“I want to speak to Rishi,” Asha said as she nodded off. “Tell him to get the girls.” The drug seem to pull her violently down into the bed and into unconsciousness.
O’Higgins stood there watching until she stopped muttering.
She woke up almost two hours later.
“It’s you … the man on the boat.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where are my girls?”
“We’re looking for them,” O’Higgins said. “I promise you.” He had Asha’s iPhone in his hand. He was hoping that whoever had taken the girls would call Asha Chaundhry’s phone.
Marvin had gone back to the scene on Broadway. They’d decided to keep the Chaundhrys’ house closed down for another twenty-four hours. O’Higgins had no one to go home to as he might have done in the past, to catch a meal and explain to his wife what the case was about. Instead he’d decided to stay at the hospital and sat in the room waiting for Asha to wake up. He’d had time to look at Asha’s texts and to take a call that had come in from one of Asha’s girlfriends, who told him Nirad Chaundhry had been living with the couple for the last few weeks.
“I’m terribly thirsty,” Asha said from the bed.
O’Higgins stood up and brought the short plastic water glass and helped her drink from its straw. The second sedative they’d used on her had enervated her completely. Her eyes were glassy and bloodshot.
While he’d sat there, waiting, he’d gone through her phone. It was a picture of a woman of her age: Photos, dozens, of her twin girls, of Rishi, and of the girls’ school. Some of her husband and an older man who looked like her husband. O’Higgins guessed that was her father-in-law. There was a photo of a Hindu god, of some kind, as her phone’s desktop. She had a WeChat account, but all the messages on WeChat were in Hindi.
Someone had sent Asha an Instagram photo while he’d been poking around—a selfie taken at what looked like some kind of university, as there were university-age students in the background. The girl in the Instagram photo looked like Asha and may have been a younger sister, or niece, he guessed.
He looked for anything in the text messages—there were more than 200. But they seemed to be mostly innocuous. Contractors of one kind or another, asking to be let into the house at a certain time, or Asha’s girlfriends chatting about random subjects. He saw a picture of an Indian temple and noted it because it seemed to be in the Bay Area.
He finally noticed a text from someone, writing in English, who kept asking the same question but received no reply: Coffee? He counted over a dozen texts from the same person, Robert Thomas.
There were emails in both Hindi and English. New ones were coming in from immediate family members, wondering why they’d not head back from her. Asha’s mother—in English— had left several voice messages, each one had sounded progressively more concerned and agitated. Then they’d stopped altogether. He wondered why Asha’s mother wasn’t still trying to reach her daughter. Had she heard the news about her son-in-law?
“My husband is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Bharti too? You’re sure?”
“Yes. I’m afraid so,” O’Higgins said standing next to her.
“Why?”
“We don’t know. Your girls are with your father-in-law, it seems. He picked them up at the Gilberts. It was an Uber car that picked them up. They were taken to the Indian Consulate and dropped off. We checked. So we’ve ruled out kidnapping. I’ve found your father-in-law’s cell number and left a message for him. But he’s not called back yet.”
She stared at him. “Nirad has the girls? Why? I don’t understand.”
“We don’t know. We’re trying to contact him. Have you noticed anything strange in the neighborhood? Perhaps strange people canvassing?”
“No. Nothing.” The hospital was quiet. It was a dramatic change from the morning, when it had been so hectic and noisy.
“Did your husband mention anything at all that might help us? Anyone who came to the house who might have done this?”
“No. Where is he? His body, where is it?”
“The coroner’s office will take both bodies to the morgue.”
“I have to call his parents,” Asha said.
“Your father-in-law was at the house when you left to go to the store?”
“Yes. No. He may have been. I don’t know exactly. He was due home for dinner. He’d called at lunch — I didn’t see Nirad when I arrived. The girls were across the street at the Gilberts’. A play date.”
“But your father-in-law was staying there at the house with you?”
“Yes. Yes. Give me my phone,” she said. He handed her back her cell phone. “I would like some privacy, please — Detective,” she said.
“Yes, of course.” He made for the door and stopped. He thought of asking her permission to have the technical staff at Battery Street clone her phone’s memory, but didn’t bother. He could ask her later.
He looked at his watch. It was 5:00 a.m. He’d not slept for more than twenty-four hours, and was exhausted.
Asha Chaundhry was speaking in a low tone of voice in Hindi on her phone. O’Higgins walked out of the room and down the ward’s empty, well-lit hallway. A nurse passed him and smiled; the nurses all seemed to know he was a San Francisco police detective. He nodded back.
He was glad that the two little girls were probably safe. The idea that they might have been kidnapped had horrified him. He went home to shower, lay down, and fell into a deep sleep. It was the first time he’d been able to sleep without taking a Valium. He woke three hours later, his phone ringing on the bed beside him.
CHAPTER 7
Four months before the murders
“Mother, please tell them both hello,” Asha said.
She had two English girlfriends who had both been up at Cambridge with her. The two were staying a week with her parents while visiting India. It was Asha who suggested it. She tried to stay in touch with her English girlfriends since she’d married, but the circumstances of her marriage had made her Western girlfriends uncomfortable.
The two English women staying at her parents’ house were typical of all her English and American friends who would never understand Indian culture, or accept her being happy in an arranged marriage, which she was. Although she understood their attitudes about arranged marriage — they loathed the idea, primarily because they were besotted with the idea of “romance” — she’d ignored their dire warnings, taken the plunge and married Rishi. She had not regretted it for a moment.
She hung up her iPhone after allowing her mother, a well-known concert pianist, to explain in great detail why she hoped Asha’s father-in-law, Nirad Chaundhry, would not succeed in his bid for Prime Minister. There would be a general election in three months. The Indian press was full of speculation that Nirad would head the next government of India, bringing his Hindu Nationalist Party, the BJP, back to power.
Asha pocketed her phone, took her two girls’ hands and headed across busy Geary Street toward the art gallery she intended to visit. Politics bored her in general, but the idea of her father-in-law becoming Prime Minister of India was exciting, and she knew it would be very good for her children. All doors around the world would open for them, should Nirad become prime minister.
“I was interested in the landscape in the window,” Asha said.
“It’s a Piazzoni. Hello, I’m Robert Thomas, the owner,” the well-dressed young man said, walking out of the gallery’s Rare Book Room and into a flimsy-feeling light. “Gottardo Piazzoni. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?”
Asha was wearing black yoga pants and an expensive white blouse she’d bought at Banana Republic the day before. She looked elegant and chic. She was clutching her iPhone, waiting for her husband to return a text about when she could expect him back at the hotel.
“Do you like it?” Thomas asked fro
m across the still-cold salon. The heater had just kicked in. The young man was a slight, handsome in an old-school way. His mother’s friends all said he looked like the ’60s-era movie star Montgomery Clift, lean and dark-haired and somewhat fragile looking. Asha thought at first he was gay, but something about his smile changed her mind. It was slightly feral, and vibed straight.
Thomas flipped on the light switch next to him, lighting up an entire wall behind him, hung with forty or more landscape paintings, mostly California artists from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a dazzling display. Scores of Tonalist and Pasadena School paintings appeared out of the gloom, caught in spotlights designed to show them to their best effect: desert scenes of Palm Springs before it turned into the cheesy resort town; pristine Southern California seashores, before cars and black-top highways invaded, a time when there were still “Pismo clams” at Malibu; Yosemite’s famous Half-Dome in winter: fabulous rose gardens of the wealthy in Pasadena of the 1920s: the wondrous almond and orange orchards of San Jose before it became home to the Pentagon’s techno-military-industrial complex. The paintings captured all of early 20th century California’s once varied, heart-stopping landscapes, long past and forgotten, buried by freeways and McDonalds restaurants.
The art startled her. It was almost as if each painting were only part of a panel in one monumental work, a masterpiece that stretched across 40 feet of gallery wall: California. It opened up something in her.
“I’m looking for a gift, for my husband. For Christmas,” Asha said, standing near the entrance as if afraid to come in a step further. Her daughters had pulled away and were exploring a still-dark cavernous second room to Asha’s left. “And we’ve a new place to furnish as well. Terribly exciting, but quite daunting in its scope.”
Asha looked down to see a luxe red carpet that gave the place a sumptuous quality, something between a Turkish pasha’s harem quarters and the office of a powerful dictator. She felt warm air pour down over her shoulders, from a heating vent in the ceiling directly above her.
The young man looked at her as if she had fallen from the sky instead of walking through the door. She was used to being ogled by men, young and old, and she took it in stride. It had been going on since she was a very young girl. She had the kind of perfect body men couldn’t help but stare at or want in the most basic and physical way.
The gallery owner had not noticed her two girls, but now he heard them playing in the adjoining room. The two were sitting in a ‘60s hoop chair, having a gay time of it.
Robert Thomas stopped smiling and looked at them. He deliberately lit the room the girls were in from the array of light switches behind him. The girls looked at him, caught out.
“But it’s the painting in the window that caught my eye,” Asha said. “It would be perfect for our new place, I think.”
Thomas walked Asha toward the painting in the window. He climbed up into the display and turned the canvas toward her. Something about him was athletic and confident. He is the King of this empire, she thought.
Robert Thomas had designed the window display himself with the utmost care. It was meticulous and enchanting. It was the gallery’s special holiday display, and he’d taken great pains to make it look attractive and inviting. He’d arranged a kind of tableau with a mid-century couch and the Piazzoni landscape tilted against it. He’d draped a long string of real antique black pearls off the painting’s gilded frame. He’d placed a bottle of French Champagne—one of the large magnums—in an antique silver ice bucket on a silver tray off to its side. He’d laced the scene with tiny Christmas lights. He’d managed to make the old-school painting sexy and modern by combining it with hip furniture. He had a knack with things like that.
The painting impressed Asha again when he turned it toward her. It looked even better in the strange demi-light of morning. The dull winter’s light from Geary Street infused it with something special, adding to its delicious moody quality.
He brought the painting closer so she could view it. People walked by the gallery, looking in at them as they passed. He said nothing, letting her enjoy what she was so taken with. He’d seen customers look at paintings like that before. He knew she loved it in a way that was personal and intense, and could lead to a quick sale.
Something about the painting was haunting and profound, Asha had thought the moment she’d first seen it. She’d found herself staring at it from the sidewalk the day before, on the way to lunch. It was of a bay somewhere, with something quietly, intensely intimate about it. The color scheme was classic Tonalist work in different muted gold and green tones, one color fading into the next, dreamlike and sublime. It was as if the painter had assigned this landscape to stand in for some deep emotion he’d felt—a kind of secret between the painter and the landscape that would be impossible to share completely.
You would have to have some key to its meaning, she thought, studying it again. Or have known the artist, been his lover even. Or been with him that day he’d painted it, at least. Before knowing who the painter was, she’d been sure it had been painted by a man and not a woman. Something about it was very male. And then he might only have whispered it to you.
Without intending to she had a quasi-sexual fantasy about the painter, working that day. In her fantasy she sat down next to him and listened to him explain things, things that would otherwise have been unknown to her. It was magical. They were together alone with the landscape, becoming part of it.
He, the painter, turned and looked into her eyes. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“India. I’m from India,” she’d said. They’d kissed. The painter touched her breast. His palm was warm. It felt as if he’d touched the very center of her being and flipped the switch, the one that had been there waiting to be turned on without her even knowing it.
The painting sparked something, perhaps just a recognition of nature’s power, including her own power. She wondered if she could be pregnant again. Her prior pregnancy had brought on intense emotions: sexual, a strong human compassion too, and at odd times. Since they’d arrived she was constantly buying food for homeless people on Geary Street. If I were pregnant that would explain it. I would blame this weird feeling on a sudden splash of mother-chemicals. But I’m not pregnant. It’s something else.
“Where is this bay, so enchanting? It’s so — intriguing,” Asha asked. The young man had not said a word since he climbed into the display.
“Tomales Bay,” Thomas said. “Have you ever been?”
“No. We’ve just moved here from India. Is it close, Tomales Bay? Perhaps we’ll visit.”
“About two hours from the City, maybe less. To the North. Marin County.” He put the painting back in its place and climbed out of the display window. “Would you like to buy it?”
“Yes, very much,” she said, smiling, knowing she could never explain the purchase to her husband. He didn’t care much for figurative landscape paintings. When it came to Western paintings, he was attracted to abstract expressionist work. “It’s so — relaxing. Is it terribly expensive?”
“No, not at all. Sixty thousand dollars. A steal, really.” Robert mugged straight-faced for a moment, then cracked a half-smile. “Should I have it wrapped up and sent along?” He was going to say fifty thousand, which was what he’d been quoting, but something told him to push it higher. She struck him as some guy’s heart-stopping trophy wife.
The Chaundhrys had only been in San Francisco for a month. Asha was happy to be out of India—Mumbai, especially, where they’d lived since they were married. She’d found Mumbai claustrophobic. San Francisco was just the opposite. She loved it. They were living in the Clift Hotel while waiting for their new house to be remodeled. She had insisted on living in the City despite the fact that her husband was setting up a new plant near Silicon Valley, to be part of his family’s electronics empire.
The Chaundhry family had three massive electronic
s plants in India—motherboard producers for Dell and others, including secret work for the Indian government. They had decided it was time to expand their motherboard production into the US and had sent their eldest son, Rishi, to make it happen. At least that was what the Indian business press had reported, in countless glowing stories.
Rishi was older than she by almost fifteen years. It was what she’d found attractive about him. He was secure, with that attitude of entitlement the rich have everywhere. His brother was a notorious playboy who dated Bollywood film stars and ran from one bedroom to the next. Rishi was just the opposite. He’d been the perfect Indian son, tending to the business, working with his father and staying out of the newspapers. Asha’s parents had found no fault in the man. The fact that he was slightly older than their daughter they viewed as a positive.
When she’d said yes to the marriage—they’d had only really one date, and it had been chaperoned—she knew that her children would have the best of everything. That had made her feel profoundly secure. They had two beautiful daughters, and they hoped to have a third child, a boy.
“I see. Sixty thousand dollars. Well —” Her English was British English, and Robert thought it sounded posh. She was extremely attractive, model quality. He was a ladies’ man and considered himself a connoisseur of beauty, as well as number of other things.
He’d skipped college altogether, deciding instead to learn the gallery business from his grandfather, who had been a hard taskmaster but a very good teacher. By the time he was nineteen Robert had become an acknowledged expert, not just in 19th century landscape painting, but in rare books and mid-century furniture, both of which he avidly collected and had a passion for, especially rare books. At the moment he was trying to acquire a manuscript of Kafka’s novel The Castle. He thought of himself as a playboy with very good taste. And it was probably true. That he had a serious personality disorder was lost on him.
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