The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller by Noreen Ayres

opened a wallet, took out a card and handed it to me.
    “What’s this?”
    “My card,” he said, as if any moderately bright person could assume.
    In the top left corner was the stylized head of a great blue heron. In the middle,
Gil Vanderman
, and under it,
Naturalist
. A phone, a fax, and the words
Tours, Photography, Lectures
completed the card.
    “See, Smokey? There may be a dead guy in the culvert,” he said, “but I didn’t do it.” His voice was softer, his eyes even kinder than before. He could be a Ted Bundy, that smooth style.

THIRTEEN

    N
umero quatro
.
    In a storm drain off Ortega Highway, Juan Doe Number Four was found lying face down in a couple of inches of water.
    Trudy Kunitz was on it. “He had a good haircut,” she said, “like from a salon, shaved close on the sides, with three horizontal lines above the ear.” She said he still had a knit cap on, nailed by a bullet. T-shirt and jeans. Old dress shoes, no socks. There was a watch with a busted leather band and an alligator on its face. “I’m faxing the sketch to Homicide in about twenty minutes. They’ll put it out to the papers tomorrow. You watch. That haircut, we’ll get an ID overnight.”
    I said, “I took a chance somebody would be in who knew about the case.” I was using my cell phone.
    “Somebody was.”
    “Go home now, Trudy.”
    “It’s like a tomb in here,” she said. “Couple of guys in Tox, is all.”
    “Then I’d say it was time to go home.”
    She was silent a moment, then said, “It’s worse at home.”
    As I drove north, I reviewed the cases like a journalist figuring the Four W’s and an H: What, Where, Why, When, How. I added another: Who? Four GSW’s to the face. All Does.
Why?
    I was nearing Technology Park. Beyond it, a blue cloud was poised over the twin blue humps of the Saddleback mountains like a stalled flying carpet.
    Farther on, a single green tractor with yellow wheel-rims was perched, manless, in a tilled field.
    Once I’d seen a man with a roll of plastic set upon his shoulders, the free end fleeing down his back and onto the cultivated rows to cover new plants as he slow-walked in silhouette against a gold sunset. When he was done the sheeting would turn these fields to lakes of silver.
    Though I had just come from cane cutting, I longed to be out there, quiet, anonymous, fruitful. In the fields there’s a willfulness of life that pleases me. A mouse daring a hawk. A stumbling beetle racing for shade. Poke a seed, spit on it, it grows. I wanted to be there, away from what mankind inclines to do to itself in all the varieties of cruel intrusion.
    “How was cane cutting?” Joe said.
    “Dirty, hot, and fun. You can join me sometime.”
    “Not on your life. A couch, a beer, a game, and thou, my dear.”
    I balanced the phone on my shoulder while I went to look in at Motorboat. Squinched at the back of his log, he pipped. I raised the cage lid. He darted out, then back. Guinea pigs should be called greased pigs. They go as fast in reverse as forward.
    “I just talked to Trudy Kunitz,” I said. “A body was found Thursday afternoon in San Juan Creek, down where I was working today.”
    “You have anything to do with it?”
    “A card, that’s what you are,” I said. “Think of it, though. Another one. What the heck’s going on?”
    “Worry about that tomorrow. Today’s still Sunday.”
    I let that sink in, then asked, “Okay, so what are you doing this afternoon?” He said he was going out with his son to buy tires. “Oh yeah,” I said, “he told me about that.”
    “He told you?”
    “At the parade.”
    “What a dummy, huh?”
    “That boy’s almost as smart as his father,” I said.
    He laughed and said, “I’m meeting him at Jennifer’s. It’ll be in the air, like our son wouldn’t be acting weird if our marriage hadn’t taken a left turn over Iceland.”
    “I’m sorry, Joe.”
    “I look at her, this woman I spent twenty-two years with, it’s like I don’t