Her not being there with the others makes sense.
But not the rest of it.”
“Gee, you’re fun to be with,” said Milo. ‘Tll call
you next time I need a yes man.”
His face opened in a giant yawn. When he’d taken
in enough air he continued. “Everything you say is
logical, pal, but I’ve gotta touch all bases. I called
Houten in La Vista just before I came here. Woke
the poor devil up and told him to scour the town
for her and the kid. He was pretty broken up hearing’about
the parents, said he’d already searched
carefully the first time I asked, but agreed to do it
again.”
“Including the Touch’s plaee?”
“Especially there. Melendez-Lynch may have been
right from the beginning. Even if Houten comes up
empty they’re sweet suspects I’m heading down
there today to Check them out. Especially the two
that visited the Swopes. A couple of my guys are
going to the hospital to interview anyone who took
care of the Swopes. With special emphasis on squeezing
that asshole Valcroix.”
I told him about Seth Fiacre’s assessment of the
Touch as a reclusive group that shunned the limelight
and tacked on Mal’s account of the greening of
Norman Matthews.
“They don’t’ seek converts,” I pointed Out. “They
seclude themselves.’ What motivation would there
be for’them to get involved with outsiders?”
Milo seemed to ignore the question and expressed
Surprise at Noble Matthias’s identity.
“Matthews is the guru? I always wondered what
happened to him. I remember the case. It went
down in Beverly Hills so we weren’t involved. They
locked the husband up in Atascadero and six months
later he mixed himself a Draino cocktail.” He smiled
mirthlessly. “We used to call’Matthews .the ‘Shy
ster to the Stars.’ What do you know?”
He yawned again and drank more coffee.
“Motivation?” he repeated. “Maybe they-thought
they’d convinced the parents to treat the kid their
way, there was a change of heart and things got out
of control.”
“That’s pretty far out of control,” said.
“Don’t forget what ! told you in the motel room.
About the world getting crazier and crazier. Besides,
maybe ‘the cultists were camera-shy when
your professor friend studied them but not anymore.
Weirdos change, like anyone else. Jim Jones
was everyone’s hero until he turned intO Idi Amin.”
“It’s a good point.”
“Of course it is. I’m a pro-fesh-you-nole.'” He
laughed, a good warm’ sound soon replaced by silence
made cold by unspoken words.
“There’s another possibility,” I said, finally.
“Now that you’ve mentioned it, yes.” His green
eyes darkened with melancholia. “The kids are buried
somewhere else. Whoever did it got scared before
he could finish dumping them at Benedict and
took off. There are coyotes and all sorts of creepy
crawlies out there. You could see a pair of eyes and
easily get spooked.”
174 tonathan I&llern
I’d been heartsick and numb since learning of the
killings, my attention vacillating between Milo’s
words and the images they evoked. But now the
full impact of what he was saying slammed straight
into me and I mustered up a walt of denial to block
it out
“You’re still going to look for him, aren’t you?”
He looked up at the urgency in my voice.
“We’re canvassing-Benedict from Sunset up into
the Valley, Alex, doing door-to-doors on .the chance
someone saw something. But it-was dark so an
eyewitness is unlikely. We’re also going to cruise
the other canyonsMalibu, Topanga, Goldwater,
Laurel, right here in the Glen. About a thousand
man hours and unlikely to be productive.”
I got back on the subject of the parents’ murders
because grim as it was, it was preferable to fantasizing
about Woody’s fate.
“Were they shot right there, in Benedict?” I asked.
“Not likely. There was no blood on the ground
and we couldn’t find any spent shells. The rain
introduces a little uncertainty, but each of them
had half a dozen bullet holes. That much shooting
would make a lot of noise and there’d have to be
some shells left behind. They were killed somewhere
else, Alex, and then dumped. No footprints
or tiretracks, but that you can definitely put down
to the rain.”