SILVERMAN HAD BEEN in this neighborhood before, more than once, but it felt different this time.
Big houses, deep lawns. Huge trees overhanging the street. In some yards, jacarandas were in early bloom, blue blossoms cascading through the branches like fireworks frozen in mid spectacle. If the day had been sunny, the effect would have been dazzling.
In the somber light of a gray overcast, however, the beautiful street had a funereal quality, as if all of this—including the culture that produced it—was in its twilight, as if something new and disturbing might be rising to take its place, so that one day, even when the sun shone, the scene would be ashen and bleak.
They parked in front of Overton’s house. Within minutes, Ramos and Hubbert arrived with a warrant specifying that the search was essential to preserve the lives of innocents under imminent threat.
There was no reason to suppose a citizen of Overton’s stature might be a serious physical danger to the warrant-serving officers, regardless of what illegal and ugly business he might have been doing with Robert Branwick. He was a winning attorney whose weapon was the system, which he used against the system, and he didn’t need to turn to violence. A SWAT team was not deemed necessary.
After Harrow rang the doorbell repeatedly and no one responded, Ramos and Hubbert went around the house, looking for evidence that someone might be in residence, but found none.
With a lock-release gun, the front-door deadbolts were disengaged. When Harrow opened the door, the house alarm did not sound, suggesting that someone must be home.
Harrow loudly announced that they were FBI, acting with an emergency search warrant. No one responded.
Lights glowed throughout the house. The gray day wanted lamps, but this was lighting suitable only to a house at night.
The silence seemed to be more a substance than a condition, so heavy that it repressed the sounds the agents made as they cleared the ground floor, being careful to touch nothing. Ramos remained at the foot of the stairs, while the other three ascended.
By the time Silverman followed Harrow and Hubbert to the second floor, the silence thickened. Experience and intuition—and perhaps the unconscious awareness of a subtle malodor—told him this must be the silence of death, coiling through the fashionable house from the slack-jawed mouth of a screamer no longer capable of screaming.
When they entered the master bedroom, the bad odor was not subtle anymore.
Cut-away clothes, linked cable ties, and a few drops and smears of blood on the limestone floor of the adjoining bathroom did not bode well for William Overton.
In the walk-in closet warmed by overhead lights that had been burning a long time, the bad odor became a stench. Leaking onto a carpet that must have cost upward of two hundred dollars a square yard, the corpse might have been Overton’s; but identity would have to be determined by the medical examiner. Judging by the progress of putrefaction—a greenish discoloration of the lower abdomen, lesser discoloration of the head and neck and shoulders, swelling of the face, and marbling—the victim, dressed only in briefs, had been dead longer than thirty-six hours.
If Robert Branwick had been killed Thursday evening, as the condition of his corpse had suggested, Overton had been killed about twenty-four hours thereafter.
They retreated to the upstairs hall, where Harrow called the Beverly Hills Police to report a homicide.
Silverman said, “Security cameras in the hallways.”
“Yeah. We need to find the recorder.”
“Then we’ll know she did it,” Silverman said, and he wondered that he had not said, Then we’ll know if she did it.
His certainty could have been intuition, although it felt like something far more intense. It felt like an article of faith, as if Jane’s villainy were the central dogma of a new religion that had come to him fully formed by divine revelation. Once he’d thought of her with admiration and affection. But now in his mind’s eye, she had a dark aura, and there was a wickedness in her face that he had not recognized before. A voice spoke to him, an interior voice but not his own, and the voice named her for him: Mother of Lies.
8
* * *
VALLEY AIR SOLD, LEASED, repaired, and garaged helicopters, serving corporations and well-to-do individuals. The company also maintained a helo air ambulance under contract to several hospitals in Napa and Sonoma Counties, and operated a crop-dusting service.
The co-owner of Valley Air, Ronnie Fuentes, was waiting for them in the front office, though this was a Sunday. In his late twenties, he had the self-possession of an older man and the manners of an earlier century.
“Sergeant,” Fuentes exclaimed at first sight of Dougal, “you’ve been groomed and broomed! Are you planning to re-enlist, sir?”
“Hell, kid, I’ll always be too uncouth for today’s Army.”
When Dougal introduced Jane as his friend and associate, Fuentes bowed slightly from the shoulders and offered her his hand. “Friendship is as sacred to Sergeant Trahern as God is to a good priest. So it’s a real honor to meet you.”
Instead of decorating the walls with pictures of the aircraft in which the company dealt, management had chosen to hang large works of colorful military art—helicopter gunships and troop carriers and medevac units—portrayed under fire in chaotic and stirring circumstances.
“So your dad and mom are on a Caribbean cruise?” Dougal said.
“Yes, sir. For their thirty-fifth anniversary. Did you hear, Mom talked him into a year of dancing lessons before the trip?”
“Quito Fuentes on a dance floor. These must be the Last Days.”
“It’s the only time he ever used a pity defense,” Ronnie said. “Claimed it was cruel to tell a one-armed man he could dance.”
“Break dance, maybe.”
“They got darn good, sir. You should see them waltz, cha-cha, fox-trot.” He grinned at Jane. “Though Dad will never let his old sergeant here see him doing what he calls ‘fancy-boy steps.’?”
Minutes later, when they got down to business, Dougal said, “You say no to what I want, nothing changes between us. Understand?”
“Valley Air always fulfills its slogan.” Ronnie Fuentes sang a variation of the lyrics from an old Joe Cocker song, “We lift you up where you belong,” as Dougal pretended to be pained.
Fuentes refused Dougal nothing, though they haggled over the price, Fuentes insisting there would be no charge, Dougal insisting the charge would be enormous.
9
* * *
IN THE OVERTON RESIDENCE, the FBI agents advised and watched over the Beverly Hills police, and the cops quietly asserted their authority. The exaggerated consideration that each of them gave the others could not disguise the frustration that stiffened every neck in the house.
Jurisdiction was clouded. Overton had been a target of an FBI probe, but no charges had been filed. From the perspective of the BHPD, this was the murder of a citizen—nothing less, nothing more. And the Bureau did not get involved in murder cases unless a perp operated across state lines or killed a federal officer.
Silverman felt it was best to allow the locals to proceed with quiet Bureau oversight, in the interest of expediting the search for evidence and perhaps for a clue as to where Jane had gone from here.
Although he was convinced she had whacked Branwick and Overton, he as yet had little admissible evidence to support his conviction. Likewise, he lacked a theory of her motive and future intentions.