Rogue Wave (27 page)

Tchernak was not amused. “That’s not the worst of it.”

“It has to be the worst. What could be worse than speaking ill of this best of all possible dogs? A dog who’s bark is worthy of the San Diego Men’s Chorus.”

“I made the man chicken soup. Homemade. Cornfed chicken. Vegetables that came with the roots intact.”

“That for a man who complained about Ezra?”

“Olsen turned up his stuffed-up nose at it. He’ll only eat Lipton’s!”

Kiernan threw her head back and guffawed. Ezra bayed. From the bedroom Olsen yelled, “Hey, what the hell”—and dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing.

“Congratulations, Tchernak,” Kiernan after she’d got control of herself. “You are about to be inducted into a very exclusive club.”

“What’s involved in this induction?” he asked, his hazel eyes narrowing in mock suspicion.

“Nothing, you’ve already proved your worthiness.” She lifted her glass. “To Bradley Walka Tchernak, second member of the No Bedside Manner Club.”

Tchernak leaned forward and kissed her. “That is the initiation ritual, isn’t it?”

The bedroom door burst open. “Jeez,” Olsen growled. Dank brown hair clumped on his forehead, hanging halfway over his eyes. His face was a pale yellow, the fleshy cheeks drawn. He leaned heavily on the door frame, listing to his right as if to keep the weight off the left hip.

“Get back in bed,” Kiernan ordered.

“I don’t—”

“Do as I tell you or we leave you here on your own.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me. Look, Skip, it’s only your miserable condition that’s kept me from talking to you longer before. Now get back in bed and get ready to answer a few questions. And then, dammit, you can eat your dehydrated sodium-packed packaged chicken soup while Brad and I have the real stuff for lunch.”

Olsen hesitated, then turned and slowly limped back to bed.

As Kiernan started to follow, Tchernak whispered, “You’ll always be number one in the club!”

Olsen lay amidst a tangle of sweat-damp sheets and blankets. The pillow was clumped under one side of his head. It needed fluffing. Ignoring this, she said, “Okay. Answer some questions for me. You hired Delaney six weeks ago. How did you know about Robin then?”

“The car.” Olsen shoved the pillow behind him. “I tracked down the red convertible,” he said proudly.

And on the strength of that he put Delaney on the boat, and then Delaney was killed. Now it was clearer why he wasn’t willing to take the chance of Kiernan turning down the case. By this point Olsen had nearly as much of himself invested as Maureen. Kiernan smiled grimly. Obsession was something she understood. “Tell me about the wire. Delaney didn’t install that, did he? Robin put it in.”

Olsen raised an eyebrow. “How’d you”—He tensed, grabbed for the sheet, and let out a sneeze of hurricane proportions.

Kiernan glanced away. “Hartoonian said Cummings had told her business secrets unintentionally. Quite a scam Robin had there, overhearing the business get-togethers Cummings set up. He gets guys from different oil companies together. They’re all swapping ideas, admittedly carefully, but still one or two tidbits must have fallen every so often. Did she take out other oil company groups?”

“Specialized in them. She was the favored one with the oil guys.” Olsen reached for a tissue and blew.

“So all Robin had to do was keep abreast of moves in the industry—no big deal when she heard men talking about it all day on her boat. She’d recognize the slip of the tongue that could mean money when passed on to the right party. When did Delaney realize Robin was on to him?”

Still holding the tissue in front of his nose, he mumbled, “Not what you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking?”

“She didn’t uncover him one day and kill him the next. Look, Delaney was the first operative I had to hire. I should have checked up on him more. But I got it on good authority he was honest. And it didn’t seem like too tough a job. I thought he could handle it. I never would have …” A series of coughs shook him. He grabbed the sheet again, coughed into it. When he had got his breath back, he said, “Delaney screwed up looking for the wire. Two weeks before he died he told me he’d marked up the woodwork around the windows when he’d found the wires and he was afraid Robin would notice.”

Kiernan didn’t ask how Olsen had handled that. Judgment calls, they were part of the trade. She said, “We both know how fussy Robin was about that boat. Something like that she’d notice right off.”

“But, Kiernan, he scuffed the woodwork two weeks before he died.”

“Maybe she had to wait for bad enough weather to cover his drowning.”

“In those two weeks we had enough small-craft warnings to sink a navy. Maybe it had something to do with her argument with Jessica.”

“Argument with Jessica! Skip, is this another little fact you haven’t bothered to tell me? How long have you known about this?”

“Hey, wait!” He held up a quivering hand. “This is the info I got on the dock day before yesterday. I paid a big price for this lead. It’s not like I’ve been lying in the sun, you know. I’ve—”

“Skip, for Chrissakes, tell me about the argument!”

“I just did. That’s all I know. What I got, from one of the deckhands, was that the two ladies were staring daggers at each other. There were words, but he was too far away to hear.”

Kiernan sighed irritably.

Olsen waited a beat, then said, “This argument, Kiernan, it was two days before Matucci went under.”

She would have expected to find a smug smile on his face, but he was still clutching the sheet in front of his mouth, uneasily, guiltily. Why? She leaned back against the wall and said, “What is it you can’t talk about this time?”

“Nothing. They—Nothing.”

“They? Who?”

Involuntarily Olsen glanced at his hip.

“The guys who kidnapped you. What did they want to know?”

“About Delaney,” he muttered half into the sheet.

“So they knew he was an investigator.”

“Yeah, they knew.”

“What did you tell them?” Getting information out of Olsen was like pulling out pubic hairs, a painful proposition with ugly results.

“I told them nothing. I said Delaney hadn’t reported his findings to me.”

“Surely they didn’t believe that.”

Olsen snorted, then gagged in response to the snort. “No. That was when they said they were going to break my good hip. You know what that would do to me?”

Kiernan winced. “I can see why you’d talk.”

“I didn’t tell them everything,” Olsen insisted indignantly. “I said it had taken Delaney a long time to learn the job and so he hadn’t come up with anything except that Robin took out oil company guys.”

“Surely they didn’t accept that either. How long could it take a bright guy to learn to bait hooks and clean fish? So what did you give them?”

“Well, I had to tell them something, right?”

“If someone were going to break my one good hip, I’d talk.”

Olsen was sweating. “I just told them that Delaney hadn’t been able to report in ten days.”

What was the man avoiding? What could he have told his captors that he was so afraid of admitting, to her. What would she— “Delaney’s address, you gave them that, right?”

“Had to. They were going to break my hip.” He slid lower under the covers.

He was still protecting himself; his whole posture screamed it. So what else had he told them? Delaney’s address and … Blood heated her face; her hands clenched into fists. Very slowly she said, “You told them I would be breaking into Delaney’s apartment, didn’t you?”

Olsen coughed weakly.

“Skip, admit it!”

“Well, Kiernan,” he spoke from a mouth half hidden by sheet. “What choice did I have? I didn’t tell them
when
you’d be there.”

“You didn’t
know
that. And what difference did that make? They wouldn’t expect me to break in in the middle of the day. So it meant that all they had to do was watch the place after dark—watch me go in, give me enough time to find what was important, and break in and take it from me!”

“Kiernan, I didn’t know—”

“Forget it,” she snapped.

“But—”

“I said forget it. You wanted to sleep. Sleep.” She strode out of the room and slammed the door.

Tchernak was standing in the kitchen, half-sliced loaf of sourdough on a cutting board on the counter behind him, serrated knife clutched daggerlike in his hand. “So, I take it we’re leaving?”

Kiernan shook her head.

Ezra hoisted himself up and walked over, shoving his head against her ribs.

“Look, I heard all that. The little whiner could have gotten you killed. Dumb enough you couldn’t resist housebreaking …” He was waving the knife like a baton.

“Tchernak, I’m not about to give up the case. I’m too close. Jessica Leporek could clear up the whole thing. But,” she said looking at the eager Tchernak, “we can’t both leave here. We can’t abandon Olsen, because we can’t trust him.”

K
IERNAN HURRIED INTO
the “Yes on 37” office. The storefront was mobbed; phones rang cacophonously. Groups of volunteers huddled in every corner, clipboards in hand. At one side of the room a copy machine hummed and spat out papers. The whole place reeked of copier fumes and bad coffee. Kiernan smiled at the sandy-haired boy behind the desk and hurried through the cup-and-paper-strewn back room to Jessica’s office. Jessica Leporek’s appearance gave new meaning to the phrase “three days before the election.” Her red hair was scraped back in a rubber band; it appeared to have been finger-combed. If she’d started the day with makeup, she’d rubbed it off. She was brushing papers from the top of a pile with her right hand, clutching the phone with her left. “Don’t tell me offshore drilling will reduce the need for tankers! Do you think the oil companies are going to allot every drop they drill out there to gas stations along the coast? Of course not. They’re going to transport that oil. How are they going to move it? Tankers, right? The cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles won’t allow pipelines through their waters. Any platforms there have to load tankers. Up here we’ve already got more than a thousand tankers a year coming through the Golden Gate. Just one of average size carries sixty percent more oil than the Exxon
Valdez
spilled. That’s over seventeen million gallons a ship. Do you know what the cleanup capability for this area is? I’ll tell you. Eight hundred forty thousand gallons. You got those figures? Good, well, print that!” She put down the receiver, clearly restraining the urge to slam it. Glancing up at Kiernan, she squinted. “You’re the detective, right? Look, I answered your questions, gave you time I couldn’t afford. You want to ask me more, you’ll have to wait till after the election. Then I’ll have forever. If I live so long.”

Kiernan moved a pile of papers, sat on the corner of Leporek’s desk and said, “I’ll be brief. Robin—”

“I told you I’m sorry if the woman is dead, but—”

“You’re not, of course. But that’s beside the point. The point is you had an argument with her two days before she disappeared. It’s not your fault, doubtless it wasn’t your intention, but whatever you said to Robin pushed her over the edge.”

Jessica laughed. “Robin Matucci is not the type of woman to be pushed over the edge. And certainly not by mere words.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing that would cause her to take her boat out in a deadly storm.” She turned her attention back to the most precarious pile, batting ineffectually at the edges.

“What did you tell her?”

“Look, I don’t need to talk to you.”

Kiernan lowered her voice. “Jessica, I’m going to reveal to you something I’ve discovered in my investigation. Robin Matucci is definitely alive.”

Jessica stopped abruptly. “Are you sure?”

“What did you and Robin argue about? The memo that was stolen from Dwyer Cummings?”

She turned back to the pile, tapping the edges frenetically.

“Jessica, I’m good at my job. I found out about Robin. I’ll discover the rest, but you can save me a lot of time. I’d appreciate that.”

Jessica’s hands slowed, then stopped. “Okay, okay. Here is the whole, full, entire story. Three years ago at the gallery opening Garrett Brant told me he had a memo that would skewer the oil industry. He said he’d give it to me.”

“How did he get this memo? And why was he so willing to part with it?”

“I didn’t ask. I figured I’d get the memo first and ask questions after I had it in my hand. He’d promised it to a woman charter captain—”

“Robin. Why would he give it to her?”

“Money. I got the impression she offered him plenty. But between then and the time he talked to me, he found out he was a finalist for the Arts of the Land prize. Even if he didn’t win—he expected he would, Garrett wasn’t modest about his work—even as a runner-up, he knew he’d get enough press and shows and sales so that he wouldn’t need the money, wouldn’t need to sell his principles. He really did care about the environment; his canvases show that. And”—Jessica laughed—“he’d been working as a janitor for the oil companies for months. He loved the idea of getting back at them. So he was willing to give the memo to me.”

“But he didn’t.”

“He said he needed to tell his boat captain first. That was a principle, too. He was going to see her the next day.” She turned and looked directly at Kiernan. “The next day he was hit by a car. He never got his memory back. I never got the memo.”

“And that’s why you kept after Robin Matucci, because you figured she might have it?” Kiernan began to feel the excitement she always found when the pieces came together.

“Right. She denied even seeing Garrett. There was no proof.”

“What exactly was in the memo?”

With an irritated sigh, Jessica slammed back against the chair. “I told you: I don’t know. If I knew—if it’s as important as I think it is—I’ve have it in every ad in the campaign.”

“Surely you asked Garrett.”

“Of course I asked. But Garrett was a tease and he loved having a secret.”

“Still he had to have told you some fact. You wouldn’t have coveted this memo for years because an artist you just met thought it was important.”