4th of July

Chapter 26

PENELOPE WAS A LARGE Vietnamese potbellied pig, all black and whiskery. She waddled over to me, huffing and snoodling, so I leaned over the fence and patted her head.

“Hi, gorgeous,” I said.

Hi, Lindsay.

There was a note tacked to Penelope’s little bungalow, so I entered the pen to get a better look at “The Pig House Rules,” as “written” by Penelope.

Dear Lindsay,

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.