maybe we’d find some way to communicate with him.”
The retriever leaped to his feet and padded directly to Nora. From the
expression on his face and from the intent look in his eyes, Nora knew that her
proposal was a good one. Tomorrow, she would collect dozens of books and
magazines, and put the scheme into operation.
“It’s going to take a lot of patience,” Travis warned her.
“I’ve got oceans of patience.”
“You may think you have, but sometimes dealing with Einstein gives a whole new
meaning to the word.”
Turning to Travis, the dog blew air out of his nostrils.
The prospects for more direct communication looked bleak during the first few
sessions with the dog on Wednesday and Thursday, but the big breakthrough was
not long in coming: Friday evening, June 4, they found the way, and after that
their lives could never be the same.
2
“…reports of screaming in an unfinished housing tract, Bordeaux Ridge—”
Friday evening, June 4, less than an hour before nightfall, the sun cast gold
and copper light on Orange County. It was the second day of blistering
temperatures in the mid-nineties, and the stored heat of the long summer day
radiated off the pavement and buildings. Trees seemed to droop wearily. The air
was motionless. On the freeways and surface streets, the sound of traffic was
muffled, as if the thick air filtered the roar of engines and blaring of horns.
“—repeat, Bordeaux Ridge, under construction at the east end—”
In the gently rolling foothills to the northeast, in an unincorporated area of
the county adjacent to Yorba Linda, where the suburban sprawl had only recently
begun to reach, there was little traffic. The occasional blast of a horn or
squeal of brakes was not merely muffled but curiously mournful, melancholy in
the humid stillness.
Sheriff’s Deputies Teel Porter and Ken Dimes were in a patrol car—Teel driving,
Ken riding shotgun—with a broken ventilation system: no air-conditioning, not
even forced air coming out of the vents. The windows were open, but the sedan
was an oven.
“You stink like a dead hog,” Teel Porter told his partner.
“Yeah?” Ken Dimes said. “Well, you not only stink like a dead hog, you look like
a dead hog.”
“Yeah? Well, you date dead hogs.”
Ken smiled in spite of the heat. “That so? Well, I hear from your women that you
make love like a dead hog.”
Their tired humor could not mask the fact that they were weary and
uncomfortable. And they were answering a call that didn’t promise much
excitement: probably kids playing games; kids loved to play on construction
sites. Both deputies were thirty-two, husky former high school football players.
They weren’t brothers—but, as partners for six years, they were brothers.
Teel turned off the county road onto a lightly oiled dirt lane that led into the
Bordeaux Ridge development. About forty houses were in various stages of
construction. Most were still being framed, but a few had already been stuccoed.
“Now there,” Ken said, “is the kind of shit I just can’t believe people fall
for. I mean, hell, what kind of name is ‘Bordeaux’ for a housing tract in
Southern California? Are they trying to make you believe there’s going to be
vineyards here one day? And they call it ‘Ridge,’ but the whole tract’s in this
stretch of flatland between the hills. Their sign promises serenity. Maybe now.
But what about when they pitch up another three thousand houses out here in the
next five years?”
Teel said, “Yeah, but the part gets me is ‘miniestates.’ What the fuck is a
miniestate. Nobody in his right mind would think these are estates—except maybe
Russians who’ve spent their lives living twelve to an apartment. These are tract
homes.”
The concrete curbs and gutters had been poured along the streets of Bordeaux
Ridge, but the pavement had not yet been put down. Teel drove slowly, trying not
to raise a lot of dust, raising it anyway. He and Ken looked left and right at
the skeletal forms of unfinished houses, searching for kids who were up to no
good.
To the west, at the edge of the city of Yorba Linda and adjacent to Bordeaux