The Keeper (4 page)

8

T
HE HOUSE WAS
a small stand-alone two-story on Stanyan Street in the Upper Haight-Ashbury District. Hal parked in the driveway in front of the garage door, and he and Glitsky walked up the sidewalk to the stairway leading to the porch. The front door featured a stained-glass half-moon window that glared in the rays of the setting sun.

Chase knocked twice, lightly, at the door. Footsteps sounded from ­inside, and then the door swung open and they were looking at an ­attractive fortysomething woman holding a swaddled baby up against her shoulder. Accepting a quick buss from her stepson, Ruth Chase pulled the door all the way open, while from behind her, another child came running up: “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

Hal Chase leaned down to grab up his daughter and press her to him, raining a flurry of kisses onto her face. “How's my very, very favorite girl?”

More kisses as the greetings continued to play out. Hal Chase might be an insensitive guy who yelled a lot, Abe thought, but his daughter gave every indication that she loved him absolutely.

Five minutes later, Ruth had settled Will into a playpen in the living room. Effectively out of earshot, Ellen sat at her own little table across the kitchen, drawing with crayons. Hal and Warren drank coffee from mugs while Glitsky, across the dining room table from the brothers, waited for the tea that Ruth was brewing in the kitchen.

If the half brothers shared genes, they weren't much in evidence. Hal was medium to stocky, with thick dark hair and ruddy coloring. Warren, perhaps a dozen years younger, was tall and lean, with wispy blond hair that he wore almost to his shoulders. He sported some grungy facial hair, a UCLA sweatshirt, well-worn jeans, and flip-flops—to Glitsky's mind, the typical college look.

Hal was finishing up the explanation of who Glitsky was and why he was there when Warren cut him off. “You mean to tell me the actual Missing Persons police aren't looking into where she's gone? What's that about?”

“It's about them thinking she's been”—Hal looked over at his daughter, engrossed in her drawing, and lowered his voice—“done away with. And,” he added, “apparently, they think I had something to do with it.”

“They can't really think that.” Ruth, carrying a tray with a teapot and cookies, stopped in the doorway. “When did all this happen? Nobody was saying anything like that over the weekend.”

“Maybe not, but they were thinking it. This morning, a couple of Homicide cops came to see me at work. It was obvious I was a suspect, and they thought Katie . . .” Again, he looked over to his daughter, who was paying them no mind, then he shrugged at the adults. “It was obvious what they thought.”

“So you went to a lawyer?” Ruth asked.

Hal nodded. “It seemed like a good idea. If they were going to be questioning me, I wanted some advice on what I should say.”

“How about the truth?” Ruth asked.

“Sometimes they can twist the truth and make it sound pretty bad.”

“But getting a lawyer, isn't that going to make you look guilty no matter what?” Warren asked. “I mean, you don't need a lawyer unless you've done something.”

“No. Sometimes you need a lawyer before anything happens. If only to keep it from happening.”

Ruth crossed to the table, placed a cup and saucer in front of Glitsky, and poured. “The bottom line is that no one's looking for Katie?”

“They say they are,” Hal said. “But they're looking for her body.”

“That's just wrong,” Ruth said. She turned to Glitsky. “That's why you're here, right?”

“I hope I can help find out where she is,” Glitsky said, trying to keep everything low-key. “Basically, I'm investigating her disappearance. If she doesn't use a credit card and we don't hear from her or whoever took her, I can't—”

“What do you mean, whoever took her?” Warren asked. “You think somebody kidnapped her?”

Glitsky put his cup into its saucer and held his hand out, palm down. “Easy,” he said softly to Warren. “Your brother and I talked on the way out here. He doesn't think she would have left on her own, not with the kids asleep in the next room. Do you think it's possible she did?”

Warren, flustered, met eyes around the table. “She could have had some sort of breakdown, couldn't she?”

“Possibly,” Glitsky said. “She also could have slipped and banged her head and woken up and wandered outside. Neither very likely.”

“You were saying,” Ruth put in, “that if she doesn't use a credit card or get in touch with us . . . ?”

“Then there's no trail,” Glitsky said. “And without a trail, finding her is going to be problematic.”

Ruth asked, “What are you looking for?”

“A reason,” Glitsky replied. “Something that makes sense, that leads somewhere, possibly to where she is now.”

“You mean, in her life?” Ruth asked. “What could that be? I mean, she was, is, a stay-at-home mother of infants. I don't say that disparagingly. I raised two boys, and it can be a noble calling. Are you saying she might have been involved in something that got her in trouble? That seems a stretch.”

“It might be,” Glitsky agreed. “If there's a rational answer at all.”

“What if it was a random crazy person?” Warren asked. “He saw Hal leave, and he looked through the window and saw Katie here alone and knocked at the door and had a weapon . . .”

Glitsky nodded. “Entirely possible. I don't have any idea. I've barely begun with this.” He sipped his tea. “At least I'm not trying to build a case against Hal. I'm trying to find out what happened to Katie and why. I'm not working with the police. Really. If there's an answer to be found, wherever it leads, I'll try to run it down. That's what I'm here for.”

“If there's an answer . . .” Hal said. “What if there isn't?”

“Let's not go there,” Glitsky said. “Not for a while, anyway.”

9

A
T ABOUT THE
same moment, JaMorris and Abby knocked at the front door of the Dunne home on Guerrero Street in the Mission District. It was a three-story structure on its own lot that gave the impression of ­having been the project of several shabbily genteel architects over its thirty years of life. Odd angles jutted from corners and roofs; the entire second floor seemed to float behind plate-glass windows; a fountain splashed over perennial reeds into a koi pond in the half-covered courtyard that doubled as the welcoming lobby on the first floor.

Exposing a fairly common vein in San Francisco's über-liberal culture, some past owners (or perhaps the Dunnes themselves) had spent serious money in an effort to render the home aggressively ­proletarian.

The detectives, negotiating around the bicycles parked along the walls, followed the head of the household down the hallway that ran inside along the courtyard, and came to a large family room at the back of the house, where three women sat on stools in front of a bar, turned to face their incoming visitors. Each had a full glass of white wine at her elbow, and all of their eyes showed signs of tears.

With an air of exhaustion, Curt Dunne stopped just inside the door and said with some formality, “These are Inspectors Monroe and Foley. Inspectors, my wife, Carli—Katie's mother—and my daughters, ­Barbara and Sherrie. My son, Daniel, couldn't get off work, but he told me he'd be glad to talk to you by appointment; I believe you have his numbers.”

“We do, thank you.” JaMorris turned to the women. “Thank you all for agreeing to sit down with us this afternoon. I know it's been, and continues to be, a tremendously difficult time.”

He silently ceded the floor to Abby, who picked up where he left off. “As you know, it's been nearly five full days since Katie's gone missing, and in that time we haven't heard from any third parties, such as kidnappers demanding a ransom. We haven't gotten any messages from Katie, and we don't have a record of her having accessed her credit cards or used her cell phone.” She paused. “Given all of these realities, we are forced to consider the possibility that Katie was the victim of foul play, perhaps even—I know you've all considered this—murder.”

At the word, Carli Dunne brought her hand to her mouth. Curt crossed over to stand directly behind her, his arm along the bar. The younger women, in tandem, reached for their wine.

JaMorris pulled up a stool from near the wall, sat down, and picked up the narrative. “This means that we're shifting the object of our investigation somewhat. It's not that we're not doing everything we can to locate Katie or some sign of where she could be, but if she was murdered, our next order of business is to identify a suspect whom we might profitably question to see whether we can move along this investigation and get to the bottom of what happened to Katie.”

“Since you are among the people who know her best and love her”—Abby, taking over, was careful to keep references to Katie in the present tense—“we thought an interview might help to get us off on the right foot. Now we understand, as you made clear to our colleagues last week, that you've always been on reasonably good terms with Hal, and that you're all going through this tragic time together, but—”

Suddenly, Curt Dunne blurted out, “No buts. Let's forget all that. Hal was the last one to see her alive. He had almost three hours between when he left the house and got home with his brother. Which is more than enough time to have done whatever he decided to do and—”

“Curt!” His wife put her hand down on his arm. “Wait! We can't just . . .”

“The hell we can't. We can call a spade a spade. Can you give me any other plausible scenario? Who the hell even knew he would be gone at exactly that time?”

JaMorris threw a glance at his partner. “So I'm gathering that you, at least, Mr. Dunne, think Hal might have played a role in Katie's disappearance? Missing Persons didn't mention anything about your suspicions. They said you were all coming from basically the same place, which was wondering what could have happened. Has something changed since last week?”

Curt Dunne didn't wait for a consensus. “You're damned straight something's changed. It's become obvious that Katie didn't just walk out on her own. None of us can imagine she would have abandoned the kids, not even for a couple of minutes. And once that's clear, who does that leave?”

“Well, sir,” Abby said, “it leaves the whole universe, unless you've got some specific reason to think it was Hal.”

The woman nearest the inspectors spoke up. “We never really thought about Hal until we started talking about him. I mean, it's just not something we'd ever considered. We'd always assumed that they got along the way most of us did.”

“I'm sorry,” Abby said. “Your name again?”

“Barbara. Barbara Payson.” She spelled her last name.

“And what did you start talking about?”

“You know, stuff between them that we didn't think was very important before. Stuff Katie had told us.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” Barbara said, “you know she was seeing a family counselor. Hal wouldn't go with her. He thought it was a waste of money and didn't believe they needed counseling. But their fights were getting more serious, and she was worried about them.”

“Physical fights?”

“No. She never said that he hit her.”

The other sister, Sherrie, said abruptly, “She wouldn't have said if he did.”

“How do you know that?” JaMorris asked.

“That's who she was,” Sherrie replied. “She was the oldest of us and . . .”

Carli joined the discussion. “She definitely would have left him if he'd been abusing her. But I don't like how we're demonizing Hal because she was going to counseling and he wouldn't go.”

“Was there any talk of them breaking up?” Abby asked. “Did she talk about divorcing him?”

“I never heard that,” Barbara said.

Sherrie added, “We really didn't acknowledge they were in trouble until . . . until this thing. And now she's gone, and we may never know.”

“Still, do any of you have a specific reason for suspecting Hal?”

“They could have had a real fight that night,” Curt said. “I mean where he actually hit her. And then he had to get rid of her so there wouldn't be any sign of it.That could have been why he did it. To cover it up.”

“Although you are not aware of any evidence of a physical fight between them. Am I right?” Abby asked.

Curt answered, “He could have gotten rid of any evidence. Straightened things up.”

“That's all conjecture, dear,” Carli said. “You know it is. Whether he hit her, whether they were fighting. We don't know.”

“We do, Mom,” Sherrie said. “At least arguing.”

“Okay, so they were going through a rough spell, maybe, but with two young children, is that really so unusual? She wanted or needed help dealing with what was bothering her, and he was too proud to go along with her. That could have been all this is. We all talked to Hal last week. We know he's truly devastated. I looked in his eyes, and he was in agony. He wasn't faking that. I don't think we should accuse him of anything unless we find out something that he definitely did.”

“That's good advice,” JaMorris said. “Anything you do find, whether it's about Hal or anybody else, please come to us first. We know the newspapers have been bothering you, and it wouldn't be productive to have them put Hal on trial in the press.”

Curt wasn't ready to give it up. “Let's not forget that he could have simply woken up that morning and done what he did with no new reason. He could have gotten to the end of whatever he was going through and decided to act.”

“Yes,” Abby said, “that could have happened. But usually, there's a reason of some kind, and without any hint of what that might have been, we're in the dark. More important, we don't have grounds to charge anyone.”

“I'm telling you, it's him,” Curt said. “Hal. No one else fits.”

Abby nodded. “We're going to keep looking and hope we turn up something in the line of motive or evidence. If it's any consolation, at the moment, he certainly remains a person of interest.”