It was late and I was sitting alone on my balcony, drinking.
The wind was unusually blustery, with low clouds that seemed to glow faintly from within. It was a rare night in southern California that you couldn’t see the stars, the moon, or the occasional UFO.
I had spent the rest of the day canvassing Huntington Beach, handing out many hundreds of flyers with Mitch Golden’s picture, my name and my number. So far, no luck. And no calls.
Something would come up. I was sure of it. Someone, somewhere had seen something. Someone, somewhere knew something.
I drank some more beer and pictured the corpse lying at the bottom of the ocean, being nibbled and feasted on, until a trawler came chugging by with its nets.
Hell of a way to go.
The clouds above swirled and churned and raced towards wherever clouds went to.
Sounds like a Shel Silverstein book, I thought.
When I was ten, my father and I came home after picking up a pizza, only to discover that my mother, Mary Knighthorse, had been murdered. She had been raped, her throat had been slit, and she had been left to bleed to death in her bedroom.
Which was where I had found her.
I’m thirty-one now. The image of my mother’s corpse reaching under her bed will forever haunt me. Hell, it’s now who I am, a part of my genetic make-up. It’s also a reminder that her killer is still out there.
That was twenty-one years ago.
I now had in my possession a time-lapse photograph of a young man, a surfer by the looks of him, who had been following my parents on the very day my mother had been killed.
My parents had spent that day in Huntington Beach, working hard to rekindle their love. I rarely gave my father much credit for anything, but I did give him credit for that: at least, making an effort to salvage their marriage.
Granted, his many affairs had done much to spoil the marriage to begin with.
Anyway, my parents had been taking photos of each other on that day-her last day. Some of the photos were just him, some were just of her. Some were together, no doubt taken by strangers. There were over twenty photos. And in three of them, a young man had been watching them.
Using state-of-the-art age-progression photography, I had one of the pictures analyzed. The image that came back was startling.
Startling, because I recognized the man.
The son of the detective in charge of investigating my mother’s murder. My mother’s murder which remained unsolved to this day.
I shook my head again, and considered the implications all over again.
His son. A cover-up?
I didn’t know.
But I was going to find out.