

  “She’d call if she was with a girlfriend.”

  “Then call the watch commander.”

  “He did that, too.”

  Virginia was quiet a moment. “I don’t like this. It’s something your father would have done. Annie got more of Poon than you or Jake did, so if I taught her one thing, it was how to take care of herself.”

  “That doesn’t make her home, Mom.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll try Becky’s.”

  Jim closed the door quietly behind him and walked north along the bayfront. He was passing Ann’s Kids when he saw that the door was cracked open. Weir stopped and looked at his watch: it was 3:37 A.M., Tuesday, May 16. He tried the gate, which was locked, then climbed the fence and landed heavily on the other side. The chain link chimed briefly, then settled. Six steps to the door, boot heels on concrete, no lights on. He poked the door with his finger and it swung easily on quiet hinges.

  Weir stepped into the house and flipped on a light. This was the playroom, with clean hardwood floors and all manner of toys—plastic buckets and shovels, dolls and doll-houses, big blocks with letters on them—arranged along one wall. A rocking horse waited on its springs, frozen in gallop. A low case filled with picture books stood along another wall. There was a trash basket filled with tops, yo-yos and jump ropes, and a larger one that contained those big red balls that smell of rubber and ping beautifully when you bounce them.

  The second room was for quiet time and videos. The kitchen was clean. Jim nudged open the door to Ann’s office with his toe: desk, three folding chairs, a typewriter, telephone, answering machine. An empty flower vase, half-filled with water, sat beside the phone. He smelled it—the water was fresh.

  Looking out a window to the backyard, he saw the dark outlines of a playhouse, a rabbit cage, a sandbox.

  He switched off the lights, locked the front door, and pulled it shut behind him. Climbing back over the fence, he wondered why the door had been left open and why there was a flower vase on Ann’s desk half-filled with clean water, but no flowers.

  Four houses down the sidewalk, he went through a wrought-iron gate, up a short walkway, then onto a wooden deck that gave humidly beneath his feet. Ray opened the door before he knocked.

  “The preschool door was open, Ray.”

  “I know. I went there first, looked around, left it the way it was. Did you lock it?”

  Jim nodded.

  Raymond looked at him sharply. His forehead was shiny with sweat and the hair around his ears looked damp. “I hope you didn’t contaminate it.”

  Jim understood now just how panicked Raymond really was. “It’s not a crime scene.”

  “Something’s wrong. I can feel it. When you’re married for twenty years and something’s wrong, you know.”

  Jim stood in the living room while Ray poured coffee. The house was a small two-bedroom, with low ceilings and knotty pine walls that seemed dark as walnut. They’d been renting it for ten years, and it was a step up from their old apartment. They both wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and rent wasn’t cheap anymore. The second room was the study, where Raymond labored over his books. Jim could see in the dim lamplight thick volumes stacked on a table, a legal pad lying beside them, a dozen pencil tops emerging from a green coffee can. Ray had been going to law school part-time since Jim had quit the Sheriff’s, two years back. He had told Weir that compared to studying law, the streets were a vacation—he was more comfortable with crooks than books. To Jim, Ann and Ray seemed like a lot of other people from the neighborhood: blue-collar, hardworking, and not much to show for it. Ray’s JD was his ticket on the upward express. Virginia paid the tuition.

  Weir understood Raymond’s struggle to break out—his own ticket was in his hand. The fact that he had quit a detective’s job to hunt treasure was something that everyone in the neighborhood seemed to approve, but Weir had always sensed a bit of contempt mixed with it, the insinuation—trailing along just behind the good wishes—that he had sold out. In one sense, he knew that he had, but it wasn’t the money he wanted, it was the liberty. No more cops, no time clocks, no oppressive county bureaucrats, no endless hours waiting in courthouse halls to put away the same people for the same dreary, vicious, stupid crimes. There had to be more than that.

  Raymond understood, Raymond always had, although this was the least of what bound Weir to him. Deeper than this yearning for something more were layers of friendship that had endured nearly thirty years, trust that only time can build, years of competition and loyalty, years of honest confession and minor deceit, years of being boys together and men apart, years of Ann as the shared hypotenuse of their lives. Jim had long understood—with awe—that if Raymond had to, he would offer his life for him. Weir had first attributed it to the partnership in a job that can get people killed; later, to something sacrificial in the very blood that coursed through Raymond Cruz’s veins. Finally, he had seen it for what it was: a simple product of love. Weir believed that if the moment came to offer the same gift, he would be able to give it in return, knowing, too, that it is not a question that can be answered ahead of time.

  The phone rang in the kitchen. Jim studied Ray’s face as he picked it up. Raymond stared at Weir and didn’t say a word until he put the handset back down. He drew a deep breath. “They found Ann.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FOG POWDERED THE WINDOWS OF RAYMOND’S CAR AS HE drove down Pacific Coast Highway toward the bridge. The pavement shone and tiny specks of moisture arced in the headlights. The Mississippi paddleboat Reuben E. Lee sat at dock, strings of lights sketching its profile against the black water of the bay. A halogen-baked construction site pressed the traffic into one lane.

  Raymond did not say a word. Jim glanced at him several times, noting the clammy face, moist, unblinking eyes. Jim had seen enough expressions like that to recognize it as the mask of tragedy. A coolness spread into his palms.

  Raymond turned onto Dover, took Westcliff to West-wind to Morning Star Lane. The Back Bay, Jim thought: nobody out of their million-dollar homes this late, a habitat solely for drunks and fishermen. The estuary was a shallow incursion of the sea running a mile inland between two bluffs that lay roughly a mile apart. The brackish flats had once been tended to produce salt. This minor utility had been abandoned decades, ago, leaving the Back Bay to joggers, nervous seabirds, fish running in and out with the tide, and people like Virginia battling developers over the future of it all. For Weir, it had always been a place of strangeness—neither sea nor land, neither saltwater nor fresh, neither liquid nor solid, neither beautiful nor ugly.

  “Okay, Ray. What’s going on?”

  Raymond tu
rned to him and his eyes said it all. Jim could smell Ann’s hair, feel her elbow going into his side just—he checked his watch—six hours ago. In his mind, a sense of unreality began blurring the edges of his thoughts. The hardest thing for him to do when he’d learned about Jake was to keep his mind clear. It was a feeling he hated more than any other, strong and incessant, a heroin of the soul. The fog coiled, struck, blew past.

  Two squad cars were already parked at the dead end of Morning Star Lane. The lights of one flashed obscenely. The door of the other was open and an officer sat half in, half out, talking on the radio. Jim looked up to the big houses, saw an upstairs window yellow with light, saw the perfect silhouettes—Mr. and Mrs. Citizen, good people, frightened, side by side—staring out.

  The officer in the car stood quickly when he saw Raymond, replaced the handset, then led them down a narrow trail in the embankment. The ice plant on either side of the path glistened; the water of the bay wavered to shore in rapid black ripples; the fog slid by in patches that burst upward and vanished with each gust of breeze.

  “She’s over here,” said the officer gently.

  They walked fifty yards east, across the weedy, sandy patch that fronted the inlet. Jim felt the damp soil giving under his boots, the slip and slide of rosea and fescue. Far ahead, two more shapes moved slowly behind two triangles of light. Weir’s stomach squeezed something vile into his throat.

  The officer leading them—his name was Bristol—moved to the shoreline, and stopped a few yards short of the water. His light beam ran the length of a dark green blanket covering a body on the ground. Nothing had been roped off yet. “Fisherman brought her to shore—called us at three-fifty. He told us what he knew and we cut him loose. I recognized her. I called as soon as I could, sir.”

  Jim and Raymond stepped toward the blanket together, knelt down, and, each taking a corner, lifted it away. Ann’s face was pale and peaceful, her blond hair falling back into the damp earth. Her eyes were dull and seemed focused on something very large, right in front of her. She was wearing a short red skirt that clung heavily to her legs, a long-sleeved white blouse, and one espadrille—on the left foot—that matched the skirt. Her arms lay comfortably at her sides, palms up, fingers gently curled. Her legs were slightly apart, toes pointing off in almost opposite directions. A bouquet of purple roses was stuffed down the waist of her skirt, stems lost inside, drowned blossoms sagging in heavy unison against her ribs. From beneath the hem protruded another stem, and Jim could tell from its angle where the blossom was lodged. Her white blouse was soaked in pale red, and stuck closely to her body. There were so many thin angular cuts in it that Jim’s breath caught in his throat and he tipped buttfirst onto the ground and closed his eyes.

  This was not Ann. Ann was never meant to be a thing lying on the earth. He could hear the water lapping at the beach, and Raymond’s quick, shallow breathing. When he opened his eyes again, Ray was on his knees, cradling Ann’s head in his arms, his cheek against hers, rocking her slowly and in silence. Jim saw the rose blossoms jiggling against her breast. Officer Bristol loitered deferentially in the background. The distant flashlight beams still worked patiently toward him. From Raymond now came the low, haunted sounds of agony. He looked up once at Jim, his face little more than shadow and tears.

  Weir slid his hand under Ann’s curled fingers and held on to her for dear life.

  Jim stood with Officer Bristol, ten yards away from Ann and Raymond. He could not remember the specifics of how he got there. “Tell me what you know,” he said in a voice he hardly heard.

  Bristol droned away as if on a long-distance line—got a call from Dispatch at ten ’til four. Local fisherman saw her floating fifty yards off. He was out with his wife and son for the day, trying to make the isthmus at Catalina by sunup. He used a gaff to get her in to shore, then he motored over to the bridge, walked to the pay phone at the Mobil station, and called us. Took a statement, but the guy’s wife got sick a couple of times, so we let them go. What he knows is what we know. We haven’t tried the neighborhood yet. No disturbance calls.

  Bristol looked toward Raymond and Ann. “I’m awful sorry, Mr. Weir.”

  “Did the gaff do any of this?” I have to ask these things, Annie.

  “He said he snagged her cuff, brought her alongside his boat easy as he could. No.”

  “Was she facedown?” It’s important we know, Annie.

  “Yes, sir. He tried to move her as little as possible.”

  “You guys touch her?” They shouldn’t have touched you, sweet sister.

  “I checked her artery, then put on the blanket.”

  “What about the other shoe?” You don’t mind, do you, Ann?

  “We’re looking, sir. I know you were a Sheriff’s investigator a while back, working the harbor here. How fast would a body float this time of day?”

  Weir listened to his own answer: depends where it went in … close to shore, with an ebb like this, two hundred feet an hour … farther out, faster. They killed her. Someone killed my sister, Ann. Close your eyes, wipe it away like a dream. You are still in Mexico. You are hallucinating with fever. Begin this night again.

  “Would she come to shore if she was dumped out far?”

  “Not this soon.”

  “So we should be looking east of here for the crime scene?”

  Weir listened for his answer, but his body simply walked off and stood closer to Ann. She looked so desecrated, so invaded, so unquestionably without life.

  “Sir … if he killed her out here, it’s not likely he’d take her up bay to put her in, is it?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Dwight Innelman and Roger Deak, two NBPD crime-scene investigators, emerged from the fog ten minutes later. Innelman was a tall, lanky man of fifty whom Weir knew from the Sheriff’s Department years ago. Deak was short and thick, and looked about twenty-two at most. He had a burr haircut and carried a heavy case in each hand. They prodded Raymond away from Ann and went to work with cameras and video.

  Jim stood beside his brother-in-law down by the shore. Raymond shook violently, and in the first faint light of morning Jim could see that his face was white. His breath came fast, sputtering on the inhale. Jim knew the signs.

  “Let’s go back to the car and sit down, Ray.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “We’re going back to the car.”

  Raymond made it three steps before his knees buckled and he crumpled down and sat in the dirt with his legs out like an infant. His face was ice. Jim got a blanket from Bristol and told him to call the paramedics. Raymond was slipping into shock by the time Weir got back to him. All he could do was lay him out, cover him, and try to talk him through it.

  Jim told him about Zihuatanejo, the dreamy blue water and white sand, about languid descents to eighty feet, the first perilous giggles of rapture of the deep, about the dives that didn’t yield even a shred of the Black Pearl, the setup with the drugs, his days in jail. Weir felt himself slipping away to Mexico, because being here was a hell he never knew existed on earth, until now.

  Raymond’s teeth chattered and his body twitched intermittently, as if electrified. His eyes were wide and unblinking. Jim talked on, a port of words in this storm, gazing all the while across the beach toward Ann and the strobe flashes that blipped her pale body in and out of focus like some cheap disco gimmick. For a moment, Weir had the sensation of standing alone on the bow of a ship, steering a course from the blackness of one shore to the blackness of another. I promise you, Ann, in the name of this moment, that I will find him. It was the most dismal commitment of his life, and Weir knew it.

  By the time the medics finally got there and took Raymond away, the fog had battled the sunlight to a gray standoff. Jim sat on the beach with his arms crossed over his knees and watched Ann Cruz, age thirty-nine, borne upon a stretcher by two men she had never met, one red shoe peeking from beneath the blanket, heading for the first of several checkpoints she would need to pass before crossing the last border into her grave.

  Back at Raymond’s car, he got the tire iron out of the trunk, then walked a hundred yards down the beach and found something vertical. It started out as a NO DIVING sign, but when Jim was too tired and his hands too blistered and bloody to hit it anymore, it was basically just scrap metal and splintered wood. He screamed his curses to the yawning sky, aiming straight for the face of God. He screamed things that actually scared him.