To Catch the Moon (2 page)

Joan’s bravado fled as quickly as it had
risen. She rocked back and forth, cold, so cold, her body a foreign
thing that trembled uncontrollably. There was so much blood! How
could one man have so much blood? It seemed big as a lake on the
library’s hardwood floor, Daniel lying in the middle of it like a
marooned ship. She wished she’d never seen it in the clear light of
day, because now that she had, she would never forget it. That was
how she would remember Daniel.

Daniel, her husband. Her husband, Daniel.
Dead.

Snippets of memory careened unbidden into her
frazzled brain. Meeting him at the Cafe d’Orsay in New York,
stunned into silence by the tall, blond Adonis across the
proverbial crowded room. Falling into a canopied bed at the Hotel
Pierre the first time they made love, a bed over which he had
strewn the petals of a dozen red roses. Their June wedding on the
lawn of her parents’ Pebble Beach estate, five hundred people
bearing witness, the Pacific surf a crashing counterpoint to their
vows. Back then he had made her feel like his entire world revolved
around her. Before it all changed, before the cosmos tipped on its
side and he started expecting her to revolve around him.

That was over. Now he was dead. Gone. Daniel
was dead.

A widow, Daniel made me a widow
. Joan
shuddered. That made her feel ancient. Ancient and used up. But she
was young, only thirty, and had all of life ahead of her. That was
one thing Daniel couldn’t take away.

Her back stiffened. In fact, Daniel couldn’t
take anything away from her anymore. That whole mess with
Headwaters and her father’s living trust? That would clear up
now.

There was another good thing, too. The
campaign was over. She wouldn’t have to play the adoring political
wife for the next eight years. And it would have been eight years,
because Daniel would’ve won this election and then he would’ve won
the next.

And you know why?
she asked her dead
husband silently.
Because of Daddy. And me.

Maybe now with Daniel gone,
she’d
get
credit for all she’d accomplished. People would seek
her
out, ask for
her
advice. Maybe at long last
she’d
be
a dinner party’s star attraction.

She certainly deserved to be, far more than
Daniel had. He only basked in the Hudson family light. She cast
it.

It was just five in the afternoon, but what
little sun the Monterey Peninsula had enjoyed that winter solstice
day was long gone from the sky. A drizzle was falling, a mist
really, just enough to dampen the pavement, blur the view, and
chill your bones.

Alicia shivered, staring out the
floor-to-ceiling windows of the enormous steel-and-glass structure
that Daniel Gaines had called home. They overlooked Carmel Bay and
the Point, one of the most exquisite vistas money could buy, a
sweep of sea and sand that all day had been overhung with gloom as
if to reflect the horror that had transpired.

What Bucky had told her—she couldn’t get it
out of her mind. What a horrible way for a man to die. How
grotesque; how primitive. She knew she shouldn’t leap to
conclusions, yet one was so very obvious. Still, she had to wait
and see what the totality of evidence revealed.

She glanced down at the checklist in her
hand, scrawled on the yellow legal pad that also held her notes for
Monday’s opening statement, whose importance was now dwindling into
near nothingness. The top page had no heading, but she might as
well have written:
How to wrest control of the Gaines case and
jump-start your life
, by Alicia Maldonado.

In a small-time D.A.’s office like Monterey
County’s, there was a kind of finder’s-keeper’s rule regarding the
best cases. When something high-profile happened, which almost
never did, a prosecutor who got to the scene first could lay claim.
It was ambulance chasing, county-style, about the only way a
prosecutor could advance her career.

Well, she got there first. She could lay
claim. Besides, she’d won more cases than any other prosecutor.
Penrose has to assign me this case. I’m the best he’s
got.

And the bottom line was, this was big-time.
Murders didn’t happen in Carmel-by-the-Sea. But now one had, and of
a gubernatorial candidate, no less. It could make or break the
prosecutor who argued the case, depending on whether or not she
screwed up. That explained the sick feeling in Alicia’s
stomach.

She forced her attention back to her list,
the only thing that afternoon anchoring her to a sane reality. Item
one:
Get the DO J criminalists
. Done. They were in the house
collecting evidence.
Get Niebaum
. Done. The pathologist was
bent over what they had all begun to call “the body.”
Get
Penrose
. Done, unfortunately, because she had to. He was on his
way.
Call the Gaines campaign
. Done, with a promise to call
again when she had more info.

Her cell rang. She flipped it open.
“Maldonado.”

“Alicia, it’s Rocco.”

Great. Rocco Messina, the second-winningest
prosecutor in the Monterey County district attorney’s office,
clearly calling to sniff out the situation and see if it was
possible for him to sneak in.

Sorry, pal.

She made herself sound harried. “I apologize,
Rocco, but I don’t have time to fill you in right now.” She thought
fast. “Kip and I’ll put together a briefing for the office Monday.
See you then.”

She nearly hung up but he kept talking. “Kip
assigned you the case?”

“Yes,” she lied, and this time did hang up.
Another sin on her Saturday scorecard, and this four days before
Christmas. Some Catholic she made.

Well, she told herself, she needed
advancement more than Rocco Messina did, and it looked like she was
going to get it on the back of a dead man. A famous dead man. So
there you go. Sometimes a woman had to do what a woman had to
do.

She looked around, tentatively venturing
farther away from the front windows, wary of disturbing evidence.
The house amazed her, and not in a positive way. It was named
Dorado del Mar
since houses in Carmel didn’t have addresses
but names, a cute-ism that meant people had to trot to the post
office every day to get their mail. But what a pretentious choice!
Golden Treasure by the Sea? It irked her that white-bread Joan and
Daniel Gaines had picked a Spanish name. Somehow it seemed they had
no right. And the place looked more like a modern-art museum than a
home. Alicia half expected to find a souvenir shop around one of
its angular corners. It didn’t have much in it, and what it did
have was glass or metal, nothing plump or soft or squishy. It was
impossible to find anything you actually wanted to touch.

Though of course it was tremendously
valuable. People said the cheapest properties on Scenic near the
Point went for five million bucks, and those were the tiny
board-and-batten cottages. From the mid-nineties, Carmel-by-the-Sea
had become an odd place. Few of the founding writers, artists, and
poets who had given Carmel its bohemian flavor were left. Now most
of the properties were second homes. There were almost no kids,
because nobody who had kids could afford to live there. Prices had
been driven up by the rich Texans and dot-commers who snapped up
the beachfront, then tore down the classic chalkstone bungalows to
put up monstrosities like the one she was standing in now. She
remembered reading how Joan and Daniel Gaines had railroaded the
planning commission into granting them the permits to build, even
though they were going to obstruct lots of people’s views.

Nice. But then again they didn’t have to be.
The Hudson family was American aristocracy, like West Coast
Kennedys. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted.

She returned to the window and peered
outside. The Carmel police, with the aid of the county sheriff’s
department, had cordoned off the property with sawhorses and yellow
crime tape, keeping the huge number of reporters and TV crews
thirty yards at bay. They huddled in the chilly air and except for
the equipment looked like spectators for a late-season football
game. But the only kickoff here would be of a media circus.

A commotion at the crowd’s edge caught her
eye. A tall man, mid-fifties, good-looking in an aging Ivy League
way, moved importantly along the sawhorses, greeting the reporters,
shaking hands, no doubt remembering names like the politician
Alicia knew he lived to be. His face wore a grave look, as if to
convey that he was the man who would distill this tragedy to its
essence when the right moment came. She shook her head in disgust.
Now it would really start. One of the clowns had arrived.

Monterey County District Attorney Kip Penrose
made a noisy show of promising to return soon with a statement,
then let himself past the crime tape and in through the home’s
front door, reeking of pomposity and sea air.

“Alicia.” His voice was clipped. He took off
his trench coat, as usual avoiding her eyes. She knew Kip Penrose
wanted as little as possible to do with his rebel prosecutor, even
visually.

“Hello, Kip.”

“Where are we here?”

“Everything’s in order. Shikegawa and Johnson
are making progress. Niebaum is going to be a while.”

Andy Shikegawa and Lucy Johnson were the two
Department of Justice criminalists she’d called to the scene; Dr.
Ben Niebaum was the pathologist. Bucky Sheridan, the veteran Carmel
PD beat cop who’d answered the initial call, had rapidly been
sidelined as higher authority arrived. Alicia thought he seemed
grateful to be relegated to crime-tape duty.

They were nervous, all of them. The shadow of
botched high-profile cases hung in the air like smoke from a
distant fire. O. J. Simpson stood in one corner; Claus von Bulow in
the other.
Just do everything by the book
, Alicia told
herself, which was easier said than done when she wasn’t entirely
sure what the book said. She’d successfully prosecuted two
homicides but had never actually been at a “fresh” crime scene. Or
seen a “body.”

Penrose folded his overcoat and laid it on
the floor. Rule one: Don’t touch anything. “Who found him?” he
asked.

“Gaines’ wife. She told Bucky she got home
this morning about eleven from Santa Cruz, from some overnight
party she always has the weekend before Christmas with old friends
from Stanford.” Alicia paused. The next bit was weird. “She says
she didn’t find him till the afternoon.”

Penrose skated right past that. “So it was
Joan who called 911?”

Joan
. On such familiar terms with her,
wasn’t he, old Kip. “At two-thirty.” Alicia consulted her notes.
“When Bucky got here ten minutes later she was standing in the
street, pacing. He said she was kind of wild-eyed, kept messing
with her hair, couldn’t talk straight. Hyperventilating.”

He frowned. “And Bucky calmed her down?”

That was hard to fathom. “Well, he talked to
her for a few minutes, until she ran upstairs to the master
bathroom.”

“Where is she now?”

“Still there.”

Penrose’s face took on a horrified
expression. “Still?”

“Chill out, Kip.” She couldn’t hide her
irritation. “She’s fine. I go up every once in a while to check on
her through the door. She just wants to be left alone.”

He seemed mildly placated. “Daniel Gaines was
a great man,” he declared quietly, then turned away, and Alicia was
overcome by a wave of disgust, as un-PC as that might be while the
man in question lay murdered in the next room.

Did no one else see Daniel Gaines for what he
was? She’d read the newspaper articles; she’d seen the TV stories.
And it seemed pretty clear to her that he was an opportunistic
carpetbagger who married the daughter of a former governor and used
the millions he’d raked in from his timber business to launch a
gubernatorial campaign. Did any of that make him a great man? Hard
to see how.

“Kip.” She decided to broach the hot topic
right away. Take the bull by the horns, seize the moment, just do
it. “We need to talk about who’s going to handle—“

His cell phone rang, cutting her off. He
turned away and put on his official voice. “Penrose,” he announced,
then his tone slid from cocksure to sycophantic. “Libby, I am so
sorry. So very sorry ...”

Damn. Now he’d never get off the phone.
Elizabeth “Libby” Storrow Hudson, Gaines’ mother-in-law and the
widow of former governor Web Hudson, was one of Penrose’s biggest
campaign donors, hence an enormous blip on his political radar
screen. She was one of those aristocratic types: richer than God,
white-haired, thin-lipped, permanently wearing a disapproving
expression. A Boston Brahmin, people called her, though Alicia
wasn’t sure what that meant. Quite a character, though. Alicia
remembered reading that she’d even competed in the Olympic trials
in her youth.

“You’re in Santa Barbara?” she heard Penrose
say. “Ah, at the San Ysidro Ranch.”

A major destination for the rich and famous,
Alicia knew, where JFK and Jackie had honeymooned in the
fifties.

Penrose fell silent. Then, “One of my aides
told me Joan is holding up all right and I was just about to
confirm that for myself.”

One of my aides.
Alicia rolled her
eyes.

“Yes,” he went on, “let me put you through to
her ...” and Penrose headed upstairs, cell phone in hand, his
deputy D.A. forgotten, clearly caught up in his critical role of
connecting mother and daughter at this tragic hour.

Alicia and Kip Penrose had a robust mutual
dislike. She was a holdover from the prior D.A., and when Penrose
had ridden in on his horse he’d promptly demoted every prosecutor
who wasn’t a stalwart in his own party. She’d been among the first
to fall, losing her post as a department head.