To Catch the Moon (25 page)

The few people around took little notice of
him. In fact, most were grouped in one office, devouring what
appeared to be a New Year’s sheet cake. As he walked past, he heard
the pop of a champagne cork, followed by laughter and whistles.

He turned another corner and there in front
of him, at the end of the corridor, was an office whose superior
furnishings indicated that its owner had to be Kip Penrose. Just as
he made that deduction Milo watched Alicia enter the office from
the corridor perpendicular to his own and claim one of the two
upholstered chairs in front of the sprawling desk. She crossed her
legs, threw back her head, and stared at the ceiling, the picture
of raw impatience.

Clearly she was waiting for Penrose. Milo
retreated behind a cubicle wall and pondered what to do. This would
not be a good time to interrupt her. He wanted her undivided
attention and wouldn’t get it while she was waiting for her boss.
Nor did he want Penrose to interrupt them in what he hoped would be
a personal conversation. But he couldn’t lurk in these corridors
forever. Maybe he could wait in the men’s room?

He was considering that humbling option when
he leaned forward and saw Penrose enter his office from the same
corridor Alicia had used, then slam shut the door.

For a few seconds, Milo remained in place. No
one was near him. The party continued a few offices away.
Cautiously he inched forward. When he reached Penrose’s door he saw
that the office to its left was empty and dark. Its owner—R.
Messina, judging from the nameplate just right of the doorjamb—was
apparently gone for the day.

Milo gave another quick look around. Still
all clear. On impulse he slipped inside the empty office, half
closed the door, and stood in the shadows with his back against the
wall adjacent to Penrose’s office. Some instinct told him that
Alicia and Penrose were about to discuss the Gaines case. The
journalist in him was curious to know what they would say, and he
soon realized he would be able to—for the voices next door were
being piped loud and clear through the offices’ shared heating
duct. He stilled and listened.

“Why should I care if she called you?”
Alicia’s voice, indignant. “Is that what you’ve been upset
about?”

Penrose. “You should have warned me you were
going to interview Courtney Holt a second time.”

“Why? So you could have forbidden me to do
it? Or come along and fawned all over her the whole time?”

“It is highly questionable whether a second
interview was even necessary. You’re constantly telling me how busy
you are.” Penrose slammed something. “Maybe you’d clear off your
desk faster if you didn’t traipse off to Santa Cruz redoing what
the police have already done.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have to if the police were
more competent.”

“So now you’ve got a gripe against Carmel PD?
What the hell’s your problem with them?”

Milo could hear the rising anger in Penrose’s
voice. For once he couldn’t blame him. He knew where Alicia was
headed with this and it didn’t make much sense to him, either.

She was talking again. “They don’t even
mention in the report of their interview that Joan Gaines didn’t
actually stay in the Holt house that night. She stayed in the
guesthouse.”

“So what?”

“So I’ll tell you what. Given the separation
of the guesthouse from the main house, and where she parked her
car, she was able to come and go with no one being the wiser.”

Penrose laughed out loud. “I repeat! So
what?”

“So she
did
come and go.”

Silence. Milo frowned.

A second later Penrose spoke again, sounding
truculent. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have an eyewitness who puts Joan Gaines in
front of her house at 10 PM the night her husband was killed. When
she was supposedly asleep in Santa Cruz.”

Milo reared back from the wall.
What?

“She lied, Kip,” Alicia went on. “She lied
about her whereabouts. What else do you think she might be lying
about?”

There was a long silence. Then Milo heard a
loud scoffing sound, presumably from the D.A. “That’s absurd,” he
heard Penrose say.

“Louella is deposing the eyewitness right
now.”

Another few beats of silence. Then, “Who is
this supposed eyewitness?”

“His name is Harry McEvoy. He lives on
Twelfth, just a few blocks from the Gaines’ house. He—”

Alicia went on talking but Milo missed it,
too busy sliding his reporter’s notebook from his overcoat pocket
and jotting down what he had heard, though his hand trembled and he
didn’t really believe it. Either Alicia had something wrong or this
McEvoy character did. Somebody was confused or lying or
something.

“This is crazy!” Penrose, loud and angry.
“You know how unreliable eyewitness accounts are!” Milo heard a
slamming sound, as if the D.A. slapped his hand down hard on his
desk. “We do not need to second-guess Joan Gaines’ whereabouts the
night her husband was murdered. She is not a suspect in this
case.”

“Well, maybe she should be. Let’s see. Not
only did she lie about her whereabouts, but an eyewitness places
her at the scene of the murder at the time of the murder. She’s
shown no emotion. She’s shown zero interest in the case. She went
on a shopping spree two days after her husband was killed.
She—”

Penrose interrupted. Perhaps it was because
Milo’s heart was thumping, or because crazy thoughts were
thundering across his brain, or simply because Penrose had lowered
his voice, but for a time Milo did not catch the conversation
beyond the wall. When he could again focus, Alicia was
speaking.

“Don’t think for a minute that I’m going to
back off. I don’t give a damn if the Hudsons are huge donors to
your campaigns. I don’t give a damn if you and everybody else in
this county is one hundred percent convinced Treebeard is guilty. I
am not convinced. And I am not going to let it drop.”

Shuffling noises, as though someone had risen
out of their chair. Probably Alicia, getting ready to leave.

“I’ll tell you another thing,” she said, her
voice suddenly much clearer. Milo held his breath. She must have
moved closer to the duct. “As a prosecutor I feel a very strong
duty to get at the truth. People’s lives are at stake here,
Kip.”

Her voice grew fainter. She must have moved
again. She would probably leave soon. Milo edged toward the door
and pushed it slightly more closed, wincing as it groaned with the
movement. Then he scooted back to his hiding place in the
shadows.

Penrose’s door opened. Milo watched a shaft
of light spill across the corridor and into it step Alicia’s
shadow. Very clearly now, he heard her again speak. “And FYI, I am
not doing this on my own. This morning Louella got a subpoena for
Joan Gaines’ cell-phone and credit-card records.”

She stomped off. Milo stood motionless,
reluctant to try to slip past Penrose’s open door. Thirty seconds
later the shaft of light in the corridor disappeared.
He’s
shutting off his lights
, Milo thought with relief.
He’s
going
. Then he watched Penrose leave, wearing his overcoat and
striding rapidly down the corridor past R. Messina’s office.

Milo waited a minute more, then cautiously
approached the door. From down the corridor the noise from the
party rolled toward him in waves.

He had just stepped into the corridor,
planning to exit by slipping past the party, when he was abruptly
halted by the voice of the last person on earth he wanted to see at
that moment.

“Hey!” The voice was female. Commanding.
Angry. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Milo turned his head to look into the flaring
eyes of Alicia Maldonado.

*

He heard everything. He heard every
word
. Alicia didn’t need to confirm it. She knew it in the
marrow of her bones. The only question was what would he do with
what he had learned?

Wrong—there was a second question, she
realized. What did she want him to do with it?

“In here.” She grabbed him by the elbow and
pushed him back into Rocco’s office, then shut the door behind them
and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights. She turned to face
him. “How did you get in?” To her own ears her voice sounded
shrill, demanding.

For a second he was silent. Then, “I slipped
in while some of your coworkers were coming out.”

She shook her head. “Don’t lie to me, Milo
Pappas. I could charge you with felony trespassing.”

“It wouldn’t stick.” He half sat on the
corner of Rocco’s desk and crossed his arms over his chest.

He gave no sign of being flustered. She found
herself both admiring of his self-possession and irritated by it.
“You’re pretty damn cocky for somebody who’s just been sneaking
around government buildings eavesdropping on privileged
conversations.”

“It’s called reporting.”

“Oh, really? Reporting is getting information
any way you can, is that it? It doesn’t matter under what false
pretenses?” Something was starting to get away from her. She felt
anger ignite in her chest like heartburn. “You don’t follow a
single ethical guideline, do you? You’re completely comfortable
trespassing and eavesdropping and, oh, let’s add a third category!
Trying to seduce the prosecutor so she’ll give you inside dirt when
you need it.”

He slid off Rocco’s desk and approached her
across the small distance that separated them. His eyes bored into
her own. “I did not try to seduce you for inside information. I
merely asked you out and you refused me. If anyone should feel
insulted here, it’s me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, then turned
away from him, his proximity making her thoughts leap in a
direction she could neither predict nor control. If any insult
existed it was to her own dignity, for that single kiss he had
given her stuck in her memory like the heart a lovesick teenager
carved into the bark of a tree. Images of this delicious,
infuriating man wrapped around her, above her, within her, took
delectable shape in her mind, making her heart thud and her skin
flush. His kiss came back to her in excruciating detail. What more
could that mouth of his do, if she allowed it freer rein?

Stop it. Stop it
.

She forced herself to look at him again, and
to keep her gaze cold. “What are you going to do with what you
heard?”

He seemed to ponder that. He averted his
gaze, and his brow furrowed. “I don’t know.”

“I warn you, Milo. This is an ongoing
criminal investigation.”

“I am well aware of that.”

“You mess with it and you’re in deep
shit.”

“I have no intention of messing with it.”

“What intention do you have then?”

He raised his voice, still not looking at
her. “I told you, Alicia, I don’t know.”

She watched him. A muscle twitched in his
jaw, which was showing the trace of a five-o’clock shadow. It was
puzzling. He wasn’t excited or defiant from his journalistic coup,
which she would have expected. Instead he seemed disturbed,
profoundly so, as if what he’d learned—that Joan Gaines had lied
about her whereabouts the night of the murder—bothered him in some
fundamental way.

Then she remembered what he’d told her at the
Mission Ranch. He knew Joan Gaines. He knew her family. He had a
personal tie.

Not surprising he’d be upset then, though any
intimacy between Milo and Joan chafed. He was an ambassador’s son.
She was a governor’s daughter. No doubt they attended the same Ivy
League schools, dined in the same five-star restaurants, flew to
Europe in the same first-class cabin.

The chasm between Alicia and Milo Pappas
yawned before her in all of its heartbreaking clarity, an
unreachable divide built of money and class and education, all the
things that equal-opportunity Americans weren’t supposed to think
mattered. But to Alicia they were as real as the nicks on Rocco’s
battle-scarred wooden desk, the streaks of dirt on his perennially
unwashed windows, the nasty brown stains on his carpet left by the
coffee spills of prosecutors past.

She raised a warning finger in his direction.
“You listen to me, Milo Pappas. If I hear that you let a single
word of this slip out, you can damn well be sure that I’ll go after
you for felony trespassing. And believe me, I’m one prosecutor who
could make it stick.”

She walked out then, tempted to flip off the
fluorescent lights and leave him in Rocco’s office in the dark. But
she didn’t, though part of her ached to lash out at this
untouchable man in whatever small way she could manage.

Shortly before noon on an overcast New Year’s
Eve, Joan lay on her back on a massage table in a private treatment
room of the Lodge’s spa. Her naked body was draped by a sheet, her
eyes were shielded by a hand towel, and her skin was warmed by a
fire in a mosaic-fronted hearth a few yards to her right. At her
instruction the masseuse was working her horribly tense trapezius
muscles. The air was scented with pine, both from the Douglas fir
strung with holiday lights in a corner of the room and from the
fire; the lighting was dim; and the sound system piped forth a
gentle medley of New Age favorites.

She had been wise, she decided, to choose the
three-hour Stress Reliever package, though even that had been
fraught with tension-creating decisions. Fine, she would begin with
the Pebble Beach Water Experience, but which bath additive should
she choose? Mineral sea salt, seaweed and aromatherapy, or rose
petals? Then which scrub? The Sea-salt Body Scrub, Cypress Pine
Exfoliation, or Huckleberry Herbal Body Wrap? Even the choice of
massage was daunting. Therapeutic, lymphatic, or Shiatsu?

Joan considered whether she should take the
therapist’s recommendation and add the Cranio-Sacral Therapy
Session as a fourth treatment. Surely no woman was in more
desperate need of balancing her energy and relaxing her central
nervous system. Not after the last few days.