The phone rang in the kitchen. Jim studied Ray’s face as he picked it up. Raymond stared at Weir and didn’t say a word until he put the handset back down. He drew a deep breath. “They found Ann.”
Chapter 2
Fog powdered the windows of Raymond’s car as he drove down Pacific Coast Highway toward the bridge. The pavement shone and tiny specks of moisture arced in the headlights. The Mississippi paddleboat Reuben E. Lee sat at dock, strings of lights sketching its profile against the black water of the bay. A halogen-baked construction site pressed the traffic into one lane.
Raymond did not say a word. Jim glanced at him several times, noting the clammy face, moist, unblinking eyes. Jim had seen enough expressions like that to recognize it as the mask of tragedy. A coolness spread into his palms.
Raymond turned onto Dover, took Westcliff to Westwind to Morning Star Lane. The Back Bay, Jim thought: nobody out of their million-dollar homes this late, a habitat solely for drunks and fishermen. The estuary was a shallow incursion of the sea running a mile inland between two bluffs that lay roughly a mile apart. The brackish flats had once been tended to produce salt. This minor utility had been abandoned decades ago, leaving the Back Bay to joggers, nervous seabirds, fish running in and out with the tide, and people like Virginia battling developers over the future of it all. For Weir, it had always been a place of strangeness — neither sea nor land, neither saltwater nor fresh, neither liquid nor solid, neither beautiful nor ugly.
“Okay, Ray. What’s going on?”
Raymond turned to him and his eyes said it all. Jim could smell Ann’s hair, feel her elbow going into his side just — he checked his watch — six hours ago. In his mind, a sense of unreality began blurring the edges of his thoughts. The hardest thing for him to do when he’d learned about Jake was to keep his mind clear. It was a feeling he hated more than any other, strong and incessant, a heroin of the soul. The fog coiled, struck, blew past.
Two squad cars were already parked at the dead end of Morning Star Lane. The lights of one flashed obscenely. The door of the other was open and an officer sat half in, half out, talking on the radio. Jim looked up to the big houses, saw an upstairs window yellow with light, saw the perfect silhouettes — Mr. and Mrs. Citizen, good people, frightened, side by side — staring out.
The officer in the car stood quickly when he saw Raymond, replaced the handset, then led them down a narrow trail in the embankment. The ice plant on either side of the path glistened; the water of the bay wavered to shore in rapid black ripples; the fog slid by in patches that burst upward and vanished with each gust of breeze.
“She’s over here,” said the officer gently.
They walked fifty yards east, across the weedy, sandy patch that fronted the inlet. Jim felt the damp soil giving under his boots, the slip and slide of rosea and fescue. Far ahead, two more shapes moved slowly behind two triangles of light. Weir’s stomach squeezed something vile into his throat.
The officer leading them — his name was Bristol — moved to the shoreline, and stopped a few yards short of the water. His light beam ran the length of a dark green blanket covering a body on the ground. Nothing had been roped off yet. “Fisherman brought her to shore — called us at three-fifty. He told us what he knew and we cut him loose. I recognized her. I called as soon as I could, sir.”
Jim and Raymond stepped toward the blanket together, knelt down, and, each taking a corner, lifted it away. Ann’s face was pale and peaceful, her blond hair falling back into the damp earth. Her eyes were dull and seemed focused on something very large, right in front of her. She was wearing a short red skirt that clung heavily to her legs, a long-sleeved white blouse, and one espadrille — on the left foot — that matched the skirt. Her arms lay comfortably at her sides, palms up, fingers gently curled. Her legs were slightly apart, toes pointing off in almost opposite directions. A bouquet of purple roses was stuffed down the waist of her skirt, stems lost inside, drowned blossoms sagging in heavy unison against her ribs. From beneath the hem protruded another stem, and Jim could tell from its angle where the blossom was lodged. Her white blouse was soaked in pale red, and stuck closely to her body. There were so many thin angular cuts in it that Jim’s breath caught in his throat and he tipped buttfirst onto the ground and closed his eyes.
This was not Ann. Ann was never meant to be a thing lying on the earth. He could hear the water lapping at the beach, and Raymond’s quick, shallow breathing. When he opened his eyes again, Ray was on his knees, cradling Ann’s head in his arms, his cheek against hers, rocking her slowly and in silence. Jim saw the rose blossoms jiggling against her breast. Officer Bristol loitered deferentially in the background. The distant flashlight beams still worked patiently toward him. From Raymond now came the low, haunted sounds of agony. He looked up once at Jim, his face little more than shadow and tears.
Weir slid his hand under Ann’s curled fingers and held on to her for dear life.
Jim stood with Officer Bristol, ten yards away from Ann and Raymond. He could not remember the specifics of how he got there. “Tell me what you know,” he said in a voice he hardly heard.
Bristol droned away as if on a long-distance line — got a call from Dispatch at ten ’til four. Local fisherman saw her floating fifty yards off. He was out with his wife and son for the day, trying to make the isthmus at Catalina by sunup. He used a gaff to get her in to shore, then he motored over to the bridge, walked to the pay phone at the Mobil station, and called us. Took a statement, but the guy’s wife got sick a couple of times, so we let them go. What he knows is what we know. We haven’t tried the neighborhood yet. No disturbance calls.
Bristol looked toward Raymond and Ann. “I’m awful sorry, Mr. Weir.”
“Did the gaff do any of this?” I have to ask these things, Annie.
“He said he snagged her cuff, brought her alongside his boat easy as he could. No.”
“Was she facedown?” It’s important we know, Annie.
“Yes, sir. He tried to move her as little as possible.”
“You guys touch her?” They shouldn’t have touched you, sweet sister.
“I checked her artery, then put on the blanket.”
“What about the other shoe?” You don’t mind, do you, Ann?
“We’re looking, sir. I know you were a Sheriff’s investigator a while back, working the harbor here. How fast would a body float this time of day?”
Weir listened to his own answer: depends where it went in... close to shore, with an ebb like this, two hundred feet an hour... farther out, faster. They killed her. Someone killed my sister, Ann. Close your eyes, wipe it away like a dream. You are still in Mexico. You are hallucinating with fever. Begin this night again.
“Would she come to shore if she was dumped out far?”
“Not this soon.”
“So we should be looking east of here for the crime scene?”
Weir listened for his answer, but his body simply walked off and stood closer to Ann. She looked so desecrated, so invaded, so unquestionably without life.
“Sir... if he killed her out here, it’s not likely he’d take her up bay to put her in, is it?”