To Catch the Moon (46 page)

Because she had no idea.

“What happened?” she asked timidly, lamely,
which set Barlowe off on another tear.

“What happened?” he shouted. “You really want
to know, Joan? We had a major accident last night, that’s what
happened! Turns out some of our men did a little extra cutting on
the side on one of our biggest, oldest trees. And believe me, it
wasn’t one we had officially earmarked. That baby was nearly two
hundred years old and about as off-limits as you can get. And guess
who went down with it?”

No. Oh, no
.

“Yes. Your friend Hank Cassidy. Who, thanks
to you and this insane scheme of yours, is dead.”

*

Alicia mounted the stairs to the second floor
of the Gaines home, criminalist Andy Shikegawa approaching her on
his way down. He carried his small crimson leather journal, his
crime-scene bible, in which all his notes were jotted in a careful
hand.

“Find anything?” she asked—stupidly, because
surely she would have heard if he had.

He shook his head. “No.”

“You’ve gone through the master suite? And
the other bedrooms?”

“Also Gaines’ home office,” he said, then
pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing down his wire-frame
glasses. “Got any aspirin?”

“No, but I’m sure Louella does.”

“She’s downstairs with Lucy?” Lucy Johnson,
the second DOJ criminalist, who’d also been present at the initial
search of the crime scene.

“Yes,” then, casually, “Mind if I look around
upstairs?”

He stepped aside to get out of her way. “Be
my guest.”

Alicia climbed the last of the stairs, hope
fading fast. So far they’d found nothing. Who did when revisiting a
crime scene over a month after the fact? Still, she’d had to push
for the search, her last chance to trap Joan. But all too easily
she could imagine an ignominious retreat, tail between her legs,
Shikegawa and Johnson and Louella too kind to deliver a single
I
told you so
.

And what would Milo say? Milo who sat
downstairs, detained by this last-ditch search she had made happen.
When all of this was over, would he think her a fool or a hero? She
didn’t know which she would choose herself. Merely pondering the
future beyond this search sent a rogue wave of doubt crashing
through her. If this ended with her finding nothing, Joan would
win. She would lose. And what of her and Milo?
Was
there a
her and Milo?

I can’t think about him now
. By force
of will she pushed Milo out of her mind as she arrived at the
second-floor landing, where the hardwood gave way to creamy white
carpeting, thick and luxurious. To her right was the door to the
master suite, all the way open. The interior was flooded with sun,
thanks to a huge bay window giving on to a stunning view of Carmel
Point and the bay. Along the corridor were half-open doors to
bedrooms, three of them, and at the end of the hall to her left was
what had been Daniel Gaines’ home office. Her legs led her in that
direction.

She stopped on the threshold. It was a small
room, clearly a working office. It was obvious from its simplicity,
from the bulging dog-eared files to the rolling swivel chair on a
scarred rectangle of Plexiglas, that its owner had been Daniel and
not Joan. Alicia guessed that the library downstairs, where Gaines
had died, was where he’d held meetings. This was where he’d done
actual work.

She stepped farther into the room and
approached the desk, set opposite the door beneath the room’s only
window, over which a shade was half-pulled to block the sun. Deeper
inside she noticed a faint lingering scent of men’s cologne, as if
Daniel Gaines had just been present, sitting at the desk, working
on his computer. Here, where no doubt he had spent many hours,
Alicia felt the man as she did nowhere else in his house. It was
unnerving.

On a small side table left of the desk
hunched a copier/fax; beneath it on the floor was a bulky laser
printer. The desk’s surface was completely covered by a phone, the
desktop computer, stacks of files, and, she then noticed, an open
box of Gaines campaign stationery. There was the red-white-and-blue
logo that Treebeard had described and which she herself had seen on
New Year’s Eve when Louella had given her a sample.

She stared at it. From downstairs she could
make out the murmur of conversation; in that silent room she heard
only her own breathing.

Of course Gaines would have the stationery
here. This was his home office. Another thought prompted her to
kneel in front of the laser printer, which was linked by thick,
dusty cords to the computer. She latched her fingers beneath its
paper tray and tugged. The tray pulled open. Loaded into it, again,
was the stationery.

Shikegawa and Johnson went through the
computer when they were collecting evidence from the house, on the
Saturday when Gaines’ body was discovered. If the letter Treebeard
described had been here, they would have found it, right?

Then again, they hadn’t been looking for it,
for the simple reason that they didn’t know it existed. The only
reason she knew was because of what Treebeard had told her when she
interviewed him at the jail, and that was a week after the Gaines
home was searched. The only other person who’d heard Treebeard’s
account of the letter was his defense attorney, Jerome Brown.

Alicia had told only Louella about it. She
hadn’t said a word to Penrose or Shikegawa or Johnson. Before this
second search of the Gaines home, only Louella had helped her
investigate the possibility that someone other than Treebeard had
murdered Daniel Gaines.

Alicia stood up, then pulled out the desk’s
rolling chair and sat down. It creaked at her weight and slid
sideways a few inches on the Plexiglas sheet, as slippery as ice.
The computer was booted up, its screen saver a black background
with stars shooting toward her as if she were hurtling through
space. One touch of the keyboard brought up Windows Desktop, which
displayed all the usual icons: My Computer, Internet Explorer,
Recycle Bin.

She launched Windows Explorer, then opened
the My Documents folder. Beneath it were a dozen subsidiary
folders, which broke down further into personal, Headwaters,
campaign, and trust categories.

It can’t be here
, she told herself,
but trolled through the folders anyway.
This is a waste of
time
, her brain said, but her fingers pecked away on the
keyboard regardless, rebellious agents going about their own
business.
Why would the letter be on Daniel Gaines’ computer
anyway? He wouldn’t have framed Treebeard for his own
murder!

After a few minutes it occurred to her to use
the Find function. What word should she search for? She typed in
Treebeard
then clicked on Find Now. No files appeared. Maybe
Bracewell
. That was one name Treebeard had said had appeared
on the letter.

Bracewell’s name brought up a huge number of
files. Alicia was partway through them when another thought struck
her. Wouldn’t whoever had written the letter have avoided saving it
on the hard disk? Wouldn’t they have written it, printed it, and
deleted it, never saving it? They might have thought that would
make it as if the letter had never existed.

But Alicia knew the letter wouldn’t just
disappear. Even if it had never been saved it would remain among
the Temp files unless those files had been purged from the hard
disk. She knew from her own habits that she very rarely did that
kind of computer housekeeping.

Alicia minimized the files she’d been
scanning, then brought up the Temp files. There were tons of them,
but it was possible to search for files created on a specific date.
She typed in December seventeenth through nineteenth, the
nineteenth being the day before Daniel Gaines was murdered, the day
on which Treebeard said he received the letter.

She clicked on Find Now. The number of Temp
files was reduced to about a dozen. Listed alongside them were
their size and the date and time on which they had been last
modified. One was a small file bearing the date
12/19, 11:08
AM
.

Alicia held her breath and clicked on it. It
opened.

A shiver ran up her spine, into the hairs at
the back of her neck. She stared at it for a long time, unable to
believe what she was seeing. Yet there it was, undeniable, and just
as Treebeard had described. His name appeared nowhere on the letter
but other phrases leaped out at her.
Please join us at Daniel
Gaines’ home Friday evening at nine o’clock ... Perhaps some
private conversation would allow us to find common ground ... Best
regards, Molly Bracewell.

*

Milo drummed his fingers on the round glass
table in the kitchen nook of Joan’s home. The nook really was more
like a greenhouse, with paned windows on three sides affording a
view of the road above the bluff.

He was puzzled. For on that road not only
were gawkers beginning to gather, so were newspeople, so many that
the sheriff’s department had cordoned off the area with yellow
crime tape. Two camera crews already had set up behind the tape, in
addition to a still photographer. Reporters were arriving on the
scene in news vans and ENG trucks, which signaled that live shots
would be happening for the noon news.

All this for a search warrant? Implausible.
But what else could it be? Milo had no idea, which depressed him.
He was out of the loop, fired, no longer of import in the news
business. For all he knew Mac and Tran were out there among the
mob, taping a stand-up with his replacement. Weeks before his ego
had chafed at the assignment. Now he wished it were his.

As it was, he felt as if it were wartime and
he was battling on all fronts. Yet he was too drained to be upset.
Perhaps the life force had seeped out of him while he was
throttling Joan, leaving him a shell of a man, with a ruined past
and an uncertain future. No job. No reputation. No Alicia.

He’d had her for a time and then he’d lost
her. Why? Because his anger at Joan had gotten the better of him.
He’d run back to her house like a man possessed, or a man obsessed.
Who could blame Alicia for wanting to wash her hands of him?

The cop sitting to Milo’s left cleared his
throat. BUCKY SHERIDAN, his badge said. Somehow he didn’t look like
one of the department’s top performers.

“Officer Sheridan,” Milo asked, “do you know
why there are so many reporters outside?”

“Beats me.” Then the cop raised his brows.
“You don’t know? Aren’t you one of ‘em?”

Milo let that pass. “Is it the search
warrant?”

“Beats me.”

Not exactly a font of information, was he?
Milo resumed watching the housekeeper, who was doing a lousy job
mopping the floor. She did some areas repeatedly and totally missed
others. But he had to assume she was scared to death. One month ago
her employer was murdered in the house. Today for the second time
cops were crawling all over the property and reporters were massing
like jackals on the street outside.

As he watched, she stepped backward without
looking and knocked over her pail of sudsy water. “
Dios
mio
,” she muttered, then just stood still, as if it were all
too much, holding her mop with one hand and massaging her forehead
with the other.

Milo rose to his feet. “Here, let me
help.”

She raised tired eyes to his face.
“
Gracias, senor
. Thank you.”

Between the two of them they made quick work
of cleaning up, while Officer Sheridan did his bit by observing
their progress from the table. Toting the pail and mop, Milo
trailed the woman to a mudroom off the kitchen. She pulled open a
utility closet stuffed to the gills with foul-weather
paraphernalia, from Gore-Tex parkas to slickers and mud boots and
garden clogs.

“These both go in there?” he asked. It was
hard to believe.

“Mop only, please. I take pail.” She relieved
him of the latter as he pushed the mop back inside, then apparently
had another thought. “Get me broom, please?”

“No problem,” he said, but it wasn’t true.
Not only did he have to shove past all the gear, he then had to
root around against the back wall among the collection of brooms.
His hands closed on one and he pulled it out, then stared down at
it, frowning.

This is no broom
.

It was a long, slim piece of highly buffed
wood, about five feet in length, with one small notch carved into
the top and another carved into the bottom.

This is no broom. It’s a bow
.

An unstrung bow, which made it hard to
recognize.

Milo stared at it, awestruck. It fit right in
with the brooms and mops. It was the same size, made of the same
material. But with a totally different purpose. Its aim was to
kill.

*

Alicia stood in the library with Joan, the
sheriff’s deputy, Shikegawa, Johnson, and Louella. They were
gathered around Joan like a posse, or a lynch mob. It was
deliberate, cruel but deliberate. Alicia handed Joan the letter to
Treebeard, which she had printed out on Gaines campaign stationery,
and watched her carefully. She was trying to shock an admission out
of her, as she had New Year’s Day. That time it had worked. She
needed it to work again.

For while the letter lent Treebeard’s story
credibility, it didn’t convict Joan. It was damning, but
circumstantially so. Alicia still needed more.

“Explain this to me,” Alicia demanded. She
made her voice harsh and accusing. “You wrote this, didn’t
you?”

Joan just shook her head, though she looked
ready to crack. Her eyes were puffy from crying, and her skin was
mottled. Chips of mascara littered her cheeks. The sheriff’s deputy
who’d been watching her said the phone calls she was getting, one
after another, were upsetting her. Something about Headwaters, and
a lumberman dying in an accident.