The Disappearance (13 page)

A Ketel One on the rocks, a light meal—small Caesar salad, shrimp risotto, a glass of Foxen pinot noir. Tomorrow, for the third or fourth time, he’ll dig into the evidence against Allison—the police reports, how the evidence was handled, anything else that’s there. Maybe there’s something he’s missed. He has to give this an honest shot—he can’t help it, it won’t work for him to do it any other way.

The restaurant is three-quarters full. Couples and foursomes sit at tables covered with Irish linen tablecloths; a single pink rose adorned with baby’s breath in a slender cut-glass vase graces each table, alongside a candle in a brass ship’s candlestick. A fire’s going in the fireplace in the main room, the light low and soothing. He sits with his decaf cappuccino and a glass of port, feeling the alcohol spreading comfort and warmth in his body. He’s tired—he’ll sleep well tonight.

On the other side of the room, a party of eight are finishing their meal—six men and a couple of women, from their attire professionals who came here directly from the office. They have been loud and boisterous in a good-natured way, trading insults and raucous opinions. Luke, his back to them, hasn’t been paying them attention.

They debate their bill briefly, a couple of credit cards are thrown down. Then a voice cuts through: a voice too familiar for Luke not to notice.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Luke knocks back the last swallow of port, pushes up from his bar stool, and crosses the room to the dinner party.

It’s been three years. Ray Logan has put on a good twenty pounds, making his Newt Gingrich-like doughboy face even rounder. Balding, pink to the point of translucence around the ears, Ray looks the stereotype of the well-fed barrister.

“Hey, Ray. How’re you doing?”

The assemblage turns to look at him, at first without recognition—who the hell is this?—then with slack-jawed disbelief.

“Luke?” This is Ray Logan finding his voice.

“Hello, Ray.”

They’re all staring at him like he’s a brother from another planet. They’re all senior deputy D.A.’s, almost all of whom were recruited by him, and worked for him, and took their marching orders from him blindly and with fierce commitment.

A few of them mutter “hello” and “Luke.” Then Logan’s loud voice supersedes: “Jesus Christ!”

Luke smiles. “Something the matter?”

“You look like …”

“What?” He’s grinning fiercely.

“A biker.”

“A biker? I do own a motorcycle. So does Jay Leno. What’s that mean?”

“It means you look like a bad actor. Certainly not a professional lawyer.”

The grin dies. Luke stares at Ray, then at the others. He knows them all except one woman and one man, the youngest in the group. Hired since he left. But they’d know who he is; oh, yes.

“How are you all doing?” he asks, his eyes sweeping the group.

They stare back at him. A mixture of respect, fear, anxiety.

Logan is composed. “I heard you were back in town,” he says. “That you’re thinking about hiring on as Joe Allison’s lawyer.”

“You heard it on the grapevine?” Luke asks coolly. “Well, obviously I am back in town,” he continues, “and I’m full of life.”

“If you’re thinking of taking Joe Allison as a client, you’re full of something and it isn’t life,” Ray Logan says to him.

“I thought the trial hadn’t happened yet,” Luke says evenly.

Logan shakes his head in dismissal. “Only technically.” He looks Luke over again. “What’re you doing here? How did you get into this?”

“Judge De La Guerra asked me to come down and peruse the situation,” Luke drawls. His voice and everything else about him are getting under Logan’s fair skin, which gives him pleasure.

“He should know better than to stick his nose into this.”

“My impression was that he was an emissary for the establishment. People like you, Ray.”

“You’re laboring under a false impression, Luke.”

Luke looks the group over again. They used to be as loyal to him as Hannibal’s troops. Now they’re looking at him like he’s the enemy.

He’s the enemy now.

Ray Logan reaches out and puts a soft, plump hand on Luke’s shoulder. It’s almost a gesture of affection. “You don’t want to get involved in this, Luke. It’s an absolute loser. This is as strong a case as I’ve ever been around.” He searches for Luke’s eyes with his own. “Look at the evidence I have. You’ll see it. You know what to look for, better than any of us.”

Luke smiles. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, pal. If I take this case,” Luke replies, holding Logan’s stare, “I’ll remember you helped persuade me.”

Logan stiffens. “I heard you changed, Luke. We all did. But we didn’t think you’d gone off the deep end.” He pauses. “Run across Polly since you’ve been back in town?”

The question takes Luke by surprise. The expression on his face reveals everything Logan wanted it to.

Luke’s former assistant lets fly his harpoon. “When Polly sees you, she’ll know she made the right decision.”

He sweeps out of the restaurant with his entourage flowing behind him, leaving Luke nailed to the floor, shaking in rage and pain.

Before dawn he arises from a restless sleep. The freshly pressed pants and newly laundered shirt are carelessly flung over the burnt orange Naugahyde chair that is jammed into the near corner of the small motel room. Underwear and socks lie balled up in another corner, hastily pulled off and flung away.

Crusty with sweat, his armpits stink—he hadn’t opened the window or turned on the phlegmy air conditioner, so the air overnight has turned warm and stale, like pond water becoming stagnant. He had tumbled into sleep on top of the covers, naked, teeth unbrushed.

After leaving the restaurant the night before, too keyed up with exposed nervous emotion to go back and work, he walked into the center of town and wandered through the Paseo Nuevo mall, mingling with the sparse midweek nighttime crowd. He ambled through both large chain bookstores, Borders and Barnes & Noble, catty-corner across State Street from each other, leafing through magazines and paperbacks but not buying anything, then walked a block over to Anacapa and down to the Paradise.

He sat at the bar of the Paradise from ten until closing, midnight. The television was tuned to ESPN, featuring wrapups of the day’s sports and a recap of the weekend’s PGA tournament. Sitting at the bar, watching the tube, he drank five margaritas.

He was high, but not close to drunk. He never gets drunk, he knows his limit. During the cab ride back to the motel he has the driver detour to the Albertson’s on upper State, where he bought a pint of Fundador Spanish brandy and a large box of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies.

Back at the motel he watched the tail end of Leno and part of Conan O’Brien and ate cookies and drank brandy. When he got undressed and went to bed, he doesn’t remember exactly. Time wasn’t particularly important.

Now he drinks half a large bottle of Mountain Spring water without pausing, pisses at length, brushes his teeth, flossing last night’s grunge out. He needs water from the source, the sting of the spray on his face.

Standing on the beach at Rincon Point, fifteen miles south of town in Carpinteria, he sees the sun starting to rise to the east, already a strong, soft, rosy explosion. Red sky at morning doesn’t apply here: storms rarely hit this part of the Pacific, and when they do, they’re tropical tails from the south or Hawaii.

Today’s waves are small ones, not the ones that have made this beach a famous surf spot, but good enough to get wet over. Wearing his ancient wetsuit, he paddles out on his board past the shore break and sets up at the edge of where the outer waves are forming.

He rides for a couple of hours, nothing higher than three-footers. There are few other surfers out here. The mild surf report has kept most of the regulars in bed.

He didn’t come expecting big waves, or needing them. He came because he needed to feel the water of the ocean on him. Up north he does this a couple of times a week. The waves are big there, sometimes fifteen or twenty feet. Those he handles gingerly, usually passing them by. He’s your basic okay surfer, not a lifer by any means. But he loves it, the communion with this watery vastness. Even when he’d become the D.A. and was the epitome of workaholism, he would come out early in the morning, weekends mostly, and paddle out into the water and catch some waves.

As he’s throwing the board into the shell of the pickup truck and is peeling off his wetsuit, a splinter of sunlight momentarily blinds him. Looking to the cliffs above, he sees a shadow moving out of his line of sight. The figure has a pair of binoculars around its neck.

Someone’s watching him. He doesn’t know why he thinks that, since there are other hardy souls out here, but he knows it to be true. He’s being spied upon.

Someone from Ray Logan’s office? No. That would be overkill. They know he’s in town, what would they be watching him for? He isn’t dangerous. As far as he knows, no one is aware that he’s in town except Logan and the others he encountered last night, Joe Allison, and Ferdinand De La Guerra. By midmorning, of course, Logan will have spread the word about his return home; he will speak of Luke in a jokey, dismissive manner, like the toadstool that he is, forget that he’s an important elected official now; to Luke, who was his boss, he’s still and forevermore shall be a nerd, a dweeb.

He wonders if Ray Logan has called the Lancasters. If Doug Lancaster has been scaring prospective lawyers off, as the judge said, he certainly wouldn’t want Luke, a former local icon, getting involved.

As soon as he thinks that, he dismisses it. Doug Lancaster wouldn’t stoop to spying on him. The man has too much class.

But someone was there, watching him. He’s certain of that. Not a comforting thought. Because he might be defending a man accused of a crime? A terrible crime, to be sure, but are the passions against Joe Allison so high that his lawyer will also be a pariah and a target?

Jesus, he just got back to town. All this is happening awfully fast.

He didn’t ask for this job. He sure as hell isn’t going to put himself in harm’s way for it.

Late morning in the jail, after having come back from surfing, showered, breakfasted at the Carrow’s across the street. His meeting with Joe Allison is a desultory affair. “How well did you know Emma Lancaster?” he asks.

“How well?” The prisoner shrugs. “Pretty well. Like I said, she was mature for her age. You could talk to her like an adult.”

“When would you talk to her?”

Another shrug. “At the house, mostly. Sometimes she’d tag along to the station with her dad. She was interested in broadcasting. I think Doug was fantasizing about her coming into the business someday.”

“There were always other people around? When you and she were together?”

Allison frowns. “Is somebody saying there was a relationship of some kind between me and Emma?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Luke tells him. “But if there was, I’ve got to know it. I don’t want to wind up getting blindsided.”

Allison can’t mask his hopefulness. “So you are going to get involved?”

“I said, don’t get your hopes up. I still don’t know. I don’t know how to defend you yet, and if I can’t figure that out, I can’t take your case.”

Allison laughs nervously. “I’m being set up. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Maybe to you,” Luke responds, “but not to the rest of the world.”

“What about you?” Allison challenges him for an answer.

Luke doesn’t avert his eyes from Allison’s stare. “I don’t know. I don’t know you well enough yet to know. But what I do know is that this setup business is a crummy defense. It reeks of desperation. I’d feel uncomfortable if that’s all I went into a courtroom with.” He gets up. “I need to study on this more. I’ll give you an answer day after tomorrow, okay?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

Back at the motel, early afternoon. Going over the material again.

The shoes and the key ring. How do you finesse those? Maybe one, but not both. If, as Allison claims, they were both a plant, whoever did it would have to have intimate access to Allison’s personal life, and also would have to be both incredibly clever and extraordinarily lucky. The evidence sits unknown for a year, then is recovered on a fluke? In another week Allison would no longer have been living in Santa Barbara. Even if the stuff had been found, it would have happened in another jurisdiction whose authorities wouldn’t have known what they meant.

Sitting in the room’s one decent chair, the front door left open to let in fresh air and lift his spirits, he studies some recent photos of Emma Lancaster. If he’d encountered her and was told she was seventeen, he would have believed it.

He asks himself a basic question as he studies the material. What does Joe Allison have in his favor? What could a reasonable defense be built upon? Not a
plausible
defense, necessarily, something clear and logical; plenty of the best defenses have come from left field, built on any manner of preposterous premises. But reasonable in the sense that you can get a jury to believe it, or at least believe that it’s possible, and thus cast reasonable doubt.

Start with the key ring in the glove box. It’s Emma Lancaster’s, of that there’s no doubt. It is, without question, the single most important piece of evidence in the case, because it concretely links Emma with Joe Allison. Unless, as Allison is asserting, it was a plant—which no jury in the world is going to buy, not as a stand-alone entity. Either he or the deceased put it in there. And if there is a connection between them, beyond that of the boss’s daughter and an employee, it’s a connection that has only negative implications. What would a fourteen-year-old girl be doing in the company of a thirty-year-old man? Maybe he gave her a lift somewhere, she accidentally dropped the key ring in the car, he threw it in the glove compartment and then forgot about it?

Selling that would be a bitch, but there might be room to maneuver around it. Allison had been Mirandized, but not as a suspect in the kidnapping/murder. There’s a big difference between a drunk driving charge and premeditated murder. They should have been clear with him about that. That would be an argument that might have merit.