A Grave Talent Page 3

  “I’d better see him first, it’ll only take a minute.”

  “He’s in his workshop, around back of the barn.”

  “I know where it is,” said Hawkin, and walked off across the gravel.

  Kate and Trujillo followed him through the door into the little building, where two men looked up from their contemplation of the object on the workbench in front of them. For a wild instant Kate thought it was a dismembered arm, until her eyes took in the metallic gleam and she recognized it as the detached arm of the suit of armor that stood in the corner. The Japanese man remained seated, but the other, older man stood up and, wiping his hands on a white cloth, came around to meet them. He was a small man, barely taller than Kate, about forty years old, and he moved with a heavy, twisting limp. His shoulder length hair, brown streaked with gray, was gathered into a pony tail, and his beard was trimmed low on his jaw. He wore a loose homespun shirt, more nearly a blouse, tucked into faded but ironed blue jeans, and soft leather boot-moccasins on his small feet.

  “Hello, Inspector Hawkin,” he said. “I cannot say I am exactly glad to see you again, considering the reason you’re here, but you are welcome.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tyler. This is my assistant, Inspector Casey Martinelli. I appreciate your allowing us to bring half the county to your house.”

  Tyler waved it aside. “The house is used to it. Some of the residents are setting up the tables Paul asked for. I left it to them; hauling furniture around isn’t my specialty, and I had to come out here and get Toshiro started.” He looked embarrassed. “I would have asked him to come some other time, but I made the arrangements months ago for him to be here, and I couldn’t reach him this morning to cancel them. I hope it doesn’t—.” He broke off, though Kate could finish the sentence in her head: “—seem callous.”

  Hawkin spoke calmly. “No, of course not, no reason for everything to come to a halt. You go on with it. I have to go up the Road now, but I’ll need to talk with you later.”

  Tyler looked relieved at this forgiving attitude, and Kate wondered if Hawkin was trying to soften him up. They left the two men and went back into the half-drizzle, and before they were out the door Tyler had resumed his conversation with Toshiro the armorer.

  “It’s the vambrace, you see, that binds when I raise my sword…”

  Hawkin took no notice but spoke unceremoniously to Trujillo.

  “What have you got to take us up in?”

  Kate was relieved that it was not to be her car that tackled the dirt track and stood with him as he looked past the obviously inadequate cars near the house and toward the shed, with its row upon row of bumpers fronting a mind-boggling collection of rust and dents—two, four, and six wheels, round bodies and square, old school buses, campers, pickups, Volkswagen vans and bugs—and half a dozen shapes covered tightly with dusty canvas shrouds.

  “The county cars are all pretty busy but Tyler’s loaning us his wagon. It’ll go anywhere.”

  He pointed to an object so large, so old, and so apparently immobile that Kate had assumed it was a display, useful for entertaining children, like the hulls of planes and trains that occasionally grace playgrounds. It looked thoroughly rooted to the ground, resting on cracked tires as high as Kate’s waist, doors sagging, windows cloudy with the abrasions of the decades. It had once been red.

  “That?” Hawkin stared in disbelief.

  “Yes, it’s great,” said Trujillo with enthusiasm. “It used to be a fire wagon in the thirties, and Tyler keeps it up something great. Of course, parts are hard to get, and it won’t go more than forty without the doors flying open, but for getting up the hill there’s nothing like it.”

  Hawkin turned his attention from the vehicle to the man.

  “I didn’t realize you knew him so well.”

  “Tyler? Known him for years.”

  “Maybe they should’ve put somebody else on this case, then.”

  Trujillo smiled gently. “Inspector, you’d be hard put to find a cop in the county who doesn’t know Tyler and consider him a friend. It’s a small place.”

  “I see. Okay, let’s get on with it. Are you going to drive this thing?”

  “Good God, no. Tyler wouldn’t trust me with his baby. Mark Detweiler’s the only one who’s allowed to touch it. He’ll be driving. Mark?” He went to the door and stuck his head inside. “Mark! Anybody seen Mark?”

  After a few minutes of confusion a slow mountain of a man, gray braids reaching to the waist of his ancient jeans, plaid shirt hidden by a beard nearly as long, emerged to plant his heavy boots on the plank steps and survey the yard through a pair of smudged horn-rimmed glasses held together by a twist of wire and dirty duct tape. One gold earring glinted through the foliage.

  “I’m coming,” he rumbled. “Just hold your horses. Just wanted to use the john. Kinda fun to be able to flush.” He grinned merrily at them, revealing a missing front tooth amidst the gray fringe, and climbed up into the driver’s seat. Hawkin watched, openmouthed, as the man methodically tied the door shut with a hunk of frayed rope, jerked the window up with a pair of pliers and inserted a wedge to hold it almost shut, and fished around in the mends of his jeans for a pocket, from which he pulled a key.

  “What’s the matter, Al,” murmured Kate as she climbed past him. “Didn’t have such classy chauffeurs in Los Angeles?” He shook his head, once, and followed her into the back, Trujillo in front. With a roar and a massive cloud of blue exhaust the starter caught, and they rumbled out onto the road, a leviathan among the minnows.

  The reporters would get some fine footage for their pain of turning out so early, thought Kate, and saw a scramble to record the parade of wagon, high-axled coroner’s van, and the handful of lesser vehicles that brought up the rear.

  Trujillo turned as they went through the gate and saw the expression on Hawkin’s face.

  “We do have the four-wheel drives, but they’re both already up the Road. I didn’t think you’d mind this thing, and we needed the others to get the teams up there and to go up notifying people. I hope you don’t mind,” he repeated, hesitantly.

  “Oh, no, it lends the proceedings an air of dignified purpose, evoking the ponderous wheels of justice turning. Don’t let me forget to use that for the news cameras, Casey, in case they missed the symbolism. It’s quite all right, Trujillo, it serves to remind me of the unswerving support given us by our superiors. So encouraging.”

  Trujillo did not seem entirely encouraged by this response, thought Kate, straight-faced, but any answer was cut short as the wagon turned a hard corner and juddered to an abrupt halt that had all but the driver off their seats.

  “Brakes work fine,” was Detweiler’s phlegmatic comment. The car face-to-face with their very bumper, filled with white-faced passengers, reversed into a wide spot a hundred yards up the road. It was the county’s shiny new four-wheel-drive car, and it contained three women, two men, and a gaggle of excited children, all of whom watched the procession in wonder. The uniform of the man behind the wheel did not look entirely fresh, Kate noticed, and she had a sinking feeling that her own khaki trousers would soon look the same.

  “That’ll be the second bunch, coming down,” said Trujillo. “Like I told you on the phone, I don’t know how many of them we’ll persuade to come down to Tyler’s, but we’ll get as many as we can. This third body will shake them, especially the ones with kids, and they’ll cooperate more than they might otherwise. Some of them, though, you’ll have to just go see. There’s six or eight who are real hermits. You’d need a court order to pry them out, and even then they might just walk into the woods for a couple of weeks.”

  “A nice, straightforward investigation, I can see now.”

  “It is a bit different from San Francisco. Sir.”

  “It’s a bit different from anywhere.”

  “That was Tyler’s original idea.”

  “Well, it succeeded.”

  3

  Samantha Donaldson was small for her age, fo
rty-two pounds at her last checkup, but she looked even smaller now, her thin body huddled into the rotten log that had stopped her from rolling down into the creek that ran, at this point, about fifty feet below Tyler’s Road. Kate’s hands wanted to reach out and brush the leaves from the tumbled hair, wipe the dirt from the surprised little mouth, close the puzzled eyes, but instead she took out her notebook to record Hawkin’s remarks and allowed her eyes to avoid the child’s neck.

  A couple of hours later they stood watching as the lifeless object that had been Samantha Donaldson, hands wrapped in bags against any evidence her nails might be hiding, covered in dirt and leaves, having been prodded, examined, and photographed in ways it never would have been in life, was folded into the anonymity of a body bag. The men moving the tiny burden onto the stretcher were well used to death, but there was none of the customary easy black humor here.

  “You okay?” asked Hawkin as the disturbingly small parcel was carried past them.

  “I’m not about to faint, Al,” she snapped. “I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

  “Yes,” he said, responding not at all to her tone. “But a dead child is a terrible thing.”

  “Yes.” And because his voice was honest and his own loathing lay openly on his face, she answered in kind. “Yes, it’s pretty awful. I probably would feel sick if it didn’t make me so angry.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first. The first dead child I had, I couldn’t keep anything down for two days. Better to stay angry. Now, tell me where you think the murderer stood to throw her down there.”

  They found one vague ridge of mud that might or might not have been from the side of a shoe, braced to hurl forty pounds into the air. It was so beaten down by rain that it was impossible to define and could easily have been pushed up by a horse’s hoof some days before. Other than that, there was a depressing similarity to the sites where the other two bodies had been found, and by the time the wet, aching team had finished their backbreaking examination of the hillside, they had accumulated a number of rusty tin cans; one broken Coke bottle, old; two buttons, one very old; a handful of odd bits of machinery; a half-buried car tire; a short length of ancient chain with a stub of leather dog collar attached; one cheap ballpoint pen, almost new; and an assortment of paper scraps, including a soggy matchbook from a bar in San Jose.

  All that was much later, though. The doors slammed shut on the ill-filled bag that contained what had once been a little girl, the stoic team started down the hillside with their own, smaller, evidence bags, and Kate and Hawkin ducked under the yellow tapes and climbed back into the wagon.

  “Back to home base?” inquired Detweiler.

  “No, not much point in it yet.” A couple with baby, child and dog trudged by, all in bright nylon ponchos. The woman smiled shyly, the child stared from the man’s back. “They’ll be drifting in for another hour or more. I want to see the Road again, up to the top, if this thing’ll make it.”

  “No question about that,” said the driver, sounding hurt. “She may be slow, but she’s sure.”

  “Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It’ll make things easier when we get back to Tyler’s. Now, whose house is that?” Hawkin pointed past the driver’s nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.

  “That ain’t a house, that’s Jenny Cadena’s goat shed.” Kate wrote in the name. “Only now Harry Gustavson’s using it to store the window glass for his house.” She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. “Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he’s still there?” He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.

  Kate looked at the map and sighed. “Anybody have a pencil?”

  Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car’s flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road’s summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler’s shoulder.

  “Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey.”

  The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.

  “That’s where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother’s lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill.”

  The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn’t move.

  “What is he after?” he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. “What is he doing?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. Neither do I.” He suddenly looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence, and began dutifully to explain.

  “The bodies are unmolested; he’s not the more obvious kind of pedophile. It isn’t money; there’s no ransom. He just picks them up, so carefully that so far he’s been invisible, and strangles them. After that he removes their clothing and leaves them on or near Tyler’s Road. Why here, a hundred miles from where he’s picked them up? Why is he doing this?”

  He cocked one eyebrow at her and turned back to the waiting behemoth, and though she knew he wasn’t expecting an answer, she wished she could give him one. All that came to mind was, “So maybe he’s a nut case,” and that was so obviously inadequate that she said nothing and followed him meekly back down the rough surface that passed as Tyler’s Road.

  Five minutes later Detweiler stopped the wagon on a hilltop at a wide, clear area with, incongruously, a picnic table. The temporary, enthusiastic sunshine illuminated glimpses of the Road below them and revealed a wedge of the distant, turgid sea. A scattering of roofs and cleared fields peeped from the vista of dark redwoods. The occasional gleam of solar panels and two high-tech wind-powered generators were the only indicators of the twentieth century.

  “Nice, huh?” grunted Detweiler. “Tyler says he’s going to build up here when he gets old and gray. I doubt it. He likes to be in the middle of things. Always will.” He put the wagon back into gear and they lurched downhill, the engine whining now as it kept the ex-fire truck from flinging itself down to the sea. “Oh, yeah, I forgot old Peterson’s place. It’s up there, see the flag?” The flag was an old scrap of torn sheeting. “Up along that pathway. No, he doesn’t have a drive. When he built the place he carried everything in by foot.”

  Kate wrote in the name Peterson and reflected that a housing inspector would have a grand time with the violations on this hillside. She said something of the sort to Detweiler, careful to avoid the impression that she was in any way connected with such a low breed of bureaucrat.

  “Oh, yeah, well, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Actually there’s been an ongoing war between Tyler and the county over the building regulations. At first they said that all the houses had to be wired for power, even if there wasn’t any for miles. So there’s half a dozen places with wall plugs and empty light fixtures, and kerosene lamps. Right now he’s trying to get around it by having the whole Road made into an experimental, non-profit organization. Has a state senator on his side; he may do it yet. That’s Riddle’s place, do you have that?” he asked Kate.

  “Yes, Ben Riddle, whose brother Bob may or may not be there or in the Cadena-Gustavson goat shed-storage barn.”

  “Clear as mud, eh?” He laughed heartily, and Kate wondered if he ever ran out of clichés.

  The litany continued to wind with t
he Road.

  “That’s Brother Luke’s place. He and Maggie’ve lived there since Tyler first got the idea. He used to be a monk somewhere. Not now, though. They’ve got five kids. The Dodsons live there, funny place, real dark. Nice clearing in back for the ponies, though. Angie’s little girl Amy loves her pony. And I told you about Vaun, way up there? She’s an artist, real good one.” Visions of castles and maidens with starry-eyed unicorns danced in Kate’s head. “The Newborns—those little house things are for the pigs. And Tommy Chesler you know.”

  Coming down the mountain they stopped to pull the county car out of the creek bed into which its four driven wheels had taken it, and as they continued down, they picked up several parties of chattering hill folk who might easily have been going to a hoedown rather than to a murder interrogation. (What is a hoedown, anyway? wondered Kate.) Kate found herself wedged between Hawkin and a very large, damp young man who smelled of dog, and with an even damper and more fragrant baby on her lap. After ten minutes a high voice from somewhere in the front asked if anyone had Ivanhoe.

  “Is that a disease?” wondered Kate aloud.

  “It’s my baby,” the voice answered.

  “Is it hairless and wet?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then it’s here.”

  “Oh, good. I just wanted to make sure he got in. You can keep him until we get to Tyler’s.”

  “Thank you,” said Kate gravely, and tried to decide whether the bouncing was from the ruts or from Hawkin laughing, and if the latter, what she should do about it. In the end she did nothing.

  4

  The multicolored crowd that whirled in and out of the rooms in Tyler’s house was like something from another world, or perhaps several worlds—part Amish, part Woodstock, part pioneer. Children ran yelling and shrieking among the knees and the furniture, dogs wandered in and were thrown out into the rain, the smells of bread and spaghetti sauce and wood smoke mingled with wet clothing, underwashed bodies, and the occasional aura of stale marijuana. Tyler had given the police three rooms downstairs, furnished with a motley collection of tables and desks, where they prepared to take statements. Kate stood in the main room—the hall—with its fifteen-foot ceilings and the floor space of an average house, and wondered how Hawkin intended to proceed with a murder investigation in this chaos. For the first time she was very grateful that he, not she, was in charge.