A mile into Ventura, Milo hooked right, veering toward the land side. I caught a peek of my rented house on the private beach just ahead, a wedge of weathered wood visible beyond a sharp curve of the highway. Robin and I had liked it out there, watching the pelicans and dolphins, not minding the rust that seemed to settle in daily. We’d stayed there nearly a year while our house in the Glen was being rebuilt. The moment the lease was up, the landlord had handed the place over to his brilliant aspiring-screenwriter son in hopes of spurring Junior to creativity. The only time I’d met Junior he’d been drunk. I’d never seen anything with his name on it at the multiplex. Kids today.
The car climbed into the mountains. Neither of us talked as we searched for the unmarked road that led to the property. Address on the mailbox, Kris Lamplear had said.
The first time, Milo overshot and had to circle back. Finally, we found it, nearly five miles from the ocean, well past its nearest neighbor, preceded by a good mile of state land.
The mailbox was ten feet up the entrance, concealed by a cloud of plumbago vine. Rusty box on a weathered post, its door missing. Most of the gold-foil address numerals gone, too. The three digits that remained were withered and curling.
Nothing in the box. The air was cool, sweet, and the unmarked’s idling engine seemed deafening. Milo backed out, parked on the road, turned off the motor, and we returned to the mailbox on foot. Ahead of us, the dirt road—more of a path—swept to the left and flattened in an S that snaked through the greenery. Nothing in the immediate distance but more vines, shrubbery, trees. Lots of trees.
Milo said, “No sense announcing ourselves, giving him a chance to orchestrate. Let’s see if we can get a view of the cabin, watch it for a while.”
We walked a thousand feet before it came into view, graying clapboard barely discernible through a thickening colonnade of pine and gum trees and sycamores. Old, twisted sycamores, just like the one where Alice Zoghbie and Roy Haiselden had been propped. Had Ulrich/Burke noticed that? I thought he had. He would have liked that, the symmetry, neatness. The irony. Frosting on the old murder cake.
If Milo was thinking that, he wasn’t putting it into words. He trudged steadily but very slowly, mouth set, eyes swiveling from side to side, one arm loose, the other at his belt, inches from his service revolver. More tension than readiness for battle. He’d stashed his shotgun in the trunk of the unmarked.
The path finally ended at an egg-shaped parking area partially edged by large, circular rocks. The border looked like someone’s primitive attempt at hardscape, long disrupted by the elements. Two cars: Ulrich’s navy BMW and Tanya Stratton’s copper-colored Saturn.
Ulrich had told us a tale of another dark BMW stationed on Mulholland.
BMW like ours.
I’d agonized over whether the car had been Richard’s. Richard or Eric at the wheel. But it had existed only in Ulrich’s lie.
Orchestrating.
The building was just beyond the cars, at the rear of the property, and we approached, trying to shield ourselves behind trees, straining for a better look. Finally, we had a view of the front door. Open, but blocked by a dirty-looking screen.
Ugly little thing, not much more than a shed, shoved up against a mountain wall and surrounded by brush. Tar-paper roof the brown-green of a stagnant pond, the clapboard, once white, now murky as laundry water. Nearly hidden by low branches—one bough swooped within a foot of the door—as if yielding itself to green strangulation.
Up above, barely visible through the sycamores, was a mountain ridge crowned by a thick black coiffure of pines. More state land. No prying neighbors. We advanced to within twenty yards of the cabin before Milo stopped, ducked off the path and into the brush, motioning me quickly to do the same. A second later, the screen door opened and Tanya Stratton stepped out, letting it slam shut with a snare-drum rattle. She wore a long-sleeved tan shirt, blue jeans, white sneakers, had her hair tucked into a red bandanna. No dark glasses this time, but she was too far away for us to see her eyes. She stretched, yawned, went to her car and popped the trunk.