To Catch the Moon (6 page)

Alicia squinted at the image, as did everyone
else. The arrows sure did look like the one that killed Daniel
Gaines: roughly carved and with a distinctive treelike symbol cut
into the wood near the rear feathers.

On the videotape Treebeard screamed at the
headquarters, though clearly he was performing for the cameras.
“Will you destroy California the way you’ve destroyed our forests?”
He was shrill and melodramatic, almost a caricature of an activist.
“Will you kill habitat to enrich yourself and your pampered
friends?”

“Do we know where Treebeard is now?” she
asked.

Bucky spoke up. “He abandoned his campsite.
Soon’s I saw the arrow I had the sheriff go check out where he
was.”

“They checked yesterday afternoon?” Louella
asked. “But he was gone?”

“He was gone,” Bucky repeated. “Campsite was
cleared out. And who knows where he went?”

The question hung in the air. Treebeard was
famous for having no address, no phone. Unless he was incarcerated,
which he was fairly often, no one knew where he was.

“That’s it,” Penrose declared. “We’ve got
more than enough to arrest him.”

Alicia watched Penrose rise from his chair
and puff out his chest.
Slam-dunk
, Shikegawa had said the
prior afternoon.
This could be a slam-dunk
. In fact, most
homicides were. Mystery fiction aside, clues in a homicide were
usually obvious, the culprit most often sloppy. Yet still this
bothered her. Treebeard might as well have left a calling card as
kill Daniel Gaines with his own homemade arrow and leave bloody
prints all over the scene.

“I’ll place a personal call to the governor
to tell him Treebeard is our man,” Penrose announced, “and that we
will issue a nationwide APB.”

Alicia said nothing, unable to shake a vague
discomfort.

*

“Another one down, only one more live shot to
go,” Milo heard the director say in his earpiece. “You’re doin’
great, buddy!”

Milo clutched at his chest and performed a
fake stagger for the camera, knowing everyone in the control booth
back east was watching. Then he stepped away from the shot, pulled
out his earpiece and mike cord, and bent to retrieve the foam cup
of cooling coffee he had set on the asphalt.

How the mighty had fallen. A mere twenty-four
hours before he’d been fill-in anchoring the
WBS Evening
News
, one of the network’s plummiest assignments. Now he was
freezing his butt off in California and suffering the personal
humiliation of standing in front of Joan’s property as if he didn’t
know her from Adam, grinding out live shots for WBS’s sister cable
network, which did news nonstop and on the cheap.

At least he had the lead story. What with the
macabre video of Gaines’ skewered corpse tumbling onto the
pavement, aired over and over, usually in slo-mo, on every news
outlet in the nation, this saga was far and away the airwaves’
hottest ticket.

“I’m gonna go get some wide shots of the
property,” Mac told him.

“Great.”

Mac McCutcheon, broadcast camera perched on
his right shoulder, moved away trailing sound operator Tran Nguyen.
The two made an incongruous pair, Mac blond and forty-five years
old and built like Arnold Schwarzenegger; Tran a short, wiry
fifty-seven, lifted by WBS out of Saigon thirty years before and
employed in DC ever since. But they were killer, which was why they
worked with Milo, and for
Newsline
.

Milo rubbed his eyelids in a futile attempt
to de-gum his contact lenses. It’d been stupid to put them in when
he had left New York, nearly twelve hours before. Under his black
overcoat he was still in the wool trousers and open-collared dress
shirt he’d flown in, though he’d been able to sneak in a dry shave
before the first live shot, sitting in the rented Ford Explorer
they’d picked up at San Francisco airport.

It would be grueling even without the
emotional baggage Milo had brought on the trip. But this was
downright embarrassing, him making hay out of Joan’s tragedy. His
only consolation was his complete certainty that she was long gone.
Even if her husband hadn’t died in the house, Joan would never
linger in the eye of a media hurricane. She wouldn’t tolerate it.
So there was zero chance she’d look out her front windows and see
him among the horde of grasping, opportunistic newspeople, with
their live shots and telephoto lenses and satellite trucks.

His deepest desire was that he be able to
leave the Monterey Peninsula without seeing her. He did not want to
“renew their acquaintance,” as O’Malley so euphemistically put it.
He did not want a fresh reminder of his humiliation at being
dumped. He did not want to be a shoulder to cry on. And he did not
want to be compared to Daniel Gaines, god among men, of whom
forevermore no unkind word could be spoken.

Mac and Tran returned. Milo stomped on the
ground, trying to warm up, the wind off the bay biting. During the
winter months coastal Northern California could be as damp and
bone-chilling as the shores of the Potomac.

“Mac,” he asked, “when’s the last time we had
to do back-to-back live shots?”

Mac shook his head. Tran just laughed.

Once a WBS correspondent and crew got to work
for
Newsline
, which aired Tuesdays at the highly civilized
hour of 9 PM, that kind of grunt TV labor was a thing of the past.
Problem was that, thanks to O’Malley, Milo was now assigned to a
breaking news story, and so was forced to feed run-of-the-mill news
shows, even those on cable. And he had to do it cheerfully, despite
his ego’s insistence that such work was beneath him.

Mac spoke up. “After
Evening
, though,
we should be clear.”

“Should be.” Milo chuckled without humor.
“Unless there’s a new development.” Which could happen at any time
and, according to a perverse truth of the news business, was likely
to happen at a bad time, like when they were sitting down to a meal
or finally about to get some shut-eye. “You have an idea where you
want to go to dinner, Mac?”

He asked, though he knew. Like many network
cameramen, Mac was a human Zagat guide. He obeyed his breed’s
cardinal rules: Be fast, fast, fast. Always have your camera with
you, loaded with videotape and ready to roll. When you’re not
working, play. And know where to find pleasure, of both the food
and female variety, in every corner of the planet.

Mac crossed his flannel-covered arms and
narrowed his eyes, as if that would aid his decision. “For tonight,
I was thinking of a little Italian place in Pacific Grove.”

“It better be good,” Tran said. “Remember
that one we went to in Kansas City? With the white sauce that had
those chunks in it? When we did that piece on roll-over
tractors.”

“That wasn’t Kansas City,” Mac said. “It was
Des Moines.”

“It was Lincoln,” Milo said, then thought
better of it. “No, you’re right, Mac, it was Des Moines. But it
wasn’t the tractor piece—it was the quintuplets.” It was a muddle,
these stories, one after the next, blurring into each other in an
amorphous chain that carried him from year to year.
Feed the
beast
, one of the WBS bureau chiefs said about network life,
and the beast was always famished. Milo calculated that the prior
year he’d slept seventy-nine nights in his own bed. Sometimes it
seemed pointless even to own a bed, though he loved the brownstone
in which it stood waiting for him, just off Embassy Row, only a few
blocks from the house he considered home even though his family had
never owned it. It was the official residence of the Greek
ambassador to the United States, and while the Pappas clan had been
able to lay claim for fourteen years, they’d had to give it up
eventually. Just another part of Milo’s life stamped with
impermanence.

“Let’s wait it out in the truck.” Mac hoisted
the camera from the tripod. “It’s too goddamn cold out here.”

All three made for the white Ford Explorer,
whose rear compartment was packed full of the bulky aluminum
stowage containers loaded with broadcast gear that they hauled from
site to site. They were using two vehicles: the rental Explorer
plus an ENG—or electronic news gathering—truck on loan from the
local WBS affiliate, which gave them live-broadcast capability.
Milo claimed the Explorer’s front passenger seat—shotgun being the
standard correspondent position—while Mac got in behind the wheel
and Tran crammed his smaller body onto the collapsible seat. Milo
cranked the all-news radio station.

They’d settled in to wait the twenty-odd
minutes until the final live shot, when the cell phone in Milo’s
inside jacket pocket vibrated. He pulled it out. “Pappas.”

“Milo?” A breathy female voice, whispery,
clearly half asleep.

He sat up straighter, his heart beginning to
thump.

“Milo?” the woman repeated.

Instinctively he turned away from Mac toward
the passenger window. “Yes?” He didn’t want to say—or to
assume—Joan?

“I saw you on TV. You’re here.”

It had to be Joan. And she’d seen him. But
she didn’t sound angry so much as out of it. How had she gotten his
cell number? Apparently she was as resourceful as ever. “How are
you doing?” he asked carefully.

“I’m fine.” He heard a rustle—sheets?—and
then she let out a long, soft breath. Milo remembered that breath.
“You’re very good, you know,” she said. “Even better than you used
to be. You’re just”—another sigh—“amazing.”

“No ...” Automatically he began to demur.

“Oh, yes. Amazing.”

She said nothing more. Had she fallen asleep?
He was unnerved. He gazed out the Explorer window at the gloaming
sky. It seemed darker now than it had five minutes before.

“Why don’t you come over?” she asked
suddenly.

“What?” He was shocked. “Come over?”

“I’m at the Lodge. You know where that
is?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I mean
...” He stopped.
Your husband’s been dead twenty-four hours and
you want an old boyfriend to visit you in your hotel room?

“Are you thinking about Daniel? Oh”—and she
sounded dismissive, at the same instant she read his mind—“don’t
worry about Daniel. It doesn’t matter about him anymore,
anyway.”

Soft click. She’d hung up.

*

Alicia lingered in the corridor outside
Penrose’s office while he made his phone calls. He even shut the
door when he phoned the governor, as if her overhearing him would
somehow be disruptive. Afterward he pulled the door open and
ushered her back in. She felt like a kid being summoned into the
principal’s office.

He reclaimed the throne behind his desk.
“Let’s get a few things straight here and now,” he said the instant
she crossed his threshold.

That immediately got her back up. “Like
what?”

“Don’t think I haven’t seen how you’re trying
to inject yourself into this case.” His eyes were cold. “It’s
unseemly, this naked ambition of yours.”

“You’re going to sing that old tune?” She sat
back down in the chair out of which she’d been hoisted twenty
minutes before. “If Rocco Messina behaved the way I did, you’d be
trying to think of a way to promote him. I’ve got news for you,
Kip. The old-boys’ club is officially illegal.”

He looked affronted. “This has nothing to do
with gender favoritism.”

Right.
“You also seem to forget
I
was the one who picked up Bucky’s initial call.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Is it also irrelevant that it was me who
called Niebaum and Shikegawa to the scene?” She heard her voice get
louder but couldn’t seem to rein it in. “And me who got the
Sheriff’s department deployed to handle the press?”
All while
you were AWOL, which didn’t surprise anybody around here.

“I don’t like that tone of voice,” he said.
Then he slapped his desk and abruptly rose to his feet, causing his
rolling chair to bang into the wall behind him. He leaned toward
her over his desk and pointed a finger in her face. “And
insubordination won’t do you a damn bit of good.”

She met his gaze steadily, refusing to blink.
Finally he backed off and reclaimed his chair. “I’m not assigning
you the case,” he said, and her heart plummeted.

“Why not?”

“Because you don’t have sufficient experience
prosecuting homicide.”

“That’s a crock and you know it!”
Damn
him
. She abandoned her chair to pace his office. This was
exactly what she’d been afraid he would do, though it made no sense
at all. It was so Kip-like! Thickheaded and counterproductive.

And no doubt inspired by sheer malice.

She decided to try to reason with him, though
Kip Penrose was rarely moved by logic. She returned to her chair
and leaned toward him. “I have done homicides,” she said. “I’ve won
them. I’ve been handling serious felonies for seven years. And I
have the highest conviction rate in this office.”

“I don’t dispute that. But this is a special
case.”

“I don’t dispute
that
. But you and I
both know that when it comes right down to it, a case is a case is
a case. You do the prep work, you pay attention to the details, you
get a working knowledge of the record.” She locked onto his eyes,
blank as ever. “Kip, I’m the best you’ve got. I win more than
anybody around here. And,” she added as inspiration struck her,
“it’s a must that you win this case. Not only because of how
high-profile it is, but because of your special tie to the Hudson
family.”

He stared at her, appearing to consider that.
Nothing like a reference to campaign money to get Kip’s attention.
Finally he nodded, his gaze skidding away. “That’s true,” he
said.

She was surprised, and pushed on. “Appointing
me will make you look good. To the voters.” She let that sink in.
“You put a woman, a Latina, front and center? That makes you
inclusive. It makes you forward-thinking. You can use it in
November.”