Windansea was a small but famous surfer’s beach in La Jolla. Many local surfers had made their name on the waves rolling off a reef break. I drove past the small parking lot above the beach. The lot was empty. I parked two blocks past and took the stairs down to the beach from the Westbourne Street entrance. The Surf Shack was an open, four-poled hut with no side walls and a palm-frond-thatched roof.
The Shack had been made famous in literature and local lore, and was now a San Diego landmark. Tonight, the meeting place for a five-time murderer.
The moon slashed a silver triangle down on the whomping shore break. The tide was low and I stayed up against the sandstone cliffs and slowly made my way toward the Surf Shack 200 yards away. My eyes peered through the shadows made by the night, moonlight, and crevices of the cliffs. No Randall yet. I’d driven to Windansea directly from Rankin’s house and arrived forty minutes early. Enough time to get the lay of the land and find the right place to lie in wait.
I inched along the beach, flush against the sandstone walls, the Surf Shack still 100 yards away. Waves crashed thunder every thirty seconds. Residual foamy white water of the last wave sucked back out into the ocean. A sound behind me. I whipped around and saw a hulking shadow, backlit by the moon. Larger than Gold’s Gym back at Alan Rankin’s house.
“Hello, Mr. Cahill.” Randall’s voice came out of the massive shadow. “Are you here on behalf of Mr. Rankin?”
“I’m here on behalf of Timothy Buckley and Trey Fellows.” I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket and onto the handle of the Ruger .357 Magnum.
“That’s an odd thing to say, Rick.” A taunting laugh in his voice. “You don’t mind if I call you Rick, do you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Seems like we’re past the formalities. If you’re here on behalf of your dead friends, God rest their souls, you’re in the wrong place. Didn’t you hear the news? Chief Moretti said Steven Lunsdorf killed your friends.”
I slowly moved my right foot back to position a shooter’s stance. “You met Trey at his house yesterday evening so you’d have an explanation if the crime lab techs found your DNA there, right?”
“I’m afraid you’re not quite up to date.” Jovial. Enjoying himself. “The techs found some rolling papers at Trey’s house with Lunsdorf’s fingerprints on them, and a pair of socks with Trey’s and Mr. Buckley’s blood on them at Lunsdorf’s house. Socks. Kind of ironic, huh?”
“You didn’t intend on killing your sister, did you? Your tears for her were real when I visited you at San Quentin.”
“I miss my sister very much.” The joy left his voice. “Please don’t mention her again.”
“That helped sell me on your innocence during my visit. I wasn’t quite convinced when you talked about your parents, but you convinced me with your tears for Molly. I wish I’d been smart enough to realize that you were crying because you’d killed her, not someone else.”
“You’re a cruel man, Rick.” Menace.
“From you, that’s a compliment.” I kept my eyes on the shadow that was his right hand in the front pocket of his dark, hooded sweatshirt. “Molly walked in when you were butchering your parents and you had to kill her. If she just hadn’t woken up, she’d still be alive, right?”
A blur from his left side. I yanked the gun free from my pocket, then something hard exploded onto my right wrist. My gun dropped to the sand and pain screamed along my arm, my right hand dangling immobile. His arm moved again. I spun to my left and ducked my head. The iron crowbar bounced off my shoulder and banged my head behind the right ear. I splatted face-first down onto the sand.
“You didn’t know I was ambidextrous, did you, Rick?” He chuckled. A reverb from hell. “Gun in my right hand, crowbar in my left, snug against my leg. Old magician’s trick. You watched the wrong hand, Rick.”
I tried to push up off the sand but collapsed back into it. Crippling pain swelled in my head. The world tilted on its axis, spinning me off its edge. I sensed Randall next to me and caught him swiping my gun off the ground. He shoved it in his waistband behind his back. I fought the spinning in my head and tried not to pass out.
“Make a move and your life ends now, Rick.”
Randall grabbed my jacket and yanked me up into a sitting position. The back of my head slammed against the sandstone cliff. The pain vibrated in my ears. Randall put the barrel of a gun to my temple and checked my jacket pockets with his free hand. He pulled the blackjack out of my left pocket and the moon caught his grinning teeth.
“Old school, huh? Nice, but just a bit behind the times, Rick. Just like you’ve been a few steps behind me the whole way.” He patted down my pants and found the wireless recorder. He shoved it and my cell phone into his jeans pockets. “Must be a microphone here, somewhere.” He stuck his hand down inside my coat and shirt and ripped out the microphone taped to my chest.
“Thought you were going to get me to confess and take the recording to the police?” The devil’s laugh again. He took the gun from my head and stepped back. “Never would have thought of that.”
I was going to die on the beach tonight. The cops weren’t on the way. Neither were Rankin’s men. Bob Reitzmeyer wasn’t backing me up. Unless I somehow stopped armed, prison-fit Randall Eddington—without a weapon, with a broken right wrist, and a spinning head—he would pound my skull jagged like he had Trey Fellows’, Timothy Buckley’s, and his family’s. I wouldn’t be able to trick him. He was smarter than me. The fact that he wanted me to know just how smart was the only thing I had going for me. All I could do was try to prolong my life and hope for a miracle.
Or make one happen.
“Why me?”
“Oh, come on, Rick. I thought you were supposed to be a tough guy. You’re not going to go out begging for your life, are you?”
“No. Why did you choose me to work with Buckley on your case?” I fought the pain in my head that told me to lie down and let it be over. “You let that slip at the celebration the other night.”
“You know, Rick, it’s a good thing you never went to prison for your wife’s murder, cuz you wouldn’t have survived. Not smart enough.” The moon caught his smile again. I felt time and my life ticking away. “I didn’t let that slip. I put it out there to see if you’d react or catch on. A little game to make things interesting. In prison, you have a lot of time to try to make things interesting.”
“Why me?”
“Like I told you the other night, you know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do. That made you sympathetic to my plight. A lot of ex-cop PIs wouldn’t believe a man could be convicted of murder if he didn’t do it, or they wouldn’t care either way. Once I hooked you in, I knew you’d do whatever it took. I also did my research. Every hour I had of computer time in the joint, I researched you and Buckley. I knew that you worked for Bob Reitzmeyer, who fucked that whore of a mother I used to have. He was close to the investigation. I hoped he might know something about the planted evidence and you’d find out about it. And you did, then your hero complex kicked in, and everything fell into place.”
“Planted evidence that helped convict a guilty man.”
“Guilty or not, LJPD cheated, and you caught them. Because of that, and a little cheating on my side, I’m now a free man. Thanks again, Rick.”
“Why did you have to kill Buckley? He didn’t know the truth about you.”
“Collateral damage. Felt badly about it.” The demon’s smile. “For a good second or two. Trey wouldn’t see me alone. He was smart enough not to trust me. I coaxed Buckley to go with me. Told him Trey had new evidence to show us for a civil case against LJPD. When we got there, I opened up my backpack, took out my crowbar, and that was it. I wanted to meet back at Trey’s because it was a tight space. Nowhere to run. A quick tap to incapacitate Trey. A couple to kill Buckley, then back to kill Trey. And, finally…ah, the finishing touches to make it look like a Raptor murder.”
“You think Lunsdorf is just going to roll over for the murders? How do you know he doesn’t have an alibi for Trey and Buckley?”
“He does. He was dead at the time. Now the police are chasing a dead man’s shadow. Too bad they’ll never find him.” The laugh. “Or what’s left of him.”
Randall had demonstrated his brilliance. There wasn’t anything left to say. He’d attack soon without warning. I had to attack first. “You forgot about Rankin. He knows everything.”
“He’ll never say a thing. He’s under Rock Karsten’s thumb, and I’m Rock’s boy.”
“He already told me everything. About you and the concocted confession. The threat to kill Brad Bauer. It’s on the recorder you took off me.”
In a slip of moonlight, I saw uncertainty in Randall’s eyes. He took the recorder out of his pocket. I waited for his eyes to look at the recorder to turn it on.
“I recorded the recording on my voicemail—” He looked down. I bolted up from the sand, pushing off the cliff with my one good arm, and sprang at Randall. His reaction with the crowbar whooshed just behind me as I exploded into his chest with my left shoulder. He clamped his massive right arm around my neck, but I kept churning my legs and slammed him into the lone boulder behind him at the shoreline, before his left arm could match his right. The air whumped from his body and he dropped the crowbar. We bounced off the rock. His hold loosened an instant, and I ducked down and reached my left hand around his back and found the Ruger in his waistband.
His hold on my neck vised again, and he tightened it with his left arm. I yanked out the Ruger and jammed it into his ribs as my throat started to close off. The hold went slack. I sucked air into my lungs.
“Step back.” I held the gun on him in my left hand. My right, useless, dangling from a broken wrist. I willed my gun hand not to shake and fought the dread from my nightmares. My hand trembled slightly, but I didn’t think Randall could see it in the darkness.
He took a small step back, but his smile returned. “Nicely done, Rick. You saved yourself. But it doesn’t change things for me.”
I backed up three paces.
“Slowly take the gun out of your sweatshirt pocket by the barrel with two fingers and toss it over here.” He tossed the gun at my feet. “Now, hands behind your head.”
He did as told. “You think you’re going to walk me into LJPD and tell them you caught the killer of poor Mr. Buckley and the drug dealer, Trey Fellows?”
“Kneel down.”
He ignored me.
“I’m untouchable. The press loves me. Nationwide. You think LJPD wants to arrest me again on some crazy story of yours? You taped Alan Rankin without him knowing. Your supposed tape is inadmissible, my dim-witted friend. And you’re not exactly LJPD’s favorite citizen. Besides, the cops have all they need to chase the ghost of Steven Lunsdorf for the murders.”
Everything he said was true. Even if the Rankin tape could be admitted, it was all hearsay and speculation. I’d needed a confession by Randall on tape, and I’d failed.
“Kneel the fuck down!”
“How are you going to hold that gun on me and call the police with your broken hand?”
The devil’s laugh. “Tell you what. We’ll call this one even. We stay out of each other’s way and get on with our lives.”
He moved his head slightly to the left and moonlight spotlighted down on me. And my trembling left arm.
“Rick, your hand is shaking. Lost your edge after being off the force for ten years? Put the gun down now and we’ll go our separate ways.”
His mother, father, and sister. Timothy Buckley and Trey Fellows. Steven Lunsdorf. Randall had murdered them all to serve his purposes. No other reason. Obstacles in the selfish life he’d chosen to live. And he was going to walk away a free man to live that life and eliminate other obstacles. Evil has no conscience.
A wave crashed down onto the beach. My hand held steady. I pulled the trigger.