Sten came back to him now, but he had to drop his eyes because he couldn’t let this man — or any man — look inside him and see what he was or how this whole business was twisting in his veins like rusted wire. Thank god Carolee wasn’t here, that was all he could think. Thank god. “I don’t know,” he said.
A gull sailed overhead so that its shadow fell across the sheriff’s face and then lifted again. “At school?” Rob prompted. “Surely you — or whoever — must have confiscated things like this at school.” He paused. “It’s what they call a blunt, for smoking marijuana?”
Sten nodded. He knew what it was. And he knew what was coming too.
“We found this at the Bachman crime scene. Actually, we found two of them. The other one, the second one, was up there where that bunker was?” The sheriff paused a moment to swell his cheeks and let out a long trailing breath, as if the whole thing was too much for him, traipsing from one crime scene to another, hauling things around in plastic bags to confront people with on a day like this, with the sun showing bright all the way up into the stratosphere and not even the faintest stir of a breeze. “And another thing,” gesturing now to his deputy, who must have been all of twenty-two or — three, and if this kid smirked or even thought about it, Sten didn’t know if he could hold himself back, not the way he was feeling now. This was the cue for the deputy, Jason, to hand him another plastic bag, inside of which were shell casings, dull silver in color, as if they’d been tarnished. “You recognize these?”
What could he say? They were shell casings. They could have come from anywhere, from anybody. He shrugged.
“Come on, Sten, I’m trying to tell you something here.”
“All right, then tell me.”
“These are casings from a Chinese assault rifle, not something you see every day around here. A Norinco — what was it, Jason?”
“SKS Sporter. Takes 7.62 millimeter rounds.”
The sheriff was standing there on a patch of grass the rain had reinvigorated, the shoots gone green to replace the yellow that had prevailed for the past six months, new life springing up under the soles of the Belleville flight boots he preferred to standard issue. He had his hands on his hips. “I just wanted to ask,” he said, and his eyes never left Sten’s face, “—your son has a rifle, doesn’t he? Adam?”
This was a cold question and Sten felt a chill all of a sudden though the sun was shining and the bay at the mouth of the river glittered like a heat lamp. Fatherhood. He’d never really wanted it, never sought it, and it had come on him late when Carolee, at the age of thirty-nine, had found herself miraculously pregnant. We’re blessed, she’d told him, her face composed round the news, truly blessed.
“Yeah,” he said, so softly he could scarcely hear himself.
“Chinese-made, isn’t that right?”
“Yeah.”
“What I’m saying is, Sten, and I know this is hard on you, it wasn’t the Mexicans that shot Carey Bachman and they didn’t shoot Art Tolleson either. You know that, don’t you?”
What came next was a detailed account of what had occurred yesterday afternoon on Georgia Pacific property approximately three miles northeast of the house on the Noyo where Adam formerly lived with his grandmother — the house Adam had vandalized because he wasn’t right in the head, because he was angry and upset and never had gotten over the death of Carolee’s mother and the way the world kept letting him down.
“That’s correct, isn’t it?” the sheriff wanted to know. “He did live there, didn’t he?” He drew a pair of drugstore reading glasses from his shirt pocket, shook them out and carefully fitted them over the bridge of his nose to consult the police report the deputy handed him. “At 3772 Forest Road?”
Sten nodded.
“You recall how long?”
“Something like six or seven years now, I guess,” Sten said, his voice gone dead on him. He didn’t want to hear this, but he was going to hear it whether he liked it or not.
The sheriff dropped his eyes to the report and continued, glancing up from time to time to make sure Sten was getting the full impact of it because this was a trial in progress, a prosecutorial marshaling of the facts and make no mistake about it. “It says that the victim, in the company of a local resident, Charles Moody, came across a growing operation at that location — opium poppies, the seedpods of which showed evidence of sap collection, which is illegal in the state of California and everywhere else in the United States as well. You can grow poppies all you want and let them go to seed and use those seeds to grow more poppies or sprinkle them on your bagel or do anything else you want with them, but when you cross the line and start scoring the pods to extract opium, that’s a felony offense, that makes you a narcotics purveyor with intent to sell. You understand what I’m saying?”
“He’s not in his right mind, Rob. He’s not responsible. We’ve tried to get help for him, like that time at the Chinese consulate—”
But the sheriff wasn’t paying any attention because mental states weren’t the issue here. Murder was. Murder and felony drug violations. He went on, reading now: “‘As the victim and Mr. Moody made their way upslope in a light misting rain, they were unaware that the suspect was armed, concealed and lying in wait. It was their assumption that the operation had been abandoned, as it was late in the season and they saw no signs that anyone was in attendance. At some point, no more than ten minutes after they’d arrived, the suspect sprang from cover in a threatening manner and when the victim recognized him — called out his name, Adam—the suspect opened fire with his Chinese-made assault rifle, fatally wounding the victim, and then firing on Mr. Moody, who took cover and returned fire with a legally registered handgun he routinely carried for protection in the woods.
“‘The suspect subsequently retreated but began a flanking maneuver that caught Mr. Moody by surprise (he was at this juncture in full flight, in a heavily wooded area some two miles north of the river and the California Western Railroad tracks, or Skunk Railroad, as it is popularly known). Suddenly he came under fire again, and initially, using the trees for cover and returning fire to keep the suspect at bay, he couldn’t determine from which direction the fire was coming. When he realized that the shooter was now in front of him, cutting off his retreat, he began evasive maneuvers, heading west in deep forest before again turning south, where he finally reached the railway tracks at mile marker six and was able to flag down the operator of a railway utility vehicle known as a speeder cart, who took him to safety where he subsequently placed a 911 call.’”
The sheriff glanced up, held him with his eyes, then slapped the report down on the table. “Just so you understand, Sten, Adam actively hunted this guy down, and if Moody wasn’t armed and hadn’t used his head, we’d be talking about three deaths here.”
“He didn’t kill Carey. That was the Mexicans. I saw them. We both saw them out there in their pickup — Carey even called 911 to report them.” A glance at the deputy — and he was smirking. Or gloating. One or the other, take your pick. “What are you smirking about, you son of a bitch?”
And now the kid came to attention, all right, one hand instinctively going to his duty belt. “Who you calling a son of a bitch?”
“You. I’m calling you a son of a bitch.”
“Back off, Jason.” Rob straightened up with a sigh, put his hands on his hips. “In fact, why don’t you go out to the car for me and I’ll call you when I need you?”