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Street to get on the freeway.
    But I passed the 110 East to San Gabriel and found myself getting on the Santa Monica freeway and driving west—toward the water, to the edge of the continent, where I drove down the California Incline to Pacific Coast Highway, which I took north until I reached Will Rogers State Beach and I parked the car and got out and stood in the sand in front of my car and stared at Sara’s ghost…gripped by a memory, lost in a memory that I didn’t even know I had until this moment.
    The cool, steady ocean breeze has dried the sweat from my shirt and I am breathing again. But my face is wet. I realize I have been crying.
    What the hell happened back there? I fled Parker Center like a felon. My heart pounding, I simply fled. Something in me had been awoken; some deep, forbidden button was pressed. I shut down and got out and drove—no way I could face Sara’s things now. So I drove west, toward…what?
    The airport. That must be it. In the back of my mind there must have been the thought that I could take an earlier flight. Get the hell out of L.A. Yes. But the California Incline only goes one way, and I wound up driving north along Pacific Coast Highway until I came to Will Rogers Beach and the sudden memory of Sara called to me like a siren. A memory from long before the Unspeakable…
    “It’s ridiculous,” Sara would say. “We live in L.A. and we never go to the beach.” I had finally relented and we made a day of it…and half a night…
    I shake it off. Get in the car. Maybe there will be an earlier flight. I drive to the exit from the parking lot. I look right, then I look left, and then I see the traffic light, far ahead north—
    Temescal Canyon .
    I stop the car in the middle of my right turn onto Pacific Coast Highway. Then, suddenly, I turn the car left, toward Temescal.
    I have never liked being afraid and I have learned that anger can trump fear and now I am angry.

    CHAPTER FIVE

    The Escort’s headlights illuminate the dusty row of eucalyptus trees that line the parking lot in Temescal Canyon Park. I stop the car near the end of the lot, where the darkness starts, and I get out.
    It’s warmer here than at the beach. The pavement and dirt and brush hang onto the heat longer than the wet sand. The air is still and saturated with the dry fragrance of eucalyptus and sun-baked sage. I walk toward the darkness at the edge of the parking lot. I don’t know where I’m going and yet, as I approach the edge of the paved lot I somehow know there will be the entrance to a trail…and there it is.
    How did I know?
    I take the trail, my focus hard ahead of me. I have no idea where I am going, but the landmarks along the way are sudden reminders of… what?
    The cinderblock meeting-house. The tombstone-sized granite slab with the park’s donor’s names on a bronze plaque…
    I have never been here but as I climb up the trail, dusty sage bushes brushing my legs, I recognize little things—the boulder with graffiti, the railroad ties embedded as steps where the trail becomes treacherously steep.
    And then I come to it: the small plateau—the clearing where Killer buried Grace Beverly in the book.
    But I invented this small plateau.
    Sara and I drove past this park, when we went to the beach that day. We were driving back, it was late at night, and I noticed the sign that said Temescal Canyon. I liked the name—liked the music of it, and I told her and she liked it too and I reached for it later when I was writing the first book. But I’ve never set foot here. I am certain of it. As certain as I am of anything…
    I walk ahead, refusing the fear growing inside me. I walk toward the site where I buried poor young Grace Beverly in my imagination years ago.
    As I come closer I am briefly calmed. There is no crime scene tape, nothing to show that the police have ever been here. Nothing to see here, folks…
    And then I see it.
    Twenty feet ahead of me, illuminated only by the thumbnail moon