Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  But what impressed her even more were his powers of organization and analysis. There were no digressions. He could have been reading from a script. And his critiques of some of the lab work were both pitiless and brilliant.

  “I was surprised and disappointed to find that your forensics people offered no opinion as to whether the Hudson woman’s throat was cut from right to left or left to right. All they had to do was examine the wound under magnification—20X would have done it—and they would have been able to see in which direction the fraying occurred.”

  “And that would have told us exactly what, Mr. Tregear? Whether the killer was right- or left-handed?”

  “Only if we assume he was standing behind her when he cut, Inspector Tyler. Of course, if he had her tied faceup on a table, for instance, in which case he could have been standing on either side, then it would tell us nothing.”

  “And do you have an opinion, Mr. Tregear? Which is he, right- or left-handed?”

  “An opinion, Inspector Tyler? No.”

  “Or, since you’re obviously a man who chooses his words with care, you know it for a fact?”

  For a moment Tregear appeared to be studying Sam’s expression, as if seeking some clue to his intentions. Or, more probably, he had already made up his mind on that point, and he was simply enjoying himself. Ellen fancied there was the faintest trace of a smile on his face.

  “Your killer is left-handed,” he said at last.

  “And you know this for a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re left-handed yourself. That’s interesting.”

  Sam was sitting on the right-hand side of the sofa, and he shifted his weight so that he was leaning a little more heavily on the armrest. He appeared to be measuring Tregear for his shroud.

  “You conclude this from the fact that I wear my wristwatch on the right,” Tregear answered, holding that arm up for inspection. There was something almost pitying in his voice. “Feel free to inspect my left hand. There’s a writer’s bump on the middle finger, so you’re correct in your assumption. It’s an infirmity I share with from five to fifteen percent of the population—I’ve often wondered why that particular statistic isn’t more precise.”

  Sam didn’t look happy. Perhaps he was beginning to realize that he was out of his depth with this guy. But like a good cop he went straight ahead.

  “I wonder if you’d care to share with us how you know this particular bad guy is left-handed.”

  Tregear shook his head.

  “No. I’m not ready yet, which means that you’re not ready yet. But I’ll give you something else.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  It was clear that Sam didn’t enjoy being toyed with, but Ellen had the impression that that was not what was going on. Tregear was serious.

  “I’m sure it’s obvious to you,” he said finally, “that this particular murderer has had a lot of practice. He isn’t making his debut in San Francisco. Can we agree on that?”

  Sam nodded, with effort. “For purposes of this discussion, yes.”

  “Then I can offer you something,” Tregear announced, as if genuinely pleased. “Talk to the Seattle police about four unsolved murders that occurred between June and November of last year. Then call a Sergeant Carton at Boise Homicide, about a case that’s still on the books from last April. Needless to say, there are others, but those will give you a taste.

  “And now you can do something for me.” Tregear addressed this to Ellen. “Tell me about the Wilkes killing.”

  Ellen glanced at Sam, who looked as if his lunch was beginning to disagree with him, and then turned back to Tregear with what she hoped was a modest, slightly embarrassed smile.

  “I wonder if I could use your bathroom.”

  It took a brief moment for the request to register, and then Tregear instantly switched back to the perfect host.

  “Certainly.” He halfway rose out of his chair, as if he thought he might be required to lead her by the hand. “Up the stairs. First doorway on your left.”

  As she exited the room, she wondered if Tregear was watching her. And then she wondered what her wondering might mean.

  It was the cleanest bathroom in living memory, which was a disappointment. There was nothing on the sink except a dispenser of liquid soap—no comb, no brush, no electric razor. The medicine cabinet was just as barren.

  Ellen had the sinking feeling that this was probably the guest bathroom.

  Then she noticed the towels. They weren’t folded as if they had just come from the linen closet. She touched the face towel and it was still slightly damp.

  This was Tregear’s bathroom. He was just a clean freak.

  There was a shower stall. Lots of people preferred a shower stall to a bathtub. Maybe the only thing Tregear did in this room was use the shower.

  The shower drain was covered with a plastic cap. She took out the jackknife she always carried and pried the cap out.

  Praise be to God, there were a few strands of hair sticking to the inside.

  Ellen extracted an evidence bag and one plastic glove from her pocket. By the time she had put the glove on, used her finger to scoop out the hair strands, put both the glove and the hair in the evidence bag and then put the bag back in her pocket and replaced the drain cap, she had been in the bathroom for about a minute and a half.

  She was almost ready to leave and go back downstairs when she remembered she had forgotten to flush the toilet. She worked the handle and then made a leisurely production out of washing her hands. Men always assumed that it took women forever to pee, so when her hands were clean she inspected her face and hair in the mirror.

  She didn’t like her expression. It was cold and cynical. This is what I do, she thought to herself. I steal hair out of people’s drains. I pry into their lives.

  When she got back to the living room, there was complete silence. Ellen had the impression there had been what her mother would have called a “scene.” Sam looked angry and Tregear looked uncomfortable, as if he had just witnessed a display of bad manners he was too polite to acknowledge.

  Sam stood up. “We’d better be going now.”

  The only exchange of pleasantries at the door occurred when Tregear took her hand and smiled the kindest, warmest smile Ellen had ever seen.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” he said.

  They were in the car and had already slipped into the flow of traffic before Ellen could bring herself to speak.

  “So what happened while I was gone?” she asked.

  “I told him I’d check with Seattle and Boise and that if his information turned out to be useful we might have another chat.” Sam was clenching the steering wheel as if he hated it. “But if that freak thinks I’m going to share any information with him, he really is crazy.”

  Then he looked at her and grinned, almost savagely.

  “I think your little hunch might just pan out, Ellie. I think this might be Our Boy.”

  Ellen didn’t answer. In theory she agreed. Tregear was the leading contender. He even fit the psychological profile, another narcissistic game player, a smart son of a bitch who thought the rest of the human race existed solely for his amusement. Another Brad, if you will.

  Except that this guy was even smarter than Brad, and Brad expressed his contempt of women—or, at least, of her—by dumping them without even the courtesy of a good-bye, which was a step or two up from cutting their guts out while they were still alive to enjoy it.

  “Didn’t you just love the way he played with us?” Sam shook his head and, as he changed lanes, almost sideswiped a little old lady in a white Buick. “He thinks he’s so smart. He thinks he can come this close to the fire and not get burned, the arrogant prick. Well, his arrogance will be his undoing. I’ll enjoy putting the cuffs on this one.”

  In that moment Ellen decided she wouldn’t tell Sam about the hair samples.

  7

  Tregear saw off his visitors, locked the door behind them a
nd went upstairs to the guest bathroom.

  There was a bathroom immediately across the hall from his bedroom, but it didn’t have a shower stall, which he preferred to washing himself while he stood in a bathtub screened by a plastic curtain decorated with blue waves and mermaids. He liked to be able to see out, just in case he should have forgotten to lock the door.

  Thus he always showered in the guest bathroom. Otherwise, he used the one next to his bedroom.

  He wasn’t absolutely sure that Ellen Ridley had had some devious purpose in visiting his bathroom, but he preferred to know these things.

  The inside of the sink was wet and there was a droplet of liquid soap clinging to the nozzle of the dispenser, so she had washed her hands. But the toilet seat was still up. How many women would think to put the toilet seat back up? So the odds were good that she had flushed the toilet without actually using it.

  And thus it followed that she had been up to something.

  The room contained only the toilet, the sink, which she had used, a medicine cabinet, which contained nothing except a bottle of rubbing alcohol and three boxes of bandages, and a shower. Tregear opened the shower door.

  There was nothing obvious, so he got down on his hands and knees for a closer look.

  Sure enough, he found a tiny scratch in the metal rim of the drain. It sparkled under the light, so it was new. Inspector Ridley had been here ahead of him.

  Tregear pried off the drain cap, but there didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about the drain. Then he turned the cap over and had a look at the inside.

  There were two strands of his hair just under the top, but the sides, where he knew from experience that hair would be more likely to collect, were perfectly clean—just as if someone had scoured all the way around with her finger.

  Now, who could that have been?

  He popped the drain cap back into place, closed the shower door and went back downstairs to his kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. When it was ready, he took it with him into the living room and sat down on the leather chair. As he drank the tea, he stared at the left side of the sofa, where Inspector Ridley had been sitting not twenty minutes earlier. He seemed to be trying to conjure her up out of the thin air, and perhaps he was.

  “Sneaky girl,” he said, without anger, in a voice that was just audible. “Now why did you do that?”

  The obvious answer had of course occurred to him, but he almost dismissed it out of hand as too wildly improbable. What could she possibly want with a few strands of his hair except a DNA sample? But, once she had it, it would be useless unless she had another sample, taken from a crime scene, to which she could match it.

  There had been no suspect DNA recovered from the bathroom at the Marriott and none from the car trunk in which Kathy Hudson had been found. So far, the autopsy findings on Sally Wilkes hadn’t been posted, but Tregear would have been prepared to bet very serious money none had been found there either.

  He wondered if she had any plans to tell her partner about the hair samples.

  Of course both of them thought that he was their killer, an idea he had made no attempt to discourage, but they had nothing tangible that connected him with any of these murders. They had only the information he had given them and Inspector Ridley’s tenuous hunch.

  Tregear was in love with Inspector Ridley’s hunches. The instant he first saw her, up on Skyline Boulevard when she got that photographer to film him, he had sensed that she was not a by-the-book type.

  In the slightly more than twenty-four hours since she had pulled up his DMV records, Tregear had learned a good deal about her, and a streak of rebellion ran through the details of her life like a flaw through a diamond. The child of money, she was a working cop who gave every indication of living on her police salary. The performance records written by her immediate superiors were generally glowing, shadowed only here and there with oblique references to a less than perfect respect for authority and proper procedure: “Patrolwoman Ridley certainly merits promotion to Assistant Inspector, where her independence of mind will find more scope.” “Inspector Ridley’s first year in Juvenile Offenders has been generally satisfactory, even exemplary. Like so many of our better officers at the beginning of their careers, she has at times exhibited an understandable degree of impatience with the workings of the juvenile justice system.” There was even a complaint, which the judge had dismissed out of hand, from a drug-addicted father whom she had threatened with mayhem if he didn’t stop abusing his daughter.

  Alas, so things went. There was justice, which dwelt in Heaven, and then there was the law, in this case represented by the San Francisco Police Department. And Inspector Ellen Ridley seemed to feel the tension between them as a kind of private travail. Thus, impatient of constraint, she had ignored the rules and followed her nose to Fisherman’s Wharf, hoping to pick up the scent of a murderer.

  Well, good for her.

  But could it be that now, as she and Inspector Sergeant Tyler drove away together, perhaps she was just a shade less confident? Tregear was not much given to vanity about his effect on women, but he was observant—he could read the signs. And he had detected a chord of sympathy in Ellen Ridley which, under happier circumstances, might have emboldened him to ask her if she might care to share a few glasses of wine with him.

  At least, he felt permitted to suspect, she would not be utterly crushed to discover that Sally Wilkes had been murdered by somebody else.

  And that, probably, was the best he could hope for.

  Still, she was a pretty woman—prettier at close range than she had appeared to be up on the coast road—and it was a pleasure to remember her. He liked her hair. It was an unusual color, a mix of red and brown which couldn’t possibly have come out of a bottle. It was almost a pity she wore it so short, but it framed her face and somehow emphasized the delicacy of her features. She had beautiful, clear skin and a mouth that just hinted at a streak of sensuality in her nature. And her eyes, large and light brown, were lovely.

  But today was probably as close to her as he would ever manage.

  As he sat alone in his living room, holding an empty teacup, Tregear was forced to admit to himself that there were times when he found the circumstances of his life utterly depressing.

  8

  Ellen soothed her conscience with the reflection that she couldn’t have told Sam anyway. Sam had his pension to think about. She had illegally gathered evidence, and she had no business involving him in that.

  Besides, he was obsessive about proper procedure. Yesterday she had followed Tregear along a couple of blocks of public sidewalk, and Sam had given her one of his copyrighted lectures. What would he have said if he knew she was carrying strands of Tregear’s hair around in her coat pocket? He wouldn’t have understood.

  And, truth to tell, she wasn’t sure she understood herself. The hair samples would not be admissible evidence and, if it ever got out how she had obtained them, any subsequent case against Tregear stood a good chance of being thrown out. Ellen was perfectly aware that during the last twenty-four or so hours she had not been behaving like a model detective.

  Their shift was nearly over. They drove back to the station and Ellen found two manila folders on her desk. The first was thicker and contained about twenty high-definition photographs of the crowd at Sally Wilkes’ discovery site. The detail was much better than in the video. Ellen was at last able to determine that the trousers Tregear had been wearing were olive green.

  In five of the photos his face was particularly clear, and one of them Ellen would have liked to pin up on her refrigerator. Probably it had been taken before he noticed the camera, and his expression reflected an anguish Ellen had sensed in him but never actually seen. It was impossible to look at that face and believe Stephen Tregear was a murderer.

  He was something, this guy. He wasn’t amazingly handsome, but he made your average heartthrob movie star look like a troglodyte. His face radiated intelligence, as if no secret could be hidden fr
om him, and somehow that was way sexier than sculpted eyebrows.

  After about five minutes, she put the photos back in their envelope. After all, this was a murder investigation.

  The other envelope contained, providentially, the DNA report on the semen recovered at autopsy from Sally Wilkes.

  While Sam was in the men’s room, she took the report over to the Xerox machine and copied it, all five pages.

  When Sam came back, he threw himself into his chair and lit a cigarette.

  “Girl, I don’t know what you’ve got in mind for the contents of that envelope, but just don’t sell it to The National Enquirer.”

  Then he laughed.

  After Sam had driven her home, and she was alone in her apartment, she threw a frozen lasagna into the microwave, poured herself a glass of Pinot Grigio, and sat down to read the report. For all that she was able to understand it, it might as well have been written in cuneiform.

  With some obscure idea of eventually going to law school, Ellen had majored in philosophy. The physical sciences were not among her strengths and the report, with its references to VNTR assays and SNPs, was completely unintelligible to her. Even the graphs, which looked like finger paint smears, meant nothing.

  Okay. In any case, she could hardly turn her purloined hair samples over to the police lab; she would need an outside expert.

  And that meant she would have to beg a favor from Daddy.

  Fortunately, tomorrow was her day off; she could postpone her visit home for another twelve or thirteen hours.

  * * *

  The next morning Ellen was up at five. Her father’s office hours didn’t start until ten, and so he never left the house before nine-forty. She could be in Atherton by seven, which would give her plenty of time to work on him.

  The section of Atherton where her parents lived was enclosed by a brick wall and was home to some of the wealthiest people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both her mother and father had inherited money, and her father had a lucrative practice—many of his patients were the children of neighbors—but even between them they didn’t have quite enough money to really fit in. Thus, their social position was ambiguous. They were popular, particularly Ellen’s father, but Dr. Ridley was someone you hired by the hour. It was all very distressing.