rendered the small task prohibitively difficult. The watch went in a pocket also.
Granola High in carbohydrates. She forced herself to swallow one of the bars in three gooey chews. Though her stomach remained uneasy, she needed to replace the food she’d lost.
The killer, now stripped of his gear, was still breathing, still out cold, still tied securely. She would have to leave him. She hoped he didn’t choke on the gag.
Enough of this. Time was wasting.
Trish took a deep breath and decided she was ready.
Tire marks in the sand led to a wide, paved path sloping upward in a gentle grade. The house loomed above her, squares of lighted windows glowing brighter than the stars.
Such an isolated place. The end of the world, Pete Wald had called it.
As she climbed the path, a childhood memory drifted back to her-an abandoned farm, a field of weeds, an empty house with boarded windows and padlocked doors and a dry well near the back porch. Another lonely place, a place where you could cry out for help and no one would hear.
A place of death.
Trish stared up at the Kent estate and wondered if her body would be found on its grounds, blue eyes staring, a roach crawling slowly, slowly over one glazed eyeball.
After all this, she still might not survive this night. Still might end up like Marta, sprawled in the weeds.
She had turned twenty-four less than two months ago. Wald had treated her like a child. Maybe he’d been right.
But she was growing up fast.
26
Charles sat very still, absorbing the news with something like indifference, all emotional reaction on hold.
“Saw your face,” he echoed blankly.
“Yes, Mr. Kent.” Charles had always liked hearing his own name, but not the way Cain said it, as if a Kent were some species of flatworm. “My handsome face.”
Charles felt his mouth twitch in imitation of a smile. That was a little joke Cain had just told. Not a very funny joke, but then neither of them was laughing.
Cain might have been handsome once, with his arresting gray eyes and wolfish smile, his square chin and brush-cut blond hair-until the knife had done its work. Charles had never asked about the details, but the essence of the story was written in the jagged diagonal scar that ran from Cain’s right temple to the left corner of his mouth like a badly knitted seam.
And Ally had seen that face, that scar.
“How” Charles whispered. “How did she … see you”
“That doesn’t matter now.”
It was not like Cain to be evasive.
Charles leaned forward slowly. “What did you do to her”
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Did you … did you try…”
“She would have been better off,” Cain said without expression, “if she’d let me.”
Delayed emotion finally kicked in. A spasm of anger propelled Charles half out of his chair, hands bunched into fists.
Perhaps the fact that Cain did not move, did not flinch or frown, did not even do him the small courtesy of making some conciliatory gesture or remark-perhaps that was the reason he hesitated, then sank back down, palms flat against his thighs.
When he spoke again, his voice was toneless and dull. “She can identify you.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll be interviewed by a police artist. There’ll be a sketch …”
“They won’t need a sketch.” Cain paced, big arms swinging. Charles had seen those arms uncovered-hairy, prison-buffed, laced with popped veins. “Just a description.”
He was right. The local police had modem access to data bases of known felons in several counties. A keyword search would cull the names and mug shots of all facially scarred white males of the appropriate age.
Cain would be on that list.
“They’ll I.D. me in a half hour,” Cain said as if tracking his thoughts. “Then they’ll look into my past. And find you.”
“Bakersfield,” Charles whispered.
“You.”
Two years ago Charles had read a brief write-up in the Santa Barbara News-Press on a brutal beating in Bakersfield, a matter of local interest only because the victim was a Santa Barbara man on a business trip.
The man had stumbled on a thief breaking into his rented Dodge in a parking garage, and had tried to be a hero. When paramedics reached him, he was nearly comatose from blood loss. His assailant most likely had left him for dead.
But he recovered, and having seen his assailant’s face-his scarred face-he identified a known felon named Cain.
Even then Charles had begun to fantasize about tonight’s operation. From his rap sheet Cain had sounded like precisely the sort of man he would need. And so Charles offered to relieve the overworked public defender of the case.
Barbara and Ally, passing the summer at a seaside retreat in Majorca, never knew about the week Charles spent in Bakersfield, holed up in a cheap motel where he wouldn’t be recognized, breathing smog and defending Cain.
Cain was guilty, of course, but Charles had no qualms about that. Nearly all the hotshot drunk-driving movie executives and wife-beating record producers he defended were guilty too. His challenge was to persuade the jury that Cain had been wrongly identified.
The scar was the only detail the battered victim recalled. In a day and a half of cross-examination Charles got the poor bandaged son of a bitch to admit that the scar might have run from right to left or from left to right, might have ended at the assailant’s mouth or continued down his chin, might have been straight or curved. The garage lighting had been poor, the encounter brief and violent, and the victim’s concussion might have altered his memory.
On the stand, Cain swore he’d gone straight. He’d been in Indio that night, two hundred fifty miles southeast of Bakersfield. A disinterested witness, a girlishly lisping young lady named Lilith, confirmed his alibi.
The jury set Cain free. Justice, American style.
Charles asked nothing for his services, merely requested that Cain keep in touch. If he could mail a card to a post office box in Ventura now and then, updating the phone number where he could be reached, Charles might make it worth his while someday.
Someday had arrived. And now everything was going wrong, spiraling out of control.
The cops would look into Cain’s past and learn that his attorney in the battery case had been Charles Kent. Charles could say it must be a coincidence or some sort of twisted revenge on Cain’s part, but the police wouldn’t buy it. Coincidences of that kind didn’t happen.
Anyway, why would Cain want revenge against a man who’d obtained his acquittal Why had Charles gone all the way to Bakersfield to take a pro bono case Why had he stayed in an obscure motel instead of his customary lavish accommodations Why hadn’t he deducted his traveling expenses as a charitable contribution on his 1040 form
And when investigators looked into his bank accounts, when they discovered the recent liquidation of a $100,000 certificate of deposit six months before maturity-when they learned of an account in Cain’s name in Carlsbad, New Mexico, which had been credited with a matching deposit the next day-then they would have more than questions for him.
They would have handcuffs.
