The Murderer's Daughter (33 page)

No activity behind the chain-link fence. Grace took a close look at the construction notice. The building had been condemned and permits had been granted for a project titled Municipal Green WorkSpace. Lots of official stamps, city, county, and state. Handwritten additions in blue marker listed the contractor as DRL-Earthmove. Date of completion was eighteen months in the future but given the lack of progress that seemed fanciful.

Modifications included “seismic retrofitting.” Like a too-easy punch line, the irony was unsatisfying.

Grace crossed the street to the park. Only three benches in the entire acreage: a pair under the trees now occupied by snoozing homeless men, and one, unused, with a slightly oblique view of the building site.

She sat down, hid behind the newspaper, took occasional, unfruitful peeks.

Nearly an hour passed and she was about to leave, fixing to return later in the afternoon, when a voice behind her said, “Help a friend?”

She turned slowly. The man hovering behind the bench was dressed shabbily and his skin bore the rare-steak glaze that typified life on the street.

His hand was out, no subtlety there. But not the lurcher who'd scored her dollar last night, returning for an encore.

This guy was
much shorter, maybe five three or four, and slightly hunchbacked with cottony white chin whiskers, equally skimpy muttonchops, and a milky left eye.

Grace gave him a buck.

He looked at the bill. “Thank you profoundly, daughter, but that won't even purchase coffee in this foodie burg.”

Grace tried to stare him down. He smiled, did a little jig. Winked with his good eye. Surprisingly acute eye, the color of a clear Malibu sky. On closer inspection, she saw that his frayed, baggy outfit had once been high-quality: gray herringbone jacket, brown Shetland sweater vest, white-on-white shirt, droopy olive twill pants, cuffs dragging in the dirt. Even this close, no booze reek.

And his nails were clean.

He stopped dancing. “Not sufficiently impressive? Care for a tango?” Bending low, he dipped an imaginary partner and, despite herself, Grace smiled. He was the first person to entertain her since…in a long time.

She gave him a ten.

He said, “Indeed! For that, I'll fetch both of us coffee!”

“I'm fine, treat yourself.”

He took a deep bow. “Thank you, daughter.”

Grace watched him scurry off and decided to stick it out on the bench for a while. As if the old tramp had revved up her endurance.

After another thirty-five minutes with nothing to show for her patience, she was folding up her paper and making sure her Glock hadn't shifted awkwardly in her bag when Little Mr. One-Eye returned and thrust something at her.

Fresh-baked croissant, the aroma was wonderful. Set neatly on waxed paper in a small cardboard box. A bakery called Chez something.

She said, “Thanks but I'm really not hungry.”

“Tsk,” said One-Eye. “Save it for later.”

“It's okay, enjoy.” She began to rise.

The bent old man said, “Why are you studying that hellhole?”

“What hellhole?”

He pointed to the condemned building. “The boondoggle, the scama-rama, the suck-on-the-public-teat extravaganza. You've been watching it since you got here. Or am I mistaken?”

“It's a con, huh?”

“May I?” He pointed to the bench.

Grace shrugged.

“Not much of a welcome,” said the little man, “but beggars-choosers-and-such.” He plopped down as far from her as possible, got to work on the croissant, nibbling daintily and constantly brushing away crumbs.

A fastidious bum. His shoes were battered wingtips, resoled countless times.

When he finished eating, he said, “What was your major? You did go to college?”

“I did.”

“Here?”

“No.”

“What did you study?”

Why bother lying? “Psychology.”

“Then you know about the Hebbian synapse, Friedrich August von Hayek.”

Grace shook her head.

“Kids today.” One-Eye laughed. “If I told you I studied economics with Hayek, you wouldn't believe me so I won't waste my breath.”

“Why wouldn't I believe you?”

“Well, I did, daughter,” he said, grinning. Intent on a monologue. “Had no problem with the man's accent—Friedrich the Great. Though others did. Try to disprove that fact of nature, daughter, and you'll come out on the losing end, I'm telling you nothing but truth. You may be cagey about your alleged education but I have nothing to hide. I took courses in a swirl of eclecticism down in La La Land, the sixties, before Leary and Laing made madness socially acceptable.”

He tapped his own head. “Born too early, by then they were talking to me in here, forcing me to ignore them. I eschewed food and water for stretches, I went without female companionship for a century, I traversed campus wearing paper bags on my feet and avoiding the
I Ching.
Despite a closet full of haberdashery and an Anglican mother. Nevertheless, I learned my social science.”

He waited. Grace said nothing. “Oh, bosh,” he finally said. “
Ook-
la. Palm trees and pedagogy?”

Grace stared.

One-Eye exhaled in frustration. “Ookla? Numero Two campus? Predicated on
this
place being Uno.”

It took a moment for Grace to decode that. “UCLA.”

“Finally!
Sí, sí,
the wilds of Westwood, back before the hippies and the libertines took over. Before everyone talked about social justice but no one did anything about it. More like so
-called
justice. Or should I say So
Cal
justice and we all know about the morality of manipulative movie moguls.”

A withered hand gestured toward the construction site. “Case in point. Green. Ha. So is snot.”

“You don't approve.”

“It's not up to me to approve, daughter, the die is cast.”

“For the project.”

He shifted closer to her, brushed away nonexistent crumbs. “It's perfidy grounded in hypocrisy, mendacity, and two-facedness. The prior owner of that rather homely pile of mud was a villain who had the good graces to die but also the poor judgment to sire a second-generation villain who trumpets social justice and greases the palms of
forward-
leaning politicians. Same old story, no? Caligula, Putin, Aaron Burr, name any petty alderman of Chicago at random.”

“Politics corrupts—”

“Think about it, daughter: You inherit a decrepit pile of bricks, what should you do with it…hmm, shall I ponder—
I
know, let's sell it to the city at an inflated price then propose a snot-green project to build cubicles for yet more bureaucrats and manage to insinuate ourself as the builder.”

Now Grace was on full alert. “One-stop shopping, huh? Doesn't look as if much has been done.”

He frowned. “Was a time a man could find refuge in there.”

“In the building?”

Three hard nods. “Was a time.”

So the place had served as a squat. Grace said, “When did that stop?”

“When the family tradition recommenced.”

“What tradition?”

“Have you not been paying attention?”

Grace shot him a helpless look.

He said, “All right, I'll slow down and enunciate—where did you say you went to college?”

Grace said, “Boston U.”

“Not Harvard-grade, eh? All right, you're too young to remember this but once upon a time an unpleasant shifting of tectonic plates wrought devastation upon the land upon which we now sit. Bridges crumbled, a baseball game was interrupted, and if that's not spitting in the eyes of all that is patriotic and sacred, I don't know what is—”

“The Loma Prieta quake.”

The old man's single functional eye widened. “A student of history. At BU, no less.”

Grace said, “It's not exactly ancient history.”

“Daughter, nowadays anything prior to five minutes ago is ancient. Including the messages transferred into here by the powers that be.” Tapping his forehead again.

He stood, smoothed his trousers, sat back down. “So…the plates shifted and the dishes shattered. Heh heh! Then the second disaster ensued, villains profiteering as they always do when collectivism and the collective unconscious collude to triumph over the will of man and by man I mean both sexes so please no whinnying about sexism, daughter.”

Grace looked at the construction site. “The people involved with that profiteered from the quake?”

“Insurance,” he said. “Essentially, a game of chance with infrequent payoffs. But even in Vegas machines pay off occasionally.”

“They didn't.”

He crooked a thumb in the direction of the high school. “The young are essentially unsocialized savages, correct? Lords, flies, et cetera, if anyone should qualify for capital punishment it's fourteen-year-olds. But one villain easily sniffs out another and those Fly Lords were entrusted with the task of pressuring the common folk not to pursue recompense.”

“The guy in charge of that project hired students to intimidate—”

“They might as well have worn suicide vests. These were terrorists, nothing more, nothing less, and they enabled the villain to buy up distressed properties for an off-key song and sell them back to the you-know-who.”

“The government,” said Grace.

“Agency A, Agency B, Agency Zeta—
that
one implanted an iridium electrode right here and attempted to convert me to Islam.” He tapped his right temple. “Fortunately, I caught on and managed to deactivate it.”

He yawned, dropped his head, began snoring.

Grace said, “Nice talking to you.”

She was a few yards away when he said, “Anytime.”

O
kay, so now she had a confirming source.

Psychotic to be sure, but with enough occasional lucidity—and premorbid intelligence—to take seriously.

She found a moderately busy Internet café farther up on Center Street, brought a latte and a bagel she had no intention of eating to a corner booth. One sip later, sitting among students and those pretending to be students, she'd logged onto the wide wide world of random knowledge.

Municipal green workspace
pulled up a dozen hits, mostly government documents composed in agency doublespeak. After wading through a few choice sections, Grace got the gist: The construction project had moved quickly through numerous city and state committees and subcommittees, received approval a little over a year ago, with the contract awarded on the basis of “specialized bidding contingency” to DRL-Earthmove, Inc., of Berkeley, California.

From what Grace could tell, “specialized bidding” meant there'd been no competition at all, with DRL judged to possess unique qualifications: “eco-sensitivity,” “foreknowledge of site history and ethos,” and “emphatic local emphasis, including employment of Berkeley residents with set-asides for inner-city applicants from Oakland and other nearby economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

Grace hoped to see Roger Wetter Junior's name surface in the documents but DRL's CEO and sole proprietor was one Dion R. Larue. Disappointed, she Googled and pulled up three hits, all squibs from fund-raisers Larue had attended.

The recipients of the developer's generosity included a local food collective called the Nourishment Conspiracy; the Trust Trust, an Oakland gang-rehab program; and UC Berkeley's experimental film festival of four years ago, the theme being Liberation: National and Personal.

The Nourishment folk had thanked their donors with a vegan banquet and provided photos on their Facebook page.

Grace scrolled through shot after shot of glowing, smiling countenances.

And there he was.

Tall, handsome, well-built
man in his thirties, wearing a black-and-gold silk brocade tunic over black jeans. Shoulder-length blond hair was parted in the middle and worn loose, Anglo-Jesus style. A gray-blond stubble beard was film-star correct.

Dion Larue's stance was relaxed as he held a glass of something orange in one hand and draped his free arm over the lean, bare shoulders of a brunette in her late twenties. Not a stunner but attractive. Dramatic cheekbones, as if an ice cream scoop had been taken to her face.

Azha Larue, wife of the boss. Exotic name but nothing but Celtic in her features.

Her smile seemed forced. His was high-wattage.

But the emotion of the moment was irrelevant; his eyes told the story. Piercing yet strangely dead. Eyes Grace had seen before.

As she continued to study the photo, years peeled away and reality slithered out. Twenty-three years had passed since Samael Roi the teenage Venom Prince had showed up at Ramona's ranch with his sibs and murdered a crippled boy, indirectly caused Ramona's death, and shattered Grace's status quo.

Dressed in black, then as now.

The bastard had changed his name. Wanting to rid himself of his adopted father's local baggage? If so, it had worked, if you didn't factor in the overreaching memory and loose associations of Little Mr. One-Eye.

From Roger to Dion…?

As if a switch had been flipped, Grace's brain decoded, scrambling and reassembling letters as if they were game tiles.

Dion R. Larue.

Arundel Roi.

Perfect anagram.

Forget the man who'd made him wealthy, he was out to honor his birth father's identity. Prioritizing bloodline over everything that had happened since the shoot-out at the Fortress Cult.

This was more than a psychopath ridding himself of an uncomfortable history.

This was an attempt at reincarnation.

Now the murders of three sets of parents made strange, cruel sense: Samael Roi reconstructing a childhood spent with a madman and his concubines. Out with the old, in with the new.

Specialized bidding, indeed.

An elderly schizophrenic might recall the bad old days of crumbling bridges and splintering soil, the Wetter family's exploitation of the helpless, but no one else in this city that prided itself on human rights seemed to know or care.

No surprise, Grace supposed, in the Age of Endless Chances and Reinvention.

An uncomfortable truth settled in Grace's gut:
I've also benefited from that.

Staring at Dion Larue's smug smile, she couldn't help but think of him as her playmate, perched on the other end of a cosmic seesaw.

The two of them, perfect rivals.

She hadn't chosen to do battle. But now…

Drinking her second
refill of coffee—add that to her breakfast caffeine and her heart was thumping and racing—she shifted her analysis to Andrew né Typhon Roi. Surer than ever that she'd been right about the reason he'd sought help.

Needing to sort out his own lineage of evil.

But the question remained: Had he
committed
evil?

True, Palo Alto being near Berkeley easily accounted for a chance meeting between the brothers. Or did she have that backward and had the sons of Arundel Roi reunited long ago, both agreeing to settle in the Bay Area?

Samael honing his psychopathic skills.

Typhon, brighter, outwardly moral, working on building a professional career.

An alliance set well before the slaying of their adopted families? The thought repelled Grace but she needed to face it: The man she'd known as Andrew may have committed outrages and finally found the guilt too much to live with.

Including the death of his sister, because she'd been judged too bonded to the McCoys to be integrated into the new clan his brother envisioned.

Did Typhon/Andrew's survival years after Lilith's demise mean he'd been a co-conspirator? Or simply a silent witness his brother had trusted to maintain silence?

Either way, he'd died because of what he knew and Grace supposed it didn't much matter. Still…it was time to learn more about the pleasant, pliable man she'd met in a hotel lobby. But first, she needed to educate herself about his sole surviving sibling.

Snapping a bite out of her bagel, she searched for anything related to the new corporation Dion Larue had created. She found no other DRL-Earthmove projects in Berkeley but seven years previous the company had snagged a similar government-funded contract near Gallup, New Mexico, converting a block of derelict shops to an “environmentally friendly” industrial park aimed at enriching “local culture.”

Larue's partner for that one had been one Munir “Tex” Khaled, a dealer in Indian art. Googling that name brought up a homicide case: Khaled had been found shot to death in the desert near the Mexican border. That location had obvious implications and rumors of a drug connection had endured.

As far as Grace could tell, the crime remained unsolved. Nor could she find any evidence of the Gallup project ever breaking ground.

That despite a golden-spade groundbreaking ceremony attended by hard-hatted politicians. By a hard-hatted Tex Khaled, as well. The former art dealer was a small, dark-haired man in his sixties wearing a brown shirt tucked into daddy jeans secured by an enormous tooled-silver belt buckle and a string tie fastened by an equally oversized chunk of turquoise. Next to him stood a younger, jubilant Dion Larue, also protectively helmeted and wearing a blousy white buccaneer's shirt that exposed a deep V of smooth tan thorax.

But clothing wasn't what caught Grace's attention, or even the likelihood that Tex Khaled had posed happily with his murderer. She'd fixed on a figure standing behind Larue, slightly to the right.

Early thirties, slightly taller than average, coarse features. Not the shaved-head Beldrim Arthur Benn she'd encountered in her garden. The long-haired, shaggy-mustached visage from Benn's driver's license.

Despite the smiles of nearly everyone else in the shot, Benn appeared watchful, even grim.
Nearly
everyone else because of one other exception: a man positioned next to Benn and around the same age and height as Benn but twice as wide.

A bullet-headed rhino with sparse fair hair, a face the shape of a pie tin, squinty eyes, and tiny, close-set ears.

Mr. Beef. Central-casting thug. Maybe that's why Benn, less obtrusive physically, had been sent to West Hollywood to take care of Grace. Leaving Rhino to dispatch Andrew.

She wondered if the heavy man was still in L.A.—maybe tossing her office—or back here with the boss.

The disposable cell she'd used to call Wayne chirped. His private number. She switched it off and continued to search for info on DRL-Earthmove.

Nothing. Time to switch gears and veer into territory she knew well.

The engineering section of the inter-university peer-review-journal website coughed up three articles authored by Andrew Van Cortlandt during the year of his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. All were math-laden treatises exploring the structural properties of conductor metals under various electrochemical and thermal conditions.

All had been co-authored with Amy Chan, Ph.D., of Caltech.

Backgrounding Chan revealed that she'd served her postdoc at Stanford the same year as Andrew before taking a lectureship in Pasadena. But that position had lasted only two years and now she was an assistant professor of engineering right here at UC Berkeley.

The department's website offered up a headshot of a pleasant-looking woman who could've passed as a high school senior, with a small-boned face surrounded by long black hair trimmed into straightedge bangs. Amy Chan had continued to delve into the world of structural integrity and had received high marks for teaching from undergrads.

Grace knew reading too much into a face—into anything—was foolish. But Chan's portrait projected diffidence by way of soft eyes and a bashful smile.

Time to take a risk. She phoned Chan's office extension. If she got a bad feeling, she could hang up and ditch the phone.

A woman with a whispery, slightly tremulous voice picked up.

“Is this Professor Chan?”

A beat. “I'm Amy.” Chan
sounded
like a high school senior.

Grace said, “My name is Sarah Muller, I'm an ed-psych consultant from L.A. who was friends with Andrew Van Cortlandt.”

“Was?” said Amy Chan. “You're no longer friends? Or…?”

“It's complicated, Professor Chan, and I know this sounds strange, but I'm worried about Andrew and if you could find the time, I'd appreciate talking to you.”

“Worried about what?”

Grace waited a second. “I'm concerned for his safety.”

“Something has happened to Andrew? Oh, no.” Words of dismay delivered in an even tone. The tremulousness was gone and Grace's guard went up but she persisted. “What exactly are you saying?”

“Could we meet to discuss it, Professor?”

“You can't tell me now?”

“The last time I saw Andrew he seemed troubled. Nervous. He refused to say why and I haven't heard from him since. He'd mentioned his work with you, so I—Professor, I'd prefer not to get into any more over the phone, but if meeting's a hassle, I understand—”

“No,” said Amy Chan. “Not a hassle.” The vibrato had returned. “I just finished office hours, have a few other things to do. I suppose I could use a breather.”

“Anywhere you'd like, then.”

“How about up near Lawrence Hall—the science museum? Not inside the building, the front area.”

Grace knew the spot. She'd been to Lawrence during one of her trips with Malcolm, found the museum full of kids. The site was up in the hills, above campus. The open area Chan had requested offered gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline of San Francisco that caused people to linger.

Safe place to meet a stranger. Careful woman but that would work to Grace's benefit, as well.