Sudden Exposure (32 page)

She nodded, propping the rifle on the back of the futon. I put the coffee beside her, and then, with a longing look at my warm, waterproof anorak, I spread it over her legs. “I’m going out the back. Give me a cover shot.” I started to add, “If I’m not back in an hour …” but the logical end of that sentence was “you’ll bleed to death or Pironnen will shoot you.”

She looked up at me. Her breathing was so shallow it seemed that she was afraid to exhale, afraid she would fall to dust. She cranked up a shadow of a smile and said, “The coffee, it’s not Peet’s; but I’ll drink it anyway.”

I grinned and in that moment liked her more than I had anytime since I’d met her.

I opened the front fireplace window, shot toward the woods, and pulled the window shut. “Okay, Bryn.”

She fired just as I opened the back door.

I ran full out. A shot came from the far side of the house. Glass shattered, but no scream followed. He hadn’t hit Bryn. He was firing at the house.

Another shot cut the air, closer. I kept moving, slower now, stepping carefully, back toward the cover of the redwoods. Rain smacked my head, my shoulders, my back. When I made it to the trees, my sweater was sodden and my hair was streaming. I turned to face the cabin. It wasn’t fifty yards away but I couldn’t make out more than a dark blob. And Pironnen could be anywhere.

I stood listening. The gunfire had stopped. The only sound was the rain and wind, and that so steady it was like cotton jammed in my ears blocking out any warning.

If I could circle around to the path, I could run. Maybe Bryn’s cellular phone was still in Pironnen’s car. I could get the sheriff out here in … in two hours, one and a half at best. Too long, much too long.

My hand tightened on my gun. I had never shot a man. I’d pulled the trigger in training but never in real life. Pironnen was a good shot; probably a better shot than I was.

Lifting each foot carefully, I made my way to my right, away from the sound of the shot. I counted twenty steps and stopped, surveyed 360 degrees around me. Branches waved; dark clumps squatted thigh high. But there were no sharp movements; he wasn’t there. Probably.

I moved on, another twenty-five steps. Checked again. And moved on. The drenched sweater felt leaden on my shoulders. My feet squished with each step. Twenty-four, twenty-five. I turned slowly.

Behind me a twig snapped. I spun toward the house.

Underbrush rustled.

Both hands on the automatic, I braced my legs, moving the gun in a side-to-side arc.

The rustling was closer. He wasn’t even making an attempt at stealth. Too cocky? Too desperate? Carefully, silently I shifted behind a tree. The trunk wasn’t wide enough for protection, but in the semidark it gave some cover.

Leaves rustled. He was moving in, like he knew where I was. I slid my finger from the ready position to the trigger.

And then he barked.

I gasped, with shock. Then with relief. Then with fear.

Pablo, the pi dog. The dog who had kept himself between Pironnen and me. The rescued dog who would protect his master to the death.

He was a blur between the trees to my right, barking, pointing me out for the kill. I aimed my gun at the center of the blur. Rain ran down my forehead into my eyes. I shook it off. The dog had inched closer. I could see him clearly now, his ears cocked, mouth open panting, his short black and brown coat slick against his body, his ribs lifting and giving way with each tense breath. I sighted between his eyes, tightened my finger on the trigger. My finger was stiff; I wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t … shoot this trusting dog. I couldn’t …

Pablo barked again. He jostled the tree beside him. Pironnen could be back there, part of the noise, or coming up behind me, his movement covered by it. I had no option to run; all I could do was shoot the dog. My whole body felt frozen …

But I was a police officer, for Chrissakes, I had a duty. I couldn’t be paralyzed by sentiment.

I sighted him one last time.

Then I realized that once again reality had reversed. We were on Pironnen’s playing field, but now I made the rules. My hand eased on the trigger. “Pironnen,” I yelled, “I’ve got your dog in my sights. Walk over here slowly, hands on your head, or I will shoot Pablo.”

The barking stopped, the rustling ceased. Only the pounding of the rain held steady. And my heart thumping in my rock-tense chest.

“Now, Karl! Don’t call him. He moves, I shoot! Walk over here, out in the clearing, hands where I can see them. I’m counting to three. If you’re not here by then,
you’ve
killed Pablo! One!”

There was a rustling of leaves, but I couldn’t tell where it came from. It could be Pironnen; it could be the storm. The dog barked.

“Two!”

Pablo barked and kept barking, as if he knew his danger. My hands were shaking on the gun. The trees, the wind, the dog, the rain mixed into one great well of sound. I waited another beat, watching, hoping.

On three I would shoot and run like hell.

“W
AIT!
D
ON’T SHOOT
P
ABLO!
I’m here! Pablo, stay, boy!” Pironnen shrilled in panic as he ran into the clear.

“Place your gun down on the ground in front of you where I can see it,” I yelled. “Do it now!”

Tall, thin, charcoal gray in the dim light, he lifted something—a rifle?—from his shoulder and dropped it on the ground.

Still barking, Pablo ran toward him, stopped in front, and stood barking at me.

“Hands above your head! Now!”

A tear ran down my cheek. “Karl, make the dog sit! I don’t want to have to hurt him!”

Pironnen reached forward, his hand shaking so hard it looked like a fan. For an instant I thought he was going for the rifle, to protect his remaining companion. But he dug his fingers into the dog’s fur. Then he murmured something and the dog lay warily down, leaving Pironnen’s hand empty and quivering.

“Okay,” I forced out.

Pironnen fell to his knees and pulled the pi dog to him. I thought I heard a sob but I couldn’t be sure.

I knew then that the possibility of Pablo dying was much more real to Pironnen than the deaths of Ellen or Bryn. We, people, couldn’t squeeze through his protective grate. For Pablo it was no barrier at all.

I suppose I would have shot Pablo—logic assures me I would have, but God, I’m glad I didn’t find out. I couldn’t have borne taking the friend Karl Pironnen loved more than his own life.

If I had had second thoughts about this single-handed excursion to a cabin an hour’s walk up and down hill from the end of the road, the events of the next two hours made clear I should have had third thoughts, fourth, however many it took till I came to No.

I handcuffed Pironnen to a tree and went to check on Bryn. After the half hour of terror and loss of blood, she was barely lucid and too weak to walk. I didn’t dare leave her. I found a wheelbarrow behind the house, rigged a support across the handles, and made it as comfortable for her as possible. Maybe it was from the relief that Pablo was okay—more likely it came from the overload of emotion so foreign to him—but Pironnen clearly wanted to help out. I warned him against fleeing, reminded him I was armed, and unlocked the cuffs. He took the handles of the wheelbarrow and steered as carefully as if Pablo had been the injured passenger. And so our odd little parade headed off over hill and dale to the cars.

I’d been afraid the trek would be too much for Bryn, but the air or the coffee or the prospect of safety actually revived her. When we lifted her from the barrow, she was coherent.

I didn’t even bother to question Pironnen. He was the prime suspect, and I was about to arrest him. If I asked anything about the murder, I would have to read him his rights and offer him a lawyer, which I couldn’t produce. And when he did get a lawyer, that officer of the court would say I had single-handedly scuttled the state’s case. So I did what any wise police officer does in these situations. The law does not preclude our listening to statements freely offered by a suspect. I moved Pironnen to the back of Bryn’s van and cuffed him out of reach of her. Then I kept my ears open as I drove out.

His first question was what I would have guessed. “My dogs, what’ll happen to them?”

“Your dogs!” Bryn demanded. Her voice was soft but it didn’t waver, and only someone from another planet would have misconstrued her anger. “You’re worried about your dogs! You could have killed
me.
You shot a woman who looked like me when she was sitting in my car!”

The outburst seemed to have gone over his head. In the same slightly confused voice he said, “Ellen killed Dan.”

“She wasn’t the gunman, only the driver. And she went out of her way to tell you how sorry she was.”

“Sorry?” he said as if contemplating a strange substance. “What difference does
sorry
make? Does it give Dan life? Or me Dan?”

Bryn started to protest. “No!” Pironnen shouted. “The only thing sorry would change would have been how
she
felt. She killed my brother as an aside! An inconvenient incidental! Dan died and no one cared. No one
noticed.
They didn’t even remember his name!” He sucked in his lips. “And then she comes around my neighborhood saying the past is over and you should forget it and go on with your life. I heard her tell Fannie Johnson that! On the lawn, right in front of me!”

“But—”

Out of Pironnen’s sight I waved my hand at Bryn and put a finger to my lips.

“She killed him. Then she used my dogs to get to me. And she used me, dragged me to that bank where he died. She sat in his room! She didn’t care about Dan, she didn’t care about me; it was all so
she
would feel better. She wanted me to absolve her, to say Dan’s death didn’t matter. That Dan’s life was nothing.”

“That’s why you killed her?” Bryn’s voice was stilted and barely audible. “I don’t believe that. You thought you were shooting me.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror; Pironnen was smiling. He didn’t explain. Bryn gave a weak snort. She may have taken his silence for agreement.

But it was a smile of victory. I wondered how long he waited for just the right moment. Chess players are patient planners. And this was one well-thought-out murder. Ellen had thrown the pebble in the water; the ripples had splashed on Dan, and on Karl. It must have taken her years to realize that she’d been drenched too.

Victory meant in death Ellen would receive as little notice as Dan had. In Berkeley, where we have twenty or fewer murders a year, each one gets noticed. It’s hard to murder a woman and have no one eulogize her. But Pironnen had set up this one so everyone, including Bryn, focused on Bryn. He’d made it seem as if Ellen Waller was just the pawn in Bryn’s place.

We reached the road before Bryn demanded, “This cabin is my hideaway. I bought land as inconvenient as I could get, so I wouldn’t have people dropping in, and then you …” Her voice trailed off as she must have realized the irony of her first visitor. “How the hell did you find it?”

“Ellen looked in your papers for me. Once I understood her game, I knew she wouldn’t chance refusing me.”

I pulled over at a phone booth and called the sheriff. In twenty minutes the medics took Bryn and the sheriff guided Pironnen into the back of his car.

To me the sheriff said, “We’ll get animal control for the dog.”

“No!” Karl Pironnen’s scream filled the air. “Pablo, no.” Palms against the window, eyes fathomless with grief, he stared not at the sheriff, or even at the dog, but at me. “They’ll kill him. No. Don’t let them. Please!”

An eye for an eye? I thought of Ellen and how much she’d risked to recapture her name, her life. Too much. Once you lose hold of who you are, you never get it back. I shook off the thought, rested my hand on the dog’s back. “I’ll find him a home, Karl.”

“Y
OU COULD HAVE BEEN
in a lot of trouble,” Howard said as we sat on the sofa in the living room.

“So Eggs told me, and Jackson, and Pereira just about fell off the desk confiding that bit of information. All before Doyle called me into his office and just about sent me to my room without dinner.”

It was now three in the morning on Friday. Between the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department and our department the aftermath of the case had taken well into Wednesday morning. I’d missed the Wednesday patrol shift altogether, leaving the team short. Howard had arrived home sometime Wednesday night when the end of the world wouldn’t have woken me. And when I finally did drag myself out of bed Thursday afternoon, I barely had time to get to team meeting at 4
P.M
.

I don’t know what I had expected when I got to the station. Everything was, of course, the same. And yet it was different, as if the colors were slightly off, or the wall and the tables against it were not metal and masonry but made of something very different. Or maybe it was all the same and it was me that wasn’t quite all there under my uniform. I had trusted Ott and withheld information from Brucker. I had endangered my life and that of a witness to protect a murderer from a fellow police officer. But the case was closed, the media happy, and no one was on my back.

It’s a myth about walking through the sand and leaving no footprints. There might be hints of prints in Doyle’s view of me, and Chief Larkin’s. And Brucker wasn’t likely to forget. Since this high-profile collar wouldn’t go on his record, he wouldn’t be as choice material for Sacramento. There were footprints, indeed, and they traipsed over me. I had cared too much about Karl Pironnen. Police officers have to trust each other; they have to mesh into a team, interdependent to the death. I knew now that I could pull my weight, do my share, protect my buddies. But there would never be a point when I would take an order automatically. And if I were asked tomorrow to give Pironnen to Brucker, I wouldn’t do it. Ott, of course, would understand. And Murakawa and Leonard and Pereira. And, I expected, in the privacy of his home, Inspector Doyle might, too. No one would admit it publicly. But that’s why we worked in the city that resented authority and spent a year considering whether it was legal or
fair
to prevent people lying on the sidewalk or walking nude down Telegraph Avenue. I was glad to be with
this
department. The room hadn’t changed; it was still solid. It was I who had become more porous.