10

ON LAUREL CANYON ON THE way to Mulholland the flow of traffic was steady. Rusted clunkers trailing smoke like a black feather boa, trucks, Porches, a vintage Rolls. And of course, lots of Camrys.

He widened his search this time. It seemed to Farrell that he had underestimated the desperation. Maybe Terry had more guts than he had given him credit for, but then maybe it wasn’t guts so much as the realm were deviousness turned into obsession. Terry could just blink at you and tell you, “That girl? No problem. Everything’s going to be all right.” Not batting an eye. Was it the lying or the coldness that was the worst?

Farrell pulled up Terry’s address on his iPad and examined the terrain within a half-mile radius. Then a mile. The landscape near Terry’s house didn’t have that many places, and he’d already searched them and come up empty. Or, was that wrong? Had he hidden the British girl in his house and then waited to move her? Farrell thought this was unlikely, but then with this scale of liar, anything was possible.

The sky was clear and there weren’t any birds circling over anything. Then he thought of Catherine, and that glance in her eyes. Still, Farrell didn’t want to go out as far as Sumatra Drive, and if he didn’t go that far, he was left with the small streets that went toward the Valley, on the north side, or toward Hollywood, on the south side. Would Terry have taken one of those? More houses there, but more privacy, too, since there were places with a lot of brush.

Maybe it wasn’t guts, but cunning. Guts would mean he could drive almost to Malibu on Mulholland, but cunning meant he could have gone a half mile and stopped behind someone’s swimming pool. Cunning meant he knew the girl would be found. Guts meant he hoped that she would disappear. So, which was it? And why hadn’t Farrell asked the obvious? How long had the girls had to wait for Terry to get back?

At the side of the road, in front of a wall of that brownish scrub, the dust of the shoulder, Farrell stopped and considered the possibility that Mary Jones was out here, too. How long had it been? Three weeks or so, maybe more. And how could she be identified? Farrell wasn’t even sure she really came from Alaska, and then, if he tried to find out about her, he’d have to face any number of young women in Alaska who ran away to the Lower Forty-eight every year. And that supposed a missing person report was filed for each one. This, surely, was not the way it worked. So how many just slipped away, unnoticed or unreported?

Farrell had a box of latex gloves on the passenger seat. He put them in the glove box. If he was stopped, he didn’t want to explain them.

From Mulholland, the Valley was obscured by the smoke that hung in the Los Angeles Basin, and it often seemed that the mood of the place was shown in the air. Farrell knew the job at hand was to bear down, to stop imagining things, but the difficulty was that imagining things was precisely how he worked, and without that he was lost. He had to imagine how desperation appeared in all its forms, and these were almost infinite. Lost in the labyrinth.

When he had looked for a place for those throwaway papers, he had wanted a canyon where he could dump the bales without being seen. Now the uneasiness seemed to rise from the pale dirt, since when Farrell had searched for a place to dump papers, he never thought it would come in handy to find a dead girl who had been pushed into the bushes. He understood, with a sweaty rush of claustrophobic anger, what he had lost between then and now.

The Valley didn’t look inviting, and the hillsides didn’t either. The brush at this time of the year was brown, and the eucalyptus trees made the landscape appear like the African savannah or the Australian outback, at once familiar and still foreign. The sky had a profound indifference. The Universal back lot, which was down below, made Farrell uneasy, since it could be molded into appearing like anything, the steppes of Asia, the plains of Africa, or anything else. The sets were built to appear like a backstreet in Paris, Rome, Prague, or any place at all. Nothing definite in that piece of land: just the possibility of a million illusions.

The pullout at the side of the road was along the top of a slope too steep to build on, and Farrell walked along the brush and kept his eyes on the soft shoulder, just beyond the blacktop. Had anything been dragged across it? Did Terry have the presence of mind to brush out any track? In the middle of the night and high as a weather balloon, Terry wouldn’t stop to worry about leaving tracks. Farrell’s shoes went around the fast-food wrappers, beer cans, glassine envelopes, and small squares of paper that looked like origami but were the small sheets that had been folded into cocaine bindles. The creases looked like a piece of newspaper that had been folded into a kid’s hat. Empty now, left along with the other junk.

An animal had left footprints in the dust. Not that large, probably a medium size dog? Something like that. Of course, Farrell knew someone could bring a dog up here to let it run around and not have to clean up after it. That could explain it. The difficulty was that everything people did left marks, tracks, signs. But it was hard to pick out one that meant something beyond just clutter.

Another possibility presented itself. This search might not turn up what Terry had left, but something else. Something that other people had to hide, or someone to hide, and so there was a possibility of finding, say, the dead husband of a woman who had decided to cash in on his life insurance and had given him a hot shot of insulin and pushed the body into the brush up here.

If something like that was around, what could be done? Call the cops? Farrell didn’t think so. What was he doing looking around in the brush? Well, ah, I was just. . . . No. He couldn’t say a word. And this realization, no matter what or who had been found, that he wouldn’t say a thing, only added to the sense of being in some downward suction. As though what was in the air was in the landscape, the soil, too, and that it exercised a gravitation that worked against what everyone knew was the right thing to do. As the reddish mist thickened, he realized the essential fact of being alone. He considered Catherine, and he imagined talking to her, or saying, “I’d like to ask you something. What do you do when you’re feeling alone?”

“Why, nothing,” she’d say. “You wait.”

“You mean, you pick your chances?”

“Yeah,” she’d said. “If you can.”

“And the right thing is vengeance?”

The dog tracks went into the brush, which had to be pushed out of the way. Nothing sounds like that buzz of a rattlesnake, sort of similar to a toaster on the fritz. Or some timer that is meant to wake you from the deepest sleep. Sometimes, after pulling the brush one way and then another, after spreading it, the branches snapped into his face. The slight trickle of blood was like an ant crawling on his cheek or the side of his face, and when he wiped it away and then put his finger in his mouth, the sea-like taste of blood lingered. The taste fit the brush, the dust, the valley in the distance.

The silence was of a particular variety, not of malice, but of indifference. No animal was here, just that hiss or that emptiness after the last drops of water flow out of a pitcher. To Farrell this keen lack of sound had a visual element, like a clear piece of plastic that covered everything. Or maybe it had a slight, reddish tint.

He faced the tracks of dogs, coyote, fox, or something else. Who knew what species were moving into the hills?

He looked around where the tracks disappeared into nothing, then moved through the brush back toward the road, got into his car, went another hundred yards, pulled over, and examined the yellow brownish dirt of the shoulder.