Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  Ellen took it from him, cracked open the little tab on the lid and took a tentative sip.

  “Where did you buy this stuff?” she asked. “It’s even worse than usual.”

  “You want me to bring it all the way from Daly City? If you’d find yourself an apartment in a decent neighborhood, instead of this slum, then just maybe I could find a place nearby that sells decent coffee.”

  “We have to take life as it comes to us, Sam.”

  He didn’t reply. He just extracted his coffee from the paper bag, drained off about an inch, and put the cup in a plastic holder attached to his dashboard. Then he shifted out of park and they were rolling.

  “You know what you’ve done, don’t you?” he said, once they had crested the hill and Market Street was in sight. “You’ve tipped him. Now he knows we’re looking at him as a suspect, so he’s going to be very careful. It was a mistake. You shouldn’t have gone anywhere near him.”

  “You’ve got it backwards, Sam. He tipped us.”

  This answer seemed to focus him morosely on his driving. For two blocks, through heavy morning traffic, the very stripes on the crosswalks were the objects of his dark and unpitying concentration. In perfect silence, he glowered as if he wanted to arrest every pedestrian in sight.

  “Sometimes I think you have too much imagination to be a cop,” he said at last, without looking at her. “Twenty years have taught me one thing, which is that the best way is to put off reaching a conclusion for as long as possible. Just let the evidence gather, and it will lead you to your suspect. You’re doing just the opposite. You have a hunch about Mr. Tregear, and you’re torturing perfectly neutral facts into supporting evidence. This is going to come to grief, Ellie. Even if Tregear is Jack the Ripper, it’ll end badly.”

  “Sam, could we just take a look at this guy?”

  “Ellie…”

  “Come on, Sam. Just give it a day or two. It’s not like we have any other hot leads.”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Commander Hal Roland parked across the street from the San Francisco Police Department. He picked up his hat from the seat beside him and, before he locked the car, took his uniform coat from the hook above the rear door. As he almost always did lately, he looked at the gold stripes on the sleeve—thick, thin, thick—and experienced a faint twinge of anguish.

  He was due for promotion. In another two months, if everything proceeded on schedule, that middle stripe would widen out to catch up with the other two, and it was about goddamned time.

  Until recently, Roland had had few anxieties about his career or much of anything else. He was a Navy recruiting poster boy, athletic and trim, with the sunny smile that comes with excellent fitness reports from adoring superiors. He had finished in the top ten percent of his class at Annapolis, having been gifted with the kind of practical intelligence the brass likes to see in an ambitious and promising junior officer. His private life, like his personnel file, was without blemish. He was happily married with twin girls. Everyone liked him, which even his posting to the Shore Patrol hadn’t changed. He was that contradiction in terms, a popular cop.

  And then one fine day he had been assigned as Stephen Tregear’s case officer.

  For starters, Tregear was a civilian. Granted, he worked for the Navy, but as a private contractor, so why was he the Shore Patrol’s responsibility? Naval Intelligence, yes—and Roland had more than a suspicion that the spooks kept themselves very well informed about Tregear’s movements and associations—but it was not normally part of the Shore Patrol’s duties to babysit the errant geniuses of Special Projects.

  And then there was the man himself. It gave Roland the fidgets just to be in the same room with him.

  Roland had read the files. Stephen Tregear, having lied about his age, had joined the Navy at sixteen. He had risen to the rank of seaman first class. He had never even finished high school, and yet out of the blue, God knows how or where he had picked it up, his Standard Interservice Aptitude Test scores revealed he possessed a knowledge of mathematics and probability theory that would have been considered astonishing in an MIT graduate. His IQ was not even considered measurable.

  The Navy had taught him computers and, after a while, had put him to work in Codes and Ciphers, where apparently he had performed wonderfully. The Navy had offered to send him to school so he could qualify for a commission, but he had declined. He regularly refused promotion. Still, at the end of his tour, Tregear had reenlisted for another four years. He seemed at home, a career man albeit rather a strange one.

  And then, at the beginning of his second tour, the whole world changed. There had been an arrest. A chief warrant officer had been selling code manuals to the Chinese for some eight years, and the Navy suddenly found itself without any secrets. The enemy had everything they needed to read Navy cipher like it was the Sunday funnies. But four weeks after the indictment Tregear came up with what amounted to a version of the old-fashioned book code but was virtually unbreakable because the referent was itself encoded and, anyway, changed randomly, sometimes even from line to line in the same message.

  Overnight, he was the indispensable man. He held the whole apparatus of naval security in the palm of his hand.

  The brass couldn’t do enough for him. Anything he wanted was just fine. He still wouldn’t take a promotion, but lieutenants and above answered to him like they were messenger boys. His commanding officer had only one standing order: keep Seaman Tregear happy and working.

  Then, halfway through his third tour, he put in for separation. Even more astonishing, the Navy agreed. He was mustered out and entered into a murky arrangement with the Department of Defense, the details of which were classified.

  Roland had a theory that Tregear had given the brass an ultimatum—either let me out, in which case I will continue to do whatever it is I do for you, except as a civilian, or I stop doing it. You can set me to swabbing decks for the next two years, or you can send me to the brig, but you can’t make me do what you want done on any terms except my own.

  But that was just a theory. Two things that Roland did know for certain were 1) the powers that be considered Tregear indispensable, and 2) it was in the terms of his contract with the Department of Defense that he was subject to surveillance and could not leave the United States without the Navy’s permission.

  Otherwise, he was free to come and go as he pleased. He worked at home, and home had been a lot of different places in the eight years since he had taken off his uniform.

  Fine. Lots of people liked to travel. But a normal human being with complete freedom of movement didn’t spend six months in Spartanburg, South Carolina, then pay out the lease on his apartment to move to Wichita, in the middle of winter. Then some dog hole in New Mexico, then Chicago, then half a dozen places nobody ever went if he weren’t born there or didn’t have to, then Seattle for six months, then San Francisco.

  Also fine. The world was filled with very bright people, and a lot of them were reasonably weird, but Roland had always figured he could handle anyone. That was what he was good at, handling people. Tregear, however, was a little different.

  It wasn’t that he wasn’t a nice guy. He seemed to be a very nice guy. It was that he insisted on playing by his own rules and he made the lives of his babysitters miserable—because, of course, the Navy wasn’t going to let him just wander around loose.

  There was a story, unconfirmed but probably true, that one team of watchers in Seattle got tired of the way he kept disappearing on them and put a signaling device on his car. The next day Tregear went for a ride, and everything worked precisely according to plan. For about twenty minutes. He was headed south on Highway 5. The team was about three-quarters of a mile behind him. Then all at once, the signal shifted. Tregear’s car was on Highway 90, halfway to Mercer Island. Except that was impossible, because the intersection with Highway 90 was three exits north of them. They turned around and went back, and found the car in a parking lot. The signaling device was precisely
where they had put it. They never figured out how he did that.

  And there was something about the way he looked at you. Roland had been his case officer for two months, and in that time he had met personally with the man twice. On both occasions Tregear had been scrupulously polite, but you had the feeling he could see into your brain. Every word you said, every smile, every gesture, was analyzed and understood. He seemed to know exactly what it meant, what it was intended to mean and what it was hiding. It was like being naked—no, that wasn’t quite right. It was like being transparent.

  You couldn’t control Tregear. You couldn’t charm him, and you couldn’t do without him. And he got you into situations like this. Situations that could easily backfire and end up as nasty little addenda to otherwise exemplary fitness reports.

  Roland slid his arms into the sleeves of his uniform coat and locked the car. Now he had to make a ticklish decision. All the way from Treasure Island, where, even after the naval base had been decommissioned, the Navy still maintained a nondescript field office, he had been weighing his choices, but now he had to come down one way or the other. He was here to make a complaint, yet he had no jurisdiction in the matter and he had no desire to antagonize the SFPD.

  God knows he didn’t want to be here, but Tregear had phoned him at home at seven-fifteen that morning and insisted.

  “Take care of it, Hal,” he had said. “I have enough grief with you guys. I don’t need SF Homicide added in. I don’t know what they want with me, but you get them off my back.”

  And, since Tregear himself had all kinds of ways of punishing innocent lieutenant commanders up for promotion, Roland had decided the discreet and sensible thing to do was to have a word with the local law. He was less afraid of them.

  So whom should he talk to? Where would that word do the least harm and still satisfy Tregear?

  How would he, Hal Roland, USN, feel if the SFPD came to him on similar business? The natural thing for them to do would be to see the shift commander, the man in charge. But if then the shift commander came and unloaded it all on him, he would resent that. If there was a problem with one of the Shore Patrolmen, it was more diplomatic to take it up with the man’s immediate superior.

  So the smart thing to do, the tactful and career-protecting thing, was to proceed laterally and drop in on the offending officer’s lieutenant.

  Homicide was on the third floor.

  You got off the elevator and you walked down a corridor that was like the Steinhart Aquarium. There were rooms on either side, like fish tanks, into which you could peer through huge plate glass windows—even at this hour of the morning there were people in there, hopeless-looking and stranded, stuck to their chairs like mollusks to a rock.

  The duty room was a larger, less tidy version of the one on Treasure Island, furnished more or less at random with desks and metal chairs, a few computer terminals and a coffeemaker on its own wooden table near the door to the lieutenant’s office. It had to be the lieutenant’s office because that was what was written on the door—LIEUTENANT.

  “Is he free?” Roland asked, pointing to the door and addressing his question to any one of the five men who happened to be lounging around the room. They looked him over, or rather his uniform, as if he had arrived in a space suit. “Is he in his office?”

  “Yeah, he’s in there. Do you have an appointment?”

  “Are you his social secretary?”

  The man leaned back in his chair and allowed himself a few syllables of good-natured laughter. He was in his forties, bald with a small black mustache that ran over his upper lip like a caterpillar. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his shirt, which was rolled up over thick forearms, was a pale mint green. There was nothing on his desk except a telephone, a newspaper and a black straw hat with a wide, colorful band. The man could have been a bartender or a racing tout as easily as a cop. Roland didn’t like him.

  “Yeah, Captain. I’m his social secretary. Go on in. He’ll be glad to see you.”

  With a wave of his arm he dismissed Roland from existence.

  Roland tapped twice on the frosted glass and opened the door.

  “And who might you be?”

  Roland took his identity card from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the desk. The lieutenant picked it up and read it carefully, glanced at the back, which was blank, and put it back down. He didn’t return it. He kept it right there on his blotter, as if he were considering adding it to his collection.

  Then he looked up at Roland, then back down at the card, which included a small photograph, then at Roland again.

  “So sit down. Name’s Hempel. What can I do for you?”

  Roland accepted the invitation, removing his hat and smiling his best all-American-boy smile. “I’m almost embarrassed to mention it,” he said. “You have an Officer Ridley on your shift, an Ellen Ridley?”

  “Yeah, sure. So what’s the problem?”

  Lieutenant Hempel’s face, which was narrow to begin with, seemed to close even tighter at the suggestion that the Shore Patrol might have the gall to come into his jurisdiction and claim to be embarrassed about one of his officers. The tips of his long fingers went up to run caressingly along his jawline as he considered the affront.

  “I wonder if you could tell me what cases she’s currently working on.”

  “I might, if I knew why you want to know.”

  Apparently Hempel had played these games before. Roland stopped smiling—it wasn’t working anyway—and drew himself up straight in his chair. It was his way of acknowledging defeat.

  “It’s really not a jurisdictional thing,” he began. “Within the city limits, criminal investigations that don’t involve service personnel are, as a rule, strictly none of our business, and we like to keep it that way. There are, however, a few civilians living in San Francisco in whom, for security reasons, we take an interest. These people are assets to the Navy, and we like to keep them out of harm’s way, if we can. If you like, we’re babysitters.”

  “And Inspector Ridley has stumbled over one of your babies?”

  “Yes. He tells me she accessed his DMV records yesterday morning, and then last night she followed him. We need to know why.”

  For a long moment Lieutenant Hempel appeared not to be listening, and then, very slowly, his gaze swung around to Roland and his eyebrows went up about two millimeters.

  “She accessed his DMV records? How the hell would he know that? Did she tell him?”

  “No. There was no contact. But he knows. I haven’t a clue how, but take my word for it. He knows. By now he probably knows Inspector Ridley’s high school grade average. There are no secrets from this man.”

  “Who is he? Houdini?”

  “In reverse, yes. He doesn’t break out—he breaks in. He’s a computer security specialist and a cryptographer. That’s what he does for the Navy.”

  “Then maybe Ridley’s on to something.” The lieutenant smiled faintly. “He must be keeping a pretty careful watch if he knows that Ridley looked up his driver’s license.”

  “Not necessarily. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s got all his records flagged. If anybody anywhere does a search on him, he gets a readout on his screen.”

  “He can do that?”

  “He can do that. The Navy’s working assumption is that he can do just about anything he wants. That’s why I’m here. Anything that touches him is automatically a security issue.”

  Roland allowed himself a few beats of silence, just to let it all sink in, and then he leaned forward a little in his chair, his face a mask of polite insistence.

  “Now, can you tell me what Officer Ridley’s interest might be?”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Stephen Tregear.”

  Hempel wrote it down on a notepad on his desk. It wasn’t really something he needed to remember. He was stalling, taking those few seconds to make up his mind about something.

  “You familiar with the Sally Wilkes case? Ridley’s working that
.”

  “Was that the woman they found sliced up by the Coast Road?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tregear is a suspect?”

  “Not that she’s mentioned to me.”

  “It’s fantastic.” Roland actually laughed, although he couldn’t have said why. “I know this man. He’s not the type. Believe me, he is not the type.”

  “Is there a type?”

  Was there? And, upon reflection, what did anybody know about Steve Tregear’s inner life? Perhaps it wasn’t so very safe to defend him.

  “He’s under routine surveillance,” Roland lied. He knew the one thing the Navy would want above all else was for their wunderkind to be protected. They wouldn’t care if he cut up half a dozen prom queens a week. “If he were engaged in any kind of criminal activity, we’d know about it.”

  “Would you?” Lieutenant Hempel actually seemed to want that confirmed. “Then he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”

  “Pull Ridley off.”

  “Why? As a professional courtesy?”

  “Yes.” Roland ignored the dig. “She’s wasting her time. We’ll investigate. The Navy owns him—we don’t have to worry about his civil rights. If there’s anything, we’ll find it. You’ll get a complete report.”

  “Oh. That’s very comforting.”

  Lieutenant Hempel, Homicide, crouched slightly in his chair, giving the impression he was getting ready to spring. He smiled faintly. The smile might have been intended to be reassuring, but its effect was precisely the reverse.

  Hempel looked at the ID card again, as if he wanted to make sure he was talking to the right person, and then handed it back to Roland.

  “Your Mr. Tregear sounds like a clever guy,” he said. “He’s important to you, but you let him run around loose. Why? Because he doesn’t give you a choice?”

  Roland wasn’t aware that his face betrayed anything, but Hempel nodded.

  “I thought so. I think the main reason you’re here is that you don’t want to piss off your whiz kid. Well, we’re a little different. We’ve got a homicide to solve, and we don’t care how Mr. Tregear feels about it.”