Mouth agape, rock protruding from the forehead like a rapacious tumor, the face defied long observation. Shephard looked instead at his watch. A mile to the west he heard waves breaking on Main Beach, or perhaps the swooshing of cars on Coast Highway, The early morning air tasted good. The man was sprawled, legs and arms out, as if he had been dropped from above. Shephard followed an imaginary line from the sky to the body, his eyes at first refreshed by the slate gray clouds, then accosted again by the ugliness on the earth in front of him. The left hand lay open and relaxed, the right was clenched tightly, even in death. Shephard coaxed open the fist as Pavlik slid a sheet of clean white paper underneath. From the still-white palm tumbled a meager handful of hair, which Pavlik immediately bagged.
“Nice,” he said.
“Stupendous,” Shephard agreed, unfolding the blanket to cover the body. Pavlik reached out and claimed a burnt match from the ground not far from the dead man’s head.
For a brief moment, the two men lost themselves in the search for more matches, a welcome relief from the close-up study of the dead. Finding none, they rose without speaking and followed the footprints toward the house. The prints were deeper and more clearly marked in the soft clay near the porch. Bending down with his flashlight, Shephard saw that one set had been made by bare feet and began not far from the porch steps — the distance of a running jump, he guessed — and continued in a staggering, disordered pattern. They ended at the body. Another set bore the signs of cowboy boots, deep heel, wide ball, and scant toe. The right heel was cloven sharply by a V-shaped divot in the back. These followed the bare feet halfway to the body, then veered into the gravel and reappeared in the soil, facing — not pursuing — the dead man’s. Shephard noted other tracks, older and trampled over by the boots and naked feet.
“Shoot the fresh prints, Carl. Then rope them off. Get a good close-up of the right boot.”
“Why did he run all the way around to get Tim from the front?” Pavlik asked gloomily.
He was right, Shephard thought. Tim, if it was Tim, had apparently run into, rather than away from, the person who had killed him. Unless the poor wretch had run all the way from the porch with a rock dividing his head. “It must have been easy,” he said, pointing to the chaotic pattern of the dead man’s prints. “He wasn’t breaking any speed records.”
Shephard went through the open front door and into a well-ordered, cowboyish living room. The lights were on. A pair of Winchester lever-action rifles were crisscrossed over a brick fireplace, a Navajo rug lay centered on the wooden floor, the window curtains were plaid, the coffee table solid oak. One wood-paneled wall was generously graced with photographs and paintings of horses. The other was covered in shelves for books, plants, a small television set. A tall but neat stack of Racing Form newspapers rose not far from the fireplace. More lay scattered on the coffee table in front of the leather couch. Shephard checked the dates: July 21 and 28, August 4 and 11. Horse man, horse race fan, he thought. Why the empty corral?
Also on the table were two shot glasses and a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. Leaning forward, he noted that both glasses smelled of alcohol. Lights on and drinks poured. An early morning drink with a friend?
Open and face down on the floor near the coffee table lay a Bible. Shephard lifted it with his fingertips and set it down on the couch. The book was worn but serviceable, the gold letters of Holy Bible worn away from the leather cover, the binding battered but the pages intact. The first page offered a fancy filligreed frame and the words “Presented To,” followed by three blank lines. The smeared black ink of a sloppily imprinted stamp read:
THI BIB PRO OF
FO TAT I N
The title page that came next had a colorplate called “Jesus and the Children.” Printed in bright red ink under the words Holy Bible was a concise and neatly lettered message:
Liars Burn and Little Liars
Burn First
Shephard felt a faint, sideways flutter in his chest as he read the note again. Then the room darkened.
Pavlik stood in the doorway, his rumpled form outlined in fresh sunlight, the ever-present forensic case dangling from one hand. He set it down with a thud on the hardwood floor. “Robbins’s people will be here in twenty minutes to get the body. Want to help me dust?”
“Do what you do best, Carl. I’m going to have a look at the house. Dust the book on the couch first. If there aren’t any prints, I’ll take it with me.”
“Grimes get to you? He hates new-hires. It’s a way of being colorful.”
“You got it, Carl, buddy. A colorful individual.”
“He’ll loosen up. He doesn’t have any idea what it’s like in the City of Angels. I do, and I never want to go back.” Pavlik blew a purple bubble and sucked it back in.
Neither will I, Shephard thought as he walked down a short hallway that led out of the living room. A full-length mirror at the far end threw back his reflection. He stopped a moment to look at himself, a habit that was less vanity than curiosity: Who am I? Every mirror seemed to offer a different story. Only the fundamentals remained the same, a tall and meatless body, straight shoulders, brown hair that a TV commercial would have dismissed as unmanageable, a face of harsh angles softened only by the drowsy mustache that was so well integrated with the rest of his face he might have been born with it. Beyond that, the mirrors disagreed. Some emphasized the bags under the eyes, an image of weariness. Others suggested a stark, almost monotonous intensity. Still others shaded, altered, colored, rearranged him as if by whim.
The first room off the hallway was a den. It was arranged with a passion for symmetry: the bed centered and flanked by identical nightstands with identical lamps, a poster of a galloping horse framed in the middle of one wall, smaller pictures facing each other from opposite ends of the bed, same horse, same picture. Nothing in the room, he noted, suggested a woman’s presence. It was fanatically clean, fanatically unlived in. Shephard recognized the bachelor’s dependence on order.
The large bedroom at the end of the hall was similar in spirit. On the nightstand stood two pictures, one of a man and a woman, one of the same man and woman with a small girl between them. The room was distinctly cool. The bed was made. An early morning drink with a friend he was expecting? Or was he used to rising long before sunrise and making the bed?
In the living room, Pavlik was on hands and knees, his face point-blank to a shot glass. One hand dusted the glass gently with a small brush, working white powder concentrically outward in short strokes. The other held a black sheet of construction paper behind the glass. Both were gloved in translucent white rubber, which Shephard noticed was approximately the pallor of Carl’s face. Pavlik pulled back and exhaled, chewing the gum with vigor. “Fair,” he said. “Nothing on the book. Leather’s too old and porous. Interesting note on the title page, though.”
Shephard slipped the book into his coat pocket and stepped outside. The morning was already growing warm, and the northbound work traffic on Laguna Canyon Road had thickened. He watched the coroner’s van lumber to a stop behind Lydia Worth’s patrol car, against which Grimes leaned, smoking a cigar. Grimes blew a blue haze as Shephard approached. Before it cleared, two more patrol cars crunched onto the driveway, followed by the white Chevy four-door of the department’s publicity officer. The Chevy skidded to a stop and Pincus of Public Relations got out, late but officious. Shephard confronted Grimes’s puffy, bulldoggish face.