growing enraged at high tide. Sometimes a stray retriever or setter showed up and he romped with them, ending up winded and drooling. But his new appetite for silica more than made up for those indignities, as did a lust for barking at shorebirds in a strangulated gargling tone that evoked an old man choking.
Mostly he stayed by Robin's side, riding shotgun in her truck, accompanying her to the jobsite. This morning, they'd left at six and the house was dead quiet. I slid open a glass door and let in some heat and ocean noise. The coffee was ready. I took it out to the deck and thought some more about Lucy.
After getting my number from Milo, she'd taken ten days to call. Not unusual. Seeing a psychologist is a big step for most people, even in California. Somewhat timidly, she asked for a 7:30 A.M. appointment that would get her to Century City by 9:00. She was surprised when I agreed.
She arrived five minutes late and apologizing. Smiling.
A pretty but pained smile, rich with self-defense, that stayed on her face almost the entire session.
She was bright and articulate and full of facts- the small points of the attorney's legal wranglings, the judge's mannerisms, the compositions of the victims' families, Shwandt's vulgarities, the yammerings of the press. When the time came for her to leave, she seemed disappointed.
When I opened the gate to let her in for the second session, a young man was with her. Late twenties, tall, slender, with a high brow, thinning blond hair, Lucy's pale skin and brown eyes, and an even more painful version of her smile.
She introduced him as her brother, Peter, and he said, 'Nice to meet you,' in a low, sleepy voice. We shook. His hand was bony and cold, yet soft.
'You're welcome to come in, take a walk on the beach.'
'No, thanks, I'll just stay in the car.' He opened the passenger door and looked at Lucy. She watched him get in. It was a warm day but he wore a heavy brown sweater over a white shirt, old jeans, and sneakers.
At the gate Lucy turned to look back, again. He was slumped in the front seat, examining something in his lap.
For the next forty-five minutes, her smile wasn't as durable. This time, she concentrated on Shwandt, intellectualizing about what could have led him to sink to such depths.
Her questions were rhetorical; she wanted no answers. When she began to look beaten down, she switched the topic to Milo and that cheered her up.
The third session, she came alone and spent most of the time on Milo. She saw him as the Master Sleuth, and the facts of the Bogeyman case didn't argue with that.
Shwandt had been an equal-opportunity butcher, choosing his victims from all over L.A. County. When it became apparent that the crimes were connected, a task force involving detectives from Devonshire Division to the Sheriffs substation in Lynwood had been assembled. But it was Milo 's work on the Carrie Fielding murder that closed all the cases.
The Fielding case had brought the city's panic to a boil. A beautiful ten-year-old child from Brentwood, snatched from her bedroom in her sleep, taken somewhere, raped, strangled, mutilated, and degraded, her remains tossed on the median strip that bisected San Vicente Boulevard, discovered by joggers at dawn.
As usual, the killer had left the crime scene impeccable. Except for one possible error: a partial fingerprint on Carrie's bedpost.
The print didn't match the little girl's parents' or those of her nanny, and neither was it a mate for any swirls and ridges catalogued by the FBI. The police team couldn't conceive of the Bogeyman as a virgin and went looking through local files, concentrating on newly arrested felons whose data hadn't yet been entered. No leads emerged.
Then Milo returned to the Fielding house and noticed planter's mix in the dirt beneath Carrie's window. Just a few grains, virtually invisible, but the ground beneath the window was bricked.
Though he doubted the importance of the find, he asked Carrie's parents about it. They said no new planting had been done in their yard since summer, and their gardener confirmed it.
The street, however, had been planted extensively- magnolia saplings put in by a city crew to replace some blighted old carrotwoods- in a rare show of municipal pride stemming from the fact that one of the Fieldings' neighbors was a politician. Identical planter's mix had been used around the new trees.
Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn't show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.
The landlord said Sand was paid up for another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray, reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disconnected hot water heater and the seams of a trapdoor barely visible underneath.
An old cellar, said the landlord. No one had used it in years.
Milo removed the heater and climbed down.
Spatter and shreds and gobbets in formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.
In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter's mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots planted with things that would never grow.
A background check showed Sand had given the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter. He'd been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.
He was picked up a week later, just outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human hand- a child's, not Carrie's, and never identified.
The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings' maid, who'd been in Mexico during the week of Carrie's murder and hadn't been available for comparison printing.
I sat silently through Lucy's recitation, recalling all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over it.
Sometimes
Carrie Fielding's fifth-grade photo.
Shwandt's methedrine eyes and drooping mustache and salesman's smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long white fingers.
How much restoration of innocence could Lucy hope for?
Knowing more about her background might educate my guess.
So far, she'd kept that door closed.
I did some paperwork, drove to the market at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin's call telling me she'd be home in a couple of hours.
'How're things at the money pit?' I said.
'Deeper. We need a new main for the sewer.'
'That's metal. How could fire burn through that?'
'Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently that's how they used to build them. And it didn't burn. It was demolished by someone's heavy equipment.'
'No one's 'fessed up. Could have been a tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax.'
I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I'd helped thousands of patients relax. 'How much?'
'Don't know yet. We have to get the city out here to take a meeting with our plumbers- I'm sorry, honey, hopefully this is the last of the major damage. How'd your day go?'
'Fine. And yours?'
'Let's just say I'm learning new things every day.'
'Thanks for handling all the crap, babe.'
