Solitude Creek (18 page)

Not every day. But often enough. Andy didn’t care. Mom could do what she wanted. He had what he needed. He had his video games.

‘How’s your calamari, sir?’ the young waitress asked, as if she really, really cared.

‘Good.’

She tipped him with a smile.

March used to think that was the reason he was drawn to, well, less healthy interests than his classmates: Dad never around, Mom tackling her own Get in her own special way. Plenty of free time as a boy. The solitary games.

Come on, Serena.

A little closer, Serena.

Look what I have for you, Serena …

Was he angry at their absence? March honestly couldn’t say if he would have turned out different if he’d spent his evenings curled up in jammies as Mom or Dad read
Lord of the Rings
to him.

No, not much anger. Sure, Markiatikakis became March but that just made sense. He kept Antioch, didn’t he?

Though I prefer Andy.

And he’d followed in his father’s shoes. Life on the road. Life in business. And he
was
a salesman in a way.

In the employ of the website.

And working for his main boss.

The Get.

He could recall the exact moment of coining the term. In college. Hyde Park, U of C, the week of exams. He’d aced a few of them already and was prepared, completely prepared, for the rest. But he’d lain in bed, sweating and chewing on the inside of his cheek with compulsive molars. He’d tried video games, TV to calm down. No go. He’d finally given up and picked up a textbook for his Myths in the Classical World as Bases for Psychological Archetypes. He’d read the book several times and was prepared for the test but, as he flipped through the pages, he came across something he hadn’t paid attention to. In the Oedipus story, where a son kills his father and sleeps with his mother, there was this line that referred to Oedipus as ‘the get of Jocasta and Laius’.

The get …

What did that mean?

He’d looked it up. The word, as a noun, meant ‘offspring’.

Despite his anxiety that night he’d laughed. Because in this context the word was perfect. Something within him, a creation in his own body, something he’d given birth to was turning on him. The way Oedipus would destroy father and mother both.

And – he couldn’t help but think of the pun – whatever this feeling was, it forced young Antioch March to do whatever he could to ‘get’ peace of mind, comfort.

And so the hunger, the lack, the edge was named.

The Get.

He’d felt it all his life, sometimes quiescent, sometimes voracious. But he knew it would never go away. The Get could unspool within you anytime it wanted.

It
wanted, not you. You didn’t have a say.

And if you didn’t satisfy the Get, well, there were consequences.

Somebody wasn’t happy …

He’d talked to doctors about it, of course – well, shrinks. They understood; they called it something else but it was the same. They wanted him to talk about his issues, which meant he’d have to be open about Serena, the Intersection, about Todd. Which wasn’t going to happen. Or they wanted to give him meds (and that made the Get mad, which was something you never, ever wanted to happen).

March tried to be temperate on his jobs. But the Asian family’s death had been denied him, the theater disaster too.

What the hell?

‘Miss? A Johnnie Walker Black. Neat.’

‘Sure. Are you finished?’

‘I am, yes.’

‘A box?’

‘What?’

‘To take home with you?’

‘No.’ The Get made you rude sometimes. He smiled. ‘It was very good. I’m just full. Thanks.’

The drink came. He sipped. He looked around him. A businesswoman eating dinner accompanied by an iPad and a glass of grapefruit-yellow wine glanced his way. She was around thirty-five, round but pretty. Sensuous enough, probably Calista-level sexy, to judge from her approach to eating the artichoke on her plate (food and sex, forever linked).

But his gaze angled away, avoiding her eyes.

No, not tonight.

Would he have a family some day with someone like her? He wondered what her name might be. Sandra. Joanne. Yes, she would be Joanne. Would he settle down with a Joanne after he got tired of the nights of Calistas and Tiffs?

March – yeah, yeah, so fucking handsome – could have asked Joanne, sitting over there with her artichoke and wine, a bit of butter on her cheek, to dinner tomorrow, and, in a month, a weekend getaway, and in a year to marry him. It would work. He could get it to work.

Except for one thing.

The Get wouldn’t approve.

The Get didn’t want him to have a social life, romantic life, family life.

He thought of the attack, at
Solitude
Creek.

How was that for a sign? Though Antioch March thought this in a droll way: he didn’t believe in signs.

Solitude …

The family was preparing to leave, collecting phones, bags of chocolate sea otters, leftovers to be discarded in the morning. The father had the keys of his car out. Keys didn’t jangle any more. They were quiet plastic fobs.

And, in this damn reflective mood, he couldn’t help but think about the intersection. Well, upper case: the Intersection.

Serena had changed his life in one way but the Intersection had changed it most of all. Everything that came after was explained by what had happened where Route 36 met Mockingbird Road. Reeking of Midwest America.

After Uncle Jim’s funeral, driving back.

‘Nearer My God To Thee’.

‘In Christ There Is No East Or West’.

The insipid, noncommittal Protestant hymns. They had no passion. Give me Bach or Mozart any day for gut-piercing Christian guilt. March had thought this even then, a boy.

It had been quiet in the Ford, the company car. His father, home for a change. His mother, being a wife for a change. Driving on the bleak November highway, winding, winding, pine turned gray by the mist, everything still.

Then around a bend, rocks and pines with stark black trunks.

Then: his mother gasping a brief inhaled scream.

The skid flinging him against the door, the brakes locking, then—

‘Sir?’

March blinked.

‘Here you go, sir.’ The waitress set the bill in front of him. ‘And at the bottom you can take a brief survey and maybe win a free dinner for the family.’

March laughed to himself.

For the family.

He doled out bills and didn’t tell her that after his business was concluded here he wouldn’t be coming back to the area again for quite a long time, if ever.

When March looked up, the couple and their children were gone.

It would be a busy day tomorrow. Time to get back to the inn.

His phone hummed with an email.

At last.

It was from a commercial service that ran DMV checks. The answer he’d been waiting for.

That morning as he’d enjoyed the Egg McMuffin and coffee, parked near the multiplex that would have been his next target, March had noted an assortment of police cars and – this was curious – a gray Nissan Pathfinder.

He couldn’t learn anything from the other vehicles or the uniformed or sport-coated men who climbed out of them. But the occupant of the Pathfinder, that was a different story. It wasn’t an official car. Not a government plate. And no bumper stickers bragging about children, no Jesus fish. A private car.

But the driver
was
official. He could tell that from the way she strode up to the officers. The way they answered her questions, sometimes looking away. March was at a distance but he supposed she had a fierce gaze. Intense, at least.

Her posture, upright. March had sensed instinctively that this woman was one of the main investigators against him.

The search had revealed that the Pathfinder belonged to one Kathryn Dance.

A lovely name. Compelling.

He pictured her again and felt a stirring low in his belly. The Get was unspooling. It, too, was growing interested in Ms Dance. They both wanted to know more about her. They wanted to know
all
about her.

‘Never rains but it pours,’ Michael O’Neil offered, walking into Dance’s office.

TJ Scanlon glanced at the solid detective, who was sitting down across from her desk. ‘I never quite got that. Does it mean, “We’re in a desert area, so it doesn’t rain but sometimes there’s a downpour and we get flooded because, you know, there’s no ground cover?”’

‘I don’t know. All I mean is, my plate’s filling up.’

‘With rain?’ TJ asked.

‘A homicide.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’ TJ often walked a fine line between jovial and flippant.

Dance asked, ‘The missing farmer? Otto Grant?’ She was thinking of the possible suicide, the man distraught about losing his land to the eminent domain action by the state. She couldn’t imagine what he had gone through, losing the farm that had been in his family for so many years. She and the children had been at Safeway recently and she’d noticed yet more 8.5-by-11 sheets of paper, attention-getting yellow, with Grant’s picture on them.

Have you seen this man? …

O’Neil shook his head. ‘No, no, I mean another case altogether.’ He handed Dance a half-dozen crime-scene photos. ‘Jane Doe. Found this morning at the Cabrillo Beach Inn.’

A dive of a place, Dance knew. North of Monterey.

‘Prints come back negative.’

The photo was of a young woman who’d been dead seven or eight hours, to guess from the lividity. She was pretty. She had been pretty.

‘COD?’

‘Asphyx. Plastic bag, rubber band.’

‘Rape?’

‘No. But maybe erotic asphyxia.’

Dance shook her head. Really? Risking death? How much better could an orgasm be?

‘I’ll get it on our internal wire,’ TJ said. This would send the picture to every one of the CBI offices, where a facial-recognition scan would be run and compared with faces in the database.

‘Thanks.’

TJ took the pictures off to scan them.

O’Neil continued, to Dance: ‘The boyfriend’s probably married. Panicked and took off with her purse. We’re checking video nearby for tags and makes. Might find something.’

‘Why wasn’t she on the bed? I don’t care how kinky I was, sex on the floor of
that
motel is just plain ick.’

O’Neil said, ‘That’s why I said
maybe
about the erotic asphyx. There were marks on her wrists. Somebody might’ve held her down while she died. Or it could have been part of their game. I’m keeping an open mind.’

‘So,’ she said slowly, ‘you still with us on the Solitude Creek unsub?’ She was afraid that the death – accidental or intentional – would derail him.

‘No. Just complaining about the rain.’

‘You still on the hate-crime case too?’

‘Yeah.’ A grimace. ‘We had another.’

‘No! What happened?’

‘Another gay couple. Two men from Pacific Grove. Not far from you, down on Lighthouse. A rock through their window.’

‘Any suspects?’

‘Nope.’ He shrugged. ‘But, rain or not, I can work Solitude Creek.’

He was then looking down at the newspaper on Dance’s chair. The front page contained a big picture of Brad Dannon. The fireman, in a suit and sporting a bright flag lapel pin, sat on the couch next to an Asian American reporter.
Hero Fireman Tells the Horror Story of Solitude Creek.

‘You interview him?’ O’Neil asked.

She nodded and gave a sour laugh. ‘Yep. And his ego.’

‘Either of them helpful?’

‘Uh-uh. In fairness, he was busy helping the injured. And we didn’t know it was a crime scene at that point.’

‘You ran the Serrano thing, in Seaside?’

‘Yep.’

‘How’s that working out?’ The question seemed brittle.

‘It’s moving along.’ Then she didn’t want to talk about it any more.

Her phone rang. ‘Kathryn Dance.’

‘Uhm, Mrs Dance. This’s Trish Martin.’

The daughter of Michelle Cooper, the woman killed in Solitude Creek.

‘Yes, Trish. Hi.’ She glanced toward O’Neil. ‘How’re you doing?’

‘Not so great. You know.’

‘I’m sure it’s difficult.’ Thinking back to the days after Bill had died.

Not so great … Never so great.

‘I heard, I mean, I was watching the news and they said he tried to do it again.’

‘It’s looking that way, yes.’

There was a long silence. ‘You wanted to talk to me?’

‘Just to ask what you saw that night.’

‘Okay. I want to help. I want to help you get him. Fucker.’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

‘I can’t talk here. My father’ll be back soon. I’m at my mother’s house. He’ll be back and he doesn’t want me to talk to you. Well, to anybody.’

‘You’re in Pebble Beach, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You drive?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Meet me at the Bagel Bakery on Forest. You know it?’

‘Sure – I have to go he’s coming back bye.’ Spoken in one breath.

Click.

She’d been crying.

Dance gave her credit for not trying to hide it. No makeup, no averted eyes. Tears and streaks present.

Trish Martin was sitting in the corner of the Bagel Bakery, toward the back, under a primitive but affecting acrylic painting of a dog carefully regarding a turtle. It was one of a dozen for sale on the walls, this batch by students, a card reported. Dance and the children came here regularly and she’d bought a few of the works from time to time. She really liked the dog and turtle.

‘Hi.’

‘Hey,’ the girl said.

‘How you doing?’

‘Okay.’

‘What do you want? I’ll get it.’ Dance was tempted to suggest cocoa but that smacked of youthening the girl, marginalizing her. She picked a compromise. ‘I’m doing cappuccino.’

‘Sure.’

‘Cinnamon?’

‘Sure.’

‘Anything to eat?’

‘No. Not hungry.’ As if she’d never be again.