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A
LSO BY
J. C
ARSON
B
LACK
The Shop
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Dark Side of the Moon
The Devil's Hour
Dark Horse
Darkscope
The Desert Waits
The Tombstone Rose
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2012 by Margaret Falk
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612182704
ISBN-10: 1612182704
To my fellow author and good friend William Simon,
who can always talk me down from the ledge.
Acknowledgments
M
ANY THANKS TO
the people who helped make this book a reality: Deborah Schneider of Gelfman-Schneider Literary Agency; my editors, Courtney Miller of Thomas & Mercer and Charlotte Herscher; and to my friends and fellow writers for their helpfulness and unbending support: Sinclair Browning, Elizabeth Gunn, J.M. “Mike” Hayes, Carol Davis Luce, Susan Cummins Miller, Michael Prescott, Cheryl Shireman, and William Simon.
Thanks to my husband and publisher, Glenn McCreedy, and my wonderful mother, Mary Veronica Falk.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Big Bear Lake, California
W
HEN HE CONSIDERED
all he’d had were textbooks, some of which he’d written himself, and a slide rule, retractable measuring tape, calculator, drafting pencil, and reams of notebook paper, Dr. Stephen DePaulentis was quite proud.
Stephen DePaulentis, MD, PhD, chief forensic pathologist with the Los Angeles Police Department (retired), member in good standing with the National Board of Medical Examiners, and frequent crime-scene expert on CNN, was well aware that his thirty-plus years of accumulated knowledge would go unappreciated in the cabin at Big Bear Lake.
But for the moment, he savored the magnitude of his accomplishment.
He’d discarded three prospective scenarios as impossible and stuck with the simplest solution to the problem presented him. Over a two-day period, he had gone over his projections from stem to stern. There were no holes.
He peered out the half-closed blinds of his cabin. A speedboat arrowed across the lake. Sunlight glistened on blue water. He wished he could be out there—
And realized, for the first time in eight months, he actually
wanted
to live. The heart bypass had kneecapped him,
shrunk
him, and the depression that followed was crushing. Now he felt useful again.
He heard a motion behind him. His captor.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he said. “It’s all done.”
“Good,” his captor said.
“Everything’s worked out, the blood spatter, the trajectories, where to place the…” He looked at the still, quiet eyes and faltered. “At any rate, mission accomplished. You can simulate it on a computer. I’ve given you all the measurements, probabilities, forensics—everything.”
Abruptly, he felt deflated. Nothing left to say.
His captor held a takeout bag from The Lodge. Last night Dr. DePaulentis had asked for Kobe beef, and had gotten it. Not as good as you’d get in the restaurant, but good enough for takeout. Today it was poached salmon.
He tucked in while his captor read over his notes. They finished about the same time. His captor said, “Remarkable.”
“I think so.” He wiped his chin with the linen napkin that had come with the food. Wondered what his pals in the forensic biz would think.
As he set down his fork, he heard a snap behind him. It was a snap he recognized from years of donning latex gloves. He spun around. “What—?”
His captor looked at him with that stone face, eyes immovable in her head. One gloved hand held a semiautomatic. She nodded in the direction of the bathroom. He capitulated, walking ahead of her, his heart ramming its way up into his throat. He could hear the motorboat whining across the water, see the sun filter through the ponderosas between the blinds. The sky outside was a perfect, crystalline blue.
She stopped at the bathroom doorway. “Take off your clothes.”
“Can’t we talk about this? I have two grown daughters—”
She raised the gun to chest level. No point arguing. He removed his clothes, embarrassed by his white, flabby body, the scars on his chest. Covered himself with shaking hands.
“Get in the bathtub.”
He stepped in. What else could he do? The water had once been warm, but it was tepid now. She must have run it before she went to get his lunch.
“Sit.”
He sat in the tub, tried to keep his voice calm. “You don’t have to do this. I promised I’d keep quiet, and I will.”
She reached down by the sink and handed him a full bottle of wine. Good wine too, he noticed. “Drink,” she said.
“You can monitor my phone, my e-mails. I promise I won’t say anything.”
“Drink.”
No choice. He drank. Good wine or not, he barely tasted it. His mouth was sour with fear. He swallowed rapidly, like drinking from a fountain, wanting to be as drunk as possible.
His captor emptied a vial of pills into her hand. He recognized them immediately: secobarbital. He stared at the red capsules for a long time, his heart hammering in his ears. He wouldn’t get through this alive. His only choice was
how
.
He took a deep breath and reached out with surprisingly steady fingers. Picked the pills up delicately, one by one, from her outstretched palm and transferred them to his own, then placed them in his mouth.
Thinking,
I did truly fine work
.
He almost choked, his mouth was so dry.
But eventually, he swallowed them all.
I: DESERT CREATURES
Chapter One
T
HE WOMAN AND
the boy came from LA. They drove a white 1999 Toyota Camry, which looked like a million other Toyota Camrys all over the West. The woman, who’d bought the car two days previously from a man in Anaheim, wanted something that would slip under the radar.
There was an “AAA” sticker on the back bumper. They’d argued about it. The woman for, the boy against. The boy thought that someone might notice the Triple A sticker, but the woman said the sticker hinted at solidity. Besides, she said, people don’t see Triple A stickers.
The woman won. She always won—she was the boss.
They’d started out at dawn, stopping in Banning for breakfast. No hurry. Detoured off I-10 to drive into Palm Springs. For five dollars, the woman bought a map of the stars’ homes. They drove past Frank Sinatra’s Twin Palms, which you could rent for $2,600 a night, and the honeymoon house of Elvis and Priscilla Presley on Ladera Circle, and Marilyn Monroe’s house. The Palm Springs Tram was closed for repairs or they would have taken it to the top of San Jacinto. The boy got a souvenir, though—a Palm Springs traveling cup.
He had quite an accumulation of souvenirs from their travels, mostly cheap things. In Indio, he insisted they stop at a roadside stand for a bag of dates. Not to eat, but to add to his stash.
“When we dump the car,” the woman said, “you can’t take all this stuff with you.”
The boy shrugged. He knew better than most that life was a transient proposition.
The boy was twelve going on twenty. Quiet. He kept his feelings to himself. But the woman knew that behind the subdued facade was a land mine waiting to explode. You just needed the right thing to trigger it.
He
wanted
.
The woman knew what he wanted, and she would have liked to give it to him, but this was serious business. The job came first.
He was lucky she was taking him at all.
Chapter Two
W
ELL INTO THE
second hour of Max Conroy’s incarceration, the arresting officer came to release him from this stinking hellhole. About time.
From the outside, the courthouse in Paradox, Arizona, was nineteenth-century ornate, but that didn’t fool anybody. The inside was moldering, cramped, and oven-hot. It smelled of urine, alcohol, and BO. His cell mate hadn’t moved in the two and a half hours Max had been in here; he just lay on the one bunk with his face to the wall, snoring like a gas generator.
The alcohol fumes were getting to him. He couldn’t stand the stench. Sometimes his mind would drift—this had happened a lot in the last couple of weeks—and when he came back into his body he imagined he could smell it on himself.
But he was clean. Alcohol and drug free.
Reborn.
A couple of hours later, the deputy who arrested him unlocked the cell door. Her nameplate said “Tess McCrae.” Tan uniform, twenty pounds of leather and weaponry girding her hips and ruining what was probably a nice line. She had good posture, though. Squared away, no nonsense. Efficient too, the way she’d had him handcuffed and shoved up against her sheriff’s cruiser in one fluid motion.
She led him through intake, which was also output, just a shabby corner hidden from view by a flimsy partition. The whole inside of the third floor of the courthouse was like a stage set. Even the guard by the door seemed like a cardboard cutout—adding to the unreality that floated around Max most of the time now.
