'What's the matter, Al,' murmured Kate as she climbed past him. 'Didn't have such classy chauffeurs in Los Angeles?' He shook his head, once, and followed her into the back, Trujillo in front. With a roar and a massive cloud of blue exhaust the starter caught, and they rumbled out onto the road, a leviathan among the minnows.
The reporters would get some fine footage for their pain of turning out so early, thought Kate, and saw a scramble to record the parade of wagon, high-axled coroner's van, and the handful of lesser vehicles that brought up the rear.
Trujillo turned as they went through the gate and saw the expression on Hawkin's face.
'We do have the four-wheel drives, but they're both already up the Road. I didn't think you'd mind this thing, and we needed the others to get the teams up there and to go up notifying people. I hope you don't mind,' he repeated, hesitantly.
'Oh, no, it lends the proceedings an air of dignified purpose, evoking the ponderous wheels of justice turning. Don't let me forget to use that for the news cameras, Casey, in case they missed the symbolism. It's quite all right, Trujillo, it serves to remind me of the unswerving support given us by our superiors. So encouraging.'
Trujillo did not seem entirely encouraged by this response, thought Kate, straight-faced, but any answer was cut short as the wagon turned a hard corner and juddered to an abrupt halt that had all but the driver off their seats.
'Brakes work fine,' was Detweiler's phlegmatic comment. The car face-to-face with their very bumper, filled with white-faced passengers, reversed into a wide spot a hundred yards up the road. It was the county's shiny new four-wheel-drive car, and it contained three women, two men, and a gaggle of excited children, all of whom watched the procession in wonder. The uniform of the man behind the wheel did not look entirely fresh, Kate noticed, and she had a sinking feeling that her own khaki trousers would soon look the same.
'That'll be the second bunch, coming down,' said Trujillo. 'Like I told you on the phone, I don't know how many of them we'll persuade to come down to Tyler's, but we'll get as many as we can. This third body will shake them, especially the ones with kids, and they'll cooperate more than they might otherwise. Some of them, though, you'll have to just go see. There's six or eight who are real hermits. You'd need a court order to pry them out, and even then they might just walk into the woods for a couple of weeks.'
'A nice, straightforward investigation, I can see now.'
'It is a bit different from San Francisco. Sir.'
'It's a bit different from anywhere.'
'That was Tyler's original idea.'
'Well, it succeeded.'
3
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Samantha Donaldson was small for her age, forty-two pounds at her last checkup, but she looked even smaller now, her thin body huddled into the rotten log that had stopped her from rolling down into the creek that ran, at this point, about fifty feet below Tyler's Road. Kate's hands wanted to reach out and brush the leaves from the tumbled hair, wipe the dirt from the surprised little mouth, close the puzzled eyes, but instead she took out her notebook to record Hawkin's remarks and allowed her eyes to avoid the child's neck.
A couple of hours later they stood watching as the lifeless object that had been Samantha Donaldson, hands wrapped in bags against any evidence her nails might be hiding, covered in dirt and leaves, having been prodded, examined, and photographed in ways it never would have been in life, was folded into the anonymity of a body bag. The men moving the tiny burden onto the stretcher were well used to death, but there was none of the customary easy black humor here.
'You okay?' asked Hawkin as the disturbingly small parcel was carried past them.
'I'm not about to faint, Al,' she snapped. 'I've seen dead bodies before.'
'Yes,' he said, responding not at all to her tone. 'But a dead child is a terrible thing.'
'Yes.' And because his voice was honest and his own loathing lay openly on his face, she answered in kind. 'Yes, it's pretty awful. I probably would feel sick if it didn't make me so angry.'
'You wouldn't be the first. The first dead child I had, I couldn't keep anything down for two days. Better to stay angry. Now, tell me where you think the murderer stood to throw her down there.'
They found one vague ridge of mud that might or might not have been from the side of a shoe, braced to hurl forty pounds into the air. It was so beaten down by rain that it was impossible to define and could easily have been pushed up by a horse's hoof some days before. Other than that, there was a depressing similarity to the sites where the other two bodies had been found, and by the time the wet, aching team had finished their backbreaking examination of the hillside, they had accumulated a number of rusty tin cans; one broken Coke bottle, old; two buttons, one very old; a handful of odd bits of machinery; a half-buried car tire; a short length of ancient chain with a stub of leather dog collar attached; one cheap ballpoint pen, almost new; and an assortment of paper scraps, including a soggy matchbook from a bar in San Jose.
All that was much later, though. The doors slammed shut on the ill-filled bag that contained what had once been a little girl, the stoic team started down the hillside with their own, smaller, evidence bags, and Kate and Hawkin ducked under the yellow tapes and climbed back into the wagon.
'Back to home base?' inquired Detweiler.
'No, not much point in it yet.' A couple with baby, child and dog trudged by, all in bright nylon ponchos. The woman smiled shyly, the child stared from the man's back. 'They'll be drifting in for another hour or more. I want to see the Road again, up to the top, if this thing'll make it.'
'No question about that,' said the driver, sounding hurt. 'She may be slow, but she's sure.'
'Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It'll make things easier when we get back to Tyler's. Now, whose house is that?' Hawkin pointed past the driver's nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.
'That ain't a house, that's Jenny Cadena's goat shed.' Kate wrote in the name. 'Only now Harry Gustavson's using it to store the window glass for his house.' She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. 'Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he's still there?' He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.
Kate looked at the map and sighed. 'Anybody have pencil?'
Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car's flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road's summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler's shoulder.
'Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey.'
The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.
'That's where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother's lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill.'
The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn't move.
'What is he after?' he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. 'What is he doing?'
'I'm sorry, I don't understand.'
'Neither do I. Neither do I.' He suddenly looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence, and began dutifully to explain.
'The bodies are unmolested; he's not the more obvious kind of pedophile. It isn't money; there's no ransom. He just picks them up, so carefully that so far he's been invisible, and strangles them. After that he removes their clothing and leaves them on or near Tyler's Road. Why here, a hundred miles from where he's picked them up? Why is he doing this?'
He cocked one eyebrow at her and turned back to the waiting behemoth, and though she knew he wasn't
