Phillip Margolin
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Phillip Margolin
Lost Lake
PROLOGUE
LOST LAKE, CALIFORNIA-1985
Deputy Sheriff Aaron Harney pulled his cruiser onto a grassy strip at the side of the road and rolled down his window. The clean mountain air felt good after the day’s oppressive heat. He lit up and watched the smoke from his cigarette drift toward the diamond-bright stars that glittered above Lost Lake. Life didn’t get much better than this.
Harney was a local boy who’d seen a little of the world during a hitch in the army and had decided that Lost Lake was the only place on earth that he wanted to live. There was fishing, there was hunting, and there was Sally Ann Ryder, his high school sweetheart. What more could you want out of life than a day outdoors and an evening with a cold beer and the woman of your dreams?
Harney’s choice of career had been a no-brainer. He had been an MP in the military. The sheriff had been glad to sign him up. Harney had no political ambitions, and he did what he was told without complaint. Take tonight, for instance. There had been some vandalism in the expensive summer homes that were scattered along the shoreline of the lake, and Sheriff Basehart had assigned Harney to patrol them. Everyone was pretty certain that the vandalism was the work of townies, resentful of the fat cats who summered at the lake and then deserted to San Francisco at the first sign of bad weather.
Harney even thought he knew which kids had broken the picture windows in the Fremont and McHenry homes. He doubted that the little bastards would be back at it tonight, but the sheriff wasn’t taking chances with his biggest contributors, and Harney was perfectly content to cruise the lake on this beautiful summer evening.From where he was sitting, the deputy could see the flat black outline of Congressman Eric Glass’s modern log cabin on the far shore. Last year, Harney had been part of the security detail for the congressman’s fund-raiser cookout. That was some house. In the back the lawn sloped down to the dock where the congressman moored his speedboat. You couldn’t see the boat or the dock in the dark, but Harney remembered them and the narrow path that led through the woods to a tennis court. Imagine having your own tennis court. Harney wondered what the house had cost. A hell of a lot more than he could afford on a policeman’s salary, that was for sure.