4th of July

Chapter 47

“BAD DOG,” I SAID to Martha. “You can’t keep out of trouble, can you?” Martha turned her melting brown eyes on me, wagged her tail, then resumed her surveillance of the boulder-sculpted highway.

As I drove south on Highway 1, I was bristling with excitement. Three miles down the road, I turned off at Crescent Heights, an idiosyncratic collection of houses freckling the face of the hill at the tip of Half Moon Bay.

I pointed the Explorer up the gravelly one-laner, feeling my way along until the scene of the crime nearly jumped out at me. I pulled over and turned off the engine.

The yellow clapboard-sided house was a charmer, with three gabled dormers, an overgrown flower garden, and a whirligig of a lumberjack sawing wood attached to the post-and-rail fence. The name Daltry was painted on the handmade mailbox, and a half mile of yellow plastic tape was still wrapped around this, the American dream.

Crime scene. Do not enter by order of the police.

I tried to imagine that two people had been brutally murdered in this homey little cottage, but the images didn’t fit together. Murder should never happen in a place like this.

What had drawn a killer to this particular house? Was it a targeted hit—or had the killer just happened on this home-sweet-home by chance?

“Stay, girl,” I told Martha as I got out of the car.

The murder had occurred more than five weeks ago, and by now the police had relinquished the crime scene. Anyone who wanted to snoop could do so, as long as they didn’t break into the house—and I saw signs of snoopers everywhere: footprints in the flower beds, cigarette butts on the pavement, soda cans on the lawn.

I stepped through the open gate, ducked under the tape, and walked around the house, slowly frisking the scene with my eyes.

There was an abandoned basketball under the shrubbery, and a single child’s sneaker on the back steps, still wet from last night’s dew. I noticed that one of the basement windows had been removed from its frame and was leaning against a wall of the house: the probable point of entry.

The longer I stayed at the Daltry house, the harder my heart pounded. I was creeping around a crime scene instead of taking charge of it, and that made me feel weird and bad, as though this crime was none of my business and I shouldn’t be here. At the same time, I felt driven by what Claire had told me on the phone last night.

The Daltrys of Crescent Heights weren’t the first murder victims to be whipped. Who else had been savaged this way? Did these killings connect with my unsolved case, John Doe #24?

Relax and keep a low profile, Yuki had said. I actually laughed out loud. I got into the Explorer, patted my furry sidekick’s flank, then bumped down the gravelly road to the highway.

We would be back in the center of Half Moon Bay in ten minutes. I wanted to see the O’Malley house.