sanctum sanctorum without allowing it either to dominate him or to change in any way the face or the personality that he presented to the world above.
Slowly a measured smile formed as he considered what fun he might have rising to this challenge, as he had risen to so many others with ever-escalating success.
111
Already, by 2:05 Thursday afternoon, Sheriff Hayden Eckman had talked himself into a good mood. Tio Barbizon was right: It was a relief to be owned, to have no responsibility except to do as he was told. When Barbizon’s men arrived at six o’clock to collect dead bodies and evidence, to have Hayden sign off on a concocted version of recent events that would satisfy the attorney general, then his new life could begin.
He was in a living room armchair, a third of the way through a second serving of Scotch, when his personal phone rang. The caller was Deputy Reed Hannafin, one of the loyalists Hayden had appointed.
“Sheriff, I just learned from one of our guys that Dr. Conroy was at the Bookman house last night while we were guarding it.”
Hayden sat up straighter in the chair. “We couldn’t find Carson earlier. Jim Harmon had to run the murders at the heating-cooling plant. What the hell was Carson doing at the Bookman place?”
“Nobody knows. His Explorer was parked in front. Then he left before dawn. You want me to find him? Maybe check out his house?”
After a hesitation, Hayden said, “I’ll have to ask.”
Puzzled, Hannafin said, “Ask who?”
“I mean, I’ll have to think about it, how to approach it. He shouldn’t have gone there, not officially or unofficially. But he’s an odd duck. Testy. Let me deal with this.”
“Just thought you ought to know.”
“Now I do,” Hayden said and terminated the call.
Half a minute later, his phone rang. Rita Carrickton.
“I got some sleep,” she said. “Did you?”
“No. Maybe I’ll never sleep again. I’m wired.”
“I’ll come over and unwire you. I’m horny as hell. All this action, this violence—I don’t know, it just turns me on.”
Hayden consulted his wristwatch. He had almost four hours until Barbizon’s men would show up. A tumble with Rita might be the only way he could relax enough to get maybe two hours of sleep before the Sacramento boys arrived. He needed a little rest to hold his own with them. “Come on over.”
“Be there in twenty minutes.”
The sheriff hurried into his bathroom and downed a fifty-milligram Viagra with a swallow of Scotch.
He turned off the alarm and went into the garage. From the trunk of his patrol car, he retrieved the cash and the jacket with diamonds sewn into its lining.
In the kitchen again, he hung the jacket on a stool and dumped the cash onto the center island.
He wasn’t going to tell Rita about being owned by Tio and most likely by Purcell. Being owned was a good thing. He knew it was a good thing. But Rita might need some persuading. She would want to talk it to death. Right now, Hayden didn’t want to talk; he wanted her to bang his brains out. She was already in the mood, and the sight of all that money would be like feeding her a pound of a powerful aphrodisiac.
He almost put the alarm back on while he waited for her, but she would want to know why it was engaged. He didn’t want her to think he was afraid of Lee Shacket.
Instead of twenty minutes, she arrived in fifteen. She parked in the garage and came into the kitchen through the connecting door. She was off duty, not in uniform, and when she saw the money piled on the island, her nipples swelled instantly, enormously, against her white T-shirt.
She said, “What’s this, some case evidence or something?”
“No, baby, this is righteous spoils.”
Amazed, she said, “Yours?”
“Ours. It was hidden in Shacket’s car.”
She had brought a bottle of good red wine. She set it on the island and buried her face in the money, and inhaled deeply. When she looked up, she said, “You are going to get so totally humped.”
“I need to take a quick shower.”
“It better be quick. I’ll be waiting in bed with two glasses of wine, Mr. Big.”
He loved it when she called him Mr. Big. How astonishing that, only a short while ago, he had been lying on the kitchen floor in the fetal position, convinced that his life must be over or that his future must be diminished to the point that he