Pacific Beat

Chapter 23

Raymond hustled up the sidewalk from his house, still dressed in his funeral suit. He was carrying a paper shopping bag. He had it pinched between his thumb and first finger, holding it slightly out to his side, as if it contained something foul or dangerous. Whatever it was, Jim could see that it was light: A gust of breeze swayed the bag out toward the odorous water and Raymond’s arm extended, giving it play.

Ray’s face looked exhausted, but his eyes were sharp and clear. “He wrote me. At first, I thought it was a joke. It’s not.”

Jim could see the agitation on Raymond’s face, the need for movement, release. Raymond smiled and shook the bag as if it was a reward long overdue. “It came with the afternoon mail.”

Becky stepped forward and held out her hands to receive the bag, but Raymond shook his head and didn’t offer it. “No,” he said. “I don’t want it contaminated any more than it already is. Robbins is waiting for it.”

Becky asked what it said.

But Ray was too energized to answer directly. His eyes betrayed an almost-religious excitement, and the sack shook in his hand as if there was something live inside it. “It’s the real thing. I could feel it as soon as I read the first words. He’s close. I can smell him, man, smell his fuckin’ breath.”

Becky caught Ray by the arms and kissed him. “Good luck, boys. I don’t think my presence would be appreciated in Ken Robbins’s kingdom. Call me, please.”

Brian Dennison and Mike Paris were already with Robbins in his office, locked in a murmuring discussion that ended quickly when they walked in.

“Beautiful work,” said Paris.

“Getting your mail out isn’t too tough,” said Ray.

The Crime Lab was empty this late in the evening. The hallways echoed with their footsteps and the overhead lights seemed hungry for bodies to shine on. Robbins took them into Hair and Fiber Analysis, put on a pair of latex gloves, and turned on the light of his examination table. The surface was glass, with a clean sheet of butcher paper taped over it. The fluorescent tubes threw a bright clean light up around the corners of the paper. Using a pair of kitchen tongs, Robbins lifted the envelope up and held it steady against an overhead wire. He clipped it on with a red plastic clothespin — the same kind of clip, Jim noted — that Horton Goins used in his makeshift darkroom. Weir looked at Dennison and Raymond, but neither seemed to catch it. Dumb coincidence, he thought; put it out of your mind. Then Robbins clipped up the letter, one page at a time, three sheets.

He spoke from behind his magnifier, his breath making little condensation clouds on the bottom of the lens. “Printer paper, eight and a half by eleven, continuous feed, blank letter edge. Common as dirt. Twenty-four pin dot matrix printer, ten-point courier font, set to low speed for high resolution. Not fancy stuff, just the basics. Now.”

He pulled a standard stainless-steel table knife with a nonserrated edge from an alcohol jar like Weir’s doctor used for thermometers, wiping it on a cotton cloth. Robbins’s forehead glistened with sweat. “Don’t get your hopes up — paper doesn’t hold much. Tell me again where you touched it and when.”

Working from the top down, he tapped the knife against the envelope. Weir stared at the crisp fluorescent light for falling debris, but saw nothing. Robbins’s lined tan face stayed eye level with the pages, following the descending pattern of the knife. He finished the last page, then started in again, this time working the backs. “Squat,” he said. “Inside the envelope might be bonus time — things collect.”

Using the tongs again, Robbins reversed the envelope and clipped it upside down. With the gloved tip of his index finger, he lifted out the flap, then slid the knife blade inside and held the pouch apart. He tapped the outside with his finger, across the bottom, the middle, the top. “Zip,” he said. “Don’t worry. There’s the adhesive to check, and under the stamp.”

Next, Robbins photographed the pages, swinging the big camera into place like a dentist positioning the X-ray machine. He took a second set of photos with magnification, shooting each page four times. When he was finished, he went back over each sheet with his glass. “ ‘A heavy heart,’ ” he mumbled. “ ‘My own shock and fear of self... I am a brave man... helpless against me...’ ” Robbins looked at each of them in turn. “These guys are always so florid.”

“Is it genuine?” asked Dennison.

“It’s a genuine letter from a genuine nut,” said Robbins. “The rest is up to you.”

In the Fingerprint Lab, Robbins aimed the others to some stools beneath the counter. A window overlooked the parking lot. Weir sat down next to a cabinet filled with vials of chemicals, fingerprint powders, and sprays. A helium-cadmium laser setup dominated one corner, bedded for the night beneath a blue plastic cover. In a far corner stood the light oven for boosting chemicals.

Robbins threw off the laser cover and turned on the machine. “We hardly ever get friction-ridge impressions from paper,” he said. “Unless they use a messy ink pen, or have something pretty obvious on their hands — blood, food — I got one from engine lube once. We’ll use the laser, try to fluoresce the sodium and potassium chloride — body oil.”

He worked the envelope first, adjusting the eyepiece to read the scan. “Smudges, boys. The kind your mailman would leave. No... nothing clear at all.”

Three sheets of paper later, nothing gave. “He was careful, used a tissue or something to keep his fingers off the paper. Careful son of a bitch, but not as careful as I am. We’ll atomize with ninhydrin-acetone, which will bring up things pretty fast on this paper. Heat boost will help.”

He mixed the solution fresh, drew it into the atomizer, then hung the sheets again and misted both sides. “Kalb, who usually does latents, soaks her things. Too much spray and you drown the ridges. The oils manifest as purple and pink after the heat boost.” The sheets went into the oven one at a time, then the envelope. “Bloom, my little violets, bloom in the spring.”

Weir could see the purple smudges developing, like Polaroid film, in the upper-right corner of the first page and the top-left of the last, backside.

Robbins pointed and looked at Ray. “Yours?”

“I’d guess so.”

Robbins picked up the phone, ordered from Index a full set of prints for Raymond Cruz and Horton Goins. “ASAP will do it,” he said, “I need them five minutes ago.”

He worked the camera into place and shot the developing blossoms. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to read this thing before the Index people get here.”

Robbins read out loud and slowly, grunting at certain lines every few seconds, wiping the sheen of sweat off his brow with a paper towel.

Robbins looked up from the letter to Raymond, who sat staring without apparent focus through the window at the receeding evening. He looked, to Weir, so alone and so exposed. Robbins turned back to the document.

Robbins’s voice had lowered. Weir’s heart had grown heavier with every line, heavy with the knowledge of Ann’s terror. Raymond sat with his head in his hands. Paris gazed down at the floor. Dennison appeared to be praying. Robbins sighed quietly, and continued.

A kind of roaring silence filled the room, a silence too crowded with emotion to admit anything as insignificant as sound.

Weir felt as if he’d been sucked down into some funnel cloud of insanity, left spinning with it, unable to find balance or escape.

“Brian,” said Robbins, “This sound like Horton Goins to you?”

“I can almost hear his voice,” said Dennison. “It’s perfectly him.”

Robbins turned to Raymond. “Ray?”

“It isn’t him. He’s too young. Mr. Night knew Ann and she knew him. It isn’t Goins.”

“Jim? Your vote?”

“I’m with Raymond. Goins couldn’t have written it.”

“Mike?”

“Brian’s right — it is Goins, right down to the schizophrenic delusions of grandeur. It’s all in his hospital records.”

Robbins sat back, crossed his arms, and looked down again at the letter.

Weir asked him what he thought.

“I’ll keep my opinions to myself for right now,” he said. “We’d do best to focus on the text itself. Let’s take it through, okay? First, rage and sorrow. He’s got a lot on his mind.”

Ray nodded. “He wants to talk about it.”

“Not very much, he doesn’t,” said Dennison. “He wants to obscure.”

“I think Raymond is right,” said Robbins. “It’s half his reason for writing — a need to confess. And the other half?”

“His confidence needs bolstering,” said Weir. “He’s waving the trophy, bragging.”

“That’s my take, too,” said Robbins. “And speaking of trophies, I’ll bet he’s kept something else of hers from that night, besides the flower. He thinks he loved her. According to his definition, maybe he did.”

“Her purse,” said Raymond. “All the personal things — the smells.”

“Her shoe,” said Jim.

Robbins nodded. “Both good bets. Okay, this is what I hear. Educated, middle or upper class. Probably has some kind of job — that stuff about being talented might even be true. Obviously, he’s got access to a word processor and printer, and he knows how to use them. He isn’t delusional, seeing visions, hearing voices. Raymond, I just have to ask you this straight out — what about this affair? Did Ann have a lover?”

“I never suspected,” Ray said quietly. “Until I saw the pictures. Of Ann in the limousine. She was completely discreet about it — if it’s true.”

If it’s true, thought Jim. Raymond buried his faithful wife today, and he’ll keep her faithful to the bitter end.

“If he was really seeing her,” said Dennison. “If his love affair was anything more than sniping her with a camera, following her around the neighborhood. Maybe his trophy was a photograph of what happened.”

Robbins shook his head in disagreement. “That would certainly make our jobs easier. But what good does it do to lie about an affair he never had?”

“Building up his confidence again,” said Dennison.

“Throwing us off the track,” said Paris. “He’s built up this whole romance in his mind. There wasn’t any romance. He followed her; he raped her and killed her. He wants to believe in an affair — that’s why he wrote it down.”

“Maybe,” said Robbins. “He’s got a big ego to keep feeding. The whole letter about a woman he allegedly loved and allegedly killed? It’s about his feelings, his needs, his confusion. He’s arrogant. When they write, there’s always an element of taunting, too. He’s challenging us, rubbing our noses in it. Especially when the man he writes to is a cop.”

The heavy silence hovered in the room, disturbed by nothing but the whirring of the air conditioner.

Raymond spoke next. “Goins wouldn’t be so linear.”

“I wonder,” said Robbins. “I read his file yesterday for the third time this week. The boy — man, I guess — is ineffable. He’s committed for rape and attempted murder at the age of fifteen, and two years later at the state hospital he’s already teaching photography to the chronics. He’s taking correspondence classes in everything from astronomy to genealogy, for goodness sakes. His favorite subjects are the nuns that come through; he takes their portraits and gives them away. Probably the only women he saw. Maybe that’s where he gets his religious bent — himself as God, Ann as an angel. At the time they committed him, he’d had a Stanford-Binet intelligence test in school and tested out at eighty-six. They gave him another one in the hospital four years later and he scored one thirty-nine. Goins is formless. I think he could have written this, but it’s nothing more than a guess at this point.”

Dennison cast a quick, satisfied looked to Weir and Raymond. “I mean, if he was her lover, why rape her anyway? He was... you know... getting it for free.”

“He didn’t,” Weir answered. Certain particulars of Ann’s beating had been bothering him for days. In this new context, something that he had dismissed as improbable suddenly made twisted, brutal sense. “He didn’t. We assumed it was a rape, but it was consensual. Yee found bruising on the mons, but he said it was done close to the time of death, could even have been postmortem. He beat her after they had intercourse, to throw us off, to create a dimension that wasn’t there. He as much as told us that.”

“Dumb,” said Dennison.

“I reached the same conclusion Jim did,” Robbins snapped. “By the third paragraph. Call it what you want, Brian. I don’t think she was raped.”

Dennison stood, head at an incredulous angle. “But why does lover boy kill her in the first place?”

Raymond spoke next, his voice trailing off to a whisper. “I think Annie got herself into something she couldn’t get out of. Maybe she tried to, and that’s what set him off. That’s all he talks about — how he can’t ever... own her.”

“The roses,” said Weir. “He sent her the roses because he sensed the end with her. He dressed up, wore a suit, a slick diamond tie tack. Ann did the same. She made love to him one last time, asked him down to the bay for a moonlight walk. She was going to lay it on the line. The footprints showed no hurry, no struggle. They walked with their arms around each other, Ann thinking about what she was going to say, how she was going to break it off, not wanting to hurt him or light his fuse. Maybe they’d already talked about it, worked out the basics, and this whole night was supposed to be just a long goodbye. Either way, be knew. He already knew what was coming. He was ready.”

“But how come she was going to dump him?” asked Dennison. “Assuming this was a real affair?”

“Simple,” said Weir. “She found out she was pregnant. The child wasn’t his.”

The unasked question filled the room. No one seemed willing to give it breath. After another roaring silence, Raymond did it himself. “The child was ours. I know that. We had names, the announcement party, everything...”

“How would Ann know?” asked Robbins. “For sure?”

Raymond considered. “Maybe they used birth control. I know we didn’t. Maybe she didn’t have intercourse with him until April. It was April twenty-seventh when she saw the doctor. That puts her conception back to late March.”

“It could fit,” said Robbins, but Weir detected something disingenuous in his voice. It was not like Robbins to feign. “It could also fit that she hadn’t been intimate with him for long. He was still in the heat of passion for her. No sooner had he consummated than she tried to cut him off. Less than a month. He thought he loved her; she was using him for a fling. That’s a perfect trigger for someone as unstable as this guy is.”

Dennison began pacing the room, shaking his head. “Bunch of fuckin’ baloney. You guys are suckers if you believe much of anything in that letter. The guy’s a nut. That have any bearing here?”

“Quite a bit, I’d think,” said Paris.

“I realize it’s contradicting your assumptions,” said Robbins. He turned to Ray. “For the sake of argument, say the child was his. What would she do, if she knew?”

Raymond stood and looked out the window a long while. The evening had fallen. Headlights crept past on the boulevard below. Ray’s voice was so quiet, it hardly rose above the hum of the air conditioner. “Ann wanted a child badly. If she had gotten pregnant by someone other than me, I think... I think she might have kept it, and told me it was mine. That’s speculation, though. Maybe that’s just a way to convince myself that she loved me more than she really did.” He turned from the window and sat back down, crossing his legs and looking at Robbins.

“And what would she tell him?”

“She sure as hell wouldn’t discuss it with me,” said Ray. “But why speculate? We can’t test the... Ann’s fetus now.”

Weir looked at Robbins, whose face was visibly paler. The medical examiner crossed his arms and shook his head slowly. “We already did. We used the blood they took at the hospital when you were in, ran all the chemical panels. The genetic typing confirmed it this morning. Ray, the child wasn’t yours.”

Jim watched Raymond look out the window again, his eyes as black as the night outside the glass. He seemed to have shrunk inside the funeral suit, which hung loosely on him, pant cuffs slopping down to the floor. He turned and looked at Weir, then at the others in turn. His face had deepened in color. “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s nice to know. It might have shaded my decision when we were picking out names.”

He moved toward his chair, snapped a kick, and sent it toppling and skidding quick along the floor before it slammed into the far wall. Jim watched the eyepiece of the laser scope wiggling with the impact.

“You should have just fucking said so up front.”

“We’re not sure what it means, so far as the case goes,” said Robbins. “There wasn’t any gentle way to tell you. I wish I didn’t have to.”

Raymond stood over his fallen chair now, then reached down and picked it up. He slumped into it, arms crossed, eyes lost to some distance near or far, Weir couldn’t tell, and it didn’t seem to matter. Raymond then straightened himself, composing his face by sheer force of will. “The fact,” he said quietly, “the fact that he mentioned the child means she told him she was pregnant. Ann... she couldn’t have known who the father was, not for sure. She must have just assumed, prayed it was mine. Maybe I’m flattering myself. Maybe she didn’t care enough, even for that. Maybe she was going to make me the father, when really I wasn’t. But it would explain why she was breaking off with him — her in a family... way.”

“I would have to agree,” Robbins said quietly.

Dennison seemed ready to speak but said nothing.

The silence that fell again was merciless and impenetrable. Weir watched the headlights below, studied the dark shapes of the county buildings through the window. Then the door flew open and a courier from Index came in with the print cards.

Robbins took the slides to the laser scope and set Raymond’s prints against the ones taken from Mr. Night’s letter. The latents, as Weir knew they would, belonged to Raymond.

“We’ve got two last shots,” said Robbins. “The possibility that our man used his own saliva to seal the envelope or the stamp, and the off chance that we get something from under the stamp. The serology will take a day or two to work up. We can do the stamp now, with permission from Mr. Eliot. Say your prayers.”

Weir watched as Robbins used an autoclave to steam it off. It curled up on the edges, a folding poet, loosening by degrees. The idea struck Jim that the key to this case was never going to be found under a goddamned postage stamp.

Raymond continued to stare out the window. Jim walked over and stared with him. It was an ugly city on an ugly night.

He was aware of Robbins removing the envelope with his tongs and placing it back on the light table. Dennison leaned over, his hands crossed behind his back.

Then, a sudden motionlessness came over them. Dennison still stood, his hands still folded behind his back. Robbins had straightened, his head bent down toward the light table. He turned to Weir and Ray.

“He left a hair under the stamp,” he said. “A beautiful half inch of dark brown hair.”

Ten minutes later, Robbins had run it against a sample taken by the Newport cops from a brush in Goins’s old bathroom at the Island Gardens, and another taken from a T-shirt hanging in the closet of the El Mar Motel.

No match.

Then Robbins compared it to the hair taken off the blouse that Ann was wearing that night on the Back Bay. “Same guy,” he said finally. “I can put him with Ann; I can put him with the letter. Killer at large. Killer unknown. I need a warm body, gentlemen.”

Dennison considered. He looked at Paris, who seemed to take it as a signal for something.

Paris’s voice dropped in pitch, took on a weight that suggested certainty. “Goins has an IQ of one thirty-nine. He’s bright enough to slip someone else’s hair under that stamp. It’s too convenient. It’s too pat. I’ll go far enough out on a limb to suggest it’s a frame.”

“Parrot,” said Jim. “You can do a good imitation of Brian here. You can do a good imitation of a man who knows what he’s talking about. But deep down, you’re dumb as a stump and you ought to be chained to your desk writing press releases.”

It was almost eight o’clock by the time they left the crime lab. On the damp steps of the building, Dennison stopped and took Jim’s arm, aiming him away from Raymond and the suddenly subdued Mike Paris.

“I’ve got a proposition for you, Jim. I want to put you where you belong, back on this case. You can come on as sergeant of detectives — that’ll be a level-five pay grade. Violent Crimes will be your section, and you can focus on Ann. Interested?”

“No.”

“Care to explain why?”

“I quit that life five years ago,” said Weir. “Because chasing after people to put them in jail just doesn’t do it for me. And you know something else, Brian? Some of your men are real assholes.”

Dennison regarded him with suspicion as Jim told him about his shearing at Davis Marine Industries the night before, and his encounter at sea with some of Dennison’s finest. As Jim looked at him, he saw that the chief had lost weight the last few days, that his coat seemed large and his pants were slipping down. The outdoor floodlight threw a waxy shine onto Brian’s face.

Dennison listened carefully, then, to Jim’s surprise, actually apologized. He pulled a roll of antacid tablets from his pocket, chewed down a small handful. “Jim, Jesus... I’m going to kick some ass tomorrow. I swear to God.”

“You might mention to them that at this rate, someone’s going to get killed.”

It was clear to Jim that Brian Dennison finally believed that he was in over his head. His campaign was plodding, his suspect was still at large, and he couldn’t keep track of his own men. Something between worry and panic showed in his eyes.

“That’s why I need you,” said Dennison. “You quit the Sheriffs on your way up. You were good. I’ve checked around — everybody thought you were good. I’m giving you a chance to do what you’re best at.”

“I’ve got a new trade and I’m going to ply it.”

“Hunting treasure?” Dennison asked. There was a whisper of near-woe in his voice. “Or working for Becky Flynn?”

“She asked me to do some work.”

“And you took it?”

“She’s moving in some interesting directions.”

“Care to share these with the police?”

“Not right now. She’s got a press conference tomorrow. The papers should be full of it.”

The few cars in the lot were misted with condensation, windshields opaque as dirty mirrors in the lamplight. Weir could smell the moisture rising from the asphalt.

“I could really use you, Jim.”

Weir looked again into Dennison’s uneasy eyes. “What you want is me off the case, Brian. You see it one way and I see it another. If I go to work for you, I’m paid to see it your way. No. But thanks.”

“I hope you changing sides won’t loosen your tongue about the arrangement we had.”

“It won’t. But you saw that Becky knows, same as your men and half the people at city hall. If the papers finally start to make noises about Ruff and a cop car, don’t come to me.”

“No.”

“You’re too eager for Goins — even you know that. Maybe your Internal Affairs people have kicked up something that doesn’t smell right. Something about Kearns’s twenty minutes away from his car that night.”

Dennison paused. “Internal Affairs is moving carefully, as they should. But I’m not sold on Goins. There are some things that don’t fit.”

“I noticed.”

“I took a beating in there just now.”

“Don’t tell George Percy that.”

“Robbins will. Just don’t forget, Weir, that two hairs in this universe don’t make Horton Goins an innocent man. That guy’s a dangerous son of a bitch and you know it. You can check my file for the pictures of what he did in Ohio, if you ever need to put Horton Goins in a clear perspective. He left one of her tits hanging by a piece of skin. He raped her the nice old-fashioned way, then he tried to do it again with his fist. Made the same kind of bruises we found on Ann, incidentally. Nice kid. Reliable. Innocent. A heartwarming individual.”

“We’ll see, Brian. My guess is a lot of things might look different to you, after June fifth.”

Dennison’s eyebrows fluttered above his flat gray eyes. “You shouldn’t make too much of that. Yeah, I’m using this case for the publicity. And Becky’s found a way to do the same. She and your mother will be all over this chemical spill in the bay, like if you don’t vote for the Flynn, Slow Growth ticket, you may as well have dumped that stuff yourself. It’s just the politics of politics, Jim. A year from now, we’ll all be doing whatever we’re doing and no one will even remember.”

“I don’t care about the politics,” said Jim.

“Maybe you should.”

Weir stopped, took Dennison by the arm, and turned him. “You know what I think? I think politics is just a circus full of assholes — everyone for himself. I think whatever happens to Newport is whatever Newport deserves. You and your developer friends can have it, if that’s how the people vote. Dice up every last inch and sell it off. Mom and Becky can preserve the whole thing in formaldehyde, legislate flattops and bouffants if that’s how it comes out. But Ann wasn’t politics, unless you’ve learned something I haven’t. Someone killed her and all you people do is try to fit it into your programs. I’m sick of the bullshit, Brian — the way you’ve used Goins to look good, the way you’re playing up half the evidence and playing down the other half, the way you and Becky snarl at each other like a couple of dogs over a stinking bone. Anybody care about the fucking truth here? What I care about is getting that guy, sticking his ass where the sun don’t shine.”

“So join up with me. Ann would be yours.”

“She already is mine.”

Dennison stopped at his car, put his hands in his pockets, and looked at Weir. He shivered once, bunching up his shoulders against the chill. “Virginia and Becky are going to point some fingers on this spill, aren’t they?”

“Christ, Brian — that’s what I mean.”

“Do me a favor, will you?”

“No. No Brian, I won’t do you a favor. I’m out of fuckin’ favors for you and everybody else.”

“If Virginia knows who did the dumping, will you tell me? Just tell me if she knows. She’s got some ideas, doesn’t she? They’re going to make an announcement, right? All I’m asking you to do is share some information.”

Jim was silent for a moment. There was just no way to get through, he thought, no way to get a train like Brian Dennison or Virginia Weir to stop and change direction. Maybe that was the way of the world.

“You know what you’re trouble is, Weir? You’re afraid to put yourself on the line, to take a side. Stand in the middle of the road, Jim, you get run over by traffic on both sides.”

“I’m off the road, Brian. It’s your road. It’s Mom’s.”

Then Dennison offered a haggard smile. “The only people who stay free are children and drunks. Life’s a shitty thing sometimes.”

Dennison climbed into his car and rolled down a dew-dripping window. He turned over the key but the starter just kept coughing and the engine wouldn’t catch. “Becky can use you just like I can, Jim.”

“I know that. And I also know you’ve got to get Ray back on the job. He’s got no business with Annie’s case right now. It’s hurting him. Get him out there on the streets where he belongs.”

Dennison’s car finally started. “One step ahead of you, Jim. Ray’s on the day shift starting tomorrow.”

He pulled the Jaguar up to Jim, gunning the engine. “I’ll share everything I’ve got on Ann with you, if you’ll share some of Virginia’s and Becky’s intelligence with me. It could work out in the best interests of us both.”

Weir shook his head. “You know what your trouble is, Brian? You’re an amateur.”

Dennison smiled, a little sickly. “We’ll see.”

When Jim got into the truck, Raymond was already there, his gaze flattened against the misty windshield. “It’s okay. Maybe it’s better if I don’t believe anymore that I put an angel in the ground today. Maybe it’s better if she didn’t have my child, that she was a fuckup sometimes like everybody else.”

Weir was quiet for a moment. “This may not hold much water, but that last night I saw her at the Whale, her eyes lit up when she talked about you. She wanted to call you right then, let you know I was back. You were the first thing she thought about. I think she died loving you Ray, no matter what was going on at the end.”

Raymond nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Thanks.”

Going over the bay bridge, Jim looked out to the fog-muted lights of the restaurants, the hushed spring calm of preseason Newport. The air was rank as they dropped onto the peninsula. A Newport Beach cop unit pulled in behind them and trailed along.

Raymond sat up straight, looked over at Jim, then out the window. He started drumming his fingers on the armrest, looked over at Weir again.

“What?” Jim asked.

“I want to go in the water, deep. I want to do it now.”

“Can’t see much at night, Ray.”

“I don’t want to see. I want to not see.”

Jim drove on for a while. “Okay.”

They got one of Virginia’s rental boats from Poon’s Locker and took her down to Laguna. It was a nice little Whaler with a 35hp Yamaha on it. Weir could barely see the houselights in the fog. They anchored off of Moss Point and geared up. Jim found some glow sticks in his dive bag, and hooked one to Ray’s vest and one to his own. He checked the light batteries and water seal: okay. Night dives were always a little strange, and Raymond wasn’t used to them.

“Follow me down,” said Jim.

“How deep is it here?”

“Sixty. There’s the eighty-foot wall about fifty yards out, but we’re not going down it. Stay above sixty.”

They put on their masks, traded thumbs-ups, and spilled over.

The cold water filled Jim’s wet suit as soon was he was under. It was a chilling, sobering cold, one that erases clutter from the mind. He knew what Ray was after. His regulator drew easily and he dropped to ten feet, looking upward through his bubbles to watch Ray descending, his glow stick burning bright green against the darkness.

Weir found the anchor line, turned on his light, and motioned Raymond down. The visibility at forty feet was almost nil: There was only the beam of light on the pale rope of the anchor line, the luminescent rise of bubbles, and Raymond’s glow stick ten feet above him. The pressure mounted and Jim cleared his ears.

As he slowly descended, Jim felt the strange ebb of reality that always hit him when he was under, that replacement of the old order with a new one. Down here was the alternate world, governed by alternate law and principle. Down here, you were smaller, disenfranchised, considerably lower on the food chain.

Raymond joined him at the anchor. Jim’s depth gauge said seventy feet. He knew where the wall was, but Raymond was in no condition for the wall; not tonight — maybe not ever.

They traded okays again. Through the glass of Raymond’s mask, Jim could see his eyes — wide and a little frightened. Raymond was working hard to stay down. Like a lot of people, he left too much air in his vest, as if that little extra would give them a head start on their way through seventy feet of water. Jim reached out and hit the deflate button on Ray’s compensator. Raymond settled comfortably down beside him. Jim pointed to the rocks and Ray nodded.

Night is day for most creatures of the sea, Weir thought. They feed, travel, mate by night; the corals bloom and the anemones open; a rock outcropping that looks abandoned by day will brighten and bloom and teem with life in the darkness. Jim floated over the rocks, watching his flashlight beam. A garibaldi, bright as an orange, perused him from beside a round tan stone. A halibut wavered along the sand, its two eyes shifting alertly in Weir’s light. Jim could see the antennae of a lobster in the deep crack between two rocks. The sea grass wavered in the current, blown left then right by a breeze of water. Two silver mackerel streaked by. Jim looked behind him. Ray had fallen back twenty feet. Okay, he thought, Ray is going to be okay. The suctioned tentacle of a big octopus swirled behind a rock. Jim swam over and picked up the creature in his light. The sand was settling where the octopus had squeezed under the rock, but he couldn’t get all the way in. Three tentacles still wavered, rippling outward like whips cracked in slow motion. Jim pulled him out, felt the surprising strength of it, let go, and watched as it convulsed, hovered, then shot away from him toward the larger rocks. What an unlikely grace, he thought.

He felt the current pushing him to and fro, like the sea grass. He’d found that if you let go and let it take you, it was easy and natural, as if the currents around you and the currents inside you were the same. When you fought it was when you got into trouble, when you’d understand its ceaseless, unresistible power. That was what Raymond had to do with the current, he thought, with the current and everything else in his life. Go with it some. Don’t fight every inch of the way. It was going to take time.

He checked his air and depth and watch. Just ten minutes down. He felt good.

When he turned to see how Ray was doing, Ray was gone.

He stopped, running his light beam through the congested deep. He backtracked, swinging the light in front of him. The beam looked like a white rope for a few feet, then it frayed and dulled into darkness. He found the anchor line, but no Ray. On the surface, he tread water until he found the Whaler, which had swung north and west with the swell. The lantern glowed from the aft bench of the boat, but Ray wasn’t on it. Jim understood in a flash that Raymond had gone to the wall.

He headed back down, along the rope, then swam west toward the open sea. The wall — more of a trench — was an almost vertical drop of eighty feet that formed a valley before rising almost as sharply on the far side. When he got to the drop, Jim floated out over it. In good water, you always got a little jolt of vertigo when you did this, the sudden fear that you were about to fall straight down for eighty feet. But you didn’t. You hovered there, pinned to the sea, viewing the bottom below. It was like flying.

He could see Raymond’s glow stick descending. His depth gauge said seventy-five feet. His tank had 1,700 psi of air. Ray would be using his air faster, breathing hard. Jim felt the anger gnawing at him: Divers didn’t just leave each other and head out on their own — not at night. There were reasons, and the reasons had to do with yourself: What if your regulator clogged, your mask shield popped out, your tank strap got caught on a rock, your legs cramped? What if you just got lost?

Jim closed the distance, kicking steadily and strongly. The pressure squeezed in on his aching ribs. At one hundred feet, Ray was still ten yards ahead. Jim felt the first subversive lightness of the nitrogen buildup in his blood, brought on by pressure. Some people called it rapture of the deep. It made you loosen up, forget, take chances, get playful — all the wrong attitudes at depth. It was a hazard, and a good diver never forgot how dangerous it could be.

He caught Raymond at 150 feet, took his swim fin and pulled him back. Ray swung around lazily, smiled, offered the okay sign. Jim shook his head, thinking it isn’t okay at 150 feet, you fool — it’s too deep, too cold, too dark, and too far from the boat. Now we’ll have to decompress on the way up — five intervals, three minutes each, starting at one hundred feet. That was fifteen extra minutes of cold, wasted energy, air. Jim hooked his thumb toward the surface, twice. Ray nodded, started up, then dolphin-dove and reversed direction, heading down again. Weir caught him by his ankle. Then he took Raymond’s vest in his right hand and shook him. Ray was smiling again, drunk on the nitrogen and wanting to get drunker. Jim took Ray’s chin in his hand, straightened it, and forced Ray to look at him. He wasn’t smiling now, but he looked at Jim with a woozy expression containing something that sent a genuine shiver of fear up Weir’s back. It was a look of defeat. Ray was moving toward the ultimate surrender.

Jim guided him up to one hundred feet, then stopped and timed the decompression rest. Ray floated there, staring down the wall as if he had left something precious behind.

At seventy feet, they used the anchor fine to steady themselves. By the time Jim threw his mask and fins into the Whaler and climbed over the starboard stern, he was chilled and shaking.

He took Ray’s equipment and helped him up the ladder. He already had the engine running and was cranking up the anchor by the time Ray got his weight belt off.

Ray set down the belt, lost his balance in the swell, and plopped down onto the bench. “You pissed?”

“That was stupid. You’re supposed to be there for me.” He drew up the anchor and settled it into the box behind the breast hook. “You want to fuck with somebody’s life, fuck with your own.”

Jim regretted his words as soon as he heard them. That’s what you get for diving with an amateur. What he hadn’t understood was how desperate Raymond was, how his despair was pushing him toward closure, toward anything that would end it. Now Jim was angry at himself for not knowing. Had Raymond let him down, or the other way around?

“I didn’t mean that,” he said.

“You’re right.”

“You scared me, goddamn it.”

“I scared myself. The deeper I got, the better idea it seemed just to keep going. For a while, nothing hurt and everything was okay. It was like washing it all away.”

Jim pushed the throttle forward and headed north for Newport. The Whaler bounced hard against the chop and the shoreline lights inched past them. He shivered, wrapped his jacket tight.

“But I realized something,” said Raymond. “I realized where Ann would keep the journal. It hit me at a hundred and twenty feet — clear as a vision.”

Jim looked at him and waited.

“Stop at the Sweetheart Deal on the way in. That’s where we’ll find it. That’s where we’ll find out who was... who her lover was.”