“Why didn’t this show up in your original backgrounding?”
A silence. Then, reproachfully: “You didn’t specify deep backgrounding, Shar. Criminal records’re hard to access unless you want to use contacts like Adah. And you’ve warned me not to abuse the privilege.”
I sighed. “Well, it didn’t occur to me to go deep on an old friend who sold them a house…or on the victim.”
“Which leads us to private investigator’s lesson number one…”
“Right. Suspect everyone.” I thanked Mick and broke the connection. Pulled back onto the road.
Jeb Barkley finds his former partner in crime running a boutique up in Mammoth Lakes. He needs money badly, and his friend Tom Worthington has refused to help him out. Darya is attractive, just the sort of woman who might attract a man like Worthington, who is trapped in a dead marriage. So Barkley reminds Adams of the old days and puts pressure on her to begin a relationship with Worthington, with an eye to getting her hands on his assets. Adams agrees, because she values her reputation and position in her community. But then Adams and Barkley have a falling out, maybe because she’d actually fallen in love with her victim. Now she’s afraid of someone down at the cabin.
Barkley, who demonstrated this morning that he was familiar with the place-so much so that he even knew where she kept the hummingbird food-and who also had a set of keys.
And she’d had good reason to be afraid. He’d found her alone on July thirty-first, they’d quarreled, and he’d killed her. Then he’d planted evidence to implicate his friend.
Now what I needed was concrete evidence to implicate him.
As I drove the rest of the way to Big Pine, I kept thinking about the tree that Darya Adams’s body had been found under. On impulse, when I reached the intersection of Routes 395 and 168, I turned east into the foothills.
The bristlecone stood alone on the rocky slope, clinging to the poor, coarse soil. I got out of the Jeep and walked around it, ducked under its low-hanging branches. Even though the sun was dipping below the ridge to the west, it felt uncomfortably warm there, and the air was dusty enough to make me sneeze. I went out the other side where the branches were bent and sheared off, sap congealing on their broken tips.
Emergency vehicles, I thought. They did this damage getting the body out.
Or…?
I took out my cell phone, called the local sheriff’s department substation. The officer I’d spoken with the previous afternoon, who had been one of the first at the murder scene, took a look at the official photographs and confirmed my suspicion.
“Our people did some damage after the photos were taken,” he told me, “but the tree was already ripped up on that side, probably by your client’s truck when he dumped the body.”
“Was there damage to Mister Worthington’s truck? Chipped paint, scratches?”
A pause. “I don’t see any photos or mention of it.”
“In your opinion, if his truck was scratched, would the paint contain traces of the tree’s DNA?”
“Well, I’m not a lab technician, Miz McCone, but I’ll hazard a guess that it would.”
“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
Jeb Barkley’s house was on a quiet side street in Big Pine: a small stucco bungalow on a small lot with a patch of lawn out front. A sprinkler was throwing out lazy arcs of water, and light glowed behind blinds in the windows. Barkley’s Outback stood before the closed doors of a single-car garage. I parked down the block and waited until it was fully dark before I approached.
Armed with a paint scraper and one of the plastic bags I’d earlier purchased at a hardware store, I crept up to the passenger side of the car. I switched on my pencil flashlight and, holding it between my teeth, began removing flecks of paint from the scratched area on the door. When I had a respectable amount, I sealed the bag.
I glanced at the house. No visible activity there. Slowly I began to move around the car, shining the beam over it. Nothing distinctive about the tires-and the sheriff’s people hadn’t been able to take any impressions at the scene, anyway. A few more scratches on the front panel, nothing lodged under the bumper.
The outside vent below the windshield, maybe. He would have removed anything obvious that was caught there, probably had washed the car, but deep down inside…
Yes!
I glanced over at the house. Still no activity. I fumbled in my bag for the pouch where I keep miscellaneous objects-chopstick, nail clippers, tweezers for the splinters I’m always getting. Took out the tweezers and fished around in the vent, until I found a slender wood fragment.
Ten to one it came from the bristlecone pine. There was another fragment lodged down there, but I’d leave it for the sheriff’s technicians.
I slipped back to the Jeep, headed for the substation.
Overconfidence, I thought, that’s what always brings them down. Jeb Barkley hadn’t counted on anyone looking into his past and discovering his connection with Darya Adams. He hadn’t bothered to have his car repainted because who would suspect him-a small-town real-estate agent, and Tom Worthington’s friend-of killing anyone? He hadn’t even bothered to conceal from me his knowledge of where things were kept in the cabin.
All of that, and irrefutable DNA evidence as the clincher.
Glenn Solomon was going to love this. Maybe he’d even pay a bonus for my getting results in record time.
The Carville Ghost A John Quincannon Story
Sabina said: “A ghost?”
Barnaby Meeker bobbed his shaggy head. “A strange apparition of unknown origin, Missus Carpenter. I’ve seen it with my own eyes more than once.”
“In Carville, of all places?”
“In a scattering of abandoned cars near my home there. Floating about inside different ones and then rushing out across the dunes.”
“How can a group of abandoned horse-traction cars possibly be haunted?”
“How, indeed?” Meeker said mournfully. “How, indeed?”
“And you say this apparition fled when you chased after it?”
“Both times I saw it. Bounded away across the dune tops and then simply vanished into thin air. Well, into heavy mist, to be completely accurate.”
“What did it look like, exactly?”
“A human shape surrounded by a whitish glow. Never have I seen a more eerie and frightening sight.”
“And it left no footprints behind?”
“None. Ghosts don’t leave footprints, do they?”
“If it was a ghost.”
“The dune crests were unmarked along the thing’s path of flight and it left no trace in the cars…except, that is, for claw marks on the walls and floors. What else could it be?”
Quincannon, who had been listening to all of this with a stoic mien, could restrain himself no longer. “Balderdash,” he said emphatically.
Sabina and Barnaby Meeker both glanced at him in a startled way, as if they’d forgotten he was present in the office.
“Glowing apparitions, sudden disappearances, unmarked sand…confounded claptrap, the lot.” He added for good measure: “Bah!”
Meeker was offended. He drew himself up in his chair, his cheeks and chest both puffing like a toad’s. “If you doubt my word, sir…”
It’s not your word I doubt but your sanity, Quincannon thought, but he managed not to voice the opinion. “There are no such beings as ghosts,” he said.
“Three days ago I would have agreed with you. But after what I’ve seen with my own eyes…my own eyes, I repeat…I am no longer certain of anything.”
Sabina stirred behind her desk. Pale March sunlight, slanting in through the windows that faced on Market Street, created shimmering highlights in her upswept black hair. It also threw across the desk’s polished surface the shadow of the words painted on the window glass: CARPENTER AND QUINCAN-NON, PROFESSIONAL DETECTIVE SERVICES.