Obstruction of Justice (20 page)

For this lousy profession, built on sleepless nights and anxiety-ridden days, at the nexus of trouble, failure, guilt, hatred, every human failing? She was so busy trying to prop up her clients that she was on the edge herself, and there was no one who cared to catch her— not Collier, farther out on the edge than she was, and not Paul—and that was her own fault.

A memory surfaced, of a legal services lawyer she had known in San Francisco, a young man committed from the beginning to righting injustices and saving his clients from their own mistakes. He had come from a poor family and worked his way through college and law school the hard way. In the rotunda of city hall she had met him one day, and he had said, "I’m burned out. I’m getting out."

"To where?" she had said.

"I’m going to drive a forklift at a warehouse in San Jose. Like I did in college."

"You can’t do that!" she had said, aghast. "All your training, your ambition—"

"I’m looking forward to it. It beats lawyering all to hell. I’ll pick up boxes and put them on pallets, and at the end of the day they’ll still be sitting where I put them. I’ll actually accomplish something positive."

"That’s ridiculous."

"Not as ridiculous as rolling rocks up a mountain all day, only to find they roll back down as soon as you turn your back."

She never saw him again. He had been a casualty.

She thought, It’s not my duty, I’m not going to put this on my shoulders, I’m not going to drive up to that cabin by myself, no matter what.... It isn’t fair, no one could ask it of me....

While all these thoughts born of fear caromed around in her head, she was already climbing the face of the granite cliff that led over Echo Summit and out of the Tahoe basin, keeping the Bronco in second gear, trying not to hit the sightseers gawking over the edge of the cliff at the turnouts. Clouds were gathering over the Carson range, just as they had on Tallac barely two weeks before.

And then, from nowhere, her doubts began to subside. Some hidden source of strength surged up and she said to herself, It may be too big to fight, but you have to get in the ring with it anyway. What else had she spent years developing her skills and her strength for? Was she going to cringe and run back to push some more papers after telling Sarah she’d help her?

The inner tumult continued to recede, like the backwash of a stream that has met the giant Amazon. The road left the cliff and turned west, toward Wright’s Lake. She followed it.

16

"DO YOU WANT THE GOOD NEWS OR THE BAD news first?" Ginger asked Paul over the phone.

Having spent Saturday afternoon closing off leads one by one, Paul was calling from a pay phone on the street. His friend at the DMV had said the computers at the agency wouldn’t be able to scrounge up all Catalina owners from a particular town years ago.

"Bad news first."

"The bad news is, this car’s been washed and vacuumed inside and out. I pulled out the seats, the gear shift mechanism—stuff gets down in there sometimes. I vacuumed until I felt like the upstairs maid. I found enough dog hair to stuff a pillow—kid hair, grownup hair. You send me samples from the family down in L.A. My guess is it’s all their hair."

"Any sign the car’s ever been in the mountains?"

"A few pine needles under the floorboards. Might or might not confirm your man’s story that he bought the car in the mountains."

"What else?"

"Chewing gum under the door handles. Skittles and M&M’s. Cardboard holder that used to hold fried zucchini. Pepsi can under the right front seat. Cheap ballpoint pen. Loose change and an old eyebrow pencil, light brown."

"Any fingerprints?"

"Millions. I got the prints from the family. A million of those. Even a few of yours on the steering wheel and door handle. Lots more. I’m working on them, but you know you can’t expect me to be able to identify all of them. No bloody prints at all.

"Beyond that, I found lots of sandy dirt. And, no, there’s nothing special about the dirt, either. Even at the molecular level, it’s just L.A. dirt. No obscure seeds or spores."

Disappointed, Paul said, "Rats."

"One interesting thing—semen stains on the backseat. You send me a semen sample from Bright, I can try for a match. Or do a straight DNA test on a blood sample if he doesn’t want to send his jism through UPS. UPS has been losing my checks, and God knows where my last set of test tubes from the factory in New Jersey ended up."

"You do have your fun, analyzing secretions for a living," Paul said. Peculiar clunking sounds came over the phone line. Paul imagined Ginger, whom he had worked with through the computer and phone but never met in person, as one of those perfectly groomed petite Asian-American ladies who wore high heels shopping; the soul of efficiency, walking around the lab in her pristine whites, the phone glued to her ear with a shoulder, performing four other tasks at the same time.

"Are the mom and pop likely candidates for a little romance in the backseat? It’s a big, wide car. Even big, wide, middle-aged people might be tempted."

Paul thought back to Bryan Bright and his wife. It was hard to imagine Debs having the energy or time for a romp in the Cat, but you never knew. "Don’t ask me."

"Ask Bright, then."

"I will."

"Because if they didn’t do it, and the kids are too young, that leaves the previous owner."

"Or some member of the El-Barouki tribe. They had the car for a while. You wouldn’t even need a partner."

"It’s a long shot," Ginger said. "Pun intended."

"Good news?"

"The car was definitely in an accident. Since then, as I already mentioned, a nice paint job overlaid the original white color with black. The windshield has also been replaced. It’s nonstandard for that type car in that year, jury-rigged to fit. Crummy work. The wind practically whistles through it. The radiator is new, new tires, and there’s a new transmission. Other than that, the car’s cherry. Bright maintained it very well."

"What about the glass I collected in the parking lot?"

"Meets the factory specs for this type car’s windshield, but not for headlights. That’s all I can say, because the old windshield is gone."

So Paul would never see the ghost of Anna’s face in the windshield. "That’s it?"

"I’ve saved the best for last. The really good news, if you can call it that, is that the sample you gave me for Anna Meade matched up with some blood I discovered gunked behind a dent in the bumper. Apparently, the bumper was just washed, not replaced. Those carwashes do such a piss-poor job."

Paul felt a maniacal grin break out on his face. Ginger had come through. Bright’s Pontiac had to be the car.

"Well, you do like keeping people in suspense, don’t you?" he said. "Good work, Ginger. Dammit! I have to get back to Carmel and take care of some other clients. I don’t know how long it will take."

"What do I do about the car?"

"My client wants to send down an El Dorado County forensics tech to bring it back up here. It’s still an open case. He’s going to give what I’ve dug up to the police."

"He’s sending a cop down here? What is he, the police chief?"

"Better."

"I guess that explains how you managed to get me samples from a woman who died three years ago. But what about the hair and semen samples? And continuing with the fingerprint work? I’d like to finish this job, Paul. Somebody else takes over now, there could be a screw-up."

"I’ll have the client hold off picking up the car for a week or so, and call the guy in L.A. I’ll try to get you the samples right away. You do the analysis and write up a report. Can you do it that fast?"

"Send me the samples, and I’ll analyze them. But it’s been three years and a lot of other people have been in the car. Don’t expect anything."

"If you never expect anything, you never get anything. We’ve got the car. Our eyewitness couldn’t ID it from my Polaroid, but maybe she’ll have better luck when she sees the actual car."

"What else do you have?"

"Not a dad-blamed thing."

"Put an ad in the paper," Ginger said. "Offer a reward for anybody who saw the car or the accident. Attorney friend of mine always does that on his hit-and-runs."

"I just did that."

"Oh." Ginger had run out of suggestions. "Okay, then. I have to go babysit the centrifuge."

"Talk to you soon." Paul hung up, looking at the low-hanging clouds. He found a quarter and called Nina’s office and house and car phone. Recordings and ringing.

Too bad he couldn’t say good-bye in person. He felt a longing to talk to her. Shaking that uncomfortable feeling off, he called Kim and heard her recorded sultry alto telling the world that she would be out of town for a few days, leave a message.

Well, shit. His racquetball bag full of dirty clothes and his equipment were already loaded in the back of the van, and he had checked out of Caesars that morning. He shrugged and climbed in.

On the way out of town he stopped for an early dinner. At barely five-thirty, the heavy overcast had effectively ended the day. Up the highway past Echo Summit he started the seventy-mile, seven-thousand-foot descent toward Sacramento, where Interstate 5 would take him south toward the Pacheco Pass and home, hard jazz like ice cubes coming from the quad speakers, the heater on for the first time that season.

His jubilation had passed. The news from Ginger was a breakthrough, but there was too much unfinished business at Tahoe. He had taken the Meade case from cold to simmering, and he hated to leave it. And Nina worried him. Her case had a menacing, live-action quality he didn’t like. She had called on him, and he hadn’t done much to help. And Kim—also a hot situation.

He almost turned the van around and drove back, but if he did, he would lose at least two regular clients in Carmel, which would cramp his lifestyle for several months.

Still trying to make up his mind, he passed the sign for Wright’s Lake, ten miles off the highway somewhere up in the mountains on his right, and from the edge of his rearview mirror even thought he caught a glimpse of Nina’s weatherbeaten white Bronco heading up that road. Now he was seeing things. He drove on.

She drove up, up the narrow, twisting road hewn somehow from the side of the mountain. How could there be a lake up here? At the top the road leveled out and she entered dwarf Alpine forest, each bush neatly skirting its neighbors, and all the same height. She was on a high, beautiful meadow, about eight thousand feet in altitude, no more mountains above her, completely alone. She followed the cracked and potholed road a few miles farther, seeing no sign of man or animal, then went from overcast sky to dark trees as the road entered a well-forested hidden valley.

Signs of logging here and there: a truck loaded with tree trunks at a turnout, stumps and sawdust and debris across the road, but no people. The clouds had lowered to obscure the narrow road and she traveled at twenty miles per hour, even the motor sound hushed. It would be dark soon.

At last she reached a sign that said WRIGHT’S LAKE— CAMPGROUND AND CABINS. Slowing to a crawl as the first cabin came into view, she spotted the small lake, gray and flat through the trees. As on many of the lakes that fringed Lake Tahoe basin, these cabins had been built right up to the edge of the lake, many with decks built out over the water. Almost all were boarded up for the winter. Each house had its propane tank and its outhouse, and, using the last light to see, she could glimpse no sign of electrical lines. The summer residents must enjoy returning to the nineteenth century. Their days would be spent fishing from canoes, scrambling among the boulders, and working jigsaw puzzles under Coleman lanterns at night.

The cabin she sought was set a little apart from the others, down its own dirt driveway and directly on the lake.

The shades had been pulled down, but she saw flickering light around the edges.

No car in the driveway. A sharp sense of relief came. No one home. But that light ...

Her first knock was so tentative, they couldn’t have heard it. Yet she heard an answering sound, furtive and soft, like the rustling of a curtain. Warmth leaked from the interior. She tapped again; a dry, official rap that meant business. No answer except for that faint rustle. She tried the latch.

She pushed the door open. The rustle was fire.

Fire darted from all sides, hot shadows moving in the corners. As she watched, rigid with astonishment, the curtains burst into flames. Over there, stretched out on the floor, adding the sweet, foul stench of a once living thing to the odor of gasoline, something wrapped in a blanket smoked, something large—oh, God, it was a person, it had to be the body of Ray de Beers....

She was backing out when she saw Quentin de Beers lying on the smoking couch, his mouth sagging in the tanned, lined face as if to say something, his eyes wide and staring, his eyelashes singeing as she watched, his clothes smoking too. She couldn’t tell what had killed him.

Gagging and choking, she ran across the room to him, feeling the vicious heat of the flames on the other side of the cabin intensify as she came closer. Quentin stared up at her as she seized his limp hand, feeling for his pulse above the wrist. The hand was warm, but then everything in the room was hot, getting hotter.... She couldn’t feel the pulse. She reached under his shoulders and tried to lift him out, but he was too big, and he was dead, every bone in her body screamed it....

The flames ran up the curtains and began to lick the ceiling. Bits of burning fabric peeled off and fell to the floor, starting their own tiny fires.

A pair of green Vuarnets lay on the floor. She scooped them up, knowing whose they were.

"Jason! Jason!"

She ran through the front door again as a spark attached itself to her shirt and began to grow. She ripped open the shirt, tossed it onto a flat rock, and ran for the truck. The crackling fire behind her clamored for fuel, whooshing up the side walls and piercing through the shingled roof to twist into its wild dance against a dark sky....

She jumped in, threw the Bronco into reverse....

And the front windows of the cabin exploded, the shards blasting twenty feet away, much too close....

Then the peaked roof of the place seemed to lift off slowly like a rocket at Canaveral, landing askew with a whump. New tongues of fire lapped around new chinks and crannies. She had the impression that the whole place was bowing outward, enlarging as if in a cartoon.

The Bronco rolled backward as she wrestled the wheel to stay on the dirt, her eyes helplessly bonded to the cabin. She heard a terrible sucking noise.

The cabin burst apart, sending out blue and orange flames and a concussion of hot air against the Bronco. Burning wood crashed everywhere.

She was at the road. Prying her hands from the wheel, she pulled out the cell phone. No. She put it back and steered the Bronco to the campground, only a minute down the road, where she pulled up to the pay phone she had passed on the way in. Slamming a quarter into the slot, she pushed the numbers, all of them, 911. "Fire!" she yelled. "At Wright’s Lake! Hurry!" As the questions came, the phone went back into its slot, and Nina took off for the highway.

Her eyes searched for him all the way down the mountain. She called his name into the vacant meadows and black forests. But Jason never answered. At Echo Summit she heard the sirens, then saw the red flashing lights, as the fire trucks from Tahoe came toward her.

It was only when she parked the truck in Matt’s driveway, safe, and reached with trembling fingers into her pocket to find the house keys, that she picked them up again off the front seat.

A pair of green Vuarnet sunglasses, the lenses coated with soot.

Jason’s sunglasses.