“Before you get carried away, Mr. Doncaster, I’m told your client’s gun may be linked to a murder in San Diego County.”
“What was the date of this alleged crime?”
The judge peers through his glasses. “Last Tuesday, August third.”
Doncaster confers with me. “I was in… I think I was in Las Vegas. Maybe New Orleans.”
“My client was not in San Diego County at that time, Your Honor.”
“We’ll take that up in court, Counselor. Bail is set at one hundred thousand dollars.”
“But, Your Honor-”
“Next case.”
It’s an hour and a half before the business with the bail bondsman is concluded, almost noon before my wallet and cell phone and pocket change are restored to me and I’m standing outside the Santa Rosa courthouse, more or less a free man. My rental car was towed to an impoundment lot in Guerneville, which is thirty miles south of Gualala. For a moment, I’m paralyzed with indecision. Should I take a taxi to the car? Rent a new car here in Santa Rosa?
First, although I don’t want to, I call my parents to thank my dad, and let them know I’m okay. I’m relieved when I get the answering machine.
Instead of heading straight to the coast, I go to the information counter in the courthouse, where a friendly woman directs me to the county clerk’s office. Ten minutes later, I’m sitting at a computer looking at a plat that covers the area of coastline I’m interested in. The property belonging to Sequoia Solutions comprises five hundred twenty-one acres, with almost a mile of coastal frontage. One big rhomboid and several smaller ones show the location of the house and its outbuildings. I note that they’re set quite a ways back from the ocean.
The huge parcel belonging to the Sea Ranch lies directly to the north of Mertz’s place. To its south sit several slivers of land extending from the highway to the sea, belonging to various individuals.
I ask the clerk if there’s a store in town that sells outdoor equipment. She directs me to one in a mall on the outskirts of town and, when I ask her to, calls me a taxi.
I ask the driver to wait while I shop. Eight minutes later, I’m out of the store with hiking boots, socks, a backpack, a Patagonia fleece jacket, and a large Maglite flashlight. The big flashlight is heavy. But I don’t have the gun anymore, and as a beat cop in D.C. once pointed out to me, there’s a reason cops favor Maglites. They’re better than billy clubs.
Then I ask the driver where I can rent a car. Twenty minutes later, I drive away from Santa Rosa Executive Rentals in a silver BMW.
It’s only seventy miles from Santa Rosa to Gualala, but the road is full of twists and turns – and speed zones. It takes me more than two hours, even though I’m speeding the whole way. I planned to go back to the Breakers and get my suitcase, and especially my laptop, but I head straight for the Sea Ranch rental office.
The blonde at the desk doesn’t seem to read my impatience. When I’m ready to take an available oceanfront condo on the southern fringe of the Sea Ranch property, she wants to show me all the other alternatives.
“No, really, the Housel Hut, that’s perfect.”
“It’s three hundred twenty-nine dollars a night, minimum two-night stay. Actually,” she says, tapping a few keys, “it’s booked on Monday, so I could only really manage-”
“Two nights is all the time I have. That’s perfect.”
I put it on my Visa. She gives me maps of the compound, passes to various facilities, a tag for my car, a schedule of events, and finally, the keys.
It’s five-twenty by the time I park behind the condo. I go inside only for a minute, long enough to grab the two bottles of water from the complimentary basket, along with the two wrapped biscotti. I put the water, the cookies, my wallet, the Maglite, my cell phone, and my fleece jacket in the backpack. At the last minute, I rummage through the kitchen drawers, and find a stash of Ziploc bags. I put the cell phone inside one, my wallet in another. I add a kitchen knife.
And then I head for the beach that abuts the land belonging to Luc Mertz. On my way, I pass a silver-haired couple, as fit-looking as nineteen-year-olds. The woman has a beautiful smile. They wave and stride on.
It’s a wild landscape. For centuries, the surf has thrashed against the stone, leaving an archipelago of pinnacles, their shapes determined by the hardness of the varying striations of rock. They look like minarets or the cupolas of Russian churches, sculpted by the water. Standing among them is the occasional monolithic boulder and a scatter of rounded rocks, like giant bowling balls. The water thrashes wildly amidst all this. Near shore, mats of kelp strands roll in the surf. Which is thunderous. When the waves hit the rocks head-on, the impact is amazing, sending up geysers of spray fifty feet or more into the air.
The high-tide line is clear, marked by a dark irregular line of seaweed, driftwood, and other detritus abandoned by the receding water. Looking inland, beyond the tide mark and all the way to the bluffs, it’s clear that the rocks closer to shore were not always beyond the reach of the water. The dramatic formations continue two hundred yards or more up into the hillside, where they end in a craggy cliff-face, above which glows the bright green of rolling meadowland.
And then I glimpse it, running straight down through the meadowland – the glint of razor wire that identifies the property line between Sea Ranch and Mystère. The tide is low and I’m careful as I approach to stay out of view of Mertz’s surveillance cameras. As I suspected, the fence continues down into the rocky area, but stops a few feet short of the high-tide mark.
Like the residents of most states, Californians are constitutionally entitled to walk the beaches, the land between the high tide and low tide being deemed a public resource. The only problem is access. We did a piece about the public-private rift not long ago when activists organized a beach-in in Malibu. Advocates of greater public access transported hundreds of beachgoers by motorboat; the masses occupied the sand in front of the houses of the rich and famous for the few hours between the tides.
I have to admit that when I saw “beach” on the plat for Sea Ranch, I was thinking of sand, not rock. I’m wearing khaki pants and I picked out the fleece jacket for its beige color, wanting to minimize my visibility. Wrong choice. There’s not much sand here. Just rock, and where the rock is wet, it’s almost black.
There are two ways to go. One is to wait for night and try to creep into Mystère. But I’d have to do it here, through the rocks, and the landscape is so rugged that would be almost impossible. The moon might help if the sky clears, but right now, the cloud cover is thick and low.
The other choice is to go out into the water and try to climb from rock to rock until I’m far enough beyond the reach of the cameras. Such CCTV cameras normally don’t have much depth of field. Then I’d traverse until it seemed safe to head in toward the shore. Of course, Mertz might have some kind of surveillance on the beachfront, but I doubt it. No one could possibly get a boat or even a kayak through these rocks without getting smashed by the surf. Almost certainly Mertz would have a security system protecting the house.
My watch reads six thirty-five. When does it get dark? Eight thirty? At best, I’ve got a couple of hours of light left.
I can’t climb in the area close to shore because I’ll be visible to the cameras. This means I have to get out past the surf break, which is wildly irregular, given all the rocks. The other problem is that the rock formations are not contiguous.
I see that almost inevitably, I’m going to get wet. The water is cold, very cold. I test it with my hand and try to guess. Fifty? Maybe fifty-five. Cold enough that after thirty seconds of immersion, my hand is numb. So cold that I should have a wet suit. Climbing shoes. Gloves. Picks and ropes.