Watson made some notes. “You didn’t see any suspicious activity for the days prior to the body being found?” he asked.
“No. It’s usually quiet out here.” Juanita bowed her head. “What a tragedy for her family,” she said again.
Watson felt bad for Mrs. McCoy. This body had been discovered on her ranch, so now she was being dragged into the muck, even though the forensic detectives were almost positive that the murder had not been committed where the remains had been discovered. The preliminary investigation indicated that the girl had been killed somewhere else, then brought there. This was a remote location; a good place to dump a body you didn’t want found. If the ranch foreman hadn’t been out there surveying the property, the vultures and flies would have picked the corpse clean before it was discovered, and then it might never have been found. Regardless of where the girl had been killed, however, the body had turned up here. Mrs. McCoy was going to be in the limelight. Not something to wish on an older woman, particularly one of her stature in the community.
Juanita walked the detectives outside, shielding her eyes against the high midday sun. “I hope you catch the killer soon,” she said. “I don’t like all these people tramping around out here.”
“So do we,” Watson answered tightly. “And we’ll do our best to keep our incursions to a minimum. But we do have a murder to solve.”
“I understand,” Juanita answered. She went back inside, after promising to call them if she thought of anything that might be helpful.
“It’s so pretty out here,” Rebeck commented, looking past the barn to the pasture. “The authentic old Santa Barbara.”
Watson, oblivious to the beauty around him, said darkly, “This is going to be a bitch.”
“Tell me about it,” Rebeck answered, her partner’s morose objectivity bringing her down to earth with a thud. “We’d better come up with somebody who saw this
chiquita
the day she disappeared. She was a social butterfly, there have to be witnesses.”
The detectives walked to their department-issue Crown Victoria. Watson slid in behind the wheel. He turned the ignition, but didn’t put the car in gear. “There’s one thing that doesn’t compute.”
“What?” Rebeck asked, as she fastened her seat belt.
“The gate on the road that leads there. If I’m trying to dump a body, I’m going to look for a place that’s more accessible.”
Rebeck nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe it wasn’t locked that day. I’ll bet they don’t check on it that often.”
“Anything’s possible,” Watson agreed glumly. He lightly banged on the steering wheel. “We’d better get lucky with a witness or we’re going to be up shit’s creek.”
R
IVA GARRISON, STEPPING OUT
of the shower, glanced over at her husband, Luke, who was trimming his goatee with a battery-powered trimmer. “The gray’s beginning to overtake the brown, big boy,” she observed acutely, if not kindly. “You’re starting to look like Willie Nelson.”
“I’m not braiding my hair, if that’s the direction you’re pushing this conversation,” he replied. “It isn’t nearly long enough. And there aren’t that many gray ones, comparatively.” He squinted into the steamed-up mirror. “I’d say no more than ten percent.”
It was six-thirty in the morning. Luke had already been out for his run. Now he stood naked in front of the mirror, a cup of coffee on the sink, peering at his foggy image.
Riva wrapped her own long, luxuriant, mink-brown hair in a towel and began drying off with another. “And aren’t you about due for your annual eye exam?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes in mock-exasperation. “When did you start channeling Don Rickles?”
“Just stating the facts, counselor.” She sat on the toilet lid and began drying off her legs. She nudged his bare tush with her toes. “Man turns fifty, it’s like he becomes someone else. What is that?” she teased.
Three months ago, Luke had celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Riva had thrown a balls-out party for him. Everything was done up perfectly: she had a big tent erected in the backyard, where a caterer grilled New York steaks, baby back ribs, and Maine lobsters for two hundred of Luke’s friends. Jack Daniel’s, Johnnie Walker Black, and Veuve Clicquot were the house-pours. She also imported a killer blues band from L.A. It was a great bash: to quote John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Everybody had a good time.” Nobody thought about the flip side of that verse, “Everybody had a hard year.”
Except Luke, who woke up the next morning with a raging hangover and the first gray hair in his beard. Since then, his goatee had become increasingly pewter in appearance. It was still mostly brown, but the tide was turning.
Not that he gave much of a shit; he wasn’t a vain man. But it reminded him that life didn’t go on forever. He had two young children and a wonderful wife. He wanted to hang around with them for a long time to come. The gray in his beard, the reading glasses he had started using a couple of years ago, the daily five-mile run that used to take thirty-eight minutes and now took forty-two; all signposts of this mortal coil we struggle through.
Well, that was a bit overreaching, he thought as he finished his beard-trimming and lathered shaving gel onto the rest of his face. No Hamlet he.
To be
was the only way for him, it always had been;
or not
was never an option.
That didn’t mean he had to like the creeping grayness. Although a bit of distinction was a plus in the courtroom. If your hair grows to your shoulders, your goatee looks like it belongs on the face of a ’50s tenor sax player, and you often don’t wear a tie into court, you have to be a damn good, if not near-great barrister, to pull it off; and like the legendary Gerry Spence, who he saw occasionally around town and also famously didn’t wear a tie, Luke was a great lawyer. Juries loved him, as did his clients.
It had been some journey, he thought, as he carefully shaved around his goatee, getting to the midcentury mark. Youngest District Attorney in the state at age thirty-four, gone from office (voluntarily, but under a cloud) before age forty, virtually retired by age forty-three, then a new life working the other side of the aisle as a criminal-defense lawyer by age forty-five. A real roller-coaster of a ride. A wonderful wife, two healthy and bright children, work that he enjoyed (at least some of the time). Life was good. Knock on wood.
Even with gray hairs and less-than-perfect vision to live with.
He answered Riva’s jibe through the mirror. “He becomes a fifty-year-old man, no more, no less,” he stated, only the slightest bit testy. “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
“And…?” Dry now, she threw her towels into a hamper.
“And nothing. It’s just a fact. A fact of life.”
“And a benchmark.”
He stared at her through the frosted glass. “What is the point of this?” he asked, now a bit…petulant? Not a nice emotion.
She kissed him between the shoulder blades. “There is no point. I’m teasing you, is all. Can’t a wife tease her husband?”
“Not before seven in the morning.”
“When else do we have time to ourselves?” she asked.
As if on cue, a high, shrill child’s voice clamored: “Mommy!”
“Not for the rest of today, obviously,” Luke answered.
Riva threw on a robe. “I’ll be right down,” she called back equally loudly to their son. “And don’t yell, you’ll wake up your sister.”
Luke laughed. He put down his razor and reached into the shower to turn on the spigots.
“Are you having breakfast with us this morning?” Riva asked as he stepped in.
He shook his head. “I have a client coming in early.”
“What about dinner? You haven’t been home to eat with the kids once this week.”
He nodded—he was a notorious workaholic, but he was getting better. He didn’t want to be an absentee father, like his own had been before he had abandoned the family, when Luke was still a kid. “I’ll try. I’ll definitely be home before bedtime,” he promised.
“Mrs. McCoy, how are you?”
Juanita was in Luke’s reception area, sitting erect and still like a bird on a wire. It was a few minutes before eight; she was his first appointment.
“I hope you don’t mind that I came early,” she said as she got up. “I was awake and I had nothing to do, so I just drove in.”
“Of course not.”
“Your associate was nice enough to get me some coffee,” Juanita said, looking over at Margo Howells, Luke’s stalwart paralegal and all-around girl Friday.
“Good.” Luke smiled to himself. He liked that Juanita had called Margo his “associate,” rather than “secretary.” She was an old lady chronologically, but she was modern in the world.
He ushered Juanita into his office. “Hold everything,” he instructed Margo, as he closed the door.
“To answer your question, I’m all right, personally,” Juanita told him as she sat down. She carefully placed her coffee cup on the edge of his desk. “Distracted.”
“I can imagine,” he replied sympathetically, sitting down opposite her. “That must have been quite a shock, a murdered girl found on your property.”
“It was,” she agreed. “Horrible. That poor girl. And her mother.” She shuddered. “Outliving a child is a parent’s worst nightmare.”
“I hope I never know.” An older parent, Luke was over forty when the first one was born. A compartment in a far recess of his brain was reserved for worrying about them. Most of the time the drawer was closed, so that he didn’t feel anxious about them consciously, but he knew it was always there. “So,” he said, positioning a legal pad on his knee, “how can I help you today?”
“I need some legal advice.”
Luke sat back, perplexed and a bit disturbed. When Mrs. McCoy had called and said she had an issue to discuss with him, he had cleared his calendar to fit her in right away. But there had been an unsettling itch as he wrote her name on his schedule. McCoy and Dixon, her late husband’s law firm, handled her legal affairs. Why was she coming to him? Was she in some kind of trouble she didn’t want them to know about? Was there a criminal issue with that murdered girl? Henry’s firm didn’t do criminal work.
“Two police detectives came by yesterday,” Juanita said. “They were trying to find out how that girl wound up on the ranch, who might have put her there, was there anything I knew that could help them.” She hesitated for a moment, then spoke again. “I told them I didn’t know,
which I don’t
,” she said emphatically. “But there was one thing I didn’t tell them, because I didn’t remember it at the time. But now, thinking back, I realize I didn’t fully answer a question they asked me.”
All right, Luke thought. Here’s the reason she came to a criminal-defense lawyer. “Which was?” he prompted.
She adjusted her position on the chair. “They asked how many people have access to that section of the ranch. And they also mentioned the security gate on the road that leads to it. I explained who comes and goes—hardly anyone—and then they moved on to other questions.”
She fidgeted some more; he picked up on it. Something was stuck in her craw, and she was having a hard time coughing it up. “What I didn’t tell them,” she said, “because I simply forgot, was that there
had
been someone at the ranch, about the same time the girl disappeared.” She shifted around in her chair yet again.
This is uncharacteristic for her, Luke thought, because normally this woman was a rock. Something was really troubling her. “Who was it?” he asked, his ballpoint poised over the yellow pad.
“My grandson, and a friend of his,” she said with a nervous catch in her throat. “They showed up the morning of the day the police say the girl disappeared. They had been on the road for a couple of weeks and they stopped by to see me before they went back to college. In Tucson,” she added with precision. “Steven—my grandson—is a senior at the University of Arizona. So is his friend. Tyler. Tyler Woodruff.”
Luke hummed silently to himself. This was a wrinkle that needed to be ironed smooth.
“The boys couldn’t have known anything,” Juanita continued, as if pleading a case that as yet didn’t have any accusation attached to it, “because they weren’t at the ranch during the day, except when I was there. They didn’t return until later that night, and the police said the girl must have been abducted in the daytime.”
Luke tilted back in his chair. He wanted to help her, but her personal feelings, particularly for a blood relative, weren’t going to satisfy the sheriff and D.A. He needed facts. “Where were they, and how do you know?”
“In Santa Barbara,” she answered. “They gave me a rundown of what they’d done, the next morning. They hooked up with some friends. I don’t know what they did, exactly. Whatever college kids do, I assume. They got back late that night, I made them breakfast the next morning, and they took off. I haven’t spoken to Steven since then,” she concluded.
“Did they tell you who they were with? Any names you recall?”
She shook her head. “No. Just friends.”
“Have you spoken to your grandson about this murder?” he asked her. “Does he know about it?”
Juanita shook her head. “No, I have not spoken to him.” She raised a finger as she reconsidered. “I did mention in an e-mail I sent to my daughter-in-law—Steven’s mother—that a body had been found on the ranch, but I didn’t get into any particulars. Just that a body had been found on the property, of a local girl who had been shot. But no,” she concluded, coming back to his question, “I haven’t said anything to Steven about it.”
“But he probably knows, if you told his mother.”
“I suppose,” Juanita agreed.
“And he hasn’t communicated anything back to you about it. That he knows anything about it.”
“No,” she said. “He hasn’t.” She thought for a moment. “She may not have told him. Steven doesn’t live at home, he shares an apartment with Tyler. I don’t know how often he talks to his parents, but I doubt it’s on a daily basis.”
Luke put his pad and pen aside. “There’s two separate areas to be considered here,” he said. “One is legal, the other’s ethical.”
She looked at him intently.
“The detectives didn’t
specifically
ask you if your grandson or some other particular person was there, did they?”