Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (20 page)

"Yes, it is."

Soriano finished putting his cigarette out and stood, adjusting his
suit jacket. His face was even more drawn now and I thought I detected
a trace of anger. "If the conclusion's
correct, it'll put Jay through hell. He blames himself."

"For what?"

He shook his head. "That's his business. And frankly, I'm sick of
sitting around here waiting for the Porky Pig of stand-up. That club
has been nothing but a pain in the ass for me; from now on I'm
confining myself to Atlas Development."

Atlas Development. Where had I… ? Of course! "The car that was
stolen off the club's lot that night—the one that the prosecution
claimed Foster used to kidnap Tracy—was registered to Atlas
Development."

"That's right. It was the company car used by my executive
assistant, Jim Fox. He'd dropped by the club for the first time that
night, at my invitation. Met a lady and went home with her. When he
went back for the Volvo, it was gone."

"Exactly when did he report it stolen?"

"Not until early the next evening. The lady dropped him at work, and
I drove him to the club after we'd finished for the day."

So that was why the vehicle registration check that the highway
patrol routinely makes when issuing citations hadn't shown the Volvo as
stolen.

Soriano seemed to have lost interest in our conversation. He glanced
at his watch and said, "Now I really do have to be going. If you see
Marc, please don't tell him he's about to be canned. I'd hate to spoil
the pleasure Jay will take in the act." Before I could reply, Soriano
bowed curtly and left the apartment.

I remained where I was for a minute or so, digesting this latest
information. The picture of Tracy that was emerging was an unsavory
one, and my distaste created a sour sensation in my stomach. I'd never
really regretted not having children, and now I was beginning to feel
positively
blessed. The pain these revelations would cause George—if I couldn't
somehow suppress them—was incalculable, and I was selfish enough not to
want to be the one who caused them to be aired.

After a moment I shoved my musings aside and went down the hall to
the linen closet, where I searched for the probe that opened the locked
door of Tracy's room. It wasn't in evidence. I felt in my bag for a
suitable implement and came up with a long nail—a piece of the detritus
that accompanies a homeowner in the throes of renovating. It took some
maneuvering, but in thirty seconds the lock snapped open and I stepped
through the door.

A strangled cry came from the darkness in front of me.

I flattened against the wall, one hand groping for the light switch,
the other going reflexively to the side pocket of my bag, even though I
wasn't armed. When the overhead flared, I saw Laura Kostakos.

She crouched on her knees between the bed and the armoire by the
window. Her blue lounging pajamas were crumpled and looked as if she
hadn't taken them off since I'd interviewed her the previous Thursday;
her gray-blond hair was limp and disheveled. Her eyes worried me more
than her grooming: they were wide with fright and curiously unfocused.
She opened her mouth as if to cry out again, and I raised a hand in a
calming gesture.

Laura slumped closer to the floor, her bowed head all but
disappearing from my view. I hurried around the bed, murmuring soothing
things, and grasped her arms to help her up. They were matchstick thin;
the gardenia perfume smelled fetid, as of flowers that had fallen from
the bush and rotted. Her body sagged against mine. I managed to prop
her in the nearby rocker.

She leaned her head back, breathing raggedly. "… Frightened me."

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you were in here."

"A man came into the apartment. Strange man. I locked the door and
hid."

"That was Jay Larkey's business partner. He's gone now."

She nodded wearily, closing her eyes and beginning to rock.

I sat on the edge of the waterbed; waves rippled inside, sloshing
softly. "Mrs. Kostakos… Laura," I said, "what are you doing in here? It
can't be good for you to keep coming here, waiting, dwelling on the
past."

She continued to rock silently.

"If Tracy were to come back," I added, "it wouldn't be to this
apartment. She probably doesn't even know you've kept it."

"She does."

"Why do you think so?"

"Because she told me to come here when she called me. Both times."

A chill touched my shoulder blades. "When was that?"

"New Year's Eve, in the afternoon. And again today, around five."

"Are you sure it was Tracy?"

"I know my own daughter's voice."

"Exactly what did she say?"

"The first time, just to come to the apartment, she'd meet me here.
I waited all night, but she never arrived. Today she apologized, said
she'd been detained, but that tonight she'd be here for sure. But then
that man came, and now you. She's probably been frightened away."

Or was never coming to begin with, I thought. Had it really been
Tracy who had called, or someone perpetrating a cruel hoax? "Why do you
think she would be frightened of Rob Soriano or me?"

No reply.

"Laura—why?"

She shook her head, rocking harder.

I watched her silently, taking my earlier line of reasoning to its
inevitable conclusion. If Tracy had been involved— either directly or
indirectly—in the killing at the Napa River, she would have good cause
to fear being seen, particularly by Rob Soriano, who had known her. Had
she given her mother any indication of what had happened that night, or
in the intervening years? Or had she merely summoned her? And in either
instance—why now? Because she had heard the case was being reopened?
That presupposed her being in touch with someone who knew about my
investigation.

"Laura," I said, "were Tracy's calls long distance?"

"… I don't know where she was."

"But did they sound like long distance?"

"… No. She couldn't have been too far away, not if she planned to
meet me here in the evening."

I was silent again, assessing what she had told me. Tracy could
really have called, or it could have been someone pretending to be her.
Laura could be lying, or she could have imagined both episodes. I had
no basis for determining which possibility was the truth.

Laura sat up straighter and opened her eyes, glaring defiantly at
me. "I know what you're thinking," she said. "That I'm making it all up
or hallucinating. You're just like George. You don't believe me."

At the mention of his name I felt a stab of guilt. I had slept with
her husband the night before, would probably sleep with him again
tonight. And in the meantime, this woman sat in a dark room waiting for
a daughter who might never come to her. A daughter who, in any event,
would never again be the child she had raised and loved.

"Just like George," she said again, and began to cough.

Alarmed, I asked, "What's wrong?"

She waved an arm at the door and choked out, "Water."

I hurried to the kitchen, found a glass among the welter of objects
on the counter, and rinsed it. I was filling it when I heard a crash.
Startled, I dropped the glass in the sink, shattering
it, and ran toward the bedroom. But partway through the living room I
realized the crash had been the front door slamming; Laura was gone.

I rushed outside and down the stairway. By the time I got to the
sidewalk, Laura was climbing into the Mercedes sports coupe that was
parked in the drive. I ran around to her side, but she had locked the
door. She started the car and it hurtled backward, tires barely missing
my toes. By some miracle, there was no oncoming traffic on Upper Market.

As I watched the Mercedes careen downhill and out of sight, I hoped
Laura had enough control net to kill herself or someone else on her way
back to Palo Alto.

George said, "I'll call a colleague of mine and ask him to look in
on her. If she refuses to see him, though, there's not much I can do."

We were seated in the kitchen of his borrowed house, drinking wine.
The promised pizza was on its way. He had gone ahead and ordered it, I
thought, as a way of maintaining the illusion of normalcy, but my news
about Tracy's purported telephone calls and Laura's behavior had shaken
him badly.

"Maybe you should be the one to talk to her," I began tentatively.

He shook his head. "No, Sharon, I can't. It's over with Laura and
me. Last night affirmed that." To my inquiring look, he replied, "No,
you're not the first woman I've slept with since the separation. And I
confess I wasn't always faithful to my wife. But you were the first
woman since Laura with whom I've shared that essential connection that
makes it the beginning of a relationship, rather than a casual affair.
I can't encourage Laura to think there's still something between us,
no matter how bad a shape she's in."

"Besides," he added, "Laura's a very perceptive woman, even when
she's in a poor emotional state. She'd realize I was only coming round
out of pity, and that would take away her pride. She'll need her pride
if she's going to survive whatever's ahead."

I nodded, twirling my wineglass slowly between my fingers. "Just so
long as someone looks in on her. But what about those phone calls,
George? Do you think they actually were from Tracy?"

His eyes were clouded, their hazel tinged with green. "The phone
calls… I just don't know. The whole thing's so clandestine, spooky—so
unlike Tracy. And yet I have to remind myself that it was also unlike
her to disappear and maintain a silence while her friend was convicted
of killing her. I just don't know, dammit!"

"Is it possible the calls are a figment of Laura's imagination?"

"Yes." He grimaced, then laughed bitterly. "You know, part of me
wants to believe that, because I can't imagine what Tracy's become,
that she would put us all through such an ordeal. But on the other
hand, if Laura's imagining them, she's deteriorated drastically in the
course of a week."

"Do people just suddenly… go like that?"

"Sometimes. It could have been accelerated by the holidays. She
refused to do anything during them, even though some relatives had
asked her to visit, even tried to get her to go to dinner with me on
Christmas Eve, but she wouldn't."

I felt a prickle of jealousy, even though I hadn't so much as known
of George Kostakos's existence then.

He smiled and covered my hand with his. "I only did that because I
felt sorry for her. I should have known better. She saw right through
me, of course." He paused, studying my face, his candid gaze asking me
to believe him. After a moment I lowered my own gaze to the tabletop,
discomforted because
he had seen through me as easily as Laura had seen through him.

He understood that, too, released my hand and rose briskly. "I'll
call my colleague. You listen for the pizza delivery guy."

I remained at the table, sipping wine moodily and staring at a big
bunch of dried red peppers that hung from a black iron pot rack.
Strangely ambivalent feelings were welling up in me. On the one hand, I
wanted George all to myself; on the other, I wanted him to do something
to help Laura. The night before, I had not thought of him as a
still-married man with a badly disturbed wife; tonight it was the only
way I could think of him. Perhaps this relationship would prove to be
more than I wanted to handle—

The doorbell rang. I picked up the money he'd left on the table and
went down to meet the man from Domino's.

We spent the remainder of the evening in tacit agreement not to
discuss either his wife or my investigation. After we ate, we built a
fire and—in lieu of comfortable furniture— piled blankets and pillows
on the floor in front of the hearth. For a while we stared at the
flames and traded past histories and small confidences—the mortar that
binds the bricks of physical desire and runaway emotion into a
structure far stronger than either of those elements alone.

I learned that George had always lived in Palo Alto, except for the
years he spent in college at Harvard and postgraduate work at the
University of Michigan; that he'd turned his back on the family
business—oil exploration and drilling—by entering the Ph.D. program,
and thus became estranged from his father. He met and married Laura,
who was also doing graduate work, in Ann Arbor; unlike many academic
couples, they both managed to secure faculty positions at Stanford.
After Tracy's birth, he and his father reconciled, and when his father
died some dozen years ago, he found himself in
possession of a small fortune.

"But the money never made a difference," he said. "It was nice to
have it, and we lived well, but it just… didn't make a difference."

"How do you mean?"

"Things went along much as they always had. Life fell into a
predictable routine, day to day, month to month, year to year—the way
it does when you're building careers and raising a child. It wasn't
unpleasant, but…" He fell silent, watching the fire for a moment.

"You know," he went on, "there's a whole period in my life that's
gray. I really don't remember much about it. Little things stand out: a
nice Christmas, Tracy's high school graduation, a good vacation. But
it's as if they happened to someone else and were told to me. What I do
remember are things from early on: winter mornings in Cambridge, when
it was so cold you dressed inches from the electric heater and
literally slid to class on ice-slicked snow; autumn days in Ann Arbor,
when the whole Huron River Valley was hazed with leaf smoke that still
didn't mute the fall color; a special evening with Laura shortly after
we moved to Palo Alto, when we walked through the eucalyptus groves at
Stanford after a rain, with that overpowering smell of the trees all
around us and water dripping off them onto our bare heads. For a long
time I thought maybe I'd lived all my real moments and that those
scattered memories were all I ever would have."