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“I feel like telling you a few things now,” he said finally.
“About time.”
“My mother has always been my best friend. We’re very close. Lately, we argue. She’s cutting herself off from me.”
When he finished telling her about that, Kat nodded, saying, “That’s rough.”
“Yeah. Rough. Now let me tell you a few things about my partner. My former friend.” He began to speak, and once he started, it shot out like rain through a downspout. He talked and talked until he had told her about the affair, the office politics, Antoniou’s dungeon. “I didn’t really understand before how good it feels to just give in and hate someone,” he said. “It’s an exciting feeling. It’s also addictive and corrosive. I now understand people who say they wake up in the morning hating themselves.”
“What are you going to do about your firm?”
“I can’t stand working with Martin anymore. I see him so differently. I had a girlfriend years before I met Leigh who I thought was great. Over time, I couldn’t ignore the real her: she shoplifted, lied to avoid confrontations, and backstabbed. It’s that way with Martin, like a love affair gone sour. He looks like his own evil twin to me now.”
“Have you considered that Martin might have something to do with Leigh’s disappearance? Maybe she tried to leave him and he got angry.” This story about the partner and Leigh-was it true? Kat wasn’t surprised Leigh had had a relationship with somebody else-it happens-though she felt a disappointment she would deal with later. What mattered was that Martin was married, and an amoral opportunist, according to Ray, and Leigh was gone.
“I put it to him and he denied it. If I go that way I have to think about Martin’s wife. I think she knew about the affair. And Suza
“We need to explore all possibilities.”
He sighed heavily. “I have a feeling the police are already doing that.” Out of the blue, he went on, “I’ve thought about killing Martin. Maybe I almost did.”
Shocked, Kat kept her cool, and said, “I almost got a college degree. I almost won the lottery. I almost got eaten by a shark when I drank too much and went for a midnight swim at Huntington Beach. I almost smacked my sister right in the kisser for saying something really rude to me.”
“Martin used to know me better than anyone. Know how he pegged me? As a paralyzed veteran. Yeah, not of wars, but of a disturbed childhood. He used to say I played a good game, had a good face for it, but in fact, lacked a strong sense of self. Well, he was right. I feel like seaweed, bobbing along, no idea where I’ll end up.
“Up to a month ago I could hide it pretty well. People envied me. Imagine that? They thought I had a good life. Now all I have is a nightmare and a hard-nosed appraiser who doesn’t trust me.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to rise to the occasion,” Kat said. “Okay, Ray, I’m going to tell you why I expected there was something there. As a hard-nosed appraiser, I spend all my time snooping around other people’s houses. Complete strangers. When I walk into a house, people expect me. I have an appointment.”
“What does that matter?”
“It matters that they know I’m coming. What they leave for me to see has meaning. And they leave out things that would straighten your short and curlies. That’s the secret. They expose themselves by what they choose to leave for me to see.”
“Like what?”
“Underwear. Women’s clothes in the man’s closet. Guns, knives, clubs. Checkbooks, bank statements showing their balances. We see a lot of sex toys,” she said. Some resembled male members, some resembled alien members. “Leather straps, clothing with strategic bits missing, if you get my drift.” She shoved her own experiments in such directions out of her mind. She was good at that. Somehow her own peccadilloes were acceptable and other people’s were frightening. “I know more about people in Los Angeles than I ever wanted to know.”
Ray spoke quietly. “You think whatever is left, she meant to leave.”
“Yes, I do.”
Silent for a moment, in his ironed slacks and silk shirt, he crossed his legs, then crossed them again.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When you come into my house, what do you see?”
“It’s a beautiful house,” she admitted.
“I think-my ideas on what makes a home are changing. I’m designing another house right now, and I want to get it right. I want it strong, but soft. Light but warm. I don’t care about this place anymore. It’s not right.”
He unfolded an open envelope, reached inside, pulled out a bank statement, and pointed to one of the items. “Look at this. While you were talking to your sister, I read the mail.”
He held the statement out to her. She read it.
“There’s an ATM withdrawal from the Idyllwild branch of US Bank. She wasn’t dead when she used the card to take out five hundred dollars on her way out of town,” he said. “Check the date. I just realized that’s the morning after she left.”
Someone had used the cash card in Idyllwild, a forested mountain community not too far from Palm Springs. Kat sat very still, trying to control her excitement. “Then she’s alive.”
Kat wanted to call Detective Rappaport immediately. Ray did not. Ray kept saying it proved Leigh was safe.
“What if somebody took her and forced her to withdraw money? Don’t the banks keep videos of automatic cash machines?”
Ray, fingering the statement, obviously loathed this idea. “Nobody abducted Leigh. She ran away on her own. She took the money out herself and moved on. Please, let’s not complicate things. Let’s not involve the police unless we have to. It’s only been a week. We have no proof of anything good or bad.”
“This is the eighth day, Ray. No, something is still very wrong.”
“Look, whoever took the money that day would have to know her personal identification number, her PIN. That’s not something Leigh would give out freely.”
Kat thought about her friend. Leigh hated trivia and even more hated math. At Cal High, she had almost flunked trigonometry, in fact had relied on Kat to cheat on her homework. “She might have written the number down in her wallet.”
His compressed lips confirmed her hypothesis.
Kat jumped up. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Where?”
“Idyllwild. Bring a picture.”
“Idyllwild-wait-”
“Come on, Ray. Grab whatever you need to grab. Her parents had a cabin there years ago.” Up in the mountains that fringed the Los Angeles Basin, Idyllwild was a few hours away. “Uh, the street was called Tahquitz Lane. They called the place Camp Tahquitz, that’s why I remember. That was so long ago. I wonder if they still own it?”
“I never went there, but she mentioned it a few months ago. She said that her parents had some run-down old shack that they never went to anymore and were trying to sell.”
Kat ran out to her car to get her laptop, tapped into his AirPort, and pulled up Realtor.com to have a look at multiple listings for Idyllwild. The town was too small to have a separate set of listings, but she called up the area listings and very quickly found a cottage for sale on Tahquitz Lane.
“Two bedroom,” she said. “Sixty-five years old. They’re only asking two-twenty for it. How refreshing. Cheap these days.”
“She described it as a dump.”
“The description matches. I’m going to call the realtor up there.”
“We could just call her parents. But then they would-”
“It would be out of our control after that,” Kat said. They looked at each other.
“Go on. Call the realtor,” Ray said. “You will with or without my permission.”
The lady handling the cottage wasn’t in but her broker was, and Kat, using her appraiser credentials, managed to get the owner names.
Hubbel. No bites had come into the office after more than a year. The cottage had sat there unsold for months, in desperate need of updating, but the owners refused to fix it up.