Self-Defence

Then Milo returned to the Fielding house and noticed planter's mix in the dirt beneath Carrie's window. Just a few grains, virtually invisible, but the ground beneath the window was bricked.

Though he doubted the importance of the find, he asked Carrie's parents about it. They said no new planting had been done in their yard since summer, and their gardener confirmed it.

The street, however, had been planted extensively- magnolia saplings put in by a city crew to replace some blighted old carrotwoods- in a rare show of municipal pride stemming from the fact that one of the Fieldings' neighbors was a politician. Identical planter's mix had been used around the new trees.

Milo set up fingerprinting sessions for the landscaping crew. One laborer, a new hire named Rowland Joseph Sand, didn't show up, and Milo went to his apartment in Venice to see why. No sign of the man or his registered vehicle, a five-year-old black Mazda van.

The landlord said Sand was paid up for another two months but had packed some bags and driven off yesterday. Milo got permission to search and found the apartment scrubbed neat as a surgical tray, reeking of pine cleaner. A little more searching revealed a disco

An old cellar, said the landlord. No one had used it in years.

Milo removed the heater and climbed down.

Straight down to hell, Alex.

Spatter and shreds and gobbets in formalin. Needles and blades and beakers and flasks.

In one corner of the cellar stood sacks of peat moss, sphagnum moss, planter's mix, human excrement. A shelf of pots planted with things that would never grow.

A background check showed Sand had given the city a false name and ID. Further investigation showed him to be Jobe Rowland Shwandt, alumnus of several prisons and mental hospitals, with convictions for auto theft, exhibitionism, child molestation, and manslaughter. He'd been in prison most of his life but had never served more than three years at a time. The city had given him a chain saw.

He was picked up a week later, just outside of Tempe, Arizona, by a highway patrolman who spotted him trying to change a tire on the black van. In his glove compartment was a mummified human hand- a child's, not Carrie's, and never identified.

The fingerprint on the bedpost turned out to be a false lead, belonging to the Fieldings' maid, who'd been in Mexico during the week of Carrie's murder and hadn't been available for comparison printing.

I sat silently through Lucy's recitation, recalling all those meetings with Milo for late-night drinks, listening to him go over it.

Sometimes my head still filled with bad pictures.

Carrie Fielding's fifth-grade photo.

Shwandt's methedrine eyes and drooping mustache and salesman's smile, the oily black braid twisting between his long white fingers.

How much restoration of i

Knowing more about her background might educate my guess.

So far, she'd kept that door closed.

I did some paperwork, drove to the market at Trancas to buy groceries, and returned at two to catch Robin's call telling me she'd be home in a couple of hours.

"How're things at the money pit?" I said.

"Deeper. We need a new main for the sewer."

"That's metal. How could fire burn through that?"

"Actually it was clay, Alex. Apparently that's how they used to build them. And it didn't burn. It was demolished by someone's heavy equipment."

"Someone?"

"No one's 'fessed up. Could have been a tractor, a Bobcat, one of the hauling trucks, even a pickax."

I exhaled. Inhaled. Reminded myself I'd helped thousands of patients relax. "How much?"

"Don't know yet. We have to get the city out here to take a meeting with our plumbers- I'm sorry, honey, hopefully this is the last of the major damage. How'd your day go?"

"Fine. And yours?"

"Let's just say I'm learning new things every day."

"Thanks for handling all the crap, babe."

She laughed. "A girl needs a hobby."

"How's Spike?"

"Being a very good boy."

"Relatively or absolutely?"

"Absolutely! One of the roofers had a pit bull bitch chained up in his truck, and she and Spike got along just fine."

"That's not good behavior. That's self-preservation."

"Actually she's a sweet dog, Alex. Spike charmed her- she ended up grooming him."

"Another conquest for the Frog Prince," I said. "Want me to fix di

"How about we go out?"

"Name the place and time."

"Um- how about Beauvilla around eight?"

"You got it."

"Love you, Alex."

"Love you, too."

The beach house had cable hookup, which meant foolishness on sixty cha

The screen filled with the limestone facade of the main court building, then switched to a ring of chanting marchers waving placards.

Anti-capital punishment protestors bearing preprinted posters. Behind them, another crowd.

Twenty or so young women, dressed in black, waving crudely lettered signs.

The Bogettes.

At the trial, they'd favored ghost-white face makeup and satanic jewelry.

They were chanting too, and the admixture of voices created a cloud of noise.

The camera pulled in close on the preprinted placards:

LOCK THE GAS CHAMBER, GOVERNOR! ALL KILLING IS WRONG!

NO DEATH PENALTY!

THE BIBLE SAYS: THOU SHALL NOT KILL!

Then, one of the hand-scrawled squares: pentagrams and skulls, gothic writing, hard to make out:

FREE JOBE! JOBE IS GOD!

The marchers came up to the court building. Helmeted police officers in riot gear blocked their entry.

Shouts of protest. Jeers.

Another group, across the street. Construction workers, pointing and laughing derisively.

One of the Bogettes screamed at them. Snarls on both sides of the street and stiffened middle fingers. Suddenly, one of the hard hats charged forward, waving his fists. His companions followed and, before the police could intervene, the workers knifed into the crowd with the force and efficiency of a football offense.

A jumble of arms, legs, heads, flying signs.

The police got in the middle of it, swinging batons.

Back to the newsroom.

"That was- uh, live from downtown," said the woman anchor to her deskmate, "where there's apparently been some sort of disturbance in co

Her partner said, "I think we can see that passions are still ru

"Yes, they are, Chuck. No surprise, given the fact that it's serial murder we're dealing with, and- uh, controversial issues like the death penalty."

Grave nod. Shuffle of papers. Chuck fidgeted, checked the teleprompter. "Yes… and we'll have something a little later on the situation regarding capital punishment from our legal correspondent, Barry Bernstein, and some face-to-face interviews with prisoners on Death Row and their families. In the meantime, here's Biff with the weather."

I turned off the set.

The death penalty opponents were easy enough to understand: an issue of values. But the young women in black had no credo other than a glassy-eyed fascination with Shwandt.