Apparently these kids had not believed in locks. That was, he supposed, part of their generation’s optimism, part and parcel with their theories on free love, mutual trust, and brotherhood. Theirs was the same generation that was supposed to live life so fully that they all but denied the existence of death.
Their generation. Chase was only a few years older than they were. But he did not consider himself to be part of their generation or any other. He was alone in the flow of time.
“Where’s your blouse?” he asked.
She was no longer fixated on the corpse, but she was not looking at Chase either. She stared at her knees, at her white knuckles, and she mumbled.
Chase groped around on the floor under her legs and found the balled-up garment. “You better put this on.”
She wouldn’t take it. She continued murmuring wordlessly to herself.
“Come on, now,” he said as gently as he could.
The killer might not have gone very far.
She spoke more urgently now, coherently, although her voice was lower than before. When he bent closer to listen, he discovered that she was saying, “Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me.”
” I won’t hurt you,” Chase assured her, straightening up. “I didn’t do that to your boyfriend. But the man who did it might still be hanging around. My car’s back there. Will you please come with me?”
She blinked, nodded, and got out of the car. He handed the blouse to her. She unrolled it, shook it out, but could not seem to get it on. She was still in a state of shock.
“You can dress in my car,” Chase said. “It’s safer there.”
The shadows under the trees were deeper than they had been.
He put his arm around her and half carried her back to the Mustang. The door on the passenger’s side was locked. By the time he got her to the other door and followed her inside, she seemed to have recovered her senses. She slipped one arm into the blouse, then the other, and slowly buttoned it.
When he closed his door and started the engine, she said, “Who are you?”
“Passerby. I saw the bastard and thought something was wrong.”
“He killed Mike,” she said hollowly.
“Your boyfriend?”
She didn’t respond but leaned back against the seat, chewing her lip and wiping absentmindedly at the few spots of blood on her face.
“We’ll get to a phone – or a police station. You all right? You need a hospital?”
“No.”
Chase swung the car around and drove down Kanackaway Ridge Road as fast as he had driven up. He took the turn at the bottom so hard that the girl was thrown against the door.
“Buckle your seat belt,” he advised.
She did as directed, but she appeared to be in a daze, staring straight ahead at the streets that unrolled before them.
“Who was he?” Chase asked as he reached the intersection at Galasio Boulevard and crossed it with the light this time.
“Mike,” she said.
“Not your boyfriend.”
“What?”
“The other one.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Did you see his face?”
She frowned. “His face?”
“Yes.
“Face.” As if the word were meaningless to her.
“Have you been doing anything?” he asked.
“Anything?”
“Drugs?”
“A little grass. Earlier.”
Maybe more than a little, he decided.
He tried again: “Did you see his face? Did you recognize him?”
“Face? No. Yes. Not really. A little.”
“I thought it might be an old lover, rejected suitor, something like that.”
She said nothing.
Her reluctance to talk about it gave Chase time to consider the situation. As he recalled the killer’s approach from the top of the ridge, he began to wonder whether the man had known which car he was after or whether any car would have done, whether this was an act of revenge directed against Mike specifically or only the work of a madman. Even before he had been sent overseas, the papers had been filled with stories of meaningless slaughter. He had not read any papers since his discharge, but he suspected that the same brand of senseless murder still flourished.