T. Parker - Laguna Heat

Her voice again: “I’d like to know if the subsequent trauma of that shooting and resignation has in any way affected your handling of this case.”

The room was so quiet Shephard could hear the whirring of tape inside the camera, or was it the whirring of blood inside his head? He silently cursed the woman, the light, himself. The silence was lasting too long.

“Of course not.”

Her voice shot back quickly: “What about stress? I’m curious if stress has in any way impaired your search for what is obviously a single and very single-minded killer.” Jesus, he thought, who is she?

“Stress? No, I don’t think it has.”

She was on him again. “We appreciate your avid concern for the facts, detective, but I’d like to know about your feelings. This is a small town whose murder rate has quadrupled in one week. The cases are being handled by a very young detective who was recently forced to resign from a larger and more potent force. What are your feelings now? What about your fears and doubts, Detective Shephard. Do you have any?”

The drop of sweat found its way to his nose. He wiped it with what grace he could muster, then stared toward the voice as the lights bore into his eyes. He heard the door open and quietly close. His mind began to eddy: How was Cal’s swollen eye? How much vacation time did he have after two months on the job? Was the table below him real wood or wood-look? He thought of Jane. Then he heard himself talking, slowly, conversationally, as if to a friend over the telephone.

“Fears and doubts? Sure, I’ve got the same fears and doubts you’d have if you walked into a bathroom and found a dead person in the bathtub. It scares you. It makes you feel cursed and unclean, like you want to take a long shower or swim way out in the ocean. And you doubt if the same man did the same thing the next night in the next house that you’d get there in time to prevent it. There’s enough fear and doubt to choke on for a lifetime. As far as why I’m running this investigation, well, it’s my job. I work here. That’s all.”

Shephard nodded once to the cameras, then sat back down, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. Pedroza whispered “Bitch” in his ear, then stood and disappeared. Shephard’s eyes reeled from the lights. Blue dots spun and expanded, so clear and bright that they seemed real enough to reach out and touch. He clumsily removed a cigarette and someone lit it for him. A few of the reporters gathered in front of him, helping themselves to copies of the Identikit sketch, respectfully quiet. Then a stocky young blonde was standing in front of him, slipping a reporter’s notebook into her purse and staring down.

“Tina Trautwein,” she said, “Daily Pilot . I hope I didn’t get too personal. Our paper believes in getting deeper than the headline.” Then she turned with a swirl of light hair and muscled her way through the other reporters to the door. But Shephard never saw her go through it, buried as she was by an orb of bright blue light.

The technicians broke down the lighting tripods while the director ordered them to Algernon’s Riding Stables for an “on-location background intro.” The director lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall while his crew scrambled. “Tough job, eh, kid?”

“Beats washing cars,” Shephard said without forethought.

He brought an Identikit sketch to the table in front of him and buried himself in it. The last of the reporters filed out. The face seemed pleased by the way the conference had gone: it looked up at him with a wry smile that seemed to say, “Well, Shephard, I’m so happy to hear about your fears and doubts. Wouldn’t you like to know what’s next?”

Next, he thought. Damn.

The door closed and the room was quiet. Finally. Peace and quiet. Then he was aware of someone sitting at the far end of the table, just on the fringe of his returning field of vision. He looked at her, then to the side, as he would at night to see a distant road sign. A young woman in a light blouse, tan arms, dark hair. Shephard rubbed his eyes and sighed, prepared for neither the wrath nor the icy beauty of Jane Algernon.

“I came to see you,” she said. After the pressing voices of the reporters, her tone sounded subdued, reasonable, even pleasant.

“To sue me?”

“To thank you. For... helping me break through. I don’t have a lot of people I talk to on a regular basis, so I’d kept a lot of things inside where they turned bad. You saw that, and I thank you for, well, for seeing it.”

Across the table her eyes looked bright blue, and it wasn’t the flash dot any more.

“You should have held a press conference,” he said wearily. “They would have seen it.”

Jane Algernon neither smiled nor spoke. She set a purse on the table and brought out an envelope, then a small box, which she slid down the table to Shephard.

In the envelope he found Tim Algernon’s bank statement, another snapshot of him, and a letter written to “Rita.” The box contained a tooth of some kind, yellowed, small, not sharp.

“Buster dropped it,” she said. “He’s still a pup. The California Indians considered the teeth of the sea lion to be good luck. Good luck to you from Buster and me.”

The change in Shephard’s spirit was fundamental: he could feel something coming into him, other things going out.

“I let myself into your conference,” she continued. “But when that woman started asking questions, I wished I hadn’t. You handled it rather well. You said you wanted to go swimming in the ocean when you saw Hope Creeley. I knew what you meant because I do that every night. I swim in the ocean.” She stood up and walked to the door. She shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other, then back again. “I guess I could stand here all day and move this silly thing around, couldn’t I? What I mean is, I swim at Diver’s Cove at nine every night, and if you’d like to swim tonight I’d... I wouldn’t mind the company.”

Shephard considered her loveliness, her rage, her strength, her pain, her invitation. As he looked at her, the list went on and on.

“I’d love to be the company,” he said finally, and then she was gone.

The California DMV in Sacramento had unsnarled its computer jam sometime during Shephard’s press conference. Pavlik had left a note on his desk in his inimitably cramped, precarious handwriting. The registered owner of the car bearing plates 156 DSN was Dick Moon of 4887 S. Coast Highway in Laguna Beach.

Shephard pocketed the note and slipped out the back entrance of the station, watching — out of habit it seemed by now — for Daniel Pedroza loitering near the Mustang. But his car was unattended, and he was relieved as he pushed it into gear and backed from the shade of an olive tree into the fierce Laguna sun.

Ten minutes later he drove into the parking lot of Moon Chevrolet and parked beside a new Camaro. The dealership owner was a portly man wearing a polka dot shirt with a collar so wide it looked like wings. He introduced himself as Dick Moon.

“Lot of people think we named this place after the moon,” he said with a bright smile. “But Moon is me. Now, what can I get you into, young man?”

Moon’s grin disappeared when Shephard expressed interest in an aging Cadillac with the plates 156 DSN. He waddled ahead of Shephard, leading them back to the sales office, where he consulted a logbook. Moon ran his fat finger down the column and shook his head.

“Got no such car on the lot. We got a sixty-nine Valiant with those plates, no Caddy.”

“I’d like to see it,” Shephard said.

Moon bit the end off a cigar and pointed it behind him. “She’s round back,” he said. “Real cute little thing.”

Around back, Shephard found the cute little thing slouched alone beside the trash container for the parts department. The paint was peeling as if from a severe sunburn, the windows were clouded with dust, one tire was flat, and the car listed heavily to port. Moon arrived behind him, announced by the aroma of cigar.