outside, and went over everything he’d told the sheriff’s people and Glenn Solomon. Then we went over it again. I found no inconsistencies.
“Mister Worthington,” I said, “were you and Miz Adams getting along at the time of her death?”
“Better than ever. That last weekend we spent together was…well, I’ll never forget it.”
“I understand you were planning to leave your wife, marry Miz Adams.”
“I had hoped to.”
“And the delay was because of your marital situation?”
He rubbed his hand across his stubbled chin, nodded. “My wife…has her problems. I was trying to find a way to leave the marriage without exacerbating them.”
“She drinks.”
“…Yes. I’ve been trying to convince her to get help, so has our family doctor. Until she does…” He spread his hands.
“I understand. Is your wife the sort of person who becomes violent when she drinks?”
“Betsy? God no! She’s constantly sedated.”
“Perhaps she’s drinking to sublimate anger?”
“I don’t…oh, I see where you’re going. No, Miz McCone, Betsy didn’t find out about Darya and kill her. She hasn’t left the house, except when I’ve forced her to accompany me, in five years. And those occasions were not successful ones.”
“What about your children…did they know about your affair with Miz Adams?”
“Jeannie, my daughter, didn’t. She’s too caught up in her drugged-out little world. Kent did. He’s visited at the cabin, and he liked Darya. She had a calming effect on him.”
“I understand he has anger-management problems.”
“Yes. Anger toward his mother, primarily. But he’s working on them.”
“Mister Worthington, are you aware that Miz Adams was afraid of something or someone? And that it was connected with your cabin?”
“Darya? Afraid?”
I explained what Kathy Bledsoe had told me.
Worthington shook his head in a bewildered way. “Why didn’t she confide in me? Or in Jeb? If somebody’d been bothering her while she was down there, he would’ve taken care of them.”
“Jeb’s a good friend?”
“The best. He’d do anything for me. Or Darya.”
“He claims he was advising you on how to conserve your assets in the event of a divorce.”
Worthington had been grim-faced through most of our meeting, but now he smiled. “Jeb? He’s the one who needs advice when it comes to financial matters.”
“Why d’you say that?”
“Jeb nearly lost his shirt in a real-estate deal a couple of years ago. High risk, and I warned him not to get into it, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s got a big balloon payment coming due, and he can’t cover it. Jeb’s a sweet guy, but…” He spread his hands. “He introduced Darya and me, you know.”
“I thought Kathy Bledsoe did.”
“We deliberately gave her that impression. I went up to meet Darya at an opening at the Lakes Gallery…turned out Kathy was the artist. I was taken aback to see an old acquaintance, and find out she worked for Darya. Darya sensed my discomfort and played along when Kathy introduced us. But no, I met Darya about six months before that at Jeb’s house in Big Pine.”
“And how long had Jeb known her?”
“His whole life. Darya was his cousin.”
“No, Shar,” Mick said over the phone. “Jeb Barkley has no cousin. And neither does Darya Adams.”
“Are you sure?”
“My computer doesn’t lie.”
“Why not? Mine does, all the time.”
“That’s because you don’t use the right databases.”
That was probably true. I sighed.
“Shar? Anything else?”
“Yes. I need deep background on Jeb Barkley and Darya Adams. Specifically, if either has a criminal record.”
The scenario that came together in my mind as I drove back to Big Pine was a disturbing one. Jeb Barkley had no cousin; Darya Adams had none, either. But Tom Worthington was under the impression they were related.
Barkley had introduced Adams to him as his cousin. Why?
Wealthy man with an unhappy home life. Young, attractive single woman. Old friend who has lost money in a real-estate deal and has a large balloon payment coming up in a year and a half. He introduces the woman as his cousin. The wealthy man is induced to leave his wife for her. The woman then has a community-property stake in those assets…which she can share with her “cousin.”
Not cousins-partners in crime.
But something had gone wrong.
My phone buzzed. I pulled to the side of the road, picked up. Mick.
“Shar, I called Adah Joslyn at the SFPD.”
Adah, an inspector on the Homicide detail, and a good friend. “And?”
“She accessed Barkley’s and Adams’s criminal records for me. The two of them…Adams was Darya Dunn then, her maiden name before she married the marine…were arrested over in Nevada fifteen years ago on a bunko charge. Barkley did time. From what I’m reading between the lines, he took the rap for Adams.”
“Why didn’t this show up in your original backgrounding?”
A silence. Then, reproachfully: “You didn’t specify deep backgrounding, Shar. Criminal records’re hard to access unless you want to use contacts like Adah. And you’ve warned me not to abuse the privilege.”
I sighed. “Well, it didn’t occur to me to go deep on an old friend who sold them a house…or on the victim.”
“Which leads us to private investigator’s lesson number one…”
“Right. Suspect everyone.” I thanked Mick and broke the connection. Pulled back onto the road.
Jeb Barkley finds his former partner in crime running a boutique up in Mammoth Lakes. He needs money badly, and his friend Tom Worthington has refused to help him out. Darya is attractive, just the sort of woman who might attract a man like Worthington, who is trapped in a dead marriage. So Barkley reminds Adams of the old days and puts pressure on her to begin a relationship with Worthington, with an eye to getting her hands on his assets. Adams agrees, because she values her reputation and position in her community. But then Adams and Barkley have a falling out, maybe because she’d actually fallen in love with her victim. Now she’s afraid of someone down at the cabin.
Barkley, who demonstrated this morning that he was familiar with the place-so much so that he even knew where she kept the hummingbird food-and who also had a set of keys.
And she’d had good reason to be afraid. He’d found her alone on July thirty-first, they’d quarreled, and he’d killed her. Then he’d planted evidence to implicate his friend.
Now what I needed was concrete evidence to implicate him.
As I drove the rest of the way to Big Pine, I kept thinking about the tree that Darya Adams’s body had been found under. On impulse, when I reached the intersection of Routes 395 and 168, I turned east into the foothills.
The bristlecone stood alone on the rocky slope, clinging to the poor, coarse soil. I got out of the Jeep and walked around it, ducked under its low-hanging branches. Even though the sun was dipping below the ridge to the west, it felt uncomfortably warm there, and the air was dusty enough to make me sneeze. I went out the other side where the branches were bent and sheared off, sap congealing on their broken tips.
Emergency vehicles, I thought. They did this damage getting the body out.
Or…?
I took out my cell phone, called the local sheriff’s department substation. The officer I’d spoken with the previous afternoon, who had been one of the first at the murder scene, took a look at the official photographs and
