China Lake Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  ‘‘Simply put, the finest crime suspense series I’ve come across in the last twenty years . . . your basic can’t-put -’em-down thrill rides.’’

  —Stephen King

  China Lake

  ‘‘[An] exciting mix. Great stuff.’’ —Independent on Sunday

  "Meg Gardiner makes it all work . . . amazingly entertaining. " —Stephen King

  "With a colorful cast of richly delineated characters, a protagonist with whom the readers will easily identify—all big hearted, quick tongued, and hair-trigger tempered . . . a fast-paced ride through some of the more dubious nooks and crannies of the American dream.’’ —The Guardian (UK)

  ‘‘Fast and hard-edged. Buy it, read it.’’ —Hull Daily Mail

  ‘‘A cracker, with memorable characters, memorable lines, and a plot that races along to an explosive ending. A great summer read.’’ —Huddersfield Daily Examiner

  ‘‘Very well written, racy, and witty.’’ —Tangled Web

  Kill Chain

  ‘‘Evan Delaney is a paragon for our times: tough, funny, clever, brave, tireless, and compassionate. The pace and inventiveness never flag, and the climax . . . is both nail-biting and moving. But the brilliant writing is what puts this thriller way ahead of the competition. Intelligent escapism at its best.’’ —The Guardian (UK)

  ‘‘I loved every minute of it. A breathtaking thriller, gripping and relentless.’’

  —Caroline Carver, CWA Dagger-winning author of Blood Junction

  ‘‘A rattling good read.’’ —News of the World

  ‘‘Brilliant.’’ —Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, UK)

  ‘‘The action is high octane from the first page. Once you pick it up, it’s a very hard book to put down.’’ —My Weekly

  ‘‘Fast and furious.’’ —The Literary Review

  Crosscut

  ‘‘Full of classic Gardiner one-liners . . . but mostly there’s a serious freezerload of scare-you-silly chills.’’

  —Stephen King

  ‘‘A tense and exciting thriller where almost anything seems possible. A conspiracy theorist’s must-have.’’

  —Independent on Sunday

  ‘‘Easily one of the best thrillers I’ve read this year. I could barely wait to get to the next page. If you start this book, be prepared to be unable to put it down. Meg Gardiner has written a cracker.’’ —Caroline Carver

  ‘‘This book rips. It makes Silence of the Lambs look like Mary had a little one—it never lets up.’’

  —Adrienne Dines, author of The Jigsaw Maker

  Jericho Point

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner dishes out the gripping plot in tense helpings. Short, punchy chapters keep the pace flowing, and you’ll find it impossible to find a resting point.’’

  —Evening Times (Glasgow)

  [Gardiner’s] depictions of the criminal elements of the Hollywood fringe and the local drugs culture is a tightly observed slice of realism. This is a relentless, claustrophobic examination of mistaken identity and the terror of being accused of a crime for which you are not responsible.’’

  —Sherlock Magazine

  ‘‘Fast-paced, witty, and brutal.’’

  —The Independent (London)

  Mission Canyon

  ‘‘A harrowing (and all-too-timely) story of corporate greed and evildoing in quirky Southern California.’’

  —Jeffery Deaver

  ‘‘A rattling good read with an unexpected twist.’’

  —The Sunday Telegraph

  ‘‘Fiction at its finest . . . many nail-biting moments and hand-wringing twists.’’ —Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, UK)

  ‘‘If you read Sue Grafton, Lee Child, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, or Nelson DeMille, you’re going to think Meg Gardiner is a gift from heaven for thriller/mystery readers." —Stephen King

  "Meg Gardiner is a welcome addition to the ranks of American thriller writers.’’ —The Daily Telegraph (UK)

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner has rekindled my interest in thrillers.’’

  —The Independent (London)

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner is a class act at the top of her game.’’

  —My Weekly

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner has a powerful style—fast paced, immediate, and imaginative.’’ —Sherlock Magazine

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner goes from strength to strength.’’

  —OneWord Radio

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner is brilliant at making the over-the-top seem utterly convincing.’’ —The Guardian (UK)

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner hard-boils her American crime with the best of them. . . . If you like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich, you ought to have discovered Gardiner by now.’’

  —Evening Telegraph (Peterborough, UK)

  ‘‘Meg Gardiner takes us to places we hope we’ll never have to go in reality.’’ —Caroline Carver

  Also by Meg Gardiner

  Mission Canyon

  Jericho Point

  Crosscut

  Kill Chain

  The Dirty Secrets Club

  OBSIDIAN

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  Published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. This is an authorized reprint of an edition published by Hodder & Stoughton. For information address: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH

  First Obsidian Printing, June 2008

  Copyright © Meg Gardiner, 2002

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3052-1

  For Paul

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For invaluable help with this novel, I thank Ann Aubrey Hanson; Carolina Shreve; Sally Gardiner; Sara Gardiner, MD; Marilyn Moreno, attorney at law; Nancy Fraser; Adrienne Dines; Irena Kowal; Milena Banks; Melinda Roughton; Bonni Connell; Jane Warren; Mary Albanese; and Frank Gardiner, who gave me everything that counted. For their encouragement and advice, I also thank my agent, Giles Gordon, and my editor, Sue Fletcher.

  1

  Peter Wyoming didn’t shake hands with people; he hit them with his presence like a rock fired from a sling-shot. He was a human nail, lean and straight with brush-cut hair, and when I first saw him he was carrying a picket sign and enough rage to scorch the ground. The sign read, GOD HATES SLUTS, and he held it erect in his fist, aimed so mourners read it as we stepped from the church into the autumn sunshine. Behind him, his followers hoisted other placards. AIDS CURES WHORES. SEX ED = AIDS = DAMNATION. Ahead, the dead woman’s daughter walked behind the casket, gripping her husband’s hand for support.

  When Wyoming saw her, he began chanting, ‘‘Hey, hey, what do you say? Claudine burns in hell today!’’

  That was when I made my first mistake. I took him for a grandstander, a bigot, a man who, from the looks of his sign, had trouble with women. And I underestimated him.

  Wyoming was the pastor of a church called the Remnant, which proclaimed itself the last swatch of godliness in a pustulating world. They thought Santa Barbara, this postcard city of acrylic blue skies and red tile roofs, of coffee bars and beaches and Mexican-American warmth, was a sluice gate on the sewer pipe to hell. They liked to drive home the point by jeering at AIDS funerals.

  We ignored them. The dead woman’s daughter, Nikki Vincent, had known they were coming and told us to treat them as if they were invisible. Treat them like roaches underfoot.

  Now Nikki laid a coffee brown hand on the coffin. Saying, Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll take care of you. Or maybe drawing strength from her mother one last time. Claudine Girard had never backed down from anything. A small woman with a Haitian French accent, she was an AIDS activist even before the disease raked into her. She had also been my university professor, who salted her literature classes with commands to stand straight and belly up to life. Her death seemed impossible.

  She had been well-known in Santa Barbara, and reporters were clustering outside the Spanish-style church, under palm trees stirring in the breeze. They looked eager for action. Wyoming, anxious to supply it, tightened his bolo tie and stared at Nikki—seven months pregnant, holding on to her husband’s arm and Claudine’s coffin, ready to run the gauntlet.

  He raised his sign. ‘‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch?’’

  The Remnant shouted, ‘‘The voodoo witch!’’

  It was twenty yards to the hearse waiting at the curb: a long way. The funeral director, usually all smooth, inconspicuous moves and black-suited calm, clasped his hands in dismay. Confrontational funerals were poor advertising for the Elysian Glen Mortuary. He urged the pallbearers forward. Nikki lifted her chin and followed, her face like varnished wood, sunglasses hiding her swollen eyes.

  A snub-nosed woman jutted forward from the crowd. ‘‘Slut lovers! Queer lovers! Take your mumbo jumbo back to Haiti!’’

  Mourners deliberately looked past the protesters. We were a mixed bag—academics rumpled in grief, Claudine’s Caribbean family, and friends like me, with my Celtic looks, middle-class manners, and bitten-back shock. My own religion was a subterranean Catholicism that welled up for deaths and holidays. God-as-stink-bomb was a novelty to me. I felt myself fraying, but for Nikki’s sake I kept walking, looking into the distance where the October air shimmered over the Santa Ynez mountains.

  Peeved that we weren’t responding to them, a crew-cut young man with acne pointed at Nikki. ‘‘We’re talking to you, witch girl.’’

  That blew it. Nikki’s husband, Carl, who had the heart and temper of an accountant, turned toward him. ‘‘How dare you?’’ His hand was raised, index finger pointing. ‘‘How dare you speak that way to my wife?’’

  Peter Wyoming said, ‘‘Wife? You mean your ho?’’

  His followers laughed. They laughed and cheered and shook their picket signs.

  Carl’s owlish glasses were askew on his face. ‘‘Bastards! You call yourselves Christians? Shame on you.’’

  Wyoming blinked with lizard quickness. His eyes were pale blue and looking at Nikki. ‘‘The Lord says, ‘Your shame will be seen. I have seen your abominations, your adulteries and neighings, your lewd harlotries.’ ’’

  Carl’s muscles bunched beneath his pinstripes. Nikki said, ‘‘Don’t,’’ but he stepped toward Wyoming. She glanced at me. ‘‘Evan—’’

  We grabbed his arms. He was two feet from Wyoming, cocking his elbow to throw a punch I knew I couldn’t stop.

  Then I heard Nikki’s voice, close to his ear, speaking coolly and loud enough for Wyoming to hear. ‘‘He’s an inbred, low-wattage, mouth-breathing redneck. He’s not worth it.’’

  The impertinent dignity of her outrage held Carl back. His arm dropped and he turned to her. So he didn’t see the smirk on Wyoming’s face, the disdain that meant: No real man lets two women restrain him.

  Wyoming said loudly, ‘‘You think Claudine was great, always promoting ‘compassion’ and ‘cure’ and ‘education.’ Those are just fancy excuses for whoring.’’

  Ahead, the pallbearers slid the casket into the gaping embrace of the hearse. Nikki watched, her fingers clenched. I nudged Carl forward, tipping my head toward the reporters and saying, ‘‘All they’d notice is that you threw the first punch.’’

  ‘‘ ‘Be wretched and mourn and weep,’ ’’ Wyoming intoned. ‘‘ ‘Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.’ ’’

  The words struck and bruised: scripture as covering fire. Forget it. I was through holding back. ‘‘I just figured out your problem. You confuse humility with humiliation.’’

  Crew-cut said, ‘‘Big words don’t trick us. You’ll burn in hell.’’

  Nikki was biting her lip, walking at a heavy, pregnant pace, fighting not to cry in front of these people. Carl held his arm tight around her.

  ‘‘Slut!’’ Crew-cut shouted as an afterthought, or maybe just punctuation.

  I turned to face him. ‘‘Why is it that people with tiny brains always come out with that same, tired insult? Can’t your skulls fit in even a slender second thought?’’

  His acne flamed. Before he could answer I spun around. Carl was holding the door of their car for Nikki, waiting for her to lumber in before slamming it. As he walked around to the driver’s side, I saw the look on her face. It was brittle, and rupturing.

  She was staring at the windshield, where a flyer had been stuck under the wipers. I hurriedly pulled it out. In lurid red print it said, YOUR NEXT. Beneath the words was a comic strip titled, ‘‘AIDS: God’s Roach Ho-tel.’’ The cartoons showed Hollywood st
reet tarts scratching at open sores, with the tagline, Ho’s check in—but they don’t check out! The drawings were gruesome and irritatingly professional. At the bottom of the page was a cheery note from the Remnant: Visit us on the World Wide Web!

  Carl started his engine. Other mourners were yanking the flyers off their windshields, shaking their heads, crumpling them. Behind me, reporters were calling to Wyoming, clamoring for his attention. The hearse pulled away and Carl followed, heading up a somber procession, accompanying Claudine on her last journey.

  Wyoming’s dry, deep voice rose above the background noise. He was speaking to a television reporter, leaning into the microphone, sounding aggrieved. To let him have the last word here seemed intolerable. I began walking toward him.

  I heard him say he didn’t hate sick people—God did, and the Remnant was just stating that fact. The reporter leaned forward assertively, cocking his head to demonstrate attentive skepticism, asking Wyoming if he thought he had converted the people who attended the funeral.

  ‘‘No, and I don’t care one bit. ‘Let the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right.’ ’’

  ‘‘Excuse me,’’ I said.

  Wyoming, his followers, and the reporter looked at me. I said, ‘‘ ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ ’’ It was the first Bible quote I could think of, Gospel of Matthew, and fortunately it was apt.

  Wyoming looked amused. His expression said, Come on, swap chapter and verse with me; you’ll end up as my chew toy. The reporter pushed his sunglasses up his nose and twitched his mustache, not sure whether this interruption would make good airplay.

  ‘‘ ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy,’ ’’ I said. ‘‘I just wanted you to remember that, Mr. Wyoming.’’

  He surveyed me with a stare that started at my feet, rode up my legs, and seemed to slide under my skirt and blouse. He appeared unimpressed by what folks called my tomboy figure—the sprinter’s legs, spartan chest, short, mussy hair the color of toffee. Still, by the time his eyes reached my face I felt flushed.

  The reporter said, ‘‘You seem upset about Pastor Wyoming’s presence, Miss . . .’’