Then we looked at the door.
There were wedge-shaped impressions in the frame and on the face of the door itself. No subtle art with a set of thin picking tools. Someone had gone at it with a crowbar.
“It was like this when you left it?”
“No.”
He moved me aside, reached into his jacket, and drew his gun.
“May I?”
“Go ahead.”
He pushed the door open with two fingers. I hadn’t even unlocked it yet.
“You got any enemies, Crowe?”
“A few.”
“Anyone I should know about?”
“No one who stands out.”
“Stay behind me so you don’t get shot,” he said. “I hate paperwork.”
He stepped into my office suite, and I followed him. There was a light switch to the right, and I hit it. The lights came on. Whoever had punched the door had wanted privacy on the stair landing, which was visible from the sidewalk. But once he got inside, he could shut the door.
“What’s in there?” Chang said, pointing with the gun.
“A bathroom. Size of a phone booth.”
“And there?”
“That’s my office.”
“Open the bathroom door.”
“Okay.”
I opened the door and stood to the side. Even cockroaches had trouble hiding in my office bathroom. It was that small. Inspector Chang looked at my toilet, my mop bucket, and my wall-mounted sink. Then we crossed the reception room and I opened my office door.
“Jesus,” Inspector Chang said. “Is it always like that?”
I came from the wall and looked around the door.
“No,” I said. “I keep it neat.”
I stepped into the office. It had been thoroughly tossed. The desk drawers were on the floor, the couch was tipped over, its upholstery ripped open with a knife. The lithographs were off the walls, their frames smashed. My desktop computer was gone. I knelt and looked under the desk.
“Missing anything?”
“My safe.”
“What was in it, besides the memory card?”
“Some evidence from a case—letters. My Smith and Wesson, a thirty-eight. My ex-wife’s engagement ring.”
“The gun was registered to you?”
“Yeah.”
We were both kneeling by the desk, which sat on a knockoff Persian rug. The missing safe had left a square footprint in the pile, two feet by two feet. Other than my gun and Juliette’s ring, everything in the safe was related to Claire Gravesend. The memory card, the letters she’d sent to reassure her mother. Of course, DeCanza didn’t know that, and neither did Agent White. Whoever stole the safe wouldn’t know what it held. Not until he got it to an empty warehouse and cut it open.
I thought again of the man I’d killed. Throughout our dark encounter, he’d spoken exactly six words.
Who else knows? Who’d you tell?
I looked at Inspector Chang. He holstered his gun as he got to his feet.
“I can get the guys here in ten minutes.”
“I’ll handle this on my own.”
“I figured,” Inspector Chang said. “But the safe had the memory card, and the memory card has my evidence. So it’s not just your problem.”
If I had put the same camera system in my office that I had in my apartment, I’d have known about the break-in. Which meant that fifteen minutes ago in the interrogation room, I’d have come up with some excuse about the memory card. But the office was so new, I hadn’t protected it yet. Now Inspector Chang was here, and it would only make things worse to argue with him.
“Have at it,” I said. “The place is yours.”
He looked disappointed. Like he’d been ready to argue a point, or press me again on the ring of bruises circling my neck. I’d given him the only nail he could hang a hat on in the Claire Gravesend investigation. I’d admitted to being in the neighborhood just before she died. I’d been in a fight and I wouldn’t give names. If he thought I was a liar, he might go a leap past that: It wasn’t a coincidence that I found Claire, because I’d watched her fall. Not from the street, but from the top of the building. Just after peeling her hands off my neck.
So if he’d wanted to push me, he could have pushed hard, with search warrants. A deep dive into what I’d been doing that night wouldn’t leave many great options. My alibi was that I’d been tied up in the Westchester. Too busy intimidating a federal witness to have killed an heiress. In terms of jail time, I’d get a better deal if I just confessed to bumping her off the roof in a drunken stupor.
But Inspector Chang decided not to push. Instead, he got out his phone, dialed a number, and turned his back on me.
18
It was three a.m. before I got out of there.
When Inspector Chang said he could call his guys, he apparently meant two vanloads of forensic technicians, plus all the cops who could squeeze into seven patrol cars. The city must have been having a slow night. The crew crawled around on the floor, looking for fibers and footprints. They dusted every hard surface for prints; they shot a terabyte of raw data photos. A woman with a laser pointer and a digital protractor was calculating angles from the doorjamb. Another woman, with a tattooed crucifix peeking from her shirtsleeve, grilled me on the make, model, contents, weight, and progeny of the safe, of which I knew little, because the thing had been in the office when I got the place, its combination jotted on a sticky note.
Then they left, and I was still there, waiting for a locksmith. He arrived at two thirty, installed a new dead bolt, and told me I should look into a steel door. I paid him and waited for him to go. Then I turned my new key in my new lock and went across the landing. The broken glass from the light fixture was pulverized beneath my feet. A thousand footsteps, cop boots coming in and out, had turned it into powder.
At three a.m., I was out walking. There was nowhere I needed to be and no one waiting for me when I got there. The usual state of affairs. Except that I was marked up with bruises, perfectly sober, and had a lot of money in the bank.
Across the street, a parked car flashed its headlights.
A big car. A Bentley so black, it almost disappeared into the night. I’d never seen it, but I knew in an instant who was driving it. She’d had a new Bentley every year since she’d turned sixteen.
The headlights flashed again.
I crossed the empty street, walking at an angle until I came to the driver’s window. It slid down, beads of rain peeling off and running down the door panel.
“It’s been a while,” I said.
She looked up at me. It had been twelve years since I’d first met her, and six since the last time I’d seen her. I could say she hadn’t changed at all. There was the pale face framed by dark curls. A dancer’s taut curves half hidden by a jacket that hooked close to her throat, giving it the effect of a cape. The same perfume. But there was something in her face I’d never seen before. A shadow across her eyes, and a clench to her jaw. Maybe those were just the casual and indiscriminate marks of time gone by, but I had the idea that the last six years hadn’t been easy on her.
“Get in,” Juliette said. “Come on—it’s pouring.”
I walked around an acre of hood, then opened the passenger door and eased onto the leather seat. The heater wasn’t on, but the seat warmer was. The rain picked up outside. The car was built so heavily, I couldn’t even hear the drops pounding its metal skin.
“You were in the neighborhood,” I said. “Just happened to be driving past.”
“Something like that.”
His Honor’s courtroom was a block or two away. Maybe he was working late tonight. And since it was June, he’d probably just brought on his newest summer clerk. That could keep him after hours.
“You need a detective. You’re wondering why’s he working so late. It’s not like he ever asks questions from the bench. It’s been eight years since the chief justice let him write an opinion. And he doesn’t need to read the
briefs—he looks at his bank account, or calls your father, to know how he’s going to vote. So what’s he doing there?”
“Lee.”
“But you probably have some ideas.”
“I didn’t come here to hire you. It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
“Some real detectives came to talk to me. About you. They made it sound like you were in trouble. Not like you’d done something wrong—the other kind of trouble. Like something could happen to you. I got scared, and I told them what I knew. And then, when they were gone, I thought maybe I’d messed up. I tried calling, but your phone’s been off. And then I happened to come past here. I saw the police cars, so I waited.”
“When they came to talk to you, you told them where I park.”
“Yes,” she said. She took her hands from the steering wheel and turned to me. “Did I mess up? Are you in trouble?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Just a break-in at the office. Not a big deal.”
“Okay,” she said. She paused, deciding what to say next. “But if you are in trouble, and you need some help—”
“I’m good,” I said. It didn’t sound like a lie. And I hoped my next question wouldn’t give it away. “When did they see you?”
“It wasn’t just once. It was two different times.”
“Different guys?”
“Yeah.”
“Describe them.”
“A Chinese guy. Straightforward, city cop—he showed me his badge. Inspector Chang. And a white guy, the second time.”
“Describe him.”
“Blond hair, cut short. Like a military haircut. These eyes— I don’t know. If you saw them, you’d remember. It’s like you’re standing in front of a searchlight.”
“No badge on the white guy?”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
“You told both of them where I park?”
“Just the first guy,” she said. “The white guy didn’t ask.”
“Then what’d he ask?”
“If I’d seen you. If we had any mutual friends. Whether I had some way of contacting you, something other than your cell or your email.”
“No, no, and no.”
“Which is what I told him,” she said. She turned to face me. For a moment, I thought she might reach across the dark car and touch me. “And that’s all I told him.”
“When was this?”
“A few days ago,” she said. “Right after you sold that photo.”
“You saw that?”
“Everyone saw that.”
“But they came when? The same day the photo hit the stands?”
“The same hour,” she said. “But what’s the photo have to do with your office break-in? Did you know her?”
“No,” I said. “Did you?”
She looked through her rain-lashed windshield.
“Claire Gravesend,” she said. “Olivia Gravesend’s daughter. I must have met her. Or been in the same room as her. Not anytime recently—when I was a girl. When I had to tag along to my father’s things. But she was younger than me, wasn’t she?”
“A bit,” I said. “A few years, anyway.”
It was actually a twelve-year age difference. Not that Juliette needed to know how much I knew about the woman I’d photographed.
“So you know about her.”
“What’s in the papers.”
“How about a ride to your garage?” she asked. “It’s still pouring.”
“Sure.”
She shifted the transmission and we started to roll toward Van Ness.
“You’re still driving her?” she asked.
“The Beast?”
“Yeah.”
“No reason not to. She still runs.”
“That’s good,” she said.
“I’m not the kind to walk away from something. As long as it works.”
“Right. You’ll just drive it into the ground. Until all it wants to do is die. And meanwhile, you’re not having any fun either.”
“That’s the plan.”
We stopped at a light, then took a right onto Van Ness. She had to slow in the middle of a block to let a man push his shopping cart out of the street. The old Juliette might have swerved behind him, not wanting to interrupt her schedule. So maybe she’d changed a little. I watched the row houses go by. A few lit-up stoops, a lot of dark ones. Silhouettes of men on concrete steps. Puffy rain jackets, bottles in paper bags.
“You been okay?” she asked.
“Sure—good clients, good jobs. You wouldn’t like it. But it suits me. I follow cheating husbands around, with a gun and a camera. I can get salt-and-pepper shrimp at two in the morning, and all the Tsingtao I can carry up the stairs.”
“Half of that sounds okay.”
“And you? You’ve been doing good?”
She didn’t answer right away. She sped up, to catch a yellow light before it turned. The car whispered along. Heavy as a battle cruiser, but quiet as the fog.
“Most nights, I wake up around now. Three, four in the morning. I hear his key in the lock and pretend I’m still asleep. That way we don’t have to talk. And I don’t have to think.”
“They’ve got pills for that,” I said.
“I take most of them.”
“That’s good.”
We didn’t have anything to say after that. I’d thought about this moment a thousand times, but I’d never imagined she’d say what she did. Or that hearing it would leave me so cold. I should have been triumphant, but I felt smaller than ever.
In five minutes, she stopped across the street from my garage. I got out and leaned down to look at her. She looked back. Neither of us had anything to say. The Beast was two stories beneath us. Juliette’s blanket was still in the trunk. We could reach any of a dozen coves on Highway 1 before sunrise. So I imagined what it might be like if I got back in the Bentley. If I ran my fingertip along the fine line between Juliette’s ear and her Botticelli chin. But I didn’t do anything to find out. I just shut the door and went across the street. At some point, she must have driven off. The car was too quiet to hear, and I never looked back to check.
I stood behind the Beast and contemplated her. The garage’s well-spaced lights gave a low hum.
If Inspector Chang posted men to watch her and wait for me, then he hadn’t gotten a warrant to plant a tracking device. He was a by-the-book guy. As clean as you could be and still rise in the SFPD ranks. So I was safe from him.
I couldn’t feel so sure about Agent White, who must have been the second man to come at Juliette. He was nowhere close to clean. If he’d known where to find my car, and if he’d had anything to do with Boston, then a planted GPS transceiver was the least of my worries. Considering the damage I’d done to the Lorca case, a block of plastic explosive wired to the ignition wasn’t beyond the imagination. But White hadn’t gotten anything out of Juliette about my parking space. So maybe the car was safe.
I took out my keys, unlocked the door, and sat down. To drive the car meant that I was trusting Juliette. Either I believed what she said about White, or I had no business using the car. I’d had six years to contemplate her trustworthiness, and had a pretty well-settled opinion on the matter. But tonight, the ground was shifting. She hadn’t apologized, but she might have, if I’d stuck around long enough. She might have done a lot of things if I’d stayed in her car. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted to pull that thread. So I hit the ignition and pumped my foot on the gas.
The Beast roared to life. There was no explosion. I backed out of my spot and headed up the ramps toward the street.
I took a roundabout route to Baker Street, driving through the park and across the bridge, then sitting awhile in the first pull-off, the city just an orange blur beneath the fog that smoothed out the hills. I crossed over again, parked on Chestnut Street, and walked back to Baker. When I finished climbing the hill, I could see the delivery van parked at the top. A good sp
ot—they could survey the whole block. I pulled out my burner and called.
“What’s up?” Jeremiah said. “That you, down at the corner?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s still inside. Three hours ago, she went upstairs. I saw her in the window. An hour ago it was lights out.”
“Okay.”
“You good, or should I stay?”
“I’m good.”
“All right.”
I hung up, then went up to the house and unlocked the door. I took off my shoes and walked around the entry level without turning on any lights. She’d had another bowl of ramen noodles. She’d found a bottle of wine but hadn’t drunk much of it. The basement and garden doors were both locked. I went upstairs. Her bedroom door was open. I looked in and saw her beneath the covers. She was asleep on her side, facing me. There was a nightlight, low down, beneath the bedside table. I waited for my eyes to adjust, waited until I could see the slow rise and fall of her rib cage. Her hair was spread across the pillow as if, in the violent reaction to a dream, she had jerked her head forward.
Perhaps she’d been falling. Standing on the balustrade of a Tenderloin rooftop, unsteady in her black heels. And then a step off the edge. The city inverting itself as she somersaulted, the raindrops coming to a standstill as her velocity matched theirs.
“Lee?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hi.”
“How long have you been there?”
“Not long,” I said. “I was just checking. Making sure you’re okay.”
“What time is it?”
“Four thirty.”
“You just got back?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll get up,” she said. “Give me a minute?”
“Keep sleeping,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
I closed the door, then went upstairs.
I was too wired to sleep, and I hadn’t properly searched Claire’s study. Better to do that without Madeleine watching over my shoulder. And better to keep my hands and eyes busy so that I wouldn’t start thinking about White, and the man in Boston, and my missing safe. Or, for that matter, Juliette Vilatte, and how she’d waited across the street from my office, freshly showered and lightly perfumed, at three in the morning. Better not to think of any of that at all.
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