“So that just leaves Gander,” said Curt. “The one who’s missing.”
“Missing?” Then Worden nodded again. “Yeah, you would, all right. Only I don’t buy your story about walking all the way to San Conrado. I think you left the cove a lot later than your statement says, and that you hitched a ride with someone we haven’t found yet.”
He stopped, dug in his trouser pocket, and then dropped something on the coffee table. Curt picked it up curiously: a blackened silver skull-and-crossbones ring, very heavy and made for a large finger. He looked up, surprised an almost erotic expression on Worden’s face. “This is supposed to mean something to me?”
“Some fishermen down the coast hooked into a ten-foot white shark yesterday — one of the man-eaters. They sliced him open, just for the hell of it, and found a partially digested human arm in his belly. Wearing this ring on one of the fingers.”
“You mean that Heavy Gander—”
“His old man has identified it. Funny thing, Halstead, tough old guy like that, you’d think he wouldn’t give a damn. But he busted down an’ cried like a baby when we showed him that ring.”
“Yes,” said Curt. “Well.” He felt as if he had been bludgeoned, but he knew now that he would be all right. He realized that Worden had come hoping for a confession, and he knew that Worden wasn’t going to get one. Even if he had been guilty, anyone but Worden. He looked at his watch. “I suppose you’ve got to be going. Sergeant...”
Worden stared at him for a long moment, then heaved a deep sigh. “Yeah, you’re a tough cookie, Halstead. One of the worms. I spent the morning with the D.A., tryna convince him we had enough to prosecute. He said no; he was right, of course. On what we got, no jury would convict — not with a smart defense attorney to drag your dead wife into court by the guts whenever you needed her. So you’re gonna get away with it...”
“Just like they would have gotten away with it, Sergeant,” said Curt. He let the detective get to the front door with his hand on the knob before calling his name; trying to match his tone to Worden’s, when the detective had told him almost casually that the predators would never be found or punished.
Worden turned, eyes hard and wary. “Yeah?”
“No hard feelings?” said Curt. “It’s just the facts of life, Sergeant.”
He stood by the open door, watching the tail of the angry detective’s car disappear down the driveway between the trees. One of the worms, Worden had said. Perhaps he could operate in his world only by seeing everyone and everything in two dimensions only; perhaps police work demanded a clear-cut choice between the good and the evil. Because Curt still thought that Worden was a damned good cop.
He went upstairs to his study, sat down at his desk. The time of predators was past — at least for now — but the time had left behind a need for decisions. For endings, in fact.
Curt wrote out his resignation from Los Feliz University in long-hand on his letterhead, read it through once, and sealed it in an envelope for delivery to the university. Preston had been right: the whole man was involved, you could not change your nature, you could only control it. Until Curt was more sure of what he was controlling, of just who and what he was, he knew that he no longer could teach.
Then he went downstairs to the phone, dialed a number, was aware of a tingling in his fingertips when the receiver was raised.
“Barbara? Curt Halstead here. I’m sorry I didn’t call before, but... I had some things to work out. I... this evening I’m going over to the hospital to see Debbie Marsden, and I wondered if you would like to go along. And I thought that maybe afterward...”
His suggestion hung in the electronic limbo between them for a long time; and when Barbara answered, she seemed to have made a decision about far more than just how she might spend her evening.
“I’d like that, Curt,” she said evenly. “I’d like that very much.”
Curt Halstead stood for a long time beside the phone, before finally replacing it in its cradle. Yes, he thought, a time for decisions, a time for endings.
But perhaps, also, a time for beginnings.