Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  But it was a smile of victory. I wondered how long he waited for just the right moment. Chess players are patient planners. And this was one well-thought-out murder. Ellen had thrown the pebble in the water; the ripples had splashed on Dan, and on Karl. It must have taken her years to realize that she’d been drenched too.

  Victory meant in death Ellen would receive as little notice as Dan had. In Berkeley, where we have twenty or fewer murders a year, each one gets noticed. It’s hard to murder a woman and have no one eulogize her. But Pironnen had set up this one so everyone, including Bryn, focused on Bryn. He’d made it seem as if Ellen Waller was just the pawn in Bryn’s place.

  We reached the road before Bryn demanded, “This cabin is my hideaway. I bought land as inconvenient as I could get, so I wouldn’t have people dropping in, and then you …” Her voice trailed off as she must have realized the irony of her first visitor. “How the hell did you find it?”

  “Ellen looked in your papers for me. Once I understood her game, I knew she wouldn’t chance refusing me.”

  I pulled over at a phone booth and called the sheriff. In twenty minutes the medics took Bryn and the sheriff guided Pironnen into the back of his car.

  To me the sheriff said, “We’ll get animal control for the dog.”

  “No!” Karl Pironnen’s scream filled the air. “Pablo, no.” Palms against the window, eyes fathomless with grief, he stared not at the sheriff, or even at the dog, but at me. “They’ll kill him. No. Don’t let them. Please!”

  An eye for an eye? I thought of Ellen and how much she’d risked to recapture her name, her life. Too much. Once you lose hold of who you are, you never get it back. I shook off the thought, rested my hand on the dog’s back. “I’ll find him a home, Karl.”

  Chapter 29

  “YOU COULD HAVE BEEN in a lot of trouble,” Howard said as we sat on the sofa in the living room.

  “So Eggs told me, and Jackson, and Pereira just about fell off the desk confiding that bit of information. All before Doyle called me into his office and just about sent me to my room without dinner.”

  It was now three in the morning on Friday. Between the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department and our department the aftermath of the case had taken well into Wednesday morning. I’d missed the Wednesday patrol shift altogether, leaving the team short. Howard had arrived home sometime Wednesday night when the end of the world wouldn’t have woken me. And when I finally did drag myself out of bed Thursday afternoon, I barely had time to get to team meeting at 4 P.M.

  I don’t know what I had expected when I got to the station. Everything was, of course, the same. And yet it was different, as if the colors were slightly off, or the wall and the tables against it were not metal and masonry but made of something very different. Or maybe it was all the same and it was me that wasn’t quite all there under my uniform. I had trusted Ott and withheld information from Brucker. I had endangered my life and that of a witness to protect a murderer from a fellow police officer. But the case was closed, the media happy, and no one was on my back.

  It’s a myth about walking through the sand and leaving no footprints. There might be hints of prints in Doyle’s view of me, and Chief Larkin’s. And Brucker wasn’t likely to forget. Since this high-profile collar wouldn’t go on his record, he wouldn’t be as choice material for Sacramento. There were footprints, indeed, and they traipsed over me. I had cared too much about Karl Pironnen. Police officers have to trust each other; they have to mesh into a team, interdependent to the death. I knew now that I could pull my weight, do my share, protect my buddies. But there would never be a point when I would take an order automatically. And if I were asked tomorrow to give Pironnen to Brucker, I wouldn’t do it. Ott, of course, would understand. And Murakawa and Leonard and Pereira. And, I expected, in the privacy of his home, Inspector Doyle might, too. No one would admit it publicly. But that’s why we worked in the city that resented authority and spent a year considering whether it was legal or fair to prevent people lying on the sidewalk or walking nude down Telegraph Avenue. I was glad to be with this department. The room hadn’t changed; it was still solid. It was I who had become more porous.

  Now a fire worthy of Brian Boru, the Celtic king, crackled, and leapt wildly in the great hearth. Smoke rejected by the inadequate flue seasoned the air. On the disc player a guitar and a cello keened, the sound drifting off into the smoke. I nestled back into the sofa cushions and smiled at Howard. He wrapped his long arm around my shoulder, pulled me closer against him. “I didn’t pay enough attention to those cute little ears when they were covered with hair,” he said, and nuzzled one. “And I did think that by the time I got back, you’d have collared my nudist.”

  “Gone. The nudists were just cogs in the wheels of private enterprise.”

  “Very private enterprise.” He laughed. “Maybe someone will sue over Rent-a-Freak. That’d be a show.”

  When he settled back, I grinned at him—in time to see his blue eyes narrow covetously. But his gaze was no longer on me, it was at the wall beside the fireplace, specifically at the cracks and gouges therein.

  “Howard,” I said, reaching for my wineglass, “you’ve gotten off very easy on this bet of ours. You’ve been away from your temptation. Me, on the other hand—well, chocolate didn’t leave town.”

  Howard laughed delightedly. The man really loved to win.

  “But now,” I said, running my finger under the edge of his collar, “you’ve got the whole weekend here.”

  “Hmm. And just what is it you have in mind?” he asked as suspiciously as I’d ever heard him.

  “The month runs another eleven days.”

  He was figuring, I could tell. He was concluding that he was about to lose not one but two weekends of the joy of spackling, the satisfaction of sanding, the pristine pleasure of painting. “So?”

  “So, we’re adults. In our time we’ve made mistakes, done stupid things, misjudged effects. But we are mature adults. Let’s scrap the bet.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “And hit a twenty-four-hour grocery for ice cream, is that what you mean?”

  “No. I can go on without sweets. It’s no big thing.”

  Howard was laughing.

  “No, really. I could shift into fruits, and uh, stuff.”

  He threw his head back and roared. “I was just picturing you whipping up carrots and yams.”

  “Howard, I’ve just single-handedly corralled a murderer. I’m sure I could do whatever it is you do to a yam.” Ignoring his hoots of laughter, I went on. “I could go either way on junk food. But like I said, I’m a sensible adult. Why should I fill my mouth with orange tuber when I could have chocolate? I mean, people have been committed for less than that.”

  Howard’s laugh eased off, but he was still smiling. He lifted the skewer of the last chicken brochette out of the Da Nang Restaurant carton. “You know, Jill, you really are lucky that Doyle likes you. Brucker’s got a lot of ties in Sacramento. The guy is pissed. You could have been in a lot of trouble.”

  “I may have closed another case today.”

  “Changing the subject?”

  “Not totally.”

  “Okay, which case?”

  “Candace Upton.”

  “The one who’s getting the phantom calls from former Presidents?”

  “Right. First thing I got on shift today was another call back for her. By now half of patrol has dealt with her. But I don’t think she’ll be bothering patrol again.”

  “Who will she be after?”

  I leaned back, propped my feet on the coffee table, and took a bite of Howard’s brochette. “Well, Howard, you remember that framed photo Brucker displays so proudly on his office wall? I photocopied it, affixed Brucker’s card, and slipped it under Candace Upton’s door.”

  It took Howard a moment to recall the picture of Brucker shaking the hand of Ronald Reagan.

  A Biography of Susan Dunlap

  Susan Dunlap (b.
1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

  Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

  One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

  After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

  Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

  In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.

  Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”

  Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.

  In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”

  Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”

  Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.

  Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”

  Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”

  For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.

  The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.

  Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to the Berkeley Police Department and particularly Sergeant Steve Odom, Brenda Logan, and all those who put on the Community/Police Awareness Academy, a fascinating class on how the police department works,

  to Sergeant Kay Lantow, who is always there with help and answers,

  to Officer Teri Rein, for sharing her patrol shift,

  to Sergeant Mike Holland and Albany Officer Karan Alveraz, for always being willing to help,

  and to Officer Abbie Cohen, for her generosity, her insight, and her friendship from beginning to end.

  To Ron Wright, thanks for his tales of chess.

  When writing I am reminded again what a wonderful resource our public libraries are. I have relied on the research librarians at the Berkeley Main Library, and am grateful to Oakland librarian Barbara Bibel for her special efforts.

  And to my superb editor, Jackie Cantor, a writer’s dream.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1996 by Susan Dunlap

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-5053-2

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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