A Death In Beverly Hills

Chapter One

Detective Simon Katz studied the eight-foot-high stone wall surrounding Tom Travis’ mansion and thought that it looked like something built to defeat a mob of angry villagers. After a quick glance at Katz, Jack Furley pressed the intercom button and said “Los Angeles Police Detectives” into the microphone. A sharp click sounded and the carved-teak gate swung open. A hundred feet across the lawn a two-and-a-half story beam-and-stucco house blotted out half the night sky.

What did the property taxes on something like this run? Eighty thousand a year? A hundred thousand? Katz wondered as Furley paced down the winding slate walkway.

 “Jack, slow down,” Katz snapped as the pain flared up in his bad knee. Barren rhododendrons framed an arch over the double-wide front doors. Furley waited for Katz to catch up then rang the bell. A stocky, mid-forties Hispanic woman in a maid’s uniform appeared almost instantly.

 “I’m Detective Katz. This is my partner, Detective Furley. We’re here to see Mr. Travis.”

 “Yes, he is waiting for you,” she said, her face a worried mask, and led the way deep into the house. Furley seemed fascinated by the marble statues and gilt-framed paintings. They passed one room containing a six-foot high fountain in the form of a circular waterfall. Katz ignored it and limped doggedly on.

They found Tom Travis in a leather massage chair in front of a 70-inch flat-screen. Some kind of gangster movie was playing, Pacino in Scarface or maybe the second Godfather film. Travis flicked the remote before Katz could figure out which.

“Guys, thanks for coming.” Travis shook hands with Furley giving him a big smile. “Get you anything, coffee, whatever?”

“No thanks,” Katz said.

“You hungry? Delfina could fix you up a steak sandwich.”

“Thanks, nothing,” Katz snapped before Furley could accept. Travis shot Furley a questioning look and the young detective hesitated then gave his head a quick shake.

Without asking, Katz lowered himself onto a leather couch. “You said there was a problem about your wife?” Furley took out his pad, ballpoint poised to take notes.

“Yes, maybe,” Travis said, giving Katz a quick, embarrassed smile. “I hope not.” Through the windows brief flashes of fireworks flickered across the distant sky. “I came home around six and she wasn’t here.” Travis paused. Katz just stared at him. “We were supposed to go somewhere, New Year’s Eve you know and, well, she wasn’t here and the house was dark.”

“What about the maid?” Furley asked. Katz kept his face blank though in his head he was shouting, ‘Shut up and let him talk!’

“She had the day off. When it got past seven and Marian still hadn’t come home I called Delfina and asked her to come in.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you want the maid to come in?” Katz asked.

“In case I needed something.” Katz and Furley stared as if Travis had been speaking in tongues. “Well, obviously I had to stay home and wait for Marian so I would need someone to make dinner and then clean up.”

Katz paused for a beat then started again.

“Uhhuh. . . . Have you checked with your wife’s friends, family?”

“Delfina handled that. . . . Delfina?”

The maid appeared in the study doorway. “Yes, Mr. Tom?”

“Delfina, the policemen want to know who you called about Mrs. Travis.”

The maid looked back and forth between the two detectives, finally settling her gaze on Katz. “I call her father, her brother, her friend, Miss Leslie. No one has seen her.”

“Is this unusual, Ms. Travis not being home for dinner?”

“She is very tired now, with the baby. She never stay out. She take naps.”

“She has a baby?”

“Soon, soon. Maybe two weeks. She is gordo,” Delfina made a gesture with two hands in front of her stomach, “Big. It makes her tired.” Furley scribbled another note. “Besides, she never stay out this late with Sarah.”

“Who’s Sarah?”

“My stepdaughter,” Travis cut in, “Marian’s daughter from her prior marriage.”

“She is four. A beautiful child,” Delfina added, half in tears.

Katz gave Furley a quick guarded look.

“What was your wife scheduled to do today?” Katz asked.

“Delfina,” Travis held out his tumbler and rattled the half melted ice, “while you’re up.” The maid hurried over and took the glass. “Sure she can’t get you guys something?”

“Maybe later,” Katz said, muzzling Furley with a sharp glance. “About Mrs. Travis’s plans for the day. . . ?”

“Uhhh, not sure. You know how it is,” Travis said, turning to Furley. “The wife’s always yakking at you. After a while you just say ‘Yes, dear’ and go back to the game.” Travis shrugged. “I don’t know. Shopping, I guess. She loved to take Sarah shopping. The kid’s got more shoes than the Dodgers starting line-up.”

“Where were you today?”

“In the desert.”

Confused, Katz looked at Furley, got a quick head shake, and turned back to Travis. “What were you doing in the desert?”

“I just got a new dune buggy. Christmas present to myself. This is the first chance I’ve had to take her out for a test drive.”

“I’ll need a time line for my report.”

“Uhhh, sure. Okay, I hooked up the trailer to my Hummer and pulled out, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight, eight-thirty this morning. I drove to Templeton in San Bernardino County. Got there around ten-thirty. Had an early lunch and hit the desert around noon. Quit about four and got back here around six. That’s about it.”

“Did anybody see you there?”

“Am I a suspect?”

“A suspect for what?”

“I don’t know. It just sounds like you’re asking me for an alibi or something.”

“We’re just getting all the details.”

“Yeah, sure, I understand. Sorry. I guess I’m more upset than I want to admit. I should know better. I’ve played a cop ten, twenty times at least. I know how it works. Okay, well, sure, I saw some people but I don’t know their names.”

“Did you pay for anything with your credit card?”

“Just gas on the way back. Everything else I paid cash, but I always save my receipts.” Travis handed Katz a plain envelope marked “Dune Buggy Research Expenses.” Inside was the register tag for lunch at the El Jefe Restaurant, a receipt from the State of California Bureau of Parks and Recreation for the $20 entry fee to the Double Peaks Off-Road Vehicle Recreation Area, and an ARCO pump printout for nineteen gallons of premium gas.

“Why did you save these?”

“In my tax bracket you take every deduction you can get.”

“This was a business trip?”

“Research. I might play a dune-buggy racer in my next film.” Travis flashed another quick smile. “At least as far as the IRS is concerned, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Katz flicked his eyes and Furley hurriedly copied Travis’s comment, word for word. They spent half an hour longer questioning Travis and the maid but learned nothing significant. Travis signed a consent for a tap on his phone, gave them his contact numbers and promised to call if he heard anything from his wife. A babble of noise erupted outside and red and white flashes lit the sky.

“Happy new year,” Furley said in a flat tone.

“Hell of a way to spend New Year’s Eve, Marian and Sarah missing like this. You think they’re okay, don’t you? It’s probably just car trouble or something, right?” Travis looked expectantly at Furley then frowned and drained his glass.

Ten minutes later Katz and Furley were following the twisting walk back to the street. A few distant pops tattooed the night.

“Why didn’t you let the maid fix us a sandwich?” Furley complained when they reached the gate. “I’m starving.”

“Listen, you never take favors from a suspect. You’re already on his turf. You don’t make it worse by accepting his food.”

“How many times has somebody given you a cup of coffee on the job?”

“A glass of water, a cup of coffee, a Coca Cola, okay, but you never break bread with a perp. You’ve gotta learn that, Jack.”

“When did he become a perp?”

“Did he seem like a broken-hearted husband to you?”

“Not so much. “

“You ever had a millionaire just happen to save a cash register tape for a ten dollar lunch?”

“That could be for the IRS, like he said.”

With a grunt Katz settled into the Crown Vic’s passenger seat.

“Sure, and OJ was framed.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Jack, listen to me. This is not going to end well. Running this case is going to be like slogging through twenty miles of rain-soaked shit and it isn’t going to be pretty when we get to the end.” Katz glared at the eight foot high wall. “Let’s get the hell out of here. My knee’s killing me.”

Chapter Two

“Thanks for coming down, Mr. Travis,” Katz began. “We appreciate your help.”

“No, I appreciate your help. And call me Tom.”

Katz forced a weak smile and plowed on.

“We were hoping, Tom, that you might have remembered something new about the day Marian disappeared.”

“Gee, guys, I’ve told you everything I know. You’ve seen the poster, right?”

Thousands of eleven by fourteen inch placards with the heading:

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?

followed by a picture of Marian Travis in her wedding dress holding a glass of Dom had been scattered all over Southern California. The phone number in red at the bottom was 1-800-MISSING. Travis was reported to have paid someone $25,000 for the number. Katz suspected that he had gotten it in exchange for an autographed head shot and a lunch at Ivy.

“Yeah, Tom, we sure have,” Furley assured him.

“We’ve already gotten over five thousand tips. Most of them are whackos,” Travis smirked and fluttered his hands like flapping cuckoo birds, “but we’ve gotten some good leads too. Turned them over to you guys, of course.”

Katz shot Furley an embarrassed glance and turned back to Travis. “Yeah, we’re checking them out. But, back to the day she disappeared, were you able to remember anything else she said about where she was going?”

“All a blank, sorry,” Travis said, shrugging.

“Your maid, Delfina Angelinez, said Mrs. Travis was planning on spending the day at home with her daughter. Does that ring any bells?”

“Delfina would know better than me.” Travis sneaked a peek at his watch, a Patek Philippe, no thicker than a business card, all done in silver and gold and secured to his tanned wrist with a silver strap. “I figure that since you found her car at the Beverly Center someone probably grabbed them from there.”

“That’s a possibility—”

“You know, I did a film once, Against The Grain, you remember it?” he asked Furley. “I played this private detective hired to find a missing rich girl. Daddy was worried about her but my character thought she had set up her own kidnapping to get daddy’s money. But Razor, that was my character, Razor Sands, he was wrong. Her stepmother had really grabbed the girl so that the Old Man would leave all his money to her. So—” Travis held up his hand, “so, anyway,” he continued speaking faster, “the way they kidnapped her in the movie, they let the air out of one of her tires at the mall and when she bent over to look at it, two guys jumped out of the van parked next to her and grabbed her up.”

Travis paused for a quick breath and studied Katz and Furley for some sign that they were following him. “So, I was thinking, you found Marian’s Escalade at the mall, what if . . . “ Travis paused theatrically, “the bad guys had studied me, you know checked out my films, and copied that scene. Marian’s about to get into the car and bang, the van door flies open, two guys grab her, throw her in, the door slides closed. Ten seconds later, they’re gone. Nobody’s seen anything.” Travis looked expectantly at Furley.

“What about the little girl?”

“Sarah?”

“Yeah, what about little Sarah?”

“Okay, well, after they get Marian in the van, one of them ties her up, tape or something, while the other one grabs Sarah.” Travis spread his hands palms up. “Five more seconds is all it would take.”

“We’ll take another look at the security tapes for any vans near your wife’s car,” Katz said in as sincere a tone as he could manage. Travis gave him a quick smile.

“So, guys . . . “ Travis glanced at his $15,000 watch.

“Just a couple of other things. We don’t want to have to ask you to come back again.”

“Hey, I’m the star. They aren’t making the movie without me.”

“We’ve been going over the list of people who were in your house in the weeks before your wife disappeared. There are still some prints we can’t match up. Can you think of anyone else?”

“I gave you the pool guy, right?” Page in hand, Furley checked the list and nodded. “Let’s see, Delfina . . . the gardener, he might have come inside to use the can. He’s supposed to use the one in the pool house but, well, what are you gonna do? He’s probably Delfina’s second cousin or something.” Travis pursed his lips in thought as if multiplying two five digit numbers in his head. “My personal trainer, the catering crew for the Christmas party, all the guests from the party, Marian’s family, father, brother— that kid’s a piece of work. I told you to check him out, right?”

Katz nodded.

“Well, okay. You know how it is. The caterer brings his crew, waiters, bartender, busboys, who knows?”

“We’ve printed all of them.”

“Sure, you printed the ones they told you about. Half those people are probably hiding from Imigracion. Last thing they’re gonna do is line up to be fingerprinted by the policia. That’s probably who your missing prints belong to. Besides. . . .” Travis shrugged.

“Besides what?”

“Well, what are the odds that someone who could have done something like this would leave his prints in my house and not already have a record? I mean, anybody who was in my house who isn’t already in your computers is probably a producer or a studio guy, not a kidnapper.” Seeing Katz’s blank stare, Travis frowned. “I’d like to help you but I’m just saying that I think this fingerprint thing is a dead end. If you ask me, it’s some whack job like the guy who killed Lennon.”

“You think your wife is dead?”

“No, hell no! I didn’t mean that, just that when you’re a celebrity, shit like this becomes part of your life, they paint a target on you,” Travis tapped his chest and scowled.

I don’t believe this guy, Katz thought. His pregnant wife is missing and probably dead and he’s complaining that there’s a target on his chest!

Simon suppressed his anger and gave Travis another forced smile and as politely as possible said: “You know, Tom, in cases like this, we have to consider all the possibilities.”

“Sure.”

“It’s like a pilot, before he takes off, he goes through the checklist.”

“It’s not that he thinks the gas tank is empty,” Furley cut in, “but he still calls off ‘Fuel?’ and the co-pilot checks the gauge. That way, if something goes wrong later and someone asks, ‘Did you run out of gas,’ the pilot can say, ‘No, we checked that specifically before we took off.’ It’s like that with us. Just because we ask a question doesn’t mean we think something is wrong. We just gotta go through the checklist.”

“Sure, I understand. You’ve got to be thorough.”

“Right,” Furley said, smiling weakly. “We’ve got to check off all the boxes.”

“Okay, lay it on me.”

“You know, Tom,” Katz began in a fatherly tone, “we’ve heard some things, that in the past maybe you’ve gotten physical with people now and then. True?”

“I don’t let anybody push me around.”

“Of course not. You’re not some pansy musical star,” Furley added. “We get that. But, we’ve got to deal with this part of the checklist.”

Katz opened a folder and flipped a couple of sheets over the top. “You were in a fight in August of ‘98 with a . . . Gary Dolenz?”

Travis waved his hand as if shooing a fly. “One of those guys in a bar who thinks he’ll look tough if he sucker punches Tom Travis. I don’t sucker punch that easy.”

“December ‘99 at the Ionic Grill?”

“You guys ever jump off the back of a pickup truck doing thirty miles an hour? The director couldn’t get the shot he wanted and I told him, ‘To hell with the stunt guy. I’ll do it myself.’ — I did it all right. Fucked up my back for weeks. Anyway, long story short, never mix Vicodin with two bottles of Fogarty Reserve Cab. Did I trash the place? Yes, I did, and I also paid all the damages the next day. Do I remember what happened?” Travis gave Katz a level stare. “Not a fucking thing. Nada. One minute I’m ordering the appetizer, the next I’m waking up in one of your cells.” Travis shook his head. “Taught me a lesson — never mix pain pills and alcohol.”

Katz looked back at his list. “February of 2000?”

Travis frowned. “Yeah, I messed up bad on that one. That one’s on me. Valentine’s day. Clare Cantrell had just moved in with me a couple of weeks before. She was my co-star in Danger Nights. You do a movie like that with a woman like her, built like a you-know-what, and stuff’s gonna happen unless you’re playing for the other team, which I never was. Anyway, we think it’s love or lust or some damn thing and the next thing you know she moves in. Brings her fucking rat dog, and her maid and her dietician and her personal trainer and her life coach and twenty other losers and starts taking over. ‘Don’t eat red meat’, ‘Don’t drink so much’, ‘Try my herbal tea,’ ‘Why are you so mean to Mr. Whiskers?’ God damn disaster from day one but the sex was good, so what are you going to do?

“Let me tell you, by the middle of February I was at the end of my rope. A nice ass can only take you so far. Anyway, I come home, beat, and she starts in, I don’t appreciate her, I take her for granted, I didn’t bring her anything for Valentine’s Day. . . you get the picture. And she won’t shut up. She just keeps going and going and going like the frigging Energizer Bunny!” Travis frowned and threw up his hands. “I snapped, okay? I just snapped.”

“You split her lip and knocked out one of her teeth,” Katz said, reading from his file.

“I just gave her one shot, one little shot, just to shut her up.” Travis waved his hands as if to dispel the unpleasant memory. “She tripped. Yeah, I hit her. I admit that, but not hard. She got excited, I don’t blame her for that, and she tried to back up and caught her foot on the rug or something and fell against the coffee table. That’s how her lip got split and her tooth knocked out. Hell, you know that, Jack” Travis said, turning to Furley.

Katz glanced sourly at his partner.

“I’ve told Simon about being the investigating officer that night,” Furley said, embarrassed.

“Then you know what happened,” Travis said to Katz. “Jack did a great job. You’ve got one hell of a good cop for a partner here. Professional all the way. He got Clare to the hospital, stayed with her, got her calmed down. An hour later she realized that we were both out of line and neither of us needed the bad publicity. She refused to testify and I went to anger management. Best thing I ever did. Changed me, really. I have to admit that. Hey, we’re good friends now. I see her all the time on the Drive. Can’t even tell which tooth was the one that got knocked out. Glued it back in. Fucking doctors are miracle workers these days.” Travis gave Katz a quizzical glance and looked at his watch. “We just started shooting my new project last week, a horror flick but in sort of a Film Noir style, The Bone Yard. I’ll get you guys passes to the premiere. So, are we all done?”

Katz glanced at Furley then closed the file. “Yeah, Tom, we’re done. If you think of anything else, you give us a call.”

“You bet. Oh-oh,” Travis took another quick glance at his Patek Philippe, “gotta jet.”

“Tripped on something sticky and fell on something hard?” Katz muttered after Travis had left the room.

“He hit her with a solid right cross. His ring knocked out the tooth. She figured pressing charges would just cause her grief in the industry and anyway, at most all he’d get would be a slap on the wrist.”

“Well, at least he took an anger management class.”

“Yeah. I wonder how that worked out for him?” Furley mused, hitting the ‘Off’ switch on the video camera.

Chapter Three

“They said I should talk to you.” The girl said softly in a breathy, whispering voice. Katz gave her a quick once over and then looked again. She was five feet five with coal black hair, pale gray eyes, pouty lips and breasts a man could get lost in. Were he any younger a girl like her could infect his nights and torture his days. Even now, just looking at her raised his pulse five or ten beats.

“I’m Detective Simon Katz. You are . . . ?”

“Kaitlen Berdue,” she said with a Catholic school girls’ smile and extended a slim hand. Katz took it and didn’t want to let it go.

“Please take a seat.” He gave her what he hoped was a fatherly smile and released her hand. “How can I help you, Ms. Berdue?”

“Call me Kaitlen, please. It’s about Tom Travis, well, about his wife, I guess.”

“You have some information concerning her whereabouts?”

“Huh? Oh, no, I mean, I don’t know where she is. I never met her. I’m here about Tom, Mr. Travis.”

“You know him?”

“We were . . . involved.” A quick frown painted her face.

“Romantically involved?”

“Yes.” Her eyes flicked down and her cheeks went from alabaster to pink.

“When did this relationship begin?” Katz asked in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage.

“About ten months ago. I didn’t know he was married, well, I mean I knew but he said it was just for show, that she was gay and that it was just a play marriage to keep her ex-husband from using the lesbian thing to get custody of her daughter. Tom said he was doing her a favor, you know, to help her keep her child. I believed him, until I read the stories in the papers. Is it true, what the paper said about his wife?”

Katz gave her a level stare and a tiny, almost regretful nod. “The father of Marian Travis’ daughter died in a car crash a little less than a year before she married Tom, and as far as we know, she was not a lesbian.”

“So he did lie to me. I’m such a stupe!”

“Uhh, no, Ms. Berdue.” Katz wanted to take her hands in his but didn’t. “It’s not your fault. Tom Travis is a very convincing person. Remember, he’s a professional actor.”

“Men are always lying to me.” Kaitlen sniffled and pulled a pink tissue from her bag.

“Don’t blame yourself.” Katz made a note on his pad. “When did your relationship with Mr. Travis end?”

“Uhh, well now, I guess. I can’t continue seeing him after . . . this!”

Katz felt an excited shiver run up his spine. “When was the last time you talked to him?”

“Last night. We made a date for this weekend. He’s, he was taking me to Cabo.”

“So, he doesn’t know that you know the real story about his wife?” Katz asked in almost a whisper.

“I didn’t want to accuse him of anything until I was sure. You shouldn’t believe everything they put in the papers,” Kaitlen said with deep sincerity. “But now that I’ve talked to you . . . well, I’ll have to break it off.” Kaitlen sniffled then jammed the worn tissue back into her purse. “And I liked him so much! He was always nice to me, except when he had too much to drink, but he was getting better about that.”

“Do you think you could get him to talk to you about his wife?” Katz asked gently.

“On the phone? Because I don’t want to see him again, not after the way he lied to me and all.”

“Sure, the phone would be good.”

“Well, I guess so. Do you mean you want to tape record what we say?”

“Would that be okay with you?” Katz asked politely and held his breath.

“Well, sure! I mean what if he killed that poor woman? We have a responsibility to her, I mean as citizens and all, don’t we?”

“Yes, Ms. Berdue, we absolutely do. I couldn’t agree with you more.” Katz wanted to leap over the desk and smother her with kisses but restrained himself. “If I could just get your contact information, then we can plan the call.”

An hour later Furley wandered into the squad room. Kaitlen was having lunch in the deli across the street while Katz blocked out her script.

“What are you up to?” Furley asked, pointing at the pile of hand-printed pages. Katz gave him a wolfish grin. “Jesus, what canary did you swallow?”

“Guess who had a girlfriend?”

“Tom Travis? Is that a surprise?”

“I phrased that wrong. Guess who has a girlfriend?”

“He thinks she won’t talk? He can’t be that stupid.”

“He thinks she’s that stupid. He told her Marian was gay and she believed him. He thinks she still believes him. He thinks he’s taking her to Mexico for the weekend.”

“Were you able to convince her to help us?”

“She volunteered! She says it’s her civic duty to help us find out what happened to that poor, poor woman.”

“Son of a bitch!” Furley shouted and held out his hand for a high-five. “Damn! What’s she like? Bimbo? Skank?”

“Hey! She’s very, very sweet.”

“Does that mean ‘airhead’?”

“Listen up! She’s a very nice, very decent young woman. And that’s how you’re going to treat her. Do I make myself clear?”

“Jeez, Simon, I was just—”

“I mean it! You don’t treat her right, I’ll find a new partner who will. Got it?”

“Sure. I got it. As far as I’m concerned she’s Mother Theresa.”

“Good. She’s due back here in ten minutes. Help me script her call to Travis.”

*  *  *

“What’s this word?” Kaitlen asked, tapping Katz’s notes.

“Hmmmm.” Simon scratched out ‘impetuous’ and replaced it with ‘silly.’ Kaitlen read through the rest of the page.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said, frowning.

“It’s really important.” Furley gave her his best ‘We need your help to catch the bad guys’ stare.

“No, I mean, reading this. I can’t keep it all straight. What if I lose my place or he says something I don’t expect? I’m just not smart enough.” Her lips pursed and she glanced down. “Couldn’t I just talk to him and ask him about his wife?”

Furley and Katz exchanged a look then a shrug. “Sure, let’s try that,” Simon agreed.

Travis picked up his cell on the third ring.

“Hi, Tommy, it’s me.”

“Hey, baby, I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too. Tommy, have you told anybody about us, I mean, well, me?”

“Has somebody called you?” Travis asked, clearly concerned.

“No,” Kaitlen said with a little tremor, “but with all the stuff in the papers I was wondering if I should worry about reporters or anything.”

“No problem, Sweetie. I wouldn’t let you get dragged into this. Nobody knows.”

Furley and Katz exchanged another look.

“Have they found out anything, about, you know?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“Jeez, I don’t know. One minute she’s here, the next she’s gone.”

“Has her ex called? Do you think he did it?”

“Could be. Who knows?”

“You said they had a terrible divorce, with her being gay and all. I was just thinking that maybe he did it and took the little girl. Is he violent? You said he was a big jerk.”

“The biggest. Sure, he could have been behind it.”

“But the police are after him, you know, investigating him, right? You told them about him?”

“Sure, he’s their number one suspect, but don’t tell that to anyone. It’s kind of a secret between me and the cops.”

“This is so sad, even if you weren’t really, you know, married, her being gay and all. Do you miss her?”

“Sure, I miss her, in a way. She was a friend, I mean I married her to help her out with her custody fight. How many guys would do that?”

“Only you, Tommy. Do you think about her? What was the last thing she said to you?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know.”

“You’re blocking, Tommy. We’ve talked about that. You’ve got to open up to your emotions, not block them out. Come on, what did she say?”

There was a long pause and Katz’s eyes strayed to the cassette’s revolving spools. Finally, Travis responded.

“Sweetie, you know I don’t like this touchy-feely stuff.”

“You can’t fight Karma, Tommy.”

“Okay, fine, the truth is, we had a fight.”

“Oh no. What happened?”

“Oh, the same old crap. I wasn’t supportive enough. I wasn’t there for her. All the pregnancy stuff. She was still on me to be her coach, like her having another kid was my idea. We both knew the baby wasn’t mine but she still wanted me to act like I was the daddy. It made me feel like a patsy.”

“But you paid for the doctors and the artificial whatever it was they did to get her pregnant. That was a really nice thing. Didn’t she appreciate that?”

“Hell, no. She didn’t give a damn about me. The handwriting was on the wall. As soon as the kid was born she was going to divorce me and move in with her lesbian lover. That was always her plan. But,” Travis sighed, “I agreed to it.” Furley and Katz both rolled their eyes. “I told her I’d cover for the pregnancy and she could have her girl friend, so long as I could be with someone I loved. I guess I can’t complain since that’s how I got you.”

 Kaitlen’s lips formed a little girl’s smile.

“Oh, Tommy!”

“It’s true, Sweetie. I can’t wait to see you. The guy dropped off the ticket, right?”

“Oh, yeah, I got it, but, well, there’s a little problem.”

“Like what?”

“I’m afraid we’ll be seen together.”

“Don’t worry, Sweetie, I’ll protect you.”

“That’s not what I mean, silly. I mean, I’m worried about you.”

“Me?”

“Well, sure. I mean, what if one of those awful photographers gets a picture of us together or they bribe the maid or the bellhop or something? I mean, the world doesn’t know about Marian being gay and it not being your baby. Here she is like, disappeared, and pregnant and everybody’s looking for her, and if they catch us together, how will that look? If they find out my name they’re going to talk to my friends, my boss, it will all come out. They’ll say terrible things about us.”

“We’ll be real careful. No one will see us.”

“Silly, somebody’s always watching, and that was before Marian disappeared. We can’t take the chance.”

“But, Katey, honey—”

“What if they come to my job? What if they put my picture in those terrible papers? ‘Tommy Travis’s Cheating Whore’ that’s what the headline will say. No, I can’t, we can’t.”

“Sweetie, Katey, it—”

“No, Tommy, not until this is over.” A sob caught in Kaitlen’s throat. “I have to go. I’ll call you.” She clicked off the phone. “Was that okay?” Kaitlen asked Simon nervously.

“Okay?” Furley cut in. “It wasn’t just ‘okay.’ It was perfect.”

Kaitlen beamed.

Chapter Four

The road was packed dirt and meandered through a valley formed by two crumbling shale cliffs. Katz and Furley followed a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Cherokee, choking in its trailing plume of alkali dust. Katz’s window vibrated to the rhythm of an unmufflered engine a quarter mile to the east.

“People do this for fun?” Katz muttered as their Crown Vic bottomed out in a dry wash.

“Not in a car like this. We need one of those bad boys.” Furley pointed at a bathtub-sized ATV bounding over a stretch of low dunes.

The Cherokee pulled into blade scraped parking lot. Katz had finally given in to necessity and today was wearing Sears sneakers and jeans instead of his customary baggy brown suit.

The deputy, Harley Kress, stepped out and poured himself a cup of coffee from a chrome Thermos. “You want some?” he asked. Katz tried to identify Kress’s accent, some kind of a flattened twang. Blond and rangy, all elbows and knees, the deputy slurped half his coffee in a gulp. “You think we’ll find her today?” he asked Furley, then glanced at the sky. Somewhere above them a National Guard plane with ground-penetrating radar and thermal imaging was flying an imaginary grid.

“We’ve covered sixty percent of the park. If she’s here. . . “ Furley shrugged and shaded his eyes, searching the sky for the buzzing black dot. Of course, Katz reminded himself, if Travis wasn’t the killer, they were wasting their time. But what were the odds of that?

“Not like the old days, I guess,” the deputy said, nodding at Katz.

“I’ve never searched the desert for a body before.”

“I mean the gizmos they’ve got now, GPS, the stuff in that plane up there.” The deputy waved vaguely at the pale sky. “That guy knows exactly where he is, where he’s been and where he’s goin’, down to a couple of feet. Try and search fifty wild acres without somethin’ like that, and well hell, good luck to ya.”

Katz nodded, muttered something innocuous, and scratched a line in the dust with the toe of his new shoe. Gizmos. The bastard, son-of-a-bitch Tom Travis had murdered his wife and their unborn baby and left them out here in this God-forsaken wilderness and all this kid wanted to talk about were the latest toys from Best Buy.

A squawk sounded from Kress’s radio. “Baker Four, this is Eagle One. Over.”

Harley pressed a plastic box the size of a jumbo Hershey bar to his lips. “This is Baker Four. GA Eagle One. Over.”

“Thermal’s showing a point of interest nine hundred meters northwest of your position.”

“On the move, Eagle One. Hang on.” The deputy jumped into the Jeep and waved at Katz and Furley. “You guys will have to ride with me the rest of the way.”

The Cherokee bounded over rocks and scrub occasionally taking a detour around boulders and the banks of dead streams too steep to traverse. “Baker Four, turn twenty degrees to your left,” the pilot ordered, then refined his directions yard by yard until they reached the site.

“You see anything?” the pilot asked once they were on foot.

To Furley the patch of desert looked no different from any other piece of dirt a mile in any direction. Ahead of them a twenty-foot high ledge of mud-colored rock showed through the side of an eroded slope. More rocks, red, brown, burnt orange and dark gray littered the earth at the base of the hill, turning to sand and tussocks of wild grass all the way to the broken streambed behind them. A huge, lonely boulder, twenty feet high, stood to their left almost at the edge of the bend in the dry creek. In its shadow lay an eight-foot oval-shaped litter of rocks in colors from ashes to chocolate.

“Just some rocks. Why don’t you go get back on your grid while we take a look? Over.”

“Roger, Baker One,” the pilot said, slipping back into protocol. “Out.”

“Okay, boys, let’s move these guys.” The deputy smiled and grabbed a pitted gray stone the size of a loaf of bread.

“Put on your gloves!” Katz ordered.

“I can take it.” Kress smiled and held up a calloused palm.

“I’m sure you can, Deputy, but this is a potential crime scene. First we take photographs with yardsticks in them for reference. Then we sketch and measure. Then, wearing gloves, we move the rocks to a specific location for forensic analysis if needed.”

For a moment the deputy froze then carefully replaced his stone. Fifteen minutes later they had exposed a ten foot by ten foot patch of gray sand. Furley took three more pictures then handed Kress a shovel.

“Scrape, don’t dig!” Katz shouted before Harley could turn his first spade full of earth. The deputy frowned but did what he was told. This was the fifth time they had come out here and the third time they had used the National Guard plane. On each expedition they were assigned a different deputy. By the time they were done, Katz figured he and Furley would have trained half the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department in proper forensic procedures.

“Huh!” Harley muttered and knelt close to the ground. Barely eight inches down the shovel’s blade had snagged something then slipped free. Kress reached down, then pulled. A piece of grimy plastic ballooned, shedding puffs of gray dust.

“Jack, get a picture!”

“Is this her?” Harley asked, not believing his eyes.

“Back up!” Katz pulled brushes and small garden tools from a bag. Together he and Furley removed enough dirt to confirm they had an adult female body then called it in over the deputy’s radio.

Harley carefully approached the excavated grave and peered down at the corpse, then backed away.

“I guess you’ve seen a lot of them,” he said to Furley, “DB’s.” Jack didn’t reply. Harley turned toward Katz and shook his head. “Gee, Marian Travis. I can’t believe we found her.”

“That’s not Marian Travis,” Katz said almost under his breath.

“Huh? You mean that’s some other poor—”

“That’s just what’s left of the container Marian Travis came in,” Simon said wearily. “Marian Travis, the human being, was lost forever the instant she died. That over there is just a bag of bones.”

An hour later a helicopter dropped the Sheriff’s forensic team and all their gear. It took them eight hours to fully expose, photograph, and remove the body. Every handful of sand was sifted, every rock photographed.

Katz and Furley were still there when Marian Travis’s corpse was lifted from her shallow grave, a lamp cord still knotted around her neck. A slight swell distended her belly containing the body of her unborn child, a little girl the coroner later reported.

Secretly, Simon Katz named her Rachel and for her, secretly, he wept.