Digging Up the Dead (20 page)

“It’s a beautiful tradition,” said Thatch. “When I was in Bangkok all the homes I saw had a spirit house in the yard.”

”Thanks for the explanation,” said Tosca. “What do you think will happen to Sunida?”

“Happen?” Thatch looked at Tosca quizzically. “What do you mean? She’ll go on with her life, of course, like everyone else.”

“She just seems so vulnerable, that’s all,” said Tosca, “losing Oliver Swenson so suddenly. They were so happy together. All right. I hate to change the subject but could you drive a little faster? There’s a musical instrument I still need to research.”

Thatch took the 9 a.m. phone call from Delano while cataloguing the few rocks he’d brought back from his aborted trip to Idaho, which he had been forced to leave early due to the blizzard. Some of the rocks came from the Precambrian sedimentary formation in the panhandle near the Canadian border and had metamorphosed into slates. He put them aside to be set on a different shelf in his collection.

“Hi, Dan, any news?” said Thatch.

“More than I expected. I have to head down your way in an hour or so. Got a beer or two handy?”

“More than you expect,” Thatch laughed and added, “just got a case in.”

He tapped his cell phone off and checked the refrigerator. After counting the bottles of beer, he put six into a small cooler, took it out to the patio, placed it next to one of the Adirondack chairs and sat. The Southern California coast’s infamous marine layer of low clouds, known as June Gloom, shaded the sun. The sullen clouds hung heavily over the coast, but he knew they’d burn off around 11:00 a.m. in time for Dan’s arrival.

The two had been friends for three decades, meeting at first as professional law enforcement officers when their agencies cooperated on a case and soon becoming friends who shared similar tastes. One was the Stiegl beer they’d both enjoyed while on assignment in Austria and now made a point of drinking wherever it was available.

Thatch had taken early retirement from the U.S. Secret Service soon after his wife died of cancer. His son, a Newport Beach police rookie, visited often. Thatch’s daughter, Christine, had been settled into a halfway house for functioning schizophrenics. She’d lived there for six years, since her twenty-third birthday. Like the other patients, Christine was unable to focus enough to hold a job but did her own grocery shopping and cooking. Her great pleasure was listening to music, and both her father and brother made sure she had plenty of CDs to play and iTunes gift cards for her iPod.

Agent Delano was in charge of the Orange County field office, reporting to the massive main FBI agency in Los Angeles. Thatch had sought his help in connection with a case he and Tosca had been involved in, and he appreciated the investigative facilities Dan had made available to him, particularly the forensics lab at Quantico, FBI headquarters in Alexandria, near Washington, D.C.

Thatch called Tosca’s cell phone.

“Dan has some news for us. Want to come over?”

“On my way,” she replied. At his house she went straight out to the patio and sat in a lawn chair.

“Hey, Dan,” Thatch called out when he heard the doorbell ring and the door open. “We’re out here. Just saw a light-footed clapper rail.”

“Oh, no,” said Delano, coming through the house and sitting next to his friend in the other Adirondack chair. “Don’t go running those bizarre bird names by me again. You know I have no interest in ornithology. Hi, Tosca, good to see you again.”

“But Dan,” said Thatch, “this is a rare sighting. Okay, here, your first beer of the day,” he said, handing him a Stiegl from the cooler. “Tosca?”

“Thanks, but I brought a flask of tea.” She turned eagerly toward Dan. “What have you found out about the musical instruments and Graydon Blair? Where’s the murder weapon? Was it the dagger? Have they caught the thief? Was Blair the killer?”

Dan popped the bottle cap and drank. “Let’s take your questions one by one.”

Thatch picked up the notepad at his side and looked expectantly at Delano.

“You sounded pretty upbeat about the results you found about the murdered Jordanian diplomat,” he said.

“Yeah.” Delano took several sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “You’ll see from these that we have files on him as well as his valuable collections of Middle Eastern daggers and rare musical instruments from that part of the world. There was one dagger missing from his wall collection, and amazingly it showed up four years later in France. Seems a hobo found it in a trash can, so our killer wasn’t so smart after all. No fingerprints, but enough specks of the Jordanian’s blood were in the hilt and the elaborate carving for testing. Since the New York police had a photo of the missing dagger from the Jordanian embassy, we were able to confirm it was the murder weapon, and DNA did the rest.”

“How did it make its way to France?” said Tosca.

“We tried to trace its journey backwards but had no luck. The hobo probably sold it, and it eventually ended up with a pawnbroker in France who recognized it from a police flyer. He was obviously anxious to keep in with the police, and they contacted Interpol, who contacted us, and that was it.”

“Okay, so we have the murder weapon but no connection to Graydon Blair. Anything on him and his rebec?”

“This particular rebec was almost as rare as the dagger but a lot easier to trace, because the musician usually needs to replace the strings at one time or another. The strings are custom made, and by contacting the few companies that sell them, we were able to put a list together.”

“I knew it!” said Tosca. “There are always clues to be found in musical instruments. Piano wire has often been used as a garrote, and I read of a husband who recorded his violin solo in the highest C note and played it nonstop for two days, having tied his wife up in a chair. It drove her literally crazy. So, Dan, what can you tell us about Blair’s rebec? I assume it belonged to the Jordanian?”

“Well, hold on now. His family has confirmed he was the owner of a rebec, but there’s no proof it’s the one your neighbor owns. Interpol agents are still investigating. We know it was stolen, probably by the killer, but there’s no connection to Blair with either the dagger or the rebec at the moment.

“What about the deep scratch on the side?” said Tosca.

“Yes, there is that, but where’s the proof someone didn’t find it in an antique store or on eBay? One thing we are doing is checking out the people who ordered some strings. We can only hope Graydon Blair’s name is on the list.”

Tosca sat quietly, her eyes fixed on two figures in the marshes below, the man following a gliding hawk with binoculars, the woman holding a camera. But Thatch knew Tosca’s mind was racing like a leopard after its prey, trying to come up with another angle to pursue that would give them an answer faster.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he said, “let it go for now. No sense allowing impatience to get the better of us and coming to the wrong conclusion. How about we all go out for lunch?”

Arriving back at J.J.’s house after a meal at a seafood restaurant famed for its crab cakes, Tosca and Thatch went upstairs to find J.J. and Christine in the living room. They were talking animatedly and stopped when they saw Tosca.

“Mother, you will never guess what happened,” said J.J. “Oh, hi, Thatch.” She turned back to Tosca. “We went to six residence homes and talked to a lot of the staff and several patients with Alzheimer’s, you know, for that music program I told you about that can help to bring back their memories. We let them listen with headphones and iPods, after we picked out songs we thought they’d heard as young people. Well, it worked!”

“You mean everyone began dancing and singing?”

“No, of course not. Well, a few of them were humming and smiling, so I know the program is a success. Christine,” said J.J., turning to Thatch’s daughter, “tell your dad what a great time we had.”

Christine got up and hugged her father. “Hello Dad, we had a very interesting time. I only got impatient once! Just once!”

She went back to the sofa, smoothed her blouse and stared at the floor after her outburst, fiddling with the dark blonde hair she wore in long braids down her back, her fair complexion slightly flushed.

“That’s great,” said Thatch. “I’m real proud of you. But why were you impatient?”

“It took a long time for some of the people in the homes to understand why they were asked to wear earphones. It was so obvious.”

“To you, Christine, it was obvious because you listen to your iPod all day, practically, but some of those elderly patients have never owned one, let alone listened to one.”

Thatch had learned over the years, ever since his daughter had succumbed to schizophrenia six years earlier, to treat her as if she was as normal as anyone else. The disease had first struck when she was in her senior year in college. She had begun to hear voices and went through various phases of violent reactions to different colors, depending on the time of day. She finally dropped out and returned to her parents’ house.

Thatch and his wife had scoured the country, seeking a cure. Finally accepting that schizophrenia in Christine’s case could be controlled with medications but that she would never be restored to her former self, they found a private residential facility in the next town, San Clemente. The home housed five other semi-functioning patients who, like Christine, were able to grocery shop and cook their own meals but were unable to hold jobs because they couldn’t focus long enough. There were medical staff who made sure they took their meds every morning and evening.

“Time for us to go, Christine,” said Thatch. Bidding J.J. and Tosca goodbye, he and his daughter left.

Tosca poured herself a glass of mead and asked J.J. if she’d like a cup of tea, knowing full well her daughter never drank her mead, but J.J. said she hadn’t finished telling her about the visit to the Alzheimer’s patients.

“You’re going to like this,” she said. “A nurse at the third home we went to asked if it was at all possible to find some music played on a rebec, one of those rare instruments you told me that Graydon Blair has. She showed me a photo of a patient playing one he used to own. He asked if I had it, poor guy. When I told him I didn’t, he asked me to find it for him. Isn’t that amazing? I said I would do some research and asked if I could borrow the photo. Here, is this like Graydon’s rebec?”

Tosca looked at the picture and noted the damage on the side of the instrument. It appeared to be identical to the rebec she’d seen at Blair’s house, complete with the long scratch.

“We need to talk to this patient,” she said.

“That won’t help,” said J.J. “The guy thinks he sold it to an Arab years ago.”

“Aha. Then that proves Blair stole it,” said Tosca.

“How do you figure that? Maybe that Arab sold it to another Arab. You don’t have any evidence that Blair stole it.”

“All right, I’ll concede that, but this is definitely the same instrument. I doubt he’ll tell me where and how he obtained it. It’s easy to make up stories that can’t be checked.”

Dark hair blowing in the early morning ocean breeze, Tosca strode around Isabel Island’s seafront at a quick pace. The marine layer was in full force at 6:00 a.m., but she welcomed its coolness for her daily walk. Several times she had hoped the clouds promised rain, but she’d come to accept that they dissipated by midmorning, and the sun and blue sky became picture postcard perfect. Darn. Was she never again going to feel the soft, sporadic cloudbursts that often marked the afternoon hours of her homeland?

As Tosca passed the house she always admired, with its Imperial concert grand piano viewable through the full-glass window, she wished she could hear its massive soundboard, but she’d never seen anyone seated there.

Approaching the Isabel Island ferry that carried three cars and dozens of passengers to the Peninsula and back, she remembered meeting Detective Parnell for the first time. The dock was close to the place where the Island’s first-ever murder had occurred several months earlier. It became the case that started Tosca on her quest to become a crime reporter.

She pulled her attention back to the various pieces she’d gathered together in her current investigation, including the book manuscripts on the flash drive, the lab report of the sap poisoning that killed Sally and the unanswered questions she had about Graydon Blair.

Several imaginary crime scenarios flashed through her mind: Oliver Swenson informing Blair he was going to blow the whistle on Fuller Sanderson’s fake manuscripts and Blair batting him over the head with the crwth. Or Blair gloating over his rare instruments and wiping blood from the rebec. How about Karma kneeling next to Sally after putting poison in her White Russian? Maybe the four neighbors had conspired to gather the sap from their giant milkweed plants and give it to their landscape gardener.

That last idea was pretty wacky, even for me, she reflected. What really happened? Why was Sally murdered? Obviously, to keep her quiet about something, but what? Oh, of course. The tell-all that Sunida was writing. As for Swenson’s death, was he killed, too, to stop his Thai fiancée’s book that could blemish Norman Sanderson’s name? Yet, who would care? He was a failed novelist. However, Karma would care after announcing her fundraiser for Fuller’s library. Wouldn’t do to have his granddaughter accused of murder. If she was the killer, forget any fundraising.

So what or who was left?

“Chief Parnell? Ah, yes, it’s Tosca Trevant. Pardon? Yes, of course I am still here in the United States. I’d hardly call you all the way from London. Kind of you to ask, though. I wonder if I might come over to the station later this morning and talk to you for a few minutes. Oh, yes, it’s very important. In fact, extremely important. Good. See you in twenty.”

Pleased that she felt she was becoming acclimated by using American phrases, she tried it out on her daughter who was curled up in an armchair nearby watching the news on television.