Chapter One

      When I was ten years old my godmother announced through clouds of Marlboro smoke that I was definitely not an old soul. It was clear, she explained, that I carried no baggage from previous incarnations and therefore should be encouraged to explore life without the usual annoying constraints. After all, I was starting at zero and had a lot to learn.

      But for those long-ago remarks I might not have been here in the middle of the California desert when the body was found. I might have restrained my personal anarchy and conformed. I might have been a regular person, probably an insurance agent in the Midwest. State Farm. It’s unlikely that I would have been anywhere near Wren’s Gulch, California, less than three weeks ago when something large wrapped in a heavy-duty lawn and leaf bag began to thaw in a public freezer only ten minutes from my pool.

      Not that I knew what was there and thawing, of course. But I think of that package now, the frozen blood melting, a pale hand moving sluggishly in the dark. Imperceptible movements. Lifeless but significant, nonetheless.

      Sometimes I think of these small motions as a last warning, a danger signal I would have ignored in any event. At other times I just wonder what it felt like, trussing an adult human body tightly in the fetal position with lengths of clothesline. Then tucking it into a plastic bag and rolling it into a public frozen food locker.

      It’s been twenty-five years since my godmother, Carter Upchurch, found temporary enlightenment with a New Age group and cheerfully defined the nature of my soul. But I haven’t forgotten. When Carter arrived at my childhood home that day for one of her visits with my mother, I had just created and then arranged for the dramatic kidnapping of an imaginary set of parents whose sole function was to supplant the jolly tedium of the real set, Elizabeth and Jake. I was between the fictional scenarios with which I entertained myself. And I was thrilled to hear Carter’s summation of me as a daring seeker who would never be bored. A New Age baby soul. Perhaps a bit of a flake.

      The concept stuck. Without it I clearly would have been somewhere other than here when Beatrice “Muffin” Crandall, a sixty-one-year-old widow, confessed on the day the body was discovered to bashing a stranger in the head with a paperweight five years in the past. Then, she told police, she stored the stranger in a public freezer for half a decade. I read the San Diego newspaper account of her crime with interest but failed to imagine that I might have a role in its consequences. This perfectly ordinary oversight pales in comparison to the succession of dangerously erroneous assumptions I would soon make.

      The body was found after a minor earthquake rumbled beneath the desert floor near San Diego. The quake disarmed the automatic timer on the generator at a public food locker called Roadrunner Ice and Food Storage outside the little desert town of Borrego Springs, where I live. Or at least where I reside. Roadrunner’s proprietor, a retired high school chemistry teacher with a lust for blackjack, was in Las Vegas when the temblor occurred. The temperature in Borrego Springs that day hovered around a hundred and fifteen. Nowhere near a record for the last week of August. Nothing unusual. Except at the locker.

      I’m convinced that Brontë and I were swimming in the motel pool when the timer failed and everything in the Roadrunner began to thaw. I like to troll images of things past for those moments in which cosmic inevitability becomes for the first time completely obvious. I’m a social psychologist, so this hobby isn’t as weird as it sounds, although I am. I choose to believe that Brontë and I were swimming on that day less than two weeks ago when a man thawed inside a lawn and leaf bag and slumped against the locker door. We were undoubtedly still by the pool when the backcountry sheriff’s department arrived in Borrego Springs to assign the body its fictitious name, “Jose Doe.” The Spanish-American takeoff on “John Doe” never fails to make me think of square dancing.

      I choose to remember that Brontë looked rather dashing then in the teal green life jacket that enables her to stay in the pool long after her lean Doberman legs have tired of dog-paddling. Human memory is quite selective, and I tend to select images in which things look dashing.

      Certainly we were playing catch in the pool that day with a sodden orange tennis ball that might have been a small sun bursting through blue chlorine spray. Eventually I’ll assign a title and music to this picture, a soundtrack. Sun/Woman/Dog. Mozart, probably. But for now there is only silence echoing brilliant light on water. That was the moment in which a process began that would force me to remember a woman named Misha Deland, even though I’d just spent two years successfully forgetting her.

      Social psychology is the academic discipline in which I earned the dubious right to call myself “Doctor,” but my business card says merely “B. McCarron, Consulting.” The “B” stands for Blue, the only first name I’ve used since leaving Waterloo, Illinois, for college at eighteen. Names like “Blue” do not inspire confidence in businesspeople, however. Hence the more acceptable “B.”

      My increasingly adequate income is derived from advising retailers, mostly male, about the social psychology of women. The retailers are not aware that their wives and daughters could tell them exactly the same things that I tell them, without my exorbitant fees. They are also not aware that even shopping may be traced to its roots in primate behavior. To a man they have not read my book, an academic press release of my doctoral dissertation, which was roundly trashed as retro-Darwinian by postmodernists at the time of its publication. Postmodernists really hate the fact that males and females are innately different, and I agree that the concept is scarcely groundbreaking, merely supportable. Nevertheless, my book remains the answer to gangs, rape, drugs, teen pregnancy, and political imperialism, if only the right people would read it. Which is not to say that no one reads it. At least one man did.

      My book, Ape, is responsible for my involvement in the Muffin Crandall case. Somebody read it. Then he showed up beside my pool on the first day in September, a Wednesday, two days after the body was found, displaying straight white teeth and the kind of hands that remind people of statues they saw when they were children. Big, out-of-proportion hands with no cuticles at the base of nails like shovels. I was, as usual, nude in the pool. And Brontë lost no time snarling her way up the net ladder I’d secured for her in a corner of the deep end.

      Significantly, Brontë came to Misha and me four years ago after her owner, very drunk at his thirteenth birthday party, dressed the dog in his older sister’s underwear and sprayed beer foam on her. Finally, she nipped him. That same night the boy’s father, who had provided the lads with a case of brew and three of his milder porn videos as a birthday treat, drove the Doberman to a twenty-four-hour emergency animal clinic in San Diego. He explained that the dog had savagely attacked a child engaged in what he regarded as normal boyish hijinks. The father paid the euthanasia fee in cash.

      But a clinic night attendant, an acquaintance of Misha’s from one of the multitude of feminist groups invited to meet in our apartment, phoned at two in the morning begging that we drive into the city and rescue the Doberman before a lull in emergency room traffic permitted the on-duty vet enough time to load and discharge a syringe. That’s how Brontë came to live with us, later with me. Not unreasonably, the scent of testosterone enrages her.

      “Brontë, stay!” I bellowed as the man executed an impressive scramble to the top of the eight-foot chain link fence I installed around the pool to prevent its use as a watering hole by the larger desert fauna. The smaller fauna I net from the filter baffle each morning, waterlogged or dead. Limp mice, lizards, the occasional snake. These serve as a constant reminder that I don’t really belong here anymore than the pool does, but I love the solitude and the truth is, where else would I go? A tribute to careful training, Brontë froze at my command, forelegs flat on the pool decking, hindlegs paddling against the net ladder. But I could feel