Winston held out the keys to Violet. She took them without a word and then started the car. She put the gear in reverse and began backing toward the wide steel door at the rear of the showroom. Kathy watched as Winston crossed to the door and gave the handle a yank. The door ascended on its track with a low rumbling sound. He leaned toward the driver’s-side window, probably to offer her advice, but Violet swung the car into the alley and took off without so much as a backward look.

Kathy saw Winston glance at his watch, and she felt a little thrill of fear because she knew exactly what was on his mind. Even if Violet took the long way around, the drive couldn’t take more than five minutes. Which meant he could have the car on the floor again before her dad returned from lunch.

6

I found Sergeant Timothy Schaefer in a workshop at the back of his property on Hart Drive in Santa Maria. The house itself was built in the 1950s by the look of it-a three-bedroom frame structure so uniformly white that it had been either freshly painted or recently covered in vinyl siding. His workshop must have been a toolshed at one time, enlarged by degrees until it was now half the size of a single-car garage. The interior walls were all raw wood and exposed studs. He’d used layers of newspaper as insulation, and I could probably read a year’s worth of local news items if I peered closely enough.

Schaefer had told me he’d retired from the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department in 1968 at the age of sixty-two, which made him eighty-one years old now. He was heavyset, his loose gray pants held up with tan suspenders. The brown and blue in his plaid flannel shirt had been washed to a blend of softly faded hues. His hair was a flyaway white, as fine as spun sugar, and he wore bifocals low on his nose, fixing me with an occasional sharp look over the rims.

In front of him, on a chunky wooden workbench that lined the shop on three sides, he’d set a newly refinished rocking chair, its seat in need of recaning. His tools were neatly lined up: a pair of needle-nose pliers, two ice picks, a knife, a ruler, a container of glycerin, and loops of cane held together with clothespins. On the chair he was currently caning, he’d used golf tees to hold the cane in place until he could tie them off underneath.

“My daughter got me into this,” he said idly. “After her mother died, she thought a hobby would keep me out of trouble. Weekends, we make the rounds of flea markets and yard sales, picking up old beat-up chairs like this. Turns out to be a money-making proposition.”

“How’d you learn?”