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"He liked
her," Merci said. "He's trying to help her by helping us.”

"If
he wants to help us he could just admit he's a little foggy on some of this.
You know, a half-assed witness is worse than none at all sometimes."

Merci
just shook her head. "I know that. But I want to know happened here. I
mean I really want to know."

Zamorra
knelt and looked at the loose handle of the still-open sink cabinet, then to the
drawer that was pulled out and stranded on its bent runners.

"I do too,"
he said, almost like it surprised him.

Merci
wondered what it must be like to investigate a murder while your wife was
dying. There was a time when she had believed she could use her will to keep
people from dying, but now she didn't. Zamorra didn't seem like the kind of guy
who'd believe in that. It was naïve.

What
she came up with was that Paul must want to run away times, to make his own
hurt stop. When Merci was in her greatest pain—after Hess and her mom died,
after a monster named Colesceau had almost killed her, right after Tim, Jr.,
was born—she pictured a small house on a Mexican beach, with bright purple
bougainvillea potted on the deck and herself sitting there in the shade.

She
imagined that beach house in Mexico now, then she was in Aubrey Whittaker's
kitchen. What did Aubrey Whittaker picture, when the paying guys were doing
their thing? A house with a beach? Eternal fire?

"The
fingerprints," Paul said, like he'd come to a conclusion. "And her
little black book. There's going to be a straight line in there, somewhere.
And it's going to point right at this creep."

M
erci sat with Tim on her lap and let Clark clear the
dishes. The house was cold this December, and she could feel the draft on her
ankles through her socks. Past the windows she could see, in the beams of the
yard lights, the big patio with the baby's trike and the barbecue, the cats on
the wall and the orange trees beyond. The lot was surrounded by the grove and
the grove was surrounded by housing you couldn't see until you walked right up
to them. She'd rent house for its privacy, and because it was cheap.

Tim had on a knit
cap, half against the cold and half because he looked cute in it. It reminded
her of Hess, Tim's father, because worn a hat the last couple of times she had
seen him. Tim, Jr., looked like Hess. It was hard to think of him without
thinking of all that gone wrong.

She
banished Hess from her thoughts, trying to be gentle about it.

"Poker
night," said Clark. She knew it was poker night because her father was
washing the dishes fast, eager to make his eight o' game. It was Clark and his
old retired friends from the Sheriff Department. Every Wednesday.

"Win lots,"
she said absently. Her mind was on the work of the day, no matter how hard she
tried to forget it. "Hey, we homicidals got our Christmas bonus
today."

"Your very own
unsolved?"

"Mine's from
nineteen sixty-nine. A woman named Patti Bailey. I brought it home for pleasure
reading tonight."

Clark was scrubbing
away at a saucepan. He was a tall, lean man with nice gray hair and glasses.
She watched him scrub. Merci wondered at what year a man entered the age of
sharpened elbows. Hess had sharp elbows, even though he had been built heavy
and her father was built slender. Clark looked back over his shoulder at her.

"Buy
a novel if you want pleasure."

"You
remember it?"

"Barely. I was
just starting burg-theft in sixty-nine. I think Rymers and Thornton got that
one."

"They
still around?"

"Thornton's
up in Arrowhead, I think. Rymers died."

"How?"

Clark turned again.
When he smiled the lines in his face changed direction and he looked sweet and
wise. "Stroke."

Merci said nothing.
Her dad was always telling her to leave her work at work. To leave alone the
things she couldn't change. To understand that not every death in the world was
a homicide she needed to solve. To get a life—a contemporary phrase he'd
started using, which hugely irritated Merci.

He also wanted her to
marry Mike McNally, have another baby, be a stepmom to Mike's boy, Danny, be a
mom instead of a mom cop. To Clark, being a cop was just a job, a concept that
Merci had never understood.

To her it was a life. When
she looked at her parents Merci couldn't see where she'd gotten her
single-mindedness and her drive. Who knew how Tim, Jr., would end up, if things
like that could just barrel right into your soul.

• • •

While Tim pulled the ears
and chewed the nose of a stuffed panda, Merci read the Patti Bailey file. The
body was found in an orange grove culvert near the corner of Myford and Fourth,
in unincorporated Orange County. Gunshot. The year was 1969.

The
panda flew across the bedroom. Tim waddled in hot pursuit.

Myford
and Fourth, thought Merci. Odd. It was just a couple miles from here. Now it
was called Myford and Irvine Boulevard. She wondered if Brighton had shuffled
the deck to give her something close to home, then wondered why he'd bother.

The
dicks were Rymers and Thornton, just as her father had remembered. A kid had
found the body in the ditch; his dad called the sheriffs. The responding deputy
was one Todd Smith.

Merci
looked at her son. He was gouging at the panda's eye grunting happily.

Patti
Bailey was a plain looking woman. Twenty-three, petit brown hair pulled behind
her ears. She had heavy eyelids and a crooked smile in her mug shot. Merci
thought it took a lot of guts to smile for a mug, or maybe a lot of alcohol or
dope. Her impression of the year 1969 was that everybody was loaded and disrespectful
to authority. She was only four at the time, so it was just speculation.

Bailey
had been arrested three times for prostitution, tried and convicted once. She'd
dodged marijuana and barbiturates charges dismissed, same judge. Two tumbles
for possession of heroin: eighteen months in all.

While
Tim throttled and cooed at his panda, Merci read through Todd Smith's report.
Bailey was found by the kid on the evening of August 5. Smith got there at 6:30
p.m
. and found the woman facedown
on the slope of the culvert. All she had on was a bra and a pair of shorts.

The
medical autopsy found no conclusive signs of rape. No sign of struggle. There
was THC in her system, nembutal and .08 blood alcohol. She'd eaten peaches and
chocolate chip cookies less than an hour before she died. She'd been dead about
twenty-four hours before the kid found her.

Merci
looked quickly through the crime-scene and autopsy photos. The autopsy had been
performed in a funeral home because the county had had no facilities of its own
back then. The photos struck her as most homicide photos did: The victims
looked so disrespected, so brutally dismissed. What could you have done to earn
such contempt? She’d been shot from behind and up close. The bullet entry was a
clean hole and the exit tore open a crudely triangular flap at the bottom. Went
through her heart—right atrium. The M.E. said maybe a .38 or maybe 357 Magnum,
which was the same diameter but considerably faster. Any number of more exotic
calibers could have made the same hole.

Merci cringed when
she looked at the bullet-path study, in which the deceased Patti Bailey lay on
her side with a long dowel pushed through the middle of her torso. She looked
like something spiked for a barbecue.

Merci
turned over the pictures and sighed.

Tim now had his
toddler's hair comb and was styling the fur on the panda's head. More like
hitting it with the comb. He was talking to his customer, a series of bright
syllables and occasional words that formed his sincere and expressive babble.
He was smiling. From this angle, he looked like her.

Go into cosmetology,
she thought, open a salon and make people pretty.

It struck her as
strange that while she would trade little on Earth for her job, she wanted none
of it for her own son. Maybe Tim will see it like Dad does, she thought: It's
all just a way to pay the bills. Be a banker, a sales guy, a lawyer. Take
pictures of mountains or models. Play ball. Why see all this?

Because people die
every day who aren't supposed to, and the assholes who do it shouldn't go
free.

There
it was. Inelegant but true.

It looked to her like
Rymers and Thornton had done what they could. No murder weapon. No witnesses.
Not much evidence collected: some partial shoe prints in the soft soil of the
orange grove and a short list of drug-suppliers and johns who might or might
not have had a reason to kill Patti Bailey.

The case stayed
active for two years, open for eight more, then it was filed in the unsolved
cabinet. Until now.

Merry Christmas.

• •

Mike McNally called right
after Tim went to bed, as he did almost every night.

"I'm
really sorry about today," he said.

"It's
okay."

"Look,
we're going to get another girl to help on the outcall owner. But I know where
to find him, and you should, too."

Merci
wrote down the name and the home and business addresses: Goren Moladan, Newport
Beach and Dana Point.

"He's
got the assaults on the girls," said Mike. "But he did his time and
his probation, so he's clean right now. I don't think he knows we’re going
inside on him."

"We'll do what
we can to keep it that way."

"You
guys must have gotten prints all over the place in Aubrey Whittaker's place, I
mean."

"She made dinner
for someone that night."

Mike
said nothing for a moment. "Well, something's going to pop then. You think
it was the shooter?"

"That's the
percentage."

"Domiciles
are full of latents though. I mean, a lot of people come and go."

"Yeah. Coiner
says it was crawling with loops and whorls."

Mike
was quiet again for a beat. She could hear his bloodhounds, Dolly, Molly and
Polly, barking in their run.

"Merci,
I'm really sorry for jumping in your face today. I was just disappointed. We
agreed to set Wednesdays aside for movies with the kids. You know, with the old
men at poker night. I was just counting on seeing you. I know you're tired."

"It's
really okay. It just surprises me when you get so absolutely pissed off so
quick. You remind me of me."

The
joke fell flat. Mike tended not to get jokes other than his own, which were
often dumb. He'd lay them on you like a six-year-old handing you a toad.
This horse sits down at a bar, the bartender looks and asks, why the long face?
And so forth.

She
could hear him breathing. Then she heard the old furnace kick on in the
basement, the shudder of the ducts and the hiss of warm air through the floor
vent. One of the cats slunk in, then out.

"Merci, have you
thought about what we talked about?"

Her heart sank.
"Sure."

"And?"

She tried to compose
herself. "I'm still not ready, Mike. It doesn't feel right. It feels too
soon."

"We can make it
whenever you want. Wait a year. It's got to be right for both of us. What's
important is we start planning. Otherwise it'll never happen. The years, man,
they just keep speeding up."

"Let's
wait."

Another silence.
There seemed to be an endless river of them lately. She felt punished.

The dogs were still
yapping in the background. She could imagine Mike's face drawn in
disappointment, his blond forelock hanging disconsolately down, his eyes blue
and wide.

"Because
of what happened with Hess?"

"Yes,
exactly."

"It's
not me?"

"I
love you, Mike. I respect you. It's not you."

"You put off a
good thing long enough, maybe it just goes away. It says that right in the
Bible. 'Hope deferred is a sadness to the heart.' "

She felt her anger
and guilt collide. Careful now. "I don't want you to be sad."

"I
meant your heart, too."

"I
know. It's coming along, Mike. Things are going to be okay."

"I'll
stick with you."

"I
need that."

"You've
got it. Stick with me, too."

"I
will."

Another pause.
"See you tomorrow, girl. Danny and the bloodhounds love you, too."

"Good night,
Mike."

• • •

No sooner had she hung up
than Gary Brice from the Orange County
Journal
called. Brice covered the
crime beat. She trusted him as much as she could trust any reporter—he had
never printed something she had asked him to hold back. He'd always trade a
favor for a favor.

Sometimes
he reminded her of herself, except that the uglier something got, the funnier
Brice thought it was. She understood his view of things but didn't see how he
turned it to humor.