Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn’t show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.
The landlord said Sand was paid up for another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray, reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disconnected hot water heater and the seams of a trapdoor barely visible underneath.
An old cellar, said the landlord. No one had used it in years.
Milo removed the heater and climbed down.
Straight down to hell, Alex.
Spatter and shreds and gobbets in formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.
In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter’s mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots planted with things that would never grow.
A background check showed Sand had given the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter. He’d been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.
He was picked up a week later, just outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human hand—a child’s, not Carrie’s, and never identified.
The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings’ maid, who’d been in Mexico during the week of Carrie’s murder and hadn’t been available for comparison printing.
I sat silently through Lucy’s recitation, recalling all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over it.
Sometimes my head still filled with bad pictures.
Carrie Fielding’s fifth-grade photo.
Shwandt’s methedrine eyes and drooping mustache and salesman’s smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long white fingers.
How much restoration of innocence could Lucy hope for?
Knowing more about her background might educate my guess.
So far, she’d kept that door closed.
I did some paperwork, drove to the market at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin’s call telling me she’d be home in a couple of hours.
“How’re things at the money pit?” I said.
“Deeper. We need a new main for the sewer.”
“That’s metal. How could fire burn through that?”
“Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently that’s how they used to build them. And it didn’t burn. It was demolished by someone’s heavy equipment.”
“Someone?”
“No one’s ’fessed up. Could have been a tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax.”
I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I’d helped thousands of patients relax. “How much?”
“Don’t know yet. We have to get the city out here to take a meeting with our plumbers—I’m sorry, honey, hopefully this is the last of the major damage. How’d your day go?”
“Fine. And yours?”
“Let’s just say I’m learning new things every day.”
“Thanks for handling all the crap, babe.”
She laughed. “A girl needs a hobby.”
“How’s Spike?”
“Being a very good boy.”
“Relatively or absolutely?”
“Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine.”
“That’s not good behavior. That’s self-preservation.”
“Actually she’s a sweet dog, Alex. Spike charmed her—she ended up grooming him.”
“Another conquest for the Frog Prince,” I said. “Want me to fix dinner?”
“How about we go out?”
“Name the place and time.”
“Um—how about Beauvilla around eight?”
“You got it.”
“Love you, Alex.”
“Love you, too.”
The beach house had cable hookup, which meant foolishness on sixty channels instead of seven. I found an alleged hard news broadcast on one of the local stations and endured five minutes of happy talk between the anchors. Then the male half of the team said, “And now for an update on that demonstration downtown.”
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