“What’s the opposite of ‘anthropomorphize?’”
“‘Zoomorphisize.’ Did I pass my vocabulary test today?”
“I just wanted to know. I had no clue.”
Melody hemmed in a smile and gave him a nudge on the arm. “Oh my God, who doesn’t know that word?”
Chapter Thirty-eight
NOLAN RAPPED HARDER ON THE DOOR of Yukiko Easton’s Marina del Rey rental. It was a gorgeous little bungalow a few blocks from the water and fueled her latent misgivings about her own choice of rental. But a property like this would be far more expensive, so every year she lived in the Valley, she would be putting money in the bank that would eventually accrue into a down payment for a house of her own. With LA’s exorbitant real estate prices, she might be able to afford one the year she retired.
“Ms. Easton? LAPD, please open up.”
Crawford sucked in his cheeks and maneuvered his tongue around his mouth. She tried hard to chase away the image of him coaxing shreds of his breakfast bacon out of his molars. “She’s not home, Mags.”
“And she’s not at work, and not answering her phone.”
“Not everybody is connected to their phone with an umbilical cord. We’ll come back later.”
Nolan crossed the porch and looked through the front window, hoping for a glimpse between the slats of the wooden shade. It was closed tight. “I’m going around the side.”
Crawford followed her along a rock path choked with a tangled mat of flowering groundcover. “If something doesn’t feel right, you kick down the door. I love kicking down doors, just give me a reason.”
“There’s no sign that anybody is in imminent danger. I’m just being thorough, so keep your inner stud on a leash.”
“After twenty years of marriage, I’m not sure I have an inner stud.”
“Keep that information on a leash, too.”
Nolan finally found a window with a half-opened blind that looked into a bedroom and saw a reason for Crawford to kick down the door. But he didn’t have to—it was unlocked.
* * *
Unlocked door, a shattered vase paving the entry with jagged pieces of blue and white porcelain, an upturned table. A chef’s knife lying in a pool of blood on the tiled kitchen floor, and red drag marks smearing the beige hallway carpet.
“She fought,” Crawford mumbled.
Nolan felt the anger and depression rising, each negative emotion battling for dominance. She knew it would end in a miserable stalemate. “Home invasion?”
“How about her husband? She opens the door for him, but he’s in a rage over the separation, maybe finances, maybe something else. She fights, she runs, but doesn’t make it any farther than the kitchen.”
“Sam Easton doesn’t strike me as a rager type.”
“What are the odds Traeger’s boyfriend and Easton’s wife were both killed in their homes within twenty-four hours of each other?”
Nolan didn’t like it any more than Al. “Astronomical.”
They carefully skirted the trail down the hall and followed it into the bedroom. A lamp had been knocked off the nightstand, and bloody feathers from a ruined pillow were scattered on the bed and floor. Yukiko Easton was lying on the bed. Without the violence, she might have been taking a nap. The front of her white shirt was sliced open and saturated with blood. She’d also been shot in the head with a large caliber gun.
“Different gun than the one that killed Gallagher. It’s not impossible that there are two perps and two motives.”
Crawford circled the bed, his eyes coursing the room. “There are no coincidences in homicide, Mags. And they’re…”
“Almost always simple. I know, got it.”
“Sam Easton is simple.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
AFTER THE VISIT TO PINK’S AND another bizarre encounter with Rolf, Sam focused all his energy on purging his mind of all worldly sorrows. He lifted weights for an hour, ran ten miles without an episode of any kind, then got down to the business of cleaning the Mustang after her double outing this morning.
He sprayed and soaped and rinsed, then got to work with the chamois, buffing the body until the blue skin sparkled. Once he was satisfied, he moved on to the wheels, polishing the chrome to a blinding finish. The sun was high and hot on his shoulders and it felt good. Sweat dripped down his face like rain and his muscles were aching—sweet distractions from more saturnine thoughts, like the end of his marriage.
After a final inspection of his handiwork, Sam went inside to cool down. He looked out the front window as he drank a bottle of cold water, admiring the Shelby, all fluffed and buffed and sitting in the driveway, on rare display for all to see. Like he’d told Melody, you couldn’t keep a race horse in a stall all its life. Maybe he would drive it more often.
His neighbor, a blond version of Katy Villa who had a rolled yoga mat slung over her shoulder like a weapon, gave it an appreciative double take as she walked to her Volvo. He knew nothing about her or her husband, even after living next to them for four years. Pretending your neighbors didn’t exist was an unspoken canon of LA life. You had to deal with enough unpleasant people on any given day, why risk discovering that you might also live next door to some?
It suddenly occurred to him that in the eight years of their marriage, and even when they’d been dating, Yuki had never asked for a joy ride in the Mustang. She’d been an unenthusiastic passenger on occasion and had never been timid about her contempt for it. The engine was obnoxiously loud, the suspension too stiff, the odor of leaded gasoline nauseating. Maybe their relationship had been doomed from the start.
But now was not the time to dwell on Yuki because there was no definitive conclusion to be drawn until he spoke with her. Agonizing over it now was pointless. If the news was bad, he’d just be living through it twice. But it wasn’t something he could easily shove aside into a mental pending file, and the hours between now and five o’clock spread out before him like an unnavigable sea.
Sam paced the house, frantic for some diversion. He took a shower, but even the mysterious Irish Spring had lost its ability to captivate. Pausing at a bookshelf, he considered the collection of photo albums filled with pictures from better times. No, not a good time for a trip down memory lane, he couldn’t bear it now. He also averted his eyes from the framed photograph of him in Afghanistan with his men, more people gone from his life.
He went outside again and roamed the yard, but visual reminders of pain and loss weren’t just in albums and frames, they were everywhere: Yuki’s beloved persimmon tree, moribund from lack of care; her herb garden, now weed-choked; the empty shepherd’s hooks where her baskets of flowers had hung not so long ago.
It bothered him that she’d taken the impermanent flowers, presumably because she had no faith he’d keep them watered, but hadn’t even checked on her persimmon yesterday. If her intention was to return to him, to this house, she would have, and consequently excoriated him for destruction of precious property.
Sam abandoned the yard and slipped back into the house, feeling even more anxious and aimless. The bottle of rye was calling to him, promising escape, but succumbing to that weakness would be pure self-destruction. Drastic measures were required. He sank into the sofa, grabbed his backpack, and excavated Rolf’s script—the ultimate act of desperation.