Bindlestiff (The Nameless Detective) (21 page)

A couple of hundred yards beyond the Glen Ellen turnoff, I noticed a sign at the edge of a private road that said: VINELAND WINERY • PREMIUM SONOMA VALLEY WINES • TASTING ROOM. Runquist’s place. I could see it as I passed by, an old brick building coated with ivy, nestled back in a grove of trees with the vineyards stretching away at the rear.

The turnoff I wanted was a mile or so farther on. Trinity Road. The only road you could take from the Valley of the Moon to the Napa Valley across the Mayacamas Mountains that divided the two—a distance of maybe fifteen miles, I knew, because I had driven it a couple of times in the past. The mountains were heavily wooded, dotted with occasional small vineyards over toward the Napa side, and offered some spectacular views of one valley or the other, depending on which end of the road you were on. So naturally people with money had begun building secluded homes up there several years back; a lot more were being built even in these economically depressed times by people like Hannah Peterson and Harry Runquist.

Trinity Road, a narrow two-laner, began to wind upward almost immediately after I made the turn off Highway 12. There were some switchbacks in it, too, because the ascent was so steep and rapid. I had gone less than a mile when the vista began to open up on my right and behind me as I climbed. It was pretty spectacular, all right. The vineyards, the little villages here and there, and in the distance, rising dark against the sky, the Sonoma Mountains that bounded the valley to the west.

I pretty much had Trinity Road to myself. There weren’t any other cars going in my direction, and I only passed one heading the other way. I kept one eye on the odometer, because Runquist had told me the house he and Hannah were building, or rather the lane that led to it, was exactly 3.2 miles from the Highway 12 intersection. It was the only private road within several hundred yards, he’d said. And to make sure I didn’t miss it, there was a whitewashed gate between two mossy old stone cairns at the foot of it.

I had no trouble; I saw the lane and the gate and the stone cairns as soon as the odometer clicked off 3.2 miles. I slowed, swung over onto it, stopped in front of the gate. Fir and oak trees grew dense and in close to both Trinity Road and the lane here; all I could see ahead and on either side was a narrow ribbon of crushed gravel that curled away to the left, then vanished into the woods.

When I got out and went over to the gate I found that it wasn’t locked, just fastened with a spring-type latch. I swung it open; drove through and kept on along the lane. There was not much point in reclosing the gate while I was on the property.

The lane hooked through the trees for maybe a hundred yards before it emerged into a good-sized clearing. The far left-hand side of the clearing fell away into a long slope covered with chaparral and scrub pine; that was where the house was being built. It was not difficult to understand why Hannah and Runquist had picked this spot. There was a mostly unobstructed view of the valley from Kenwood on the north to El Verano on the south.

I parked on the near side of the house. It was almost half-finished and bigger than the kind you usually saw up in the mountains. Hannah would have insisted on that, I thought, for show, if for no other reason. The side deck was a good twenty feet wide and jutted out over the slope on steel support girders; the railing for it hadn’t been built yet. The back half of the place was still an open mini-forest of vertical beams. On the grassy earth in front and alongside were stacks of two-by-twos and two-by-fours, sheets of plywood, roofing shingles, bricks, and other building materials.

There wasn’t anything else to see from where I was, no sign of anybody or that anybody had been here recently other than the construction people. After a few seconds I got out into a light mountain breeze that carried the smells of pine and chaparral and cut lumber. Some bees made buzzing noises in a patch of clover nearby; birds chattered at each other in the trees. Otherwise, the clearing was wrapped in that soft kind of stillness you only find in the country.

I went over to the rear of the house, up onto the deck. The floor was empty except for a handful of forgotten nails; equally empty were the unfinished rooms inside. I made my way through the forest of beams anyway, past the skeleton of a massive fireplace and into the roofed-over front section. Most of the walls were up in there, and another fireplace was nearing completion in what was probably the master bedroom. A stack of bricks and a wooden mortar tray were on the floor in front of the hearth.

So was a quilted nylon sleeping bag. And a paper bag that had come from Jack in the Box. And an empty half-pint bottle of sour-mash whiskey.

Those things erased any doubt that Hannah Peterson had come up here on Friday night. And it looked as though she hadn’t been alone when she got here; she wasn’t the type to eat fast-food or to drink sour mash straight out of a bottle. Or, as Runquist had said, to spend the night in a sleeping bag in an unfinished house. Unless she was forced to, I thought.
Had
she spent the night here with Raymond? There was only the one sleeping bag. Well, if she had slept with him she’d done it under duress and it amounted to rape. Whatever else she was, she wasn’t enough of a coldhearted bitch to willingly sleep with the man who’d just murdered her father.

The sleeping bag was zippered all the way open and folded back; I could see without touching it that there wasn’t anything inside. I sat on my haunches and used thumbs and forefingers to open the paper sack. It contained what I’d expected it to—the remains of a fast-food supper. From the feel of the lone french fry, it had been there a while.

I straightened and took a turn around the room. There wasn’t anything else to find in there; or in any of the remaining rooms. The way it seemed, Raymond had spent Friday night here, with or without Hannah, and then beat it sometime yesterday. But Hannah had been back at her place in Sonoma at nine A.M.; if Raymond was the one in the dark-green car that had pulled into her driveway, where and how had he got the car? And what was he doing at her house? And what had Hannah been loading into her Toyota?

I didn’t like the way things were shaping up. It had all appeared to be coming together, and maybe it still was, but I was beginning to get a sense of twists and turns and hidden hazards, like a bad road on a dark night with a bridge down somewhere up ahead.

Outside again, I went around to the other side of the house. More building materials; a lightweight aluminum roofer’s ladder leaning against the wall; one of those portable outhouses you see nowadays on construction sites. Across thirty yards of grassy open space, at the edge of another patch of woods, were a tumbledown shed and what was left of an old stone well. The shed and the well, and those ancient, moss-caked cairns down at the foot of the lane, told me somebody else had lived on this property before Hannah and Runquist purchased it. But not in a good long while, judging from the condition of that shed. There had probably been a house here, too, that had had to be razed before they could start putting up the new one.

Another lane, or a continuation of the one from Trinity Road, cut through the trees over there; from where I stood I couldn’t see where it led to. I looked at it for a few seconds. Then I crossed to the edge of the clearing and looked at it some more, closer up.

What I saw deepened my growing sense of uneasiness. This lane hadn’t been used much; its surface was all but obliterated by a thick carpeting of pine needles and oak leaves and rotting humus. But there were faint parallel marks in the carpet now, as if a car had gone along there recently. A clump of tall grass that grew at the clearing’s rim had been crushed, too, and the soft earth underneath showed the clear imprint of a tire tread.

Maybe one of the builders had driven over here for some reason, I thought. Except that the imprint was narrow and fairly shallow, not the kind a heavy vehicle like a pickup truck or van would make. It was the tread of a passenger car’s tire, and a small passenger car at that.

I went along the lane, walking in the middle, listening to the bird sounds and the dry brittle cracking of the leaves and needles underfoot. Feeling a slow gathering of tension across my neck and shoulders. The lane made a sharp dogleg to the left after twenty yards, extended another twenty after that, and petered out at a massed jumble of decayed boards and creepers and shrubs that rose up at the base of a sheer rock wall. It had once been a building of some kind—a small barn, maybe, or a chicken coop—but that had been long ago.

To the left there were not many bushes, just a lot of grass that grew thick and knee-high. The two parallel tracks that hooked through it, around to the rear, were plainly visible. I knew what I was going to find as soon as I saw those tracks, and when I got around behind the decayed building I found it: a car parked nose up to a blighted live oak, half-hidden there in the grass—a beige Toyota Tercel, license plate 735-NNY. Hannah Peterson’s car.

The windows were all rolled up; I bent to peer through the one in the driver’s door first, then the one in the rear door. The interior was empty, nothing at all on the seats or the floor or the dashboard or the rear-window deck. But the keys were still hanging from the ignition slot.

I got out my handkerchief, wrapped it around my right hand, and tried the driver’s door. It wasn’t locked. I leaned in and punched the button to open the glove compartment. A map of Sonoma County, a map of California, a plastic envelope containing the car’s registration and owner’s manual, two unopened packages of Marlboro cigarettes, and a small flashlight. I shut the compartment, looked around in front and back another time without finding anything. Then, still using the handkerchief, I slid the keys out of the ignition and went around to the rear and opened the trunk.

On the deck inside was a rifle partially wrapped in an old blanket, a small carton that contained a wood-handled revolver and boxes of cartridges for both it and the rifle, and a larger carton full of neatly folded clothing. The rifle, I saw when I pushed aside part of the blanket, was a bolt-action center-fire Savage—the kind hunters use for deer and larger game. The revolver was a Smith & Wesson .38 hammerless, a belly gun. The clothing in the bigger box was all men’s stuff, shirts and pants and lightweight jackets; on top, like some sort of crown, was an old railroader’s cap.

Now I knew what Hannah Peterson had been loading into the trunk yesterday morning. And I had a pretty good idea why, too. The guns had probably belonged to her late husband; the clothes had either belonged to him or they were her father’s and she’d been storing them. Raymond was a fugitive and a multiple killer, and even though he’d likely beat it out of Oroville with his own gun, it made sense he’d have wanted more weapons and ammunition. Getting them from Hannah was a lot safer than stealing them. The same was true of fresh clothing; whoever the items in that carton had belonged to, he had been the same approximate size as Raymond.

But what was it all still doing in the trunk? And why had the car been driven back here and hidden this way? And by whom?

I shut the trunk lid, put the keys back into the ignition, closed the driver’s door. There were no other sections of crushed or bent grass in the area; the person who’d driven the car in here had walked back out along the wheel tracks, without detouring anywhere. I went back that way myself, around to the other side of the collapsed building. There wasn’t anything to find over there, no tracks of any kind. The Toyota had been brought here and abandoned—that was all.

Okay, I thought. The rest of it was up to the police and the FBI. I’d done all I could without overstepping myself again; and I had dug up enough circumstantial evidence of a link between Hannah Peterson and Lester Raymond, or at least that
something
fishy was going on, to stir up official interest.

I hurried back along the lane. When I reached the clearing I started across it at an angle toward the front of the house.

And that was when I noticed the blood.

It was a few yards away on my right, a sun-streaked blob of it that shone a dull red-brown against the bright chlorophyll green of the grass. I had seen too much blood in my life not to recognize it, even from a distance. Ah Jesus, I thought, Jesus. I veered over there and bent down to examine it. A big splotch, dry and dark and flaky to the touch; it had been there a while, but not too long—a day or so. Animal blood, maybe. Only it wasn’t animal blood; I felt that down deep where the gut feelings, the bad feelings, always come from. It was human blood and somebody had spilled a lot of it here yesterday. Too much for any kind of superficial wound.

The tension, now, was like a hand clutching the back of my neck. I could feel the pain of it the length of my bad left arm, and in the tender bruised place on my scalp. Straightening, I began to walk a slow, widening spiral outward away from the splotch. The second bloodstain, smaller than the first, was ten feet to the west. The third, smaller still, was back to the north. The fourth and fifth lay in that direction, too, forming an irregular and grisly trail.

And where the trail led was straight to the old stone well.

It had been long abandoned, that well. If it had ever had a windlass of any kind it was gone now; there was nothing above ground except a foot or so of its circular shaft with a wooden lip cemented on top. Two wooden covers, like halved circles, had been built to fit over the lip, but neither was in place; they had been dragged off and were lying on the ground nearby. On the near side of the lip was a small thin smear of dried blood.

I leaned over to look inside the well. But the overhanging tree branches blotted out the sun, and it was too dark in there for me to make out much except for the gleam of water. I trotted around to my car, taking care to avoid the bloodstains in the grass, and unhooked the heavy-duty flashlight from its clip under the dash. But when I got back to the well and aimed the light down inside I still couldn’t see much. There was water in it, all right, maybe a dozen feet below ground level—scummy and brown, its surface scabbed with dead leaves—but nothing else was visible, and there was no way of telling from up here how deep the water was.