Blood Ties (6 page)

“Our Boy is turning into an obsession, Ellie. Get a life. Go out and find yourself a new boyfriend or something. You've got to stop this shit.”

“Have you ever seen this guy?” Ellen answered, ignoring the advice.

“No, never.”

“And how many murders have we worked since then? How long has it been? Six weeks? And you've never seen this particular specimen behind the barricades?”

“You need a vacation, Ellie. Come home to Daly City with me tonight and let Millie feed you some of her lasagna. Afterwards we'll have a little three-handed canasta and play with the dogs.”

“Let's find out who he is, Sam.”

It was not very difficult. Murderers loved to admire their own handiwork so, as a matter of routine at every homicide that attracted a crowd, one of the uniformed officers would be assigned to walk around and write down the license plate numbers of all the cars in the immediate area. If a suspect turned up, his car plates were checked against the lists, and if the numbers matched, it at least established his presence at the scene. Also it provided the sort of corroborating evidence that made an interrogator's life so much easier:
What were you doing at Van Ness and Stockton at three o'clock in the afternoon on the
twenty-sixth? You think we don't know you had your car parked around the corner from where David Thomas got his head blown off?
More than one man had been put on death row that way.

And so, to cut down on computer time, they compared the plate numbers from the Sally Wilkes scene with those from the North Beach killing. They found three matches. They would start with those. They ran the numbers over the hookup with the DMV, checking the photographs on the driver's licenses. Two of them Sam recognized at once as well established members of the Fan Club. The third was the man in the tan Windbreaker.

“Stephen Tregear, six twenty-one North Point Street.”

“So the guy isn't broke.” Sam lit his tenth cigarette of the morning and exhaled a cloud of smoke that seemed to stand as a comment on life's many injustices. “Apartments that close to the Wharf go for a nice nickel. I imagine you want to run a check on him.”

“It wouldn't hurt.”

But a search of the department database came up empty. Stephen Tregear, it seemed, had never been arrested or questioned by the police, had never been mentioned in any filed report, had never even received a parking ticket. He seemed to be a model citizen.

Which should have ended it—it ended it for Sam.

“So file his name,” he said, “and we'll see if he turns up again sometime.”

“Let's dig around a little.”

“Why?” Sam held up his hands, as if to prove he had washed them. “You have nothing on this guy except you don't like the way he looked at the camera. For the rest, he's Mr. Clean.”

“He's too clean.”

“Just so you know, Ellie, there actually are people out there who go through their whole lives without so much as incurring a library fine. He isn't any guiltier because we don't have a folder on him.”

“I think we should run him, give him the full treatment. We'll find something.”

“Ellie—sweetheart—give it a rest. What have you got in mind? The Bureau? His service records? A search like that costs money, and what are we going to tell the lieutenant when he asks us why?”

“He won't ask if we come up with something.”

“And if we don't? Forget it. The answer is no.”

Sam was right. He was usually right. His was the received wisdom of the department and Ellen went back to her paperwork without even a grumble of rebellion.

By eleven o'clock a preliminary report on the glass found in Sally Wilkes' kitchen had made it upstairs to Sam's desk. He handed it to Ellen almost as if disappointed.

“I don't suppose we could have asked for more,” he said. “They came up with good saliva residue, and Our Boy is definitely a secreter, so the next step is to see if the DNA in the saliva is a match with the semen.”

“And no prints.”

Sam raised one shoulder and smiled, as if to say,
What did you think?
“He's arrogant, but he isn't stupid.”

“You think he's still playing with us.”

“Oh sure. He'd love for us to spend a couple of hundred hours of very expensive lab time trying to find a cross match. He knows we won't find it, and he doesn't expect we'll catch him.”

“None of them ever expect that.”

“And some of them are right.”

Two or three times a year the department had to requisition a new swivel chair for Sam. He was a big man—he had played football in high school—and he was hard on the furniture. He didn't so much sit down as throw himself into a chair, and he would lean back in it until, eventually, the bearings would wear out or a leg would come loose or some other catastrophe would befall it and it would have to be taken out with the trash. The lieutenant received regular complaints from Accounting, but he never mentioned them to Sam because he, like everyone else, had come to realize that such casualties were necessary. Chairs were the innocent victims that got caught in the cross fire of Sam's career-long war against the bad guys.

At that moment he had his feet up on the desk, and the chair was cradled under him at precisely the angle to put maximum stress on the back legs. It was a posture that suggested the darkest pessimism.

“This guy is beginning to spook you.”

Sam didn't take offense. At first he didn't even seem to hear.

“Could be,” he said finally. “I keep thinking about Sally Wilkes' guts, spread out like that in the bathtub. He didn't kill her there—as you pointed out, you can't disembowel someone without making a hell of a mess, and the place was spotless. For another, we're going to find out that she was alive and conscious when he did it, probably without even a gag to keep her from screaming. The screaming is likely the part he enjoys most, and she would have awakened the whole neighborhood. No, he killed her in some secret place of his own and then carted her insides back in a garbage bag and left them for us to find.

“Which, incidentally, leaves Mr. Tregear out. He's got an apartment on Fisherman's Wharf, remember? Crowds, neighbors—not the sort of place where you can really enjoy yourself the way Our Boy does.”

“If he's rich enough to live on North Point, he can afford a dungeon someplace.”

“Possible, but not likely.” Sam made a small gesture with his hand to suggest how little he thought of the idea. “Face it, Ellie. This humorist isn't some pathetic weirdo who cuts up girls because his mommy used to threaten to snip off his dick with the pruning shears. This isn't about sex with him, or even anger. It's about winning. He's a game player. So far he's making all the right moves.”

“And he's laughing at us.”

“Looks like it.”

Sam took his feet down, and the front legs of his chair hit the floor with a snap that should have shattered them like glass. He stood up and then settled again on the corner of Ellie's desk.

“Play the disk again,” he said. They watched it through twice more, each time freezing on the man in the tan Windbreaker.

“Maybe he's made his first mistake.”

Ellen felt a disappointment that was like grief when Sam shook his head.

“Maybe, but this isn't it. That isn't him, Ellie. Haven't you figured it out yet? He knows our methods. He knows all about how we go after sick fucks who butcher cocktail waitresses and leave them out in the rain. If we ever do catch him, it won't be because he fell into our laps.”

*   *   *

When her shift ended Ellen went home and played with Gwendolyn until the poor baby curled up in her lap and went to sleep. By then it was five, time to start thinking about dinner, and Ellen didn't feel like cooking.

Mindy Epstein was probably going to be sleeping on the sofa tonight, since that was what she had done after leaving her first husband. She had phoned and said her suitcases were in the trunk of her car. Perhaps Mindy would feel like dinner out.

She dialed Mindy at her office and they decided on a restaurant by Fisherman's Wharf where you could get scallops and pasta and a bottle of halfway decent wine and still pay the rent.

“It was too domestic,” Mindy announced, describing the collapse of her second marriage. “He had this house over in Tiburon.…”

“I know. I've been there.”

“Really? You're sure?” She seemed momentarily taken by surprise. “Remind me. When was that?”

“Seven months ago. Right after the honeymoon.”

“Oh, yeah.”

They were about three-quarters down on a bottle of Chardonnay, so perhaps it wasn't so surprising that Mindy was a little vague on the details. But she was clear enough on the main point—the house in Tiburon was the
casus belli
.

“I think Stewie saw our relationship from the point of view of property management. He wanted someone on the premises to deal with the lawn service guys and make sure the cleaning lady didn't get into the liquor cabinet. Tiburon, for God's sake. Do you have any idea how long the commute time is from Tiburon to Bryant Street on a Monday morning? I might have gotten used to that, but I'm an assistant district attorney and he wants to play Ozzie and Harriet.”

“So you dumped him.”

“Damn right.”

Mindy nodded emphatically. She was a small, dark-haired woman given to quick, rather startled movements, and she did most things emphatically. She was just the same in a courtroom, which was one reason she was such an effective prosecutor and most of the defense lawyers in San Francisco were scared to death of her.

“I just packed my bag and walked out. He can keep his house and his alimony checks. The manager of my old apartment building on Fell Street has promised they'll have a vacancy at the end of this month. Once my mother gets over the shock, it'll be like the whole thing never happened.”

“Is she taking it hard?”

“You can imagine.”

Yes, actually, Ellen could imagine. On the one occasion she had met Mindy's parents, when they had come all the way out to California to visit their daughter, they had been invited down to Atherton for dinner with the roommate's family. Mrs. Epstein and Mrs. Ridley had discovered they were kindred souls.

“I told Mom I'd probably be ready to settle down by the time I got to my fifth husband, but that didn't seem to console her.”

Mindy refilled her wineglass, which killed the bottle. She took a sip and smiled in a way that suggested she had at last come to the interesting part of her narrative.

“And now let me tell you about my new squeeze.”

*   *   *

They walked out of the restaurant about five to seven, and Ellen gave Mindy the key to her apartment.

“I just have a quick errand to run,” she said.

Five minutes later she was parked on North Point, across the street from Number 621. The idea had been forming in her mind all during dinner. She just wanted a quick look at Stephen Tregear's premises.

It was almost the end of spring, when the evenings lingered forever and the light seemed less to diminish than simply to clarify.

Just as Sam had predicted, it was a very nice building. Each unit was a town house, brick with bowed windows and a front door painted Delft blue. The rent payments couldn't have been less than five thousand a month.

That was about as much as she was likely to find out.

“What am I doing here?” she asked herself. “What is this supposed to accomplish?”

Nothing. That was the only possible answer—nothing. He wasn't likely to come out and volunteer a confession and, short of that, she couldn't go calling on him. She had no probable cause, so she could have looked through his apartment door and seen bloody handprints all over the walls, and they wouldn't have been admissible as evidence. She had no warrant and no grounds to apply for a warrant. She had nothing.

She had nothing, and she was sitting in her car, across the street from a suspect's apartment, because she didn't want to go home to a sleeping ferret. She envied Mindy the chaotic drama of her personal life and she wanted a little excitement. Well, she wasn't going to find it on North Point Street.

“I'm out of here.”

Her hand was actually on the ignition key when the door to Tregear's apartment opened and a man in a tan Windbreaker stepped out onto the street. It was him, big as life.

He closed the door behind him and started to walk down North Point in long strides. Suddenly he crossed the street. Then he turned a corner and was gone.

It was irresistible. He was practically begging her to follow him. She hardly expected that he would lead her to an unmarked grave in the middle of Ghirardelli Square, but the thing was still irresistible.

Ellen had never tailed anyone before, but she knew it was a team sport—on the sidewalk, you needed at least five people to shag someone for any distance. Thus she knew she had a better chance if she followed him in her car than if she started off on foot. Careful, she thought to herself. He knows you by sight. She felt reasonably confident that Tregear hadn't noticed her yet.

She drove up to the intersection and slowed. The sidewalks weren't crowded, so she had no trouble spotting him. He had cut across to the other side, so it was a safe bet he was heading toward Fisherman's Wharf.

In San Francisco the tourist season never ended so the Wharf was always mobbed, particularly in the evening, when the restaurants were serving dinner. The closer you got, the bigger the crowds and the more the streets belonged to them. She would have to leave the car.

She crossed the intersection, drove two more blocks and pulled over to the curb.

On the bay side of Jefferson she took up her station behind a rack of T-shirts under the awning of a tourist shop and waited, scanning the sidewalks, with a good view in all four directions, almost hoping that Tregear had only gone out for a pack of gum and the sports pages and was by now safely back in his apartment.