The street sign for Eden Rock Road was carved into the shape of an oaken arrow and almost completely obscured by foliage. The fire engines and news trucks were long gone, since the suspicion of foul play had been downgraded to foolish accident. Thus Stein was able to drive unimpeded into the cul de sac. There was no point in going home anymore. By now Hillary would have to have taken Angie back to her place and he’d have to deal with that unpleasantness tomorrow. Tonight he had work to do.
He parked under an overhang of cypress boughs. His gaze went up, up, up the hill until he saw Goodpasture’s house. Adrenaline lubricated Stein’s knee joints as he climbed the stone staircase. He reached the first landing without losing his breath and stopped for a moment to look over the parapet. Galaxies of electric lights cut mystical patterns through the San Fernando Valley below. Civilization’s accomplishment in ten thousand years had been bringing the stars down to earth.
The pathway alongside the retaining wall took him around to the back of the house where the explosion had occurred. Broken plaster and glass gave the patio a newsworthy look of disaster, but the structure of the house wasn’t as badly devastated as the reports had made it seem. The celebrated barbecue grill was built into the red brick patio wall, ten feet long and four feet wide. There was a pile of dirt alongside that had given the experts all the evidence they needed for their faulty conclusions. But as Stein had correctly intuited, nobody had been throwing any shrimps onto this barbee. It was all laid out in Stein’s book: In the controlled environment of indoor marijuana cultivation, there are no natural predators. No bird to eat a fly, to eat a spore. So even one unnoticed white fly egg, one mold spore could multiply into the equivalent of a locust swarm and infest an entire harvest. Goodpasture had been using the fire to sterilize his soil.
Stein knelt low to the ground and circled his open palm along the base of the retaining wall. He knew what he was searching for and his fingers found the subtle crease under the ivy that concealed the doorway tucked unobtrusively into the concrete wall. It did not look disturbed. He was satisfied that no one else had found it. The hinges were well oiled and the door opened silently. Stein ducked inside. The door shut behind him and the catch snapped crisply into place. A staircase descended into a cavern dug into the granite bedrock of the hillside. Low-wattage light bulbs were screwed into sockets at five-step intervals. They cast wavering shadows the way wax tapers would in the dungeon of a castle. Grotesquely shaped white ginsengy globs protruded into the staircase through the outer walls. The ivy’s roots. As the staircase spiraled downward, the lights behind Stein went out and those below him turned on. He resisted the desire to stop, for fear that he would become out of synch with the timer and be left in the dark.
Suddenly the entire staircase shuddered. The words, “Earthquake. Trapped!” spun up into his brain and he clutched the wall for support. After a few moments the vibration steadied into a subtle hum and so did his heart rate. Yes, it was the compressor for the air conditioner. He liked Goodpasture’s style. The boy was meticulous. The stair ended fifteen feet down into the canyon at a low door. Stein ducked his head and entered.
The shock of glaring brightness made him cover his eyes until they could adjust. Even then it seemed like he must be hallucinating. He was in a room twenty feet square with an eight-foot-high ceiling. High-powered fluorescent lights were suspended by adjustable chains above four long rows of cafeteria tables. On each table were three neatly spaced rows of sprouting pots, twenty-four to a row. And in each pot there was a marijuana seedling, three inches tall. By rudimentary guess, Stein calculated roughly a thousand little sproutlings in the nursery.
A valve hissed and a large green metal tank in the center of the nursery blew out a long breath of carbon dioxide over the two thousand cribs. At each end of the room a large oscillating fan had been placed on the floor to circulate the air and dissipate the heat generated by the grow lights. The air was vented out the chimney by periodic bursts of this fan. There was another door at the opposite end. It conducted him into another dormitory room organized in the same way, with grow lights suspended above four cafeteria tables.
The plants here were in a second stage of development. Standing eighteen inches high, their slender shoots reached out like the limbs of young ballerinas in stage light. They stood on point; their bare roots nestled not in resin or topsoil, but in plastic containers filled with liquid solutions interconnected by a winding intestine of plastic tubing that carried to them all the carefully apportioned nutrients that they would ever need.
Even in his heyday Stein had never envisioned growing-chambers of this scope. And he hadn’t yet reached the grownups’ bedroom. A door at the end of the room opened into yet a larger chamber. Plants stood four feet tall with leaves as large as palm fronds. There were occasional breaks in the ranks; and empty pots. These, he knew, had housed plants that had become male and had been uprooted lest they satisfy their insatiable thirst to procreate, to fertilize the females and create seeds. The beauty of sinsemilla is that all that procreative energy is harnessed within the untouched female colas.
He felt another rumbling still deeper below him. He descended into the final chamber, and he knew how the first human being must have felt upon beholding a forest of Giant Sequoias. Two hundred mature female plants, five feet tall and Reubenesque, stood before him in full blossom. The air was thick with their perfume. Mint and burnt sugar. It’s Paradise, he thought. I’m in the Garden of Weeden.
He realized that breathing this air was giving him a terrific contact high and that he’d better get out of here while he could think straight. Logic told him that a door would be near the four large green canisters of carbon dioxide. He located the door, ingeniously built into the granite wall. It did not lead directly outside as he thought it would, but into a small anteroom equipped with a sink and a refrigerator and a TV that had been left on and was playing a mindless drama in black-and- white. The man on screen was prowling around a parked car. Stein had a vague sense that he had seen this show before. And then he realized it was not a show but a surveillance camera, and that the car looked familiar because it was his car. And a man in a brown suit was peering into it.
Stein opened the door cautiously and returned to the outside world. He was night-blind for a few moments until his pupils readjusted. But he was turned around. He expected uphill to be to his right; it was to his left. The road was not where it was supposed to be and his car was gone. When he looked up behind him, Goodpasture’s entire house had disappeared. And now he realized that the tunnel had gone underneath the street, and that he had emerged on the other side. His car was parked directly below him. The man in the brown suit was using it as cover, glancing up at Goodpasture’s house. But as Stein was now behind him, he had a clear path to the intruder’s back. The man had a small build, trim but not athletic-the type who would row sixty miles on a machine but never go near the water.
Stein unconsciously grabbed his own flabby midriff in his hand. He calculated his advantages. He had the higher ground, logistically and morally. He could walk brazenly up to the man and say, “Yes, can I help you?” But that didn’t seem like the most prudent idea if this was the man who had killed Nicholette. There was no way to get back into Goodpasture’s house and he knew he couldn’t stay pressed against this wall very much longer. His leg was getting numb and he had to pee something fierce.
He shook his leg to restart the circulation. This was his third major mistake of the evening. He lost his balance and began to slide down the hillside. He scrambled to regain his footing but his shoes had no traction. He surrendered to gravity and careened wildly down the hill screaming a banshee war cry. The man in the suit was startled and jumped backwards, pivoted awkwardly, stumbled as he started to run and fell on his ass. Stein’s plan, if he had one, was to startle the man into running away, then jump into his own car and-after that it got vague. But with the man falling, Stein could hardly delay his charge and wait for him to start running away again and still maintain an effective pretense of threat. So Stein ran at him, screaming. His quarry went into a complete panic. He rolled onto his hands and knees. His feet were so knotted that he couldn’t stand up; so he tried to crawl away. Stein veered to the right at full speed to head him off. His left foot caught in a pothole and his torso twisted ninety degrees while his ankle stayed rooted. Sickening pain shot up through Stein’s leg into his gut. He fell to the pavement.