Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (16 page)

"Where was the car parked, Ford?"

"Right outside my room. How's Georgia?"

"Bearing up. I'd like you to come in and
talk to me. Say that you will."

"I will. Soon as I run down some leads on
the other matter. I'm on a hot trail and I—there's a connection, I
think. Something to do with the Jane Doe case is responsible for
Jim's death. I'm sure of that. But listen...mainly why I
called...I'm concerned about Vicky Victoria. She—"

"Who?"

"Jim's kid, the little
girl. This is going to sound screwy, I know, but somehow the kid is
involved in all this. I don't mean directly, of course, but...
something very strange is going on, and the kid is somehow centered
in it. She should have, uh, special protection."

"You think she's in danger?"

"Possibly, yes. I'm working an angle
that...well, I don't know how to say it without coming off as a
loony tune, but...I believe I may be in contact with—You know that
she's adopted?"

"I know that, yeah. I'm her godfather."

"Okay, great, put her under wraps."

“
Who's that you said
you're in contact...?”

"Her natural family. Possibly."

"This ties to the Jane Doe thing Jim was
working?"

"I'm almost sure it does, yes."

"You in Ojai, Ford?"

I sighed, said, "Yeah."

"Okay. Maybe I'm loony,
too, but I think I'm going to give you—uh, don't go back to your
hotel. Ventura County has police responsibility there. They have a
pickup on you. Can't cancel it, uh, I'll try to modify it. But
don't give those guys any reason to draw down on you. If you're
apprehended, just be cool until my people get there. And, uh, say
nothing. You know."

I said, "Yeah, I know. Thanks."

He told me, "It's a murder warrant."

I said, "Okay."

"Daily double."

"What?"

"Jane Doe too. What the
hell, Ford, some things just can't proceed by the book, can they?
Ten minutes ago I'd have shot you myself, on sight. You look dirty
as hell, man."

I swallowed hard and said, "I do?"

"You figure it. A security
officer at County General identified you as the man who was trying
to molest the patient shortly before she was murdered. Nobody, not
even your Miss Saunders, could alibi you for the few minutes before
and after the attack, and you
were
on the premises. You
were
at Sportsman's Lodge when
Cochran was shot, and he was shot with your gun. Also—"

"You did find it,
then...the gun."

"Oh, yeah. Crack of dawn. Not where you
suggested, though. Ford..."

"Yeah?"

"I can't, uh, withdraw this warrant. Not
sure I want to, but if you are on to something...well, I'm not
looking for a patsy. I want the killer. If it turns out to be you,
you can't run far enough to evade me, guy. Want you to know
that."

"I'm not your man, Captain."

"Hope not. For both our sakes. But I want
you in my office this time tomorrow—win, lose, or draw. Got
me?"

"Got you, yeah."

"Don't go back to the inn.
They've made you there. And don't go zipping around in that
God-obvious Maserati. The pickup went to Ventura an hour ago.
So...be advised."

I told him, "I am so advised. Thanks."

I returned to the car,
told Alison, "Good thing I didn't use the mobile. We'd probably be
looking down gun barrels right now."

That alarmed her. She gave me a wild look
and said dully, "What?"

"Cops are looking for me. Murder charge.
Both Jim and Jane. So maybe it's time you bailed out, Doc."

"What do you mean?"

I said grimly, "Get out of this. The game is
over. From this point it's sheer survival. It's okay, you're clean.
So walk away. Go home and watch it on the six o'clock news."

She said, "Don't be silly. You're not
running, are you?"

I told her, "Maybe, if I had somewhere to
run to."

"Please stop talking dumb," she moaned.

I lit a cigarette, drummed
my fingers on the steering wheel.

Alison giggled, reaching for lightness,
said, "Guess that shut you up! You really have not a thing to say
now, have you."

I grinned back at her, shared the cigarette
with her, told her, "One is forbidden. Two must come, male and
female must come. Guess I need you, kid. But I'd understand if
you'd rather just check out."

She told me, "I wouldn't miss the new moon
for all the tea in China."

"You
did
notice," I said
kiddingly.

"Notice what?"

"Hiawatha's gorgeous body."

"Oh, well, sure, I
noticed
that.
What's that got to do with anything?"

"I suspect," I told her,
not exactly kidding, “that the new moon and the earth mother have
something to do with a sex orgy.”

"In that case," she replied, "I'm sure not
missing it."

In any case, I decided,
neither was I. I was anxious to meet one of those
soul-walkers.

But then, of course, I probably already
had.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Timing
It

The problem of the moment
was to avoid detection by the local cops. Ojai was policed by the
Ventura County Sheriff's Department, under contract from the city
and via a local substation. Probably not a very large contingent,
but Ventura herself was only fourteen miles down the pike, so
possibly the sheriff had dispatched a car or two devoted to my
apprehension.

I figured we both
looked
tourista
enough to pass casual scrutiny. The problem was the Maserati,
as Valdiva noted. So we hied it away to a residential back street
and parked it beneath a majestic oak, installed the canvas cover,
and left it there.

The next problem was that
the time was just a little past twelve noon and we had to fill in
ten hours in Ojai, on foot, before the moonrise event. I was at a
sort of dead end. I mean, sure, the thing looked much more
promising now, but there seemed to be no place to take it until it
was ready to take me again.

Sure, it looked promising. Look at what had
been developed. Not only had we stumbled on to a Jane Doe
look-alike but an apparent Jane Doe family. A coincidence might be
waiting around every comer, okay, but not a whole family of
coincidences. A case logic was beginning to fall into focus. And oh
boy, I do love logic in my cases. I still did not see it all, of
course, but I did have a glimmer—and that was a hell of a lot more
than I had coming into this town.

The guy Hiawatha and his
blue-and-white running shoes—apparently living under the same roof
with a Jane Doe look-alike, with two of them, for God's sake—just
had to be the killer in surgical gown and mask at County General.
The logic, at the moment, could not extend into any explanation of
motive, but I was sure that would come when the final pieces of
this puzzle fell into place.

I had given
Oom-ray-key-too, or whoever, an opportunity to resolve one of the
issues when I insisted that we had met before. She could have
admitted that she'd been in Studio City on Wednesday night. She
could have told me that she had a dead-ringer twin sister, who I
could have met in Los Angeles at some time in the past. 'Course,
she was not obligated to tell me a damned thing. But most people,
confronted with a mistaken identity mix-up, are quick to resolve
it if they can. As for a visit to Studio City, or anywhere else in
Los Angeles, it's no big deal. Southern Californians hop from town
to town without even thinking about it; Ojai is practically a
suburb of L.A. It is not as though I had suggested that I saw her
in Paris or London. Of course, she could have been covering for any
number of innocent reasons except for the fact that I saw her, or
a dead ringer, with Jim Cochran minutes before someone put a bullet
between his eyes. The hair was the only thing that did not
match.

Both the dead Jane Doe and the ringer at
Sportsman's had short blond hair. The original Jane's hair was
extremely short, since it had only six weeks' growth after being
shaved bald for brain surgery. Minnehaha came with jet-black hair
in long braids. But what the hell, you can buy a head of hair like
that anywhere.

The shakier part of the
logic came via little Vicky Victoria, but a focus was developing
there also. One of these two women—and I was already thinking of
them as sisters—simply had to be Vicky's natural mother. Was it
sheer coincidence that Vicky's adoptive father was the policeman
assigned to the Jane Doe case? Or was a deeper story there,
somewhere? Why had Jim been killed? Alison characterized him as a
womanizer. Was he?—and was he, then, coincidence of all
coincidences, actually Vicky's natural father?

So who was Hiawatha? What was his stake in
any of this? And who was the saintly lady with the serene smile who
invaded my head in pure mind-to-mind contact but who, in Oom's
words, "says nothing"?

See, I had something
going. Just did not know exactly
what
, needed time to develop it
fully, but did not know just where to touch it without breaking the
whole thing into indecipherable pieces. I did not want to blunder
in hastily, send everything scurrying back into formless chaos.
Wanted to keep the focus developing in a controlled manner so I
could grab it all in a single piece and hand it to Captain Valdiva
in exchange for my own head.

Meanwhile the town was
developing a noticeable police presence. Two cars were prowling
constantly, slowly, evidently determined to find that head and turn
it over to Valdiva themselves. My only saving grace, as I saw it,
were the hordes of tourists so common to the area at this time of
year.

So Alison and I tried out
best to blend with the others. We window-shopped, had coffee and
pie at a sidewalk café, visited a gallery and then a museum where
I learned something about the so-called Oak Grove People who
predated the Chumash in the area by some seven or eight thousand
years.

In trying to deal with
time out of hand I usually try to relate prehistoric new-world
peoples with the generally better-known contemporaries elsewhere.
So these Oak Grove People appear to have had a thriving culture
coexistent with the early pyramid builders of Egypt. It helps to
get a perspective on time. This nation, the U.S., counts its
history in centennials; we just had our second. We think of our
pilgrims and pioneers as going way, way back in time, but we are
still dealing with time in mere hundreds of years. Even Columbus
and the "discovery" of this continent was like yesterday compared
with these other blocks of time. The days of Jesus are only a
couple thousand years back. The Oak Grove People were a thousand
years vanished by that time. And in this little museum in Ojai
there are artifacts revealing their presence on the land for many
thousands of years before the abrupt disappearance. We're
talking
thousands
of years, back to a time before Troy and Sparta, before
Minos and Crete, many thousands of years before Moses and Abraham,
before Noah, before anything that any of us really know anything
about.

Gives you a bit of a rush to stand before a
little glass case and gaze at a stone ax that was held by a living
man—one basically just like any of us today—ten thousand years
before Valley Forge.

And they called this "the New World."

Well...I was just trying
to kill time and avoid the cops, but I found myself gaining a
somewhat different perspective on my "fortune-tellers." A man at
the museum told me that the mountains of the area were recently
formed, as geological time goes. Called them "block
mountains"—pointed out that they were aligned east-west, whereas
most ranges run generally north-south—said these were formed during
the present geological age and were very "young"
mountains.

Same guy told me there was
quite a mystery surrounding the Oak Grove People. Nobody really
knows who they were or where they came from. But recent excavations
in the Channel Islands, which lie about twenty-five miles offshore
from Ventura at their closest point, reveal ancient traces of the
same people. Problem there is the fact that those islands are
rooted in the continental shelf; they are mountain peaks that once
were contiguous with the continental land mass, which suggests that
the Oak Grove People's beautiful Ojai Valley probably stretched all
the way from Topa Topa to the outermost islands—an area now covered
by the Pacific in depths down to six-thousand feet. The only reason
that is a problem is that evolutionary development of unique flora
and fauna on the islands suggest a separation from the land mass at
a time when living men and women were on the scene. Block mountains
are a result of crustal upthrusts, which in turn are associated
with fault lines such as the great San Andreas that devastated San
Francisco early in the century and threatens to send half the
state toppling into the Pacific at just any time it may decide to
do so. The geology of the Channel Islands is identical to that of
the local onshore mountains.

So maybe I was too quick
to criticize Oom's assertion that her soul-walkers had witnessed
the rise of the "sacred" mountains.

That would give you a
buzz, wouldn't it?—even us twentieth-century sophisticates—to stand
witness to the sudden birth of a mountain range? Think you'd ever
forget it? I know I wouldn't. And sure, if I'd been a natural man
of the land thousands of years ago and saw something like
that...why, I guess I'd attach religious significance to
it.