Double

38: “Wolf”

I had no trouble finding Lost Canyon Drive, the unpaved dead-end street Rich Woodall lived on out near Lakeside. The map I’d got at the airport car-rental booth was a good one, and the route up to this sparsely populated residential area from Highway 67 wasn’t complicated. I parked in front of his house, a tile-roofed Spanish job set well back from the street, screened by palms and a big hedge full of red berries. His nearest neighbor had to be a half mile away. Some house for a man who earned his living doing P.R. for a public institution...

I went along the front walk. The driveway that paralleled it was empty; I could see the garage toward the rear of the house, backed up against a brushy slope, but the doors were closed and I couldn’t tell if there was a car in it or not.

Ringing the bell got me nothing but the echoes of distant chimes. I went around to the rear and alongside the garage, to where a grimy window gave me a blurred view of the interior. An old red Porsche convertible sat there alone. But it was a two-car garage and there was a fresh-looking oil spot on the unoccupied side: Woodall probably owned a pair of cars and had gone off in the second one.

A seven-foot-high stucco wall with pieces of jagged glass embedded along its top barred access into the backyard; the gate in the wall sported a new chain and padlock. From the other side I could hear the sounds of animals moving around, the throaty cry of some kind of cat.

I looked around for something to stand on so I could see into the yard. There wasn’t anything. Well, maybe I wasn’t too old or out of shape to do a little climbing. I moved over to the gate, got one foot on the padlocked latch, and managed to hoist myself up. The broken glass took away any chance of my getting all the way inside, but at least I could see the cages and the animals that were in them: the yard wasn’t big and everything was more or less grouped in close to the wall.

Badgers, a bobcat, a lynx, a couple of arctic foxes, some exotic birds I couldn’t identify. And a glass cage full of snakes that looked uncommon. An odd assortment, I thought. Much odder than your average private menagerie.

I hung there a little longer, even though my bad left arm, the one that had never quite healed properly after I’d been shot over a year ago, was beginning to cramp up. I had had a job a while back that involved the theft of a variety of creatures from the San Francisco Zoo, so I knew something about endangered species. Badgers and lynx and bobcats and arctic foxes were all endangered animals. They were also the kind that unscrupulous people made coats, hats, and stoles out of. And the birds and snakes looked to be the sort coveted for expensive purses, shoes, and hats.

I knew some other things too. I knew that Woodall’s P.R. job would put him in contact with all sorts of people who dealt with animals, including a supplier or two who might not be above making an illegal dollar now and then. I knew from what Eberhardt had told me that Woodall had once been arrested on suspicion of selling animals in violation of the federal Endangered Species Act. I knew from Woodall himself, via McCone, that somebody had broken in here a few days ago. I knew that Jim Lauterbach had been a blackmailer, and that there had been a list of check-marked names in his file on Elaine Picard — a list of potential shakedown victims, probably — and that one of those names had been Woodall’s. And I knew, or was fairly certain, that Woodall had murdered Lauterbach.

Put all of that together and what did you get? You got Woodall still selling endangered creatures to the manufacturers of garments for rich and uncaring consumers, and Lauterbach breaking in here and finding out about it. You got Lauterbach trying to blackmail Woodall, and out of that you got at least part of Woodall’s motive for blowing him away.

There were still plenty of loose ends. Such as: Why did Lauterbach break in here in the first place? What had he found out about Woodall and the others on that list that made them candidates for blackmail? And what was on the tape recorder Woodall had made off with after the shooting? One or more of the answers might lie in whether or not Woodall had also killed Elaine Picard. If he had, and Lauterbach found that out too, Woodall’s motive for murdering him would have been doubled.

I dropped down off the gate, massaged the stiffness out of my left arm and shoulder, and went back out to the rental car. Had McCone tumbled to all of this too? And if she had, had she tried to brace Woodall herself? The uneasiness was sharp in me now, and mingled with it were the stirrings of fear.

The nearest service station was half a mile from Woodall’s house; I pulled in there and telephoned the administration office at the San Diego Zoo. The woman I spoke to said Woodall wasn’t there, he hadn’t come to work today. Hadn’t called in, either. She had no idea where he was.

He wasn’t home, he wasn’t at work — where the hell was he?

And where was McCone?