doctors wore. Four words were stitched on the breast pocket, SANTA ANA
CITY MORGUE.
“What the hell?” Reese Hagerstrom said. “You think someone from the
morgue cut her throat?”
Frowning at the lab coat, Julio Verdad said nothing.
A lab man carefully folded the coat, trying not to shake loose any hairs
or fibers that might be clinging to it. He put it into a plastic bag,
which he sealed tightly.
Ten minutes later, the officers in the dumpster found a sharp scalpel
with traces of blood on the blade. An expensive, finely crafted
instrument of surgical quality.
Similar to those used in hospital operating rooms. Or in a medical
examiner’s pathology lab.
The scalpel, too, was put in a plastic bag, then laid beside the lab
coat, which lay beside the now-draped body.
By midnight, they had not found the dead woman’s other blue shoe. But
there was still about sixteen inches of garbage in the dumpster, and the
missing item was almost certain to turn up in that last layer of refuse.
Bulleting
through the hot June night, from the Riverside Freeway to 1-15 East,
then east on 1-10, past Beaumont and Banning, skirting the Morongo
Indian Reservation, to Cabazon and beyond, Rachael had plenty of time to
think. Mile by mile, the metropolitan sprawl of southern California
fell behind, the lights of civilization grew sparser, dimmer. They
headed deeper into the desen, where vast stretches of empty darkness
opened on all sides, and where often the only things to be seen on the
plains and hills were a few toothy rock formations and scattered Joshua
trees limned by frost-pale moonlight that waxed and waned as it was
screened by the thin and curling clouds that filigreed the night sky.
The barren landscape said all that could be said about solitude, and it
encouraged introspection, as did the lulling hum of the Mercedes’s
engine and the whisper of its spinning tires on the pavement. Slumped
in the passenger’s seat, Benny was stubbornly silent for long periods,
staring at the black ribbon of highway revealed in the headlights. A
few times, they engaged in short conversations, though the topic was
always so light and inconsequential that, under the circumstances, it
seemed surreal. They discussed Chinese food for a while, subsided into
a deep and mutual silence, then talked of Clint Eastwood movies,
followed by another and longer silence.
She was aware that Benny was paying her back for her refusal to share
her secrets with him. He surely knew that she was stunned by the ease
with which he had disposed of Vincent Baresco in Eric’s office and that
she was dying to know where he had learned to handle himself so well.
By turning cool on her, by letting the brooding silences draw out, he
was telling her that she was going to have to give him some information
in order to get some in return.
But she could not give. Not yet. She was afraid he had already been
drawn too far into this deadly business, and she was angry with herself
for letting him get involved. She was determined not to drag him deeper
into the nightmare-unless his survival depended upon a complete
understanding of what was happening and of what was at stake.
As she turned off Interstate 10 onto State Highway 111, now only eleven
miles from Palm Springs, she wondered if she could have done more to
dissuade him from coming with her to the desert. But upon leaving
Geneplan’s offices in Newport Beach, he had been quietly adamant, and
attempting to change his mind had seemed as fmitless as standing on the
shore of the Pacific and commanding an incoming tide to reverse itself
immediately.
Rachael deeply regretted the awkwardness between them. In the five
months since they had met, this was the first time they had been uneasy
with each other, the first time that their relationship had been touched
by even a hint of anger or had been in any way less than entirely
harmonious.
Having departed Newport Beach at midnight, they arrived in Palm Springs
and drove through the heart of town on Palm Canyon Drive at one-fifteen
Tuesday morning. That was ninety-nine miles in only an hour and fifteen