Loose Ends (4 page)

“Of course. Thank you so much.” Mira stood and reached for the pill bottle again.

“And Mira…don’t take too many of those, all right?” I held up a hand in apology. “I’m not judging. Just because you need to be clearheaded. For your daughter. For Talia.”

“Yeah. I’ll…I’ll wait until later.”

“Is there anyone who can come stay with you? Someone you can trust?”

Mira shook her head. “No. No one close enough for this.”

I wasn’t huggy with women, but I made myself reach across to take Mira’s hand. “If you want me to look into this, I have to go now. You’ll be all right? You’ll be strong?”

A tear rolled down Mira’s cheek, quickly wiped away. “I think so.”

“Okay, then. I have to go find your daughter.”

“I know. Go on.”

Chapter 3

I let myself out Mira Sorkin’s back gate with relief. Now I felt like going,
doing
. The bright afternoon sun continued its struggle to burn away the lingering coastal drizzle, reinforcing that feeling of gusty, crackling energy.

I dialed Mickey’s desk phone before I had reached Molly, speaking as I picked my way across the wet unmowed grass and weeds of the vacant lot, avoiding muddy BMX paths. “What you got?”

“Miranda Almone Sorkin, née Herndon, born in 1970 so she’s thirty-five. Married once to Dennis Wilson Sorkin. No criminal record for either of them. Graduated Stanford pre-med at twenty and then UOP Doctor of Pharmacy at twenty-three. Married shortly after graduating in 1993, when she went to work for North Bay Distributors, a drug wholesaler owned by Rankin Pharmaceuticals. One ten-year-old child, Talia, born in 1995. They divorced in 2003, but she kept his name.”

“Tell me about the ex,” I said as I fobbed open my car with a beep and got in. At this point I really didn’t think Mira was being watched. In fact, given that the heist – the presumed heist – had not taken place, Mira supposedly had not heard from the kidnappers and I had found no bugs, I doubted they were watching the house at all.

“Dennis is an MBA, a stockbroker. Liked to live big, from what I can tell. Flew high for a few years but lost a bunch of his clients’ money on some bad trades right before the divorce. Dodged criminal charges, but the trading house dumped him hard. Looks like she was paying his bills for a while. Then they split up and he moved to Seattle where he now works at a small firm. Less than two mil in client assets. That’s not bad, but not big like he used to be. He took home one hundred ten thousand last year.”

“Decent, but not even what Mira makes.” I popped the phone into its hands-free cradle and stuck the headset on. “So he either learned from getting burned and is on the straight and level or he’s got an angle, something not obviously traceable, and is working this pedestrian gig as a cover. Was the parting amicable?”

“Not at all. Looks like a lot of bad blood, motions and countermotions, accusing each other of bad parenting, crazy stuff. Everything but child molestation and adultery. Almost comical, really.”

“No adultery charges? Why did they break up, then?”

“The initial filing listed ‘irreconcilable differences.’”

“When things start to get ugly, people begin to lie. At least, exaggerate. Seems weird that neither accused the other of sleeping around.”

I could almost hear Mickey shrug over the phone. “Sometimes it just all goes wrong. That’s what Mom says when I ask about what happened with Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“I was wondering if maybe Dennis figured out a way to burn Mira. Maybe he sicced this heist crew on to her as payback for getting custody of the daughter?” Mickey said.

“Maybe.” I chewed my lip. “Hard to believe he’d put his daughter at risk, though.”

“Probably didn’t know they’d kidnap her. Things got out of hand.”

“Mickey, you’re smarter than you look.”

“Thanks, I think. Does that mean you want me to keep tunneling?” No surprise, Mickey sounded eager to put his skills to use and make some money doing it.

“Yeah. Dig away on both of them. I got an advance and as long as the check doesn’t bounce you’re good for a few days of work.”

“Sa-
weet
.”

I revved the Impreza’s engine, spun the wheel and hit forty in the twenty-five zone in two seconds flat, twisting through the narrow car-lined streets. Unlike more modern suburbs, garages and driveways were small in this neighborhood, seldom holding more than one car, and curbside parking was the norm. “I need you to take a look at Sorkin’s landline records for the last week, incoming and outgoing. Flag repeat calls, and try to match all the numbers to names. Then cross-reference them with the ex’s. Also,” I kept my voice casual, “pull up Cole Sage’s records. Any numbers he has, including his office numbers at the
Chronicle
. See if anything lines up. Print those all out, will you?” If I was going to pay Mickey to hack, I might as well feed my favorite obsession. Okay, maybe second favorite, or third, after racing and poker.

“Okay, Boss. I’ll have all this by tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.”

“That’s my boy.”

“I wish.” Mickey hung up.

“I heard a wistful undertone in Mickey’s words,” my dead father said in my ear. Okay, I knew he wasn’t really there. He wasn’t a ghost, I was pretty sure. He’d never told me anything I didn’t already know or reveal secrets of the Other Side. But ever since the bomb blast, he’d show up and talk to me, usually when I was driving alone.

I couldn’t help but look over at the passenger seat. Sometimes I could see him, sometimes only hear his words. Today he sat there in his corduroy jacket and long 70s haircut, exactly like he appeared in my favorite photo of him, the one on my office wall.

“Poor guy’s had a crush on me since I hired him for one of my first private cases,” I replied as if nothing weird was going on, refusing to allow tears to spring to my eyes. I’d found if I tried to make the hallucination go away, whatever part of my mind created it fought back harder. Better to simply roll with it, talk it out and let it fade along with the ache in my heart.

“I wouldn’t worry. It’s a hopeless nerdy fanboy thing, like having the hots for Halle Berry because she plays superheroes and villains.”

“I don’t worry.”

“I hope you don’t flirt with Mickey to keep him working harder for you.”

I shook my head. “That would be cheap. Besides, unrequited hope seems to flow like caffeine through the whole gamer crowd’s veins. I don’t have to encourage him.”

“But you don’t
dis
courage him.”

“I don’t want to crush his ego.”

“If you did, he might get over you and find a girlfriend.”

“I can’t do that. I’m shocked you’d even suggest it.”

“Sometimes you have to kill the hope-monkey,” he said.

The hope-monkey was a metaphor Dad often used. He said people were addicted to hope like a junkie to the needle. I thought about Cole, knowing I might have more in common with Mickey than I’d admit. Maybe it was the scarring that put Cole off. I massaged the damaged area around my right ear with the heel of my hand. That part always still felt like it was asleep. My thoughts turned dark as I answered my own question.

“Your mind is wandering,” my father said.

“It does that.”

“You don’t look that bad. Plenty of men show interest in you.”

“Children don’t run screaming and people don’t flinch away, you mean.” When I see myself in the mirror or a snapshot someone has taken of me I look completely normal, but what woman doesn’t obsess over her flaws?

“Screw Cole,” Dad said. “Get a grip, girl. Plenty of fish in the sea.”

That was proof positive this apparition was no spirit, just a hallucination. Dad never used language even that strong. He’d been a good Catholic and a crusader for social justice, unfailingly polite even when he was being tough.

“Easier said than done, Dad.”

I waited, but he didn’t answer. When I looked over, he was gone, thank God.

Breaking out of the cramped neighborhood with relief, I turned off my higher brain function and floored it onto Miller Avenue, raced through the traffic as if I was at Le Mans, reveling in the physical. My fuzzbuster showed green and lasers didn’t work very well in the drizzling rain, so unless some overzealous uniform got eyeballs on me, I should be fine. Adrenaline sang through my veins like joy, mixed with anger on Mira’s behalf.

Whatever it takes to get Talia back, I’ll do, I vowed.

I proceeded down Bridgeway until it met 101 again. The state highway was still lightly traveled and should remain so in the misty daytime until rush hour and ocean fog made their inevitable rendezvous on the Golden Gate Bridge before dusk.

I was happy to live and work in the same neighborhood where I grew up, the Mission District, now a bit more gentrified than it used to be but still full of character, and not have to commute in to work as I used to. Beat cops, even detectives, didn’t make enough to live alone in the City, but now I owned my office and cars free and clear.

I’d also bought Mom and myself a house, and all it had cost was a damaged hand and face, one eardrum, some nerves and skin – and my career.

I’d happily trade the money back if I could. Because I couldn’t, I worked hard, played harder, and lived life the hardest I could. “Die young, stay pretty, live fast ’cause it won’t last,” Blondie sang on the radio when I was a teenager in the 80s. Meat Loaf had an answer for her: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

After crossing the Golden Gate I exited onto Marina Boulevard, just by coincidence less than a mile from Cole’s place, and then pulled over. I opened up his speed-dial entry and pushed the button. When I called it went through to voice mail, so I left a message in hopes of getting a callback to clarify things. Maybe he could give me some more background on Mira. She’d said he was out of town, but it was Monday. Maybe he had returned from his trip by now. I needed a lead and I hated to return to the office and hang around waiting for Mickey to come up with something.

After trying Cole’s office and unsuccessfully trying to get something more out of the receptionist, I decided to plug the address of the pharmaceutical warehouse into the GPS.

The voice of the machine led me back across the Bridge and up to a discreet commercial district in San Rafael straight to a large building with a high, heavy fence that I would have taken for a corporate headquarters rather than a warehouse if not for its utter lack of windows. A tiny plate read, “North Bay Distributors.” When I pulled up to the talk-box at the barrier I had my story ready.

“Hi, Cal Corwin of Corwin Security,” I said. I actually had several business licenses, including security consultant and bail bondsman. Telling someone up front you were an investigator wasn’t always the best move. “I need to talk with your security people.”

“Umm…I can give you the number up at Corporate,” the young male voice said from the speaker.

The camera feed should be showing my face, my good side thank God, so I ran my hair behind my ear and smiled winningly. “How about the number to the monitoring center? That can’t be against the rules, right?”

“Umm…okay. But I can’t open the gate for you.”

“That’s fine. Just the number is good.”

I wrote it down and then backed up, waving an apology at the driver behind me as I did a five-point turn in the cramped space of the lane between the curbs. I called Mickey as I drove and interrupted him long enough to get me a reverse lookup on the number. I plugged that into my GPS.

Back when I was on the force we didn’t have these things. The department wasn’t going to spring for expensive new gadgets, but for me it was an essential time saver.

This time the machine led me farther northward to Novato and an office building with an open parking lot and a lot of traffic in and out. I could have just phoned, but I find a friendly face gets a lot more results than just a voice on the line when it comes to bending the rules.

At least forty clients were listed on the directory, with Clawson Monitoring on the second floor. I breezed through the unwatched lobby. Somehow I thought it ironic that the drug warehouse was well defended while the office of the security center was not. Seemed like a point of weakness.

At least the steel company door was locked, with a keypad and card reader to the side. Its small identifying sign seemed understated. I knocked, waited, and then knocked again harder before getting an answer.

The man who answered the door narrowed his middle-aged eyes in suspicion. “Can I help you?” He didn’t sound like he wanted to help me at all.

“Cal Corwin of Corwin Security.” I waved my impressive but largely meaningless badge at him. “Can I get a few minutes of your time?”

Relaxing fractionally after looking each way down the hall, apparently ensuring I was alone, he said, “Sure. Come on in.”

I followed him into a bare reception lounge with a couple of naked workstations in it – phones, computers, not much else. No one sat at them. In one corner squatted an old refrigerator next to a kitchenette – countertops, cabinets, a two-burner stove, microwave and sink. A restroom door and another unmarked one completed the points of interest. I presumed the second entry led to the real monitoring center.

The man waved me to a seat and then sat down nearby. “What’s this about?” His eyes set deep in a grizzled hatchet face stayed very still, like a hunter, as did his whipcord-lean body.

“You’ve been on the job?” I asked, recognizing the signs.

“Like you. Bill Clawson, Lieutenant, Chicago PD, retired.” He still didn’t hold out his corded, veined hand.

“Cal Corwin, as I said. Eight years SFPD.”

His eyes flicked to my hip. “Still carry, I see.”

“Good catch. Yes, I do.”

“I don’t.” Distance surfaced in his haunted blue eyes.

“Should I ask why?”

“Can’t stand to touch a weapon anymore.” Bill snorted ruefully. “Pathetic, huh?”

I shook my head. “I get it. Everyone reacts differently.” I understood. Once bitten. Ask a plane crash survivor how they feel about flying. Some could do it and some couldn’t. I felt certain Bill had killed someone on the job and a piece inside him had broken off. Maybe it still rattled in his head. Given Chicago’s reputation as the murder capital of the U.S., I wasn’t surprised.