There was no mention of him testifying.
The name Nicholas Linstad did not appear anywhere.
Turning my attention to Linstad, I found nothing, not even an obit or death notice.
That was as much as I could learn from the comfort of home. I shut my computer and went out for a run.
When it comes to the gentrification of Oakland, Lake Merritt is old news. Nestled in the northern half of the city, bounded by water and freeways, it lies apart from the truly mean streets, steadily absorbing the drip of wealth that filters down through the tony bedrock of Elmwood, Piedmont, Montclair. I’ve lived here long enough to witness the change, liquor stores evolving into purveyors of small-batch bitters.
Rough edges remain. Hand-grind spices and pour-over coffee and letterpress all you want. That dude by the off-ramp, with the cardboard sign and the starving Chihuahua in a backpack? He’s still on meth.
That day I took my usual route along the lake: down Bellevue, past the bonsai garden, and out toward the boating center, where a group of young, fit white people in ludicrously matching outfits dragged their scull toward water rich with chop. The setting sun did a good job of wiping the world clean. Geese, out in full force, honked obnoxious taunts. For decades they’d used the park as a migratory way station. They’d drop in for a few weeks, like ill-mannered relatives, before taking off for points south. In recent years, it had occurred to them that they liked it here just fine. Maybe they could take the pulse of the real estate market. Installing themselves on a permanent basis, they’ve gobbled up territory, dropping their waste indiscriminately, so that now the lawns consist of more slime than grass. Even for a neighborhood latecomer like me, it’s hard not to view them as a metaphor.
The breeze brought a tinkle of bells from Children’s Fairyland.
I jogged along, keeping an open mind.
When, precisely, had Donna Zhao’s killer been released from prison?
Where was he now?
Distracted, I strayed to the edge of the path. From my right came a rusty shriek and a blitz of dirty brown.
“Dammit.”
I sidestepped the charging goose, leaving it snapping at the air.
Reaching Broadway, I hopped from foot to foot, waiting for the light to change.
I had other questions, too: about the accidental death of Nicholas Linstad, and the lawsuit, and Walter Rennert’s experiment gone wrong. About Tatiana.
The WALK sign lit up. I put my head down and barreled into the wind to make it feel like I was going fast. With any luck I could catch the mushroom girl before she left.
—
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Sergeant Vitti lumbered into the squad room. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.”
I minimized a window and swiveled around to accept his congratulations.
“Two weeks running,” Vitti said, pumping my arm. “Get this man a frickin cookie.”
“All gone,” Carmen Woolsey said.
“Get this man a cruller.”
Sully tossed a mini-packet of M&M’s on my desk.
“Good enough,” Vitti said. He thrust an imaginary microphone in my face. “Coach. Hey, Coach. Coach. What’s the secret to your success?”
I said, “At the present time I can’t reveal that information.”
Vitti chortled. “Lookit Bill Belichick here.”
A hail of boos.
“Don’t hate on excellence,” Vitti said. He grinned, grabbed my shoulders, and massaged them aggressively. He was a shoulder-kneader, the sergeant. “I’m coming for you this week. You know that, right? How’s that make you feel, Coach?”
“At the present time I can’t reveal that information.”
Vitti squeezed my chin, patted my cheek, and lumbered away, announcing as he went that rosters had to be in no later than five tomorrow, for five thirty kickoff.
Shupfer cast her eyes heavenward: Have mercy.
I watched Vitti disappear into his office, then reopened CME.
—
ACCORDING TO OUR system, Nicholas Linstad was a divorced white male, age forty-two.
His next of kin was his father, Herman Linstad, residing in Gottenborg, Sweden.
He had died on December 2, 2005, of an acute cerebral hemorrhage resulting from blunt trauma to the head.
The manner of death was accidental.
The coroner’s investigator was M. Ming.
I knew Ming in passing. One of the last civilian CIs, he’d retired long ago but was known to drop by the office every now and again. He and Shupfer were close. The M stood for Marlborough.
I emailed document storage.
Twenty-four hours later, a box arrived containing Linstad’s file, along with several dozen others. His was comparatively thick, containing the full autopsy protocol, a handful of photos, and portions of the Berkeley police report.
Paging through, I noted a number of superficial similarities to the Rennert case.
Linstad lived north of campus, on the upper floor of a duplex, the bottom half of which served as his office. An exterior staircase offered direct access to the living quarters. It was at the foot of these stairs that the body had been found, by the mail carrier, circa nine thirty a.m. In his narrative, Ming recorded intermittent rain on the preceding day, increasing throughout the night. Linstad’s hair and clothing were soaked. The wooden banister on the second-floor landing was rickety, and the door to the upstairs unit was slightly ajar. The interior showed some disorder but no definitive sign of a struggle. There were few furnishings and almost no clutter, which made it hard to tell. A single wineglass on the coffee table; another in the sink; a half-empty wine bottle sat on the counter, a second empty in the trash.
If you wanted to see similarities, you had to see differences, too.
Whereas Rennert’s body showed no cuts or abrasions, Linstad’s bore the hallmarks of a fall. Attempting to arrest his descent, he’d made a desperate grab at the duplex’s wooden siding, leaving deep gouges in the shingles, collecting splinters under his fingernails; tearing the right middle fingernail halfway off. Bruises ran down his spine; a long thin bruise marred his right flank, the likely result of slamming against the edge of a stair tread. Scrapes covered his knuckles, and there was blood on and around the bottommost steps, in enough quantity that it hadn’t washed away overnight. The pathologist concluded that the major trauma came from Linstad’s head hitting the pavement, rather than from an object. Toxicology gave a blood alcohol level of .11.
The parallels I did see were better explained as coincidental. Linstad and Rennert both drank. So what? Booze is a versatile killer—death’s utility player. Some people drink enough to weaken their aortas. Others drink and fall down the stairs.
Look for connections and you can find them anywhere.
Linstad lived in a duplex. Aha! So did Tatiana.
See? Hot garbage.
A statement taken by Berkeley PD heightened my interest somewhat. A rear neighbor claimed he’d heard the sound of an argument, followed by a loud bang—possibly a gunshot—around midnight.
Canvass failed to corroborate him, however, and when pressed, the guy admitted he couldn’t be sure the noise hadn’t been a thunderclap or that it hadn’t come from a television. There was, it appeared, no follow-up.
Nobody—not us, not police—mentioned the offender from the Donna Zhao murder. Either they hadn’t known about him or they regarded his involvement as so unlikely as to not merit a phone call.
Yet despite all this, Coroner’s Investigator Ming, in his initial finding, had mannered the death undetermined.
I could sense his discomfort radiating off the page. Undetermineds don’t sit well with anyone, especially next of kin. We make every effort to avoid them, convening monthly to hash them out in a group session, along with Vitti and our lieutenant. Most of the time we can arrive at a determination, just as Ming and Co. eventually had.
The death of Nicholas Linstad became an accident.
What had made Ming doubt?
I asked Shupfer if she had his phone number handy.
“I got an old case of his,” I said.
She gave me her stare-down, then scribbled on a Post-it. “Here you go, princess.”
Before I could dial, my desk phone rang.
“Coroner’s Bureau, Deputy Edison.”
“Ahhh, yes, hello there.”
“How’s it going, Mr. Afton.”
“It’s going all right, thank you, yeah. Listen, I wanted to tell you that I am ready to go ahead with the arrangements for the burial that we discussed earlier.”
“County indigent,” I said.
“Hahhhuhh…? No sir, I did not mean that, I don’t mean that.”
“You found a relative?”
“Yes sir. Well no, not that, but I spoke to the man at the place where they got him at, and originally they said it was going to cost eleven hundred dollars but the man said he can do it for five.”
The mortuary getting rid of the body, even at a loss. Chalk one up for pigheadedness. Though by Afton’s own account, five hundred was still more than he could afford.
He beat me to it: “As a matter of fact and to tell you the truth I do not have that amount in my possession currently, but I am expecting to have it sometime next week.”
“Right.”
“So what I would like from you, sir, is to inform you of that fact, so that we can keep the situation in a holding pattern, okay, a little while longer until this other situation comes through and I can get me paid.”
“Next week?”
“Yes sir.”
“Okay. You’re sure about this?”
“Ahhha, yes, yes I am.”
“All right.”
“All right all right. So I’ll talk to you next week, then.”
“No need. You can just handle it with the folks at the mortuary.”
“Yes sir. I will do that. You take care now.”
“You, too, Mr. Afton.”
I replaced the phone. Studied the Post-it with Ming’s number, unsure whether to call.
Moffett decided for me. “Yo, Coach. Ten fifty-five Alameda, we’re up.”
I stuck the Post-it to the bottom of my screen and reached for my vest.
CHAPTER 11
Two weeks later, I hadn’t heard from Afton or the mortuary, which I took as a good sign. I also hadn’t heard from Tatiana, which I chose to regard as not a sign of anything. I still had the Post-it stuck to my screen, but it had drifted to the margins of my awareness.
On a slow Saturday morning, I opened my queue to begin closing out cases.
Click a name, confirm everything’s square, send it sailing into history.
I came to RENNERT, WALTER J.
The autopsy protocol had come in the previous day.
I didn’t need to read it. I knew what it said. Everything was square.
I moved my cursor to SUBMIT.
The Post-it seemed to light up.
I pulled it loose. Stared at it. Called Ming.
Got voicemail.
I hung up without leaving a message and put the Post-it in the trash.
The cursor sat, ready and willing to flush Rennert Walter J. and Rennert-Delavigne Tatiana Middle-initial-something from my system.
I couldn’t tell her the story she wanted to hear, but I might yet convince her I’d kept an open mind.
I clicked the supplementary tab and opened Rennert’s cellphone data dump.
—
IN THE WEEK leading up to Walter Rennert’s aortic dissection, he’d used his browser sparingly. He read CNN and BBC. He searched Southwest flights from Oakland to Reno. He shopped for a new showerhead, probably to replace the leaky one in his attic quarters. He visited the homepage for the California Psychological Association, following many of the links. He’d abandoned his position but not his passion.
His email was mostly spam. One came from a Charles Rennert—Tatiana’s brother Charlie. The REPLY-TO field indicated that he worked for an NGO. He wrote testily that he was still waiting to hear back about using the Tahoe house. He needed an answer from his father by the end of the week, so he could tell Jenna whether to enroll the kids in winter camp or not. So far as I could tell, Rennert had never gotten the chance to write back.
The calendar had him playing tennis on Monday, Wednesday, and—significantly—Friday at noon. The pathologist had placed Rennert’s time of death between eight o’clock that night and two o’clock Saturday morning. I could call the tennis club, find out who he played with. Maybe that final game had been extra hardcore. Although if Gerald Clark was to be believed, Rennert played only one way.
For most of that week, he’d made or received fewer than a dozen phone calls. A dry cleaner; Citibank customer service; the pharmacy where he got his Risperdal. A handful of calls to his daughter. True to her word, she had phoned him on Friday at ten twenty-one a.m., a call lasting about four minutes.
Anything special for brunch, Dad?
Then the pattern changed.
Around three thirty p.m., Rennert began dialing an East Bay number. The calls were short, and there were a lot of them—eighteen, in fact, lasting thirty or forty seconds apiece, as though he couldn’t get through but refused to give up. They started out at fifteen-minute intervals, but by five o’clock he was retrying every few minutes.
Whoever he’d been calling was quite likely the last person to speak to him. Assuming they had spoken.
I reverse-searched the number. It belonged to the Claremont Hotel, adjacent to the club where Rennert played tennis and a five-minute walk from his house.
If he needed to reach someone that badly, why hadn’t he just gone over in person?
Maybe he had.
I called the front desk, identified myself, asked about the extension, and learned it belonged to room four fifteen. I asked who’d occupied it last September 8 and was told that information was private.
“Who’m I speaking to?”
“My name is Emilio.”
“Listen, Emilio, do me a favor and put your manager on?”
Dead air, then he came back. “I asked her, sir. She’s very clear that we can’t disclose that. Was there anything else I could help you with?”
I quashed the urge to point out that he had not helped me overly much. I said, “All right, Emilio. I’ll be seeing you later.”
“Yes sir.” Then: “Sorry, what?”
I hung up.
—
I WENT TO the Claremont that evening after work. Parking on the street to avoid a sixteen-dollar valet charge, I hiked up Tunnel Road on foot, passing Rennert’s tennis club to reach the minty glow of a marquee welcoming guests of the Lamorinda Women’s Book Society Autumn Cotillion.
The creamy tiers of the hotel rose tilting from the hillside, out of scale and lost in time, like some elderly politician who will not die. I’d been inside, years ago, for a Cal donor event, where I was trotted out and made to pose for photos with the boosters. Hometown hero, full-court general, savior. Folks had faith in me, back then. Maybe they thought they’d be getting a collector’s item, something with eBay value or at least worthy of a place on the den wall, next to their old-timey yellow-and-blue pennants.
The lobby had since been spruced up with jewel tones and aluminum tubing. In the main ballroom, the dance was in full swing. Teenage girls in ball gowns and boys in slouchy suits spilled into the lobby, gabbing and taking pictures.
At the reception desk, I badged, asked for Emilio.
In short order I was sitting in a back office across the desk from Emilio’s boss, Cassandra Spitz.
“You understand I can’t just tell you that,” she said.
“I wouldn’t ask unless it was important,” I said.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t. But you don’t stay in business for a hundred years by giving out the names of your guests.”
“Nice job with the remodel, by the way.”
She grinned. She appeared to be enjoying the diversion from her usual workweek dr
udgery. “Thank you, Deputy. I can tell you that we had a variety of events taking place that weekend. You could try asking me about those in broad terms.”
“I’m asking.”
She typed, read from her screen. “Let’s see…There was the Ellis-MacDonald wedding in the Empire Ballroom, on Saturday. Cocktails for the Berkeley Public Library Foundation, Sunday evening in the Sonoma.”
“What about earlier in the week?”
“Wednesday through Saturday, we hosted the annual meeting of the California Psychological Association.”
I said, “The guest in room four fifteen was here for that.”
“I couldn’t say.”
I showed her a photo of Rennert. “What about him?”
Her smile vanished.
“Was he part of the conference?” I asked.
“No.”
“He was here, though.”
She stared warily at the photo. “This gentleman—I’m sorry, I don’t know his name.”
“Walter Rennert.”
“Mr. Rennert came to the hotel and requested to speak to one of the guests.”
“The individual in room four fifteen. Doctor…”
She smiled. Nice try.
I smiled. “When was this?”
“Friday evening. Around six thirty.”
That fit with the phone log. He’d run out of patience. “Can I see the CCTV?”
“We only keep the last ten days.”
“Okay. Rennert shows up and asks to speak to an individual, who may or may not be the individual from room four fifteen, who may or may not have been here for the conference. Did he say what he wanted to see this person about?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Our staff offered to deliver a message to the guest. Mr. Rennert got extremely agitated and began demanding to know the guest’s room number. I came out to try and resolve the situation. I could tell he was intoxicated.”
That fit, too. “Were you aware that he’d been trying to call the guest?”
“Not right then. Later one of the desk clerks told me she’d patched him through earlier in the day.”
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