Blood Ties (24 page)

“‘And in those days men shall seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.' What do you think, Daddy? Was the prophet talking about me?”

Finally, on the fourth evening, he came and was told that his father was in a coma. His heartbeat was erratic, and they didn't expect him to last more than a few more hours.

Walter sat beside his bed, watching and waiting. And at two-seventeen in the morning the apostle breathed his last. Walter waited until he was sure his father's heart had stopped, then he got up and left, without a word to anyone.

Now, whenever he thought of God, he imagined Him with his father's face.

“… because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

 

18

At four in the morning Ellen found herself broad awake. She was in Tregear's bed and he was asleep beside her. The light from the street lamps filtered vaguely in through the bedroom blinds. She could just make out the curve of his back and she was filled with longing.

Yet what had awakened her was not lust but guilt. She felt she had betrayed him.

Either him or the department—she couldn't be true to both. So she had been a good cop. She had eaten dinner with Tregear, made love to him, and never told him that she knew where Walter was working.

It hadn't been a question of knowledge but of faith. Tregear knew more about this murderer than anyone living. He was probably the one human being on earth who would know Walter on sight. He understood his habits and his methods. If he said Walter would know if they sent a cop to his office, he was probably right.

He had been right about the secretary. Before leaving the Marriott, Ellen had looked up Allied Heating and Cooling in the yellow pages and given them a call. She had pretended to be a housewife with a furnace that wouldn't light and had had a brief conversation with the woman who answered the phone. Her voice sounded middle-aged, but there was a kind of brassiness to it that somehow managed to suggest that when her workday was over she would be going home to an empty space.

Maybe that was part of Walter's pattern, to pick a business where he knew he could win over the secretary.
To women he's like catnip.

But she was loyal to procedure. Sam was right. A cop lives and dies by the rules because a cop serves the law.

Still, if they played by the rules Walter might disappear. And, eventually, Tregear would follow him. She wasn't sure she could bear that.

All at once Tregear began to stir. He rolled over and opened his eyes. He was smiling at her.

“Can't you sleep?” he asked. Under the covers, he touched her belly with the tips of his fingers. “Are you all right?”

“I'm all right. Let's get up and take a shower together.”

It was an interesting experience to have a man put his arms behind your knees and just slide you up the tile wall like you weighed nothing. And to be all covered with soap and have that man enter you while he held you helpless was deeply stirring.

The shower lasted about forty-five minutes, and when they came out they were both really clean.

If it wasn't love, it would do. And she sensed it was love—at least for her.

Last night in bed, while her conscience was troubling her about her little secret, she had asked if it bothered him that she was a cop. He thought this was very funny.

“You're the only kind of lady friend I can have,” he had said. “One who carries a nine-millimeter and knows how to use it.”

After their shower together, they toweled each other off and went downstairs naked to have breakfast. Breakfast, it seemed, was the only meal Tregear knew how to make from scratch. For the rest, he ate out or lived on prepared food.

“I should make you dinner sometime,” she said, as she sat at the kitchen table and watched him scramble eggs. “I'm not a bad cook. It's the only one of the feminine arts I've ever mastered.”

“The
only
one? Making love doesn't count?”

He laughed at his own joke, but Ellen was already thinking of something else.

“I've been holding out on you.” She shook her head. She hadn't meant to tell him, but now she couldn't help herself.

“What? You've got a husband and six kids?”

“No. I know where Walter is working.”

He had his back to her as he was facing the stove. There was an almost imperceptible change in the slant of his shoulders, but no other sign that he had heard her. He went right on stirring the eggs.

For perhaps a minute he said nothing.

“Do you hate me for it?” she asked finally, desperate to hear his voice, even if he cursed her.

“No, I don't hate you,” he answered, still keeping his back to her. “I'm not angry or even disappointed. You were doing your job.”

He turned around, holding his egg pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, and smiled at her. Then he began to shovel eggs onto the two plates he had set out on the table.

“I'll tell you if you ask me to. Do you want me to tell you?”

When he was finished serving breakfast, he put the egg pan and spatula in the sink. Then he came to the table, kissed her and sat down.

“I'm not sure,” he said. “If you tell me, and I use it, I'll have destroyed your career.”

“And if you don't, Walter will get away and the body count will keep going up.”

“Yes, it will.” He hadn't touched his eggs yet. He seemed to have forgotten they were there. “I'm wondering if we can't work out a compromise.”

Then he turned his attention to breakfast.

“Eat your eggs,” he commanded, pointing to her plate with his fork. “They'll get cold.”

They both ate in silence and when they were both finished, Tregear picked up the plates and carried them over to his sink.

“What kind of a compromise?” Ellen asked.

“I don't know.”

He brought over their tea. Tregear used two bags of Irish Breakfast in each mug and he thought tea should be allowed to steep until it was the approximate color of molasses. It was dreadful stuff, almost as bad as police station coffee.

“You checked with the apartment managers?” he asked, sitting down. “You found out from them?”

“Yes.”

“But you haven't filed your report yet?”

“No.”

“When would you normally do that?”

“This morning, first thing.”

“Then I'd have found out anyway. This morning, second thing. But I'm glad you at least told me you knew.”

“What will you do?”

“You mean, how will I get inside their system?”

“Yes.”

“I'll send them an e-mail with a little something attached. It's a code of my own devising that none of the commercial antivirus companies know anything about. They'll open the e-mail because it'll look like a service request, and the code will install itself. I'll know in about two minutes if I've scored, when it starts downloading their database files.”

“And they'll never know?”

“They'll never know.”

“And what will you do when
you
know?”

“I'll send you an e-mail with his name and address.”

“That's it? No vigilante stuff?”

Tregear smiled and reached across the table to touch her naked breast with his index finger.

“I swear, by your right nipple, I won't get involved.”

Suddenly both of them were laughing.

*   *   *

“Mercy me, you certainly look chipper this morning.”

It was eight-fifteen and Sam had just come into the duty room with two cups of coffee, one of which he set on Ellen's desk. He sat down on the chair he was currently torturing and shook his head.

“And how was your date with Mr. Tregear last night?”

Ellen hit the “enter” key on her computer, which sent the report on her inquiries yesterday into the department database. Tregear would be reading it in five minutes.

“Sam, you're a dirty old man. By the way, I have the name of the company our very own Walter has been working for. Their office is on Gaven Street. What do you say we go roust them.”

*   *   *

One hundred sixty-four Gaven Street was just a block south of the Embarcadero. It was in a warehouse district, utterly without charm. Allied Heating and Cooling was on the second floor, above a tile store.

The door was locked, but after Sam rapped on the glass a few times a woman came to answer. She was about forty, with short brown hair and too much makeup, and her voice belonged to the woman Ellen had talked to on the phone.

Sam showed his badge, and the temperature in the room dropped about twenty degrees.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“We want to look at your employment records,” Sam told her, in his coldest interrogation voice. “It's in connection with a police inquiry.” He pushed the door closed behind them.

“Well, the boss isn't in, and I can't authorize you to go pawing through our files.”

She was stalling and she was nervous. Standing there, in the middle of that cluttered, ugly little room, she kept rubbing the heel of her left hand against her hip.

“Are you going to make me get a search warrant?” he asked her. “Because, if you do, we'll all have to sit here for a couple of hours until it arrives, and I bore easily. I'll probably start looking around. I won't be able to help myself. And I'll probably end up calling in the fire marshal and he'll probably find a dozen violations of code, which will probably force him to shut you down. Will that fill your boss's soul with joy? What do you think?”

“Go ahead. Do what you want—you will anyway.”

She wasn't happy. She glared at Sam as if she hated him, and she probably did.

“I appreciate your reasonable and civic-minded attitude,” Sam told her, sounding like he was addressing a Girl Scout troop. Then he nodded at Ellen. “Inspector Ridley will now spend a little time on your computer.”

At that precise moment, Ellen's cell phone emitted a few musical notes and the screen lit up. She had a text message.

There are only four employees: the owner, someone else with the same last name, so probably a relative, the secretary, and a Walter Stride, hired five months ago. His address is 212 Quarry Road, Half Moon Bay. His cell phone number is 415-555-0123. I am putting a trace on it now. Can you come back tonight?

Nevertheless, she went through the motions. She spent twenty minutes pretending to find Walter Stride's personnel file. Then she announced, “He's not here. There's nothing about a Juan Carrasco.”

Sam, bless him, never missed a beat.

“Then I can only apologize to you, ma'am, for wasting your time.” He actually made a little bow to the secretary. “Have a good day.”

On the way down the stairs, he put his hand on Ellen's shoulder, as if to arrest her flight.

“Who the hell is Juan Carrasco, you clever girl?”

“A character in a movie. I didn't want her to—”

“I know damn well what you didn't want her to do. You know, it occurred to me in there that Tregear was probably right about her.” They had already reached their car before he asked the really important question. “Did you find Walter?”

“Yes. But here's the part you won't like. He's outside our jurisdiction.”

“Where?”

“Half Moon Bay.”

“Oh shit!”

*   *   *

Mary Plant had worked for Allied Heating and Cooling for six years, ever since her divorce, when she discovered she couldn't live on her alimony checks. It was not a wonderful job. The pay was only slightly better than a waitress's, and Herb, the owner, was unhappily married and liked to grope her. She had pretty much concluded that this was all life would ever hold for her—a job that just allowed her to pay the rent on a walkup studio apartment, purchased at the price of her self-respect. Then Walter had come into the office.

Walter was so sweet, so tender. For a woman whose sex life had been restricted to Herb fondling her tits and her husband, an alcoholic with no imagination who had quickly made their marriage into a dirty joke, Walter was little short of a revelation. They had hit it off at once. Then he started taking her to lunch. Soon he was a regular visitor to her walkup, where he treated her body with a kind of reverence. With him, and for the first time in her life, she felt no shame. Oh, the things they got up to!

And Walter was like her, one of the world's victims.

“I did five years for a robbery. I was nineteen and stupid. When they let me out the only job I could get was in a car wash. Everybody's got a right to a second chance, and I had to have a fresh start. So I jumped parole and created a new identity for myself. Stride was my mother's maiden name. But they never give up. They've hounded me for twenty-five years. And if they ever catch me they'll put me inside until I'm old and gray and good for nothing. I'm telling you this because I trust you.”

“And if they ever come to the office, I'll warn you. Walter, I love you. I'd die if I thought I'd never feel your hands on me again. If you have to run, we'll run together.”

Maybe this thing today was nothing. Probably it was nothing. The cops were looking for someone else. Mary tried hard to convince herself they were telling the truth, because if Walter had to disappear he might go all noble and it was possible she would never see him again. She wouldn't know how to bear that.

It was the slack season. Summer was coming, but in San Francisco nobody worried very much about air-conditioning. Mary had lots of time to think.

It wasn't nothing. The cops had lied. Well, maybe they had lied. She couldn't take the chance. She couldn't live with herself if she let Walter die in prison.

She ate lunch at her desk, and over her tuna sandwich she decided she had better phone.

*   *   *

“You have no idea what a protocol mess this is,” Sam had told her as they drove back to the department. “Half Moon Bay is just a wide spot in the road, but they'll feel insulted if the request is made by anybody below the rank of captain. And their idea of police work is traffic and the drunks on Saturday night.