The Triggerman Dance

The entire crime scene took on a different personality when a newish Ford blazed into the parking lot at high speed and cam to a fishtailing, tire-smoking stop just outside the yellow crime scene ribbon.

Two people jumped from the car, ducked the ribbon and walked directly toward the covered body. They took the long assured strides of the indispensable. A Costa Mesa Police office approached them and they badged him without missing a step o even slowing down. They both wore dark suits and the lightweight, nylon overcoats Southern Californians mistakenly believe will protect them from heavy weather. The woman was tall early thirties, had very dark wavy hair, a clenched expression on her suntanned face, and the calves of a weightlifter. The man roughly her height, was bespectacled, pale and thin, with black hair cropped short. He had a prominent Adam's apple, nose and ears, and he could have been twenty-five or thirty-five. He looker scholarly, except for the lean, pronounced muscles of his jaw and neck. He projected into the space around him the kind of calm with which a mountain lion might observe.

He approached the body, stopped and considered the photographers still milling about the scene.

"If you shoot any film of me, I'll confiscate that film an your cameras," he announced. For a thin pale man, his voice was quite clear and deep. His knot of a larynx rose and fell as if in emphasis. His partner put her hands on her hips and made a slow turning circle, locking eyes, briefly, with each person holding a camera. No one moved.

He went over to the blanketed form, knelt, looked up once at the ominous dusk, then lifted the material. He seemed to study Rebecca's face for a long time. He touched her lips, then her forehead, pressing a soaked blond curl back under the hat. He kissed his fingertips and touched them against her lips again.

After that he froze there, kneeling beside Rebecca for a long time. Then he slowly rose and stood over her, but to many of the observers—and they were trained, professional observers—the man who had kneeled beside Rebecca Harris was not the man who stood up a few minutes later. The new man had a different posture. He was stooped a little, whereas the original was erect. His face was no longer simply pale, but ivory colored and very hard, as if cast from a mold or sculpted. He was most definitely smaller. And certainly, the man who first approached the body did not have the very large black eyes that now challenged each of their faces—eyes so filled with fury and heartache that some of the journalists couldn't even meet them, let alone think of taking a picture.

Susan Baum, possessing the keenest instincts of all the Journal writers, felt in her pocket for the notepad and pen, and approached the bespectacled statue standing over Rebecca.

The young man in the leather coat and fedora had retreated from the throng outside the crime scene tape, and stood alone in the vague middle distance, studying this newly arrived official with the booming voice and the corded neck muscles. He thought: I wonder if that's him.

The pale man took a few steps away from the body, and considered the dozens of people—police, sheriff department, Journal staff, plant security—still meandering on either side of the crime scene ribbon. He held up his badge again, showing it around. His voice was resonant and did not seem to belong to his slender, almost ascetic body.

"My name is Joshua Weinstein, FBI, Orange County Office. This is my partner, Special Agent Sharon Dumars. Anyone . . . anyone not on the other side of that tape in the next ten seconds will be placed under arrest and face federal charges of tampering."

Astonishingly, he actually started counting.

There was a generalized grumble from the crowd, but everyone inside the tape migrated toward it, their movements accelerating noticeably when the count got to eight. Everyone except Susan Baum, who on the count of ten stood directly before Weinstein and gazed straight into his huge dark eyes.

"God, Joshua," she whispered. "She'd mentioned you to me.

"Get behind the tape, Ms. Baum."

"If I remember right, the wedding was planned for June."

"You remember right. Now get behind the tape."

"Can we talk later?"

"We have forever to talk."

"I want to tell you something right now. I won't die before write the name of the man who did this in one of my column: He'll be identified. I swear this, to every god that's ever slept night in Heaven."

"Thank you. Now step back."