Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

She walked with the same energy and determination that he remembered, her eyes making tiny restless movements to take in everything around her as she came. She did not knock at the door, because she had already seen him studying her through the blinds, merely waited for him to get there to open it.

They hugged wordlessly, and then she stepped in, bumping her suitcase up and over the threshold before he could get around her to reach it.

“Don’t pretend you’re a gentleman at this late date,” she said. “I worked with you when you couldn’t afford an extra pair of socks.”

The voice, with its mock-sarcastic tone, made him begin to sense how much he had missed her. “You’re looking great, Lydia.”

“You’re not. You look ten years older.” She brushed past him and sat on the couch. “On the plane I used my laptop to read the Santa Barbara papers. It wasn’t exactly page-one stuff. Tell me what wasn’t in the papers.”

He recited the story again, telling her everything he had told Detective Fowler. When he had finished, Lydia sighed and stared at the wall, her lips pursed.

“I didn’t expect that you would approve,” he said.

“I don’t approve or disapprove,” she answered. “I’m not your mother, and I never had any interest in you myself, except what I could get out of you as a parole officer, which was damned little. You were terrific at holding their hands and sympathizing, but not so hot at tracking them down when they got scarce. Since I’ve known you for a very long time, I will say that I had hoped that by now you would have outgrown having sex with any young thing who has the impulse, but there’s no reason for you to be the first man who ever did. So let’s get started on finding out who she was.”

“How do you want to begin?”

“Where you did. Take me to the spot where you pulled her out of the water.”

“All right,” said Mallon. “When?”

“Now,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to change. While I’m doing it, you can put on the clothes you wore that day. It will help me put together a picture of what happened.”

Fifteen minutes later, she emerged from the spare bedroom dressed in a pair of shorts and a loose Hawaiian shirt with her long brown hair unraveled from its bun and tied back in a ponytail. Mallon drove her along the ocean to the stairway that led down to the beach.

As they walked, Lydia asked Mallon questions about his daily activities, about local real estate and weather patterns. She never showed a reaction to any of the answers except comprehension. She simply waited for a sign from Mallon that they had walked far enough.

Finally, Mallon stopped, looked at the cliffs to his right, the big rocks at their base, then up at the crest where the tops of a couple of eucalyptus trees were visible, and said, “This is it.” He pointed at the spot in the ocean where she had gone in.

Lydia looked at the rocks along the upper part of the beach under the cliffs. “When she arrived, exactly where were you? Do you remember?”

Mallon started to point, but Lydia said, “Go there.”

Mallon sat among the rocks, where he had been when he had first noticed he was not alone anymore. He watched Lydia walk to the spot where the cliff curved and came out near the water and the beach was only a few feet wide at high tide. She stopped at the spot where the girl had stood that day, staring out at the sea. Lydia turned to Mallon. Mallon nodded: that was where she had been.

“I’m not surprised that she didn’t see you.” Lydia took a slow, deliberate step toward the ocean, then another, a bit faster, and maintained a steady pace down to the hard, wet sand at the surf line. Then she stopped. She looked back at the beach above her, then began to walk in her own footprints, back toward the little point. Mallon stood up and followed her at a distance.

She was stepping slowly, dragging one foot sideways across the sand. Now and then she would go out of her path to the nearest part of the cliff face to delve in the sand around the base of a rock of a certain size, then return to the path she’d been making. It led her back the way they had come. After about fifty feet, she turned to look again at the spot where she’d left Mallon, and saw Mallon coming after her. It didn’t seem to strike her as important. She had only wanted to know where Mallon had been sitting, and she kept looking back at the spot until she was around the point. Then, instead of stopping, she went to work even harder. This time she picked up a long piece of driftwood, an inch-thick branch of some drowned tree, and began to make grooves in a sweeping motion as she walked. After ten minutes, she stopped, dropped the piece of wood, and dug with her hands. She lifted something and set it aside on the sand.

Mallon came closer. “It’s her purse, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” She was still digging, now lifting each handful of sand and sifting it through her fingers instead of merely pushing it out of the way.

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t,” she said. “She didn’t have money or I.D. when you saw her, or any keys. She’d had them earlier, so she left them someplace. This is what they sometimes do.”

“You have the purse. What are you looking for now?”

“Whatever she had that she didn’t put in the purse.”

She sifted some more sand, and then held out her hand. In the palm was a simple gold ring with designs etched on it. She looked at the place where she had been digging, then seemed to make a decision. She stood, taking the ring between her thumb and forefinger and looking inside it. “It’s not a wedding ring. It’s one of those rings men give a girlfriend.”

Mallon said, “How could you know she buried these things?”

Lydia glanced at him impatiently, then looked back at the ring. “I’ve been hired a few times over the years to find out if suicides were really suicides. It’s just one of the things they do sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It feels right to do it, so they do. By the time it happens, they’re way past pleasing anybody else, or explaining themselves. Maybe they’re not sure whether they want to destroy these things or just put them where they’ll turn up someday and be wondered about.” She thought for a moment. “And you can stop feeling bad, thinking that you said the wrong thing or didn’t think of something good enough to convince her to stay alive. She was already gone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“After you pulled her out, she didn’t come back looking for these.” She removed the wallet from the purse and thumbed through the credit cards and memberships and receipts, then opened the zipper on the cash compartment. Mallon could see a few twenty-dollar bills and hear a clink of change. She unzipped a compartment built into the silky fabric inside the purse. There was a sheaf of hundreds. She zipped it up again. “We’ll have to stop at the police station on the way to your house.”

“Maybe you ought to drop me off first,” said Mallon. “For the moment, the cops here seem to have accepted the idea that I might not be a murderer, but the case isn’t closed.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll make it clear you didn’t move this from your house or something. But this is the kind of evidence you have to get to them right away.”

As she walked along the beach toward the steps, she took out each item in the purse, one at a time, examined it closely, then put it back. When she reached the driver’s license, she held it out to Mallon.

Mallon reached for it, but she said, “You know better than that. Don’t touch it, just look. I want to be sure it’s her.”

Mallon stared at the photograph, scanned the name, the birth date and description. “Catherine Broward,” he said. “Cathy Broward. No, I think she wasn’t a Cathy. Catherine.”