“Grimes, take the houses to the west. Lydia, you take the ones east. Wake up the neighbors and find out if they saw or heard anything.”
Grimes grunted and pushed off the car. Lydia accepted a cigarette from Shephard and lit it with a still-shaking hand. “I’m not used to this.” She smiled weakly. “I talked to Tim Algernon five days ago, and now I can’t be sure that’s even him. If it is Tim, I can tell you he lived alone and has a daughter in town. Jane. He’s owned the stables for a long time. He’d rent the horses for rides in the hills. Last week he told me he’d finally retired and sold off all the horses except one. A favorite mare.”
At the far end of the driveway, the exit end for cars leaving the stables, Shephard looked for fresh tire tracks. But the gravel was well-worn, and the faint signs of travel could have been a week old or an hour new.
Outside the barn, the nicked boot again. One set of prints going into the open barn door, the same set coming back out. Shephard stepped inside. A light bulb burned overhead, halfway down the double row of stalls. The musty smell of hay and dung lingered, ingrained by now, he thought, into the wood itself. The silence inside was broken only by the muted hiss of cars heading out Laguna Canyon Road. He noted that the nameplates on the stall doors had been recently removed. Fresher paint was underneath, and screw holes were torn in the wood. Severing his sentimental attachments, Shephard thought. Like when he had taken down the pictures of Louise after their divorce. Only the nameplate on the first stall remained: BECKY. The favorite mare, no doubt.
Shephard discovered that the tack wall was empty. A complete sale, he thought. But wouldn’t he have saved a saddle, bit, and harness for Becky? He found no riding gear anywhere in the barn.
Back outside, the fresh morning sun made his eyes ache. Paralleling more bootprints toward the corral, Shephard stopped at a patch of moist clay under a pepper tree and found what he was looking for. The right bootprint bore the nicked heel.
He returned to the body and stood over it, sensing the almost tangible aura that separates the dead from the living. He felt clumsy and out of place, like a tourist in a country where his customs and language don’t apply.
From where he stood, Shephard could see the bootprints from the barn leading toward the corral. They ended at the now-open gate, obliterated by the deeper prints of hooves. Becky, he thought, a retired cowboy’s pension. The animal had taken a wide circle around the dead man — spooked by the flames, Shephard assumed — then angled off toward an embankment behind the house. Her hooves had cut deep into the bank, then down to a wide stream bottom where the dry weeks of summer had reduced the water to a brackish slick. With the sun working steadily on his neck and mosquitoes whining in his ears, Shephard followed the tracks until they climbed up the opposite bank, continued west, and disappeared into a stand of scrub oak.
Not twenty yards away stood the saddled horse, idly eyeing the detective.
Beyond the oak lay a dense grove of eucalyptus. And beyond the eucalyptus, a ten-minute ride across the dry hills, lay the city.
Two
The Orange County Coroner’s facility is housed in a drab square building in Santa Ana, the only pretense at cheer being an orange band of paint that winds around it like a gift-box ribbon. The deputy medical examiner introduced himself as Glen Yee, then led Shephard down a clinical hallway toward a set of recessed double doors.
“Shephard, from Los Angeles?” he asked casually. Yee was short, primly dressed, and vaguely oriental
“Right,” Shephard answered, bracing himself for the inevitable condescension.
“Very unfair the way the press treats you in law enforcement. But welcome to Orange County. I grew up here, not far from Disneyland. When I was ten, this was a quiet little county filled with orange trees and political conservatives. But it isn’t so quiet any more. Interesting, I think, that three of the first six men executed since the reinstatement of the death penalty grew up in Orange County. A modern place with modern problems,” he said, shooting Shephard a concerned glance. “And we now have a modern forensic facility to help solve them.” Shephard noted the pride in Yee’s voice, the tone of a future administrator. “We built the facility one year ago. Before that, we shopped the bodies out to local mortuaries, and our examiners made house calls, so to speak. At a hundred dollars each, we ran up quite a bill.”
“How much was all this?”
“About twelve million, but a money-saver in the long run. Frankly, I think the success of ‘Quincy’ helped us pass the bond. This, for instance, is a fine feature.”
Yee stopped about six feet from the doors and tapped his toe on a narrow black line. The doors slid open and waited. “The electric eye is positioned exactly one gurney-length away. The only doors in the county designed to be opened by the dead.” Yee chuckled politely. Shephard lit a cigarette and stepped in.
White tile and formaldehyde, draped sheets, gray feet. The bodies were neatly lined along the wall in front of him while technicians worked busily at a counter opposite. Four high-intensity lamps hung at intervals from the ceiling, under which four tables offered bodies to the light of forensic science. Yee led Shephard past the first three. Drained of blood to a pale gray, chests open, staggered with factory-line precision across the room, the bodies struck Shephard as more automotive than human. Yee stopped at the last one, which was covered, and produced a clipboard.
“Tim Algernon, age sixty-four, male Caucasian. The dental check was easy because we had a name and not many dentists in Laguna Beach. Anyway, he was in good health until about five hours ago. At around six A.M. he died of a massive brain hemorrhage caused by the introduction of a foreign body through the frontal lobe. The foreign body appears to be a piece of common basaltic formation, but Robbins can tell you better than I can. In my opinion a fall, even a complete unconscious fall, could not have caused the kind of penetration we have here. I don’t even think a rock that size could have been thrown through the frontal lobe. In short, it appears to me that someone literally bashed his brains out. Would you like to see?”
“No, but I will.”
The head’s features were indecipherable. Yee replaced the sheet.
“The body is seventy percent covered with third-degree burns,” he continued, stopping to run a thin hand through his black hair. “Basically every part of him not touching the ground, except for the bottoms of his feet. Ask Robbins again, he knows burns. I can tell you that Algernon hosted the fire, which implies an accelerant was used. Human skin of course is both porous and fire resistant, a trait shared by most green plants, incidentally. By resistant I mean that flame will not spread naturally.” Yee interrupted his monologue to wink at someone across the room. Shephard turned in time to see a pretty blond woman re-bury her arms in a corpse.
“Now, we found something truly interesting here, detective. Lodged in the esophagus below the epiglottis were four collections of American currency. Twenty-two bills, totaling nine hundred and ninety dollars. Given the mint condition of the bills, I’d say he ate or was forced to eat them shortly before he died. Strange.” Yee set down the clipboard and crossed his arms. His black eyebrows contracted thoughtfully.
“How much alcohol had he drunk?”
A trace of worry flitted across Yee’s smooth face. “We didn’t test blood alcohol. Generally—”
“Please do. You may find some in the stomach, too.”
“Stop by after you see Robbins. I’ll have your levels.” The deputy medical examiner offered his hand and smiled.