Free Diamond in the Buff by Susan Dunlap

the glower that followed darker. “You’ve got the game, Smith, so tell Raksen here what happens when they get the report that Diamond is complaining about us.”
    “‘COPS FINGER CROTCH WHILE MASSEUSE RUNS LOOSE.’”
    Back in my office, I called the dispatcher three times, even though I knew he would have contacted me as soon as he heard from patrol. Leila Sandoval should have ambled back to her Oriental rug and beach chair on the Avenue an hour ago. The longer she was absent, the more uneasy it made me. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get a warrant for her; as it stood now I didn’t even have grounds to charge her. You can’t charge a woman because her tree branch falls, or because she chooses to purchase a beehive.
    I had been flippant with Inspector Doyle, no doubt about that. It was as if I had peeled off the thickened top layer of chocolate pudding and tossed it on the table between us. And now, I was left with just the pudding beneath, the mushy pudding of apprehension.

8
    A S I HEADED ACROSS the parking lot to my car, Raksen was starting up his old brown Dodge. He backed up and sat in the lane for a moment staring at me, then pulled up next to me. His face was still as pasty as it had been in Doyle’s office. A film of sweat covered it and coated his wiry hair. He looked like a terrier who’d just been hauled out of the sink by the scruff of the neck. “Two things, Smith,” he said, finger tapping rapidly on the steering wheel. “First—this is really Pereira’s find, but it’ll be in my report, too—I yanked out a six-inch copper nail.”
    “From the base of the eucalypt?” I asked.
    His finger stopped, arched back stiffly from the wheel. “One of four. I left the other three.”
    “And copper nails kill trees?”
    “So people believe. I’ll get the specifics, of course.”
    “Four nails,” I said, feeling increasingly uneasy. “Someone is taking no chances. Or is even more obsessive than I’d thought. What’s the second thing?”
    Raksen shifted the gearstick into neutral, and began tapping his finger, more tentatively now. “I don’t have test results yet, so this is off the record …” He waited till I nodded. “But Smith, someone has been pulling on your eucalyptus branch. They must have tossed a rope around the branch while the bark was still on it. Could be that the rope is what loosened the bark.”
    “What kind of rope?”
    “No way to say. The bark is gone. Maybe there’s a fiber I missed. I’m going to go over it again. But I doubt it.”
    If Raksen missed it, it didn’t exist. “Thanks,” I said.
    I got in my VW, drove slowly out of the lot, and headed across Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, still thinking about Leila Sandoval. If she was hiding out, at least she wouldn’t be at her house, near enough to Diamond’s to cause any more harm. She wouldn’t know that Kris had canceled the bees. Tonight, and as things now looked, tomorrow, she would be sitting smugly in whatever bolt-hole she’d chosen, expecting the bees to do her work. I stopped at the light on University Avenue. A gray-haired woman on a ten-speed slid in in front of me. A man in a sports jacket, another in a suit, and one in an Indian dhoti crossed the street. It was already rush hour; I could be here for a while. I should have thought of that, have taken another route …
    An obsessive person would have thought ahead. An obsessive wouldn’t have trusted that the bees would arrive. She would have checked, found they’d been canceled. She’d be furious, and she would … do what?
    The light changed. I inched closer to the intersection, wishing now that I had gotten to Kris before he canceled the bees. At least with them, we knew what to expect. Now I had no idea at all.
    And there was nothing I could do but worry. What I needed was an hour swimming laps in the pool. Strong pulls, hard kicks. Real hard kicks. If I gave Mr. Kepple a brisk warning not to waste water (at least in sight of his