Blood Ties (37 page)

A search of the Daly City phone book revealed a “Tyler, Mildred” living at 441 Belhaven Avenue.

That was easy.

 

29

Tregear left Homicide a few minutes before eleven. They couldn't even have lunch in the diner around the corner because he didn't want to risk being seen with Ellen. But at least they had had a few hours together, a little interval in which to feel human.

And then it was back to work.

Ellen sat at her desk with the evidence reports from the Lockwood crime scene. They made an eight-inch-high stack of manila folders. She was a third of the way through it before she found the parking ticket discovered by Officer Ludlow, Timothy J. She brought the DMV link up on her screen and typed in the plate number.

Wait a minute.
The ticket described a gray Kia, but the plates belonged on a white Ford. The Ford was registered to a Stanley Eco of 221 Winding Road in Belmont. It would be interesting to know where Mr. Eco thought his car was. Ellen dialed the phone number.

A woman answered. “Hello?”

“Is this the Eco residence?”

“Yes.”

“This is Inspector Ridley from the San Francisco Police Department. Could I speak to Mr. Eco, please?”

“He's at work. This is Mrs. Eco.” By then a thread of anxiety had found its way into her voice. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so, ma'am. We're looking into a possible grand theft auto of a gray Kia, license plate number 6AOB291. Have you or your husband reported such a car lost or stolen recently?”

“That's the number on my husband's car—but it's white, it isn't gray.”

“Where is the car now, ma'am?”

“It's in the garage, where it's supposed to be,” Mrs. Eco almost shouted. “What is this all about?”

“There's nothing to be worried about, ma'am. But I will need to verify that the car is in your possession. Could you arrange to be home for the next few hours?”

“Well … I suppose so.”

“And, please, don't touch the car.”

As soon as she was finished with Mrs. Eco, Ellen phoned Evidence and gave them the address.

“I've got a lead on Walter's car,” she told Sam. “He switched the plates.”

Two minutes later she was in her Toyota, leaving the police garage.

Traffic was light and Ellen was in Belmont in a little over forty-five minutes. She drove up Ralston Avenue and found the Eco house in a tangle of streets west of the Alameda de las Pulgas. It was a beige two-bedroom tract house, probably built right after the Second World War. It was clinging to the down slope of a hill, so the driveway was quite steep.

The door was answered by a fiftyish woman with unconvincingly black hair. She looked up at the street, where Ellen had parked, and seemed relieved not to see a squad car.

Ellen held up her badge for Mrs. Eco's inspection.

“I suppose you'd better come in,” was all the invitation she received.

The front door opened directly into a living room that was no more than about twelve by twenty. On the far side there was a wooden table and chairs and a china cabinet to demarcate it as the dining area. The inside of the house was oppressively hot, as if no one ever opened a window.

Mrs. Eco had not asked her to sit down.

“Ma'am, as I told you over the phone, I'm with the San Francisco Police Department.” Ellen smiled thinly. She was taking her revenge. “I have no jurisdiction in Belmont, so if you would rather deal with the local police I can have them here in ten minutes.”

“Oh, no! I … Please.” Mrs. Eco turned her face slightly away and seemed to draw some spiritual comfort from contemplating her fireplace. “I'm sure…”

“Then I wonder if I might look at the car.”

Ellen phrased it as the most distant surmise, which was her way of relenting.

The garage was accessible through the kitchen and had space for two cars. The white one was on the left. There were three wooden steps down to the cement floor, and Mrs. Eco stood on the landing and pushed a button just to her right that lifted up the door to the outside.

“Those aren't Stan's plates,” she said, standing with Ellen behind the car. “How could that have happened?”

“Mrs. Eco, how does your husband normally get to work?”

“By train. I drive him down to the station in the morning. He works in the city.”

“So the car is usually in your garage?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Eco nodded sharply—but only once, as if a doubt had begun to creep into her mind. “Except when he travels. He's a compliance officer for Bank of America, and they send him all over the place, even up to Seattle. Most of the time he flies, but sometimes he drives.”

“Has the car been away from home over the past week?”

“Yes. Stan flew to San Diego. He drove to the airport and left the car in long-term parking. He just got back Wednesday.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Four days.”

“Then that's probably when the plates were switched.”

Ellen looked up the driveway to the street, where an unmarked panel truck had pulled up behind her car. The doors popped open and two men in coveralls came out, each carrying a dark brown canvas satchel.

The boys of Evidence had arrived.

“I want prints, front and back of the car,” she told them. “And print Mrs. Eco here. Her husband works for a bank, so his will be on file. And I want the plates.”

She turned to Mrs. Eco, who looked aghast, and smiled.

“One of these gentlemen will take your fingerprints.” While she was talking, she brought out her notepad and jotted down the license number. “Don't worry. The ink rubs right off and it's only for purposes of elimination. Your husband's prints and yours are going to be all over this car, and we just need to know what we're looking at.”

“But the plates…” Mrs. Eco's voice was pitched somewhere between outrage and pleading. “We can't drive the car if it doesn't have any plates.”

“They're evidence in a felony investigation. I'll have the DMV send you a new set. I'll tell them to put a rush on it.”

Using the laptop in the Evidence truck, Ellen fed the license number into the department database. The car was not listed as stolen, so the odds were the owner had put it in the long-term parking lot at the airport, the same place the Eco car had been parked, and hadn't yet come back to discover his loss. A check of the DMV site listed a 2009 Kia, color gray, plate number 2FLN211, as registered to a Chester Mowry, 2504 Middlefield Road in Berkeley.

She phoned Sam.

“Have you got any friends in the Berkeley PD?”

“Sure. What's up, girl?”

Ellen gave him everything that she had. “Unless he's ditched it already, that's what Walter's driving around in. We need to know chapter and verse about that car, including the contents.”

“I'll make the call.”

Driving back to San Francisco, Ellen couldn't help but feel reasonably pleased with herself. The parking ticket had yielded the description and, unless Walter had switched plates again, she now had the license number of his car. If he had left his prints on the Eco car, it would place him at the scene of Eugenia Lockwood's murder. The noose was growing tighter.

Patrol cars could be out looking for a gray Kia already this evening—no, tomorrow. The alert would have to be part of the morning's oral briefing. They couldn't broadcast it today because Walter might be listening to the police band.

By the time she got back to the city it would be four and her shift would be over. She would stop in at the department anyway, just to see if anything interesting had come in and to say good night to Sam, if he was still there.

He wasn't, but there was a note on her desk stating that the Berkeley PD reported that no one was answering the phone at 2504 Middlefield Road but that they would send someone around that evening. Sam had given them her cell phone number.

Out of boredom as much as anything else, Ellen went back to the DMV website for a second look. She found the name of the Oakland dealership that had sold the car to Mr. Mowry.

Finally, she wrote up her report and posted it to the department database.

Having at last run out of excuses, she went down to the garage to reclaim her car for the drive back to her apartment, where Gwendolyn, who seemed to miss Steve, would eat her dinner and then sulk for the rest of the evening.

*   *   *

As it happened, Sam had signed out early and driven through town to a diner on the Great Highway, where he could sit in a booth by the window and watch the waves breaking along Ocean Beach. As always, being a reminder of the pointlessness of all human struggle, the sight brought him to a state of pleasant melancholy. The waves had been running up this stretch of sand for a million years before the first murderer was born and would still be at it after the human race had given up and turned it all back over to the sea lions. The waves were without intention or wrath. They just went on and on.

Sometimes it was necessary to stop measuring time hour by hour and just sit back and eat your meat loaf special. Sometimes it was the only way to stay sane.

There was no one waiting for him at home, not even the dogs. As instructed, Millie had cleared out and gone to her sister's, taking the tribe with her. Millie's sister owned an elderly German shepherd who seemed to enjoy the company.

Tonight his only company would be a six-pack of Sierra Nevada IPA—and, of course, Walter's dark shadow.

He could imagine how the evening would run. Halfway through his second bottle he would turn on the television, hoping the noise would drown out his thoughts. When that didn't work he would go outside to occupy a lounge chair on the back porch. Eventually, when he could no longer see his neighbor's house, he would turn on the porch light and watch the bugs as they searched for a way through the screen. By this time he would be into his fourth ale.

And Walter, silent and listening, would be right there with him, sometimes taking fitful shape in the darkness beyond the porch light. Walter the monster, who had raised murder into an art form.

In his fourteen years with Homicide, Sam had hunted two serial killers and actually caught one of them. The other had fled to Los Angeles, where he committed three more murders and was arrested, entirely accidently, by a rookie traffic cop who had pulled him over for not using his turn signal. Afterward, Sam had flown down to interview him. They had spent most of an afternoon together.

Both men were currently on San Quentin's death row, where they regularly gave interviews and sorted through their fan mail, objects of intense interest to people who would remain forever strangers.

Somewhere Sam had read that life was most successfully viewed through a single window, but he was inclined to regard this as no more than a clever turn of phrase. Both Keith Jarvis and Eddie Massie were so obsessed with their various grievances that neither had been very successful at much of anything except murder. Probably both were far happier on death row, where the current logjam in capital case appeals meant they were much more likely to die of old age than lethal injection. They would have decades in which to enjoy the smug sense of having at last beat the system.

Up close and personal, both had proved to be disappointments, pathetically deficient in every human quality except malice and cunning.

But Walter, according to his son, was a different animal. He was intelligent and charming, and not so much blind to human feeling as merely indifferent. He understood people, but without any complicating sympathy. There was no sense in which he was compensating for anything or getting even. He just enjoyed torturing women the way teenagers enjoyed slasher movies.

It might even be true. After all, Tregear was the resident expert on Walter.

Sam pulled into his driveway and pressed the remote that opened his garage door. He put his headlights on high beam and sat in his car for a moment, studying the interior of the garage. Millie's car was gone, already down in Palo Alto, and there was nothing inside except the lawn mower and, against the back wall, a long shelf supporting the usual collection of dried-up paint cans.

“You're getting spooked, Sam,” he whispered to himself. “Cut it out.”

From force of habit, he parked his car on the driveway and actually had the door open before he remembered to close the garage.

He followed the flagstones around to the backyard. The porch enclosed the entire rear of the house, and its door was never locked. As he crossed the deck he decided it probably needed restaining. The kitchen door had a double bolt and as he turned the key in the lock he caught himself listening for the dogs. But they were with Millie, in Palo Alto.

The house was dark, so he turned on the overhead light in the kitchen and went to the refrigerator for a beer. He poured it into a tall glass, tasted it, then left both the bottle and the glass on the kitchen counter when he went into the bedroom.

He took off his sport coat and hung it in the closet, then he unclipped the handcuff case and the holster from his belt and opened the top drawer of the highboy dresser and dropped the handcuff case inside. Usually the holster followed it, but tonight Sam could not seem to let it go. He just stood there, holding it in his hand as if trying to remember what it was.

The holster held a standard police-issue .38 revolver with a four-inch barrel. It was the weapon he had carried since he was a rookie and had never fired except at the pistol range. He hated the damn thing for the way the grip gouged at his kidney every time he sat down. The gun was merely one of the inconveniences of being a cop.

But maybe not tonight.

This is different. This is Walter,
Ellen had said.

Sam took the revolver out of its holster. Maybe just this once he'd keep it with him.

He went back out to the kitchen and tasted his beer again. Having lost just a little of its chill, it was perfect.