“I knew him, but through Tracy. I tried to help involve him in some activities I thought he’d enjoy. Tracy thought it would be good for him. Tracy was really his friend. I wasn’t, not that way.”
“And you don’t think he killed her.”
Veronica shook her head. “Why would he? He’s odd, I’ll give you that. But there’s a stunned kind of sweetness under his oddness. He gets muddled, fearful, and mixes signals. Not that I’m a shrink or any kind of mental-problems expert, but that’s what I’ve observed. I might worry that he’d misunderstand something, or make a foolish choice—or even defend himself inappropriately—but never be the instigator, the mean one. That’s why I suggested he volunteer up at the Marine Mammal Center. He loved animals and he was gentle with them. And Tracy was suddenly hot to do something with animals, so they could do it together.”
Billie sighed. Nothing you could bring into a court of law. Gavin was erratic and not quite normal, but nice to animals.
“Gavin isn’t the kind to make phone calls, either,” Veronica said.
“Meaning what?”
Veronica leaned forward into the table, lowering her voice. “I’d get phone calls here. Wouldn’t hear a thing. Not heavy breathing, not talk, not a hang-up. Dead silence until I hung up.”
“Any idea of who’d want to do that to you?”
She nodded. “Tracy was staying here by then. She’d wanted to leave Robby for a long time, but she was always strapped for cash. Liked living well, better than she could afford. And every time she thought she had enough cash to make the break, something came up, like her car would die, but then she said she finally ‘felt able’ to make the break. I assumed that meant she’d saved money, ’cause breaking with him wasn’t a matter of big emotional scenes on her part. Her feelings for him had ended a long time before.”
“For how long did you get these calls?” Billie wanted to move on. Silent calls were the absence of anything. Sure, someone might be trying to frighten Tracy or Veronica, more likely. But if the person was clever—or stupid—enough to do nothing that was actually terrifying or threatening, how could that help Gavin Riddock?
“Every day for two weeks—the two weeks before she was killed.”
“You told the police?”
Veronica sighed, and looked across the room to where Jesse sat mesmerized. “Yes. But only after…not right away. Not then. Tracy was…I don’t know. Afraid of making Robby angrier, maybe. We told the police after about a week.”
“And?”
“Silent calls don’t make for major drama and that’s all I got. The thing is, I think that when Tracy answered, when I wasn’t around, he spoke to her, because twice I came in and she was on the phone, flushed and angry, telling him to leave her alone.”
“Him?”
Veronica nodded. “She said so.”
“And leave her alone? Not leave us alone? Or leave you alone? I mean it’s your house.”
“My point exactly. Those calls were for her, against her, frightening, and threatening to her.”
“Did you try to—”
“Have them traced? We were going to. The next night, we weren’t going to hang up, no matter how long it took, and I was going to call the cops on my cell phone and see if they could trace them but instead, well…there wasn’t any next night.”
“Despite what you heard, could the calls have been for you?”
Veronica’s expression soured with annoyance. “Of course they could have been, but does that make sense? I never got one till the night after she came here.”
“Peace,” Billie said. “I’m trying to think of whatever…Any ideas about who it was?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Her husband Robby. A piece of…” She shook her head and dabbed at the side of her right eye.
“We’re still talking about these phone calls, aren’t we?”
Veronica took a deep breath, tilted her head and looked at Billie appraisingly. “Robby Lester is the human example of Berserk Male Syndrome.”
She said that too patly, with too much practice, and Billie suspected it was not the first time she’d described someone that way. “Okay, I bite,” Billie said. “What the hell is that?”
“When a llama—practically always a male—is insane. He’s abnormally socialized to people. Too much of humans, not enough of his own kind. Too little discipline when he’s small and misbehaving. Eventually, he goes berserk. Territorial and aggressive, way beyond the norm. Dangerous. You can’t unteach this, or send the llama to a shrink. What you do…” She paused again, tapped her short nails on the pocked tabletop. “You euthanize them,” she said in a voice so cold it was in itself a death sentence.
Billie waited a moment. “Tracy talked to the caller, right?”
“She told him to leave her alone. When I asked, she said it wasn’t Robby. Why she’d protect him, I don’t know. She said it was a wrong number which was ridiculous because I heard her, and that isn’t how you talk to a wrong number.”
“And you told the police.”
“They made note of it but then, when she was…when she died, it didn’t matter. Robby Lester has an alibi,” Veronica said. “He has friends.” She waved at the air, almost fighting off invisible presences who were getting too close. “Of course they’d cover for him. It’s too ridiculous. Dare I say that the Tiburon police force—they’re nice people and I’m sure they mean well, and they’re admittedly great at ticketing speeders, but before now, they’ve had to deal with exactly one open-and-shut homicide case in the last millennium.”
Billie couldn’t think of a counterargument.
“They’re over their heads on this. Gavin touched the body, possibly even moved her a little and she’d been out there, against a metal statue for a while. It was dawn. So Robby claims to have been in bed, as would normal people. Only thing is, he’s berserk, but how do I prove that?”
“I gather he wasn’t happy about this divorce.”
“Separation. They hadn’t gotten to the next step. And no, he was definitely not happy about it.”
It had only been a matter of weeks since Tracy had relocated from her marriage to Veronica’s ranch. “Robby,” she prompted. “How did he show his anger?”
Veronica shrugged. “I’m sure he was making those phone calls, listening, like he was bugging her. And I said what I think. Robby Lester is a male gone berserk. He was always a brawler if he thought he was provoked, a ‘real man,’ you know? The kind who says he doesn’t ‘take crap.’ But it was all like the llamas—male against male. Protecting his turf, until Tracy walked out and became fair game.” She shook her head. “Look, I’ll give you the name of somebody else who knew Tracy and Gavin, too. Go see my friend Lizzie, she’ll tell you how they were and why it’s insane to think Gavin Riddock killed his best friend.” She pulled a drawer out of the old-fashioned kitchen table, found a tablet and pen and wrote a number on it.
Billie put the paper into her purse. “Did her husband do anything physical?” she asked. “Anything to her? I mean before she was killed.”
“You mean is there something that would impress the cops? Proof? No. She was banged up once after she told him she was leaving. She said she’d been in a fender-bender, but I couldn’t see evidence of it on her car. She insisted it wasn’t him, but I’m sure she was protecting him. She felt bad about making him feel bad by leaving.”
“So she didn’t bring charges,” Billie said.
Veronica shook her head.
“Or take out a restraining order.”
Another head shake. “After she was dead, I told the police about the black-and-blue marks and the cut and they said it was hearsay. I’m sure it wasn’t the only time, either. Robby’s that kind of man.”
Billie remembered a WW II poster her parents had acquired, with a stern person demanding, in the era of gas rationing: “IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY?”
It had been a joking byword in their house—while they were still a household and while they still made jokes—the password
that allowed the car keys to be handed over, and she’d always been able to defend the utter necessity of any outing she desired.
This trip had not been necessary. Veronica had yielded nothing but speculation, prejudice, skewed intuition, and llama analogies.
There was this good thing about children: they provided an excuse to leave. “You know, it’s getting late for Jesse, and you’re probably starting out early, so unless there’s something else you wanted to say, we’d better be—”
“If you’re trying to help Gavin Riddock, get somebody to think about Robby Lester.”
It was traditional good form to exaggerate the onerousness of your friend’s ex, but Veronica was pushing too hard and pushing nothing more than air. She thought he’d made those phone calls, she felt it in her heart he’d hurt his estranged wife that one time and others, despite Tracy’s denials, she felt it in her gut that he’d killed her.
No wonder the police ignored her.
Veronica looked hunched, her elbows on her knees. “Gavin’s finding Tracy was the luckiest thing that ever happened to the murderer. But anybody who knew that they ran together—and Robby surely knew—would have been able to predict that. Whenever she didn’t show up at his house, he went out on his own. So anybody would know that, and how to get Tracy as she was going to Gavin’s house. Anybody with half a brain and a major grudge could have planned the entire scenario.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Billie said. It was a fine sentence, promising absolutely nothing, which was, she thought, about what she could do.
Ten
Emma watched Billie sidle past her open door and into her own portion of the office. The girl behaved as if she didn’t know Emma was there. Not a snub precisely, but definitely an avoidance. She’d heard her greet Zack when she arrived.
She was being punished by Ms. Sensitive.
Emma knew she probably should say something. Smooth the water. Obviously, the delicate child was in a huff, feeling injured.
Ridiculous. Emma hadn’t said anything bad. Just…maybe she’d said whatever it was a little too…It wasn’t as if she’d cursed at the girl or chewed her out or personally attacked her, for God’s sake. Couldn’t Billie understand that even Emma had bad days, didn’t feel so hot, got irritable, was human?
This was the real world. The girl couldn’t behave like a conservatory orchid and do this job, and that’s all Emma was trying to do—toughen her up, make her able to handle this life. So what if her tone of voice wasn’t always angelic, what was the big deal?
The girl was a fool and an irritant and Emma would be damned before she’d grovel or beg forgiveness. For anything.
Instead, she poured herself another cup of the burned-tasting brew in her coffee pot and returned attention to her desk. She flicked her index finger at a small pile of mail. Catalogs. A book on self-marketing, something she knew she had to do for the company and herself, although at the moment she couldn’t bring herself to open the book. Three unanswered phone messages, one from Heather Wilson who was showing signs of being a world-class pain in the butt. One day into her search and she wanted to know how come the riddle of her ancestry hadn’t been solved yet.
It surely hadn’t. Emma was combing through the statewide birth index records for Heather’s birthday, give or take a day. Adopted or not, she was born, so where was the listing?
She looked for asterisks, the state’s indication that this was a second birth certificate, an amended one that followed the adoption and replaced the original one. Then she could search for the same certificate number elsewhere, and with some luck, find the original certificate.
Asterisks there were, four of them: two were boys, one was a child named Mei Chang, and the fourth, a girl now named Margarita Amelia Romero. But nothing showed up when she tried the list by name. No Heather Wilson born August 5, 1979 in California. Or the day before, or the day after. Or, in fact, that week.
Emma didn’t even want to consider neighboring states; a baby born in Nevada, or flown in from Georgia or Alaska. It was possible, but close to futile to ascertain, so she was going to ignore that idea for now.
She double-checked for the possibility of clerical error, though she doubted it. She reformatted the list so that it read county by county. She eliminated children from the far north and south of California. Of course, Nowell Wilson could have been a maniacal driver capable of going farther than the radius Emma had drawn. And the entire story of Heather’s arrival could be a lie to make sure that Emma didn’t track her origin.
She simply couldn’t deal with those ideas right now. They’d have to wait for the total desperation phase.
Kay Wilson hovered in Emma’s mind. Smiling, pleasant, and as vague as an organism claiming to be human could be. Yet the woman had a good job at Macy’s. She couldn’t be as passive and forgetful as she appeared to be.
Emma couldn’t blame her for disliking this search, but in that case, she might as well have said so and told Heather to do it herself if she felt it was important.
So many babies, Emma thought, going through the list. She wondered idly how many of them were still around, two decades later. How many had moved, fallen fatally ill, been gunned down in stupid rivalries. How many were in jail. How many were parents themselves.
She wondered what Heather’s story was, who she was, aside from a listless creature with a boring and menial job. She wondered what the woman who’d given her up for adoption truly represented to her. Sometimes Emma wished people had to answer all her questions, not only the ones on the form. And then send in follow-up reports. Dear Ms. Howe, This is how I used the information you found. Yes, I’m glad you confirmed my husband’s affair. Or no, nothing’s better now and I wish I had listened to your advice. Or we’ve fired those people you caught spying and now, here’s what they’re doing…
But most of the time, she kept her attention on the here and now and her job. Her own life was hers. These bits and pieces of others were work, sufficient and complete unto itself, not stories to be unraveled, not blanks to be filled in.
She’d gone through the entire week’s births twice now and nothing. She brought back on screen the counties she’d eliminated because they were too much for a one-day round-trip drive. Maybe Kay had been wrong about that. Maybe the child had been brought to a collection spot, a lawyer’s office away from the birth site.
Nothing there, either. She’d known there wouldn’t be; there hadn’t been anything when she did it by name, statewide.
Heather Wilson’s birth date was a lie and this wasn’t vagueness. This was a deliberate lie. And since Heather hadn’t contradicted Kay, this lie was long-standing. For twenty years, the girl had celebrated an imagined birth date.
Emma stood up in frustrated anger, pushed back her chair and paced her office. What was it with Kay Wilson? She realized she was shaking her head with irritation at the woman’s deceptions and ruses. Confused and walking in circles, precisely the way Kay wanted her to.
Kay Wilson had been so damnably vague about where she’d lived at any given time. “North of here around then. Not Mendocino or anything, but above Santa Rosa. We moved quite often. Rented. We lived in, oh, a grandmother unit in Berkeley. I guess it wasn’t legal, exactly, but you know how those things work. Things were hard.”
Had Kay been on drugs back then? Was that the big secret of her dimness, her murky memories? Had she been shut away some place she didn’t want to identify? And if so, who’d have given her a baby to adopt?
If any of this was close to the truth.
She sat back down, sighed, muttered a few choice phrases to Kay Wilson, wherever she was, then, finally, did a global search—any day, any county—just tell me if a Heather Wilson got herself born, ever, that year.
And there she was. Not in August, but in December. Four months later. An enormous difference in a newborn—nobody could confuse the two ages. Could this really be the same child?
She was going to find out. Get the birth certificate and see the
mother’s name.
December, in Monterey County.
She imagined a young, single woman, twenty years ago, alone and unhappy in the beautiful surrounds of Monterey. Maybe her parents tossed her out, maybe she felt she couldn’t face them. Maybe they were dead.
So what had she done? Had she found the mysterious Dr. Smith? Found Nowell Wilson and sold him her baby? Or given her to him. Was Nowell possibly the father? There was no asterisk on the birth record, no indication that this was an adoption and there was therefore no corresponding certificate number for the original birth. This was disturbing whether it was a clerical error or, more probably, another, mystifying lie on Kay Wilson’s part.
All Emma asked of humanity was a modicum of honesty. Be straight with her, refuse to cooperate if you’re set against it, but don’t lie. Kay Wilson’s hypocrisy was infuriating.
“Okay, lady,” she said out loud, standing up, “now this is about us, between you and me, and you are going to lose. Emma is on your trail.”
She’d drive down to Monterey, get the amended birth certificate—she didn’t want to wait for them to mail her one—and once she had that, see what she could dig up in the archives of the local papers. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—the paper fouled up and printed the name of the birth mother.
She checked the time. Tomorrow she’d do all that. Today, she’d go home, relax, have a drink, watch bad TV. She couldn’t remember if George was coming over or not. She thought maybe not, so she’d cook herself something heavy on the garlic and spices. Everything he couldn’t eat.
She had one sleeve of her raincoat on when Billie materialized in her doorway looking wary, as if Emma bit, for God’s sake.
“Yes?” Emma hadn’t meant to say it that loudly. The girl flinched. Too goddamned sensitive! Emma was tired of trying so hard with her. Plus Billie could surely see that Emma was about to leave, her arm was still stuck in that sleeve, for God’s sake, and she was getting hot, and what did this pesky— “Yes?” She pulled off the raincoat and tossed it on her chair. Missed. It crumpled onto the floor. She left it there. “Yes?” The girl swallowed hard before she spoke.
Whatever Doesn't Kill You (An Emma Howe and Billie August Mystery Book 2) Page 8
