Her scripted reply. She’d put together a lot of those over the years. But the answer was true even though a minute never passed without her feeling guilty. More of that day returned. “Didn’t you have some crazy marksman skills?”
“Good memory.”
For some things.
“I don’t make it to the firing range as much as I’d like, so my proficiency isn’t what it used to be.” He finished the water and set the empty glass on the kitchen table. Then he rudely wandered around her workshop, visually examining her pottery wheels, glaze buckets, pug mill, tubs of clay, and shelves of pottery. He seemed especially interested in the designs requiring an intense-heat process that involved bird feathers. He paused in front of a map that covered half a wall. The Mojave Desert. He took note of the areas marked in red.
She came and stood beside him, hands in the front pockets of her jeans. “These are the places I’ve searched for my father’s victims.” Some of her searches had taken place on what had once been her paternal grandmother’s property, now her father’s, an area so vast it would take a crew years to cover every hidden gulley and wash. Out there, a person could drive for hours and not see another car. That’s how remote it was. As the years passed, the chances of finding anything had become more unlikely. In a land of loose sand, rain washed many things away, even bodies.
And yet, she kept looking.
Other people spent their free time going to movies or going out to eat or visiting museums. She looked for the women her father had killed, feeling an overwhelming need to find them.
“Interesting,” he said. “I’ve gone over the files we have on your father, and most searches were conducted closer to his home in the San Bernardino National Forest outside Palm Springs. A small team spent only a few days on your grandmother’s property.”
She was impressed to find he knew so much about the case considering it was so old. Odd, really, but then many detectives had their pet cold cases they liked to pull out and fixate on now and then. The popular theory was that her father had disposed of the bodies closer to their Palm Springs home, in the area of Greater LA known as the Inland Empire, but she’d always felt the desert might have been the place he’d buried them. The desert promised seclusion for a killer, and the heat brought about rapid decomposition. A perfect dumping ground.
“Why the extensive focus on the Mojave?” he asked. “It’s hours away from the known locations of the most likely missing persons cases. He had much quicker access to wilderness closer to home. If he buried his victims in the Mojave, he would have had to transport them a long distance in the heat. Plus, detectives found no sign of anything at your grandmother’s cabin. And back when she was still alive, she stuck with the story of never seeing anything suspicious.”
That was all true. “He loved the desert and he was very at home here,” Reni said. And yet that link hadn’t tarnished the desert for her. Or maybe the desert hadn’t allowed itself to be tarnished.
“That’s not enough of a reason. And maybe no reason at all, because killers don’t typically want to taint the places they love.”
“Nothing you learned in any profiling class at Quantico or in the field applies to Benjamin Fisher,” she said. “He cared about me, I have no doubt about that, and yet he had no qualms about using and tainting me. In fact, I would guess it was part of the pleasure he derived from it all. Mixing me up in it, his little father-and-daughter outings of death.”
Her bluntness seemed to make him uncomfortable, yet he was the one who’d started this, who’d brought Benjamin Fisher back into her headspace. What had he expected? It had to be a struggle for him to know just where to push and just where to hold back. He might have even forgotten for a second that she was Benjamin’s daughter, and that this wasn’t a detective brainstorming session.
Looking around, he asked, “How long have you been making pottery?” He seemed to be trying to shake off the awkwardness of the situation.
“Off and on, several years.” She was happy to talk about something else.
Making pottery was an escape of a sort. She got up in the morning and cut bubbles from the clay by pulling it through wire strung between frames. She’d work it and slap a piece on the wheel and focus her energy on that piece, on keeping it centered and keeping it smooth and keeping it from going wrong, because one small error, one small distraction, and she’d have to start over.
When she threw a pot, she never thought about the past; she thought about the repeated wetting of her fingers in the can of water, the steady and even pressure applied to the clay. She thought about the way the sun felt streaming through the window, hitting her back. She never thought about her father. She would not allow him to be a part of her art, of the clay, and the creation. Her goal, which she’d somewhat succeeded at until today, had been to keep him out of this healing space.
Her pottery provided income too. The area got a lot of tourists due to the proximity to Joshua Tree National Park, and her tranquil and oddly delicate pieces that echoed the layers of sky and mountains were unique enough to take off.
Daniel picked up a bowl from a workbench and turned it over to reveal her potter’s stamp. “What’s the logo mean?”
“Just an image from a dream.” A crude stick bird, something a child might draw. Or in this area, something that could have been a petroglyph. “It has no real meaning. I couldn’t come up with anything. I had a dream and used it.”
“I wouldn’t tell people that.” He put the bowl back on the shelf. “It’s a bit underwhelming.”
She laughed. It was a sound that didn’t come out of her very often. “I’ll try to drum up something better.”
“You don’t practice at all anymore? Detective work? Teaching? Seems a shame with your insight and skill.”
“I’ve taken a few cases over the past several months. Mostly missing persons. None that ended well, but they brought closure.”
“You look different,” he said bluntly.
A long way from her Homicide days and a closet full of black suits of her own, all of which she’d given to Goodwill. The calendar would show that she’d only been gone three years, but it felt like ten. Definitely another life.
After the breakdown, it hadn’t taken long for her to realize she needed to escape everything, mostly herself and the thoughts she couldn’t turn off. There was one obvious way out, one way to make everything stop, but she refused to go that route. First because of her dog, and second because she couldn’t do that to her mother. It was her own personal joke that the dog had come first. So she made the decision to pack up her truck, load up her dog, and hit the road with no plans or goals. Because on the road, every day was an escape as the highway unfurled in front of you and rolled up behind you and you just kept moving, focusing on the needs of the day. Where to stop for gas, where to walk the dog, where to camp for the night, always moving toward or away from sunsets.
But her old dog got older and she began to feel guilty about dragging him on her journey even though he never complained. And when he reached the point where it was time to let him go, she realized she had no home for his ashes. So she returned to California less than a year ago and bought the tiny cabin and put his ashes and collar on the mantel above the fireplace. She made it livable but not too livable, because she didn’t deserve that. Years before, she’d been pretty good at making pottery, taught by a long-ago college boyfriend, so she picked up a used pottery wheel on Craigslist and began making pots again.