ruling out various avenues to investigate. Finally Gus agreed to take an exploratory trip through the game, if only because he couldn’t think of any other place to start and a dumb idea seemed better than no idea.
At least that’s what he’d told Shawn. As he said the words he could hear their falseness so clearly he began to suspect his voice and lip movements might have fallen out of synch. He couldn’t believe that Shawn would fall for his obvious untruth.
But Shawn did. And that disturbed Gus more than anything else. He tried to look at the situation generously: They’d been best friends for so long Shawn had no reason to doubt anything Gus told him.
That wouldn’t stop the nagging feeling in the back of Gus’ mind that Shawn accepted what Gus had to say only because it matched up with what he wanted to hear. That he was incapable of listening to anything that contradicted his prejudices.
That was why Gus wouldn’t tell Shawn what he was really thinking. Not only about this case, but about the agency and about their profession. About his future.
Gus knew he had some serious decisions to make in the next couple of days. And whichever choice he made, it was going to change his life forever.
Chapter Four
Oh, to be flying again, legs bare in the warm breeze, blond hair streaming against the blue, crowd noise Dopplering to a pulsing beat. To cast off the shackles of gravity and soar, higher each time before the Earth’s gentle hand reached up to pull her softly down to that tender embrace of skin and bone and sweat.
This was Juliet O’Hara’s dream, the one that recurred too rarely and left her humming all day when it did. The memories of her days on the squad remained with her always, part of her pool of experiences. But the sensation of it, the joyous floating freedom, she could regain only in her sleep.
This was something she never talked about. It was hardly a secret that she’d been a cheerleader in college, and those who didn’t know assumed it based on her looks. If anyone ever asked what those days had been like, she made a joke about dating the quarterback or chanted a halfhearted victory call.
It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her cheering days. Although the trajectory from pep leader to cop inevitably led to Buffy the Homicide Detective jokes, she’d been making them longer than anyone. And if the stereotype of the cheerleader was round-heeled and airheaded, she was secure enough in her self-knowledge that she never let other people’s prejudices bother her. Let them think she was dumb-she’d find a way to use that to her own advantage.
It wasn’t even the difficulty of persuading a noncheerleader that there was a spiritual aspect to the art. She’d never been shy about standing up for anything she believed in, no matter how obscure or unpopular.
But that sensation, that moment of floating-that was private. It belonged to her alone, and she wouldn’t share it if she knew how. Every once in a while she’d catch the eye of another former flyer and an understanding would pass silently between them. They were a sisterhood of the flight, and they had something the rest of the world lacked-a memory of peace, a sense that there was always the possibility of transcendence in the world.
Which was why the tableau into which she had stepped made so little sense.
She and her partner, Head Detective Carlton Lassiter, had picked up the call as they’d returned to their unmarked car after a fruitless morning searching for witnesses in the previous night’s hit-and-run death of a wino on State Street. Possible 187 on Lasuen Road.
Lasuen Road was one of Santa Barbara’s most beautiful streets, a curving line of ocean-view houses leading up to the El Encanto Hotel. But no neighborhood was safe from crime, not as long as there were people in it. And if she’d had any doubt about that the flashing lights of the three police cruisers outside the rambling Spanish house would have put them to rest.
As Lassiter pulled the sedan into the long driveway, O’Hara gave the scene a quick once-over. The house looked small from the front, but she knew that like many of its neighbors it was built down the steep hillside, and might have as many as three stories below the ones visible from the street. There was a tiled walkway cutting through a lush lawn toward the heavy oak front door.
A woman was standing in front of that door, staring into space as if she were trying to figure out how she’d gotten here. She was sheathed in a gray St. John Knits suit that brought out the blue in her striking eyes even from this distance. Long blond hair framed a face that might have looked thirty just moments ago. Shock and grief had undone in a second all the work of Santa Barbara’s top plastic surgeons, and there was no hiding the fifty-five years she’d been on the Earth.
O’Hara waited for Lassiter to meet her on the passenger’s side of the car, and they fell into lockstep as they walked toward the woman. Before they’d made it halfway across the grass, a uniformed officer stepped between them and the woman.
“DB’s down this way,” the officer said, attempting to steer them toward a concrete path that ran from the driveway down the hill along the side of the house.
“That’s funny,” Lassiter said, whipping off his sunglasses so he could aim his most terrifying glare at the officer. “I don’t remember asking for directions. Do you, Detective O’Hara?”
The officer, who looked like he might have graduated from the academy that morning, turned pale. “I didn’t mean to-”
“To tell us how to investigate a crime scene?” Lassiter finished for him. “To determine the order in which we collect our information? Maybe you could save us all a lot of time and just let us know who killed the victim.”
The rookie’s throat muscles throbbed as if he were fighting to keep his lunch from coming up. He’d seriously overstepped and he knew it. O’Hara might have joined Lassiter in torturing the kid, until she noticed the dark, wet patch on his uniform shirt just above his badge, and a small beige smudge next to it. Then she understood.
“Tears don’t stain unless you let them, Officer Randall,” she said, reading his nameplate. “But foundation is a bitch to get out of blues. That’s the mother?”
The officer’s face went from white to red like litmus paper dunked in lemon juice. “She asked me,” the officer started. “That is, she’s upset. Understandably upset, since it was her daughter and-”
“Unless she was understandably upset because she killed her daughter,” Lassiter snapped.
“I didn’t think-”
“We’re well aware of that, Officer Randall,” Lassiter said.
O’Hara could see a real danger that the rookie’s tears would soon be joining those of the grieving mother on his shirt. “It’s all right, Officer,” O’Hara said. “Comforting grieving survivors is part of the job. Just make sure to keep in mind what the most important part of the job is. Now, where’s the body?”
O’Hara could sense Lassiter’s irritation without glancing over at him. He wasn’t done hazing the rookie yet. But something about this scene was troubling her, and she couldn’t figure out what it was. There was nothing new to her about tragedy striking in the best neighborhoods, at the most fortunate people, on the most beautiful of days. Still, ever since they got the call she’d had a rumbling in the back of her mind that this was going to be bad, and she needed to find out just how much.
“Follow this path down the stairs,” the officer said quickly, before she could change her mind. “At the end of the house turn right onto the deck. There’s a sliding door to the laundry room. She’s inside.”
“Thank you, Officer,” Lassiter said with exaggerated politeness. “You may go back to comforting the bereaved. But do us one favor. If she should happen to say something-anything-jot it down with a little note about the time, would you?”
Without waiting for an answer, Lassiter turned and headed toward the stairs. O’Hara considered saying something reassuring to the kid, but really, what was the point? He had screwed up, and he deserved everything her partner had said to him, along with several of the things he’d wanted to but didn’t.
O’Hara followed Lassiter down a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps that plunged down the hill alongside the white stucco wall. Halfway to the garden there was a door set into the side of the house. Out of habit Lassiter jiggled the knob and found it locked, then continued down.
At the bottom of the hill the path led onto a small, flat parcel of garden surrounded by a high hedge of cypresses. The space had clearly been landscaped by pros some time ago, but since then it had been allowed to
