Light Before Day (35 page)

I returned to my motel room with a copy of the
LA Times
and a Styrofoam cup full of rank coffee. The suicide of Billy Hatfill had made the A section. The article was mostly a rehash of the quick rise and quick fall of Broadband Access Media and the sudden flight of the man behind it all, Joseph Spinotta. There were a few quotes from guys whose names I recognized, mostly bitchy asides about how Hatfill hadn't been able to attract the Hollywood and Silicon Valley celebrities and moguls who had flocked to his sugar daddy. I was pretty sure that the tableau of Billy's death would make it clear to the police that he hadn't been alone in his house when he took his life. If that was so, the police had said nothing to the
LA Times
about it.

Next I tore the entire paper apart in search of anything on the fate of a real estate developer named Martin Cale and a seventy-foot yacht piloted by a psychopathic teenager with eyes so blue they each needed their own pool man. I didn't find anything.

I was left with the article from the
Bakersfield Californian
that Brenda had given me the night before. I was desperate to see if there had been any follow-up coverage on the meth lab accident that had killed Corey's mother and younger brother, one week before he had tried to locate Joseph Spinotta. The fact that Brenda hadn't included any told me Jimmy was probably standing several feet away when she discovered the article, and she had known he was about to pull the plug on our investigation.

I read the article again. It was an unnamed source at the Kings County sheriff's department who had given the reporter information about Janice Hughes, the concerned schoolteacher who had gone to check on Corey's younger brother at the worst possible time. This detail struck me as odd, but the reporter hadn't commented on it. The explosion had occurred just a few minutes after midnight. Why had Janice Hughes chosen this time to check on the boy?

Another important fact was missing from the article. There was no mention of Tonya

McCormick's other son, the man I had known as Corey Howard.

What I was about to do was stupid. There was a homicide detective for the LA Sheriff's Department looking for me, and it was possible that he would figure out that I had been with Billy Hatfill when he died. But I was confident that I had information that another sheriff's department, miles north of LA, did not yet know. They might be eager to hear it—and that would allow me to deal.

Information gave me the number for the Kings County Sheriff's Department. A man

answered.

"Tonya McCormick had a son who ran away from home when he was sixteen" were my first words.

"What's that, sir?"

"He's been living in LA under a different last name. If anyone wants to know anything more about this guy, call me back at this number."

"Your name, please, sir?"

I gave him my cell phone number instead. He didn't ask me to repeat it, so I hung up on him.

I finished the coffee and opened the bag I had packed the night before. I placed Corey's drawing of his boyhood lover on the bed, along with Martin Cale's blinking keypad and my photographs of Spinotta, the Vanished Three, and Corey. Last night had shoved me deeper into Corey's past. I had found the truth behind one strange meeting only to be saddled with another. Four years earlier, Joseph Spinotta and Corey had met face-to-face, and neither man had uttered a word about their meeting afterward. Had Spinotta tried to draw Corey into his circle, recruit him to work alongside the Vanished Three? Ben Clamp, the porn star and prostitute, bore a striking resemblance to Corey. Had he been Spinotta’s second choice after Corey turned down the job?

I realized I was leaving out an important detail Martin Cale had shared with me. Joseph Spinotta had asked to meet with Corey after hearing the tragic tale of Reynaldo Reyez, Corey's boyhood lover. Something about the story of Reynaldo Reyez had sparked Joseph Spinotta’s interest. I laid the drawing of Reynaldo Reyez, the photograph of Spinotta, and the photograph of Corey out in a row on the bed and let my eyes sweep over them.

I moved Corey's photograph into the middle. He was lying across my love seat in a black V-neck T-shirt. To his left was a detailed pencil sketch of a hauntingly beautiful Latino boy with cat's eyes and lustrous shoulder-length black hair. Reynaldo Reyez was missing, presumed dead, murdered by his father. To his right, a well-coifed man in his forties, with a come-hither grin and a face sculpted by a scalpel, leered into the camera. He was masterminding a high-tech child porn ring from an unknown location.

The longer I stared at this gallery of faces, the more I became convinced that there was a connection among them—a connection forged during a secret meeting four years earlier. Before Spinotta’s disappearance. Before Corey's murder. I just didn't have the slightest clue what that connection was.

My cell phone rang. The caller had a blocked number. I answered without saying a word. After a confused pause, a husky-voiced woman said, "You just made a pretty interesting phone call to the Kings County Sheriff's Department. Feel like explaining yourself?"

"Who is this?"

She didn't answer.

"Are you with the Kings County Sheriff's Department?" I asked.

"No. Your call was intercepted."

"Is that a joke?"

"Jokes are funny. Did you call the Kings County Sheriff's Department or not?" The woman's tone bothered me. But she wanted the information I had. I decided to tell her how to get it.

"Learn some manners and I might answer that question. Have a good day."

I hung up. For the next five minutes, I imagined my husky-voiced friend pacing the room.

Then my cell phone rang a second time.

"It's hot and sunny here," she said stiffly. "What's it like where you are today?"

"Gray," I answered. "It's the clouds, I think."

"Most clouds are gray."

"Yeah, well, I think I'm in them."

"Like figuratively speaking?" she asked.

"No," I said. "Literally. You ever heard of Gorman?"

"You've got an LA cell phone number and you're in Gorman?" Now it was my turn not to say anything.

"Have you had any recent contact with this long-lost son of Tonya Mc-Cormick's?" she asked.

"Not recently, no." It felt like a direct answer, even if I didn't tell her that Corey McCormick was dead.

"What kind of guy is he?"

"Complicated." That flummoxed her for a moment. "You still haven't told me your name," I said.

"Do you think this long-lost son of Tonya McCormick's would be interested in the fact that the BNE is about to release a bullshit report about what caused that explosion?"

I didn't tell her that Tonya McCormick's long-lost son was no longer interested in anything at all.

"I'm interested," I finally said. "I can't speak for Corey."

"That's his name? Corey?"

"Yes."

I had no reason to trust the woman I was talking to. But I needed more details about the explosion that had killed Corey's mother and younger brother. "We should meet," I said.

"Should we?"

"Yes."

My tone seemed to convince her. She gave me directions from Interstate 5 to the tiny town of Avenal, then to a trailer park that sat just north of town on Highway 33. I realized she was directing me to the site of Tonya McCormick's trailer.

"Now can you tell me who you are?" I asked her.

"I'm the schoolteacher's daughter," she said. "That's what they started calling me around here a few weeks ago."

I studied the article in front of me. "Janice Hughes was your mother?"

"Yes." She hung up on me.

She obviously thought there was something more to the fiery explosion that killed her mother than a simple accident caused by careless meth addicts. Maybe she was a grief-driven crackpot.

If that was the case, she and I would probably get along just fine.

I let my foot up off the gas as I descended the Tejon Pass. The mountain walls broke, revealing an expanse of golden valley floor that extended to an unbroken line of peaks on the eastern horizon. They were the Sierra Nevadas, and at their feet lay the richest agricultural region in the United States. The Central Valley extended almost the entire length of the state. It was California's heart, but it was a soft and dying one. In some places the soil had turned alkaline, and the cows that grazed on it became sick and died. As I continued north on Interstate 5, massive orchards sprang up out of the dry soil. The Coast Ranges swelled on the western horizon, a smooth counterpoint to the jagged peaks that rose a good distance to the east.

The land I was driving over had once been covered by a massive sheet of water called Tulare Lake, before the cotton interests had strong-armed the federal government into shunting off its tributaries for irrigation. In its day, Tulare Lake had been home to bandits who hid out in its thick beds of tule grass.

After a while, the Kettleman Hills rose off to the left of the interstate, their tule-grass-blanketed slopes shimmering like sand dunes in the afternoon sun. I was driving into the framed photograph I had seen hanging in Martin Calles yacht.

Highway 269 took me past a squat, rounded water tower with the word
Avenal
painted on its flank.

A few seconds later, I dropped into a valley narrower than the one from which I had just emerged. The Coast Ranges loomed on the near horizon. Avenal was literally the smallest town that I had ever seen. City Hall could have been mistaken for a doctor's office, and the main street ran for only several blocks before it was subsumed by Highway 33s north-south passage through the valley. Its residential blocks were laid out diagonally from the center of town; they were lined with crumbling one-story tract homes, most of which had battered pickup trucks and utility vans parked out front.

When I went north on Highway 33, the town vanished in the blink of an eye. A few minutes later, I came to the trailer park that the daughter of Janice Hughes had described to me. Six trailers were loosely sprawled around a massive dried-out date palm. There had been a seventh trailer, but all that was left of it was a scorched footprint and a chain-link fence missing huge sections. One of the intact fence portions was laced with white ribbons. As I pulled up, a tall woman in a baseball cap dropped a bouquet of white roses onto the small drift of flowers in front of the lone square of chain link.

I approached her slowly. She kept her back to me. Her thick red hair hung down to her shoulders. It was several shades darker than the fields of tule grass extending from behind where Tonya McCormick's trailer had once sat. On the near horizon, a line of power poles crossed the valley floor like giant staples up into the Kettleman Hills.

I allowed the schoolteacher's daughter to have whatever moment she needed. The sweet sayings written on the white ribbons in front of her were all addressed to her mother, Janice.

They were parting wishes from the woman's students.

We shared our names but not a handshake. "Do you know what white phosphine is?" she asked.

"No," I answered.

"Tonya McCormick and her boyfriend were running what's called a Beavis and Butt-head lab," she said. "They'd cook about an ounce of meth at a time, then sell it so they could buy more ingredients to make some for themselves. The ingredients are bad enough. The by-products are even worse."

The brim of her cap shadowed her high brow and the sunglasses shielded her eyes. She had a long, expressive mouth and a small, sharp nose with pinched nostrils. Her white T-shirt bore the childish logo of a 10K marathon sponsored by UC Berkeley.

"One of the ingredients in meth is red phosphorous. It's basically the stuff you find on a match head. It gets added during the cooking process. Then you have to filter out the waste and get rid of it. The BNE says Tonya was dumping this stuff under the floor of Caden's room in sealed containers, which was really stupid. Red phosphine is heat sensitive, and when you heat it up, you get white phosphine, which is air reactive. Blast white phosphine with some oxygen, and suddenly you've got a fire so hot the fire department has to stand back and watch it burn. The report's saying Caden started some kind of fire that heated the containers. Then he opened a window or a door to get out and—boom!"

I looked at the blackened plot of land before me and imagined a trailer flare like a match.

"Light before day," she said. "That's how one of the deputies described the explosion. One of the neighbors said they thought an angel was coming."

Now both of us were gazing at the midnight-colored earth before us.

"Tell me about Corey. This long-lost son," she said, her back to me.

There was something she wasn't telling me, but I had no choice but to offer her some facts in the hope of a trade. "Corey's father died when he was a little boy. Tonya took him on the road for a while before she got busted for possession in Fresno. Corey was sent to live with his grandmother in Visalia. He ran away when he was sixteen and ended up in LA. He gave the Marine Corps a try. It didn't work out. He changed his last name to Howard."

Her mouth was a grim line and her thumbs were hooked in the pockets of her jeans. She could tell I was holding out on her. "What was he to you?"

"We had a relationship. You said the BNE report is bullshit. Why?"

"They're blaming Caden McCormick for the explosion," she said.

"A thirteen-year-old?" When I heard myself say the age of Corey's younger brother, I felt my chest tighten. It was the same age Melissa Brady had ascribed to the boy in the movie I had watched the night before.

"They're speculating that Caden started the fire accidentally and then ran for the hills. Out of guilt. Panic. Whatever."

My chest tightened more. "Are you telling me Caden McCormick is alive?"

She looked at me hard. "Yes, that's what I'm telling you."

"I've got an article from the
Bakersfield Californian
that says he's dead."

"Presumed dead," she said. "And they kept presuming it for about a week and a half. They don't exactly move hell and high water for meth addicts around here. Then they found only some hair traces and a chunk of the lad's ear. Not enough to confirm a death." I moved past her to the chain-link fence so she wouldn't see what I knew was happening on my face. "What do you think happened to him?"