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  “Officially, Matucci is only missing. And Mrs. Brant believes that. She wants you to find her.”

  Tchernak popped the wine cork.

  The smell of garlic and olive oil mixed with the musty scent of dog that was attractive only to a dog-owner. Why was Olsen so obsessed with this case? She shook off the question and said, “I don’t like wild-goose chases. I don’t have the patience for them. My fee is considerable and I’m not willing to charge a client to hold her hand. And I definitely won’t take her money for nothing.”

  “It’s not ‘nothing’ to her. It’s a long shot, sure, but one she’s desperate to bet on. And you are the only person who can get her any odds at all.”

  Tchernak was pouring the wine.

  “Why me?”

  “Because she needs a detective who can eyeball Delaney’s body and spot something that doesn’t fit with drowning.”

  “Just what is it she wants me to find?”

  “Proof that Delaney’s death was no accident, that he was murdered.”

  “Whew! Two people go out on a small boat in the Pacific and one body is recovered and your client assumes that there was murder. That’s quite a leap.”

  “We’re talking about a woman who left Garrett Brant for dead on the Great Highway.”

  “Well, bon appétit, Ez.” Tchernak lifted his glass.

  Turning her back to the table, Kiernan said, “Still, Olsen … Does your client have any facts that support her supposition? Did the coroner’s report find anything questionable?”

  “The final report isn’t in yet, but the word I got is ‘drowning.’ Still, he could have missed something. That’s what Maureen needs you to find.”

  Kiernan sighed. “This sounds more and more like a waste of time, Olsen. I know the coroner’s department in San Francisco. They’re not slipshod. And they’re not about to let strangers wander in to eyeball bodies. You need to be a representative of the family, or at least of the lawyer. They wouldn’t let you or me waltz in and critique their work.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. The acting coroner will let you in.”

  Behind her, metal clanked loudly against china. Ezra slurped, the sure sound of an illicit handout.

  “Skip, it’s been years since I was a resident with the San Francisco coroner.”

  “He’ll let you in.”

  She asked the question she could tell he was angling for. “Why?”

  “Because the acting coroner of San Francisco is Marc Rosten.”

  Her shoulders tensed and she could feel her face flushing. “That was a long time ago,” she said, surprised by the anger in her voice. “And I don’t like dealing with people who try to manipulate my private life. Find yourself another investigator.”

  Behind her the clank of silverware hitting china stopped.

  “Wait! I’m sorry, Doc. I guess that was out of line. But the thing is this case is real important to me. You understand what those red hairs stuck in Brant’s blood mean? After whoever hit him, that person got out of the car and stood over him. Then left him there in the cold to die. I got real hooked on this, and it’s obsessing Maureen Brant, too. She’s willing to spend the last cent she’s got on it, and I just want her to have the best she can get. Look, at least talk to her.”

  Kiernan could hear the desperation in Olsen’s voice. She remembered she’d heard some kind of rumor about him a couple of years after she’d left San Francisco. He’d been demoted. Had there been a scandal? She couldn’t recall. But that would explain why he ended up back on beat before he retired. She glanced over at Tchernak, who was jabbing his fork into a clam’s midsection. “Voodoo doll?” she mouthed, and had a fleeting sensation of sharp pains in her own stomach. To Olsen she said, “Garrett Brant’s name sounds familiar.”

  “He’s an artist. He had a couple of shows set up in California before the accident. They went ahead with them. He paints what they call ‘interpretive landscapes.’ One of the shows was in La Jolla. Maybe you saw an ad for it—the two pictures they used in the ad were called ‘Winter Bear’ and ‘Alaskan Mud Flats.’”

  Kiernan shivered. “I saw Brant’s show down here. ‘Alaskan Mud Flats’ isn’t a picture you forget. At first it seemed like just another pretty sunset painting, but I found I couldn’t stop looking at it; no one could. It held you. There was something ominous in it. I don’t know enough about art to figure out why, technically. I read the card beside the canvas—about the people who’d died walking across those mud flats. The mud looked perfectly solid. One woman took a shortcut across them and that solid-looking mud sucked her down thigh-deep and hardened around her legs like cement. She couldn’t move. Her husband tried everything he could to get her out. Nothing helped. And then the tide came in—up over her chest, her neck, her nostrils. She drowned.”

  Kiernan felt the same clutch of gut-fear she’d had three years ago. Such intensity of feeling was quite an endorsement for Garrett Brant, she thought.

  As if reading her mind, Olsen said, “The critics felt Brant could have become the most perceptive landscape painter of our time. The guy needs your help.”

  She shook her head, half-smiling. Olsen was probably sincere, but there was something of the dangerous mud flat in him, too. However honest he was, the slurping sound of deceit pulled at his words. But that wasn’t Brant’s fault. And it wouldn’t take long to talk to the Brants. She had to admit she was curious about the man who said so much on so many levels in a picture of mud and sun and water. And the idea of forcing Marc Rosten to give her something was not without appeal. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to them. Tell them to come here tomorrow.”

  “Can’t do it. Garrett Brant can’t travel, and Maureen won’t leave him. You’ll have to go there.”

  Kiernan sighed. “Okay. Where are they?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere around Big Sur. Go to a grocery called Barrow’s, on Route 1, just past the sign for the town of Big Sur. She’ll leave you directions. I’ll call and tell them you’ll be there tomorrow around noon.”

  “In the meantime, fax me whatever you’ve got on the Brants, Matucci, and Delaney. And Olsen, include the info about yourself, why you were demoted. I don’t take cases unless I know who I’m dealing with.”

  3

  DR. MARC ROSTEN, ACTING coroner of the city and county of San Francisco, washed the soap-and-Clorox mixture off his hands. He hadn’t noticed the din in the autopsy theater when he’d been working, but now the babble of pathologists dictating their findings, the sloshing of fluids, the metallic clanking of instruments hitting the porcelain tables, and the whir of a saw cutting through the frontal bone of a skull seemed deafening.

  He looked back at the corpse on the gurney. He’d done the autopsy last week. It had been a relief to leave it to someone else to close—or at least to sew up as much as any autopsy assistant could manage to do. Five days in the ocean—not a pretty way to go. Despite the air-circulation system installed to pull up bacteria that might harbor contagion, the autopsy room still reeked with the sharp odor of body fluids, of bleach and burning bones, and of dead flesh gone rotten.

  It had been twelve years, but he could still recall his own first day here. He wouldn’t have wanted a corpse like Delaney’s then. But twelve years had changed a lot of things. The bloat didn’t bother him the way it would have, nor the head that the crabs had eaten down to the bones. You couldn’t be squeamish in this line of work. And it wasn’t the exposure cases that got to him, it was the ones who looked as if they might get up off the table and go home for dinner. The ones a doctor might have saved—that he might have saved if he’d stayed with internal medicine rather than opting for forensic pathology.

  But he’d been such a damned coward. He’d made a mistake, and he’d flagellated himself year after year for it. But there was no sense in going over it again and again. After all, he’d picked up the pieces, stuck to forensic pathology, and here he was: acting coroner. Not bad for a guy who’d regretted his choice the moment he�
��d applied for the residency.

  He was a good administrator. That had surprised him. It had surprised everyone. Marc Rosten, the guy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut, who couldn’t slow down enough to plan, who trusted his smarts and played his hunches, who spent the last quarter of his internship in bed with a knockout brunette when the other guys could barely muster enough energy to get out of bed after a thirty-six-hour shift. … Who would have pegged him for an administrator? And if he proved himself as acting coroner this month, he’d be getting offers from all over the country. He’d be in a position to negotiate, to sign on with the people who were committed and willing to come up with the money to make their departments tops. He wouldn’t have to spend his time fighting to stay within budget in some small county, making do with outmoded equipment, missing subtle indicators of death because there wasn’t enough staff or equipment, thanks to a board of supervisors who knew they wouldn’t get votes by allocating money to the dead. This time next year he’d be running his own first-class coroner’s department.

  If he kept things going smoothly here. He’d already had a call about this drowning. But there was nothing unusual about it. Nothing but the eyes, and however abnormal they might be, they hadn’t killed the poor bugger. No, it was asphyxia due to drowning that had done this guy in. The blood chloride levels in the chambers of the heart weren’t the same, so Delaney hadn’t been dead when he entered the water; he had indeed drowned.

  He took a final look at the body and rolled the gurney back into the freezer. Besides, this ex-cop who’d called about Delaney was off the force for a reason. And it wasn’t because of a better offer. He’d called the department to check on the guy. He hadn’t gotten the whole story, but he’d heard enough to know that Olsen was not going to be a problem, not if Olsen was relying on cops to help him out. Olsen didn’t matter. The postmortem was fine. Everything was under control. And would be for another two weeks.

  Rosten stepped into the changing room, stripped off the scrub pants and stood thinking. If he’d done this well here, what could he have done as a diagnostician? He could have helped these people before they ever reached the slab. He did save lives; he knew that. The data he collected from the corpses, the conclusions he drew, the recommendations he made to Public Health, they all fended off future epidemics, aided future treatments. But he didn’t save these lives. He had made one wrong decision and for the rest of his life, no matter how intelligent, how dedicated he was, he would always be too late.

  4

  “THERE’S NO GOOD HOUR to drive through Los Angeles; the last one was before 1975,” Kiernan muttered, standing by the new cherry-red Jeep Cherokee wagon in the driveway. Tchernak squeegeed the residue of sea-brine off the windshield. “No one told you to leave La Jolla at four in the morning. You could fly to Monterey, rent a car, save yourself hours.”

  “And leave you the Jeep, huh? That would take the sting out of my absence?” She opened the door. Ezra aimed himself at the driver’s seat. Flinging an arm around his furry neck, she yanked him out and slammed the door. “Down, Ezra! I appreciate your concern for my comfort, Tchernak, but I have to remind you that investigators train themselves to spot the underlying truth.”

  Tchernak grinned. “You told me you bought the Cherokee for Ezra. He’s already bigger than the Triumph. It’s only fair to leave it here with him.” Backlit by the streetlight, Brad Tchernak’s face looked craggier, his grin more wicked; with his four-A.M. uncombed spikes of hair catching the light, he resembled a grizzly coming out of hibernation.

  “You and Ezra can make do for a day or two.”

  “We could come with you,” he said hopefully.

  His offer was not new, and not one she wanted to encourage. Wondering what Tchernak was up to and worrying about Ezra were the last things she needed when she was on a case. “What about the Initiative Campaign? Aren’t you scheduled to speak at some rally today?”

  “Do I catch a note of jealousy?”

  She laughed. “Employer’s pique.”

  “You can make light of it now,” he said, suddenly serious. “But if Prop. Thirty-Seven fails, don’t be surprised when your ocean view is splattered with oil-drilling platforms. Seventy new platforms off the California coast, that’s the prediction. According to the Central Coast Regional Studies Program, the probability of a large spill off our coast as a result of drilling is ninety-nine percent. It’s going to happen! And everyone: the coast guard, the scientists, even the oilmen themselves agree that there is no way to clean up a big spill.”

  She held up a hand. “Tchernak, you’re preaching to the converted. I know the state can’t prevent drilling beyond the three-mile limit. I know that Prop. Thirty-Seven instructs them to create every impediment legally possible to that drilling: no new roads, no zoning changes, no sewer hookups for the onshore support. How’s that for four in the morning!” She reached up and patted his muscular shoulder. “Besides, I ordered background searches from BakDat.”

  “Don’t exactly trust Olsen in San Francisco, do you?”

  “Not hardly. If this case doesn’t pan out I’ll have to eat the cost, but that’s better than going in cold.”

  Slightly mollified at the prospect of computer play, Tchernak gave up. “Okay, but show a little restraint this time. Don’t go into homes where you’re not invited.”

  She climbed into the Jeep and backed out before he could go on about the seductive lure of housebreaking. It was a topic she was sorry she’d ever mentioned to him.

  She headed up the empty street and caught the freeway north. Her underlying agenda, basically the same as Tchernak’s (use of the newest vehicle), was rewarded. The Jeep handled firmly, responded quickly, and the fun of sitting up high looking down at the other cars hadn’t paled yet.

  When she reached Santa Barbara, Kiernan opened the basket Tchernak had packed—a thermos of coffee, a blueberry corn muffin and a still-warm container of braised tofu, tomato, and killer-chili pepper scramble. As she ate, she looked across the white, palm-guarded expanse of the Santa Barbara beach at the lapping blue water of the Pacific and out on the oil-drilling platforms beyond. She would really miss Tchernak if he left, she thought.

  As Tchernak had smugly pointed out, the coast road was much better suited to the Triumph. The narrow road wound in and out sharply, hugging the mountains. On the ocean side there was no railing, just a drop of fifty, a hundred, two hundred feet. By late morning the sun had cleaned the sky. It sparkled off the macadam, the rock, the leaves of oak and eucalyptus, and the azure blue water of the Pacific. On the few straightaways, cars like her Triumph pulled around the Jeep. And though she knew it was ridiculous, she felt humiliated, like a sheep nipped by a border collie. She had to fight the urge to step on the gas and see just how well the Jeep could corner. “Two-hundred-foot drop!” she reminded herself.

  South of the town of Big Sur she pulled into the parking lot beside Barrow’s Grocery and called Tchernak. Using the car phone still gave her a thrill of pleasure. Tchernak picked up the receiver on the sixth ring. “Brad Tchernak here.”

  “You’re surviving, then?”

  “I am. But Ez took out his anguish on your phone cord.”

  “Shit!”

  Tchernak laughed. “I’ve already gotten another one. That’s what you have servants for. And now the news from BakDat. Maureen Brant, thirty-one, has a driver’s license, but they can’t get the address yet.”

  “Motor vehicles won’t release addresses any more. Go on.”

  “Most recent work history was with the Department of Social Services in San Francisco. Ended three years ago. No activity on the social security number since.”

  “What about Garrett Brant?”

  “John Garrett Brant, thirty-one, last driver’s license was five years ago, in California. But his last Social Security card activity was in Alaska. Two years of sporadic entries from the Flamingo Bar, Janit-temp, and Ready Cab. And then one big entry from Arts of the Land Foundation.”

  “What
about Robin Matucci?”

  “Ah. Now this is interesting. Robin Matucci, twenty-eight, coast guard licensed navigator, Social Security activity in San Francisco for two and a half years—she paid as an employer with Early Bird. And she owns a house in the Marina district of San Francisco.”

  Kiernan whistled. “The fishing must have been very good indeed. Even after the earthquake, houses in the Marina still go for half a million. Anything else?”

  “Nothing at all on Delaney.”

  “Haven’t they run him?” The fax came when ready; there would have been no explanation on what was still missing.

  Tchernak laughed. “I knew you’d ask. I called. They ran him, but there’s nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a thing. They thought it was odd, too.”

  “Damned odd. His Social Security payments from the last month or so would be too recent for them to pick up,” she mused. “But what was he doing before that?”

  “Don’t deckhands work for tips?”

  “Do they?” Kiernan asked, aware of a hollow sensation in her chest: apprehension. Justified apprehension, when she was facing a case that could pivot on something she knew nothing about. “I’ll call you between two and two-thirty, okay?” She hung up and headed inside the grocery, a small building, with dry weathered planks, and the musty smell of a place that sits under fog too much of the time.

  “Can I help you?” A plump woman with gray-streaked brown hair sat in an old overstuffed armchair behind the counter.

  “I’m Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. I need directions to Garrett Brant’s place.”

  For an instant the woman looked puzzled, then she said, “Oh, you mean Maureen’s. I forgot her husband’s name. Nice woman, Maureen.”

  “You don’t know Garrett?” Kiernan asked, as the woman reached under the counter and extricated an envelope.

  “Never seen him. Most times I forget Maureen has a husband. Or I would if she didn’t buy so much food. He’s not social, that’s what Maureen says. She says that if she’s pressed. Otherwise, she don’t say nothing at all about him.”