Self-Defense Read Free Page B

had
been used around the new trees.
    Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for
the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn’t
show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the
man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.
    The landlord said Sand was paid up for
another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got
permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray,
reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disconnected hot
water heater and the seams of a trapdoor barely visible underneath.
    An old cellar, said the landlord. No one
had used it in years.
    Milo removed the heater and climbed down.
    Straight down to hell, Alex.
    Spatter and shreds and gobbets in
formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.
    In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of
peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter’s mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots
planted with things that would never grow.
    A background check showed Sand had given
the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe
Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with
convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter.
He’d been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years
at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.
    He was picked up a week later, just
outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to
change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human
hand—a child’s, not Carrie’s, and never identified.
    The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out
to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings’ maid, who’d been in Mexico
during the week of Carrie’s murder and hadn’t been available for comparison
printing.
    I sat silently through Lucy’s recitation, recalling
all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over
it.
    Sometimes my head still filled with
bad pictures.
    Carrie Fielding’s fifth-grade photo.
    Shwandt’s methedrine eyes and drooping
mustache and salesman’s smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long
white fingers.
    How much restoration of innocence could
Lucy hope for?
    Knowing more about her background might
educate my guess.
    So far, she’d kept that door closed.
    I did some paperwork, drove to the market
at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin’s call telling
me she’d be home in a couple of hours.
    “How’re things at the money pit?” I said.
    “Deeper. We need a new main for the
sewer.”
    “That’s metal. How could fire burn through
that?”
    “Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently
that’s how they used to build them. And it didn’t burn. It was demolished by
someone’s heavy equipment.”
    “Someone?”
    “No one’s ’fessed up. Could have been a
tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax.”
    I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I’d
helped thousands of patients relax. “How much?”
    “Don’t know yet. We have to get the city
out here to take a meeting with our plumbers—I’m sorry, honey, hopefully this
is the last of the major damage. How’d your day go?”
    “Fine. And yours?”
    “Let’s just say I’m learning new things
every day.”
    “Thanks for handling all the crap, babe.”
    She laughed. “A girl needs a hobby.”
    “How’s Spike?”
    “Being a very good boy.”
    “Relatively or absolutely?”
    “Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit
bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine.”
    “That’s not good behavior. That’s
self-preservation.”
    “Actually she’s a sweet dog, Alex. Spike
charmed her—she ended up grooming him.”
    “Another conquest for the Frog Prince,” I
said. “Want me to fix dinner?”
    “How about we go out?”
    “Name the place and time.”
    “Um—how about Beauvilla