Jan Burke - Nine

The woman turned her face up to him and smiled, his previous lapse of attention forgotten. “Sure,” she said, sounding a little out of breath.

“She’s able to tell fortunes, you know,” he said.

She wasn’t as impressed by this as he had hoped. “I’ll try not to offend her,” she said. “But I don’t believe in fate and fortune and all of that.”

“No? I thought maybe…”

She saw the direction of his glance. “The earrings? I just liked them. I’m not even a Gemini.” She began searching her daypack and pulled out a pen and a small journal. She tore a piece of paper from it before tucking the journal away.

He took a moment to admire the stunning view beyond the tram as it climbed over the Cibola National Forest. Maybe a night hike wouldn’t be so bad. Someday he’d have to try one.

She handed him her number. He smiled to see she hadn’t written her name down. He asked her to hold onto the bag with the spoon rest in it while he put the number away in his wallet.

When he took the bag back, she turned and tucked her hands beneath his jacket, resting her head on his shoulder and pressing her lips closer to his own.

His arms around her, he peered inside the bag, wondering how quickly he could ditch the spoon rest into a trash can.

“Grandmother is going to love this,” he said, and reading the look in the upturned face, bent to kiss her.

San Luis Rey, California

Tuesday, May 20, 3:33 P.M.

The old man liked clocks.

A few moments ago, on the half hour, a chorus of competing chimes sounded throughout the house. Over the last two hours, hearing them perform their various renditions every fifteen minutes, Alex had come to think of them as a genteel version of the horn that sounds for a rodeo bull rider-a signal that Shay Wilder had managed to hang on to life for another little patch of time. That Shay Wilder was dying, there could be no mistake.

Ciara Morton and Alex’s uncle, John O’Brien, sat outside, talking quietly on the back porch after strolling through the small orchard outside Wilder’s home. Early on, they had managed to get away from the bells and ticking and the thick haze of cigarette smoke.

Ciara had been hesitant to bring John along, until it became clear that Wilder wouldn’t bother opening his door to them if his old friend didn’t accompany them. She had tried to beg Wilder’s help after he had refused requests from both their lieutenant and Captain Nelson. Alex figured she was hoping to show them both up. She prepared to approach Wilder by doing some homework-learned all she could about him by asking around.

But Wilder still demurred. “I’m retired,” he told her. “I really have no desire to see what the latest sadistic son of a bitch has been up to, thanks all the same.”

She had persisted.

“Detective Morton, within days-if not hours-you’ll have the country’s top profilers working on these cases. Perhaps Sheriff Dwyer will make life difficult for the FBI for a brief period of time, but we both know that they’ll be involved soon.”

“Some think you’re better than anyone who’s working out of Quantico right now.”

He laughed, then broke into a fit of coughing. “There are even other retirees who are more talented.”

So she had played what she thought was her ace-she had told Wilder that she was partnered with his old friend’s nephew. Wilder laughed again and said he would do this as a favor to John O’Brien’s nephew only if Alex would bring his uncle along.

“Can you believe it?” Ciara had complained to Alex.

“You should have anticipated that when you mentioned John.”

“Shit. I give up. You’re the one with all the connections around here. Without nepotism, the old boy network, or a penis, I guess I’m out of the running-I sure as hell won’t get anywhere in this damned department.”

Alex ignored almost all of this, a variation on an old theme, and later decided only a lack of sleep had made him say, “You think I’m here because John had some influence on my being hired or promoted?”

He saw the flash of anger, her impulse to make the accusation openly. But she regained control of herself and said, “Don’t you think you had certain advantages, growing up with a deputy in the house?”

He thought for a moment and said quietly, “I suppose so. But not in the way you seem to be suggesting.”

She backpedaled. “Look, I don’t think you got any promotion you didn’t earn. If I implied that-I’m sorry, I guess I did imply that, didn’t I? I did. And that was wrong. You work hard, you solve cases-way above the bureau average. All I meant was, you know how to play the game, because you grew up with John.”

“He has helped me to be realistic about department politics,” Alex said. “Which is what I think you mean by ‘the game.’ And, Ciara, for that reason alone, you don’t know how many times I’ve wished to God your uncle, aunt, mother, sister, granddaddy-you name it-had been with the Sheriff’s. As it is, you never seem clear about who your enemies are.”

He had seen her flinch somewhere in that recital and figured she was given this same sort of speech by the guys who called her B.B. Queen. Let it go, he said to himself, and tried to go back to concentrating on a list he had made of climbing gear suppliers. Just let it go.

Typically, she wouldn’t. “It’s my greatest weakness, isn’t it? ‘Does not play well with others.’”

He didn’t answer.

“I know you aren’t the enemy, Alex.”

He looked up at her. “No one else in the department, either, Ciara.”

“Okay, okay. I let one old man get the better of me. I’m sorry.”

“He’s not just one old man. If Shay Wilder told me he wanted to meet the Queen for tea before he’d look at the autopsy reports, I’d put him on a flight to London. As it is, he just wants us to bring an old friend of his along for the ride. It’s easy. John will love the chance to get out of the house.”

He was right-no persuasion was needed to get John to come along.

John knew the way to Wilder’s home, in the hills just inland from Oceanside, near one of the biggest of the old Spanish missions. He greeted his old friend by saying, “Damn, Shay. Guess you didn’t get the comb I sent you last Christmas.”

Wilder, whose dull gray hair rose from his head in disordered tufts, wheezed and coughed a laugh. “Buy me a mirror next time,” he said, then curtly ordered them to come inside. Alex managed to hide his shock at the change in the old man’s appearance. He had not see Wilder in about five years, although he knew John visited him often.

The once bright blue eyes were now watery and surrounded by reddened lids. His prominent brow ridge seemed to have sharpened, or perhaps the too thin face made it seem so. Only the dark, untamed hedges of the brows themselves seemed the same.

Wilder wanted to deal with business before pleasure, so he brought them all to his study, a dark room lined with books and file cabinets-all of it, like the rest of the house, reeking of cigarette smoke.

He was gaunt, his skin wrinkled and yellowish gray, stained between the two fingers of his right hand which were seldom without a cigarette between them. He used the hand in the way a chain-smoker will, moving it palm down over papers, the thumb and last two fingers working together as an especially adroit claw.

Alex felt a sudden and unaccountably painful flare of anger, then knew it for what it was-the banked fire of his grief for J.D., stirred to life by a smoker’s gesture. Alex’s old partner had moved his hand in just the same way. Useless to berate the dead for not having lived the way you wanted them to, or as long as you wanted them to, he thought, and rolled his shoulders, trying to relax.