Camouflage (Nameless Detective Mysteries) (18 page)

“I’ll talk to Farley and Crabtree, but they have every reason to stand on protocol. If you’re allowed to see her, I’m afraid it will have to be with an official audience. Of course, I can consult with her alone and try to persuade her.”

“No offense, but I stand a better chance of getting through to her and finding out what she knows. How soon can you arrange the meeting?”

“Tonight, if they’re agreeable.”

*   *   *

Runyon brewed another cup of tea while he waited for Dragovich to call back. Too strong, bitter; he dumped it out. For the first time in a long time, since the rock-bottom night shortly after Colleen’s death when he’d sat with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and his .357 Magnum in the other, he felt like having a drink of hard liquor. There was none in the apartment, but even if there had been, he wouldn’t have given in to the momentary craving. He’d never been much of a drinking man, and Angela’s alcoholism and his near suicide had turned him dry except for an occasional beer. Booze for a man like him was a problem, not a problem solver.

It was fifteen minutes before his cell vibrated again. And only the first part of what Dragovich had to tell him was what he wanted to hear.

“Preliminary reports on the fingerprints have come in,” the attorney said. “You’re off the hook and so is Robert Darby.”

“ID match?”

“None yet. It’s possible whoever wielded the knife was never fingerprinted. They’re still checking.”

So it could still be Bobby. Wasn’t likely Darby would’ve consented to the boy being printed, even if Crabtree and Farley had thought to suggest it; later, if it became necessary to Bryn’s defense, Dragovich could get a court order to compel the father to allow it. The fact that a child’s fingers were small didn’t necessarily mean anything, either. Plenty of adults had hands and fingers not much larger than a nine-year-old’s. You could get an ID match from bloody partials, but without a full clear latent and a comparison source, the lab techs would make the same assumption as the investigating officers: the prints belonged to an adult.

Runyon asked, “When do we get to talk to Bryn?”

“The best I could do is tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.”

Damn. “Delaying tactic?”

“Partly. If I know the DA, his intention is to keep her segregated to give her time to think over her position now that she’s been caught in her lie. He also wants an ADA present during the interview. Neither his office nor the police are in any hurry—there are still forty-eight hours left before Mrs. Darby is scheduled for arraignment. I suggest you and I meet beforehand for a strategy conference. Eight thirty in the community room, third floor at Eight-fifty Bryant?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Is there anything else we need to discuss tonight?”

“Bryn’s son. I don’t suppose Darby returned your call?”

“He did, as a matter of fact. Professional courtesy.”

“How’s the boy?”

“Well enough physically, but he still won’t talk about the alleged abuse or what, if anything, he may know about Francine Whalen’s death.”

“Who’s taking care of him?”

“A nurse Darby hired. He seems to be in good hands.”

No, he wasn’t. Runyon found that out twenty minutes later.

When the doorbell rang, he almost didn’t answer it. The only people who came around while he was home were solicitors and, once, one of his neighbors looking to borrow something. But the bell kept up an insistent ringing, and when Runyon finally responded he found himself face-to-face with Robert Darby. A distraught and angry Robert Darby.

“Have you seen him?” Darby said. “Is he here with you?”

“Who? You don’t mean Bobby—”

“Damn right I mean Bobby. He ran away this afternoon and I’ve looked everywhere else. If you’re hiding him, Runyon, I swear to God I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

21

Tamara was beside herself over what she called “those two bitches’ escape.” Not that she blamed Alex Chavez for the lost tail. He was an experienced field man and he’d taken every precaution, but no op can maintain road surveillance when he’s been spotted and the subjects are bent on ditching him. The dangerous last-second lane change would have caught anybody in the profession by surprise.

Alex felt bad about it, though. He’d driven straight back to Dogpatch to stake out the 20th Street house in case McManus and Carson decided to go back there. Chances of that happening were nil now, but Alex had insisted. And Tamara and I both knew his professional ethics wouldn’t allow him to take any overtime pay for the extended stakeout, either.

What upset and frustrated her—me, too—was that we were still hamstrung by the lack of hard evidence necessary to convince the law to take immediate action. What I’d found in the house was plenty suspicious, but we couldn’t report it without admitting that I’d been guilty of illegal trespass and unlawful entry, and my uncorroborated testimony alone wouldn’t constitute sufficient cause for a judge to issue a search warrant. Cops and judges frown on private investigators subverting the law in any way. So does the state Board of Licenses. And never mind the rationale.

By the time I got back to the office, Tamara had used the information The Dog Hole barfly Frank Quarles had given me to run a deep backgrounder on Gregory Pappas. The name wasn’t all that uncommon, but she was sure she had the right man. Born in Athens, Greece, in 1929, immigrated to the U.S. in 1946. Worked for a San Francisco relative who owned a Greek restaurant. Opened his own place on Polk Street, the Acropolis Restaurant, in 1959 and operated it until 1992, when it was gutted by an accidental grease fire. Underinsured, so he hadn’t been able to rebuild or reopen elsewhere—but he’d gotten enough of a settlement, and apparently had had enough put away, to live comfortably in retirement. Married, no children. Wife deceased in 1998. Never owned a home; lifelong apartment dweller. After his wife’s death, moved from the apartment he’d shared with her in the Anza Vista neighborhood to a smaller apartment in the Potrero. Lived at that address for a dozen years until the building was sold and went condo. Residence after that presumably the house in Dogpatch, but nothing to confirm it. Present whereabouts unknown. And most significantly, no death record anywhere.

“They killed him,” Tamara said. “McManus and Carson. Just like they killed Rose O’Day and Virden and God knows how many others.”

“Murder for profit.”

“Murder
factory
. Rent that room to somebody with no close friends or relatives, somebody with money or other valuables. Victim doesn’t come to them soon enough, one or both of ’em go trolling for one in Mission Bay or SoMa or Potrero Hill. That’s how they found Rose O’Day, right?”

“According to Selma Hightower.”

“Then when they got everything they could from those poor old folks, they offed ’em. Probably been doing it the whole seven years they lived there.”

“The real Roxanne McManus doesn’t fit that victim profile,” I pointed out.

“Maybe she was how they got started, part of Mama Psycho’s plan to set up the dog-boarding front.”

“Here’s another possibility,” I said. “Mama Psycho, as you call her, needed a new identity because she has a criminal record somewhere. Might even be a fugitive warrant out on her.”

“Carson, too, I’ll bet. Thelma and Louise.”

“Who?”

“That’s right, the only flicks you watch are old black-and-whites on TV.”

“What do movies have to do with this?”

“Never mind,” she said. “So McManus and Carson are running this murder factory, nobody suspects anything for seven years, and then along come Virden and us investigating and they can see the whole thing starting to unravel. Virden thinks things over in The Dog Hole after his first visit to the house and decides maybe we didn’t screw up after all. Goes back to confront the impostor, threatens to go to the cops—and that’s the end of him.”

I agreed that that was a likely enough scenario, given the bloodstain I’d found in the living room.

“We keep investigating,” Tamara said, “and McManus tries to warn you off with the lawsuit threat. Smoke screen to buy them time—they’ve already decided to haul ass out of Dodge. We’re getting too close to the truth and they can’t afford to wait around. So they empty their bank accounts, dig up their cash stash, whatever, and start loading up their SUV. Man, I wish we had some idea where they took all that stuff of theirs.”

“Storage unit somewhere, maybe.”

“Come back for it later, after things’ve cooled down? That’d be pretty risky. Seems more likely they’d want to get far away from San Francisco and never come back.”

“Depends on what their plans are. They’re too shrewd to run blind—they’d have a hideout set up or in mind.”

“So they could be anywhere now.”

“Just about. One thing they’ll do before they go very far is switch that SUV for another set of wheels, make themselves even harder to trace.”

“We can’t just sit back and let them get away,” Tamara said grimly. “We’ve got to do
something
.”

I said, “I’ve already told the SPCA about the abandoned dogs. And I’ve got a call in to Jack Logan. When I hear from him, I’ll lay out everything we suspect. He knows I wouldn’t come to him unless I was reasonably sure I had good cause.”

“But will he do anything even if you fess up to unlawful entry?”

“Whatever he can. The abandoned dogs should give the police the right to inspect the kennels. McManus’s and Carson’s prints are bound to be in there, and if we’re right that the two of them are fugitives, that’ll be enough cause for a search warrant for the house.”

“All that’s gonna take a long time,” Tamara said. “Too long.”

“No use worrying about what we can’t control. Even if APBs were put out right away, it might already be too late. They could already be off the highways by now, holed up someplace.”

“Yeah.”

“Look at it this way,” I said. “No matter what happens, they won’t be killing any more people in Dogpatch.”

“I’d feel better about that if I knew they won’t be killing any more people anywhere.” She was silent for several seconds. Then, “I keep wondering what happened to the bodies. No place on the property where they could’ve buried ’em?”

“Not unless there’s a pit hidden under the kennels.”

“… You think maybe?”

“No, I don’t. Chancy disposal method anyway.”

“What about that sick dude in Ohio a couple of years ago, had decomposing and mummified corpses all over his house and yard?”

“Different type of case. Trust me—there aren’t any corpses hidden on the Dogpatch property.”

“So maybe they cut ’em up and fed ’em to the dogs.”

“Pretty grisly work for a couple of middle-aged women.”

“Well? Men don’t have a monopoly on being monsters.”

She was right enough about that. But whatever the answer, I had a feeling it wasn’t chopped-up human dog food.

*   *   *

Jack Logan hadn’t returned my call by the time I headed home. I’d left two messages for him, one on his cell’s voice mail, the other at the Hall of Justice, both stressing the urgency of the information I had for him, but he’d become a busy man since his promotion to assistant chief. The constant demands on his time came not only from the PD but also from the city’s political hierarchy and individuals a lot more powerful and influential than I would ever be. Jack and I had been friends a long time, but that didn’t count for much on the priority ladder.

In the old days I’d had other friends in the department I could have appealed to, but they were all gone now—retired, working for other police departments or at other jobs. One more example of the effects of time erosion. There were a few inspectors I’d had business dealings with, but I didn’t know any of them well enough to approach them with a handful of nothing much more than speculation based on circumstantial evidence. Logan was the only one who’d give Tamara’s and my suspicions the attention they deserved.

*   *   *

Mild argument with Kerry when I got home. She wanted to go out to dinner—Emily was spending the night with a friend—and I wanted to stay in, relax after the long day, wait for Logan’s call. She won the argument, as she usually does when she really wants something, by a combination of cajolery, guilt-tripping (we hadn’t been out together alone in weeks), and subtle sexual promise. Not that she used sex the way some women did, as a form of extortion. She’d never said no to me just because she didn’t get her way—too honest and caring for that kind of nonsense. But if she did get her way, her natural tendency was to be more enthusiastic in her lovemaking. I may be crowding geezerhood, but I can still be as swayed by the prospect of enthusiasm as I was in my younger days.

So we went out to dinner, at a Sicilian restaurant that had just opened up in Noe Valley. My one proviso being that I keep my cell phone on because Logan still hadn’t rung back. Normally doing that goes against my grain—people who get calls and then chatter in public places are near the top of my list of my pet peeves—but this was a special circumstance. Kerry had no objection when I explained the situation on the drive down to 24th Street.

The restaurant was crowded; we had to wait twenty minutes for a table. Worth the wait: the food and the service were both first-rate. I had chicken marsala, Kerry a pasta dish called
finocchio con sarde,
made with fennel and sardines, that tasted a whole lot better than it sounds, and we shared a bottle of light Corinto wine. The place was atmospherically decorated and the lighting kept purposely dim in order to maximize the effect of candlelight. Kerry looks good in any light, the more so since she’d treated herself (and me) to the facelift after her bout with breast cancer, but there’s something about candle glow that makes her especially attractive. Gives her auburn hair a kind of fiery shine, her face a luminous, ageless quality. The longer I looked at her across the table, the more glad I was that I’d lost the argument tonight. Enthusiasm. Right. I could feel mine rising by the minute.

We were sipping the last of our wine when she broke a brief conversational lull by saying, “Tom Bates just bought a second home, a small ranch down in the Carmel Valley.”