This note is all about me.
1) I’d like a cup of pig chow twice a day and a clean bowl of water.
2) I also like cherry tomatoes, Saltines with peanut butter, and peaches.
3) Please come out and talk to me every day. I like riddles and the theme song to SpongeBob SquarePants.
4) In case of emergency, my vet is Dr. Monghil in town and my pig-sitters are Carolee and Allison Brown. Allison is one of my best friends. Their numbers are by the kitchen phone.
5) Don’t let me into the house, okay? I’ve been warned.
6) If you scratch me under the chin, you can have three wishes. Anything you want in the whole wide world.
The note was signed with big Xs and a pointy little hoofprint. The Pig House Rules, indeed! Cat, you funny girl.
I catered to Penelope’s immediate needs, then changed into clean jeans and a lavender sweatshirt and took Martha and the Seagull out to the front porch. As I ran through some chords, the fragrance of roses and the salty ocean tang sent my mind drifting back to the first time I’d come to Half Moon Bay.
It had been just about this time of year. The same beachy smell had been in the air, and I was working my first homicide case. The victim was a young man we’d found savagely murdered in his room in the back of a sleazy transient hotel in the Tenderloin.
He had been wearing only a T-shirt and one white tube sock. His red hair was combed, his blue eyes were wide open, and his throat had been slashed in a gaping grin stretching from ear to ear, nearly decapitating him. When we turned him over, I saw that the skin on his buttocks had been flayed to ribbons with some kind of lash.
We’d tagged him John Doe #24, and at the time I fully believed that I’d find his killer. John Doe’s T-shirt had come from the Distillery, a tourist restaurant situated in Moss Beach, just north of Half Moon Bay.
It was our only real clue—and although I’d combed this little town and the neighboring communities, the lead had gone nowhere.
Ten years later, John Doe #24 was still unidentified, unclaimed, unavenged by the justice system, but he would never be just another cold-case file to me. It was like a wound that ached when it rained.
Chapter 27
I WAS ABOUT TO drive into town for dinner when the late-evening newspaper landed with a whomp on the lawn.
I picked it up, shook out the folds, and felt the headline reach out and hook me: POLICE RELEASE PRIME SUSPECT IN CRESCENT HEIGHTS SLAYINGS.
I read the article all the way through.
When Jake and Alice Daltry were found slain in their house in Crescent Heights on May 5, police chief Peter Stark announced that Antonio Ruiz had confessed to the crime. According to the chief today, the confession didn’t jibe with the facts. “Mr. Ruiz has been cleared of the charges against him,” said Stark.
Witnesses say Ruiz, 34, a maintenance worker for California Electric and Gas, couldn’t have been in the Daltrys’ house on the day of the murders because he was working his shift in the plant in full view of his coworkers.
Mr. and Mrs. Daltry had their throats slashed. Police will not confirm that the husband and wife were tortured before they were killed.
The article went on to say that Ruiz, who’d done some handiwork for the Daltrys, claimed that his confession had been coerced. And Chief Stark was quoted again, stating that the police were “investigating other leads and suspects.”
I felt a reflexive, visceral pull. “Investigating other leads and suspects” was code for “We’ve got squat,” and the cop in me wanted to know everything: the how, the why, and especially the who. I already knew the where.
Crescent Heights was one of the communities along Highway 1. It was on the outskirts of Half Moon Bay—only five or six miles from where I was standing.
Chapter 28
GET IN AND OUT in under five minutes. Absolutely no more than five.
The Watcher noted the exact time as he stepped out of his gray panel van onto Ocean Colony Road. He was dressed as a meter man this morning: dun-colored coveralls with a red-and-white patch over the right breast pocket. He pulled down the bill of his cap. Patted his pockets, feeling his folding knife in one, his camera in the other. Picked up his clipboard and a tube of caulk, tucked them under his arm.
His breathing quickened as he took the narrow footpath alongside the O’Malleys’ house. Then he stooped at one of the basement window wells, stretched latex gloves over his hands, and used a glass cutter and a suction cup to remove a twenty-four-by-twenty-inch pane of glass.
He froze, waiting out the yipping of a neighbor’s dog, then slipped feet first down into the basement.
He was in. Not a problem.