Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

That was before Emily had even met Parish, had him look at her in that way he had, in which he devoted every bit of his attention to her, studying her and giving her the impression that he was seeing things about her that she had always wished men would notice but was convinced that none of them ever had. And even more to the point, she had not yet heard him. His talk was what was impossible to withstand. He used his foreignness, the fact that he had seen the world and knew things, to make people want to know them too. But he also used it to ask questions. It was as though he were a man not from across an ocean, but from across the galaxy, that he was a sublimely benevolent being who was deeply fascinated by every detail about a person but did not know anything about petty provincial rules against asking very personal questions. Talking to him for an extended period was like being slowly, gently, but relentlessly stripped.

Michael had found Mary at sixteen, and she had found Emily at nineteen, and Michael had raised them. They were his apprentices, his partners, his first and best students, so perfectly schooled in his ways that they were inheritors of his experiences as well as his knowledge.

She had never stopped being the same girl she had been when she’d left North Carolina, the girl she thought of as the basic human being. But when she wanted to, she could also be like him, someone who had hunted on veldts and fought in jungles. In becoming his second self, his reflection, she had acquired the power to kill. That was something she could never repay him for.

Mary looked around her at the small group of students. As soon as this lot had drunk too much and gone back to their cabins, she would take off this uncomfortable dress and begin to look over her gear to prepare for the next hunting party.

This morning Mallon walked the route he had usually taken during the years after he had first come to Santa Barbara, past the tourist hotels along Cabrillo Beach. The other direction-westward along the beach toward Hope Ranch and Isla Vista-would have taken him to the spot where Catherine had gone into the water, and he had not been able to bear it since her death. He was agitated, anxious, pacing along looking down at the sidewalk, going over and over the details of Lydia’s murder and trying to decide what he should do next. Diane seemed to have anticipated the restlessness he would be feeling, the urge to do something. She called him every couple of days to tell him that the Los Angeles police had not yet been able to provide new answers to her questions about Lydia’s death.

Mallon needed to do something about Lydia’s death, but he had to be smart: what else could he do that wouldn’t just distract and delay the police? Mallon tried to distinguish what he knew from what he felt. He knew that Lydia had begun to favor the theory that Catherine Broward had not exactly committed suicide: she had committed murder, sentenced herself to death, and carried out her own execution. Lydia had told him that much. What else did Mallon know? Lydia had said she was going to try to find out more about Catherine Broward. She had not said that she was going to do it that night, or how she would go about it when she did. But everything Mallon knew made him believe that Lydia had gone with the wrong person to the wrong place in order to ask questions about Catherine.

Mallon walked onto Cabrillo Boulevard, above the ocean, and kept going, past the zoo and the bird sanctuary, across the street and onto East Beach. The volleyball game that had been going on the afternoon when he had arrived ten years ago was still going on, all of the players still in their early twenties. They had been replaced many times since the first time he had seen them-always just at physical prime, a little too old to be spending business hours playing a game on a beach, already late at starting real work, already late at beginning to see each other as future husbands and wives, if not for actually marrying and having families. Within a few months, if not tomorrow, this set would be gone, replaced one at a time by others exactly like them.

He walked on, assessing the progress of the tide. This was a walk that took him to several spots where the high tide would swallow the whole of a narrow beach and the waves would roll into the cliffs. He judged from the thin strip of dry sand above the breakers that he might get a bit wet today, but it did not matter.

He went a quarter mile and came to the first of the small points that jutted out into the sea. He liked the stretches between these points, scallops of beach cut off by the rising waves. The power of places like this was not in vastness-a stretch of empty beach did not have to be long-but in seclusion. It made them seem prehistoric: human beings had not yet come. A gang of white seagulls hung in the air above the point ahead, showing him the way.

He walked along the beach toward the white gulls, thinking of his walk on the beach with Lydia Marks three days after Catherine had died. Lydia had been very astute and perceptive, searching in the right spot for the purse. It had never occurred to either of them that day that Catherine might have killed herself because she could not live with something she had done. Guilt was such an odd-what was it, an emotion? A judgment? It seemed to be both-an affliction, debilitating as a disease. He had felt it; he felt it now, but he didn’t understand it. And even if Lydia had been right about Catherine, if guilt was a way to understand Catherine perfectly, he still did not know who had killed Lydia Marks. He did believe he might know why.

He tried to separate the logical question from his grief and anger, but he could not. The part of the story of Mark Romano’s death that he and Lydia had both ignored was that Mark Romano had not been the only victim. When Detective Berwell had told them that a family nearby had been killed the same night, he and Lydia had let it go by; it was sad, but it had not seemed to have anything to do with Catherine Broward. But if Lydia’s final theory was right, and the person who had killed Mark Romano was Catherine, then it was a crucial fact. Somebody had shot four innocent people to keep them quiet, and Catherine would never have done that.

He was looking down again, so he was a bit surprised when he raised his eyes and saw two people walking along the wet sand toward him. One was a man in late middle age, dressed in baggy shorts and a nylon jacket, his head covered by a cap of netting with a bill like a baseball cap. The woman with him was half his age and attracted Mallon’s attention because her features seemed to be slightly exaggerated: she was short and had wide hips and large breasts, and her face had a wide mouth with full lips, and big eyes.

He stared at them while they were still far enough away so that he was sure they could not tell he was staring. They seemed to be opposites: the man was all bundled up to keep off the sun and the wind, but the girl was walking along comfortably in a black two-piece bathing suit, letting her curly dark hair blow in the wind as she approached.

Mallon felt frustrated when they came too close to permit him to stare anymore. Even with his eyes hidden by his sunglasses, it would be too obvious. He directed his gaze out past the next curve in the shoreline, toward the sea. It was then that he thought about the boat. It had been out there since the man and the woman had rounded the point, moving so slowly that Mallon could sometimes hear an unevenness in the distant engine sound that indicated it was running just above a stall. It was a small cruiser with a low, streamlined profile, a white hull, and a cabin that probably held only one bunk on each side. He could tell by the deep register of the engine that it was overpowered, and part of him was waiting for it to do something to justify the power: drop a pair of skiers into the water, or suddenly roar out toward the islands. As it bobbed on a wave, he saw a glint of glass near the stern that must have come from binoculars.