Serpentine: An Alex Delaware Novel

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Ellie Barker returned with two bottles of Dasani that she handed to us before settling in a facing love seat. “Thanks so much for doing this, guys. I hope it’s not a giant hassle.”

  Milo checked himself midway through an eye roll.

  Not soon enough. Ellie Barker flinched.

  Thrown off for the second time, she coped the same way and turned to me. “A psychologist…part of me does think it’s crazy, trying to find out after all this time. I can’t exactly pump myself up with hope. But if I don’t ever try…” She looked at the floor.

  I said, “Is this the first time you’ve tried?”

  “No, it’s the third time but to my mind the first two don’t count.”

  “Nothing came of them?”

  “Less than nothing,” she said. “Private investigators. I think they were taking advantage of me.”

  “Because…”

  “It was too quick. Like going through the motions. They were corporate security types, maybe that was my mistake, I don’t know.” Daring a look at Milo.

  He uncapped his water bottle, took a long swig. “Was one of them Sapient Investigations?”

  Green-gray eyes widened. “They were the first. How did you—do they have a reputation for taking advantage?”

  “They’re among the biggest and they concentrate on California. Mostly Northern California where you’re originally from. Their emphasis is on computer fraud, industrial espionage, tax cases.”

  “You researched me.”

  “Just the basics.”

  “I see.” One slender freckled hand tugged at the fingers of the other. “I got the referral through my executive board—my former board, I had a company that I sold.” Small smile. “You probably know that, too.”

  Milo said, “What was the second outfit?”

  “Cortez and Talbott. They’re down here. Costa Mesa.”

  “That’s Orange County,” said Milo.

  “Does that make them a poor choice?” said Ellie Barker.

  “Don’t know their work, ma’am, but generally it’s best to keep things local.”

  “I guess I figured with the internet, geography wasn’t relevant.” Color spread around delicate ears. “A friend of mine—an engineer at Google—recommended them, I thought they’d be close enough.”

  “Did either of them give you written reports?”

  “They both gave me one-page letters basically informing me nothing could be done. Plus bills for way more hours than seemed reasonable. I paid them and gave up. Or thought I had. But it kept gnawing at me—wanting to know anything.”

  She stared into her lap. “I read a story in college titled ‘Man Without a Country.’ I’m a woman without a past. I have no idea who my biological father is or where I was born. My first birth certificate was when my stepfather adopted me. My mother was already dead and he put down his own mother’s birthday as mine. I’ll be forty in a few months and I realized I’d probably lived the majority of my life. If that doesn’t sound coherent and rational, I can’t help it.”

  She twisted her hair. “At this point, you’re probably thinking, Oh boy, a sad case, what a waste of my time.”

  Gray eyes glistened with moisture. Ellie Barker wiped them hurriedly.

  Milo said, “I’ll be frank, ma’am. You may be walking up a dead-end road, I don’t know enough to say. But if the doctor and I limited ourselves to what was obviously rational, we’d both be out of work.”

  Ellie Barker’s smile was immediate, grateful, pathetic. Needy kid finally getting something from surrogate dad.

  “Well,” she said, “I just hope you don’t think I’m some kind of flake. I majored in business, I like to think I’m practical. I thought I was doing pretty well suppressing the whole thing. Then something weird happened. I was at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco for a fundraiser and they sat me next to a woman and she was really friendly, asking me about myself, how I’d ended up with all the old-folk donors. I was feeling pretty low because I’d just gotten Cortez and Talbott’s report so I told her about looking for my mother. She seemed sympathetic, and then the woman on the other side of her must’ve overheard because she said she had police connections. So I switched seats and talked to her—Dr. Bauer—and she said she’d see what she could do and took my number. The next day she called and said she’d contacted my state assemblyperson, Darrel Hernandez. I didn’t even know his name, politics isn’t my thing. A few days later, one of Hernandez’s assistants phoned and said she’d called your mayor and then…do you know all this?”

  Milo nodded. “The wheels of justice grinding at warp speed.”

  Ellie Barker flinched. “You think it was tacky? Using an advantage someone else wouldn’t have? I considered that, Lieutenant. But it’s not like everyone loses their mom at three so I rationalized it as some sort of karmic leveling-out.”

  “No need to justify, ma’am. I was just commenting on…an atypical situation.”

  Ellie Barker leveled her gaze at him. “You’re telling me you were pressured. I guess I should’ve figured. Does that mean we’re just going through the motions?”

  No anger, just the habitual resignation of an abandoned pup.

  “Ms. Barker,” said Milo, “I never just go through the motions.” He’d sat up straight, put some steel in his voice.

  “So you’ll try?” said Ellie Barker. “I’d be so grateful. Even if it goes nowhere.”

  He pulled out his pad. “Tell me about your mother, ma’am. Start from the beginning and tell me everything you know.”

  “Sure. I do want to say thanks so much—but could you do me one teensy favor, Lieutenant?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not used to being called ma’am.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Ellie Barker opened her mouth to speak, froze, and began fiddling with her fingers.

  “Sorry, I’m trying to sort out my thoughts.” A tongue-tip raced between her lips. “I could use some water myself, just a second.”

  She was gone longer than it took to fetch the Dasani dangling from her hand. After sitting, she set about working the cap. It resisted, plastic quivering. She put the bottle down, defeated by shaky fingers.

  Her right hand rose to her throat.

  Touching a necklace of dark-green speckled beads that she hadn’t been wearing when we entered. Fingering orbs like a rosary. Her eyes soared to the ceiling and stayed there.

  Milo said, “Take your time.”

  She shook her head. “Every time I go through this I’m confronted by how little I know. Not that the other guys really cared. They said anything relevant would be found on the internet, they had access to bases I didn’t. Is that true?”

  “The internet’s a tool, no more, no less.”

  “One of many in your toolbox, I hope.”

  “We do the best we can, ma’a—Ms. Barker.”

  “Ellie’s fine.”

  He leaned forward. “Ellie, whatever you think you do or don’t know, we have to start somewhere.”

  “Sure. Of course. Sorry.” Another lip-lick. Both hands squeezed the bottle. Bubbles floated and descended. “Okay, here goes. My mother’s maiden name was Dorothy Swoboda. When she was with my father—technically he was my stepfather but he’s the only dad I ever knew—I assumed she took his name. Barker. Stanley Barker. I found out later they’d never actually married. I don’t know who my biological father was because my stepdad had no idea and there’s no record of my birth.”

  “Nowhere?”

  “Not as Eleanor Swoboda, not as Eleanor Barker. That one thing Sapient and Cortez looked into and agreed upon. After my dad filed the certificate he got me a Social Security number and that’s the extent of it. I never knew about any of this. Why would a kid be concerned with paperwork? And I was happy with my birthday, he al
ways got me a cake.”

  I said, “When did he tell you he was your stepdad?”

  “When I was a teenager.”

  “How old?” said Milo.

  “Fifteen. I wanted to know more about Mom. Up till then I’d never asked. Maybe I was in denial, but it had never been an issue, Dad and me was what I was used to. Then I started being a teenager—questioning everything—and demanded he tell me what he knew. He got a funny look on his face, like he’d been waiting for this moment but dreaded it.”

  She gave the bottle another try. Frowned. I loosened the cap for her.

  “Thank you, where was I…okay, I demanded. Dad left the room and returned a few moments later with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He said, ‘Sit down, Ellie,’ and then he told me there was going to be a lot to handle, was I sure. I said something like ‘Fuck, yeah.’ Charming, huh?”

  Milo said, “Goes with the teen territory.”

  “And not liking it went with the dad territory,” she said. “He was pretty cut-and-dried. When he met Mom she had me, he knew nothing beyond that. I didn’t push the bio-dad issue because he already looked pretty stricken and I didn’t want to hurt him. Besides, he was my real father, I had no interest in some guy who’d abandoned me.”

  She took a long swallow of water. “The truth was I went from being obnoxious to feeling bad for him. He looked like he was going to cry. I felt like I was going to cry. Then he said, ‘Let’s go out for ice cream,’ so we went to Baskin-Robbins.”

  Small smile. “I remember what I had. Jamoca Almond Fudge in a sugar cone. At first I could barely get it down, like there was a lump here.” Tapping a spot above the green necklace. “In retrospect, should I have pushed for more information? Maybe. But he was my dad. It just didn’t seem right.”

  Milo took out his pad and pen. “His full name…”

  “Stanley Richard Barker. Doctor Stanley R. Barker, he was an optometrist.”

  “How old were you when he and your mom met?”

  “Not sure. Dad said a baby.”

  “And when she died?”

  “Not even three, thirty-three months.”

  “Is Dr. Barker still alive?”

  “I wish, Lieutenant. He passed a while back.”

  “How long ago?”

  “When I was in college…nineteen years ago.”

  “Where was college?”

  “Stanford. I did my undergrad there and was planning to enroll in the MBA program. When Dad passed, I was in my sophomore year and spending the summer doing research for a professor. European economic history, bone-dry. After Dad passed, I dropped out and got myself what I thought would be a mindless job, working for a clothing manufacturer in Oakland. The funny thing is, it led to some interesting things.”

  “You started your own company.”

  She shrugged. “I was lucky.”

  I said, “You had a good relationship with your dad and didn’t want to rock the boat. After he died you didn’t need to worry about that.”

  Her head bobbed and she winced. As if I’d embedded a hook.

  “He wasn’t a whoop-it-up dad,” she said, “but he was a great dad. Quiet, reserved, and incredibly smart. Earned a B.S. in physics from Cornell, came out to California to work for the government then went to optometry school at Berkeley. He was really into optics—not the political cliché, the real thing. He opened up an office in Danville, this upper-crusty place where we ended up living, then a second down in Oakland just so he could service poor people. He probably could’ve been Pearle Vision or LensCrafters but big business didn’t interest him, he just liked helping people see better and made a good living at it. The money he left me helped me bankroll Beterkraft.”

  She finished her water. “When I was home, we’d play Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit, watch goofy old movies.”

  Her mouth twitched. Holding something back.

  I said, “When you were home from college?”

  Another flash of color spread at the edges of her face, this one intense enough to turn her earlobes scarlet. “Before that. I went to boarding school when I was fifteen. Dad had a lot of patience but I turned incredibly difficult—no need to get into the details, let’s just say I was a pain and he tried his best and when he finally suggested I try living away, I said sure. Actually, I didn’t say it very politely. On one hand, I was thrilled to get away from rules. On the other…” Shrug. “But obviously none of that’s the issue.”

  I said, “You asked about your mother when you came home from boarding school.”

  She stared at me. “No getting around the emotional probing, huh? Yes. Exactly. Things changed when I was at Milbrook—Milbrook Preparatory Academy for Girls, it’s in Palo Alto, a feeder for Stanford. For all my behavioral issues, my grades had always been good. But now I was living with seventy other girls, and girls can get pushy and nosy. Everyone talking about their family, bragging, wanting to know about yours. I knew so little, obviously I didn’t want to talk about it. But a few of them pushed and pushed and then they started making fun of me—my parents were spies or criminals. Or worse, welfare cheats. I tried to ignore it but eventually it got to me and I struck out. Literally. I ended up smacking one particularly obnoxious little bitch in the nose and got into major trouble.”

  She passed the empty bottle from hand to hand. “Two months in and poor Dad has to come and beg the dean to keep me. He convinced her but I saw how much it stressed him, so I promised to keep it together. But by then I’d been tagged as a weirdo loner and everyone avoided me. Which on one hand was good, the questions stopped. But then with the pressure off, I realized the questions were valid. Who was she and how had she died? Who was I? So on Christmas, the next time I was home, I brought it up. Dad told me she’d died, had been cremated, and he’d scattered the ashes in a park somewhere they used to go.”

  The bottle wobbled and nearly fell out of her hands. She managed to hold on to it, placed it gingerly on the table. “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job but, again, is all this really necessary?”

  Milo said, “The more we know, the better chance we have.”

  “Sure but I don’t see why—all right, fine, you’re here to help me, I won’t be obstructive.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Nothing until Dad passed and I broke down, just went numb, the feeling of aloneness.”

  Biting her lip, she looked away. When she spoke next, her voice was weak, tinged with the vibrato of suffering.

  “Stanford assigned a nurse to look after me. They suggested I see a counselor but I blew that off. Eventually, I told myself life sucked, I just had to be strong, didn’t need a babysitter. I know I was privileged—no money worries because Dad’s executor was taking care of me on that level.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Dad’s lawyer, Lawrence Kagan. I’d known him as a customer—Larry with the Coke-bottle glasses. I knew Dad liked him but had no idea he trusted him that much.”

  I said, “Was the trust justified?”

  “Totally. Mr. K was honest and lovely to me.” She breathed in deeply. “It’s when he drove down to Palo Alto to read me the will that I saw the adoption form. Dad had decided to do it after Mom died because I was technically attached to no one. That kind of brought everything back—who was I, where had I come from. Larry had no idea—don’t bother contacting him, he’s also gone.”

  She smiled. “That day in his office. He put on one of the Coke-bottles Dad had made for him and shuffled papers like someone out of Dickens. When he showed me the adoption form, it choked me up. That Dad had always cared. Then I noticed Mom’s name. Dorothy Swoboda, not Barker, and he explained about no marriage. Which seemed pretty daring for Dad, but maybe it was her idea? Meanwhile, Larry’s reading the will, I’m Dad’s sole heir and there’s a lot of money. It took a while to settle down emotionally. A year o
r so. That’s when I first began looking for information about her using her actual name. I had no idea where to start but figured California was logical. I learned that a lot of personal documents are county forms so I worked my way down from Contra Costa to Alameda, et cetera, et cetera. It was tedious but strangely exciting. Finally I found the coroner’s report from L.A. County and then an article in the L.A. Times. Confusing because the paper made it sound like a car accident but the report said homicide. That freaked me out. I put the whole thing aside for a long, long time.”

  I said, “Your family was living in Danville but your mother died in L.A.”

  “I thought it was weird. Dad certainly never mentioned it. Maybe she was down here on some sort of trip. Or visiting someone?” A beat. “Or they’d separated. I really have no idea. That’s part of what I’d like to know.”

  “Did your dad give any indication of marital problems?”

  “Never. But he wouldn’t have. He was private. He never talked about her, period.”

  That sounded more hostile than private. I said nothing.

  Milo said, “Did he leave you any photographs of her?”

  She held up an index finger, stood and hurried up the stairs. Returned with a folio-sized brown leather album that she thrust at Milo.

  Twenty or so oversized pages, each blank but for the first, where a trio of mementos was lodged under horizontal plastic strips.

  At the top, a copy of the Times piece. Bottom of the page, two brief paragraphs.

  Below that was a faded color snapshot with crenellated edges and lowermost, dead center, a negative photostat—white lettering on a black background—of a thirty-six-year-old L.A. County Coroner’s death certificate for Dorothy Swoboda, white female, twenties, precise age unknown.

  Cause: bullet wound.

  Manner: homicide.

  Milo tapped the album. “Can I take this?”

  Ellie Barker hesitated.

  “If it’s a problem, you can make copies and send them to me.”

  “No, it’s fine…but if you could return it when you’re through—”