He left the bedroom, followed the hall, and crossed the living room before the visitor had time to ring the bell twice.
The front door had no windows. He opened it and found Detective Taggart on the porch.
9
The praying-mantis stare of mirrored lenses skewered Mitch and pinned his voice in his throat.
“I love these old neighborhoods,” Taggart said, surveying the front porch. “This was how southern California looked in its great years, before they cut down all the orange groves and built a wasteland of stucco tract houses.”
Mitch found a voice that sounded almost like his own, though thinner: “You live around here, Lieutenant?”
“No. I live in one of the wastelands. It’s more convenient. But I happened to be in your neighborhood.”
Taggart was not a man who just happened to be anywhere. If he ever went sleepwalking, even then he would have a purpose, a plan, and a destination.
“Something’s come up, Mr. Rafferty. And since I was nearby, it seemed as easy to stop in as to call. Can you spare a few minutes?”
If Taggart was not one of the kidnappers, if his conversation with Mitch had been taped without his knowledge, allowing him across the threshold would be reckless. In this small house, the living room, a picture of tranquillity, and the kitchen, smeared with incriminating evidence, were only a few steps apart.
“Sure,” Mitch said. “But my wife came home with a migraine. She’s lying down.”
If the detective was one of them, if he knew that Holly was being held elsewhere, he did not betray his knowledge by any change in his expression.
“Why don’t we sit here on the porch,” Mitch said.
“You’ve got it fixed up real nice.”
Mitch pulled the door shut behind him, and they settled into the white wicker chairs.
Taggart had brought a nine-by-twelve white envelope. He put it on his lap, unopened.
“We had a porch like this when I was a kid,” he said. “We used to watch traffic go by, just watch traffic.”
He removed his sunglasses and tucked them in his shirt pocket. His gaze was as direct as a power drill.
“Does Mrs. Rafferty use ergotamine?”
“Use what?”
“Ergotamine. For the migraines.”
Mitch had no idea whether ergotamine was an actual medication or a word the detective had invented on the spot. “No. She toughs it out with aspirin.”
“How often does she get one?”
“Two or three times a year,” Mitch lied. Holly had never had a migraine. She rarely suffered headaches of any kind.
A gray-and-black moth was settled on the porch post to the right of the front steps, a night-flyer sleeping in the shade until sunset.
“I have ocular migraines,” Taggart said. “They’re entirely visual. I get the glimmering light and the temporary blind spot for like twenty minutes, but there’s no pain.”
“If you’ve got to have a migraine, that sounds like the kind to have.”
“A doctor probably wouldn’t prescribe ergotamine until she was having a migraine a month.”
“It’s just twice a year. Three times,” Mitch said.
He wished that he had resorted to a different lie. Taggart having personal knowledge of migraines was rotten luck.
This small talk unnerved Mitch. To his own ear, he sounded wary, tense.
Of course, Taggart had no doubt long ago grown accustomed to people being wary and tense with him, even innocent people, even his mother.
Mitch had been avoiding the detective’s stare. With an effort, he made eye contact again.
“We did find an AVID on the dog,” Taggart said.
“A what?”
“An American Veterinary Identification Device. That microchip ID I mentioned earlier.”
“Oh. Right.”
Before Mitch realized that his sense of guilt had sabotaged him again, his gaze had drifted away from Taggart to follow a passing car in the street.
“They inject it into the muscle between the dog’s shoulders,” said Taggart. “It’s very tiny. The animal doesn’t feel it. We scanned the retriever, got her AVID number. She’s from a house one block east, two blocks north of the shooting. Owner’s name is Okadan.”
“Bobby Okadan? I do his gardening.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The guy who was killed—that wasn’t Mr. Okadan.”
“No.”
“Who was he? A family member, a friend?”
Avoiding the question, Taggart said, “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the dog.”
“One golden looks like another.”
“Not really. They’re distinct individuals.”
“Mishiki,” Mitch remembered.
“That’s the dog’s name,” Taggart confirmed.
“We do that property on Tuesdays, and the housekeeper makes sure Mishiki stays inside while we’re there, out of our way. Mostly I’ve seen the dog through a patio door.”
“Evidently, Mishiki was stolen from the Okadans’ backyard this morning, probably around eleven-thirty. The leash and collar on her don’t belong to the Okadans.”
“You mean…the dog was stolen by the guy who was shot?”
“So it appears.”
This revelation reversed Mitch’s problem with eye contact. Now he couldn’t look away from the detective.
Taggart hadn’t come here just to share a puzzling bit of case news. Apparently this development triggered, in the detective’s mind, a question about something Mitch had said earlier—or had failed to say.
From inside the house came the muffled ringing of the telephone.
The kidnappers weren’t supposed to call until six o’clock. But if they called earlier and couldn’t reach him, they might be angry.
As Mitch started to rise from his chair, Taggart said, “I’d rather you didn’t answer that. It’s probably Mr. Barnes.”
“Iggy?”
“He and I spoke half an hour ago. I asked him not to call here until I had a chance to speak with you. He’s probably been wrestling with his conscience ever since, and finally his conscience won. Or lost, depending on your point of view.”
Remaining in his chair, Mitch said, “What’s this about?”
Ignoring the question, returning to his subject, Taggart said, “How often do you think dogs are stolen, Mr. Rafferty?”
“I never thought about them being stolen at all.”
“It happens. They aren’t taken as frequently as cars.” His smile was not infectious. “You can’t break a dog down for parts like you can a Porsche. But they do get snatched now and then.”
“If you say so.”
“Purebred dogs can be worth thousands. As often as not, the thief doesn’t intend to sell the animal. He just wants a fancy dog for himself, without paying for it.”
Though Taggart paused, Mitch didn’t say anything. He wanted to speed up the conversation. He was anxious to know the point. All this dog talk had a bite in it somewhere.
“Certain breeds are stolen more than others because they’re known to be friendly, unlikely to resist the thief. Golden retrievers are one of the most sociable, least aggressive of all the popular breeds.”
The detective lowered his head, lowered his eyes, sat pensively for a moment, as if considering what he wished to say next.
Mitch didn’t believe that Taggart needed to gather his thoughts. This man’s thoughts were as precisely ordered as the clothes in an obsessive-compulsive’s closet.
“Dogs are mostly stolen out of parked cars,” Taggart continued. “People leave the dog alone, the doors unlocked. When they come back, Fido’s gone, and someone’s renamed him Duke.”
Realizing that he was gripping the arms of the wicker chair as if strapped in the hot seat and waiting for the executioner to throw the big switch, Mitch made an effort to appear relaxed.
“Or the owner ties the dog to a parking meter outside a shop. The thief slips the knot and walks off with a
new best friend.”
Another pause. Mitch endured it.
With his head still bowed, Lieutenant Taggart said,
“It’s rare, Mr. Rafferty, for a dog to be stolen out of its owner’s backyard on a bright spring morning. Anything rare, anything unusual makes me curious. Any outright weirdness really gets under my skin.”
Mitch raised one hand to the back of his neck and massaged the muscles because that seemed like something a relaxed man, a relaxed and unconcerned man, might do.
“It’s strange for a thief to enter a neighborhood like that on foot and walk away with a stolen pet. It’s strange that he carries no ID. It’s more than strange, it’s remarkable, that he gets shot to death three blocks later. And it’s weird, Mr. Rafferty, that you, the primary witness, knew him.”
“But I didn’t know him.”
“At one time,” Taggart insisted, “you knew him quite well.”
10
White ceiling, white railings, white floorboards, white wicker chairs, punctuated by the gray-and-black moth: Everything about the porch was familiar, open and airy, yet it seemed dark now to Mitch, and strange.
His gaze still downcast, Taggart said, “One of the jakes on the scene eventually got a closer look at the victim and recognized him.”
“Jakes?”
“One of the uniformed officers. Said he arrested the guy on a drug-possession charge after stopping him for a traffic violation about two years ago. The guy never served any time, but his prints were in our system, so we were able to make a quick match. Mr. Barnes says you and he went to high school with the vic.”
Mitch wished that the cop would meet his eyes. As intuitive and perceptive as he was, Taggart would recognize genuine surprise when he saw it.
“His name was Jason Osteen.”
“I didn’t just go to school with him,” Mitch said. “Jason and I were roommates for a year.”
At last reestablishing eye contact, Taggart said, “I know.”
“Iggy would have told you.”
“Yes.”
Eager to be forthcoming, Mitch said, “After high school, I lived with my folks for a year, while I took some classes—”
“Horticulture.”
“That’s right. Then I got a job with a landscaping company, and I moved out. Wanted an apartment of my own. Couldn’t fully afford one, so Jason and I split rent for a year.”
The detective bowed his head again, in that contemplative pose, as if part of his strategy was to force eye contact when it made Mitch uncomfortable and to deny eye contact when Mitch wanted it.
“That wasn’t Jason dead on the sidewalk,” Mitch said.
Opening the white envelope that had been on his lap, Taggart said, “In addition to the identification by an officer and the print match, I have Mr. Barnes’s positive ID based on this.”
He withdrew an eight-by-ten color photo from the envelope and handed it to Mitch.
A police photographer had repositioned the cadaver to get better than a three-quarter image of the face. The head was turned to the left only far enough to conceal the worst of the wound.
The features had been subtly deformed by the temple entrance, transit, and post-temple exit of the high-velocity shot. The left eye was shut, the right open wide in a startled cyclopean stare.
“It could be Jason,” Mitch said.
“It is.”
“At the scene, I only saw one side of his face. The right profile, the worst side, with the exit wound.”
“And you probably didn’t look too close.”
“No. I didn’t. Once I saw he had to be dead, I didn’t want to look too close.”
“And there was blood on the face,” Taggart said. “We swabbed it off before this photo was taken.”
“The blood, the brains, that’s why I didn’t look too close.”
Mitch couldn’t take his eyes from the photo. He sensed that it was prophetic. One day there would be a photograph like this of his face. They would show it to his parents: Is this your son, Mr. and Mrs. Rafferty?
“This is Jason. I haven’t seen him in eight years, maybe nine.”
“You roomed with him when you were—what?—eighteen?”
“Eighteen, nineteen. Just for a year.”
“About ten years ago.”
“Not quite ten.”
Jason had always affected a cool demeanor, so mellow he seemed to have surfwaxed his brain, but at the same time he seemed to know the secrets of the universe. Other boardheads called him Breezer, and admired him, even envied him. Nothing had rattled Jason or surprised him.
He appeared to be surprised now. One eye wide, mouth open. He appeared to be shocked.
“You went to school together, you roomed together. Why didn’t you stay in touch?”
While Mitch had been riveted by the photo, Taggart had been watching him intently. The detective’s stare had the sharp promise of a nail gun.
“We had…different ideas about things,” Mitch said.
“It wasn’t a marriage. You were just roommates. You didn’t have to want the same things.”
“We wanted some of the same things, but we had different ideas about how to get them.”
“Jason wanted to get everything the easy way,” Taggart guessed.
“I thought he was headed for big trouble, and I didn’t want any part of it.”
“You’re a straight shooter, you walk the line,” Taggart said.
“I’m no better than anyone else, worse than some, but I don’t steal.”
“We haven’t learned much about him yet, but we know he rented a house in Huntington Harbor for seven thousand a month.”
“A month?”
“Nice house, on the water. And so far it looks like he didn’t have a job.”
“Jason thought work was strictly for inlanders, smog monsters.” Mitch saw that an explanation was required. “Surfer lingo for those who don’t live for the beach.”
“Was there a time when you lived for the beach, Mitch?”
“Toward the end of high school, for a while after. But it wasn’t enough.”
“What was it lacking?”
“The satisfaction of work. Stability. Family.”
“You’ve got all that now. Life is perfect, huh?”
“It’s good. Very good. So good it makes me nervous sometimes.”
“But not perfect? What’s it lacking now, Mitch?”
Mitch didn’t know. He’d thought about that from time to time, but he had no answer. So he said, “Nothing. We’d like to have kids. Maybe that’s all.”
“I have two daughters,” the detective said. “One’s nine and one’s twelve. Kids change your life.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
Mitch realized that he was responding to Taggart less guardedly than he had previously. He reminded himself that he was no match for this guy.
“Aside from the drug-possession charge,” Taggart said, “Jason stayed clean all these years.”
“He always was lucky.”
Indicating the photo, Taggart said, “Not always.”
Mitch didn’t want to look at it anymore. He returned the photo to the detective.
“Your hands are shaking,” Taggart said.
“I guess they are. Jason was a friend once. We had a lot of laughs. All that comes back to me now.”
“So you haven’t seen or spoken to him in ten years.”
“Almost ten.”
Returning the photo to the envelope, Taggart said, “But you do recognize him now.”
“Without the blood, seeing more of the face.”
“When you saw him walking the dog, before he was killed, you didn’t think—Hey, don’t I know that guy?”
“He was across the street. I only glanced at him, then the shot.”
“And you were on the phone, distracted. Mr. Barnes says you were on the phone when the shot was fired.”
“That’s right. I wasn’t focused on the guy with the dog. I just glanced at
him.”
“Mr. Barnes strikes me as being incapable of guile. If he lied, I expect his nose might light up.”
Mitch wasn’t sure if he was meant to infer, by contrast to Iggy, that he himself was enigmatic and unreliable. He smiled and said, “Iggy’s a good man.”
Looking down at the envelope as he fixed the flap shut with the clasp, Taggart said, “Who were you on the phone with?”
“Holly. My wife.”
“Calling to let you know she had a migraine?”
“Yeah. To let me know she was going home early with a migraine.”
Glancing at the house behind them, Taggart said, “I hope she’s feeling better.”
“Sometimes they can last all day.”
“So the guy who’s shot turns out to be your old roommate. You see why it’s weird to me?”
“It is weird,” Mitch agreed. “It freaks me out a little.”