Fatalis

Chapter Six

Forty-seven-year-old Malcolm Gearhart hung up the phone. After quickly finishing his second cup of coffee, the former Marine took his portable radio from the desk drawer. He slipped the radio in its belt loop, grabbed his freshly blocked cap from the hook behind the door, and left his office in the back of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's office station in Goleta.

Gearhart made two stops on his way through the quiet administration center. The first was at the office of Chief Deputy Mike Valentine. Gearhart briefed the veteran law officer about the call he'd just received from the Caltrans District 7 Division Chief, Maintenance, regarding a 3611-10-two missing engineers. The only clue a repair crew had found was a portable radio lying in the road. The sheriff asked Valentine for four deputies from his LEO- Law Enforcement Operations, Investigations Division. He wanted two of them to meet him at Painted Cave and the other two to have files on the missing workers E-mailed from Caltrans. He wanted a complete breakdown: telephone records, bank transactions, credit card charges, and anything else that might point to a debt, extortion, or a potentially hostile contact-a mistress, a bookie, a bar or restaurant or gas station where angry words might have been swapped.

Valentine wrote down each of the requests because that was how Gearhart liked things done. Thorough, accurate, and carefully documented. No confusion, no repetition.

Next, Sheriff Gearhart stopped at the dispatcher's cubicle in the communications center, which was also where the 911 calls were received. It was Deputy Felice Washington who had taken the call from Caltrans. Gearhart informed the young woman that he wanted an immediate update of any news from the site or from Caltrans and that Chief Deputy Valentine should be copied on any of the updates. He wanted the data sent digitally, to the patrol car's mobile data computer, with an audio backup to the car radio to make sure the information had been received. The dispatcher entered the instructions on her keyboard and sent them to the other stations. If she were on a call or away from her post, one of the other communications officers would know exactly what to do.

The procedure having been established and executed, Gearhart continued toward the door.

Without breaking his stride, the tall, broad African-American set his cap squarely on his head and made sure that his black tie was tightly knotted before stepping outside. The sheriff's black-and-white was parked directly in front of the recently remodeled two-story building. Ignoring the cold drizzle, he walked to the car and eased in.

Ordinarily, Gearhart would not be investigating a routine 3611 -10-a Santa Barbara County noncriminal missing-persons report. Nor would he have involved Chief Deputy Valentine or the LEO. More often than not, missing persons in Santa Barbara County were boaters who'd been knocked around in a storm, a child who'd wandered away from the beach, or a hang glider who'd become disoriented in a cloud and smacked into a tree. But the Caltrans DCM said that there was blood at the site-a great deal of it. When a 3611-10 became a possible 187-which referred to the homicide section of the California Penal Code-Gearhart became involved.

The sheriff started the engine, turned on the windshield wipers, and adjusted the rearview mirror. He caught sight of his dark eyes. They said, God help anyone who fucked with his county.

They were right.

There was violent crime in Santa Barbara County. The sheriff's office had a most-wanted list of murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molesters, bank robbers, and even a terrorist who had posed as one of Santa Barbara 's over one hundred homeless people in order to hide explosives at the shelter in the center of town. However, most of those crimes predated Gearhart's term. Since being elected sheriff of the SBSO two years before, the popular officer had turned crime fighting into a team sport He'd expanded the Reserve Deputy Program, enlarged the Aero Squadron to patrol the mountains and coast, set higher fund-raising goals for the civilian Sheriff's Council, and beefed up the youth-oriented sheriff's Explorer Post-which an editorial in the radical Coastal Freeway dubbed the "Gearhart Youth," a nasty allusion to the Hitler Youth. That had earned the paper and its editor a permanent place on Gearhart's personal shit list. Not that he'd ever had any love for the press. They'd helped cost him and his fellow soldiers a victory in Vietnam with their endless coverage of protests, sit-ins, and fashionable anti establishment bullshit. Now the press was simply hooked on the public's right to know. Which was fine, except that reporters usually took that to mean they had the right to pry, insinuate, slant, and panic.

Since Gearhart's election, the SBSO had enjoyed a sense of purpose and community. The number of names on and below the most-wanted top twelve had dwindled. Directly across the street, the county jail was half as full as it had been when Gearhart took office. The minimum security Honor Farm was nearly empty. Murders were primarily crimes of passion and the county still had them. But people who wanted to rob, rape, kidnap, and molest tended to stay clear of Gearhart's beloved hills and shoreline.

The sheriff activated his red-and-blue flashing lights though he didn't turn on the siren. There was no need to disturb the community while it was still so early. Swinging from the parking lot onto Calle Real, he followed it east for nearly two miles before turning left onto Route 154, the only western approach to Painted Cave Road. He would stay on the twisting road straight into the mountains, through Los Padres National Forest. Just over five miles up, a winding right turn would put him near the sinkhole.

As he drove through the light morning traffic, Gearhart was proud of the fact that the people of the county and its three hundred Sworn Deputy Sheriffs hadn't been the only ones to benefit during the past two years. Perhaps the greatest winner had been someone who had survived almost daily belt-whippings as a kid, two tours of duty in a losing war, and eighteen years of fighting not only Los Angeles street gangs but judges and politicians who believed that the answer to crime wasn't hard time but compassion and gentle rehabilitation. Until one of those pundits had his car jacked or his wife mugged, they weren't going to believe that they were wrong. But they were.

After a lifetime of losing, Malcolm Gearhart had no intention of ever losing again.