Blood Ties (31 page)

And then there was this bloody handprint thing.

He didn't mind. His case had been in Ingleside, only two miles away, which in San Francisco translated into about five minutes. Besides, the handprint made it sound like a real mystery.

When he got to the scene, nobody was there except a couple of uniforms, their car and
the
car.

Krodel did his own tour of inspection, looked at the handprint and looked at the bloody lettering on the trunk: “OPEN ME.”

Time to accept the invitation.

The door on the driver's side was unlocked, and the handle yielded to the leverage of a ballpoint pen. The trunk latch was just inside the door. Krodel crouched down, took a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket and put them on. Then he pulled the latch.

The two uniforms were over by their patrol car. They wanted no part of this. After he saw what was in the trunk, neither did Krodel.

A human female, naked and very dead, stared up at him from the well, which was a pool of congealing blood. She had been cut open on her face, on her breasts and across her belly. She was a mess.

Krodel took a handkerchief and pushed the trunk lid closed again.

“Get on the horn and call Evidence,” he told the older of the two uniforms—whom he noticed had crumbs on his black shirt. “Tell them they'll be doing the whole car. And tell them we need the medical examiner.”

The medical examiner and his ambulance were there within thirty minutes. By then two more patrol cars were on the scene to help with the inevitable crowd, some of whom were already arriving. Within forty-five minutes, the Evidence crew had both doors open and were going over the front and rear compartments. The trunk was also open as the ME did his preliminary examination.

“She's been dead between three and four hours,” he said, presumably to Krodel, who was standing a discreet six feet behind and to the right of him. “Come and have a look at this.”

With Krodel as an audience, he took the dead woman by the wrist and lifted her arm.

“You see? Only minimal resistance. Very little rigor. She was almost certainly alive when whoever did this put her in the trunk. Otherwise, it's difficult to account for the quantity of blood.

“Look at that.” The ME pointed to a slash across her throat.

“Is that what killed her?”

“It's not likely. There isn't enough blood. I think it was torture. It's pretty sure she was alive and conscious while all of this was being done to her. We'll know for certain when we see her histamine levels.

“And notice the absence of defensive wounds on her hands. I think he tied her up and then went to work on her. Probably the big wound across her abdomen is what caused death. After that, she would have bled out in a few minutes.”

“So you think he put her in the trunk and
then
cut her open?”

“It seems likely. That way she would die alone and in the dark.”

While the ME's assistants were removing the body—something he really didn't want to watch—Krodel went to have a chat with the Evidence technicians.

“Finding anything?” he asked.

“Oh yeah. Prints all over the place. And all the paperwork for the car. It's all bagged and on the front seat, if you'd like a look.”

The insurance card and registration were in the name of one Harriet Murdock, of 231 Brittan Avenue in San Carlos. Krodel climbed into one of the patrol cars and tapped into the DMV link. He fed the name and address into the search form and came up with a driver's license. The woman in the photograph looked a lot like their corpse.

Krodel phoned Homicide and reported what he had found. San Carlos was miles down the Peninsula, way out of their jurisdiction. The locals would have to deal with the house.

*   *   *

At five-fifteen that morning, three patrol cars pulled up silently in front of 231 Brittan Avenue. The uniformed officers started fanning out around the house. They opened the latched wooden gate to the backyard, and within ten seconds had all the exits to the building secured.

Detective Michael Golding, who was in charge, gave the signal and a uniform with a jackhammer broke in the front door. Detective Golding, his pistol held in both hands and pointing up, was the first in.

There was no one in the living room. The kitchen and dining room were secure. They found a door to the basement and two of the uniforms went down to check it out. The bedrooms were upstairs. Golding and a uniform started doing the rooms. Every closet, every door was checked.

There was nobody home.

“Detective, I think you should have a look at this.”

It was the bathroom off the master bedroom. It contained a bathtub with a showerhead, and the bathtub was smeared with blood. The tiled wall was bloody. Blood had leaked over the side of the tub onto the floor.

This is where he did her, Golding thought to himself.

In a second bathroom, which contained a shower stall, they found traces of blood on the stall floor. The washcloth was still damp.

“And this is where he cleaned up afterward.”

There was also something a little peculiar in the master bedroom. A vanity table was against one wall, and there was a pile of stuff—a hairbrush and comb, a couple of perfume bottles, a couple of lace doilies and a plastic tissue box cover, white with roses painted on it—lying on the floor. It looked as if someone had simply swept them all off the table.

There was one object on the table, precisely in the center. It was an Ohio driver license, issued decades before. The woman in the picture looked very young.

Golding led the uniforms out of the house. They had done their job. Now it was time to bring in the Evidence teams.

*   *   *

It was Ellen's day off. At nine in the morning she and Tregear were enjoying a late breakfast of buttermilk pancakes and sausage. Gwendolyn was perched on Tregear's shoulder because she liked sausage and had figured out that Tregear was the softer touch. Later, they were going to the Steinhart Aquarium to look at the alligators.

“Did your mother teach you how to make this stuff?” he asked. The pancakes seemed to be a big hit.

“Of course not. I went to a special school. All the refined young ladies of Atherton attended the Pancake Academy.”

“Okay.”

Tregear, apparently, wasn't sure if she was joking or not.

Before she could explain, her cell phone rang. It was Sam.

“Walter's back,” he told her. “This morning he left us a body in the trunk of a car. He also left his handprint, in blood, on the windshield. The lab made the match about fifteen minutes ago. I think you should come in.”

“I'll leave here in five minutes.”

“And bring Tregear with you. They found something in the victim's house we need him to look at.”

*   *   *

They took Ellen's car and parked in the department garage. Then they took the elevator up to the third floor. Tregear could feel eyes on him when they walked into the duty room.
Who's the civilian?

Sam was at his desk. He stood up to shake Tregear's hand.

“Let me show you what we've got,” he said. Then all three of them sat down in front of the computer screen.

It was a slide show. First the car, parked halfway up on the shoulder, then the bloody handprint, then the body in the trunk.

“You see that wound on her throat?” Sam said, tapping the screen with his fingernail. “I got a call from the morgue a few minutes ago. They're still in the middle of the autopsy, but they thought we'd be interested to know that at some point he cut up her larynx. Maybe she was getting too noisy.

“The fingerprints of course confirm it—Walter's prints were all over the inside of that car—but otherwise I wouldn't have thought it was him. It's pretty sloppy work for him.”

“He meant it to be sloppy,” Tregear answered, struggling to keep the tension from his voice. “He wanted you to know it was him. He's rubbing your noses in it.”

“Not just our noses, I think.”

Sam hit a key and another image came up on the screen. It was a photograph of what looked like a driver license resting on some sort of table.

“This was found in Harriet Murdock's bedroom,” he said. Using the mouse, he highlighted and enlarged the driver license.

“Is there anything you can tell us about this?”

Tregear studied the photograph for perhaps fifteen seconds, all the while feeling his bowels turn to ice water. Finally he couldn't bear it any longer—he simply had to be alone. He got up and walked over to a window, where he stood, looking down at the traffic.

Of all the lousy things his father had done over the years, this one small cruelty offended him the most. He could have left her out of it.

Then he went back and sat down again.

“The woman in the picture is my mother,” he said, his voice as even as he could manage. “Walter kept the license in a locked suitcase in his closet, along with her clothes, wallet and wedding ring. I was eleven years old the last time I saw this.”

“Why do you think he wanted this found?”

Tregear merely shrugged, as if little disposed to speculate, so Ellen answered for him.

“It's a challenge,” she announced, her voice betraying perhaps a shade more resentment than she intended. “It's a little message from father to son. This is all a game to him, so he wants to be sporting about it and let Steve know he's on to him.”

 

24

Things had reached such a pass that Sam felt he had no choice but to take it all to the lieutenant. Hempel was not pleased.

“You've got a major serial killer running around San Francisco, cutting up women like they were paper dolls, and you've got his son sitting out there in the duty room. When was I supposed to hear about this, Sam?”

“You're hearing about it now.”

“So where does all this put us?”

At first Sam merely shrugged. Then he thought about it for a few seconds, looked Hempel straight in the face and smiled.

“Not too bad,” he said. “Not too bad. Tregear's going to help us catch this jelly bean. We're going to use him for bait.”

“I don't think so.”

“He's not giving us a choice, Dave. He says he'll either work with us or against us. If he has to go it alone, he'll publish his name, address and telephone number in the
Chronicle
and see what happens.”

“He can't do that.”

“How are you going to stop him?”

Hempel thought about it for a minute and then his face brightened.

“We'll call the Navy,” he announced. “They'll put him in the brig. They seem to think they can't keep their ships afloat without this guy. We'll let the Navy stop him.”

So Hempel made the call, and forty-five minutes later Lieutenant Commander Hal Roland was sitting in the same chair so recently occupied by Inspector Sergeant Sam Tyler.

Hempel told him the whole story.

For a long moment Hal Roland said nothing. He merely stared at his sleeve, wondering if the narrow stripe would ever catch up with the other two. His hopes for promotion seemed to be dimming by the second.

“You've got to rein him in,” Hempel said finally.

Roland looked up and tried to smile.

“The Navy doesn't have an impressive record for ‘reining in' Tregear. I don't know what you expect me to do.”

“Get him to see reason. He's a civilian. He doesn't understand the risks he's taking.”

Roland shook his head. He seemed on the verge of laughter.

“I doubt there's very much about this situation Tregear doesn't understand. He understands most things better than most people.”

“He could get himself killed.”

“Well, we can't have that.” He glanced down at his sleeve again. The narrow stripe had a terribly permanent look.

“I think I need to talk to Tregear,” he said.

The two men met in an empty holding room, sitting across from each other at a small table. Roland had taken off his jacket, hoping to give the discussion a less official quality.

He knew he had no leverage. The lieutenant was right. Tregear was a civilian. He had a contract with the Department of Defense, but what could they do if he simply stopped working? They would beg and plead and promise him anything he wanted, so Roland would beg and plead for them.

“This man—your father,” he began, hoping to strike the right note. “We can deal with this for you.”

“How, Hal? Just exactly how are you going to deal with it?”

“We can put you somewhere he can't touch you, and we let the police catch him.”

“He's been at this for thirty years and more, and the police haven't caught him yet.”

“They know more about him now. Thanks to you. They'll catch him.” Roland raised his hands a little way from the desk, as if to fend off any possible objections. “Or somebody will catch him. We'll turn it over to the Justice Department, and they'll make it a priority. Every FBI office in the country will have his prints and description. They'll be on the streets in every town in the USA, and they'll find him.”

Tregear's immediate reaction was laughter—except that “laughter” wasn't quite the right word. It was more a slightly hysterical giggle. It was an unnerving sound, suggestive of the possibility that the man might just be coming unstuck.

“And how many women die in the meantime? After all these years, his score is probably in the hundreds. How many more? Twenty? Thirty?”

“And what happens if he kills you?” Roland leaned forward so that their faces weren't more than a few feet apart. “You know, all this time you've worked for the Navy, you haven't been sitting in front of your computer screen writing video games. You're protecting your country. You're protecting the men and women you served with. Their lives matter too.”

His speech, Roland felt sure, would not be without effect. He was an Annapolis graduate and he was not cynical about patriotism, but he felt intuitively that the instinct for survival, once wrapped up in the flag, would be irresistible.