“You set the dates and times.”
“Right. Thursday? I can be here at one.”
“One’s fine.”
“See you then.” She started out.
“Wait a second,” I said. I got the spare key out of the desk drawer, took it over and presented it to her.
“What’s this?”
“Looks like a key to me.”
“To what? Not the office?”
“The office. I won’t be here Thursday afternoon; my wife and I are leaving early on a long weekend. And even when I’m working I’m in and out a lot, sometimes on short notice.”
“You trust me to just show up and go to work?”
“Why not? You don’t need supervision, do you?”
“Hell, no.”
“So you come in and go to work. Mind answering the phone, taking messages, when you’re here alone?”
“Tamara the temp. No, I don’t mind. Check your answering machine too?”
“Not necessary unless I call in and ask you to.”
“Suppose somebody, a client, walks in?”
“Find out what the person wants, write down the pertinent information, and tell him or her I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”
“What if it’s urgent and they want to get in touch right away?”
“If you know where I am, tell them.”
“This weekend too?”
“Well, this weekend’s special. . . .”
“Kind of a honeymoon, right?”
“How did you . . . oh. George.”
“George. Man’s a gossip. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” I hesitated, thinking of the situation with Chehalis. What if something broke while I was away? Sally Chehalis changing her mind and trying to contact me, for instance? “Maybe I’d better give you the address and telephone number of where we’ll be, just in case. Are you going to be busy Friday afternoon, late, or Saturday morning?”
“I’m free Saturday. Why?”
“Well, if you could stop in long enough to check messages and then phone me with a list, I’d appreciate it. The case I’m working on now is more important than most.”
“No problem.”
I wrote down the address and number of the Cazadero house for her. While I was doing that I caught her studying me in the same appraising way Horace had. Won’t do you any good, Ms. Corbin. Even I don’t know what makes me tick.
She said when I gave her the paper, “I’ll be in touch,” and then winked at me. “You and your bride have a nice time doing whatever it is people your age do on a honeymoon.”
“The same thing you and Horace do, only legally.”
“And not as often.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “And not as often. Give Horace my best.”
“I’d rather give him my best,” she said, and winked again, and went away with her PowerBook and her bright new attitude.
I said aloud to the closed door, “Yep, I think this is going to work out just fine.”
KERRY WAS OF THE SAME opinion when I told her, over dinner, about Tamara Corbin’s first day on the job. She’d approved of my decision to hire an assistant and she was pleased Ms. Corbin was turning out so well after our prickly beginning. She didn’t say so, but I knew she was also pleased I’d be sharing the office again at least part of the time. She hadn’t cared much for the ex-loft before Eberhardt moved out, and ever since, she’d tried to talk me into transferring operations to a smaller, more modern office: the loft was too big for one man alone; it held too many memories; it was gloomy and tended to make me brood. The lobbying campaign hadn’t worked, but that didn’t mean she’d given up on it. And until she convinced me, she considered this to be the next best thing.
Our other dinner-table topic was Cazadero. “Tom Broadnax brought the keys in today,” she said. Broadnax was the Bates and Carpenter client who owned the house we’d be using. “He also brought two bottles of Mumm’s as a wedding present.”
“What’s that? Mumm’s?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Champagne?”
“Very good champagne.”
“Oh. So Mumm’s the word for the weekend.”
“Ha-ha,” she said, and rolled her eyes the way Tamara Corbin had earlier. “Jim Carpenter’s letting me off at noon.”
“Good for him. You want to leave right at noon, then?”
“It’ll give us more time at the cabin. But we can wait until Thursday evening if you’ve got work to do in the afternoon.”
“Not as far as I know now. There’s a chance something will come up, though.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“The case I’m working on? No, not just yet. Maybe over the weekend.”
“You may not have time then,” she said.
“Oh, so it’s going to be that kind of weekend?”
“Exactly that kind. I plan to wear you out.”
My male ego wouldn’t let me tell her that she already had.
JOE DEFALCO RANG BACK at one o’clock Tuesday afternoon. He was home, he said, and he had plenty to tell me, but he was waiting for a couple of calls. If I wasn’t busy, why didn’t I drive over and we’d talk there? His usual tone was cynical and bantering; not today. Today he was all business.
He lived fifteen minutes away, on Twin Peaks at the end of a skinny dead-end street called Raccoon Drive. The house was an architectural mess he and Nancy had bought a dozen years ago; it had pillars, it had gables, it had odd jutting angles and one wall made entirely of glass. And to top it off, it had been painted a lime-green with brown trim—a color combination they hadn’t chosen but that they tolerated because Joe was too cheap to have it redone.
He let me in, offered a drink that I declined, and led me into his study. Big room at the rear of the house, jammed with a desk, computer, copy machine, and a mess of antique gambling equipment: two-hundred-year-old Liberty Bell slot machines, roulette wheel and layout, faro bank and chuck-a-luck outfit, and other stuff I didn’t recognize. His hobby was gambling and its history; he’d written a book on the subject, published last year. I’d read it: not bad. He could sling the bull on paper as well as he could in person.
“What did you find out, Joe?”
“Like I said on the phone, plenty. I must’ve made fifty calls since we talked yesterday. You’re onto something, all right—in frigging spades.”
“How bad does it look?”
“Worse than either of us figured.” He picked up a sheaf of handwritten notes from his desk, glanced through them. “Fifty-seven strong possibles, another twenty-two maybes.”
“Jesus. California and Oregon both?”
He nodded. “At least two cases in each of the towns you named; nine in the greater Sacramento area alone. And that’s just in the past dozen years. Ten others in the Bay Area and San Benito and San Luis Obispo counties stretching back to the mid-seventies. Seventy-nine altogether. Some are probably not his—but others that are may not have been reported. Figure him for sixty to seventy-five . . . a real hardcase psycho.”
“Three to four a year.”
“Almost double that over the past eight. That’s when the heaviest concentration of cases occurred. That’s not all, either. It gets worse.”
“Some of his victims died,” I said.
“At least two. One beaten to death in Chico in eighty-seven, one strangled in McKinleyville, north of Eureka, in eighty-nine. The woman in Chico, student at the college there . . . local authorities think she was raped after she died.”
I didn’t say anything. In my mind’s eye I could see Chehalis, fat and puffy, with his nighttime pallor and those big hands clenching and unclenching. The image brought a surge of hate as hot as fire. I had hated just one man in my life with such sudden intensity, and he was dead now—he was dead because I’d made him that way.
DeFalco was saying, “Very little definite information in eighty percent of the reported cases, confusing or conflicting testimony in the rest. Completely
random assortment of victims; youngest fifteen, oldest sixty-three. Ski masks, Halloween masks, Disney masks. Knife used in half a dozen cases; handgun in five others. Some victims choked and beaten, some just beaten, half a dozen had limbs fractured. Just not enough commonality for investigators in one area to link up their cases with ones elsewhere —that’s one of the reasons he’s gotten away with it all these years. You know how many rapes there are in California and Oregon annually, just the ones that are reported?”
“Too goddamn many.”
“Thousands. Oh, this bastard’s clever, as clever as they come. Not only does he vary his selection process and his disguises and his methods, he hits a particular town or area only every so often. Even the nine cases in and around Sacramento are spread out among different locations, different years and times of year.”
“Yeah, clever. And lucky.”
“Who is he? What’s your connection to him?”
I shook my head.
“Come on, what’s his name?”
“Joe, there’s no evidence he’s the one. Not yet.”
“No evidence? What do you call sixty or seventy rapes in parts of two states this guy visits regularly?”
“That’s circumstantial and you know it.”
“DNA testing’s proof positive.”
“He’s got to be arrested before he can be DNA-tested and tried and convicted. There’s not enough probable cause for a legal investigation or an arrest, not yet.”
“Maybe not,” DeFalco admitted.
“I want his ass nailed worse than you do—I want it so bad I’m shaking inside. But it won’t happen if we jump the gun.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“His wife knows he’s dirty. She’s the way to get him.”
“He’s married, huh? Yeah, sure, he’s married. Wife, kids, respectable front . . . it figures. What the hell is he, some kind of traveling salesman?”
“That’s just what he is. Wife but no kids. She’s suspected for a while that he was guilty of something, but she didn’t realize what or how bad it was until Sunday.”
“You responsible?”
“Not directly. But I was the catalyst.”
“What opened her eyes?”
I told him about the scrapbook.
“Holy Mother,” he said. “But if she burned the damn thing, and now she’s into denial . . . how do you expect to get through to her?”
“Maybe by telling her what you just told me. Showing her your notes: places, dates, numbers . . . those two dead women and the dead fetus. She looked at what was in the scrapbook but odds are she didn’t look too closely, doesn’t realize the full scope of his crimes. I’ll show her just what kind of monster he is.”
“Suppose she still won’t convince?”
“Cross that bridge when we come to it.”
DeFalco crossed to the roulette layout. He put the little white ball into the wheel slot and spun the wheel and watched in silence until the ball popped out and rolled into one of the numbered squares: 11, black. Then he said, “All right, go ahead and see what you can do. Best for you to brace her alone, I suppose, without me along?”
“Pretty fragile situation, Joe.”
“Yeah. But if she caves in, you call me before you take her to the cops. I want that exclusive you promised me.”
“Right. It’s yours.”
“And if you can’t convince her, you give me his name and the rest of the details anyway. Tonight.”
“Not if you’re going to print them prematurely.”
“You know me better than that. I’m looking to cover my ass, buddy boy. I had to do some fast shuffling on some of those calls I made, particularly with the cops I talked to. A lot of smart people are wondering what I know about a bunch of unsolved rape and homicide cases and a few of them are likely to start pushing pretty soon. I won’t be able to sit on this long even if I was willing to.”
“Neither of us wants it sat on. I just don’t want to go off half-cocked. But all right, I’ll give you the full story no matter how it goes with the wife. If she balks, I’ll come back here and we’ll thrash out together what to do next.”
“Your word on that?”
“My word on it.”
He moved to the Sharp copier next to his desk. “I’ll make you a set of my notes,” he said. “Just don’t keep me waiting too long.”
EASTRIDGE ROAD WAS QUIET THIS AFTERNOON. The rap music impresario and his boom box on wheels were mercifully absent when I pulled up in front of the Chehalis house. A couple of kids and a woman unloading groceries from the tail end of a station wagon were the only visible residents; the adult workforce that paid the mortgages on these middle-class homes hadn’t yet begun arriving from their jobs. My car’s unreliable dashboard clock gave the time as four-twenty.
The Chehalis driveway was empty, no sign of the blue Geo Prizm. In the garage, maybe. I hoped so—I hoped Sally Chehalis was here—because I did not want to have to hang around waiting. Her husband might decide to show up early and I was in no frame of mind to face him today. I might never be in a frame of mind to face him again without several police officers in attendance to keep me from doing something I would regret.
The house had a closed-up look and feel: all the curtains were drawn in the front windows and there was mail in the box next to the door, an unclaimed San Jose Mercury-News on the mat. Three long pushes on the doorbell brought no response. There was a chance that she’d become frightened enough to move out before Chehalis returned, gone to stay with a friend or relative or somewhere alone to think things out. If that was the case, it meant her defenses were crumbling. But it might take me a while to track her down—longer, maybe, than DeFalco could keep the lid screwed tight. The quicker I got to her, the better it would be.
I went along the walkway between the house and the garage. The rear garage door was shut and locked, but next to it was a window with a pane pitted and made half opaque by dust and grime. I squinted an eye up close to the glass. Car in there. Too little light for me to be able to tell the make and color, but the size and shape were right for a Geo Prizm.
If she was home, why hadn’t she answered the bell? Drunk on gin again? Or had she gone off in somebody else’s car?
I hesitated, then crossed to the house’s back door. I didn’t expect it to be unlocked and it wasn’t. A couple of loud knocks got me no more than ringing the bell had. Well? I turned to glance around the yard. The shrubbery and yew trees grew high enough along the fences to make an effective screen against inquisitive neighbors. I pivoted to the door again, bent to examine the lock. The chintzy push-button variety, not a dead bolt. That made up my mind for me. Here or not, drunk or sober . . . whichever it was, I had to know.
Thirty seconds of work with the thinnest blade of my penknife and I had the door open. Before I went all the way in I called her name. No answer. I shut the door behind me, entered the kitchen. Alcohol smell, mingled with something else faint and sour . . . vomit? Dirty glass and an empty bottle on the table, dirty dishes in the sink. And on the drain board, an opened beer can was tipped over on its side. The beer it had contained had spilled down onto the floor and dried into a stain the color of urine.
Dining room, living room. She’d thrown up, or somebody had, in the latter; the mess was crusted on the carpet near the couch. That wasn’t all: an end table had been overturned and a porcelain lamp had toppled with it, cracking off part of the base.
I began to get an old, familiar feeling: a sense of wrongness, a bunching and crawling of the skin on the back of my scalp. It intensified two-fold when I stepped into the master bedroom.
The mattress on the double bed had been twisted half off the box springs, sheets and blanket and counterpane all trailing in a tangle across the carpet. One nightstand lay on its side amid a scatter of cigarette butts, ashes, broken glass from an ashtray, and a reading lamp. Something hard had struck the mirror attached to the dresser; the glass was heavily spiderwebbed, pieces of it broken out so t
he dented silver backing was visible. Across the room, the door to the bathroom stood open and the light was on in there—the only light burning anywhere in the house. In its whitish glare something shone darkly on the pale blue floor tiles. I moved over to the doorway for a closer look, even though I didn’t really need to. I’d known at a glance what it was.
Blood. Thin smears and spatters of dried blood that extended more than a foot to the base of the tub.
But the bathroom and the tub were empty.
The bedroom was empty.
The whole damn house was empty.
Chapter Fifteen
I PROWLED THROUGH the place twice, front to back. The only things I touched were the knobs on closed doors, most of which opened into closets, and I used my handkerchief when I did that. Completely empty. No sign of Sally Chehalis, no clear indication of what had happened here.
Some sort of drunken rage that had led her to tear up the place? Started in the living room, ended in the bedroom, and when she broke the mirror she cut herself, and in the bathroom she tripped or collapsed and that’s how the blood . . . No. No. One person hadn’t been responsible for all of this. When an individual goes on a rampage, there’s a systematic pattern to the wreckage, a sustained breaking of everything close at hand. There were smashable items all over both rooms that hadn’t been touched. What this looked like was the aftermath of a struggle between two people.
Chehalis, I thought.
Came home early, last night sometime . . . direct summons from her, or she said something on the phone that told him she knew the truth and brought him running. Confronted him when he got here—drunkenly and foolishly. And he lost control, did to her what he’d done to his rape victims: knocked her around, bloodied her.
And then what?
Left her lying here, conscious or unconscious, and ran? Possible. She could have called somebody, been taken to a hospital for treatment. Hadn’t snitched on Chehalis, if that was the case. Otherwise there’d be some indication that the police had been here to investigate.
The other possibility was that he’d killed her.
Hardcase Page 14
