Light Before Day (20 page)

He sipped from his scotch. "I never went back to New York." His eyes betrayed a pain that seemed unrehearsed, a recollection of how it felt to be traded from one businessman to another like a wholly owned subsidiary.

"Did you love him?"

He raised his eyebrows at my audacity, but then some other emotion commandeered his face and he brought one edge of his napkin to his mouth in a poor attempt to hide it. "I thought he could own the world if he wanted to," he said. "I thought this made him as happy as it made me.

But it didn't."

"What made him happy?"

"Nothing," he said. "Certain things just made him shut up for a while."

"Like what?"

He met my eyes. "Young people."

I did my best to suppress the thought of the young person whose pain I had pried my way into that afternoon at Back Beats on Ventura Boulevard. "How young, Billy?"

"Let me put it this way," he said, resting his elbows on the edge of the table. "I was never young enough."

I didn't press. I couldn't. Every question I wanted to ask might endanger my meeting with Martin Cale. The fact that Billy had smeared Joseph's name without much provocation was information enough for now. It supported Jimmy's theory that Billy was trying to cut himself loose from Spinotta's psychic dominion over him. But it didn't confirm it.

"You don't have some informed opinion to offer?"

"I'm trying to work on not bleeding judgments, Billy."

He smiled at the table. "You aren't going to ask me why I stayed with him?"

"The answer's pretty obvious, Billy. You're wearing it."

He glanced down at the expensive Rolex on his wrist and laughed.

We drove back to his house in silence. Martin Cale was coming to shore on Saturday night; that meant I had a day or two before I could back Billy to the wall about the real reason Corey had come to his house, and the magic key Corey had used to get in the front door. After I rolled to a stop in front of his gate, Billy didn't move. He sat with his hands folded in his lap. "I never apologized to you for Everett's behavior," he said.

"Shouldn't Everett do that?"

When he turned his face to mine, the halos from the security lights atop the front gate slid across his pale cheek. "I stayed with Joseph because I thought I could learn from him." His voice had sudden gravity to it. His earlier confession had not gotten the reaction out of me that he wanted, so now he was offering up another answer to a question I hadn't asked. "I thought I could do a better job with his life than he did."

"Have you?"

"Does asking redundant questions like this make you hard?" he whispered. "You think I don't know what you're doing, asking me out to dinner like this?"

"What am I doing?" I asked redundantly, with a redundant smile.

He let out a hiss of breath. I felt his hand enclose my left thigh. He leaned over until our noses were almost touching. In the darkness, I could not make out his face.

"You think Corey's coming here to my house two weeks ago might have something to do with why he's no longer around."

I didn't say anything.

"Is that really the truth, Adam? Or is that just what you've convinced yourself of—because it gives you an excuse to circle me like this? To try to figure me out? Eventually, you would have found a way to write about me, even if Corey still worked at that car wash, and you know it. I see it on your face every time I run into you. But when I give you the story, you reject it.

Because it's not the one that you've made up. The kept boy gone wrong."

His hand worked its way to my crotch, and I felt his hot breath against my lips. "You're no better than I was with Joseph. You see my life and you think you can do better with it." He squeezed my groin. "Prove it. Come inside." His eyes fell to my crotch. They were wide and dead, full of something that looked like scientific inquiry instead of lust. He might have spent most of his afternoons polishing and rehearsing every sentence that came out of his mouth until he sounded like a cross between a British playwright and a West Side therapist, but his innate desire to sleep with men who held a cold disdain for him marked him as a spoiled adolescent.

"No thanks."

"How much do you want to meet with Martin Cale?"

"How much do you want me to hear what Cale has to say?" He loosened his hand, but he didn't turn away from me. The lights that lined the top of his front gate threw him into silhouette.

"Corey was blackmailing you," I said.

I heard the breath go out of him and his next inhalation sounded shockingly like a sob. He turned forward and slumped in his seat, his eyes screwed shut and his chest rising and falling. I had scored a hit. "Blackmail's a crime, Billy."

"And you want to know why I didn't go to the police?" He had just confirmed Jimmy's initial theory. I was startled silent for a few seconds.

"I want to know what Corey wanted," I said. "Was it money?" After several agonizing seconds, Billy unsnapped his seat belt and reached for the door handle. I put my hand on his shoulder and he batted my arm away. "I know the time I spent with Corey can't hold a candle to the time you two spent together," he said, his voice trembling. "But I saw someone you refuse to see, Adam.

He's full of rage and convinced it's something else. Martin Cale can tell you the rest."

Before I could say another word, he had gotten out and slammed the gate behind him.

"He really wants you to meet with Martin Cale, doesn't he?" Jimmy asked. I was pacing back and forth in my apartment, the poster of Dionysus leering at me.

"Yes."

"The restaurant," Jimmy said. "You think Billy picked it just because you slept with the host while you blacked out."

"I have no idea," I said. "And if I asked Billy about it, I'd get a ten-minute response that evaded the question."

"But Billy basically confirmed that Corey was blackmailing him."

"Yes."

"Don't meet with him again," Jimmy said firmly.

"Fine with me," I said, startled by this sudden about-face.

I counted long seconds while Jimmy said nothing on the other end of the phone. Something about my conversation with Billy was bothering him, and he didn't feel like sharing it with me. "I want something real on this guy," he said. "Something that didn't come out of his mouth."

"I can try to find some witnesses to this meeting he had with Corey. It shouldn't be hard.

There was a party going on."

"I doubt the two of them got into it in front of the other guests, but go ahead."

"There's another thing," I said. "Billy went to a famous prep school back in New York called Rappaport. He told me he had an affair with one of his English teachers."

"When did Billy tell you this?"

"The first night I was out asking around about Daniel Brady. I told him I'd gone to college with some of his classmates, and he asked me if they mentioned the guy who had slept with his English teacher."

"So this affair wasn't a secret?" Jimmy asked.

"Apparently not. But Billy said he had no hard feelings about the relationship."

"I wonder if the English teacher feels the same way," he said.

"You want me to find out?"

"I'll look into it first," he said. "Tomorrow I want you to retrace some of Linda Walsh's footsteps. Her file doesn't exactly set my heart racing. But I need you to verify that restaurant manager's story about firing Terrance Davidson."

I sat on my response.

"What?" he finally asked.

"Nothing," I said. "It just feels like a demotion." When he didn't answer, I decided to voice the worry gnawing on me since the ride home. "I went too far, didn't I? Asking Billy if Corey blackmailed him."

For a moment he said nothing, and I assumed that Jimmy agreed with me. "Little man, tonight Billy Hatfill tried to humiliate you and insult you, and you didn't let him do either. He also accused you of having an unnatural obsession with him when it's patently obvious that the opposite is the case. On top of all that, he's withholding information about the disappearance of a man you had deep feelings for. Frankly, I think the fact that you didn't spring across the table and wring his neck is deserving of a Purple Heart."

I was too surprised to speak.

"You are more cut out for this than you think you are," he said. "But you're not a reporter.

You're something else."

"What?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I'm leaning toward infection."

"That's flattering."

"It is," he said. "Look at who you've infected."

"Whatever. Call me when you come up with something better."

After I hung up, I came to terms with the fact that Jimmy and I could do no more than circle our target until I met Martin Cale. Corey had blackmailed Billy Hatfill. Now Billy was leading me to a man who could have provided Corey with the information he had needed to do the job.

Central Coast Ranges Same Night

Deputy Amy Stahl drove west on Highway 198 into the mountains just west of Coalinga. Her father had been an amateur geologist, and she distracted herself from the fact that she was carrying stolen evidence in the trunk of her Ford Escape by thinking about the landscape she was passing through.

The Coast Ranges had surfaced only a million years earlier. Their interior rested atop a giant platform of granite that had been carried north from below the Sierra Nevada range by the San Andreas Fault. Before they surfaced, the ocean waters carved them with inlets and bays that were now home to cattle ranches and grasslands. None of the peaks were high enough to block out the night sky, but in some places they were rough and jagged, their granite flanks exposed and flaking. In other places, they were round and smooth, as if God's hand had favored some parts of the landscape and not others.

Caroline Hughes had given Amy directions to a road that didn't exist on any map. After twenty minutes on Highway 198, Amy saw the pair of valley oaks that Caroline had told her about. They were huge trees, their branches touching the ground as if their crowns had been split down the center by a giant axe.

Even though she couldn't see the road, Amy made the turn and drove over a sweep of

grassland dotted by tumbles of chaparral. To the west, she could see the fence of a neighboring cattle ranch. Far ahead, there was a gentle slope curtained by dense stands of valley oaks with leaves that turned the color of ash in her headlights.

She almost drove right into the fence. It was fifteen feet high and its slender posts were painted black. There was no moon to light the coils of razor wire that ran along the top. Instead of slats or chain link, it had thin strands of something that looked like airplane cable. No sign warned trespassers to keep away.

Amy stepped out of her car and studied the fence. She picked up a stick and hurled it at the thin cables. The collision made a sound like the snap of a giant guitar string. Caroline Hughes had told her that this property used to belong to her father. She had said nothing about why her father had needed the protection of an electrified fence.

Suddenly an entire section of the gate swung inward, just enough for Amy to fit her truck through. The minute she drove through it, the gate swung shut behind her. She kept her Escape at ten miles an hour as she crossed the expanse between the fence and the dense stand of valley oaks that ascended the gentle slope up ahead.

Amy had been a deputy with the Kings County Sheriff's Department for five years. In that time, she had never planted or stolen evidence. The evidence she carried in her truck had lain untouched for over a week, but that did little to stanch her guilt. She knew the reason for her breach of ethics was not a simple one. The Valley was infected by a virus that was being brewed on the stovetops of trailers across the state of California.

The virus was crystal meth, and it killed most of its hosts by setting them ablaze, sometimes igniting explosions so white it looked like heaven had sprung a leak—an explosion that had killed an entire family as well as an innocent schoolteacher who had taken her last breath in Amy's arms.

Two security lights flicked on amid the trees up ahead. The lights guided her into a clearing.

The house was a long one-story log cabin with a small front porch. A short chimney rose from the broad sloping roof. From the treetops behind the house, an antenna that looked like it could pick up TV signals from Asia thrust itself into the night sky.

Caroline Hughes was waiting for her on the front porch. She was not the same kind of beauty her mother had been. Janice Hughes had moved through the world with unassuming grace.

Everything about her daughter was thick and rigid, from her sculpted arms to her muddy sheen of freckles that almost looked like a coat of war paint, to the way she could make a simple question sound like a command.

Amy opened her trunk and pulled out the box that contained the remains of Tonya

McCormick's pit bull. Caroline accepted it in both arms without bending under its weight. "What condition are they in?" she asked.

"Bones, mostly," Amy answered. "There's some skin left too. You going to put them back together?"

"I might not have to," Caroline said.

"You some kind of doctor or something?" Amy asked.

"First-year surgical resident," Caroline answered. She turned and headed toward the cabin.

Amy took note of how Caroline's clipped response didn't tell her if she had any plans to return to her studies. Maybe she planned to stay in this cabin forever, hunting the man she believed responsible for her mother's death.

Amy followed her inside. The cabin had a ten-foot ceiling. Vague lamplight came from a loft that extended out from a flimsy plywood wall that separated the galley kitchen from the common room. A giant circular rug displayed the outline of a deer leaping through a yellow egg yolk of sun. In the cast-iron stove, the last embers of a poorly tended fire were dying. A ratty sofa was pushed against one wall, covered with bright, hand-sewn bed quilts. Next to the sofa was an old schoolteacher's desk, its pockmarked wood losing its dark stain. Caroline gathered a mess of what looked like news clippings off it and shoved them inside a drawer. She dropped the cardboard box on top of the desk, angled the desk lamp over it, and peered inside.