“I’ve been a little busy,” Aloa said.
“So I’ve seen,” he said. “Nice work on the series, by the way.”
“Thanks. The scotch was good too.”
Aloa had come home on the day her series about the runner’s death had launched to find a bottle of Glenlivet and Quinn’s business card on her porch.
Quinn shrugged.
“And nice job on that honeymoon murder,” Aloa said.
The shooting deaths of a young couple on their honeymoon five weeks earlier had shaken the city—until detectives under Quinn’s supervision discovered the killer was the bride’s ex-boyfriend, who had followed the couple from their home in Modesto and gunned them down as they settled in for brunch on the first morning of their married life.
“Just doing my job,” Quinn said.
“And the evidence is good?”
“We think so.” Quinn leaned back in his chair, which gave a loud squeak. “But I’m guessing you didn’t come here just to tell me how great I am.”
Aloa smiled. “And everybody says what a lousy detective you are.”
He shook his head. “So what’s up?” he asked.
“I was wondering what you can tell me about the death of Corrine Davenport, the FBI interrogator’s wife. One of your guys caught the case, right?”
Quinn gave a slight nod.
“The Times said you have a person of interest.”
“So?”
“So I’m doing a little digging. To see if there’s something there.”
“Nothing’s been released,” Quinn said.
“I heard the guy you’re talking to teaches poetry at a junior college,” Aloa countered. Tick had given her the information about his son yesterday.
“Maybe,” Quinn said.
“Is there any connection to the husband? Cases he worked on?”
“Not that we could find.”
“And what about the Facebook guy?”
Quinn frowned.
“The one your victim blocked six weeks ago. The guy who was threatening her? I found it this morning while I was doing a little research on her.”
Quinn leaned forward, his chair protesting with a high squeal.
“Apparently, he’d read a poem of hers in some magazine and decided she was a man-hater,” Aloa said. “The comments were pretty nasty.”
Quinn reached for a folder in front of him and flipped quickly through the pages.
“His name is Jeremy Green,” Aloa said. “He lives an hour’s drive from here.”
After finding the ugly remarks, she’d traced them to an artist who’d started a group called Men4Meny, which asserted that men’s rights were being stolen from them by a culture that gave women too much power. “He’s got at least two restraining orders against him.”
“Shit. How’d we—” Quinn began.
“You’re welcome,” Aloa said. “Now will you let me see the report?”
His eyes met hers. “You know I can’t.”
“I wouldn’t say where I got it.”
“It’s an ongoing investigation.”
Now came the tricky step in the always wary dance between reporters and police. “If I find anything interesting, I’ll let you know.”
He waited half a beat, rubbed his chin, and seemed to make a decision. “There’s a press release. That’s all I can give you,” he said.
“Really?” Aloa said. “That’s it?”
He stood, his chair giving another cry of protest.
“I’ve got an appointment. I have to leave,” he said. “I trust you can see yourself out.”
“I can,” she said.
“Good.” He grabbed his suit coat from a hook on the wall and left the room. Aloa watched him disappear, then got up and closed the door quietly behind him. She went back to the desk, dug her Moleskine notebook out of her pack, and reached for the folder Quinn had left behind.
She didn’t have much time.
The photo of the victim clipped to one side of the folder made Aloa feel sick. Taken from one end of an otherwise serene-looking living room, the shot showed a woman lying on her side. She wore high heels and a pale-peach wrap dress that had fallen partially open to show an angry wound to her abdomen. It was a jagged cut that looked like the knife had gone in, then been jerked across her belly, causing part of her intestines to leak out. Another wound was on her neck and had spilled a river of blood down her throat and onto the floor. The woman’s brown eyes were vacant, her lips pulled back in a Halloween-mask grimace. A dark trail behind her told of an attempt to claw her way across the hardwood floor after her injury. Aloa could only imagine how painful and frightening the woman’s death must have been. She quickly folded back the cover with the awful photo and began to read.
The reports told a story that wasn’t too different from what she’d unearthed so far. The wife had put her husband, Christian Davenport, to bed at 10:00 p.m., a ritual of lifting, turning, dressing, and catheter care that took thirty minutes. At 10:46 p.m. (Davenport had looked at the digital clock near his bed), the FBI interrogator heard a loud knock on the door. That was followed by a muffled male voice and his wife’s reply, but he couldn’t make out the words. He guessed the male was there for about five minutes when he’d heard his wife suddenly cry out, then a thump as if someone had fallen. He’d shouted his wife’s name, heard rapid footsteps, and the front door slam. He’d cried for help for five hours until he’d fallen into an exhausted sleep, and was awakened by a scream from his assistant, who reported for work at 7:00 a.m. Davenport’s time frame was corroborated by an elderly neighbor across the street, who’d said she’d seen a man knocking on the Davenports’ front door about the same time.
Aloa stopped reading, printed the word QUESTIONS at the top of a new page, and began her list. “Neighbors not hear shouts?” “No way to phone for help?”
Someone like Davenport would certainly have had a voice-activated system for calling 911.
She read on.
Under questioning from the detective on the scene, Davenport said anyone significant he’d put in jail was either dead or still behind bars, and while there was a possibility he was the target, it didn’t make sense that he would still be alive. He also said the violence of his wife’s death pointed to something more personal.
Aloa had covered enough murder cases to agree.
Davenport had then asked if he and the detective could speak alone. The investigator had cleared the room, and Davenport had hesitated, seemed to gather his resolve, and finally told the detective that there might be another reason Corrine had been killed: two weeks before she died, Corrine had come to him and tearfully confessed to having an affair with the teacher of a poetry class she was taking.
According to the report, the wife had told her husband she’d been driven by the need for sex, for human touch. But that the guilt of what she’d been doing for the last six months had gotten to her, and she’d broken off the relationship with the teacher. The professor, however, had not taken the news well. Twice he’d followed her to her car, begging her to come back to him. She finally threatened to tell college administrators about the affair if he didn’t leave her alone.
The cops had contacted the teacher, Burns Hamlin, who was Tick’s son. He admitted there was a flirtation between him and the wife and there’d been a couple of meetings outside of class, but there’d been nothing physical, nothing even close to an affair. The wife, he said, must have imagined there was more between them. At that point, the detective had read him a number of texts from the wife’s phone, which seemed to indicate more than a flirtation. Hamlin had called the texts poetic license and said the wife’s increasing neediness had prompted him—not her—to say they could no longer communicate outside of class. He insisted he was innocent but, unfortunately, did not have an alibi for the night Corrine Davenport had died.
Aloa jotted down Burns Hamlin’s address—he’d apparently taken his stepfather’s last name—and scanned through the evidence and the medical
examiner’s report. The wife was described as being of Asian heritage, five feet five, 126 pounds, with a tattoo of two skeletal fingers in a peace sign to the left of her pubic bone. The examiner listed her age as forty-nine years and four months, noted her muscle tone was consistent with a much younger woman, and described a penetrating wound to her abdomen, along with a second wound to her jugular, which had caused her to bleed out rather quickly. He estimated the assailant had been standing slightly behind Corrine Davenport when the first slicing wound was delivered. The second was made from the side of the victim, a lacerating wound from left to right.
The dead woman was found in a corner of the living room near the kitchen, her body facing north and her face turned toward the east. The weapon was consistent with a ten-inch boning knife, but it was nowhere to be found, and the fact she still wore her diamond wedding ring and an expensive watch seemed to rule out a home-invasion robbery. Her last meal had consisted of a soba noodle salad consumed four hours before she died.
There were no bloody footprints and few fingerprints besides that of the wife and her husband’s assistant, Kyle Williams, age twenty-eight, who, according to his roommate, was at home when the killing happened.
Aloa made a few more notes, took one last look at the victim’s photo, and set the folder carefully back in the middle of Quinn’s desk where he had left it.
Aloa slipped the motorbike between two parked cars and looked up at the two-story Italianate row house located in the Mission District of San Francisco. It was set back on a sloping lot and painted a dark shade of gray, saved from resembling a skinny box by a three-sided cupola and decorative brackets that supported the eaves. A quick records search had showed Hamlin bought the house two years earlier for $1.6 million. A junior college professor with Ivy League resources, Aloa thought as she climbed the steps to the house’s porch and knocked on Burns Hamlin’s door.
The morning’s cold fog seemed to have intensified, blurring the edges of buildings and swallowing pedestrians on the street twenty-five feet away. She watched a bundled jogger run past and saw a pigeon flutter onto a window ledge next door. She knocked again and this time heard a clump of footsteps.
“What?” demanded the man who answered the door. He was about six feet in height with serious eyes, a sensuous mouth, and a nose that took up a little too much of his face. His hair was fashionably shaggy, and he was dressed in black with dark Converse sneakers. A Burberry scarf was wrapped around his neck.
Aloa gave him what she hoped was a winning smile. “Hi, my name’s Aloa Snow,” she said. “I’m a journalist and a friend of your father.”
The sun creases around the professor’s eyes deepened. “That would be two reasons for me to ask you to leave,” he said and began to close the door.
“Wait,” Aloa said, taking a step forward. “I think you might want to hear what I have to say. I’ve found something. Something that might help you in your situation.”
The door paused in its swing.
“There may be someone else. Another suspect,” Aloa said. She waited.
The professor looked up and down the street. “Who is it?” he asked.
“Maybe we should take this inside.” She cocked her head toward the neighboring house where an anxious yellow lab on a leash was tugging its female owner out the front door.
Hamlin made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a hiss. “All right. Come on, then,” he said and turned, leaving Aloa standing on the front steps. So much for manners.
Aloa followed him up a flight of stairs into a high-ceilinged living room with a whitewashed brick fireplace and chocolate-colored hardwood floors. The view out the window was of a well-kept neighborhood lined with handsome trees. The view inside was of a bachelor pad, with a tan leather couch, a glass coffee table, and a decorating style somewhere between early flea market and late secondhand store.
The professor turned and folded his arms across his chest. “Well, who is it?” he said.
“Shall we sit?” Aloa asked, settling on the couch. It was a subtle message that she wasn’t there to threaten him.
Hamlin remained standing. “This whole thing is a witch hunt, you know.”
“That’s what your dad said. Unfortunately, some of the evidence seems pretty hard to ignore.”
Hamlin’s eyes narrowed. “Those texts don’t prove anything.”
Unless your address is in the state of denial, Aloa thought. She’d skimmed the printout in Quinn’s folder of the messages between the wife and her teacher. They were filled with declarations like, “I’m counting the minutes until I see you. Cloud Bar at 1,” and “Your touch is the sun and the moon to me.”
“Then you two weren’t sleeping together?”
“No.”
“It was just a flirtation?”
“That’s right,” Hamlin said as his phone rang. He snatched it from the table and examined the caller ID. “I’ve got to take this,” he said and stomped from the room.
She heard a door close down the long hallway next to the open kitchen and pulled her Moleskine and a pen from her pack. She examined the room. A pile of books was stacked on a dusty treadmill, and a tumble of Chinese takeout boxes was on the kitchen counter. Not a cook, or an exerciser apparently. On the floor was a Persian rug (expensive) and above the fireplace was an oil painting done by a famous landscape artist (also expensive). Hamlin obviously had some source of extra income.
She turned to the mess of papers and books on the table in front of her and hesitated only a moment before she leaned forward and lifted the first piece of paper: a PG&E bill for $302. The place obviously needed some insulation. She glanced toward the hallway. Underneath the bill was a subscription notice for The New Yorker magazine and an appointment summary from an ear, nose, and throat doctor indicating Hamlin suffered from a dust allergy. The next sheet of paper was a $175 receipt for an Airbnb rental in Monterey for December 15 of last year. She noted the date and address in her Moleskine and lifted another page from the pile.
“Dear Burns,” read the printed email from something called the Midland Review magazine. “Please review the attached page proof of your poem. Any changes should be made and mailed to our office before Jan. 30. And, again, congratulations on your selection for our March issue. Best, Pam.”
“To See,” read the title of the poem. Beside it was a scribbled note in red ink. “No! No!!!” it read. “‘To Sea.’ What’s wrong with you?”
Aloa wondered if the professor’s critique style extended to his students’ papers.
She gave one more glance down the hallway and began to read. The poem described a cold ocean day, a clandestine swim between two lovers, and a reflection on the power of undertows. But what stopped Aloa was the next to last stanza of the piece.
She looked up at the sound of footsteps.
Hamlin was halfway down the hall. “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“Reading your poem,” Aloa said, keeping her voice even. “It’s good.”
“Leave my stuff alone.”
“There’s just one problem with it.”
Hamlin stopped. Frowned.
“Maybe you can spot it too.”
Aloa had grown up under the tutelage of her naturalist father, who had taught her how to see the details that told the stories of animals and birds. The upward turn of a mourning dove’s head and the tensing of its body told a tale of a hawk on a determined hunt for her dinner. A flashing of colors on a male red-winged blackbird as he sang spoke of his confidence that this patch of marsh was his.
Aloa began to read: “I saw her then / cold, shaking / skeletal fingers / touching my lover’s skin.”
“So?” Hamlin said.
“So Corrine Davenport had a tattoo of skeleton fingers,” Aloa said. “And on a place that I’m guessing only someone who’d been intimate with her would know about.”
“Jesus,” snapped Hamlin. “Give me that.” He snatched the poem from her hand.
“Lying to me won’t get yo
u thrown in jail, Professor, but lying to the police will.”
Hamlin’s left eyelid twitched.
“Sit down, please,” Aloa said. “Let’s talk.”
“Why should I?” Hamlin said.
“Because I might be able to help you.”
It took fifteen more minutes of persuasion, but eventually parts of the story spilled out: the class field trip to a poetry reading, an invitation to his most promising student to get a glass of wine, talk of her self-publishing a chapbook, conversations about poetry and trips to Spain and Italy.
“She was sharp. One of the best writers I’ve had in a long time. And her body? Jesus Christ, she swam two miles a day. You could hardly believe she was almost fifty.”
Aloa swallowed the urge to swat down his sexist and ageist comments.
“She told me her husband was disabled and that he couldn’t satisfy her anymore. All those years without anything? No wonder she was kind of messed up.” He looked down at his hands. The fingers were long and well shaped. Just like Tick’s, Aloa thought. “But we both knew it wouldn’t go anywhere. It was just sex. Then she said she was starting to fall in love with me. She wanted us to be exclusive. I told her I couldn’t do that; I wouldn’t do that. I told her I didn’t love her, and I broke it off with her.”
He’d already lied once about their relationship. Was this another one?
The wife, he said, had then threatened him, hinting that she would tell the administration he’d slept with a student unless he took her back.
“I’ll bet that made you angry.” Aloa watched him.
“Not enough to kill her.”
“Did you ever say anything threatening to her? Or follow her?”
“Who said that?”
Aloa didn’t answer. “What about an alibi for the night she died?”
The muscles in his jaw tightened. “What about the thing you said on my porch? That there was another suspect?”
The Thin Edge Page 2