Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  For my ex-wife, no door was ever truly shut. Rules were just the opening offer in a negotiation.

  “Wait here.”

  “Okay.”

  She got out but left the car running. I watched her trot up Grant, purse swinging from her left arm. She hooked a right onto Maiden Lane and went out of sight. She’d left me her phone, its screen unlocked. I opened a web browser and searched, but found nothing on the murders at Slaughterhouse Cove. Surely by now someone had discovered the bodies and called the police. But news moved slower up there. Small towns could keep secrets for years, and places like the Creekside, unambiguously in the middle of nowhere, could hold on to them forever.

  At least with Juliette’s phone I could search Mendocino County property tax records. As a licensed investigator, I had subscriptions to a couple of public records databases. I logged in to one, then entered the address I’d first seen in Claire’s credit card statement. A link popped up, and I tapped on it. The thousand-acre parcel was owned by a limited liability company called Creekside Management. I went to the California Secretary of State website and looked up the LLC in the business registry. It was a Nevada entity but was registered in California because it owned property in the state. Its local agent was a blandly named company in Sacramento—probably a one-room office in a low-rent strip mall, with a single employee whose chief responsibility was to know as little as possible.

  A Nevada limited liability company is the corporate equivalent of a Liberian-flagged cargo ship. You find them all over the world, but they have no connection to their home state. They chose their flag for the anonymity it offers. Without kicking in a door to serve a search warrant, it’s impossible to tell who owns them or what their true purpose is. They come and go in the night; they change hands in under-the-table transactions. Still, I went to the Nevada Secretary of State website and looked it up. There was a manager listed—some guy named Terry MacAllen. But he was probably just a shill. A dodgy attorney or an ex-paralegal who made a living registering companies and serving as a manager on paper only. I could probably find his name associated with a couple hundred other companies.

  I was at a dead end. But I knew Inspector Chang could go a lot further. He could get warrants. He could brandish a badge that hadn’t been laminated at a twenty-four-hour copy shop. I was prepared to do something I’d never even contemplated. I was going to walk into the SFPD headquarters, ask for a cop by name, and tell him everything. Before I did that, though, I might as well know where I stood.

  Cynthia’s name wasn’t on the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s website, but there was a phone number for Records. I called it, and was lucky. She hadn’t gone home yet, even though the sun was up.

  “Hi, Cynthia. It’s me.”

  “Lee?” she said. She must have been giving her Caller ID a double take. “You’re always on the move, aren’t you?”

  “I stay busy. Did your friend on the Cape come up with anything?”

  “You didn’t get my email?”

  “I’m having a hard time checking it.”

  “I sent you the report last night.”

  “Did you look at it first?”

  “You know me.”

  “You got time for a quick summary?”

  “There wasn’t much—the guy bled out from a two-inch stab wound in his neck. It missed the jugular, but it cut his carotid in half. He had some defensive marks on his forearm. Meaning, before he got stabbed, someone took a swing at him with something. Maybe a pipe.”

  I could have corrected her about the weapon. And I wasn’t sure it strictly counted as a defensive wound if he got it while trying to stab me.

  “What about an ID?”

  “None, but that was the interesting part.”

  “How so?”

  “They ran all the databases for prints and DNA. No matches except in the unsolved files.”

  “Say that again?”

  “There was a thumbprint at a murder scene, eight or ten years ago. That was in New York. A banker or somebody, killed in his house. Then, they got a match on his right index finger—it was identical to a print from a different scene in Nevada, four years ago. Different fingers, so until last week, no one knew those two prints came from the same guy.”

  “So they don’t have a name,” I said. “But they’ve tied him to two priors.”

  I tried to feed that information into the mix. If his prints didn’t match anything in a government identification database, he couldn’t possibly have been an FBI agent. That didn’t rule out the possibility that Agent White had paid an informant to do something off the record. But when I considered the fact that Claire’s vacant room in Mendocino had been hit at nearly the same time as her Boston house, it seemed like it was time to rule out White once and for all.

  “He was bad news,” Cynthia was saying. “Maybe not such a big loss, in the grand—”

  Right then, Juliette opened the door and got back into the car.

  “Hey, Cynth . . . I gotta go.”

  I hung up and handed Juliette her phone. In return, she gave me a suit bag and several paper-wrapped packages. There was a pair of pants, a good shirt, a belt, shoes and socks. The suit bag held a two-button jacket. I hadn’t told her any of my measurements, but if she remembered the ouroboros story from the tenth grade, then it was no surprise she could recall my shoe size.

  “You mind if I dress while you drive?”

  “Go ahead.”

  At the first red light, she dipped her hand into her purse and came out with a stack of twenties. She set it on the seat next to my leg.

  “That’s five hundred. The most I could get from the ATM.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You know what you could do?”

  “No.”

  The light turned green, and she began driving.

  “Drop by sometime. Anytime, really. You know the way.”

  “Drop by.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And if you ever get your car back, bring it. We could go for a ride.”

  I looked to see if she was joking. She reached across and touched my elbow.

  “Put the shirt on,” she said. “I think it’ll look good on you.”

  Of course there was a bank of payphones close to the city lockup, which was adjacent to the police station. I stood in a light rain in my new clothes, dropped in change from Juliette’s purse, and dialed the Homicide Detail. A secretary answered the phone, and I asked for Inspector Chang. I gave her my name and said it was urgent. Something about my voice must have convinced her, because she didn’t mess around.

  “I’ll transfer you.”

  I listened to a new line ring, and then Chang picked up.

  “Crowe?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was hoping you’d call—in fact, I was trying to call you.”

  “What?”

  “We need to talk. Now.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Right outside the station. Over by the jail.”

  “Those payphones?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll come down,” he said. “We’ll walk around. Give me two minutes. It’s got to be fast, because I’m leaving town at noon.”

  We hung up and I leaned against the jail’s outer chain-link fence and waited. In about a minute and a half, Chang came jogging around from the Bryant Street side. He looked like a guy who spent most of his downtime either running or hitting a speed bag. He slowed down when he got a look at me.

  “All that just happened?”

  “A couple hours ago.”

  “You’re working the Gravesend case,” he said.

  It wasn’t a question, and he wasn’t looking for an answer. But I nodded.

  “You were driving out of the mother’s estate when I was coming down to talk to her.”

  “Okay.”

  I thought back. After I’d seen Olivia Gravesend the last time, I’d stopped at Mission Carmelo, then at George’s house in O
akland. Chang’s men had picked me up in the garage the minute I got back to the city. Which meant that the first time we talked, he was freshly back from seeing Olivia himself. Having seen me down there that morning, he’d known I was lying about my involvement. He hadn’t let on at all. I’d thought I could read his face like an upturned card, and I’d been dead wrong.

  “Sure,” he said, as if he could read my train of thought. “I knew. And remember when you let me take a DNA swab?”

  I nodded. You don’t forget doing something like that. Not if the guy taking it is a homicide inspector and you’re in an interrogation room.

  “You’re not a suspect. Not a match at all,” he said. “And here’s something else. You were right—we found some skin scrapings under her nails. We compared that DNA to hers, to make sure she hadn’t clawed herself somehow. I just got the results back.”

  “There was a familial relationship,” I said. “The DNA came from her father.”

  “Or her son,” Inspector Chang answered. “It could go either way, is what the lab said—father or son.”

  “She didn’t have a son. But she was looking for her father. So she must have found him.”

  “And that’s why we need to talk. Because you’re still on the case, and I’m not.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  He pointed in the direction he wanted to go. If we’d gone north along the cracked sidewalk, we’d have reached the underpass and some shelter from the rain. But there were groups of men camped out down there, and Chang wanted to be alone. So we went east, in the rain. He at least obliged me by walking slowly, which was about all I could manage.

  “The word came down last night,” Chang said. “I got it from my lieutenant, and she got it from the chief. And I’ve got no idea where he got it from.”

  “What was the word?”

  “Claire Gravesend was a suicide. End of story. Case closed. Then my lieutenant handed me this.”

  He passed me a piece of paper. It was a printout of an airline reservation. Inspector Chang was flying to Anchorage this afternoon.

  “Alaska?”

  “They’ve got me sitting in on a jailhouse interview. Guy says he’s going to confess to some cold cases here in the city.”

  “Nothing to do with this?”

  “Not at all. They weren’t even my cases.”

  “Your bosses are getting you out of the way?”

  “If that’s what they wanted, Alaska’s pretty far. I’ll be gone twenty-four hours.”

  “You don’t think it was a suicide?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” he said. He stopped. “I’ll tell you something. You know the NTSB?”

  “The National . . . what is it?”

  “The National Transportation Safety Board.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’ve got a full deck of experts on car accidents. They work with the manufacturers, and their engineers have stats on every car for sale in the country. You tell them the make and model of a car, and they’ve got a guy who can answer any question about how it’ll hold up in a crash.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I had a guy from the NTSB come out to the warehouse and examine the Wraith. He had Claire Gravesend’s autopsy report. So he had the car, and he had her measurements. And what he told me is that it didn’t add up.”

  “Didn’t add up how?”

  “She hit the car so hard, she put the roof down to the door handles.”

  “Yeah—I saw that.”

  “She weighed just north of a hundred pounds. The highest place around was the roof—a hundred and forty-one feet. You take her weight and the distance she had to accelerate, and you can calculate the force. The NTSB crunched the numbers and compared it to what they know about Rolls Royce Wraiths, and they said there’s no doubt.”

  “She couldn’t have done that much damage?”

  “Not even close.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Something else fell with her, right? That’s what it has to be. She was holding on to it and hit the car with it. It wasn’t just her weight. It was Claire, plus something extra.”

  “You think—what? She had a suitcase full of gold bricks?”

  “Whatever it was, it was heavy.”

  “And you think whoever pushed her off the roof was trying to get it. After she hit the car, he ran down and took it.”

  “It’s the only explanation,” Chang said. “The only way the facts make sense.”

  We were walking again. Two blocks up, there was a taxi. Its driver was leaning against the trunk, finishing a cigarette. I was starting to get an icy feeling in my stomach. I’d been chasing leads all over Northern California, but I was beginning to realize that I’d fundamentally misunderstood the story.

  “That’s what you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you’d run with it. Because I can’t.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Telling my story to Chang and dumping the case on him wasn’t an option. He was out. It hadn’t been much of a plan anyway. If Madeleine had a chance, it was me.

  “You’ll run with it?”

  “I’m all over it,” I said.

  I needed to go. I needed to get back out there. I waved to the cabdriver. He took one more drag on his cigarette, then flicked it into the gutter.

  “I’ll see you, Inspector.”

  We shook hands.

  “Good luck,” he said. I was barely listening to him. “I’ll help you if I can. But it’ll have to be on the down low.”

  “Sure.”

  I got into the cab’s back seat and shut the door. The driver pivoted around in the front seat.

  “Turk Street,” I said. “You know the Refugio Apartments?”

  Ten minutes felt like an hour. Finally, the driver rolled down Turk Street, past my erstwhile digs at the Westchester, and then to the Refugio. I paid him with some of Juliette’s cash and limped across the street.

  I’d gotten in here the first time by using my phone to play a police radio squawk. I didn’t have a phone now. But on the wall next to the door, there was a code box and an intercom. I knew there was at least one person who’d be at home. The woman in the wheelchair. As long as the elevators were out of service, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  I punched 1201 into the intercom, not sure if the thing was even functional.

  Beside me, the speaker crackled. I was struggling to remember her name—I knew it when I’d talked to her. I could remember her face. But her name had been smashed to a pulp up at the Creekside.

  “Yes?”

  I closed my eyes and pictured myself standing at her door. There had been a smell coming from inside. Like someone had spent forty years cooking onions and boiling vegetables with the windows closed. But the apartment wasn’t triggering her name. Which is when I remembered: she hadn’t introduced herself to me. I’d found out her name by reading the notes Elijah had photographed.

  “Yes?” she said again.

  “Leola Cummings?”

  “Speaking.”

  “We talked a few nights ago about a young woman who jumped.”

  “I remember.”

  “Do you have a moment?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Any chance you can buzz me in?”

  She didn’t answer. The intercom clicked twice and I thought she’d hung up. But then I heard the door’s dead bolt slam open. I grabbed the handle, pulled the door back, and stepped into the lobby.

  If the cab ride from Bryant Street had been painfully slow, climbing the stairs was agonizing in every respect. It took about two minutes per floor, and by the time I got to the roof I was so dizzy I had to lean against the wall and close my eyes until my heart finally caught up. Then I pushed the door open and went out into the rain. I crossed the littered gravel and went to the balustrade on the building’s right corner.

  Claire had hit the street directly beneath me. But I wasn’t looking there. I was
looking at the roofs of the lower buildings. There was an apartment next door, only three or four stories tall, and a run of low tenements across the street. Their roofs were mostly flat gravel, with street-facing façades, all decorated with empty malt liquor bottles, and fast food containers, and the rat-picked remains of dead pigeons, just like the Refugio’s.

  I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for until I saw it on the roof directly opposite me. It was a hundred feet away, in the middle of a two-floor building on the other side of the street. There, alone in the gravel and black roofing tar, was a woman’s high-heeled shoe.

  Claire had been wearing one shoe when I found her. Her other foot was bare. The police had collected everything from the scene, and from the Wraith. Every piece of her personal property had been itemized on a page of her autopsy report. There was the handbag, and the pewter key fob, and the evening gown. A fine watch. And one high-heeled shoe. The other one was missing.

  The police hadn’t found it because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. If Claire had fallen off the top of the Refugio Apartments, her shoe couldn’t have landed on the building across the street. It was impossible. But now, all of the impossible things made sense. The timeline of Claire’s journey from Mendocino to San Francisco; the fact that there was no trace of her in the Refugio; the excessive damage to the Rolls Royce. And now the impossibly placed shoe.

  I looked up, into the clouds.

  Claire hadn’t fallen from a low height, carrying an extra weight. She had fallen from a great height, a point high enough that her body alone was capable of destroying the car. There were no fingerprints in the Refugio Apartments because she had never been inside the building. She had made it from Mendocino to San Francisco in record time because she hadn’t been troubled by roads.

  She’d come by air, in a small plane or a helicopter. And then she’d been thrown out.

  The ground would have been invisible, the streetlights blurred away to an orange glow as she plummeted earthward. It had all come to this, these final seconds portended again and again in her nightmares. She would have been screaming. Thrashing her arms so that she’d wake before she hit. Somehow, surely, there could be a second chance. A soft landing among sweat-soaked sheets, her breath coming hard and fast against her pillow, her heart like a wounded animal caught in her chest.