Sudden Exposure (29 page)

“Just when I came out for Nora. I ran into Bryn coming up the stairs, you know, from Codornices Path. I was surprised. She must have been down in the park, maybe jogging around the reservoir.”

“Didn’t she see the flames when she got to the house?”

“
I
didn’t spot them then.”

“Didn’t she go in the house?”

“No, she got in the van and left.”

“Where did she go?”

I should have known that finding that out was too much to hope for. I backtracked, “Jed, why were you surprised to see her on the staircase?”

His tan forehead crinkled in thought. “Well, see, she’d come in so late, it never occurred to me she’d be up and jogging. I figured she’d still be sacked out in bed.”

Pironnen shook his head slowly, staring at the burning house. “Poor Ellen. It really is Bryn they’re after. Ellen was just a mistake, just the wrong face in the car window. An anonymous corpse.”

I looked over at him and was surprised by the comfortable expression on his face. Karl Pironnen, of all people, understood the emptiness left by the death of an incidental person.

I checked in with the patrol officer, and told him for form’s sake to keep an eye on Sam Johnson’s house. I started my car just as the first TV truck pulled up.

The man who answered Fannie Johnson’s door was the young guy who’d been sitting on the table the last time I’d been there.

“I’m looking for Fannie and Sam.”

“Not here.”

“Where are they?”

“Not here.”

“Where!”

He let a smug grin grow on his face. “Gone. And cop, you don’t need to waste your precious time looking. We all heard the call on the scanner—
another
of Bryn Wiley’s many enemies taking care of her. Fannie and Sam got better things to do than hassle with you. Lady, they are gone.”

“You’re late, Smith.” Inspector Doyle busied himself with the papers on his desk. His face sagged beneath a fall of faded red hair. He looked like he’d had a lot less sleep than I had the last two nights. “You have the paperwork for Brucker?”

“Inspector, you got word on Bryn Wiley’s fire, didn’t you? This case is escalating. It’s—”

“It’s Brucker’s case, Smith.”

“Give me one more day.”

“Smith …” He looked up, with the kind of controlled annoyance you see on the face of a parent. His silence was an opening, a minute one, but if I shoved the narrow end of the wedge in it, I could force it open.

The strength of that wedge was this: Herman Ott supported Bryn against Sam and even Ott didn’t believe she was innocent. He believed Bryn caused Fannie to miss the Nationals and wreck her body. I could tell all this to Doyle, that I had to hunt down Sam and Fannie; that I had to protect Bryn. But that was what I’d promised Ott I wouldn’t repeat. “Inspector, there isn’t time for someone new to familiarize himself with the case, the witnesses, the secondary motives. This is a very high profile case—”

“Just get Brucker the papers, Smith. Then you’ve got a day off before your patrol shift. Use it to get some distance.”

Brucker was sitting in my former chair in my former office when I brought in the Waller/Nash case.

“Where do you want it?” I asked, glancing over the tidy piles on a desk that had never before known neat.

Brucker held out a hand. I placed the case between his stubby thumb and square palm and turned to leave before—again—I said things that weren’t going to do me any good. Before I had to deal with him talking about “scumbags like Herman Ott.”

“Wait a minute, Smith.” He opened the case and began paging through.

“I’m on my own time.”

“Mmm. Lot of reports missing.”

“Mmm. ’Swhat happens when you pick up a case in the middle. I’m sure you’ll round them up.”

He ran a square finger down a form, his forehead crinkled like part of a box that’s been wadded for the trash.

I could have left. I
was
on my own time. Nothing I say is going to make a difference, I assured myself. But in the end I couldn’t
not
try. “Brucker, this case isn’t letting up. After the murder it seemed like it would, but now there’s the fire. I’m worried about Bryn Wiley.” I hesitated. So far I hadn’t revealed anything.

Brucker looked up, finger tapping on the file almost imperceptibly—almost, but not quite.

“Brucker, Bryn Wiley was at the scene today. She lit out right before the neighbor spotted the flames.”

“
Lit
out, huh?”

“Wherever she is, she needs protection.”

“And where is that, Smith?”

“Don’t know.”

“Well, when you find out, you tell me.”

I started to the door, then stopped. “Bryn Wiley got to her house very late last night, at almost dawn. She could still have been sleeping in the house when the arsonist torched it. Brucker, we have to assume this is another homicide attempt.”

He smacked the folder shut. “
I
will decide what
I
have to assume, Smith.” He flipped open the file with the finger he’d had inside, marking his place. “Now Smith, you can tell me this: The neighbor who saw the flames, who was that? The kid or the old weirdo?”

“I thought we respected all our citizens.”

“No, Smith, you coddle the crazies. And there are lots of them here. That’s why up in Sacramento they call this place Berzerkeley.” He leaned back in my—his—chair and said, “Smith, you got such respect for the weirdos and scumbags, you must’ve had a tête-à-tête with your scumbag PI. What’d he tell you?”

I stiffened. Up until now I had only kept quiet about Ott. I hadn’t impeded the investigation aloud, in a word that could be recalled and used against me. “Nothing,” I said quickly, and walked out the door, careful not to slam it. As I strode down the hall to the parking lot door, I wondered if this was the last time I would walk through this hall.

I could have gone home, or driven across San Francisco to Ocean Beach and walked along the dunes halfway to Pacifica. I wasn’t due on patrol until Wednesday morning. There were a lot of things I could have done.

Instinctively, I headed back to Telegraph Avenue, heart of “Berzerkeley.”

I walked along the Avenue trying to decide what to do with my newfound free time. The buildings like Ott’s had thrown the west side of the street into deep shade by now. I passed the pizza place where I had spent many chunks of discretionary cash on the way to Ott’s heart and information. The street was relatively empty midafternoon on a Monday. Only a few diehard street artists were on duty, sitting behind tables of crystals or arrays of painted candles that hadn’t changed since before Bryn Wiley was in college. There was a time when half of Berkeley had big round candles hanging from leather harnesses, dangerously near their ferns, coleus plants, and wandering Jews. Were there really people who still bought them? Or were the sellers caught in a time warp, as if their futures had retired in Berkeley with the sixties? I glanced at the woman behind the crystals. Her dress was faded, worn, so far out of style I couldn’t have placed which decade it belonged to.

“The candles, they have fragrances, you know,” she said without hope.

I wondered where she lived,
how
she lived, when she had made the decision to close off other opportunities, or if those doors had been inched shut by things too small to remember. I wouldn’t have chosen her limited life any more than she’d have been willing to put in forty hours in uniform, give orders, take orders, turn over cases before they were ready, like candles not quite set. It was an odd bond we had, her job to keep alive the fragile hope of a bygone era, mine to protect her right not to be pushed aside.

I bought a round candle, not quite the size of a bowling ball. Who knew when the next earthquake would come and we’d need auxiliary light for a week?

Half an hour later from Noah’s, I got a poppy seed bagel with a chive cream cheese schmear and sat on a windowsill near Ott’s building. I should go home, I told myself. I’d handed over the case. But I hadn’t handed over my fears that Brucker would crush Karl Pironnen, that Bryn Wiley guarded secrets I hadn’t been able to uncover, and that the killer would track her down. I thought of the confessional bench. Had it burned to stakes of charcoal by now? I wondered if the arsonist had started the fire there.

I chewed slowly on the bagel, thinking of Ellen Waller with her life ready to start anew, and how Karl Pironnen had described her: “The wrong face in the car window. An anonymous corpse.” I’d been sure she was the intended victim, but now the fire screamed to the world that it was Bryn. Ellen had been just a mistake.

“Spare change?” asked a college-aged kid in matted street clothes.

I handed him my untouched half bagel and headed inside Ott’s building.

It took me five instead of the usual ten minutes to get into his office.

Herman Ott was clothed in the last garb on earth I could have imagined on him—sweat clothes. A gold sweatshirt and khaki shorts. The former spanned his little round paunch. The latter bagged in back like he’d gotten up so fast he’d forgotten his butt. Extending from the shorts were spindly legs a color I had not heretofore associated with the living. “What?” Ott demanded.

I walked in and waited until he’d shut the door. “I need to find Bryn Wiley.”

“Out of town would be the smart guess.”

“Out of town, where?”

Ott shrugged his sloping golden shoulders.

“At her cabin, right?”

His right eyebrow lifted a scintilla.

“Of course I know about that,” I insisted. The man could be downright insulting. “What I need from you is directions.”

“Well, Smith,” he said, propping a hand on the spot where his hip might have been. “You’ve got the entire Berkeley Police Department. Hunt her down.”

In my head, I composed a smart-ass retort: Not anymore, Ott, not since I lied to Brucker to protect you. But I caught myself before the words were out. It wasn’t that I feared he would expose me to the department or the press. He would be proud of me; he’d think much, much better of me than he ever had. And there was just a minute chance that the next time one of Sam Johnson’s buddies castigated me, Ott would leap to my defense with the tale of my glorious deed. “You leave me in an untenable position. We’re talking murder here. You know where the intended victim is and you won’t tell me. What do you expect me to do, Ott, sit around while the killer trots from cabin to cabin, tapping on the door, asking for directions to divers?”

Ott fingered his wispy mustache. He was considering. “Smith, you give me up to the cops, I won’t ever, under any circumstances, no matter what you offer or threaten, tell you as much as the time of day.”

“Ott—”

“And that’s because, Smith, I will be dead.”

The corner of the desk was poking into my leg. I didn’t move.

“Because, Smith, my clients will hear that I turned over information told to me in confidence by the only person who had that information, and my clients will start to tote up what I know about them and what would make me spill that, too. And soon, Smith, you’ll find my remains up in Strawberry Canyon, or floating in the Bay, or maybe in the lobby of the police station and you’ll be real sorry. Because … you will have so many viable, suspects it will take you the rest of your career to close the case.”

I boosted up onto the desk. Ott wasn’t kidding.
Lips zipped
was not only his motto, it was his safety. When you deal with guys who live on the edge, it doesn’t take much for them to push you over. He was being straight with me, all right, but the interesting thing was that he didn’t have to bother. He could just have stonewalled. He’d done it often enough. But despite the finality of his statements, the fact that he was making them at all, and that I was here instead of stomping down the stairs empty-handed, meant that there was some give in his position.

“I just need to know Bryn’s address. Tell me that and you have my promise that I will not repeat it, not if the entire police force and every sheriff in Sonoma County begs me one by one.”

“No circumstances whatever will make you repeat this? Even if it means you can’t get enough to charge the killer?”

He was raising the ante a thousandfold. This meant not merely denying what I knew about his opinion on Bryn Wiley. This meant withholding tangible, possibly life-or-death evidence. Evidence I wasn’t going to get any other way. If I agreed, that meant I couldn’t reveal the location of Bryn’s cabin. I would have to go alone, unauthorized, to track down a witness in a case that had been taken away from me. There should have been a better way. There wasn’t. “Okay.”

Ott caught my eye again. “You break your word, I die. But not before I tell every guy on the Avenue you’re responsible.”

“
Okay,
Ott. You’re on the verge of overkill.”

A hint of a smile lifted Ott’s narrow lips. He walked behind his desk and settled into his torn leather chair, forcing me to give up my perch on his desk and settle for the latest of his miserable client chairs. Ott didn’t need to worry about my betraying him into the hands of a killer client. Sooner or later these chairs would make one of his clients mad enough to kill him. “So?” I prodded.

He gave me directions for the hour’s walk from the Cazadero road to Bryn’s cabin.

I headed back to my car. Dusk was already clearing out the Avenue. The wind slapped my short hairs against my face. Cazadero was a two-hour drive. It was too late to start out now. I drove home.

Before dawn I got up, showered, changed into hiking boots, lined jeans, a heavy wool paid shirt, and a fanny pack for my semi-automatic, and headed north to Cazadero.

R
AIN SPLATTED ON THE
windshield just north of San Rafael. March is the wettest month in this area, as if the rain gods know this is their last chance until November. The windshield fogged; I had the defrost on, pouring all the hot air onto the glass and leaving the skin between the top of my socks and my jeans icy. I’d thought about the dirt roads outside Cazadero and the rickety condition of my VW and opted for Howard’s new truck. It drove stiff and required a firm hand to remind it who was in charge when it came time to shift gears. And with the two-step-up cab I felt like I was driving on stilts. I’d only driven it three or four times before, and each time I’d had a big reaction to it. I had loved it … I had hated it … but now I had no reaction at all. The big tank of a truck was just one more strangeness in a week where I had stepped out of my skin and left my familiar world behind with it.