Rogue Wave (15 page)

She pictured a bruised spot above Delaney’s left ear, where he had been hit hard enough to have produced bleeding beneath the membranes that cover the brain: not surprising in a man who had died in a small boat on exceptionally rough seas. She read on, looking for indications of contrecoup: broken blood vessels on the right side of the brain opposite the left subdural hemorrhage—the type of damage Delaney would have sustained had he been moving and struck his head against a hard object. At the moment of impact his skull would have been stopped abruptly, and for a split second the force of movement would have impelled the soft brain tissue onward into the left temporal and partial plates of the skull, snapping blood vessels as the brain tore away from its moorings on the right.

There was no mention of contrecoup. Hadn’t Rosten thought to look for it?

The doorknob creaked. It was turning.

Kiernan shoved the report in, closed the drawer and turned to look at the picture behind the desk.

“Everything okay?” the secretary called. “Can I get you some tea? Sometimes Dr. Rosten gets held up.”

“I was afraid of that,” Kiernan said, making a show of looking at her watch. She headed toward the door. “I’m on a tight schedule. I’ll just go ahead to the restaurant and if he makes it, he makes it.”

“I’m sorry,” the secretary said.

“Can’t be helped.” Kiernan strode out the door and clicked down the corridor.

She was at the door when she spotted Rosten in conversation with a gray-haired man. She waited till he noticed her, waved, and left.

She smiled as she pulled out of the parking lot. The hemorrhage to the anterior proximal temporalis muscle could have been a bruise sustained while Delaney fought against drowning. That would be the natural assumption. Clearly, that was the assumption Marc Rosten had made. But it could also have been the result of a chop to the head, a chop made by a woman who had studied karate as a child.

If Delaney had banged into the boat as he drowned, he would have sustained bruises. Bruises, plural! A smattering of bruises would have been consistent with violent drowning. One bruise was not.

Could Robin have subdued him with a single karate blow to the head? Not likely, not in that spot. The best such a chop to the skull would do would be to stun. Still, in an open boat in high seas, being stunned might equal being dead. Particularly in a victim with a blood alcohol of .23.

Kiernan pulled into a parking spot, picked up the phone and punched the coast guard number. Going to the Alameda Naval Station in person would have been better, but was no longer an option. Her smug little wave to Rosten had blown that. By now Rosten would be in his office looking through his desk, and suspecting she had seen not only the autopsy report, but the coast guard’s as well. She needed to get to them before he did.

“Marine Casualty Investigations, Zimmerman speaking.”

“Hello. This is the San Francisco coroner’s office. We just got your notes on the sinking near the San Mateo County line, boat called
Early Bird.”

“Sure. Glad to oblige.”

“We appreciate your cooperation. And the fact that you sent us your notes. But I’m afraid we’re having a little trouble deciphering them.”

Zimmerman gave an embarrassed laugh. “Well, I did warn the coroner that he’d be better off waiting till I got them typed.”

So in this already abnormal request, Rosten had not taken the normal route and had his secretary call; he had handled it personally. Very abnormal indeed. “He should have listened to you. But can I impose on you again? I’ve got our copy here. Could you just read me yours and I’ll make the clarifications on mine? It’s only a page long.”

“Sure. Hold on. Look, it’s going to take me a couple minutes to get it. Why don’t I call you back after lunch.”

“It’ll be a madhouse here then,” Kiernan said quickly. Zimmerman calling the coroner’s office was the last thing she wanted. “It would be a great help if you could do it now. I know I’m cutting into your lunch—”

“No, no problem. Hang on.”

A truck passed. Normally she would have worried about the noise carrying over the phone lines, but she recalled other conversations with the coast guard, some on sea-to-shore lines that crackled and rumbled. Anyone who’d survived working at the coast guard station would be used to blocking out background noises.

“Here we go,” Zimmerman said. “These are really just notes to myself. You understand?”

“Of course.”

“Okay. ‘Evidence of explosion. Engine not found. Cabin top separated—’”

“Separated from the engine, you mean?”

“Right. Any commercial vessel of this kind over twenty-six feet has built-in flotation devices. Once the engine breaks loose and that weight is gone, the cabin’s almost impossible to sink.”

“What did you find?”

“Part of the cabin, most of the wheelhouse. Smaller pieces of the rest of the top. Here, line three. Teak decking, brass fixtures. Normal expected navigational equipment for a boat of this type, plus the Dytek Seawater Temp Indicating System, and FloScan fuel monitoring system.”

“Nothing else?” Kiernan asked, thinking about the Harpoon question and what secret equipment Robin might have used to find fish.

“The explosion took care of a lot, like chairs and ovens and doors.”

“Nothing abnormal?”

“Nothing except the wires for the listening device I mentioned in the last sentence.”

Controlling her excitement, Kiernan said, “Read that to me.”

“Found unusual listening device, semicolon, wires running from cabin to wheelhouse. Turned over to coast guard Intelligence for investigation.”

“So this is like a wiretap?”

“Looked like it to me. I called the guy in Intelligence this morning—this isn’t in the report—and he agreed. Simple wiretap that anyone with a basic knowledge of electrical wiring could install. Ran right under the moldings in the cabin.”

“Where was the recorder?”

“Gone. Dammit. I’d be real interested to hear what was on that tape. But because the wires were exposed, the ends were jarred loose in the explosion and the recorder could be anywhere between Pescadero Beach and the Farallons.”

She heard the clang of a cable-car bell in the distance—down here it would have to be one of the motorized ersatz cable cars used for publicity. But the bells sounded the same. And they did not sound as if they came from inside the coroner’s office. Quickly she said, “Thanks for your help,” and hung up.

Wiretapping! Who would want to know what went on on
Early Bird?
The first name that came to mind was Ben Pedersen. Ben Pedersen would still be at sea. But he’d be back by the time she finished with Hartoonian.

W
HO IS THE
G
UY
O
LSEN
?” Marc Rosten barked, waving the scrap of paper he’d just written on. Bad move to snap at the Medical Examiner’s secretary, he knew that, but he was so goddamned furious. How could Grace have let Kiernan into his office alone, let her root through whatever she wanted?

Two phones were ringing, but the clerks could answer them. Grace Ulher looked up at him from the oversized looseleaf book into which she was inserting a file. She shook her head—the silent treatment.

Rosten forced a laugh in response to what her tone should have been.
If
Kiernan hadn’t driven him to snap at her. He valued his good rapport with the support staff, particularly these older ladies who had been with the department since this morgue had been a blueprint. Walking over to Grace’s desk, he smiled. “Grace, I spend my days with the dead. And dead men don’t talk about who’s who. But I know I’ve heard this name before. Harold Olsen? It doesn’t ring a bell with you? I thought you knew everyone who’s anyone here in San Francisco?” He grinned and waited, hoping that his smile was still boyish enough to wield some power.

“Well”—Grace put the looseleaf on the corner of her desk and looked up at Rosten—“I can’t be sure about the ‘Harold’ part, but there used to be a cop named Skip Olsen we’d see in here. ’Course that was some years back. You were probably still in school then”—she paused—“or maybe you weren’t. No, it’s within the last ten or fifteen years.”

“What happened to Olsen? He retire?”

“Too young to retire. It seems to me there was some kind of scandal. You know, one of those after-hours parties the police keep getting caught at, with drugs or sex or whatever. Olsen was on the outs with the rest of the cops after that. Then he was gone.” She looked up at him quizzically. “Why do you want to know, Dr. Rosten?”

“I knew I’d heard the name. It was going to bug me till I could remember where.” He grinned. “You’ve saved me the trouble.”

He was still grinning when he walked into the Medical Examiner’s office and telephoned an acquaintance at the Hall of Justice. “Dr. Rosten, Acting Coroner, calling for Inspector Hernicki.”

“Would you hold, Mr. Rosten?”

Dr.
Rosten, he wanted to insist. Instead he waited. That was the problem with being a public servant, dealing with other public servants. Everything moved like the dead. He fingered the Delaney file on his desk. There was nothing questionable in it, just as there’d been nothing odd in the autopsy. And yet Kiernan had been looking for something. He’d have to read it over again.

The phone line crackled. “Hey, Marc, how you doing, boy?”

“Live and kicking. You, Fred?”

“Live, but not kicking as hard as I used to.”

Rosten waited another moment, hoping Hernicki would ask what he wanted,
offer
his services. He hated this business of begging for favors, knowing he’d get a call in a month or two from Hernicki that would make him scurry around for paperwork, or force him to pressure the lab techs and get them pissed off at him, or jolly them along and end up owing them, too. If he were in private practice … Patients weren’t perfect, he knew that. There would be things he’d have to put up with. But they wouldn’t be this Tammany Hall of favors and back pats. “I need a favor, an easy one.”

“Shoot.” Hernicki was giving nothing.

“Guy named Harold Olsen. Used to be with your department. Got in some kind of hassle then left. I gather he’s none too popular down there with you guys.”

“You could say that.” Hernicki’s voice was crisp. “You asking what he was up to?”

“In part.”

When Hernicki relayed the tale of the Flamingo Café, Rosten smiled. “Olsen’s a private eye now, Fred.”

“We know that. We haven’t forgotten him. You’re not thinking of hiring the asshole, are you?”

Rosten laughed. “No, just the opposite. He’s working with another PI who’s badgering me.”

“You want us to keep an eye on him? See if he’s jaywalking? See if the other guy’s parking illegally?”

“The other guy’s a woman, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy.” Rosten held his breath, momentarily afraid that Hernicki had been around long enough to remember him and Kiernan.

Hernicki said, “Constables of the Peace at your service. It’ll be a pleasure to serve you.”

Rosten put down the receiver. In the silence of the Medical Examiner’s office, his skin felt warm with the rush of power, of control. And underneath was a cold swirling fear, as he realized just how easy it was to step inside Tammany Hall!

A
N EARLY ONE O’CLOCK.
W
ITH
luck, Kiernan thought, she’d make it to Hartoonian’s and back across the Golden Gate Bridge before rush hour began. She followed the cable-car tracks up California Street. The bright sun of the morning was gone and thin clouds obscured the horizon. Winter weather.

By the time she hit the Golden Gate Bridge, the mist was blowing strong across all six lanes. She held the wheel firm against the wind and glanced down at the choppy water below. In the fifty-some years since the bridge had been completed, nearly nine hundred people had jumped off it—San Franciscans who ended their downhill skids there, New Yorkers, Carolinians, Kansans who’d moved inexorably west, as if pulled by the magnet of death. They’d stood, almost all of them facing not the vast cold of the Pacific, but looking toward the skyline of San Francisco. The wind at their backs, for once. Then they jumped. When their bodies rose after three days, bloated from the gasses of decomposition, the coast guard brought them to the morgue. Despite—or perhaps because of—their condition, the floaters had produced more than their share of jokes among the irreverent pathology residents, the mildest of them being that resurrection was not what it was cracked up to be.

At the north end of the bridge, the mist had turned to rain. The houses were smaller, older, reminiscent of the Bay Area she remembered from twelve years ago. On the ocean side of the narrow, two-lane road, the ground dropped into arroyos of tall tan grasses flecked with green. It was a road made for the Triumph, she thought grumpily, as she yanked the Jeep into the turn.

Atmospheric Analysis sat near the crest of the hills, a rain-streaked, brown-shingled geodesic dome about forty feet in diameter. Kiernan recalled briefly considering the dome-home kits ten years ago, well after the height of their popularity. “Roll with the quake,” the brochure had promised. But somehow a house that flipped over to bobsled down the hillside seemed hardly more appealing than one that lurched off its foundation and crumbled. “How do you drag it back up?” she had asked the salesman.

Apparently it was not a question that had bothered the folks at Atmospheric Analysis.

She pulled up next to a white Bronco, hurried across the bare ground to the decking and pushed the buzzer. There was no portico to protect the waiting guest from the blowing rain.

She was about to ring again when the door opened, revealing a soft, sallow man in a brown flannel shirt and ill-fitting cords. His short brown hair lay flat against his bony skull, and the only roundness in his thin face came from the lenses of his black-rimmed glasses. Through them his dark eyes seemed too large, too intense for his pale face. It was hard to believe that this nervous, ashen man was the sought-after Harpoon. He looked like the closest he’d come to a fish was a tuna sandwich.

“I’m Kiernan O’Shaughnessy,” she said extending a hand. “I need to talk to you about Atmospheric Analysis.”