Ben’s house was in the flats on the edge of the city, down a dirt road that ended at a cattle fence that closed off Laguna Canyon and the coastal hills, a patch of wilderness, and the last of the old ranch. The place was a low-slung adobe, set in a carved-out square of orange grove—his father’s house, a cowboy’s joint, the house Ben had lived in until he was eleven. Emma had dubbed it “Casa de la Wade” three years before and the name stuck; they’d even fashioned a sign out of acetylene-torched wood and nailed it above the front door. When he and Rachel had moved back here from L.A. four years ago, they spent the first year in a rented apartment near the new university. He would drive out every once in a while to look in on the old place—the windows boarded up, the barn roof sagging. He had asked around at the corporate offices of the new “Rancho,” out by John Wayne Airport. Some of the suits remembered his dad from back when it was a working ranch, not a corporation with valuable real estate to sell, and out of respect to his father’s memory they let him have it for a moderately inflated price. The house and its acre of land hadn’t then been part of the town’s master plan; it was in the flight path of the military jets, and the Marines had wanted at least a quarter-mile perimeter of open land surrounding the runways in case an F-4 bit it on approach. The feds, though, had recently decided to close the base, and suddenly the Rancho Santa Elena Corporation zeroed in on the surrounding land. Letters from the Rancho’s lawyers had already offered him 10 percent over market value for the place. He had written back and simply said, Not interested, though he knew they wouldn’t give up so easily. The Rancho had already declared eminent domain to bulldoze artist cottages in Laguna Canyon. It had its sights set on the old cowboy camp at Bommer Canyon, too, just up the hill from Ben’s place.
It took a year of evenings and weekends, one hammered broken finger, and a nail through the arch of his right foot to get the place in shape, though mostly it remained a cowboy flophouse, stinking of leather and coffee grounds, and he liked it that way.
Ben forked hay into the barn stalls now, while Emma cotton-balled Betadine onto the cactus cuts on Gus’s flanks.
“You ready for softball?” he asked.
“I’m not going to play this year.”
“You love softball.” She had an arm; she could whip it around in a blur and pop the ball into the catcher’s mitt.
“You love softball,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You look at those girls in high school and they’re all, I don’t know, manly.”
“Manly?” he said. His tomboy little girl had a sudden need to be “pretty.” She’d started spending hours in the bathroom, rimming her eyes with eyeliner, thickening her lips with lipstick. “There’s nothing wrong with those girls.”
“I just don’t wanna play anymore, all right?”
“I gotta talk with your mother about that,” he said, glancing at her. Her face was tanned, her dark hair sun streaked. “And, by the way, you’re perfect, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, well, you’re my dad, so it counts like forty-five percent.”
Emma finished with the Betadine and closed Gus up in his stall. They had a big dinner planned—carne asada tacos, fresh avocado from the farmers’ market, corn tortillas he’d picked up that morning from the tortilleria in Costa Mesa. Back to the Future had just come out on VHS, and he’d already slipped the cassette into the VCR.
The Motorola rang in the cruiser. He stepped over to the car and leaned through the open window to grab the receiver. “Yeah, it’s Wade.”
“Been trying to get you on the horn.” It was Stephanie Martin, the evening dispatch.
“It’s my night off.”
“Hope you enjoyed it,” she said. “Got a call from a Jonas Rafferty down in Mission Viejo. They got a DB down there that’s still warm. He’s asking for you.”
A dead body. It had been a long time since he’d been on a murder scene.
“Gotta get you to your mother,” Ben said to Emma.
“What about Fiesta Night?”
“Friday,” he said, latching up the barn door. “We’ll do it Friday. I’m sorry.”
“You need a nine-to-five, Dad,” Emma said.
Seven minutes later, he parked the cruiser in front of his ex-wife’s new condominium in the center of town. Rachel opened the door a crack to let Emma in, but Ben still saw the man sitting on the couch, legs crossed at the knees, a glass of white wine resting in his palm as though cupping a breast.
“A professor?” Ben said, looking over Rachel’s shoulder as Emma waved a hello to the man and walked to the kitchen. “Drives a Datsun four-banger?”
She smiled, the dimple in her left cheek killing him a little.
“C’mon, Ben,” she said quietly. “You think I’m going to give you that?” She had used the shampoo he liked, cherry blossom or something like that, and for a moment in his mind her wet hair lay across her pillow next to him in the bed they used to share. “You’ve got a crime to solve, remember?”
“It’s a DB,” Ben said. “Barring a miracle, it’s not going anywhere.”
“Here?” she said. “In Santa Elena?”
“No,” he said. “Mission Viejo.”
“Thank God,” she said. “Is Emma’s homework done?”
He shook his head and Rachel sighed. “Out riding again?”
“She fell,” Ben said.
“Jesus, Ben.”
“One of those F-4s snuck up on us,” he said. “Spooked Gus.”
“She all right?”
“She says so,” he said. “But check on her anyway.”
“If she’ll let me.”
Apple in hand, Emma snuck behind Rachel and started up the steps to the second floor of the condo.
“Forgetting something?” Ben called through the cracked door. “Where’s my kiss?”
“Geez, Dad,” Emma said, pushing her way between her mother and the door. She leaned forward and deigned to present him her cheek, and Ben took advantage of the wide-open door to once-over the professor sitting on the couch. “Hey,” Ben said, nodding once.
“How are you this evening?” the man said, not even bothering to uncross his legs.
Pompous ass. “Got any outstanding parking tickets?” Ben said in a serious voice.
The man shifted his weight on the couch.
“Ben,” Rachel said, pushing him back from the door.
“A joke,” Ben said, holding up his hands. “Just a little police humor.”
“Go do your job, Ben,” Rachel said, and then she closed the door.
A body was growing cold seven miles away, but he walked to the carport anyway, trying his hunch on the vehicles, looking for a University of California faculty parking tag, a MEAT IS MURDER bumper sticker, anything that would give the man away as an elitist wimp. And on the fifteen-minute drive down to Mission Viejo, riding the shoulder past a red sea of taillights, all he could think about was that man’s soft hands on his ex-wife’s skin in the bedroom next to where their daughter slept.
—
THE HOUSE WAS on Mar Vista, off Alicia Parkway, .46 miles from the 5 Freeway, according to his odometer. The street was already a carnival, with neighbors straining the yellow tape and half of the Mission Viejo police force parked on the road, cruiser lights spinning blue and red circles. When Ben pulled up, Rafferty was standing on the porch, giving directions to a uniform. It was 7:47; Ben wrote it down on a yellow legal pad sitting on the passenger seat. Rafferty saw Ben’s cruiser and waved him in.
Rafferty had been a vice detective in L.A., and he took the job in Mission Viejo for the same reasons Ben had taken the job in Santa Elena—safe neighborhoods, great schools for his two kids, little smog, good benefits and retirement plan, and an easier caseload, which allowed him to put his feet up at night with a beer and watch his sons swim in the backyard pool. Mission Viejo was another in a chain of master-planned communities in southern Orange County that set out to create an idyll that never existed—lakes where there had been rock, grass where there had been dust, shade where there had been sunlight. It survived on being the opposite of L.A.—clean, organized, boring. In L.A., people were used to crime scenes, used to the fact that there were bad people and they did bad things. Here, the neighbors crowding the crime-scene tape already carried the look of communal shock.
“Got a DB on the kitchen floor,” Rafferty said, his voice pitched high with adrenaline. He placed his hand on Ben’s shoulder; his palm was hot. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Since moving south, he and Rafferty had worked a couple of cases together—an illegal-immigrant smuggling operation with tentacles in both Mission Viejo and Santa Elena, a medical-insurance fraud case.
“Homicide’s not vice, is it?” Ben said.