“I can take my things back,” Madeleine said. “And if you have any rooms—”
Larry came through the doorway. His left foot dragged a bit, but he held his back straight. He was carrying a black roller bag, the kind that could fit into any airline overhead compartment without too much fuss.
“Thank you so much,” Madeleine said.
Larry didn’t look at her, or at me. He simply set the bag down and turned to go.
“And her car keys,” the woman said. “Don’t forget her keys, Larry.”
He pointed at the bag’s outside zipper pocket, and then he went back upstairs without saying anything.
“As for rooms,” the woman said, “we opened up, after the wedding. I can give you the Drake Cottage again.”
Madeleine looked at me, and I nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “We’ll take it.”
“Then you’re all set. You’re already registered—I can just charge you for the night you had, and add this one,” the woman said. “And you know your way.”
The woman gave a weak smile, then glanced down at the bag. She was waiting for Madeleine to take it and for us to walk away. Probably only a few seconds passed, but they stretched out a long way and became uncomfortable.
“The key?” Madeleine asked.
“You don’t have it?”
“No—I—I’m sure I must have left it in the room,” Madeleine said. Her voice took on the same tone as her imitation of Claire imitating Olivia Gravesend.
“We didn’t see it when we cleaned the cottage,” the woman said. She took a key from her pocket and unlocked the cabinet on the wall behind her. Inside were small cubbyholes, labeled with the names of the cottages. Her hand moved past Vancouver and Cook, then stopped at Drake. She took the key, which was on a heavy pewter fob cast in the form of a sailing ship. She handed it to Madeleine. “Have a look for yours tonight. Or we’ll have to charge you the replacement fee.”
“Of course,” Madeleine said. “And I’m sorry about this—all this confusion.”
Madeleine took Claire’s bag and we went back out the way we’d come. When we were outside, in the parking lot, I began looking for cameras. There were none that I could see, and that was a pity. Because I saw tire tracks memorializing a particularly rapid exit from the B&B’s asphalt lot. The marks led all the way out to the road. The car had skidded out of the lot in a hard right turn. Which would have taken it to the north. Away from San Francisco.
“We won’t find the key in the Drake Cottage,” I said. “The autopsy report had a schedule of personal property. One of the things on it was a key on a pewter fob.”
“She left all her things but she took her key—she planned to come back.”
“But now the timing’s even harder,” I said. “Claire got picked up at three. That gave her an hour and a half, max, to make it to San Francisco.”
“Could they have done it?”
“They were definitely in a hurry,” I said. I nodded toward the tire tracks. “But they didn’t go the right way.”
I unlocked the Beast’s trunk and took out my backpack. It had my laptop and my toothbrush, and that was about it. Before I could shut the trunk, Madeleine stopped me with her hand at the small of my back. She leaned close to speak.
“We’re going to go wandering all around this place looking for the right cottage,” she said. “Trying our key in every lock. Larry and the Bun Lady are going to look out an upstairs window and figure out something’s wrong—if they haven’t already.”
She had a point there. The Bun Lady had accepted Madeleine as Claire. And Claire would know the way to her cottage.
“No,” I said. “I’ll go wandering, with the key and the suitcase. Because I don’t know this place. You stay here a bit. You need to make a phone call.”
“Okay.”
I took the key and the roller bag and set off. I looked back, once, and saw Madeleine leaning against the Beast’s hood, talking into her phone. She was gesticulating with one hand.
It looked real enough that I wondered if she’d actually called someone.
There were little signs in front of every cottage, which made it easier. I didn’t have to go up to every door and try the lock. I just walked past Magellan and Vancouver, and then went down the stepping-stone path to Drake. I climbed the steps to its porch and unlocked the door. Turning the dead bolt took a bit of effort, as though the replacement key hadn’t been ground to quite the right shape. I leaned to look at the lock, and saw bright scratches in the otherwise dull bronze patina. I’d picked enough locks to know the telltales.
I turned back to the parking lot. Madeleine was still talking on the phone, but acknowledged me with a two-fingered wave. If she was faking it, she was exceptional. Her lips were moving, quickly and purposefully. I went in and closed the door behind me.
It was a three-room bungalow. A living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The bed was a canopy job, and the bath had claws on its feet. There was a door from the bedroom that opened onto a small deck, where a cedar hot tub hid from the road behind a low trellis of clematis. Peek over the top and you’d have an unobstructed view of Slaughterhouse Cove.
The entire cottage was spotlessly clean. Whoever had hit it must have come after Larry and the Bun Lady had cleaned out Claire’s things. Which got my mind sprinting down a half-dozen twisting paths all at once. Claire had left this room at three in the morning, and was dead on Turk Street an hour and a half later. The B&B’s owners had cleaned out the room sometime after eleven. Someone else had checked in later that day. Sometime during that window, a person had come and picked the Drake Cottage’s lock. And barely twenty-four hours later, someone had picked the lock to Claire’s Beacon Hill house in Boston.
I believed that the man I’d killed in Boston was related to the men who’d bugged my apartment and trashed my office. And that all three break-ins were connected to Agent White.
But now I had to accept another possibility. Everything that had happened could be about Claire. I could be a target because of that alone. Because I had taken a photograph. Because Jim Gardner had sent me to Olivia Gravesend, who had hired me to find out the truth. Someone had found out about that and had set out to shut me down.
“Lee?”
I turned toward Madeleine, who had just come into the cottage and shut the door.
“Everything okay?” I asked her.
“No trouble yet,” she said.
She’d pocketed her phone.
“Were you actually talking to someone?” I asked. “You looked good out there.”
“My boss, at the bookstore. Telling him I needed a few more days.”
“Family emergency.”
“It’s true,” she said. “It is a family emergency. But I needed to tell him something, to buy a little more time.”
I hadn’t given much thought to Madeleine’s life. She was more than just a connection to Claire, and there was an entire world of things I didn’t know about her—a swirl of family, friends, jobs, pets, leaking faucets, and rent to pay. All the triumphs and the minor annoyances. The only thing I knew for sure was that when she’d heard from Claire, she’d dropped all of it to come to San Francisco.
I picked up Claire’s suitcase and set it down on the bed.
“We were lucky to get this,” I said. “If Larry hadn’t cleaned the room the next morning, it’d be gone.”
“What do you mean?”
I told her about the lock, and waited while she went over to study it. When she was back, I unzipped the suitcase, and opened it.
Judging from her credit card transactions, most of Claire’s journeys had lasted twenty-four hours or less. Out and back, in a single night. But she must have expected this one would take longer. She’d brought a few changes of clothes. I began to unpack the suitcase, lifting things out and setting them on the bedspread. Two pairs of jeans, folded carefully. A zippered mesh sack contained three pairs of panties and a bra. There was a crimson Harvard sweatshirt, in case the
nights got cool. The only thing that wasn’t neatly folded was an empty hanger bag. Larry must have stuffed it into the suitcase when he was cleaning out the room. But if it had held the dress she’d worn to her death, Claire had probably traveled with it hanging from the hook in the back seat of her rental car. She’d died wearing heels, but she’d packed sandals to wear with her jeans.
Beneath all the clothes, in matching leather cases, I found her laptop and her phone. I took out the phone and tried to reach its home screen, but it was locked. I needed either the six-digit passcode or Claire’s thumb. I held it out to Madeleine.
“Do you know the code?”
“No.”
“And you can’t use your thumb?” I asked.
“Identical twins don’t have the same fingerprints,” she said. “The patterns aren’t genetically coded.”
“For real?”
“We tested it,” Madeleine said. “We tried unlocking each other’s phones. It didn’t work.”
I took out the computer. When I folded the screen back, it lit up and invited me to enter a password. I typed in ClaireBear99. Most people use the same password across a dozen accounts. It’s wildly insecure, but it saves some time. But apparently Claire wasn’t like most people. When I hit the return key, the screen’s image shook side to side as if I’d fed it something bitter. It invited me to try again.
“Any idea on this?”
“None.”
I closed the computer and put it back into its case. I probably only had a couple more tries and then the thing would lock itself for eight hours. I didn’t want to waste my chances on random guesses as long as there was a chance Madeleine might remember something. If I’d known how short our time together really was, I might have done things differently.
22
By agreement, after a discussion in which I laid out more of my plans than I wanted to, Madeleine kept a low profile in the room. I went out to the parking lot to search Claire’s rental car. I found nothing, but not for lack of trying. I searched under the spare tire, and under the hood, and I got down on my back and looked underneath the frame. But it was just an empty rental car. The only trace of Claire was a lingering hint of perfume that I noticed when I sat in the passenger’s seat to look through the glove box.
When I was done, I walked back to the main house, taking my time so that I could look again for security cameras. The gingerbread trim along the eaves would have been a perfect hiding place. But I didn’t see anything.
I went into the house and crossed the lobby to the desk. I tapped the bell and waited for the Bun Lady to come downstairs. When she arrived, I had my investigator’s license out and waiting for her.
“The lady’s resting in her room,” I said. “But I have a couple of questions.”
“You’re a detective?”
“She’s upset and embarrassed about what happened the other night. And she’s outraged.”
“Outraged?”
“Not at you,” I said. “I’m helping her look into what happened.”
“It wasn’t a family emergency?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. I came a little closer, and lowered my voice. “She doesn’t remember a thing about that night. She doesn’t know who she left with, or when, or why. Or what they did to her.”
“Did they drug her?” the woman asked. “One of those . . . like, a date drug?”
“Date rape drug,” I said. “We can’t rule it out. Did you see the people she left with?”
The woman’s face had flattened in shock. I could guess what she wanted to tell me. Guests at the Discovery Cove Bed and Breakfast didn’t get drugged and kidnapped. Let alone raped. This wasn’t that kind of place.
“Larry saw them,” she finally said.
“He did?”
“He doesn’t sleep well. So he sits up,” she said, and pointed toward the porch. “Out there. That’s why we have all the rocking chairs.”
“Can you go get him?”
“All right.”
We spoke on the porch, side by side in wooden rockers. It was a good view. I wouldn’t have minded sitting out there on the nights I couldn’t sleep. Without turning my head, I could see the path that led down to the Drake Cottage. The parking lot was in front of me. Beyond it, there was the road, and then the cove.
“They came at three a.m.,” Larry said. He was hoarse, and the skin underneath his eyes looked bruised. “I’d been out here a couple hours by then.”
“Doing what?”
“Sweating it out.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m trying to quit these pills,” he said. “My doctor’s had me on them since I don’t know when. It got so they were worse than the pain. Which is worst at night. So I come sit out here. I don’t want to wake her up.”
“You keep the porch light on?”
“She wants me to, for business. But I usually turn it off so I can see out.”
“That night?”
“I’d turned it off.”
“So it was pretty dark.”
“Really dark, yeah,” Larry said. He reached back and fidgeted with his shirt collar. The red flannel looked like it had been through the wash about a thousand times. “They came in a black car. It wasn’t a limo, but if you stretched it out, it could’ve been. I couldn’t tell you the make and model. European, I guess. If it was American, I’d have recognized it. And I never heard of cars that big coming out of Japan.”
“Okay,” I said.
“They pulled around, like they were using the driveway for a U-turn,” he said, and pointed to the other side of the road. “You see how it is. It happens all the time.”
The highway was narrow, a thin strip of asphalt that fell away to the ocean on the west side. If you’d missed whatever you were trying to find in Mendocino and suddenly found yourself heading out of town, you’d need a driveway to turn back.
“But then they stopped,” Larry said. “Just sat there and waited, with the engine running.”
“Nobody got out?”
“Not then. Not till she came walking out.”
“Claire walked out, on her own?”
He pointed up the stepping-stone path that led back to the cottages. It wound past benches and archways of roses.
“Came through there. I heard her before I saw her. Black dress, so she blended in. It was the shoes that gave her away. Those high heels.”
“Was she steady on her feet?”
“She could’ve walked a tightrope,” Larry said. “Didn’t look to me like she’d been drugged.”
“She just came out? They didn’t honk or anything like that?”
He shook his head, then reached back to rub his neck. There were scars behind his ear, a curved line of old staple marks in his scalp.
“She came out like she’d been waiting on them. Or like they called her.”
“You keep saying they.”
“When she got up to the car, a chauffeur climbed out of the front. Big guy, in a suit and a thin black tie. And one of those hats every chauffeur’s got.”
“How well could you see him?”
“When he opened the door, the dome light came on,” Larry said. “So when he stood up, I could see him from the chest up, over the car’s roof. Clean-cut white guy, blond hair. If I ran into him in West Hollywood, I’d say he was Russian. Up here, who knows?”
“What’d he do?”
“He came around and opened the back door, and a woman got out. When she stepped out of the way, I could see a man sitting on the other side.”
“What’d they look like?”
“The woman had long blond hair. All done up in a thick braid, like a rope. She looked to be in her forties, maybe, though she seemed more fragile than that.”
“How so?”
“She moved like someone used to being careful. Like she might trip and that’d be the end of it,” he said. “And she was covered in jewelry—she had enough gold and stones to weigh down a dead body. You don’t see that on many young peop
le.”
“I guess you couldn’t see her face.”
“Not really,” Larry said. “She went up and the driver opened the front door for her, and she sat down up there. That girl of yours was coming across the parking lot. She got up to the car, and I don’t think she knew the man was in the back until she bent to get in. Then she stepped back, real quick, and said something.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t make it out, and if any of them answered her, I couldn’t hear that either.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what then?”
“The chauffeur put one hand on her shoulder and she got in the car. He shut the door behind her.”
“Did he push her in?”
“If he did, it was gentle.”
“A slow push, with a firm grip?”
“Maybe.”
That seemed possible, given what happened to Claire a few hours later. But then again, I’d seen the autopsy photos. There hadn’t been a handprint on either of Claire’s shoulders. A big guy clamping down on a young woman and muscling her into a car would likely leave a mark. Maybe all she’d needed was a little nudge. Walking across the parking lot, she would have seen the woman get out and take the front seat. Larry hadn’t said anything about her pausing when she saw the woman. So she was expecting her, but not the man—and she wanted to talk to the woman badly enough that the man wasn’t a deal-breaker.
Maybe he should have been.
“What’d he look like?” I asked. “The guy in the back seat?”
“Blond hair, past his collar. A little bit curly. Nordic-looking guy, like a Viking—except he was clean-shaven.”
“What was he wearing?”
“A suit, but he’d taken the jacket off. It was on his knee.”
“Big guy?”
“More or less like his chauffeur.”
“After she got in, what happened?”
“The driver shut her door. He went back around and got behind the wheel. And then they peeled out. I don’t know what kind of car it was, but it must’ve had a big engine. Ten, twelve cylinders. Thing had to weigh a couple of tons, but it went out of there like a rocket.”
Blood Relations Page 17
