Blood Bond (20 page)

As he scrubbed away the traces of the day he sensed the people he cared about receding from his mind as other faces, faces with secrets and accusations and long-held furies, took their place.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“WE'RE SHIPS PASSING IN
the night,” Bertrise said the next morning. The connection wasn't very good—as Joe drove through walnut and pear orchards along I-205, it popped and ebbed with static.

“Calling a Dodge Charger a ship is really taking license,” Joe said. “And it's nine in the morning.”

“You want to know what I have to tell you or not?”

Joe smiled; he liked the way Bertrise's accent came through when he teased her. “I don't know, you have anything worth listening to?”

“Judge for yourself. You want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Depends on what you think good news is. If you're telling me that Montair spent a peaceful night, without so much as a teenager out past curfew, don't bother.”

“Ah. Well, the bad news is that I couldn't find anything out at the Farmington post office.”

“Where the panties were mailed.” Farmington was a tiny town at a crossroads in the middle of San Joaquin County, just half an hour southeast of Lodi. Joe was traveling the same route Bertrise had yesterday, from the artificially green lawns along the 680 corridor through the Altamont Pass into the dry, golden flatlands of the Central Valley.

“Yes. The post office is barely bigger than a trailer, but they've got one of those machines where you put your package on a scale and it prints out the label for you. Our guy must have used that, because neither of the clerks recognized the pictures.”

“Clerks, plural?”

“Yes, both of them. I got lucky—shift change.”

“Whose pictures did you show them?”

“Everyone, Joe.” A note of reproach. Bertrise could be touchy when she thought her competence was being questioned. “Engler, McKay, Mentis, Conrad Bartelak. Anyway. Now the good stuff. Odell and I checked out Aidan McKay. You know he was law review?”

“No. That's a big deal, right?”

“Yes. Only the top students are asked. His old professors still remember him, the ones who were still around. They said he was brilliant. He could have clerked anywhere, and he did his summer at Sheppard Piper and worked on some pretty high-profile cases. Looked like he might have been headed for the prosecutor's office. One guy, a Professor Minty who's the dean of the law school now, said he thought McKay had a political career in mind. Prosecutor to U.S. attorney to a seat in the House or Senate, that sort of thing.”

“Well, he wouldn't be the first to consider it,” Joe said, but he was thinking about Gail, about her penchant for ambitious men.

“That's why everyone I spoke to was surprised to hear he's doing personal injury law now.”

“Doesn't have the same cachet, huh?”

“It's not just that. There's the money aspect. I tracked down a man who Minty said was McKay's best friend. George Dandelet.”

“Of Dandelet Harper?” Joe asked, naming San Francisco's top trial firm.

“Dandelet's son, but yes, he's a partner at the firm now.”

Joe whistled. “There's some firepower.”

“Yes, but George Junior says that McKay was always the more ambitious between the two of them. Said that McKay was always focused on money, maybe because he had a humble background—blue-collar family outside of Boston—and never felt like he quite measured up. He said Gail was like the cherry on top. Marrying into a wealthy family, a beautiful wife, a top job, that McKay finally seemed like he had it all.”

“And so what happened?”

Bertrise laughed shortly. There was no mirth in her voice. “Gail dumped him. George said he got a call from McKay the July following graduation. McKay had asked Gail to marry him some time during the last few weeks of school, and I guess she said yes, and then McKay calls George all frantic and threatens to kill himself. George drives out to Atherton, McKay had some apartment there, figured they'd live near her parents until they could buy a place, I guess, and McKay had trashed everything in the place. Knocked over tables, broke mirrors and pictures, like that. And you want to hear the best part?”

“Can't wait,” Joe said.

“Gail was engaged to Bryce by that fall. Married him at Christmas.”

“Wow, that had to hurt.”

“George went to the wedding. Said McKay was invited but didn't show. After that he said he sort of lost track of McKay to some extent. Kind of gave me the impression he didn't try too hard to stay in touch.”

“Maybe seeing another side of his best friend . . . you know, a person who destroys his own home in a rage, you figure he's got to be a little unbalanced.”

“Well, they talked now and then. I ask him about McKay's marriages—you know he has two ex-wives, right?”

“I do now.”

“Dandelet wasn't invited to either of the weddings. No Christmas cards, no birth announcements—the second wife had a couple of kids with him. It was like McKay completely severed ties with Dandelet, even though he was just over in Walnut Creek. Thirty miles away.”

“Close enough to Marva and the Englers to see them socially.” Marva had said she they all got together from time to time. She probably got referrals from McKay for her divorce and financial dealings. “Although it seems strange they stayed so close if the breakup with Gail was so rough.”

“Well, that's the last weird thing,” Bertrise said. “George stayed with McKay for a weekend after the breakup, helped him clean up the place. Said at first he practically had to force McKay to eat, locked up the knives, like that. But he said McKay recovered so quickly it was almost spooky. Said that by the second day he was cracking jokes and helping put the place back together. George said at first he thought it was therapeutic, you know, sweeping away the old life, in with the new, but that when he was getting ready to head back to the city McKay made him promise not to tell anyone what he'd done. Said something like there were plenty of women in the world, why let this one cause him any more grief.”

Joe was silent. He was driving by a newly planted orchard now; tiny stumps were tied to fresh-milled lumber stakes in orderly rows. To Joe they all looked dead; he was amazed any of them had the fortitude to grow into trees. Light, water, fertilizer—another process he understood only academically.

“All right,” he finally said. “I'm going to see Deanne Mentis's parents after I talk to the neighbor, but I'll be back after that. I asked Marva to come in tonight.” The words tasted bitter to him, as they had when he first confided to Bertrise that he'd found an inconsistency in the interviews from the night Bergman was killed.

“Joe . . .” Bertrise hesitated; Joe knew how reluctant she was to invade anyone else's personal life. But he'd caught her watching him with Marva, and he knew she probably already had him figured out.

He beat her to it: “I just can't figure her for it,” he admitted. “But stranger things have happened.”

CARL AND
Dorothy Mentis had obviously been fighting when Joe arrived. Dorothy pushed at her short, dark-dyed hair angrily, revealing smudges of makeup mussed by crying; her eyes were red and swollen. Carl shook Joe's hand with more force than necessary and stalked past his wife into the house, muttering at Joe to follow him.

The house was a scrubbed tri-level that hadn't been updated in a couple of decades. Rows of pastel pillows sat ramrod straight on couches and love seats in the living room, where Carl motioned to Joe to make himself comfortable.

“That's a bit of a drive from the Bay Area,” Carl said stiffly. “You want something to eat?”

“No thanks,” Joe said. He watched Dorothy enter the room like an afterthought, sitting in the narrowest, least comfortable-looking chair.

“You saw our daughter,” Carl said. “How'd she seem to you?”

Joe glanced from one parent to the other, tried to figure out where Carl was going. He seemed genuinely curious, but there was a hint of challenge in his voice, too. “Deanne seems like a very attentive mother,” he hedged.

Carl nodded firmly.
Yeah, just what he thought
. Dorothy, on the other hand, gave the briefest shudder.

“Look,” Joe said, figuring that straightforward honesty was the only chance he had to navigate between the warring spouses. “I'm here because I've found out that Deanne has a record of violence, not only with her ex-husband, but also with a woman she had never met before.”

“Keith's mistress,” Carl said indignantly. “You know about that?”

“The fact is that she threatened this woman with assault. To all appearances she intended to go through with it, too, since she—”

“Look, Detective, that woman
seduced
Deanne's
husband,
” Carl broke in, leaning forward in his chair, hands on his knees. “Around here that's considered a serious thing.”

“Going back to the other assaults—”

“Our daughter has a problem,” Dorothy Mentis broke in, surprising Joe. Her voice was low but intense, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. “A problem with depression. And it makes her do things she—that she wouldn't ordinarily do. That aren't in her true nature.”

“Dorothy,” Carl said in a low, warning voice.

“Carl, he's going to find out anyway. Detective, when Deanne came home from college, she practically shut down for months. She wouldn't eat, wouldn't shower, she just lay in her bed all day. I tried everything. I cooked for her. I bought her—” Dorothy stopped for a moment to compose herself. “I bought her things, little things to cheer her up, magazines and makeup and whatnot—anyway, none of it worked. We finally took her in to see a doctor.”

“A goddamn shrink,” Carl said angrily. “Cost ninety bucks an hour to tell her it wasn't her fault that girl died. Well, I been telling her the same thing for free.”

“We both did,” Dorothy said. “We knew what happened. Even if Deanne hadn't told us, we found out. The other girls talked.”

“Are you saying that Deanne's friends told you that she was innocent of forcing Jess to drink?”

“Yes,” Dorothy said softly. Carl nodded vigorously.

“But Deanne still blamed herself?”

Dorothy's gaze lost focus. “She was always that way, ever since she was little. Turned everything inside. The kind of girl who was so responsible, we used to joke that she could run the household without us. But whenever something went wrong—oh, if she couldn't figure out her math, or if she broke a glass, she would get so upset. So very upset.”

“That's what that McKay boy took advantage of,” Carl interjected. “He knew she wouldn't fight it. That she'd just lay down and take it.”

“You see your daughter as a victim,” Joe clarified. “Did she ever make any move to contact Gail or McKay? The people she thought were responsible for getting her expelled? For causing Jess's death?”

Carl stared at him with open calculation. “And Gail Groesbeck's sister. Don't forget her, she was there just like the other two, leading the cops by the nose.”

Joe took a breath before responding. “But Deanne never reached out to them in any way?”

“She was
suffering,
” Dorothy implored. “The depression—she lost twenty pounds in two months. That isn't normal.”

Joe turned to Dorothy, gentled his expression. “That had to be hard,” he said. “Did you talk to her about her feelings about the accident?”

“I tried. I mean, I talked to her all the time, but sometimes she wouldn't even answer. I checked the mail every day to make sure there wasn't anything in it that would upset her. She couldn't stand to see anything from the university. It was the reminder, you see, that she couldn't go back, that got her the worst.”

“How long did this go on?”

Dorothy sighed. “Well, she came home at the beginning of October. The next spring after it happened, I finally got her talked into enrolling for the summer session at the junior college. That helped. Once she had something to get out of bed for, a routine, even if it was just a few classes to start—it was like she got her energy back. That fall she took a full load.” She frowned. “Of course, then she met Keith.”

“He was a student, too?”

“Yes. Had a part-time job signing other students up for credit cards. Very smooth,” Carl said.

Dorothy nodded. The disagreement between them seemed almost forgotten. Shared antipathy could do that. “Sometimes I think . . . well, when she met Keith, it was like she just grabbed on to him and held on, you know, to make her forget.”

“He made her forget, all right,” Carl said. “Couldn't keep it in his pants six months after they were married. Couldn't keep a job, either. Oh, she picked a winner.”

Joe cleared his throat, reached in the folder for the copies of the complaints, and fanned them out on his lap.

“I trust you know about these,” he said. “Legally, your daughter was an adult, so there was no need—”

“She told me,” Dorothy said quickly. “She tells me everything.”

“Did she tell you she fractured her husband's collarbone?” Joe asked, pointing to his own for emphasis.

Dorothy broke her gaze from his and stared at the floor. Carl expelled his breath angrily. After a moment Dorothy looked up at Joe with a troubled expression on her face.

“You want me to agree with you that my daughter is violent,” she said. “You think she might have killed Gail Engler. I'm telling you, my daughter is not a killer. She's a sad, troubled girl.”

“She's expressive,” Carl added.

“We understand that she left town last week,” Joe said, ignoring their comments. “Did you know about that?”

Dorothy glanced at her husband, her certainty wavering. “She didn't tell me in advance,” Dorothy said. “Only when she got back.”

“Do you know where she was?”

“Napa, right? Didn't she drive to Napa?”