Blood Ties (33 page)

“What time does the mail usually come?”

“Just after lunch. The postman pushes it through the slot in the door.”

Ellen smiled. “Why don't you take the day off,” she said. “Right now there's nothing for you to do here, and we're going to need the place to ourselves.”

“Don't tell Mrs. Fairburn if she comes.” Carol shook her head vigorously. “Say I'm out running an errand, or she'll dock me for it.”

“I won't tell.”

Carol Brush left, tiptoeing over the linoleum floor of the waiting room and closing the office door as quietly as possible so as not to awaken Sam, who had fallen asleep on the couch.

Ellen instantly went to the filing cabinet Carol had pointed out to her and started going through the old mail. She found two padded mailing envelopes from Pacific Transcriptions. The second contained Dr. Fairburn's notes on Walter Stride.

“Moderate to severe lower abdominal pain, radiating up the back to necessitate sleeping in a chair. Condition worsening over previous 4 months. Rx Percocet 650mg. Scan. Blood work. Possible pancreatic involvement.”

A quick search of the receptionist's phone directory indicated a radiology practice and a lab, both in the building. Since both offices would know Carol Brush's voice, it would be necessary to walk down the hall and flash a badge.

When she went out to the waiting room, Ellen discovered that Sam was awake.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked, pushing back his hair with his left hand.

“Yes, I did. And now I want you to wander down to Suite two thirty-three and check if they have Walter's X-rays. Then I'll buy you lunch.”

“You got a deal. Are we done here?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'll meet you at the cars.”

Ellen herself went to the lab in the basement, where she was told that, yes, Walter Stride had had an appointment to have blood drawn, but he never showed up. A minute or two after she got out to the parking lot, Sam joined her and reported that the radiologists didn't have any film on Walter because he had missed his appointment.

There was a diner two blocks away. Ellen, who hadn't had breakfast, ordered an omelet, and Sam decided to risk all on their crab cake.

“So what's the matter with Walter?” he asked while carefully inspecting his spoon. “I trust it's nothing serious.”

Ellen showed him a printout of Dr. Fairburn's notes. Sam took out his reading glasses.

“‘Pancreatic involvement'—sounds ominous.” Sam raised his eyebrows speculatively. “You don't suppose he'll go and die on us, do you?”

Their orders came. Ellen tested her omelet with a fork. It had a consistency like India rubber.

“I think it's interesting that he didn't show up for his other appointments,” she announced, giving the omelet another jab.

“And what do you conclude from that?”

Sam tasted his crab cake, made a face and then reached for the ketchup bottle.

“I conclude that he only wanted Fairburn to write him a prescription. He wasn't interested in a diagnosis.”

Ellen took a bite of her eggs and then set down her fork, thinking she might not need it anymore.

“If you had so much back pain you had to sleep sitting up in a chair,” she went on, folding her hands together, “wouldn't you want to know what's the matter with you?”

“Sure.”

“Then maybe he already knows.”

Sam, who had been completely absorbed in his lunch, stopped eating and looked up at her. Gradually, he began to smile.

“Wouldn't that explain a few things, Sam?”

“You mean like why he didn't just disappear after we tossed his house?”

“Yes. And this last murder—the bloody handprint, leaving his dead wife's driver's license for us to find in the victim's house.”

Ellen shook her head, as if she were a little disappointed in their suspect.

“It's not his style. Walter has a history of committing nearly perfect murders. No fingerprints, no fibers, no evidence. But Harriet Murdock was pure theater, with Walter at center stage. Given how much we know about him, he has to realize that if he hangs around eventually we'll catch him. But what if he also realizes that he's going to be dead in a few months? Then all he has to do is beat the clock. He's taunting us.”

Sam nodded and then resumed work on his crab cake.

“It's a good theory,” he said, without looking up.

“But you don't buy it?”

“Oh, I buy it. With one reservation.”

“And what's that?”

Sam took a sip of his coffee and then set the cup down with elaborate delicacy. He raised his eyes to Ellen's face and then shrugged.

“The one reservation is that Walter isn't playing to us.” He smiled sadly, as if aware that he was demolishing some treasured illusion. “Most of the time you'd be right. These crazies, they get a little press and they start thinking it's a duel between them and the cops. They write letters, they phone us up. It becomes a game.”

The smile collapsed.

“I think, however, we need to be a little humble about Walter,” he said. “I suspect he doesn't give a damn about us. He probably imagines he can stay ahead of us forever. It's not us he's taunting. It's not us he's leaving messages for. It's Tregear.”

 

26

While Ellen and Sam were finishing their lunch, Walter was just getting up. He had slept fitfully for fourteen hours and still felt exhausted. He badly needed a pain pill.

He had gotten up once during the night to vomit and the bathroom still smelled of it. After washing down the pill with half a glass of tepid water, he looked at himself in the mirror and was not encouraged by what he saw. His face was as yellow as saffron.

It occurred to him that his slide into oblivion was picking up speed. He found the thought of food nauseating and his clothes were beginning to hang on him.

As he waited for the Percocet to kick in, he stared out through the venetian blinds of his motel room window. There wasn't much to see, only a strip of road with a gas station and a liquor store on the other side.

Out of how many windows had he looked down at some variation of the same scene? Men created for themselves landscapes of dreary horror, places to drag out their pointless, wretched lives. And pristine nature was no different. Only people who had lived all their lives in cities could delude themselves that every forest and field wasn't crowded with brutal, ugly suffering.

It was a hateful world and he would not be sorry to leave it.

When he started to feel better, he lay down on the bed, on his side to keep the pressure off his back, and picked up the Gideon Bible on his night table. He amused himself by reading the Twenty-second Psalm. When he had finished it he closed his eyes and fell asleep again.

It was nightfall before he woke up. By then the pain was almost gone. He even felt hungry. He took a quick shower and dressed and then went down to the motel lobby to buy a couple of candy bars and a can of Coke out of the vending machines.

By the time he had finished the candy bars, Walter was in a much better mood. He was planning his evening entertainment.

He had finally gotten rid of the van, leaving it in the long-term parking lot at the airport. From there he had stolen an olive-gray Kia, the sort of car no one would pay any attention to. As was his practice when he did not feel rushed, he had switched the Kia's plates with a pair from another car in the next row and then left the van in a slot some distance away. He figured he might have close to a week before the Kia was even reported stolen.

He drove it across town to a section of North Beach that seemed to be all restaurants and bars. It was nine o'clock on a weeknight, so the crowds were thin. He parked on the street. He wouldn't be long.

Ten years ago Walter had bought an antique bayonet in a secondhand store. It might have dated back to the First World War, or even earlier. The blade was a foot long and took a good edge. Since a quick kill wasn't nearly as much fun, he had never used it.

But tonight, because he would have to work out in the open—and because, anyway, the victim was purely incidental—he carried the sheathed bayonet down the inside of his trouser leg, the grip sticking up over his belt and concealed under his jacket.

He saw a woman walking down the sidewalk alone and fell into step about thirty feet behind her. He had picked her because she was young, no more than thirty, wasn't wearing a coat and was talking on her cell phone. She had come out of a yuppie bar called La Questa and with any luck at all was heading back to her car. There was something urgent in her stride, which suggested that she had had a disappointing evening.

He followed her for a block and a half, then she turned into a parking lot not much bigger than a squash court, surrounded on three sides by tall buildings. The booth at the entrance was dark. There were no overhead lights. As soon as she turned into the lot she was in deep shadow. Walter followed soundlessly behind her, the distance between them closing fast. He took out the bayonet, holding it low.

She never saw him until she opened her car door and the inside light came on. Then it was too late. She started to take a step back and the bayonet slipped effortlessly in under her ribs, puncturing her left lung before it pierced her heart. For a few seconds she just stood there. She stared into his eyes without comprehension and then her mouth opened. All that came out was a thin dribble of blood. And then suddenly, as if she had at last realized that she was dead, she collapsed.

Her keys were still in the door lock. Walter took them and opened the car trunk. Then he lifted the body from the asphalt and put it inside. She had dropped her purse, so he picked it up and searched it, taking out the cell phone, then placed the purse in the trunk beside her. He didn't want them to have any trouble identifying her.

Then he took a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and wrote “815A” on the inside of her right forearm. He posed the body carefully so that the writing would be immediately visible.

He closed the trunk lid.

When he reached the sidewalk, where there was light from the streetlamps, he checked himself over carefully and was pleased that there was no blood.

He was feeling weak and tired and he needed another pain pill. He probably needed some sleep too. He would take a shower when he got back to the motel room.

He found a traffic ticket under the windshield wiper of the Kia. Somehow it annoyed him. He wadded it up into a ball and threw it against the plate glass window of a storefront. It bounced off and landed on the sidewalk.

Then he remembered he had to call the police. His watch read 9:25, but that was too early. He would call at eleven, using the woman's cell. He would have to stay awake until then. He would watch TV.

*   *   *

Ellen took the call at ten minutes to midnight. She had been asleep for perhaps half an hour, but she was starkly awake the instant the phone rang. She knew what it meant.

A body, female, had been found in the trunk of a car in North Beach. She scribbled down the address and climbed into her clothes.

“They're expecting you,” the dispatcher had said. Well, they should be. Since Harriet Murdock, any suspected homicide in which the victim was female rated a call to either Tyler or Ridley, and at night it was Ellen because she lived in the city and was therefore closer.

North Beach wasn't far away. Within ten minutes she was standing in the parking lot, staring down into a car trunk containing a woman, probably in her late twenties, with the hilt of a knife sticking out just in front of her left arm. The angle indicated that the thrust was upward, probably tearing a good-size hole in her heart. From the look of her, she hadn't been dead for more than a few hours.

There was hardly any blood, just a stain on her blouse where she had been stabbed, and a little on her mouth and chin. Ellen felt reasonably sure that this one had died right here, probably while trying to get into her car. The keys were still in the trunk lock, put there no doubt by whoever killed her.

Had that been Walter? She wasn't sure. Walter liked them to suffer, and this woman had died from one instant to the next. It seemed possible she hadn't even had time to realize she was being murdered.

Ellen was using a standard department-issue flashlight she had taken from the patrol car that was presently blocking off the entrance to the parking lot. At two or three feet, the distance available to her as she examined the body, it cast a narrow beam. For a moment it came to rest on the handbag, which was open and lying next to the dead woman's knee. It was a nice bag, made of butter-smooth tan leather. It was open. The wallet was still inside and there was still money in it—Ellen could see the corners of a few bills sticking out.

So this hadn't been a robbery. The killer's motives were more personal.

Then Ellen moved the light again and saw the writing on the victim's arm:. “815A,” in inch-high block letters.

Oh, Jesus.

She went back to the patrol car and pulled the radio microphone off its hook.

“This is Inspector Ridley,” she almost shouted. “I want some foot soldiers out here. We've got a hot one. And send somebody with photographic equipment and a printer. We'll need to reproduce the photo on the victim's driver's license and start showing it around, right now. I want every bartender and waiter in the vicinity to see her picture tonight.”

Then she phoned Sam.

“We're going to be here for a while,” she told him. “I need you to make sure I don't make any mistakes.”

“Is it Walter?”

“I can't be sure, but I think so.”

Within twenty minutes the forensic people showed up. Within half an hour there were probably eight more uniforms milling around, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. For starters, Ellen had half of them out patrolling the neighborhood, checking the sidewalks and the streets, the trash cans and the license plates of parked cars, looking for anything out of the ordinary.