“Magnificent,” said Pender.
“Did you know it’s against the law to sell any images of it? You even hang a painting of that tree in a gallery, Pebble Beach Corporation takes you to court.”
They pulled up in front of the Lodge a few minutes after nine. Dorie had to get out and walk around the car to let Pender out-the passenger door didn’t open from the inside.
“I’m not sure of the protocol,” she said. “Is it okay to hug an FBI agent?”
“Normally you need to fill out a few forms in triplicate and submit them to-”
But she’d already thrown her arms around him. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure.” It was, too: she gave him a good full-body hug-none of that tentative, shoulder-hunching, stingy-chested nonsense. And she was tall enough that they fit nicely together. “You take care now-and try not to worry too much. These guys have cycles. The intervals tend to shorten, but judging by what you’ve told me, we probably have another two months before he kills again. That’ll probably be more than enough time to catch him.”
“That’s good to know,” said Dorie. “In a twisted kind of way. But you’ll stay in touch, right?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be home all day.”
That was the plan, anyway. Dorie had a show coming up in February, at the Plein Air Gallery in Carmel. She already had plenty of product for the wall space, but she knew herself well enough to foresee the inevitable panic as the opening approached: the paintings she’d already selected would start looking like crap to her, at which point it would be good for her peace of mind to have some backups ready. And with her oils requiring a minimum of three months to dry, it was time to get cracking.
Tomorrow, then, she would spend putting the finishing touches on Wayne’s sunset, gessoing canvases, and psyching herself up for a painting marathon. Five commercial plein airs in five days, starting with the bell tower over at Carmel Mission, the closest thing there was to a guaranteed sale, now that the Lone Cypress was off limits.
The problem was, Dorie had already painted the damn tower from every conceivable angle in every season- which was why she needed another day to psych herself up. Making a living through her painting, a dream of Dorie’s from childhood, had turned out to be a trade-off after all-but then, what hadn’t?
Returning to a dark house, fumbling her key into the lock, Dorie began to have second thoughts about her lights-off policy. It would be oh so easy for someone to lie in wait in the bushes and jump her on the dark doorstep. Perhaps she could have one of those motion-sensor floods installed-then the light would only come on when she needed it. Of course, any real security measures would have to start with fixing the lock on the studio door, which had been broken for three, four years.
Once inside, though, Dorie was comfortable with the familiar darkness of the house she’d grown up in. She didn’t have to turn on the hall light to find her way back to the kitchen, where she put the kettle on to boil in the dark, not to save electricity, but to watch the blue gas flame dancing. Dorie was an intensely visual person; as a child, she had once mentioned to her father that the blue of the gas flame was the most beautiful blue in the world.
“No, sweetheart, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you there,” he’d replied thoughtfully, his sibilants coming out wet and juicy around the stem of his pipe. “The most beautiful blue in the world is the blue of my little girl’s eyes.”
Oh, Daddy, she thought now, what a great thing to say. He’d been dead twelve years and she still missed him. Mom, too-he’d only outlived her by six months. Just kind of gave up without her. They were buried together in the old Monterey cemetery out by El Estero, next to Dennis the Menace Park; that second funeral, the orphan- maker, had been a gut-wrenching experience even for the forty-year-old Dorie.
For some reason, the blue flame didn’t seem quite so enchanting tonight-it looked cold to Dorie, like the light from a distant star. Then she switched on the low-hanging chandelier over the kitchen table and her nightmare began.
At first, she thought it
But she wasn’t screaming, the way she always did in the dream, nor did she wake up, the way she always did. Instead she felt her scalp prickling and saw the familiar multicolored fireflies swimming in front of her eyes as she tumbled through the darkness.
7
In her seven years with the Bureau, Linda Abruzzi had worked more than her share of shit jobs and shuffled more than her share of paper-federal employment background checks, interstate car theft investigations that involved comparing VIN numbers on computer printouts that were longer than she was tall, follow-the-money RICO probes-but nothing as soul-deadeningly, eye-strainingly, sleep-inducingly boring as going through fourteen file boxes of sloppily photostatted bank records.
Her initial inclination had been to blow it off. She’d finger-walked through the first few boxes, jotted down a few code numbers at random, then buzzed Miss Pool and asked her if she could come up with a number for the Chicago PD’s homicide division.
“I’ll be right in,” was the somewhat puzzling response.
“No, I just need-”
A moment later, Miss Pool appeared in Linda’s doorway. She had taken off her suit jacket; she was wearing a sleeveless black jersey under it. Good upper arms for a woman her age, thought Linda; no wobble-she must work out.
“You didn’t have to get up-I only wanted a phone number.”
“I know, hon-but don’t you want to finish going through those boxes first?”
“Why would I want to do that? You know as well as I do it’s busywork.”
“Because Maheu obviously doesn’t want you to.”
“Now you’ve lost me entirely,” said Linda. “Why doesn’t Maheu want me to go through the records he asked me to go through?”
“Because he doesn’t want you to find something.”
“But there’s nothing there to find!”
“Oh?” said Pool mysteriously, raising her left hand with a flourish and tapping the rather masculine onyx band she wore on her ring finger before going back to her desk.
“Oh.” A ringer-of course. Pool had just warned her that neither Maheu nor the counterspooks were above planting a deliberately doctored record somewhere in the files. Something so obvious that a diligent investigator could not have missed it, and so suspicious that only a double agent would have failed to report it.
Linda had ended up working on the floor all day-it was easier than hauling the boxes onto the desk-and by quitting time she had pains shooting up her legs to her butt, and her legs were so stiff she had to haul herself up using the corner of the desk for leverage. Miss Pool, who’d popped her head into the doorway to say good night, hurried over to help her.
“Don’t let the bastards wear you down,” whispered Pool, who proved to be even stronger than Linda had suspected, as she helped Linda to her chair.
“Never,” Linda said, swiveling her chair around to face her computer, intending to log back on to phobia.com-she was on her own time now.
Pool shook her head regretfully. “Sorry, no overtime.”
“I won’t put in for it.”
“Maheu wants me to log your hours. I’d fudge it, but your ID logs you in and out every time you go through a door. Then there are the gate logs and the-”
“It’s okay, I understand. And thanks for the tip about the, you know…” Linda tapped her own bare ring finger.
