Mother Nature Read online

  Seeing that I’d spotted him, he drew himself back, awkwardly trying to stuff more of himself behind the gatepost.

  Revulsion filled my stomach. Was I looking at the creature that had killed Janet? You look crazy enough. No, that’s too easy. The sheriff’s detectives would have spotted you long ago.

  An engine coughed into life up by the house. Lifting my gaze from the binoculars, I spied a second man, this one sitting behind the wheel of a battered yellow truck. He had it rolling, soon hurtling, down the long driveway toward the gateposts, where he pulled up by the big galoot and leaned his head out the window to say something to him.

  I switched back to the binoculars. I’d managed to bump them, so I missed a moment of their interchange while I realigned them. The big man was frowning—no, pouting—his eyes trained defiantly on the ground. The man in the truck gestured forcibly, bullying the bully. He was a much smaller man, but the derisive look that contorted his dark face told me he was fully accustomed to ordering the big oaf around. The oaf pointed my way. The smaller man waved him summarily into the truck, glaring from under thick black eyebrows that met in the middle. The oaf cast one more distrustful look my way and then conceded, shambling over to the truck and climbing in, his head hanging in grudging defeat.

  My heart sank. It had been a tawdry little scene. Here I was prying into people’s lives again, and already I had found at least one life I’d rather leave unpried. With mounting distaste, I realized that as they lived right by the place where the body had been found, I’d eventually have to talk to them.

  I shrugged my shoulders violently, refocusing my attention on the ditch. For all I knew, I was hundreds of miles from the place where Janet Pinchon had been killed and from the person who had killed her. This was just a ditch in rural farmland, right? Just the sort of place you’d dump a body if you didn’t want to be seen doing it. The big guy was probably just some disadvantaged human chaff who had grown leery of the stream of cops, reporters, and rubberneckers who must have been harassing his family for the past two weeks.

  To hell with the ditch, I told myself. The photographs probably tell more about Janet Pinchon’s death than the setting. I put down the binoculars and stared once again at the lurid pictures. The second showed the unnatural angles her hips, knees, and elbows had assumed in death, as if she’d been reaching for something to grab hold of as she exited this life; perhaps her bicycle, which lay farther down the ditch, its forks bent and front wheel hideously twisted. I had wondered, when I first looked at this photograph, if she had simply been hit by a car while riding. But no, Janet’s body lay prone, and a close-up photograph showed that the ugly blotching of postmortem lividity had formed while she lay supine; at minimum, she had been rolled over, and more likely killed elsewhere and moved to this spot. The next picture added further grisly evidence to the story: a close-up, showing bruises where thick, angry fingers had gouged into her neck, grasping her from behind. Not the work of a hit-and-run driver.

  I glanced reflexively up toward the ranch house where the ungainly man had gone, hoping for another look at the size of his hands, but he was nowhere in sight.

  Taking a quick breath, I held the photograph of Janet Pinchon’s sprawled body at arm’s length, superimposing black-and-white death on the dew-drenched weeds. The act disgusted me. It was unreal and vilely titillating, like watching cheap television. I hadn’t even known this woman; how in hell was I supposed to do this job?

  Placing the photographs of Janet and the bicycle on the hood of the truck, I reexamined the next, and the next. The victim’s neck, showing the prints of those large, cruel fingers. The victim’s waist, revealing a sloppy effort at tucking the snug jersey back into skintight spandex bicycling shorts that had been yanked to one side. I swallowed hard to steady my stomach.

  Something stopped me at a close-up of her left hand, a detail I presume had been photographed to illustrate an odd welt on her wrist, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. I glanced at it again, trying to figure out what had. A hand’s a hand, right?

  Closing my eyes a moment, I tried to breathe down deeply into my abdomen, but found that the muscles were so tense that I couldn’t draw air past my rib cage. I concentrated, forcing my stomach to relax.

  Hands. Wrists. Left.

  I reopened my eyes and examined my own left hand. It was softer than it used to be, the calluses and torn cuticles healed since the days when I worked in the oil fields, or the days long before that when I worked with my dad.

  A vagrant memory wisped through my brain, of riding horseback with Dad when I was four years old, checking the fences. For once, he has taken me instead of my brother. His strong arms hold me snugly on the saddle in front of him so I can see the world from where he sits. The wide Wyoming sky is awash with evening color. I am supremely happy.…

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to blank out the memory, but my mother’s blue letter paper was not to be ignored, not since that August evening four months past when the first letter had come, saying, “Your father’s dead. His heart. He went quickly. Couldn’t reach you by phone. Call for date and time of memorial service.”

  At the time, I’d been so numbed all I’d been able to think was, Why did I have to hear it from you, Mother?

  Em! my brain prompted. Do your job!

  My eyes popped open. I stared at my hands. The minute hand on the watch on my left hand ticked hypnotically around the dial. Suddenly the watch came into sharp focus, and I looked again at the photograph. No watch. I took mine off and compared my hand to the one in the picture.

  They could have been twins, right down to the pale line left where the watch band had been, the sign of a woman who worked in the sun.

  At that moment Janet Pinchon came alive to me, a young woman trying to make it in a difficult world. Perhaps, as her father seemed to suspect, her death had something to do with her profession, or more specifically, her job. Perhaps she had learned something fatal, or made a mistake, a miscalculation, too green at life to handle it any better.

  I held the photograph to my heart. No matter what her story, Janet Pinchon deserved better than to end up alone in a ditch, the final page of her life left unwritten.

  I resolved to find her killer.

  2

  I should tell you a bit more about how I came to be Senator Pinchon’s private investigator. It began with a phone call from a person who rather officiously identified himself as the Senator’s confidential assistant.

  “Would you please repeat your name?” I said. Perhaps my tone was a bit snarky, but he had awakened me from a nap, and nothing he was saying seemed to make sense.

  “This is Curt Murbles,” he reiterated, taking such pains to make his name sound dignified that I began to believe he was telling me the truth. Nobody would joke about being named Murbles; it sounded too much like a fart in a bathtub.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Murbles; my ears are somewhat bad. Too many years working on drilling rigs.” My standard excuse for inattention. “What can I do for you?”

  “As I said, I am George Harwood Pinchon’s confidential assistant.”

  “Who?”

  An exasperated sigh. “George Harwood Pinchon, United States Senator for the State of California,” he intoned, clearly appalled at my ignorance.

  “Sure,” I answered, in one of those I knew that tones.

  “This is Emily Hansen?”

  “Yeah…”

  Murbles must have thought I was making fun of him, because his tone soured from officious to snappish. “The Senator has an important business proposition for you. Be at Denver International Airport tomorrow, ten-fifteen. The United Airlines Red Carpet Lounge. Don’t be late; he has less than an hour between flights.”

  After he’d hung up, I had decided that the whole conversation had been either a bad dream or a hallucination. But an hour later, when Elyria came home from work, she confirmed that Pinchon, at least, was real. “Ambitious, high-handed. But then, that describes most of them,” she said,
as she dug absentmindedly through her mail, her smooth hair shining against the lapel of the winter coat she had yet to remove. I was amazed that she could make even as mundane a job as sorting her mail an act of grace.

  So I’m going to jump into a small swimming pool with a big shark, I mused, as I studied my roommate-landlady. Today she was dressed entirely in a warm gray save for a deep ruby scarf. A fine spray of water droplets glinted across the crown of her head and her shoulders. Droplets? I looked outside, and saw that it had begun to snow while I was asleep. Winter had come to Colorado.

  “So what do I wear to a meeting with a senator?” I asked, staring at the place where my right knee was coming through my blue jeans. Dressing Em was a pleasant, homey game Elyria and I liked to play. There is only so much you can do to make a plain, garden-variety, medium-everything person like me look (to use my mother’s term) “intentional,” but if Elyria sold sow’s ears, you’d think they were all silk purses.

  “Your indigo flannel suit with the narrow skirt, crisp white silk blouse, black pumps with the heels. Those red Venetian glass beads. Serious yet subtly extravagant, the color scheme patriotic. It says if he wants to do business with you, he must prepare himself to pay well for your time.” She slid a letter opener into the first envelope and slit it as neatly as a butcher filleting a salmon.

  “Sounds nice, but I don’t think I’ll bother,” I. mumbled. I wasn’t feeling that formidable. I squirmed farther down into the damask cushions of the couch, watching for her reaction.

  Elyria dropped the first envelope efficiently into the wastebasket she kept by the door for this purpose, and ripped into a second. “Oh? Why not find out what he wants? Have you something to lose?”

  “Just my status amongst the unemployed,” I muttered.

  “Do you good,” she continued, as she ejected envelope number two and read quickly through a begging letter from some foundation or another. “Morons! I sent them one check for fifteen dollars over a year ago. Since then, they have spent at least twenty dollars sending letters asking me for more. They expect me to support such poor planning?” Elyria is an economist, specializing in minerals. She notices things.

  “Then why are you reading it?”

  “Touché. No, really, Emily, find out what the man wants. You’ve hardly left the house since you came back from your father’s funeral. It’s been, what, four months? Hmm?”

  I know I’m in deep shit when she calls me Emily. Yes, here she was, bringing up The Topic. I tried in vain to avoid it, my voice rising nervously: “Don’t you think it sounds funny, though? Total stranger calls me up and says his boss has a business proposition for me? Hell, Elyria, I might get whisked into a private jet and taken to Saudi Arabia, never to be heard from again.”

  Elyria gave me a wilting look over the top of the page. “Firstly, my dear, the Saudis are a more civilized people than you might imagine. Secondly…”

  “Secondly, I need the money? I don’t need no stinking money. There’s always the Dumpster behind Safeway.”

  “Secondly, you’re not the white slavery type,” she continued, perfectly stone-faced. “Slave masters prefer willowy hothouse blondes with cushiony bosoms, not earthy cowgirls like yourself. They don’t make harem pants in denim.”

  “I’ll pack my own, then. I don’t have one of them nice coin brazeres, but that don’t matter, I’ll jus’ rustle up sumpin’ outta Scotch tape and a couple dimes, little girl like me.”

  Elyria affected deep interest in another piece of mail. She knew she’d won, and being at depth a compassionate person, she was leaving me a residue of my pride.

  * * *

  DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT looks like a giant Martian meringue landed in the windy prairie twenty miles east of Denver. It is a lonely place, at one and the same time too large and too exposed for human scale. It’s so sprawled out that the parking lots seem halfway to Kansas, and an underground train playing goofy tunes is required to move the glazed-looking travelers from one concourse to the next.

  I was in fact late, having misgauged traffic, and when I reached the B concourse, I was confronted with another problem: there was not one, but two Red Carpet Lounges. I flipped a coin and tried the east one first, and was informed by the creature at its entrance that my coin had misled me, there were no senators there. I dashed across the Disneyland-style concourse to Red Carpet Lounge West, argued my way past the snippy raisin at that desk (who could apparently smell that I was not a member), and ascended the long escalator to the lounge’s sun-drenched, rarified heights, wondering why I detected the scent of brimstone if I was going up.

  My stomach was doing flips by the time I walked into the lounge, only to find myself faced with the task of trying to figure out which of the overstuffed, graying men seated there was the junior United States Senator for California. When I gave up and asked the demurely tailored odalisque at the upper desk, she pointed to a man seated not twenty feet away.

  He was the obvious choice, in retrospect: the photogenic one with the commanding stage presence and the extra half inch of sumptuous wave to his hair, betraying more than a touch of vanity. As I presented myself, the Senator narrowed his eyes for a moment, then inflated his chest, spread his thick arms along the back of his chair, and slung one leg onto the opposite knee, sizing me up with a contemptuous, self-satisfied glare.

  Confidential Assistant Curt Murbles managed to look down his nose at me from a sitting position. He had a rangy build with large hands and feet, and limp, thinning hair the same color as his oily skin, and as he watched me, he ran his long, bony fingers up and down the shaft of his fountain pen.

  “Senator Pinchon,” I murmured, offering a hand to be shaken, “I’m Emily Hansen. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Miss Hansen.” He did not shake my hand. Definitely a put-down, coming from a politician.

  Murbles took over the preliminaries. “Sit down, Miss Hansen. The acoustics are in our favor here, but you will keep your voice low.”

  I settled myself tentatively on the front edge of a thickly upholstered leather chair and smoothed my skirt, feeling like a schoolgirl in the principal’s office. Okay, I’m here; now tell me what I did wrong.

  The conversation was short and to the point. The Senator’s daughter had been murdered and the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t getting to the bottom of it fast enough. The Senator, apparently satisfied with what he saw in me, topped his summation off with, “I hear you’re good with this sort of thing,” as if that was all there was to that.

  “Excuse me, sir, but who gave you my name?”

  “An associate,” said Murbles.

  I didn’t like the sound of this. Besides, I hate being told no. It always presses me to behave rashly, or as in this case, lends an assertiveness to my tone that is born more of irritation than self-confidence. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to know more.”

  The Senator seemed to like that. His face assumed a more self-satisfied arrangement of curled lip and lowered eyelids. “His name is Jacobson. His daughter knew you at school.”

  Marcie Jacobson. Yes, that fits; her father’s in the House. How the old school tie doth bind. But there was still something very wrong with the picture. I fell into arguing my lack of qualifications. Which, as I’ve already described, concluded in my agreeing to take the job.

  So I began to ask what questions I could think to ask, making an attempt at a confident, professional effect, but Murbles soon interrupted me, emphasizing the confidential nature of my “errand”: “You may present yourself as a friend of the deceased, but you know nothing of the family, not even their names.”

  “All right.”

  “You have never met either the Senator or myself.”

  I nodded.

  Then the Senator spoke. He leaned forward and fixed me with what he must have fancied was his most charismatic, arresting stare: “You will report to me and me only. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if you find anything in her activities
that connects to mine, you will call me immediately and do nothing more until we have spoken. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “No buts. You will report to me daily.”

  As they rose to go, I turned to the Senator and asked, “How may I reach you, sir?”

  “Curt, give her the number.”

  Murbles extended a card with a phone number on it. “This is the private line into the office in Washington,” he said, releasing it without touching me, as if I had a disease of the skin. “Give it out to no one.”

  I shot venom at him in a look and turned back to the Senator. Something was still bothering me. The whole proposition was misshapen. “Sir, why me? There are private investigators available right there in California.”

  “Because you’re a geologist, and a good one. I want someone who can get inside.”

  Vanity is a potent drug. When administered during a season of pain and loneliness, it can be addictive.

  3

  So here I was in California, pretending I was a professional private investigator. What a laugh.

  I hung around the ditch site for another few minutes, looking westward. The open pastureland on which I stood dropped off gradually toward a bottomland that supported a line of trees that I presumed marked the course of a narrow stream. A quarter mile beyond, the ground rose sharply to the encircling hills, here richly textured with neatly planted vineyards, there covered with an opaque wall of trees. It was a landscape of soft winter grays, each receding screen of trees a fainter tint, appearing flattened like the fading layers of a Japanese print. Overhead, the sky was rich with moisture, a paler, shiny gray tinged with opalescent pink, like the nacre that lines a shell.

  I wondered if the heavy clouds were children of the cold current that swept the shore.

  I had never seen the Pacific Ocean. When I was a child in landlocked Wyoming, my Uncle Skinny had told me about it. He said you could stand on the shore and look westward and not see another bit of land anywhere, no matter how clear the day. The idea of all that water had horrified me. I had dreamt of it almost nightly for a month, a frightening dream, for always the water was cold and quiet as death. For a moment the embrace of that long-forgotten dream once again enfolded me, throwing my thoughts into disarray.