“How many children do you have now?”

“Including the soon-to-be-born twins? Five.”

“What happened to Peter and Meg?”

“Those are my first two. They still live with us. Not to accuse you of neglect, but you missed Abigail entirely, and you’re just about to miss Travis and Scott.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by sometime,” I said weakly.

She didn’t actually hang up on me. There was some kind of ruckus in the background, and I heard her say, “Oh, shit!” Then the line went dead.

I stared at the phone. This was bad. Worse than I’d thought. Had Hallie lied to me about everything? It was clear she’d played fast and loose, but what was the point? She’d conned me into doing the legwork in her efforts to locate an ex-con named Christian Satterfield, who might not be related to her at all. He was for real, a convicted bank robber out on parole. I’d seen the article about his crime spree and I’d seen the man himself (at least as far as I could tell in the dark and at a distance). I’d provided Hallie with contact information, neatly keeping her name out of it as requested, but the story about giving a child up for adoption now seemed questionable. I wasn’t even sure the name Hallie Bettancourt was real. Probably not, now that I thought about it.

There had to be a way to track her down. How could she appear and disappear without leaving a trace?

I picked up my leather bag by the strap and slung it over my shoulder, fishing in one of the outer pockets for my keys. I locked the office and trotted out to my car. I took the back road through town, skirting the city limits as I hit the 192 and headed east toward the Clipper estate. Now the route looked different, nearly disorienting with its surfeit of visual information. At night, many houses disappeared, fading into the surrounding darkness under the cover of trees. During the daylight hours, the trajectory of the east-west mountain range was brought into high relief.

Sunlight warmed the chaparral and the dry conditions intensified the volatile oils in the dense, low-growing vegetation. The still air was heavy with the woody smell of eucalyptus, black sage, and California lilac. Manzanitas and canyon live oaks, while drought tolerant, are also highly flammable—nature’s bottle rockets. Given current conditions, with the slightest miscalculation in human judgment, the landscape could ignite, turning into an ocean of fire that would take everything in its path.

I turned left onto Winding Canyon Road, following a series of switchbacks that angled ever upward. Houses were fewer here and farther between. There were no intervening side roads. An occasional driveway led off to some unseen habitat, but I saw no other motorists. I spotted the big sandstone boulder with the house number blasted into it and I turned in as I had the week before. When I reached the parking area below the house, I shut down my engine and got out. I stood for a moment, turning by degrees until I’d taken in the whole of the property, which Vera claimed had been on the market for years. Of course there was no For Sale sign. Montebello residents frown on anything so crass. I suspect in any economic decline, countless homes are listed on the quiet, with no suggestion to the outside world that owners are scrambling around trying to scare up quick cash.