With an Extreme Burning

EIGHT

Lone Mountain Road was narrow and not in the best of repair. Edges had crumbled away in places, making it even narrower; if two cars met at these places, one would have to back up or down to let the other pass. The road corkscrewed its way up into the hills for more than six miles, finally deadending just beyond the gate to the Chenelli ranch near the top of a piece of high ground some obscure local wag had christened Lone Mountain. Once you were on the road, there was no way to get off except to turn around and drive back down to the intersection with East Valley Road. It had been built in the twenties by the county to accommodate the ranchers whose property flanked it. The only other people who used it, as far as Dix knew, were kids on beer parties and lovers looking for a private place to park and screw.

It seemed incredible, now, that he hadn't questioned Katy's presence up there on the night of August 6. Just assumed she'd taken Lone Mountain Road on a whim, as part of her pattern of aimless driving. Blind trust. Now, though, his faith had been badly shaken. Women alone don't drive out to a remote lover's lane for no good reason; they drive there to meet a man, a lover. Park and screw. Forty-one years old and humping in the backseat of a car like a teenager.

Why?

And how did he get her earrings that night?

There were plenty of places to park off the road. Little clusters of oak and madrone, cowpaths that skirted hummocks and the boulder-size rocks littering the hillsides. Occasionally county sheriffs deputies cruised up there, when one of the beer parties got too noisy or out of hand and a rancher called in a complaint. But for the most part nobody bothered the lovers in their parked cars. None of the ranchers gave much of a damn, and why should they? A minor trespassing offense meant nothing as long as their fences weren't knocked down or their cows harmed or spooked.

This is a waste of time, Dix thought. I shouldn't have come up here. I don't want to look at the place where she died.

His hands were sweaty on the Buick's steering wheel. But he didn't brake or turn around; he continued to drive slowly uphill, through the monotonous series of twists and turns. He had gone about three miles now and there were no dropoffs or dangerous curves at the lower elevations. Just the scattered trees, the rocky fields of summer-cured brown grass, the placidly grazing cattle—Friesians, black with white harnesses, and brown and white Guernseys. And ranch buildings clustered here and there in distant hollows.

He had the window rolled down and the air was breezeless, sticky with early-afternoon heat. Dry grass and manure smells clogged his nostrils. When he glanced up at the rearview mirror he saw the valley spread out behind him, watery with heat haze. If a wind came up later, fire danger in the general area would be high. Especially in the hills to the north, behind the university, where there were more homes and fewer cattle to help keep the grass cropped low.

Four miles by the odometer. The highway patrolmen hadn't told him the exact location of the accident, just that it was “near the top of Lone Mountain Road.” Getting close; the pitch of the road had grown steeper, twisting through cutbanks, along sere shoulders. His back had begun to ache from the stiffness of his posture. He bent forward, squinting against the sun-glare.

Another half-mile, the road climbing at a sharper grade. The terrain on the south side had begun to fall away—gradually in some places, more steeply in others. Around a curve, through a stand of trees. A brush-choked ravine opened up below on his right. Another curve—

And there it was.

Sheer, rocky slope, at least twenty degrees down and a hundred yards long, from the road to the ravine. Gouges in the earth, dislodged rocks, burned grass, shards of glass and pieces of metal agleam in the sun—a trail of destruction that ended in a huge blackened section of the ravine and the higher ground on both sides of it. Dix's stomach churned. He drove past the place where she'd gone off the road, up to where there was a flat parking area half-hidden beneath a clump of oaks. For half a minute he sat there, gathering himself. Then he got out and walked back down to where it had happened.

It registered on his mind that the burned area could have been much larger, that the fire from the wrecked Dodge might have spread over hundreds of acres if Harold Zachary, the rancher who owned this property, hadn't been home and heard the crash. He'd notified the county fire department and they'd gotten equipment out as quickly as they could. The Dodge had been an inferno by the time the firemen arrived. I don't think she suffered, Mr. Mallory. Chances are she was … already gone before the gas tank exploded. At least that. It's all any of us can ask for at the end. To go fast, without suffering. Yes, but that hadn't made it any easier then and still didn't now.

They had winched up the burned-out hulk of the car, trucked it away, but the spot where it had landed and the fire had first raged stood out plainly. A blackened pit at the bottom of the ravine. In spite of himself, he imagined the stench that must have been in the air that night, and the sensory perception made his gorge rise. He turned away, stood with his back to the scarred slope.

After a time he grew aware of the road surface. No skid marks. The highway patrolmen hadn't mentioned that fact to him; neither had the account in the Herald. The road was straight here, too—a seventy-five-yard stretch from the oaks above to the curve below. Her car had gone over midway down.

The absence of skid marks didn't have to mean anything significant. Dark that night, no moon, clouds, and she might have been driving too fast or been preoccupied and not paying enough attention to the road. Wheels slid off the edge, she overcorrected or didn't correct in time … that was the way accidents happen. Still, there should be some tire skin on the road, shouldn't there? Or some crumbling along the asphalt edge. There were no marks on the slope close to the road either; the first deep gouges in the grass were at least fifteen yards down—as if the Dodge had sailed off at some speed and landed hard, nose to the ground. As if she had driven off at an accelerated speed, on purpose—

No, he thought, Cecca and I settled that issue. It wasn't suicide. Katy did not commit suicide.

And the highway patrol hadn't questioned the circumstances, had they? Trained investigators, weren't they? Yes, but every accident scene is different and it had been night and they had no real reason to suspect foul play and even trained observers overlooked things, made mistakes.…

How did he get her earrings?

It keeps coming back to that. She wouldn't have given them to him, not those earrings, not under any circumstances. They were her favorites; she wore them all the time; she'd be afraid her husband would notice they were missing.

Took them from her. He must have.

Before he killed her?

Up here alone with her, hit her, knocked her out, put her under the wheel, wedged the accelerator down with the emergency brake on, jerked the brake off so the car would shoot downhill and off the road?

Monstrous … senseless …

Before he murdered her?

Harold Zachary's ranch buildings were old, weathered, in need of paint—a reflection of the difficult times rather than neglect, because the grounds were orderly and the fences in good repair. The woman who answered the door at the house said she was Mrs. Zachary and her husband was probably in the dairy barn. Dix found him there, working from a toolbox on one of the automatic milking machines.

Zachary was a spare man, with a wild shock of ginger-colored hair and sweat glistening in deep creases on his neck. Not unfriendly, and sympathetic enough when Dix introduced himself, but wary at first. “Don't know what I can do for you, Mr. Mallory. The accident happened on my property, but that's a county road out there. Just not my responsibility.”

“I know. That's not why I'm here.”

“Then?”

“I can't help but wonder why my wife was up here that night. As far as I know, she didn't know anybody who lives off Lone Mountain Road.”

“Can't help you there either.”

“There was no one else around that night, no other car, when you reached the scene?”

“Didn't see anybody, no.”

“How soon did you get there after the crash?”

“Few minutes. Not more than ten,” Zachary said. “Knew it was bad as soon as I heard the explosion and saw the flames. Told my wife to call nine-eleven, and lit out in my truck.” His eyes shifted away from Dix's. “Wasn't nothing I could do for her. Wish to God there had been.”

“Thank you. The Herald printed a photo of my wife. Did you see it?”

“I saw it.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“I never knew your wife, Mr. Mallory.”

“No, I mean had you ever seen her before?”

“I see people every time I go into town. Can't remember them all.”

“Not in town,” Dix said, “up here. On Lone Mountain Road.”

“Hard to tell from a newspaper photograph.”

“Does that mean you might have?”

“Might have. Once.”

Dix took Owen's portrait photo of Katy from his wallet. “This is a much better likeness of her,” he said.

Zachary studied it for a few seconds. Returned it without saying anything. His mouth had a pinched whiteness at the corners.

“Mr. Zachary?”

“Couldn't tell much about her car that night, by the time I got there. The fire. Paper said it was a Dodge.”

“That's right. Three-year-old Dart.”

“What color?”

“Burgundy. Dark red.”

“Personalized license plate?”

“KATYDID. Her name was Katy.”

“All right,” Zachary said. He still wasn't meeting Dix's eyes.

“You did see her, didn't you.”

“Once. Just once.”

“When? How long ago?”

“Can't say exactly. Three, four weeks before.”

“Before the accident?”

“Yeah.”

“Driving on Lone Mountain Road?”

“No,” Zachary said. “Parked.”

“Alone? Or with somebody?”

“Alone. Waiting for somebody, she said.”

“You spoke to her, then.”

“Middle of the afternoon, sitting there all by herself. My property. I was on my way to town, so I stopped, asked her what she was doing there.” He paused. “Thought maybe she needed some help.”

No, you didn't. That's not what you thought at all. “And she said she was waiting for somebody.”

“That's right.”

“Did she say who?”

“No.”

“Or why?”

“No.”

“What else did she say?”

“I told her she was on private property and she said she was sorry and she'd leave as soon as her friend showed up. I said all right. Seemed like a nice lady. Polite. None of my business, really.”

“Did you pass anybody on the way down—the person she was meeting?”

“Not that I recall.”

“Where was it she was parked?”

“Right up the road from where the accident happened. Patch of old oaks. Kids sometimes—” He bit off the rest of it, shifted his feet and tried to hide his discomfort by bending and picking up a pair of Channellocks. But Dix knew what he had been about to say.

“I won't take up any more of your time, Mr. Zachary. Thanks for talking to me.”

“Shouldn't have, maybe.”

“No, I appreciate it. I needed to know.”

He started away, and behind him Zachary said, “Mr. Mallory? Don't mean much, I guess, but … I'm sorry.”

Dix nodded and went on without looking back. Hearing Harold Zachary's pity was hard enough; he did not want to see any more of it written on the rancher's face.

He drove straight to the university, to keep his two o'clock appointment with Lawrence Hampton at Guiterrez Hall. He didn't relish the meeting; he wished as he walked across campus from the faculty parking lot that he hadn't agreed to it this morning when Hampton returned his call. But he'd felt that it was important to maintain a tight grip on the normal patterns of his life, and it had seemed best to get the meeting over and done with as quickly as possible.

Hampton was a decent sort but inclined to be pedantic. He lectured his fellow professors as if they were his students; the joke in the department was that there were two ways to teach and interpret U.S. history, the accepted way and the Hampton way. In Lawrence's stuffy office—he considered air-conditioning to be unhealthy—Dix endured an hour-long discourse on Jacksonian democracy and economic sectionalism. Complete with graphs and charts and pages of detailed notes to support the not very original Hampton theories.

On the way out of the building he passed Elliot Messner's office. Elliot wasn't there, which was a relief; he might have wanted to talk, ask if there had been any more phone calls. Dix wasn't up to that. He still regretted opening up to Elliot on Saturday. And after what he'd learned today, the suspicions that were building in him, the only person he could or would confide in now was Cecca—and her only up to a point because he didn't want to panic her. Until he had a better idea of what had happened on the night of August 6, and why, there was not even much point in relaying his suspicions to Lieutenant St. John. Or the highway patrol, or the county sheriffs department. Without some kind of evidence, he had no leverage to convince any of them to reopen an investigation into Katy's death.

He drove straight home from the university. As soon as he walked into the kitchen he was aware of the message light flashing—twice—on the answering machine. The telephone company hadn't been able to get somebody out today; tomorrow morning between eight and noon, they'd told him. He stood watching the red light blink. One of the calls would have been from the tormentor; he had no doubt of that. And the message? Something about Katy's earrings, probably. Words he didn't want to hear.

He ran the tape back to the beginning without listening to either message. And felt better for having won even a tiny victory in this ongoing war of nerves.