the Whites and the John Muir Wilderness Area. My motel was on the wide main street, a homey place with a tree- shaded lawn and picnic tables. No high-speed Internet access or other amenities that my operatives at Mc-Cone Investigations would have deemed necessities, but plenty good enough for their boss.
I tell my operatives I believe in the simple life. They claim I’m living in the Dark Ages.
Dark Ages, indeed. I had a cell phone, which I took out as soon as I entered my unit and dialed the agency in San Francisco. Ted Smalley, our office manager, sounded relieved when he heard my voice. That morning I’d flown down to Bishop, some fifteen miles north of here, in the Cessna 170B I jointly owned with my significant other, Hy Ripinsky; Ted, ever nervous about what he called my “dangerous hobby,” had probably been fretting all day.
“Shar, it’s after five o’clock. Where are you?” he asked.
“The motel in Big Pine.”
“Why didn’t you check in with me from the airport? I’ve been waiting…”
“There was somebody at the airport who offered me a ride to the dealer I’m renting a car from, so I couldn’t take the time. Then I had to stop by the local sheriff’s substation to let them know I’d be working in the area, check in here, and…why am I explaining all this to you?”
“I don’t know. Why are you?”
“Sometimes you remind me of my mother.”
“God help me. She’s a nice lady, but…”
“Yeah. So what’s going on there?”
“Quiet day, except for the trouble with the UPS guy.”
“Trouble?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Probably not. Is Mick in?” Mick Savage, my nephew and chief computer expert.
“No, he left for the day, but he said to tell you he e-mailed the files on the research job you assigned him.”
Which I would access on my laptop-another rebuttal to the claim that the boss was living in the Dark Ages.
I read through the files Mick had sent me, then walked down to a steak house I’d spotted on the way in. After dinner, I went back to the motel and sat at one of the picnic tables, enjoying the cool of the evening and planning a course of action for the next day. The air was sweet with sage and dry grass; crickets chorused in a field behind the motel, and somewhere far off a dog was barking. I felt relaxed, mellow, even; it was good to get out of the city.
The case I was working had been brought to me by Glenn Solomon, a criminal-defense attorney who threw a lot of business my way. His client, Tom Worthington, had been indicted here in Inyo County for the brutal murder of his lover, Darya Adams. Worthington was a wealthy man, an olive rancher from over near Fresno; it was natural he would turn to one of the stars of San Francisco’s legal community for his defense.
I thought back to the briefing Glenn had given me in his office high atop Embarcadero Four the previous afternoon.
“Tom Worthington is a family man,” he’d begun, folding his hands over the well-tailored expanse of his stomach. “Wife, two college-age children. Good reputation. No indications that he’s ever strayed before. Darya Adams, he apparently couldn’t resist. Former beauty queen…Miss California, I believe…and widowed. Ran a tourist boutique at Mammoth Lakes. They met when he was on a ski trip there. Before long, they were meeting on a regular basis at a country cabin he bought for her outside Chelsea.”
I looked up from the notes I was taking. “Where’s Chelsea? I’ve never heard of it.”
“You know Big Pine, Inyo County?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. One of Hy’s friends used to have a cabin in the mountains near there.”
“Well, Chelsea is a wide place on the road some seven miles into the hills above Big Pine.”
“OK, now, the murder…?”
“As close as the medical examiner could pinpoint it, it occurred on July thirty-first. Worthington and Adams had met at the cabin on the twenty-eighth, according to the employee who was minding the boutique in her absence. When Adams didn’t return on August first as scheduled, the employee called the cabin, received no answer, then asked the sheriff to check. Place was closed up. On August third, a hiker came across Adams’s body in the foothills of the White Mountains several miles from Big Pine. She’d been beaten and strangled. There were signs that the body had been moved there from the place she was killed, but the sheriff’s department hasn’t been able to determine where that was.”
“And they’re calling this a crime of passion, perpetrated by your client?”
“Right. One of Darya Adams’s friends claimed she was fed up with the arrangement and had threatened to go to his wife if he didn’t initiate divorce proceedings. He claims that wasn’t true.”
“What’s the evidence pointing to Worthington?”
Glenn shifted in his chair, reached for the bottled water on the desk.
“Two pieces. One, a key chain near the body, containing a miniature of his Safeway Rewards Club card…you know, the ones they give you so, if you lose your keys, whoever finds them can turn them in to the store, and they’ll call you. And two, a pinecone in the bed of Worthington’s truck.”
“A pinecone?”
“A bristlecone, from the tree Adams’s body was found under.”
“How do they know it was from that particular tree?”
“Ah, my friend, that’s where it gets interesting. Human beings, as you know, can be identified by their DNA. Animals, too. But are you aware that plants also have DNA?”
“No.”
“Well, they do, and, as with humans, the DNA of one plant is unlike the DNA of any other.”
“Wait a minute…you’re saying they ran a DNA test on a pinecone?”
“They did, and it came up a match for those on the tree.”
I paused for a moment, letting that sink in. “So what do you expect me to do with this? DNA is a conclusive test.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt the cone in Tom Worthington’s truck came from the place where Darya Adams was found. No doubt it was his key ring near the body. But he insists he’s innocent, that she was alive when he left for home the morning of July thirty-first. Says he’d misplaced the key ring at the cabin during a previous visit. Says he doesn’t know how the cone came to be in the truck.”
“I can see someone planting the keys, but it seems far-fetched that someone would be knowledgeable and clever enough to plant that pinecone.”
“Not really. D’you watch any of those true-crime shows on TV?”
“No. They resemble my real life too closely.”
“Well, I watch them, and so do millions of others. On July fifteenth, just two weeks before Darya Adams’s murder,
“So someone could’ve gotten the idea of planting the pinecone from the show?”
“Right.”
“And you believe Tom Worthington’s being truthful with you?”
“I do. My instincts don’t lie.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
“Then what I expect you to do, my friend, should be clear. Find out who left that key ring near the body, and the cone in Worthington’s truck. When you do, we’ll have our line of defense…Darya Adams’s real murderer.”
As full dark settled in, I returned to my motel room and again looked over the files Mick had sent me. Background on Tom Worthington and Darya Adams. Background on friends and associates, scattered throughout Inyo and Fresno counties. Tomorrow I’d begin interviewing them, starting with those in the Big Pine area, and then visit Worthington at the county jail in Independence.
Finding a lead to Darya Adams’s killer wasn’t going to be easy. Inyo is California’s third largest county-over 10,000 square miles, encompassing mountains, volcanic wasteland, timber, and desert. Its relatively small communities are scattered far and wide. In addition to its size, the county has a reputation for harboring a strange and often violent population. People vanish into the desert; bodies turn up in old mine shafts; bars are shot up by
