Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“I didn’t see one.”

“Any commercial number along the hull near the stern?”

“No, there wasn’t. It was a pleasure boat, like a small cruiser. About twenty feet long, at most. It was white, low near the stern, high at the bow. There’s a closed cabin, but low, so the guy steering the boat was standing and he was looking over the top of it. As he was coming in, I could see his head over it.”

“What did he look like?”

Mallon shrugged helplessly. “Just a head. He had sunglasses on, a black baseball cap. And his hair was-I guess-reddish, but mostly hidden by the cap. I didn’t notice much about the clothes. They were dark, maybe jeans and a sweatshirt or jacket.”

“So let’s put this together,” said the younger cop. “Small private cruiser, twenty feet, white hull, low cabin. Two males and a female. That’s all we’ve got.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mallon. “I was scared, and it was so confusing and weird that I didn’t think to look for more. I don’t know what happened, really, or what it was about. I didn’t know where to look.”

There were engine sounds, and two police cars pulled into the entrance to the cemetery, then up the drive to join them. The two police officers conferred with the newcomers for a few seconds, and then both of the cars drove out of the cemetery and off toward the east. When the two cops returned, the younger one said, “Let’s go.”

Mallon got into the back seat, and the older policeman drove them to the stretch of road just west of the Biltmore Hotel, and parked behind the others. There were already a paramedic truck and a red utility vehicle from the fire department. Down on the beach, there were policemen and firefighters forming a line.

Mallon said, “Can we help?”

The older cop said, “You’d better leave that to the people who get paid for it. If they find him they’ll let us know at the station.”

Mallon had no idea when the next low tide would come, and it surprised him. He was amazed at himself for not knowing, not having bothered to pay attention to something so big and fundamental that he saw twice every day. It was a few minutes later, after he was at the station, that he heard another cop say it was over four hours until the next low tide.

After a while, Mallon called Diane. He simply asked the older cop if it was all right if he used the telephone, and the cop nodded. Diane’s machine answered, and he left a message for her, then returned to waiting for the police to announce that they had found the body. Just as he was getting restless, another police officer came to the bench where he was sitting, invited him to a back office, and asked him the same questions the first two had asked. Then he too went away. Mallon felt like a person at a party who didn’t know anyone. People talked to him until they simply ran out of questions to ask and then drifted off.

After three hours, a policeman wearing a tan blazer came to his office and stood in the doorway. “You’re the same guy who saved the woman on the beach and then found out she killed herself.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Long. What else haven’t you said?”

“I don’t know,” said Mallon. “Have you found the body?”

“Not yet. The ocean sometimes drags things out from shore for a while, if there’s a big tide. But they come back. They get washed up somewhere.”

“The gun. The man had a gun. When he was shot-the first time-he fell down on it. When I was alone I rolled him over, and I didn’t pick it up. The ocean shouldn’t have moved that.”

The detective expressed no opinion. “Do you want to go home?”

Mallon said, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what happened. I still can’t be sure I know what was going on. But I think that I might be in danger.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I think the older man on the beach was trying to shoot me. Or maybe the one in the boat was. I don’t know. But I can’t see how this can possibly not be related to the death of Catherine Broward.”

“Why is that?”

“I have no enemies. There’s no other reason for anybody to try to harm me.”

Detective Long looked unconvinced. “I don’t understand what you think this has to do with a suicide.”

Mallon took a deep breath, released it, and said, “I kept Catherine Broward from drowning herself. Then she went off, and the next day I learned that she had shot herself with a pistol a couple of hours later. It seemed odd to me, but it didn’t bother any of the people who know more than I do about such things: Lieutenant Fowler, the coroner’s office. So I accepted that version of what had happened. But I couldn’t get her out of my head. I wanted to know what had made her do it. I hired Lydia Marks, a private detective I’d known for years, to help me find out.”

“How did she go about that?”

“We investigated, interviewed people-Catherine’s older sister, whom she had visited in Pittsburgh only a month or so before, a woman who had known Catherine and her boyfriend, the L.A. police detective who had looked into the boyfriend’s murder, the owner of a self-defense school she had gone to just before the boyfriend was killed. I don’t even know who else Lydia talked to, because when I wasn’t with her, she was often on the telephone or on her computer finding things out. After we had completed an interview, she left me here and drove back to L.A. to do some more digging. A couple of nights ago, Lydia was in a restaurant late in the evening, and she was murdered.”

“That’s quite a story,” said Detective Long. “Do you know what she was doing there? Was she alone?”

“I’m almost positive she was working. When she was killed, so were a bartender, some customers, and a waitress. I’ve been trying to figure out what the connection would be, and I just don’t know enough. Maybe it was a place where Catherine and her boyfriend used to go. Or maybe the waitress was a friend of hers. Catherine used to work as a waitress. I just don’t know. But I think that’s what got Lydia killed.”

“How do you know the Catherine Broward investigation was what she was working on?”

“She had just formed a new theory, and she said she was going back to L.A. to find out more, so she would know whether or not it was the right one. I think somebody she talked to led her into an ambush.”

“Okay,” said Long. “Then what? They waited a couple of days after they killed her, and then set up a second ambush on the beach in Santa Barbara to kill you?”

“Yes.”

“If they lured her to a restaurant and killed her to keep her quiet, why not kill you too? Why not lure you both to the place? Or maybe kill her and then drive up here to kill you the same night? It’s only a two-hour drive.”

“I don’t know,” Mallon answered. “We had been interviewing people together. Maybe they thought I’d be there with her.”

“But waiting all this time to find you gave you the opportunity to tell the LAPD everything, right?”

“I suppose it did. My lawyer told them everything we know.”

“So whatever damage you could do to these people is already done.”

“Maybe they don’t know that,” said Mallon.

Detective Long leaned against the wall near the door. “It occurs to me that what they know might be a subject worth thinking about. Do you always walk along that same beach at the same time each day?”

“I walk almost every day, but usually not there. Until recently I’ve usually headed in the other direction, toward Hope Ranch and Goleta. I suppose they could have simply been watching me, and waiting for a time when I was really alone. I can’t really even say I know that they were trying to kill me. The man on the beach may have been planning to shoot at the man on the boat. It’s possible that the man on the boat was aiming at the man on the shore all along, and never at me. I grew up with rifles. I could easily have hit what I was aiming at from that distance, but he was trying to fire while the boat was moving, coming up over waves and slapping down again. It must have been hard just to stand on the deck. I don’t know what he was trying to do. I just think it’s extremely unlikely that suddenly, after all these years, people should begin shooting that close to me, and it would have nothing at all to do with the death of Lydia Marks, or that her death had nothing to do with Catherine Broward’s.”