Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  “What kind of job?”

  “There’s a woman up in Pacific Heights,” I said. “I need her watched.”

  “Top rate?”

  “Two thousand a week.”

  “Each?”

  “That’s right,” I said. It was six times as much as I’d ever paid them, and Elijah paused to consider that.

  “That kind of money isn’t just a stakeout.”

  “She could be in trouble,” I said. “So you wouldn’t just be watching her. You’d be watching out for her.”

  “How soon?”

  “We’ll be back at the house in an hour,” I said. “I’m going to leave her there and let you take over. But she doesn’t need to know about you. If she leaves, you follow.”

  I gave him the address and then we hung up. When I came back into the café, I walked toward our table. Madeleine hadn’t fled out the back door. She was staring at the deconstructed sandwich on her plate. She was working her left cheek between her back teeth, and didn’t look up until I sat down across from her.

  “We were talking about suicide,” Madeleine said. “Assuming it’s a predilection that runs with the genes. I don’t know if it’s inherited or not, but I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Claire was afraid of heights,” Madeleine said. “If she rode in a glass elevator, she’d stand in the middle and stare at the floor. She wouldn’t lean on a windowsill if the window was open. She had falling dreams, the ones where you jerk awake right before you hit, and you’re covered in sweat.”

  I thought of Claire’s bedroom in the Carmel mansion, her window overhanging a sea cliff. I pictured a little girl, awake at three in the morning, every crash of the waves sending a subtle shiver through the house. It would be impossible to forget how high above the rocks she was, and the delicacy of her perch.

  “You guys must have talked a lot.”

  “All the time.”

  “And you?” I asked. “You’re the same about heights? The dreams?”

  She nodded.

  “So if you’re going to look at what I’d do, and draw conclusions, then think about this. If I had to kill myself, I’d do anything but jump. Anything. I’d pour gasoline over my head and flick a match. I’d swallow rat poison. I’d run a hose from the exhaust pipe. I wouldn’t jump.”

  But all of Madeleine’s alternatives required equipment. Gathering equipment takes premeditation. You have to buy the gas and find the matches, and imagine your way past the bright flash of pain. You have to get the right poison, and not only swallow it but keep it down. You have to get a hose, and a car without a catalytic converter, and find a quiet place to park it. But to jump, if you live in a city, is a different proposition. All you need is a passing urge. There are millions of windows, and rooftops, and parking garages. There are bridges, stretching over dark water, beckoning.

  In a city, the opportunity is everywhere. Which is what sets jumpers apart from most other suicides. They’re more impulsive. They’re plagued by voices and driven to desperation. The ones who survive long enough to see an emergency room all say the same thing.

  I changed my mind on the way down.

  I wondered what Claire had thought about, rushing toward Turk Street. Did she change her mind? Was the wind screaming out her error?

  Or had someone else made the decision for her?

  “What?” Madeleine asked.

  “Nothing—just thinking.”

  “You’re going to see her today? Claire’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell her about me?”

  “Not until I know what to say,” I said. “Are you ready to go back?”

  Madeleine put her napkin on her plate, covering the remains of her sandwich. When she started for the door, I turned around and traded my half-finished bottle of mineral water for hers. I held it from the bottom so my fingers wouldn’t overlay her prints. Then I quick-stepped across the café in time to open the door for her.

  We hailed a taxi and sat next to each other on the ride back to Baker Street. If I was calm about Madeleine, it was because I could barely spare time to think about her. I was still grappling with what had happened in Boston. I’d killed a man and left his body where it fell on the Common. I didn’t know who he was or why he’d come after me on the stairs. I couldn’t even guess what evidence might connect him to me. For all I knew, he’d written my name and phone number on a piece of paper and stuffed it in his shoe.

  There were too many possibilities, too many potential enemies. Madeleine and Olivia. Agent White and DeCanza. My old friend Jim, who might not be my friend at all. I had no idea who Claire had been tracking, but those people might know about me—and it was all too much. More than I’d signed on for, cash notwithstanding.

  I should have just gone to La Paz after the trial. I could have rented a room in one of the old hotels, where a ten-dollar tip to the desk clerk would let me pay in cash and write any name I wanted in the guest register. And if it had to happen, La Paz would have been a better place to kill someone. The desert was full of scavengers, the ocean churning with whitetips. If the body turned up anyway, it wasn’t a big deal. The police there weren’t like the Boston police. They were under constant siege, from men like Lorca. They had other things to worry about.

  I stopped outside the front steps, and Madeleine looked over at me. She had to touch my elbow to get my attention. The weather had turned again. Her hair was misted with fine droplets of fog.

  “You’re going to see her now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I safe here?”

  “I could get some guys to come watch over you,” I said. “People I trust.”

  In fact, I could see the Mission Appliance van parked at the top of the block. Elijah wasn’t in the driver’s seat. He was probably in the cargo area, where he could keep tabs on the house from a small screen connected to the dash cam.

  “I don’t need that,” Madeleine said. “I’ll lock the door and won’t let anyone in.”

  “I’ll be back tonight,” I said. I handed her one of my business cards. “If anything happens, call me.”

  15

  I own a car but I almost never use it. My work is too fluid, and moves too fast. If I can’t find a parking spot in less than five seconds, it doesn’t do any good to drive my own car on a tail job. It’s pointless to have a car parked halfway up Nob Hill when my target is jogging down an escalator into a BART station. So I use taxis, and ride-sharing apps. I could draw a public transit map on the back of a bar napkin with my eyes closed. And my car, a black 1965 Camaro that Juliette gave me as a wedding present, spends most of its time in a belowground parking garage near Union Square.

  I’m not sure where Juliette found the car. We came back from our honeymoon to a new house that was a gift from my ex-father-in-law. I had never seen the place, but Juliette knew the layout well enough. She immediately took me to the garage. It was two in the morning, and we’d been on her father’s plane for fifteen hours, hurtling home from Hong Kong with a fuel stopover in Anchorage. And yet Juliette wanted me to take her for a drive. The keys were in the ignition. Let It Bleed was in the eight-track. A bottle of Wild Turkey, with an unbroken 1965 tax stamp, was in the glove box. My new wife, soon to be my ex-wife, bit my earlobe and whispered.

  Take me to Half Moon Bay.

  When Juliette is in the mood to please someone, she goes all the way. She isn’t one for half-measures. Not in any of life’s arenas. She’ll take you on a moonlit ride down Skyline Boulevard, and when you get to the cove she likes, she’ll lead you down to the wet sand. You might not even notice the moment when everything else goes dark. There is just that single point of focus, a circle of light big enough to circumscribe two people. When you have her attention, you have it in full. The problem was that her attention didn’t last.

  Six years later, the only thing left is the car. And I’ve never even thought of letting her go.

  Driving a hundred and fifty
miles down the coast to see Olivia Gravesend was a chance to let the Beast stretch her legs. I hadn’t taken her out of the garage in two months. I did have to consider the possibility that Agent White might have found her, though. If he’d broken in to my apartment, it was safe to assume he’d run a DMV search. So I had a choice between being paranoid and being realistic. Knowing my plate number wasn’t the same as knowing where the car was. The parking garage was likely a mystery to him, because it was nowhere near my apartment or my office.

  I turned off my phone, then went up the Baker Street steps at a jog. I caught a bus on Jackson Street, stepped off at Union Square twenty minutes later, and then backtracked up the hill to Bush Street and my garage.

  I found the Beast where I’d left her: two stories belowground, in a dark corner, beneath a nest of iron pipes. She was covered in a fine layer of concrete dust. There’d been some construction on the street above six weeks ago. I brushed my fingertip along her hood, exposing the glossy black paint beneath the dust. I walked around the car, checking for marks like that. But as far as I could tell, no one had touched her. I got down on my back and looked under both bumpers, and in the wells above the tires. People who know what they’re doing will try to hide a GPS tracker where its antenna can get satellite reception. So I didn’t crawl all the way under the car, or pop the hood and feel around behind the engine block. It was safe to assume White knew what he was doing, so it was safe to assume White hadn’t found my car.

  I opened the door, and sat down in the stitched-leather bucket seat. When I turned the key and gave the gas pedal a tap, the engine caught right away, hitting all eight cylinders with a roar that echoed around the subterranean garage.

  When I reached the street, I leaned over and opened the glove compartment. Inside, on top of the registration and insurance envelope, there was an old-style flip phone. A pay-as-you-go model, not tied to any contract. Sometimes in my business, I need to make calls that can’t be traced back to me. I turned it on and saw its battery was still full. Driving down the hill toward Union Square, I dialed Elijah.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Crowe,” I said. “I’m using this phone today. I need to keep the other one turned off for a while.”

  “Someone tracking you?”

  I ignored the question. I didn’t want to get started on the topic of who might be tracking me, or why.

  “If anything happens with the woman, call me on this line.”

  “So far, she’s just sitting tight.”

  “Good deal,” I said. “You got the back door covered?”

  “There’s a birdhouse in the back, the kind up on a tall pole. I landed the quad on the roof, shut it down except the camera. There’s a door from the first floor, and one from the basement. I’ve got them both.”

  Last year, I’d set up Elijah and Jeremiah with a couple of small camera-equipped drones. It was barely a five-hundred-dollar investment, and now one man could cover both sides of a house without getting out of his van. Of course it was illegal. But the rewards were high and the risks were close to zero.

  “Think anyone saw it fly in?”

  “Doubt it,” Elijah said.

  “Call me if something comes up,” I said. “Neighbors with pitchforks, that kind of thing.”

  “Anyone from this block, I can handle.”

  “And if they call the cops?”

  “I’ll handle it,” Elijah said. “I know most of those guys. I take out their trash.”

  I wished him luck and hung up. After crossing Market, I hit the entrance to U.S. 101 and let the Beast have some gas. By the time I passed the airport, I’d given in and pushed Let It Bleed into the deck.

  I stopped for gas in Monterey, and spotted a payphone beside the service station. If I used my prepaid phone every time I wanted to make a call, pretty soon it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. I dialed a number from memory and listened to the phone ring.

  “Who’s this?” Cynthia Green said.

  “Crowe,” I said. “I’m on the road, using a payphone.”

  “You got the autopsy report?”

  “I did—and thanks,” I said. “I need you to do something else.”

  “It’ll be a slow night, anyway.”

  “Do you know anyone at the Boston medical examiner’s office?”

  “Not a soul,” she said. “But I know someone out on the Cape, and she’d know someone in Boston.”

  “You know her well enough to get a favor?”

  “It depends on what you want.”

  I paused. I’d trusted Cynthia for a few years now. I was about to find out how much that trust was worth.

  “Some jogger found a dead man on the Boston Common a couple mornings ago,” I said. “It was in the paper.”

  “This has to do with Claire Gravesend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Because she had a Massachusetts driver’s license in her purse,” Cynthia said. “A Beacon Hill address.”

  The thing about Cynthia was that she read everything before she filed it. And she remembered everything she read. Usually that was an asset, but right now it was a problem.

  “I just have some suspicions,” I said, evenly. “I want to see where they go.”

  “So you want the Boston ME’s report on a dead body found on the Common,” Cynthia said. “I can get that.”

  “Keep my name out of it,” I said. “And don’t say anything about Claire. I don’t want people thinking there’s a connection if there isn’t one.”

  “Sure, Lee,” she said. “Count on me.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  I hung up the phone. From that point on, I had to count on her. Because now Cynthia knew I thought something tied Claire Gravesend to a dead man in Boston. Plenty of people knew I’d been in Boston. Olivia and her butler knew. There was Claire’s journalism professor, Julia Forrester. The next-door nanny, who’d seen my PI license. My trail to Claire’s house was a mile wide, and the dead man had drawn a line in blood that pointed back to her door.

  A Boston cop could start at one end of this thing, and a San Francisco cop at the other, and they’d find me squarely in the middle.

  I went back to the car, started the engine, and twisted the chrome knob to kill the stereo. I drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Finding Olivia Gravesend’s house was harder than I thought. I missed the private road the first time and wandered down the coastal highway for five miles in the wrong direction before I realized I’d gone too far. Driving back, I kept the speed down until I spotted a gravel road between a pair of overgrown bay laurels.

  I nosed the car through the boughs, then coasted down the hill in neutral until I came to a locked gate. There was an intercom box on the left. I rolled down the window, hit the button, and waited.

  “This is a private residence. You likely saw the signs, coming down the road.”

  I recognized the butler’s voice. All he needed to round it out was a long-tailed topcoat and a monocle.

  “It sure looks like it,” I said. “Lee Crowe, here to see Mrs. Gravesend.”

  “Is she expecting you?”

  “She expected me to keep her updated,” I said. “Does that mean yes?”

  “Wait a moment.”

  “Sure.”

  It was her dime. At least sitting in the car, listening to the engine’s loping rumble, no one was trying to choke me. I wasn’t getting blood on my hands. And I was getting paid the same. A minute passed before the intercom crackled again.

  “Please come down.”

  I looked up. The gate was sliding open. I dropped the transmission into first and rolled down the hill toward the Gravesend place.

  I thought she’d receive me in the gun room again, but I was wrong.

  “She’s waiting for you on the terrace,” the old man said. “Follow me.”

  I found Olivia Gravesend in a redwood Adirondack chair, facing the ocean. There was a half-empty mug of coffee on one armrest, and an ashtray with three butt
s on the other. When she saw me, she exhaled smoke, ground out her lit cigarette, and set the ashtray on the stones by her feet.

  “I’ve started smoking again, Crowe.”

  “It happens.”

  “This was older than Claire,” she said. She held up a pack of Camels. “I stopped the day I knew I’d have her. And started the day I knew she was gone.”

  There were no other seats near her. The nearest thing was a lemon tree in a tub-sized stone pot. I brushed the dirt from the rim and sat facing her. I looked her over. She was wearing tan slacks and a white sweater. Her hair was wound into a tight bun. Bare feet; a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses perched above her forehead. I’d have said she looked good under the circumstances, except that with the sunglasses up, I could see her eyes. I guessed she hadn’t slept in three days.

  “You’ve found something,” she said. “Haven’t you, Crowe?”

  “A few things.”

  There was no reason not to share some of it. So I told her about searching the Boston house and finding my way to Julia Forrester. I skipped the fact that I’d killed an intruder and spent the better part of an hour cleaning his blood off her staircase. Instead, I told her that Claire’s computer was missing. And that based on my talk with Forrester, I believed Claire had left Harvard to pursue an investigative story. I didn’t tell Olivia about the San Francisco house. I wasn’t planning to tell her about Madeleine yet, and I didn’t want anyone to know about that house as long as Madeleine was in it.

  “She left to write an article?” Mrs. Gravesend said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “What kind of article?”

  “Claire was interested in genetics. Stem cells. Twin studies. Frozen embryos. That’s all part of it.”