Steven Gore - Act of Deceit

He looked up at her. “Like clockwork?”

Janie nodded. “My phrase, but his idea.”

“Did he say who?”

She shook her head, then sat down next to the desk.

“He told me she even borrowed money to pay for all the charity.” She smiled. “He said she took out a ‘mortuary.’ It took most of the session to figure out why he picked that word. It turned out that the bank she went to was next to a funeral home and what she got was a mortgage.”

Donnally raised his eyebrows as he looked over at Janie. It sounded less like charity and more like guilt.

“It seemed a little excessive to me, too,” Janie said.

“When are you seeing him again?”

She glanced at her watch. “Ten o’clock.”

B y noon Donnally was sitting before a different monitor, this one at the Alameda County Recorder’s Office, and paging through scans of Anna Keenan’s loan records. He became more and more puzzled as he looked through the documents. Between the day her mother signed the house over to her in 1980 and when she was murdered, she’d refinanced three times.

He wondered whether she’d discovered the violent origin of the money that went into buying the house and had decided to turn evil to good by giving it away.

Then why not just sell the house and give the money back to the armored car company?

The answer again arrived in Sonny’s words. “There’d be too much to explain.”

And with her remaining in the house, Artie and Robert would believe their money was still invested there.

Is that why they killed her? Because they found out she’d given their money away? And because they wanted to get past her to Trudy so she could make good their loss?

Donnally leaned back in his chair and stared up at the tiled ceiling.

But then strangling her? Kneeling over her on her bed and strangling her?

It didn’t make sense. Not with his years investigating homicides. A knife at her throat, yes. A gun at her temple, yes. But strangling? Not very likely. And by hand? Even less likely. Strangling hands were a weapon of passion, not calculation.

Donnally found that his eyes had lost focus. He blinked, then logged off the computer.

It just didn’t make sense.

D onnally’s cell phone rang as he drove across the Bay Bridge. It was Janie.

“Charles said that one of the two regulars she gave money to was named Art or Artie. Does that name mean anything to you?”

D onnally flashed his badge for just the second time in his ten years of retirement. He couldn’t tell whether he felt like a priest of lapsed faith giving Communion or an actor playing a part that just happened to reveal his true self.

The cellular company’s security chief in San Francisco bought Donnally’s lie that he was investigating the theft of his cell phone. His raised eyebrow and slanted grin revealed his conclusion-by-fantasy that the thief was a woman who’d run out on Donnally.

The chief handed him off to a clerk who walked him to a windowless office and printed out a list of the cell sites that had picked up Donnally’s calls as Sonny drove him from Trudy’s cabin back to Berkeley. Donnally got the clerk talking about everything but the report he was printing out so he wouldn’t notice that all the calls from the cell phone were to the same landline and only a second in length, and wouldn’t then ask whose number it was.

The electronic trail dissolved into the coastal range northeast of Fort Bragg. The clerk displayed a topographical map on the screen that showed a road heading north from the highway, and pointed out that for the first half hour, the signal had alternated back and forth on the border between two cell sites. The sites covered a little more than five square miles. Donnally was grateful that Trudy had chosen a hideaway in the hill country. Unlike the flatlands where cell sites can be twenty miles apart, antennas in the mountains are stationed close together so reception isn’t lost in the canyons.

Two hours of inspecting satellite maps on Janie’s computer narrowed his search down to three probable locations, each composed of a cabin and two outbuildings laid out in the form of a triangle within a clearing. He plotted a course from one to the other, starting at Fort Bragg along the coast and ending at the east end of the highway bisecting Mendocino County.

Each route would take him far to the north of his targets, then down fire roads to within hiking distance, and each would require camping overnight in the forest.

None of the routes was one he would’ve taken during pot-growing season, when the hills were patrolled by armed guards, patches were booby-trapped, and the earth was damp enough for the anonymous burial of an intruder.

T he first two days were a washout.

Even as he hiked up toward the ridge-top trail above the dormant marijuana fields, he suspected that he was a victim of wishful thinking that made him choose the easiest first.

And a moment after setting up his spotting scope on the outside walkway of an abandoned fire lookout, he discovered he was right: The outbuilding was too large, the barn was too small, and the cabin was just one story.

Only with that failure did he feel the aches in his muscles and hip, and the bruises on his legs and arms inflicted by shrubs and tree branches as he had bushwhacked the deer trails.

The search for the second site took him down a forest service road into a canyon about four miles north of the highway and deep into marijuana country.

He climbed out of his truck and inspected the dirt to make sure there were no fresh footprints or tire tracks, then hoisted on his pack and began a cross-country trek that would begin with a hike up eleven hundred feet in two miles, then almost down to sea level two thousand feet below over the next eight miles, and back up again.

A handheld GPS kept him on track as he hiked the growers’ trails through the pines and oaks. He stepped over rows of macheted trunks of harvested plants and over hundreds of sections of black plastic piping, the drip systems veining the hillsides, waiting to be fed in the spring and summer by water trucks like Trudy’s.

At 9 A.M. on the second day he crested the final ridge and looked for a place to spot on the property. He found a rock outcropping shaded by a mature oak and set up his scope. He held his breath as he turned the focus ring, then a moment of relief: Bear’s red truck emerged against the brown and green background of the clearing.

Donnally set up camp on the level ground under the tree and moved the scope to a flatter section of rock fifteen feet higher. He then laid out a bird-watching guide next to it in case he needed to explain his presence to hikers or growers happening by.

A chilly ocean breeze stung his face and eyes as he lay prone, watching for movement. He didn’t want to break into an occupied house, but didn’t know whether Trudy ever left. He realized that he should’ve asked about her medical treatment, how often she went to visit doctors or herbalists or acupuncturists or Indian shamans, or whoever it was who was prepared to treat her psychosomatic illnesses as real. He figured Bear would be the one who ran their errands, but didn’t know whether she ever went with him.

Nothing stirred all day in the clearing below, not even Bear emerging from the shadowed forest making his rounds.

Mist filled the valleys below him in the late afternoon, blocking his view of the cabin. He used the time to cook spaghetti on a one-burner kerosene stove and was back at his scope when the dropping temperature condensed the moisture and turned it to drizzle.

By then it was dark, and the cabin lights, now filtered by the swirling silvery droplets, burnished the clearing with what seemed to Donnally, watching through the lens of Trudy’s delusions, like nothing more than the plastic innocence of a department store nativity scene.