“My kinda judge,” said Lobdell.
The Porsche was locked but the Cadillac wasn’t. Nick used a flashlight and magnifying glass to examine the Coupe Deville’s floorboard carpet and the red leather seats. Plenty of sand, dirt, fiber, bits of paper. Strands of what looked like human hair. Some light like Bonnett’s and some dark like Janelle’s. Probably latents all over this interior. Good stuff, he thought, but he’d get the ID boys on it later.
He popped the trunk. Saw the lid rise in the rearview. Heard Lobdell.
“Hmmm, Nick.”
Nick jumped out, walked back to Lobdell. Looked down into the spacious trunk. A small toolbox. A set of jumpers, some car wax, and rags in a box.
And a sleeping bag. Black plastic bottom outside for moisture. Yellow-and-black-checked flannel inside. Not rolled up. Not folded. Just crammed back in the far corner of the trunk.
Nick pulled it out and set it beside the box. Spread it out a little. Found the head end, began unzipping it. Big enough for two. Stubborn zipper and a musty smell.
Debris inside. Black stuff. Flecked and fragile. Like burned paper, thought Nick. Or soot. Some dark hairs. Easy to see on the yellow flannel. Blood. Crate label for SunBlesst packinghouse, pretty brunette with the orange again. Blood on that.
A saw blade. Swivel bolt still attached to a shard of wood. Blood all over them, too.
By four-thirty they’d tossed the house, too, but hadn’t come up with much else.
By six-thirty they had a warrant for the arrest of Cory Bonnett.
By seven they’d talked to Don Rae of Laguna PD. Rae’s source had confirmed that afternoon that Cory Bonnett was at his place near Ensenada. Kind of a compound, said Rae. People around him. Gringos and Mexicans. Unfriendly people. A compound in the hills.
Rae said he’d let Nick know the second Bonnett was headed stateside.
“Janelle Vonn,” said Rae. “Incredible. No wonder he hit the road.”
Nick thanked him and hung up.
“Ensenada,” said Nick. “A little out of our jurisdiction.”
“There’s a way to bring him back here,” said Lobdell. “You just gotta have the nerve for it.”
29
THAT SUNDAY DAVID SAT in the first row of the Grove Drive-In Church of God to watch Darren Whitbrend deliver his guest sermon.
The young minister looked fuller in his robes. More authoritative. David had noted Whitbrend’s elevator shoes earlier in the vestry where they had enrobed. David could feel the worry coming off Whitbrend. Downcast eyes, tight jaw, few words.
Which was fine with David, who felt his own body on the verge of falling apart.
Barbara held one of his clammy hands. Wendy the other. Rachel lay on Barbara’s lap wrapped in a blanket. Two-year-old Matthew sat beside his mother, frowning his way into a bowel movement.
David watched with envy. He hadn’t had one since talking to Hambly, then Howard, on Thursday. Nothing would stay down long enough. He had drunk half a coffee mug of pink antacid earlier, trying to keep down his breakfast of white sandwich bread. Pretty much the same for dinner the night before. Almost no sleep. Hours of wideawake worry that the cops would see through Linda Langton’s words. That Howard would face a lineup and hang his final alibi on David. Then more hours of sweat and stomach pain, right on the cusp of sleep, as his conscience wriggled back into its deepest crannies to retrieve his most trivially shameful moments and present them to him for…what? These were things he hadn’t even thought about for years. The time he slugged Clay for breaking a gallon mustard jar he wanted for butterflies. The time he told Lydia Maxwell she was the ugliest girl he’d ever seen. The time he purposefully overcooked Barbara’s steak because she liked it rare and had called him a coward for not standing up to a drunk evangelist who had pawed her at a church mountain retreat two summers ago.
The pains in David’s stomach were coming faster now, like contractions for birth.
He felt a drop of sweat roll off his nose but couldn’t get a hand free in time to stop it. Watched it plop onto the leg of his Haggar knits.
Whitbrend began slowly and softly. His oratorical voice hardly stronger than his speaking voice. At first it seemed too low, so David found himself having to pay extra attention. Wondered why Whitbrend didn’t just get a little closer to the mike. Then David realized the whole congregation was listening closely.
Whitbrend told about growing up in Oregon. In a godless family. No church, no prayer, no belief. He was a mean-tempered boy. Utterly selfish. When he was seventeen he fell “helplessly” in love with a girl. All he felt in his heart was love for her and for everything around him. Took her to the homecoming dance, the Sadie Hawkins dance, and the junior prom. On the way home from the prom a car ran a stop sign and crashed into them. He had lain trapped in the upturned car, caught in metal and vinyl under her bleeding, unmoving body, praying to the God he never knew to save her life. He told God he would do anything asked of him if He would spare her life.
Whitbrend looked down at the pulpit for a moment. It was so quiet David could hear the cars on faraway Beach Boulevard. Could hear the squirting and sloshing inside his own stomach.
Whitbrend stepped away from the pulpit, then back.
She was dead when the police got there, he said. They lifted her off him and took him to a hospital. He suffered a broken wrist and minor cuts. All that night he stayed in the hospital for observation, and he prayed to the God he never knew that when he awakened this would all be a bad dream. He squeezed his eyes and arched his back and trembled on his heels and he ground his teeth in prayer. Over and over and over. When he awakened his father was standing over the bed with a broken tooth in his hand.
The broken tooth, thought David. The cap just slightly whiter than the other teeth. A reminder of faith for anyone who had heard this story.
Brilliant.
Whitbrend looked down at the pulpit again. David admired this, too. What at first had seemed evasive now seemed humble. Darren Whitbrend was not asking the congregation to bear his burden. He was showing them how it was done. Alone. Through the making of scars. Through the capping of teeth broken by prayer.
The young minister looked out at the congregation.
He said that after the funeral he made the God he’d never known an offer.
“I offered my life and flesh and soul to Him,” said Whitbrend, “if He would do one thing. That night I took the revolver from my father’s drawer.”
He walked outside and down by the river. He popped the cylinder and removed all six cartridges. Threw one into the water. It didn’t make a sound. Reloaded the other five and spun the cylinder hard, once. He closed it. And told the God he’d never known to save him only if he could know Him. And to take him if he could not. Then he sat down and pulled the trigger.
David heard the blood surging in his ears. Heard the dread and surprise ripple through his chapel, then the twitter of realization.
“And I ask all of you,” said Whitbrend, “to let me share Him with you.”
Whitbrend opened his arms to the believers and smiled. David could see the cap from here. Almost took his breath away.
David’s fever broke halfway through the closing prayer. While Whitbrend talked softly about peace beyond understanding, the tormented muscles of David’s stomach relaxed and the ache departed from his bones. The demons in his mind were quiet. He felt his strength begin to return, the strength to love and care and offer. He knew he would soon have a partner to help him guide the future of this congregation. God would help him through this other thing. Please, God, help me through this. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked that’s all for me.