Stone Eater (Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 2)

by D. F. Bailey

  Eve looked into Connie’s eyes as if she had to recall the answer from a distant memory. “Eve Noon,” she said.

  “And do you know what year it is?”

  Eve shook her head with a slight grin, as if the questions were part of a children’s party-game. “2015?”

  “Good. And the month?”

  “June. June fifteenth,” she said with certainty.

  “Close enough,” Connie said and backed away. She turned to Finch and smiled.

  “You did good,” she said. “I see you talked her out of it.”

  “Maybe.” He shrugged, still trying to unknot the kink in his neck. “What happens now?”

  “What happens now,” a bass voice cut in from behind Finch, “is we have a little talk.”

  Finch and Connie turned to see Damian Witowsky sidle up beside the bed and set his eyes on Eve’s still motionless body. She seemed to have control over her eyes, her lips, her face — but so far, little more.

  “Hello, Eve,” he said, somewhat shaken to see the bruise on her cheek. “You’re not looking too good.”

  “And you are?” Connie stepped forward, fists bunched on her hips.

  “Detective Damian Witowsky.” He held a badge up to her and she studied it a moment. “Ms. Noon is a witness to a murder and the perp is still at large. I understand from Mr. Finch that she may have a cell phone video recording of the murder.” He glanced at Finch and leered like an old card shark eyeing the last few chips on a poker table.

  “That may be.” Connie set a hand on his chest and eased him a step backward. “But she’s in no condition to speak to anyone before we assess her.”

  “No need for that,” he whispered. His low voice adopted a soothing, almost saccharine tone. “I’m just here to secure her cell phone.” He held a warrant in his left hand. Finch glanced at the bold text above the court order as Witowsky handed it to Connie: Superior Court of California, Search Warrant: Cell Phone in Police Custody.

  “It’s in my bag,” Eve whispered from the bed.

  Everyone looked at her with a mix of surprise and sympathy.

  “And that is where, exactly?” Witowsky glanced around the room.

  “In my bag,” she repeated and raised a hand and pointed aimlessly as if the bag might be hanging from one of the overhead fluorescent lamps.

  Finch found the phone in the closet and showed it to Eve. “You sure about this?” he asked.

  “Get him to sign for it,” she said and applied a weak smile to her lips.

  Witowsky grinned. “You don’t miss a trick, Eve.” He turned to Finch. “I can see she’s going to make a full recovery.” He took the phone and initialed a prepared receipt and passed it to Finch.

  “By the way, Witowsky, what’s happened to Toby Squire?” Finch said and nodded toward Eve, aware she didn’t know the name of her attacker or his condition.

  “I don’t know any more than you.” Witowsky frowned. “He’s still upstairs in ICU following a six-hour surgery. It was touch and go, apparently. If he recovers we’ll interview him. And get you to ID him.” He glanced at Eve. “Until then, the captain assigned a uniform to sit at his door. So don’t try any end runs to get to him first.”

  “Of course not,” Finch said. “And remember, you’re restricted to viewing the video recording only.” For a moment he wondered what else the police might discover on the phone. All the texts exchanged between him and Eve. Maybe something about his DNA and Gianna. Could that be stored on the phone?

  “That won’t stop them,” Eve snarled. She’d found her voice again. And a dose of petulance to go with it.

  “Good to see you, too, Eve.” Witowsky’s grin shifted to a smug snigger. He looked very pleased with himself.

  Her eyes bore through him with a look of contempt.

  “You know, there’s a lot of days when I miss you.” Witowsky’s voice brimmed with mock sincerity. Then he raised her phone in one hand and turned toward the door. As he departed he called over his shoulder, “Don’t worry. I’ll get this back to you when we’re done with it.”

  ※

  Before her discharge from the hospital Eve and Will met with a neurologist, Dr. John Cortinas, who declared that the bruise on Eve’s head would disappear in a week or two. She could now speak in coherent sentences, and better yet, answer most questions about the days before her hospitalization. Sometimes she jumbled the sequence of events and despite Will’s promptings, she had no memory of the half-hour before Toby clubbed her to the ground. She couldn’t remember splitting up with Finch at the garage, or the drive back to Sausalito following the shooting in the Beach Street parkade. Dr. Cortinas suggested that specific memories of the night of Whitelaw’s murder might remain “sketchy at best.”

  “No one’s too worried about you,” Connie Baptista said when Eve returned to the ward. She stood at the door, resting a shoulder against the door frame. “You got a serious whack on the head, a bad bruising and a few nips that are almost healed. And a few days’ extra sleep. Probably needed it, too!” She laughed and hugged Eve and then gave Finch a squeeze on his arm. “Take care!”

  When they reached the elevator bay Eve kissed Finch on the cheek and whispered, “So. Now we go see him.”

  “See who?”

  The steel elevator doors opened to admit them.

  “Toby Squire.”

  As they rode the car up one floor, Finch shook his head. “Didn’t Witowsky say they posted a cop to guard him?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  She stepped onto the ICU ward and led the way toward an overhead sign that read Critical Head Trauma. They turned a corner and at the far end of the corridor a lone police officer sat in a chair, tipped back on the rear legs so that his head slumped against the wall. A magazine rested on his lap.

  Eve marched forward, her heels clicking on the linoleum, a drumbeat to alert the cop on duty. His head turned as she approached and he set the front chair legs on the floor.

  “Looks like Saint Patrick’s Day came in June,” she blurted out from a distance. “Arty MacAteer, the most Irish cop in the SFPD. When Detective Witowsky told me they’d assigned someone to mind Toby Squire, I had no idea I’d find you here!”

  “Eve Noon.” He stood up and set the magazine on the chair. “Haven’t seen you since —"

  “This is my colleague,” she interrupted, “Will Finch.”

  The men shook hands.

  “Did Witowsky tell you what happened?” Two fingers brushed a strand of hair past her cheek exposing the bruise.

  “Yeah. Sorry to hear about that, Eve.” He shrugged. “Looks like you got off better than Squire, here.” He crooked a thumb toward the doorway leading to Toby’s bed.

  “That’s what Witowsky told me when he was visiting. Six hours of surgery. Lucky to survive. Did you see him?”

  “Witowsky? Not today.”

  “Oh. Well.” A look of surprise crossed her face as if MacAteer had missed something critical. She glanced at Finch, then turned back to MacAteer. “So. Witowsky asked me to come up after I was discharged to ID Toby Squire and verify that he’s the perp who slugged me.”

  MacAteer narrowed his eyes. His lips blubbered together as he weighed the options at hand.

  “Just a ten-second ID, Witowsky said. And that you’d confirm it to him later.”

  “Witowsky said he wanted you to ID him?” He couldn’t hide the skepticism in his voice.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Do you want me to call him? He told me he was busy today, but I’ll call him if you want.” She glanced in her purse. “Oops, sorry, he took my phone. Can I use yours?”

  MacAteer looked confused. His expression suggested that he’d have to make a decision above his pay grade. “No, that’s okay. Makes sense that he’d want you to ID the guy. But I have to go in with you,” he added.

  “Of course.”

  He led the visitors into the room, a space almost identical to the room Eve occupied one floor below. She glanced at the rat lines connect
ed to Toby’s body and skull, wires that connected to a bank of monitors above the bed. A medical ventilator had been strapped over his nose and mouth. Two thick bandages were tapped over his forehead, the site of his six-hour surgery. Critical condition, no question.

  “Let me have a closer look.” She leaned above the monster, shocked that his body filled the length and width of the bed.

  “Big bastard,” MacAteer whispered.

  “He is that.” She wanted to pull the ventilator mask from his face. Let him die of natural causes.

  Finch stared at him and shuddered.

  “That him?” MacAteer turned his shoulder, tried to edge them away from the bed.

  Eve looked at Finch. He nodded.

  “Yes. That’s him. Let me know if he wakes up, will you. And give Detective Witowsky my regards.”

  ※

  Finch drove Eve to her condo where she picked up some fresh clothing and her mail before they returned to Mother Russia for a planned convalescence under Will’s care. They both knew that soon they’d have to talk about the horror they’d shared. Soon, but not yet.

  As he settled Eve onto the sofa in his living room, he levered her against the mountain of pillows he’d inherited from Wally’s nephew. For some reason Weeland had been obsessed with pillows. A materialist fetish of some sort, Finch imagined.

  “Enough, already!” Eve pulled her arm free from his hand and tugged a pillow away from her back and tossed it to the floor. “And don’t treat me like a baby. I hate that. Besides, you haven’t told me the full story.”

  He grimaced and sat beside her. “Okay, let’s talk about it. But first, yes, I have told you the full story. In bits and pieces at least. You just haven’t put them all together. In order, I mean.” He tapped the side of his head to indicate that her memory might be failing again. He kept a poker face and then broke into laughter.

  “Okay, and you can stop that, too.” She took his hand and set it on her lap. “But seriously, I have to hear what happened. In order. From the time we left here until we got back, like ten minutes ago.”

  “That could take a while,” he said. Then he began to recite the narrative from the moment when she’d learned that Whitelaw owned the BMW and tracked down his address in Sausalito. As he spoke, she listened with her head tipped onto his shoulder and her arm looped around his elbow, hugging his biceps. He felt as if he were reading a story to a child and for a moment he thought of Buddy hunkered beside him during their bedtime ritual.

  When he described his transit through the Whitelaw mansion, of climbing to the top floor and turning off the overhead light and fixing the toilet handle and looking from the bathroom window onto the lawns below in the moonless night — hearing all that she gasped as if someone had revealed a new world she’d never imagined. He told her about Toby’s desperate attempt to flee, his collision into the inuksuk statute, the ambulance driving him off to the hospital. He described how he found the two DVDs and that he’d copied them onto his computer before turning them over to Wally Gimbel.

  “You have two videos of the man who attacked me?”

  “Yes.”

  But to divert her from that, he told her how he’d entered the cottage and found her in a walk-in closet. She shuddered when Will revealed what happened, about carrying her out of the closet with the Dutch doors and the storm of rats fleeing the cottage into the yard. She examined the fading bite marks on her wrists and winced to think what might have happened if he hadn’t saved her.

  “Ssshhh,” she whispered and pressed a finger to his lips. “Just stop there a minute.”

  He nodded lightly, tipped his chin onto the crown of her head and nuzzled her. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” She pulled herself away and looked at him, then kissed his lips. “Will … you saved my life.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded.

  “No, not maybe. Definitely. Thank you,” she murmured, and then frowned, uncertain how to continue. “I just don’t know if there’s a way to really acknowledge that.”

  “Something similar happened to me up in Oregon.” He took a few moments to describe the rainy night on a gravel driveway outside Astoria when a school teacher, Ethan Argyle, had saved his life by shooting the local sheriff. And now Argyle awaited trial for second degree murder. Will still struggled to make sense of it, of the unbalanced nature of justice. Who could possibly set these things right?

  “I don’t know,” she said as if answering his unstated question. “But right now I need to see Toby Squire’s videos.”

  “Look. They’re very disturbing,” he said. “I’m not sure you’re ready for it.”

  “Ready or not, I have to see it. And I’d sooner get it over with.”

  “Eve —"

  “I can’t sit here knowing the man who tried to kill me is still alive. What if he tries again? No, I want to see them now.”

  He knew there was no stopping this, no point to any delay. He tugged the laptop from his courier bag and placed it on the dining room table. After he’d lined up the two recordings to play in sequence he glanced at her doubtfully.

  “Ready?”

  She sat on the teak chair beside him and wrapped his arm around her shoulders, wriggling a bit to try to find some comfort in the hard, unforgiving chair. “Now I am.”

  They watched the short, grainy video of Toby and Gianna in the limousine with the dawning realization that it showed the last images they’d ever see of Gianna. They speculated that the video had been recorded by the tall, rangy man who’d shot Whitelaw through the forehead and then fired his pistol at them three times in the parkade staircase. Just a college kid, twenty, maybe twenty-two, who’d tried his hand at blackmail and instead became a killer. Eve shivered under the warmth of Will’s arm and she set a hand on his leg.

  But as soon as the second video began, when she recognized Toby Squire’s thick, heavy body, Eve withdrew from Finch and sat upright in her chair. She sank into a bleak silence as her eyes settled on the killer’s face. So soft, so big, so vacant.

  ※

  Toby Squire wiped a hand over his mouth then padded his damp palm on the pant leg above his thigh. He struggled a moment to settle his massive body into the upholstered leather chair. Following another hesitation he stated his name and the date and when he looked into the camera again, the words began to flow without interruption.

  “We’d picked up Miss Gianna from her apartment up on Russian Hill. The time must have gone past nine o’clock. She was none too excited to see us. An hour earlier Mr. W had phoned and convinced her that an evening visit with him and Mrs. W might cheer her up. She’d just lost Mr. Toeplitz to a terrible tragedy that affected her deeply. That was understandable.

  “But less than a minute after she climbed into the back seat with Mr. W, he got an urgent call. Who it came from, I can’t say. He always closed the privacy glass between the driver and back-seat passengers. It was for protection — meaning my protection — he often said, so that I wouldn’t hear any information that might land me in trouble one day.

  “After he finished his phone call, he opened the glass barrier and told me to head back to the company office. Since Mrs. Whitelaw had cooked a special dessert for everyone and he didn’t want to disappoint her, the idea was that I’d drop him off at the office on Montgomery St. and then drive Miss Gianna back to the family estate in Sausalito. Then I’d double back to the office and wait for Mr. W to finish his business.

  “After he left the Mercedes-Benz all seemed well and good. For a few minutes at least. Then Miss Gianna opened the privacy glass and told me to take her back to her apartment on Russian Hill.

  “ ‘I can’t do that,’ I told her. ‘Mr. W expects you to meet him at his home. And I know Mrs. W would be cross if she missed you,’ I added.

  “ ‘Toby, I think you have to consider my feelings about this.’ Her voice was very even and calm, I’d say. Never a hint of any trouble. Nothing like what was brewing, I can tell you. But things changed quick as we drove along
Columbus Avenue through North Beach. When she realized I wasn’t turning up Green Street to her condo, her voice changed.

  “ ‘Toby, I’m ordering you right now to take me home, or I’m getting out of this car.’

  “In the rearview mirror I could see the look on her face had changed, too. None of that easy-looking beauty that everyone always talked of. No, her features turned hard with anger. When I saw that, my hand hit the lock button and all four door locks snapped down tight. When she heard that sound and realized she’d been confined … well, then she went right crazy.

  “ ‘You fuckin’ let me outta here!’ she screamed.

  “Her tongue got a lot hotter than that, I can tell you. In a non-stop rant, too. I won’t repeat it all here. Couldn’t possibly. It would make your ears fold up in knots. What I did do, was close and lock the privacy window to damp down the screaming. And I just drove on toward home as ordered by Mr. W, thinking that she’d wear herself out, come to her senses by the time we crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Then she’d make herself presentable before we got to Sausalito and arrived at the estate.

  “However, as I drove to Lombard Street and headed toward the bridge, she put herself in a state I’d never seen in anyone. I didn’t know her anymore. I saw I’d have to do something. So I turned down Steiner in the Cow Hollow district. At the next turn, I found a little dead-end road. Nice and quiet. Service Street I think it was. My idea was to wait until she calmed down. Just sit in the car in this narrow road where no one could see or hear her. I guess I had that wrong. Completely wrong as it turns out.”

  Toby sipped some water from a glass tumbler and looked away from the camera. “This is getting difficult,” he said and cycled a hand in the air. “Getting to the difficult part, I mean.”

  He paused for about ten seconds, his eyes closed as if he had to conclude an inner, private debate. Then he nodded and continued.

  “I shut off the engine and just sat there. After a few minutes she settled and I realized I must be playing my cards right since she finally shut up. When her breathing settled down, she tapped on the privacy window and I slid it open an inch or two.