Pacific Beat

Chapter 5

A Newport Beach cop car followed him down Pacific Coast Highway for a mile or two. Jim studied the two officers in his rearview. They were young, groomed, alert. When the unit swept past him, the cop on the passenger’s side looked up and regarded Jim blankly from behind his shades. Kids, thought Weir, like Ray and I were once.

He parked on Morning Star Lane, walked past the park, down to the bay, and looked east. The sky, heavying with a marine layer, was an unemphatic white. The tide was on the flood now, higher than when Jim had seen it last, and the water broke into wedges of gray polished by the May breeze. A big Glastron motored slowly down the bay, making a white cut in the surface that healed as the boat passed.

Looking to the east, Jim could see the curve of bay, the narrow beach, the patches of ice plant and grasses that grew thicker toward the cliffs from which the big houses looked down. Beyond the water lay the mud flats, black and odorous, dotted with white seabirds.

He thought back to his days on Harbor Patrol, the placid mornings, the thick salt air, the partnership of Ray, the feeling of liberty that they both had, zipping around the water in their own boat, gainfully employed to catch bad guys. Two kids from the neighborhood never had it so good. Jim had gone to dicks — better pay, a bump-up; Raymond joined the NBPD for his sergeant’s stripes.He stopped for a moment at the place he had seen Ann last, unremarkable now except for an excess of footprints and a smooth body-length patch of earth where she had lain. Somewhere overhead a jet droned invisibly. In a world lacking absolutes, he thought, only death is nonnegotiable. The horror is the dreary efficiency of it all. It seemed less a part of the grand eternal cycle than a concept developed by CPAs. Still, there was the sadness growing inside him and it felt as if when the sadness got big enough, his body would just cave in around it and there wouldn’t be anything left. And with the sadness came the guilt, a deep and fundamental conviction that there was something he could have done, would have done, should have done. Vengeance seemed the obvious antidote. Ann had been pregnant.

He continued along the shore, his knees less reliable with each step, his ankles feeling brittle and ready to turn, his elbows and hands aching like those of an eighty-year-old predicting rain. He wished he had a coat. He stopped, took a deep breath, squeezed his hands into fists to get the blood moving again. For a brief moment, he hovered outside himself, looking down, and what he saw was a thin old man with pale skin and wispy white hair, standing alone, bent like a cane on the shore of a vast uncertain marsh, a man impermanent as the birds flitting overhead or the breeze that brushed across his sunken white cheeks.

The crime scene was undelineated, but he found the location by Innelman’s report, and by the browned, bloodstained earth. A couple of neighborhood kids stood by glumly; two more skidded around a trail on a pair of MX bikes. Lovers, arm-in-arm, watched from the shoreline with an air of forbidden curiosity, as if death were a black-tie party to which they had not been invited.

Jim read Dwight Innelman’s crime-scene report as he stood upon the unhallowed ground. It read like Ken Robbins’s summation: Ann being forced down to this midnight shore, the rape, the waiting, the final attack. No defense marks on Ann. No sign of struggle. Neighbors saw nothing; heard nothing. Door-to-doors got zip. A kitchen knife. The back of a tie tack or earring. Eleven roses, arranged. He pictured Ann, alive and beaming, at Virginia’s booth the night before.

Why no fight? Ann was five foot ten, 130 pounds. Good shape from work. Strong and capable. Did she offer herself as a sacrifice for what she carried inside, for her life? What he came up with in regards to Ann — what he had seen in her for thirty-plus years — was that she was the gentlest of all souls, and that she was capable of doing just that: offering her body to save her life. And the life of her unborn child, certainly.

Jim looked across the bay to where the other shore diminished in the haze. A sea gull winged by with a cry and the hiss of feathers on air. It was so close that Weir could hear the gristle working in its joints. In the west, the sun was starting its last rally of the day: a surge of doomed orange splendor before evening.

He stood, asking himself the most basic question of all: Why? In the simplest of terms, what was the motive? And as he had so many times in the last three days, Jim could offer no answer. She had no money. She had no power on earth to promote or hinder, really. She had none but the most casual access to the channels of power. She had no large ambitions that might lead her to blackmail, betray, leverage, connive, manipulate. She was a symbol of no cause, a proponent of no revolution. Ann was just a woman getting by, he thought. Why? Was it all done for the few minutes that her anguish could become someone else’s pleasure? Or had she had a more far-reaching agenda, did the branches of her life spread into places he had simply never known? Could someone have struck at Virginia through Ann? At Becky, at Raymond, at himself? Weir knew that he had snubbed the life — and therefore the men — of law enforcement when he quit, but how could that account for this monstrous revenge by a Newport Beach or any other cop? Nothing fit.

What he felt most strongly right now — besides the grief, guilt, and anger that continued to multiply silently inside him — was that Robbins and Innelman were trying to make something fit that wouldn’t. A vague, shapeless idea coalesced inside him, too unformed yet to hold, vaporous enough to hide itself in the looming geography of sadness. But the longer he watched the gray water of the bay, the more embodied and specific the notion became. It formed, wavered, darted away. Then it was back again, quick as a hummingbird, taunting. Weir nailed it.

Ann knew him, he thought. She came down here without a struggle because she trusted him. All the crime stats on this planet would bear out that probability.

Weir’s mind rewound quickly: Ann’s friends, coworkers, acquaintances, relatives — any male she’d trust enough to follow down here on a fog-heavy night. The list was short and obvious: Raymond, Nesto, Jim himself, a couple of Poon’s rickety old friends who’d doted on her almost as much as Poon had. Ann wouldn’t just hustle down here with anyone. Ann was private. Ann was wary. On the obvious level, she knew everyone, from the clerks at Balboa Grocery to the boys who ran the ferry — she’d lived here for thirty-nine years, gone to high school and two years of junior college, had two jobs — both of which brought the public to her. She was bright, friendly, likable, pretty. Jim thought back to a surprise party Raymond had thrown for her last year. A couple of hundred people had packed into the Eight Peso to celebrate, half of them male, many of them knowing her well enough to offer a kiss, a present, ask for a dance. Would she follow one down here to the Back Bay on a fog-heavy night? No. Not unless they were lovers. Would she take a man on the side? It didn’t seem like Ann, but neither did the lifeless form lying upon the damp earth that morning.

She didn’t even have a coat.

She changed her clothes after work, Jim thought, but she didn’t put on a coat. No coat because she wasn’t planning on going out. Maybe coming down here was the last thing on her mind. Maybe he had the knife to her throat, under her beautiful long hair. Maybe a gun to her back, like Robbins had said.

He turned to the picture of the murder weapon — an unremarkable kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a gently curving one-sided blade. The handle was in good condition and had the words KENTUCKY HOMESTEAD branded into it, along with a little logo of a kettle in a fireplace, JAPAN was etched onto the steel, just above the handle. The darkened juncture between blade and wood could have been blood, sludge, stain — or any combination. He closed the file.

As Jim climbed the embankment toward Morning Star Lane, an obvious possibility presented itself: There was so little evidence left because someone had cleaned it up and taken it away.

Like a cop would.

The cop that Mackie Ruff had said he saw.

That’s what he was doing during those minutes when Ann lay on the ground, full of someone’s brutal seed, staring up at the fog and praying that he would leave, just leave us, just walk into the night forever, and let me keep alive inside me the one miracle I thought I never could have.

He was cleaning things up.