Locked In - [McCone 29]

by Marcia Muller

  Rae and Ricky, John, Charlene and Vic. Mick, Ted, Julia, Craig, Adah. And everybody else. God I missed them!

  I’m starting to look forward to something....

  This case. That was what I was particularly looking forward to. Hearing the details of how they’d go about finding the bastard who’d altered my life—maybe irrevocably.

  But could they do it without me? I thought about that for a while. Something light rose in my chest, like a shiny bubble, and I would have smiled if that had been possible.

  You’ve heard of an armchair detective, folks? How about a locked-in investigator?

  * * * *

  JULIA RAFAEL

  S

  he took the exit from the Bay Bridge and drove toward the pier, fussing over whether she’d done the right thing to leave the money in the Peepleses’ safe and agree not to report it to the authorities. Wished she could ask Shar about it. Of course Shar— who claimed to be a by-the-book investigator—probably would’ve said it was wrong. But then Shar’s own actions didn’t always follow what the book said.

  She’d left the vineyard early, leaving a thank-you note and creeping out into the predawn light before the Peepleses stirred. She didn’t want to explain her injury or tell them that someone— maybe their missing son—had been sneaking around the stables, probably trying to retrieve the cash; the news would only increase their anguish, and Julia doubted the person would return.

  Her nose hurt and she had a bloody scab, partially concealed by makeup. She wouldn’t be surprised if her eyes were blackened within a few hours. She’d taken punches to the nose before, and that was the inevitable result.

  Julia parked in her slot on the pier’s floor and hurried up the stairs to the catwalk. Half an hour late for the staff meeting, and she felt like shit. She rushed into the conference room. Stopped. Where was everybody?

  Back down the catwalk to Ted’s office. He and Patrick Neilan were there, Ted sitting in his chair, Patrick perched on a corner of the desk. Ted’s bright red Western-style shirt—the latest of his ever-changing fashion statements—contrasted sharply with Patrick’s goth black.

  “Is the meeting over?” she asked.

  “Never got started,” Patrick said. “Adah and Derek and Thelia showed, but none of the folks who are actively working the case. Hy—who requested the meeting—was on time, but left when we realized it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “Craig wasn’t home when Adah got there last night,” Ted added, “and there’s been no word from him. Mick’s cellular is out of service range. Ricky said Rae went out in a hurry around ten. What the hell happened to you?”

  “Hostile encounter with a grape stake.” She explained about her visit to the Peepleses. “Did I do right, leaving the money there?”

  Patrick shrugged, running a hand through his spiky red hair.

  Ted said, “It’s what Shar would’ve done.”

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “Other than you icing your face? I’ll keep calling around,” Ted told her. “Maybe I can gather the troops this afternoon. In the meantime, Shar’s entertaining visitors.”

  * * * *

  Julia entered Shar’s room hesitantly, an ice bag that the nurse on the desk had provided pressed to her nose. It would help to keep her eyes from blackening, the woman said. Ice hadn’t done anything for her in the past, but she accepted the bag gratefully.

  Shar was turned on her side before a window overlooking a eucalyptus grove. The room was quiet and fragrant with flowers. Julia skirted the bed, drew up the single chair, and looked into Shar’s eyes.

  Light filled them, and Shar blinked.

  “You’re awake,” Julia said.

  Another blink.

  Dios, it was creepy! She’d never seen Shar so motionless and silent. How the hell did they know she was in there anyway? This blinking could be a reflex.

  No. Ted had said she was completely aware, that one blink meant yes and two meant no.

  Still, it was creepy.

  A questioning light came into Shar’s eyes. She stared steadily at Julia’s ice bag.

  “Oh, this,” Julia said, “de nada. I’ll explain.”

  She gave Shar a full report on her cases. Asked the same thing she’d asked herself, Ted, and Patrick. “Did I do the right thing leaving the money with the Peepleses?”

  One blink. Yes.

  “What should I do now? Oh, hell, I know you can’t answer me. But I just don’t...”

  Shar’s gaze fixed on hers, strong and compelling.

  “Okay, I could turn it over to the police.”

  Two blinks. No.

  “Right. We’re not even sure it’s stolen.”

  Blink.

  “But I don’t think this guy who worked in the stockroom at Home Showcase saved that much out of his salary. Or won the lottery. And if he had, it’d be earning interest in a bank, rather than stuffed in a duffel bag under the floorboards of his parents’ tack room.”

  Blink.

  “We don’t even know he’s the one who put it there. Right?”

  Blink.

  “Or if he was the one I chased through the vineyard?”

  Blink.

  “So what do I... ? Dig deeper, way deeper into the guy’s life?”

  Blink. Then Shar closed her eyes. Tired.

  Julia sat by the bed a few minutes more before leaving quietly only when she was sure Shar was asleep.

  * * * *

  MICK SAVAGE

  G

  od, these tracking devices were getting better and better!

  He sat on his Harley—a more powerful version of the one he’d wrecked last fall—across from the Spindrift Lodge near Big Sur. The lodge was old and sprawling, its logs washed silver-gray by the elements. Woodstove chimneys protruded above each unit, and the ice plant lawn between the semicircular driveway was strewn with driftwood. Craig had just checked in—unit twenty. Mick wasn’t about to go up and knock on the door, though; he’d wait it out, see what happened.

  Last night after he left Craig and Adah’s apartment he’d located Craig’s SUV where it was parked a block away and slapped a tracking device under the bumper. At three in the morning Mick’s monitor showed the vehicle was in motion. Mick left his condo and followed.

  Why, he wondered on the long drive down, was Craig being so damn secretive about his line of investigation? Sure, it was politically sensitive, but it might have something to do with Shar getting shot and paralyzed. Well, maybe it was just the old FBI training kicking in. Or maybe Craig wanted to score a big one for himself.

  No, Craig wasn’t like that. What he was looking into had to be something major. And he wanted to be sure of his facts before he enlisted the rest of them.

  An hour passed. The sky was clear, but a cold wind was blowing in and the sea was beating against the cliffs, throwing up big fans of spray. Good weather in Big Sur didn’t last long.

  As he waited and watched, Mick thought back to the night last November when he’d been on a similar stretch of highway, drunk out of his mind and stoned on grief because he’d lost the woman he’d considered the love of his life, Charlotte Keim. So drunk and stoned he’d decided to see how high the Harley could fly above the Pacific. He’d misjudged and landed hard on the roadside, hard enough to injure himself seriously and knock some sense into him. Sweet Charlotte had done the same: she was seven years older than he, and during repeated conversations over the next couple of months she’d convinced him that life and love didn’t end at twenty-two.

  She was getting married next month to an old college sweetheart. He wished her well.

  Activity at the inn. A car—plain, gray, probably a rental— pulled in. A woman in jeans and a dark-colored jacket, her head covered with a scarf, got out and went into the office. She returned quickly, retrieved a bag from the car, and entered Room 19, next to Craig’s.

  Mick took out his binoculars, noted the license plate of the car. Jotted down her time of arrival.

 
Half an hour later another inconspicuous sedan arrived. White this time. A man in jeans and a parka, its hood pulled up and resting low on his brow, got out and went to register. When he came out, he moved the car and entered Room 21, to the other side of Craig. Mick noted down the plate number and time.

  For an hour after that, nothing happened. It was getting cold on the clifftop: icy gusts of wind ruffled his hair and permeated his leather jacket. Finally he started the Harley and drove into the inn’s parking lot. The pleasant woman at the desk agreed to give him Room 22.

  “That’s the second request I’ve had today for a certain room number,” she said. “Man came in this morning and took Room Twenty, said he was meeting two associates; he described them and asked they be put on either side of him. Said not to mention he was here—it was a surprise. You a member of his party, too?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am,” He wanted to ask her the names all three had registered under, but didn’t want to arouse her suspicions. “Any good takeout places that deliver around here?”

  “There’s a pizza joint, but I wouldn’t recommended it.” There was an ominous tone to her voice.

  Mick was glad he always carried a couple of nutrition bars. It could be a long night.

  * * * *

  RAE KELLEHER

  T

  he second of the Bill Delaneys turned out to be Callie O’Leary’s attorney. He had his office in the front room of his shabby Victorian on Shotwell Street in Bernal Heights, two blocks from All Souls’ former headquarters. When Rae came to his door and said she was an investigator hired to locate Callie so she could claim an inheritance left her by her grandmother, Delaney let her in, but the small eyes that peered out of poochy folds of flesh were shrewd and wary.

  He probably didn’t believe her but hoped there might be something in it for him.

  Delaney urged her to take one of his clients’ chairs and sat behind his old oak desk. The room’s sagging shelves were lined with law books, but the bindings looked brittle and were faded by the sun coming through the unshaded bay window. The air smelled of dust and stale cigar smoke; the collar and cuffs of Delaney’s blue oxford cloth shirt were frayed. Rae felt much better dressed in her jeans and sweater.

  “So Ms. O’Leary is an heiress,” Delaney said, folding his stubby-fingered hands on a file in front of him.

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, but the sum is substantial for a ... woman of her means.”

  “And how would you know about Ms. O’Leary’s ‘means’?”

  “I’ve been to her last address. And from what people tell me, she was a hooker.”

  Delaney frowned reprovingly. “A sex worker, Ms. Kelleher. There’s a difference.”

  She ignored his correction. “Can you provide me with Ms. O’Leary’s present address?”

  “She doesn’t wish it to be made known. She calls me periodically, however. Perhaps you could leave the check for the inheritance with me, and I’ll hold it for her.”

  Right. Did she look like she had an IQ of twenty?

  “Sorry, no. First she’ll have to sign some documents in the presence of a notary.”

  “Then I can’t help you, Ms. Kelleher.”

  “Will you at least pass on a message asking her to call me?” Rae extended one of her cards.

  “Certainly.” He took it, tossed it carelessly on the desk, and stood up. “More than anything else, I’d like to see my client financially secure and out of her present dubious occupation.”

  Sure he would. But only if she’d go halves with him.

  * * * *

  When she got back to her car—a lovely black BMW Z4 that Ricky had given her on her birthday two years ago—Rae checked her cell phone for messages. One from Ted, asking why the hell she’d missed the staff meeting, and another from Maggie Lambert of Victims’ Advocates. She wanted a report.

  The Advocates had their offices only a few blocks away on Valencia Street. Rae decided she might as well go there and talk with Lambert in person.

  * * * *

  The offices were up a dimly lighted, mildewy-smelling staircase above a taqueria. While many blocks of Valencia Street were now lined with good restaurants and chichi shops, the economic upturn hadn’t reached this pocket of poverty. At the top Rae pushed through the door and entered a room full of cast-off furnishings. Maggie Lambert—short, gray-haired, and clad in faded jeans and a red flannel shirt with one button missing—sat at her desk leafing through a thick file. When she looked up and saw Rae, her face became stern.

  “Rae, thank you for coming. Is there any progress in the Angie Atkins case?”

  Trust Maggie to get right to the point. Rae said, “I’ve got a lead to that friend of hers I told you about—Callie O’Leary.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Her attorney will put us in touch when he hears from her.”

  “This is very unsatisfactory.”

  Rae bit back a tart retort about asking a lot of someone who was working pro bono. Said, “I’m not happy with it myself. If I could talk with Callie, she might be able to tell me more about Angie. From the police report, I gather that’s not her true identity, but there’s no guarantee she told Callie anything other than her street name.”

  “What about dental records? DNA? Did you ask the police about them?”

  Maggie must’ve been watching too many episodes of CSI. “In order to compare dental charts, you need to have some idea of who the victim was. DNA samples were taken and stored, but they didn’t match any in the current databases.”

  “So exactly what is it you intend to do?”

  “Wait for Callie O’Leary’s attorney to call. Talk with the investigating officers at the SFPD again. Comb through my files for overlooked leads. Especially anything that may connect this case with my employer’s shooting.”

  Maggie’s face softened. “How’s she doing?”

  “As well as can be expected. In fact, I’m going to visit her now: even though she can’t speak, I suspect she’ll be a great source of inspiration.”

  * * * *

  SHARON McCONE

  I

  closed my eyes after Rae left my room. Even with brief naps I was exhausted. Besides Hy and her, I’d had three other visitors: Julia, my sister Charlene, and my brother John. Enough already.

  I was beginning to understand the routine of this place. The sun was slanting low on the eucalyptus grove, which meant the nurse would soon come in, check my vital signs, catheter, and feeding tube, and turn me onto my other side. I’d doze, and when I woke Hy would be there. He’d leave late, and then there’d be another visit from the nurse. If I was lucky, I’d sleep deeply for a few hours. If not, I’d face my demons alone in the dark.

  My demons were large and numerous: looming figures from the past, including the dark one who had shot me. Vague shadows of the future—fleeting, unreal, frightening. And my present...

  Good God, is this going to be my life?

  No. No way I could face that.

  So what’s your alternative? Suicide?

  I’d always considered suicides to be cowards, heedless of the damage they did to those who loved them. Leaving messes behind for others to clean up, as my brother Joey had done when he’d overdosed on booze and drugs in a lumber-town shack outside of Eureka. On one level I hated Joey for the pain he’d inflicted on my family members and me—particularly for causing the shadows that, even on a happy day, never left my mother’s eyes. But Joey had been facing demons he apparently couldn’t control; now, facing my own, I began to wonder if he hadn’t done us, as well as himself, a favor.

  And if I were to remain in this state indefinitely? No way I could endure that. I’d rather just check out.

  But California didn’t have an assisted-suicide law. And asking assistance from someone I loved—namely Hy—would put a terrible burden on him.

  Besides, I wanted to live. I’d reached a point in my life where I could say I was happy and looking forward to a good future. At least I had been, unti
l someone fired a bullet into my skull.

  I felt the rage bubble and boil over again. I wished I could scream invectives, hit something, smash the vase of roses placed prominently within my range of vision.

  Slowly I regained control. Calm and purpose returned. I would not die a suicide, even if it was possible, because that would be giving in to the scumbag who shot me.