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“The past couple of years with Nikki have been hard. She’s struggling, just like everybody. Trying to find which way happiness is.” Staring at the table, she threaded her fingers together. “Then Bill offered to buy my one-half share of the land Grandpa Logan left Beth and me. I didn’t tell Nikki about it beforehand because I knew she would be opposed on principle. When Nikki came across the paperwork she decided Bill had cheated us. She talked about nothing—and I mean nothing—else. Night and day. All we had sacrificed. Our paradise in the desert, wasted, gone, thrown away on that conniving Uncle Bill.

“So that night, the night Bill died, when I discovered she wasn’t in her bed, I jumped in my car and I ran over to Bill and Beth’s house. I can’t tell you what a state I was in . . . the thoughts hopping around like jumping beans. Because . . . she had made some threats. But you don’t have my permission to tell anyone about this,” she said quickly. “I’ll deny ever saying it.”

“Relax,” Nina said. “I’m her lawyer, remember? I don’t want her hurt. Go on, Daria. Tell us about the threats.”

“They aren’t important,” she said. “Pretend I never mentioned threats. It was kid stuff. She was so hurt. Holding a child her age responsible for shooting off her mouth is what’s criminal. Anyway, I got there about ten-thirty, parked my car, the telltale VW, and went up to the house.”

“The front door . . .” Nina said.

“Was open, yes,” Daria finished. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have walked in like I did. Beth had called a few days before to tell me she was taking a trip to visit Jan in Los Angeles, so I knew she wasn’t there. I went looking for Bill. I looked in the living room and walked through there and the hall and then I went into the study and found him lying on the ground. My God, what a sight!”

“Was he dead?” Nina asked. “Did you check?”

“I checked. He was dead. Still warm, though.” She shuddered.

“You touched him,” Nina said.

“I took his wrist. I looked at his eyes.” Her own flicked around the room, as if avoiding the sight. “I think that was the worst moment of my life. I dream about those open eyes. I could see the pain in them even though he wasn’t there. And then I had a sudden thought that almost stopped my heart. I thought of Nikki. I thought, maybe whoever did this to Bill is still out there. Maybe he’s hurting her right now! I dropped his wrist and pushed open the double doors that led to the pool. I ran through them. And that’s when I saw it, her sweatshirt, her favorite, hanging on a bush.”

“No fingerprints on the inside of the door,” Paul said.

“I was wearing gloves,” Daria said. “My hands get cold at night!”

“No sweatshirt found at the scene,” said Paul, checking some notes.

“That’s because I took it home with me. I washed and dried it and put it into her dresser drawer before the police came.”

“Did Nikki ever mention it to you?”

“I think she must have forgotten all about it.”

“How do you know she lost it that night?” Nina asked. “Couldn’t she have left it there on some other visit?”

“No. Because I had washed clothes that morning, and it was in the load. Oh, Nina, you have to save her.” Nina and Paul looked at each other.

“Daria, does Nikki know you saw her there?” Nina asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t tell her.”

“You took the sweatshirt to protect her, to hide evidence that she was there, and you never told her?”

Daria nodded and offered up some of her inimitable reasoning. “I’ve been pretending I didn’t know she was there, so she’d get how I believe in her, no matter what she says or what it seems like she has done. The reality of what happened that night isn’t as important as our perception of the reality, and I wanted her to get out of the experience that I’m always and forever one hundred percent behind her. That’s also why I never told you. The fact of the shirt being there wasn’t important. I knew it didn’t mean Nikki had done anything, therefore, no one needed to know about it.”

Nina couldn’t help it. As a mother, she absolutely loved Daria. She loved her waving around a shotgun in defense of her daughter and Nina’s son, she loved the crazy lioness stance. What a shame that as a lawyer, she couldn’t believe a word she said. This superficially ditzy mother with an unusually intelligent child and unexpected skill with firearms and lies aroused deep-seated suspicion. “Did you hide anything else?”

“No. I took the sweatshirt, ran to my car, and left.”

“Did you leave the front door open?” Paul asked.

She considered this. “I guess I did leave it open.”

“Think about fingerprints?”

“Like I said, I had gloves on because of the cold, so I didn’t give it a thought. There was blood on my pant leg. I rinsed it out with water as soon as I got home and tossed it in the washer later. And I swear, that’s it.”

“Tell me this,” Nina said. “Did you ever tell Beth you went there that night?”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t because of Nikki, but I felt so terrible leaving Bill there all curled up like a baby with the blood all around. I went over last week and I almost told her. Should I have? But I can’t see how it would help her.”

“The police are going to find you, Daria,” Nina said. “Because of the eyewitness. Mrs. Garibaldi.”

“I’ll lie,” Daria said. “I’ll leave the sweatshirt out, okay?”

It was one of those moments. Nina wanted to shrug and let Daria do what she was going to do, but she had asked Nina if it was okay. Paul had a disgusted look on his face as if he could predict what Nina would say and thoroughly disapproved.

“You have to tell the truth if asked, Daria,” Nina said. “Don’t perjure yourself.”

“I could leave town. But I can’t. I can’t leave Nikki.”

“The thing is, you don’t have to volunteer information.”

“So—if they don’t ask me directly . . .”

Now Nina could shrug, and she did.

“You do realize,” Paul said, “that this puts an entirely different slant on things.”

“I know it’s more proof that Nikki was there,” Daria said. “I know that’s not good.”

“And of course, it places you at the scene of the crime,” he said.

“What?”

“You were there.”

“I told you he was dead when I got there.”

Nina tried to read her expression, but Daria had sunken further from the light. Her face wasn’t easy to read. Was it really conceivable she had not considered that her presence at the dead man’s side might implicate her?

“How do we know that, Daria?” Paul went on. “You lied about going to the house in the first place. You admit you stole evidence and conveniently wore gloves to a murder scene. You say you want to protect your daughter, yet you let it slip that she made threats against the murdered man.”

“You also testified that Nikki wasn’t home at the time of Sykes’s death,” Nina said. “It made you seem to be at home. You provided yourself with an alibi by burning Nikki.”

“I never thought like that. Never. You’re making it all ugly. All I want to do is protect my daughter!”

“You know what I think?” Paul said. “I think you’re the one who hated seeing your rich brother-in-law snub Nikki and you. I think you felt such financial pressures, you were railroaded into a decision you didn’t want to make when you sold him the land. I think you were the one who envied their lifestyle. They lived like kings in a castle and ignored you. It rankled, didn’t it?

“And speaking of your sister, well, without her husband around to tighten the purse strings, she’s much more generous, isn’t she? Getting close to you again, more like when you were kids. There to help out with money when you need it. Yes, you had more reasons than Nikki to kill Bill Sykes.” He stood next to Daria, looming, intimidating. “Maybe you found out he had cheated you. Maybe you discovered the land was valuable after all. And you were there . . .”

Daria leaped from her chair and threw open the door to the reception room, startling the client who was still waiting patiently in his chair. She whirled around at the door.

“I told you the truth! You people have seen too many bad things. You’re the ones who are evil. You can’t even tell an honest person!”

“Whew,” Nina said after Daria left. They had left the poor client gaping and closed the door to the conference room.

“Yes,” Paul agreed.

“She’s right. We have seen too many bad things.”

“What? Are we supposed to feel guilty that we discovered what a liar she is?” Paul went over to the coffeemaker and poured himself some mud left over from early morning. “Louise has already told the police about the car. Eventually, they’ll work out that it’s hers.”

“What do you think?”

“If she’s telling the truth she’s been keeping critical information from you and everybody else. If she’s lying, she killed Sykes and she’s letting her daughter go through hell. I suppose it’s even possible that Nikki saw her and is protecting her.”

“I don’t want it to be her, Paul.”

“Better rethink that. She’s not the client. I gotta go. It’s two-thirty and I have to get down to Carson City to see a man about a plane.”

He left and Sandy arrived to announce that the client had now officially completed all the stages of waiting, from annoyance to rage to hopelessness to passive dejection. Nina hardly had room for a thought for the rest of that afternoon, but one image leaked through, a vision of Daria and Nicholas and baby Nikki, before all this had started, before Daria’s downhill slide into fecklessness and Nikki’s growth into bitter resentment.

And she found herself hating Nicholas Zack, because it had all started with him, and it was too late to fix, really.

CHAPTER 19

NIKKI USED UP one day of her home supervision searching the Net about minerals, but she couldn’t find any photos of rocks that looked like her rocks. When Nina called for the fifteenth time trying to find Daria, she asked her flat out if she had found out anything. She could tell Nina didn’t want to get her upset or anything but Nina wasn’t going to lie.

So now she knew the rocks were opals. What Nina wouldn’t tell her was how much they were worth. Again, the Net wasn’t much help. On eBay she found some Australian opals for sale but they sure didn’t look like her dirt-colored rocks.

She logged onto her Web site. She had spent the past few weeks making animations, adding links and formatting the site and it now looked unbelievably thrashed. Her MP3 clip was up there for anyone to download. That was exciting. She uploaded two more songs she had taped as soon as Daria had left. They were awesomely powerful. She had screamed all her misery into them, just her and her guitar. Now she could hardly talk, but as always, she felt better after letting the rage out. She thought for a minute, then changed the html headline on the Web site to “Girl, Arrested.”

Log off. She shut down the computer, got up, and realized she had to get out or go crazy. She wanted to go out to the claim but if she couldn’t do that, at least she could find out what the opals were worth.

Problem was, she was so limited in what she could do. If she was a detective, she would not only know what to do, she would have wheels, fake ID, everything else that might be useful. Instead, she had a beeper on her leg blasting out her position to some disinterested bureaucrat who basically held the power of life or death over her.

In the phone book she found that South Lake Tahoe had its very own rock shop. She called the number and a girl answered. “I have some opals I want somebody to look at,” Nikki said.

“The owner could do that. But he’s out today.”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Sure. Just bring them in. Ask for Digger.”

Now she had to get rid of this damn electronic monitor.

Hamid knew a lot about electronics.

An hour passed uselessly on the telephone. Nikki couldn’t raise Hamid. In desperation, she finally called Jane, who had techno-nerd tendencies, and her mother asked her very politely never to call or darken their door again. That made her feel shitty.

And infamous. Good band name. Infamous.

For another hour, she trolled the Net. Eating a peanut butter sandwich, she studied a Web site that explained all about how electronic monitoring worked. Try as she might, she could find nothing about people who had managed to foil the ankle monitor. Disgusted, she moved to the window with a soda and the telephone.

Bob ought to be out of school by now. She found him at his cousin’s number.

“You have to come over,” she said.

“Why?” He sounded busy, and the sound of his busyness drove her crazy. How could he have a life! She was so unbusy, so bored out of her brain, so up the wall!

“I’ll explain when you get here.”

A pause.

“Hey, it’s important.”

“If it’s so important, I don’t see why you can’t tell me over the telephone.”

She felt he had reached out through the phone and landed a punch on her nose.

“Did you get in a lot of trouble about the night you came over?”

“I can’t touch a computer for a month. I can’t go to San Francisco with my cousins next weekend. No TV until hell freezes over. Plus, my mom totally doesn’t trust me anymore. If I come over to your house she’ll probably put me in some Virginia military school.”

“She hates me. Like everybody else does.”

“Nah. She would stop representing you if she did.” Nikki was realizing that what she needed no longer counted. Any influence she once had with him, any feelings he had for her, had faded without the day-today stuff to keep it alive. It hurt. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you. Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“No one else could be listening in?”

“C’mon, Nik. Most people don’t find my phone calls all that riveting.”

“Well, some people aren’t so eager to have their kids even talking with me. Has your mom said you shouldn’t talk to me on the phone?”

“Not really.”

He lied. She knew it; he knew she knew. Still, here he was talking to her anyway. That was something. “It’s this monitoring thing they have on my ankle,” she said.

“What about it?”

“Did you look at it?”

“No.”

“It’s a plastic strap with a transmitter about the size of hotel-sized soap. Maybe a little bigger. Anyway, here’s the way it works. There’s a computer hooked up that keeps track of me when I’m home. When I have an appointment, like to go to court or something, they program in a curfew, meaning, when I have to get back. You following this?”

“Ye-ah.”

“When the computers figure out you’ve violated curfew, a notice of violation goes out, sometimes right away, sometimes a few hours later. Now, here’s what I thought at first. I take the thing off, put it on my bed or somewhere, right? But it turns out even the strap is made out of a plastic that’s impervious. You just can’t do anything with it at all. Next I thought, the easiest thing would be to just disconnect the power, right? But I read these things have a battery-backup system that stores and transmits information later. Anyway, I’m out of ideas. So I wondered if you, who are technical and so smart, might have some brainstorm . . .”

“You want to bust your monitor.”

“Can you help me?”

“No.”

“Listen, I’m desperate. I need to find some things out, and I can’t do it from here. Please, just help me with this one little thing.”

“You already checked out the Net?”

“Yeah. Nothing there.”

“That’s all I can think to do.”

“Well, thanks a bunch. Bob, couldn’t you come over just for a few minutes?”

“I just can’t.”

“So you’re abandoning me too. The only friend I had left!” She hung up, breathing hard.

She would go crazy if she couldn’t leave this house. She had to get out. Had to.

She called their family doctor. “I need an appointment right away. I’m so scared. I have these symptoms. I’m afraid I might have something bad . . .” She knew every symptom by heart. She ought to, after the way they yammered at them about it at school. “Oh, please. Don’t make me talk about it. Well, VD, okay? Tomorrow at ten sounds good.”

She hated blood tests, hated the needles coming at her, but she wanted a quick appointment, and whatever worked. She couldn’t have VD. She had never even had sex yet.

When Big Brother called that afternoon, she asked for permission to see her doctor the next day. After some serious throat clearing and stalling and negotiating like Arafat and Barak, they compromised on three hours and he was not about to spring for a minute more. That gave her fifteen minutes at the doctor’s to get an order for a blood test, a quick run to the clinic lab—maybe forty-five minutes to an hour, including travel time. Two hours left. Long enough to see Digger.

Back in her bedroom, she reached under her dresser and removed a Ziploc bag taped to the bottom.

To squirrel away the most precious of her treasures was an old, old trick. There she kept a photograph of herself sitting on her father’s shoulders, pulling his hair, mouth wide open in a scream of delight, and one of her mother and father on their wedding day. Daria wore a brocade gown, with flowers twined in hair that was still light brown like hers. Her father, who always smiled like he was holding on to a lot more laughter inside, just waiting to spring a fun trick on someone, wore leather pants and a ruffled shirt. In lonely moments, she loved studying his wide nose and skin that looked fuzzy as a peach. Sometimes she thought she could remember his smell. Like nutmeg. Not sweet, not heavy. Just uniquely him.

Putting the photographs and other bits aside for now, moving toward the window’s shaft of sunlight, she thanked herself for what she had thought was a psycho move at the time, hiding away the largest rocks in her room instead of giving them to Nina. Pulling open the bag, she took out the largest one, a chunk the size of a small plum. She ran into the bathroom and dipped the stone into water, then rubbed it with a towel.

How it gleamed. “Opal,” she said out loud.

She spent the rest of the hot afternoon at the kitchen sink sweating as the sun poured in, rubbing the rocks and picking out the little dirt bits with the ice pick. The System was trying to break her spirit. She was going to stand up for herself.

The little town of Carson City, capital of Nevada, was primarily a place of moping casinos and slumping antique stores housed in grizzled if sometimes venerable buildings. The federal building, a small gray replica of a Greek temple, stood out as a haven of unexpected beauty.

Paul sat down with the chief investigator from the NTSB in charge of the investigation of the crash of Skip Bailey’s Beechcraft. Traffic rumbled by, so close Paul could almost feel the tires treading over his body, but Chuck Davis, the crash investigator, looked not at all concerned with the noise. He stroked a closely shaved jaw. “We have radar information from the FAA. The pilot was right on track with his flight plan. He wasn’t lost.”

“Any sign of equipment failure?”

“Not so far. We have checked the maintenance records. One thing you must say for the pilot, he was meticulous. Never missed an overhaul. Met or exceeded all recommended service.”

Confident in his facts and opinions, Davis spoke under the proud aegis of big government.

“Did he know he was going down?”

“His flaps were down and the landing gear was down, which makes it appear that he was trying to land, but in that mountainous country he didn’t have a chance. So he did know at some point before the crash.”

“The Reno paper said this morning that the working theory is pilot error.”

Davis said, “It’s a process of elimination. You familiar with how many things can go wrong for a pilot?” He swiveled in his faux leather chair, frisky as a kid on a merry-go-round.

“Aside from mechanically, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“Are you talking about physical problems?” Paul said. “Because there must be a million.” Paul’s chair did not swivel, he determined. “I’ve heard about some that can affect pilots. Oxygen deficiency, ear block, sinus block, hyperventilation, carbon monoxide poisoning . . .”

“Bailey had seen a doctor two days before. He was in perfect health. He was flying well below twelve thousand feet, which almost rules out hypoxia. There’s no information to suggest that this was anything other than a routine charter flight like hundreds he had flown before and therefore, hyperventilation as a result of stress also seems unlikely. So we are looking at some sort of perceptual problem.”

“By a process of elimination.”

“Exactly. We are used to relying on our senses for information. Under most conditions, pilots are trained to be responsive to the normal information gleaned from sensory data. However, many times that information can lead to false conclusions when you’re flying. Ever heard of illusions in flight?”

Paul had read all about them. He had figured this would be the road they would have to take, since no evidence existed to suggest anything more easily proven. “No,” he said, eager to hear more.

“Well, they rank among the most commonly cited factors that contribute to fatal aircraft accidents.”

“No kidding.”

“One category of illusions causes spatial disorientation. Another arises during landing maneuvers. Since Bailey was not trying to land the aircraft, we think he was affected by one of the former. In these, the motions and forces of the plane give a false sense of position. The pilot needs to reorient by referring to reliable fixed points on the ground, or use flight instruments. If he corrects instead based on what his senses are telling him . . . it can be fatal.”

Paul pictured the small plane, the two people inside, gliding through the night.

“Just for an example, say Bailey entered a banked attitude slowly, too slowly to arouse the motion sensors in the inner ear. He corrects quickly. That gives him the illusion that he’s banking in the opposite direction. We call that ‘the leans.’ Then he rolls the plane back into its original dangerous position or may lean in the perceived vertical plane.”

The two men in Paul’s mind rocked back and forth. “Witnesses did not report anything of that nature happening before the crash,” he said.

“Or there’s the graveyard spin. If a pilot’s spinning and recovers properly, he may suddenly feel that he’s spinning in the opposite direction, so he returns to his original spin.”

The picture returned to level. “Ditto. There was no spin.”

Davis ignored him. “Then there’s the false horizon . . .”

“It was a clear night.”

“But it was night. A tricky time to be in the air, actually. Then there is autokinesis . . .”

By now, Davis had to know Paul was no innocent in these matters, but he went on anyway. “Then there’s the inversion illusion, where a sudden change from climbing to straight and level flight creates an impression that the aircraft is falling backward. The pilot pushes into a nose-low attitude, which increases the illusion and causes an accident.” He waited for Paul’s refutation, and gave a satisfied grunt when none came.

“There’s the elevator illusion, where an updraft causes abrupt upward vertical acceleration. Again, the pilot goes nose low . . . Anyway, you get the idea. There are a number of possibilities.”

“Possibilities.”

But in the tradition of all storytellers, Davis had saved the punch line.

“What happened in this case, I would speculate, is something called a somatogravic illusion. If a pilot reduces the throttles quickly, the plane decelerates rapidly. The pilot’s disoriented, and he pushes the aircraft into a nose-up attitude. That causes a stall.”

The face at the window turned toward the pilot, mouth open in a silent scream. The pilot never took his hands from the controls as the plane swooped down, soundless as a bird in flight until the last instant. Annihilation.

Davis shrugged. “It could happen to the most skilled pilot. He had logged thousands of flight hours. But sometimes our instincts are too compelling to ignore.”