The Trade
The Trade
Shirley Palmer
Matt Lowell never set out to be a hero…but he wasn't given a choice.As a wildfire rages in the canyons around Malibu, Matt Lowell races along the edge of the surf in a desperate attempt to reach his house and save his dog, Barney. But as he runs he stumbles upon a horror that stops him in his tracks: a newborn baby abandoned in the sand. And before he can get her to safety, the baby dies in his arms.When the police find the baby's teenage mother dead on the side of the canyon road, her body covered with wildflowers, Matt can't ignore the unexpected sense of duty he feels for these innocent victims. And so he decides to get involved, a decision that will set in motion irreversible consequences–and lead him straight into the midst of an unspeakable crime ring of greed, slavery and murder.Matt Lowell is about to find out that doing the right thing could be the last thing he ever does…
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR SHIRLEY PALMER
“A first-rate, nailbiting hardcover-debut thriller…
Admirably paced and plotted, with the kind of guns-a-popping denouement that begs for transfer to the big screen.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Danger Zone
“With its taut plot, [Palmer’s] African thriller makes a suspenseful follow-up to her previous book,
A Veiled Journey.”
—Publishers Weekly on Lioness
“This romantic thriller…explores the complexities of culture as well as those of the human heart.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Veiled Journey
“…a suspense thriller…[with a] frenetic tempo and myriad plot twists.”
—Publishers Weekly on Danger Zone
Also by SHIRLEY PALMER
DANGER ZONE
LIONESS
A VEILED JOURNEY
The Trade
Shirley Palmer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to those who suffer from this most heinous of crimes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go first to editors Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson for their patience and continued support during the past year. Thanks, too, to Ken Atchity at AEI; to Andrea McKeown for her invaluable input; to Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Sergeant Ray Verdugo, ret.; and to Hae Jung Cho, former director of the Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles.
Finally, this book could not have been written without researcher/editor Mignon McCarthy, who not only contributed the facts upon which the entire structure rests, but gave unstintingly of her time, her literary expertise, her enthusiasm and her words. It gives me much pleasure to acknowledge the work she has done.
All errors, of course, are entirely mine.
This is a work of fiction.
The events described did not happen.
No such club exists in Malibu, nor has there ever been a breath of rumor to indicate otherwise.
To serve the story being told, the author has taken some liberty with the topography of this small, treasured Southern California town.
For this she begs indulgence.
In the perception of the smallest is the secret of clear vision;
In the guarding of the weakest is the secret of all strength.
—Lao Tse
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 (#uf56ee87e-f65d-5d8b-b8e5-6f17a3bf7811)
CHAPTER 2 (#u55e5bcd4-0d2a-58c8-b246-75bc073b3772)
CHAPTER 3 (#uc286facf-f57c-5d7b-bfcd-9498bd86a58b)
CHAPTER 4 (#u24d79343-92e5-58ba-a074-102e73a0f615)
CHAPTER 5 (#ucc9f3eb2-c644-5db3-9901-47e6fabf517d)
CHAPTER 6 (#ubd272ab9-92a5-5d23-bebd-00e18fae903a)
CHAPTER 7 (#u8b92d1a5-4180-5b2a-91ae-cf75d2fd7e45)
CHAPTER 8 (#u0b0192df-c5a8-574c-9ddc-28f70623a277)
CHAPTER 9 (#u58644790-4704-56c3-85c7-1529bd92b7fd)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1
A storm of wind-tossed embers burst through the smoke, crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, caught the dry grasses along the ocean side of the road. A stand of eucalyptus trees exploded into flame. Suddenly visibility was zero.
Matt Lowell forced himself not to jam his foot on the gas. Without the weight of the two horses, the empty trailer was already rocking dangerously. The wind slamming against it had to be gusting at eighty miles an hour.
At Trancas Canyon Road, the traffic lights were out, the Mobil station and the market both dark. On the other side of the intersection, the whirling blue and red light bars across the top of sheriff’s black and whites became visible through the murk. A police barricade stretched across the highway, blocking all lanes, north and south.
A deputy sheriff waved Matt down, his sharp arm movements directing him left into the Trancas Market parking lot. Matt recognized Bobby Eckhart. They’d been at preschool together, gone through Webster Elementary and Cub Scouts, surfed the coast from Rincon to Baja. Raised some hell.
Matt pulled over to the median and lowered the window. The acrid stink of disaster caught in his throat—chaparral burning on the hillsides, houses, furniture, lives going up in flames.
“Bobby,” he shouted. “I’ve got to get through.”
The deputy looked to see who was shouting, then jogged over to the pickup. “Hey, Matt.” Eckhart looked like hell, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, his usually immaculate tan uniform charred on one sleeve, and streaked with ash. “The PCH is closed, but we’re getting a convoy out over Kanan Dume while it’s still open. We can sure use your trailer. Take it over to the creek area, and start loading some of those animals.”
Matt shot a glance at the parking lot. Another uniformed deputy was trying to bring some order into the chaos of vehicles loaded with a crazy assortment of household goods; anxious adults riding herd on kids holding onto family pets: dogs, cats, bird and hamster cages. A makeshift corral held a small flock of black sheep, a couple of potbellied pigs, some goats. Horse trailers, rocking under the nervous movements of their occupants, lined the edge of the parched creek. In October when the Santa Ana’s roar straight out of the desert, water is a distant memory of spring.
“My horses are down in Ramirez. I’ve got to get them out.”
“Margie Little brought a couple of trailers out of there an hour ago. They’re over at the shelter in Agoura.”
“Did you see my two?”
Eckhart shook his head. “But you can’t get down there, Matt, not now. It’s been evacuated, everyone’s out.” His words ended in a fit of coughing.
Matt put his head out of the window, peered into the blanket of smoke shrouding the highway. “Where the hell are the fire crews?”
“They’re spread pretty thin but more are coming. This brute skipped the PCH at noon today, in some places it’s burned clear down to the ocean, and now some crazy bastard is setting fires along Mulholland in the backcountry.”
Matt’s gut clenched. His house was on the beach, and Barney was locked inside. “What about Malibu Road?”
“Blocked at both ends, but it was evacuated earlier today. Escondido, Latigo Shores, everything. Last I heard it was still okay, but the wind’s getting worse.”
“Bobby, I’ve got to get through. Barney’s locked in the house.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Eckhart looked stricken, he had known the yellow Lab since he was a pup. “Matt, I’m sorry, but the official word is no traffic on the PCH from here to Topanga, only law enforcement and fire crews. But you slip by, I sure can’t follow with lights and sirens.” He thumped the top of the cab with a clenched fist, and started back toward the parking lot. Matt let in the clutch.
The emptiness was eerie. No traffic along Zuma Beach. No surfers crossing, their boards balanced overhead. Twice birds literally fell out of the sky—whether from exhaustion or burns it was impossible to know—and hit the road in front of him.
At Ramirez, he pulled into the turn and jumped out of the pickup in front of the tunnel built under the highway to lead back into the canyon. The intricate metal gates barring entry to the tunnel were closed, and he ran to the keypad that would open them, cursing the day they had been installed. A movie star had dazzled the residents when it had come to a vote at the homeowner’s association. Then she got married, sold her collection of stuff, donated her property to Nature Conservancy and moved to Point Dume. Only the goddamn gates remained.
Matt entered the code. Nothing happened. Cursing, he banged out the number again. The gates jerked, held. He tried again, jamming a finger at the numbers, slamming a foot against the gate as it jerked. A burst of black smoke billowed from the darkness and he ran back to the pickup.
Matt thought quickly. Maybe Margie got the horses out, maybe she didn’t. If she didn’t, she’d open the corral, let them take their chances. A lot of people had had to do that in the 1978 fire, it had moved so fast. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it now. But Barney was at home, locked inside. If he dumped the trailer, he could jam through with the pickup, and be there in ten minutes.
The metal hitch was too hot to touch. Quickly, he reached inside the trailer, grabbed the leather gloves he used for hauling hay. He sent an anxious glance up into the eucalyptus trees. For a long choking moment, he wrestled with the hitch. Then fire swept through the oleanders, jumped to a pair of cedars, ran up the trunks of the eucalyptus. The tossing crowns exploded into flame. A shower of sparks hit the trailer, found the shreds of hay on the floor inside, ignited. Within seconds trailer and pickup were engulfed.
“I’m not going to make it.” Matt heard his own voice, maybe in his head, maybe he was yelling. “God, I’m not going to make it.”
He raced down the road to the Cove restaurant and the beach. Half a mile seemed suddenly impossible. Melting asphalt grabbed at his feet, fifty-foot eucalyptus trees were going up like oil-soaked torches, burning leaves tossed in the wind like missiles spreading fire wherever they touched. Beyond the trees on his right, the Sunset Pines trailer park was a sea of flames, metal screamed as heat buckled the double-wides, the force of the wind lifting blazing roofs, sending them spinning like giant fiery kites.
At the edge of the water the restaurant was still untouched, the old wooden pier still standing. Not a soul was around. The Cove had been abandoned.
Matt smashed a window in the kitchen door, thrust a hand through to the lock and let himself in. Normally booming with activity at this hour, the interior was utterly still, empty. He grabbed some bottled water from a refrigerator, left by the side door directly onto the beach. The sky was darker, an ominous dirty orange reflecting the fire and the low, late afternoon sun. It had to be close to sunset, but it was hard to tell.
Ash and smoke eddied in the wind, lifting the sand into a murky, eye-stinging soup. The edge of the bluff was in flames, the multimillion-dollar houses fronting the ocean probably already engulfed. Fire ate at the cascading purple ice plant, smoldering clumps dropped into the water lapping at the base of the cliff. The swells on the sea were a dark hammered bronze, the tops of the waves blown apart by the offshore wind.
Without slowing his pace, Matt struggled out of his jacket, stooping to drag it through the water. Debris tumbled in the surf, the bodies of singed birds, fish floating belly up in the unnaturally warmed water. He covered his head with the wet jacket, kept as far as he could from the base of the cliff and the brush falling in great blazing arcs blown by the wind.
The sea dragged at every step. He prayed he wouldn’t stumble into a hole—he’d surfed this coast all his life, and with a booming tide like this racing in, he knew the rip could tear a grown man’s legs from under him, drag him out to sea.
The beach widened, the bluff on his left was lower now, breaking down into sandstone gullies and he was able to get his bearing. The stairs to what used to be the Edwards place were charred and rocking with every gusts, but still standing. He could hear his breath laboring, and his lungs felt seared. Even this close to the water, the Santa Ana winds drew every scrap of moisture out of the air. In the oven-hot wind howling under a dirty sky, he felt as if he could be the last man left alive on a devastated earth.
He took a swig of the bottled water, warm now from the heat. Ahead, a large seabird, a dead pelican probably, tangled in a fisherman’s discarded line—it happened all the time—lay close to the edge of the surf. Matt fixed his eyes on it as a measure of his progress along the beach. As he got closer, he realized it wasn’t a pelican. Maybe a doll with a scrap of copper-colored fabric wrapped around it. He glanced down as he passed, took several more strides. Uncertain, he turned back.
An advancing wave broke around his ankles and tugged at the small pale form. It moved, then responding to the pull of the water, started to roll. Matt reached down instinctively to stop its slide to the sea. Suddenly he found the smoke-filled air even more difficult to draw into his lungs and in spite of the heat, the blood pumping through his veins felt icy. He picked up the tiny form, held it against his body, and put his fingers against its throat.
He felt the thready flutter of a pulse.
CHAPTER 2
Matt stripped away the wet silky covering, struggled out of his polo shirt and wrapped the newborn infant, a girl, in the soft cotton. Her eyes were closed, her hands curled into tiny fists. Downy strands of gold hair feathered damply against her head.
He scanned the beach but the blowing sand and smoke and falling ash cut visibility down to a few yards. Rabbits and a couple of raccoons huddled against the low bluff close to a flock of gulls. He could see nothing that could possibly be a human form.
Who would leave a baby like this?
He held the almost weightless bundle against his chest with some idea of warming her with his own body heat, put on his wet jacket to protect them both against falling debris, and started back along the beach toward the stairs up to the Edwards house. If they were still standing, maybe there would be firefighters trying to save it.
He scanned the beach as he ran. Trash thrown up by a polluted ocean was caught in the giant kelp above the high tide mark—nylon fishing line, plastic holders for six packs, bits of Styrofoam coolers. No sign of the mother, no patch of blood, nothing to show that a woman had just given birth. He stumbled across a beam of charred wood and saw the beach was littered with planks.
The stairs. Since he had passed them only minutes ago, the ferocious wind had blown the damaged stairs apart.
He swept his eyes across the low bluff, looking for another way up, handholds, anything, but even if he could find a way, the top of the cliff was blazing. He hesitated—the empty restaurant was closer than his own place, he could go back. But he’d lived in Malibu all his life, seen flames leap two hundred feet in seconds, consume a house in minutes. And the tide was roaring in. He had to get home.
Flooded with relief, Matt jogged across the dry sand, toward his own beach stairs. The small gray clapboard house was intact. The large houses on either side were dark, not surprising. His neighbors used them only on weekends, and that rarely.
For the last hour he’d been running nonstop, across soft sand, in and out of the ocean, holding the baby close as he clambered over the bare rocky reefs that would normally be covered by resting seals as the tide receded. On a night like this, though, they’d stay out at sea.
The sky was a cauldron, the fire dangerously close. He could feel blasts of heat from the thirty-foot flames now whirling south on the ridge above the Pacific Coast Highway as it followed the curve of the coastline toward the enormous expanse of lawn fronting Pepperdine University. That lawn still pissed a lot of people off, they were still arguing about the amount of water used to keep it green, the contaminated runoff draining into the Santa Monica Bay, but in a wildfire it could be a godsend, a break where fire crews could make a stand.
If the wind turned west again as it easily could, a maelstrom like this created its own wind patterns, flames would be across the highway in minutes, take the houses above his on the land side of Malibu Road, jump to the beach side and burn clear down to the water. From what he’d seen, so far the flames had reached oceanside houses in a staggered pattern, driven by the changing wind. His place was vulnerable, clapboard with an old shake roof, it would go in seconds.
He pushed open the door into his smoky kitchen, staggering as eighty pounds of terrified dog hurled himself at his legs.
“It’s okay, Barns. It’s okay, boy.” Matt held off the Lab with one hand and picked up the phone. No dial tone. The line was dead. He shook it in frustration. Of course it was dead—the phone lines were down. This wasn’t the first fire he’d been through in his thirty-six years, he should have remembered that. At least he had his mobile.
The baby close against his chest, he searched his jacket. Then again. Patted the pockets in his pants. The phone was gone. He’d dropped it somewhere on the beach.
He laid the child down on the soft couch in the living room, touched her pale cheek. She was cool. Colder than she had been when he picked her up. Matt felt for the pulse in the baby’s throat, as he’d done on the beach. He couldn’t find it. He flexed his fingers, felt on the other side. No pulse. Maybe he was doing it wrong. He rubbed his fingers on the couch to sensitize them, tried again. Nothing. Heart hammering, he knelt, held the tiny nose, blew gently into the infant’s mouth. Once, twice. Again. But he knew it was useless. There was no breath, no heartbeat. The baby was dead. Sometime in the last hour, as they made their way down the beach, she had died in his arms. He had not even known when life left her. Surely, he should have felt something.
He sat back on his heels. She was so delicate, so fragile, she made barely a dent in the cushion. Long lashes fanned her cheeks. He didn’t even know what color her eyes were. What sort of woman would abandon her defenseless newborn on an empty beach?
Minutes passed. Barney pushed his nose at Matt’s hand, then started to howl as if he knew, a mournful sound that gave a voice to the tangle of feeling swelling in Matt’s chest.
Matt put a hand on Barney’s head, and took a long, deep painful breath. The smoke inside the house was thicker now, the heat increasing. Barney nudged at him insistently. Matt knew he had to get some water on the roof, and soon. He looked at her one last time, then covered her face with his shirt and got to his feet.
“Come on, boy.” He snapped on Barney’s leash in case they had to make a run for it, took the Lab with him into his bedroom. Black particles of ash hung in the air and coated every surface; shadows danced madly in the dirty amber glow that was the only light, but it was enough for him to see what he needed to see. He stripped, got into dry jeans and shirt, socks and heavy boots, then retrieved a black carry-on bag from the closet and looked around for the things that were important enough to save.
He picked up the photograph by his bed, an eight-by-ten of Ginn and himself, Barney at their feet, taken last summer, and put it into the bag. The only other things of value were a framed picture of his mother and an album of old photographs of them together when he was a kid. His memory of her had dimmed over the years, only the pictures kept it alive. He took a second to wrap them in a T-shirt before putting them in the bag, threw in a handful of underwear, socks, some jeans on top. He took some of his books from the shelves in the living room, his laptop. He already had Barney ready to run. That was it. Except for the house itself, there was nothing else here he cared about.
He tied a bandanna around his nose and mouth, then grabbed all the towels in the linen cupboard, dropped the bag by the kitchen door where he could get it easily if they had to get down to the water. He slammed the door closed behind him to keep Barney confined in the house, ran along the side of the house toward the little shed of a detached garage facing the road. He could hear the rumble of fire trucks, power horns and sirens on the Coast Highway above Malibu Road. Help was on the way at last and the fire crews would make a stand wherever they could as long as they had water pressure. At least he and Barney could always get down to the ocean, so they wouldn’t be trapped. If it came to it, he’d let the house, his mother’s house, burn.
Without electricity the garage door was immovable. He climbed behind the wheel of the Range Rover parked inside, shoved the gear into Reverse, hit the gas and rammed the heavy vehicle at the overhead door. The old structure shook but the warped wood splintered at the first attempt and he was through. He got out, grabbed three of Bobby Eckhart’s surfboards, shoved them into the back, added a couple of his own. The ladder he kept for repairs had fallen off the wall with the impact. He picked it up, threw it onto the patio, then backed the Range Rover up to the street, away from the structure. Only a block away, a couple of houses were burning.
He unwound the hose on the patio, turned the spigot, let out a grunt of relief when water spurted, then shoved the nozzle into an empty trash barrel and filled it, dumped in the towels. He soaked his bandanna and retied it over his nose and mouth, dragged the hose with him up the ladder to the roof.
If the water pressure stayed strong, if the wind didn’t turn, if he could beat out sparks with the towels before they got a hold under the wooden shakes—a hell of a lot of ifs—he had a chance of saving the house. His mother’s house.
Matt looked at his watch, saw that it was after midnight. The arc of the night sky from east to west was still red with fire, but something was different. The wind had changed direction and was blowing onshore. He wouldn’t call it moisture exactly, but for the first time in hours he felt as if he could take a full breath without cooking his lungs.
He went out to the street again. Everything in the front of the house was gone, the fence, the bushes, a couple of trees, and the bougainvillea that his mother had planted for privacy thirty years ago. At least the house had survived, scorched but still there. Many landside houses above his, and several along his stretch of beach, were smoking ruins. Fire crews hadn’t even made it down here until now, when it was all over and the firestorm had moved on.
A sheriff’s patrol car cruised by and Matt stepped into the road to wave it down. The black and white slowed. The deputy sheriff looked him over.
“Who are you? This area is evacuated, authorized personnel only.”
Matt had been hoping for Bob Eckhart. He didn’t recognize the man speaking to him.
Matt said, “I live here. You got a minute? I’ve got something here you should see.”
“You got identification?”
“Sure.” Matt reached for the wallet he’d transferred from his wet jeans, flipped it open to his driver’s license.
The deputy reached for it. “What happened to your arm?”
Matt held it up, surprised to see a gash and streaks of dried blood. “I don’t know, I guess I must’ve cut it when I broke a window at the Cove to get some water.”
“I see.” The deputy handed back the license. “Well, I’ll have to get back to you, just as soon as I’ve checked out the end of the road. Things are still pretty hectic.” Fire equipment moved along the road, wetting down hotspots, checking roofs. The black and white started to roll.
Matt paced with the car. “No, wait a minute. Listen, you’ve got to come inside. Sounds crazy I know, but I’ve got a dead baby here.”
The car stopped. The deputy stared at him for a long moment, then pulled off the road. He retrieved a flashlight, played it over Matt’s face, along the still-smoking stumps of the bougainvillea, across the newly exposed house and patio. Barney, muzzle pressed against the bedroom window no longer shielded from the street by shrubbery, barked a warning. The deputy picked up his radio transmitter. “This is 103. I’ve got a report of a 927D at…” He looked at Matt. “What’s the address here?”
Matt told him, the deputy repeated the address, then signed off. He stepped out of the car.
“How come you didn’t evacuate with everyone else?” His voice was guardedly neutral.
“I wasn’t here when the order came. I came home later by way of the beach.”
“What’s your name again, sir?”
“Matthew Lowell. Yours?”
“Deputy Timms.” Ramrod posture, early thirties, dark hair short back and sides, but surprisingly long on top for a deputy sheriff. He followed Matt across the patio, along the deck by the side of the house into the candlelit kitchen.
Matt opened the door of the refrigerator. Except for a small bundle wrapped in a bright-blue polo shirt, the shelves were empty.
“What is this, some kind of joke?” Timms turned a darkening face toward Matt.
“No.” Matt gestured to the sink piled with jars and containers, orange juice, mayonnaise, olives, a carton of eggs. “In this heat, I couldn’t think of what else to do. And I thought if the house burned, she would be safer, maybe. I don’t know. I found her on the beach last night when I was coming home.”
“Jesus.” Timms reached into the refrigerator.
Matt turned away. Even in the flickering candlelight, he couldn’t bear to look again at the little face.
“There’s a lot of blood on this shirt,” Timms said.
“Must be mine. From when I cut my arm.”
“You say you found this baby, you weren’t there when it was born?”
“No, I wasn’t there when she was born. I found her, I told you. I took my shirt off and wrapped her in it because there wasn’t anything else to use. I didn’t realize there was blood on it. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, that’s all I had, my shirt.”
“I see. It’s a girl,” Timms said. “Where did you say you found it?”
“Her. I found her on the beach.”
Timms gave him another long, hard stare. “How long have you lived at this address, Mr. Lowell?”
“Most of my life, on and off. It belonged to my parents. We lived on Point Dume but we spent a lot of time here. They planned to tear this old place down and build a decent house, but my mother—” He stopped. Timms would think he was nuts, running on with his life’s story. “I’ve lived here permanently since I got out of college. Fourteen years.”
“I see. Well, I can’t get the M.E. out here now, they won’t get through. PCH is still closed in both directions. I’ll have to call this in. You wait here.”
The deputy hesitated as if uncertain what to do with a dead child, then put the tiny body back where he’d found her, and started across the kitchen. He stopped at the sound of a voice, and footsteps on the wooden deck.
“Hey, Matt. What’s going on? Everything okay?” Deputy sheriff Bobby Eckhart walked in without knocking. Lean and athletic, he was powerful through the shoulders from years of paddling out to meet the surf. Blond hair cropped close, tonight his usually clear gray eyes were swollen and bloodshot.
“Pete, what’s going on?” Bobby said to Timms. “I heard the 927D.”
“Mr. Lowell here says he found a dead baby on the beach.”
“What?” Bobby looked sharply at Matt. “Where?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere this side of the Edwards place. When I was trying to get home.”
“Oh, Matt. How old?”
“Maybe only hours. No more than a day.”
“That’s a rough one, buddy. You okay? You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing. Just a cut. I broke a window at Jimmy’s place to get some water.”
While they spoke, Timms had reopened the refrigerator, and unwrapped Matt’s shirt from around the tiny form.
“Oh, jeez, just look at this.”
“I’ve already seen her.” Matt went out onto the deck, leaving the two deputies alone. He heard Bobby’s calm voice.
“Pete, I think you’d better take it up to the courthouse. They’ve got the command post set up there.”
“You know this guy?” Timms asked.
“All my life. Those are my surfboards in his Range Rover. I keep them in his garage—saves me tracking them down from Las Flores. I catch a few waves after work sometimes.”
Timms grunted. “Yeah? Then better if you take the baby to the courthouse and I get his statement.”
Matt stared out over the ocean, one of the few remaining places in Los Angeles uncontaminated by city lights, where a star-filled night was visible. But tonight the sky was shrouded, the glow from the fire still coloring the smoke hanging low over the sea.
If he had the juice, he thought, he’d be pissed off at the doubt he could hear in Timms’s voice, the guy obviously thought he was lying—but suddenly the events of the last few punishing hours had come up and hit him in the face. He felt wrecked, and knew something in his life had shifted, although he had no idea what that could be.
He turned at the sound of Bobby’s voice asking, “Where’s Barney? Is he all right?”
“Yes, I’ve got him locked in the bedroom.”
“Timms has gone.” Bobby handed Matt a bottle of Evian, and leaned his belly against the railing. “I saw Margie Little. Your horses are over in Agoura. Be good if you could make arrangements for them, the animal shelter is pushed to the limit.”
“I’ll get them out of there as soon as I can. Your house okay?” Bobby and his wife Sylvie had a tiny place in Las Flores Canyon.
“Yeah, bit singed is all. Lost the big cedar in front, though. Okay, I’ve got to go, there’s a long night still ahead.” He patted Matt’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of the baby, Matt. Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’d better have someone take a look at that arm.”
“Sure,” Matt said. He did not turn to see Bobby leave with the child in his arms. He listened to retreating footsteps, the sirens racing along the highway. The wind had shifted and was blowing offshore again.
It would be days before this fire was contained.
CHAPTER 3
“Matt, did you hear what I said?” Ned Lowell leaned back from his desk to look out of the window of the office on San Vicente Boulevard in fashionable Brentwood. “What’s so interesting down there?”
The small plaza below the window was festive, elegant stores decorated for Halloween with piles of pumpkins and hay bales, kids and adults in costume, witches, dragons, fairies, a lot of Harry Potters. Matt had his eyes on a small pink rabbit with big floppy ears and white tail. Her mother was holding her on a large orange pumpkin while her father took pictures.
“Cute mom,” Ned said.
Matt spun his chair around, fitting his feet around Barney, asleep under his half of the partner’s desk he shared with his older brother. The office was large, the main decorative feature the display of architectural photographs of Lowell Brothers projects. “I’m listening. What did you say?”
“I said Mike Greffen called about that building downtown on San Julian and Pico. Did you look at it?”
“Not yet. I’d planned to go down on Monday before the fire. Used to be a dress factory. Been empty for years, price should be right.”
“What’s around there?”
“About what you’d expect in the garment district. Plus some light manufacturing, a few run-down apartment buildings. Pretty grim, but it might be good for studios or workshops.”
In fourteen years, they had created elegant offices in abandoned banks for those eccentric souls who found high-rise office buildings sterile, made luxurious pied-à-terre apartments out of crumbling warehouses, built low-cost housing in old railroad yards, for which the city loved them. They had turned deconsecrated churches into concert venues and restaurants, created artisans workshops, art studios and lofts throughout downtown. On the way, Lowell Brothers had received design awards, thanks from a grateful city, and made a lot of money.
Ned rose to his feet, stretched his six foot two plus frame—he had a couple of inches on Matt—rotated his hips, then shrugged into his jacket. Matt noticed how much his brother was looking like their dad as he grew older, the same thick rumpled head of dark hair streaked now with gray, the deepening lines around his eyes and mouth. He’d look like that, too, probably, when he was Ned’s age, another ten years. They’d always looked alike.
“I’ll call Mike in the morning then. Right now, I’ve got to get home for trick-or-treating or Julie will kill me. Are you coming?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Ned stopped at Matt’s desk, and peered into his face. “Matt, you don’t look so good. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but are you okay? Sleeping, eating, that kind of stuff?”
“What are you, my mother all of a sudden? Get out of here.”
Ned lingered. “Listen, this dead baby. You want to talk about it?”
“Nothing to talk about. Get going.”
“I know it was a hell of a thing, but it’s not your business. You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t know that baby. You couldn’t have saved it. It happens, shit like this.”
“You’re right. It does. It just did.”
“Oh, come on, you know what I mean.”
“No, you’re right. It’s not my business.”
But it felt like his business. Yesterday, Matt had spent a couple of hours with sheriff’s deputies walking the beach trying to pinpoint the exact place where he’d found the baby’s body. They’d found nothing. No trace.
“So why don’t you come over tonight and hand out candy, while we take the boys out to plunder the neighborhood?”
“Not this year.” Last year, he and Ginn had still been together. It had been a blast just watching her laughing at the parade of kids, oohing and aahing over the costumes. She was good with kids.
“We’ve got people coming over later, costumes and some drinks. Julie asked Susan Dean, and I think she only said yes because Julie dangled you as bait. Susan’s a good architect, bright, and gorgeous. What she sees in you God only knows.” He thumped Matt’s shoulder affectionately.
“Now you’re my social director, too? I thought you said you were going home.”
“If it’s still about Ginn, Matt, that was your choice.”
“She’s the one who left, not me.”
“Come on, man. She’s thirty-five years old. She wants kids. You don’t even want to get married. You think you left her any option?”
“Knock it off, Ned, okay?”
Ned raised both hands. “Sorry I spoke. See you tomorrow.”
Matt waited until the door closed behind him. He looked down into the plaza, but the pink rabbit and her family had gone.
He reached for the phone. The deputy who answered said that Eckhart wasn’t in the station house. Matt left a message that he’d called.
Traffic was clogged on the Pacific Coast Highway. Fire equipment returning to home bases all over the state rumbled south to the I-10. Going north was a nightmare of backed-up traffic. At Topanga Canyon a young entrepreneur was doing a brisk business, running up and down the line of cars waiting to get through the sheriff’s department roadblock, taking money, handing out T-shirts that read “I Survived The Latest Greatest Malibu Topanga Fire.”
Matt showed his driver’s license to a deputy to prove he was a resident and was waved through. A few restaurants had reopened in time for Halloween but they’d be crowded with people wearing false noses and mustaches, partying and swapping war stories. He stopped at PC Greens to pick up food for dinner.
It was dark when he got home. Instead of the sweet smell of sumac and thyme that grew wild up on the hills, the heavy stink of wet ash pervaded the air, overpowering even the fresh salt spray from the Pacific.
The phone in the kitchen started to ring as he came down the walkway. Barney raced ahead and Matt hurried the last few steps—mad hope, but maybe Ginn was calling to find out whether the house had survived, if the horses were okay, how Barney had come through. She’d found Barns at some rescue outfit, a two-month-old pale yellow scrap with an unusual white star on his forehead, and brought him home, dumped him in Matt’s lap on his birthday a couple years ago. Matt let himself into the kitchen, dropped the groceries on the table and picked up the phone.
“Matt Lowell.”
“Hey, Matt. What have you been up to?” Jimmy McPhee’s voice was loud, jovial.
“Hi, Jim. Heard the restaurant made it okay. I’m glad.”
“Yeah, by the grace of the Almighty. Only damage was a broken window in the kitchen, can you beat that?”
“I’m afraid I did that.” Matt glanced down at the bandage on his arm. “I took some water from the big fridge, too.”
“You were down here? Hell on wheels, Matt, how did you manage that?”
“Dumb luck, I guess. Lost my pickup and trailer at the tunnel, though. They should be cleared out by now. Do you know if the wrecker turned up?”
“Yeah, they’re gone. They were a hell of a mess, just a tangle of burned-out metal.”
While he listened, Matt filled Barney’s dish with kibble, popped a can of Rolling Rock, turned on the television. Reception had been restored, electricity was back on. He hit the mute.
“St. Aidan’s is all right, too,” McPhee said. “Bit scorched is all. A service of thanksgiving is scheduled for Sunday.”
“Okay, I’ll try to make it.” His only church attendance nowadays was on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of his mother’s death twenty-six years earlier when he was ten. She’d gone out to get ice cream one Sunday afternoon, and he’d never seen her again. The drunk who’d killed her was sentenced to two years. So now, around June 20 every year his dad came up from Palm Springs, and the three of them, he and Ned and their father attended morning service at St. Aidan’s and had lunch afterward at Jimmy’s.
Matt clicked to the local news. The fire was no longer at the top of the hour. Life was returning to normal for the rest of Los Angeles. With hotspots still in the backcountry, it would be weeks for Malibu, months and even longer, if ever, for those who’d lost everything. He turned off the news and waited for Jimmy to get to the point.
“So, James, what’s up?” he said when Jimmy let a moment of silence linger.
“Had a couple of sheriff’s department detectives asking about you today.”
While listening, Matt walked outside to the deck and looked out over the Pacific. A sliver of moon was rising, stars blazed in a clear sky.
“What did they want?”
“Just had I seen you during the fire. I said I hadn’t, but they went on awhile, wanted to know if I was sure. You know, bunch of questions like that.” Jimmy gave a strained laugh. “What have you been up to? Raiding the old Edwards place while it burned?”
“Thought I might find a Princess Di mug or something.”
Blake Edwards, his famous wife Julie Andrews, and their brood of kids had lived in the house for years without raising comment. But after the Edwards’s moved, Harrods heir, Dodi Al-Fayed, bought the house and started a major remodel, and Malibu was giddy with the rumor that Princess Di was coming to town.
“They seemed pretty serious, Matt. You in trouble?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I’ve known your dad for thirty years, kiddo, and I loved your mother, God bless her. If you’re in trouble, you just have to say the word. I’ll help if I can, you know that.”
Matt nodded as if McPhee could see him. After his mother was gone, most family celebrations were held at Jimmy’s restaurant—birthdays, graduations. He’d had his first legal beer at Jimmy’s.
“During the fire after I left the Cove, I found the body of a baby,” he said. “Lying on the beach.”
“Holy Mother of God! Whose baby?”
“Well, I guess that’s what they’re trying to find out, Jim.”
“Oh, sure. Of course. Poor little soul. How old?”
“Newborn.” Matt reached for his beer. He couldn’t bring himself to say that the baby had been alive when he’d found her. “Jim, listen, thanks for calling, but I’ve got to go.”
“Yeah, sure. Well, if you need anything, let me know, okay?”
“Sure thing.” Matt put a finger on the disconnect, started to replace the phone, then found himself punching out the number he hadn’t used for almost a year. After she’d left, he’d ring just to listen to her voice on the machine, always hanging up if she answered in person. But one night, she’d said, “Matt, I know it’s you. Please don’t keep doing this. Don’t force me to get an unlisted number.”
It had been like breaking an addiction. Just for today, he’d tell himself, I won’t call her. Just for today. Ten months of one day at a time not calling Genevieve Chang.
After four rings, the familiar voice said, “This is Ginn Chang. If you leave your number I’ll call you back. If you don’t, I won’t.”
Matt hesitated. He wanted to tell her about the baby, about the cops asking questions about him. He wanted…What? Marriage? A family? He dropped the phone into the cradle, went into the bedroom, Barney at his heels.
The eight-by-ten was back on the table by his bed. Every line was etched in his mind, but he picked it up and studied it. Ginn in hipriding white shorts and a bikini top leaned her narrow back against his chest. He had both arms wrapped around her, his chin resting on top of her head, the half-grown Barney stretched at their feet, grinning as only a happy young Lab could. He remembered the day clearly. Ned and Julie and their boys had come over for the day, Ned with a new digital camera posing everyone until they finally rebelled.
Matt thought about his brother. Ned didn’t complicate life. He’d found the right girl when he was twenty-eight, he’d gotten married, settled down, had a couple of kids. No sweat.
Matt replaced the picture on the table. From the moment they met, he’d never doubted that Ginn was the right girl. It was the rest of the story that wouldn’t fall into place. The old family album was still on the dresser where he’d put it after the fire. Slowly he turned to a page—any page—as he did sometimes. They were all photographs taken by his dad of their mother and Ned and himself, with their horses at the ranch on Zumirez Drive on Point Dume; the three of them running on the beach outside this house, throwing sticks for their two Shepherd-type mutts, playing in the surf. His mother always seemed to be smiling. Something he could still remember about her, sometimes the only thing was that wide, sweet smile. He closed the album.
“Come on, Barney. Let’s get out of here.”
He changed into old jeans and running shoes, and opened the door to the deck. Barney pushed ahead of him, but instead of heading for the gate and the narrow stairs down to the beach, the dog dashed along the walkway toward the street, tail wagging furiously. The automatic patio lights, hanging by a wire from the garage but still working, flashed on as Bobby Eckhart stepped across the beam. He was wearing black jeans, leather jacket, heavy boots.
“Hey, Matthew, you coming or going?”
“Going. I was taking Barney for a run on the beach, but it can wait. Did you come on your bike?” He hadn’t heard the sound of the love of Bobby’s life, his Harley.
“What else?”
“What brings you here?”
“You called, master?”
Matt laughed. “Come on in. You want a beer?”
“Is the pope Catholic?” Bobby tussled with Barney until they both banged their way through the door into the kitchen. He looked down at his pants. “Look at this. I’m covered in yellow hair. Don’t you ever brush this mutt?”
“You know where the brush is kept, buddy. Be our guest.”
“Too late. Damage is done.” Bobby crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator, opened the door, looked in, stared at the empty interior. “You got something against food?”
“I picked up some stuff on the way home.” He didn’t explain that no way could he ever open that door without seeing the shirt-wrapped bundle resting on a steel rack. He’d already ordered a new refrigerator, different make, different configuration. “Sit down. I’ve got water, warm beer, or scotch. If you want cold, there’s a bottle of Stoli in the freezer.”
“A glass of your best red will do me fine. Gotta get my sweetie home in one piece.”
Matt grinned. “Would that be Sylvie or the Harley?” Bobby’s wife was also a deputy sheriff.
“Sylvie’s got late duty tonight, that’s why I’m here. So I don’t have to cook.” Bobby peered into the containers of braised beef, roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes.
“I don’t know how she puts up with playing second fiddle to that bike.”
“She knows she’s on to a good thing. She’s got us both.”
Matt opened a bottle of Merlot while Bobby decanted the food, put it into the microwave.
Matt leaned back in his chair, reached for a couple of glasses, poured the wine.
“So, what’s up?” Bobby asked.
“The sheriff’s department is asking questions about me,” Matt said. “Jimmy McPhee called tonight.” He repeated the conversation.
“Routine stuff, nothing to worry about.” The microwave beeped. Bobby placed the containers on the table.
“What will happen to her, Bob?”
“The baby? Well, if they can’t find the mother, she’ll either get a civil burial or transfer her body to a teaching hospital where pediatric surgeons get their training.”
The food in Matt’s mouth was suddenly a lump impossible to swallow. “You mean—” He wanted to gag. He thought of the delicate body he’d seen, the fragile limbs. “She shouldn’t be cut up.”
Bobby helped himself to more braised beef. “Yeah, turns your stomach, doesn’t it? You know, in one month last year…August, I think, three babies were found on the beach in Santa Monica, about a week apart. Remember that?”
“No.”
“Yeah, well. No one notices. Just the flotsam of a big city. Another little Jane Doe, no one to claim her.”
“Then I’ll claim this one. She should have someone, not end up on a surgical slab, alone.”
“You can’t just walk in and claim a body. It’s not that easy. Why would you want to do that?”
Because she died in his arms. Because maybe he could have saved her if he hadn’t been so hellbent on getting home to his house and his dog. Although he still didn’t know how.
“Because I found her, I guess. Why not?”
Bobby shook his head. “Matt, just think for a minute how this plays. Single guy finds a baby. She’s still alive. No one’s around as a witness. Baby dies. Then the guy claims the body, spends a fair amount of change to give this Baby Doe a funeral. What do you think that says?”
“That someone wants to do the right thing? What? You think like a cop, Bobby, you know that?”
“Twelve years on the job, Matt. It’ll do it to you every time.” After college, Bobby had bummed the world following the waves for a couple of years before he came home, met Sylvie and joined the sheriff’s department.
Matt pushed his chair back, got to his feet. He dumped the remains of the food into the trash. “So what’s the next step? Do I call the coroner’s office?”
“No. You sleep on it for a week, then you call.”
“That might be too late.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “You’re right.”
CHAPTER 4
“See what I mean? It’s a prime piece of property.” Mike Greffen of Downtown Realty Associates, was resplendent in a well tailored gray suit, white shirt, Hermes tie. He gestured toward the vast empty interior of the almost derelict building. In spite of the brilliant fall day outside, the late afternoon sunlight barely penetrated the second floor windows, multi-paned and washed with a thin film of brown paint. The place reeked of excrement, human and animal, rats, stray cats, the unwholesome stink of the transients who used the place to drink and vomit and crash. “Know what they say about location. Still can’t beat it, gentlemen.”
Ned stamped a foot tentatively on the splintered wooden planks of the uneven factory floor. A small cloud of dust coated his Nikes. He and Matt wore their usual working clothes, blue jeans, polo shirts, sneakers.
“Wow. Nearly went through there. What do you think anyone can do with this piece of industrial wasteland? Matt, you got any ideas?” Matt recognized Ned’s opening salvo for negotiation on the price. Ned managed their financial affairs, bank loans, mortgages. There wasn’t a real estate broker or a banker alive who could best Ned. He could wring the last penny out of any deal.
Matt shrugged. “I’d call in the bulldozers.” His cell phone buzzed and he excused himself, walked over to the bank of darkened windows.
“Matt Lowell.”
“Matt, it’s Bobby. Listen, a heads-up. Better you don’t contact the coroner about that matter we talked about last night. Something’s come up. Okay?”
“What’s happened?”
“I’m at the desk, I can’t talk now. Just hang tight, don’t make any calls, okay?”
“Too late. I called this morning.”
“Shit. Did you leave your name?”
“Of course I left my name.”
“Shit,” Bobby said again. “Oh well, maybe it won’t make any difference. They lose bodies all the time down there, chances are they’re no better with telephone messages.”
“What bodies? What are you talking about?”
“I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you tonight. Better yet, I’ll come by. Meantime, don’t make any more calls to the coroner.” He rang off.
Slowly, Matt returned the cell to his pocket. He cleaned a circle in the filthy window with the heel of his hand. Across the street stood a mirror image of the four-story building he was standing in. Someone had enough faith in the neighborhood to try to do something with it, but not enough to trust the neighbors not to make off with anything they could get their hands on. Surrounding the old factory was a new ten-foot chain-link fence topped with a concertina of razor wire.
Matt walked over to rejoin the two men.
“Mike tells me we can turn this dump into luxury apartments,” Ned said. “You’re the design and structural arm of the firm.” For Matt, the thrill of his job was in seeing the aesthetic possibilities in the crumbling buildings they restored. He was good at it, had the imagination to see what could be, probably got it from his father. It also enabled him to see the absence of opportunity, such as this building.
Matt laughed. “Mike, you don’t believe that.”
“Sure I do. Would I lie to you guys? This is a wicked piece of property. Great potential.”
“Yeah, potential to go from bad to worse.”
“That building you were looking at, Matt? Across the street there? Sold in less than a week, asking price, and I hear it’s going to be gutted and refitted as apartments. It will bring the whole area up.”
“In your dreams, Michael,” Ned said. “Who’d you sucker into that deal?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have the listing, but I hear it was bought by some outfit from Canada. I could have offered this one to them, but we’ve been doing business for a long time. I wanted to give you guys first crack at it.”
The three men navigated the dark filth-encrusted stairs and stepped out into the sunshine.
“So don’t wait too long, guys,” Mike said. “This is a primo piece of downtown real estate, a steal at the price.”
He slid into his late model Lexus, tapped his horn at a kid running across the street, and drew away.
“Shall we go for it, Matt?” Ned’s tone was doubtful.
Matt eyed the street scene. A couple of guys selling foam-rubber pads and remnants of fabric from the back of a beat-up truck to small round women a long way in time and distance from their Aztec roots. Men with the same flat features leaned against walls, hats tipped over eyes, waiting for God knows what. In the middle of the block, kids converged on an old guy selling ice cream from a handcart that looked as if it had been in use since the fifties.
“Pass. Let someone else take the hassle.” Matt looked again at his watch. “See you tomorrow.”
Matt put the Range Rover into the now doorless garage, walked down the side deck past Bobby’s Harley, a Softail, parked in the middle of the ruined front garden, and let himself into the kitchen.
Bobby was sprawled on the overstuffed sofa in the living room, a box of crackers on the table in front of him, watching a ballgame on television, Barney at his feet. The Lab got up as Matt came in, gave him a swift, enthusiastic greeting, and went back to monitoring Bob’s hand-to-mouth motion. Bob held up a warning finger. “USC, Arizona, flag on the play. Oh, damn. USC’s offside.” He clicked off the set.
Bobby tossed Barney a Ritz and swung his feet to the floor. “You’ve got to find a new hiding place for the house key. That flowerpot’s history.”
Matt threw his briefcase onto the kitchen counter. The key had always been kept in a flowerpot. “I’ll get a new one.”
“And get the fence fixed while you’re at it. You’re totally exposed to the street, your neighbors are never here and this place is barely more than a shack. A quick push on the kitchen door, and you’re cleaned out in minutes.”
“You try getting anything done. Half of Malibu’s in line ahead of me.”
“What about one of your own work crews?”
“Ned would have a coronary. Leases are signed and we’re getting the Contessa project ready for occupancy. Anyway, Barney would take the hand off anyone coming in here.”
“Okay, that’s my community outreach for the week,” Bobby said.
Matt filled Barney’s bowl, took a bottle of water from the fridge. He crossed to the living room, dropped into an armchair, propped his feet on the coffee table. “So, okay, what’s happened that’s so all-fired important?”
Bob leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “A body’s been found up on Encinal Canyon Road. A girl, maybe fourteen, fifteen. White.”
Matt knew what Bobby was going to tell him, but he didn’t want to hear it. A fourteen year old. Just a kid herself. “Didn’t Encinal burn out?”
“No, not all the way down to the beach. Anyway, she wasn’t in the fire area. She was by the side of the road, and she was covered in wildflowers. A fire crew checking hotspots found her.”
“Flowers? Someone must have cared about her.”
“Or some sick bastard thought it was a cute touch.”
“How’d she die, Bobby?”
“Until we get an autopsy report, it’s just guesswork. She’s been badly abused at some time, but the scars are old. Marks on her breasts as if she’d been burned by cigars, that sort of thing. Poor kid had a short and brutal life, but whoever put her on the side of the road wanted her found. She was dressed in some expensive threads, baggy silk pants, a matching top and a shirt. The pants were blood-soaked, but someone had tried to clean her up. My guess is that she gave birth then hemorrhaged out.”
“So that’s the mother.”
Bobby shrugged. “Putting two and two together, that’s my guess. Homicide’s got it. So far her description doesn’t match any missing person on file in Los Angeles County. They’ve sent it to Sacramento, see if they get any hits statewide. I thought you’d be interested.”
“What’ll happen if they don’t get anything?”
“Nothing much. No identifying marks on her or the baby, no way to find out who they were.”
“What about dental records?”
“Sure, but not everyone visits a dentist. And anyway, there’s no national database for teeth. All we can do is find out if they’re related. After that, there’s nowhere to go.” Bobby dropped another cracker for Barney. “Don’t try to get that baby released to you, Matt. Let it drop.”
“It’s too late, I told you. I called the coroner this morning.” Matt got up, put his empty glass in the sink. “I’m going out to eat. Sylvie still on late duty?”
“Yeah, all this week. You want to take this seriously, buddy.”
“I am taking it seriously, but what do you want me to do? I’ve already called the coroner’s office. They have my name, my address, my phone number. They didn’t ask for my social security number, or they’d have that, too. So, you want to go eat?” Bob let out a long breath. “Okay. Usual place?” Matt had been thinking of Granita for a change, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant at the top of the road, but the prices were pretty rich for a deputy sheriff with a Malibu mortgage, even with two salaries coming in. Bob would agree if he suggested it, then insist on carrying his weight. “Sure. Googie’s Coffee Shop in five.”
CHAPTER 5
7:00 a.m. on a Friday morning, and traffic on the I-10 from Santa Monica to downtown was moving steadily. In another hour, it would be gridlock. Matt listened to Coltrane, and restrained the impulse to jockey the Range Rover from lane to lane. He got off the freeway at 9th Street, and stopped to pick up a couple of caffe grandes at the Starbucks by Macy’s—he knew better than to risk the coffee on a construction job, which tasted as if it were made with iron filings, guaranteed to burn a hole in the lining of the stomach.
By 7:30 he was at the Contessa, four hundred low-rise luxury apartments on what used to be a used-car lot before the neighborhood got too run-down even for clunkers. Swimming pools, tennis courts, running track, gym, all the bells and whistles, heavily landscaped, an urban refuge, and close to major freeways and the Staples Center. The city was jubilant, already counting on the tax base to revitalize the surrounding area. Lowell Brothers was gambling the company shirt on the project, their first venture into new construction, but so far it looked good. Ned had negotiated leases with both teams that called the Staples Center home, NBA basketball and NHL hockey, the Lakers and the Kings.
Half a dozen trucks loaded with large boxed jacaranda trees were lined up on Bixel Street outside the Contessa. By the time the job was finished, a hundred prime specimens would be in the ground.
“Good morning, Ben.” Matt handed Ben Pressman, the landscape architect, a container of coffee, popped the lid on his own and took a sip. He and Ben circled the trucks, checking out the jacarandas.
“Pretty nice, huh?” Ben said.
“Yeah. Not bad, Ben.” He and Pressman had personally selected each one, shopping half a dozen tree farms to get what they wanted. “Let’s get them in the ground.”
He stayed on through the morning, ate enchiladas with the Hispanic work crew gathered around Roxanne’s Hot Lunch, the roach wagon that made the rounds of downtown construction sites.
It was almost four when he got back to the office in Brentwood.
Two men, flipping without much interest through magazines devoted to the construction business, looked up as he walked in. Matt raised an inquiring eyebrow at Marni behind her desk in the front office.
“These gentlemen are waiting to see you, Matt. They’re from the sheriff’s department.”
The men replaced the magazines on the table, got to their feet. The elder of the two said, “Mr. Lowell? I’m Detective Jim Barstow. My partner, Detective Eduardo Flores.”
Matt glanced at the proffered shields, noted the nicotine-stained fingers and the smell of tobacco that clung to the two men. He shook hands with each in turn, conscious of Marni’s ears straining to hear every word, and ushered them into the office. Ned, frowning at the computer screen on his own side of the partners’ desk, looked up as Matt introduced the detectives. They refused coffee. Matt settled himself behind his desk, indicated a couple of chairs on the other side.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Just a few questions. You are the Matthew Lowell who found the child on the beach, is that right?” Barstow asked. Late forties, thinning fair hair, deep set blue eyes. Slim, sharp tailoring.
Not much got past him, Matt guessed. “Yes. During the fire.”
“That would be last Monday?”
“Yes. Monday.”
“She was alive when you found her?”
Matt nodded. “Yes.”
“About what time of day was that, Mr. Lowell?”
“Sometime between four and five. It’s hard to say exactly. The smoke from the fire was black and covered the entire sky, so it was dusk long before the sun started going down. And sunset these days is at five. So I can’t say for sure. I didn’t look at my watch.”
Barstow’s partner gave a half smile. He’d caught the sarcasm. Flores was in his early forties, bulky but not fat, an ungainly nose away from being darkly handsome.
“Well, that’s close enough for now,” Barstow said. “Were you working in Malibu on Monday?”
“No, I was here, but I’ve lived in Malibu all my life and I know how fast a brushfire moves in a Santa Ana wind. I had horses in Ramirez Canyon and was worried about getting them out. And my dog was locked inside my house.”
“That’s the house on Malibu Road?” Barstow asked. He produced a small notebook from the inside pocket on his jacket.
Matt nodded. “That’s right.”
“You say you found the baby several miles north of that location between four and five o’clock. By noon the entire area had been evacuated, the highway was closed in both directions from Topanga Canyon in the south, and Trancas Canyon in the north. How was it you managed to be on that particular part of the beach at that particular time? Can you explain that?”
“I drove—”
“Wait a minute,” Ned said. “What is this? An interrogation? He’s already reported this to—”
“It’s okay, Ned, let me handle it,” Matt said. He held a tight rein on his irritation. Ned could be a pain sometimes with his big brother concern. Ginn thought it was guilt because Ned had been at Wharton in Philadelphia when their mother was killed, and had gone back to school the day after she was buried, leaving Matt alone with their father in a house that contained only shadows where she had been.
“You’re right,” he said to Barstow. “The Pacific Coast Highway was closed when I got to Topanga Canyon.”
“What time was that?”
“About two, two-thirty.”
Barstow made a note on his pad. He looked up, nodded for Matt to continue.
“I turned around and went back to the Santa Monica Freeway, took the 405 north across the Sepulveda Pass to the 101 in the San Fernando Valley.” Deliberately, Matt went through every detail of the long circuitous route back to Malibu. “The 101 west was pretty clogged because of fire closures, but I was able to make it to Las Posas Road below Oxnard. I turned off there and drove toward the ocean through the berry fields and came down the PCH that way.”
Barstow flipped through the pages of his notebook.
“On your way down the PCH you had to pass Encinal Canyon, right?”
Matt felt his gut clench. “Yes.”
“Did you drive up into Encinal Canyon?”
“Of course not. I was trying to get home.”
“And the Pacific Coast Highway was already closed at Trancas Canyon when you got there?”
“That’s right. They were pretty busy in the market parking lot, getting a convoy together to go over the Kanan Dume Road while it was still open. It wasn’t difficult to drive around the roadblock.”
“What were you driving?”
“I had a pickup and a horse trailer.”
Flores spoke for the first time. “Do you usually commute to work here in Brentwood with a horse trailer, Mr. Lowell?”
“No. I picked it up at Malibu Riding Club on Pacific Coast Highway.”
“That’s just before Encinal Canyon, is that right?”
“Yes.” The enchiladas he’d eaten at lunch suddenly felt like a lead weight in his stomach. They thought he had used the trailer to transport the body of the dead girl.
“Why didn’t you take the Kanan Dume Road from the 101? Why go all the way up to Las Posas?”
“I wasn’t sure Kanan Dume was open. I didn’t want to run into another roadblock and have to turn back. I didn’t have that kind of time.”
“Are you saying that in the middle of a fire, an equestrian center loaned you a pickup and horse trailer? I would’ve thought they’d need vehicles like that to evacuate their own animals.”
“The truck and trailer didn’t belong to the riding club, they belonged to me. I boarded my horses there until a couple of weeks before the fire. I left some tack and the pickup and trailer there until I could pick them up.”
“Where are they now, this pickup and trailer?”
“At A-1 Auto Wrecking in Oxnard.”
Barstow raised his eyebrows. “What happened to them?”
Matt held on to his temper. What did this bozo think happened to them in the middle of a goddamn fire? “I was trying to get into Ramirez Canyon at Paradise Cove but the gates to the tunnel under the road were closed. The fire came through the tunnel, caught the trailer and pickup. I made a run for it to the Cove restaurant. The trailer and pickup are a total loss. I had to have them towed.”
Barstow continued making notes. “I see. What happened then?”
“I got some water from the restaurant, and started south along the beach. It’s about seven miles to my place from the Cove. I was more than halfway there, just past the Edwards estate, when I spotted what looked like a downed pelican lying near the water. I got closer, and saw it was a baby.”
“And the baby was alive when you picked it up?”
Matt had to force himself not to look away. “Yes. I thought I just said that.”
“No, you didn’t. So then?”
“I felt a faint pulse. I wrapped her in my shirt and went back to some stairs that I’d seen still standing. I thought maybe I could get some help there, but when I got back the stairs had burned and the wind had blown them apart, so I turned around and continued toward home.”
“It didn’t occur to you to go back to the restaurant?”
“Of course it did, but what for? Fire blocked the road, the restaurant was empty, no one was coming, no fire crews. Plus I was more than halfway home.”
“When did you realize she was dead?”
“When I got home. I put her on the couch. She seemed cold. I tried to feel a pulse and couldn’t. I tried to give her CPR, holding her nose and breathing into her mouth, but it was too late. She was dead.” He’d been reliving that moment over and over ever since.
“You’ve got a bandage on your arm, Mr. Lowell. What happened?” Flores asked this question. Matt guessed they were taking turns.
Instinctively, Matt looked down at his wrist. He’d dropped by his doctor’s office, Phil had put a couple of stitches in, and covered it with gauze and a Band-Aid. That was the day after the fire.
“I broke a window at the restaurant to get some water and I guess I cut it. I didn’t notice it until later.”
“You didn’t notice a cut that was bad enough to need stitches and bandaging?”
“A hell of a lot more was going on then than a cut on my arm, Detective Flores. Half of Malibu was on fire.”
Flores nodded and gave him that thin smile again. “So is that your blood on the blue shirt the baby was wrapped in?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t you get help for this baby right away?”
“Where? It was in the middle of a wildfire. The phones were down. I’d dropped my cell on the beach. Where was I supposed to find help?”
“You could’ve taken her to the Civic Center there in Malibu, couldn’t you?”
“She was already dead, and flames were coming over the ridge. What would have been the point of attempting that?” He wanted to ask if this guy had ever been caught in a firestorm, but the answer was obvious. He hadn’t.
“You’ve shown an interest in claiming this baby, Mr. Lowell. Why is that?” Barstow asked.
Out of his peripheral vision, Matt saw Ned open his mouth, then close it without speaking. He hadn’t told Ned what he intended.
“No reason. I just thought…I didn’t like the idea that she might be cut up for the purpose of training doctors.”
“Who told you that would happen?”
“Doesn’t it?”
Barstow shrugged. “A young woman was found yesterday morning on Encinal Canyon Road. It’s possible she was the mother.”
“Really?”
“You don’t sound too surprised. Did you know this girl?”
“Know her? No, I didn’t know her. I would’ve told you if I knew her. Look, I found a child on the beach in the middle of a wildfire. I did the best I could to keep her alive. I feel terrible that I wasn’t able to, but I got in touch with the authorities as soon as I could, which was around midnight. After I’d spent hours fighting to save my house. I thought it would be the right thing to do to give her a burial. Where are you going with this?”
Flores joined the conversation. “Why do you feel so threatened by these questions?”
“I don’t feel threatened, Mr. Flores.” Matt made a conscious effort to relax. Flores was right, he sounded defensive. “I just don’t understand why you’re talking to me about a young girl found dead in Encinal.”
“Well, the spot in Encinal is not too far from where you said you picked up the child on the beach. You’ve shown quite an interest in that baby. We’re just trying to do our job, get to the bottom of who knew what and when they knew it,” Flores said.
Matt held his eyes. They were a mid-brown, the sort of brown usually described as warm. But these were as cold as any Matt had seen, and the slight smile hovering around Flores’ tight lips didn’t help.
“Well,” he said, “if I can help you do that, of course I will. Anyway, are you sure the girl you found was the mother?”
Neither man responded. It was clear they were not here to answer questions, just ask them.
“Would you be willing to give a sample for DNA testing, Mr. Lowell?” Flores asked. “Just for the record.”
“Now wait a minute,” Ned said. “Just you guys wait a minute here—”
“It’s okay, Ned,” Matt said. He turned to Barstow. “Why are you asking me to do that?”
“There’s nothing to it, Mr. Lowell, nothing invasive,” Barstow said. “A swab, some saliva, that’s all.”
“You haven’t answered the question,” Ned said. “Is he suspected of some crime?”
“We don’t know that a crime has been committed, Mr. Lowell. This is just routine.”
Matt sat back and let Ned run with it. He’d seen Ned’s face and knew better than to start an argument with him in front of a couple of detectives.
“Routine, bullshit,” Ned said. “What happens to that sample afterward? It’s kept on record, right? So my brother, who has done absolutely nothing except behave like a model citizen, now has his DNA on record in a police file connected to some unknown girl’s death?”
Flores shook his head. “The sample will be destroyed.”
“Come on,” Ned said. “We’re supposed to trust the police department that screwed up the blood evidence in the O.J. Simpson case?”
Barstow turned to Matt. “We have your shirt, Mr. Lowell, and we don’t need your permission to test it.”
“Then why are you asking for saliva?”
“Well, cooperation would count in your favor—”
Ned was on his feet. “What are you talking about, in his favor? Is he being accused of something?”
“No. Well. Thank you, we’ll be in touch. If you remember anything else, give us a call.” Barstow produced a small leather cardholder, removed a business card and placed it on Matt’s desk. He glanced at Flores, and both detectives rose. “And we’re the sheriff’s department, not LAPD. Just so you know. Anyway, thanks for your time.” At the door, Barstow turned. “Your horses get out okay?”
“Yes, thanks,” Matt answered.
Barstow nodded and offered a polite smile. The two detectives left the room, leaving behind a faint trail of stale cigarette smoke, and the unspoken words hanging in the air.
They suspected him of murder.
CHAPTER 6
Matt turned off his laptop and pushed back from his desk in the corner of the living room. It was no good. He couldn’t work. It seemed as if he’d been going over the same set of drawings for the last three hours. All he could think of was the conversation with the detectives and the two creatures who’d somehow fallen into the middle of his life, the baby who had died in his arms, and the young girl who may or may not be the baby’s mother.
He got to his feet, poured another cup of coffee, his third that morning, took it to the window. Rays from the sun pierced the bottom of the mounting gray-and-white thunderclouds, and sparkled in large intermittent coins of light on the water. The temperature had dropped dramatically since the fire, and rain was in the forecast.
A flight of California brown pelicans swept low, wingtips skimming the top of the waves. Matt followed their glide with his eyes until they disappeared over the water. The pelicans were making a comeback after the DDT disaster in the seventies that had damn near wiped them out.
He picked up the phone, punched out the number for the animal shelter in Agoura, identified himself to the woman who answered, described his two horses, the small gentle Andalusian mare he’d bought for Ginn, his own buckskin quarterhorse gelding, and asked how soon he could pick them up.
“The sooner the better,” she said. “We’re like Noah’s ark over here. If you can tell me what time you’ll be here, I’ll have them brought in from the pasture.”
“I have to make a couple of calls, see if I can borrow a trailer. Probably be around one, is that okay?”
“Sure. See you then,” she said and hung up.
Margie Little’s place had been burned out, so he called the Malibu Riding Club, agreed to pay double the usual boarding fee—the stable manager made sure he was aware she was doing him a favor, that space was tight after the fire, and he had, after all, removed his horses from the club for no reason she had been able to fathom. But as a courtesy, he could leave his Range Rover at the club, use one of their trailers and a pickup to get his horses from Agoura. If he were still a member, she’d waive the rental fee, but since he wasn’t, of course, there would be a charge.
He loaded Barney into the Range Rover and took the Pacific Coast Highway north. The roadblocks at Topanga and Trancas had been removed, but traffic was still sparse. By tomorrow, if the rain held off, Sunday drivers would be out in force inspecting the damage—the chimneys still standing surrounded by rubble, the blackened beams from collapsed roofs, the burned-out armchairs and sofas that had once enclosed celebrity bottoms.
He slowed at the sign for Encinal Canyon Road. The girl’s body had been found less than a mile from the PCH. On impulse, he turned right onto the canyon road, a tortuous two-lane ribbon of asphalt that switchbacked across the Santa Monica Mountains down into the San Fernando Valley on the other side.
A quarter mile up the narrow gorge was a different world. The erratic wind-driven fire had skipped the entire lower canyon. Sycamores were still in fall yellows and russets, branching over the roadside tangle of willow and toyon and wild tobacco.
For Matt, the Santa Monica Mountains with their latticework of canyons and ravines were as much a part of Malibu as the ocean. When they were kids, he and Bobby Eckhart had camped all over these hills. They’d seen bobcats and mountain lions, rattlesnakes and redtailed hawks, even eagles soaring above bare rocky crags. They’d found traces of Chumash Indian pictographs in caves, and they knew where the virgin creeks were that ran all year, tumbling over rocks into pools deep enough to swim in. They’d also seen their share of abandoned vehicles and rusted-out discarded appliances. They’d never seen an abandoned body, but the canyons of Los Angeles were notorious for all kinds of murder and mayhem and they’d heard the stories.
Matt pulled into the clearing in front of the wide metal gates to the old archery range. According to Bobby, the dead teenager had been found about three hundred feet beyond this point.
He left Barney in the Range Rover—there was no shoulder to speak of, and the edge dropped off sharply on the creek side, dangerous if a vehicle hurtled around a curve, too many people used these mountain roads as raceways. Barney would be safer locked up. Matt crossed the road and walked toward a strip of yellow plastic police tape sagging between a couple of coastal oaks.
That was all there was to mark the place. There should be more, Matt thought. But what? Maybe crime scene tape’s as good as anything. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. But he couldn’t shake the barren feeling he had standing in this empty spot along the road.
On the ground at his feet he noticed a scattering of desiccated wildflowers. He knew them from Boy Scouts, yellow tree tobacco, white virgin’s bower, red California fuschia, purple rosemary. Bobby had told him the body had been covered in flowers. He sat on his heels, picked up a spray of canyon sunflower, held it to his nose, breathed in the faint scent. He twirled the spray gently in his fingers, then realized there was moisture on his skin. Sap from the stem.
The flowers in his hand were fresh. He looked around. The road was empty, quiet.
He stood and peered over the edge of the steep cliffside that fell off down to the creek. His eye caught a flash of blue. He squinted, made out a crouched form hidden in a tangle of toyon and manzanita.
“Hey!” he called. “Can I talk to you?”
The figure bolted upright, plunged through the brush in a wild crashing descent.
“Wait a minute.”
Matt started after him, grabbing branches, using his boot heels as a brake, half sliding, half running.
The flash of blue disappeared, reappeared and disappeared again. Part way down, another figure, long straight brown hair, broke cover and took off headlong down the hillside.
Girls, he thought. A couple of girls. He hit the canyon bottom, raced after the two of them toward the dry creek bed. They jumped from rock to rock, scrambled up the other bank.
Matt followed across the creek, leaping the same boulders. He stopped short as the figure in blue suddenly turned in a small clearing in front of a grove of wild walnut trees, blocking Matt’s way, teeth bared in a snarl, eyes blazing and wild. With a jolt, Matt realized he was looking at not a girl but a teenaged boy. He was an astonishing apparition in blue silk shirt, torn and soot stained, an open blue velvet vest, matching blue velvet pants, worn tight, the knees ripped. He’d armed himself with a long, heavy stick, and stood protectively in front of four young girls. They appeared to be no older than sixteen, and white, except for a black child who was maybe ten.
Matt held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.”
The boy lifted his chin, fixed fierce narrowed eyes on Matt. He was trembling, Matt saw, but not from fear. This kid would kill if he had the chance.
Matt looked at the girls huddled together under the walnut trees, a bizarre little group, dressed in a strange assortment of garments in brilliant parrot colors, green, yellow, scarlet. Torso-hugging, skinny strapped tops, silky loose-fitting pants. The fabric looked rich, heavy silk, torn and stained. Their feet were clad in matching soft leather boots. They could have been a circus troop still in costume.
“What are you doing here?” They were sure not on a camping trip, not in that gear. They all had sun-damaged skin, huge welts on arms and chests caused by the poison oak that grew all over these mountains. Their lips were dry, cracked and bleeding.
He looked at each girl in turn. Their faces were filthy with mud and ash, their bodies shivering in the cool air of the canyon, even cooler on a day like this with rain clouds hanging low. They looked traumatized. No one spoke.
“Okay, you don’t have to talk to me. But you’re going to have to talk to someone. A girl was found up on the road. Did you know her?”
His questions were greeted with silence.
“Who are you? How long have you been here in the canyon?”
Every eye was locked on Matt, watching his every move, the girls looking as if they were ready to run. Or maybe fight. They stared at him, no glimmer of understanding in their eyes. They either didn’t understand English, or they were deaf. Matt touched his fingers to his cheeks and arms, made small circling motions and then pointed to the group’s faces and bare arms.
“Poison oak,” he said slowly. “You need to have that treated. I’ve got salve in my car. And water, you look like you need some water.” No one moved and Matt said, “Look, I want to help. Why are you here?” He looked around at the canyon. “You shouldn’t be here dressed like that. The weather is going to change, it’s going to rain and turn colder.”
One of the girls started to cry. She appeared to be the oldest, the longhaired girl he’d been chasing.
Matt took off his denim jacket, held it out to her.
“Come on, you need it. It will protect you.” He patted his own shoulders to show her what he meant.
The girl moved to reach for it. The boy spoke sharply.
In spite of her distress, the girl responded just as sharply. Nothing wrong with their hearing, Matt thought. For a moment, they argued in a language he had never heard before.
The girl accepted the jacket and said something to him. Matt thought she was asking a question. It could be English, but the accent was so heavy he couldn’t make it out.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Please, speak slowly.” He watched her lips. It sounded as if she were saying “eye eeder.”
“Eye eeder.” Her voice broke on a sob. “Eye eeder.” The boy yelled at her. The other three girls started to cry.
“Eye eeder?” Matt started to shake his head, then realized she was saying a name. Matt gestured toward her. “Your name is Aida?”
She shook her head.
“She was the girl on the road?”
In a soft voice, she answered, “Yes.”
Her eyes darted toward the boy. Screaming, he lunged at her, the heavy stick raised. Matt grabbed him before he could strike, shook the menacing club out of his hand, spun him around so that the boy’s back was against his chest. Holding him was like trying to control an octopus, limbs everywhere. The kid was frantic, explosive, strong beyond his slight frame. It took a few minutes before Matt was able to pin both arms to his sides and swing him off his feet. Gradually the boy stopped struggling.
“Listen,” Matt said against his ear. “I’m not going to hurt you, any of you. A girl died. Tell me how she died.”
“You bring police,” the boy said.
He could speak English. Now maybe they could get somewhere. “No one’s going to bring in the police, so you just relax, all right?” The boy said nothing. “Okay?” Matt said again. “I’m going to let you down now. Just stay quiet, nothing is going to happen to you.”
It was a long time coming but finally the boy nodded. Carefully Matt allowed the boy’s feet to touch the ground and as soon as he thought the kid would stay put, released him. The boy turned quickly. Tears of rage wet his eyes.
“You’re a good man,” Matt said. “You’re okay. What is your name?”
The boy clenched his lips together as if to prevent Matt from seeing that they were trembling.
“Hasan.” The older girl answered for him, and the boy spat what sounded like a curse.
Matt looked at him in surprise. The Arabs Matt had met or seen were dark-eyed, dark-haired, olive-skinned. This Arabic boy was blue-eyed, had dark blond hair, neat small features. Matt kept his eyes on the boy. “That’s you? Hasan?”
The boy did not answer.
“Okay,” Matt said. “Hasan. Good. And Aida was the girl who died. How did Aida die?”
No answer.
He tried a different question. “Where do you come from?”
The older girl said an indecipherable word. She pointed to herself and the two other white girls. She repeated the word. Matt still couldn’t understand her.
Matt looked more closely at the little black girl. “What about you?” he asked gently. “Where do you come from?”
The child refused to meet his eyes, and the older girl, the only one who had so far spoken, put an arm around her protectively.
“Africa,” she said. “She from Africa.”
CHAPTER 7
Matt took off the flannel shirt he had on over his T-shirt and stepped forward to wrap it around the child. All he could see was the top of her small dark head. She flinched as he touched her, and the older girl murmured a crooning sound of comfort. She took the shirt from Matt’s hand, knelt and wrapped it around the African child’s body.
“What’s happened to her?” he asked softly. And to the rest of you, but he left those words unsaid. What kind of disaster had brought this strange band into Encinal Canyon?
Darting fearful looks at Matt, the girls exchanged a few words among themselves, until Hasan spoke sharply, driving them back into silence.
“She want mama,” the boy said.
Yes, Matt thought, of course she does. Matt had the sudden image of himself at that same age, watching his mother’s flower-blanketed coffin being carried from St. Aidan’s Church. He took a breath, and the image faded, leaving him feeling as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.
He fumbled in his pants pocket for the energy bar he always kept handy and offered it to the child, but she would not look up. He passed it to the older girl, who unwrapped it, lifted the child’s hand, and pressed her fingers around it until she was sure it would not fall from the child’s grasp. The child broke off a corner, put it into her mouth and handed the rest back. The older girl divided it up, handing a fragment to each of the others, including Hasan who ignored the piece she held out to him. After a moment, she gave it to the little one.
“This little girl needs help,” Matt said. “All of you need help. I will take you to my house, get you some food and clothes.” He looked at Hasan, making a point of including him. “We will talk, and we will decide what to do.”
“Kanita,” the older girl said. She pointed to herself. “Kanita,” she said again. She then pointed to Matt.
More progress, he thought. They were communicating. “You are Kanita.” He enunciated each word carefully. “I am Matt.” He glanced at the closed, hard face of the boy, and turned back to the girl. “Kanita, you cannot stay here.” He pointed to the sky, gestured rain with his hands, hoping she understood. “Rain. Rain is coming. You must get shelter. Come with me. I’ll get help.” And maybe these kids could tell the authorities what they knew about the dead girl, Matt thought, and remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over his head.
Kanita slid a nervous yet defiant look at Hasan then beckoned to Matt and started toward a cluster of large granite boulders. Matt glanced at the boy, then went after her. She led him between the rocks and into a sheltered crawlspace created by a tangle of roots and the limbs of canyon oak trees. Matt peered inside.
A slight solitary figure lay motionless on the ground. Also a teenager, she was dressed similarly to the others, in a beaded tank top and gauzy loose-fitting lavender pants. She lay on a makeshift bed of brown paper grocery sacks spread out on the bare ground.
Matt’s throat tightened and he fought back a wave of panic. Another dead girl? He crawled into the shelter and touched the girl’s hand, and started to breathe again. Her skin was an unhealthy grayish white and clammy, but warm, maybe too warm. Her eyes were closed, her face framed by a mass of dirt-encrusted black hair tangled with bits of leaves and twigs.
“How long has she been like this?”
Kanita frowned and he repeated the question slowly.
“Today, yesterday, tomorrow.” Kanita shrugged as if an explanation of time was beyond her.
He patted the unconscious girl’s hand, hoping to rouse her. He’d have to carry her out and she would be a dead weight to pick up. He turned to Kanita. “What’s her name?”
Kanita shook her head. Matt pointed to himself, to Kanita, repeating their names as he did so. Then he indicated the girl. Kanita patted her mouth, pointed to the girl and shook her head again.
This was getting them nowhere. Matt slid an arm around the girl to lift her into a sitting position.
The girl opened her eyes, deep black eyes that widened in terror at the sight of him. She shoved hard at his chest, scrabbled to get away but managed only a few yards. A long high-pitched keening ripped from her throat.
The skin on the back of Matt’s neck shuddered at the sound. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” He managed to quell the instinct to raise the pitch of his own voice and kept his tone low and reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay.”
Matt quickly ran through his limited options. The girl needed medical treatment. He could go for help, but as as soon as Matt was out of sight, the boy would be gone, dragging the girls with him. And the Santa Monica Mountains were wild enough to swallow up anyone who didn’t want to be found. These kids were a line to the dead girl, and if she were the mother, to the dead newborn. He could not lose track of them.
Kanita was speaking softly to the sick girl, insistently, the same words over and over, in the same unrecognizable language. Kanita held her until she quieted and her agitation softened into a rhythmic rocking motion.
“No immigration. No police,” Kanita said suddenly as if reading Matt’s mind. “No immigration, no police,” she said again, repeating the universally understood words.
“Okay, right, no immigration.”
“No police.”
Matt smiled at her. Brave girl, he thought. Kids shouldn’t have to be this scared. He knew there were children in the world who lived in daily fear, including a primal fear of the authorities, but he’d never seen it up close and raw.
“No police,” he conceded. “No immigration.”
The sick girl continued lying quietly in Kanita’s arms. If he wanted to learn anything more from the older girl, now was the time to ask, with Hasan out of earshot. He leaned toward her. “What happened to Aida?”
Kanita shook her head. “She die.”
“A baby, then die?”
Kanita’s eyes stared unblinkingly into Matt’s before sliding to a point over his shoulder. He turned his head. Hasan stood just feet behind him. Matt hadn’t heard a thing, not the crunch of a twig or the rustle of footsteps through leaves. The kid had approached in absolute silence as if trained in guerrilla warfare.
Kanita motioned to Matt to take the girl in her arms, then scrambled to her feet. Eyes lowered, she scurried past the boy and disappeared around the edge of the rocks. With Hasan watching, Matt put an arm around the limp body, another under her knees and maneuvered her out of the shelter and into the open.
“I’m taking her to a doctor,” Matt said the boy. “I want you all to come with me.”
The boy stood squarely in the narrow defile between the boulders, barring the way.
“If Aida died after giving birth, Hasan, I promise you won’t get into any trouble. It wasn’t your fault, man.” Matt wasn’t sure about the legalities of child abandonment—hell, he wasn’t sure about anything anymore—but that would have to wait. “If you come with me, I’ll explain what happened. I’ll get you all the help you need.”
Hasan stood unmoving.
“Okay, your call,” Matt said.
He squeezed past the rigid figure, made his way back along the path, into the clearing. If they were illegal, they’d need a lawyer, child services, some kind of help. He could feel how tired they were, how much they wanted some relief, someone to care for them.
“Tell them it’s going to be okay, Kanita.” Although he wasn’t sure himself exactly how. “Tell them they should come with me now.”
The slight, slim figure of Hasan appeared in the clearing. His voice, filled with the biting power of rage, swept over the small group of girls.
Matt looked at Kanita. “What did he say?”
She gestured to the girl in Matt’s arms. “Okay, she go.”
“What about you and the others?”
She shook her head.
“Hasan, rain is coming. Let them come with me, man.”
The boy stared without speaking, hatred seeming to emanate from every part of his body.
Matt could feel the girl becoming heavier. He’d hit a dead end, at least for now.
“I’ll be back with food.” He included Hasan in his glance. “No police, no immigration. Stay here. We’ll talk. We’ll work it out, whatever has happened. Whatever it is, Hasan, it can be fixed.”
No one spoke.
One of the older girls put an arm around the ten-year-old and drew her closer.
At least that was something, Matt thought. He turned to go.
CHAPTER 8
As soon as they were out of the canyon, Matt picked up his cell phone, tapped out Phil Halliburton’s private number. He threw a quick glance at the girl, wondering why Hasan had let her go with only a token show of obstruction, unlike the others who needed help almost as urgently. Her eyes closed, she was still leaning against the door of the Range Rover, covered by the blanket he kept in the back for Barney.
“Phil, it’s Matt.”
“Hey, Matt, how are you doing? And that’s strictly a social question. If you have symptoms, take two aspirins and call the office on Monday. Whoops, I forgot. How’s the arm?”
Matt dispensed with a laugh at Phil’s standard joke. He’d known Halliburton since Phil opened his practice in internal medicine in Malibu ten years ago. Their relationship was mainly social, but Halliburton was the guy he saw on the rare occasions he needed a doctor.
“It’s okay, thanks. Phil, can you meet me at my house? I need some help.”
“What’s up?”
“I can’t say right now. I’ll explain when you get there.”
“If it’s a medical emergency, Matt, really, you’re better off calling 911. The paramedics have everything at their fingertips. All I’ve got is my little black bag.”
“No, I need a private doctor. Can you make it?”
A moment of silence. “You’re being very mysterious. Annie and I have plans for tonight.”
“Phil, this won’t take long. Please.”
Another silence. Matt waited him out.
“Okay, but this had better be good.”
“Bring the black bag. I owe you one, Phil.”
He hung up then called the Agoura shelter to tell them something had come up, he’d have to reschedule a time to pick up his two horses. Ten minutes later he drove into his garage. The girl had not moved since he had placed her in the seat and her eyes were still closed. He got out, opened the tailgate for Barney. Before he could go around to the passenger door, the girl slammed it open and was out of the garage, across the road, narrowly missing a passing car.
Shouting at Barney to stay, Matt tore after her. He dragged her off the bank, scooped her against his chest, started back across the street. A few houses away the car had slowed almost to a stop. He put his mouth to the girl’s ear, the words soothing and simple. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Matt crossed the road without looking in the direction of the car, the picture, he hoped, of a young father and his playful teenager, their ecstatic Labrador jumping around them in greeting. He ran along the deck by the side of the house, got the kitchen door open, kicked it closed behind him, and set the girl on her feet.
She backed away, dark hair tangled with leaves and twigs hanging in her eyes, lips bared in a snarl. Dressed as she was in flimsy silk she had to be freezing.
Matt held his hands out to the side. “It’s okay, you’re safe here. I’m not going to hurt you. A doctor is coming, you understand, a doctor?” Keeping his distance, he went to the hall closet, pulled out a blanket, held it out to her. “Put this around you.”
She kept her eyes on him without moving and he tossed the blanket on the back of the sofa that separated the living room from the kitchen. He turned the thermostat up to eighty, then knelt and touched a match to the fire. The gas lighter flared, caught the kindling, flames curled around the logs. He went back into the kitchen, filled the kettle, put it on to boil, keeping up a running commentary to reassure her.
“It will be warmer in here soon. Do you like peppermint tea?” He was completely out of his depth.
He picked up the telephone on the kitchen counter, tapped out Ginn’s number. His heart hammered in his chest while he waited, then her voice, her real voice, was in his ear.
His mouth was suddenly dry. “Ginn, it’s me.”
“Matt, I am going to hang up. Goodbye.”
“No, don’t. Ginn, listen. Please. I need help—”
“Then call your brother, or your father in Palm Springs, or Bobby. Why call me?”
Because I love you. “Because you’re a lawyer, and you’re the only one who can help.”
“Goodbye, Matt.”
Speaking quickly to hold her, he said, “I found some kids today, holed up in a canyon.”
“What?”
“Kids on their own, fourteen, fifteen, suffering from exposure and covered in poison oak. Illegals, I think. A young boy, five girls, one of them a black kid about ten.” He spoke rapidly, trying to convince her before she hung up. “I’ve got one of the girls here now, and she won’t speak. I’ve got to go back to get the others—”
“Are you crazy? Call the authorities. Call Bobby Eckhart. Do it now, before you get any deeper. Goodbye.”
“I can’t, Ginn. They’re illegals, I promised I wouldn’t call the police—” He was speaking to a dial tone.
The kettle was whistling. He rummaged around in the cupboard, found a package of peppermint teabags, dumped a couple in a mug. He covered them with water, spooned in sugar. The girl had not moved. Mug in hand, he started to walk toward her. “Now you sit down and drink this, you’ll feel better—”
She exploded into action, made an end run around him, grabbed a knife from the wooden block on the counter. She backed into the far corner of the living room, wedged herself between the built-in bookcases and the wall. She held the long narrow bladed paring knife in front of her with both hands. It looked as dangerous as a shiv.
“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” Matt said. He put the mug on the end table, and moved toward her. “You don’t need that.” Slowly, he held his hand out for the knife. “It’s very sharp. Come on, give it to me.”
She slashed at him, barely missing his fingers, and he jumped back. He could see the whites of her eyes surrounding the dark iris. She looked like a trapped animal, in shock, ready to kill, ready to die.
Footsteps pounded along the walkway and Matt backed through to the kitchen and opened the door.
“Man, am I glad you’re here.”
“So, what’s up?” Phil Halliburton took off his outer coat, hung it on the coat stand by the door. Early forties, he was tall and slender, well barbered dark hair, the kind of guy who spent time and effort cultivating a polished image. He looked more like a celebrity lawyer than a doctor. He rubbed Barney’s ears while trying to keep the Lab away from his dark slacks. “So what’s the big mystery?”
“There she is,” Matt said.
Halliburton looked at the girl pressed into the angle between bookshelves and wall, then back at Matt. He looked in shock. “Good God, Matt. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I came across a bunch of kids in Encinal. This one was lying on the ground, looking half-dead, so I brought her home and called you.”
“You what? A bunch of kids? What kids?”
“I don’t know, Phil. Just kids, obviously illegals. It was going to rain, and she looked so sick. I couldn’t leave her.”
“You kidnapped her?”
“No, I didn’t kidnap her. What are you talking about?”
“What else would you call it? Doesn’t look as if she came willingly. What’s that you’ve given her?”
“Peppermint tea, with a lot of sugar. I tried to hand it to her and she grabbed the knife.”
“Matt, you should have left her there, whoever she is, and called the authorities.”
“Yes, well, maybe, but it didn’t seem the thing to do at the time.”
Halliburton crossed the living room, but stopped when the girl jabbed the knife at him. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything.” Then Matt remembered the girl Kanita patting her mouth and shaking her head, and he realized why Hasan was willing to let her leave.
“I don’t think she can speak.”
“Can she hear?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure she can.”
Phil looked from the girl to Matt. “Oh, man, you’ve got yourself into one hell of a mess here. Well, if I can get the knife away from her, I can give her a shot, calm her down. Then we can figure out where to go from there.” Halliburton took another step toward her. The girl pressed her back deeper into the corner and kept the knife pointed toward him. “Come on, honey, put down the knife,” he said firmly. He moved closer.
Her eyes locked on his, the girl pressed the point of the blade into the soft place beneath her own chin.
“Back off, Phil,” Matt said. “She’s going to hurt herself.”
Halliburton ignored him. “Now, you’re not going to do that, are you, honey? Come on, be a good girl, put the knife on the table.”
Matt could see the point pressing deeper into the delicate skin. “Phil, back off, she means it.”
“Don’t worry, she’s bluffing.”
The skin broke, blood trickled down the girl’s throat.
Matt grabbed Halliburton’s arm. “This is not going to work. I’m going to call the sheriff’s department.”
“No, wait a minute. This kid’s in shock. Look at her, her skin’s gray, and she’s sweating. That’s not a fever. Get a bunch of deputies in here slamming about, this could escalate into a tragedy.”
His eyes on the girl, Matt said, “You just said—” He stopped as the outside door opened.
Wriggling with joy, his tail waving from side to side, Barney hurled himself against the small, slight figure in the doorway.
Ginn Chang staggered, dropped to her knees, put both arms around him. “Oh, Barns. I love you, too.” She buried her face in his neck, as if giving herself time to ease into the room. “I’ve missed you, Barns. I’ve missed you so much.” She held Barney’s head, kissed him between his eyes, then looked up at Matt.
Matt drank her in. “Ginn.”
She was wearing a bright red pea coat, a heavy white turtle-neck, jeans, the elegance of her French mother as apparent as the delicate bone structure and bloodlines of her Chinese father. Matt’s mouth was suddenly dry, his heart bumped unevenly. She hadn’t been here for ten months, the longest ten months of his life and he hadn’t heard her light step along the deck. He couldn’t see her fabulous hair, it was pushed under a red woolen watchcap—unless she’d had it cut off, an awful thought. She looked wonderful. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Well, here I am. What did I interrupt?” Ginn got to her feet, took off the hat, freeing a shoulder length mass of shining black hair. She shook her head, removed the coat, threw it on the back of a kitchen chair. She looked at the girl, took in the knife. Her eyebrows shot up. “What’s going on here?”
“This is the girl I told you about on the phone.”
“No kidding. What’s she doing with a knife?”
“She grabbed it when I tried to hand her a cup of tea.”
“He was just explaining to me how he found her in the canyon and decided to bring her home because she was sick,” Phil said. “Good to see you, Ginn.”
“You, too, Phil.” Her tone was less than convincing. Matt knew she’d never had the same regard for Phil that he had. As far as she was concerned, Phil was just one more guy who wanted everything but marriage, and was breaking Annie Lautner’s heart in the process. Matt felt his face flush as she turned back to him. “Did you call Bobby?”
“No,” Matt said. He was beginning to realize how crazy all this sounded. “I found this kid lying on the ground in Encinal. There were several others, and they were all so terrified I promised I wouldn’t contact the police.”
Ginn glanced at the girl. “She looks pretty bad.” She started across the room, the dog following. The girl’s black eyes darted from the men to Ginn, and the point of the knife pressed deeper into the soft spot beneath her chin. Beads of fresh blood oozed from the wound. Ginn stopped well short, and dropped to sit cross-legged on the floor, eye-level with the girl. Barney leaned against her and Ginn put an arm over him and drew him closer.
She smiled and said gently, “You look very tired. Why don’t I make you something to eat, and then we’ll talk. No one is going to hurt you, sweetie.”
The girl’s dark eyes swept across the two men, then came back to Ginn. The hand holding the knife was shaking.
Ginn picked up the mug, put it to her nose and inhaled. She smiled. “Nice. Peppermint. Have some.” She held it out. The girl shrunk back. Ginn sipped the tea. “Mmm. Good.” Slowly, carefully, she pulled the small end table within the girl’s reach, replaced the mug and got to her feet. “Have you got any eggs, Matt?”
“Yes, sure.”
“This girl is in shock, suicidal, probably psychotic. Eggs won’t cure that,” Halliburton said.
“Can’t hurt. Why don’t you two go sit at the kitchen table while I fix something for her to eat. Give her some space.”
Ginn moved around easily in the kitchen that had been hers for five years. She scrambled eggs, toasted bread, put oatmeal cookies on a plate, warmed milk. She placed the food on a tray, carried it over to the table and put it down. As if the last of her strength was deserting her, the girl had leaned her back against the wall. Even with both hands wrapped around the handle of the knife, she was only just managing to keep it upright, the shaking point at her throat.
Tail waving, Barney followed the tray. Trained to ignore any food unless invited, he nuzzled the girl, then licked her face. The knife wavered, the girl sagged against him and the same thin, terrible moans Matt had first heard in the canyon seemed wrenched from her throat. The sound arrowed straight into his heart.
Ginn knelt in front of her and slowly reached for the knife. She covered the girl’s hand with her own, holding it until the small fingers relaxed the knife into her hand. Barney licked the girl’s face anxiously and she put her arms around him, burying her head in his shoulder.
Briefly, Ginn touched the girl’s dirty, tangled hair, then reached for the blanket on the back of the couch and draped it over her shoulders. The girl’s face was hidden in Barney’s coat, but the moans were turning into sobs. Ginn passed her fingers briefly over her eyes before standing up slowly to rejoin the two men at the kitchen table.
“Now what?” Matt said softly.
Phil got his bag, broke open a sealed sterile syringe, selected a vial, drew the colorless liquid into the syringe.
“The first thing is to quiet her down, give her some relief from all that anxiety. It will also give me a chance to examine her. Something’s caused all this.”
“Leave her alone, Phil,” Ginn said. “Just let her cry.”
“So, you’re a doctor now, Genevieve?” Halliburton asked pleasantly.
“It just seems common sense, that’s all. Look at her.”
The girl had her arms around Barney, her head resting on him. The dog sat quietly, his eyes on the plate of food. “I’d use a knife, too, if some strange guy came at me with a needle, wouldn’t you? Sit down, I’ll make some tea.”
Matt smiled to himself. Ginn’s response to most crises was tea. The canister she had left when she moved out was still full of some blend she had sent to her from Canada.
Phil replaced the syringe and vial, and closed his bag. “That little girl is suffering from exposure, dehydration and hysteria. She’s suicidal and should be in a hospital.”
“How can I send her to a hospital?” Matt said. “Who am I going to say she is? I don’t know her name or anything about her. I can’t answer any questions. How long could we get away with it if I made up something?”
“Maybe she’s a runaway and she’s got parents searching for her, frantic with worry. Did you think about that?”
“Phil, does she look like a runaway to you, with a loving family somewhere? They’re not runaways, these kids, not unless they’ve run away from a circus. They were all dressed in these bizarre outfits. One little kid was black, Phil. Ten years old and African. And not African-American, from some place in Africa. God knows what language she speaks. And it’s going to rain.”
Matt looked out the window. The sky was heavy with cloud and a band of rain moved across the horizon. Ginn put a mug in front of him, handed the other to Halliburton, and took a chair from which she could keep an eye on Barney and the girl. With her head, Ginn motioned for Matt to look, and he turned. The girl was kneeling in front of the little table, shoveling food into her mouth, with Barney at her side following each bite. Smiling, Matt held Ginn’s eyes, sharing a moment of pleasure with her for the first time in almost a year.
“I really don’t understand what’s going on here, Matt.” Halliburton had not picked up on the moment. “What were you doing in Encinal in the first place? Isn’t that where a girl’s body was found couple of days ago?”
“What body?” Ginn asked.
“You don’t know about that? A girl was found dead by the side of the road,” Halliburton said. “Do you think this girl, these kids, could be tied up somehow with that?”
“I don’t know. Could be.” Matt looked at Ginn. “During the fire, I had to come home along the beach. Just past the Edwards old house, I found a baby, maybe a couple of hours old. When I got her here, she was dead. The girl they found might be her mother.”
“Oh, Matt! Oh, my God!”
“You didn’t tell me about that when you came to get stitched up,” Phil said.
Shrugging in dismissal, Matt showed Ginn the Band-Aid covering the wound on his wrist. “I must have cut it breaking a window at Jimmy’s. Phil put a couple of stitches in. Anyway, a couple of sheriff’s detectives came to see me about the baby and they told me a girl’s body had been found, covered in wild-flowers, so I went to have a look at the place for myself. I saw these kids but when I called out, they ran, so I followed them. Five girls and a boy. One of the girls spoke a few words of English, really a few words, I could barely understand her. It was very strange, they seemed to be completely dominated by the boy.”
“If they’re that scared, you’d think they’d put distance between themselves and the place where a body was found, not hang around like that,” Phil said.
“That’s what I thought.” Matt got to his feet. “First I’m going to get some clothes together for them and then I’m going to try to bring them back with me. Their clothes were barely covering them, and it’s cold out there now.” He nodded toward the girl. “I had to wrap that one in Barney’s blanket.”
“You’re planning to keep five, six kids here?” Halliburton looked around the combined kitchen, dining room, living room. “Besides the little detail that it’s illegal, this whole place is smaller than my foyer.”
“I’ll think of something. Phil, can you stay here with Ginn for about an hour?”
Halliburton held up a warning hand. “Sorry. I’ve done all I’m going to do. I was never here, I don’t know anything about illegal kids. Annie and I are going out to dinner.” He got up, took his coat from the stand, shrugged into it. “This girl needs care and she should be watched.” He picked up his bag. “Plenty of fluids, light nourishing food, bed rest. Lock away the knives. Good seeing you, Ginn.” He closed the door firmly behind him.
“Good seeing you, too, Phil,” Ginn said to the closed door. The retreating footsteps faded. “So what are you going to do with a bunch of illegal kids you can’t communicate with?”
“I don’t know.” Matt hesitated, then said, “Would you feel safe staying alone with her? I won’t be gone long.”
“You’re really going to bring them here?”
“If you’ve got a better suggestion, God knows I’m open to it.”
Ginn shook her head. “All right, I’ll stay, but I’ll have to make a call. I had plans, too.”
“Oh. Okay, I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Matt went into the small spare bedroom. Of course she was dating, he should have expected that. But right now she was here, with him. That was something. He opened the closet, pulled out skis and poles, tennis racquets, a couple of baseball bats and mitts, and threw them on the bed so that he could get at the shelves of old winter clothes, some of it his, some of it Ginn had left behind when she moved out. Her sweats were small enough for the girls to wear, Hasan, too, come to that. He was so slight he was hardly there. A tough little bastard, though, a fighter. Matt cleared a shelf, dumped the clothes into a black canvas bag.
Then he felt Ginn behind him. Matt breathed in the scent she always wore, maybe from the giant bottle he’d put in her stocking last Christmas with a card from Barney…Not last Christmas. Last Christmas was the first without her in five years. Last Christmas he’d skied in Davos and fucked his brains out with some Italian girl whose name he didn’t even remember.
“I raided the refrigerator. You haven’t got much, just some cheese and bread and some apples. I put in water as well.” Ginn handed him a plastic bin liner. “I tried to get her into bed but she wouldn’t go. She’s lying down on the couch, so that’s something. I had to let Barney get up on the couch with her.”
Matt gave a small laugh. “Bet that was hard.”
“You know Barns. Matt, do you think Phil will go to the sheriff?”
“Come on. I know he’s not your favorite, but he wouldn’t do that.” He packed in another load, fastened the bag and stood. “Okay, now you’ve got my cell phone number, Bobby’s is on speed dial on the kitchen phone and in the bedroom. If she gets violent or threatens you, just run. You leave her, or you let her go if that’s what she wants. Don’t try to stop her. Promise me.”
“Matt, she’s not going to do anything like that.”
“Ginn, please, just do as I ask. Promise me.”
“Okay. I promise. But don’t worry, I’ve got Barney.”
Matt picked up the bag. “Back in an hour.”
CHAPTER 9
Using the bag as a brake, Matt half slid, half slithered down into the canyon. The heavy moisture of late afternoon intensified the foul stink of the burn being drawn toward the ocean.
“Kanita!” His voice came back at him. His stomach was heavy with the weight of anxiety. “Hasan!” He hefted the bag, made his way to the piled rocks and trees where he had left them, his boots sliding on wet rock. He stood by the boulders, yelled again, listened to the silence resonate. He dumped the bag, walked the immediate area, then widened the search, calling, scanning the ground for footprints, but the leaf-strewn ground gave up nothing but the wrapper from the energy bar he’d given the child.
Hasan had herded them away, and they could be anywhere by now. Images flipped through his mind, the girls crying, the little group huddling together for comfort—and the child, her face filled with bewilderment and terror. She was about the same age he’d been when his mother died. He knew the bewilderment, but he’d never experienced the kind of terror he’d seen on that little girl’s face.
He returned to where he’d left the canvas carryall, took out his wallet, tucked every bill he had into a side pocket, not much, five twenties, a ten and some singles. He carried the bag to the little shelter under the trees, knelt to shove it way back into the darkest patch of tangled branches. He stood and looked around. He’d done all he could. So why did he feel so lousy?
The headlights on the Range Rover picked up Ginn’s silver BMW, then swept across a new black Mercedes 500 parked just beyond it. Matt drove into the garage, turned off the ignition, walked along the side deck. Ginn had put on the beach lights, illuminating the sand in front of the house, and the curl of the waves hitting the beach. She always used to do that when he worked late.
He opened the door. “Sorry it took so long,” he called out.
“It’s okay, Phil kept me company,” Ginn said. She came into the kitchen, looked over his shoulder. “Where are they?”
“They weren’t there. I left the stuff under a tree.” Matt hung up his coat and glanced at Halliburton. “I thought you had a dinner date with Annie.”
Phil shrugged. “I cancelled. I couldn’t leave you alone with this.”
A surprisingly kind gesture. He and Phil were not that close. “Thanks. Where is she?” He looked at the sofa, then at Ginn. “Where’s Barney?”
“I managed to persuade her to get into bed. Barney’s with her, she seems to feel better when he’s there. I think she’s sleeping. Phil, can I get you a fresh drink?”
“Sure, thanks.”
Ginn reached into the cupboard for glasses, mixed the drinks, put a vodka and tonic on the coffee table in front of Phil, handed the other glass to Matt, then poured a glass of Chardonnay for herself. Matt wondered if she realized she had not asked him what he wanted, she’d just fallen into their old end of the day routine, Laphroaig and water for him, white wine for her.
Matt swirled the liquid in his glass. His breath felt heavy, his very bones felt as if they were made of lead. “I think I’m going to have to call Bobby Eckhart.”
“We’ve already been through that. It’s not an option,” Ginn said. “Bobby would have to report it. She’d be taken into custody right away.”
Matt got up, walked around the sofa, looked out the window. The horizon had closed in, as if a gray curtain had dropped fifty yards out. The forecast said rain would move onshore sometime during the night but it looked as if it was already here. “Phil, can you get me a nurse, twenty-four-hour care?”
“You mean, live in? Here?” Phil asked.
“Well, I can’t leave her, I can’t take her to the hospital, what else is there?”
“Well, I suppose I could take her home with me,” Phil said slowly. “My housekeeper Lupe was illegal herself before the amnesty.”
“What about Annie?” Matt asked.
“What about her? We don’t live together. Besides, it’s only until you find another solution.”
Matt felt a flood of relief. “I’ll start with an immigration lawyer tomorrow.”
Phil looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. You got something to put on her? I can’t take her out dressed like that.”
“There’s still some of Ginn’s stuff in the closet.”
“I’ll get it.” Ginn got up, disappeared into the small guest bedroom.
As soon as she’d left, Phil opened his medical bag. “I’m going to have to give her that shot, Matt. I won’t be able to deal with her in the car if she’s hysterical.”
“No, I’m with Ginn on this. You saw how she was.”
“That’s precisely the point. A shot of Valium and there’s no danger of it happening again.” Halliburton opened the bedroom door.
The girl’s shriek brought Ginn hurtling through the doorway. She dropped a pile of clothes to the floor, shot across the room.
“What are you doing?” She saw the syringe in Halliburton’s hand. “It’s the needle, she’s frightened of the needle.”
“It’s hysteria, Ginn. In two minutes, she’s going to be okay.”
“No, she’s not,” Ginn said. “She’s terrified.”
The girl was curled into the fetal position, her shrieks replaced by the awful mewling of terror.
“This is not the first hysterical teenager I’ve treated. It’s just Valium, for God’s sake.”
“You’re not giving her anything. You guys get out,” Ginn said. “Go on. I’ll sit with her. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Ginn, this is a medical problem,” Phil said. “It’s hysteria, pure and simple.”
Ginn shot him a look that would have withered fruit on the trees. “Got it. Thanks, Phil. Leave Barney here when you go.”
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Shirley Palmer
Matt Lowell never set out to be a hero…but he wasn't given a choice.As a wildfire rages in the canyons around Malibu, Matt Lowell races along the edge of the surf in a desperate attempt to reach his house and save his dog, Barney. But as he runs he stumbles upon a horror that stops him in his tracks: a newborn baby abandoned in the sand. And before he can get her to safety, the baby dies in his arms.When the police find the baby's teenage mother dead on the side of the canyon road, her body covered with wildflowers, Matt can't ignore the unexpected sense of duty he feels for these innocent victims. And so he decides to get involved, a decision that will set in motion irreversible consequences–and lead him straight into the midst of an unspeakable crime ring of greed, slavery and murder.Matt Lowell is about to find out that doing the right thing could be the last thing he ever does…
PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR SHIRLEY PALMER
“A first-rate, nailbiting hardcover-debut thriller…
Admirably paced and plotted, with the kind of guns-a-popping denouement that begs for transfer to the big screen.”
—Kirkus Reviews on Danger Zone
“With its taut plot, [Palmer’s] African thriller makes a suspenseful follow-up to her previous book,
A Veiled Journey.”
—Publishers Weekly on Lioness
“This romantic thriller…explores the complexities of culture as well as those of the human heart.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Veiled Journey
“…a suspense thriller…[with a] frenetic tempo and myriad plot twists.”
—Publishers Weekly on Danger Zone
Also by SHIRLEY PALMER
DANGER ZONE
LIONESS
A VEILED JOURNEY
The Trade
Shirley Palmer
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is dedicated to those who suffer from this most heinous of crimes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks go first to editors Dianne Moggy and Amy Moore-Benson for their patience and continued support during the past year. Thanks, too, to Ken Atchity at AEI; to Andrea McKeown for her invaluable input; to Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Sergeant Ray Verdugo, ret.; and to Hae Jung Cho, former director of the Coalition Against Slavery and Trafficking in Los Angeles.
Finally, this book could not have been written without researcher/editor Mignon McCarthy, who not only contributed the facts upon which the entire structure rests, but gave unstintingly of her time, her literary expertise, her enthusiasm and her words. It gives me much pleasure to acknowledge the work she has done.
All errors, of course, are entirely mine.
This is a work of fiction.
The events described did not happen.
No such club exists in Malibu, nor has there ever been a breath of rumor to indicate otherwise.
To serve the story being told, the author has taken some liberty with the topography of this small, treasured Southern California town.
For this she begs indulgence.
In the perception of the smallest is the secret of clear vision;
In the guarding of the weakest is the secret of all strength.
—Lao Tse
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 (#uf56ee87e-f65d-5d8b-b8e5-6f17a3bf7811)
CHAPTER 2 (#u55e5bcd4-0d2a-58c8-b246-75bc073b3772)
CHAPTER 3 (#uc286facf-f57c-5d7b-bfcd-9498bd86a58b)
CHAPTER 4 (#u24d79343-92e5-58ba-a074-102e73a0f615)
CHAPTER 5 (#ucc9f3eb2-c644-5db3-9901-47e6fabf517d)
CHAPTER 6 (#ubd272ab9-92a5-5d23-bebd-00e18fae903a)
CHAPTER 7 (#u8b92d1a5-4180-5b2a-91ae-cf75d2fd7e45)
CHAPTER 8 (#u0b0192df-c5a8-574c-9ddc-28f70623a277)
CHAPTER 9 (#u58644790-4704-56c3-85c7-1529bd92b7fd)
CHAPTER 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 1
A storm of wind-tossed embers burst through the smoke, crossed the Pacific Coast Highway, caught the dry grasses along the ocean side of the road. A stand of eucalyptus trees exploded into flame. Suddenly visibility was zero.
Matt Lowell forced himself not to jam his foot on the gas. Without the weight of the two horses, the empty trailer was already rocking dangerously. The wind slamming against it had to be gusting at eighty miles an hour.
At Trancas Canyon Road, the traffic lights were out, the Mobil station and the market both dark. On the other side of the intersection, the whirling blue and red light bars across the top of sheriff’s black and whites became visible through the murk. A police barricade stretched across the highway, blocking all lanes, north and south.
A deputy sheriff waved Matt down, his sharp arm movements directing him left into the Trancas Market parking lot. Matt recognized Bobby Eckhart. They’d been at preschool together, gone through Webster Elementary and Cub Scouts, surfed the coast from Rincon to Baja. Raised some hell.
Matt pulled over to the median and lowered the window. The acrid stink of disaster caught in his throat—chaparral burning on the hillsides, houses, furniture, lives going up in flames.
“Bobby,” he shouted. “I’ve got to get through.”
The deputy looked to see who was shouting, then jogged over to the pickup. “Hey, Matt.” Eckhart looked like hell, eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, his usually immaculate tan uniform charred on one sleeve, and streaked with ash. “The PCH is closed, but we’re getting a convoy out over Kanan Dume while it’s still open. We can sure use your trailer. Take it over to the creek area, and start loading some of those animals.”
Matt shot a glance at the parking lot. Another uniformed deputy was trying to bring some order into the chaos of vehicles loaded with a crazy assortment of household goods; anxious adults riding herd on kids holding onto family pets: dogs, cats, bird and hamster cages. A makeshift corral held a small flock of black sheep, a couple of potbellied pigs, some goats. Horse trailers, rocking under the nervous movements of their occupants, lined the edge of the parched creek. In October when the Santa Ana’s roar straight out of the desert, water is a distant memory of spring.
“My horses are down in Ramirez. I’ve got to get them out.”
“Margie Little brought a couple of trailers out of there an hour ago. They’re over at the shelter in Agoura.”
“Did you see my two?”
Eckhart shook his head. “But you can’t get down there, Matt, not now. It’s been evacuated, everyone’s out.” His words ended in a fit of coughing.
Matt put his head out of the window, peered into the blanket of smoke shrouding the highway. “Where the hell are the fire crews?”
“They’re spread pretty thin but more are coming. This brute skipped the PCH at noon today, in some places it’s burned clear down to the ocean, and now some crazy bastard is setting fires along Mulholland in the backcountry.”
Matt’s gut clenched. His house was on the beach, and Barney was locked inside. “What about Malibu Road?”
“Blocked at both ends, but it was evacuated earlier today. Escondido, Latigo Shores, everything. Last I heard it was still okay, but the wind’s getting worse.”
“Bobby, I’ve got to get through. Barney’s locked in the house.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Eckhart looked stricken, he had known the yellow Lab since he was a pup. “Matt, I’m sorry, but the official word is no traffic on the PCH from here to Topanga, only law enforcement and fire crews. But you slip by, I sure can’t follow with lights and sirens.” He thumped the top of the cab with a clenched fist, and started back toward the parking lot. Matt let in the clutch.
The emptiness was eerie. No traffic along Zuma Beach. No surfers crossing, their boards balanced overhead. Twice birds literally fell out of the sky—whether from exhaustion or burns it was impossible to know—and hit the road in front of him.
At Ramirez, he pulled into the turn and jumped out of the pickup in front of the tunnel built under the highway to lead back into the canyon. The intricate metal gates barring entry to the tunnel were closed, and he ran to the keypad that would open them, cursing the day they had been installed. A movie star had dazzled the residents when it had come to a vote at the homeowner’s association. Then she got married, sold her collection of stuff, donated her property to Nature Conservancy and moved to Point Dume. Only the goddamn gates remained.
Matt entered the code. Nothing happened. Cursing, he banged out the number again. The gates jerked, held. He tried again, jamming a finger at the numbers, slamming a foot against the gate as it jerked. A burst of black smoke billowed from the darkness and he ran back to the pickup.
Matt thought quickly. Maybe Margie got the horses out, maybe she didn’t. If she didn’t, she’d open the corral, let them take their chances. A lot of people had had to do that in the 1978 fire, it had moved so fast. Either way, there was nothing he could do about it now. But Barney was at home, locked inside. If he dumped the trailer, he could jam through with the pickup, and be there in ten minutes.
The metal hitch was too hot to touch. Quickly, he reached inside the trailer, grabbed the leather gloves he used for hauling hay. He sent an anxious glance up into the eucalyptus trees. For a long choking moment, he wrestled with the hitch. Then fire swept through the oleanders, jumped to a pair of cedars, ran up the trunks of the eucalyptus. The tossing crowns exploded into flame. A shower of sparks hit the trailer, found the shreds of hay on the floor inside, ignited. Within seconds trailer and pickup were engulfed.
“I’m not going to make it.” Matt heard his own voice, maybe in his head, maybe he was yelling. “God, I’m not going to make it.”
He raced down the road to the Cove restaurant and the beach. Half a mile seemed suddenly impossible. Melting asphalt grabbed at his feet, fifty-foot eucalyptus trees were going up like oil-soaked torches, burning leaves tossed in the wind like missiles spreading fire wherever they touched. Beyond the trees on his right, the Sunset Pines trailer park was a sea of flames, metal screamed as heat buckled the double-wides, the force of the wind lifting blazing roofs, sending them spinning like giant fiery kites.
At the edge of the water the restaurant was still untouched, the old wooden pier still standing. Not a soul was around. The Cove had been abandoned.
Matt smashed a window in the kitchen door, thrust a hand through to the lock and let himself in. Normally booming with activity at this hour, the interior was utterly still, empty. He grabbed some bottled water from a refrigerator, left by the side door directly onto the beach. The sky was darker, an ominous dirty orange reflecting the fire and the low, late afternoon sun. It had to be close to sunset, but it was hard to tell.
Ash and smoke eddied in the wind, lifting the sand into a murky, eye-stinging soup. The edge of the bluff was in flames, the multimillion-dollar houses fronting the ocean probably already engulfed. Fire ate at the cascading purple ice plant, smoldering clumps dropped into the water lapping at the base of the cliff. The swells on the sea were a dark hammered bronze, the tops of the waves blown apart by the offshore wind.
Without slowing his pace, Matt struggled out of his jacket, stooping to drag it through the water. Debris tumbled in the surf, the bodies of singed birds, fish floating belly up in the unnaturally warmed water. He covered his head with the wet jacket, kept as far as he could from the base of the cliff and the brush falling in great blazing arcs blown by the wind.
The sea dragged at every step. He prayed he wouldn’t stumble into a hole—he’d surfed this coast all his life, and with a booming tide like this racing in, he knew the rip could tear a grown man’s legs from under him, drag him out to sea.
The beach widened, the bluff on his left was lower now, breaking down into sandstone gullies and he was able to get his bearing. The stairs to what used to be the Edwards place were charred and rocking with every gusts, but still standing. He could hear his breath laboring, and his lungs felt seared. Even this close to the water, the Santa Ana winds drew every scrap of moisture out of the air. In the oven-hot wind howling under a dirty sky, he felt as if he could be the last man left alive on a devastated earth.
He took a swig of the bottled water, warm now from the heat. Ahead, a large seabird, a dead pelican probably, tangled in a fisherman’s discarded line—it happened all the time—lay close to the edge of the surf. Matt fixed his eyes on it as a measure of his progress along the beach. As he got closer, he realized it wasn’t a pelican. Maybe a doll with a scrap of copper-colored fabric wrapped around it. He glanced down as he passed, took several more strides. Uncertain, he turned back.
An advancing wave broke around his ankles and tugged at the small pale form. It moved, then responding to the pull of the water, started to roll. Matt reached down instinctively to stop its slide to the sea. Suddenly he found the smoke-filled air even more difficult to draw into his lungs and in spite of the heat, the blood pumping through his veins felt icy. He picked up the tiny form, held it against his body, and put his fingers against its throat.
He felt the thready flutter of a pulse.
CHAPTER 2
Matt stripped away the wet silky covering, struggled out of his polo shirt and wrapped the newborn infant, a girl, in the soft cotton. Her eyes were closed, her hands curled into tiny fists. Downy strands of gold hair feathered damply against her head.
He scanned the beach but the blowing sand and smoke and falling ash cut visibility down to a few yards. Rabbits and a couple of raccoons huddled against the low bluff close to a flock of gulls. He could see nothing that could possibly be a human form.
Who would leave a baby like this?
He held the almost weightless bundle against his chest with some idea of warming her with his own body heat, put on his wet jacket to protect them both against falling debris, and started back along the beach toward the stairs up to the Edwards house. If they were still standing, maybe there would be firefighters trying to save it.
He scanned the beach as he ran. Trash thrown up by a polluted ocean was caught in the giant kelp above the high tide mark—nylon fishing line, plastic holders for six packs, bits of Styrofoam coolers. No sign of the mother, no patch of blood, nothing to show that a woman had just given birth. He stumbled across a beam of charred wood and saw the beach was littered with planks.
The stairs. Since he had passed them only minutes ago, the ferocious wind had blown the damaged stairs apart.
He swept his eyes across the low bluff, looking for another way up, handholds, anything, but even if he could find a way, the top of the cliff was blazing. He hesitated—the empty restaurant was closer than his own place, he could go back. But he’d lived in Malibu all his life, seen flames leap two hundred feet in seconds, consume a house in minutes. And the tide was roaring in. He had to get home.
Flooded with relief, Matt jogged across the dry sand, toward his own beach stairs. The small gray clapboard house was intact. The large houses on either side were dark, not surprising. His neighbors used them only on weekends, and that rarely.
For the last hour he’d been running nonstop, across soft sand, in and out of the ocean, holding the baby close as he clambered over the bare rocky reefs that would normally be covered by resting seals as the tide receded. On a night like this, though, they’d stay out at sea.
The sky was a cauldron, the fire dangerously close. He could feel blasts of heat from the thirty-foot flames now whirling south on the ridge above the Pacific Coast Highway as it followed the curve of the coastline toward the enormous expanse of lawn fronting Pepperdine University. That lawn still pissed a lot of people off, they were still arguing about the amount of water used to keep it green, the contaminated runoff draining into the Santa Monica Bay, but in a wildfire it could be a godsend, a break where fire crews could make a stand.
If the wind turned west again as it easily could, a maelstrom like this created its own wind patterns, flames would be across the highway in minutes, take the houses above his on the land side of Malibu Road, jump to the beach side and burn clear down to the water. From what he’d seen, so far the flames had reached oceanside houses in a staggered pattern, driven by the changing wind. His place was vulnerable, clapboard with an old shake roof, it would go in seconds.
He pushed open the door into his smoky kitchen, staggering as eighty pounds of terrified dog hurled himself at his legs.
“It’s okay, Barns. It’s okay, boy.” Matt held off the Lab with one hand and picked up the phone. No dial tone. The line was dead. He shook it in frustration. Of course it was dead—the phone lines were down. This wasn’t the first fire he’d been through in his thirty-six years, he should have remembered that. At least he had his mobile.
The baby close against his chest, he searched his jacket. Then again. Patted the pockets in his pants. The phone was gone. He’d dropped it somewhere on the beach.
He laid the child down on the soft couch in the living room, touched her pale cheek. She was cool. Colder than she had been when he picked her up. Matt felt for the pulse in the baby’s throat, as he’d done on the beach. He couldn’t find it. He flexed his fingers, felt on the other side. No pulse. Maybe he was doing it wrong. He rubbed his fingers on the couch to sensitize them, tried again. Nothing. Heart hammering, he knelt, held the tiny nose, blew gently into the infant’s mouth. Once, twice. Again. But he knew it was useless. There was no breath, no heartbeat. The baby was dead. Sometime in the last hour, as they made their way down the beach, she had died in his arms. He had not even known when life left her. Surely, he should have felt something.
He sat back on his heels. She was so delicate, so fragile, she made barely a dent in the cushion. Long lashes fanned her cheeks. He didn’t even know what color her eyes were. What sort of woman would abandon her defenseless newborn on an empty beach?
Minutes passed. Barney pushed his nose at Matt’s hand, then started to howl as if he knew, a mournful sound that gave a voice to the tangle of feeling swelling in Matt’s chest.
Matt put a hand on Barney’s head, and took a long, deep painful breath. The smoke inside the house was thicker now, the heat increasing. Barney nudged at him insistently. Matt knew he had to get some water on the roof, and soon. He looked at her one last time, then covered her face with his shirt and got to his feet.
“Come on, boy.” He snapped on Barney’s leash in case they had to make a run for it, took the Lab with him into his bedroom. Black particles of ash hung in the air and coated every surface; shadows danced madly in the dirty amber glow that was the only light, but it was enough for him to see what he needed to see. He stripped, got into dry jeans and shirt, socks and heavy boots, then retrieved a black carry-on bag from the closet and looked around for the things that were important enough to save.
He picked up the photograph by his bed, an eight-by-ten of Ginn and himself, Barney at their feet, taken last summer, and put it into the bag. The only other things of value were a framed picture of his mother and an album of old photographs of them together when he was a kid. His memory of her had dimmed over the years, only the pictures kept it alive. He took a second to wrap them in a T-shirt before putting them in the bag, threw in a handful of underwear, socks, some jeans on top. He took some of his books from the shelves in the living room, his laptop. He already had Barney ready to run. That was it. Except for the house itself, there was nothing else here he cared about.
He tied a bandanna around his nose and mouth, then grabbed all the towels in the linen cupboard, dropped the bag by the kitchen door where he could get it easily if they had to get down to the water. He slammed the door closed behind him to keep Barney confined in the house, ran along the side of the house toward the little shed of a detached garage facing the road. He could hear the rumble of fire trucks, power horns and sirens on the Coast Highway above Malibu Road. Help was on the way at last and the fire crews would make a stand wherever they could as long as they had water pressure. At least he and Barney could always get down to the ocean, so they wouldn’t be trapped. If it came to it, he’d let the house, his mother’s house, burn.
Without electricity the garage door was immovable. He climbed behind the wheel of the Range Rover parked inside, shoved the gear into Reverse, hit the gas and rammed the heavy vehicle at the overhead door. The old structure shook but the warped wood splintered at the first attempt and he was through. He got out, grabbed three of Bobby Eckhart’s surfboards, shoved them into the back, added a couple of his own. The ladder he kept for repairs had fallen off the wall with the impact. He picked it up, threw it onto the patio, then backed the Range Rover up to the street, away from the structure. Only a block away, a couple of houses were burning.
He unwound the hose on the patio, turned the spigot, let out a grunt of relief when water spurted, then shoved the nozzle into an empty trash barrel and filled it, dumped in the towels. He soaked his bandanna and retied it over his nose and mouth, dragged the hose with him up the ladder to the roof.
If the water pressure stayed strong, if the wind didn’t turn, if he could beat out sparks with the towels before they got a hold under the wooden shakes—a hell of a lot of ifs—he had a chance of saving the house. His mother’s house.
Matt looked at his watch, saw that it was after midnight. The arc of the night sky from east to west was still red with fire, but something was different. The wind had changed direction and was blowing onshore. He wouldn’t call it moisture exactly, but for the first time in hours he felt as if he could take a full breath without cooking his lungs.
He went out to the street again. Everything in the front of the house was gone, the fence, the bushes, a couple of trees, and the bougainvillea that his mother had planted for privacy thirty years ago. At least the house had survived, scorched but still there. Many landside houses above his, and several along his stretch of beach, were smoking ruins. Fire crews hadn’t even made it down here until now, when it was all over and the firestorm had moved on.
A sheriff’s patrol car cruised by and Matt stepped into the road to wave it down. The black and white slowed. The deputy sheriff looked him over.
“Who are you? This area is evacuated, authorized personnel only.”
Matt had been hoping for Bob Eckhart. He didn’t recognize the man speaking to him.
Matt said, “I live here. You got a minute? I’ve got something here you should see.”
“You got identification?”
“Sure.” Matt reached for the wallet he’d transferred from his wet jeans, flipped it open to his driver’s license.
The deputy reached for it. “What happened to your arm?”
Matt held it up, surprised to see a gash and streaks of dried blood. “I don’t know, I guess I must’ve cut it when I broke a window at the Cove to get some water.”
“I see.” The deputy handed back the license. “Well, I’ll have to get back to you, just as soon as I’ve checked out the end of the road. Things are still pretty hectic.” Fire equipment moved along the road, wetting down hotspots, checking roofs. The black and white started to roll.
Matt paced with the car. “No, wait a minute. Listen, you’ve got to come inside. Sounds crazy I know, but I’ve got a dead baby here.”
The car stopped. The deputy stared at him for a long moment, then pulled off the road. He retrieved a flashlight, played it over Matt’s face, along the still-smoking stumps of the bougainvillea, across the newly exposed house and patio. Barney, muzzle pressed against the bedroom window no longer shielded from the street by shrubbery, barked a warning. The deputy picked up his radio transmitter. “This is 103. I’ve got a report of a 927D at…” He looked at Matt. “What’s the address here?”
Matt told him, the deputy repeated the address, then signed off. He stepped out of the car.
“How come you didn’t evacuate with everyone else?” His voice was guardedly neutral.
“I wasn’t here when the order came. I came home later by way of the beach.”
“What’s your name again, sir?”
“Matthew Lowell. Yours?”
“Deputy Timms.” Ramrod posture, early thirties, dark hair short back and sides, but surprisingly long on top for a deputy sheriff. He followed Matt across the patio, along the deck by the side of the house into the candlelit kitchen.
Matt opened the door of the refrigerator. Except for a small bundle wrapped in a bright-blue polo shirt, the shelves were empty.
“What is this, some kind of joke?” Timms turned a darkening face toward Matt.
“No.” Matt gestured to the sink piled with jars and containers, orange juice, mayonnaise, olives, a carton of eggs. “In this heat, I couldn’t think of what else to do. And I thought if the house burned, she would be safer, maybe. I don’t know. I found her on the beach last night when I was coming home.”
“Jesus.” Timms reached into the refrigerator.
Matt turned away. Even in the flickering candlelight, he couldn’t bear to look again at the little face.
“There’s a lot of blood on this shirt,” Timms said.
“Must be mine. From when I cut my arm.”
“You say you found this baby, you weren’t there when it was born?”
“No, I wasn’t there when she was born. I found her, I told you. I took my shirt off and wrapped her in it because there wasn’t anything else to use. I didn’t realize there was blood on it. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, that’s all I had, my shirt.”
“I see. It’s a girl,” Timms said. “Where did you say you found it?”
“Her. I found her on the beach.”
Timms gave him another long, hard stare. “How long have you lived at this address, Mr. Lowell?”
“Most of my life, on and off. It belonged to my parents. We lived on Point Dume but we spent a lot of time here. They planned to tear this old place down and build a decent house, but my mother—” He stopped. Timms would think he was nuts, running on with his life’s story. “I’ve lived here permanently since I got out of college. Fourteen years.”
“I see. Well, I can’t get the M.E. out here now, they won’t get through. PCH is still closed in both directions. I’ll have to call this in. You wait here.”
The deputy hesitated as if uncertain what to do with a dead child, then put the tiny body back where he’d found her, and started across the kitchen. He stopped at the sound of a voice, and footsteps on the wooden deck.
“Hey, Matt. What’s going on? Everything okay?” Deputy sheriff Bobby Eckhart walked in without knocking. Lean and athletic, he was powerful through the shoulders from years of paddling out to meet the surf. Blond hair cropped close, tonight his usually clear gray eyes were swollen and bloodshot.
“Pete, what’s going on?” Bobby said to Timms. “I heard the 927D.”
“Mr. Lowell here says he found a dead baby on the beach.”
“What?” Bobby looked sharply at Matt. “Where?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere this side of the Edwards place. When I was trying to get home.”
“Oh, Matt. How old?”
“Maybe only hours. No more than a day.”
“That’s a rough one, buddy. You okay? You’re bleeding.”
“It’s nothing. Just a cut. I broke a window at Jimmy’s place to get some water.”
While they spoke, Timms had reopened the refrigerator, and unwrapped Matt’s shirt from around the tiny form.
“Oh, jeez, just look at this.”
“I’ve already seen her.” Matt went out onto the deck, leaving the two deputies alone. He heard Bobby’s calm voice.
“Pete, I think you’d better take it up to the courthouse. They’ve got the command post set up there.”
“You know this guy?” Timms asked.
“All my life. Those are my surfboards in his Range Rover. I keep them in his garage—saves me tracking them down from Las Flores. I catch a few waves after work sometimes.”
Timms grunted. “Yeah? Then better if you take the baby to the courthouse and I get his statement.”
Matt stared out over the ocean, one of the few remaining places in Los Angeles uncontaminated by city lights, where a star-filled night was visible. But tonight the sky was shrouded, the glow from the fire still coloring the smoke hanging low over the sea.
If he had the juice, he thought, he’d be pissed off at the doubt he could hear in Timms’s voice, the guy obviously thought he was lying—but suddenly the events of the last few punishing hours had come up and hit him in the face. He felt wrecked, and knew something in his life had shifted, although he had no idea what that could be.
He turned at the sound of Bobby’s voice asking, “Where’s Barney? Is he all right?”
“Yes, I’ve got him locked in the bedroom.”
“Timms has gone.” Bobby handed Matt a bottle of Evian, and leaned his belly against the railing. “I saw Margie Little. Your horses are over in Agoura. Be good if you could make arrangements for them, the animal shelter is pushed to the limit.”
“I’ll get them out of there as soon as I can. Your house okay?” Bobby and his wife Sylvie had a tiny place in Las Flores Canyon.
“Yeah, bit singed is all. Lost the big cedar in front, though. Okay, I’ve got to go, there’s a long night still ahead.” He patted Matt’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of the baby, Matt. Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’d better have someone take a look at that arm.”
“Sure,” Matt said. He did not turn to see Bobby leave with the child in his arms. He listened to retreating footsteps, the sirens racing along the highway. The wind had shifted and was blowing offshore again.
It would be days before this fire was contained.
CHAPTER 3
“Matt, did you hear what I said?” Ned Lowell leaned back from his desk to look out of the window of the office on San Vicente Boulevard in fashionable Brentwood. “What’s so interesting down there?”
The small plaza below the window was festive, elegant stores decorated for Halloween with piles of pumpkins and hay bales, kids and adults in costume, witches, dragons, fairies, a lot of Harry Potters. Matt had his eyes on a small pink rabbit with big floppy ears and white tail. Her mother was holding her on a large orange pumpkin while her father took pictures.
“Cute mom,” Ned said.
Matt spun his chair around, fitting his feet around Barney, asleep under his half of the partner’s desk he shared with his older brother. The office was large, the main decorative feature the display of architectural photographs of Lowell Brothers projects. “I’m listening. What did you say?”
“I said Mike Greffen called about that building downtown on San Julian and Pico. Did you look at it?”
“Not yet. I’d planned to go down on Monday before the fire. Used to be a dress factory. Been empty for years, price should be right.”
“What’s around there?”
“About what you’d expect in the garment district. Plus some light manufacturing, a few run-down apartment buildings. Pretty grim, but it might be good for studios or workshops.”
In fourteen years, they had created elegant offices in abandoned banks for those eccentric souls who found high-rise office buildings sterile, made luxurious pied-à-terre apartments out of crumbling warehouses, built low-cost housing in old railroad yards, for which the city loved them. They had turned deconsecrated churches into concert venues and restaurants, created artisans workshops, art studios and lofts throughout downtown. On the way, Lowell Brothers had received design awards, thanks from a grateful city, and made a lot of money.
Ned rose to his feet, stretched his six foot two plus frame—he had a couple of inches on Matt—rotated his hips, then shrugged into his jacket. Matt noticed how much his brother was looking like their dad as he grew older, the same thick rumpled head of dark hair streaked now with gray, the deepening lines around his eyes and mouth. He’d look like that, too, probably, when he was Ned’s age, another ten years. They’d always looked alike.
“I’ll call Mike in the morning then. Right now, I’ve got to get home for trick-or-treating or Julie will kill me. Are you coming?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Ned stopped at Matt’s desk, and peered into his face. “Matt, you don’t look so good. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but are you okay? Sleeping, eating, that kind of stuff?”
“What are you, my mother all of a sudden? Get out of here.”
Ned lingered. “Listen, this dead baby. You want to talk about it?”
“Nothing to talk about. Get going.”
“I know it was a hell of a thing, but it’s not your business. You just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. You didn’t know that baby. You couldn’t have saved it. It happens, shit like this.”
“You’re right. It does. It just did.”
“Oh, come on, you know what I mean.”
“No, you’re right. It’s not my business.”
But it felt like his business. Yesterday, Matt had spent a couple of hours with sheriff’s deputies walking the beach trying to pinpoint the exact place where he’d found the baby’s body. They’d found nothing. No trace.
“So why don’t you come over tonight and hand out candy, while we take the boys out to plunder the neighborhood?”
“Not this year.” Last year, he and Ginn had still been together. It had been a blast just watching her laughing at the parade of kids, oohing and aahing over the costumes. She was good with kids.
“We’ve got people coming over later, costumes and some drinks. Julie asked Susan Dean, and I think she only said yes because Julie dangled you as bait. Susan’s a good architect, bright, and gorgeous. What she sees in you God only knows.” He thumped Matt’s shoulder affectionately.
“Now you’re my social director, too? I thought you said you were going home.”
“If it’s still about Ginn, Matt, that was your choice.”
“She’s the one who left, not me.”
“Come on, man. She’s thirty-five years old. She wants kids. You don’t even want to get married. You think you left her any option?”
“Knock it off, Ned, okay?”
Ned raised both hands. “Sorry I spoke. See you tomorrow.”
Matt waited until the door closed behind him. He looked down into the plaza, but the pink rabbit and her family had gone.
He reached for the phone. The deputy who answered said that Eckhart wasn’t in the station house. Matt left a message that he’d called.
Traffic was clogged on the Pacific Coast Highway. Fire equipment returning to home bases all over the state rumbled south to the I-10. Going north was a nightmare of backed-up traffic. At Topanga Canyon a young entrepreneur was doing a brisk business, running up and down the line of cars waiting to get through the sheriff’s department roadblock, taking money, handing out T-shirts that read “I Survived The Latest Greatest Malibu Topanga Fire.”
Matt showed his driver’s license to a deputy to prove he was a resident and was waved through. A few restaurants had reopened in time for Halloween but they’d be crowded with people wearing false noses and mustaches, partying and swapping war stories. He stopped at PC Greens to pick up food for dinner.
It was dark when he got home. Instead of the sweet smell of sumac and thyme that grew wild up on the hills, the heavy stink of wet ash pervaded the air, overpowering even the fresh salt spray from the Pacific.
The phone in the kitchen started to ring as he came down the walkway. Barney raced ahead and Matt hurried the last few steps—mad hope, but maybe Ginn was calling to find out whether the house had survived, if the horses were okay, how Barney had come through. She’d found Barns at some rescue outfit, a two-month-old pale yellow scrap with an unusual white star on his forehead, and brought him home, dumped him in Matt’s lap on his birthday a couple years ago. Matt let himself into the kitchen, dropped the groceries on the table and picked up the phone.
“Matt Lowell.”
“Hey, Matt. What have you been up to?” Jimmy McPhee’s voice was loud, jovial.
“Hi, Jim. Heard the restaurant made it okay. I’m glad.”
“Yeah, by the grace of the Almighty. Only damage was a broken window in the kitchen, can you beat that?”
“I’m afraid I did that.” Matt glanced down at the bandage on his arm. “I took some water from the big fridge, too.”
“You were down here? Hell on wheels, Matt, how did you manage that?”
“Dumb luck, I guess. Lost my pickup and trailer at the tunnel, though. They should be cleared out by now. Do you know if the wrecker turned up?”
“Yeah, they’re gone. They were a hell of a mess, just a tangle of burned-out metal.”
While he listened, Matt filled Barney’s dish with kibble, popped a can of Rolling Rock, turned on the television. Reception had been restored, electricity was back on. He hit the mute.
“St. Aidan’s is all right, too,” McPhee said. “Bit scorched is all. A service of thanksgiving is scheduled for Sunday.”
“Okay, I’ll try to make it.” His only church attendance nowadays was on the Sunday closest to the anniversary of his mother’s death twenty-six years earlier when he was ten. She’d gone out to get ice cream one Sunday afternoon, and he’d never seen her again. The drunk who’d killed her was sentenced to two years. So now, around June 20 every year his dad came up from Palm Springs, and the three of them, he and Ned and their father attended morning service at St. Aidan’s and had lunch afterward at Jimmy’s.
Matt clicked to the local news. The fire was no longer at the top of the hour. Life was returning to normal for the rest of Los Angeles. With hotspots still in the backcountry, it would be weeks for Malibu, months and even longer, if ever, for those who’d lost everything. He turned off the news and waited for Jimmy to get to the point.
“So, James, what’s up?” he said when Jimmy let a moment of silence linger.
“Had a couple of sheriff’s department detectives asking about you today.”
While listening, Matt walked outside to the deck and looked out over the Pacific. A sliver of moon was rising, stars blazed in a clear sky.
“What did they want?”
“Just had I seen you during the fire. I said I hadn’t, but they went on awhile, wanted to know if I was sure. You know, bunch of questions like that.” Jimmy gave a strained laugh. “What have you been up to? Raiding the old Edwards place while it burned?”
“Thought I might find a Princess Di mug or something.”
Blake Edwards, his famous wife Julie Andrews, and their brood of kids had lived in the house for years without raising comment. But after the Edwards’s moved, Harrods heir, Dodi Al-Fayed, bought the house and started a major remodel, and Malibu was giddy with the rumor that Princess Di was coming to town.
“They seemed pretty serious, Matt. You in trouble?”
“Not that I know of.”
“I’ve known your dad for thirty years, kiddo, and I loved your mother, God bless her. If you’re in trouble, you just have to say the word. I’ll help if I can, you know that.”
Matt nodded as if McPhee could see him. After his mother was gone, most family celebrations were held at Jimmy’s restaurant—birthdays, graduations. He’d had his first legal beer at Jimmy’s.
“During the fire after I left the Cove, I found the body of a baby,” he said. “Lying on the beach.”
“Holy Mother of God! Whose baby?”
“Well, I guess that’s what they’re trying to find out, Jim.”
“Oh, sure. Of course. Poor little soul. How old?”
“Newborn.” Matt reached for his beer. He couldn’t bring himself to say that the baby had been alive when he’d found her. “Jim, listen, thanks for calling, but I’ve got to go.”
“Yeah, sure. Well, if you need anything, let me know, okay?”
“Sure thing.” Matt put a finger on the disconnect, started to replace the phone, then found himself punching out the number he hadn’t used for almost a year. After she’d left, he’d ring just to listen to her voice on the machine, always hanging up if she answered in person. But one night, she’d said, “Matt, I know it’s you. Please don’t keep doing this. Don’t force me to get an unlisted number.”
It had been like breaking an addiction. Just for today, he’d tell himself, I won’t call her. Just for today. Ten months of one day at a time not calling Genevieve Chang.
After four rings, the familiar voice said, “This is Ginn Chang. If you leave your number I’ll call you back. If you don’t, I won’t.”
Matt hesitated. He wanted to tell her about the baby, about the cops asking questions about him. He wanted…What? Marriage? A family? He dropped the phone into the cradle, went into the bedroom, Barney at his heels.
The eight-by-ten was back on the table by his bed. Every line was etched in his mind, but he picked it up and studied it. Ginn in hipriding white shorts and a bikini top leaned her narrow back against his chest. He had both arms wrapped around her, his chin resting on top of her head, the half-grown Barney stretched at their feet, grinning as only a happy young Lab could. He remembered the day clearly. Ned and Julie and their boys had come over for the day, Ned with a new digital camera posing everyone until they finally rebelled.
Matt thought about his brother. Ned didn’t complicate life. He’d found the right girl when he was twenty-eight, he’d gotten married, settled down, had a couple of kids. No sweat.
Matt replaced the picture on the table. From the moment they met, he’d never doubted that Ginn was the right girl. It was the rest of the story that wouldn’t fall into place. The old family album was still on the dresser where he’d put it after the fire. Slowly he turned to a page—any page—as he did sometimes. They were all photographs taken by his dad of their mother and Ned and himself, with their horses at the ranch on Zumirez Drive on Point Dume; the three of them running on the beach outside this house, throwing sticks for their two Shepherd-type mutts, playing in the surf. His mother always seemed to be smiling. Something he could still remember about her, sometimes the only thing was that wide, sweet smile. He closed the album.
“Come on, Barney. Let’s get out of here.”
He changed into old jeans and running shoes, and opened the door to the deck. Barney pushed ahead of him, but instead of heading for the gate and the narrow stairs down to the beach, the dog dashed along the walkway toward the street, tail wagging furiously. The automatic patio lights, hanging by a wire from the garage but still working, flashed on as Bobby Eckhart stepped across the beam. He was wearing black jeans, leather jacket, heavy boots.
“Hey, Matthew, you coming or going?”
“Going. I was taking Barney for a run on the beach, but it can wait. Did you come on your bike?” He hadn’t heard the sound of the love of Bobby’s life, his Harley.
“What else?”
“What brings you here?”
“You called, master?”
Matt laughed. “Come on in. You want a beer?”
“Is the pope Catholic?” Bobby tussled with Barney until they both banged their way through the door into the kitchen. He looked down at his pants. “Look at this. I’m covered in yellow hair. Don’t you ever brush this mutt?”
“You know where the brush is kept, buddy. Be our guest.”
“Too late. Damage is done.” Bobby crossed the kitchen to the refrigerator, opened the door, looked in, stared at the empty interior. “You got something against food?”
“I picked up some stuff on the way home.” He didn’t explain that no way could he ever open that door without seeing the shirt-wrapped bundle resting on a steel rack. He’d already ordered a new refrigerator, different make, different configuration. “Sit down. I’ve got water, warm beer, or scotch. If you want cold, there’s a bottle of Stoli in the freezer.”
“A glass of your best red will do me fine. Gotta get my sweetie home in one piece.”
Matt grinned. “Would that be Sylvie or the Harley?” Bobby’s wife was also a deputy sheriff.
“Sylvie’s got late duty tonight, that’s why I’m here. So I don’t have to cook.” Bobby peered into the containers of braised beef, roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes.
“I don’t know how she puts up with playing second fiddle to that bike.”
“She knows she’s on to a good thing. She’s got us both.”
Matt opened a bottle of Merlot while Bobby decanted the food, put it into the microwave.
Matt leaned back in his chair, reached for a couple of glasses, poured the wine.
“So, what’s up?” Bobby asked.
“The sheriff’s department is asking questions about me,” Matt said. “Jimmy McPhee called tonight.” He repeated the conversation.
“Routine stuff, nothing to worry about.” The microwave beeped. Bobby placed the containers on the table.
“What will happen to her, Bob?”
“The baby? Well, if they can’t find the mother, she’ll either get a civil burial or transfer her body to a teaching hospital where pediatric surgeons get their training.”
The food in Matt’s mouth was suddenly a lump impossible to swallow. “You mean—” He wanted to gag. He thought of the delicate body he’d seen, the fragile limbs. “She shouldn’t be cut up.”
Bobby helped himself to more braised beef. “Yeah, turns your stomach, doesn’t it? You know, in one month last year…August, I think, three babies were found on the beach in Santa Monica, about a week apart. Remember that?”
“No.”
“Yeah, well. No one notices. Just the flotsam of a big city. Another little Jane Doe, no one to claim her.”
“Then I’ll claim this one. She should have someone, not end up on a surgical slab, alone.”
“You can’t just walk in and claim a body. It’s not that easy. Why would you want to do that?”
Because she died in his arms. Because maybe he could have saved her if he hadn’t been so hellbent on getting home to his house and his dog. Although he still didn’t know how.
“Because I found her, I guess. Why not?”
Bobby shook his head. “Matt, just think for a minute how this plays. Single guy finds a baby. She’s still alive. No one’s around as a witness. Baby dies. Then the guy claims the body, spends a fair amount of change to give this Baby Doe a funeral. What do you think that says?”
“That someone wants to do the right thing? What? You think like a cop, Bobby, you know that?”
“Twelve years on the job, Matt. It’ll do it to you every time.” After college, Bobby had bummed the world following the waves for a couple of years before he came home, met Sylvie and joined the sheriff’s department.
Matt pushed his chair back, got to his feet. He dumped the remains of the food into the trash. “So what’s the next step? Do I call the coroner’s office?”
“No. You sleep on it for a week, then you call.”
“That might be too late.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said. “You’re right.”
CHAPTER 4
“See what I mean? It’s a prime piece of property.” Mike Greffen of Downtown Realty Associates, was resplendent in a well tailored gray suit, white shirt, Hermes tie. He gestured toward the vast empty interior of the almost derelict building. In spite of the brilliant fall day outside, the late afternoon sunlight barely penetrated the second floor windows, multi-paned and washed with a thin film of brown paint. The place reeked of excrement, human and animal, rats, stray cats, the unwholesome stink of the transients who used the place to drink and vomit and crash. “Know what they say about location. Still can’t beat it, gentlemen.”
Ned stamped a foot tentatively on the splintered wooden planks of the uneven factory floor. A small cloud of dust coated his Nikes. He and Matt wore their usual working clothes, blue jeans, polo shirts, sneakers.
“Wow. Nearly went through there. What do you think anyone can do with this piece of industrial wasteland? Matt, you got any ideas?” Matt recognized Ned’s opening salvo for negotiation on the price. Ned managed their financial affairs, bank loans, mortgages. There wasn’t a real estate broker or a banker alive who could best Ned. He could wring the last penny out of any deal.
Matt shrugged. “I’d call in the bulldozers.” His cell phone buzzed and he excused himself, walked over to the bank of darkened windows.
“Matt Lowell.”
“Matt, it’s Bobby. Listen, a heads-up. Better you don’t contact the coroner about that matter we talked about last night. Something’s come up. Okay?”
“What’s happened?”
“I’m at the desk, I can’t talk now. Just hang tight, don’t make any calls, okay?”
“Too late. I called this morning.”
“Shit. Did you leave your name?”
“Of course I left my name.”
“Shit,” Bobby said again. “Oh well, maybe it won’t make any difference. They lose bodies all the time down there, chances are they’re no better with telephone messages.”
“What bodies? What are you talking about?”
“I can’t talk right now. I’ll call you tonight. Better yet, I’ll come by. Meantime, don’t make any more calls to the coroner.” He rang off.
Slowly, Matt returned the cell to his pocket. He cleaned a circle in the filthy window with the heel of his hand. Across the street stood a mirror image of the four-story building he was standing in. Someone had enough faith in the neighborhood to try to do something with it, but not enough to trust the neighbors not to make off with anything they could get their hands on. Surrounding the old factory was a new ten-foot chain-link fence topped with a concertina of razor wire.
Matt walked over to rejoin the two men.
“Mike tells me we can turn this dump into luxury apartments,” Ned said. “You’re the design and structural arm of the firm.” For Matt, the thrill of his job was in seeing the aesthetic possibilities in the crumbling buildings they restored. He was good at it, had the imagination to see what could be, probably got it from his father. It also enabled him to see the absence of opportunity, such as this building.
Matt laughed. “Mike, you don’t believe that.”
“Sure I do. Would I lie to you guys? This is a wicked piece of property. Great potential.”
“Yeah, potential to go from bad to worse.”
“That building you were looking at, Matt? Across the street there? Sold in less than a week, asking price, and I hear it’s going to be gutted and refitted as apartments. It will bring the whole area up.”
“In your dreams, Michael,” Ned said. “Who’d you sucker into that deal?”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have the listing, but I hear it was bought by some outfit from Canada. I could have offered this one to them, but we’ve been doing business for a long time. I wanted to give you guys first crack at it.”
The three men navigated the dark filth-encrusted stairs and stepped out into the sunshine.
“So don’t wait too long, guys,” Mike said. “This is a primo piece of downtown real estate, a steal at the price.”
He slid into his late model Lexus, tapped his horn at a kid running across the street, and drew away.
“Shall we go for it, Matt?” Ned’s tone was doubtful.
Matt eyed the street scene. A couple of guys selling foam-rubber pads and remnants of fabric from the back of a beat-up truck to small round women a long way in time and distance from their Aztec roots. Men with the same flat features leaned against walls, hats tipped over eyes, waiting for God knows what. In the middle of the block, kids converged on an old guy selling ice cream from a handcart that looked as if it had been in use since the fifties.
“Pass. Let someone else take the hassle.” Matt looked again at his watch. “See you tomorrow.”
Matt put the Range Rover into the now doorless garage, walked down the side deck past Bobby’s Harley, a Softail, parked in the middle of the ruined front garden, and let himself into the kitchen.
Bobby was sprawled on the overstuffed sofa in the living room, a box of crackers on the table in front of him, watching a ballgame on television, Barney at his feet. The Lab got up as Matt came in, gave him a swift, enthusiastic greeting, and went back to monitoring Bob’s hand-to-mouth motion. Bob held up a warning finger. “USC, Arizona, flag on the play. Oh, damn. USC’s offside.” He clicked off the set.
Bobby tossed Barney a Ritz and swung his feet to the floor. “You’ve got to find a new hiding place for the house key. That flowerpot’s history.”
Matt threw his briefcase onto the kitchen counter. The key had always been kept in a flowerpot. “I’ll get a new one.”
“And get the fence fixed while you’re at it. You’re totally exposed to the street, your neighbors are never here and this place is barely more than a shack. A quick push on the kitchen door, and you’re cleaned out in minutes.”
“You try getting anything done. Half of Malibu’s in line ahead of me.”
“What about one of your own work crews?”
“Ned would have a coronary. Leases are signed and we’re getting the Contessa project ready for occupancy. Anyway, Barney would take the hand off anyone coming in here.”
“Okay, that’s my community outreach for the week,” Bobby said.
Matt filled Barney’s bowl, took a bottle of water from the fridge. He crossed to the living room, dropped into an armchair, propped his feet on the coffee table. “So, okay, what’s happened that’s so all-fired important?”
Bob leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “A body’s been found up on Encinal Canyon Road. A girl, maybe fourteen, fifteen. White.”
Matt knew what Bobby was going to tell him, but he didn’t want to hear it. A fourteen year old. Just a kid herself. “Didn’t Encinal burn out?”
“No, not all the way down to the beach. Anyway, she wasn’t in the fire area. She was by the side of the road, and she was covered in wildflowers. A fire crew checking hotspots found her.”
“Flowers? Someone must have cared about her.”
“Or some sick bastard thought it was a cute touch.”
“How’d she die, Bobby?”
“Until we get an autopsy report, it’s just guesswork. She’s been badly abused at some time, but the scars are old. Marks on her breasts as if she’d been burned by cigars, that sort of thing. Poor kid had a short and brutal life, but whoever put her on the side of the road wanted her found. She was dressed in some expensive threads, baggy silk pants, a matching top and a shirt. The pants were blood-soaked, but someone had tried to clean her up. My guess is that she gave birth then hemorrhaged out.”
“So that’s the mother.”
Bobby shrugged. “Putting two and two together, that’s my guess. Homicide’s got it. So far her description doesn’t match any missing person on file in Los Angeles County. They’ve sent it to Sacramento, see if they get any hits statewide. I thought you’d be interested.”
“What’ll happen if they don’t get anything?”
“Nothing much. No identifying marks on her or the baby, no way to find out who they were.”
“What about dental records?”
“Sure, but not everyone visits a dentist. And anyway, there’s no national database for teeth. All we can do is find out if they’re related. After that, there’s nowhere to go.” Bobby dropped another cracker for Barney. “Don’t try to get that baby released to you, Matt. Let it drop.”
“It’s too late, I told you. I called the coroner this morning.” Matt got up, put his empty glass in the sink. “I’m going out to eat. Sylvie still on late duty?”
“Yeah, all this week. You want to take this seriously, buddy.”
“I am taking it seriously, but what do you want me to do? I’ve already called the coroner’s office. They have my name, my address, my phone number. They didn’t ask for my social security number, or they’d have that, too. So, you want to go eat?” Bob let out a long breath. “Okay. Usual place?” Matt had been thinking of Granita for a change, Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant at the top of the road, but the prices were pretty rich for a deputy sheriff with a Malibu mortgage, even with two salaries coming in. Bob would agree if he suggested it, then insist on carrying his weight. “Sure. Googie’s Coffee Shop in five.”
CHAPTER 5
7:00 a.m. on a Friday morning, and traffic on the I-10 from Santa Monica to downtown was moving steadily. In another hour, it would be gridlock. Matt listened to Coltrane, and restrained the impulse to jockey the Range Rover from lane to lane. He got off the freeway at 9th Street, and stopped to pick up a couple of caffe grandes at the Starbucks by Macy’s—he knew better than to risk the coffee on a construction job, which tasted as if it were made with iron filings, guaranteed to burn a hole in the lining of the stomach.
By 7:30 he was at the Contessa, four hundred low-rise luxury apartments on what used to be a used-car lot before the neighborhood got too run-down even for clunkers. Swimming pools, tennis courts, running track, gym, all the bells and whistles, heavily landscaped, an urban refuge, and close to major freeways and the Staples Center. The city was jubilant, already counting on the tax base to revitalize the surrounding area. Lowell Brothers was gambling the company shirt on the project, their first venture into new construction, but so far it looked good. Ned had negotiated leases with both teams that called the Staples Center home, NBA basketball and NHL hockey, the Lakers and the Kings.
Half a dozen trucks loaded with large boxed jacaranda trees were lined up on Bixel Street outside the Contessa. By the time the job was finished, a hundred prime specimens would be in the ground.
“Good morning, Ben.” Matt handed Ben Pressman, the landscape architect, a container of coffee, popped the lid on his own and took a sip. He and Ben circled the trucks, checking out the jacarandas.
“Pretty nice, huh?” Ben said.
“Yeah. Not bad, Ben.” He and Pressman had personally selected each one, shopping half a dozen tree farms to get what they wanted. “Let’s get them in the ground.”
He stayed on through the morning, ate enchiladas with the Hispanic work crew gathered around Roxanne’s Hot Lunch, the roach wagon that made the rounds of downtown construction sites.
It was almost four when he got back to the office in Brentwood.
Two men, flipping without much interest through magazines devoted to the construction business, looked up as he walked in. Matt raised an inquiring eyebrow at Marni behind her desk in the front office.
“These gentlemen are waiting to see you, Matt. They’re from the sheriff’s department.”
The men replaced the magazines on the table, got to their feet. The elder of the two said, “Mr. Lowell? I’m Detective Jim Barstow. My partner, Detective Eduardo Flores.”
Matt glanced at the proffered shields, noted the nicotine-stained fingers and the smell of tobacco that clung to the two men. He shook hands with each in turn, conscious of Marni’s ears straining to hear every word, and ushered them into the office. Ned, frowning at the computer screen on his own side of the partners’ desk, looked up as Matt introduced the detectives. They refused coffee. Matt settled himself behind his desk, indicated a couple of chairs on the other side.
“So, what can I do for you?”
“Just a few questions. You are the Matthew Lowell who found the child on the beach, is that right?” Barstow asked. Late forties, thinning fair hair, deep set blue eyes. Slim, sharp tailoring.
Not much got past him, Matt guessed. “Yes. During the fire.”
“That would be last Monday?”
“Yes. Monday.”
“She was alive when you found her?”
Matt nodded. “Yes.”
“About what time of day was that, Mr. Lowell?”
“Sometime between four and five. It’s hard to say exactly. The smoke from the fire was black and covered the entire sky, so it was dusk long before the sun started going down. And sunset these days is at five. So I can’t say for sure. I didn’t look at my watch.”
Barstow’s partner gave a half smile. He’d caught the sarcasm. Flores was in his early forties, bulky but not fat, an ungainly nose away from being darkly handsome.
“Well, that’s close enough for now,” Barstow said. “Were you working in Malibu on Monday?”
“No, I was here, but I’ve lived in Malibu all my life and I know how fast a brushfire moves in a Santa Ana wind. I had horses in Ramirez Canyon and was worried about getting them out. And my dog was locked inside my house.”
“That’s the house on Malibu Road?” Barstow asked. He produced a small notebook from the inside pocket on his jacket.
Matt nodded. “That’s right.”
“You say you found the baby several miles north of that location between four and five o’clock. By noon the entire area had been evacuated, the highway was closed in both directions from Topanga Canyon in the south, and Trancas Canyon in the north. How was it you managed to be on that particular part of the beach at that particular time? Can you explain that?”
“I drove—”
“Wait a minute,” Ned said. “What is this? An interrogation? He’s already reported this to—”
“It’s okay, Ned, let me handle it,” Matt said. He held a tight rein on his irritation. Ned could be a pain sometimes with his big brother concern. Ginn thought it was guilt because Ned had been at Wharton in Philadelphia when their mother was killed, and had gone back to school the day after she was buried, leaving Matt alone with their father in a house that contained only shadows where she had been.
“You’re right,” he said to Barstow. “The Pacific Coast Highway was closed when I got to Topanga Canyon.”
“What time was that?”
“About two, two-thirty.”
Barstow made a note on his pad. He looked up, nodded for Matt to continue.
“I turned around and went back to the Santa Monica Freeway, took the 405 north across the Sepulveda Pass to the 101 in the San Fernando Valley.” Deliberately, Matt went through every detail of the long circuitous route back to Malibu. “The 101 west was pretty clogged because of fire closures, but I was able to make it to Las Posas Road below Oxnard. I turned off there and drove toward the ocean through the berry fields and came down the PCH that way.”
Barstow flipped through the pages of his notebook.
“On your way down the PCH you had to pass Encinal Canyon, right?”
Matt felt his gut clench. “Yes.”
“Did you drive up into Encinal Canyon?”
“Of course not. I was trying to get home.”
“And the Pacific Coast Highway was already closed at Trancas Canyon when you got there?”
“That’s right. They were pretty busy in the market parking lot, getting a convoy together to go over the Kanan Dume Road while it was still open. It wasn’t difficult to drive around the roadblock.”
“What were you driving?”
“I had a pickup and a horse trailer.”
Flores spoke for the first time. “Do you usually commute to work here in Brentwood with a horse trailer, Mr. Lowell?”
“No. I picked it up at Malibu Riding Club on Pacific Coast Highway.”
“That’s just before Encinal Canyon, is that right?”
“Yes.” The enchiladas he’d eaten at lunch suddenly felt like a lead weight in his stomach. They thought he had used the trailer to transport the body of the dead girl.
“Why didn’t you take the Kanan Dume Road from the 101? Why go all the way up to Las Posas?”
“I wasn’t sure Kanan Dume was open. I didn’t want to run into another roadblock and have to turn back. I didn’t have that kind of time.”
“Are you saying that in the middle of a fire, an equestrian center loaned you a pickup and horse trailer? I would’ve thought they’d need vehicles like that to evacuate their own animals.”
“The truck and trailer didn’t belong to the riding club, they belonged to me. I boarded my horses there until a couple of weeks before the fire. I left some tack and the pickup and trailer there until I could pick them up.”
“Where are they now, this pickup and trailer?”
“At A-1 Auto Wrecking in Oxnard.”
Barstow raised his eyebrows. “What happened to them?”
Matt held on to his temper. What did this bozo think happened to them in the middle of a goddamn fire? “I was trying to get into Ramirez Canyon at Paradise Cove but the gates to the tunnel under the road were closed. The fire came through the tunnel, caught the trailer and pickup. I made a run for it to the Cove restaurant. The trailer and pickup are a total loss. I had to have them towed.”
Barstow continued making notes. “I see. What happened then?”
“I got some water from the restaurant, and started south along the beach. It’s about seven miles to my place from the Cove. I was more than halfway there, just past the Edwards estate, when I spotted what looked like a downed pelican lying near the water. I got closer, and saw it was a baby.”
“And the baby was alive when you picked it up?”
Matt had to force himself not to look away. “Yes. I thought I just said that.”
“No, you didn’t. So then?”
“I felt a faint pulse. I wrapped her in my shirt and went back to some stairs that I’d seen still standing. I thought maybe I could get some help there, but when I got back the stairs had burned and the wind had blown them apart, so I turned around and continued toward home.”
“It didn’t occur to you to go back to the restaurant?”
“Of course it did, but what for? Fire blocked the road, the restaurant was empty, no one was coming, no fire crews. Plus I was more than halfway home.”
“When did you realize she was dead?”
“When I got home. I put her on the couch. She seemed cold. I tried to feel a pulse and couldn’t. I tried to give her CPR, holding her nose and breathing into her mouth, but it was too late. She was dead.” He’d been reliving that moment over and over ever since.
“You’ve got a bandage on your arm, Mr. Lowell. What happened?” Flores asked this question. Matt guessed they were taking turns.
Instinctively, Matt looked down at his wrist. He’d dropped by his doctor’s office, Phil had put a couple of stitches in, and covered it with gauze and a Band-Aid. That was the day after the fire.
“I broke a window at the restaurant to get some water and I guess I cut it. I didn’t notice it until later.”
“You didn’t notice a cut that was bad enough to need stitches and bandaging?”
“A hell of a lot more was going on then than a cut on my arm, Detective Flores. Half of Malibu was on fire.”
Flores nodded and gave him that thin smile again. “So is that your blood on the blue shirt the baby was wrapped in?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t you get help for this baby right away?”
“Where? It was in the middle of a wildfire. The phones were down. I’d dropped my cell on the beach. Where was I supposed to find help?”
“You could’ve taken her to the Civic Center there in Malibu, couldn’t you?”
“She was already dead, and flames were coming over the ridge. What would have been the point of attempting that?” He wanted to ask if this guy had ever been caught in a firestorm, but the answer was obvious. He hadn’t.
“You’ve shown an interest in claiming this baby, Mr. Lowell. Why is that?” Barstow asked.
Out of his peripheral vision, Matt saw Ned open his mouth, then close it without speaking. He hadn’t told Ned what he intended.
“No reason. I just thought…I didn’t like the idea that she might be cut up for the purpose of training doctors.”
“Who told you that would happen?”
“Doesn’t it?”
Barstow shrugged. “A young woman was found yesterday morning on Encinal Canyon Road. It’s possible she was the mother.”
“Really?”
“You don’t sound too surprised. Did you know this girl?”
“Know her? No, I didn’t know her. I would’ve told you if I knew her. Look, I found a child on the beach in the middle of a wildfire. I did the best I could to keep her alive. I feel terrible that I wasn’t able to, but I got in touch with the authorities as soon as I could, which was around midnight. After I’d spent hours fighting to save my house. I thought it would be the right thing to do to give her a burial. Where are you going with this?”
Flores joined the conversation. “Why do you feel so threatened by these questions?”
“I don’t feel threatened, Mr. Flores.” Matt made a conscious effort to relax. Flores was right, he sounded defensive. “I just don’t understand why you’re talking to me about a young girl found dead in Encinal.”
“Well, the spot in Encinal is not too far from where you said you picked up the child on the beach. You’ve shown quite an interest in that baby. We’re just trying to do our job, get to the bottom of who knew what and when they knew it,” Flores said.
Matt held his eyes. They were a mid-brown, the sort of brown usually described as warm. But these were as cold as any Matt had seen, and the slight smile hovering around Flores’ tight lips didn’t help.
“Well,” he said, “if I can help you do that, of course I will. Anyway, are you sure the girl you found was the mother?”
Neither man responded. It was clear they were not here to answer questions, just ask them.
“Would you be willing to give a sample for DNA testing, Mr. Lowell?” Flores asked. “Just for the record.”
“Now wait a minute,” Ned said. “Just you guys wait a minute here—”
“It’s okay, Ned,” Matt said. He turned to Barstow. “Why are you asking me to do that?”
“There’s nothing to it, Mr. Lowell, nothing invasive,” Barstow said. “A swab, some saliva, that’s all.”
“You haven’t answered the question,” Ned said. “Is he suspected of some crime?”
“We don’t know that a crime has been committed, Mr. Lowell. This is just routine.”
Matt sat back and let Ned run with it. He’d seen Ned’s face and knew better than to start an argument with him in front of a couple of detectives.
“Routine, bullshit,” Ned said. “What happens to that sample afterward? It’s kept on record, right? So my brother, who has done absolutely nothing except behave like a model citizen, now has his DNA on record in a police file connected to some unknown girl’s death?”
Flores shook his head. “The sample will be destroyed.”
“Come on,” Ned said. “We’re supposed to trust the police department that screwed up the blood evidence in the O.J. Simpson case?”
Barstow turned to Matt. “We have your shirt, Mr. Lowell, and we don’t need your permission to test it.”
“Then why are you asking for saliva?”
“Well, cooperation would count in your favor—”
Ned was on his feet. “What are you talking about, in his favor? Is he being accused of something?”
“No. Well. Thank you, we’ll be in touch. If you remember anything else, give us a call.” Barstow produced a small leather cardholder, removed a business card and placed it on Matt’s desk. He glanced at Flores, and both detectives rose. “And we’re the sheriff’s department, not LAPD. Just so you know. Anyway, thanks for your time.” At the door, Barstow turned. “Your horses get out okay?”
“Yes, thanks,” Matt answered.
Barstow nodded and offered a polite smile. The two detectives left the room, leaving behind a faint trail of stale cigarette smoke, and the unspoken words hanging in the air.
They suspected him of murder.
CHAPTER 6
Matt turned off his laptop and pushed back from his desk in the corner of the living room. It was no good. He couldn’t work. It seemed as if he’d been going over the same set of drawings for the last three hours. All he could think of was the conversation with the detectives and the two creatures who’d somehow fallen into the middle of his life, the baby who had died in his arms, and the young girl who may or may not be the baby’s mother.
He got to his feet, poured another cup of coffee, his third that morning, took it to the window. Rays from the sun pierced the bottom of the mounting gray-and-white thunderclouds, and sparkled in large intermittent coins of light on the water. The temperature had dropped dramatically since the fire, and rain was in the forecast.
A flight of California brown pelicans swept low, wingtips skimming the top of the waves. Matt followed their glide with his eyes until they disappeared over the water. The pelicans were making a comeback after the DDT disaster in the seventies that had damn near wiped them out.
He picked up the phone, punched out the number for the animal shelter in Agoura, identified himself to the woman who answered, described his two horses, the small gentle Andalusian mare he’d bought for Ginn, his own buckskin quarterhorse gelding, and asked how soon he could pick them up.
“The sooner the better,” she said. “We’re like Noah’s ark over here. If you can tell me what time you’ll be here, I’ll have them brought in from the pasture.”
“I have to make a couple of calls, see if I can borrow a trailer. Probably be around one, is that okay?”
“Sure. See you then,” she said and hung up.
Margie Little’s place had been burned out, so he called the Malibu Riding Club, agreed to pay double the usual boarding fee—the stable manager made sure he was aware she was doing him a favor, that space was tight after the fire, and he had, after all, removed his horses from the club for no reason she had been able to fathom. But as a courtesy, he could leave his Range Rover at the club, use one of their trailers and a pickup to get his horses from Agoura. If he were still a member, she’d waive the rental fee, but since he wasn’t, of course, there would be a charge.
He loaded Barney into the Range Rover and took the Pacific Coast Highway north. The roadblocks at Topanga and Trancas had been removed, but traffic was still sparse. By tomorrow, if the rain held off, Sunday drivers would be out in force inspecting the damage—the chimneys still standing surrounded by rubble, the blackened beams from collapsed roofs, the burned-out armchairs and sofas that had once enclosed celebrity bottoms.
He slowed at the sign for Encinal Canyon Road. The girl’s body had been found less than a mile from the PCH. On impulse, he turned right onto the canyon road, a tortuous two-lane ribbon of asphalt that switchbacked across the Santa Monica Mountains down into the San Fernando Valley on the other side.
A quarter mile up the narrow gorge was a different world. The erratic wind-driven fire had skipped the entire lower canyon. Sycamores were still in fall yellows and russets, branching over the roadside tangle of willow and toyon and wild tobacco.
For Matt, the Santa Monica Mountains with their latticework of canyons and ravines were as much a part of Malibu as the ocean. When they were kids, he and Bobby Eckhart had camped all over these hills. They’d seen bobcats and mountain lions, rattlesnakes and redtailed hawks, even eagles soaring above bare rocky crags. They’d found traces of Chumash Indian pictographs in caves, and they knew where the virgin creeks were that ran all year, tumbling over rocks into pools deep enough to swim in. They’d also seen their share of abandoned vehicles and rusted-out discarded appliances. They’d never seen an abandoned body, but the canyons of Los Angeles were notorious for all kinds of murder and mayhem and they’d heard the stories.
Matt pulled into the clearing in front of the wide metal gates to the old archery range. According to Bobby, the dead teenager had been found about three hundred feet beyond this point.
He left Barney in the Range Rover—there was no shoulder to speak of, and the edge dropped off sharply on the creek side, dangerous if a vehicle hurtled around a curve, too many people used these mountain roads as raceways. Barney would be safer locked up. Matt crossed the road and walked toward a strip of yellow plastic police tape sagging between a couple of coastal oaks.
That was all there was to mark the place. There should be more, Matt thought. But what? Maybe crime scene tape’s as good as anything. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. But he couldn’t shake the barren feeling he had standing in this empty spot along the road.
On the ground at his feet he noticed a scattering of desiccated wildflowers. He knew them from Boy Scouts, yellow tree tobacco, white virgin’s bower, red California fuschia, purple rosemary. Bobby had told him the body had been covered in flowers. He sat on his heels, picked up a spray of canyon sunflower, held it to his nose, breathed in the faint scent. He twirled the spray gently in his fingers, then realized there was moisture on his skin. Sap from the stem.
The flowers in his hand were fresh. He looked around. The road was empty, quiet.
He stood and peered over the edge of the steep cliffside that fell off down to the creek. His eye caught a flash of blue. He squinted, made out a crouched form hidden in a tangle of toyon and manzanita.
“Hey!” he called. “Can I talk to you?”
The figure bolted upright, plunged through the brush in a wild crashing descent.
“Wait a minute.”
Matt started after him, grabbing branches, using his boot heels as a brake, half sliding, half running.
The flash of blue disappeared, reappeared and disappeared again. Part way down, another figure, long straight brown hair, broke cover and took off headlong down the hillside.
Girls, he thought. A couple of girls. He hit the canyon bottom, raced after the two of them toward the dry creek bed. They jumped from rock to rock, scrambled up the other bank.
Matt followed across the creek, leaping the same boulders. He stopped short as the figure in blue suddenly turned in a small clearing in front of a grove of wild walnut trees, blocking Matt’s way, teeth bared in a snarl, eyes blazing and wild. With a jolt, Matt realized he was looking at not a girl but a teenaged boy. He was an astonishing apparition in blue silk shirt, torn and soot stained, an open blue velvet vest, matching blue velvet pants, worn tight, the knees ripped. He’d armed himself with a long, heavy stick, and stood protectively in front of four young girls. They appeared to be no older than sixteen, and white, except for a black child who was maybe ten.
Matt held up his hands. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m not here to hurt you. I just want to talk to you.”
The boy lifted his chin, fixed fierce narrowed eyes on Matt. He was trembling, Matt saw, but not from fear. This kid would kill if he had the chance.
Matt looked at the girls huddled together under the walnut trees, a bizarre little group, dressed in a strange assortment of garments in brilliant parrot colors, green, yellow, scarlet. Torso-hugging, skinny strapped tops, silky loose-fitting pants. The fabric looked rich, heavy silk, torn and stained. Their feet were clad in matching soft leather boots. They could have been a circus troop still in costume.
“What are you doing here?” They were sure not on a camping trip, not in that gear. They all had sun-damaged skin, huge welts on arms and chests caused by the poison oak that grew all over these mountains. Their lips were dry, cracked and bleeding.
He looked at each girl in turn. Their faces were filthy with mud and ash, their bodies shivering in the cool air of the canyon, even cooler on a day like this with rain clouds hanging low. They looked traumatized. No one spoke.
“Okay, you don’t have to talk to me. But you’re going to have to talk to someone. A girl was found up on the road. Did you know her?”
His questions were greeted with silence.
“Who are you? How long have you been here in the canyon?”
Every eye was locked on Matt, watching his every move, the girls looking as if they were ready to run. Or maybe fight. They stared at him, no glimmer of understanding in their eyes. They either didn’t understand English, or they were deaf. Matt touched his fingers to his cheeks and arms, made small circling motions and then pointed to the group’s faces and bare arms.
“Poison oak,” he said slowly. “You need to have that treated. I’ve got salve in my car. And water, you look like you need some water.” No one moved and Matt said, “Look, I want to help. Why are you here?” He looked around at the canyon. “You shouldn’t be here dressed like that. The weather is going to change, it’s going to rain and turn colder.”
One of the girls started to cry. She appeared to be the oldest, the longhaired girl he’d been chasing.
Matt took off his denim jacket, held it out to her.
“Come on, you need it. It will protect you.” He patted his own shoulders to show her what he meant.
The girl moved to reach for it. The boy spoke sharply.
In spite of her distress, the girl responded just as sharply. Nothing wrong with their hearing, Matt thought. For a moment, they argued in a language he had never heard before.
The girl accepted the jacket and said something to him. Matt thought she was asking a question. It could be English, but the accent was so heavy he couldn’t make it out.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Please, speak slowly.” He watched her lips. It sounded as if she were saying “eye eeder.”
“Eye eeder.” Her voice broke on a sob. “Eye eeder.” The boy yelled at her. The other three girls started to cry.
“Eye eeder?” Matt started to shake his head, then realized she was saying a name. Matt gestured toward her. “Your name is Aida?”
She shook her head.
“She was the girl on the road?”
In a soft voice, she answered, “Yes.”
Her eyes darted toward the boy. Screaming, he lunged at her, the heavy stick raised. Matt grabbed him before he could strike, shook the menacing club out of his hand, spun him around so that the boy’s back was against his chest. Holding him was like trying to control an octopus, limbs everywhere. The kid was frantic, explosive, strong beyond his slight frame. It took a few minutes before Matt was able to pin both arms to his sides and swing him off his feet. Gradually the boy stopped struggling.
“Listen,” Matt said against his ear. “I’m not going to hurt you, any of you. A girl died. Tell me how she died.”
“You bring police,” the boy said.
He could speak English. Now maybe they could get somewhere. “No one’s going to bring in the police, so you just relax, all right?” The boy said nothing. “Okay?” Matt said again. “I’m going to let you down now. Just stay quiet, nothing is going to happen to you.”
It was a long time coming but finally the boy nodded. Carefully Matt allowed the boy’s feet to touch the ground and as soon as he thought the kid would stay put, released him. The boy turned quickly. Tears of rage wet his eyes.
“You’re a good man,” Matt said. “You’re okay. What is your name?”
The boy clenched his lips together as if to prevent Matt from seeing that they were trembling.
“Hasan.” The older girl answered for him, and the boy spat what sounded like a curse.
Matt looked at him in surprise. The Arabs Matt had met or seen were dark-eyed, dark-haired, olive-skinned. This Arabic boy was blue-eyed, had dark blond hair, neat small features. Matt kept his eyes on the boy. “That’s you? Hasan?”
The boy did not answer.
“Okay,” Matt said. “Hasan. Good. And Aida was the girl who died. How did Aida die?”
No answer.
He tried a different question. “Where do you come from?”
The older girl said an indecipherable word. She pointed to herself and the two other white girls. She repeated the word. Matt still couldn’t understand her.
Matt looked more closely at the little black girl. “What about you?” he asked gently. “Where do you come from?”
The child refused to meet his eyes, and the older girl, the only one who had so far spoken, put an arm around her protectively.
“Africa,” she said. “She from Africa.”
CHAPTER 7
Matt took off the flannel shirt he had on over his T-shirt and stepped forward to wrap it around the child. All he could see was the top of her small dark head. She flinched as he touched her, and the older girl murmured a crooning sound of comfort. She took the shirt from Matt’s hand, knelt and wrapped it around the African child’s body.
“What’s happened to her?” he asked softly. And to the rest of you, but he left those words unsaid. What kind of disaster had brought this strange band into Encinal Canyon?
Darting fearful looks at Matt, the girls exchanged a few words among themselves, until Hasan spoke sharply, driving them back into silence.
“She want mama,” the boy said.
Yes, Matt thought, of course she does. Matt had the sudden image of himself at that same age, watching his mother’s flower-blanketed coffin being carried from St. Aidan’s Church. He took a breath, and the image faded, leaving him feeling as if he had been hit by a two-by-four.
He fumbled in his pants pocket for the energy bar he always kept handy and offered it to the child, but she would not look up. He passed it to the older girl, who unwrapped it, lifted the child’s hand, and pressed her fingers around it until she was sure it would not fall from the child’s grasp. The child broke off a corner, put it into her mouth and handed the rest back. The older girl divided it up, handing a fragment to each of the others, including Hasan who ignored the piece she held out to him. After a moment, she gave it to the little one.
“This little girl needs help,” Matt said. “All of you need help. I will take you to my house, get you some food and clothes.” He looked at Hasan, making a point of including him. “We will talk, and we will decide what to do.”
“Kanita,” the older girl said. She pointed to herself. “Kanita,” she said again. She then pointed to Matt.
More progress, he thought. They were communicating. “You are Kanita.” He enunciated each word carefully. “I am Matt.” He glanced at the closed, hard face of the boy, and turned back to the girl. “Kanita, you cannot stay here.” He pointed to the sky, gestured rain with his hands, hoping she understood. “Rain. Rain is coming. You must get shelter. Come with me. I’ll get help.” And maybe these kids could tell the authorities what they knew about the dead girl, Matt thought, and remove the cloud of suspicion hanging over his head.
Kanita slid a nervous yet defiant look at Hasan then beckoned to Matt and started toward a cluster of large granite boulders. Matt glanced at the boy, then went after her. She led him between the rocks and into a sheltered crawlspace created by a tangle of roots and the limbs of canyon oak trees. Matt peered inside.
A slight solitary figure lay motionless on the ground. Also a teenager, she was dressed similarly to the others, in a beaded tank top and gauzy loose-fitting lavender pants. She lay on a makeshift bed of brown paper grocery sacks spread out on the bare ground.
Matt’s throat tightened and he fought back a wave of panic. Another dead girl? He crawled into the shelter and touched the girl’s hand, and started to breathe again. Her skin was an unhealthy grayish white and clammy, but warm, maybe too warm. Her eyes were closed, her face framed by a mass of dirt-encrusted black hair tangled with bits of leaves and twigs.
“How long has she been like this?”
Kanita frowned and he repeated the question slowly.
“Today, yesterday, tomorrow.” Kanita shrugged as if an explanation of time was beyond her.
He patted the unconscious girl’s hand, hoping to rouse her. He’d have to carry her out and she would be a dead weight to pick up. He turned to Kanita. “What’s her name?”
Kanita shook her head. Matt pointed to himself, to Kanita, repeating their names as he did so. Then he indicated the girl. Kanita patted her mouth, pointed to the girl and shook her head again.
This was getting them nowhere. Matt slid an arm around the girl to lift her into a sitting position.
The girl opened her eyes, deep black eyes that widened in terror at the sight of him. She shoved hard at his chest, scrabbled to get away but managed only a few yards. A long high-pitched keening ripped from her throat.
The skin on the back of Matt’s neck shuddered at the sound. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” He managed to quell the instinct to raise the pitch of his own voice and kept his tone low and reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay.”
Matt quickly ran through his limited options. The girl needed medical treatment. He could go for help, but as as soon as Matt was out of sight, the boy would be gone, dragging the girls with him. And the Santa Monica Mountains were wild enough to swallow up anyone who didn’t want to be found. These kids were a line to the dead girl, and if she were the mother, to the dead newborn. He could not lose track of them.
Kanita was speaking softly to the sick girl, insistently, the same words over and over, in the same unrecognizable language. Kanita held her until she quieted and her agitation softened into a rhythmic rocking motion.
“No immigration. No police,” Kanita said suddenly as if reading Matt’s mind. “No immigration, no police,” she said again, repeating the universally understood words.
“Okay, right, no immigration.”
“No police.”
Matt smiled at her. Brave girl, he thought. Kids shouldn’t have to be this scared. He knew there were children in the world who lived in daily fear, including a primal fear of the authorities, but he’d never seen it up close and raw.
“No police,” he conceded. “No immigration.”
The sick girl continued lying quietly in Kanita’s arms. If he wanted to learn anything more from the older girl, now was the time to ask, with Hasan out of earshot. He leaned toward her. “What happened to Aida?”
Kanita shook her head. “She die.”
“A baby, then die?”
Kanita’s eyes stared unblinkingly into Matt’s before sliding to a point over his shoulder. He turned his head. Hasan stood just feet behind him. Matt hadn’t heard a thing, not the crunch of a twig or the rustle of footsteps through leaves. The kid had approached in absolute silence as if trained in guerrilla warfare.
Kanita motioned to Matt to take the girl in her arms, then scrambled to her feet. Eyes lowered, she scurried past the boy and disappeared around the edge of the rocks. With Hasan watching, Matt put an arm around the limp body, another under her knees and maneuvered her out of the shelter and into the open.
“I’m taking her to a doctor,” Matt said the boy. “I want you all to come with me.”
The boy stood squarely in the narrow defile between the boulders, barring the way.
“If Aida died after giving birth, Hasan, I promise you won’t get into any trouble. It wasn’t your fault, man.” Matt wasn’t sure about the legalities of child abandonment—hell, he wasn’t sure about anything anymore—but that would have to wait. “If you come with me, I’ll explain what happened. I’ll get you all the help you need.”
Hasan stood unmoving.
“Okay, your call,” Matt said.
He squeezed past the rigid figure, made his way back along the path, into the clearing. If they were illegal, they’d need a lawyer, child services, some kind of help. He could feel how tired they were, how much they wanted some relief, someone to care for them.
“Tell them it’s going to be okay, Kanita.” Although he wasn’t sure himself exactly how. “Tell them they should come with me now.”
The slight, slim figure of Hasan appeared in the clearing. His voice, filled with the biting power of rage, swept over the small group of girls.
Matt looked at Kanita. “What did he say?”
She gestured to the girl in Matt’s arms. “Okay, she go.”
“What about you and the others?”
She shook her head.
“Hasan, rain is coming. Let them come with me, man.”
The boy stared without speaking, hatred seeming to emanate from every part of his body.
Matt could feel the girl becoming heavier. He’d hit a dead end, at least for now.
“I’ll be back with food.” He included Hasan in his glance. “No police, no immigration. Stay here. We’ll talk. We’ll work it out, whatever has happened. Whatever it is, Hasan, it can be fixed.”
No one spoke.
One of the older girls put an arm around the ten-year-old and drew her closer.
At least that was something, Matt thought. He turned to go.
CHAPTER 8
As soon as they were out of the canyon, Matt picked up his cell phone, tapped out Phil Halliburton’s private number. He threw a quick glance at the girl, wondering why Hasan had let her go with only a token show of obstruction, unlike the others who needed help almost as urgently. Her eyes closed, she was still leaning against the door of the Range Rover, covered by the blanket he kept in the back for Barney.
“Phil, it’s Matt.”
“Hey, Matt, how are you doing? And that’s strictly a social question. If you have symptoms, take two aspirins and call the office on Monday. Whoops, I forgot. How’s the arm?”
Matt dispensed with a laugh at Phil’s standard joke. He’d known Halliburton since Phil opened his practice in internal medicine in Malibu ten years ago. Their relationship was mainly social, but Halliburton was the guy he saw on the rare occasions he needed a doctor.
“It’s okay, thanks. Phil, can you meet me at my house? I need some help.”
“What’s up?”
“I can’t say right now. I’ll explain when you get there.”
“If it’s a medical emergency, Matt, really, you’re better off calling 911. The paramedics have everything at their fingertips. All I’ve got is my little black bag.”
“No, I need a private doctor. Can you make it?”
A moment of silence. “You’re being very mysterious. Annie and I have plans for tonight.”
“Phil, this won’t take long. Please.”
Another silence. Matt waited him out.
“Okay, but this had better be good.”
“Bring the black bag. I owe you one, Phil.”
He hung up then called the Agoura shelter to tell them something had come up, he’d have to reschedule a time to pick up his two horses. Ten minutes later he drove into his garage. The girl had not moved since he had placed her in the seat and her eyes were still closed. He got out, opened the tailgate for Barney. Before he could go around to the passenger door, the girl slammed it open and was out of the garage, across the road, narrowly missing a passing car.
Shouting at Barney to stay, Matt tore after her. He dragged her off the bank, scooped her against his chest, started back across the street. A few houses away the car had slowed almost to a stop. He put his mouth to the girl’s ear, the words soothing and simple. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Matt crossed the road without looking in the direction of the car, the picture, he hoped, of a young father and his playful teenager, their ecstatic Labrador jumping around them in greeting. He ran along the deck by the side of the house, got the kitchen door open, kicked it closed behind him, and set the girl on her feet.
She backed away, dark hair tangled with leaves and twigs hanging in her eyes, lips bared in a snarl. Dressed as she was in flimsy silk she had to be freezing.
Matt held his hands out to the side. “It’s okay, you’re safe here. I’m not going to hurt you. A doctor is coming, you understand, a doctor?” Keeping his distance, he went to the hall closet, pulled out a blanket, held it out to her. “Put this around you.”
She kept her eyes on him without moving and he tossed the blanket on the back of the sofa that separated the living room from the kitchen. He turned the thermostat up to eighty, then knelt and touched a match to the fire. The gas lighter flared, caught the kindling, flames curled around the logs. He went back into the kitchen, filled the kettle, put it on to boil, keeping up a running commentary to reassure her.
“It will be warmer in here soon. Do you like peppermint tea?” He was completely out of his depth.
He picked up the telephone on the kitchen counter, tapped out Ginn’s number. His heart hammered in his chest while he waited, then her voice, her real voice, was in his ear.
His mouth was suddenly dry. “Ginn, it’s me.”
“Matt, I am going to hang up. Goodbye.”
“No, don’t. Ginn, listen. Please. I need help—”
“Then call your brother, or your father in Palm Springs, or Bobby. Why call me?”
Because I love you. “Because you’re a lawyer, and you’re the only one who can help.”
“Goodbye, Matt.”
Speaking quickly to hold her, he said, “I found some kids today, holed up in a canyon.”
“What?”
“Kids on their own, fourteen, fifteen, suffering from exposure and covered in poison oak. Illegals, I think. A young boy, five girls, one of them a black kid about ten.” He spoke rapidly, trying to convince her before she hung up. “I’ve got one of the girls here now, and she won’t speak. I’ve got to go back to get the others—”
“Are you crazy? Call the authorities. Call Bobby Eckhart. Do it now, before you get any deeper. Goodbye.”
“I can’t, Ginn. They’re illegals, I promised I wouldn’t call the police—” He was speaking to a dial tone.
The kettle was whistling. He rummaged around in the cupboard, found a package of peppermint teabags, dumped a couple in a mug. He covered them with water, spooned in sugar. The girl had not moved. Mug in hand, he started to walk toward her. “Now you sit down and drink this, you’ll feel better—”
She exploded into action, made an end run around him, grabbed a knife from the wooden block on the counter. She backed into the far corner of the living room, wedged herself between the built-in bookcases and the wall. She held the long narrow bladed paring knife in front of her with both hands. It looked as dangerous as a shiv.
“Hey, hey, wait a minute,” Matt said. He put the mug on the end table, and moved toward her. “You don’t need that.” Slowly, he held his hand out for the knife. “It’s very sharp. Come on, give it to me.”
She slashed at him, barely missing his fingers, and he jumped back. He could see the whites of her eyes surrounding the dark iris. She looked like a trapped animal, in shock, ready to kill, ready to die.
Footsteps pounded along the walkway and Matt backed through to the kitchen and opened the door.
“Man, am I glad you’re here.”
“So, what’s up?” Phil Halliburton took off his outer coat, hung it on the coat stand by the door. Early forties, he was tall and slender, well barbered dark hair, the kind of guy who spent time and effort cultivating a polished image. He looked more like a celebrity lawyer than a doctor. He rubbed Barney’s ears while trying to keep the Lab away from his dark slacks. “So what’s the big mystery?”
“There she is,” Matt said.
Halliburton looked at the girl pressed into the angle between bookshelves and wall, then back at Matt. He looked in shock. “Good God, Matt. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I came across a bunch of kids in Encinal. This one was lying on the ground, looking half-dead, so I brought her home and called you.”
“You what? A bunch of kids? What kids?”
“I don’t know, Phil. Just kids, obviously illegals. It was going to rain, and she looked so sick. I couldn’t leave her.”
“You kidnapped her?”
“No, I didn’t kidnap her. What are you talking about?”
“What else would you call it? Doesn’t look as if she came willingly. What’s that you’ve given her?”
“Peppermint tea, with a lot of sugar. I tried to hand it to her and she grabbed the knife.”
“Matt, you should have left her there, whoever she is, and called the authorities.”
“Yes, well, maybe, but it didn’t seem the thing to do at the time.”
Halliburton crossed the living room, but stopped when the girl jabbed the knife at him. “What’s her name?”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t said anything.” Then Matt remembered the girl Kanita patting her mouth and shaking her head, and he realized why Hasan was willing to let her leave.
“I don’t think she can speak.”
“Can she hear?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure she can.”
Phil looked from the girl to Matt. “Oh, man, you’ve got yourself into one hell of a mess here. Well, if I can get the knife away from her, I can give her a shot, calm her down. Then we can figure out where to go from there.” Halliburton took another step toward her. The girl pressed her back deeper into the corner and kept the knife pointed toward him. “Come on, honey, put down the knife,” he said firmly. He moved closer.
Her eyes locked on his, the girl pressed the point of the blade into the soft place beneath her own chin.
“Back off, Phil,” Matt said. “She’s going to hurt herself.”
Halliburton ignored him. “Now, you’re not going to do that, are you, honey? Come on, be a good girl, put the knife on the table.”
Matt could see the point pressing deeper into the delicate skin. “Phil, back off, she means it.”
“Don’t worry, she’s bluffing.”
The skin broke, blood trickled down the girl’s throat.
Matt grabbed Halliburton’s arm. “This is not going to work. I’m going to call the sheriff’s department.”
“No, wait a minute. This kid’s in shock. Look at her, her skin’s gray, and she’s sweating. That’s not a fever. Get a bunch of deputies in here slamming about, this could escalate into a tragedy.”
His eyes on the girl, Matt said, “You just said—” He stopped as the outside door opened.
Wriggling with joy, his tail waving from side to side, Barney hurled himself against the small, slight figure in the doorway.
Ginn Chang staggered, dropped to her knees, put both arms around him. “Oh, Barns. I love you, too.” She buried her face in his neck, as if giving herself time to ease into the room. “I’ve missed you, Barns. I’ve missed you so much.” She held Barney’s head, kissed him between his eyes, then looked up at Matt.
Matt drank her in. “Ginn.”
She was wearing a bright red pea coat, a heavy white turtle-neck, jeans, the elegance of her French mother as apparent as the delicate bone structure and bloodlines of her Chinese father. Matt’s mouth was suddenly dry, his heart bumped unevenly. She hadn’t been here for ten months, the longest ten months of his life and he hadn’t heard her light step along the deck. He couldn’t see her fabulous hair, it was pushed under a red woolen watchcap—unless she’d had it cut off, an awful thought. She looked wonderful. “I didn’t think you’d come.”
“Well, here I am. What did I interrupt?” Ginn got to her feet, took off the hat, freeing a shoulder length mass of shining black hair. She shook her head, removed the coat, threw it on the back of a kitchen chair. She looked at the girl, took in the knife. Her eyebrows shot up. “What’s going on here?”
“This is the girl I told you about on the phone.”
“No kidding. What’s she doing with a knife?”
“She grabbed it when I tried to hand her a cup of tea.”
“He was just explaining to me how he found her in the canyon and decided to bring her home because she was sick,” Phil said. “Good to see you, Ginn.”
“You, too, Phil.” Her tone was less than convincing. Matt knew she’d never had the same regard for Phil that he had. As far as she was concerned, Phil was just one more guy who wanted everything but marriage, and was breaking Annie Lautner’s heart in the process. Matt felt his face flush as she turned back to him. “Did you call Bobby?”
“No,” Matt said. He was beginning to realize how crazy all this sounded. “I found this kid lying on the ground in Encinal. There were several others, and they were all so terrified I promised I wouldn’t contact the police.”
Ginn glanced at the girl. “She looks pretty bad.” She started across the room, the dog following. The girl’s black eyes darted from the men to Ginn, and the point of the knife pressed deeper into the soft spot beneath her chin. Beads of fresh blood oozed from the wound. Ginn stopped well short, and dropped to sit cross-legged on the floor, eye-level with the girl. Barney leaned against her and Ginn put an arm over him and drew him closer.
She smiled and said gently, “You look very tired. Why don’t I make you something to eat, and then we’ll talk. No one is going to hurt you, sweetie.”
The girl’s dark eyes swept across the two men, then came back to Ginn. The hand holding the knife was shaking.
Ginn picked up the mug, put it to her nose and inhaled. She smiled. “Nice. Peppermint. Have some.” She held it out. The girl shrunk back. Ginn sipped the tea. “Mmm. Good.” Slowly, carefully, she pulled the small end table within the girl’s reach, replaced the mug and got to her feet. “Have you got any eggs, Matt?”
“Yes, sure.”
“This girl is in shock, suicidal, probably psychotic. Eggs won’t cure that,” Halliburton said.
“Can’t hurt. Why don’t you two go sit at the kitchen table while I fix something for her to eat. Give her some space.”
Ginn moved around easily in the kitchen that had been hers for five years. She scrambled eggs, toasted bread, put oatmeal cookies on a plate, warmed milk. She placed the food on a tray, carried it over to the table and put it down. As if the last of her strength was deserting her, the girl had leaned her back against the wall. Even with both hands wrapped around the handle of the knife, she was only just managing to keep it upright, the shaking point at her throat.
Tail waving, Barney followed the tray. Trained to ignore any food unless invited, he nuzzled the girl, then licked her face. The knife wavered, the girl sagged against him and the same thin, terrible moans Matt had first heard in the canyon seemed wrenched from her throat. The sound arrowed straight into his heart.
Ginn knelt in front of her and slowly reached for the knife. She covered the girl’s hand with her own, holding it until the small fingers relaxed the knife into her hand. Barney licked the girl’s face anxiously and she put her arms around him, burying her head in his shoulder.
Briefly, Ginn touched the girl’s dirty, tangled hair, then reached for the blanket on the back of the couch and draped it over her shoulders. The girl’s face was hidden in Barney’s coat, but the moans were turning into sobs. Ginn passed her fingers briefly over her eyes before standing up slowly to rejoin the two men at the kitchen table.
“Now what?” Matt said softly.
Phil got his bag, broke open a sealed sterile syringe, selected a vial, drew the colorless liquid into the syringe.
“The first thing is to quiet her down, give her some relief from all that anxiety. It will also give me a chance to examine her. Something’s caused all this.”
“Leave her alone, Phil,” Ginn said. “Just let her cry.”
“So, you’re a doctor now, Genevieve?” Halliburton asked pleasantly.
“It just seems common sense, that’s all. Look at her.”
The girl had her arms around Barney, her head resting on him. The dog sat quietly, his eyes on the plate of food. “I’d use a knife, too, if some strange guy came at me with a needle, wouldn’t you? Sit down, I’ll make some tea.”
Matt smiled to himself. Ginn’s response to most crises was tea. The canister she had left when she moved out was still full of some blend she had sent to her from Canada.
Phil replaced the syringe and vial, and closed his bag. “That little girl is suffering from exposure, dehydration and hysteria. She’s suicidal and should be in a hospital.”
“How can I send her to a hospital?” Matt said. “Who am I going to say she is? I don’t know her name or anything about her. I can’t answer any questions. How long could we get away with it if I made up something?”
“Maybe she’s a runaway and she’s got parents searching for her, frantic with worry. Did you think about that?”
“Phil, does she look like a runaway to you, with a loving family somewhere? They’re not runaways, these kids, not unless they’ve run away from a circus. They were all dressed in these bizarre outfits. One little kid was black, Phil. Ten years old and African. And not African-American, from some place in Africa. God knows what language she speaks. And it’s going to rain.”
Matt looked out the window. The sky was heavy with cloud and a band of rain moved across the horizon. Ginn put a mug in front of him, handed the other to Halliburton, and took a chair from which she could keep an eye on Barney and the girl. With her head, Ginn motioned for Matt to look, and he turned. The girl was kneeling in front of the little table, shoveling food into her mouth, with Barney at her side following each bite. Smiling, Matt held Ginn’s eyes, sharing a moment of pleasure with her for the first time in almost a year.
“I really don’t understand what’s going on here, Matt.” Halliburton had not picked up on the moment. “What were you doing in Encinal in the first place? Isn’t that where a girl’s body was found couple of days ago?”
“What body?” Ginn asked.
“You don’t know about that? A girl was found dead by the side of the road,” Halliburton said. “Do you think this girl, these kids, could be tied up somehow with that?”
“I don’t know. Could be.” Matt looked at Ginn. “During the fire, I had to come home along the beach. Just past the Edwards old house, I found a baby, maybe a couple of hours old. When I got her here, she was dead. The girl they found might be her mother.”
“Oh, Matt! Oh, my God!”
“You didn’t tell me about that when you came to get stitched up,” Phil said.
Shrugging in dismissal, Matt showed Ginn the Band-Aid covering the wound on his wrist. “I must have cut it breaking a window at Jimmy’s. Phil put a couple of stitches in. Anyway, a couple of sheriff’s detectives came to see me about the baby and they told me a girl’s body had been found, covered in wild-flowers, so I went to have a look at the place for myself. I saw these kids but when I called out, they ran, so I followed them. Five girls and a boy. One of the girls spoke a few words of English, really a few words, I could barely understand her. It was very strange, they seemed to be completely dominated by the boy.”
“If they’re that scared, you’d think they’d put distance between themselves and the place where a body was found, not hang around like that,” Phil said.
“That’s what I thought.” Matt got to his feet. “First I’m going to get some clothes together for them and then I’m going to try to bring them back with me. Their clothes were barely covering them, and it’s cold out there now.” He nodded toward the girl. “I had to wrap that one in Barney’s blanket.”
“You’re planning to keep five, six kids here?” Halliburton looked around the combined kitchen, dining room, living room. “Besides the little detail that it’s illegal, this whole place is smaller than my foyer.”
“I’ll think of something. Phil, can you stay here with Ginn for about an hour?”
Halliburton held up a warning hand. “Sorry. I’ve done all I’m going to do. I was never here, I don’t know anything about illegal kids. Annie and I are going out to dinner.” He got up, took his coat from the stand, shrugged into it. “This girl needs care and she should be watched.” He picked up his bag. “Plenty of fluids, light nourishing food, bed rest. Lock away the knives. Good seeing you, Ginn.” He closed the door firmly behind him.
“Good seeing you, too, Phil,” Ginn said to the closed door. The retreating footsteps faded. “So what are you going to do with a bunch of illegal kids you can’t communicate with?”
“I don’t know.” Matt hesitated, then said, “Would you feel safe staying alone with her? I won’t be gone long.”
“You’re really going to bring them here?”
“If you’ve got a better suggestion, God knows I’m open to it.”
Ginn shook her head. “All right, I’ll stay, but I’ll have to make a call. I had plans, too.”
“Oh. Okay, I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Matt went into the small spare bedroom. Of course she was dating, he should have expected that. But right now she was here, with him. That was something. He opened the closet, pulled out skis and poles, tennis racquets, a couple of baseball bats and mitts, and threw them on the bed so that he could get at the shelves of old winter clothes, some of it his, some of it Ginn had left behind when she moved out. Her sweats were small enough for the girls to wear, Hasan, too, come to that. He was so slight he was hardly there. A tough little bastard, though, a fighter. Matt cleared a shelf, dumped the clothes into a black canvas bag.
Then he felt Ginn behind him. Matt breathed in the scent she always wore, maybe from the giant bottle he’d put in her stocking last Christmas with a card from Barney…Not last Christmas. Last Christmas was the first without her in five years. Last Christmas he’d skied in Davos and fucked his brains out with some Italian girl whose name he didn’t even remember.
“I raided the refrigerator. You haven’t got much, just some cheese and bread and some apples. I put in water as well.” Ginn handed him a plastic bin liner. “I tried to get her into bed but she wouldn’t go. She’s lying down on the couch, so that’s something. I had to let Barney get up on the couch with her.”
Matt gave a small laugh. “Bet that was hard.”
“You know Barns. Matt, do you think Phil will go to the sheriff?”
“Come on. I know he’s not your favorite, but he wouldn’t do that.” He packed in another load, fastened the bag and stood. “Okay, now you’ve got my cell phone number, Bobby’s is on speed dial on the kitchen phone and in the bedroom. If she gets violent or threatens you, just run. You leave her, or you let her go if that’s what she wants. Don’t try to stop her. Promise me.”
“Matt, she’s not going to do anything like that.”
“Ginn, please, just do as I ask. Promise me.”
“Okay. I promise. But don’t worry, I’ve got Barney.”
Matt picked up the bag. “Back in an hour.”
CHAPTER 9
Using the bag as a brake, Matt half slid, half slithered down into the canyon. The heavy moisture of late afternoon intensified the foul stink of the burn being drawn toward the ocean.
“Kanita!” His voice came back at him. His stomach was heavy with the weight of anxiety. “Hasan!” He hefted the bag, made his way to the piled rocks and trees where he had left them, his boots sliding on wet rock. He stood by the boulders, yelled again, listened to the silence resonate. He dumped the bag, walked the immediate area, then widened the search, calling, scanning the ground for footprints, but the leaf-strewn ground gave up nothing but the wrapper from the energy bar he’d given the child.
Hasan had herded them away, and they could be anywhere by now. Images flipped through his mind, the girls crying, the little group huddling together for comfort—and the child, her face filled with bewilderment and terror. She was about the same age he’d been when his mother died. He knew the bewilderment, but he’d never experienced the kind of terror he’d seen on that little girl’s face.
He returned to where he’d left the canvas carryall, took out his wallet, tucked every bill he had into a side pocket, not much, five twenties, a ten and some singles. He carried the bag to the little shelter under the trees, knelt to shove it way back into the darkest patch of tangled branches. He stood and looked around. He’d done all he could. So why did he feel so lousy?
The headlights on the Range Rover picked up Ginn’s silver BMW, then swept across a new black Mercedes 500 parked just beyond it. Matt drove into the garage, turned off the ignition, walked along the side deck. Ginn had put on the beach lights, illuminating the sand in front of the house, and the curl of the waves hitting the beach. She always used to do that when he worked late.
He opened the door. “Sorry it took so long,” he called out.
“It’s okay, Phil kept me company,” Ginn said. She came into the kitchen, looked over his shoulder. “Where are they?”
“They weren’t there. I left the stuff under a tree.” Matt hung up his coat and glanced at Halliburton. “I thought you had a dinner date with Annie.”
Phil shrugged. “I cancelled. I couldn’t leave you alone with this.”
A surprisingly kind gesture. He and Phil were not that close. “Thanks. Where is she?” He looked at the sofa, then at Ginn. “Where’s Barney?”
“I managed to persuade her to get into bed. Barney’s with her, she seems to feel better when he’s there. I think she’s sleeping. Phil, can I get you a fresh drink?”
“Sure, thanks.”
Ginn reached into the cupboard for glasses, mixed the drinks, put a vodka and tonic on the coffee table in front of Phil, handed the other glass to Matt, then poured a glass of Chardonnay for herself. Matt wondered if she realized she had not asked him what he wanted, she’d just fallen into their old end of the day routine, Laphroaig and water for him, white wine for her.
Matt swirled the liquid in his glass. His breath felt heavy, his very bones felt as if they were made of lead. “I think I’m going to have to call Bobby Eckhart.”
“We’ve already been through that. It’s not an option,” Ginn said. “Bobby would have to report it. She’d be taken into custody right away.”
Matt got up, walked around the sofa, looked out the window. The horizon had closed in, as if a gray curtain had dropped fifty yards out. The forecast said rain would move onshore sometime during the night but it looked as if it was already here. “Phil, can you get me a nurse, twenty-four-hour care?”
“You mean, live in? Here?” Phil asked.
“Well, I can’t leave her, I can’t take her to the hospital, what else is there?”
“Well, I suppose I could take her home with me,” Phil said slowly. “My housekeeper Lupe was illegal herself before the amnesty.”
“What about Annie?” Matt asked.
“What about her? We don’t live together. Besides, it’s only until you find another solution.”
Matt felt a flood of relief. “I’ll start with an immigration lawyer tomorrow.”
Phil looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. You got something to put on her? I can’t take her out dressed like that.”
“There’s still some of Ginn’s stuff in the closet.”
“I’ll get it.” Ginn got up, disappeared into the small guest bedroom.
As soon as she’d left, Phil opened his medical bag. “I’m going to have to give her that shot, Matt. I won’t be able to deal with her in the car if she’s hysterical.”
“No, I’m with Ginn on this. You saw how she was.”
“That’s precisely the point. A shot of Valium and there’s no danger of it happening again.” Halliburton opened the bedroom door.
The girl’s shriek brought Ginn hurtling through the doorway. She dropped a pile of clothes to the floor, shot across the room.
“What are you doing?” She saw the syringe in Halliburton’s hand. “It’s the needle, she’s frightened of the needle.”
“It’s hysteria, Ginn. In two minutes, she’s going to be okay.”
“No, she’s not,” Ginn said. “She’s terrified.”
The girl was curled into the fetal position, her shrieks replaced by the awful mewling of terror.
“This is not the first hysterical teenager I’ve treated. It’s just Valium, for God’s sake.”
“You’re not giving her anything. You guys get out,” Ginn said. “Go on. I’ll sit with her. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Ginn, this is a medical problem,” Phil said. “It’s hysteria, pure and simple.”
Ginn shot him a look that would have withered fruit on the trees. “Got it. Thanks, Phil. Leave Barney here when you go.”
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Shirley Palmer
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Ужасы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Matt Lowell never set out to be a hero…but he wasn′t given a choice.As a wildfire rages in the canyons around Malibu, Matt Lowell races along the edge of the surf in a desperate attempt to reach his house and save his dog, Barney. But as he runs he stumbles upon a horror that stops him in his tracks: a newborn baby abandoned in the sand. And before he can get her to safety, the baby dies in his arms.When the police find the baby′s teenage mother dead on the side of the canyon road, her body covered with wildflowers, Matt can′t ignore the unexpected sense of duty he feels for these innocent victims. And so he decides to get involved, a decision that will set in motion irreversible consequences–and lead him straight into the midst of an unspeakable crime ring of greed, slavery and murder.Matt Lowell is about to find out that doing the right thing could be the last thing he ever does…