China Lake

Table of Contents

‘‘[An] exciting mix. Great stuff.’’ —
Independent on Sunday

"Meg Gardiner makes it all work . . . amazingly entertaining. " —Stephen King

"With a colorful cast of richly delineated characters, a protagonist with whom the readers will easily identify—all big hearted, quick tongued, and hair-trigger tempered . . . a fast-paced ride through some of the more dubious nooks and crannies of the American dream.’’ —
The Guardian
(UK)

‘‘Fast and hard-edged. Buy it, read it.’’ —
Hull Daily Mail

‘‘A cracker, with memorable characters, memorable lines, and a plot that races along to an explosive ending. A great summer read.’’ —
Huddersfield Daily Examiner

‘‘Very well written, racy, and witty.’’ —Tangled Web

‘‘Evan Delaney is a paragon for our times: tough, funny, clever, brave, tireless, and compassionate. The pace and inventiveness never flag, and the climax . . . is both nail-biting and moving. But the brilliant writing is what puts this thriller way ahead of the competition. Intelligent escapism at its best.’’ —
The Guardian
(UK)

‘‘I loved every minute of it. A breathtaking thriller, gripping and relentless.’’

—Caroline Carver, CWA Dagger-winning author of
Blood Junction

‘‘A rattling good read.’’ —
News of the World

‘‘Brilliant.’’ —
Evening Telegraph
(Peterborough, UK)

‘‘The action is high octane from the first page. Once you pick it up, it’s a very hard book to put down.’’ —
My Weekly

‘‘Fast and furious.’’ —
The Literary Review

‘‘Full of classic Gardiner one-liners . . . but mostly there’s a serious freezerload of scare-you-silly chills.’’

—Stephen King

‘‘A tense and exciting thriller where almost anything seems possible. A conspiracy theorist’s must-have.’’

—
Independent on Sunday

‘‘Easily one of the best thrillers I’ve read this year. I could barely wait to get to the next page. If you start this book, be prepared to be unable to put it down. Meg Gardiner has written a cracker.’’ —Caroline Carver

‘‘This book rips. It makes
Silence of the Lambs
look like Mary had a little one—it never lets up.’’

—Adrienne Dines, author of
The Jigsaw Maker

‘‘Meg Gardiner dishes out the gripping plot in tense helpings. Short, punchy chapters keep the pace flowing, and you’ll find it impossible to find a resting point.’’

—
Evening Times
(Glasgow)

[Gardiner’s] depictions of the criminal elements of the Hollywood fringe and the local drugs culture is a tightly observed slice of realism. This is a relentless, claustrophobic examination of mistaken identity and the terror of being accused of a crime for which you are not responsible.’’

—
Sherlock Magazine

‘‘Fast-paced, witty, and brutal.’’

—
The Independent
(London)

‘‘A harrowing (and all-too-timely) story of corporate greed and evildoing in quirky Southern California.’’

—Jeffery Deaver

‘‘A rattling good read with an unexpected twist.’’

—
The Sunday Telegraph

‘‘Fiction at its finest . . . many nail-biting moments and hand-wringing twists.’’ —
Evening Telegraph
(Peterborough, UK)

"Meg Gardiner is a welcome addition to the ranks of American thriller writers.’’ —
The Daily Telegraph
(UK)

‘‘Meg Gardiner has rekindled my interest in thrillers.’’

—
The Independent
(London)

‘‘Meg Gardiner is a class act at the top of her game.’’

—
My Weekly

‘
‘Meg Gardiner has a powerful style—fast paced, immediate, and imaginative.’’ —
Sherlock Magazine

‘‘Meg Gardiner goes from strength to strength.’’

—OneWord Radio

‘‘Meg Gardiner is brilliant at making the over-the-top seem utterly convincing.’’ —
The Guardian
(UK)

‘‘Meg Gardiner hard-boils her American crime with the best of them. . . . If you like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich, you ought to have discovered Gardiner by now.’’

—
Evening Telegraph
(Peterborough, UK)

‘‘Meg Gardiner takes us to places we hope we’ll never have to go in reality.’’ —Caroline Carver

OBSIDIAN
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Published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. This is an authorized reprint of an edition published by Hodder & Stoughton. For information address: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

First Obsidian Printing, June 2008

Copyright © Meg Gardiner, 2002

All rights reserved

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For invaluable help with this novel, I thank Ann Aubrey Hanson; Carolina Shreve; Sally Gardiner; Sara Gardiner, MD; Marilyn Moreno, attorney at law; Nancy Fraser; Adrienne Dines; Irena Kowal; Milena Banks; Melinda Roughton; Bonni Connell; Jane Warren; Mary Albanese; and Frank Gardiner, who gave me everything that counted. For their encouragement and advice, I also thank my agent, Giles Gordon, and my editor, Sue Fletcher.

Peter Wyoming didn’t shake hands with people; he hit them with his presence like a rock fired from a sling-shot. He was a human nail, lean and straight with brush-cut hair, and when I first saw him he was carrying a picket sign and enough rage to scorch the ground. The sign read, GOD HATES SLUTS, and he held it erect in his fist, aimed so mourners read it as we stepped from the church into the autumn sunshine. Behind him, his followers hoisted other placards. AIDS CURES WHORES. SEX ED = AIDS = DAMNATION. Ahead, the dead woman’s daughter walked behind the casket, gripping her husband’s hand for support.

When Wyoming saw her, he began chanting, ‘‘Hey, hey, what do you say? Claudine burns in hell today!’’

That was when I made my first mistake. I took him for a grandstander, a bigot, a man who, from the looks of his sign, had trouble with women. And I underestimated him.

Wyoming was the pastor of a church called the Remnant, which proclaimed itself the last swatch of godliness in a pustulating world. They thought Santa Barbara, this postcard city of acrylic blue skies and red tile roofs, of coffee bars and beaches and Mexican-American warmth, was a sluice gate on the sewer pipe to hell. They liked to drive home the point by jeering at AIDS funerals.

We ignored them. The dead woman’s daughter, Nikki Vincent, had known they were coming and told us to treat them as if they were invisible. Treat them like roaches underfoot.

Now Nikki laid a coffee brown hand on the coffin. Saying,
Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of you.
Or maybe drawing strength from her mother one last time. Claudine Girard had never backed down from anything. A small woman with a Haitian French accent, she was an AIDS activist even before the disease raked into her. She had also been my university professor, who salted her literature classes with commands to stand straight and belly up to life. Her death seemed impossible.

She had been well-known in Santa Barbara, and reporters were clustering outside the Spanish-style church, under palm trees stirring in the breeze. They looked eager for action. Wyoming, anxious to supply it, tightened his bolo tie and stared at Nikki—seven months pregnant, holding on to her husband’s arm and Claudine’s coffin, ready to run the gauntlet.

He raised his sign. ‘‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch?’’

The Remnant shouted, ‘‘The voodoo witch!’’

It was twenty yards to the hearse waiting at the curb: a long way. The funeral director, usually all smooth, inconspicuous moves and black-suited calm, clasped his hands in dismay. Confrontational funerals were poor advertising for the Elysian Glen Mortuary. He urged the pallbearers forward. Nikki lifted her chin and followed, her face like varnished wood, sunglasses hiding her swollen eyes.