Bloodlines (53 page)

"Wait, now I remember him. He had been serving on death row up in San Quentin. He got out when the court overturned all those death penalty convictions in the 1970s."

"Right."

"O'Connor wrote about him. He was upset that he was going free."

"Well, O'Connor was right. Harmon's confessing to seven murders, two of them here in Las Piernas."

The phone rang. I answered it.

"Irene? It's Max."

"Max! Are you in town for a while?" I saw Frank frown. It always takes him a moment to remind himself that Max is a friend and not a former boyfriend.

"Yes, I'm here for a few weeks. In fact--well, I called to let you know I'm engaged."

"Engaged!"

Frank's frown became a grin. I was grinning, too.

"Yes, well, you weren't available any longer, so I had to pick someone else."

"Oh, right. As if you aren't the most sought-after bachelor I know."

He laughed. "You'll like her, Irene. She's as good for me as Frank is for you."

"Then she must be perfect for you. And in that case, I'm sure I will like her. Does this perfect woman have a name?"

"Gisella. Gisella Ross." The way he said her name told me all I needed to know. Max Ducane, who had withstood more matchmaking attempts, more women chasing after him, more flat-out onslaughts on his single status than any man I know, had fallen for someone.

"Is she here with you in Las Piernas?"

"Not right now. She's going to join me here in a few days. Actually...I was wondering, do you think I could get together with you and Frank sometime before Friday?"

"You want Frank to do a background check on her?"

He laughed. "No. I've met her family. Very upper-crust New Englanders."

"I'll read up on my Emily Post before we meet. I don't want to embarrass you."

"You couldn't do that. Besides, she's not as stuffy as her parents are."

"Hang on," I said. I talked it over with Frank, then said, "Are you free tomorrow night? Why don't you come over?"

He agreed to it, and we arranged for him to come by at about seven. I hung up and looked over at Frank. "Wonder what's on his mind?"

"I don't know," he said, gently pulling me closer and nuzzling my ear. "How about if I tell you what's on mine?"

I have always liked the way Frank's mind works.

**CHAPTER 54

AT WORK THE NEXT MORNING, I FORGOT TO USE MY NEW PASSWORD, AND was immediately locked out of my computer. Computer services was tied up on another problem and couldn't help me right at the moment.

"I thought I was supposed to get three tries before it locked me out."

"You do," the technician said. "I'll check on that when I get a minute."

I was going to try persuading him to take that minute right now, but one of my outside lines was ringing, so I hung up. It was Frank, calling from LAX.

"Hi, sorry I didn't call you earlier, but everything has been rushed this morning. I'm flying up to Sacramento."

"Today? I mean, of course you're going today, but--"

"I need to talk to Harmon. Just a preliminary interview."

"Oh."

"Look, I haven't forgotten about our dinner plans--I might be able to make it back, since it's only an hour's flight, but I might not. So--you and Max go on ahead without me if you haven't heard from me by six, okay?"

"I can call Max, try to reschedule..."

"No, don't do that. He's excited about the engagement, and you're the one he really wants to talk to, anyway."

"Frank--"

"You'll make me feel bad if you cancel. I'll call you when I leave Folsom to let you know what's going on."

Over the next twenty minutes, I reached for the phone several times, thinking I should call Max and reschedule anyway, but ultimately I decided I'd take Frank at his word.

I began reading though a packet of materials that was part of the agenda for the city council meeting next week, circling points I needed to ask questions about, and making notes.

"Computer not working?" Mark Baker asked, seeing that I was doing all of this in longhand.

"No, it's not." I told him my password problem. "Someone is supposed to fix it with an override code or something, but there's some bigger problem with the software that runs the presses, so you know how high I am on the priority list."

"Just remember that it will never, ever be as bad as it was when we had those first computers."

"No kidding." We spent a few minutes recalling hardware and software disasters of the 1980s--whole pages that would have to be reentered, bizarre line justification that produced odd gaps in type, stories lost somewhere in the ether, and worse.

"And all the headaches for the designers--what a mess. I went to bed every night wondering if the paper would get out the next day."

"Same here," Mark said. "Say--if you have a few minutes, why don't you walk with me down to the morgue?"

This is one of the things I like about Mark. He's one of about a dozen people at the paper who still call the paper's archives "the morgue," rather than "the library."

"You talked to Frank before he left?" I asked as we made our way downstairs.

"Yes. His lieutenant released the story to other media, too, of course, but we've got the inside track, anyway--we covered these murders. I'm going to see if I can find the stories the Express ran on the cases. Interesting stuff--the cases go back to 1941 and 1943. The bodies weren't found until 1950."

I stopped walking.

He looked at me and said, "You know."

"O'Connor's sister. But she disappeared near the end of the war--1945, I think."

Mark shook his head. "That's the weird thing. Frank said Harmon didn't mention her. He said two victims here, and their names are..." He looked at his notes. "Anna Mezire and Lois Arlington. Anna disappeared on April 30,1943. Lois on April 18, 1941."

"Wait--he's saying that God inspired him to admit to two murders but not a third? That doesn't make sense."

"None whatsoever. But it makes me wonder. If he had something to gain in this lifetime, I'd say he hasn't told us everything. But no one asked or coerced him to talk about these two--he doesn't get any better treatment or time off at this point. The only break it's going to give him is on the other side--when he meets his Maker. So why not make a completely clean breast of it?"

"You're looking up what we had on it then?"

"Yes. And any background I can find on Harmon."

"I've got some of O'Connor's old papers. I'll look through them and see if I can find his notes about his sister's disappearance. Knowing him, he must have had his own investigation going."

"Thanks. Listen--I appreciate your help with the story, but that's not why I wanted to talk to you."

"Oh?"

"This computer business makes me wonder about something. This morning, I got here early and caught Ethan snooping around your desk. He claimed he was just looking for a pair of scissors. I told him off, but I wanted you to know about it."

"Was he trying to log on to my computer?"

"I don't know. I didn't actually see that, but..."

"But I think I just figured out why I couldn't log on this morning. If you log on with the wrong password three times, it shuts the computer down until a system administrator can log you back on, right?"

"Right."

"Last night, I changed my password. This morning, out of habit, I entered the old password--but I only did that once before I was locked out of the system."

"So someone else had tried it twice and failed?"

"Yes. I don't think I need too many guesses about who it was. He failed twice and knew better than to enter it a third time. If I had entered the new one this morning, there never would have been a sign of anything wrong."

"How'd he get the old one?"

"Sits right across from me. He could have easily watched me log on dozens of times without my noticing it."

Mark took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We stood there in silence. After a while, Mark said, "He could be fired."

"Not any time soon. He's such an ass-kisser, if Wrigley turns a corner, that kid's nose will break."

"You've got that right. He's trying to suck up to me now, too. I think he realized yesterday that I didn't buy his version of events. And getting caught at your desk this morning scared him."

"Mark, you know I don't like newsroom gossip, but--let's just say I've heard some things that make me think we need to keep an eye on him."

"I wouldn't need to hear any gossip to know that."

"Why?"

"Call it intuition. I think he's a phony. He's got some kind of problem."

"What do you mean?"

"He's come to work hung over more than once. You haven't noticed?"

"This is a horrible thing to admit, but I guess I expect young men his age to do that once in a while."

Mark shook his head. "This isn't once in a while, Irene."

"I'll pay more attention."

He laughed. "Sorry, didn't mean to scold--or to make it sound as if you are supposed to be the kid's mama while he's here. You aren't even his editor."

I hesitated, then said, "I think the biggest problem is going to be Lydia."

He put a hand on my shoulder. "To be honest, I'm glad to hear you say that. I was worried I was going to have to be the one to mention it."

Back at my desk, I got a call from the computer services department and learned that I could log on again with a password the technician gave me. "But change it again to one of your own right away," he said.

I followed these instructions. Ethan was schmoozing with the executive news editor, John Walters, at that moment, so I wasn't worried that he'd be spying on me. He hadn't had as much success with John as he had had with Lydia and Wrigley. I was fairly sure that if Ethan did manage to ingratiate himself with John, it wouldn't last long.

Lydia was another story.

By choice, our careers had taken separate paths. I chose to stay with reporting and writing, she moved into editorial work.

Not all reporters get a reputation for being writers. You can be invaluable to the paper because you have the persistence to ferret out the facts, the ability to get people to confide in you, and other news-gathering skills. There are reporters who can do all of that, but are then unable to express what they've learned in clear terms.

Conversely, there are those who can't figure out what question to ask next, but can take the dullest, most completely jumbled story you've ever seen and rework it into something clear and exciting to read.

Lydia was both reporter and writer, but she excelled at writing. Before she had worked on the news side for very long, the paper put her to work in rewrite, then as a copy editor, and soon after that, an assistant city editor--the first woman to have that job on the Express.

She was now the city editor, and her skills in that job were unquestioned. All hell could break loose, she'd stay calm and divvy up the crises of the moment to those most capable of handling them. She was good at assigning stories, and although there would always be someone who thought he or she would have been the better reporter for this story or that, no one thought Lydia was arbitrary or showed favoritism. She not only knew which reporter would best handle a story, she knew how to get the best out of each reporter.

She was known for her loyalty to the reporters, for sticking up for them with the bosses--she might tell someone off (in her quiet way) in private, but she'd take on John Walters or Wrigley III in defense of that same reporter. She had won both the trust of the veterans and the respect of the newer reporters.

The problem was, when it came to seeing a guy like Ethan for what he was, I wasn't so sure of her abilities. If you're working on the street as a reporter, you usually spend time around a wider variety of people than editors do. You start to learn what most liars look like when they're lying to you--not all, by any means, but the garden variety becomes readily apparent, and eventually some of the most expert find it harder to get past you. You figure out who's uncomfortable with attention just because they're a little shy, and who is hoping you will not ask a dreaded question. You don't always find what's hidden, but you almost always sense when something important is being kept out of view.

I had no doubt that Lydia could tell if something in a story didn't ring true. But I wondered now if she had lost some of that ability to read people as well as she read stories.

Then I remembered Mark's comments about how often Ethan showed up hungover, and also that I had failed to notice that the little twerp had watched me enter my password. I decided I should worry about my own inability to keep my BS detector working.

Even if Ethan had managed to log on to my computer before now, I wasn't too worried about him looking at my notes. I was, you might say, a third-generation cryptographer.

O'Connor had been trained in newspaper work by Jack Corrigan, who had worked for the paper at a time when the morning News was the rival of the evening Express. Reporters spied on one another all the time. Corrigan wrote his notes in an oddball code--a mixture of a kind of shorthand, initials, and ways of referring to things that might not be readily apparent. RCC, for example, was not the Roman Catholic Church, but "the rubber chicken circuit," or political fund-raising banquets.