Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  * * *

  One hundred sixty-four Gaven Street was just a block south of the Embarcadero. It was in a warehouse district, utterly without charm. Allied Heating and Cooling was on the second floor, above a tile store.

  The door was locked, but after Sam rapped on the glass a few times a woman came to answer. She was about forty, with short brown hair and too much makeup, and her voice belonged to the woman Ellen had talked to on the phone.

  Sam showed his badge, and the temperature in the room dropped about twenty degrees.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “We want to look at your employment records,” Sam told her, in his coldest interrogation voice. “It’s in connection with a police inquiry.” He pushed the door closed behind them.

  “Well, the boss isn’t in, and I can’t authorize you to go pawing through our files.”

  She was stalling and she was nervous. Standing there, in the middle of that cluttered, ugly little room, she kept rubbing the heel of her left hand against her hip.

  “Are you going to make me get a search warrant?” he asked her. “Because, if you do, we’ll all have to sit here for a couple of hours until it arrives, and I bore easily. I’ll probably start looking around. I won’t be able to help myself. And I’ll probably end up calling in the fire marshal and he’ll probably find a dozen violations of code, which will probably force him to shut you down. Will that fill your boss’s soul with joy? What do you think?”

  “Go ahead. Do what you want—you will anyway.”

  She wasn’t happy. She glared at Sam as if she hated him, and she probably did.

  “I appreciate your reasonable and civic-minded attitude,” Sam told her, sounding like he was addressing a Girl Scout troop. Then he nodded at Ellen. “Inspector Ridley will now spend a little time on your computer.”

  At that precise moment, Ellen’s cell phone emitted a few musical notes and the screen lit up. She had a text message.

  There are only four employees: the owner, someone else with the same last name, so probably a relative, the secretary, and a Walter Stride, hired five months ago. His address is 212 Quarry Road, Half Moon Bay. His cell phone number is 415-555-0123. I am putting a trace on it now. Can you come back tonight?

  Nevertheless, she went through the motions. She spent twenty minutes pretending to find Walter Stride’s personnel file. Then she announced, “He’s not here. There’s nothing about a Juan Carrasco.”

  Sam, bless him, never missed a beat.

  “Then I can only apologize to you, ma’am, for wasting your time.” He actually made a little bow to the secretary. “Have a good day.”

  On the way down the stairs, he put his hand on Ellen’s shoulder, as if to arrest her flight.

  “Who the hell is Juan Carrasco, you clever girl?”

  “A character in a movie. I didn’t want her to—”

  “I know damn well what you didn’t want her to do. You know, it occurred to me in there that Tregear was probably right about her.” They had already reached their car before he asked the really important question. “Did you find Walter?”

  “Yes. But here’s the part you won’t like. He’s outside our jurisdiction.”

  “Where?”

  “Half Moon Bay.”

  “Oh shit!”

  * * *

  Mary Plant had worked for Allied Heating and Cooling for six years, ever since her divorce, when she discovered she couldn’t live on her alimony checks. It was not a wonderful job. The pay was only slightly better than a waitress’s, and Herb, the owner, was unhappily married and liked to grope her. She had pretty much concluded that this was all life would ever hold for her—a job that just allowed her to pay the rent on a walkup studio apartment, purchased at the price of her self-respect. Then Walter had come into the office.

  Walter was so sweet, so tender. For a woman whose sex life had been restricted to Herb fondling her tits and her husband, an alcoholic with no imagination who had quickly made their marriage into a dirty joke, Walter was little short of a revelation. They had hit it off at once. Then he started taking her to lunch. Soon he was a regular visitor to her walkup, where he treated her body with a kind of reverence. With him, and for the first time in her life, she felt no shame. Oh, the things they got up to!

  And Walter was like her, one of the world’s victims.

  “I did five years for a robbery. I was nineteen and stupid. When they let me out the only job I could get was in a car wash. Everybody’s got a right to a second chance, and I had to have a fresh start. So I jumped parole and created a new identity for myself. Stride was my mother’s maiden name. But they never give up. They’ve hounded me for twenty-five years. And if they ever catch me they’ll put me inside until I’m old and gray and good for nothing. I’m telling you this because I trust you.”

  “And if they ever come to the office, I’ll warn you. Walter, I love you. I’d die if I thought I’d never feel your hands on me again. If you have to run, we’ll run together.”

  Maybe this thing today was nothing. Probably it was nothing. The cops were looking for someone else. Mary tried hard to convince herself they were telling the truth, because if Walter had to disappear he might go all noble and it was possible she would never see him again. She wouldn’t know how to bear that.

  It was the slack season. Summer was coming, but in San Francisco nobody worried very much about air-conditioning. Mary had lots of time to think.

  It wasn’t nothing. The cops had lied. Well, maybe they had lied. She couldn’t take the chance. She couldn’t live with herself if she let Walter die in prison.

  She ate lunch at her desk, and over her tuna sandwich she decided she had better phone.

  * * *

  “You have no idea what a protocol mess this is,” Sam had told her as they drove back to the department. “Half Moon Bay is just a wide spot in the road, but they’ll feel insulted if the request is made by anybody below the rank of captain. And their idea of police work is traffic and the drunks on Saturday night.

  “If Walter lived in the Mission District, I’d send a SWAT team. My sense is he’s not the type to come quietly. Does Half Moon Bay even have SWAT? They’ll have to borrow, and that means more delay.”

  “But we have to get rolling on this,” Ellen said. She knew she was stating the obvious and it bothered her that she sounded like she was pleading. But she was pleading. She kept remembering what Tregear had said: If you muff it, he’ll vanish like a ghost. Had they already muffed it? To women he’s like catnip. Was that secretary already on the phone to Walter?

  Sam nodded, as if he could read her mind.

  “Never fear. Captain Jacobs was my shift commander when I was a rookie. I’ll talk to him the minute we get back.

  “What about the lieutenant?”

  “To hell with Hempel.”

  19

  Captain Roman de Lores of the Half Moon Bay Police Department received the call a few minutes after eleven in the morning. An arrest warrant would be faxed in two minutes. The suspect was wanted in connection with two, possibly three homicides in San Francisco. He was to be considered extremely dangerous. Captain de Lores scribbled down the address and waited for the fax. Then he had to decide what to do.

  This was precisely the sort of mess he had come to Half Moon Bay to escape. De Lores had been seven years on the San Francisco force and had worked his way up to inspector. By then his marriage was in deep trouble and, when he and his wife went into counseling, the therapist had told him that the stress of his job was the problem. He knew instantly that the diagnosis was correct, so he quit. He had tried running a security service for a while, but that had gone nowhere, and then he accepted the job in Half Moon Bay, where he had grown up. It was a quiet little town, a fishing village with a fair amount of tourist trade, and the work was restful. A big case was some kid’s stolen iPod. In his ten years there had been exactly two murders, both of which were cleared up within twenty-four hours.

  He didn’t ne
ed this. He didn’t want any part of it. But the arrest had to be made.

  His own force was hopelessly inadequate. He knew that. None of them had ever gone up against somebody like this. Captain Jacobs had put him on the phone with the sergeant who was working the case, and he had recommended SWAT. The closest SWAT team was in San Mateo. Captain de Lores made the call.

  * * *

  “I think we should be there.”

  Ellen was having a lot of trouble paying attention to her reports. The computer screen kept blurring in front of her eyes.

  “We can’t. We’d be visiting firemen. Our presence would be resented.”

  Then Sam suddenly raised his head. Pythagoras had probably looked like that when he discovered his theorem.

  “On the other hand, we could just go out to Half Moon Bay and play tourist. We could have crab salad for lunch.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  It was twenty-three minutes past noon, and they had barely reached Daly City, when Ellen’s cell sounded its plaintive little tune to tell her she had a text message.

  She tipped him. That was all it said.

  Ellen stared at the screen for about fifteen seconds, feeling as if a sliver of ice were being forced through her heart. Then she closed the phone and put it in her pocket.

  “Walter knows,” she said finally. “That secretary phoned him.”

  Sam never glanced at her. Instead, he focused all his rage on the traffic.

  “Tregear.” He shook his head. “Goddamn him.”

  “You’re mad at him because he was right? We should have listened to him.”

  “Maybe so.”

  It was probably a full minute before he spoke again.

  “De Lores made inspector in four years, so he isn’t stupid. He’ll have a man watching the house. If Walter runs, they’ll be all over him.”

  “If he’s even home.”

  “That’s right. If he’s even home.”

  * * *

  And he wasn’t home. He was in a parking lot at a public beach a few miles down the coast, where he busily switched license plates with the car next to his van. That would do for a few days, but pretty soon he would have to get rid of the van. The police were way too close this time.

  Walter knew how they had made him, of course. They were tracking the services calls. It was just surprising they had thought of that so quickly.

  To be inconsistent was a point of pride with him. All of his little escapades were individual works of art, with no apparent connections among them. The whore in the hotel was just something that happened—on his day off Walter had gone into the Marriott to use the restroom, and one thing led to another. It had been an improvisation. The other two women had been carefully planned, but perhaps he was getting sloppy.

  Still, the police shouldn’t have made the connection with Allied this early.

  Obviously he couldn’t go back to the house, which was unfortunate. With a little more warning he would have burned the place to the ground, but now they would have his things. There would be fingerprints. Unless they were idiots, they would find a few traces of Sally Wilkes in the basement.

  He wondered what they were doing. Had they gone inside yet, or did they just have the house staked out and were waiting for him to come back?

  Well, there wasn’t any good reason why he couldn’t go have a look.

  About a mile from his house there was a low hill, and behind it a dirt road that led from nowhere to nothing. It was an unwanted place, forgotten by everyone.

  Walter parked his van at the side of the road and climbed up the hill. In his left hand he carried a very good pair of field glasses. As he approached the crest of the hill, he got down on his hands and knees. He found a spot where he would be concealed by some brush and lay flat to watch the show.

  * * *

  Except there was no show. At least, not yet.

  An unmarked police car waited on Highway 92, about a quarter of a mile from the entrance to Quarry Road, which was a dead end. Regular patrol cars were in town, looking for Walter Stride’s van. As soon as anybody saw him, SWAT would move in.

  In the meantime there was nothing to do except wait, which meant that Sam got his crab salad for lunch.

  They sat outdoors at a round table. Ellen was playing with her iced tea, stirring it relentlessly with her straw. She couldn’t think about food.

  “Steve should be out here,” she said finally.

  Sam put his fork down and stared at his salad as if bidding it farewell.

  “He’s really gotten to you, hasn’t he.”

  “Yes, he’s really gotten to me. But he should be out here anyway.”

  “He’s a civilian.”

  This seemed to strike Ellen as funny, or preposterous, or both.

  “Walter is gone. He’s probably fifty miles from here, driving a car that won’t be reported stolen until tomorrow, when he’ll be in New Mexico, or Oklahoma or God knows where.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Oh yes, we do. Steve did a triangulation on his cell phone. It hasn’t moved in an hour, which means that Walter dumped it. It’s within a hundred yards of where we’re sitting. Day after tomorrow somebody will probably find it in a litter basket. He’s gone.”

  “We have to be sure. In three hours, if he hasn’t turned up, SWAT will move on the house.”

  “Then promise me that when the house is clear, we fetch Steve. He should walk the grid with us when we do the place. He’ll see things we’ll miss.”

  “Okay. But babysit him. He gets to look, but that’s all.”

  “Agreed.”

  Sam studied her face for a moment and then shrugged and went back to his salad.

  “I wouldn’t have thought he was your type,” he said, without looking up. “I thought your tastes ran to college boys with three degrees and all the right friends.”

  “That’s my mother,” Ellen answered, amused in spite of herself.

  “Are you going to take him home to the folks? I’d love to see that.”

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  Ellen took a sip of her tea and looked around at the other patrons. She was embarrassed, although she wasn’t sure why. If she had a friend in this world, it was Sam.

  And then it occurred to her that she was embarrassed by the idea of bringing Steve for a cozy family dinner in Atherton.

  Why was that? Probably because he hadn’t graduated from the right sort of school—or any school, for that matter. Because her mother would make snide little asides and check to see if he had axle grease under his fingernails.

  Her father’s perspective would be a little broader, since there had already been one plebian in his family.

  “My grandfather’s baby sister married beneath her,” he had told her once. “My great-uncle Johnny never got past the fifth grade. He grew up during the Depression, and his father died when he was ten, so he had to go to work.

  “I got to know him while I was in high school. He had been plant manager for a peanut butter company, of all things, but he was retired by then. He was a clever man, a machinist. If something broke down, Johnny could fix it. He and my great-aunt lived in Alameda, in a house he had built himself—and I mean all by himself. He had bought the lot cheap and within a year he had the house up, well built and beautifully designed.

  “He and Mid—my great-aunt’s name was Mildred, but everyone called her Mid—took a cruise when they were both in their seventies. To Panama. Johnny was crazy to see the canal. He wanted to see how they managed the locks.

  “That was what interested him, how things worked. He was not a philosopher, but he liked to read history and he had a point of view: ‘What did the Renaissance achieve, except to give some aristocrats a pretty place to go to church? But the Industrial Revolution, which was about machines, changed everything for everybody. The common man now lives in a state of physical comfort medieval kings would have envied.’

  “And he wasn’t boasting. He simply
understood that men like him had remade the world.

  “And Mid was a happy woman. She knew she had hit the jackpot. Johnny was a lovely man, one of nature’s aristocrats.”

  So was Steve. He was a working-class waif and a high school dropout. He was also brilliant. He could solve any puzzle. The Navy thought he was a national treasure. There were books on his shelves in three foreign languages.

  To hell with her mother, she decided. When she got the chance, she would take him home. It would be fun.

  “Would you like to know just how far we have gotten?” she asked suddenly, without knowing quite why. Perhaps she just wanted to confess.

  “Oh, that’s apparent.” Sam laughed.

  When Sam had finished his salad, they went to an art gallery and admired the seascapes. After two hours of this, they were rescued by Sam’s cell phone.

  He listened for a moment and then answered, “No. We’re here. We’ve been enjoying the local cuisine. We can be there in five minutes.”

  He folded up his phone and announced, “SWAT is ready to clear the house.”

  All through the drive, Ellen kept thinking about Tregear’s story of his grandparents’ murder, of how the house had been booby-trapped. When she mentioned it to Sam, he just shook his head.

  “They know Walter has used explosives. They’ve probably brought their dogs with them.” He grinned. “Nevertheless, we’ll wait outside until they’re finished.”

  “Can I phone Steve?”

  “Sure.”

  By the time they arrived at 212 Quarry Road, which was about as isolated a spot as one could imagine, SWAT was already inside the house. And, yes, they had brought dogs.

  Sam and Ellen went over to wait with Captain de Lores.

  After about ten minutes the SWAT team started coming back out through the front door, their helmets peeled off and their gun barrels down. The house was clear.

  “Nobody home,” the SWAT commander announced, smiling wearily. “I’m always a little disappointed when we don’t get the bad guy.”

  “So am I,” Sam agreed, with a perfectly straight face. “Think of the money you might have saved the taxpayers.”