I brewed lousy coffee in the room the next morning and took it with a lousy attitude out onto my three-hundred-dollar a night veranda to call Rosamund Reynolds again. Once more I was routed to voicemail.
‘What’s left of your two-thousand-dollar retainer is stuck, confused and unnecessary, in an expensive room on the sands of Laguna Beach,’ I said to her recorder. ‘The cops won’t tell me anything. To learn more will take time. Call me.’
I went down to the lobby, got better coffee and more of the superb saltwater taffy, and used the guest computer to Google Dainsto Runney, the preacher in Oregon. Nothing new was posted. If he’d been killed or disappeared unnaturally, news of it had not yet been sniffed by the Internet.
I called his Church of the Reawakened Spirit from the sidewalk and was surprised when an articulate, businesslike woman answered instead of some drugged-up dreamer of the lost sixties. It proved, for the first time, that I shouldn’t judge a church by its name.
‘Dainsto Runney, please.’
‘He’s not here.’
‘When will he return?’
‘May I ask who is calling?’
‘It’s regarding an insurance payout,’ I said, because even reawakened spirits love free money.
‘If it’s personal, you should send him a letter.’
‘It’s a sizable amount.’
‘A letter would be perfect,’ she said, and hung up.
And perfect, too, was Runney. He fit seamlessly into Rosamund’s ragged puzzle. He’d either gone away like Halvorson or gone dead, like Arlin. I had no doubt Rosamund knew Runney was missing before she hired me.
I called her again, and again got sent to voicemail. ‘Runney’s missing. I’ll waste more of your money to verify that in Oregon.’
I got my duffel from my room, grabbed a last fistful of taffies from the lobby and headed north to the airport and the safest direct route north to Oregon.
But I slowed, as I knew I would, a mile before the turn to Los Angeles International. I’d been talking to myself above the Prius’s silently sanctimonious electric motor, reminding myself that I had other business in that part of the world, business that demanded more than a simple telephone call. A face-to-face conversation was so very necessary, I told myself.
What I didn’t need to tell myself, I devoutly hoped, was that I had to be careful, that there was rarely even one Amanda for the dumb-luckiest of men and that the odds of getting second chances with such a woman were smaller than moon shots attempted with basement-built rockets.
I blew past the turn-off to LAX and continued driving north.