Conklin and I were attending the Barons’ funeral because there was a chance that their killer might show up.
It happens. Sometimes a killer will return to the scene of the crime to gloat or bathe in the memories. Funerals are the after party, not only to exult in and rerun the bloody memories but also to enjoy the grief of the bereaved.
We were in the town of Bolinas, population sixteen hundred, on the edge of the Pacific. If the Barons’ killer paid a call, he would see that it was a beautiful day for a funeral. Soft sunlight warmed the clean lines of the old Presbyterian church. The cemetery was across the road, an acre of sloping clipped grass, marked with old tombstones and ringed with a stone wall. There was also an imposing wrought-iron gate.
Dozens of people would be in attendance, but the hundreds of fans, press members, tourists, and curiosity seekers were not welcome.
Warren Jacobi, former chief of police and my close friend, had volunteered to be a consultant, my undercover escort for the day. Partnering with him was like old times, and as clueless as we were about whodunit, the whole team was revved up. We were hoping that Leonard Barkley or Jacob Stoll or a previously unknown suspicious character might crash the funeral.
I wore a skirt and a boxy black jacket to hide the holster at the small of my back. Jacobi and Conklin were both armed, and Cindy wore a somber gray dress, playing her part as Conklin’s civilian date.
We all blended in and took our seats in pews at the front and the rear of the church. The church was lovely inside and out, and the funeral service was touching and hopeful, given the circumstances. Reverend Grandgeorge was elderly and sweet; he talked about the Barons being at home in heaven and said that he knew we hoped they were comfortable and at peace.
I had a different take on that.
I thought that if there was a heaven and they were in it, they would be enraged that their lives had been cut short and that their children would be raised by other people.
The organ played. People prayed. And when the service ended, we all left by the double-wide front doors.
Outside the church, in parked cars camouflaged by a fringe of woodland around the parking area, our colleagues Chi and McNeil, Lemke and Samuels, were armed with guns and cameras, ready to pursue a fleeing suspect.
Jacobi offered me his arm and I took it, tottering a bit on my high heels as we crossed the dirt road between two lines of yellow tape, backed by local police who were charged with keeping the press in check. Which wouldn’t be easy.
Photographers jostled for good angles as reporters shouted questions about the police investigation. Paul Baron’s parents were long dead, but we accompanied Ramona’s family—her parents, Jill and Charles Greeley; her sister, Bea; and the two small children, DeeDee and Christopher—through the cemetery gates. We mingled with mourners, walked a few hundred yards across the acre of grass, coming at last to the white tent over the two open graves.
The mourners gathered. Remembrances of Ramona as a child were offered, as well as shared laughs, hugs, and tears. The children clung to their grandmother.
I looked around surreptitiously and noticed a beefy man in a canvas jacket, red-faced with clenched fists, standing off to the side. I nudged Jacobi. Conklin was already looking at the big man as he stepped toward the tent.
When he was standing near the open graves, the man in canvas said loudly, “What a load of crap.”
He then coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat on Paul Baron’s coffin.