Crucifixion River

Irrefutable Evidence A Sharon McCone Story

I tossed the pinecone from hand to hand and looked up at the tree it had fallen from. It was perhaps twenty feet tall and very dense, with branches that swept the ground except on its left-hand side, where they were bent and sheared off. A young bristlecone pine, hundreds of years old and still growing. In the high elevations of California’s White Mountains, where the tule elk and wild mustangs range, there are bristlecones over 4,000 years old-some say the oldest living things on the face of the earth. Years ago, I’d made one of the better decisions of my life while lying under such a pine; today, I’d been hoping this tree would yield evidence that would help me identify a killer.

No such luck.

After a time I turned away and, still holding the pinecone, retraced my steps to my rented Jeep. I tossed the cone on the passenger’s seat, got in, and cranked up the air-conditioning. The temperature was in the midnineties-August heat. I eased the vehicle over the rocky, sloping ground to the secondary road, bumped along it for two miles, then turned southwest onto Route 168 toward Big Pine, a town of 1,350 nestled in a valley between the Whites and the John Muir Wilderness Area. My motel was on the wide main street, a homey place with a tree-shaded lawn and picnic tables. No high-speed Internet access or other amenities that my operatives at Mc-Cone Investigations would have deemed necessities, but plenty good enough for their boss.

I tell my operatives I believe in the simple life. They claim I’m living in the Dark Ages.

Dark Ages, indeed. I had a cell phone, which I took out as soon as I entered my unit and dialed the agency in San Francisco. Ted Smalley, our office manager, sounded relieved when he heard my voice. That morning I’d flown down to Bishop, some fifteen miles north of here, in the Cessna 170B I jointly owned with my significant other, Hy Ripinsky; Ted, ever nervous about what he called my “dangerous hobby,” had probably been fretting all day.

“Shar, it’s after five o’clock. Where are you?” he asked.

“The motel in Big Pine.”

“Why didn’t you check in with me from the airport? I’ve been waiting…”

“There was somebody at the airport who offered me a ride to the dealer I’m renting a car from, so I couldn’t take the time. Then I had to stop by the local sheriff’s substation to let them know I’d be working in the area, check in here, and…why am I explaining all this to you?”

“I don’t know. Why are you?”

“Sometimes you remind me of my mother.”

“God help me. She’s a nice lady, but…”

“Yeah. So what’s going on there?”

“Quiet day, except for the trouble with the UPS guy.”

“Trouble?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Probably not. Is Mick in?” Mick Savage, my nephew and chief computer expert.

“No, he left for the day, but he said to tell you he e-mailed the files on the research job you assigned him.”

Which I would access on my laptop-another rebuttal to the claim that the boss was living in the Dark Ages.

I read through the files Mick had sent me, then walked down to a steak house I’d spotted on the way in. After dinner, I went back to the motel and sat at one of the picnic tables, enjoying the cool of the evening and planning a course of action for the next day. The air was sweet with sage and dry grass; crickets chorused in a field behind the motel, and somewhere far off a dog was barking. I felt relaxed, mellow, even; it was good to get out of the city.

The case I was working had been brought to me by Glenn Solomon, a criminal-defense attorney who threw a lot of business my way. His client, Tom Worthington, had been indicted here in Inyo County for the brutal murder of his lover, Darya Adams. Worthington was a wealthy man, an olive rancher from over near Fresno; it was natural he would turn to one of the stars of San Francisco’s legal community for his defense.

I thought back to the briefing Glenn had given me in his office high atop Embarcadero Four the previous afternoon.

“Tom Worthington is a family man,” he’d begun, folding his hands over the well-tailored expanse of his stomach. “Wife, two college-age children. Good reputation. No indications that he’s ever strayed before. Darya Adams, he apparently couldn’t resist. Former beauty queen…Miss California, I believe…and widowed. Ran a tourist boutique at Mammoth Lakes. They met when he was on a ski trip there. Before long, they were meeting on a regular basis at a country cabin he bought for her outside Chelsea.”

I looked up from the notes I was taking. “Where’s Chelsea? I’ve never heard of it.”

“You know Big Pine, Inyo County?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. One of Hy’s friends used to have a cabin in the mountains near there.”

“Well, Chelsea is a wide place on the road some seven miles into the hills above Big Pine.”

“OK, now, the murder…?”

“As close as the medical examiner could pinpoint it, it occurred on July thirty-first. Worthington and Adams had met at the cabin on the twenty-eighth, according to the employee who was minding the boutique in her absence. When Adams didn’t return on August first as scheduled, the employee called the cabin, received no answer, then asked the sheriff to check. Place was closed up. On August third, a hiker came across Adams’s body in the foothills of the White Mountains several miles from Big Pine. She’d been beaten and strangled. There were signs that the body had been moved there from the place she was killed, but the sheriff’s department hasn’t been able to determine where that was.”

“And they’re calling this a crime of passion, perpetrated by your client?”

“Right. One of Darya Adams’s friends claimed she was fed up with the arrangement and had threatened to go to his wife if he didn’t initiate divorce proceedings. He claims that wasn’t true.”

“What’s the evidence pointing to Worthington?”

Glenn shifted in his chair, reached for the bottled water on the desk.

“Two pieces. One, a key chain near the body, containing a miniature of his Safeway Rewards Club card…you know, the ones they give you so, if you lose your keys, whoever finds them can turn them in to the store, and they’ll call you. And two, a pinecone in the bed of Worthington’s truck.”

“A pinecone?”

“A bristlecone, from the tree Adams’s body was found under.”

“How do they know it was from that particular tree?”

“Ah, my friend, that’s where it gets interesting. Human beings, as you know, can be identified by their DNA. Animals, too. But are you aware that plants also have DNA?”

“No.”

“Well, they do, and, as with humans, the DNA of one plant is unlike the DNA of any other.”

“Wait a minute…you’re saying they ran a DNA test on a pinecone?”

“They did, and it came up a match for those on the tree.”

I paused for a moment, letting that sink in. “So what do you expect me to do with this? DNA is a conclusive test.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt the cone in Tom Worthington’s truck came from the place where Darya Adams was found. No doubt it was his key ring near the body. But he insists he’s innocent, that she was alive when he left for home the morning of July thirty-first. Says he’d misplaced the key ring at the cabin during a previous visit. Says he doesn’t know how the cone came to be in the truck.”

“I can see someone planting the keys, but it seems far-fetched that someone would be knowledgeable and clever enough to plant that pinecone.”

“Not really. D’you watch any of those true-crime shows on TV?”

“No. They resemble my real life too closely.”

“Well, I watch them, and so do millions of others. On July fifteenth, just two weeks before Darya Adams’s murder, Case Closed did a segment in which a murder conviction hinged on DNA testing of seed pods.”

“So someone could’ve gotten the idea of planting the pinecone from the show?”

“Right.”

“And you believe Tom Worthington’s being truthful with you?”

“I do. My instincts don’t lie.”

“That’s good enough for me.”

“Then what I expect you to do, my friend, should be clear. Find out who left that key ring near the body, and the cone in Worthington’s truck. When you do, we’ll have our line of defense…Darya Adams’s real murderer.”

As full dark settled in, I returned to my motel room and again looked over the files Mick had sent me. Background on Tom Worthington and Darya Adams. Background on friends and associates, scattered throughout Inyo and Fresno counties. Tomorrow I’d begin interviewing them, starting with those in the Big Pine area, and then visit Worthington at the county jail in Independence.

Finding a lead to Darya Adams’s killer wasn’t going to be easy. Inyo is California’s third largest county-over 10,000 square miles, encompassing mountains, volcanic wasteland, timber, and desert. Its relatively small communities are scattered far and wide. In addition to its size, the county has a reputation for harboring a strange and often violent population. People vanish into the desert; bodies turn up in old mine shafts; bars are shot up by disgruntled customers. It’s not uncommon for planes carrying drugs from south of the border to land at isolated airstrips; desert rats and prospectors and cults with bizarre beliefs hole up in nearly inaccessible cañons. I’d have no shortage of potential suspects here.

Too bad my visit to the bristlecone pine under which Darya Adams died hadn’t offered a blinding flash of inspiration.

The red sun over the mountains told me the day was going to be hot. I dressed accordingly, in shorts and a tank top, with a loose-weave shirt for protection against the sun. After a big breakfast at a nearby café-best to fortify myself since I didn’t know when the next opportunity to eat would present itself-I set off for the offices of Ace Realty, a block off the main street.

According to my background checks, Jeb Barkley, the agent who had handled the sale of the cabin near Chelsea last year, was an old friend of Tom Worthington’s, had played football with him at Fresno State. A big man with a round, balding head that looked too small for his body, he was at his desk when I arrived. The other desks were unoccupied and dust-covered; business must not be good.

Barkley greeted me, brought coffee, then sat in his chair, leaning forward, hands clasped on the desktop, a frown furrowing his otherwise baby-smooth brow. “I sure hope you can do something to help Tom, Miz McCone,” he said.

“I’m going to try. Did you see him on his last visit?”

“Oh, no. He and Darya…they liked their privacy.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Couple of months ago. He came alone, to go fishing, and, when he got to the cabin, he discovered he didn’t have his keys. So he called me and I drove out to let him in with the spare we keep on file here.”

That would support Worthington’s claim that he’d misplaced the keys that had been found near Adams’s body. “How did he seem?”

“Seem? Oh…” Barkley considered, the furrows in his brow deepening. “I’d say he was just Tom. Cheerful. Glad to be there. He asked if I’d like to go fishing with him, but I couldn’t get away.”

“Mister Barkley, when Tom Worthington bought the cabin, was it clear to you that he was buying it for Darya Adams?”

“From the beginning. I mean, they looked at a number of properties together. And the offer and final papers were drawn up in her name, as a single woman.”

“As an old friend of Tom’s, how did you feel about the transaction?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Tom Worthington was cheating on his wife. Buying property for another woman. How did that make you feel?”

He hesitated, looking down at his clasped hands. “Miz McCone,” he said after a moment, “Tom has had a lot of trouble with his wife. A lot of trouble with those kids of his, too. Darya was a nice woman, and I figured he deserved a little happiness in his life. It wasn’t as if he was just fooling around, either. They were serious about each other.”

“Serious enough that he would leave his family for her?”

“He said he was thinking of it.”

“But so far he hadn’t taken any steps toward a divorce?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Let me ask you this, Mister Barkley. Are you convinced of Tom Worthington’s innocence?”

“I am.”

“Any ideas about who might have killed Darya Adams?”

“I’ve given that some thought. There’re a lot of weird characters hanging out in the hills around Chelsea. Screamin’ Mike, for one.”

“Who’s he?”

“Head case, kind of a hermit. Has a shack not too far from Tom and Darya’s cabin. Comes to town once a month when his disability check arrives at general delivery. Cashes it at Gilley’s Saloon, gets drunk, and then he starts screaming nonsense at the top of his voice. How he got his name.”

“Is he dangerous to others?”

“Not so far. Ed Gilley runs him off. He goes back to his shack and sobers up. But you never know.”

I made a note about Screamin’ Mike. “Anyone else you can think of?”

“There’s a cult up one of the cañons…Children of the Perpetual Life. Some of their members’ve had run-ins with the sheriff, and a couple of years ago one of their women disappeared, was never found. Maybe Ed Gilley could help you. Running a saloon, he’s hooked in with the local gossip.”

I noted the cult’s and Gilley’s names. “Well, thank you, Mister Barkley,” I said. “When I spoke with your local sheriff’s deputy yesterday, he told me they have no objection to my examining the cabin, and I have Mister Worthington’s permission as well. Has he contacted you about giving me the keys?”

“Yes. But why do you want to go there? If the sheriff’s department didn’t find anything…”

“Even so, there may be something that will give me a lead.”

He rose, then hesitated. “The cabin…it’s kind of hard to find. How about I drive you there, let you in myself?”

At first I balked at the idea, but I sensed a reserve in Jeb Barkley; he might volunteer something useful in a less structured situation. “OK,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”

We went outside to a parking area behind the real-estate office, and Barkley unlocked the doors of a blue Subaru Outback whose left side was badly scratched. He saw me looking at it and said: “Damn’ kids. Keyed it while the wife and I were at the movies last week.”

“I guess kids in small towns aren’t any different from those in big cities.” I slid into the passenger seat, wincing as the hot vinyl burned the back of my thighs.

“Makes me glad I never had any.” Barkley eased his big body behind the wheel.

“You mentioned that Tom Worthington had trouble with his children.”

“Yeah. Jeannie, the older one, got into drugs in high school. Tom had her in and out of schools for troubled teens, but it didn’t do any good. She’s out on her own now, only shows up when she wants money. The boy, Kent, has…I guess they call them anger-management problems. Did jail time for beating up his girlfriend. He’s in college now and doing well, but Tom says he’s still an angry young man.”

I made a mental note to find out more about Worthington’s troubled offspring. “And his wife…what kind of trouble did he have with her?”

“…I’m not sure I should be talking about that.”

“You’ll save me from having to ask him.”

“Well, OK, then. Betsy, that’s the wife’s name, she drinks. It’s gotten so that she doesn’t go out of the house, just drinks from morning till night. Wine after breakfast, the hard stuff in the afternoon, more wine during and after dinner. And then she passes out. They don’t have much of a life together.”

“Do you think she knew about Darya Adams?”

“Doubt the woman knows much about anything. I mean, when you’re in the bag all the time…”

“I hear you.”

Barkley drove north on the highway for about three miles, then looped off onto a secondary road that twisted and branched, twisted again, and began climbing into the hills between rocky outcroppings to which pines and sage and manzanita stubbornly clung. The road flattened briefly, and a scattering of buildings appeared-grocery store, propane firm, diner, and several small private homes.

“Chelsea,” Barkley said, and turned into a side road.

“Not much to it.”

“Nope. Of course, it suited Tom and Darya. As I said, they liked their privacy.”

“Why here, though? Why didn’t they buy a place nearer to Mammoth Lakes, where she had her shop?”

“Darya wasn’t comfortable with that. She’s…she was a prominent businesswoman, active in civic organizations and charities. Until Tom could see his way clear to divorcing Betsy, Darya preferred to keep their relationship secret.”

“Exactly why couldn’t he see his way clear?”

Barkley glanced at me, lips twisting wryly. “Money…what else? Community-property state, lots of assets at stake. He was trying to figure out a way to minimize the divorce’s impact on his holdings. I’ve been advising him how to do that.”

“You mean you’ve been advising him on a way to hide his assets.”

Barkley shrugged, turned his eyes back on the road.

After about a mile, he braked and made a sharp right turn into a graveled driveway. Clumps of dry grass stubbled the ground to either side, and ahead, tucked under tall pines and backing up to a rocky hill, stood the cabin. It was small, of stone and logs, with a wide porch running along the front and a dormer window peeking out from under its eaves. Barkley pulled the car up near the steps.

I got out and climbed to the porch. It was refreshingly cool there. Barkley followed, taking out a set of keys, and opened the front door. The interior of the cabin was even cooler.

The main floor was one big room: kitchen with a breakfast bar separating it from an informal dining area, sitting area centering around a stone fireplace. Rustic furnishings, the kind you expect in a vacation place. Stuffed animal heads on the walls; I could feel their glassy eyes watching me.

“Worthington’s a hunter?” I asked.

“What? No, the place came furnished.”

A spiral staircase led up to a loft. I climbed it, found two bedrooms with a connecting bath. In the larger of the two, the bed was unmade, the blanket and sheets tangled. In the bathroom, towels were draped crookedly over their bars; a silk robe in a red-and-black floral pattern lay on the edge of the tub.

I thought about the vacation place Hy and I owned on the Mendocino coast. At the end of every visit, we took time to tidy it, so we’d be greeted by a clean home when we returned. Tom Worthington claimed he had left the cabin on the morning of July thirty-first-apparently delegating the clean-up to Darya. Darya was due back at her shop in Mammoth Lakes on August first, and she probably would have wanted to go home and get settled in the night before, but there was no sign she’d been preparing to depart. I went down to the kitchen. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, and a trash receptacle was overflowing. Barkley stood at the counter, his back to me, looking out a greenhouse window.

“Poor hummingbirds,” he said. “Their feeder’s empty. I think I’ll fill it.” He reached into a cabinet next to the sink as I went back to the living area.

There were two grass-cloth place mats and pewter salt and pepper shakers on the table, and the chairs had been neatly pushed in. The cushions on the sofa in front of the fireplace were rumpled, but I saw no books, magazines, or anything else of a personal nature. There were no knickknacks, photographs, or pictures on the wall.

Who are you people? I thought, standing by the fireplace. Or, in Darya’s case, who were you? With the exception of the disarray upstairs and in the kitchen, the cabin might have been a set for a TV movie. I couldn’t begin to fathom how the woman had died unless I knew how she had lived. And-with due apologies to Glenn’s instincts-I couldn’t fully assess Tom Worthington’s guilt or innocence until I knew what kind of man he was.

I decided to take a run up Highway 395 to Mammoth Lakes, in Mono County, right away. I’d speak to Adams’s employee there. Then, in the afternoon, I’d drive down to the Inyo County jail in Independence.

When Jeb Barkley dropped me off at my rental car, I called the office and asked Mick to start background searches on Tom Worthington’s son and daughter. Then I phoned Darya Adams’s employee, Kathy Bledsoe, and made an appointment to meet her at Adams’s shop, High Desert Mementoes. As I drove northwest on 395, I reviewed what I knew of the woman.

Kathy, according to Mick’s files, was an artist, in her midthirties, around Darya’s age. She’d enjoyed some success selling her landscapes through a gallery in Mammoth Lakes. For a number of years she’d been employed as a ski instructor at one of the area’s resorts, but had quit in order to devote more time to her painting; it must have been the right move, for a review of a showing of her works at the gallery last year predicted that her career was due to take off.

Mammoth Lakes struck me as an upscale community for Mono County. Hy owned a ranch to the north, near Tufa Lake, that he’d inherited from his stepfather, and I was accustomed to the small towns and open countryside of that area. But here you had good motels (presumably equipped with all the amenities my operatives would find desirable), a variety of restaurants, and shopping centers. A lot of shopping centers. I located Darya Adams’s establishment in one of them, not far from 395. Its windows displayed a better class of merchandise than usually found in tourist shops: obsidian sculptures, lava rock, dried desert plants, coffee-table books. The sign on the door said the shop was closed, but when I tapped on the glass, a slender, dark-haired woman admitted me and identified herself as Bledsoe.

When we were seated in a small office behind the selling floor, she said: “Truthfully, I don’t know what I can tell you that might help Tom. I mean, I was just here minding the store when Darya…Well, I just don’t know.”

“Basically I’m after background. I take it you knew about Miz Adams’s relationship with Mister Worthington?”

“Knew about it? I introduced them.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Tom was a friend of my former husband’s. They’d known each other forever, fished together. About two years ago, I had an opening at the Lakes Gallery…I’m a paint er, landscapes, mainly. Tom was up skiing and came to the show. Darya was there, too. They hit it off, and the rest, as they say, is history.” Her dark eyes clouded. “A good history, until last week.”

“The relationship was harmonious, then?”

“Very. Darya never mentioned so much as a harsh word.”

“So she was open about it with you?”

“Of course. Why d’you ask?”

“I’ve heard she tried to keep it a secret.”

“From people who had no business knowing, yes. But not from me.”

“Was Tom planning to divorce his wife?”

“Eventually.”

“And Darya had no problem with the delay?”

Kathy Bledsoe smiled faintly. “If anything, she was in favor of waiting. Darya was very independent… she’d had to be, since her husband…a marine…was killed on a military training exercise when she was twenty-three. Darya loved Tom, but I sensed she was having trouble getting used to the idea of giving up some of that independence. The cabin was a sort of compromise for them, a place where they could give living together a trial run.”

“Have you ever been to the cabin?”

“Only once. The boutique was closed because some repairs were being done, and Darya wanted to go down to the cabin because she had an appointment with a plumber who was going to install a new hot-water heater. But she didn’t want to be there alone, so she asked me along. I had a good time.” Bledsoe’s eyes filled with tears. “God, it’s so damn’ unfair!”

I waited till she’d gotten herself under control, then asked: “Why didn’t she want to go alone? Because of the isolation?”

“No. Her house here is fairly isolated, and she’d never had a problem with that.” Bledsoe frowned. “Now that you mention it, I remember thinking it strange at the time. She seemed on edge the whole time we were there.”

Interesting. “Think about that weekend. Did anything unusual happen? Anyone drop by, or call, besides the plumber?”

She thought, shook her head.

“Did Miz Adams ever mention a man called Screamin’ Mike?”

“I’m sure I’d remember if she had.”

“Anyone else in the area?”

“No.”

“But you’re sure she was on edge that weekend.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Darya was afraid of something or someone down there.”

Tom Worthington was a handsome man. Even in the jail jumpsuit, his eyes shadowed and puffy from lack of sleep, his gray-frosted dark hair tousled, he would have turned female heads. We sat in a little visiting room, guard outside, and went over everything he’d told the sheriff’s people and Glenn Solomon. Then we went over it again. I found no inconsistencies.

“Mister Worthington,” I said, “were you and Miz Adams getting along at the time of her death?”

“Better than ever. That last weekend we spent together was…well, I’ll never forget it.”

“I understand you were planning to leave your wife, marry Miz Adams.”

“I had hoped to.”

“And the delay was because of your marital situation?”

He rubbed his hand across his stubbled chin, nodded. “My wife…has her problems. I was trying to find a way to leave the marriage without exacerbating them.”

“She drinks.”

“…Yes. I’ve been trying to convince her to get help, so has our family doctor. Until she does…” He spread his hands.

“I understand. Is your wife the sort of person who becomes violent when she drinks?”

“Betsy? God no! She’s constantly sedated.”

“Perhaps she’s drinking to sublimate anger?”

“I don’t…oh, I see where you’re going. No, Miz McCone, Betsy didn’t find out about Darya and kill her. She hasn’t left the house, except when I’ve forced her to accompany me, in five years. And those occasions were not successful ones.”

“What about your children…did they know about your affair with Miz Adams?”

“Jeannie, my daughter, didn’t. She’s too caught up in her drugged-out little world. Kent did. He’s visited at the cabin, and he liked Darya. She had a calming effect on him.”

“I understand he has anger-management problems.”

“Yes. Anger toward his mother, primarily. But he’s working on them.”

“Mister Worthington, are you aware that Miz Adams was afraid of something or someone? And that it was connected with your cabin?”

“Darya? Afraid?”

I explained what Kathy Bledsoe had told me.

Worthington shook his head in a bewildered way. “Why didn’t she confide in me? Or in Jeb? If somebody’d been bothering her while she was down there, he would’ve taken care of them.”

“Jeb’s a good friend?”

“The best. He’d do anything for me. Or Darya.”

“He claims he was advising you on how to conserve your assets in the event of a divorce.”

Worthington had been grim-faced through most of our meeting, but now he smiled. “Jeb? He’s the one who needs advice when it comes to financial matters.”

“Why d’you say that?”

“Jeb nearly lost his shirt in a real-estate deal a couple of years ago. High risk, and I warned him not to get into it, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s got a big balloon payment coming due, and he can’t cover it. Jeb’s a sweet guy, but…” He spread his hands. “He introduced Darya and me, you know.”

“I thought Kathy Bledsoe did.”

“We deliberately gave her that impression. I went up to meet Darya at an opening at the Lakes Gallery…turned out Kathy was the artist. I was taken aback to see an old acquaintance, and find out she worked for Darya. Darya sensed my discomfort and played along when Kathy introduced us. But no, I met Darya about six months before that at Jeb’s house in Big Pine.”

“And how long had Jeb known her?”

“His whole life. Darya was his cousin.”

“No, Shar,” Mick said over the phone. “Jeb Barkley has no cousin. And neither does Darya Adams.”

“Are you sure?”

“My computer doesn’t lie.”

“Why not? Mine does, all the time.”

“That’s because you don’t use the right databases.”

That was probably true. I sighed.

“Shar? Anything else?”

“Yes. I need deep background on Jeb Barkley and Darya Adams. Specifically, if either has a criminal record.”

The scenario that came together in my mind as I drove back to Big Pine was a disturbing one. Jeb Barkley had no cousin; Darya Adams had none, either. But Tom Worthington was under the impression they were related.

Barkley had introduced Adams to him as his cousin. Why?

Wealthy man with an unhappy home life. Young, attractive single woman. Old friend who has lost money in a real-estate deal and has a large balloon payment coming up in a year and a half. He introduces the woman as his cousin. The wealthy man is induced to leave his wife for her. The woman then has a community-property stake in those assets…which she can share with her “cousin.”

Not cousins-partners in crime.

But something had gone wrong.

My phone buzzed. I pulled to the side of the road, picked up. Mick.

“Shar, I called Adah Joslyn at the SFPD.”

Adah, an inspector on the Homicide detail, and a good friend. “And?”

“She accessed Barkley’s and Adams’s criminal records for me. The two of them…Adams was Darya Dunn then, her maiden name before she married the marine…were arrested over in Nevada fifteen years ago on a bunko charge. Barkley did time. From what I’m reading between the lines, he took the rap for Adams.”

“Why didn’t this show up in your original backgrounding?”

A silence. Then, reproachfully: “You didn’t specify deep backgrounding, Shar. Criminal records’re hard to access unless you want to use contacts like Adah. And you’ve warned me not to abuse the privilege.”

I sighed. “Well, it didn’t occur to me to go deep on an old friend who sold them a house…or on the victim.”

“Which leads us to private investigator’s lesson number one…”

“Right. Suspect everyone.” I thanked Mick and broke the connection. Pulled back onto the road.

Jeb Barkley finds his former partner in crime running a boutique up in Mammoth Lakes. He needs money badly, and his friend Tom Worthington has refused to help him out. Darya is attractive, just the sort of woman who might attract a man like Worthington, who is trapped in a dead marriage. So Barkley reminds Adams of the old days and puts pressure on her to begin a relationship with Worthington, with an eye to getting her hands on his assets. Adams agrees, because she values her reputation and position in her community. But then Adams and Barkley have a falling out, maybe because she’d actually fallen in love with her victim. Now she’s afraid of someone down at the cabin.

Barkley, who demonstrated this morning that he was familiar with the place-so much so that he even knew where she kept the hummingbird food-and who also had a set of keys.

And she’d had good reason to be afraid. He’d found her alone on July thirty-first, they’d quarreled, and he’d killed her. Then he’d planted evidence to implicate his friend.

Now what I needed was concrete evidence to implicate him.

As I drove the rest of the way to Big Pine, I kept thinking about the tree that Darya Adams’s body had been found under. On impulse, when I reached the intersection of Routes 395 and 168, I turned east into the foothills.

The bristlecone stood alone on the rocky slope, clinging to the poor, coarse soil. I got out of the Jeep and walked around it, ducked under its low-hanging branches. Even though the sun was dipping below the ridge to the west, it felt uncomfortably warm there, and the air was dusty enough to make me sneeze. I went out the other side where the branches were bent and sheared off, sap congealing on their broken tips.

Emergency vehicles, I thought. They did this damage getting the body out.

Or…?

I took out my cell phone, called the local sheriff’s department substation. The officer I’d spoken with the previous afternoon, who had been one of the first at the murder scene, took a look at the official photographs and confirmed my suspicion.

“Our people did some damage after the photos were taken,” he told me, “but the tree was already ripped up on that side, probably by your client’s truck when he dumped the body.”

“Was there damage to Mister Worthington’s truck? Chipped paint, scratches?”

A pause. “I don’t see any photos or mention of it.”

“In your opinion, if his truck was scratched, would the paint contain traces of the tree’s DNA?”

“Well, I’m not a lab technician, Miz McCone, but I’ll hazard a guess that it would.”

“Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

Jeb Barkley’s house was on a quiet side street in Big Pine: a small stucco bungalow on a small lot with a patch of lawn out front. A sprinkler was throwing out lazy arcs of water, and light glowed behind blinds in the windows. Barkley’s Outback stood before the closed doors of a single-car garage. I parked down the block and waited until it was fully dark before I approached.

Armed with a paint scraper and one of the plastic bags I’d earlier purchased at a hardware store, I crept up to the passenger side of the car. I switched on my pencil flashlight and, holding it between my teeth, began removing flecks of paint from the scratched area on the door. When I had a respectable amount, I sealed the bag.

I glanced at the house. No visible activity there. Slowly I began to move around the car, shining the beam over it. Nothing distinctive about the tires-and the sheriff’s people hadn’t been able to take any impressions at the scene, anyway. A few more scratches on the front panel, nothing lodged under the bumper.

The outside vent below the windshield, maybe. He would have removed anything obvious that was caught there, probably had washed the car, but deep down inside…

Yes!

I glanced over at the house. Still no activity. I fumbled in my bag for the pouch where I keep miscellaneous objects-chopstick, nail clippers, tweezers for the splinters I’m always getting. Took out the tweezers and fished around in the vent, until I found a slender wood fragment.

Ten to one it came from the bristlecone pine. There was another fragment lodged down there, but I’d leave it for the sheriff’s technicians.

I slipped back to the Jeep, headed for the substation.

Overconfidence, I thought, that’s what always brings them down. Jeb Barkley hadn’t counted on anyone looking into his past and discovering his connection with Darya Adams. He hadn’t bothered to have his car repainted because who would suspect him-a small-town real-estate agent, and Tom Worthington’s friend-of killing anyone? He hadn’t even bothered to conceal from me his knowledge of where things were kept in the cabin.

All of that, and irrefutable DNA evidence as the clincher.

Glenn Solomon was going to love this. Maybe he’d even pay a bonus for my getting results in record time.