“I’m sure your counseling will help him immeasurably.”

“You’re just saying that to placate me.”

“You know me better than that, Savannah.”

She blew air through her lips, flapping them. “What am I going to do with you, Logan?”

“I can think of a few things.”

The phone made a funny beep in my ear. I ignored it. Savannah didn’t.

“You have another call coming in,” she said.

“I don’t have call waiting.”

“Yes, Logan, you do, because that beep’s definitely call waiting. Could be important. I’ll let you go.”

I reluctantly admitted that I was “unfamiliar” with how call waiting worked on my new phone — or any phone, for that matter.

“You can fly the wings off anything ever built but you can’t figure out call waiting?”

“If I were dyslexic, Savannah, would you make fun of that?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why belittle a man who’s cellularly challenged?”

“You’re right. That was incredibly insensitive. You’ll have to forgive me.”

“I’m working on it.”

She told me which buttons to push on my new phone to toggle between calls. I pressed a button, promptly disconnecting her along with whoever else was trying to reach me. The phone rang almost immediately. It was Detective Rosario.

“One of our patrol units located that pickup truck you were looking for,” she said, “the one registered to C.W. Lazarus. We also located Mr. Lazarus.”

I’d fantasized about finding the son of a bitch myself, forcing a confession from him, then enacting with my fists the damage he’d done to the Ruptured Duck. But that wasn’t going to happen now. Life, I reminded myself, is full of disappointments.

“Did you ask him about my airplane? I’m hoping he spilled his guts.”

“That he did,” Rosario said. “But he won’t be talking about your airplane anytime soon, or anything else. C.W. Lazarus is dead.”

Twenty-three

Turkey vultures orbited high above Lazarus’s remains as Detective Rosario and I ascended the hill where his corpse lay under a broiling, late afternoon sun.

Mountain bikers had discovered the body a few hours earlier about a quarter-mile from a trailhead in the Cleveland National Forest where Lazarus’s Nissan pickup with its PCAFLR vanity license plates had also been found. The truck had been broken into and its radio stolen — not an uncommon occurrence these days among vehicles left unattended overnight in America’s majestic outback. Authorities surmised that garden variety vandals were likely responsible for the ransacking of Lazarus’s truck. As for the apparent murder of Lazarus himself, blame and explanation had not yet been apportioned.

“Ever wonder why vultures are bald?”

“Can’t say I have.” Rosario was breathing hard, trudging uphill. “But I don’t think it’s because Mother Nature decided that rockin’ a bald look would necessarily enhance their appearance.”

“No feathers means the gunk that clings to their heads dries faster and falls off quicker after they go Dumpster diving inside the body cavities of dead animals.”

“I could’ve gone the rest of my life without knowing that.”

Rosario stopped and bent at the waist, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath. I paused and waited for her. She was wearing lace-up hiking boots, faded Levis with her badge and pistol clipped to the waist, and a pink tank top that, without her shoulder rig obscuring it, revealed ample cleavage I hadn’t noticed before.

“You doing OK, Detective?”

She nodded. Sweat beads dripped from her short black hair onto the dirt. “I gotta start hitting the club more.”

The club. Before the days of computerized incline stair-steppers and cardio monitors, they were called “gyms,” unvarnished houses of pain where jocks and those who aspired to be jocks sweated, not preened. You went there to pump iron until your hands bled and your arms burned like magnesium. Nobody went looking to check out the local talent. I’d had my fill of gym workouts after four years of playing wide receiver for the Air Force Academy. Exercise for me these days consisted of a few tortured minutes every morning of stomach crunches and push-ups, followed by coffee and three ibuprofens. Call them whatever you wanted, health clubs or fitness centers, I’d no sooner join one than I would the Communist Party.

Rosario dug an inhaler out of her shoulder bag and sucked deeply. “Better now,” she said after a minute, standing erect and finger-combing her sopping hair. “Adult asthma. This getting older thing blows.”

“After the age of thirty, the body has a mind of its own.”

“You just make that up?”

I shook my head. “Bette Midler.”

“You don’t exactly strike me as the Divine Miss M type, Logan.”

“Are you kidding? I’m huge into musicals. Nothing finer in my opinion than a big Broadway production number.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“You’re right. I’m not. Musicals make my butt hurt after about ten minutes. I just remember random stuff. Pointless facts to know and tell.”

“Like why buzzards are bald.”

I smiled.

Rosario drew a deep breath and continued walking uphill while I fell in behind her. A half-mile or so below us, I could see the winding dirt road where I’d been arrested after escaping the clutches of Ray Sheen who, according to Rosario, was still on the lam.

I had persuaded her to let me look at Lazarus’s body, to stare down at the face of the man who’d caused me to crash my airplane. She’d turned me down at first, saying department policy prohibited unauthorized civilians from entering designated crime scenes. I countered by pointing out that the guy hadn’t tried to kill me; he’d tried to kill us.

“We survived a life-and-death experience,” I said. “That makes us brothers — or sisters — depending on how politically correct you want to get about it. I just want to look down at the dirt bag for a few seconds and gloat. Call it a catharsis.”

“What’s a catharsis?”

“It’s an arrangement. You let me have my little moment of satisfaction, I’ll spring for dinner afterward.”

The detective mulled my proposal, then said, “If anybody asks who you are or what you’re doing, you let me do the talking. You touch nothing, stand where I tell you, do what I tell you. Understood?”

“Roger.”

We made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a church one block from the sheriff’s department’s Pine Valley substation, about forty highway miles east of downtown San Diego, just off Interstate 8. Rosario would then drive us to the scene, which was less than two miles from the substation. Her partner, she said, would not be coming along. Lawless’s wife was in labor. They were expecting twins.

No way was it a date with Rosario. Of that I convinced myself. My having asked the detective out to dinner was nothing more than reimbursement for a favor asked and granted. And even if it was a date, what Savannah didn’t know would never hurt her. Still, as I hiked up the trail, staring at Rosario’s bottom, I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow cheating on Savannah. A tart taste rose up behind my tongue and stayed there.

The body was draped with a yellow tarp and surrounded by yellow crime scene tape looped in a loose circle around creosote bushes on either side of the trail. A pair of uniformed deputies, one African-American, the other white, guarded the scene, wiping sweat from their faces and sipping from plastic water bottles. They both looked bored and overheated. On the slope twenty meters above them, a ponytailed civilian in a green windbreaker with “SDSD Crime Lab” printed on the back was sweeping over the mountainous terrain with a metal detector, searching for what I assumed were spent bullets.

“What’s the story on the ME, Alicia?” the African-American deputy asked Rosario as we approached. “We’ve been here since before lunch.”