Rogue Wave (2 page)

There was another short pause. This one, she suspected, was the vacuum left by unfulfilled curiosity. Then he said, “I’ve got this drowning that might not be a drowning. I need you to check out the body.”

“Wait a minute.
You’ve
got this case? You’re not with the department anymore. Have you gone private?”

“I’m licensed. Not that big a deal for a guy who was a police sergeant.”

“But?” she prompted, responding to his tone.

“I do background checks, things like that that don’t call for much legwork. Like I said, I got lamed out—took a shot in the hip. They put my pelvis back together, but my days of fast getaways are gone.” He gave an uncomfortable laugh. “But this isn’t just a new case. It’s connected to a hit-and-run I handled three years ago on beat.”

On beat?

“The client is Maureen Brant. Here’s the story. A party fishing boat—you know, the type that takes groups out to fish for a day or so—went down south of San Francisco. That was ten days ago. Two people were aboard, Robin Matucci, the owner and captain, and her deckhand, Carlos Delaney. Delaney’s body, or what’s left of it, was washed up on the Farallons. Matucci’s never turned up.”

“Not surprising,” Kiernan said, warming to the subject in spite of her hesitation about Olsen. “I did the postmortems on a few Golden Gate jumpers when I was at Bryant Street. One was washed all the way out to the Farallons.”

“Not much left, I’ll bet. Farallons are the only spot around where the ocean floor isn’t too deep for marine life. You got the whole food chain out there: plankton, little fish, salmon, albacore, sea lions and the sharks. And plenty of happy crabs on the bottom all the time. You drop something or
somebody
in the water near there, don’t expect to see them again. Or, if you do, they end up looking like lace tablecloths.”

Kiernan recalled that false bravado of Olsen’s; remembered him looking down at a drowned pimp on the slab and snidely pronouncing, “Not so well hung any more, huh?” The pathologist at the next table had begun clipping rib cartilage. Olsen had turned whiter than the autopsy table and run for the sink.

“Four minutes,” Tchernak called, clearly irritated.

“Three years ago,” Olsen hurried on, “Maureen Brant’s husband, Garrett, was found unconscious on the side of the Great Highway out by the ocean. We figured he was walking by the dunes when the car struck him.”

Garrett Brant. The name sounded familiar.

“You remember the Great Highway?”

“I lived in the city for seven years. The Great Highway isn’t a place you forget,” she said tersely. Skip Olsen had always made her a bit terse—her and everybody else, too. But she did remember the Great Highway, better than he’d have thought. Oddly deserted for a metropolitan beach, the dunes beyond it provided delicious if icy seclusion for lovers. Kiernan had discovered them in the spring of her first year of internship. For a pair of interns trying to escape the long, harried shifts at San Francisco General, the fog-covered dunes were a soft, secluded womb for a sleeping bag, a foolishly romantic spot in which to wrap each other close in a passion that blocked out thoughts of hospital rounds, IVs, and death; a place to drink wine from specimen containers while the May sun sank into the muddy gray Pacific. In winter, angry gusts off the ocean tossed tons of sand up and over the macadam, creating impassable dunes where the road had been.

“Whoever left your client’s husband unconscious chose one of the places best suited to death by hypothermia.”

“Three minutes, Kiernan!” Tchernak glared through the connecting doorway to his kitchen.

“Okay.” To Olsen, she said, “I’ve got to make this fast. What’s the link between the drowning ten days ago and this three-year-old hit-and-run?”

“I caught the call on Brant back then. I could see he was in bad shape the second I looked at him. It took exactly five-and-a-half minutes for the medics to roll up, so I had plenty of time to observe him. I noticed two things: one was a trail of blood from his nose. The other was a couple of hairs stuck in the blood. Reddish hairs. And Brant’s a blond.”

“The blood was from traumatic hemorrhage?”

“Good guess, but no,” Olsen said, a touch of satisfaction in his voice. “It was a one-in-a-million stroke of bad luck. The windshield had shattered and sent slivers of glass flying at Brant. There was glass everywhere. But—and here’s the one in a million—one sliver went up his nose.”

Kiernan shivered. “And lodged in his brain?”

“Right. Of course. There was no way I could know that at the time.”

“Two minutes!”

Nodding at Tchernak, Kiernan said to Olsen, “But you realized that the red hairs had to have fallen in the blood after the accident.”

“I bagged them, got the department to run a DNA check, and convinced a friendly tech to check it against every new San Francisco sample they ran. Three years and I came up empty.”

“Until now.”

“Right. Until the remains of that boat washed up on the beach. There’d been a fire. There wasn’t much more left of the boat than there was of Delaney, but the remains included part of the wheelhouse. The lab needed to identify Delaney. So they ran the hairs. They didn’t find a match for his, but they found the captain’s, Robin Matucci’s. And hers matched the hair stuck in Garrett Brant’s blood.”

“A DNA match in less than a week? Come on, Olsen. The tests for that are run sequentially; you can’t complete them so quickly.”

Olsen made an odd grunting sound. “Okay, Doc, semantic difference. What they ran was a PCR test.”

“Not just a semantic difference. The polymerase chain reaction is only ninety-three percent accurate—at best.”

“Yeah, but add to that that a witness saw a red convertible near the scene of the hit-and-run, and Robin Matucci drives a red sports car.”

“Did she have it three years ago?”

“She did. And she’s one of only fourteen women in all of San Francisco who’ve got both red hair and red convertibles. Maybe you’ve been gone too long to recall that San Francisco is fog land. Only people with money to blow buy convertibles so they can freeze.”

Tchernak rounded the doorway, platter in hands. Ezra jumped up and bounded to the table.

“Have a seat,” Tchernak grumbled “since you’re the only one who’s interested.”

Refusing to acknowledge the jibe, Kiernan said, “The red convertible could have been borrowed. Still, okay, so the woman who captained this boat is a suspect in the attack on Brant three years ago.”

“Yes and no.”

“What?”

“The statute of limitations for felonious vehicular assault is three years and one day. The accident was just over three years ago. The statute’s run out. And I’m off the force, so, for all intents and purposes the Brant case is closed. But for Garrett Brant’s wife, it’s more open than ever, and she wants to hire you.”

“To do what? If Robin Matucci went over the side of the boat and didn’t wash up on the Farallons, there’s a lot less left of her than there was of Delaney.”

“Officially, Matucci is only missing. And Mrs. Brant
believes
that. She wants you to find her.”

Tchernak popped the wine cork.

The smell of garlic and olive oil mixed with the musty scent of dog that was attractive only to a dog-owner. Why was Olsen so obsessed with this case? She shook off the question and said, “I don’t like wild-goose chases. I don’t have the patience for them. My fee is considerable and I’m not willing to charge a client to hold her hand. And I definitely won’t take her money for nothing.”

“It’s not ‘nothing’ to her. It’s a long shot, sure, but one she’s desperate to bet on. And you are the only person who can get her any odds at all.”

Tchernak was pouring the wine.

“Why me?”

“Because she needs a detective who can eyeball Delaney’s body and spot something that doesn’t fit with drowning.”

“Just what is it she wants me to find?”

“Proof that Delaney’s death was no accident, that he was murdered.”

“Whew! Two people go out on a small boat in the Pacific and one body is recovered and your client assumes that there was murder. That’s quite a leap.”

“We’re talking about a woman who left Garrett Brant for dead on the Great Highway.”

“Well,
bon appétit,
Ez.” Tchernak lifted his glass.

Turning her back to the table, Kiernan said, “Still, Olsen … Does your client have any facts that support her supposition? Did the coroner’s report find anything questionable?”

“The final report isn’t in yet, but the word I got is ‘drowning.’ Still, he could have missed something. That’s what Maureen needs you to find.”

Kiernan sighed. “This sounds more and more like a waste of time, Olsen. I know the coroner’s department in San Francisco. They’re not slipshod. And they’re not about to let strangers wander in to eyeball bodies. You need to be a representative of the family, or at least of the lawyer. They wouldn’t let you or me waltz in and critique their work.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. The acting coroner will let you in.”

Behind her, metal clanked loudly against china. Ezra slurped, the sure sound of an illicit handout.

“Skip, it’s been years since I was a resident with the San Francisco coroner.”

“He’ll let you in.”

She asked the question she could tell he was angling for. “Why?”

“Because the acting coroner of San Francisco is Marc Rosten.”

Her shoulders tensed and she could feel her face flushing. “That was a long time ago,” she said, surprised by the anger in her voice. “And I don’t like dealing with people who try to manipulate my private life. Find yourself another investigator.”

Behind her the clank of silverware hitting china stopped.

“Wait! I’m sorry, Doc. I guess that was out of line. But the thing is this case is real important to me. You understand what those red hairs stuck in Brant’s blood mean? After whoever hit him, that person got out of the car and stood over him. Then left him there in the cold to die. I got real hooked on this, and it’s obsessing Maureen Brant, too. She’s willing to spend the last cent she’s got on it, and I just want her to have the best she can get. Look, at least talk to her.”

Kiernan could hear the desperation in Olsen’s voice. She remembered she’d heard some kind of rumor about him a couple of years after she’d left San Francisco. He’d been demoted. Had there been a scandal? She couldn’t recall. But that would explain why he ended up back on beat before he retired. She glanced over at Tchernak, who was jabbing his fork into a clam’s midsection. “Voodoo doll?” she mouthed, and had a fleeting sensation of sharp pains in her own stomach. To Olsen she said, “Garrett Brant’s name sounds familiar.”

“He’s an artist. He had a couple of shows set up in California before the accident. They went ahead with them. He paints what they call ‘interpretive landscapes.’ One of the shows was in La Jolla. Maybe you saw an ad for it—the two pictures they used in the ad were called ‘Winter Bear’ and ‘Alaskan Mud Flats.’”

Kiernan shivered. “I saw Brant’s show down here. ‘Alaskan Mud Flats’ isn’t a picture you forget. At first it seemed like just another pretty sunset painting, but I found I couldn’t stop looking at it; no one could. It held you. There was something ominous in it. I don’t know enough about art to figure out why, technically. I read the card beside the canvas—about the people who’d died walking across those mud flats. The mud looked perfectly solid. One woman took a shortcut across them and that solid-looking mud sucked her down thigh-deep and hardened around her legs like cement. She couldn’t move. Her husband tried everything he could to get her out. Nothing helped. And then the tide came in—up over her chest, her neck, her nostrils. She drowned.”

Kiernan felt the same clutch of gut-fear she’d had three years ago. Such intensity of feeling was quite an endorsement for Garrett Brant, she thought.

As if reading her mind, Olsen said, “The critics felt Brant could have become the most perceptive landscape painter of our time. The guy needs your help.”

She shook her head, half-smiling. Olsen was probably sincere, but there was something of the dangerous mud flat in him, too. However honest he was, the slurping sound of deceit pulled at his words. But that wasn’t Brant’s fault. And it wouldn’t take long to talk to the Brants. She had to admit she was curious about the man who said so much on so many levels in a picture of mud and sun and water. And the idea of forcing Marc Rosten to give her something was not without appeal. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to them. Tell them to come here tomorrow.”

“Can’t do it. Garrett Brant can’t travel, and Maureen won’t leave him. You’ll have to go there.”

Kiernan sighed. “Okay. Where are they?”

“I don’t know exactly. Somewhere around Big Sur. Go to a grocery called Barrow’s, on Route 1, just past the sign for the town of Big Sur. She’ll leave you directions. I’ll call and tell them you’ll be there tomorrow around noon.”

“In the meantime, fax me whatever you’ve got on the Brants, Matucci, and Delaney. And Olsen, include the info about yourself, why you were demoted. I don’t take cases unless I know who I’m dealing with.”

D
R.
M
ARC
R
OSTEN,
ACTING
coroner of the city and county of San Francisco, washed the soap-and-Clorox mixture off his hands. He hadn’t noticed the din in the autopsy theater when he’d been working, but now the babble of pathologists dictating their findings, the sloshing of fluids, the metallic clanking of instruments hitting the porcelain tables, and the whir of a saw cutting through the frontal bone of a skull seemed deafening.

He looked back at the corpse on the gurney. He’d done the autopsy last week. It had been a relief to leave it to someone else to close—or at least to sew up as much as any autopsy assistant could manage to do. Five days in the ocean—not a pretty way to go. Despite the air-circulation system installed to pull up bacteria that might harbor contagion, the autopsy room still reeked with the sharp odor of body fluids, of bleach and burning bones, and of dead flesh gone rotten.

It had been twelve years, but he could still recall his own first day here. He wouldn’t have wanted a corpse like Delaney’s then. But twelve years had changed a lot of things. The bloat didn’t bother him the way it would have, nor the head that the crabs had eaten down to the bones. You couldn’t be squeamish in this line of work. And it wasn’t the exposure cases that got to him, it was the ones who looked as if they might get up off the table and go home for dinner. The ones a doctor might have saved—that
he
might have saved if he’d stayed with internal medicine rather than opting for forensic pathology.