It was easy to fit Mrs. Gravesend’s story with what Madeleine had told me. They matched up, two pieces of a puzzle. Claire had been abandoned at Mission Carmel on October 29, 1999. Two days later, three-year-old Madeleine appeared at the St. John Catholic Church in Yakima, Washington. Yakima was probably eight or nine hundred miles north of Carmel. An easy two-day drive. He could have done it in a day, but maybe having a sick toddler in the car had slowed him down. Or maybe he’d lost time because, for whatever reason, he’d wanted to stay off the interstates. And maybe the roads were off-limits altogether during daylight hours.
But that was all just conjecture. I didn’t really know anything at this point. At least some of the guesses felt solid. Madeleine must have been very sick, and her early years were marked with neglect and abuse. Her memories began in Yakima, when people started taking care of her. I couldn’t fathom what had been done to her, but I could at least surmise a few things about the guy who’d done it. He was meticulous and purposeful. The pattern of scars proved that. And he must have started somewhere south of Carmel. He was headed north, and he was dropping off unwanted objects along the way.
Narrowing it to south of Carmel didn’t help much, though. I needed to find another way in. I thought about the churches. The priest in Mission Carmel had heard a knock at the door, and then cries. Claire was swaddled, and left in a box. The man hadn’t wanted to be seen, but he hadn’t felt comfortable about a baby girl taking her chances. He’d made sure she was warm, that she couldn’t roll off a step. He’d knocked, so her wait wouldn’t be long.
And then there was the fact that he’d abandoned the girls in different places, on different days. Claire first, then, two days later, Madeleine. Why not both at once, and be done with it? Perhaps because the girls were the best clue to who he was. By abandoning them a thousand miles apart, he hoped their kinship and identical genes might go unnoticed. One abandoned child is an occurrence so common, it wouldn’t merit a mention in a local paper. Two blond girls, with matching scars, might hit the front page. And if anyone had done a DNA test, identical twins with a three-year age difference would have been an international media circus. Maybe the man didn’t think his secret could withstand that kind of scrutiny.
Or then again, it could be something simpler. He might have wanted to keep the girls. But the infant was sick and weak, and hard to travel with. So he dropped her off first, and kept the stronger one. Then, in central Washington, she began to slow him down. Maybe she was bleeding, or crying too much. Maybe she’d taken a fever and he was scared. Better to let someone else handle it. And both times, when it came to passing the responsibility, he’d chosen Catholic churches. Not hospitals, or fire stations, but priests. That had to say something about him, and what he was running from. If he wasn’t the girls’ savior, then he wanted to be. And there was someone else he was afraid of.
17
Instead of going back up the peninsula to San Francisco, at San Jose I followed the east side of the bay, dodging traffic on my way up to Oakland. My forensic guy, George Wong, lived in the hills to the east of town. He’d retired from the FBI Laboratory a decade ago, had left Quantico for his hometown, and was now teaching at Berkeley. He had access to good labs, and he took work on the side. I had hit the gas station payphone in Monterey again, so he was expecting me. He came out and met me in the driveway, already wearing a pair of latex gloves. Instead of shaking my hand, he waited for me to open the trunk.
“You touched the bottle?”
“Only on the bottom.”
“And she drank from it?”
“Yeah.”
“Who screwed the cap back on?”
“She did.”
“Great,” he said. “How about the box?”
“I picked it up from the bottom. Four other people might have touched it, too.”
“You know their names?”
“Olivia Gravesend. A priest named David Martinez. And the most recently deceased bishop of the Monterey Diocese—Martin Pascutti.”
“You said four.”
“The fourth is the guy I’m looking for. Whoever dropped off the little girl.”
“You said something about a hair to compare with DNA from the bottle?”
“Yeah,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and extracted the receipt I’d folded around the hair I’d lifted from Claire’s brush. “Here.”
“Bring it inside,” he said. “You can open the door for me.”
He had balanced the bottle of water on top of the box. I shut the trunk, and we went into the house to talk payment and timing. I wanted everything as fast as he could turn it around, so I knew it wouldn’t come cheap. But as long as Olivia Gravesend was still taking my calls, I wasn’t too worried about that.
When we were done, I drove back down from the hills and waited in traffic to get across the Bay Bridge. There was more gridlock in the city, and it took me twenty minutes to get from the bridge to my parking spot. I was thinking about lost time, and my next steps, and not paying much attention to anything else. So I didn’t notice the two uniformed cops waiting in the shadows beside my parking stall until I got out of the car.
“Leland Crowe?”
I looked up.
“Who’s asking?”
“Inspector Chang,” the taller cop said. “He’s waiting for you at Bryant.”
“He’s with Homicide,” the other one said. “If that rings any bells.”
I glanced around. There was no patrol car parked down here, but then I remembered one on the street before I turned into the garage. I didn’t see any choice but to play it cool. Better not to ask too many questions now.
“You guys want to pat me down, go ahead.”
“Hands on the trunk.”
“Sure.”
They did a hand check, ankles to collar. One of them took my wallet and the leather case for my PI license.
“You fool a lot of people with this?”
“Hardly any.”
“How come you carry two phones?”
“One to call my wife, and one to text my girlfriend. Better not to get mixed up, you know?”
“Lee Crowe,” the taller cop said. He snapped my wallet closed. “I heard of you. You walked into a judge’s chambers and knocked the guy’s teeth down his throat.”
“I’ve reformed.”
“How I heard it, he had it coming. And I bet you don’t call your wife much.”
“I heard none of us likes to talk about it. Something in the settlement agreement. You guys driving?”
“Don’t expect a ride back.”
“I’d never.”
They handed my things back. The shorter cop made a show of sanitizing his hands with a plastic bottle he pulled from a pouch on his hip. If he thought I was dirty, he didn’t know the half of it. Or at least I hoped he didn’t.
I followed Jim’s favorite legal advice on the ride down to the Hall of Justice. I sat in the back of the cruiser, not cuffed but locked in all the same, and I kept my mouth shut. The shorter cop asked why Inspector Chang wanted to talk to me. I shrugged and looked out the window. I could think of three or four reasons Chang might want me under a hard light in a windowless room. But at least he was with the SFPD and not the FBI.
They parked in the garage and brought me into 850 Bryant from the back. Then up the elevators to the sixth floor. I glanced at my watch. It was ten o’clock. If they kept me around long enough, I might run into Elijah as he made his nightly round. That would be a new one, for both of us.
They walked me past a cubicle farm, past a men’s room that had a trickle of water running from beneath the door. Then we stopped at a scuffed-up metal door. The tall cop opened it. Inside was the requisite wooden table. Three plastic chairs with metal legs. A coned light above the table, a mirror on the back wall. There was an eyebolt on the floor, and another on the table. You could lock a man down, bind him hand and foot.
“Wait here,” the short cop said. “He’s on his way.”
I stepped
into the room and they shut the door behind me. I heard them walk off. Soft-soled shoes on linoleum, muffled voices. I waited until they were gone, then tried the door. It wasn’t locked. I shut it, and thought about that.
This wasn’t a custodial interrogation. I could walk out anytime I wanted, and if the camera in the corner was running, they could prove I knew it. Which also meant Chang wasn’t going to read me my rights. He was hoping I’d get too comfortable, that a combination of casualness and confidence would lead to a mistake. I’d contradict myself, I’d slip out some damning admission. Whereupon the tenor of the interview would change.
I looked at myself in the one-way glass and wondered if Chang had been to Boston yet. He was probably on the other side of the mirror, watching me. I pretended I could see him, and I nodded. One investigator to another. Then I pulled out the perp chair and sat down with my feet on either side of the eyebolt.
A minute passed. The door clicked open and Inspector Frank Chang walked in. Gray suit, white shirt. No tie. He had a couple of file folders tucked under his arm, and a paper cup of coffee in each hand.
“Lee Crowe?” he said. “Thanks for making the time.”
“Sure.”
He sat down across from me and set one of the cups on my side of the table.
“What happened to your neck? My officers rough you up?”
“Not at all,” I said. “They were pros.”
“So what happened?”
“A scuffle in the Tenderloin. A basic misunderstanding—a guy in a parked car mistook me for a Peeping Tom. We sorted it out.”
I didn’t have to reach deep for the lie. It was the kind of thing that happened often enough.
“You reported it?”
“If I had, then the husband’s name would be in a police report. Embarrassing, to my client. He was in a delicate situation.”
“This was when?”
“Three, four nights ago.”
He arched a black eyebrow. The gesture rearranged the shadows on his face. I noticed that his nose had been broken two or three times. He was built like a boxer. Short and wiry, the kind of guy who ducks the first punch and gets in close with jabs so fast his gloves are a burnt-red blur.
“This was the same night you took your famous photograph?”
“The same,” I admitted. At least now I knew how I’d landed on his radar.
“You were busy,” he said. “Seeing things, and not reporting them. You got assaulted, and then you found a dead girl. In that order?”
“Yeah.”
“Two cell phones, no 911 call.”
“Work comes first.”
“Important client?”
“Sure.”
“Important enough to have a name?”
“Mrs. Jane Doe. But she’ll probably go back to her maiden name pretty soon.”
“Your client’s name isn’t privileged.”
“Let’s agree to disagree. We’ll get along better.”
His eyebrow did its thing again. I was pretty sure it was an involuntary reaction, something he might not even be aware of. That made me like him a little more.
“Tell me about finding the girl,” Chang said. “Time, location. The scene on the street.”
“I was coming up Turk, on foot. This was after four a.m.”
“Which way on Turk?”
“Toward Van Ness.”
He nodded. He’d probably already talked to the advertising guy and his assistant. They would have told him about me.
“You were first on the scene?”
“The first conscious person.”
“How do you mean?”
“There was a guy passed out, across the street. I call him Snowsuit Man. He’s got this full body suit, and a smell like—”
“I know who you’re talking about.”
“So he was there, but he was out.”
“Open windows, people looking out?”
“None I could see.”
“Did you mess with the scene?”
“I touched the girl,” I said. “On her neck, under her chin. To look for a pulse. She was still warm.”
“You thought there might be a pulse, and you still didn’t call 911?”
“There wasn’t a pulse,” I said. “And anyway, I could hear the sirens.”
“So you touched her,” he said. “Just on the neck?”
“Just the neck.”
“Not her hands?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?” he asked.
Years ago, when I was fresh out of law school and Jim Gardner’s newest associate, I’d watch him prepare his clients for cross-examination if they chose to take the stand. His rules were pretty simple. Just answer the question that was asked. No more and no less. Don’t try to anticipate the next question. Don’t overthink it. Simple rules to lay down, but hard rules to follow. Inspector Chang was interested in Claire’s hands. He was pushing me on the question, either because he wanted me to change my answer or because he wanted to draw a box around my response. Something I couldn’t get out of later. Don’t think too much, Jim would say. But I wondered what he’d found out about her hands.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I didn’t touch her hands.”
“Mind showing me yours?”
I laid my hands flat on the table in front of him, fingers splayed. There were no bruises or scratches. I turned my hands over and let him look at my palms and forearms. Now I understood why he’d started the interview by handing me a cup of coffee. He wasn’t trying to be a good host. He wanted to trick me into giving him a DNA sample.
“Your medical examiner took fingernail scrapings from the girl?” I asked.
“What gives you that idea?”
“I have a television and a library card,” I said. I picked up the coffee and took a sip. Then I handed him the cup. “If you’re trying to rule me out, you could run that to the lab after you turn me loose. Maybe they’d get a decent sample and maybe they wouldn’t. Or you could go get a DNA collection kit, and do it right.”
“You’re consenting to that?”
“If it’ll keep your guys from following me around, I’m happy to,” I said. “You’ve got a man’s DNA under her fingernails? Is that it?”
That wasn’t in the autopsy report, I almost said. They must have done additional lab work after the report was written. Or Frank Chang was just bluffing, to see if I got nervous about the idea.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “I’ll go get that kit. Enjoy your coffee.”
He got up and left. If I hadn’t been sure that a recorder was running, I’d have gotten out my phone to call Cynthia Green. She needed to check the Gravesend autopsy file again, to see if any lab reports had been added.
Inspector Chang came back a moment later. He’d put on latex gloves and was opening a DNA dry swab kit.
“You know what to do?”
“Sure,” I said.
He handed me the swab and I ran it on the inside of my cheek and down against my lower gums, and then put it into its storage tube. I handed that to Inspector Chang, and he put it into a zipper-lock evidence bag. He took a fine-tipped marker from his pocket and wrote his name and the date on the bag.
“You take any photos besides the one you sold?”
“Plenty.”
“You’ve been very cooperative, Mr. Crowe.”
“Anything for my city.”
“Do I need a search warrant to get the photos?”
“No, sir,” I said. “You got an email address?”
“I’d rather have the original memory card,” he said. “Chain of evidence.”
He was in luck. I’d put a fresh memory card into the camera an hour before discovering Claire. There weren’t any photographs of DeCanza or his FBI minders, so I wouldn’t have to bargain with him about deleting the photos he didn’t need.
“The card’s in my office safe,” I said. “You want to give me a ride?”
“You’re over by City Hall?”
> I nodded. The sooner I gave him what he wanted, the sooner I’d get rid of him.
Inspector Chang looked as glad to be out of the interrogation room as I was. He straightened up a little as we stepped out of the Hall of Justice and away from the buzz of its fluorescent lights. We went back to the garage, and to what I assumed was his personal vehicle. The city probably didn’t loan out early-eighties Jeeps to its inspectors.
“You’ve got to give that door a good yank,” he said.
I pulled it open and climbed up to the passenger seat.
“How’d you find me?” I asked, when he was inside and had the engine started.
“Same way you’d do it, if you’re any good,” he said. “I made a couple calls to set my lines, and then I waited.”
He backed out of the space, his face impassive.
“What about Claire?” I asked. “After the photo, I followed the papers. You’d think it was simple. Suicide, case closed.”
“You’d think.”
“But you’re still working.”
“I’m still working.”
“Did she go off the roof?”
“I have no idea,” Inspector Chang said.
I reminded myself to ask Elijah to ransack Chang’s office as soon as he got a chance. The SFPD might already have a preliminary report on the liquor bottle and cigarette butts collected from the roof. If Chang had Claire’s DNA or fingerprints, then he could put her on the roof that night and he was lying to me now.
“She must have gone out a high window,” I said. “That or the roof. No way she could have done that much damage to the car from a lower floor. Right?”
“I’m not sure about that either,” he answered. “What’s your stake in this?”
“Curiosity.”
“Because you took a photo,” Chang said. “Now you’re in it for the long haul.”
“I’m not in anything for the long haul. She just looked like a nice kid.”
The light above my office door was out. We felt our way up the stairs in the dark. As I stepped up to the lock, key in hand, something crunched under my shoe’s sole. Behind me, Inspector Chang clicked on a flashlight. I saw I was standing on shards of broken glass. I looked up, and Chang followed with the beam. The light fixture looked as if someone had shoved a broom handle through the frosted globe and into the bulb.
Blood Relations Page 13
