by Linda Barnes
Utilitarian. That was the word for Mark Jason's fourth-floor flat. The furnishings were student sparse, but plenty of books lined the block-and-board shelves. A picture of Carol Lawton smiled up from a silver frame.
"I'd like to take something with his fingerprints on it." Spraggue said. "Nothing of value. A pen he used. A glass from the bathroom."
"Will that tell you for sure?"
"It'll tell the fingerprint experts in Napa."
She led the way through a narrow hall to a tiny bathroom. "The blue glass," she said. "He'll be mad if he comes back and—"
"I won't lose it," Spraggue said. He wrapped it carefully in a paper towel.
The phone rang. Carol ran back to the living room, snatched the receiver up, color flooding her cheeks. "Hello," she said urgently, willing Mark Jason onto the other end. Her face fell. She held the receiver out limply. "It's for you."
"Me?" He stared dumbly.
"The Napa County Sheriff" s Office."
He grabbed it. "Hello?"
"Well, there you are. Who's the lady with the pretty voice?" It was Bradley.
"How did you—"
"No sweat, once I got on to Eustace. God, that man can talk."
"What's up?"
"Get back here."
"Look, I've got a real lead. I think I lmow—"
"Just get back as fast as you can, Spraggue. Kate Holloway should be discharged any time now."
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Yeah, but——"
"We just pulled another body out of a car trunk."
"Not—" Spraggue had a momentary vision of Howard.
"Unidentified. One of the cops says he spotted the guy hitchhiking around the place. Just found him. Changes things."
"Right." Spraggue checked his watch. "I'll be there in an hour. I'll leave now."
"Check my office for a message if I'm not in."
"Thanks."
Spraggue hung up the phone and stared blankly at the girl on the couch.
17
He didn't break any speed records on the return trip to Napa. His departure was delayed; he owed Carol Lawton some kind of explanation.
She listened woodenly, her thin features utterly composed, so much so that Spraggue wasn't sure if anything he said actually registered. She nodded occasionally, but that might have been politeness, not comprehension. She broke in on his soliloquy near the end.
"But this, this new death . . ." She spoke hesitantly, so softly he had to lean forward in his chair and practically lip-read. "The one you just heard about. Doesn't that throw everything off? Couldn't that mean Mark's okay?"
"No," he'd said bluntly, cruelly, not wanting her to hope.
But she hadn't really believed him.
He'd taken the carefully wrapped glass and promised to phone that evening, giving her the Holloway Hills number just in case.
To shut out the memory of that pinched, hurt face, Spraggue turned on the tiny tape recorder he faithfully kept in his pocket, recited lines and cues from Still Waters all the way back to the sheriff s office. He didn't memorize a single line, but it kept his mind off Bradley's new discovery.
He parked at a fire hydrant, ripe for a ticket. Kate was gone, released half an hour ago, and chauffeured home. No Bradley. No Enright. No message. Spraggue entrusted the precious glass to a sergeant, with instructions to give it to no one but Bradley. In exchange, he got the whereabouts of the latest victim: Deer Park Road.
He drove north. Just past the second turn-off for Sanitarium Road, the familiar police cars, vans, and wreckers were drawn into a huddle. It was like the discovery of Lenny's body all over again, in a day light dream.
The police had cordoned off the area with wooden stakes and heavy rope. Sunlight glinted off tripod-mounted cameras and the chrome bumper of a red-and-white ambulance. Ten or more people, each intent on a specific task, crowded the small plot of ground—motioning, shouting, staring, scribbling in spiral notebooks. The effect, Spraggue thought briefly, was much like that of an on-location film site. The sheet-covered corpse that two men lifted onto a stretcher was real.
"Just keep on moving, buddy." The gravel-voiced cop leaned in his front window as he pulled the station wagon over onto the soft grass.
"Lieutenant Bradley's guest," Spraggue said.
The man shrugged, blew a bubble out of what Spraggue had assumed to be a huge wad of chewing tobacco. "Name?"
"Michael Spraggue."
"Keep out of the way."
"Sure."
Spraggue left the car unlocked for a quick escape in case Enright caught sight of him before Bradley. The dark-green Buick Regal was the focus of all attention. Four doors flung wide, trunk and hood uplifted, it attracted not only the scrutiny of men with magnifying lenses, but a constant barrage of flashbulbs. The left front tire rested in a low rut, but there were no tire cuts in the turf, no sign that the driver had rocked the car in an effort to get out of the hole. The tracks were clear; the car had been abandoned. Unless it was out of gas.
The rear license plate was muddy, but legible. Spraggue wrote down the numbers on the back of an old business card. Either heisted from some suburban shopping mall or rented by a John Smith or Jane Doe. Still, the car was a break in the pattern. As far as he knew, it had absolutely no connection to Kate or Holloway Hills.
A van, beige with rainbow—colored letters announcing KABC, pulled over with a screech and blocked his escape route. Spraggue glanced around for Bradley, saw Enright.
At six feet four and three hundred pounds, Enright was normally hard to miss. Now, face flushed to a beet red, voice raised as he hollered instructions to his crew, he was unavoidable. Spraggue ducked behind a tree and listened. Was Enright so furious because he'd had to let Kate go? Or had he been on the receiving end of a few choice comments by the elusive Sheriff Hughes?
If Bradley was anywhere around, he'd have to be over in a little tree-shaded gully. Spraggue took a few steps in that direction, stopped dead when the sudden hush warned him of Enright's approach. The huge man's complexion was an even duskier hue than before. He bore down on Spraggue with giant steps. "What do you think you're doing here?" he demanded. "This is official-"
Spraggue turned to confront Enright and was shocked to find a toothy grin spreading over the captain's face. Spraggue looked over his shoulder and blessed KABC. They had their video-cam pointed straight at Enright. The little red light on the top was flashing.
Spraggue slipped into the reporter role instinctively, knowing that Enright, this new Enright with the fatuous grin, would tell him just about anything as long as that red light gleamed.
"When was the body found?" he asked authoritatively. A woman joined him, nodded, and shoved a microphone up against Enright's chin.
"Uh . . . we discovered the body of an unidentified young white male two, maybe three hours ago."
"How did that come about?" Spraggue asked.
"Huh?"
The woman took over, and Spraggue breathed a sigh of relief. "Did you discover the body through a routine check, or did you receive information that a body would be found?" She had dark hair and wide-set green eyes. Spraggue thought he might have seen her once on the news.
"I can't answer that at this time," Enright said, looking self-important.
The reporter wasn't thrown a beat. "Are the police considering this the third murder by the Car Trunk Killer?"
"It has certain similarities to other homicides we are currently investigating—"
"And you feel that one man is responsible for all three killings?"
"I do," Enright said, nodding his head stiffly for emphasis. He stared right into the camera, mesmerized.
"Is there anything significant about this particular death?" asked the woman. "Something you might consider a clue to the murderer's identity?"
"Well, uh." For a moment Enright looked as if he would balk at an answer. He glared fiercely at Spraggue, willing him to go away. Spraggue smiled at the camera.
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"Uh . . . we do feel that we have a motive, a clear motive in this case. With that in mind, we will now review our findings in the other two deaths. No further questions, please."
The red light went off. The woman and her crew backed off for a long-shot wrap-up. Spraggue tried to tag along.
"You," Enright whispered furiously. "You. Get back here!" His grin was gone.
"What do you mean, you've got a motive?" Spraggue decided to attack.
"What do you mean, barging through a police cordon—"
"Look, Enright, you're wrong on this one. This murder breaks all the patterns. Why are you calling it the third in the series?"
"Wait a minute." Enright held up a huge pawlike hand. "You're saying we've got two, maybe three separate killers who get off stuffing bodies in car trunks?"
"This one is different! You've got a car that's not anywhere near Holloway Hills. It doesn't belong to anyone connected with Holloway Hills."
"So you say—"
"So I say. How was this guy killed?"
"Looks like manual strangulation."
"Well, that's out of whack, too. The other killer goes in for more exotic means."
"Maybe he ran out of ideas."
Spraggue wished he didn't have to stare so far up at Enright. "The victim was a hitcher, right? No connection with the wine industry?"
"Not as far as we—where did you get that about him being a hitchhiker?"
"Look, I think I know who the first victim was."
Spraggue hoped Bradley would forgive him. "I left a glass at your office to be fingerprinted."
"Folks at my office don't take orders from you." Enright's voice was pitched dangerously low. "I think you'd better get a move on."
"I'm just trying to point out that there are such things as copycat killings."
"Look, Spraggue, I want you out of here. For good. While your partner was in jail, I had some sympathy for you. But now that she's free, you've got no interest, legitimate or otherwise, in police affairs."
"The first victim's name is Mark Jason. He was a student in enology at U.C. Davis."
"Write it all up for me, why don't you?" Enright said scornfully. "And leave it at my office. No need for you to follow me around."
"Listen—"
"You want me to have some of these fine officers escort you to your car?"
Spraggue muttered an obscenity under his breath, took one more desperate glimpse around, saw no one remotely like Bradley. He had to honk at the TV van for five minutes before the driver deigned to move it the necessary two feet. He broke the speed limit driving back to Holloway Hills.
18
As he mounted the creaky front steps, Spraggue called Kate's name. He knocked three times before using his key, eased the door open with a curious mixture of anticipation and dread.
"Kate?" He couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed by the answering empty echo. He scanned the living room: nothing. Not even his duffel bag dumped in the middle of the rug, an unspoken order to leave.
He blew out a deep breath. She was probably up at the winery by now, assuaging Howard's myriad fears.
Automatically, he walked into the kitchen to check the refrigerator door for messages. The smudged porcelain surface stared back blankly and he realized that it had been seven years since he and Kate had used the refrigerator as their blackboard. Seven years . . . The discovery made him feel old. He ran his index linger around the rim of a lipstick-stained coffee cup on the kitchen table. The inch of black liquid at the bottom of the mug was still warm.
He did a quick search of the downstairs rooms, climbed the steps to the second floor. Behind the closed bathroom door, the shower hummed. He knocked and the wooden door opened, releasing a cloud of steam so fragrant, so redolent of Kate, that it hit him deep in the pit of his stomach.
She wore a long white terry-cloth robe, belted tightly at the waist, with a deep V neck. Spraggue kept his eyes carefully on her face, not knowing what to expect. Anything from anger to apology, he supposed. He was never certain with Kate.
"How are you?" he said.
"Okay," she answered after a long pause. "I'm about to take the world's longest shower. They made me take miserly little two-minute cold showers in jail, and the floors were cement. And the smell . . ."
Spraggue inhaled. "Is wonderful," he finished.
"I'm working on it."
"Can I stay?" Spraggue asked, raising one eye-brow.
"A change of heart? You weren't interested on Friday."
"I regret it. I missed you. Besides," the eyebrow went up even higher, "jailbirds turn me on."
She made a sarcastic noise and started to turn away.
"I'll dry your back. I'm sure nobody dried your back in jail."
"There are a lot of things nobody did for me in jail."
"Kate—"
She pressed her hand over his mouth, leaned close, and whispered in his ear. "You can stay."
They kissed in the doorway until she shivered and drew him into the warm scented room. He stripped in seconds and laughed when she made her traditional remark about his Eastern lack of a tan. Her robe slipped to the floor and he traced the bikini mark low on her stomach with his index finger.
"And you," he said, "still wear the most indecent swimsuit on the beach."
The yellow-tiled shower stall was too crowded for two; they'd come to that conclusion eight years ago. And ignored it. The crowding increased the pleasure.
They adjourned from the shower to the bed and made love with the easy familiarity of old lovers, tinged with the urgency of a new encounter.
When they had finished, they lay in silence for some time.
"You've loved someone since me," Kate said finally.
"What is this, True Confessions?"
"Did you really miss me?"
He hesitated, then answered honestly. "Not until I saw you. I try not to think about you in Boston. Aunt Mary reads all your vineyard reports. She snatches them off the tray when Pierce brings in the mail, as if the simple sight of your handwriting might unhinge me."
"Does it?"
"No," he said, flinging back the sheet and frankly staring at her unself-conscious nakedness. "It's your . . . beautiful . . . mind that unhinges me."
"I'l1 bet," she said, laughing.
"You'd lose."
"You know," she said, her palm massaging a gentle circle on his stomach, "your body can remember something, long for something, even when your mind knows better than to get involved."
"Your body has an excellent memory."
She stalled before answering, twisting a strand of her long dark hair into a tight curl. "I think it made a mistake."
"Why?"
She sighed. "There's so much background for us, Spraggue, so much context. We've known each other too long."
He smiled. "Too long to live together and too long to let each other go."
She burrowed into his shoulder and, for the moment, felt as if she belonged there.
"We've had a thousand too many battles, Michael," she said softly. "I don't think we could make a new beginning. Not another one."
His hand slid down her spine, went automatically to the small of her back, rubbed.
"Oh, Michael," she said, "I get so tired of explaining myself to strangers, starting over from the beginning. Where was I born and who am I now and all the wayward twists and turns in between."
"I understand."
"Who else knows me the way you do? Who else remembers the girl I was at nineteen? Who else rubs my back in just the right spot?"
"You reinvent your past," Spraggue said. "All the time, for every new friend, every new lover. It's not really lying; it's self-preservation, selective memory. Even the past changes with the years."
"Sometimes it's nice not to have to invent."
"But we do. Don't you think I have a version of our fights that's totally different from yours? Your version would hardly sound familiar to me."
"If it weren't fo
r the winery," she said, "I wouldn't have to see you again."
"Would that make you happier? A clean break?"
"I don't know." She settled back on his shoulder, breathing evenly, and Spraggue decided that now was not the time to ask if she had killed Lenny Brent.
The phone rang. Kate gave it a reproachful look and leaned across the bed to answer.
"For you." She handed the receiver to Spraggue.
"Young and female. Have I been standing in for someone?"
"Lying in," said Spraggue. "Hello?"
"Mr. Spraggue? This is Carol Lawton. I'm sorry to bother you, but I thought you might have tried to reach me."
"I haven't heard anything about the fingerprints yet—"
"Because," she said hurriedly, "you wouldn't have been able to get through. The most awful thing. The apartment . . ." Her voice trailed off into what might have been a cough or a sob.
"What, Carol? Tell me."
"There was a fire. It must have started while I was out shopping for dinner. I wasn't gone more than half an hour and the fire engines were there when I got back. Everything . . . everything was . . ."
"Where are you now?" Spraggue rested the receiver behind his ear and started reaching for his clothes.
"At the apartment. Not my—not our apartment. I'm calling from the superintendents, on the first floor. The damage—it was only on the upper stories .... "
"Wait there. I'll be over as soon as I can. An hour, maybe less."
He hung up, slamming the receiver down into the cradle. He pulled on one sock, fumbled with his shoelaces. "While I'm gone, Kate," he said, "stay put. Don't answer the door."
"Are you going to tell me what this is all about, or are you just trying to scare me?"
"I'm trying to scare you." He buckled his belt, ran a hand through his tousled hair.
"Why?"
"Because I don't know what the hell is going on."
19
Kate's station wagon did a warning shimmy when it hit eighty-five. Then Spraggue would realize how far down he jammed the accelerator, how tightly his hands gripped the steering wheel. He'd take a deep breath, ease up on the pedal, shake out his left hand, then his right, unclench his jaw. Ten minutes later, the car would shake again.
