“You see, Mapstone, it all comes down to money and sex. They’re thicker than blood,” Townsend said. “I have money and I have Julie. Whatever happened between us, we always wanted to be richer, and we always fucked each other’s brains out. Nothing and nobody could ultimately come between that. I hope that doesn’t disillusion your bullshit college ardor for her.” He raised the gun. “And I am bored with this conversation.”
“Did your Julie tell you she slept with me for three nights?” I said hastily. Julie stared at me with a glassy look. Townsend’s mouth tightened. “She seemed pretty needy. I didn’t hear her calling out your name, Greg.”
He jerked his arm away violently and pushed her. “You told me you were through sleeping around, Julie. My health is at stake. And our security.”
She looked at him sullenly. “I didn’t.”
“What else does he know? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
He said very quietly, “Lying bitch.” And he shot her, the automatic filling the room with a high-pitched, eardrum-bursting blast.
He immediately pointed the gun at me, before I could draw or go to Julie. She was against the wall, sliding down. Blood trickled out around the solar plexus, darkening the center of her light blue blouse. She was staring at me in surprise, moving her mouth silently.
“Don’t do it, Mapstone,” he yelled. Then: “Tell me what she told you…when she fucked you.”
I just stared at him with a fool’s courage.
He stiffened and then exhaled. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go. I mean, I’ll just tie you up. That way, I can have time to get away. I’ll let you live.”
“That’s probably what you told Phaedra, too,” I said.
“What do you want from me!” he screamed.
“You’re the one with the gun pointed at me,” I said.
He screwed up his face and lowered the gun a bit. “Let me get my money, and I’ll let you live,” he said. “I need a partner. You’re a smart man.”
“And you are a stupid man,” I said. “The money’s gone. We found the storage locker and Phaedra’s car.”
His eyes widened. “What the hell are you saying?” He let his elbow drop.
I drew the Colt.
“No!”
The room exploded and something tore into my left shoulder.
I lined up the sights, squeezed the smooth trigger action of the Python, felt the big gun leap in my hand, squeezed it again, and Townsend was instantly blown backward in a cloud of noise and smoke and blood. He collapsed heavily into a lamp, two large holes in his chest, a look of shock and disbelief in eyes that were already dead. The little automatic clattered harmlessly to the floor.
I holstered the Python and knelt before Julie. She was breathing very shallowly and her eyes followed me. The bluest eyes I ever saw. She had lost a lot of blood. Her skin was an ashen color. I started to rise to call for help, but she put her hands on my arms tightly. Tears were running down her face.
“Oh, David,” she whispered. “I’m a mess.”
My left shoulder was numb. My eardrums were ringing. And I was crying, too. I can’t say exactly why.
She pulled herself into me and I held her. “Cold, it’s so cold,” she said. “David, I’m so cold.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Lindsey and I are not beach people. She does not tan. I become bored too easily. But the gentle San Diego sun feels so good on my shoulder, on the nickel-sized scar just below my collarbone. We lie on a clean, little-used beach I know in the Sunset Cliffs neighborhood, our legs entangling. She is rereading
The vastness of the ocean reminds me of that night in Sedona, of one of the last things I remembered before passing out. I was found by Deputy Taylor, who summoned help. They carried me out of the cabin to a waiting ambulance, in which I’d be driven to a clearing to meet a medevac helicopter. And the stars-my God, the stars. Billions and billions, uncountable, unimaginable. Pain and shock do strange things. I remember thinking of all the centuries and all the history those pinpoints of light represented. The suns of unimagined civilizations perhaps? Light that had originated when the Declaration of Independence was signed, that had been someone’s day and night when Caesar was subduing Gaul. I remember thinking how, back in college, Julie loved for me to drive her into the desert to see the stars. The next thing, I was lying in a hospital bed, groggy. Lindsey was holding my hand tightly, and Peralta was snoring softly in a chair at the foot of the bed.
The next day, Peralta told me what he thought I should know: Townsend was dead, of course. His DNA matched him to Phaedra Riding’s murder. The case was closed, “which is more than I can say for the Harquahala murders,” Peralta said ruefully. I would have to appear before a board of inquiry, but Peralta assured me it had been a “clean kill.” What a strange phrase. I had gone forty years without taking a human life. I wished I could have gone a lifetime.
Sam Larkin confessed to killing Rebecca Stokes. He still claimed it was an accident. His association with Dennis Copeland, a cop killer, would be harder to portray as accidental. Lorie Pope wrote a great Sunday story on the case-hell, I even looked okay without my beard in the photograph. Peralta didn’t charge McConnico, who abruptly announced he was retiring from politics.
“Maybe the next governor is Mike Peralta,” I said.
Peralta laughed. It was a nice sound.
“You know,” I said, “he offered me a professorship if I’d just go along. One old Arizonan to another.”
“You have a job,” Peralta said.
Now, hard by the sea, Lindsey and I don’t talk about all that has happened. We talk about art, literature, jazz, and, of course, history. We read to each other out of a rucksack of books we lug along. We laugh a lot. After we make love, we never talk: The silence and all that has gone before it are too important. And all of this helps. Only occasionally do I think of Julie. Only every now and then do I wake from dreams about her bleeding to death in my arms, so cold, so cold.
I have spent my life with books and ideas. I am a trained historian. But I’ll be damned if I understand the devils that destroy human beings, that cause them to destroy themselves. The itches we can’t scratch. The dark cells waiting for the right switch to turn on and consume us in a hungry confusion of longing and revenge and rage. Lindsey once asked me if I believe in good and evil, and I do. But I can’t bring myself to think of Julie Riding as evil. And that is my failing, for she surely flirted with evil, took it home for a onenight stand, and it moved in for good.
History is an argument without end, as one of my professors used to say. Historians and detectives build cases, believing in the justice of our endeavors. I was trained to sit in academic detachment, take the full measure of time, and formulate arguments that will carry the day in articles, lectures, and books. I expect to know. But detectives don’t usually have time on their side. In my new job-or maybe it is my old, old job-there is much I can never know. I am the historian of Rebecca and Phaedra, and I can’t say I did a good job.
At night, we walk into Ocean Beach and eat Mexican food and wander through the kitschy shops along Newport Avenue. Lindsey collects postcards and giggles at the tourists, and I adore her more than I should dare.
Just before we came here, I got an E-mail from Patty. She said she was moving back east, to Virginia, and intended to get married again. It didn’t bother me. San Diego is no longer a city of demons for me. So maybe some history has been settled.
School has already started, and my internal clock, set by years of teaching, is a bit askew. But no universities are clamoring for me. So I will stay on at the Sheriff’s Office as a deputy and a consultant, working the old cases,
