Blood Ties (7 page)

Assuming the guy was a serious suspect, she had no business doing this; if he spotted her it would only complicate the investigation. The problem was, she couldn't help herself.

She just had to get inside his head a little. She wanted a sense of him, something to go with the way those eyes had focused in on the camera—fearless, almost amused. The joker who takes the trouble to have his victim found wearing a pair of red satin heels.

Besides, he wasn't going to spot her. Why should he? He had no reason to believe he wasn't absolutely in the clear and, until a few hours ago, he had been. He was clever, but he wasn't a mind reader.

And, anyway, he wasn't going to spot her because she had probably missed him. If he was going anywhere on the Wharf he would have to pass this intersection. It had probably been seven or eight minutes since she had seen him coming out of his front door, so where the hell was he?

Childishly, she was disappointed, as if she had been stood up by a date. She had felt something, an excitement, and now it was gone. She didn't have a lover to go home to, but she had had Tregear—briefly—her very own quasi suspect. But not now.

And then, there he was, strolling up the street toward her, with all the careless self-possession of a man with nothing on his mind or conscience. Ellen stood perfectly still, hardly breathing, as he passed by on the sidewalk, close enough that she could almost have reached out and touched him. He never glanced at her.

Aside from a fleeting glimpse of the man on disk, this was the first chance Ellen had to take a good look at him, and she had no trouble understanding how women might be willing to put themselves in his power. He was not handsome in any conventional way, but he was attractive. He had a small, rather thin mouth, but his face, which was angular and hard and appeared a trifle sunburned, was dominated by his eyes. His eyes, for those few seconds at least, were far from cruel. Deep set and shaded beneath heavy eyebrows, they were somewhere between blue and gray and seemed to suggest that they had seen too much. What they reflected back to the world was something almost like compassion.

And, God, he was a treat to watch. His every movement was graceful, so that he made crossing the street look like something out of a Fred Astaire movie. The man was elegant—there was no other word for it.

It wasn't until he had passed, as she was looking at his back, that she observed he had a newspaper tucked under his right arm.

She counted to thirty before she came out onto the sidewalk. He was three-quarters of a block away, almost lost to sight in the evening foot traffic. She didn't begin to follow until he had crossed the street.

He made it easy for her and went to the Cannery, which was a big, open structure with lots of corners and enormous cement pillars to hide behind. He couldn't have been nicer about it—he took a table out on the patio, crossed his legs and opened the newspaper. With the sports pages open in front of him like a sail, he seemed to think he had the universe to himself. It was several seconds before the waiter could attract his attention to take his order.

“Your usual?”

On the second floor, lurking around in the impenetrable early evening shadow, Ellen was too far away to hear the words, but that was what it looked like. Without even pausing for an answer, the waiter set a cup down on the table and produced a silver coffeepot from somewhere behind his apron. No cream, no sugar. No little plate of chocolate-covered cookies. That was that. He seemed to enjoy a comfortable understanding with Tregear, as if what a man liked to drink over his
Chronicle
was the true index of his character. If only he knew.

Not that Ellen was feeling particularly smug about it. Looking down from her hiding place at the man with his newspaper and his neat coffee, she was forced to admit to herself that Stephen Tregear was a highly unusual suspect.

How many murderers had she processed in her two years on Homicide? Maybe thirty or thirty-five. As a rule they were not very complicated types. As a rule they were stupid, astonished to be under arrest. Astonished at the fuss everybody was making just because they had knifed some guy over a twenty-dollar gambling debt. The more intelligent ones, the career bad guys, that distinct minority who could figure out for themselves that homicide was not classified as a misdemeanor, were usually remarkable only for what was missing from their interior furnishings—principally any sense at all that, aside from their own, human life had value.

Killing was simply a way of tidying things up, an exercise in problem solving. As Stalin put it: no man, no problem. Murderers, in Inspector Ridley's experience, were guilty first and foremost of a lack of imagination.

But the man who had eviscerated Sally Wilkes while she was still alive was neither a fool nor an emotionally blunted drug dealer just looking after his customer base. Our Boy was an enthusiastic student of pain and death, a perfectionist, a technician and an artist, laughing at his critics and audience, the SFPD. He was a book written in a language only he understood, a permanent enigma. He was a monster, a beast that should have been born with scales and claws.

And right now, if hunches meant anything, he was sitting in the patio of the Cannery, drinking a cup of black coffee and reading the basketball scores. A nice fellow, a favorite customer. His human face was his disguise.

The sunlight was fading. The outside floodlights popped on with a little electronic crinkle of sound, which somehow threw Ellen's hiding place into deeper shadow.

This is where I live, she thought. In shadow.

In her head she kept replaying Mindy's reaction to her turning down Ken the photographer's dinner invitation.

“Are you out of your mind?” she had almost shouted. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“I don't know.”

And that had been the truth—she didn't know. And then she had mumbled some excuse about not being big on casual sex.

“Well, great. We're over thirty and you want to play the dewy virgin.” And then she had cocked her head to one side, looking at Ellen through narrowed eyes. “You're not still pining for Brad, are you?”

“No—maybe. I don't know.”

“What are you going to do, be like the Indian widows and throw yourself on the funeral pyre? Brad wasn't worth it. And casual sex is better than no sex at all. Any day.”

And now, instead of being tucked up in bed with Ken or anybody else, she was watching a man read the sports pages.

For twenty minutes Tregear had been hidden behind that newspaper. Then, all at once, he closed his paper, folded it neatly and stood up. He shelled out five bills on the table—no wonder the waiter liked him—and started up the steps that led to Beach Street.

Ellen left the building by another direction. She took her time, and spotted him again within a block.

She had more or less decided she would let him go now. The fit had passed off, and she realized she wasn't going to gain anything by following him back to his doorstep. She was parked on Beach, not a block away, so she would wait until he was out of sight and then she would go home to a little television and a long evening of contemplating her assorted sins.

When Tregear drew even with her car he seemed to slow a trifle. Right in front of her bumper he stepped off the sidewalk and, before crossing to the other side of the street, he lifted the driver side windshield wiper and slid the newspaper underneath it. Then he walked away, without ever looking back.

The son of a bitch had made her. He had been toying with her the whole time. Even while she was still sitting in her car, trying to decide what she should do about him, he had spotted her. It was one of the most humiliating moments of her life.

The newspaper was folded to show two columns of print from the second page. The article was headlined:
BODY DISCOVERED NEAR COAST ROAD.

 

5

Inspector Sergeant Sam Tyler did not look convinced.

“This is the guy,” Ellen said to him, not for the first time. “Don't look at me that way, Sam. Stephen Tregear is not some innocent civilian. He's in this up to his belt buckle.”

“You followed Mr. Tregear…”

“Will you stop calling him that?”

Sam paused for a second, subjected her to his best deadpan stare, and then started over, as if she hadn't uttered a syllable.

“You followed Mr. Tregear from his place of residence to the patio of the Cannery, where he feloniously drank a cup of coffee. He spotted you, which somehow I have no trouble believing, and, just because he didn't want you to imagine you were invisible, he decided to let you know he knew you were there. Very humbling I'm sure, but doubtless good for the soul.”

“He's teasing us, Sam. He's having his little joke. Remember what you said, ‘a villain with a sense of humor'?”

“Sticking a newspaper under your windshield wiper doesn't qualify as much of a joke—not really up to Our Boy's standards. However, if it would make you feel better, I suppose we could arrest Mr. Tregear for littering.”

They were sitting in Sam's car. It was eight-fifteen in the morning and he had just picked her up for work. When she didn't answer immediately, he opened the paper bag that was on the seat beside him and brought out a Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid. He handled it gently, with the tips of his fingers, since the coffee was still hot.

Ellen took it from him, cracked open the little tab on the lid and took a tentative sip.

“Where did you buy this stuff?” she asked. “It's even worse than usual.”

“You want me to bring it all the way from Daly City? If you'd find yourself an apartment in a decent neighborhood, instead of this slum, then just maybe I could find a place nearby that sells decent coffee.”

“We have to take life as it comes to us, Sam.”

He didn't reply. He just extracted his coffee from the paper bag, drained off about an inch, and put the cup in a plastic holder attached to his dashboard. Then he shifted out of park and they were rolling.

“You know what you've done, don't you?” he said, once they had crested the hill and Market Street was in sight. “You've tipped him. Now he knows we're looking at him as a suspect, so he's going to be very careful. It was a mistake. You shouldn't have gone anywhere near him.”

“You've got it backwards, Sam. He tipped us.”

This answer seemed to focus him morosely on his driving. For two blocks, through heavy morning traffic, the very stripes on the crosswalks were the objects of his dark and unpitying concentration. In perfect silence, he glowered as if he wanted to arrest every pedestrian in sight.

“Sometimes I think you have too much imagination to be a cop,” he said at last, without looking at her. “Twenty years have taught me one thing, which is that the best way is to put off reaching a conclusion for as long as possible. Just let the evidence gather, and it will lead you to your suspect. You're doing just the opposite. You have a hunch about Mr. Tregear, and you're torturing perfectly neutral facts into supporting evidence. This is going to come to grief, Ellie. Even if Tregear is Jack the Ripper, it'll end badly.”

“Sam, could we just take a look at this guy?”

“Ellie…”

“Come on, Sam. Just give it a day or two. It's not like we have any other hot leads.”

*   *   *

Lieutenant Commander Hal Roland parked across the street from the San Francisco Police Department. He picked up his hat from the seat beside him and, before he locked the car, took his uniform coat from the hook above the rear door. As he almost always did lately, he looked at the gold stripes on the sleeve—thick, thin, thick—and experienced a faint twinge of anguish.

He was due for promotion. In another two months, if everything proceeded on schedule, that middle stripe would widen out to catch up with the other two, and it was about goddamned time.

Until recently, Roland had had few anxieties about his career or much of anything else. He was a Navy recruiting poster boy, athletic and trim, with the sunny smile that comes with excellent fitness reports from adoring superiors. He had finished in the top ten percent of his class at Annapolis, having been gifted with the kind of practical intelligence the brass likes to see in an ambitious and promising junior officer. His private life, like his personnel file, was without blemish. He was happily married with twin girls. Everyone liked him, which even his posting to the Shore Patrol hadn't changed. He was that contradiction in terms, a popular cop.

And then one fine day he had been assigned as Stephen Tregear's case officer.

For starters, Tregear was a civilian. Granted, he worked for the Navy, but as a private contractor, so why was he the Shore Patrol's responsibility? Naval Intelligence, yes—and Roland had more than a suspicion that the spooks kept themselves very well informed about Tregear's movements and associations—but it was not normally part of the Shore Patrol's duties to babysit the errant geniuses of Special Projects.

And then there was the man himself. It gave Roland the fidgets just to be in the same room with him.

Roland had read the files. Stephen Tregear, having lied about his age, had joined the Navy at sixteen. He had risen to the rank of seaman first class. He had never even finished high school, and yet out of the blue, God knows how or where he had picked it up, his Standard Interservice Aptitude Test scores revealed he possessed a knowledge of mathematics and probability theory that would have been considered astonishing in an MIT graduate. His IQ was not even considered measurable.

The Navy had taught him computers and, after a while, had put him to work in Codes and Ciphers, where apparently he had performed wonderfully. The Navy had offered to send him to school so he could qualify for a commission, but he had declined. He regularly refused promotion. Still, at the end of his tour, Tregear had reenlisted for another four years. He seemed at home, a career man albeit rather a strange one.