Dead Aim by Thomas Perry

Author:Thomas Perry [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58836-308-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

This morning Mallon walked the route he had usually taken during the years after he had first come to Santa Barbara, past the tourist hotels along Cabrillo Beach. The other direction—westward along the beach toward Hope Ranch and Isla Vista—would have taken him to the spot where Catherine had gone into the water, and he had not been able to bear it since her death. He was agitated, anxious, pacing along looking down at the sidewalk, going over and over the details of Lydia’s murder and trying to decide what he should do next. Diane seemed to have anticipated the restlessness he would be feeling, the urge to do something. She called him every couple of days to tell him that the Los Angeles police had not yet been able to provide new answers to her questions about Lydia’s death.

Mallon needed to do something about Lydia’s death, but he had to be smart: what else could he do that wouldn’t just distract and delay the police? Mallon tried to distinguish what he knew from what he felt. He knew that Lydia had begun to favor the theory that Catherine Broward had not exactly committed suicide: she had committed murder, sentenced herself to death, and carried out her own execution. Lydia had told him that much. What else did Mallon know? Lydia had said she was going to try to find out more about Catherine Broward. She had not said that she was going to do it that night, or how she would go about it when she did. But everything Mallon knew made him believe that Lydia had gone with the wrong person to the wrong place in order to ask questions about Catherine.

Mallon walked onto Cabrillo Boulevard, above the ocean, and kept going, past the zoo and the bird sanctuary, across the street and onto East Beach. The volleyball game that had been going on the afternoon when he had arrived ten years ago was still going on, all of the players still in their early twenties. They had been replaced many times since the first time he had seen them—always just at physical prime, a little too old to be spending business hours playing a game on a beach, already late at starting real work, already late at beginning to see each other as future husbands and wives, if not for actually marrying and having families. Within a few months, if not tomorrow, this set would be gone, replaced one at a time by others exactly like them.

He walked on, assessing the progress of the tide. This was a walk that took him to several spots where the high tide would swallow the whole of a narrow beach and the waves would roll into the cliffs. He judged from the thin strip of dry sand above the breakers that he might get a bit wet today, but it did not matter.

He went a quarter mile and came to the first of the small points that jutted out into the sea.

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