“Not from us, they won’t,” said Wade. “You’re on special duty. That’s all it is right now, Terry.”
There was a heavy silence in the dark room, undercut with the cheers from outside. Hawlsey was still buried in his blank notepad. Zant sat forward like a fan at a boxing match.
Sheriff Wade was rigid in his chair, with his arms on the desk and his head cocked just slightly as he looked at me. “Naughton, stay low. I hope this doesn’t turn out to be what it looks like. That’s for your sake as well as my own.”
“It already isn’t what it looks like,” I said.
“Noted.”
I set up the chair I’d knocked over. “You think I did it? Jim? Rick? Laird?”
The question hung in the air like the silence after a scream. No one spoke.
“I’ll tell you something,” I said. “You gloomy chickenshit bureaucrats are all going to regret this. A lot. I promise. Not quite as much as the sonofabitch who did it, maybe, but a lot.”
“Naughton,” said Wade, “give us the same respect we’re trying to give you. You’re a good investigator and a decent-seeming guy, when you’re not sinking your teeth into somebody’s ankle. You are also not in possession of photographs picturing me with underage girls. I have those, of you. That means I could roll your head and wash my hands right now, and save a big gamble. The CAY unit leader doesn’t show up in photographs with girls. It stinks up my entire department. If the media finds out, and I’m not doing something, my head rolls right alongside yours, down the ramp and into the basket. So I’m doing something. I’m gathering the facts. Lay low. Let the facts come in. If you’re scared of what we’ll find, then sell your house and get the best lawyers you can afford. If you’re not, you might actually think about cooperating. In the meantime, stay out of my sight. And when the Classic is over, get off my property.”
I told Melinda right after dinner. Penny was at the neighbors’ house, playing with a friend. Mel set the plate she was rinsing into the sink. For the longest time she just stood there, arms still in the rinse water, the faucet running, her back to me. When she turned her face to me it was a classic translation of the mask of tragedy.
“Terry?”
“You know I wouldn’t do that. You do, don’t you?”
“Pictures?”
“Somehow, they’ve been mocked up. I’m not sure how you do it, but I know you can. Reilly says they look genuine, but he’s wrong.”
Her mouth was open and her head was shaking very slightly, very quickly, side to side.
“Joe says they’re real?”
“They’re going out to the FBI, Mel. They’ve got more sophisticated ways of analyzing them. I know... I’m absolutely positive we’ll find out they’re doctored, staged, mocked up, whatever you call it.”
I went to her and turned her around. “Please, have some faith in me,” I said.
Her face was pale and I thought for a moment she might cry. Her prying eyes moved quickly back and forth, searching my face. Tears welled up in the corners, but Melinda let not a drop fall down her cheek.
“I need to sit down,” she said.
I held her arm as we walked across the scuffed hardwood floor to the sofa. I sat beside her. I could feel her recoil, the proximity of her jangling nerves.
“What’s Wade going to do?”
“I’m on special duty. House arrest for my usual shift, eight hours a day. Full pay. That’s funny, isn’t it? While he collects evidence to charge me. Hawlsey and Zant are leading the charge.”
“Good God.”
It was just us and the silence of the house for a long while.
“I’d like a minute to just sit here,” she said. “Alone.”
“I’ll walk Moe up the hill. When I come back, I’ll do whatever you’ve decided is best.”
I had no idea I could get that far into the wilder recesses of Laguna Canyon so quickly. I wondered what the neighbors must have thought as I ran along the road with Moe on his leash. Then I thought, who cared? When I passed the burned foundation of Scotty Barris’s old home I cut off through the brush and onto the trail.
Moe was dragging by the time I made the cave, but I felt fresh and alert. The first thing I checked was my little cache of vices, near the cave. My sleeping bag was gone. My cigars, tequila and pillowcase were gone. Booked into evidence?
Inside, it was obvious that someone had been there. I couldn’t itemize all my furnishings from memory, but I noticed my old foam egg-crate pad, a GI surplus wool blanket and my propane lantern were all missing. I could tell that the fire ring had been used because the rocks were arranged in a neat circle that I’d never bothered to maintain, and because of the pile of blackened ashes in its center. I could smell the recent fire. Even the uncertain light was enough to show me that there were footprints everywhere. With some dread I shone a flashlight on the cave belly and saw the gray carbon fingerprint dust still on the harder surfaces of the rock.
I shuddered. If you’ve ever had a guilty secret, you know the naked shame you feel when you are exposed to the merciless light of day. And it’s all the more shocking when you realize you never really felt guilty about it until someone knows.
I stood there and wondered who I had told about the cave. Melinda and Penny. Donna. Johnny and Louis, I think. Ardith. Frances? I couldn’t be sure. Mel and Penny were the only ones I’d actually brought here. It was amazing to me how lax I’d been in talking about the place. I’d never considered the cave, or what I did in it, as something to hide. Not that I mentioned the blackouts, or the mornings when I’d awaken somewhere else altogether. But those were a thing of the past, right? Now all I could see as I stood there inside it was a blond-headed girl of maybe eight, engaging my own hungry, lascivious body.
And as I saw that horrible image in my mind, suddenly I had a thought that made all of this even worse. Considerably worse. I had to brace my hands on the cave wall to keep myself up, and lower my head for air. I breathed deeply to purge my mind of the image, but I couldn’t. Because the girl in the photographs looked familiar. I couldn’t say where or when, but I believed I had seen her before. I knew I had. But where? Somehow, my presence in the cave triggered the memory, a memory that wouldn’t come to me as I sat in Jim Wade’s ranch-house office, confronted with false evidence of my own criminal pathology.
I turned and looked around me, trying to picture her here. I tried to picture myself here. It was easy to do. But were the images in my mind’s eye scenes of what had happened, or scenes appropriated from doctored photographs by my desperate memory?
I stared blankly into the dead ashes in me fire ring. I stared hard while my chest ached and my stomach tightened into an even tighter knot. When I finally blinked, I could see clearly again. I could see clearly enough to understand that the first forty years of my life had just tapered to this tremulous point, then vanished. I was a man bisected, a man whose history had not prepared him for his future. And I knew that nothing to come would be anything like what had gone before. I was over. And I was just beginning. I stared into the dead fire, a new man with new eyes. How badly I wanted to be the old one.
Terry Naughton, I thought, champion of the little people, always on the case. Film at eleven. Donna.
My head felt light and my breathing was short and shallow as I walked back outside to the gathering dusk.
The image of Lauren Sharpe came to my mind. With her face next to mine and her teeth sunk into my cheek. No, it wasn’t Lauren in those pictures. But it was someone I’d seen.
I didn’t do that, I told myself. I didn’t do that. I didn’t.