His stare was clearer now than before. “That’s a way of thinkin’ about it. And maybe true.” He looked back along the path they had followed. “Nobody’s lurkin’. I’m safe enough now.”
When he looked at her again, a memory from childhood for a moment carried her back twenty years. She had found a bird’s nest that some predator must have cast down from tree to lawn. Three small eggs had been clawed and bitten open, their contents eaten. Barney’s eyes were not faded-denim blue; they were precisely the pale robin’s-egg blue of those sad and broken shells.
“What is it?” he asked.
“What is what?”
“What is it you want to ask?” When she didn’t reply, he urged, “Go ahead, whatever it is. Nobody and nothin’ offends me anymore.”
After a hesitation, she said, “The other people who…who live the way you live. Do any of them ever commit suicide?”
“Suicide? Well, you got to set aside half of them, ’cause they’re crazy as shithouse rats. Pardon my French. They don’t know from suicide ’cause they aren’t half sure whether they’re alive or already dead. The rest of us? Suicide? Hell, we’re clawin’ at life every day just to hang on. Unless you mean slo-mo suicide like takes forty years of hooch and tick bites and rotten teeth and sleepin’ out on cold nights ’cause I don’t want any shelter nanny tellin’ me what to do. But that’s not suicide. It’s more like early retirement and poor man’s adventure. God wants to yank me out of here, He’s gonna have to pull real hard, I got roots like an oak tree.”
She said, “I’m glad to hear it.”
Belated understanding softened his life-hardened face. “Who was it of yours who took their own life?”
She was surprised that she told him. “My husband.”
For a moment, Barney seemed overwhelmed by this revelation. He opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. He looked at the gulls far above and then at her again. Tears shimmered in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, Barney. I’m dealing with it. I’m okay.”
He nodded, worked his mouth soundlessly, nodded again, said at last, “Whyever he might’ve did it, it never could’ve been you.”
He turned from her and shuffled away, bent under his backpack, carrying his trash bag, hurrying as best he could, as if it must be this very kind of thing, the tragedies of the world, from which he had so long been running.
She called after him, “Roots like an oak tree, Barney.”
He raised one arm to wave, indicating that he had heard her, but he never looked back.
33
* * *
FROM THE COAST, Jane drove Wilshire Boulevard east toward Westwood, the big risks of the day behind her, a smaller risk ahead.
The heavy traffic labored through the sunshine, the drivers aggressive, few conceding equality to others under the rules of the road, with the consequence of stop-and-go progress, much barking of brakes, much bleating of horns.
For some reason, she recalled Bertold Shenneck as he had been in his videos: the kindly face, the appealing smile. And she thought of the mice with brain implants, marching in organized phalanxes, as though to martial music on a parade ground….
The one regret she had about the operation in Palisades Park was that she’d needed to use her FBI credentials to be allowed to scout the hotel thoroughly to determine the best way to use it and to conduct surveillance from inside its front doors.
Paloma Wyndham, the general manager, would perhaps feel that she had been played by an arrogant agent of the Bureau or she would figure that the ID had been forged. In either case, she was all but certain to call the Los Angeles field office to file a complaint or to do her citizenly duty and report an agent impersonator.
The last thing Jane needed was to have the Bureau diligently on her trail in addition to the still-nameless forces determined to put an end to her investigation into the plague of suicides.
Of all buildings opposite the park, the hotel had been by far the best facility to serve as a way station for the transfer of the files from the briefcases to the trash bag, though she’d considered using her Ford instead. She could have parked along Arizona Avenue, a few spaces off Ocean, could have been waiting behind the wheel with the engine running. Nona could have skated to the vehicle. But if Radburn’s people were close behind her when she got to the Ford, there would have been no way to delay them—no equivalent of a chain and padlock—to keep them from dragging Nona down.
Besides, if she had used the car, Jimmy and his crew would have seen it and captured the license-plate number. If subsequently the conspirators behind the suicides tracked her to Vinyl and Jimmy, then they would know what she was driving, and she would have to abandon the Escape. She didn’t have the federal government’s deep pockets; she couldn’t be tossing away cars every few days.
In Westwood, near UCLA, Jane cruised in search of a house where she had once attended a dinner party. She didn’t recall the address; but she knew that she would recognize the place.
In ten minutes, she found it. Georgian architecture. Stately but not immense. A columned front porch without railing. Brick walls painted white.
She parked two blocks away on a parallel street and walked back to Dr. Moshe Steinitz’s residence.
Moshe was a forensic psychiatrist, recently retired at eighty. He’d had his own psychiatric practice in addition to being a valued professor at UCLA. He had lectured periodically at the FBI Academy in Virginia, and sometimes advised Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4 on difficult cases involving serial killers.
Three years earlier, Moshe half reasoned and half intuited the answer to why a killer operating in suburban Atlanta had cut out and taken away his victims’ eyes. That theory led to the capture of one twisted individual, Jay Jason Crutchfield, the very night that he would have murdered an eighth woman.
Jane doubted that a visit to Moshe Steinitz involved a large risk. He had stopped lecturing at the Bureau when he retired more than a year earlier. She and the psychiatrist weren’t close friends. But he had advised on three of her cases; they liked each other.
She climbed the front steps, rang the bell.
He answered the door in a white shirt, blue bow tie, charcoal dress slacks, and pale-blue Skechers sport shoes with orange laces. He’d always worn Oxfords before. Skechers were retirement gear.
Scowling over reading glasses pulled halfway down his nose, he seemed to be expecting one annoyance or another, but he smiled when he saw who had come calling. “What a world of wonders,” he declared. “If it isn’t the girl with eyes bluer than the sky.”
“How are you, Dr. Steinitz?”
Taking her arm to escort her over the threshold, he said, “I am very well indeed, and I’m even better now that you have swept in like a fresh breeze.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead.”
Closing the door behind them, Moshe said, “Then there would have been no surprise, and I enjoy surprises. But what happened to your long lovely golden hair?”
“Cut it, dyed it. Needed a change.”
At five feet five, just an inch shorter than Jane but seeming shorter still, Moshe was slightly plump, with a warm smile and sad eyes. His face had been so gently folded by time and so respectfully drawn by gravity that advanced age was, in his case, a grace.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said.
He looked her over as if assaying a great-grandchild whom he had not seen in months and whose growth he found remarkable. “As you know, I’m retired for a second time, without a profession, with only leisure activities, so of course I’m desperate for interruptions.”
“I’d be grateful for an hour of your time. I need your thoughts about something.”
“Come on, come with, back to the kitchen.”