III
“Well, we’re here,” Colin said as he pulled into the driveway. San Atanasio was only a few minutes away from LAX. Colin despised the airport. Who in his right mind didn’t? But the trip back and forth was easy enough.
Rain drummed on the roof of his middle-aged Taurus and splashed off the windshield. In the passenger seat, Kelly Birnbaum grinned a crooked grin. “Why don’t we ever meet when it’s sunny?”
“Hey, it’s February. Even L.A. gets rain in February. Sometimes, anyhow,” Colin said.
“I know,” she admitted. “It was coming down even harder in Norcal, I’ll tell you that.”
He thumbed the trunk button. “Head for the porch. I’ll grab your bag.”
“Such a gentleman.” Her eyes twinkled.
Several raindrops nailed his bifocals before he could get under cover himself. He wasn’t wearing a cap now, the way he had in Yellowstone. He wiped off most of the water with a hankie and undid the dead bolt and the regular lock. Then-a gentleman-he held the door open for Kelly. “Go on in.”
She did. “It’s so big,” she marveled.
“It’s just a house.”
“When you’ve lived in dorms and grad-student apartments and tents as much as I have, a house looks humongous. I freak out when I visit my parents down here, and their place is smaller than this. You’ve got it all to yourself, too.”
“Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “Marshall visits sometimes. His room still has his junk in it. The rest… It’s mine, all right, such as it is.”
Kelly caught the edge in his voice. “Sorry. I’ve got foot-in-mouth disease.”
“Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have this place all to myself, I wouldn’t have pried your phone number out of you when we started talking there by the lake, and I’m darn glad I did.” He set a hand on her shoulder.
She moved closer to him. “Me, too.” She looked around some more. “Everything is so neat. Books, DVDs, CDs-they’re all where they belong. I have to paw through piles of trash to find anything.”
“Navy hangover,” he said with a shrug. “Want something wet?”
“A beer, I think. But give me the tour first.”
“Okay. You’ve got to remember, most of the stuff on the tables and the shelves and all is Louise’s taste.” That taste ran to sad-faced icons, enamelware boxes, and figurines that nested one inside another. Colin didn’t know why his ex had wanted to make the place look like a cheap imitation of the Hermitage, but she had. Thinking back on it, some of the pieces hadn’t been so cheap. Way too late to worry about it now.
“Well, Russian art is something different, anyway,” Kelly said diplomatically.
One upstairs bedroom had a closed door with yellow tape reading POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS! running from the top left corner to the bottom right. “Marshall’s,” Colin said dryly.
“Duh!” Kelly winked at him.
Colin’s study was next door, with his computer and more bookshelves. It looked out on the backyard. Some wet sparrows and mourning doves pecked seed from a tray feeder.
“I like this,” Kelly said. “It feels like you.”
“No saints on the wall here,” Colin replied, which might have been agreement. He also had a work niche in the master bedroom, the next stop. He’d been using it more since he didn’t need to worry about waking up Louise by turning on a light at odd hours. Kelly didn’t seem to care about that. She was looking at the bed. Colin needed no grad school to work out why. “If it bothers you, there’s still a bed in what used to be Vanessa’s room. All the bedclothes are new since-well, since. Same old mattress, though.”
She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she said, “That should be okay. Now what about that beer?”
They went downstairs. The kitchen was also humongous, at least if you listened to Kelly. As Colin poured a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales (he’d drunk Bud, but going with Kelly had opened his eyes to the notion of good beer), he said, “I know why you say that all the time.”
“Say what all the time?”
“Humongous. It’s what you guys call the top end of eruptions. A real technical term, like perpetrator or something.”
“You’ve been reading books again.” Kelly sounded amused and accusing at the same time.
“Guilty. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules.” Colin raised his glass. The pale ale was several shades darker than Bud, which was, now that he thought about it, the color of piss. This brew had real ingredients in it. “Here’s to us.” They solemnly clinked, then drank. The pale ale had real flavor in it, too. A damn shame it cost as if it did.
“To us.” Kelly glanced around the kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house. “I still get nervous saying that.”
“How come?” Alarm bells jangled in Colin’s mind. He was pretty sure he’d found a good one, a keeper. Was she having doubts she’d found one? If she was… idn’t know what he’d do if she was.
“Because people who go through divorces are usually crazy for a couple of years afterwards,” she answered seriously. “God knows I’ve watched enough grad-school marriages explode.”
God knew Colin had watched enough cops’ marriages explode, including Gabe Sanchez’s and his own. If you were crazy, did you know you were crazy? If you knew you were crazy, did that mean you weren’t really crazy after all or only that you couldn’t do anything about it? A DA would argue one way, a defense attorney the other.
He’d seen people do some pretty nutso things after their marriages crashed and burned-no two ways about that. He’d seen guys date women and women hook up with guys they never would have looked at twice if they were in their right minds. Most of them regretted it soon enough. One or two made it work. He’d also seen one guy smash his truck and end up in a wheelchair with gazillions in medical and legal bills because he hopped in while he was drowning his sorrows. And one pretty good cop had got buried in a closed coffin because not even a mortician could make him presentable after he ate his gun.
Suicide scared cops shitless, not least because it sometimes seemed contagious. If one guy did himself in, it could happen that a couple of weeks later someone else, someone nobody’d thought had any big troubles, also took the long road out. Spooky.
Colin didn’t want to feel spooky right now, which was putting it mildly. Kelly hadn’t flown down from the East Bay to make him feel spooky. He hoped like hell she hadn’t, anyhow. He put his hand on her shoulder again. She smiled and moved closer to him, the way she had before. That eased his mind.
“So how’s the supervolcano doing?” he asked casually.
Her smile winked out like a blown candle flame. Maybe he’d spooked her. “My chairman doesn’t like what it’s doing,” she said, the way Colin might have said The chief wouldn’t like that. She went on, “And I really don’t like what it’s doing.”
“I’ve seen stuff in the papers,” he said, nodding. “More quakes over 5.0, the geysers’ schedules all fouled up…”
“Yeah, the tourists get upset when Old Faithful doesn’t go off right on time.” Kelly didn’t bother hiding her scorn. “But that’s only part of what I mean-the part that makes the papers and sometimes even the TV news. The worst things don’t. They only show up in surveyors’ records and satellite radar readings.”
“How do you mean?” Colin asked.
“The magma domes are bulging. Pushing up. Especially the new one, the one under Coffee Pot Springs,” Kelly said. “Moving up by feet where they moved by inches even just a couple of years ago.”
That led to the obvious question, so Colin came out with it: “Is it getting ready to blow, then?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve never observed a supervolcano eruption before, so how can we tell for sure what we’ve got?” The way Kelly knocked back a big gulp of beer said she sure didn’t like what they had. “Something’s going to happen, though. Maybe it’ll go back down again. It could. Maybe there’ll be ordinary volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had any for seventy thousand years, give or take, and they might relieve the pressure. Or maybe you can drop Rhode Island half a mile straight down.”
“Your chairman will know people-people in the government, I meanolin said slowly. “So will the other scientists who study this thing. Are they jumping up and down, trying to make the Feds pay attention in case
