Rogue Wave (7 page)

Kiernan slid down to sit on the sofa. “When was this break-in?”

“There may have been more than one. Gar complained about things being moved, but I didn’t pay attention. It wasn’t until yesterday that I saw a change I knew neither of us could have made. But maybe I was just looking more carefully.”

“Maybe you were thinking about Robin Matucci.”

“Maybe.”

Kiernan turned to face Maureen directly. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? It could be important.”

“I realize that. I’m sorry. The whole thing’s just so overwhelming. After the last three years to finally have the chance of getting that woman …”

Kiernan stared at her. “Maureen, is there anything else I should know?”

“No. You’ve got it all.”

“You’re sure? Think.”

“I’m sure,” she said, irritably.

“Okay. I’ll be in touch.”

“Tomorrow. Ten o’clock,” Maureen insisted.

Kiernan headed the Jeep west, into the wind and the bright afternoon sun. Was Maureen’s story of the break-ins true? Was that story what she’d been hiding? That was the question to hold and ponder.

Why had she agreed to take this case? Certainly not for the money, which at best she would feel guilty about accepting. Was it for the excuse to face down Marc Rosten? She mentally shook her head, knowing at the same moment that she was lying. Making Rosten break the rules for her was part of it. But not all. Was it the thought of passionate Garrett Brant, now become the ultimate unreachable lover? Or was it the absolute horror of Maureen Brant’s future: life imprisonment with a man she could scarcely recognize?

K
IERNAN WAS IN
M
ONTEREY
when she got through to Marc Rosten. “Rosten here.” The voice was gruff, but a note of excitement tempered it. Kiernan could picture Marc Rosten poised anxiously for a call, a lab report, the answer to something he couldn’t wait to know. But it was the Marc Rosten of twelve years ago she envisioned: a small, wiry man with black curly hair and watchful brown eyes that seemed always on the lookout, as if what he knew was never quite enough—as if the next elusive fact would be the one that would provide him certainty.

“Marc, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy.”

“Kiernan? … Oh … Kiernan. … This is a surprise. What can I do for you?” There were pauses between each phrase.

His tone changed from the sharps of curiosity to the flats of wariness. No social niceties, she noted. But that had never been a part of their relationship.

“I need a favor.”

“A favor?”

“I need to see one of your cadavers.”

“Oh, are you back with the coroner’s office?”

Was that a note of condescension? Obviously she wouldn’t be back with the coroner if she’d needed his support. Taking a moment to make sure her own voice didn’t betray her anger, she said, “No, I’m private, investigating a hit-and-run. Your cadaver is only incidental to it. I could get an okay from his family or his lawyer, but that would waste a lot of time. The trail goes cold fast in cases like this one.”

Over the phone she could hear another phone ring, a door slam. “Surely,” he said, “you recall the rule here: the morgue is not a zoo; we don’t give tours.”

“And surely, Marc, you don’t expect me to believe that holds true for the acting coroner,” she said, her fury seeping out of control.
Out of control:
that summed up her months with Marc Rosten.

“Kiernan, I’m in charge here. It’s up to me to uphold the rules. I—”

“You owe me! You know that. Let me see Carlos Delaney’s body and we’re square. This is an easy out for you.”

He didn’t reply. She could picture him nervously moving a report from one pile to another, as if keeping things in motion would prevent them from settling long enough to threaten him. She pictured his bushy eyebrows drawn tight in angry consideration, his full lips pressed together. She could tell him she knew about his refusal to support her when she was fired, but she hated to waste her last card. Instead, she said, “I’ll be there at eight tonight, at the parking lot door.”

M
ARC ROSTEN SLAMMED DOWN
the phone. “Damn her!” He realized his jaw was tight with anger, his free hand jammed into a fist. And his groin hard. That last discovery made him even more furious. “Damn her to hell!”

He glared down at the stack of “While You Were Out”s his secretary had put on his desk before she went home. Connelly at Northern Station about the Jessup report—third call. Connelly was one of those cops who never got the idea that bacteria couldn’t be rushed. For Connelly, lab reports should take as long as it took to type them up. Well, Connelly could damn well wait. He crumpled the message and threw it into the garbage. Merke, the architect, re: the specs for remodeling the tox lab. An Anita Kole from the Northern California Association of Pharmacology, re: his lecture. Postmortem reports from the last two days to initial. Call from the tox lab. Call from Heins, the forensic dentist. Call from … Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. Dammit, he was not going to have thoughts of her interfering with his work. Not again. It had taken him nearly a decade to erase them.

It was too quiet in the Medical Examiner’s office. The pictures of the ME’s wife and kids were gone, but the place still had his potted plants, his desk set, and his chair—made for a man eight inches taller than Rosten. Every time he sat in it Rosten felt like a kid who has sneaked into his daddy’s chair. He was used to the office he shared with three other pathologists, where the phone was always ringing, there was plenty of talk, and clerks would stop to chat when they brought in reports. There was always something going on.

He picked up the phone, punched Merke’s number. No answer. It was after five; he must have gone home. Rosten replaced the receiver and looked down at the desk. But it wasn’t the desk he was seeing, it was that first day on pathology rotation twelve years ago. There had been only one postmort in progress when Susman had guided the clutch of them in. “Well-nourished white female,” he remembered Bailey muttering with a snicker as they neared the whalelike shape. The Y incision had already been made, and whoever was doing the work was clipping the rib cartilage with a tool that looked like something meant to prune rosebushes. The whole scene made him want out. But slinking off was not the Rosten style. He’d forced himself to push his way toward the front. He should remember the corpse, but he didn’t. He couldn’t even recall the pathologist.

What he remembered was Kiernan, the green scrubs hanging loose on her small body, her dark eyes focused entirely on the corpse. What was it about her that had hooked him? He remembered her firm breasts, the round of her hips … but that was later. Then it was all intensity, that passion vibrating just below her skin. Other guys had found her obsessed with medicine, too fascinated with forensic pathology, too bright, too abrupt, too unyielding. But he had seen a passion that matched his own.

The light through his bedroom window had been filtered by a maple tree then. He could still see the lines of yellow and gray as they cut across … He shook his head sharply. This was not the time to think of that.

He went to the cabinet and extricated the Delaney file. After twelve years she calls him out of the blue, and what does she want? The Delaney file. He laughed soundlessly. Well, the other guys in that internship class wouldn’t be surprised, would they?

But what could she want to know about Delaney, the drowning? He pulled the coast guard report and scanned it. Thirty-foot waves the day Delaney’s boat must have capsized. Perfect weather to drown in. He had the cause of death, and the contributing factor. No question on this one.

No question—and yet he’d already had two other calls on Delaney. One from a Dwyer Cummings from Coastal Oil Group asked for the Delaney autopsy protocol. Who was this Cummings, and why did he want to know about Delaney? And Jessica Leporek. He’d heard of her, naturally. Woman running the local campaign for that initiative to impede oil drilling. She didn’t ask for the autopsy report, just left a request to call her back re: Delaney. No, not a request; a demand that implied she was a powerful woman, or would be if the initiative passed—which seemed pretty doubtful from what Rosten had read. The coroner’s office got calls about autopsies all the time, but from relatives or the press, not people like these. They’d made him uneasy enough to take a second look at Delaney.

He could, of course, not let Kiernan in. It was tempting. Who the hell was she to say he owed her? So he hadn’t come to her rescue when she got herself fired from the coroner’s office up north, but that was years ago. And she of all people should not have missed a single indicator in a single autopsy. All right, so he was the only pathologist in the area who’d said that. None of them knew her like he did. She hadn’t changed their lives.

At eight o’clock he could leave her standing at the back door. But he knew he wasn’t going to.

K
IERNAN COULD HAVE TAKEN
the freeway, but this late in the afternoon the coast road was just as fast and much more appealing. The Jeep was a St. Bernard, a savior in mud or blizzard, but the Triumph—she sighed, yearning for her sleek black convertible—the Triumph was a greyhound. She knew she was driving the Jeep too fast. It’s not a game, Tchernak had said before finally refusing to ride with her on roads like this. But for her it was—a dumb game, a lethal one. And the rush she got screeching out of a hairpin curve next to a two-hundred-foot drop was right up there with sex.

Past Monterey the road flattened. She passed Ano Nuevo, where the elephant seals came to mate, and headed on into miles of fog-laden dunes, cold, secret places washed by the sounds of eternity. The scenery reminded her of the Great Highway farther north, where Robin Matucci had left Garrett Brant for dead.

Why? Kiernan asked herself again. Take the evidence at face value: Matucci had struck Garrett with her car, stopped, got out, looked down at him, and then simply walked away. But why even stop? Remorse? To see if she could help? Apparently not. Why leave him to die? Panic? Possibly. And what about Delaney? Did she kill him, or was that Maureen’s wishful thinking? After she’d had a look at the body at the morgue, Kiernan thought, she’d have a better idea.

Tendrils of fog floated across the two-lane road. This part of Highway 1 was empty except for the illegally parked campers pulled off in beach lots. She turned on the radio, slowly twisting the dial, ear cocked for the moan of guitar strings. The words “Proposition Thirty-Seven” stopped her hand. The offshore drilling initiative.

A male voice was saying: “… debate between Dwyer Cummings of the Energy Producers’ Group and Jessica Leporek, Northern California Director of the Initiative Campaign. Good evening. Our first question will deal with the issue of offshore drilling itself. What’s at stake here? Mr. Cummings?”

“Lots, Barry.” Cummings’s voice held traces of a southern accent. “The D.O.L, that’s the Department of the Interior for those of you who aren’t on a nickname basis with these guys, well, they estimate that there’s one point three billion barrels of oil out there on the Outer Continental Shelf. We need that supply for virtually everything from driving our cars to heating our houses, cooking our food, and warming our bathwater. Our—”

“Let me interject here,” a woman, presumably Jessica Leporek, insisted, “that one point three billion barrels is merely seventy-seven days’ worth of oil. Are we willing to endanger our beaches for less than a three-months’ supply!”

Cummings let a moment pass before saying, “Well, Jessica, that just shows you how critical each drilling site is. But to get back to my point: we in the oil industry are frequently painted as the bad guys in this. I’ll tell you right now, we hate that. We don’t want oil spilling any more than you do. We go to the beach, we care about the birds and the otters just like everyone else. And, added to that, we have a big investment in that oil. With the cost of gasoline skyrocketing even if we cared nothing about the environment, we still wouldn’t want our supply wasted in a spill.”

“Wanting is one thing, Dwyer, but here’s the record. Spills the size of the one from the Exxon
Valdez
in Alaska—that’s eleven million gallons—occur every single year. Spills of one million gallons occur every single month. And nobody, Dwyer, neither the coast guard nor the petroleum industry, believe we can clean up more than a few thousand gallons.”

There was another pause. “I’m glad you raised the clean-up efforts. Let me tell you what we are doing. The—”

Kiernan moved the knob. She’d heard all this before. It didn’t matter what they were doing, Tchernak had insisted, because no one could clean up a bad oil spill. “It’d be like having someone dump tons of molasses down your chimney. It fills the whole house. There’d be just enough air space for Ezra to keep breathing,” he’d added quickly. “Now, your problem is to clean it up without letting that molasses get outside the house, where it will wreck something else. You can skim off the liquid, but how are you going to get the hardened gook off the ceiling, the carpets, the mattress? How will you clean your papers, your computer keyboard, and Ezra? All that and keep him from tracking goo back over every spot you’ve already cleaned, getting himself sick in the process? You can’t, of course. That’s the bottom line.”

She glanced across the sand to the breakers, now almost hidden behind the thickening fog. The latest pole listed the initiative as too close to call. She turned the radio knob until she heard guitar music. The moan of the strings moved down her spine. After a while it echoed between her breasts and she thought not about the Spill Initiative, but about Marc Rosten and what a dangerous decision it was to see him again.

Twelve years ago, with him everything had seemed fine, then without warning, it was rubble.

The coast road widened to eight lanes by the outskirts of the city. The dark and the fog billowing in from the Pacific made it feel unnaturally cozy. She pulled over at the top of Upper Market Street and looked down the slope at the lights of downtown San Francisco: ropes of yellow beads glowing against the silky blackness, diamond sparkles as the trolleys switched overhead power lines, blue and salmon neon outlining new high-rises. She loved this view of the city, the promise of freedom.