At noon McMichael and Hector drove onto the Rio Verde Reservation in north San Diego County. The village of Rio Verde greeted them with its poor face- rust-riddled cars in the dusty yards, washing machines on the porches and sun-faded sofas under towering, leafless sycamores. A little boy with a soft drink in his hand stared at them as they drove past.
But directly across the highway stood the new casino- seven restaurants, an entertainment complex, three hundred slot machines and sixty blackjack tables all housed in an immense and elegant brick-and-glass structure. The parking garage was three stories high.
Alex Dejano, tribal elder and operations manager for the Rio Verde Casino & Resort, welcomed them into his third-floor suite with crushing handshakes.
McMichael guessed him at six five or six, right at three hundred. Dark skin and eyes, a black ponytail, knife scars on his face and forehead, a sullen face that broke into an engaging smile when Dejano introduced himself.
Dejano explained that he'd been introduced to Pete Braga by Malcolm Case. Case was an old acquaintance who knew that Dejano- the Rio Verde tribe of Indians, to be more accurate- had some money that needed to be put to work.
"Casino money," said McMichael.
"The casino has turned out to be profitable," said Dejano. His voice was soft and high-pitched for such a big man, McMichael thought. He noted the scars and pits on Dejano's big, padded hands.
Dejano said that Pete Braga and Malcom Case had an idea to open a cargo terminal when the old airport closed, then link it up with the old Spreckels railroad that runs out to Imperial Valley.
"And Case's company, Pacific Transfer, would build the terminal," said McMichael.
Dejano nodded. "Rio Verde bought two million in Pacific Transfer stock," he said. "It looked like a good investment. But the rest of Pete's idea looked foolish to us. He wanted to build a fish cannery at Tuna Harbor, where the restaurant and Tunaboat Foundation is. Load up the railroad cars with his product and get richer."
"Not likely," said McMichael.
"Impossible is more like it," said Dejano. "You're talking ten, fifteen million to build a cannery like he wanted. Then you've got all the problems with the fleet and the licensing and the fishing regulations that keep changing, the porpoise and the competition and the high labor here in the States. All the same things that ran Pete's business out of here twenty years ago."
"Hasn't really changed," said McMichael.
"Not really. One thing you understand by now if you're an Indian- don't exploit the animals and the land around you. Exploit people. There's an endless supply of people. But you can only kill so many bison or deer or tuna before the supply dries up. You want to kill something, fine, but eat it. Don't sell it. I don't think Pete learned that. He was naive. Arrogant, too."
"Arrogant like how?" asked Hector.
"For instance, he wanted me to buy the right-of-way on Indian land for any new railroad track that would have to be built north of the border. See, the Congress and state legislature weren't happy about a railroad dipping down into Mexico- jurisdiction, narcotics, illegals- all sorts of problems. Pete's idea was to build some new track in East County and skip Mexico altogether. He assumed the native tribes who own that desert would give me a sweet deal for the rights because I'm a native, too. Because redskins are just one big happy savage family. And I'd sell them to him cheap. That's not how it works."
"So you decided not to buy into the cargo terminal, just into Case's company, which would do the construction," said Hector.
Dejano nodded his big head. "When Pete got killed we figured we'd back off. No telling what the Port Commission or the Tunaboat Foundation might do without Pete on them. Sink the whole project, if they felt like it. And just between you and me, I don't always trust Malcolm Case to do what's best for the Rio Verde people. Or anybody else, for that matter."
McMichael wrote quickly, trying to get his exact words. "Tell us about New Year's Eve," he said.
Dejano looked at him with unconcealed suspicion. "What about it?"
"We're interested in the nurse," said Hector.
Dejano stared placidly at them, dark eyes lost in the huge dark face. "She bash him?"
"We're thinking she may have been involved," said McMichael. "She might have known it was coming."
"Shit," said Dejano. "Pete loved her."
"Tell us about that," said Hector.
"You should have seen the gleam in that old man's eye when she walked into the room. Or when he talked to her. Or about her. I met Pete two years ago. Before the nurse, he was just an old fart who wouldn't admit his days were getting short. But after he hired her, he could laugh at himself some. He could see he wasn't right all the time. So if she set him up to get whacked… man, I don't know what to say."
McMichael noted the difference between Dejano's version of Pete and Patricia's version. Patricia saw him meaner; Dejano saw him happier.
"Pete ever say anything to you about changing his will?" asked Hector.
Dejano frowned and nodded. "That night, New Year's Eve. He was watching her make drinks and toss popcorn to Pete's dog. Me and Pete were over in the corner talking. He said he liked her so much he'd leave her the house if he could. I asked him why he couldn't. He just winked."
"That's all he said about it?" asked McMichael.
"Yeah, I took it as a joke, you know? We're all drunk. You're talking shit just to hear yourself say it."
McMichael wondered how Pete's comments would go over with his granddaughter. "Was Patricia there?"
"She and her husband were gone by then," said Dejano.
"Did Case and the nurse have a thing?" asked Hector, glancing at McMichael.
"Case is always talking up the pretty ones. It didn't look like he was getting very far."
"What about you and the nurse?" asked McMichael. Some inner wire twinged inside him. He felt it vibrate then go still.
The big man peered at McMichael, face darkening, thick fingers tapping his desktop. "I made a pass. Maybe two. I said if I ever met the guy who did her neck like that, I'd squeeze the brains out of his head."
"Get far with that line?" asked Hector.
"No."
"How'd your date like it?" asked McMichael.
"Put it this way. It was a New Year's, but it wasn't happy for me and my lady."
"The nurse and Victor get along?" asked Hector.
"They seemed to like each other."
"How about the nurse and Angel?"
Dejano shook his head. "Didn't meet any Angel."
"She was Pete's professional company," said McMichael. "A prostitute."
"Never met her."
"How about Penny? She's a prostitute, too."
Dejano smiled. "Pete still had it in him, eh?"
"Until someone bashed it out," said Hector.
Dejano studied them in silence.
"I don't have any ideas about that," he finally said. "But I don't think the guy who did it was at the party. It was a holiday. That's friends and family."
"What about the nurse and Patricia?" asked McMichael.
Dejano shrugged. "I don't remember them talking or doing anything together."
"They might not have much to say," said Hector, "if Patricia thought he wanted to give the house away."
"But Patricia wasn't there for that," said Dejano. "And I still think Pete was joking."
"Jokes are always true," said Hector.
And if this one was true and Patricia knew, thought McMichael, she had motive to kill her grandfather. He thought of how angry Patricia had been about the gifts to Sally Rainwater. Common prostitute. True, Patricia had known nothing about Pete's letters to Grothke, Steiner & Grothke- she'd asked McMichael to tell her what they were about. But she could have learned about Pete's plans some other way. Could she bludgeon him? Probably not. But what about someone else? Someone she could trust. Someone who'd stand to profit along with her? What about Garland? Or Victor? Something for Sally Rainwater meant less for them.
McMichael looked out the window to the pretty green hills of the reservation land, the little lake they'd built off to one side of the casino, the cloudless blue sky. He felt a shadow float over his soul. Motive and opportunity, he thought. Patricia might have had both.
"You see anybody feeding the dog, besides Sally Rainwater?" asked Hector.
"I gave him some mushrooms, I think. What's that got to do with anything?"
"He died that night of strychnine poisoning," said Hector. "We figure someone at the party did it."
"What the hell for?"
"Maybe get him out of the way."
"That's ugly, man. I didn't see anybody feed the dog except for me and Sally. Last I saw of the dog, Pete had him in his arms, dancing with him. Come to think of it, the dog didn't look too good. He was panting a lot, tongue hanging out."
McMichael pictured a drunken Pete waltzing with his poisoned dog. "How were Patricia and Pete with each other that night?" he asked.
Dejano shrugged again, big shoulders stretching the fabric of his shirt. "Old man kind of ignored her. Patricia, she gets along with people. In control of herself, you know? She brought a big bunch of flowers in a nice glass vase. Pete clipped one of them off with his pocketknife, stuck it in his lapel."
Driving back through Rio Verde, McMichael looked out at the poverty and neglect, wondered how much gambling money was coming back to the people. What did they need with two million dollars of stock in Pacific Transfer when their own school bus stood broken down by the side of the road, tires flat and windows broken? What would it take to fix it- one hour's worth of casino profit?
"I didn't see Patricia or Garland as possible suspects," said McMichael.
"Me neither," said Hector. "But if Old Grothke's telling us the straight story, then the nurse's cut has to come out of someone else's."
"It doesn't read right to me," said McMichael. He thought of Garland Hansen's heated reaction to seeing him with Victor that night at the Waterfront. He'd assumed that Garland was just eager to lay the blame for Pete on the most obvious person- Sally Rainwater. But laying the blame on Sally could be part of a show.
"That would be funny, wouldn't it?"
"What's that, Heck?"
"Us putting the wrong person in jail."
Back at his desk, McMichael had two more phone messages from newspaper reporters and one from a local television news station. He couldn't believe they were onto him and Sally Rainwater so fast, but what else could it be? Was Sally's lawyer behind it, lighting the fires? He screwed up his courage and called them back, grateful to get two answering machines and only one live body, who told him that the television news reporter was in makeup and not available.
He got through to Charley Farrell, who had sold three wine-colored SUVs in the last three months. McMichael took down the names, addresses and phone numbers of the proud new owners: Andre Proulx of San Diego, Dawn Bigley of Carlsbad and Eqbar Quatrah of La Jolla.
Then he logged on to VICAP for an update on Dylan Feder. Thirty-four days into his parole skip and he still had not been seen.
McMichael talked to Feder's Dade County parole officer, a rough-voiced man named Norm Briggs. Briggs said he had thought Feder was going to play it straight, because he'd checked out of prison and into his designated Miami motel, contacted his P.O., went out and got a job selling advertising space in an adult newspaper. He'd found a girlfriend, passed four drug tests, seemed to be turning things around.
"Then he cut out," said Briggs. "Now he's looking at eighteen more months in lockup, just for skipping out on a job and a girl and me. Stupid. Another year he'd have been free and clear."
"Any idea where he went?"
"I got a maybe from Dallas PD, and I got a maybe from Tucson PD."
"Coming west."
"Sally still in San Diego?"
"We just arrested her in connection with a robbery-homicide."
McMichael explained the basics.
"That surprises me," said Briggs. "I had her for a pretty good lady with bad judgment when it comes to men."
"Probably so," said McMichael.
"Feder's terms don't let him within fifty miles of her. That's good for the rest of his life. He never said one word to me about her. But hey, a hundred bucks to a PI and he's got an address and phone."
"Where's he likely to show up?"
"He's a ladies' man. Clubs, bars. Anywhere there's women to prey on. He was selling space in one of those dating tabloids here in Miami. Doing pretty well for himself. You might look into the local skin rags."
"Are the VICAP mugs good?"
"He changes his facial hair a lot- mustache and a little Vandyke- there one day and gone the next. He's a body guy, too, always in the gym. Big muscles, tight clothes. You know the type."
"No aka's?"
"None he's used before. But you can bet he's got at least one now."
It took McMichael just two calls to get Dade County Juvenile Court judge Paul Ramos on the line. He remembered Sally Gaglosta and was also surprised to hear of her arrest.
"How good was her self-defense story?" McMichael asked.
"It was her against him. She was lucid and specific and credible. He was dim and contradictory. She told me she hit him with the dull side of that cleaver so she wouldn't hurt him too bad. I believed her, and thought it was a remarkable thing to be thinking, under the circumstances. Trouble is, the dull side's the heavy side and she hit him where the skull was weak from the motorcycle crash. Now, he'd been a pillar before the accident- degree from the University of Florida, worked in a local bank, churchgoer. Sally, she came from bad circumstances in Pike County, Kentucky. I talked to her mother, one of her sisters. Sad, troubled lives. I thought it was to Sally's credit that she'd risen above those circumstances as far as she had."
McMichael thought a moment. "Did you have any evidence that she was working it somehow- stealing, or manipulating him?"
"The investigators turned everything upside down at least once and didn't come up with anything. Not long after, her boyfriend tried to kill her. To be honest with you, I wasn't surprised."
"How so?"
"Sally Gaglosta has bad luck. Pure and simple. Just being born into that family was bad enough. Then the attack, then this boyfriend shooting her. I'm not saying she's a bad person at all. She's not, in my opinion. Just, some people, they're lightning rods for trouble. She's one of them. Miami's no place to be with luck like hers."
While McMichael thought about this thing called luck, he ran records checks on Proulx, Bigley and Quatrah. Bigley and Quatrah came back clean.
But Proulx popped with convictions for assault and soliciting prostitution.
Boom, thought McMichael. The other kind of luck.
McMichael looked through Sally Rainwater's phone records. Most of her calls for November, December and early January were local. With the help of a reverse directory and the security departments of both the cell and landline phone companies, he put names to all of them.
An hour later he'd run warrant and records checks, finding all but one of them clean. There were calls to the school friend she'd talked to from Ye Olde Plank on the night of the murder. Two sisters back East. She'd called Dr. Jonathan Bailes of the University of California at La Jolla twice in November. She had called her mother in Hagville, Kentucky, just once, at noon PST on Christmas day. And her brother- the convicted pot farmer- in Pikeville a few minutes later.
Nothing seemed unusual and nothing caught McMichael's eye. He talked briefly to the girlfriend and the professor, and they seemed concerned, willing to talk, and straight up. The other brother was still in prison. The sisters were out of state. She hadn't called a soul in Florida.
Where was her accomplice? And how was she talking to him or her or them? Pay phones, he thought. Or maybe he was calling her. Or maybe there wasn't one.
The desk officer called him at two-thirty to say that McMichael had a visitor in the lobby. "Lance Wood," said the desk cop. "He says he wants to talk to you about Pete Braga."
"Can we go outside?" asked Lance Wood. He looked at McMichael with steady blue eyes, then turned to look behind him. He looked early twenties, tall and tanned, with a thatch of straw-blond hair. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, shorts and thongs despite the cool January afternoon. McMichael noted the edge of a plastic shopping bag visible in the sweatshirt pocket.
"How come?" asked McMichael.
"Because this is a police station."
"Let's go outside."
They sat on a planter wall, well away from the headquarters entrance. McMichael looked out at the old gray buildings, humbled against the intense blue sky.
"I got your name from the paper," said Wood.
"Okay."
"I scavenge the harbor a couple times a week in my kayak, hit the good spots for finds. After a storm I go out for sure, because the high tides wash up all sorts of good stuff. I was down off of Point Loma a couple of days after that Braga guy got killed, but I didn't know it."
"Didn't know about Pete?"
"Yeah, I don't read the news or watch TV, so I just heard about it two days ago from one of the guys out surfing at Ralph's. He said the old man got beat to death with a fish club right in his own house. The wood and glass one down at Poinsettia Street."
"That's what happened."
Lance Wood reached into the front pocket of his sweatshirt and pulled out a plastic bag with something in it. "I found this down the beach from that house. Friday, after he got killed."
Wood slid a fish bat from the bag. It looked identical to the one lying in Pete's blood in the trophy room.
"Set it on the wall here," said McMichael.
"I've touched it a bunch."
"That's okay."
"When I heard about the old guy, I looked hard at this thing. Thought maybe it was important."
McMichael looked down at the bat. Exactly like the one they'd gotten at Braga's, so far as he could see. "I'm going to have to take this," said McMichael.
"That's why I brought it."
McMichael wrote down his address and phone, talked a little about kayaking and scavenging the bay, found out that Lance had gone to the same high school he did, knew a few of the same families.
"Sorry it took so long," Wood said. "I keep stuff. I hung it on a nail in the garage, figured I might find a use for it someday."
"Don't be. Will you show me where you found it?"
"About a hundred yards south of the house."
"I mean exactly," said McMichael.
"I can do that."
"I'll drive."
"You'll have to. I walked here."
McMichael carried the bat back into the building, took it upstairs, asked Hector to book it into evidence ASAP, get it to Arthur Flagler in the lab and run an NCIC check on Lance Wood. He wrote down Wood's phone and address and hustled back downstairs.
When he came back down Wood was still sitting on the wall. McMichael led the way to his car. "How come you don't like the cop house?" he asked.
"I got busted for pot when I was nineteen. One joint. Cop shoved me and my girlfriend around more than he had to. A lot more. So I shoved back, and got the living shit beat out of me, right in front of her."
"That's rough."
"You're telling me."
Lance Wood had found the club on the beach, one hundred and eight McMichael steps from the south corner of the wall in front of Pete Braga's house.
"It was here," said Wood. "About fifty feet above the waterline, but the tide was low by then. It could have washed up, or it could have been dropped. Buried, maybe."
They stood on a pretty little beach, a spit of sand that swept gracefully into the bay. The remnant of an old seawall angled from the sand down into the water. A bright white gull stood on the wall and eyed them antisocially. To the south McMichael saw the boatyard cranes rising into the pale blue sky, a Coast Guard cutter on patrol, the barren tip of Coronado Island. A silver passenger jet lowered over the hills toward Lindbergh Field.
"Think it's the murder weapon?" asked Lance.
"We'll have to look at it," said McMichael.
He drove Wood to his Pacific Beach apartment, getting a message from Hector on the way: Wood had come up as a convicted drug offender on NCIC- possession of marijuana, nineteen ninety-eight, clean since.
McMichael asked him about it.
"I was just young and got caught," said Wood. "Everybody smoked grass. I guess you guys can find out anything about anybody."
"Just the bad stuff," said McMichael. "The computer won't tell anybody that you helped a cop. So, thank you."
Wood nodded, frowning. "No problem."
McMichael stepped into Pete Braga's trophy room. Again he pictured the silver-haired old man there, oblivious to the intruder as the wind kicked at the window glass. He pictured the man in the dark jogging suit, creeping straight toward the fireplace with the club he'd use on Pete. He pictured the club coming up in the gloved hand, and he heard the first shattering, pressurized concussion of aluminum on bone. He saw Pete's body vibrating as it slumped, the blood flying off the club every time it was raised, the roostertail of liquid splattering against the lights. Again and again. Sixteen times, at least.
You're tired and you're breathing hard, but you think you're smart, don't you? You see the tear in your glove, but you've planned for this- you know the wall club is clean and will stay clean, if you're just careful. And you are. You set down your weapon near Pete, go to the trophy wall and lift the Fish Whack'r off the nail between the dorado and the barracuda, gently, by the leather strap, and you rest it in the bloody pool next to Pete, then let it drop. This way, the cops will have the wrong one to work with from the start. This way, the murder weapon can go into the storm that will wipe it clean.
Yes, McMichael thought: you knew about the club on the wall and you got one just like it. To cover and confuse. To make things harder on us. You gave us the wrong murder weapon.
And you knew exactly when the nurse was gone. Because you watched her from your car, parked in the darkness on the street, figuring she'd have to leave him alone one of these nights? Because you'd seen her do it before? Or because she told you?
And you knew Zeke wouldn't be a problem because you took care of the little terrier once and for all on New Year's Eve. Eat, eat. Dance, dance. Pant, pant.
Maybe you fed him the poison from outside that night. Maybe you snuck up to the wall and tossed him a treat. Maybe.
Or maybe you were invited to the party. Because you are friend, or family, or an acquaintance valuable in business.
You thought you were smart and careful and clever, but you weren't smart enough to know your fingerprints would be inside the gloves. Or that your club would wash up on shore.
McMichael walked to the sliding glass door and unlocked all three locks. He pulled it open to a fresh blast of air, trotted across the sand, hopped the wall and headed south toward Aster Street. For a moment he stood there and looked back to where the street hit the beach- concrete steps with a rust-pitted handrail, steel warning stanchions with reflectors, a large Norfolk Island pine casting the end of the cul-de-sac into shade. Entirely possible, he thought, that the neighbors just didn't see the car.
He imagined the basher, breathing hard as he grabbed a handful of sand and ran it up and down the handle of the Fish Whack'r, then hurled it into the bay. Too dark to see it land. Too windy to hear it.
Then the gloves- jamming them into the wet sand to clean them, peeling them off from the back, stuffing them down into the warm-up jacket, then deep into the trash can. You can't be stopped or seen with the gloves on. You can't be stopped or seen with the bloody jacket.
Now he's running for the car. He knows he just has to drive away, and he'll never be caught. The storm makes him think everything's going to be covered, changed, erased. He doesn't know that the storm will trick him, wash his weapon onto the shore. He doesn't know that his prints are on the latex.
McMichael's cell phone vibrated against his side and Captain Don Rawlings's voice yanked him back to reality.
"We found Courtney Gonzalez down in the desert," he said. "Shallow grave, the coyotes got some of her. Had two hundred dollars and a CDL in her coat pocket."
"Angel," said McMichael.
"She is now," said Rawlings. "Rattlesnake Gorge Road. Two miles north of Highway Eight. Sheriff's are there."