Compulsion (11 page)

The Santa Ynez Valley lolls between two mountain ranges, soaking up sun and grace. Blessed with shirtsleeve temperatures and vine-coated slopes, the region’s been mistaken for Eden. Where grapes don’t grow, apples flourish. Hills are soft-focus and gentle and so is the ocean breeze that tempers the morning. Tourists flock to the valley for wine, food, antiques, horses, and fantasies of what could be if only.

Most of the towns that dot the region – Solvang, Buellton, Ballard, Los Olivos – flourish under the attention.

Then there’s Ojo Negro, named after a ragged-edged black eye of abandoned lime quarry.

Set on an inhospitable triangle of aquifer-neglected dirt just south of where the 101 aims for Los Alamos, Ojo Negro once served as a highway rest stop. Prosperity had its drawbacks: pedestrians pulverized by semis, the kind of mischief inspired by transience. But people made a living. When the highway was rerouted a few miles north, Ojo Negro died.

So had Wendell Salmey, the sheriff who’d investigated the Bright-Tranh murders nine years ago. Milo had found out by checking a law enforcement database. He’d also set up an eleven a.m. appointment for me with George Cardenas, the new sheriff.

“Don’t expect too much, Alex. Guy’s been on the job eighteen months. If you can nose around, great. Maybe you’ll find some lonely soul who craves conversation.”

Ojo Negro didn’t show up on any of my road maps so I turned to an online service. The route summary warned of an unmarked exit 4.3 miles past Baca Station Road.

At ten p.m., Milo called again. Sitting in his car, three hours into surveillance, watching nothing happen at Tony Mancusi’s apartment.

I said, “Craving conversation?”

“Craving my own pulse. I just got hold of the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s detective who worked Bright-Tranh with Salmey. He told me the case was an unclosable whodunit from day one. But he’s retired and bored so he’ll do you a favor and meet with you. Donald Bragen, lives in Buellton. Used to be a sergeant, sounds like a guy who still digs the title. He’s flying up this afternoon to Seattle, catching a puddle-jumper to Alaska for a fishing trip. If you get to Santa Barbara by nine, he’ll have breakfast with you at Moby Dick on Stearn’s Wharf.”

“I’ll bring my harpoon.”

“Ciao. Back to my Red Bull and burrito.”

“You and Tony dig the same cuisine?”

“Not only that, the same greasy spoon,” he said.

“Empathy?”

“Cultured palates.”

I set out the following morning at seven a.m., endured the commuter crush from Encino to Thousand Oaks, got a little careless with speed limits when I cleared Camarillo, and was nearing Santa Barbara by eight forty. A few miles before the Cabrillo exit, Milo phoned to let me know Donald Bragen had caught an earlier flight and canceled breakfast.

I said, “No desire to talk about old failures?”

“Or the salmon decided to show up early, self-deluded bastards.”

“The fish?”

“Leaping upstream as if someone’s gonna be impressed.”

Now I was thirty miles beyond the beach town’s city limits, past where the 101 hooks inland and north and any notion of blue water vanishes. The Baca Station Road exit wasn’t much of anything. The unmarked turnoff was closer to six miles up. A bloodhound could’ve missed it.

Bumping along a carelessly maintained road, I sped through a cottonwood grove that ended as abruptly as a Hollywood marriage. The view on both sides was straw-colored, waist-high wild grass and a scattering of gray, twisted tree trunks. To the north, the Santa Ynez range showed a bit of skin but kept its distance, like an ambivalent starlet.

The old lime pit came into view and I slowed to have a look. Chain link hung with warped panels of corrugated plastic concealed most of the excavation but through gaps in the plastic I could see a dark maw. Skull-and-crossbones warning signs established a friendly ambience. As I started to drive away, movement caught my eye.

A mangy coyote slinked off into the grass, ruffling the blades, then disappearing.

It took a few cottonwood clumps and a lot more nothing before the grass gave way to an unattended junkyard and a bird-specked green sign proclaiming Ojo Negro to be ALT. 231 FT. POP. 927.

Half a mile later, I spotted a thin, black-haired woman walking along the side of the road, carrying a large metal cage. Using both hands to lug and keeping her back to me. The wrong way to do it.

The sound of my engine made her turn but she kept going toward an old brown jeep parked ten yards up.

I rolled to a stop and lowered the passenger window. She turned sharply, held the cage in front of her. Spring-latched animal trap, heavy enough to drag at her shoulders. Brown stains coated the bottom grid.

“You need something?” Early twenties, Latina, wearing a white western shirt, jeans, boots. Thick, shiny hair was tied back tight from a wide, smooth brow. She had gold-brown eyes, a strong nose, thin lips. Exceptionally pretty woman; all angles, like a raptor.

“I’m looking for Sheriff Cardenas.”

The trap lowered a bit. “Just keep going. He’s in town.”

“How far’s town?”

“Right around the first turn.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you that doctor from L.A.?”

“Alex Delaware.”

She said, “He’s expecting you.”

“You work for him?”

She smiled. “I’m his sister, Ricki.”

I held out my hand.

“You don’t want to touch me after I touched this.”

“What’d you catch?”

“Another ca-yote. One of the senior citizens George looks after has them messing with her garbage but she still won’t get cans that shut tight. She’s eighty-nine, so when she hears noise or finds scat, she calls George. It’s animal reg’s job, but try getting them out here.”

“You volunteer?”

“I’m visiting for a week, nothing much else to do.” She hefted the trap. “It was a little baby ca-yote, real scared, made pathetic noises.”

“I just saw a larger one near the lime pit.”

“They’re all over the place.”

“We get ’ em in L.A.,” I said. “Clever little rascals.”

“Not so clever they won’t walk into a trap full of cat food. George gets everything here. Bobcats, raccoons, rattlesnakes. He’s had reports of mountain lions but hasn’t seen one yet. Anyway, I need to clean up. George is in his office. You can follow me.”

Stashing the trap in the jeep, she drove off. The turn was half a mile up. Rounding it revealed a main drag named Ojo Negro Avenue, fishboned by diagonal parking spaces. Four vehicles for two dozen slots. Three pickups and a white Bronco with a cherry on top.

Ricki pointed to the left and kept driving. The road swooped upward toward a hill of dirt and a couple of struggling sycamores. I pulled in next to the Bronco.

The sidewalks were cracked and sunken, weeds taking advantage of loose seams. Most of the storefronts were dark. Some were boarded.

The active businesses were a white cinderblock cube painted with
Ojo Negro Sheriff
in block lettering that tried too hard, a parrot-green stucco bar tagged
The Limelite,
a dry-goods/grocery store doing additional duty as an insurance broker and a U.S. post office, a beauty salon/barbershop with faded headshots in the window, and the O.N. Feed Bin graced by a
Support Our Troops
banner.

The weekly specials at the bin were oats and hay and live breeder rabbits from “Belgium, Europe.”

In the sheriff’s office, a young, completely bald man in khakis sat at a PC keyboard. Behind him was a one-room jail as clean as his head. The walls were papered with the usual wanted posters, bulletins, and safety pitches. Cinderblock made an inhospitable bed for tape, and some of the papers had curled loose.

“Dr. Delaware? George Cardenas.”

“Morning, Sheriff.”

This sibling shook heartily and smiled without reservation. His skin was clear like his sister’s, his eyes the same gold-brown. But his face was round and soft, with none of that falcon-alertness. Baby-face; the lack of head hair did little to age him. “Coffee?”

“Black, thanks.”

Cardenas poured both of us Styrofoam cups, dosed his with Coffee-mate, and motioned me to sit. “You’re a little early.”

“My previous appointment canceled.”

“Detective Bragen changed his mind, huh?”

“You know him?”

“Talked to him for the first time this morning. I figured he might do that.”

“Why’s that?”

“Talking about the case made him kind of annoyed. He called it a loser from the git-go, like he didn’t want to churn it up.”

Beside his computer was a short stack of paper. He peeled off the top sheet and handed it over.

Sheriff Wendell Salmey’s summary of the Bright-Tranh murders.

I learned a few facts DV Zapper hadn’t reported: The name of Leonora Bright’s salon had been Stylish Lady. She’d been thirty-three at the time of her death. Vicki Tranh, a recent arrival from Anaheim, had been only nineteen. No disruption of the store, other than two dead bodies and lots of blood. Both women were left with jewelry on their persons, and a day’s worth of cash remained in the register, ruling out robbery.

Salmey’s spelling was better than the kid’s, but not by much.

George Cardenas said, “That’s all there is.”

He brushed imaginary dust from his trousers. “When I took the job, all of Sheriff Salmey’s files were in boxes in a storage facility in Los Alamos. I started going through them, trying to get a feel for the town. Mostly, he dealt with small stuff – apples stripped from a tree, lost dog, once in a while a domestic. He was in favor of diplomacy rather than enforcement.”

“Going easy on the locals?”

Cardenas’s thumb hooked at the jail cell. “Folks tell me about the only time that got used was if a transient needed to sleep off a drunk. Sheriff’s wife died eleven years ago, then his son a year after, traffic accident on the 101 near Buellton. Sheriff pretty much curled up after that.”

“Ten years ago is right before the murders,” I said. “You’re thinking he wasn’t in high gear.”

Cardenas sat back and crossed his legs. “I don’t want to talk ill of the dead, everyone says Sheriff was a great guy. But Ojo Negro since the highway moved is pretty much an oil painting. I don’t mind, but it’s not for everyone.”

“You like the quiet.”

“Sometimes I do get a little antsy and call my sister, ask her to drop in for a spell – we’re twins, she’s a nurse at Cottage Hospital in S.B., gets good vacation time. But mostly I’m working, so the quiet’s perfect.”

“Working on cases?”

He eyed his computer. “This is gonna sound stupid, but I write. Or at least try to.”

“Fiction?”

Averting his face, he talked to a fire alert poster. “Started with short stories then I read in some writer’s magazine that there’s no market for them, so I’m trying a novel. Haven’t started yet, still working on finding what they call my point of view.”

“Police novel?”

“Depends what comes out once I get the story set in my head,” he said. “I was a double major at U. New Mexico. English and criminal justice, couldn’t figure out what I liked more, so I decided to get some police experience, maybe I’d have something to say in a book. Did a couple years with the state police, then Ojo Negro came up, they hadn’t had a sheriff in five years, got a two-year state grant to fund one. My sister and her kids aren’t too far and she’s divorced and her ex is out of the picture. I figured maybe I could be a good influence.” Shrug. “Seemed like a good opportunity.”

“I’ve talked to a couple of detectives at Santa Fe P.D. Steve Katz and Darrell Two Moons.”

“Know ’em by sight but never worked with ’em. Mostly I was in Albuquerque, doing gang suppression. That got me close to a couple of homicides, I watched the pros, learned it’s not my cup of tea. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to help you much on this one. That one sheet’s all I found.”

“Is there anyone I could speak to who was here nine years ago?”

“Just about everyone still living in Ojo Negro was here nine years ago. Most of my people are seniors who don’t want to or can’t afford to leave. The grocery store brews fresh soup when there’s enough demand and the big day is when the Social Security checks come in.”

“Anyone you’d recommend to start with?”

His legs uncrossed. “Lieutenant Sturgis really thinks this could be related to an L.A. case?”

“Hard to say. The main link is a stolen black car.”

“Mercedes and Bentley, yeah, he told me. The original GTA filing on the Lincoln is under Santa Barbara’s jurisdiction ’cause the car was taken there. I checked and it’s archived. All I could find is a basic theft-recovery report. By the time the tags were linked to that Clint Eastwood-type loiterer, the vehicle had been cleaned and rerented, had over a hundred new miles on it. No probable cause to examine it, so that was that. In terms of people who might remember, I asked around, and, sure, anyone with a working memory recalls the case. This was the first homicide in forty years. But no one has any details about the loiterer beyond tall white male, long coat, cowboy hat. And I can’t find anyone who actually saw him.”

“Mysterious stranger.”

“We don’t get too many visitors and I doubt nine years ago was any different ’cause that’s still after the highway reroute. There’s nothing really connecting this individual to the crime other than his hanging around and no one knowing him.”

“The coat and the hat could’ve been a disguise,” I said.

“I guess.”

“Any way he could’ve been a local?”

“No way, Doctor. This is a real small town.”

He sipped his coffee. “Hate to say it, but the whole thing sounds pretty frozen to me. Maybe I’ll make up an ending and put it in my book.”

“Beats reality,” I said.

He tapped his keyboard. “What
you
do sounds interesting. Maybe I could pick your brain sometime.”

“Sure. I noticed a salon on this side of the street. Was that originally Leonora Bright’s place?”

“Nope, Cozy Coiffure replaced something else – restaurant, I think. The Ramirez family runs that place. Estella and Ramon, no kids. They moved here from Ventura three years after Leonora got murdered. Took that long for the town to get anyone, running ads in other towns’ papers. Before that, folks had to drive to Los Alamos to get trimmed. The crime scene was the last store as you leave town. Want to have a look? I could use a stretch.”