There wasn’t anything else to see from where I was, no sign of anybody or that anybody had been here recently other than the construction people. After a few seconds I got out into a light mountain breeze that carried the smells of pine and chaparral and cut lumber. Some bees made buzzing noises in a patch of clover nearby; birds chattered at each other in the trees. Otherwise, the clearing was wrapped in that soft kind of stillness you only find in the country.
I went over to the rear of the house, up onto the deck. The floor was empty except for a handful of forgotten nails; equally empty were the unfinished rooms inside. I made my way through the forest of beams anyway, past the skeleton of a massive fireplace and into the roofed-over front section. Most of the walls were up in there, and another fireplace was nearing completion in what was probably the master bedroom. A stack of bricks and a wooden mortar tray were on the floor in front of the hearth.
So was a quilted nylon sleeping bag. And a paper bag that had come from Jack in the Box. And an empty half-pint bottle of sour-mash whiskey.
Those things erased any doubt that Hannah Peterson had come up here on Friday night. And it looked as though she hadn’t been alone when she got here; she wasn’t the type to eat fast-food or to drink sour mash straight out of a bottle. Or, as Runquist had said, to spend the night in a sleeping bag in an unfinished house. Unless she was forced to, I thought. Had she spent the night here with Raymond? There was only the one sleeping bag. Well, if she had slept with him she’d done it under duress and it amounted to rape. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t enough of a coldhearted bitch to willingly sleep with the man who’d just murdered her father.
The sleeping bag was zippered all the way open and folded back; I could see without touching it that there wasn’t anything inside. I sat on my haunches and used thumbs and forefingers to open the paper sack. It contained what I’d expected it to-the remains of a fast-food supper. From the feel of the lone french fry, it had been there a while.
I straightened and took a turn around the room. There wasn’t anything else to find in there; or in any of the remaining rooms. The way it seemed, Raymond had spent Friday night here, with or without Hannah, and then beat it sometime yesterday. But Hannah had been back at her place in Sonoma at nine A.M.; if Raymond was the one in the dark-green car that had pulled into her driveway, where and how had he got the car? And what was he doing at her house? And what had Hannah been loading into her Toyota?
I didn’t like the way things were shaping up. It had all appeared to be coming together, and maybe it still was, but I was beginning to get a sense of twists and turns and hidden hazards, like a bad road on a dark night with a bridge down somewhere up ahead.
Outside again, I went around to the other side of the house. More building materials; a lightweight aluminum roofer’s ladder leaning against the wall; one of those portable outhouses you see nowadays on construction sites. Across thirty yards of grassy open space, at the edge of another patch of woods, were a tumbledown shed and what was left of an old stone well. The shed and the well, and those ancient, moss-caked cairns down at the foot of the lane, told me somebody else had lived on this property before Hannah and Runquist purchased it. But not in a good long while, judging from the condition of that shed. There had probably been a house here, too, that had had to be razed before they could start putting up the new one.
Another lane, or a continuation of the one from Trinity Road, cut through the trees over there; from where I stood I couldn’t see where it led to. I looked at it for a few seconds. Then I crossed to the edge of the clearing and looked at it some more, closer up.
What I saw deepened my growing sense of uneasiness. This lane hadn’t been used much; its surface was all but obliterated by a thick carpeting of pine needles and oak leaves and rotting humus. But there were faint parallel marks in the carpet now, as if a car had gone along there recently. A clump of tall grass that grew at the clearing’s rim had been crushed, too, and the soft earth underneath showed the clear imprint of a tire tread.
Maybe one of the builders had driven over here for some reason, I thought. Except that the imprint was narrow and fairly shallow, not the kind a heavy vehicle like a pickup truck or van would make. It was the tread of a passenger car’s tire, and a small passenger car at that.
I went along the lane, walking in the middle, listening to the bird sounds and the dry brittle cracking of the leaves and needles underfoot. Feeling a slow gathering of tension across my neck and shoulders. The lane made a sharp dogleg to the left after twenty yards, extended another twenty after that, and petered out at a massed jumble of decayed boards and creepers and shrubs that rose up at the base of a sheer rock wall. It had once been a building of some kind-a small barn, maybe, or a chicken coop-but that had been long ago.
To the left there were not many bushes, just a lot of grass that grew thick and knee-high. The two parallel tracks that hooked through it, around to the rear, were plainly visible. I knew what I was going to find as soon as I saw those tracks, and when I got around behind the decayed building I found it: a car parked nose up to a blighted live oak, half-hidden there in the grass-a beige Toyota Tercel, license plate 735-NNY. Hannah Peterson’s car.
The windows were all rolled up; I bent to peer through the one in the driver’s door first, then the one in the rear door. The interior was empty, nothing at all on the seats or the floor or the dashboard or the rear-window deck. But the keys were still hanging from the ignition slot.
I got out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my right hand, and tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. I leaned in and punched the button to open the glove compartment. A map of Sonoma County, a map of California, a plastic envelope containing the car’s registration and owner’s manual, two unopened packages of Marlboro cigarettes, and a small flashlight. I shut the compartment, looked around in front and back another time without finding anything. Then, still using the handkerchief, I slid the keys out of the ignition and went around to the rear and opened the trunk.
On the deck inside was a rifle partially wrapped in an old blanket, a small carton that contained a wood-handled revolver and boxes of cartridges for both it and the rifle, and a larger carton full of neatly folded clothing. The rifle, I saw when I pushed aside part of the blanket, was a bolt-action center-fire Savage-the kind hunters use for deer and larger game. The revolver was a Smith amp; Wesson. 38 hammerless, a belly gun. The clothing in the bigger box was all men’s stuff, shirts and pants and lightweight jackets; on top, like some sort of crown, was an old railroader’s cap.
Now I knew what Hannah Peterson had been loading into the trunk yesterday morning. And I had a pretty good idea why, too. The guns had probably belonged to her late husband; the clothes had either belonged to him or they were her father’s and she’d been storing them. Raymond was a fugitive and a multiple killer, and even though he’d likely beat it out of Oroville with his own gun, it made sense he’d have wanted more weapons and ammunition. Getting them from Hannah was a lot safer than stealing them. The same was true of fresh clothing; whoever the items in that carton had belonged to, he had been the same approximate size as Raymond.
But what was it all still doing in the trunk? And why had the car been driven back here and hidden this way? And by whom?