Carter unhooked the leash from his collar — there was no way the dog could escape from the enclosed atrium — and Champ instantly ran down the path to a spot that afforded easier access, then went up the slight rise to the source of the waterfall again. For a second, Carter thought he might just be thirsty, but then he saw it — lying there, atop a larger, flatter stone in the center of the stream.
The object from the La Brea Man’s grasp.
But now, perhaps because it had been partially cleansed by the running water, it gleamed, like the mano — or grinding stone — it had clearly once been. On its surface there were long diagonal scratches, made with another, possibly redder stone. Champ, unable to reach it, was hovering over the small pool from which the waterfall descended. Carter, not quite able to see everything from the pathway, stepped off the cement and, wrapping his arm around the base of a slim pine spruce, hauled himself up. He had to nudge Champ to one side just to make room for himself; this was an ornamental garden, and it wasn’t designed for off-road adventures. But the ground around his feet didn’t look as ornamental and undisturbed as the rest of the garden. Carter could see that some brush had been cleared to one side, and the dirt here looked freshly turned.
Champ barked, as if confirming his discovery, and Carter, suddenly realizing what he was standing on, instinctively stepped back.
“What’s there?” Hector asked from the walkway below.
Carter wasn’t sure how to answer that. But then he said, “A grave, I think.”
Hector crossed himself.
Carter looked again at the mano stone, sitting in the stream like a kind of marker, and then at the turned earth on the bank where he stood. It was as if he had stumbled upon a prehistoric burial site.
“What do you mean, a grave?” Hector said. “Whose?”
That much, Carter knew. It was the grave of the La Brea Woman, who had died just a few hundred yards away, over nine thousand years ago — though who had dug it here, and how, he couldn’t even guess.
“Damn,” Hector muttered, “this is something we got to report.”
“Not yet,” Carter replied. First he needed to know more about how it had happened. And then, he would need some time to think through its consequences. “Just let me handle it. Okay?”
Hector looked dubious, but at the same time glad to be off the hook. “You’ll say that it isn’t my fault? You’ll say that I did my job?”
“Yes,” Carter said, reaching down to ruffle Champ’s fur in gratitude, “I’ll keep you out of it entirely.”
Hector’s mind appeared at rest.
But Carter’s was not. As he surveyed the marking stone, the last and most precious thing in the world to the La Brea Man, and then the earth that still bore the trace of bony fingertips, his own mind was decidedly in turmoil.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
For Sadowski, it felt as if this night would never end. It was the night before the Fourth of July and it felt a hell of a lot like Christmas Eve, back when he was a kid. He remembered not being able to get to sleep or even stay in bed, and one year, when he was about five, he’d crept into the family room early, started unwrapping his presents, and gotten a good walloping for it when he was caught. But he was all grown-up now, and he had no excuse.
He couldn’t even talk about any of this to Ginger. It was all top secret. Not that she’d have understood it anyway. All she could talk about lately was going to Las Vegas to catch that faggot, Elton John, at some casino. “It’s for my act,” she kept saying, and Sadowski kept promising he’d take her some other time, though the point of taking a stripper to Las Vegas, on your own dime, eluded him. There were more strippers and more hookers per square inch in Las Vegas than anywhere on the whole fucking planet. Why bring your own? It’d be like carrying a six-pack into a bar.
“Stan, aren’t you ever coming to bed?” she asked now, from under the covers. “You’re keeping me up.”
There were only two rooms in the apartment and there wasn’t a real door between them — just a couple of louvered panels that swung back and forth. Sadowski had the TV on — another one of those Cold Case files — and he was swigging his fifth or sixth beer of the night. “I’m not sleepy,” he shot back, and she instantly retorted, “Then why don’t you go back to your place, because I am.”
She had a point — though he would never have admitted it. He’d only come over here to get his rocks off — and he’d already done that — and there was only one reason not to go back to his own place now.
All his gear was there and he knew, if he did, he would start fiddling with it again.
He watched TV until the show ended — it was another one of those where the DNA from a semen stain caught up with the guy ten years later — and then, when he was satisfied that he’d made his point and kept her awake long enough, he tossed the can into the garbage pail, burped loudly enough to elicit a disgusted groan from the bedroom, and headed out.
The night air felt good — it was relatively cool, maybe high sixties, but it was still dry. The only thing that could have spoiled their plans was rain, and there was absolutely no fucking chance of that. During the commercials on Cold Case, he’d kept flipping back to the Weather Channel, just to hear more about the arid conditions in the L.A. Basin and the advisories for anyone planning some Fourth of July festivities: “The whole county is a tinderbox,” one blow-dried blonde declared, “so don’t even think about setting off those Roman candles or cherry bombs, folks.”
Well, it wasn’t any goddamn cherry bomb he was planning to set off.
Driving home in his black Explorer, he was careful not to go too fast or make any mistakes that some cop on patrol might pull him over for. Even a guy his size would never pass the Breathalyzer test with a six-pack under his belt. (Once, he’d been pulled over and failed the test after having only three.) No, easy does it, he kept telling himself. Easy does it.
His own place was a dingy apartment above a mechanic’s shop, accessible by a wooden staircase off the alley. Ginger had never been there; nobody had ever been there. And that was just the way he liked it. He’d replaced the landlord’s door, at his own expense, with one made of vulcanized steel, with a kick-proof base panel and a dead bolt that could withstand anything short of a battering ram. Inside, he had a warren of small, dark rooms, the last of which had its own locked door on it. He took his key ring out of his pocket, opened it, and flicked the switch on what he called his War Room.
A bank of ceiling lights came on, bathing the room in a stark, white glow. On the walls he’d mounted topographical maps of L.A., along with some free gun posters he’d gotten from Burt at the firing range. In the center of the room, there was a beaten-up desk and chair, and behind that a couple of green metal lockers he’d salvaged from a gym being demolished up the street. That was where he kept his field gear.
Should he just suit up, he thought, and get it over with? He knew this would happen — that if he got anywhere near his stuff again, he would want to get started.
But he also knew what Burt had told them all, a dozen times: “If it goes off too soon, it’ll go nowhere.” The whole idea was to carefully plant the incendiary devices in all the places marked on the map, and time them to go off so the resulting blaze would be unstoppable. As soon as the fire department moved its resources to stop one, another one would start up, just beyond where a firebreak might have been formed. Burt knew all about this stuff — he’d been a volunteer firefighter in the Northwest, and he’d made a thorough study of the L.A. geography and terrain. If everybody in the inner circle did exactly as he was supposed to do, then the whole west side of Los Angeles, from Westwood to the Pacific Palisades, would go up in the biggest fucking conflagration the country had ever seen. And the Sons of Liberty would have done in one night what the Minutemen hadn’t been able to do in years: put the illegal aliens — and the terrorist threat from our unguarded borders to the south — in the dead center of the national radar screen.