Night Relics Read online

  The detective nodded, tilting his own chair back, listening to Peter as if he were a psychologist and not a cop. Peter rolled the story out carefully, trying to make the whole thing sound a little less lame than it was. He left nothing out, though—the argument, Peggy, the airline tickets and traveler’s checks, the Honda still in the garage. He avoided any talk about premonitions and hallucinations.

  Partway through, the detective abruptly sat up straight, looking as if he had just then remembered something, or as if Peter, finally, had said something that made a difference. Peter stopped talking.

  “You live out in Trabuco Canyon?” the cop asked.

  Peter nodded.

  “Where? You mean Trabuco Oaks? Coto de Caza?”

  “No, out in the canyon itself—Alder Springs area. Above the lower campground. Cabin with a Forest Service lease.”

  “Where do you work?”

  Peter hesitated. The seeming irrelevancy of the question forced him to stop in order to process it. “Sycamore College,” he said. “I’m a teacher. Architectural drafting.”

  “You were at school last week, Tuesday, say?”

  “No. In fact I’m off right now. Lot of work to do on my house. I’m on half-pay leave until February.”

  “So where were you the first of last week, then? Down at the lumber yard?” The cop stared at him, waiting for him to say something good.

  Surprised, Peter gaped back at him. He hadn’t said anything yet about having gone to Santa Barbara to visit his brother. It had seemed irrelevant to him. “I was gone for a couple of days. Up north. Let’s see … Monday through Wednesday. I stayed with my brother. He can—”

  “I believe you,” Detective Slater said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to talk to your brother. Wait here.” He didn’t sound irritated or suspicious, but he didn’t look tired anymore, either. If anything, his voice held a note of compassion now, and the tone of it filled Peter with instant dread.

  The detective stood up and pushed out through the door, taking his clipboard and pen with him, leaving the door open. Peter was suddenly nauseated. His fears and premonitions were like ghosts slowly growing visible in a night-darkened room. He closed his eyes and waited, wondering what the news would be, trying to anticipate it, to make himself ready.

  The weight of the long morning oppressed the air of the room. The seconds ticked by. He nearly stood up in order to pace around the small room, but instead he forced himself to look out the window. Across the street people walked in and out of the savings and loan, going about their simple business. The bushes in the flower beds blew fitfully in the wind. A hook-and-ladder pulled out of the fire department garage, turning on its siren and swinging around onto Chapman Avenue, followed by a paramedics truck.

  Detective Slater walked back in and sat down. “Change your mind on that coffee?” he asked.

  “No,” Peter said. “Thanks.”

  After shuffling through the few papers on the clipboard, the detective scanned a sentence or two. “Trabuco Canyon is out in county territory,” he said, looking up, straight into Peter’s eyes. He spoke slowly, seeming to choose his words carefully. “So we don’t have any jurisdiction out there. A lot of it lies inside the Cleveland National Forest, where your house evidently is. Still, it’s the county sheriff that covers that area. If they find anything back there that might concern us, the sheriff’s department sends out a notice.” He paused, as if to establish that Peter was taking all of this in.

  “What did they find?”

  “Nothing, really. Keep that in mind. What we’ve got is this. A hiker claimed to have seen two bodies out there.” He looked at his clipboard, either reading or else pretending to read in order to give Peter time to wrestle with what he was saying. “This was back in a place called Falls Canyon.”

  “Right near my house,” Peter said, nearly unable to breathe.

  The detective nodded. “It was night. This hiker was back in there with the idea of sleeping somewhere. I gather he was some kind of transient. He claims to have heard a scream right as he came around in sight of the falls, and there were the bodies, maybe thirty feet away. He was alone, and apparently it scared the hell out of him, and he hiked back out to the road and all the way down to the ranger station at O’Neill Park to report it. One of the rangers called the sheriff and then beat it back out there. When they got back into Falls Canyon, the bodies were gone. They just weren’t there anymore.”

  Peter looked at him for a moment before asking, “A woman and boy?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  12

  POMEROY PICKED UP A FOIL-WRAPPED TOWELETTE FROM the dashboard and tore it open, carefully wiping his face with skin freshener. Dust and leaves swept through the deserted schoolyard across the street, and he felt suddenly lonely and disconnected as he listened to the wind. It reminded him of playing alone on autumn afternoons in the empty field of his neighborhood school. What he remembered most keenly was the drone of distant, unseen airplanes. Somehow there was a world of loneliness in the sound of an airplane. It was sentimental weakness, though, thinking like that now. The past was simply past, and unless you could use it, it was nothing but a liability to recall it.

  He tossed a bag full of videotapes into the backseat. He had spent longer in the video store than he’d meant to, looking at titles. Once, five years ago, he’d been at a party for a salesman friend of his that was getting married—not exactly a friend, really, just a man he worked with. They’d drunk beer, the rest of the men had, shown porno movies of the worst kind—women together, men and women committing perversions … He had walked out. There was no way he was going to sit around with a bunch of beer-swilling perverts and watch filth.

  The video store had a whole section in the back full of movies like that. In the privacy of his own home a man might look into them. Some of them might be quite artistic, really, which was something you could appreciate if there weren’t a lot of drunks shouting obscenities at the screen. There was no way he could check one out, though, not face-to-face with the clerk behind the counter….

  Even though there were a couple of hours to kill, he had no desire to drive back out into the canyon today. There was the chance that he could shoehorn another cabin owner into thinking about selling, but the cat bite in his hand throbbed, and the wind was just too damned wild, blowing straight down off the hills like that. And besides, there were other highly entertaining things to do.

  He pulled into the post office parking lot and cut the engine, then took a padded manila envelope out from under the seat and slid a sheaf of papers halfway out of it. He shuffled through them slowly, stopping to scan a line or two on a page or to glance at a set of figures. He had made the copies in the fifteen-cent Xerox machine at the local grocery store, and some of them were so badly reproduced that they were edged with black shadows. Klein would get the point, though. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of clear sentences and he’d get the point as clear and sharp as if he’d been hit with a pickax.

  Pomeroy laughed silently, unable to make up his mind. Bills, transcripts, letters—everything he had was pretty good, although most of the letters and bills wouldn’t mean much by themselves. They were substantiating evidence, really. Finally he decided on one of the best of the lot, a five-page transcript of a telephone conversation that Klein would no doubt rather not be reminded of. There were a couple of other choice articles among the papers; could have copies of them in due time, if he needed them. The extortion business, if you did it right, was like cooking a bird. You didn’t pour the heat to it all at once and burn it to a crisp. You let it simmer.

  The transcript itself was ten years old—or at least the original was—and Klein had no idea on earth that it existed, although Pomeroy was willing to bet that hadn’t forgotten about the phone call itself. Pomeroy hadn’t. He could remember every detail of it.

  The shady little business meeting that followed the call had taken place at Angel Stadium: Angels versus Oakland, September 29, 19
83. Pomeroy himself had been there along with old Larry Collier and a contractor out in Tustin who did core samples and geological surveys. It had even rained that evening, just a few big drops like a warning out of the sky before the clouds passed on. In the west a rocket had gone up out of Vandenberg, fizzling out and corkscrewing over the Pacific, painting the sky with a smoke trail that was clearly meant to be handwriting. Going into the game, the Angels had been contenders, two games out of first, and then lost that night to Oakland eight to two, sealing their fate on the very same night that Klein was sealing his. That was Klein in a nutshell, always coming close, but never quite making it to the series.

  There was a certain synchronicity to things when the game was going right—or wrong, as was the case with Klein and the Angels. The universe played along, dealing out signs and symbols. If you understood the language, you could read your fate in the sky or on a baseball scoreboard.

  From the glove compartment, he took a cassette taps of Klein’s voice, recorded for posterity, and slid it into a fresh manila envelope along with the transcript of the recording. He had already addressed the envelope with rub-on letters, very neatly. It looked pro. Nothing to arouse suspicion in anyone but Klein himself, and Klein was already suspicious. Once he opened the envelope and took a good hard look at the contents, suspicion wouldn’t enter into the transaction anymore.

  Wind shook the car, and people up on the sidewalk turned their faces away from it, hurrying to get inside one of the open shops.

  He moistened a sponge with water out of a plastic bottle, rubbed the gum on the flap, and sealed the envelope. Then he started the car, drove to the mailbox in front of the post office, and dropped the envelope into the chute. It would probably be routed through the main post office and get to Klein on Monday. By then Klein would have been simmering long enough, and Pomeroy could turn up the heat.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the traffic was fairly heavy through Live Oak Canyon, mostly commuters driving home to Coto and Santa Margarita. Pomeroy owned condo up there himself: athletic club, tennis courts, pool complex. It was close enough so that he could still make it home in time to put a fresh bandage on his hand and take a quick shower before his dinner meeting with Klein.

  Traffic cleared, and he swung out onto the highway, heading northeast toward the turnoff to Trabuco Oaks. In his rearview mirror he saw a Volkswagen bus pull up behind him, signaling to make a left, up Parker Street, into the Oaks. A blond woman was driving, and he knew right away who she was.

  “Beth,” he said out loud. Linda’s name only occurred to him afterward, as a sort of echo. He looked at his bandage-wrapped hand. Beth would heal both wounds! The sight of her sent a thrill through him now, and for a moment his breath caught in his throat as it had that morning, as if the mere sight of her would physically incapacitate him. Running into her twice in one day! What were the odds of that? He couldn’t let the opportunity slide. It would be the easiest thing in the world right now to find out where she lived.

  He breezed past Parker, watching in the mirror as the bus turned left, disappearing beyond the general store. Fifty yards farther, he made a quick U-turn across the left shoulder and pulled straight out onto the highway again.

  13

  DETECTIVE SLATER SAT IN SILENCE, LOOKING OUT AT THE street.

  “What’s being done?”

  “Nothing,” the cop said. “There isn’t any case. Just the testimony of one hiker. It was night. The man was scared, alone. When the ranger got back in there he couldn’t find anything at all. No blood, no broken-up bushes. Sheriffs looked the place over next day. There wasn’t a piece of thread or a scuffed rock. Nothing. Locals back in there hadn’t seen or heard anything.”

  “So what are you saying?” Peter asked. “What the hell happened to the bodies? Nobody was dead? What?”

  The cop shrugged. “Hiker might have been full of baloney. Or else the people he saw might not have been dead at all. Maybe they got up and walked away. That’s possible. Hell, we get reports of dead bodies around here all the time. Almost always turns out to be someone passed out drunk or a bag lady asleep in the Plaza. So I’m saying that nobody knows what happened out there in the canyon. Might be a half dozen answers for it. They’ve got the hiker’s description of the alleged bodies, though—clothes, hair color.”

  “What clothes?” Peter asked, suddenly full of both hope and fear. If Amanda and Peter had disappeared out there, they would have been wearing the clothes they’d driven out in. They hadn’t brought any others.

  “Woman had on a long black dress. The hiker was close enough to see that. Apparently there was some moonlight. The boy …”

  “He’s sure it was a boy?”

  “That’s what it says here. The boy wore light-colored pants, maybe khakis. White long-sleeve shirt.”

  “That isn’t what Amanda and David were wearing.” Peter said. A wave of relief swept across him. “It wasn’t them.”

  Detective Slater shrugged again, noncommittally. “Let’s hope not. As far as the sheriff’s department knows, it wasn’t anyone. They don’t have any bodies, just a man’s testimony. What got me, though, was the coincidence of the whole thing. You lose your wife and boy out there, and a couple days later a hiker claims to have seen a woman and child dead. It’s a small world, but it’s not that small. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to drive out to Santa Ana, soon as you leave here. Sheriff’s office is down on north Flower Street, 550 block near the corner of Santa Ana Boulevard, by the courthouse buildings. I called them when I went after the report a few minutes ago.”

  Peter’s head spun. He had spent the last hour processing what he knew, over and over until he couldn’t see past it or around it. Now all of that was swept aside by these new revelations. “Am I under suspicion then?” he asked suddenly. “What, I just drive over to the sheriff’s department alone?”

  “That’s the ticket. No crime’s been committed as far as I know. Nobody’s suspected of anything.”

  “What do I expect from them? Will they hold me on suspicion of something?”

  “Of what?” Detective Slater shook his head slowly. “You shouldn’t expect anything except a few questions. Like I said, nobody’s under suspicion. If there’s no bodies and no evidence of anything, then there’s no investigation beyond the information taken from the hiker and the ranger a week ago. If bodies turn up, and if they’re identified as your wife and son, then you can bet the sheriff’s going to come looking for you. Right now all you’ve got to do is drive out to Santa Ana and tell them what you told me. I’ll file two missing-persons reports and we’ll see what comes up. Meanwhile I’ll send them out copies of the photos and fingerprints you gave me. That’s about it. If you think of something, though, or find out anything, come straight back here.”

  “Right,” Peter said. “Thanks.”

  The detective stood up and put his pen into his pocket. It was over, this part was. He shook Peter’s hand and walked him out to the door, explaining where the sheriff’s department was again, where to park, who to ask for. Together they stepped outside, into a sheltered alcove between buildings. Even there, leaves and debris blew along the concrete and out toward the street. “Wind won’t quit this year,” Slater said.

  Peter nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to say. The small-talk center in his brain had been temporarily shut down. He wondered if that wasn’t one of the things you lost forever if you became insane.

  “You know, maybe there’s other explanations for this,” the detective said, making no move to go back in. “I don’t mean the bodies out in the canyon, I mean your wife disappearing.”

  “What’s that?” Peter asked.

  “How about custody kidnap? What was the deal there? You say you were separated but not divorced. Was she happy with the arrangements? She got to keep the kid? The house?”

  “She would keep David weekdays. He can go to the neighborhood schools that way. He stays with me weekends, holidays, summer vacations. My schedule’s
good that way.”

  “That’s carved in stone?”

  “It will be in another couple of months.”

  “And she likes that? Lot of mothers wouldn’t give a child up that easily, you know. That’s a pretty modern idea—sharing custody. Sometimes that kind of thing looks good in theory, but actually doing it is a different thing. How do you know she didn’t just take the kid and go? Move to the east or something?”

  “She wouldn’t do that.” Peter said this with conviction. Almost at once, though, he wondered how sure he was about it. “Impossible,” he said, after a moment. “Why dump money into airplane tickets to Hawaii? Why leave a thousand dollars in traveler’s checks behind, along with your luggage and clothes?”

  “Why not do all that? If you’re putting one over on the world, you want to do a job of it. Convinced the hell out of you, didn’t it? She have any money? Enough to be independent of you?”

  “She has enough. More than me, really—better job. It’s me that’ll have to tighten the belt. And she owns the house that her parents lived in before they died.”

  “The house here in Orange. Is that hers?”

  “Technically it’s both of ours still,” Peter said. “It’ll be hers when the papers are final.”

  “What I’d do, maybe, if I were her, is take out a big second, or a home equity loan on her parents’ place. Lot of equity in that house, I’d guess, if she owns it outright? Then I’d throw a little of it away on airplane tickets and traveler’s checks, set up my husband, and walk away with the kid. She could move out of state and do pretty well. It would cost her, but I’ll guarantee you there’s people all over the country doing it right now. It’s a popular crime. Some states won’t even extradite in cases of custody kidnap. Texas is a good bet for that. Living’s cheap, too. She could buy a house with cash and bank the rest.”