“I understand.”
She held the door open. “Thank you.”
“When will you get an opinion on that handwriting?”
“Soon. I won’t be sharing much with you.”
“Unless you’ve got a great reason to.”
“Such as?”
“It’s my job to find things people want.”
Ocean Beach — OB in local dialect — is seven miles from the JTTF offices downtown. It’s one of California’s last truly funky beach towns — rebellious, charming, and a tad long in the tooth. It seems to me that the developers who came up with the name Ocean Beach could have used some of those brain-stimulating exercises they advertise on the radio. Under “Citizenship,” an OB report card might say “doesn’t play well with franchises.” But OBecians don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s live and let surf. Suds and board shorts. Women on wheels. Endless summer.
I sat in my truck across the street from World Pizza, watching the sidewalk patio fill up. It was almost noon. Popular place. I’d seen their billboard advertisements up and down Highway 395, halfway up the state of California: Pizza on Earth, Pizza Be with You, Wanna Pizza Me? Lately, artisan beers had exploded in popularity here in San Diego, and through my truck window I could see the big hand-chalked beer menu standing in one corner of the patio.
On one side of the restaurant was a squat antiques store with Christmas garlands framing the windows. On the other stood an oddly slender three-story building with a sun-blanched mirrored door and a row of faded flags drooping from a second-story planter box. The words International Hostel were faintly visible from where I sat.
I took a two-top inside, got a big slice of today’s special and a pint of stout made right there called Gnarly Barrel. The pizza was excellent and the stout had “notes” of tangerine and cedar in it, and tasted better than it sounds.
When the check came I counted out the bills and overtipped, as usual, having tried and failed at waiting tables in my junior year of college. I sat and looked around the restaurant again, inside and out, for Hector Padilla, but I knew the chances of seeing him were slim. I wondered what Special Agent Taucher’s questioned-documents expert would say about the similar writing on the death threat and the thank-you note. It occurred to me again that any man who signed his name on a thank-you note, then a few days later handwrote an anonymous death threat and mailed it to the same person, was certainly one of the stupidest ever born. Certainly Rasha Samara was brighter than that.
Which left me with these fragments:
An apparent Middle Eastern overlap between Caliphornia and Rasha Samara.
A threatened knife.
And a real knife, deftly wielded on a picnic.
Golf courses all over the world and a San Diego postmark.
And the fact that Taucher’s handlers were looking at Samara.
Just as Lindsey Rakes had been looking at him, though in a very different way.
Into this strange brew I tried to factor in a distant but perhaps freshly pissed-off ex-husband.
And a Mexican American acting weirdly at San Diego’s well-known mosque — weirdly enough to catch the attention of fellow worshipers and the FBI. Enter one Hector Padilla — who was also a big fan of World Pizza.
Where I now sat. It seemed more than strange that someone out there had used this very address to help deliver a death threat to a friend of mine. Maybe Lindsey’s wannabe beheader lived in OB. Or used to. Maybe he had just passed through and had a good pizza. Maybe he’d stayed at the International Hostel with the faded flags. Possible, too, that he had never set foot in San Diego and that a confederate such as Hector Padilla had mailed the letter. Maybe our beheader wanted that San Diego postmark just to throw Lindsey and everyone else off his trail.
A man calling himself Caliphornia. Had to be a man, didn’t it? Terror. Vengeance. A gruesome threat. A very personal lust to it. Intimate? Jump to a son of Saudi parents building golf courses, nimbly cutting salami with a folding knife while watching a beautiful desert sunset with Lindsey. Same guy? This was possible. I felt uneasy that the world — having once been so vast and free — now seemed so small and crowded.
5
Home from world pizza, I sat in front of the west-facing window in my upstairs office and looked out at my rancho. Twenty-five acres of hills and valleys. Oaks and sycamores, chaparral and coastal scrub, bold granite outcroppings. Some of the oaks are huge. No neighbors in sight, though there are other homes beyond. The nearest town is Fallbrook. My high ground is held by a large Spanish-style adobe-brick hacienda built in 1894. There is a barn, a workshop, various outbuildings, and six small casitas built along the shore of a spring-fed pond. Roughly a century ago it was given the name Rancho de los Robles — Ranch of the Oaks.
I did nothing to earn this generous land grant except marry Justine Ann Timmerman. Rancho de los Robles was our wedding gift from her parents. It had been in the Timmerman family for decades, one of their several holdings in our American West. Justine and I had loved each other fiercely for those few months we were given, and when Justine died in a light-plane crash, I tried to give the rancho back to the Timmermans. They said I was family and the place was mine.
And so it is.
The rancho aspires to its early California graciousness but is still in formidable disrepair. It feels interrupted by Justine’s sudden departure. I’m not sure if it’s haunted, but I do see her at times — never the whole her, just a movement, a wisp, a presence. I hear her voice occasionally, too: not words, but sounds in her key and timbre, mixed in with the groan of old pipes or wind hissing through the casement windows.
My upstairs office is hushed, and the tall windows are operatically draped. The hardwood floor is bare of the Persian carpets that litter the rest of the house. Justine’s parents traveled to Iran before the fall of the shah, to hand-pick and collect them, circa 1975. The office has rustic, locally crafted furniture that is handsome and not quite comfortable. Modern upgrades include a high-speed Ethernet connection — not inexpensive in this sparsely populated part of the grid — a powerful computer assembled for me by a friend, and a wheeled task chair, much like Joan Taucher’s, that I often carom around the room on.
I shoved off the western wall and coasted back to the monitor on the massive oak desk.
Rasha Samara’s Internet existence was sparse but interesting. He had led a partially visible public life, but I could find only three photographs of him, no video, and a total of four attributed media quotes that totaled nine sentences.
The Las Vegas Sun article was informative. Rasha was born in Orange to prosperous Saudi immigrants who had settled in Irvine and naturalized. The father was eventually tenured at UC Irvine (molecular biology), the mother at UC Riverside (philosophy). Rashad — which means “integrity,” according to the reporter — had spent his childhood and school years in the United States, with summers in Riyadh with his extended family. He called himself Rasha rather than the full Rashad. Rasha’s father was interested in golf and horses, and so was his son.
He had graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in botany and a minor in architectural studies, gone on to study sustainable arid soil agriculture and ornamental horticulture at UC Davis. He had moved to Las Vegas at twenty-six to start his own landscape architecture company, TerraNova, with loans from his parents and distant relations in Saudi Arabia.