I opened the Buick’s back door. Seat and floor were both empty. Around to the rear, then, where I slid one of his keys into the trunk lock.
“No!” Barlow came stumbling back there, pawed at me, tried to push me away. I shouldered him aside instead, got the key turned and the trunk lid up.
The body stuffed inside was wrapped in a plastic sheet. One pale arm lay exposed, the fingers bent and hooked. I pulled some of the sheet away, just enough for a brief look at the dead woman’s face. Mottled, the tongue protruding and blackened. Strangled.
“Noreen Chalfont,” I said. “Where were you taking her, Barlow? Some remote spot in the mountains for burial?”
He made a keening, hurt-animal sound. “Oh, God, I didn’t mean to kill her…we had an argument about the money and I lost my head. I didn’t know what I was doing…I didn’t mean to kill her…”
His legs quit supporting him; he sat down hard on the pavement with legs splayed out and head down. He didn’t move after that, except for the heaving of his chest. His face was wetter than ever, a mingling now of sweat and drizzle and tears.
I looked over at the misted store window. That poor bastard in there, I thought. He wanted to make his wife pay for what she did, but he’ll go to pieces when he finds out Barlow did the job for him.
I closed the trunk lid and stood there in the cold, waiting for the law.
Sometimes it happens like this, too. You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and still things work out all right. For some of the people involved, anyway.
Irrefutable Evidence A Sharon McCone Story
I tossed the pinecone from hand to hand and looked up at the tree it had fallen from. It was perhaps twenty feet tall and very dense, with branches that swept the ground except on its left-hand side, where they were bent and sheared off. A young bristlecone pine, hundreds of years old and still growing. In the high elevations of California’s White Mountains, where the tule elk and wild mustangs range, there are bristlecones over 4,000 years old-some say the oldest living things on the face of the earth. Years ago, I’d made one of the better decisions of my life while lying under such a pine; today, I’d been hoping this tree would yield evidence that would help me identify a killer.
No such luck.
After a time I turned away and, still holding the pinecone, retraced my steps to my rented Jeep. I tossed the cone on the passenger’s seat, got in, and cranked up the air-conditioning. The temperature was in the midnineties-August heat. I eased the vehicle over the rocky, sloping ground to the secondary road, bumped along it for two miles, then turned southwest onto Route 168 toward Big Pine, a town of 1,350 nestled in a valley between the Whites and the John Muir Wilderness Area. My motel was on the wide main street, a homey place with a tree-shaded lawn and picnic tables. No high-speed Internet access or other amenities that my operatives at Mc-Cone Investigations would have deemed necessities, but plenty good enough for their boss.
I tell my operatives I believe in the simple life. They claim I’m living in the Dark Ages.
Dark Ages, indeed. I had a cell phone, which I took out as soon as I entered my unit and dialed the agency in San Francisco. Ted Smalley, our office manager, sounded relieved when he heard my voice. That morning I’d flown down to Bishop, some fifteen miles north of here, in the Cessna 170B I jointly owned with my significant other, Hy Ripinsky; Ted, ever nervous about what he called my “dangerous hobby,” had probably been fretting all day.
“Shar, it’s after five o’clock. Where are you?” he asked.
“The motel in Big Pine.”
“Why didn’t you check in with me from the airport? I’ve been waiting…”
“There was somebody at the airport who offered me a ride to the dealer I’m renting a car from, so I couldn’t take the time. Then I had to stop by the local sheriff’s substation to let them know I’d be working in the area, check in here, and…why am I explaining all this to you?”
“I don’t know. Why are you?”
“Sometimes you remind me of my mother.”
“God help me. She’s a nice lady, but…”
“Yeah. So what’s going on there?”
“Quiet day, except for the trouble with the UPS guy.”
“Trouble?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Probably not. Is Mick in?” Mick Savage, my nephew and chief computer expert.
“No, he left for the day, but he said to tell you he e-mailed the files on the research job you assigned him.”
Which I would access on my laptop-another rebuttal to the claim that the boss was living in the Dark Ages.
I read through the files Mick had sent me, then walked down to a steak house I’d spotted on the way in. After dinner, I went back to the motel and sat at one of the picnic tables, enjoying the cool of the evening and planning a course of action for the next day. The air was sweet with sage and dry grass; crickets chorused in a field behind the motel, and somewhere far off a dog was barking. I felt relaxed, mellow, even; it was good to get out of the city.
The case I was working had been brought to me by Glenn Solomon, a criminal-defense attorney who threw a lot of business my way. His client, Tom Worthington, had been indicted here in Inyo County for the brutal murder of his lover, Darya Adams. Worthington was a wealthy man, an olive rancher from over near Fresno; it was natural he would turn to one of the stars of San Francisco’s legal community for his defense.
I thought back to the briefing Glenn had given me in his office high atop Embarcadero Four the previous afternoon.
“Tom Worthington is a family man,” he’d begun, folding his hands over the well-tailored expanse of his stomach. “Wife, two college-age children. Good reputation. No indications that he’s ever strayed before. Darya Adams, he apparently couldn’t resist. Former beauty queen…Miss California, I believe…and widowed. Ran a tourist boutique at Mammoth Lakes. They met when he was on a ski trip there. Before long, they were meeting on a regular basis at a country cabin he bought for her outside Chelsea.”
I looked up from the notes I was taking. “Where’s Chelsea? I’ve never heard of it.”
“You know Big Pine, Inyo County?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. One of Hy’s friends used to have a cabin in the mountains near there.”
“Well, Chelsea is a wide place on the road some seven miles into the hills above Big Pine.”
“OK, now, the murder…?”
“As close as the medical examiner could pinpoint it, it occurred on July thirty-first. Worthington and Adams had met at the cabin on the twenty-eighth, according to the employee who was minding the boutique in her absence. When Adams didn’t return on August first as scheduled, the employee called the cabin, received no answer, then asked the sheriff to check. Place was closed up. On August third, a hiker came across Adams’s body in the foothills of the White Mountains several miles from Big Pine. She’d been beaten and strangled. There were signs that the body had been moved there from the place she was killed, but the sheriff’s department hasn’t been able to determine where that was.”
“And they’re calling this a crime of passion, perpetrated by your client?”
“Right. One of Darya Adams’s friends claimed she was fed up with the arrangement and had threatened to go to his wife if he didn’t initiate divorce proceedings. He claims that wasn’t true.”
“What’s the evidence pointing to Worthington?”
Glenn shifted in his chair, reached for the bottled water on the desk.
“Two pieces. One, a key chain near the body, containing a miniature of his Safeway Rewards Club card…you know, the ones they give you so, if you lose your keys, whoever finds them can turn them in to the store, and they’ll call you. And two, a pinecone in the bed of Worthington’s truck.”