I was in the motel’s breakfast room the next morning. I was getting edgy, not having heard from Sherwood in a day. Charlie had gone back to acting like Charlie. Maxie was back from lacrosse camp.
Kathy was pushing hard for me to come home.
Our conversation the day before had been one of the toughest of my life. We had never kept things from each other, and for the first time in our marriage, I felt like I was. I knew I was! And I had other patients I ought to have been back for.
Since I’d arrived, it seemed like someone had been telling me to go back home. I was wearing down and starting to feel like that was what I ought to be doing.
“This seat free?”
I looked up, recognizing the voice before I saw the face. Sherwood.
The burly detective pulled out a chair without waiting for me to reply.
I looked at him, upbeat. “Tell me this is just a coincidence and that you just happened to wander in.”
“Yeah, like all your weird coincidences, doc . . .” He spun the plastic chair around and sat, facing me. “I was just wondering what you had going on tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I know what I should be doing! Staff meeting at nine. Possible interview with a new surgical candidate at eleven. My high school senior’s pushing for a new computer, so I thought I’d take him to the Apple store . . .”
“Heading home?” He grinned amusedly. “So soon?”
“Yeah.” I sniffed back a wistful smile. “So soon . . .”
“Too bad,” Sherwood said. “I was hoping we might take a ride.”
“Since I met you, you’ve been telling me to get the hell away, Sherwood. Now you want to take me sightseeing. Where?”
“Sonoma coast. Beautiful up there. Town of Jenner.”
“The Sonoma coast? It’s a nice offer. You want to have a picnic too?” I cut the sarcasm and pushed a corn muffin his way. “I’ve got a living to get back to. And a wife who thinks I’ve lost my mind . . .”
“I’m sorry about that, doc.”
“ ’Cause I’m out here, trying to connect these dots on my nephew’s death where there might not even be any frigging dots. So if you have something, Sherwood, tell me, and please, make it a good one, ’cause I’m really hanging by a thread right now, trying to do the right thing. Jenner, what’s there?”
“Susan Pollack.” The detective looked at me.
His answer hit me like a bludgeon. I waited for him to grin, like he was only screwing around. But he didn’t grin. He just kept staring at me with those heavy gray eyes.
Except now there was kind of a spark lit up in them. And it looked a lot like vindication.
“You found something, didn’t you?”
“Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves . . . But instead of just ‘washing my hands of it,’ ” he said with a smirk, “I went back out to the rock—not that I was buying much of what you were selling, understand—and started asking around.” He picked up the muffin and started tearing it apart on the paper plate. “Someone saw Evan there—the day it happened. Around five thirty . . . Heading to the rock.”
My blood was revving, and I had the feeling he was holding something back. I waited while he made a shambles of the muffin. “And . . . ?”
“And . . .” He looked back up at me. “It seems he wasn’t alone.”
Those words hit me like a bus slamming into a wall at a hundred miles an hour.
First it was the possibility that maybe I wasn’t so off the deep end after all—Zorn, Evan, Susan Pollack, the two sets of “eyes” leading back to Houvnanian.
Then I realized that that, in itself, couldn’t be why Sherwood, the last person who had a reason to buy into this, was there.
“It was a woman, right?” I stared at him, my blood surging. And then I knew! “It was her. Susan Pollack. She was with him!”
“Look, we can’t be sure,” Sherwood said, finally jamming a crumbled piece of muffin in his mouth. “I don’t want us to be like ‘buds’ or anything, but a street vendor spotted them together, as Evan was heading toward the rock. I showed the guy a photo of her and he couldn’t be entirely sure. She was a ways away and was wearing sunglasses and a cap. Smoking.”
My mind immediately darted back to the person in the car outside Charlie’s apartment. She was in a drawn-down cap. Behind a car window.
Then she tossed out her butt at me.
“But you think it’s true.” My blood was hard to hold back. “You must, or else you wouldn’t be here.”
“What I think, doc—and trust me, it’s all I’m thinking—is that it’s worth checking out. Just too bad you had to be heading home today, after investing all this time. Would’ve been nice to have the company.”
My face edged into a grin, a surge of anticipation filling me up expansively. Sherwood never once changed his expression. He only twisted his face up at the half-stale muffin. “This is what you eat every day?”
“How did you find out where she is?” I asked.
“California Department of Corrections. I have made a few buddies washing my hands of things over the past twenty-five years. While technically she’s not on parole, the state requires a convicted felon to file a place of residency. Jenner’s just a dot on the map. A tiny fishing village. Maybe four, four and a half hours from here.”
“What are you telling your boss?” I asked him. I thought of the stack of unresolved cases on his desk.
“Less the better.” He smiled at me. “What are you telling yours?”
“That maybe she was right.” I smiled at him as well. “Maybe the sun out here has made me a little dizzy.”
“What sun?” Sherwood got up, dropped the rest of the muffin back on my tray with a twist of his mouth. “How about seven A.M. then? In front of the hotel. And in case there’s any doubt, I’ll bring breakfast.”