Storm Runners

7

Stromsoe sat in Dan Birch’s Irvine office and looked out at the clear October morning.

It was thirty-two days since Miami and the pot of water in his face. He had come back to California with Birch, completed a monthlong detox program in Palm Springs, then taken a furnished rental in downtown Santa Ana, not far from where he had grown up. He’d started jogging and lifting weights during his detox, with arguable results. Everything hurt.

Today, Monday, he sat in his friend’s office with a cup of coffee, like any other guy hoping for a job. He could hardly believe that over two years had passed since he last talked with Birch in his haunted, long-sold home in Newport.

“How are you feeling, Matt?”

“Good.”

“Drinking?”

“Lightly.”

“You idiot.”

“It’s under control.”

Birch tapped his desktop with a pen. The office was on the twelfth floor and had great views southwest to Laguna.

“We got a call last week from a woman down in San Diego County,” he said. “She’s a weather lady for Fox down in San Diego — Frankie Hatfield is her name. Nice gal. Seen her on TV?”

“No.”

“I hadn’t either, until last night. She’s good. A year ago I did some work for one of the producers there at her channel. Frankie — Frances Leigh is her full name — told him she had a problem. The producer recommended me. I recommended you.”

Stromsoe nodded as Birch stared at him.

“Up for this?” asked Birch.

“Yes, I am.”

“You would be an employee and representative of Birch Security Solutions,” said Birch. “I use the best.”

“I understand, Dan.”

“The best control themselves.”

“I can do that. I told you.”

Birch continued to look at his friend. “So, Frankie Hatfield is being stalked. Doesn’t know by whom. Never married, no children, no ugly boyfriends in the closet, no threats. The last time she saw the guy, she was doing one of her live weather broadcasts. They shoot live on location, various places around San Diego. He might be an infatuated fan — some guy who follows the Fox News van out of the yard and around the city. I’ve got some letters and e-mails she’s received at work but I don’t see anything to take seriously. She’s caught glimpses of this guy — dark hair and dark complexion, medium height and weight — three times. Twice on her private property. She filed a complaint with SDPD but you know that drill.”

“They can’t help her until he assaults her.”

“More or less.”

Birch tapped his keyboard, adjusted the monitor his way, and leaned back. “Yeah, here. She’s seen this guy outside her studio in downtown San Diego, on her residential property in Fallbrook, on her investment property in Bonsall, and possibly following her on I-5 in a gold four-door car. She hasn’t gotten plate numbers because he stays too far back. He takes pictures of her. He has not spoken to her. He has not called. He has not acknowledged her in any way except by running away from her.”

“She’s tried to confront him?”

“Confront him? Hell, she photographed him. Check these.”

Birch flicked four snapshots across the desk to Stromsoe. Stromsoe noted that they were high-pixel digital images printed on good picture paper.

“Frances is not a fearful sort,” said Birch.

Two of the pictures showed a sloping hillside of what appeared to be avocado trees. In a clearing stood a tapered wooden tower of some kind. It looked twenty feet tall, maybe more. In one picture a man stood beside the tower looking at the camera, and in the next three he was running away. He was dark-haired and dark-skinned, dressed in jeans, a light shirt, and athletic shoes. He looked small.

“That was taken on her Bonsall property,” said Birch.

“How big is the parcel?” asked Stromsoe.

“A hundred acres. Says she goes there to be alone.”

“Where’s Bonsall?”

“Next door to Fallbrook.”

Stromsoe pictured a woman sitting in the middle of a hundred-acre parcel to be alone. It seemed funny, but it also seemed like she had a right to her privacy on her own land.

“Frankie has a decent home security system,” said Birch. “I set her up with a panic button that will ring the Sheriff’s substation in Fallbrook and you simultaneously. I set her up with one month of twice-a-day patrol. I sold her a bodyguard — that would be you — for trips to and from work and while she’s on the job, for the next thirty days. Handle it?”

“I can handle it.”

“This guy is pretty bold, Matt. She’s seen him three times in twelve days, plus the maybe on the freeway. I don’t think he’s a weenie wagger — he’d have whipped it out already. Obsessed fan? Rapist? Find out. Arrest the creep if you can, let the cops chew his sorry ass. Give Frankie some peace of mind. I told her you were our best. She’s expecting you at her home at noon today, to follow her into San Diego to the studio. She starts around one in the afternoon and heads home after the live shoot at eight o’clock. Keep track of your hours. If you shake this guy loose before thirty days are up, we’ll all talk.”

Birch handed Stromsoe the panic button, a concealed-carry sidearm permit for San Diego County, and a sheet of paper with Frances Hatfield’s numbers on it.

Fallbrook was a small town fifty miles north of San Diego, twelve miles inland, tucked behind Camp Pendleton. Stromsoe had never been there. The road in from Oceanside was winding and the traffic was light. He looked out at the avocado orchards and orange groves, the flowered undulating valleys of the big nurseries, the horses in their corrals, the houses on the hilltops or buried deep within the greenery. There was an antiques store, a feed and tack store, a drive-through cappuccino stand. He saw a tennis court hidden in the trees, and a very small golf course — obviously homemade — sloping down from a house with a red tile roof. He drove through a tunnel of huge oak trees then back into a blast of sunlight and thousands of orange butterflies. The sky was filled with them. A herd of llamas eyed him sternly from an emerald pasture. He rolled down the window of his new used pickup truck and smelled blossoms.

Frances Hatfield’s voice on the gate phone was clear and crisp. She enunciated well. The gate rolled to the side without sound.

Her property was hilly and green, planted with avocado and citrus. The avocado trees were tall, shaggy and heavy with small fruit. Stromsoe had no idea how much of the land was hers because the orchards rambled on, a hilly, fenceless tableau in the clean October sunlight. A hawk shot across the treetops with a high-pitched keen.

Frances Hatfield was a tall woman, dark-haired and brown-eyed. She looked to be in her midtwenties. A straight, narrow nose and assertive bones gave her a patrician face, but it was softened by her smile. She was dressed in jeans, packer boots, and a white blouse tucked in.

“Hello, Mr. Stromsoe. I’m Frankie Hatfield.”

She offered her hand. A golden retriever itemized the smells on Stromsoe’s shoes and legs.

“My pleasure, Ms. Hatfield.”

“This is Ace.”

“Hey, Ace.” He looked up. “Nice butterflies.”

“Painted ladies,” she said. “They migrate by the millions every few years. They’ll be gone with the first rain.”

“Are these your orchards?”

“I almost break even on the avocados,” she said. “They take a lot of water and water is expensive here. Please come in. Want to just go with Frankie and Matt?”

“Good.”

The house was cool and quiet. Through the mullioned windows the orchard rows convened in the middle distance. Ace produced a ball but gave no hint of giving it up. Stromsoe smelled blossoms again, then a recently used fireplace, then brewing coffee. A grizzled gray dog with a white face wandered up to Stromsoe on petite feet and slid her head under his hand.

“Hope you don’t mind dogs,” said Frankie.

“I love dogs.”

“Do you have any?”

“Not right now.”

“That’s Sadie.”

They sat in the living room. It was large, open-beamed, and paneled with cedar. With its many windows the room seemed to be a part of the patio beyond it and the avocado orchard beyond that. The patio fountain trickled faintly and Stromsoe could hear it through the screen doors.

A series of softened explosions seemed to roll across the sky to them, powerful blasts muted by distance.

“That’s artillery exercise at Camp Pendleton,” said Frankie. “The sound of freedom. You get used to it.”

“I used to live near the beach and I got used to the waves. Didn’t hear them unless I tried to.”

“Kind of a shame, actually.”

“I thought so.”

Stromsoe felt the faraway artillery thundering in his bones.

“I have no idea who he is, or what he wants,” said Frankie. “He does not seem threatening, although I take his presence on my property as a threat. I have no bad people in my past. I have skeletons but they’re good skeletons.”

Stromsoe brought her snapshots from his coat pocket and looked at them again. “Does he resemble anyone you know?”

She shook her head.

“Brave of you to whip out the camera and start shooting,” he said.

“I lack good sense sometimes.”

“I’m surprised it didn’t scare him off. What’s this wooden tower for?”

Stromsoe held out the picture and pointed.

“I have no idea. It’s been on the Bonsall property forever.”

“Is that where you go to be alone?”

“Yes. I escape from me.”

Stromsoe noted that the tower didn’t look old enough to have been somewhere forever.

He brought out the panic button and set it on the rough pine trunk between them.

“You flip the cover like an old pocket watch, push the button three times,” he said. “If you hold the button down for five seconds or more, the call is officially canceled but I’ll show up anyway. So will the sheriffs if you’re out here in the county, or the San Diego PD if you’re downtown.”

“GPS?” She examined the gadget.

“Yes. It’s always on.”

“Can it differentiate between all the cities in the county?”

“Any city in the United States, actually.”

“Impressive.”

“Not if you don’t have it with you.”

She smiled. The smile disarmed the angles of her face and brightened her dark eyes. “I will.”

Stromsoe told her he’d follow her to and from work, said not to get out until he’d parked and come to her vehicle, to leave the engine running until then, and if he didn’t get there within two minutes to hit the panic button, drive to the exit, get on the nearest freeway, and call the police.

“Do you have a gun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you good with it?”

“Yes. I used to be very good,” he said.

“Do you adjust for the monovision?”

“Of course.”

“Your prosthetic is a beautiful match, really,” she said. “A friend of mine in school had one. She was a poet.”

Stromsoe nodded. He reflexively balled his left fingers into a loose fist to obscure the missing one. “I suppose you’ve got a gun.”

“It’s a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight revolver, two-inch barrel. I’ve got a valid CCP and I’ve done ten hours of range training. To be honest I’m shaky outside of twelve feet. Fifty feet, I can’t even hit the silhouette. It kicks like a mule.”

“Those short barrels make it tough,” he said.

“It makes lots of noise though. I feel better with it.”

“You possibly are.”

“It’s a very unpleasant feeling, being watched.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No matter how ready I am, it always comes as a surprise when I see him. And I almost always feel watched before I realize I’m being watched. But then, I feel watched and a lot of the time I’m not. That’s what it does to you. You begin to doubt your senses. And that makes a person feel weak and afraid.”

Frankie’s hands were large and slender and she used them generously while she talked. Since losing the finger, Stromsoe had paid special attention to people’s hands. He considered the way that weather forecasters like to swirl theirs over the projection maps to show the path of coming fronts and storms.

“Don’t feel weak and afraid,” he said. “My job is to make your job easier. Forget about this guy. He can’t hurt you. Leave him to me.”

She looked at him straight on, no smile, the dark eyes in forthright evaluation.

“I can’t tell you how good that sounds,” she said. “I’ve lost more than a little sleep over this.”

“No more.”

Her intense scrutiny dissolved into a smile. “We should go. It takes an hour to get to San Diego this time of day. We’re going to the Fox building off of Clairemont Mesa. I drive fast.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep up. After you’re past the parking-lot booth, don’t drive to your space. Wait for me while I explain myself to the attendant.”

“He’s a tough old guy,” said Frankie. “Suspicious and not friendly. You drive up for the five hundredth time and he looks at you like he’s never seen you before. Then he takes an hour to check your number.”

“He’ll see the light,” said Stromsoe. “Your job is to pretend I’m not there. Things will work best that way.”

She half smiled, said nothing. Ace continued to hoard his ball and the artillery went off again in the west.

8

By 4 P.M. Frankie’s video team had set up on a sidewalk overlooking Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla. The big elephant seals lolled and roared in the cooling afternoon. The painted-lady butterflies filled the sky by the fluttering thousands. The ocean reminded Stromsoe of Newport, and Newport reminded him of Hallie and Billy, and for a moment Stromsoe was back in an earlier time when he and his wife and son could walk on a beach together. Now, two plus years after their deaths, his memories of them were less frequent but more distinct, and, somehow, more valuable.

Frankie — with a black windbreaker and her hair whipping in the breeze — held up her microphone and explained that the ridge of high pressure would continue through the week, gradually giving way to cooling and low clouds as the marine layer fought its way back onshore. However, a “substantial” trough of low pressure was waiting out over the Pacific. She smiled enthusiastically and said that rain was possible by Sunday, something in the one-inch range, if the current jet-stream pattern held.

“Now I remember what the farmers used to say about the rain when I was just a girl,” she told the cameras. “Early in, late out. So if we do pick up some serious rain this early in October, we could be in for a long, wet season. Okay with me — we need it! Just be sure to keep your umbrellas handy and your firewood dry. I’m Frankie Hatfield, reporting from Seal Rock Reserve in La Jolla.”

Stromsoe watched almost everything except Frances Hatfield: the families and tourists out enjoying the fall day, the cars parked along Coast Boulevard, especially the single men who perked up when they spotted Frankie and the unmistakable Fox News van. A semicircle of onlookers formed as Frankie finished her report and Stromsoe spotted a dark-haired, dark-complected young man who stood and calmly stared at her. In that moment Stromsoe got a glimpse of what being a public figure was like, the way people assumed they had a right to stare at you. No wonder celebrities wore sunglasses. The young man backed away and continued his walk along the shore.

When Frankie was finished she took a few minutes to talk with the crowd and sign some autographs. She was half a head taller than most everyone. She knelt down to talk to a little girl. After the last fan walked off, she looked at Stromsoe, took a deep breath, then exhaled.

And that was when her secret admirer stepped out from behind the gnarled trunk of a big torrey pine, saw Stromsoe break toward him, then wheeled and sprinted for Coast Boulevard. Stromsoe saw that he looked a lot like his picture — young, dark-haired, and dark-skinned. He was square-shouldered and small, and he ran with rapid, short-legged strokes. He had what looked like a camera in his right hand.

Stromsoe was a big man and not fast. The pins in his legs caused a tightness that hadn’t gone away. A month of jogging and weights and rehab didn’t erase his poor condition after two years of boozing in Florida, and by the time he hit the sidewalk he saw, far down on Coast Boulevard, Frankie’s stalker slam the door on a gold sedan and a moment later steer into the southbound flow of traffic. But the traffic was dense and his truck was parked way up by the Fox van, so Stromsoe powered down the sidewalk as fast as his pinned legs would carry him and almost took out a mom and a stroller but he detoured onto the grass as the gold car stopped behind a blue van about to pass through a stop sign. Stromsoe saw that it would be close. He cut back to the sidewalk then into the street. He ran through a cloud of orange butterflies. The blue van started across the intersection with the gold car glued to its bumper and honking. Stromsoe raised his knees and clenched his fists and charged up near the car just as it screeched around the van in a blast of white smoke that left him blinded and lumbering out of the way of a monstrous black SUV driven by a young man looking down on him assessingly. Stromsoe hailed the young man in hopes of following the stalker but the driver flipped him off and stomped on it right through the stop sign.

Stromsoe stood on the grass, hands on his knees, panting as he watched the gold sedan sweep around a corner. He’d gotten the first four of the seven plate symbols: 4NIZ or 4NTZ. It was hard to get a fix on that license plate with his feet jarring on the asphalt and his one good eye trying for a decent look at the driver.

So, 4NIZ or 4NTZ. Fuck, there were a thousand combinations to check. He kicked a trash can and looked back toward the Fox van. Thirty-nine years old, he thought, and I can barely run two hundred yards.

Furthering his humiliation, Frankie Hatfield was already halfway toward him, loping across the grass while her video man shot away.

He squared his shoulders and tried not to limp as he walked to meet her.

Frankie was rattled but went on to do live reports from downtown La Jolla, Torrey Pines State Park, and UCSD. Stromsoe didn’t see the stalker or the gold sedan again.

Five lousy yards away, he thought. That close.

By nine that night he was following her brilliant red Mustang up the long driveway through the darkened avocado orchard in Fallbrook. Only a sliver of moonlight showed in the black sky.

She pulled into her garage, locked up her car, and came to his truck. He rolled down the window. He heard her dogs barking inside the house.

“Thank you,” she said. “You gave our little friend something to think about.”

“I’ll get him next time. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“I’d feel better if you lived a minute away instead of an hour,” said Frankie.

“I’ll park down at the gate for an hour or two, if you’d feel better,” said Stromsoe.

“No. It’s okay. That’s not in the contract.”

Stromsoe killed his engine. She took another step toward the truck and crossed her arms.

“Look,” he said. “The sheriffs are tied to the panic button, and Birch got them to A-list you. The substation is only a couple of miles away.”

Stromsoe had intended this to be comforting but he knew she was calculating response time the same as he was. By the time the alarm came through, dispatch made the call, and the nearest prowl car blundered through miles of unlit country roads and found a home lost on ten acres of grove and orchard?

Who knew.

Stromsoe heard a car engine idling back in the orchard. Then the engine died. He looked at Frankie but she apparently hadn’t noticed it.

“Thank you,” she said. “And good night.”

“You’re going to be just fine, Frankie.”

It sounded lame and he wished he hadn’t said it.

“I know I will.”

When she opened the door he saw the dogs bouncing around her. She looked back at him and he started up the truck.

Stromsoe drove back through the orchards, looking for the car that had been idling. He saw nothing.

When he finally got down to where the orchard ended at the main avenue, he parked and turned off the engine and waited, just to see if someone might start up the slope toward Frances Hatfield’s place.

Half an hour later he’d seen plenty of cars going up and down the avenue, and an opossum that barely made it in front of a tractor trailer with a gigantic bouquet of gladiolas painted on the rear doors, and three coyotes that trotted past the front of his truck with the harried concentration of young executives. The painted ladies billowed by.

But no cars on their way to Frankie’s house.

Five minutes later her flashy red Mustang nosed out from the black orchards, then roared onto the avenue.

Stromsoe brought the truck to life, checked his clearance, and barreled off after her.

True to her word, she drove fast. But it was easy for Stromsoe to see her in the light traffic, so he kept back behind a tractor trailer for a half a mile, then behind a truck very much like his own, then behind a new yellow Corvette.

She took Old Highway 395 south then headed west on Gopher Canyon. She was going toward Bonsall, he thought — her investment property? He glanced at his watch: almost eleven-thirty. Kind of late to be going somewhere to escape from yourself, wasn’t it?

She turned right and left and right again, longer and longer stretches of darkness between the turns, and Stromsoe followed as far back as he could with his headlights off.

The road turned to gravel, rising gently. Stromsoe eased his truck into the wake of Frankie’s dust and crept along in the pale red glow of his parking lights.

When he came over the top he could see down now, to where the Mustang had stopped in a gateway. He killed his parking lights and engine. He watched the driver’s-side door of the Mustang swing out and Frankie pull herself from the little cabin. Her two dogs spilled out behind her.

In the spray of her headlights Frankie lifted a thick chain off a post, then swung open a steel-pipe gate. After the Mustang was through, she got out, called the dogs, swung the gate closed, and lifted the chain back into place. She got the dogs back into the car and rolled off.

Stromsoe gave her a few minutes then drove slowly to the gate. He made a U-turn and left his truck parked on the far side of the dirt road, facing out.

He took a small but strong flashlight from his glove box and locked up the truck. A sign on the gate said NO TRESPASSING — VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. He lifted the chain from the gatepost and let himself in.

He limped down the dirt road in the faint moonlight, climbed a rise, and stood now at the top of a hillock looking down on a wide, dark valley. He smelled water and grass and the butterscotch smell of willow trees.

A barn sat a hundred yards off the road. The red Mustang was parked beside it. Next to the Mustang was a white long-bed pickup truck. The barn door was closed but light inside came around the door to fall in faint slats on the ground. A window glowed faintly orange and Stromsoe thought he saw movement inside.

He stayed on the dark edge of the dirt road as he moved toward the barn. Above him the sky was pinpricked by stars and again he smelled water and grass. A horse neighed in the distance. He could hear the ticks and pops of the Mustang’s cooling engine as he approached the barn, crept slowly to the window, and looked in.

Frankie’s side was to him. Ace and Sadie lay on a red braided rug not far from their master. Frankie was standing at a wooden workbench fitted with a band saw, a circular saw, a drill press, and half a dozen vises. She wore jeans and boots again, and a pair of oversize safety goggles. She squared a length of two-by-four on the bench, hooked the end of a yellow tape measure over one end, took a pencil from her mouth, and marked it. Then she pressed the board forward into the circular saw and a brief shriek followed. The motor died and Stromsoe heard the clink of the board on the concrete floor.

Beyond Frankie’s workbench there was a similar bench, at which a white-whiskered old man drilled holes in lengths of two-by-four like the one Frankie had just sawn. He wore safety goggles too, but they were propped up on his head. A cigarette dangled from his mouth and a lazy plume of smoke rose toward the high rafters.

A tall wooden tower stood beside the old man’s bench, the same type that Stromsoe had noted in Frankie’s photograph of the stalker. It looked larger than the one in the picture. It was newly made. The redwood was still pink and Stromsoe could see the gleam of the new nuts and bolts and washers that held it together. The top was a plywood platform about the right size to hold a person, a fifty-five-gallon drum, or a couple of small trash cans. There was a one-foot-high railing around the edge of the platform, as if to keep something from tipping over or falling off. The tower rose up twenty feet high, at least. Beside it stood another tower that was only about one-third finished.

The old man carried two lengths of wood, joined at right angles, over to the tower in progress. He pulled a socket wrench from his back pocket and began bolting the boards to the tower.

The dogs looked up and the old man’s gaze started his way and Stromsoe moved away from the window.

From this point he could see the west wall of the barn. There were four long benches along it, similar to the workbenches at which Frankie and the old man worked. These were covered not with tools but with books and notebooks, beakers and burners, tubes and vials, canisters and bottles, boxes and bags, all overhung with a series of metal lamps hung by chains from the rafters. There were two refrigerators and a freezer along the far wall. There was a small kitchen area with four burners, an oven, and a sink. A fire extinguisher was fastened to every fifth post of the exposed interior frame. In the far corner was what looked like an office, separated from the main barn by a door that stood open.

Stromsoe thought of the meth labs he’d seen out in the Southern California desert not far from here. Riverside County was ground zero for the labs, but there were plenty in Los Angeles and San Diego and San Bernardino counties, too. Interesting, he thought — except that he was pretty sure Frances Hatfield and the old man weren’t cooking drugs.

He heard Frankie’s saw start up and eased his face back to the window. She pressed the board into the blade, then another. She worked with assurance, and no hurry.

The old man wrestled another set of bolted boards off his bench, walked them across the floor, and fitted them into the growing tower. He took out his socket wrench and looked at the structure appraisingly.

“Nice, Ted,” said Frankie. Stromsoe could just barely make out her words.

“When this one’s finished I’m done for tonight,” said Ted. “Been at it since four.”

“We’ll be ready for next week,” said Frankie.

“I hope so.”

“We need that jet stream to stay south. Just a little help from the stream is all we need.”

The old man said something back but Stromsoe couldn’t make it out.

He eased away from the barn, found the dark edge of the road, and walked back to his car. Ready for next week, he thought. Need the jet stream to stay south?

He wondered if the wooden towers were a decorative garden item that Frankie and her partner sold to local nurseries. He’d seen little windmills that looked a lot like them, though Frankie’s were four times the height and had no blades to catch a breeze.

Then he thought of water wells and storage tanks and railroad structures and mining rigs and weather stations and airport towers and fire observation decks and oil derricks and guard towers and wind turbines for making electricity.

Ready for next week could mean for the distributor, or to complete an order, or...

Frankie, you have some explaining to do.

He smelled the river water again, then the sweet aroma of oranges and lemons carrying on the cool night air.

9

Mike Tavarez surveyed the exercise yard and listened to the inmates counting off their sit-ups: thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three...

Their voices rose in crisp unison into the cold afternoon air of Pelican Bay State Prison. They sounded like a small army, thought Tavarez, and in a sense they were, because the Mexican gangs here in Pelican Bay didn’t stand around like the Nazi Lowriders or the Aryan Brotherhood or the Black Guerillas.

No, La Eme and Nuestra Familia — though they would kill one another if you put them together in the same exercise yard at the same time — worked out here in the general population yard for two hours every day. Different hours, but they worked out hard. They heaved and strained and yelled the cadence, in training to stay alive when it was time to fight.

Give people a beat to follow and they’ll do anything you tell them to, thought Tavarez. Like a marching band.

Forty-nine, fifty, fifty-one...

“Why don’t you work out with them?” asked Jason Post. Post was one of the correctional officers who had helped get Tavarez transferred from the Security Housing Unit to the general population. That was six months ago. The Prison Guards Union held substantial power at Pelican Bay, and Post was a union activist.

“I like watching,” said Tavarez. “I like their discipline. I never got to see this in the X.”

The Security Housing Unit was known as “the X” because it was shaped like one. Sometimes it was called the Shoe. Tavarez had spent his first year there. It was a living hell. The SHU was made up of pods — eight glass-faced cells per pod — arranged around an elevated guardhouse. It was always twilight in the X, never light and never dark. Tavarez was watched by guards 23/7 on television. When he used the toilet it was televised onto a guardhouse monitor. The toilets had no moving parts that could be made into weapons. For one hour a day he was allowed to exercise alone in “dog run” — a four-walled concrete tank half the size of a basketball court. A guard watched him do that too, from a catwalk above. In the X, time stopped. His great aloneness swallowed him. There had been days in the X when Tavarez had had to bite his tongue to keep from weeping, and swallow the blood.

It was solitary confinement, but in full view of the guards. The X was designed by an architect who specialized in sensory deprivation. Even the warden admitted that it was designed to make you insane. The feeling of hours stretching into years was indescribable for Tavarez, unbearable. He never thought he would actually feel his mind leaving him. Finally, he found a way to get to Jason Post and Post had begun the process that saved his life.

The difference between the SHU and general population was the difference between hell and freedom. Or at least between hell and the possibility of freedom, for which Tavarez was now planning.

He saw that the count was slowing as his men approached eighty push-ups.

Seventy-six... seventy-seven...

“Besides,” he said. “I like having the pile to myself.”

“I’ll bet you do,” said Post. He was a thick young Oregonian with a downsloping head of yellow hair. “Nobody gets that except you.”

Tavarez got an hour a day on the iron pile, where he could lift weights alone and let his mind wander. He had arranged this privilege through Post also, and paid for it by having money wired into various bank accounts. His iron-pile hour was generally between 11 P.M. and midnight but Tavarez was largely nocturnal anyway. He’d grown very strong.

And one night per week, usually Monday, Tavarez would skip his late-night workout and instead be escorted to the far corner of the southeast compound perimeter, where he would stand handcuffed while a prostitute serviced him through a chain-link fence.

“How’s Tonya?” asked Tavarez.

“Chemo sucks, you know?”

Tavarez figured that Post would need some help.

“With her not feeling good, you know, the kid doesn’t get decent meals and he doesn’t ever get his homework done. I’m here in this shithole forty-eight hours a week ’cause we need the money, so I can’t do everything at home, you know?”

“Sounds difficult,” said Tavarez.

“That’s because it is difficult.”

“As soon as you get me the library, I can make a transfer for you.”

Post was predictable and self-serving as a dog, which was why Tavarez valued him.

“It’s done,” said the young guard. “You have the library for one hour tonight. The laptop will be inside in the world atlas on the G shelf, down at the end, up on top, out of sight. Lunce will come to your cell at ten to take you in. Then he’ll take you to the iron pile at eleven, then back to your cell at midnight.”

Tavarez suppressed a smile. “Batteries charged?”

“Hell yes they’re charged.”

“I’ll make the transfer.”

“Ten K?”

“Ten.”

Tavarez watched the men labor and count. The ten K infuriated him but he didn’t let it show. Plus, he had the money.

...ninety-eight... ninety-nine... one hundred!

“Behave yourself, bandito,” said Post.

“Always,” said Tavarez.

“You don’t want to go back to the X.”

“God will spare me that, Jason.”

“God don’t care here. It’s every man for himself.”

“That’s why I value our friendship,” said Tavarez.

“Yeah, I bet. Make that transfer, dude.”

Prison investigator Ken McCann delivered a cloth sack full of mail to Tavarez in his cell later that afternoon. Mail was delivered to Tavarez only twice a week because he got so much of it. The Prison Investigation team — four overworked Corrections employees overseeing a prison population of almost 3,500 — had to read, or attempt to read, every piece of Mike El Jefe Tavarez’s incoming and outgoing correspondence.

“Strip out, Mikey,” said McCann, making a twirling motion with his finger.

Tavarez faced the far wall and spread his arms and legs. “Looks like quite a haul.”

Then the guard unlocked the cell and McCann tossed the sack onto the bed. The door clanged shut with a faint echo, and the lock rang home.

Tavarez backed again to the door slot — it was called the bean chute because meals sometimes came through it too — then went to his bed. The bed was just a mattress on a concrete shelf built into the wall. He dumped the mail onto the thin green blanket. He sat and fanned through the correspondence. True to form, McCann and his investigators had opened every envelope except the ones from law firms. Attorney-client privilege was a constitutional right even in a supermax prison, though Tavarez suspected that McCann opened and read some of them anyway. Which was fair, since several of the law firms with very impressive letterheads were fictitious, and others were counterfeit. There were fifty or sixty letters in all.

“How many letters did you write this last week?” asked McCann.

“Seventy.”

“Every week you write seventy.”

“Ten a day,” said Tavarez. “An achievable number.”

Tavarez knew that most of the inmates got little or no mail at all. He’d seen printouts of the pen-pal ads on the prison Web site, which were full of pleas for letters from inmates who hadn’t received a letter in years, or even decades.

But Tavarez was El Jefe, and he got hundreds of letters every month from friends and relatives — long, usually handwritten tales of life in the barrio, life in jail, life in other prisons, life in general.

“It’s pure numbers, isn’t it, Mikey?” asked McCann. “Enough mail comes and goes, and you know your messages will get through.”

“No, Ken. I just have lots of family and friends.”

“You have lots of business is what you have.”

“You overestimate me.”

“Well, the piss trick won’t work anymore.”

“No. You’re too smart for that.”

Tavarez had used his urine to write a coded message on the back of a letter to a cousin in Los Angeles. The message was about raising “taxes” on a heroin shipment coming north from Sinaloa to Tucson, then on to L.A., though McCann couldn’t decipher it. It was an old prison trick — the urine dries invisible but the sugars activate under a hot lamp and the code can be read. McCann had had the good luck of picking this particular letter for his heat-lamp test.

But Tavarez had written the same message in a kite — a small, handwritten note — that a trustee had smuggled out for him through a friend in the prison kitchen, so the tax hike had gone into effect anyway.

Tavarez noted a letter from Ruben in San Quentin. Always pleasant to know what’s going down on death row.

And one from the nonexistent law firm of Farrell & Berman of Worcester, Massachusetts, which would contain news of La Eme’s East Coast business.

And one from his mother, still on Flora Street, still chipper and full of gossip, no doubt. Money was no longer a problem for his parents, though why they insisted on staying in the barrio Tavarez couldn’t understand.

There was a letter from Jaime in Modesto — trouble with La Nuestra Familia, most likely.

One from a real lawyer — Mel Alpers — who was representing him on appeal. It looked like a bill.

One from Dallas, where the Mara Salvatrucha gang had butchered two local homies in a war for narcotics distribution in the south side. Blood was about to flow. We should exterminate the Salvadorans, thought Tavarez. Bloodthirsty animals with no sense of honor.

And another letter from Ernest in Arizona State Prison, a supermax prison like Pelican Bay. Ernest was doing a thirty-year bounce on three strikes. Tavarez knew that Ernest’s boys in Arizona were busy these days. Since so much attention had been focused on California’s border, Arizona was now the nexus for drugs, humans, and cash going in and out of the United States. In many ways Arizona was better, Tavarez believed — the deserts and mountains were filled with dirt roads and impossible to patrol. Much of the land was Indian, and the state and federal agents were not welcome there. Also, Arizona had one-tenth the population of California, and was closer to good markets like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Business was good. Very good.

Tavarez sighed and picked through more mail, looking for the one letter that never came.

“What are you worth these days, Mike? Two million? Three?”

Tavarez shook his head, sorting through the mail. “Nowhere near the millions you dream of. My life is about honor.”

“The honor of La Eme. That’s funny.”

“I don’t think honor is funny,” said Tavarez.

La Eme’s code of silence forbade him from so much as saying those words — La Eme — let alone admitting membership.

McCann grunted. He had long accused Tavarez of secretly hoarding funds that should have gone into La Eme “regimental banks,” though McCann had no evidence of it.

“Fine,” he said. “Lie about your money. But if I do my job right, you won’t have one dollar left to give your children when you die. Undeserving though they are.”

Tavarez looked up from his mail. “Leave my family out of it.”

McCann shrugged. He enjoyed chiding Tavarez about the fact that, despite getting hundreds of letters a month, Tavarez’s letters to his own children always came back marked Return to Sender.

In the beginning McCann had opened these letters both going out and coming back, suspecting that the Tavarez children had marked them with coded messages before resealing the envelopes and having their mother write return to sender on the front. But all he’d ever found were heartfelt pleadings from the great Jefe, asking for understanding and a letter back. No urine messages, no pinprick “ghostwriting” that would come alive when a pencil was rubbed over them, no writing in Nahuatl — the language of the ancient Aztec — which was La Eme’s most baffling code.

“Must be lousy, sitting in a stinkhole while your kids grow up without you.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Better here than in the SHU though.”

Tavarez looked at McCann and McCann smiled. “Those millions don’t do you much good, do they?”

“They don’t do me much good because I don’t have them.”

McCann stared at Tavarez for a long beat. He liked staring down the inmates. It was a way of saying he wasn’t afraid of them. McCann was large and strong. Tavarez had heard the story about the Black Guerilla gangster who had jumped McCann and ended up knocked out and bleeding. McCann loved talking about the SHU. To anyone who had been incarcerated there, it was like having a knife waved in your face. Or worse.

“Honor?” asked McCann. “How do you stand yourself, Mike? Blowing up a woman and a little boy? A woman you knew, someone you lived with and slept with? The wife of an old friend?”

“I had nothing to do with that. I was framed by a U.S. government task force. The real killers were his own people, of course — the same task force. Because he was corrupt, on the payroll of La Nuestra Familia. Everyone knows what bunglers the government people are. All this was proven in court by my lawyers. The reason the government sent me here was so they could continue their fictional war on drugs against a fictional gang. It all comes down to dollars, jobs, and budgets. I am good for their business.”

McCann whistled the tune of a corrido. Even the guards knew the corridos — the Mexican songs that romanticized the exploits of criminal heroes who fought against corrupt police torturers and bone breakers, usually Americans. This particular song was very popular a few years ago, and it told the story of El Jefe Tavarez and an American deputy who love the same woman.

Tavarez stared at the investigator.

“All three of you went to high school together,” said McCann. “Later, the deputy took your girlfriend. So what do you do? You kill her, you fucking animal.”

Tavarez said nothing. What was the point of defending himself to a fool?

“What did you and Post talk about today?” asked McCann.

“Family. He likes to talk.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“The X made me talkative. He’s just a kid.”

“Going to help him out?”

“My hands are cuffed.”

“Don’t get any big ideas, Mikey. Behave yourself and who knows? Maybe you’ll actually get a visit from one of your own children someday.”

Tavarez nodded and picked up a letter. Ears thrumming with anger, he could barely hear the sound of McCann’s shoes on the cell-block floor as he walked away.

When he got out of this place, when the time was right, maybe he’d come back here to Crescent City and settle up with McCann.

But McCann was right. Tavarez yearned for letters from them — John, Peter, Jennifer, and Isabelle. John was the oldest at ten. He had gotten his mother’s fretful character. Isabelle was eight and a half, and she had her father’s ambition — she was acquisitive and calculating. Jennifer, only seven, had inherited her father’s lithe build and her mother’s lovely face and was excelling at tae kwon do, of all things. Little Peter had learned to run at nine months and walk at ten. He was three and a half when Tavarez had shuffled through the series of steel doors that took him into the heart of the X.

They still lived in the Laguna Beach mansion he had bought, along with his ex-wife, Miriam, and her parents from Mexico.

Miriam had cut off all communication with him after his conviction for the bombing. She had told him that she forgave and pitied him for what he had done and she would pray for his soul. But she would not allow him to poison their children. No visits. No phone calls. No letters. No communication of any kind. Her word was final. She was filing.

The Tavarez children all spoke English and Spanish, and attended expensive private schools. Their gated seaside haven was a place of privilege and indulgence.

Tavarez had removed his children as far as he could from the barrio near Delhi Park where he had grown up. He wanted them to be nothing like him.

He fanned through the last of the envelopes, his heart beating with the fierce helplessness of the caged.

10

That night at ten Brad Lunce called him out. Lunce was one of Post’s buddies. There were three kinds of guards: the bribable, the sadistic, and the honest. Group One was small but valuable, and Post had introduced Tavarez to a few of his friends.

Lunce watched Tavarez strip naked, open his mouth wide, spread his toes and butt, then get dressed and back up to the bean chute so Lunce could handcuff him before opening the cell door. Lunce never seemed to pay close attention, Tavarez had noticed, something that he might be able to use someday.

When Tavarez was handcuffed, Lunce let him out.

Murmurs and grumbling followed them down the cell block. Any other inmate being led out at this time of night would have brought yelling and catcalls and demands for explanation. But all the Pelican Bay cell blocks were segregated by race and gang. And this block was populated by La Eme and the gangs with which La Eme had formed alliances — the Aryan Brotherhood, the Nazi Lowriders, and the Black Guerillas. So when the inmate was El Jefe, respect was offered.

Tavarez walked slowly, head up, eyes straight ahead. Something fluttered in his upper vision: a kite baggie on a string floating down from tier three to find its intended cell on tier one. Night was when the kites flew.

Lunce unlocked the library just after ten o’clock. It was a large, windowed room with low shelves to minimize privacy, pale green walls, and surveillance cameras in every corner.

Tavarez looked up at one. “Cartwright again?”

“What do you care?” said Lunce. Lunce was large and young, just like Post. He resented his manipulation more than the other guards and Tavarez was waiting for the day when Lunce would turn on him.

Cartwright was the night “situations” supervisor, which put him in control of the electric perimeter fence and video for the eastern one-quarter of the sprawling penal compound. This made Cartwright the most valuable of all the cooperative guards, and a kickback to him was included in almost every transaction that Tavarez made with lower-ranking men such as Post and Lunce. There were kickbacks to mid-level COs also, to those lower than Cartwright but above Lunce and Post. That was why favors were expensive. The western, northern, and southern perimeter guard-tower sharpshooters and attack dogs were under the control of other supervisors but Mike had found no way to influence them.

“He can turn the cameras back on whenever he wants to,” said Tavarez.

“Not with me in here he won’t. You got less than one hour. I’ll be watching you.”

Tavarez nodded. Having an L-Wop — life without parole — meant that there weren’t too many punishments they could give him if he was caught. They could move him back to the SHU, which was something he didn’t even allow himself to think about. But he didn’t pay all that bribe money for nothing, and after all, he was only in the library. No violence intended, no escape in mind, no drug abuse, no illicit sex.

“The cuffs,” said Tavarez, backing over to Lunce. It made the hair on his neck stand up — giving his back to a hostile white man — but if prison taught you anything, it was to overcome fear. Outside, you might have power. Inside, all you had was the bribe and the threat.

He found the world atlas on top of the G shelf, which he now slid toward him with a puff of dust.

Both the table and the chairs were bolted to the floor, so Tavarez plopped the heavy book down on the metal table, then worked himself into a chair in front of it.

He lifted the big cover, then the first hundred or so pages. Sure enough, the laptop sat in an excavated cradle. Post had come through.

For the next fifty minutes Tavarez sat before the screen, practically unmoving except for his hands, tapping out orders and inquiries in an elaborate code that he had helped devise for La Eme starting way back in 1988, during his first prison fall, before he had become El Jefe.

The code was rooted in the Huazanguillo dialect of the Nahuatl language that he had learned from Ofelia — his frequent visitor at Corcoran State Prison. The dialect was only understandable by scholars, by a few Aztec descendants who clung to the old language, and a handful of upper-echelon La Eme leaders. Ofelia was both a budding scholar and a nearly full-blooded Aztec. Back then, Paul Zolorio, who ran La Eme from his cell just eight down from Tavarez, arranged to bring Ofelia up from Nayarit, Mexico, to tutor the handsome young Harvard pistolero.

Now Tavarez’s text messages would soon be decoded by his most trusted generals, then passed on to the appropriate captains and lieutenants. Then down to the ’hoods and the homeboys, who actually moved product and collected cash. Almost instantly, the whole deadly organization — a thousand strong, with gangsters in every state of the republic and twelve foreign countries — would soon have its orders.

Tavarez worked fast:

Ernest’s Arizona men need help — everyone had a finger in that pie now that California had been clamped down. Move Flaco’s people from the East Bay down to Tucson.

The L.A. green-light gangs would have to be punished severely. Green-lights won’t pay our taxes? They’re proud to go against us? Then peel their caps. Cancel one homie from each green-light gang every week until they pay, see how long their pride holds up.

Albert’s men in Dallas are up against the Mara Salvatrucha. MS 13 has the good military guns from the United States but they don’t get our south-side action. Move ten of our San Antonio boys over to Dallas immediately. Shoot the Salvadorans on sight if they’re on our corners. Not a grain of mercy.

At the end of his fifty minutes, Tavarez had passed on more information than he could send in a hundred handwritten, coded letters and kites. Which would take him a week and a half to write. And a week to get where they were going. And half would still be intercepted, diverted, destroyed — perhaps even passed on to La Nuestra Familia by people like Ken McCann.

But with the computer he could write things once, in just a matter of seconds, then send his commands to a handful of trusted people, who in turn would send them down the line. His code was wireless and traveled at the speed of sound. It was practically untraceable and virtually indecipherable. It was clear, concise, and inexpensive.

Pure, digital Nahuatl, thought Tavarez, beamed exactly where it was needed.

All it had really cost him was a few months of subtle persuasion, then ten unsubtle grand to help the Post family through Tonya’s cancer.

Tavarez turned off the computer, closed the screen, and set it back into the hollowed pages of the atlas of the world.

Like an alert dog who hears his master stir, Lunce appeared from behind the G shelf, dangling the cuffs.

“Looking at porn?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Are they cute as your whores?”

“Not as cute.”

“I don’t believe you. I think you’re running your business. La Eme business.”

Tavarez just shrugged. He felt the cuffs close around his wrists.

Tavarez lifted weights furiously that night, putting everything he had into the repetitions, increasing the weight until his muscles gave out, doing sit-ups and crunches between sets, panting and growling and sweating for nearly an hour. Lunce watched him work out and shower but Tavarez was hardly aware of him.

By the time he was back in his cell, it was well past midnight. His body trembled from the exertion. He lay on his back on the bed and listened to the snoring and the distant wails from the ding wing — psych ward — and the endless coughing of Smith two cells down.

He closed his eyes and thought back to when he was released from his first prison term and he’d moved into Ofelia’s apartment for six blessed weeks. All of the pent-up desire they’d felt for each other during her visits came charging out like water from ruptured dams. She was only seventeen, hopeful and innocent, a virgin. He was twenty-seven, the adopted favorite of La Eme kingpin Paul Zolorio, and suddenly free. He had been tasked by Zolorio to exact tribute from the Santa Ana street gangs for all drug sales — starting with his own Delhi F Troop. Zolorio had given him a mandate of one hundred percent compliance.

There was nothing better, Tavarez had realized back then — than to be free, employed, and in love.

His heart did what it always did when he thought of Ofelia — it soared, then hovered, then fell.

He pictured her slender young fingers as they traced the Nahuatl symbols across the page in the Corcoran visitation room. He could hear her voice as she translated their sounds and meanings into Spanish and English for him. There was innocence in her smile and trust in her eyes, and luster in her straight black hair.

He remembered the simple shock on her face when he told her, six weeks after moving into her cheerful little apartment, that he was going to marry Paul Zolorio’s niece from Guadalajara. He really had to, he explained, really, it wasn’t quite arranged in the old-fashioned way, but his marriage to Miriam would solidify the families and the business they did, it was practically his duty to Paul to...

He remembered how softly she shut and locked the door when he left her apartment that night, and the heaviness in his heart and the painful clench of his throat as he drove south into the night. It was nothing like walking away from Hallie Jaynes and her insatiable desires, her murderous guerra selfishness. No, Ofelia was uncorrupted, untouched except by him. She was drugless and guileless and had the purest heart of anyone he had ever known, and the wildest beauty to her smile.

One year after he had married Miriam, shortly after she had given birth to John, Tavarez secretly traveled to Nayarit to find Ofelia.

With doggedness and patience he was able to learn that she had joined a convent in Toluca, Mexico’s highest city. It took him another day to fly to Mexico City, then rent a car for the drive up to Toluca.

Sister Anna of the Convento de San Juan Bautista scolded him for coming here unannounced with such a request. She said Ofelia never wanted to see him again, after what he had done to her. Yes, she was healthy and happy now in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was not a love given and taken away according to lust, commerce, or advancement. She looked at him, trembling with disgust.

Tavarez set five one-hundred-dollar bills on the desk between them. “For the poor,” he said in Spanish.

“They don’t need your money,” Sister Anna said back.

He counted out five more. “Let the poor decide.”

“I have decided for them.”

“Okay.”

Tavarez rose, leaned across the desk, and grabbed the holy woman by her nose. He pulled up hard and she came up fast, chair clacking to the tile floor behind her. He told her to take him to Ofelia or he’d yank it off.

“You’re the devil,” she said, tears pouring from her eyes.

“Don’t be silly,” said Tavarez, letting go of Sister Anna’s nose. “I’m trying to see an old friend, and help the poor.”

She swept the cash into a drawer, then led Tavarez across a dusty courtyard. The other sisters stopped and stared but none of them dared get close. Sister Anna walked quickly with her fist up to her mouth, as if she’d just been given unbearable news.

The vesper bells were ringing when Sister Anna pushed open the door of Ofelia’s tiny cell. It was very cold, and not much larger than the one he’d spent five years in, noted Tavarez. She had a crucifix on the wall. His cell had pictures of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Ofelia rose from the floor beside her bed. She looked up at Tavarez with a stunned surprise. She was thinner and pale, but her eyes still held the innocent wonder that he had loved. She was not quite nineteen.

In that moment he saw that she loved him helplessly, in the way that only the very young can love, and that the greatest gift he could give her would be to turn around and walk away. It would mean denying himself. Denying his desires, his instincts, his own heart. It would mean giving her life.

He reached out and put his hands on her lovely face. Sister Anna flinched.

“Love your God all you want, but come with me,” he said.

“We’ll both go to hell,” she said, her breath condensing in the freezing air.

“We’ve got three days and a lifetime before that.”

“What about your wife?” asked Ofelia.

“I have a son too. Accommodate them. I love you.”

Tavarez watched the struggle playing out in Ofelia’s dark eyes but he never doubted the outcome.

“I don’t have much to pack,” she said.

Sister Anna gasped.

Tavarez looked at her and smiled.

Even now, ten years later, Tavarez thought of that moment and smiled.

But finally — as always — he remembered what Matt Stromsoe had done to Ofelia. And with this memory Tavarez canceled her image as quickly and totally as someone changing channels on a TV.

11

The first For Rent sign he saw in Fallbrook was for a guest cottage. The main house was owned and occupied by the Mastersons and their young son and daughter. The Mastersons were early twenties, trim and polite. She was pregnant in a big way. They were willing to rent out the cottage then and there, so long as Stromsoe would sign a standard agreement and pay in advance a refundable damage deposit. The rent wasn’t high and the guest cottage was tucked back on the acreage with nice views across the Santa Margarita River Valley. A grove of tangerine trees lined the little dirt road leading to it. Bright purple bougainvillea covered one wall of the cottage and continued up the roof. It had an air conditioner, satellite TV, even a garage.

Within forty minutes of driving up, Stromsoe had written a check for first and last month’s rent and deposit, and collected a house key and an automatic garage-door opener.

Mrs. Masterson handed him a heavy bag full of avocados and said welcome to Fallbrook and God bless you. Included in the bag was last week’s worship program for the United Methodist Church.

Frankie called him around noon and asked him over for lunch before their drive south to the studio.

“I just moved to Fallbrook,” he said.

She laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“The butterflies sold me. And I’m minutes away if you need me.”

She was silent for a beat. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What are the wooden towers for?” he asked when the lunch was almost over.

“The one in the picture?”

“The ones in the Bonsall barn.”

Frankie set her fork on her plate. Her expression went cool. “For meteorological instruments,” she said. “I study weather. How do you know about them?”

Stromsoe explained waiting for the idling car and seeing nothing until Frankie came blasting out of the dark in her Mustang.

“So, Mr. Stromsoe — are you a bodyguard or a snoop, or a little of both?”

“You’re being stalked. I hear a vehicle idling near your house. Half an hour later, you leave your home on a code red. What would you have done?”

“Followed me.”

Stromsoe nodded. “Who’s Ted?”

Stromsoe tracked the emotions as they marched across her face — embarrassment, then irritation, then confusion, then control.

“Came right up and listened in, did you?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t like your attitude right now.”

“It comes from thirteen years of being a cop.”

“But you’re a private detective now. You have to act polite and charming.” She smiled. It reversed the stern lines of her face and Stromsoe remembered a time when he actually had been polite and maybe even a little charming.

“Ted’s my uncle,” said Frankie. “He’s a retired NOAA guy. That’s National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. They study climate and report weather.”

“I apologize for following you. I was slightly worried.”

“I’m glad you were worried. That’s why I pay you. You were curious too.”

He nodded.

“The towers are made of redwood and finished with a weather seal,” she said. “They’re twenty-two feet high, and we anchor the legs in concrete on-site.”

“Where do you put them?”

“Mostly around the Bonsall property.”

“You sit on the platforms to escape from yourself?”

She smiled and colored. “No. I told your boss the property was a place I went to be alone, because I didn’t want him asking the same questions you’re asking now.”

“Who cares if you study weather?” asked Stromsoe.

“I was a lot more relaxed about it until I saw that guy on my fenced, posted property, inspecting one of my towers.”

Stromsoe wondered about that. “Are there commercial applications to what you’re studying?”

“Possibly,” said Frankie Hatfield.

“You think the stalker is a competitor?”

“I don’t believe so.”

Frankie explained the value of weather prediction. Its applications were endless — agriculture, water and energy allocation, public safety and security, transportation, development — you name it. When you studied climate you had long-term charts to go on, she said, and generalities became apparent. But predicting weather was a whole different thing from predicting climate. Within a general climate, the weather itself could be very unpredictable. That’s where she came in. She was trying to find ways for extremely accurate thirty-day forecasts. Right now, the best they could do was five days. Seven tops, but even NOAA had dropped its seven-day radio forecasts because they were so often wrong, useless, and sometimes even dangerous.

“Global warming is interesting but it’s not my thing,” she said. “I’m interested in telling you what’s going to happen — I mean exactly what’s going to happen — exactly where you live, one month from now. The precise temperatures, wind, and humidity. The exact amount of precipitation, if any.”

“I didn’t think the conditions arose thirty days ahead.”

“They do but they’re not apparent. That’s where I come in. I’m on the verge of nailing a way to see and measure them.”

Stromsoe waited for that smile again but it didn’t come. He watched Frankie Hatfield’s face as she stared out the window of her dining room to the bright Fallbrook afternoon. She didn’t blink. A flat patina came over her eyes, and it looked as if she were seeing nothing, lost in a thought that overrode vision.

“Right on the verge,” she said quietly, glancing at her watch. “I guess I should go to work.”

Frankie and her crew shot the live spots around downtown that evening — outside the ballpark, in front of the old Horton Grand Hotel, up on the Cabrillo Bridge leading into Balboa Park. She wore a polka-dot sundress with a white cotton jacket, and a straw fedora. Her weather forecasts were almost identical to the ones of the day before, making Stromsoe wonder how challenging a San Diego meteorologist’s job really was.

Frankie did say that it was looking more and more like the jet stream would carry the low-pressure system into San Diego County, and that Sunday night would very possibly be wet. Monday looked “promising” for rain too, with two more low-pressure troughs “stacked up” behind the first.

The little crowd that had gathered groaned at the thought of a wet weekend in mid-October.

“Rain is life,” said Frankie, smiling. “Sorry.”

The urban settings in which Frankie did her stories made Stromsoe hypervigilant and a little nervous, and he realized how limiting his monocular vision was when it came to surveillance. He wondered if he could accurately fire the Colt Mustang .380 he carried on a Clipdraw on his belt. He hadn’t fired the thing since the bomb. This was one more reason to regret his two-year decomposition in Miami, though at the time it had seemed his only choice. A time for casting out stones.

By Frankie’s last broadcast at 8 P.M. Stromsoe hadn’t seen the stalker, much less entertained drawing his sidearm.

Just after nine o’clock he was once more following her through the dark orchards toward her home in the fragrant Fallbrook night. The butterflies lilted through the beams of his headlights.

Again she pulled into her garage and again Stromsoe stopped to make sure she got into the house safely. He heard the dogs start barking inside again too, and he wondered what it was like for this young woman to live alone in the middle of ten acres of avocado and citrus trees, with two dogs, a stalker, and a gun.

She came up to his window, pulling up the collar of her coat against the October chill. Her hat sat back at an end-of-the-workday angle.

“Come in for a cup?”

“I’d like that.”

12

Frankie pushed open the French doors to let in the breeze and the smell of the orange blossoms into the living room. Ace sniffed systematically at Stromsoe’s pants. White-faced Sadie lay down and looked up at him.

“I read those articles about you,” she said. “And Dan Birch told me some things.”

“So, are you a weather lady or a snoop or a little of both?”

“I haven’t followed you anywhere yet.”

“You might have a better chance of running down your secret admirer than I did.”

“My money’s still on you,” said Frankie.

Stromsoe nodded.

“I want to say I’m sorry that all those things happened to you and your family,” she said. Her voice was softer than Stromsoe was used to, more confidential. “I felt very strongly that you had endured more than your share. And your wife and son, well, there’s nothing I can say that would do them any justice.”

They were silent for a moment.

“They got the guy, so there’s some of that kind of justice,” said Stromsoe, trying to be helpful.

“There’s no justice when the irreplaceable is taken away,” she said. “Someone’s vision, someone’s life.”

“No. After that you settle for what’s left.”

She looked down at aged Sadie. “Dogs have less problems with that.”

Stromsoe smiled and nodded. For a moment they sat and said nothing. He listened to the frogs and crickets.

Frankie was gone for a while, then back with tea service and a basket of biscotti on a tray. She set it down on the coffee table between them.

“Dan told me you took some time off,” she said.

“Yes, down in Florida mostly. I was here for part of the trial.”

“Are you satisfied with the life sentences?”

“Yes.”

“I would have wanted death,” said Frankie.

“At first, I did too,” said Stromsoe. “Then I realized that if you aren’t alive you can’t suffer.”

“Brutal and true,” she said.

“Exactly. I’ve seen Pelican Bay. He did a year in the Security Housing Unit, which is so bad it can drive men crazy. But he conned his way out. Still, the line is nobody’s idea of fun.”

“Line?”

“The general population.”

Frankie swirled a tea bag through her cup. “I can’t compare any tragedy of mine to yours,” she said. “My parents are alive. I’ve never married and have no children. A good friend died of cancer when we were both twenty-one. That’s the biggest loss I’ve had.”

“I think we’re measured by what we give, not what’s taken,” said Stromsoe. “That was awfully pompous. I mean, I just now made it up. I was talking about you, not me.”

She looked at him with a frankly evaluative cock of head. Again they said nothing for a few moments.

“You seem like a good man, Matt. I’m done with my questions for now. I just like to know who I’m in business with.”

“No apology needed. Questions bring up memories and memories can be good.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.”

“It took a while, but now I do.”

“Will you tell me about them someday, your wife and son?”

“Okay.”

More silence, during which Stromsoe drank his tea and looked out to the very distant lights beyond the avocados.

“Want to see my pickled rivers?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

“Come on back.”

The first room off the hallway contained three rows of glass-topped exhibition tables as might be found in a museum. Each row was lit from above by strong recessed bulbs.

But instead of rocks or gems or spiked insects there were mason jars filled with varying shades of clear liquid.

“One hundred and eighty-two rivers, creeks, and streams,” she said. “So far. They have to run year-round to qualify. Eight of them don’t even have names, which I think is majorly cool. My furthest one is the Yangtze in China. My favorite is the Nirehuao in Southern Chile. Very sweet to the taste, very clear, and full of large trout. I boil and filter the water before I taste it. I’m not a complete fool.”

“No, I can see that.”

Stromsoe noted that each mason jar was approximately three-quarters full. Some had sediment on the bottom. In a small stand beside each jar was a color photograph of the body of water, with the name, location, date, and time of day handwritten in elaborate cursive script. On another stand was a map of the world with a tiny blue-, red-, or white-headed pin marking the location.

“Blue for river, red for stream, white for creek.”

“What’s the difference between a stream and a creek?” he asked.

“A stream is a small river. A creek is a small stream, often a tributary to a river. A creek can also be called a branch, brook, kill, run, according to where you go. The truth is there are creeks bigger than streams or rivers. The terminology isn’t precise, which adds to the romance and fun of it.”

Stromsoe nodded as he toured the tables. The woman had traveled to every continent to collect jars of river water.

“Why not lakes?” he asked.

“It has to be moving water. That’s just a personal standard I have.”

Stromsoe stopped at the Nile and looked at the pale, sandy-colored water.

“They didn’t turn out quite like I’d hoped,” she said. “I thought each jar would have a kind of spirit to it, something talismanic. After fifty rivers I realized a jar of water is pretty much a jar of water, though the argument has been made that we drink the same water that Jesus did or Hitler or Perry Como. But when I sign up for something, I’m in for the duration, you know? I go down with the ship. I don’t quit on anything, ever.”

“I’m impressed,” said Stromsoe. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a passion displayed so literally and scientifically.”

“I am a scientist.”

“It clearly shows. Interesting that different rivers have different shades of water.”

“Isn’t it?” asked Frankie. “Really, a hundred and eighty-two shades of water in one room. And each one is from just one fraction of its river. Some people might consider this a useless collection of jars. But aren’t they lovely? I had this idea of emptying them all into a clear, curvy, tube like they make for hamsters, and running the little river all over the house. World River, I was going to call it. But who wants a river in a tube? They actually have one — the Lower Owens comes out of a concrete tube into the Gorge Power Plant. Then it comes all the way to L.A., mostly in a tube. Weirdest thing to put a river inside something. Makes you want to let it go, like an animal in a cage.”

Stromsoe saw that there were more tables around the perimeter of the room. These were glass-topped also, and contained rocks.

“Those are just river, stream, and creek rocks,” she said quietly. “One from each.”

Stromsoe moved slowly from table to table. Some of the rocks were beautifully shaped and colored; others were dull and common.

“The Blackfoot in Montana has the best rocks,” she said.

“Very nice, almost red,” said Stromsoe.

“If you get that one wet, it has owl eyes.”

“Unusual.”

“The Liffey River jar broke on my way home from Ireland,” she said. “Customs at LAX took the Mures River from Romania, which broke my heart because Vlad the Impaler drank from it. They said it was illegal to import because I hadn’t purchased it. Then Security at San Diego confiscated my Congo from Zaire right after 9/11, which you know darn well Conrad touched. So I’ve got some replacements to get.”

Stromsoe turned to face her. “Is part of your interest which people have touched which river?”

“Part. A river is liquid history.”

“I like your collection.”

“Thank you. What do you think of me?”

“You’re one of the least ordinary women I’ve ever met.”

She blushed and shrugged. “When I hit five-ten in the eighth grade I figured, hey, I’m not ordinary. Collecting rivers was easy after that.”

“Not ordinary is good.”

She nodded. “Well, I’m great, then. Maybe we’ll finish that tea.”

After he left Frankie’s house, Stromsoe waited at the end of her road again but the red Mustang never materialized. He saw no stalkers or suspicious vehicles. The coyotes hustled by.

He retraced his way out to the Bonsall property, parked in a tight little turnout just past the gate, and walked up the rise. There was no pickup truck out front, no lights on inside. Stromsoe got his flashlight and walked down the dirt road in the waxing moonlight. It had been a while since he’d noticed the difference twenty-four hours can make in the amount of moonlight.

The sweet smell of water hit him — what little river was it that flowed through here, he thought, the San Luis Rey? — no wonder she bought a parcel. He heard owls hoo-hooing to one another from the trees but they stopped as he got closer.

The big sliding barn door was locked. So were both of the convenience doors, front and rear.

He stood on an empty plastic drum and jimmied a window with his pocketknife, climbing through with great slowness and pain. He hadn’t twisted himself into such complex postures in years.

Inside, as he moved his flashlight right to left, he saw in installments the same basic scene as last night — the workbenches in the middle, the tables along the far wall cluttered with their beakers and bottles and drums, the office in the back.

But the second tower now stood complete beside the first. Stromsoe went over and touched it, smelling the clean odor of freshly cut redwood and waterproofing compound.

He went to the tables against the far wall and looked at the labels on some of the containers: sulfates and sulfides, chlorides and chlorates, hydrates and hydrides, iodides, aldehydes, alcohols, ketones.

This close to the chemical containers the barn smelled different — the air was sharp and aggressive.

Stromsoe walked over to the corner office, following his light beam. The door was open and Stromsoe went in. He flicked on the lights and the large, neat room came to life. There were bookshelves nearly covering two of the walls. There was a long table with a computer and peripherals, a phone/fax, and a copier. There were four weather-station monitors with current readouts for exterior and interior temperature, humidity, wind velocity and direction, barometric pressure, daily rain, monthly rain, yearly rain. There was a black leather chair on wheels. The top of the table was littered with notebooks, science journals, and loose papers held down by rocks. Stromsoe lifted a piece of gray-and-black granite. The sticker on the bottom said San Juan River, 8/1/2002 in Frankie’s ornate handwriting.

On the office walls were framed black-and-white photographs of a young man with a thin face and a cutting smile. In most of the pictures he wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a necktie, and fedora. In some he was standing on towers that looked just like the ones out on the barn floor. In others, he was using gloves and longhandled tools to mix something in five-gallon drums. The smile was self-conscious and playful. It was hard to place the year. Stromsoe guessed the 1920s. He could have been Frankie Hatfield’s great-great-grandfather. A moonshiner? A country still? That would explain the containers, the towers, maybe even the guy’s smile.

Stromsoe went to one of the bookshelves and scanned titles. Most of the books dealt with the sciences — chemistry, astronomy, physics, biology, hydrology, meteorology. Some were state history. But most were about weather and weather forecasting. And most of the volumes appeared to be decades old.

Stromsoe picked one out: Semi-Tropical California: Its Climate, Healthfulness, Productiveness and Scenery, published in 1874. It was hardcover, with illustrations, charts, and maps. There was a 1907 edition of The Conservation of Natural Resources by Theodore Roo sevelt. And an entire shelf devoted to Weatherwise magazines dating back to 1948.

But the shelves along the other wall held more recently published books and articles: Deepest Valley: Guide to Owens Valley, 1995; Water and the California Dream, published in 2000; Weather Modification Schemes, 2002; and Cloud Seeding in Korea from 2003.

There were booklets and stapled abstracts: Daily Weather Maps, Weekly Series, collected since 1990; Making the Synoptic Weather Map, 1998; and Useful Symbolic Station Models, published in 1999.

Stromsoe moved down the shelf and looked at titles. On one shelf he found a stack of national weather maps. He could hardly make sense of them for all the symbols and designs. On another, two boxes labeled letters from g-g-g’pa. He opened one. The first envelope he lifted out had a return address for Charles Hatfield of San Diego. He set it back in the nearly full box.

A handsome leather magazine holder caught his eye. The first magazine was The Journal of San Diego History from 1970. On the cover was an illustration of the same man pictured on the office walls — slender, wearing a suit and hat — apparently analyzing the contents of a test tube of some kind.

The title of the article was “When the Rainmaker Came to San Diego.”

He scanned through the article. “Professional rainmaker” Charles Hatfield had contracted with the drought-stricken city of San Diego to bring forty to fifty inches of rain to the city’s Morena Reservoir in 1916. He was to be paid ten thousand dollars, but only if he was successful. He set up his wooden towers near the reservoir and mixed his “secret chemicals” that he guaranteed would bring rain. A short time later it started raining and didn’t stop. So much rain fell it overflowed the reservoir, flooded the city, broke a dam, and ruined thousands of acres of property. Hatfield was run out of town without being paid.

The last part of the article was interviews with experts who said that Hatfield’s success was simple coincidence, that his secret chemicals were bogus, that Hatfield was a hustler who simply studied the weather patterns for San Diego and tried to defraud the city.

I’ll be damned, thought Stromsoe. Frankie’s trying to make rain.

He took the magazine over to the wall where the pictures hung, held it up, and made sure that he was looking at the same guy. No doubt, he thought. Same face. Same hat and clothes. Hatfield, the rainmaker.

He compared the pictures of the towers to the towers that Frankie and the old man had made.

Stromsoe shook his head. Frankie Hatfield’s trying to make rain like her great-great-granddaddy did.

In an odd and admiring way, he wasn’t surprised.

Stromsoe turned off the office lights, found his way to the leather chair, and sat. He aimed his flashlight beam on one of the photographs of Charles Hatfield. Stromsoe smiled slightly, then clicked off the light and set it on the desk. He locked his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes.

The weather lady who makes rain, he thought.

He wondered if she had met with any success in her rainmaking venture, if she’d told anyone about it, if she was sane.

It was possible that the answer to all three questions was no.

He sat for a few minutes, thinking about how easy it was for catastrophe and heartbreak to kill your hope and your wonder. The death of hope and wonder was the hidden cost charged by every criminal, torturer, and terrorist. Few wrote about that, how the facts of loss are not the truth of loss. Few seemed to realize how often and easily the beautiful things vanish, except those from whom they had vanished. And most of those people didn’t have much left to say, did they, because without hope and wonder you can’t even move your lips. A lot of them were in their own private Miami hotel rooms, as surely as he had been, ending things slowly, good citizens to the end.

So why not put a river in a bottle?

Make it rain.

Amen, sister.

A few minutes later Stromsoe turned off the lights in the office, followed his flashlight to the window, and climbed back out. He landed on the drum with a hollow thud, hopped off.

When he turned and looked up the dirt road he could see the guy fifty yards out ahead, looking over his shoulder and hauling ass for the gate.

13

Stromsoe broke into a run, swinging his arms and getting his knees up as best he could.

When he came over the rise he saw that he might actually catch up before the guy got to his car, or at least in time to throw himself onto the back of it like a PI in a movie.

Maybe.

Pins smarting and joints stiff, Stromsoe dug down for all the speed he could get. The guy hopped the gate. Same guy as in La Jolla, Stromsoe saw — same square shoulders and squat-legged sprint. Same gold sedan.

The man was at his car, struggling with his keys while he stared at Stromsoe in apparent fear. The car door swung open. Stromsoe timed his stride to launch himself over the gate like a pole-vaulter. It worked. Midair he saw the car door open and the lights flash on but Stromsoe landed square, took three quick steps, and tackled the guy just as he hit the seat.

Stromsoe immediately felt his weight advantage, so he used it. Covering the struggling man with his big body, he found the guy’s hands and pinned them back onto the passenger seat. It was harder than he thought with his little finger missing — an entire one-tenth of his hand tools gone. The guy yelled in pain and head-butted Stromsoe hard right between the eyes, so Stromsoe butted him hard back. He used his weight to slow the guy’s breathing. When he felt him getting tired he let go and punched him in the jaw and wrestled him over. Then Stromsoe swiped out the plastic wrist restraint from his back pants pocket. He wrenched the guy’s arms back, cinched the restraints with the flourish of a calf roper, dragged the now unstruggling man out of the car, lifted him by his belt and collar, and dumped him facedown across the hood of his own sedan. The guy’s chest heaved and his breath made a patch of fog on the gold paint. Stromsoe patted him for weapons and tossed his wallet onto the front seat. Then he flipped the guy faceup and patted him for weapons again.

Stromsoe stepped back, panting. “Relax, hot rod. You’re mine now.”

“Chinga tu madre!”

“Yeah, sure, first chance I get.”

“Gimme my lawyer.”

“I’m not a cop, so you don’t get a lawyer. You just get me. How come you’re following Frankie around?”

“Frankie who, man? I don’t follow no guys around.”

“Damn,” said Stromsoe. “I work that hard just to collar an idiot. Look, let me sketch this out for you — I’m calling Frankie Hatfield and the cops, she’ll ID you, and you’re going to jail for trespassing, stalking, and aggravated assault. They’ll set bail sometime tomorrow and it will be high because she’s a star and you’re a dumb-ass. She’s got pictures of you lurking around her property, for chrissakes. So you’re meat. Right now we’re going to my car to get my cell phone.”

Stromsoe pulled on the guy’s foot to slide him off the hood.

“No! Okay, okay, okay. I’m just doing what I do, man. Just... don’t call any cops.”

“So you’re going to talk to me?”

“Yeah, man, yeah.”

“Get started.”

Stromsoe tied the guy’s bootlaces together. They were workingman’s boots, grease-stained suede and soles worn smooth. The laces were regulation brown, not sureño gangster blue or norteño gangster red. He wore jeans and a gang-neutral black T-shirt. The guy was younger than Stromsoe had figured — midtwenties at most. He was short — five foot six, maybe. He looked Hispanic, but could easily be something else. The only accent Stromsoe could detect was Southern Californian. Stromsoe ran his flashlight over the guy’s arms for gang or prison tats but saw none.

“I saw her on TV, man. I’m her biggest fan. I went to her work and followed her to the different places where she does her show. I used the Assessor’s office to get her parcel numbers and from there I figured out what she owned and where she lived.”

Stromsoe picked up the wallet and sat in the driver’s seat. He checked the glove box for a gun but came out with a handful of digital snapshots and a cell phone instead. He put the phone back and flipped through the pictures in the poor interior light: Frankie Hatfield outside her home, going into the Bonsall barn, doing a live report from what looked like Imperial Beach. The shots had probably been printed side by side on picture paper, then cut out in a hurry.

“Yeah, hot rod — Assessor’s office. Keep talking.”

“So I went and looked at her, man. I just looked. I didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

“You just like to look?” asked Stromsoe.

“You seen her. You know.”

“Know what?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“There are lots of beautiful women you don’t stalk.”

The guy said nothing for a beat. “But she’s totally giant, man. A perfect, giant lady.”

“You’re stalking her because she’s tall?”

Again, the guy was quiet for a moment.

“Because she’s tall and beautiful,” he said. “That’s what it is, all it can ever be, man.”

Stromsoe used his flashlight and both sides of a business card from his wallet to take down the driver’s-license information:

“Yep, she’s six inches taller than you, John.”

“You see what I mean then, man. You her boyfriend? Or are you a bodyguard she hired?”

“You like to wag it while you look, John?”

“It ain’t that! I don’t do that never, ever.”

Stromsoe counted the money in the wallet — sixty-four dollars, plus an ATM card, a video-store membership, and a car-wash card with three washes punched out and dated.

“Ever been in her room?” asked Stromsoe.

“No, man. I’m not a panty bandit. I ain’t that kinda stalker. I can prove it.”

“What do you do with these pictures?”

“They’re for me and my own information. That’s my private shit, man.”

“Private. That’s a good one, John. Where’d you do your time?”

“Six months L.A. County, that’s all. They said I was a deadbeat dad but I wasn’t. The post office fucked me up. I taught that boyfriend of hers some manners, though.”

“Way to go, John. Why come all the way to San Diego to stalk a tall woman? Don’t you have any closer to home?”

“Not like her I don’t. You seen those hats she wears on TV?”

“What channel is she on up there in Azusa?”

“Uh, six, I think.”

“You think.”

“I got TiVo. I can watch whatever I want whenever I want to.”

“You can watch Frankie Hatfield over and over.”

“That’s the truth. What’s your name, man? Who am I talking to, sitting there in my own ride?”

“Call me Matt.”

Cedros shook his head slowly. “I call you bullshit.”

“You got a job, John?”

“Centinela Valley Hospital. Janitorial.”

“You can keep up on the child support, then.”

“Bitch married the punk and I still gotta pay,” said Cedros.

“Your kid’s worth it,” said Stromsoe.

“She’s the cutest little thing you ever saw in your life.”

“Then hope nobody like you follows her around and takes her picture,” said Stromsoe. “What’s your cell-phone number, John?”

Cedros gave it. He gave the same home address that appeared on his CDL. He knew his employee number by heart, which Stromsoe took down also. The name of his supervisor at Centinela Valley too — Ray Ordell. On still another business card Stromsoe wrote down the name of Cedros’s ex-wife and her new husband and daughter — all residents of Glendora. He even got Cedros’s parents’ phone number. If the statements weren’t true, Cedros was one of the best liars Stromsoe had ever seen.

Still, Cedros wasn’t adding up for him.

“John,” said Stromsoe. “I believe your details. But I think your main story — you stalking Frankie because she’s tall and pretty — is a crock. What do you think?”

Stromsoe aimed his flashlight into Cedros’s face while he waited for the answer. Cedros glared into the light, but Stromsoe saw calm and intelligence in the man’s eyes.

“I think I’m telling you the truth and nothing but,” he said. “When I saw her on TV, I just... man.”

Stromsoe let the crickets and frogs do the talking for a moment. There wasn’t much left to do but the obvious.

“I need to use your phone,” he said.

“What for? I get to meet Frankie?”

“You get to meet the sheriff.”

“Homes, man, I been cooperating. You can’t do this to me.”

“Got to. But the sheriffs are close, so no roaming charge.”

Cedros tried to wriggle off the car. His boot heels and head both pounded the hood and it looked like he might slip off. Stromsoe spun him back to the middle of it, where Cedros flopped like a fish on a rock.

“Oh, man, you cannot do this to me. Let me go. I’ll give you anything.”

“John,” said Stromsoe. “When this is all over, if I catch you around Frankie again, you will be very unhappy.”

Stromsoe dialed.

14

At ten-thirty the next morning Frankie Hatfield identified John Cedros in a Sheriff’s lineup at the Vista Sheriff Station.

Stromsoe hustled her to her car and got her out of there before the crime reporters could figure out who she was and why she was there. He’d had her wear sunglasses and a ball cap.

At the nearby San Marcos Courthouse, Cedros was assigned a public defender who suggested that unlawful arrest by the county, and assault and battery by PI Stromsoe, might be more appropriate charges than the ones against his client. Stromsoe observed. The defender talked to a young bearded man afterward and the young man took notes.

Earlier that morning Stromsoe got a copy of Cedros’s rap sheet from Dan Birch — assault, possession of stolen property, drunk in public. A total of six months in county. He’d never been convicted of failing to pay child support, as he’d said the night before. And no record of stalking, harassment, blackmail, exposure, or burglary.

Stromsoe was not surprised. After a night to think about him, Cedros still didn’t add up.

For one thing, Cedros admitted right off to stalking Frankie because she was pretty and tall. He had pictures of her in his glove box — a sex rap right there, thought Stromsoe — exactly the kind of thing you try to cover up, not confess. Then Cedros didn’t know what channel Frankie was on up in Los Angeles County because Frankie wasn’t even on the air up there. L.A. County had its own Fox affiliate and its own weather people. Stromsoe had checked with the satellite and cable operators for Azusa, and neither offered San Diego’s local stations.

There was also that cagey gleam in Cedros’s eyes, even when Stromsoe had taken him down to the hood of the gold sedan. Like he was thinking, figuring, acting. The guy just didn’t look right, in a way that Stromsoe could see but not explain.

So he sat in the courtroom and watched as tiny, muscular John Cedros was charged with stalking, loitering near a residence, trespassing on posted agricultural property, and unlawful interference with property. Cedros’s lawyer entered a plea of not guilty. Bail was set at seventy-five thousand dollars. A temporary restraining order was issued.

Cedros posted a bond for seventy-five hundred through a bondsman and walked into the lobby of the courthouse at five o’clock.

Stromsoe was waiting for him.

“You’re a nightmare, man,” said Cedros.

“My head still hurts,” said Stromsoe.

“What do you want from me?”

“I’ll help you past the reporter outside if you’d like.”

“Reporter? Where?”

“The short guy with the beard. I’m going to give you my coat in case he’s got a cell-phone camera.”

“You helping the weather lady or me?”

“The weather lady.”

“Lead the way, man. Keep that reporter out of my face.”

Stromsoe did exactly that, ushering Cedros to the parking lot and keeping himself between the accused and the young crime reporter. Cedros put the coat over his head even though the reporter never brandished a camera. Stromsoe got Cedros into his truck and started back to the Sheriff’s substation.

Cedros threw the coat into the backseat and stared out the window.

“John, I’ll tell you. I got to thinking and I talked to Frankie. I thought I could help you both out — you tell me why you’ve been watching her and I can get her to drop the charges.”

Cedros looked at Stromsoe with a scowl, but his eyes were cool and analytical.

“I told you why I followed her, man.”

“It was a good story but it wasn’t the truth.”

“It’s my truth and I’m not changing it.”

Stromsoe pulled into the substation and walked Cedros inside. He waited while Cedros submitted his bail papers to a large deputy, who handed them to an even larger deputy, who read them slowly and disappeared. A few minutes later he came back with Cedros’s car keys.

Stromsoe followed Cedros out to the impound yard to get his car. Cedros plunked himself into the front seat, reached down for the lever, and slid the seat way up. He checked the glove box.

Stromsoe stayed back by the trunk.

“Oh, man,” said Cedros. “They took my pictures.”

“They took them for evidence, John. Pop this trunk and see what else they took.”

When the trunk lock popped Stromsoe lifted the lid to shield himself, quickly reached down beneath the bumper, and felt the GPU locator jump from his fingers to the car frame. The locator was held in place by strong magnets and could broadcast to a receiver up to a hundred miles away. Birch had agreed that Cedros was worth a closer look, and the locator was one of Birch’s favorite new toys.

Stromsoe was staring hopefully into the trunk.

“Just get away from me, man,” said Cedros. “Let the whore hit me with trespassing — it’s a fine is all it is. Let her hit me with harassment because I didn’t harass her or nobody else, man. I never said one thing to her. I didn’t stalk her either. I just... looked. I don’t have any priors like that. The judge will throw it out. They got all my pictures, but that’s okay with me because it’s proof of what I did — I snapped some shots of a pretty lady I saw on TV. The Enquirer does it all the time and those guys get paid for it.”

“Who paid you for it?”

“Man, you’re stubborn as a goat. I told you and told you again.”

For the first time since last night Stromsoe thought John Cedros might be on the level — a short, garden-variety stalker who got off spying on and taking pictures of a tall, celebrity woman.

Using the locator receiver, Stromsoe tailed the gold sedan north toward Los Angeles in the dismal evening traffic. It was interesting to follow a blipping light on a map rather than an actual car.

Inching through Santa Ana, he saw a city that hadn’t changed a lot in twenty years. His old home was just half a mile from this freeway. The high school wasn’t far. Mike’s house wasn’t either. He passed a cemetery hidden behind towering cypress trees where as a twelve-year-old he had attended the funeral of Uncle Joseph, his mother’s charming and humorous brother. At that service Stromsoe had had the revelation that people were constantly entering and exiting the world, so that the departing always left the gift of one more available space, and we should thank them.

Glancing into the rearview, he saw a man who had changed drastically. Where was the chubby-cheeked freshman with a passion for leading the marching band? He felt unrecognizable. He hadn’t kept up with a single person from his high school, except for Hallie, who was dead, and Mike Tavarez, who had killed her. He couldn’t think of one person from his past who would surely recognize him.

To his surprise, John Cedros didn’t drive home to Azusa, but directly to the downtown headquarters of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Stromsoe had to pull over and watch as Cedros stopped at Gate 6, inserted a card, then drove in when the arm lifted.

Stromsoe looked up at the DWP headquarters. It rose fifteen stories high above Hope Street, a horizontally layered steel-and-stone fortress that looked down on the city it powered. One parking lot was shaded by solar panels. There were flowers in the planters of the walkway leading to the entrance.

Stromsoe swung his truck around and parked out front behind a LADWP van. He dialed Cedros’s cell phone number and was surprised when he answered.

“John, this is Matt Stromsoe, Frankie’s friend. Make it home okay?”

“Yeah, I made it home,” said Cedros. “Gonna get a cold beer out of the fridge right now.”

“Not coming back down to Fallbrook, are you?”

“It’s a free country, pendejo. I’m not afraid of you.”

“You working today? Going to tell Ordell about your adventure in jail?”

“Keep my boss out of it. And keep my work out of it. It’s the only damned thing I got left.”

An hour later the gold sedan pulled out of the lot and headed toward the freeways. It was nine o’clock by now and Los Angeles was a sprawling jewel against the black October sky.

Stromsoe fell back and followed the locator again. Traffic was light now and Cedros got himself onto the 210 going east for Azusa. A few minutes later the GPU indicator stopped moving. Stromsoe pulled over and waited twenty minutes to make sure. Then he got within eyeshot of 300 North Walton and saw the gold sedan in the driveway.

He parked under a huge, drooping jacaranda tree that had soon littered the hood of his truck with pale purple-blue blossoms but made him feel invisible. Scrunched down in the seat, he could see through the upper arc of the steering wheel.

He could hear the traffic out on Azusa Avenue and the peppy rhythm of corridos coming from one of the houses across the street.

Stromsoe remembered a corrido written about Mike “El Jefe” Tavarez. In the song, Tavarez is a new Robin Hood, while his boyhood rival — who kidnaps and rapes Tavarez’s young wife — is the “big swine” of the American DEA, a man called Matt Storm. Stromsoe had first heard it back in 1995. It was based on a story by a Tijuana newspaper reporter who had come up with a few scant facts that inspired the corrido writer. Back then Stromsoe thought the song was deranged and amusing but now, almost ten years later, he was angered by the way it reversed the truth for entertainment.

Mike had been the subject of at least a half dozen corridos. In all but one of them he was a handsome leader forced by gringo racism into a life of armed robbery, but who also found time to play guitar, sing beautifully, and write stirring love songs. He killed without remorse but was loyal to the woman who was taken from him. In one corrido, which was commissioned by a leader of his rival La Nuestra Familia, Tavarez was portrayed as a musically gifted coward.

Stromsoe had been mentioned only in the one — Matt Storm, the big swine of the DEA. He remembered playing it for Hallie one evening. It made them smile uneasily, and speculate whether Stromsoe’s interagency team of crimebusters would catch Tavarez before someone murdered him, and which would be preferable.

He listened to the news, dozed fitfully, his legs threatening to cramp. He straightened them across the bench seat of the F-150, rubbing the backs of his thighs. He hit the wipers and cut a cloudy swath through the jacaranda blossoms on his windshield.

Just after sunrise he saw John Cedros come from his house and open a rear door of the gold sedan. A pretty, pregnant young woman in a white robe and matching slippers walked behind him. His hair was gelled back. His shirt was short-sleeve, blue, and had an emblem on the left breast. The collar of a white T-shirt showed at the open neck. His trousers were blue too, his work shoes were black and looked heavy.

Cedros kissed the woman, who hugged him once before letting him go. She was taller than him by two inches. He checked his watch as he got in and started up the car.

The woman waved as the gold sedan pulled away, then walked back into the house.

Stromsoe followed the car at a comfortable distance, all the way back to the Department of Water and Power, where it stopped again at Gate 6.

As he watched Cedros’s car pull forward into the lot, Stromsoe used the DWP phone directory to get his number.

“This is the Department of Water and Power custodial...” The recording gave an emergency number and said to leave a message.

Stromsoe didn’t.

Instead, he called Centinela Valley Hospital and was given the number of Empire Janitorial, which did not employ a John Cedros at Centinela Valley or any other of its contract sites. There was no Ray Ordell in their employ either.

Heading back down the freeway, Stromsoe called Frankie.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“Sure, but about what?”

“Making rain,” he said.

She was silent for a moment. “Sunday night we might really have something to talk about.”

“Can you do it?”

“I don’t know yet. But I think the answer is yes. Meet me at the barn at six Sunday evening.”