Valley of Lights (11 page)

'Yeah,' McKay agreed. 'The whole point about being a cop is that you don't sit around like Joe Citizen waiting to be told what happens next.'

Morrell handed me a Diet Pepsi. 'What did you make of it in there?' he said.

I could sense a change in their attitude then, a shift to a more watchful mode; they might look like burned-out hippies, but they were still detectives, after all.

So I simply said, 'It was bad.'

'They say that the house on the park was worse,' McKay said.

'No kidding?'

'And Michaels was the first one in.' He glanced over at Michaels, who had wandered down to the far end of the pool and was well out of earshot. 'You heard the story?'

'Only what they wrote in the newspaper.'

'That was only half of it. Word is that he heard a kid screaming, so he went in without waiting for backup. Got the full effect in Technicolor.'

Morrell said, 'Did he say what he saw?'

'No, but look at him. Half his mind's been somewhere else ever since. And I know Michaels, he isn't soft — whatever he saw, it must have been something that could frighten the crap out of a commode.'

We sat around for a while longer, until it was clear that we'd been forgotten, and then Morrell went through the fence to see if he could get a ruling on whether or not we should still hang around. We'd all agreed — Michaels excepted, because he hadn't even participated — that we couldn't come up with anything to throw light onto the mystery here.

Returning, Morrell said, 'Somebody's out looking at the desert from a helicopter. See if they can't spot what the X is supposed to be marking.'

'What about us?' McKay wanted to know.

'We're no use to anybody, we can go. They'll send for us if they need any more of our advice.'

McKay looked at what was left on the table, which wasn't much apart from a hambone and. some empty cola cans.

'I'll advise them all they like,' he said. 'It beats working any day.'

I finally got home about eight, to find a rental car with its trunk open in the spot where Loretta usually parked her jeep. I went inside and, as I looked through my mail — the letter from the department about the lifting of my suspension and the probability of a written reprimand going into my file, and a second letter from Doctor Mulholland — I could hear the goings-on next door. I heard an older woman's voice saying, plaintively,
Well if she isn't here, where is she?
and a man's voice replying,
I don't know. Clara. I just don't know.
It should have occurred to me earlier that the Mister Heilbron mentioned by the receptionist wouldn't be Loretta's husband, but her father-in-law and Georgie's grandfather. I went through and dropped wearily onto the bed, and wondered what the hell I was going to do next.

And that was my day.

NINETEEN

It was strange to put on the uniform again and go out to work; it felt like an unreal existence, a masquerade. Most people on the station seemed pleased to see me back, and the union representative took me aside and tried to sell me on the idea of making a claim for wrongful suspension, which I said I'd think about just so that I could get rid of him. I sat well to the back of the room at the start-of-shift meeting, where I learned that I was to lose four men from my squad to assist the murder team while the rest of us would have to spread a little more thinly to cover the normal patrols. Michaels was also being attached to the murder investigation, as a kind of go-between to carry out essential liaison between the two areas' forces.
Because he's been fucking useless for anything else ever since,
I heard someone close by me mutter, and I looked across at Michaels. His uniform looked as if it had been slept in, although from his eyes it didn't look as if he'd slept at all. He also seemed oblivious to the unease that he was creating around himself.

For a moment I began to wonder whether... but no, it was too much to hope. He'd seen a bad sight to end all bad sights, but I was the only one who'd nosed out the truth about Woods/Winter. As we all rolled out, the KOOL-TV copter passed low overhead to pick up some footage of the patrol cars rolling out in force, regardless of the fact that most of us were going to be out covering ordinary duties. The press had been given a detailed release on the second murder in time for the late news the previous evening, and now they were all preparing their specials. They love anything like this, it's only natural. I sometimes wonder if they don't sit at home and pray for disasters when things get quiet.

I was hoping that I'd be able to get through it all somehow on a mechanical level, but it was the frustrating little things that got to me in the end. About two hours in, I was taking details of some minor traffic collision and I looked into one driver's car and I saw this cesspit, dirty ripped seats and a floor full of junk, the only clean thing in there a brand-new Mr Submarine sandwich box that he'd emptied and tossed into the back, and then the next thing I knew I was chasing this little fat guy down the road and he was running so hard that he obviously thought he was going to die if he stopped. That's exactly what he did, though, when a patrol car suddenly erupted out of a side-street before him and slammed to a halt blocking the way, and Travis and Leonard were out of the car and holding him by the arms before I got there.

And then, when I got my breath back, I had to say, 'It's okay, let him go.'

'What did he do?' Travis said; and the answer was that he hadn't actually done anything. He wasn't even the culpable driver in the collision. Travis took him back to wait by his car, talking to him in a low voice, and Leonard said, 'Everything all right, Alex?'

'As good as it's going to get,' I said, and left them to take over.

Three blocks away I unhooked the portable radio from my dash so that I could keep in touch and went for my usual donut break, alone. This wasn't working out; Winter, and what he might have done to Georgie, were preying on my mind, but I still didn't see any way that I could act on what I'd learned. The waitress in the place knew my name, but I didn't know hers and we'd become familiar beyond the point at which I could admit it and ask; and as I was sitting by the window, she said, 'Alex, can you get me some more of those Operation Identification stickers?'

These were little yellow stickers which announced that anything of value on the premises had been marked and would be traceable. I said, 'What happened to the others?'

'Somebody stole them before I could put them up.'

'I'll bring some more next time.'

The shop was almost empty, so she came over. She said, 'You're looking tired. Did you get a vacation this year?'

'I took a trip upstate,' I said. 'It didn't work out.'

Five minutes later, I was back in my car and heading back to base. I'd had a radio call to say that someone was waiting to see me in the station yard. Considering the goings-on of the last couple of weeks, it could have been anything; I wouldn't have been surprised to find Doctor Elaine Mulholland, demanding to know why I wouldn't even phone her to explain the appointments that I kept missing. But what I found instead was an ordinary patrolman in an ordinary patrol car from the north-eastern district, sent to collect me and take me out into the desert to the marked spot found that morning by one of our helicopters.

It was the grave. It had to be. Not enough time had passed for the traces to be covered over completely, and the disturbance of the ground would be even more apparent from the air. I now had the length of one car ride to come up with the explanation that I'd so far avoided even considering.

Nothing promising seemed to be offering itself.

But as we came out of the yard and along by the airport, the patrolman was saying, 'It looked like a grave, but the lab people spent the last three hours taking the dirt out with little spoons and they didn't find a thing.'

'It was empty?' I said.

'It had been dug over, but nothing was there. The reason you haven't heard is that they've been keeping it off the radio so that the press people won't get to hear about it and come trampling around. Listen, can you read the map for me when we get closer? I'm not a hundred per cent sure of the turnoff.'

'Of course,' I said, and found the folded city map in the door pocket beside me. I left it open on my knees, even though I wouldn't need it when we got there. I knew the turnoff only too well.

So the grave was empty. Only Winter could have done it, because only Winter and I had known where it was; and of the two of us, probably only Winter had the long-time familiarity with the desert to be able to find the exact spot again. What was the point? I wondered. There had to be one, and I somehow didn't think that it would turn out to be anything that I'd like.

We headed out into the desert by the old broken stake. The dirt road didn't look any more heavily-used than it had last time, but then the earth was probably baked as hard as concrete. The patrolman said, 'Your liaison guy, Michaels. Is he all right?'

'Most of the time,' I said, thinking that most of the time didn't include the hours since he'd walked out of the so-called 'massacre house'. The patrolman nervously changed his grip on the wheel, and I could see that he had a delicate point to make.

He said, 'Well, maybe you could have a word with him. He's wandering around like he hardly knows what he's doing. He walked off into the desert this morning and didn't reappear for almost an hour.' And then he glanced over at me with a brief, apologetic smile, and I realised then that this was the real, if unofficial, reason for me being summoned along, not because there was some new dimension to the Paradise connection but because Michaels was on the slide and needed someone to quietly take him home. Business had to continue, and the massacre house hero was becoming an embarrassment.

There were only a couple of cars and a van remaining when we got there, first glimpsed through the heat haze but firming-up as we got closer. The lab people had taken their samples and covered the grave site with polythene sheet, staking it down against the possibility of wind and adding stones for extra certainty. Now they were stowing their gear away, their hair in sweat-spikes and their shirts patched dark.

Twenty minutes later, they and the patrolman had gone. They left me, and Michaels, and Michaels' car.

He hadn't said more than two words to me in all of that time, one of which had been
Hi
and the other of which had been
Alex
. He'd spent most of it carefully treading the dust around the edge of the site, arms folded and his eyes on the ground in front of him as if looking for lost money. I'd seen the lab people exchanging glances about him as if having him around made them uncomfortable — which is pretty rich, if you know lab people at all. But in this case, I couldn't blame them.

Watching as the dirt-clouds raised by the departing vehicles slowly dispersed towards the horizon, I wondered how I was going to open this conversation. Time seemed to take a beat.

But then, Michaels was the one who spoke first.

He said, 'Let's not kid each other, Alex, okay?'

I turned to him. The peak of his uniform cap shaded his eyes, somehow making his gaze seem all the more intense. It was like talking to somebody wearing mirror sunglasses, which I've never liked to do.

I said, 'Kid each other about what?'

'I was at the Paradise when it started. I've seen the sequence, too.'

I said warily, 'What sequence is this?'

'Don't make me put it into words, Alex. I don't want to hear myself saying those things. I've been walking around these last two days and it's like I've been able to feel my mind slipping away, one piece at a time. But then I put you and that business with Woods into the picture, and it all came together again.'

'I mistook the guy, that's all,' I persisted, and he stared at me for a few moments longer. I couldn't even guess what he might be thinking.

Then he said, 'Come with me.'

He turned, and set off into the desert without looking back. I hesitated a moment, then started to follow. I didn't know if he'd fastened on the truth, or what. He might even have reached something like the right conclusion, but for all the wrong reasons; the only safe course was to watch, and let him speak, and give away as little as possible.

But life had turned pretty interesting again in the last couple of minutes.

I glanced back at the car several times, uneasy at the chance of losing sight of it. We seemed to be covering quite a distance, and a light breeze would have been enough to wipe away our tracks in the dust and leave us stranded; but the air was still and hot, and furthermore Michaels seemed to have a definite sense of where he was going.

'I saw birds overhead,' he said at last. 'That's what led me here.'

We'd reached the side of a shallow canyon, a straight-sided cleft that had been cut by some long-vanished river. It went down about fifteen feet, no more, and the scrubby growth of the desert had intensified and become almost lush in its shelter. Michaels scrambled down the side, and began to make his way along the canyon floor; I followed in his wake, feeling absurdly like a kid on a dare.

Where the canyon turned about fifty yards further on, one of the sides formed a shady overhang and it was here that I got my first glimpse of our destination. A bleached adobe wall showed through the prickly bushes, its edges crumbling away, and I could see other shapes and structures in the unmistakable pattern of a ruined pueblo built into the canyon side. How long it had stood there, I couldn't have said; some of these things go back a thousand years or more.

This one hadn't been so big, only about seven or eight windowless rooms, and most of these were now open to the sky. We went in through what had once been a doorway, and climbed a step into the next chamber. This was the biggest of the complex, and. looked, to be the most complete. Michaels stepped aside to let me pass.

Before me, on an earthen dais that had once served some other purpose but which now had the look of nothing less than a primitive throne, sat the body of Woods. Someone had taken a lot of trouble with it. He was crusted with desert dirt and his time in the dry ground had sucked all of the moisture from his flesh, stretching his skin tight and drawing his lips back in a tight oval. It gave him the look of those Vietcong dead in the newsreels. His arms were spread wide and had been converted to form crude wings by the addition of twigs, brush, feathers, and scraps of cloth; and in the hollow that had been his skull, a rounded boulder sat neatly like an egg in a cup. However he'd come to be here, it was pretty certain that he hadn't walked.

It was another joke, of course. I didn't have to see a caption to know that it would read something like
Phoenix in Flight
. I could see that his eyes were gone, probably pecked out like a lamb's.

Michaels said, '
Now
have you got anything to tell me?'

Woods may not have had many friends in life, but in death he'd found plenty of admirers, all of them flies. I turned away. I said, 'How come you kept this to yourself?'

'Because I wanted you to see it,' Michaels said, and there was desperation in his voice. 'Because if you don't open up to me, Alex, we get nowhere. My guess is that you killed him and he came back, am I right? So now I've got your problem because I can't tell that to the investigators. But you know better, don't you, Alex? Because you killed him, and he came back, and now all of this is just to show you that he's too powerful to be stopped.'

Time to take a gamble. What did I have to lose, after all?

'He can be stopped,' I said.

I saw the relief in Michaels' eyes. 'So what went wrong?'

'He was lucky.'

We moved through into the next chamber, away from all the insect life, leaving Woods to hold court in an empty room. I sat on the rubble of an inside wall and Michaels stayed on his feet, as if he was too hungry to rest. He already knew most of the story from being involved in it, but I filled him in on some of the scenes where he hadn't been present. Then, after the details, came the speculation.

'This is amazing,' he kept saying. 'This is incredible.'

'Number one,' I said, 'he's
old
. That's the key to everything he thinks and does. You've got to think of what the worst old people can be like, and then multiply it a hundred times over. He's set in his ways, not flexible like a creature like him really needs to be. He kept going back to the same motels over and over out of habit, and that's why he was so easy to find again. He knows how to drive, but he doesn't seem to like to. And he's crabby, he hates young people... and to him,
everybody's
young. I don't think he only hates youth, I think he hates life itself — he's been around too long and it's gone sour in him. But his nature won't allow him even to consider the idea of giving it up, so he takes it out on the rest of us. He knows to keep his head down for most of the time, but every now and again it comes bursting out and we get the killings and the mutilations. Right now more than ever, because I found a weakness in him and his pride's been dented.'