17. The Land
The Land
And then Rosalind Marsh solved it, in her kitchen, with a rubber band and a receipt book, which is the single best thing that happens in this book and I had almost nothing to do with it.
She called me on a Tuesday evening.
"Dr. Bennett. I've been doing what you did. With the boxes." Her voice was perfectly level. "I've been going through it properly instead of visiting. And I want to read you something and I want you to tell me if it's stupid."
"It's not stupid."
"You don't know what it is yet."
"Mrs. Marsh, you've been right about this since a Tuesday in 1998. Read me the thing."
I heard paper.
"The rent receipts," she said. "Eleven of them, for the Bath Street apartment. All of them say Tomasetti Family Properties LLC, and they're signed by him. You saw those."
"I did."
"Well, I got the magnifying glass out, because I'm seventy-nine." A dry little pause. "And at the bottom of the printed part, under the company name, there's an address. For the company. Not the apartment — the company's own address, where you'd send a letter."
"Okay."
"It says 1140 Cliff Drive."
I sat down on my own stairs.
"Mrs. Marsh," I said, "say that again."
"Eleven-forty Cliff Drive," said Rosalind Marsh.
"And I know what's at eleven-forty Cliff Drive, Dr. Bennett, because I have driven past it four hundred times on my way to that beach, and so have you.
" Her voice finally did something. "It's the bluff.
It's the lot above Arroyo Burro. It's where my daughter was. "
The Tomasetti family had owned eleven acres above Hendry's Beach from 1961 to 2004.
It took Ray's people two days at the county recorder and it was not hidden and it was not complicated and nobody had ever had a reason to look, because for twenty-eight years there had been no body, and a parcel of land is not interesting until somebody is found on it.
Antonio Tomasetti bought it in 1961. It passed to his sons in 1988.
It sat undeveloped — it is a bluff, it is unstable, the coastal commission would sooner see the sea rise than permit a house on it — and in 2004 the family sold the whole eleven acres to the county for open space, at a very good price, in a transaction that was written up admiringly in the paper and for which Carl Tomasetti received a plaque.
The Douglas Family Preserve trail runs across the top of it. There is a bench.
"He sold it to the county," I said. I was in Ray's car again; we seem to have all our worst conversations in Ray's car. "Ray, he sold the land she was buried in to the county for a park."
"Six years after."
"Why would you *do* that?"
"Because it's the safest thing he could possibly have done," said Ray Dominguez, and his hands were tight on the wheel.
"Think it through. It's a bluff nobody can build on.
It's a liability. And as long as his family owns it, it's *his* — if anything ever turns up there, it turns up on Tomasetti land and the first question anybody asks is Tomasetti.
But sell it to the county for open space, at a discount, get a plaque, get it into the paper as a gift to the people of Santa Barbara —" He shook his head slowly.
"And now it's a park. It's everybody's. Eleven acres that four hundred people a day walk their dogs on, and if somebody ever finds something up there, the answer is *well, it's public land, it's been public for twenty years, anybody could have been up there. *"
"That's not a man panicking," I said. "That's a man planning."
"That's a man who waited six years," said Ray, "and then made the problem belong to everybody."
He got the warrants on the eighteenth of June: the 1998 phone records, the Tomasetti Family Properties files, the corporate banking.
And on the nineteenth, the Friday, a forensic geologist from Cal Poly stood on the slump face at the east end of Hendry's Beach with Dr. Harlan Greaves and a county surveyor and established that the material that had come down in the March storm had originated approximately eleven feet below the 1998 grade surface, in a disturbed lens of backfill that did not match the surrounding stratigraphy.
Which is a sentence that means: somebody dug a hole, and it was not a natural one, and the hillside kept it for twenty-eight years and then, in four days of rain, gave it back.
They were going to arrest him on Monday the twenty-second.
The 5K was Saturday the twentieth.