The Emerald Cat Killer (21 page)

“Bart, you never found anyone, did you?”

He gave a wry shake of his head. “A couple of times I thought I had. But it never quite happened. I guess I'm glad. It wouldn't have worked. And the past few years, since I got my pension, I thought I was happy. Or at least, not unhappy.”

“That's not the same thing.”

“I know.”

They were sitting on the couch, holding hands like an old-fashioned courting couple.

“It's been wonderful. I ought to go.”

“You could have another cup of coffee. Or a glass of wine.”

“It was very good wine.”

There was a momentary pause, then, “Bart, stay over.”

“It's too late, Marvia.”

“No, it isn't.”

“You're just being kind.”

Her smile was wistful. “I planned this all along.”

He released her hands and put his arms around her.

Her bedroom was decorated with a beautiful seminude painting by Kevin Williams. Her bed had a warm, fluffy comforter on it.

*   *   *

Lindsey woke up in the middle of the night and heard her breathing. The rain had lessened and a streetlamp on Bonar provided shifting illumination through branches and leaves that moved in the wind. He touched her gently, not wakening her, and pressed his face to her shoulder, feeling and smelling and tasting her, and hearing her heart beat, thinking about what he had once had and lost and had now regained, at least for this one night.

In the morning they faced each other across eggs and juice in a sunlit kitchen. It took Lindsey three attempts to get the words out but he finally did.

“Marvia, marry me.”

She laughed. Then she said, “You mean it.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Hobart, last night was lovely. This morning is fun. Here we are playing Mister and Missus, aren't we? But we're just playing, aren't we?”

“We don't have to be.”

She stood up, circled the table, and pressed her cheek against his. She picked up a spoon and held it like a mirror. “You're still a boy at heart, aren't you? I think most men are, all their lives. Some nice lady invites you into her bed and by morning you decide you're in love forever. That's the way a fifteen-year-old thinks.”

“I am in love with you forever.”

The toaster popped and she added toast and marmalade to their breakfast.

FOURTEEN

Red turned over and swung her feet from the side of the bed and onto the floor. It was fuckin' cold.

She tried not to waken Bobby but he grabbed her wrist and demanded, “Where you goin'?”

“Nowhere, Bobby. Nowhere.”

“Goddamn it, where you goin'?”

“I need to take a piss, that's all.”

“All right, hurry up. It's fuckin' cold in this bed. Not that you do me much good anymore, but at least you generate a little body heat.”

She pulled on her jeans and T-shirt and shuffled down the hall to the bathroom. When she got back she pulled off her jeans because she knew that Bobby didn't like the feel of denim against his legs, but she kept on the T-shirt. At least that was some protection against the morning's chill.

It had rained hard during the night. The wind and the sheets of icy water crashing against the window, the cold air that got in around the cracks, reminded her of that one awful night, the worst night of her life, the night she'd finally found a car to crawl into only to face that ancient geezer coming out of the house.

She could remember what he looked like, his face lighted by the streetlamp, puzzled and sleepy and furious and a couple of other things that she didn't even have names for, any more than she had a name for herself except Red. And when he pulled open the car door—why the hell hadn't she had the brains to lock the door before she tried to go to sleep!—when he pulled open the car door and reached for her, she could see just what was going to happen.

He'd call the cops and they'd drag her down to Martin Luther Goddamn Fuckin' King Junior, and hold her there, and maybe it would mean another trip to juvenile hall with all the apprentice lesbians to fight off and then back home to Mommy and Daddy, who would take her to another goddamned shrink, and she'd wind up in another fancy prison for rich kids called a school, and she didn't think she could take that again.

Not again.

“Bobby,” she said.

“Shut up, I'm sleeping.”

“You're not, you're awake.”

He gave her half a shove—half a punch—and, jumping out of bed, she said, “Ouch, Bobby. Bobby, I need a jolt.”

He said, “We don't have anything in the house. And if we did you know that stuff is for sale. I'm trying to run an honest business here, not a candy store for a scrawny chicken like you.”

“I'm sorry, Bobby. I'm sorry. Couldn't I have maybe just one jelly bean? I need a jolt.” She was crying. She hadn't wanted to cry, she knew that Bobby got mad when she cried, but she couldn't help it. “One little jelly bean, Bobby.”

“Shit, Red, we don't have anything in the house. Can't you get that through your feeble brain?”

“But, Bobby—” She was crying harder but at least he didn't hit her this time, so maybe he really did like her, she thought. Maybe he loved her. Maybe he did.

“Tell you what, Red. We'll go see Morty up in El Cerrito. I'll see if I can get anything on credit. Bastard at the Ruby Red always wants money. Cash on the barrelhead, he calls it. Stupid fuck. They must have called it that back in the ice age when he was young. But I'll try and get something on the come.”

“Thank you, Bobby.”

“Get back in bed and warm me up, shithead.”

*   *   *

“I'm getting somewhere, Dorothy. In fact, I'm getting a lot of somewhere, but I think I'm going to need some help.”

Dorothy Yamura leaned back in her leather chair. She wore plainclothes but the plaque on her desk showed a pair of captain's silver bars beside her name.

“Okay. First, fill me in on the progress. Then tell me what kind of help you need.”

Marvia gave her a rundown on her efforts to backtrack the stolen laptop.

“You mean, Mr. Lindsey gave us some real help, and that he and Officer Rossi actually recovered the computer?”

“That's right. Mr. Lindsey essentially got a bead on it, thanks to Rachael Gottlieb. The chain led backward to the Watkins couple, the flea-market Space Cadets. Mr. Lindsey worked forward from Chocron and found the machine at Universal Data Services. Or, actually, with the Chen children. We have the computer itself. It's in the evidence room.”

“Did the tech crew get anything off it?”

“Nothing useful.”

“No prints? No DNA?”

“Plenty. Plenty of both. There were so many fingerprints, layers and smudges, they got nothing useful. Some DNA but it was such a stew they had to give up on that, too.”

Yamura nodded. Then she asked, “And what about Mr. Lindsey?”

“He's satisfied. He needed to verify the presence of a file on the computer, a novel that Gordon Simmons had just completed. That's all for a civil case, not our problem.”

Yamura nodded. “Okay, I'll buy that. But how does that get us any closer to a solution of the Simmons murder?”

“The Watkins couple—the Space Cadets—are apparently running a legitimate business.”

“Within a slightly flexible definition of legitimate.”

“Point taken. But the question for us is, How did they get the computer? They say they bought it, strictly a cash transaction—don't ask, don't tell—from a John and Mary Smith.”

Captain Yamura shook her head. “You'd think they would use a little creativity. Call themselves O'Houlihan or Wakamatsu, or Porky and Petunia Pig, for heaven's sake. Okay, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”

“Obviously the names are useless and the Watkinses didn't get an address or driver's license. No real ID at all.”

“That's bad.”

“But they did get a pretty good look at the couple, and Mrs. Watkins especially was able to describe them. The Watkinses didn't get their ages but from their descriptions they sound like a pair of teenage runaways. I'd like to borrow Celia Varela to help me look for them.”

“Done.” Dorothy Yamura looked pleased. “Look, Celia might already have a file on them already. That flea market was in Oakland, you say?”

“The one on 880 near the Coliseum.”

“Right. So we don't know if these kids are from Berkeley. Could be Oakland, could be anywhere.”

“True enough. I'll check the database, call around. But the Simmonses lived in Berkeley, and he was killed in Berkeley. I'd expect the perp to be a Berkeley person.”

Dorothy Yamura pointed to the door of her office. “Come back carrying your shield, Myrmidon!”

*   *   *

Officer Celia Varela was in her office and she was intrigued by Marvia Plum's story.

“I think you've come to the right place, Lieutenant.”

She jumped from her chair, pulled open a file cabinet and extracted a manila folder.

“That scrawny kid with the dirty blond hair, he could be any one of dozens. Standard model runaway. I could practically give you his life story right now. But the girl—the redhead—she sounds familiar. I'm pretty sure she's been through this office, and I think I know who she is.”

She had laid the folder on her desk. She tapped it with a fingernail once, twice, three times. Pause. Tapped again. She turned the folder in a half circle and pushed it across her desk toward Marvia.

There was a picture of a young girl. She looked to be junior high school age.

Marvia asked, “How old is the picture?” Then, “Oh, here's a date stamp on the back. Year and half ago.” She studied the personal data and history in the file. “They certainly start young these days, don't they?”

Varela asked, “You have any of your own, Lieutenant? If you don't mind my asking.”

Marvia Plum smiled. “Just one.”

“No problems?”

“You're kidding, of course. He did well. Worst problem I ever had with him was over smoking weed. You know what I heard. ‘All the kids are doing it, Ma, and besides, you drink booze and weed is no worse, and look at the tobacco ads all over the place and we know how much damage that does and how addictive it is.' And the thing is, of course, he was totally right.”

“So what did you do?”

“I had to fall back on ‘The law is the law and when you're grown up you can try and change it.' That plus, ‘Because I'm your mother.'”

Varela laughed. “I have three little ones.”

“Enjoy them while you can, Celita.”

“But what about your son?”

“Big shot at Pixar. Planning to be married soon. Someday I expect they'll have a couple of sprouts of their own. Then I'll play the doting grandma. I can't wait.” She turned the pages in the case folder on the desk. “Familiar story, isn't it? We pick her up, Mommy and Daddy take her home, she gets in trouble again, and we start all over again.”

“Except this one has been on her own for over a year. Parents come to see me every so often and I can't give them much more than sympathy. They have plenty of bucks. Hired a private detective, even. Kellen Jamison.”

“I know him. Used to be a cop in San Francisco. Took a bullet and a pension and went into business for himself. He have any luck?”

Varela shook her head. “Only of a negative nature. He's pretty sure young Miss Horton isn't in the city or up in Marin. He keeps changing his story. One day she's in L.A. Next day she's in Berkeley, Oakland, Alameda.”

“Not much of that in Alameda, Celia.”

“Not much isn't none.”

“You're right on that score. Anyway”—she closed the folder and handed it back to Varela—“they might be able to give us something at juvenile hall. It's a nice day. Let's take a ride.”

*   *   *

They tried to make it look like a school, but the minute you laid eyes on Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro, you knew it was a prison. A temporary prison for runaways, substance abusers, underage prostitutes, arsonists, gang-bangers, and killers. Capacity, 299 juveniles. Present population, 425 and counting. They would stay here for a few hours or a few days, sometimes a lot longer than that, before a court remanded them to a longer-term facility or sent them home to Mommy and Daddy.

The sheriff's deputy who greeted Marvia and Celia was plump and looked almost young enough to be an inmate. Her tan uniform, in contrast to the others' police midnight blue, made her look more like a Girl Scout. She had prepared for their arrival and had the case folder—Juvenile Hall's version of the case folder—on her desk, neatly squared away, ready for examination.

“Here it is, Lieutenant, Officer. Not very much more than I could have told you on the telephone.”

“I know that,” Marvia Plum told her. “But I think somebody out here might give us something more.”

The folder contained the same photo she had seen in Celia Varela's office. There were fingerprints. Those would be the same. “Horton, Rebi,” Marvia commented. “Unusual first name.”

The deputy said, “Hebrew. It's a variant of Rivka or Rebeccah.”

Marvia Plum said, “You know a lot about names.”

“A hobby of mine,” the deputy explained.

Marvia Plum consulted the folder once more. “Parents' address, nice neighborhood. Wish I could live like that. And look at those schools she's been in and out of. And her arrest and custody record.” She shook her head. “How can a girl from that kind of home compile this kind of biography by the age of fifteen?”

She closed the folder. “All right, I want to talk to somebody who knows her. Teachers, therapists, anybody who can help me?”

The deputy nodded. “I've got just the person for you. Our best drug person.” She picked up a telephone and punched a couple of numbers. “Kyoko? You have a few minutes to discuss one of your cases? I've got a couple of Berkeley police officers here. Okay.