© 2003 Casey Dorman

Chapter 1

The white Cadillac convertible followed the narrow road between the endless rows of orange trees, trailing a fine dust that fell like heavy mist upon the pale citrus leaves. The Cadillac driver’s blonde ponytail bobbed up and down as the car bounced along the uneven dirt track. The sounds of Marty Robbins' "White Sport Coat," drifted into the night. Beside the girl, the eyes of her Mexican-American companion searched the shadows between the trees.

The young woman switched off the engine and silence enveloped the car. Shadows and thin moonlight alternated around the widening in the road where the Cadillac had stopped. The blonde began to giggle, while the Mexican-American boy continued to search the night with his quick, shifting gaze. Without words, the young woman, who looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, slid across the seat and turned the boy’s head toward hers. She began unfastening the top of her taffeta evening gown, revealing small round breasts that showed pale and pink against the stark white of her bra in the moonlight. Guiding the young man’s hands to the dress’ metal snaps, she found the buttons on his shirt and eagerly began to unfasten them. While their hands undressed each other, their lips touched, at first just brushing then devouring each other hungrily. Their hands and mouths began a frenzied exploration; the girl’s breathing punctuated by sighs and squeals of pleasure. The Mexican boy was more controlled, a fraction of his attention alert to the sounds of the night around them. But even that fraction gave way as the white dress of his young companion, with its pinned on pink carnation, fell the last few inches from her shoulders, revealing her slim, white arms and soft, narrow back. He fumbled with the clasp of her bra.

A metallic click interrupted the silence of the night. The boy turned his head in startled terror while the girl instinctively clutched her rumpled dress to her exposed breasts. She stared anxiously at her companion then watched in horror as his head snapped forward, his face exploding as the deafening sound of a gunshot shattered the stillness. She turned, still clutching her dress for protection; a terrified cry not reaching her lips before a second shot tore through her slim, soft neck, spewing bone, flesh, and blood across the dashboard and window of the car.

"CUT!" From the darkness surrounding the white Cadillac, a dozen blinding klieg lights switched on simultaneously, bathing the gory scene in stark white light.

"Jesus Christ that looked real." The film director’s exclamation was the only sound from the shadowy figures of the crew that emerged from behind the lights. Thirty actors, cameramen, and assorted crewmembers edged toward the car, trading anxious glances. Their anxious looks remained as the first of the crew reached the car. A pink-cheeked, shaven-headed young man in a wrinkled UCLA football jersey reached out a tentative hand toward the Mexican boy slumped forward in the front seat.

" Oh Shit!" the young man yelled, withdrawing a hand that was covered in bright wet blood. He turned to face the others, his face white with shock, his eyes wide in terror. "They’re dead!" he screamed. " Holy Shit, they’re both dead!"

**********

"And that’s why this course represents one more misdirected step in the erosion of the quality of science that this university offers to our students." George Baron's voice droned on as he sat stiffly upright, his half-glasses set severely on the end of his nose, giving the not completely inaccurate impression that he was permanently looking down at everyone else, his hands folded primly on the shiny surface of the mahogany table in front of him. My eyelids felt as if they had sandpaper glued to their insides but I couldn’t stop them from slipping down over my eyes, which produced the dizzying sensation of my eyes rolling up and back into my head. George’s monotone had that effect on me.

"You’ve been misinformed, George, " I said, yawning. "Some of our efforts to erode science haven’t been misdirected at all. I believe they hit their mark perfectly."

George's tone was acidic. "Why do you even bother to attend these meetings, Routledge? You don’t seem to take anything at this university seriously."

I beamed at the senior professor. "That’s why I’m here, George. It’s good for my character. Maybe someday I’ll grow up to be a serious professor like you."

Robinson, the representative from the English Department, snorted, trying to suppress a laugh. Norris, his look-alike match from Philosophy, kicked him under the table. Robinson elbowed him back. Baron looked even more sternly down his nose at the three of us.

I flipped through the Xeroxed pages of the agenda in front of me. It was difficult for me to achieve a comfortable position for my six-foot six-inch frame in the short-legged mahogany chairs that were a torturous fit for someone the height of an average NBA player. I wiggled and stretched, folded and unfolded my legs, and rued the fact that there were still four more courses for our curriculum committee to consider. And George was just getting warmed up. In vain, I let my eyes wander the walls of the faculty conference room with their dusky old pictures of former faculty senate presidents, each looking as imperious and solemn as George Baron. I took little comfort in knowing I wasn’t the first person to have to fight to stay awake in that room.

I was rescued by the insistent buzz of my pager. Recognizing the number as that of the Student Counseling Center, I gave the three other committee members a helpless shrug. George glared at me, but Robinson and Norris watched with envious eyes as I unwound my legs from the contortionist position I’d finally achieved, pushed my chair away from the table, and stood up. Whatever crisis had led to me being paged by the counseling center, it couldn’t be any worse than the torture I would have had to endure if I’d had to listen to George Baron for even ten more minutes.

There was no need to ask what the problem was. Lucia Chavez, a dark haired freshman student, beautiful, brilliant, provocative, and habitually of a fiery temper, was pacing in front of the worn green velour couch, glaring like a caged lioness at the center’s secretary and the three other students who sat in the waiting room. I ignored the distraught secretary and invited Lucia into my office.

Lucia sat poised on the edge of the chair opposite me; one slim leg crossed over the other, her short black skirt riding up on her thigh as she angrily swung her leg to and fro. A lone tear slid from beneath the lash of one eye and formed a droplet that threatened to finish the trip down her cheek. She blinked it away in irritation but it was replaced by another, larger one. "Ramon is dead!" she said, raising red-rimmed eyes to look at me.

I stiffened in shock. Ramon was Lucia’s older brother by two years. I had only met him twice, but I knew that he and Lucia were extremely close. No wonder she’d called me, even though we’d already terminated her weekly counseling sessions. I wasn’t sure why I was hearing anger rather than grief, but I was sure that I was about to find out.

"I’m sorry, Lucia. How did it happen?"

She looked surprised. "You didn’t read about it? He was killed while he was making a movie." She was trying to control her breathing, trying not to break down.

I remembered that Lucia had told me her brother was pursuing an acting career, but I hadn’t made the connection when I’d seen the headline about the movie tragedy in Sunday's Orange County Register. I felt a hollow emptiness in my stomach when I thought of losing someone with such promise.

"I’m terribly sorry."

Her shoulders sagged as if they were burdened by a massive weight. Tears rolled down her cheeks. "I’m sorry to come bursting in here like this," she said, her words punctuated by sobs. " I don’t know who else to turn to. They won’t tell me anything." She looked up at me with large, sad eyes, her tears dotted with specks of mascara.

"Who won’t tell you anything?" I asked, my voice sounding as if I had something stuck in my throat.

"The Sheriff’s Department. The same assholes who arrested me when I was younger," she said, her anger flaring again.

"What are you talking about?"

"They told me to mind my own business."

What she was telling me didn’t make sense. Jim Stapleton, my best friend since childhood, was Chief of Homicide in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s Criminal Investigations Division. Stapleton ran a tight ship when it came to protecting minority rights. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same thing for the officers outside of Jim’s division.

The department’s anti-gang task force, dubbed SNAG, was the unit that had most of the dealings with Latino youth. It was SNAG with whom Lucia had had her run-ins when she was younger. Some, and maybe a whole lot of her anti-cop attitude was justified. But a death on a movie set wouldn’t have involved SNAG and there was no reason that Lucia should have gotten the cold shoulder.

"To whom did you talk?" I asked.

"Detective Torres."

"Torres is with SNAG," I said.

"Not any more. He’s in charge of investigating my brother and that girl’s deaths."

"Girl?"

"She was in the movie scene with Ramon. They playing a pair of teenagers who got killed. Somebody shot real bullets." She looked dazed. "That’s all anyone will tell me."

I told her I had a friend in the Sheriff’s department. I’d straighten everything out.

She looked up at me, her eyes dull, as though she was drugged. "Ramon was murdered" she said, her voice barely audible.

"Murdered?"

She cleared her throat. "My brother knew something he wasn't suppose to know."

I asked her what she thought her brother knew.

She gave me a helpless look.

Accepting the tragedy of a senseless accident was always harder than accepting an act of villainy. That's why conspiracy theories popped up in cases of plane crashes, fires, and explosions. I wasn't going to tell her that, though. Not right now.

She sat up, uncrossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. She tried to regain her composure but her lower lip quivered. "I need your help, Dr. Routledge. I need to know what happened to my brother."

She needed to let her brother go, not look for a mysterious killer. I didn’t say that. I told her I’d do what I could and I wanted to see her again.

"Thank you." A spark of hope flashed in her eyes. "I knew I could come to you, Professor." She started to reach out to me, then caught herself.

I smiled and reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. She managed to return a weak smile and got up from her chair.

I watched Lucia leave the office, remembering when I’d first met her. Coming from nearby Santa Ana, the county’s poorest community, she’d had an arrest record for vandalism and drug possession by the age of fourteen. Her next bust was for car theft and with three arrests before her fifteenth birthday, her stay in juvenile hall was followed by referral to an experimental rehabilitation program sponsored by the county. The counselors and teachers in the program recognized that they had a diamond in the rough in Lucia. They threatened, cajoled, and pushed her to apply herself in school, stay off of drugs, and change her friends. When she graduated with honors, her counselors wanted her to go to college and, because I occasionally did some consulting to their program, they approached me about getting Lucia into Chandler. I pulled a few strings with Minnie Washington, who ran our minority scholarship program, and Lucia was in – with one proviso – she had to attend counseling with me for her first year at Chandler.

Chandler University is a lot like other small, liberal arts colleges. We have a mostly affluent white student body – bright, but not brilliant- quite a few Asian students because of the large Asian community in Orange County, and a sprinkling of Latinos and African Americans, usually quite good students, like Lucia, who came to Chandler because of the generous minority scholarship program sponsored by Janet Erskine Jones, our school’s principle benefactor and mine.

The magnanimous Mrs. Jones had recommended me for my teaching position following the amicable conclusion of a brief, but torrid affair between the two of us. That was five years ago - prior to my marriage and between Janet’s third and fourth trips to the altar. Fortunately, marriage never was in the cards for Janet and me. I didn’t need the money she’d inherited as an heir to the famous and vast Erskine Ranch landholdings; now transformed into the Erskine Company, the megacorporation that had developed all the land from Santa Ana down to Mission Viejo. I didn’t need a job, either; but Janet had made it so easy, that I decided to try teaching.

To my astonishment, I enjoyed teaching and had even churned out enough research and writing to retain my job on my own merits after the expiration of my initial contract. With my degree in psychology, I’d specialized in delinquency, a topic familiar to me from personal experience.

Let me explain.

Having been born with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth, the only son of an old-moneyed family from Marblehead Massachusetts (it's actually Phineas Routledge, the Third), I’d proceeded to steal the spoon as well as our neighbor’s classic 1934 Rolls Royce in what I hoped would be an exhilarating joy-ride down the coast to Cape Cod. My trip was cut short less than a mile into it when I missed the narrow viaduct that crossed from Marblehead Neck onto the mainland, and the Rolls and I ended up in the harbor. I surfaced easily, which was more than I could say for the Rolls. The curmudgeon who owned the car insisted that my parents do something about me or he would file charges, so I was packed up and sent to Pickering Academy, a school for privileged misfits in the hills above Santa Barbara. It was at Pickering that I met my now closest friend, Jim Stapleton.

Jim was a Mutt to my Jeff and when he arrived at Pickering, he realized that being the smallest boy in a school full of delinquents was going to be a liability unless he teamed up with the largest boy, who was I. We were instant friends. I soon found out that Jimmy knew every ruse there was to avoid homework, extra duty assignments, and how to shift the blame for our myriad indiscretions to other students.

After graduation, Jimmy went to Cal State University Fullerton on a wrestling scholarship and studied criminology, having already learned the basics of the subject at Pickering. My parents had enough money that I didn’t need a scholarship and my athletic interests were in martial arts, which was not yet a college sport. I went to the pricier Santa Clara and then, because my family donated a large sum of money to the scholarship fund, Stanford, where I managed to eke out a doctorate in psychology. I capitalized on my background by writing my doctoral thesis on the criminal mind. When I found myself in a teaching position at Chandler, Jim offered me some consulting with his department to strengthen my meager academic credentials. After a string of shocking gang murders, Jim let me interview the perpetrators and my series of articles in the Journal of Delinquency gained me some academic credibility.

As you may have surmised, I wasn’t the type to be committed to a life in academia, but when I met my wife, a beautiful Vietnamese woman who believed in hard work and the principle that those who were privileged to have been granted a higher degree from a prestigious university should do more with it than use it as the basis for a pickup line, I decided to continue on the faculty at Chandler. Besides, I felt guilty continuing to purchase my expensive clothes, vintage wines, and other accouterments of the good life if I wasn’t adding something to the family coffers. So far, I hadn't regretted the decision. I enjoyed teaching and I found that my additional duty of counseling the few, mostly minority, students, who needed help adjusting to their first year at a mostly white, middle class college, was fulfilling, and sometimes challenging. Which brings me back to Lucia Chavez.

******

"How’s life with the Gestapo?" I greeted Jim Stapleton when he answered my phone call. I was back in my office, where I could slip off my Bruno Magli penny loafers and my Armani jacket and sit back and relax while I discharged my promise to Lucia to follow up on her inquiries with my closest friend, the Chief of Homicide in the County Sheriff's Department. I told him about Lucia’s problem.

Stapleton didn’t sound happy that I’d brought the subject up. In fact, his tone made it sound as if I’d jabbed him in a festering wound. " Christ, Phin, there’s nothing to tell the Chavez girl. It’s a closed case."

"Two people were shot dead in the middle of a movie scene," I said. "What do you need to make it suspicious, a letter from a terrorist group claiming responsibility?"

"Thirty or forty people saw what happened," Jim said, his irritation starting to boil over into anger. "It was all out in the open. If Chavez’s sister can’t accept the fact that her brother died accidentally, then she needs to talk to somebody and get over it."

"She's talking to me. I told her that I'd get some answers for her. I didn't expect to get brushed off, especially not from you." I was starting to believe Lucia’s story about getting the run around, but it wasn’t coming only from Detective Torres.

"For Christ's sake, Phineas, don't get so hot about it," Stapleton said. "Nobody's brushing you off and nobody brushed the Chavez girl off. She talked to Torres. He’s in charge of the case. He told her everything."

"He didn’t tell her squat. She thinks Torres remembers her from SNAG and he’s not telling her anything because of her record." Maybe she hadn’t said exactly that, but I was making a point.

I could virtually hear Stapleton bristle on the other end of the phone. "I’m sure that Torres told her everything he was allowed to tell her."

"Everything he was allowed to tell her?"

"Don't push this one, Phineas. The brass want this put to rest as soon as possible. They’re getting pressure from some of the county’s heaviest hitters."

"Like who?"

Jim’s voice was beleaguered. " Don’t even go there, Phin. You become a pain in the ass the way you usually do and it could backfire this time. You’re not dealing with some university committee or the yacht club. These people play hardball."

"Don't worry. I never leave home without a baseball bat."

Stapleton’s voice dropped into a confidential octave. "I’m not kidding around Phineas. Leave this one alone. You’ve got better things to do than mess with this case."

"Thanks for the warning, " I told him. "I’ll talk to Detective Torres and make up my own mind."

"You be careful, Phin. I mean it," he said.