both sides of the fence, creating an impenetrable wall of green.
I strained to catch a lateral glimpse but Borchard swung the cart away and drove along the development’s south rim, parallel to the hedge. The road continued for several minutes before branching to a three-tine fork.
“Okay? Satisfied?”
Milo said, “Where do these roads go?”
“They’re not roads, they’re driveways. That one’s to the clubhouse, that’s to the recreation center-basically for towels from the linen service-and that one goes to La Mer, which is the formal, open for dinner only, and also to Cafe Seabird, which is right next door and does three meals a day and also has a tearoom for snacks-what the hell, I’ll show you.”
Three loading docks, all of them bolted shut. Not a truck in sight. Despite Borchard’s boast of observers everywhere, no workers.
“Quiet day,” said Milo.
“It’s always quiet,” said Borchard, as if he regretted the fact. Reversing the car, he headed back toward the front. As we passed the chain-link gate, Milo said, “Stop for a sec,” and hopped out and peered through.
He came back stoic.
“What’d you see?” said Borchard. “Empty land, right? No nutters in sight. Can I go on?”
“You keep the disks from that CC camera?”
“Knew you’d ask that. The disk erases itself every twenty-four and we recycle. ’Cause there’s never nothing on it. Now I’m taking you back, I already got too many curious residents wanting to know what’s up.”
I said, “What are you going to tell them?”
“That you guys are from the county. Making sure we’re earthquake-safe. Which we are. Totally.”
Back at the unmarked, Milo asked Borchard for detailed directions to the undeveloped land.
“Just what I told you.”
“How about if we don’t want to get back on the freeway?”
Borchard scratched his head. “I guess you could, as you get out of here, turn left, then left again. But it’s way longer, you’re making a big square. Then you have to drive a ways till you see an artichoke field. At least now it’s artichokes, sometimes they plant it with something else-when it’s onions, trust me you’ll smell it. You get to the artichokes, you still keep going and then you’ll see a whole bunch of nothing, like you just saw through the back gate.”
He scraped a tooth with a fingernail. “That’s how you’ll know you’re there. It’s a whole lot more nothing than anywhere else around here.”
CHAPTER
39
After several wrong turns, we found the artichoke field. The crop was ample but not ready for picking. A solitary man stood sentry near the south edge of the acreage, positioned on a dirt road above a drainage ditch drinking amber-colored soda. Small and dark-skinned, he wore gray work clothes and a broad-brimmed straw hat. When Milo pulled the unmarked within a yard of his feet, he didn’t budge.
Human scarecrow. Effective; not a bird in sight.
We got out and he finally turned. The soda was Jarritos Tamarindo. His workshirt had two flap pockets. One was empty, the other sagged under the weight of a cellophane-wrapped half sandwich. Some kind of lunch meat, Spanish writing on the pack.
“Hola, amigo,” said Milo.
“Hola.”
“Ever see this person?”
The drawing of Huggler evoked a head shake.
Same for the photo of the late James Pittson Harrie.
“Ever see anyone around here?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Okay, gracias.”
The man tipped his hat and returned to his post, repositioning himself with his back to the car.
Milo consulted the notes he’d taken from Borchard’s sketchy directions, drove another quarter mile, made a turn, came to a stop. “Guess ol’ Rudy was right.”
Humming first seven bars of “Plenty of Nuthin’,” he knuckled an eye.
A vast field stretched west to the twenty-foot ficus hedge and SeaBird’s rear gate, thousands of square feet of brambles and weeds, much of it tall as a man. Drought-friendly wildflowers with pinched gray foliage alternated with coarse grass bleached to hay. Ragged bare spots were occupied by shards of rusted metal and tan stucco fragments edged with the snipped ends of chicken wire.
At the far end, a second ficus hedge stood, untrimmed and taller than SeaBird’s rear border by a good ten feet. The east end, where Specialized Care had once stood. Behind the wall of green, the foothills sprouted like massive tubers.
We sat in the car, dispirited. The failure of my theory meant Huggler could be anywhere.
Milo said, “What the hell, we tried.” He lit up a wood-tipped panatela, exhaled acrid smoke through the driver’s window and called in for messages, starting with Petra.
The officers who’d arrested Lemuel Eccles thought Complainant Loyal Steward might be James Harrie but they couldn’t be positive, they’d been concentrating on the offender not the victim.
Raul Biro had pressured Mick Ostrovine into giving up the truth: Yes, “Dr. Shacker” had sent insurance cases to North Hollywood Day. No, there’d been no kickback, he was just another referral source.
Well-Start Insurance was through returning calls.
Biro said, “There had to be kickbacks. I found out who owns the place, bunch of Russians headquartered in Arcadia and they’re billing Medi-Cal gazillions. But I don’t see pursuing that unless there’s an organized crime aspect to our cases.”
“God forbid,” said Milo.
“That’s what I thought. Can’t think of anywhere else to go with this, El Tee.”
“Take your girlfriend out to dinner.”
“Don’t have one,” said Biro. “Not this month.”
“Then find one,” said Milo. “Meal’s on me.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause you do your job and don’t bitch.”
“Haven’t done much on this one, El Tee.”
“So run a tab.”
Biro laughed and hung up and Milo called the coroner. Dr. Jernigan was out but she’d authorized her investigator to summarize James Pittson Harrie’s autopsy for Milo. Harrie’s heart and lungs and brain had been perforated by five bullets fired from the service gun of Sheriff’s Deputy Aaron Sanchez, any of which could’ve proved fatal. No I.D. had been found on Harrie’s person but his fingerprints matched some from twenty-five years ago when he’d begun work as a janitor at V-State.
The human blood in the Acura’s trunk came from three separate samples, two type A’s, one type O. DNA swabs would take a while to analyze but a sex screen had come back female.
Milo hung up and gazed at weed-choked acreage. “A tunnel would’ve been nice. When you were here, you never heard of that?”
“No,” I said.
“Why’d you end up here, anyway?”
“To learn.”
