Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (56 page)

"So what you've got is someone on the amateurish side who marked
this up to make it appear Tracy had used it to plan her own
disappearance. Why?"

"I don't know. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. My reopening
the investigation must have been what prompted it, though, because the
book wasn't where Barbour says she found it when I searched last
Thursday evening. Between then and when she gave it to me on Monday
morning, I'd conducted a number of interviews; a lot of people knew
about that."

"But what did the person who planted this book hope to accomplish?"

"That's what I don't understand. Finding this—if I'd accepted it as
genuine—would only have convinced me I was onto something and made me
work harder. So whoever put the book in Tracy's room can't have wanted
me to drop the investigation. On the other hand, since I was already on
the case, a person who wanted Tracy found wouldn't have needed to go to
such lengths."

"Unless whoever it was knows where she is, and there's some clue in
the notes in the margins."

It was a farfetched idea, but at that point I was willing to
consider anything. I took the book back around the table and made a
list of the notations on a legal pad. After looking it over and
arranging them in various sequences, I shrugged and passed the pad over
to George. "If there's a clue here," I said, "it's damned obscure. I
think these are nothing more than what the person who marked the book
thought a reader who had studied it carefully might note."

He looked the pad over, did some rearranging of his own, and finally
nodded in agreement.

"Another thing to consider," I said, "is who had opportunity to
plant it there. Who had access to that apartment? Amy Barbour. Marc
Emmons. Any number of people who may have visited there. And Laura."

"I can't imagine her doing such a thing. My wife is disturbed, but
not irrational."

"Even if she were, this sort of thing doesn't strike me as her
style. My guess is that it was either Amy or Marc. She came forward
with the book. He became quite angry when I suggested he'd planted it.
They're the logical ones to suspect, except… You know, I keep thinking
of how Bobby Foster's notebook—the one with the misspellings that
matched those in the ransom note—turned up conveniently, too."

"The notebook actually belonged to Foster, though."

"That's true." Discouraged, I went to the refrigerator for a glass
of wine, then slumped in my chair, frowning down at the table. When I
looked up, I saw that George was reading the first entry in the
sketchbook. My impulse was to snatch it away from him, but I resisted
and merely waited.

When he finished, he closed his eyes and rubbed his hand across
them. "This is herself she's describing, isn't it?"

"I think so. She only did that once—as her first entry." The lie
came out easily; there was no way I was going to let him read that
final entry. I reached for the book, but he held on to it with both
hands.

" 'The beloved father, for all his academic knowledge, was little
better. Vague, fondly absent. Sometimes she thought him only half
alive.' Jesus, what did I do to my daughter? And to Laura? No wonder
she was cold—she had a husband who wasn't really there."

I didn't speak for a moment, because I wanted to phrase what I was
about to say very carefully. I knew that how I said it, even more than
the actual sense of it, would be crucial to the future of our
relationship.

"You can only offer what you have at a given time," I finally said.
"I know that sounds simplistic, but you can only do and feel whatever
your current capability is. And the situation, the flaws in it, are
never wholly of your own making. Perhaps there was something in Laura
and Tracy— in who and what they were and how they responded to you—that
made you unable to act as a so-called proper husband and father should."

He considered that, then nodded and reached across the table for my
hand. "It's true. People change, depending on the situation and the
others involved in it. I'm not like that any longer—vague or fondly
absent. I won't be that way in the future, either. That much I can
promise you."

I entwined my fingers with his, leaned forward for his kiss. And the
phone rang.

It was Stan Gurski. "I have some information that I thought might
interest you," he said. "By way of a repay for your tip on Mclntyre."

"Oh?" I glanced at George. He was paging through the sketchbook.

"Mclntyre was shot. Bullet was lodged in the ribcage, a .38. Makes
it look premeditated."

"Why?"

"When I called the owner of the cottage in Mexico Monday
morning—easier to get his permission to enter and search the premises
than to get a warrant—I routinely asked if any weapons were kept there.
He said no; he's strictly a fisherman. So we can assume whoever shot
her brought the gun with them. Gun like that means business, too."

I was well aware of that. I own a .38 and consider it a necessary
precaution for a woman whose job requires her to go into dangerous
places and situations. But I don't take the responsibility lightly, and
I never carry it unless I'm fully prepared to use it.

"Another thing," Gurski said. "She was shot in the car."

"What?"

"Uh-huh." There was thinly veiled pride in his voice now. "When the
ME reported the probable cause of death, I called SFPD. They still have
the car impounded—capital case, appeals coming up. I asked them to look
for other bullets. There was one, lodged in the door panel on the side
where the bloodstains were. Our preliminary comparison shows it's from
the same gun as the one lodged in the remains. San Francisco's finest
sure screwed up on this one."

They had, in more than one way, and it unnerved me to think how
close to the gas chamber that combination of mistakes had taken my
client. I said, "Well, this completely invalidates Foster's confession.
I'll pass the information along to his attorney."

The delivery-truck driver came through the door from the back porch,
invoice in hand, looking for a check. I thanked Gurski for calling and
terminated the conversation, then paid for the Sheetrock and went out
to lock the side gate.

When I came back to the kitchen, George had Tracy's sketchbook open
to the last page. He was staring into space, his face rigid with pain.
My breath caught, and I stopped in the doorway.

Slowly he turned his head toward me and said, "Why did you lie?"

Perhaps he'd known his daughter better than he thought. Had I been
in his place, I would not have recognized her—would not have wanted to
recognize her—in that brief paragraph.

I said, "I hoped you'd never have to know."

"But you know. And we can't allow a secret of that magnitude to come
between us."

I nodded and went to sit at the table.

"I think," he added, "that you'd better tell me everything you know
about my daughter."

Wednesday dawned clear and cold—one of those mornings following a
rainstorm when everything looks hard edged, vivid, and clean. My mood
didn't fit the weather, however. By eleven I had swiveled away from my
desk and was scowling out the bay window at the flat sprawl of the
Outer Mission, wondering what right such a dingy neighborhood had to
look so good in the sunlight. The desk behind me was stacked with
papers and folders. Our holiday slowdown had ended, and our clients
were once more suing and being sued, divorcing and getting arrested and
appealing sentences. I no longer would have the luxury of pursuing the
Foster/Kostakos investigation full-time; I'd give it until Monday
morning, then juggle it with my other duties.

I had to acknowledge that a good part of the reason for my low mood
was the way George and I had left things the afternoon before. As he'd
asked, I'd been frank with him about Tracy, and what I'd had to relate
disturbed and depressed him. He left around six, saying he needed some
time alone. That was the last thing I needed, so after microwaving a
couple of burritos (or "nuking" them, as my nephew
Andrew calls it), I left the house and embarked on what I knew would
probably be a fruitless tour around the city: to the public library to
look for the copy of the L.A. Times that Jane Stein had mentioned,
where I found the microfilm room closed; to Amy Barbour and Marc
Emmons's buildings, in case they'd slipped past the police patrols; to
Lisa Mclntyre's building, in the vain hope its manager might be home;
to Café Comedie, to see if Larkey had heard from Emmons.

While I was at the club, I ran into Kathy Soriano and asked if I
might speak with her about Lisa and Tracy. She pleaded lack of time,
vanished through the door marked Yes, and never came back. I asked
Larkey if he would intercede and arrange an appointment for me with
Kathy. He said he didn't know how strong his influence was in those
quarters lately, but he'd try.

Eventually I ended up at the Remedy, kicking around my ideas on the
case with Jack and Rae. All that did was leave me several dollars
poorer (Rae was so broke Jack and I had to take turns paying for her
beers) and as confused as before. When I went home, my bed seemed too
cold, large, and lonely. I was a long time getting to sleep, and when
the contractor arrived to start work at eight the next morning, I was
barely coherent. Not a good start to the day.

And now I'd had no word from George all morning. Larkey hadn't
phoned about the appointment with Kathy Soriano. Rae had received no
response to any of her inquiries. My spirits were sagging so fast that
I calculated they'd be about ankle level by noon.

When the phone buzzed, I snatched up the receiver and growled
something that sounded like one of those syllables in the crossword
puzzle that correspond to the clue "kennel sound."

Larkey said, "What's the matter—you caught a cold?"

"Oh, Jay, hi. No—just a frog in my throat."

"They do better in ponds. Listen, I talked to Kathy, and she's
willing to see you if you can get to her house in Tiburon by noon."

"Tiburon by noon. No problem. What's the address?" I scribbled it
down, thanked him for arranging things, and left the
office buoyed by the relief of a kid going out for recess.

Kathy Soriano didn't look very good that day. Her makeup was freshly
applied, but there was a pallor under the tan base; her expensive suede
shirt had a grease spot on it, and her leather boots bore scuff marks.
Her hands shook as if she might have a hangover, and her greeting was
subdued.

I found myself feeling sorry for her, even though she had a Jaguar
sedan in the drive of the redwood-and-glass house set high above the
bay. Her windows might overlook Angel Island and pine-studded
hillsides, her living room might be filled with bronze sculptures and
Imari porcelain, but I remembered what Larkey had said about the
creditors closing in on the Sorianos. And I remembered Tracy's brutally
frank description of Kathy as a woman who jumped when those in power
snapped their fingers, and who felt compelled to betray her steely-eyed
husband. Kathy moved and spoke like a nervous, unhappy woman and seemed
pathetically alone in the big house. And because of the attitude I had
sensed in her toward others of her gender, she probably didn't even
have a woman friend whose shoulder she could cry on.

She seated me facing a glass wall that overlooked a veritable forest
and offered me a glass of wine, which I accepted. When she returned
from the wet bar, I noticed her own drink looked to be something far
more potent than wine. She drank half of it straight off, and gradually
her color improved.

"I'm sorry I ran out on you so abruptly last night," she said in the
tones of a little girl whose parents have told her to
apologize. "I wasn't feeling well, and I needed to get home."

"That's too bad. I hope it's nothing serious."

She shrugged and looked away. The little girl had told her polite
social lie but didn't want to be bothered with elaborating on it.

"Thank you for seeing me," I added. "I suppose Jay's already told
you that the body I thought was Tracy Kostakos's is actually Lisa
Mclntyre's?"

She nodded.

"I'm trying to find out when Lisa went up to the Napa River, and
why. Jay tells me you and Rob drove her home the last night that any of
you saw her."

"Yes, we did. It was raining pretty hard by then, so we took her
right to her apartment building."

"I also understand that you went around to her apartment at Jay's
request the next week, and the manager told you she'd moved out."

"Skipped out is how she put it. Lisa didn't give any notice, and she
left a lot of her stuff there. She was also behind on her rent."

"What's the manager's name?"

"… I don't remember."

"I've been trying to contact her, but there's never anyone home."

"I'm sorry I can't help you, but it was a long time ago."

"No matter. Let's go back to that Thursday night. Your husband's
executive assistant, Jim Fox, had come around to the club. The next day
he found that his company car had been stolen off the lot."

"Yes, by Bobby Foster."

"I've recently found out that Tracy was the one who took it—"

"That's ridiculous!" She finished her drink quickly and went to the
bar for another. "Tracy wouldn't have done that. She was a nice girl.
Everybody liked her. I even liked her, and let
me tell you, I'm not too keen on women. She wouldn't have ripped off
one of our cars. She wouldn't have needed to, with all her family's
money."

"Nevertheless, it appears she did. Would you go over the sequence of
events that night for me?"

"I'm not sure I understand. About the car or about Lisa?"

"Both. Why don't you start with when you arrived at the club."

"I was there from about ten o'clock on. Around closing Rob wanted to
go over some papers about the real estate business with Jay. The place
was practically empty by then, so Lisa changed out of her uniform and
waited with me at the bar."