A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [1]
“Then I guess I can’t help you,” he said.
He stood up and knocked on the window for the watch sergeant. He left the man lying on the floor.
1
“Someone’s coming.”
Terry McCaleb looked at his wife and then followed her eyes down to the winding road below. He could see the golf cart making its way up the steep and winding road to the house. The driver was obscured by the roof of the cart.
They were sitting on the back deck of the house he and Graciela had rented up on La Mesa Avenue. The view ranged from the narrow winding road below the house to the whole of Avalon and its harbor, and then out across the Santa Monica Bay to the haze of smog that marked overtown. The view was the reason they had chosen this house to make their new home on the island. But at the moment his wife spoke, his gaze had been on the baby in his arms, not the view. He could look no farther than his daughter’s wide blue and trusting eyes.
McCaleb saw the rental number on the side of the golf cart passing below. It wasn’t a local coming. It was somebody who had probably come from overtown on the Catalina Express. Still, he wondered how Graciela knew that the visitor was coming to their house and not any of the others on La Mesa.
He didn’t ask about this — she’d had premonitions before. He just waited and soon after the golf cart disappeared from sight, there was a knock at the front door. Graciela went to answer it and soon came back to the deck with a woman McCaleb had not seen in three years.
Sheriff’s detective Jaye Winston smiled when she saw the child in his arms. It was genuine, but at the same time it was the distracted smile of someone who wasn’t there to admire a new baby. McCaleb knew the thick green binder she carried in one hand and the videocassette in the other meant Winston was there on business. Death business.
“Terry, howya been?” she asked.
“Couldn’t be better. You remember Graciela?”
“Of course. And who is this?”
“This is CiCi.”
McCaleb never used the baby’s formal name around others. He only liked to call her Cielo when he was alone with her.
“CiCi,” Winston said, and hesitated as if waiting for an explanation of the name. When none came, she said, “How old?”
“Almost four months. She’s big.”
“Wow, yeah, I can see . . . And the boy . . . where’s he?”
“Raymond,” Graciela said. “He’s with some friends today. Terry had a charter and so he went with friends to the park to play softball.”
The conversation was halting and strange. Winston either wasn’t really interested or was unused to such banal talk.
“Would you like something to drink?” McCaleb offered as he passed the baby to Graciela.
“No, I’m fine. I had a Coke on the boat.”
As if on cue, or perhaps indignant about being passed from one set of hands to another, the baby started to fuss and Graciela said she would take her inside. She left them standing on the porch. McCaleb pointed to the round table and chairs where they ate most nights while the baby slept.
“Let’s sit down.”
He pointed Winston to the chair that would give her the best view of the harbor. She put the green binder, which McCaleb recognized as a murder book, on the table and the video on top of it.
“Beautiful,” she said.
“Yeah, she’s amazing. I could watch her all —”
He stopped and smiled when he realized she was talking about the view, not his child. Winston smiled, too.
“She’s beautiful, Terry. She really is. You look good, too, so tan and all.”
“I’ve been going out on the boat.”
“And your health is good?”
“Can’t complain about anything other than all the meds they make me take. But I’m three years in now and no problems. I think I’m in the clear, Jaye. I just have to keep taking the damn pills and it should stay that way.”
He smiled and he did appear to be the picture of health. As the sun had turned his skin dark, it had worked to the opposite effect on his hair. Close cropped and neat, it was almost blond now. Working on the boat had also defined the muscles of his arms and shoulders.