The Summerland (30 page)

Here, at last, was someone who might begin to understand the immense pressure he was under, both internal and external. Drebin had been around the block, had stood at the mantle of leadership before, and Bill was so tired of being everything to everyone in Mariposa County. His deputies looked to him to solve the problems of the world, the community looked to him to keep them safe, the politicians looked to him to keep their communities clean and their reelection chances bright and shiny. And then there was Arden.

The one person he should have been able to unburden himself to, the first person he’d truly loved since the death of his grandparents was on her way here to confirm the fact that her sister had disappeared once again.

He wasn’t sure what that would do to the edgy, complicated relationship that had evolved over the past few weeks. By maintaining her distance, staying in L.A., he’d been forced to see Arden as she saw herself, to understand her deep-seated fear of being second best yet again. She wasn’t the only one having an identity crisis. Since her abrupt departure in mid-September he’d been forced to go back to his solitary, bachelor’s existence. He’d forgotten how hard it was to sleep alone, to wake up alone. There was nothing on this earth that he would do to hurt Arden, but as seemed to be the norm in this case, karma was against them.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Drebin’s eyes narrowed as he studied the entries on Kimmie Ross. While all of the other women had been randomly selected, it appeared that Kim Ross had been carefully chosen, even cultivated as she began to express her dissatisfaction with life in a small town. Porter’s notes didn’t make it clear where the two of them had first come into contact, but he’d been drawn to her incandescent youth and vitality from day one.

On Midsummer Eve he sentenced Victoria Rogers to death for her perceived lack of godliness. The next day Kim Ross was his.

From his notes, Kim was the closest he had come to achieving his goals. Drebin still couldn’t quite believe what those goals were. How a well-educated, world traveled man could have embraced such beliefs was beyond him. He knew he was in for an education when he viewed the videotapes, but in themselves Porter’s notes were fascinating reading.

He’d begun his worship as a young man traveling with his parents in the Armed Forces. They’d been stationed at Fort Hood, Texas before the Wiccan religion had undergone its latest resurgence, so his involvement in it had been a closely guarded secret.

Drebin could easily imagine a young, inexperienced boy going into a sexual culture like that and believing that he had found the keys to heaven. Whatever that coven had taught him, he’d left it to follow women’s studies and religion as co-majors at UCLA, then moved onto Johns Hopkins for his Master’s and Doctoral work.

The guy had been incredibly smart, that much was obvious.

Drebin sat there with brown notebooks scattered across the table like the damage trail from a tornado. And damage had been wrought, in more ways than one.

Ashton had been wrong. Porter had been experimenting with ascending to the next plane for over ten years, more like fifteen. He’d only been videotaping his victims for ten.

He moved every one or two years when the local crop of potential goddesses began to run dry. Mariposa had been a virtual smorgasbord, with an endless supply of transient females running the Highway 140 corridor to Yosemite on an annual basis. In his mind, sooner or later he would find his goddess. If it hadn’t been for Samantha, he could have continued almost indefinitely. His role as a rock-solid community member would have overwhelmed any suspicion.

Drebin wearily massaged the bridge of his nose. This had been a cluster from the get go, and even though there was not a damn thing that anyone could do about it, the blame had fallen squarely on one man, and it wasn’t Adam Porter.

He felt sorry for Ashton, knew that the man’s career as an elected official was over with the close of this case, or maybe even before that. Even though procedure had been followed to the letter and all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, the press was still having a field day. From what he could tell, the county supervisors and mayor weren’t exactly planning a parade either.

Most people, especially city dwellers, would never understand the delicate balance of authority that seesawed between the Sheriff’s Department and the County Supervisors. Both held enormous power, but as the sole law enforcement in a county that was larger than several eastern states, the Sheriff was usually on the receiving end of any press, be it good or bad. Sheriffs in towns like this were either elected to one term, then ousted, or stayed in the position until they retired.

Bill Ashton’s career was over simply because, through no fault of his own, he had let that balance of power shift to the Supervisors. As elected officials, they knew when and where to cut their losses. Knowing Ashton, he would wrap this up as quickly as possible, then exit stage left to get on with his life. It saddened him because besides being a good guy, Ashton was a damned good cop. Too good to waste on ranch life in the sticks.

* * * *

“
Hello Arden.” The Bill Ashton that greeted her was reserved, keeping a good distance between them when all she wanted to do was walk straight into his arms and make everything good and right again. She’d thought that by getting to know the man over the telephone, by putting him at a distance, that she would get over the craving she had to see him, to touch him. She had been wrong. She’d thought she needed time and distance to put her thoughts, feelings into perspective. Wrong again. What she felt for Bill Ashton hadn’t diminished one little bit over the course of forty-five days it had only strengthened her desire and outright need to be with him. The fact that he was the investigating officer in her sister’s disappearance had stopped being a factor about twelve hours after she met the man.

And at least once a day she felt guilty about shunting her sister’s disappearance into second place. That lack of loyalty to her sister was totally unlike her, but then again, in reality, Samantha had been missing from her life since she was sixteen years old. With Adam Porter’s help she had come to the realization that when she had begun this quest for her sister, it had been out of familial duty more than anything else. Through those interviews, she felt she’d come to know her sister a little better and maybe even begun to understand the forces that drove a woman like Samantha. Certainly she hadn’t liked seeing what her sister had become in the years since they’d seen each other last, but who was she to throw stones? Particularly since her relationship with the Sheriff now took precedence over even Samantha.

She’d carefully considered everything that had happened since that hot day in June when she rolled into Mariposa. While her life had certainly taken some bizarre twists and turns since then, one of the oddest she’d discovered, in retrospect, was that she’d never felt, deep down in her bones, that Samantha was hurt, or really in danger. Sure, they’d never been close in any sense of the word, but she intuitively knew that had harm come to Samantha, somehow she would have known.

And now all of that wondering and soul searching had come full circle. Arden stood in the bullpen area of the Sheriff’s Department, looking at her lover’s standoffish posture and wondering if her own self-protection measures had been too much for him. If the conversations they’d shared in the last forty-five days had been just that, conversations. Not the growth of the real, lasting relationship she’d been hoping, yearning for.

Knowing it was far too late to guard her heart, she stood before him, this time waiting for him to decide how far to take their reunion, oblivious to everything and everyone around them.

Drebin broke the thickened silence, knowing the two of them needed a mediator of some sort, at least to start. As a man born and bred to read people, he could see where the wall between the Sheriff and Arden was coming from, and it wasn’t from the Air Force captain. He wondered if Ashton knew what he was doing.

“
Captain Jones.” Arden nodded at the enormous agent, her eyes never leaving Bill’s. “Ma’am?”

Reluctantly, Arden pulled her gaze from the Sheriff’s, feeling the chasm yawn between them, scared to death that she had put it there. “Hello Agent Drebin. What do you need me to do?”

“
We’d like you to take a look at a section of videotape and confirm or deny the identity of the woman in the video. What have you been told to this point?”

“
Sheriff Ashton just told me that someone very similar to Samantha had surfaced, and could I please come up to ID her. Is there anything I should know before I see this tape?”

“
Probably, but I’d like to get your candid reaction.” Drebin answered honestly. “You know your sister better than anyone else. We’d like to get your first impression, so please talk us through it, OK?”

Arden nodded, falling into step behind Drebin, knowing that Bill had remained behind and was now staring at her with an almost uncomfortable intensity. Drebin seated her in the conference room, making her flash back to the last time she’d been in here with Doug Brewster, just six weeks before. The room was just as stuffy and oppressive, just as cliched as a questioning room on any TV crime series. A large television and VCR sat on a rolling cart, the TV tuned to a Fresno station.

Arden saw herself enter the Sheriff’s Department, Doug Brewster pushing through the crowd of reporters with the finesse of a battering ram. The picture flashed to the midday reporter, who told the world that there had been a break in the Ladykiller case.

Drebin folded his long body into a seat next to her, watching her face as he hit the Play button on the remote.

There was no doubt it was Samantha, and Samantha in her prime. What made her gut clench, though, was not her sister, but the man on the bed behind her. Nausea roiled through her stomach as her mind flashed from point to point to make the obvious connection.

Keeping her game face on, she turned to the agent. “Porter. It was him?”

Drebin nodded slowly, hitting the Pause button, freezing Samantha in place as she stood before the folding screen with the sigil emblazoned across the front, her finger pointing directly to the arcane marking.

“
How? I spent hours with the man, talking about Samantha, her strengths, and her weaknesses. I bared my soul to him! How could someone keep a secret like that, play it off so perfectly while I sat right next to him?” The questions were flying out of her mouth in a horrified jumble, all pretense of poise gone.

“
For God’s sake, he was the police’s ‘expert.’ Don’t you people run some kind of background check before you give someone full access to a murder investigation?” Anger and frustration arced off of her like sparks. She knew full well that the department had followed standard procedure, but that didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

The Sheriff spoke from behind her, his voice low and tortured. “Frank, I’ll take it from here. You didn’t have anything to do with this. Thanks.”

Drebin nodded, standing up. When Bill had asked him to perform the initial viewing with Arden, he’d agreed out of personal and professional courtesy. This case had been convoluted from the outset, and the relationship between the Sheriff and Arden only made it more complicated. He just hoped they both made the right choice.

Arden looked at the Sheriff, fury and hopelessness battling for supremacy in her eyes, in the rigid set of her posture.

The Sheriff walked to the other end of the table, turning off the television as he did so. The careful way he sat told Arden more about what this case had done to him than the clipped, precise words that came out of his mouth.

“
Adam Porter killed at least fifteen women over the same amount of years across the country. We can tell that from his notes and the videotapes he left. Samantha would have been his sixteenth. From what we can tell by reading those notes and watching the tapes, he was trying to create a Goddess, someone who could elevate him to the level of God. It looks like he found one.

“
The ME says he died from a heart attack, but Adam Porter was in the prime of his life, the prime of his health.”

“
Are you telling me you think Samantha did this?” Incredulity raised Arden’s voice, gave it an almost hysterical lilt.

“Jesus Christ Bill, look at her. She’s naked and unarmed. Porter must have outweighed her by at least sixty pounds. Just exactly what are you implying?” Her eyes narrowed as she stared across the battered metal table, her hands claw-like on the sides of the tabletop.

“
I’m saying that we both know enough about the Wiccan religion to know that weird things can happen. Regardless, the ME says it was a heart attack, so that’s what it was.” He shrugged, his studied nonchalance showing that he was anything but indifferent. “Has Samantha tried to contact you at all in the last twenty-four hours?”

“
Oh yeah,” Arden snapped. “She hopped on her fucking broom and dropped in for a Halloween nightcap. Of course she hasn’t.” Irritation bloomed ripe and potent in her voice. “You know I would have called you. Let’s stop circling around whatever it is you want. Why don’t you just get to the point?”

“
The point is, we want to talk to her, find out what the hell happened here. We can figure out ninety-nine percent of it from his notes and tapes, but that one percent is killing us. We’d just really like to talk to her as soon as possible, okay?” At her nod he pushed up from the table.

“
Are you going back to L.A. tonight, or staying here in town?” Weariness, with a dose of abject sadness, laced his words. They dropped out of his mouth like lead weights.