The Color of Light

The Color of Light

A MAGGIE MACGOWEN MYSTERY

Wendy Hornsby

PERSEVERANCE PRESS / JOHN DANIEL & COMPANY
PALO ALTO / MCKINLEYVILLE, CALIFORNIA, 2014

This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, ­institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher's first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher's permission is prohibited.

Copyright © 2014 by Wendy Hornsby
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-56474-783-9

A Perseverance Press Book
Published by John Daniel & Company
A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.
Post Office Box 2790
McKinleyville, California 95519
www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

Book design by Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara,
www.studio-e-books.com

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Hornsby, Wendy.
 The color of light : a Maggie MacGowen mystery / by Wendy Hornsby.
      pages cm
 ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-542-2 (pbk.)
1. MacGowen, Maggie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. 3. Homecoming—Fiction. 4. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 5. Police—California—Berkeley—Fiction. 6. Berkeley (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
 PS3558.O689C65 2014
 813'.54—dc23
                        2013035789

Toujours, Paul

This book is a work of fiction. The Berkeley, California police department is a very real, and very fine, organization. I assure you that all characters and situations within this book that I have ascribed to that organization are entirely the product of my fevered imagination and do not reflect any actual member of the BPD or its operations. Ditto for the laundryman and the car repair guy. Maggie's neighbors, however…

Six girls walk down
the sidewalk away from the camera, seemingly unaware anyone is watching them. Foreshortened by the telephoto lens of the old Super 8 that captures them, weighted down by backpacks and school projects, they seem like spindly giants as they move through long morning shadows. They are ten and eleven years old, still coltish—leggy, hipless, breastless—apparently confident about their place in the small universe encompassed within this comfortable, leafy neighborhood.

A skinny girl wearing stovepipe blue jeans and red high-top sneakers, walking near the front of the pack, seems to be the primary target of the lens. The resolute set to her shoulders, head held high, suggests that she and her cohort are on a mission.

The camera's wide field of vision places the girls within the usual dance of morning along the narrow tree-lined street: a car backs out of a driveway, a gardener mows a lawn, a dog chases a squirrel, a deliveryman drives his route. Now and then branches obscure the shot as the cameraman pans to one side or the other with some apparent interest in stands of shrubbery or garden walls; potential hiding places? Clearly, it is the progress of the girls that draws him.

One by one, new arrivals enter the frame from either side and merge with the group, until there are twelve girls. Each newcomer greets the others with a hand slap or a conspiratorial nod of the head before falling into formation.

At the last driveway before the corner, a boy about the same age as the girls waits with his mother. The mother is quietly, unfashionably beautiful in a starched pastel blue shirtwaist dress. The boy is pretty like his mother, his straight dark hair slicked back from his forehead, roses in his round cheeks. Puppy fat makes him seem younger than the girls; his mother looks at him as if he is made of pure gold.

As the girls approach, the boy begins to strain against his mother's grip. The mother gives her boy a few cautionary words and receives a duty kiss in return. She releases him to join his friends. His polished black brogans make a sharp contrast to the intentionally scruffy, brightly colored sneakers worn by the girls.

The cameraman loses the children when they turn at the corner. By the time he catches up to them, they have formed a line across the road, shoulder to shoulder, facing down a group of boys who seem to have been lying in wait. There are half as many boys as girls, but the boys are bigger, older, railed out, already well into puberty, young toughs trying to look like bikers: blue jeans worn low on narrow hips, rolled cuffs, tight white T-shirts showing off budding biceps. The film has no sound track but the body language makes it clear that the toughs taunt the girls. But the girls, and their single boy, hold their ground.

The girl wearing red high-tops strides forward until she is nearly toe-to-toe with the hobnail boots of the opposition leader, a snaggletoothed youth with a greasy blond pompadour. He cants his body forward and yells into her face while stabbing his middle finger toward the small boy who is shielded by the girls. Red high-tops shakes her head to whatever blond pompadour is saying. Frustrated, he pushes her hard enough that she drops one foot back to keep her balance. Instead of returning the shove, she crosses her arms and faces him directly, speaking in a voice so soft that he has to lean forward to hear her.

What she says seems, at first, to confuse him. But after he tries a verbal comeback or two, his face and his bravado suddenly collapse. Sobbing, he runs back through the line of his buddies and out of the frame.

I hit the Stop button and the image on the television screen faded to black.

“God, Maggie, you had balls.” Detective Kevin Halloran of the Berkeley PD, my friend since childhood, sat forward in the big leather chair in my late father's den, where we were holed up in front of the television set, as we had when we were teenagers, too broke then for a real Saturday night movie date, or so he'd say. There was a wistful smile on his weathered face when he turned toward me. “Every kid in Berkeley knew you made Larry Nordquist cry. What did you say to the little punk?”

“Nothing I'm proud of,” I said.

“Did you know that he's out on parole?”

“Gracie Nussbaum told me.”

“If he comes back to Berkeley, you better watch yourself.”

“That scuffle happened over thirty years ago, Kev,” I said. “I'm not worried about Larry Nordquist.”

“If you say so.” Kevin lifted a shoulder, a dismissive shrug. “Gracie also tell you that Beto took over his dad's deli?”

“She did. I went in for a sandwich the other day,” I said. “Beto gave me an extra pickle and comped my drink.”

“That's our Beto,” he said with fondness, as if Beto were still the chubby ten-year-old in the film, clinging to his mother's hand, and not the rotund forty-something he had become. “Beto would love to see that little movie, Mags, to see his mom. I forgot how damn gorgeous Mrs. Bartolini was. She was what? Chinese?”

“Vietnamese,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice as I remembered what lay ahead for her the day the film was shot; what lay ahead for all of us.

“So?” Kevin dipped his head toward the television. “This is what you asked me to come over and see, you kids walking to school? You made it sound urgent.”

“Beto told me you're looking into his mother's murder,” I said.

He nodded. “I took it on as a favor to him.”

“What have you found?”

“Bupkis.”
He held up empty hands. “I started with
bupkis
, and that's exactly what I've come up with; nothing. After thirty years, whatever evidence there was—and there never was much—has disappeared, rotted, or died. Every lead petered out a long time ago. I'm only going through the motions because my friend Beto asked me to.”

“So, you're not doing a serious, all-out investigation?”

“Of course I am.” The question embarrassed him. “Department resources are tight, but I'm doing what I can with what damn little I have to go on.”

His focus slid from me to the blank television screen and back again. “What's that have to do with—?” Before he finished the question he nailed me with a glare. “Hey, you're not thinking about doing one of your TV-show hatchet jobs on Beto's mom are you? Because I don't—”

“Dear God, no,” I said, reaching for his arm.

“No ‘Maggie MacGowen Investigates'?”

“I promise you, no.”

“You promise, huh?” he said. He tried to look intimidating, but I saw a flash of the big tease he had always been hovering behind the effort. “You know you can't lie to me, Maggie MacGowen. We have a soul bond that's stronger than a blood oath.”

Clueless, I asked, “We do?”

“You bet.” He lifted the corner of his cheek to wink at me. “We got each other's cherries, Maggie. That's sacred.”

“Since you put it that way,” I said, trying not to laugh; he'd caught me off guard. “Cross my heart, no TV project on this one.”

“Okay. Now that we have that settled, you want to tell me what I was supposed to see on that film besides scrapping kids in funny clothes and bad hair?”

“The film was shot on the same morning that Beto's mother was killed.”

“On that very day? Thirty-some years ago? You can't know that. Hell, Mags, I barely remember breakfast this morning.”

“Some things you don't forget.”

He hesitated, thinking through what he knew and what he remembered before he shook his head. “After all this time, you can't possibly be sure.”

“But I am.” I leaned toward him. “The police came to school that day at lunch time. We all thought we were in trouble for fighting, but they were there to take Beto home to his dad before he heard about his mom from someone else.”

“Even so, thirty years is a long time.”

“There's something else.”

I walked over to my dad's desk, took an envelope out of the top drawer and carried it across the room to him. He pulled out the single Polaroid photo inside, saw what it was, and blanched: In the faded photo, Beto's mother lies at the base of a granite outcropping at Indian Rock Park a few blocks from our homes, half-naked, long dark hair in a loose spill across her face. She looks more like a doll that has been dragged through mud and cast away by a willful child than like the quiet, reserved woman we had known in life.

“Jesus Christ, Maggie.” He turned the photo face down on the table beside him. “Where the hell did you get this?”

“I was clearing out Dad's desk— you know Mom has given up the house. I found it locked in a strongbox with the film I just showed you.”

“If you're thinking your dad took the picture, he didn't. It's one of a series taken at the murder scene by the original crime scene investigators,” he said. “The rest of them are in the evidence box locked up in my office. The question is, how did your father get hold of this one?”

As an answer to his question, I took the yellowed envelope the photo had been in and pointed to the embossed return address, BENJAMIN G. NUSSBAUM, M.D., my father's closest friend.

“Doc Nussbaum,” he said, nodding as he carefully placed the photo back inside the envelope. “He used to give the department a hand from time to time, sit in on autopsies when there was a gunshot wound involved so he could testify in court as our department expert. He was a M.A.S.H. surgeon during the Korean War so he knew a hell of a lot more about gunshot wounds than any of us ever could; we don't get a lot of experience with murder in Berkeley. He must have bagged the picture and given it to your dad. The question is, why?”

“That is the question, isn't it?” I said.

He aimed his chin toward the dark television screen. “Did your dad shoot that film?”

“As far as I know, he did.”

“There's no record in the evidence log that he ever showed a film to the police.”

“I'm sure that he didn't,” I said. “Your people would have kept it.”

“If you're right about what day that was, then you kids were just about the last people to see Mrs. B alive.”

“That's why I thought you should see the film.”

“Uh-huh.” He sounded skeptical.

“Kevin, was Mrs. Bartolini raped?”

“Looks that way.”

“Did they do a rape kit?”

“Sure, but it's long gone.”

“You had the coroner do a search for it?”

“Hey, Maggie?” Voice low, words drawn out, sounding like my dad when he was about to deliver a scolding. “I know you play at being an investigator when you put together your TV shows. But just for a minute, why don't we pretend that I'm a real cop and I know what I'm doing?”

“I don't doubt your ability, Kevin,” I said. “But this is new information to me. I'm shocked by it. Whenever I think about Mrs. B in death, I see her as she was in her coffin, looking as serene as a Christmas angel. Not like this.” I tapped the back of the envelope. “This was brutal, angry. Help me out, here. What happened to her?”

He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly as if he felt put upon. “You saw; it was ugly. She was battered, maybe raped, shot in the chest, and dumped in a public place. That suggests that the perp meant to humiliate her or her family, or to upset the peace of the community.”

“He succeeded in all the above,” I said. “Who was he?”

“That's the question, isn't it? There was blood found on her teeth and lips that suggests she might have taken a chunk out of her attacker. A sample was collected.”

“Is that lost, too?”

“Lost? No. Gone, yes,” he said. “Thirty-something years ago, blood type was about all they could get from blood or semen. We didn't have DNA labs and cold case units back then. There wasn't enough of either found on her for typing, so the samples were disposed of during routine house cleaning when the coroner moved to a new facility. Okay?”

“Okay.” I gave his knuckle a flick as I smiled up at him. “Just to be clear, I get paid fairly well to play at investigating.”

“I didn't mean that as a shot.”

“Sure you did.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “God, I've missed you, ­Maggie.”

He started to rise from his chair and I thought he was ready to leave. But he glanced at the dark television and a new thought seemed to occur to him.

“Why was your dad out there filming you that morning, anyway?” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Did you tell him there was going to be a rumble?”

“Hardly. Would you have told your parents that you were heading off for a showdown with a pack of middle-school bullies?”

“They'd have locked me inside the house,” he said. “But your dad was there, he saw what was happening. Why didn't he try to stop it?”

“He taught me to fight my own battles,” I said. “If things had gotten out of hand, he would have done something. But they didn't, did they?”

“Did you know he was there?”

“No.”

“So, why was he?”

“Does it matter?”

“I can't know that until you tell me what you know. Everything you know.”

I sighed, sat back down in my chair and rubbed my eyes. For a while—not long enough—I was married to a homicide detective. No one could ever successfully tell my Mike that there was something he just did not need to know. I had no reason to believe that my old friend Kevin, now Detective Halloran, was any less relentless than Mike had been. I also trusted that Kevin, like Mike, would be discreet about what he learned.

Kevin still watched me, waiting.

“It's a long story, Kevin.”

He glanced at his watch. “I have time.”

“Lordy.” I did not want to go into all the sordid details, and sordid they were. I said, “The short version is, the woman who raised me, Mom, was not my birth mother.”

“Everyone knows that now,” he said. “It was all over the news last winter when your birth mother died. I DVR'd the interview you did on TV so I could watch it a couple of times. I record all your TV shows, Maggie. We all do.”