Nina thought, not for the first time, what has modern art come to?

The artist’s home consisted of a series of adobe cubes piled haphazardly alongside each other, anchored by tall double Indonesian doors painted in garish gold leaf, reds, yellows, and greens. Brown shutters on all the windows, closed. Satellite dish, chimneys, tiled roof. Primitive stencils on the wall here and there. A million-dollar home, so altered that it would perhaps be unsellable.

“The garage door’s open,” Prem said. “The Jeep’s gone. Shit!”

She ran to the door and fumbled a key out of her bag, though Nina called “Wait!” She pushed open the door and disappeared inside.

“You ready?” Paul said to Nina, taking her hand. “You could stay outside.” She could see it in his face, the anxiety, the grim anticipation.

“I’m with you.” So they went in together.

Polished echoing floors, an almost-empty foyer. A sideboard, all the drawers pulled out. Place mats and tablecloths lying on the floor where they had been tossed.

From somewhere to the right they heard a full-throated, anguished shriek. Nina’s eyes met Paul’s. He shook his head slightly. He held his gun in his right hand. Nina fell behind as they moved right, into a painting studio.

Canvases propped against the wall. A long scarred Gothic table down the center, covered with a tarp and tubes of oil paint, brushes, bottles, plates, cups, animal skulls, mirrors, dead flowers. And what were those vines in the watery glasses? Nina shrank back.

She looked at the pictures. He was painting poison oak, skulls, dead things, hyperrealistically. While her eyes raked the otherwise-empty room, a vision came to her of the interior of his mind, and she shrank from this too.

And yet. And yet, the brilliant light filtered through the shutters to stripe the concrete floor; the dead things lay passively, giving up their essence, at ease at last; the painting technique, so old-fashioned, brushless, jewel-colored, was so accomplished that the overall feeling she experienced was a sense of quiet and formality, the sense that only great painting can give. She thought of Hieronymus Bosch, Henri Rousseau, Vermeer.

No sound anywhere, now. Paul’s hand around hers tightened and he pulled her toward an arched doorway. Nina felt no fear, because of Paul, but also because in this world of deathly harmony she already knew what they would see and she already knew it would be quiet, unmoving. The jittery energy of danger had left.

Prem knelt in the kitchen, behind a prosaic butcher-block kitchen island, copper pots reflecting the shining stripes of light, knelt over a large bloodied creature on the floor. Nina saw hanks of hair, a pool of blood of the most saturated, purest red, with its tributary stream meandering down a slight declivity in the floor. A face covered in this scarlet paint, arms and legs akimbo; he must have been beaten to death. Paul stretched out an arm and stopped her.

“No farther,” he ordered. Then he moved gingerly in toward Prem, sobbing next to that bleeding head, and gently lifted her up and brought her back to Nina. Nina put her left arm around her and, with her right hand on the cell phone, punched 911.

27

T HE NIGHT BEFORE IN CACHAGUA HAD gone on too long. The police needed statements. Paul, evasive but tired, wasn’t his usual suave self and practically got himself arrested. She had played the tight-ass attorney to get him out of trouble. What they learned at the scene was that the artist was wealthy, had many fans, many detractors, and many possible killers.

She started off Tuesday morning sitting in her visitor’s chair in Paul’s office, laptop on her knees, listing the things she felt might be important to remember in her preparations for Wish’s preliminary hearing. On the wall she had pasted her hand-drawn map of Carmel Valley Village, showing the location of the fires and Siesta Court. Faint laughter filtered up from the Hog’s Breath.

Sandy, at Wish’s old desk, was reading the Monterey newspaper out loud, in between working on court papers they needed to file.

“Donnelly really was famous.”

“He’ll be more famous now,” Nina said shortly.

“The motive seems to be robbery. His sister said he often kept cash in the house. He was a lumpy-mattress type. Plus Coyote stole his Jeep. You’d think the highway patrol could pick out every Jeep in five hundred miles with helicopters.”

“I agree, fleeing in a Jeep is as desperate as dodging a taxi by running into a bus.”

“Says here, he was a bit of a recluse. Kinda like Stephen King. People knocking at his door toting bombs, wanting money.”

“He despised fame,” Nina said. “Unusually private type, but if you ask me, some of that was drug-induced paranoia.”

“So it might not be Coyote?”

“It’s Coyote. Has to be. We talk about Coyote, and Britta leaves me a note telling me to head for Donnelly’s if anything happens to her, and something happens to her. Then something happens to Donnelly. That’s what I explained to the homicide detective last night. Not that he appeared to be fully convinced, but he was interested.”

“How’s she doing? Britta Cowan?”

“When I called David Cowan this morning, he said they’ll bring her out of the coma in a couple more days. She’s going to make it. What did she do when she left me that day? How did she know he might try to rob Donnelly? I really need to talk to her.”

Unable to come to any useful conclusions, Nina and Sandy returned to their work. The clock on Paul’s desk ticked. He was out at the handicapped facility in Carmel Valley Village, interviewing the people there, and the phones were blessedly silent.

Nina began doodling names. Britta. Elizabeth Gold. Coyote. Danny. George Hill.

How to prove that Coyote set the fires without implicating Danny, and by further implication, Wish? She got out the autopsy report on Danny and studied it again, reread Wish’s story, thought again about the more than six thousand dollars in Coyote’s account, wondered again how Danny got his “tip.” Tip in quotes, because she wasn’t at all sure there had been any tip.

Now she started drawing little sketches of the objects surrounding this case-little sketches for little objects. A piece of paper with Twelve Points. A margarita glass. A cat, a concho belt, fire, cowboys, a little kid with his diapers hanging down, a Jeep, Danny’s flute…

She shook her head and tried again. Sandy had come over to get something and was looking at her paper.

“Why do you do that? I’ve seen you do that for every case. What does it do for you?”

“It’s how I think.”

“What about logic?”

“It’s never about logic, Sandy. It’s always about emotion.”

They tapped on their keyboards for a while. The phones rang a few times. Sandy dispensed with calls with her usual mixture of tact and ironhandedness. At lunch, they called an order down to the restaurant. Nina went down to pick up the food and breathe some of the cleansing fog into her lungs. They ate at their desks, communicating, as they often did, in a shorthand that pricked the silence like static.

“Those papers,” Nina would say.

“Done.”

“Did you call…?”

“Called at ten. Weren’t you listening? They say they’ll have the discovery papers couriered over this afternoon.”

“Wish wanted us to bring…”

“I took that stuff over last night.”

Nina asked a question that had been bothering her. “Sandy,” she said, biting into a pepper, “do you need a place to stay, or are you staying with that friend of yours who lives near here?”

“Staying at your place.”

“You are?” Nina struggled for neutrality. Had Paul invited her without saying? How in the world could they have any kind of a life with Sandy on the couch or in his precious den?