“Thanks,” said Carolee. “Nice of you to say.” Then she turned her back on him.
“I’m Dennis Agnew,” he said, pressing on. “Sure, you don’t know me, but listen, we can change all that. Why don’t you girls offer me a seat? Dinner’s on me.”
“Thanks anyway, Dennis,” I said, “but we’re having a nice time on our own. You know. Girls’ night out.”
A frown suddenly crossed the guy’s face, like the lights dimming during a brown-out. A fraction of a second later, his cockiness surged back, as did his beautiful smile.
“You couldn’t be having such a good time. Come on. Even if you’re the kind of girls who don’t like guys, it’s okay with me. It’s just dinner.”
Dennis Agnew was a crazy blend of smooth and crude, but whatever he was up to, I’d had enough of it.
“Hey, Dennis,” I said, fishing my badge out of my handbag and flashing it at him. “I’m a police officer and this conversation is private. Okay?”
I could see the pulse beating in his temple as he tried to strike a face-saving pose.
“You really shouldn’t make snap judgments, Officer. Especially about people you don’t know.”
Agnew walked back to the bar, put down some bills, and gave us a final look.
“You take care, now. I’ll be seeing you around.”
Then he stiff-armed the door that led out to the parking lot.
“Nice work, Lindsay.” Carolee made a cocked gun of her hand and blew imaginary smoke off the end of her finger.
“What a creep,” I said. “Did you see the look on his face? Like he couldn’t believe we were blowing him off. Who does he think he is? George Clooney?”
“Yeah,” said my new friend. “His mom and his mirror have been telling him that he’s irresistible for his whole life.”
Too funny! We laughed hard, clinked glasses. It was great to be with Carolee; I felt that I’d known her for years. Because of her, I stopped thinking about Dennis Agnew, killers and corpses, and even my looming court date.
I lifted my hand and ordered another round of Pete’s Wicked.
Chapter 51
THE SEEKER STASHED HIS new knife under the front seat of his car, then got out and opened the door to the convenience store. He was instantly refreshed by the air conditioning, the soothing sight of the tall, frosty coolers filled with soda and beer.
He was especially gratified to see a small dark-haired woman wearing an expensive Fila tracksuit in line at the checkout counter.
Her name was Annemarie Sarducci, and the Seeker knew that she had just finished her nightly run. She’d buy her bottle of imported spring water, then walk home and have dinner with her family in their home overlooking the bay.
The Seeker already knew a great deal about Annemarie: that she was vain about her size-three, 112-pound figure; that she was screwing her personal trainer; that her son was dealing drugs to his classmates; and that she was insanely jealous of her sister, Juliette, who had a long-running role in a daytime soap filmed down in Los Angeles.
He also knew that she authored a blog under the screen name Twisted Rose. He’d probably been her most attentive reader for months. He’d even signed her “guest book” with his own screen name.
“I like the way you think. The SEEKER.”
The Seeker filled a paper cup with strong black coffee from the urn in the corner of the store, then joined the line behind Mrs. Sarducci. He jostled her a little, brushed her breast as though it were an accident.
“I’m sorry. Oh. Hey, there, Annemarie,” he said.
“Yeah. Hi,” she answered, dismissing him with a bored glance and a nod. She handed a five to the sallow young girl behind the cash register, accepted her change for the bottled water, and left without saying good-bye.
The Seeker watched Annemarie leave the store, wiggling her little ass because it was her habit to do so. In a couple of hours he’d be reading her online diary, all the kinky things she didn’t want people in her real life to know.
See you later, Twisted Rose.
Chapter 52
WHEN CAROLEE CALLED AND asked me to keep Allison for a few hours, I wanted to plead, “Please don’t ask me to babysit.” But Carolee got to me before the words left my mouth.
“Ali misses that pig,” she’d said. “If you’ll let her visit Penelope, she’ll amuse herself and I can get my molar fixed. I’d really appreciate it, Lindsay.”
A half hour later, Allison bounced out of her mom’s minivan and ran up to the front door. Her dark glossy hair was in two bunches, one on either side of her head, and everything she wore, including her sneakers, was pink.
“Hi there, Ali.”
“I brought apples,” she said, pushing past me into the house. “Wait’ll you see.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, faking some enthusiasm.
As soon as I opened the back door, Penelope trotted over to the fence and began grunting a noisy string of squeals and woofles—and Allison squealed and woofled back. Just about the time I thought the neighbors would call the animal warden, Allison grinned at me and said, “That’s what we call Pigese.”
“So I’ve been told,” I said, smiling back at her.
“It’s a real language,” Allison insisted. She raked the pig’s back and Penelope rolled over, assuming her ecstatic, feet-in-the-air stupor. “When Penelope was a piglet, she lived in a big house near the sea with pigs from all over the world,” Ali told me. “She used to sit up all night and talk Pigese with the other pigs and during the day she gave pedicures, called pigatures.”
“Is that right?”
“Pigs are a lot smarter than people think,” Ali confided. “Penelope knows lots of things. More than people would ever realize.”
“I simply had no idea,” I said.
“Look,” Ali continued. “You feed her the apples. I have to paint her nails.”
“Really?”
“It’s what she wants.” With Allison assuring me that it was okay to let the pig onto the back deck, I did what I was told. I held Granny Smith apples so that Penelope could chomp them while Allison chattered to us both and painted the pig’s cloven hooves with pearly pink nail polish.
“All done, Penny.” Ali beamed proudly. “Just let them dry. So,” she said to me. “What can Martha do?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, border collies also have a language. Martha is trained to herd sheep on command.”
“Show me!”
“Do you see any sheep around here?”
“You’re silly.”
“Yes, I am. But you know what I love most about Martha? She keeps me company and she warns me about bad guys or even about things that go bump in the night.”
“And you have a gun, right?” Ali asked with an almost cagey look on her sweet face.
“Yup. I have a gun.”
“Wow. A gun and a dog. You rock, Lindsay. You might be the coolest person I know.”
I finally threw back my head and laughed. Ali was such a cute and imaginative child. I was shocked at how much I liked her and how fast. I’d come to Half Moon Bay to rethink my whole life. Now I was being visited by a vivid fantasy of me, Joe, a home, a little girl.
I was turning this shocking thought around in my mind when Carolee came into the backyard with a lopsided Novocain smile. I couldn’t believe two hours had gone by and I was so, so sorry to see Ali go.
“Come back soon,” I said, hugging her good-bye. “Ali, come back any time.”
Chapter 53
I STOOD ON THE street waving until Carolee’s minivan disappeared around the loop in Sea View Avenue. But when it was gone, a thought that had been circling the periphery of my consciousness parked in my forebrain.
I took my laptop to the living room, settled into a puffy chair, and booted up the NCIC database. Within minutes I learned that Dr. Ben O’Malley, age forty-eight, had been cited for speeding a few times and arrested on a DWI five years before. He had been married and widowed twice.
Wife number one was
Sandra, the mother of their daughter, Caitlin. She’d died inside their two-car garage in 1994, hanged herself. The second Mrs. O’Malley, Lorelei née Breen, murdered yesterday at age thirty-nine, had been arrested for shoplifting in ’98. Fined and released.
I did the same drill on Alice and Jake Daltry, and reams of information scrolled onto my screen. Jake and Alice had been married for eight years and had left twin boys, age six, when they were slaughtered in their yellow house in Crescent Heights. I pictured that cute place with its sliver of bay view, the abandoned basketball, and the child’s sneaker.
Then I focused back on the screen.
Jake had been a bad boy before he married Alice. I clicked down through his rap sheet: soliciting a prostitute and forging his father’s signature on his Social Security checks, for which he served six months, but he’d been clean for the last eight years and had a full-time job working in a pizzeria in town.
Wife Alice, thirty-two, had no record. She’d never even run a light or backed into a car at the supermarket.
Still, she was dead.
So what did this add up to?
I phoned Claire, and she picked up on the first ring. We got right into it.
“Claire, can you dig around for me? I’m looking for some kind of link between the O’Malley murder and those of Alice and Jake Daltry.”
“Sure, Lindsay. I’ll reach out to a few of my colleagues around the state. See what I can find.”
“And also could you look into Sandra O’Malley? Died in 1994, hanged herself.”
We talked for a few more minutes, about Claire’s husband, Edmund, and a sapphire ring he’d given her for their anniversary. And we talked about a little girl named Ali who could channel pigs.
When I hung up the phone, I felt as if I were breathing air of a richer kind. I was about to close down my computer when something caught my eye. When Lorelei O’Malley went to trial for boosting a twenty-dollar pair of earrings, a local lawyer by the name of Robert Hinton had represented her.
I knew Bob Hinton.
His card was still in the pocket of my shorts from the morning he had mowed me down with his ten-speed.
And as I remembered it, the guy owed me a favor.
Chapter 54
BOB HINTON’S OFFICE WAS a shoe box of space on Main Street, nestled between Starbucks and a bank. Taking the chance that he might be in on a Saturday, I pushed open the glass door and saw Bob sitting behind a large wooden desk, his balding scalp bent over the San Francisco Examiner.
He jerked his head up and his arm flew out, knocking over his coffee and spilling it across his newspaper. I saw the picture on the front page just before it became a coffee-sodden mess. It was a close-up of a fair-haired boy in a wheelchair.
Sam Cabot. My own little nightmare.
“Sorry, Bob, I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”
“You have nothing to be s-s-sorry for,” Bob said. He adjusted his pink-framed glasses and pulled some paper napkins out of his desk drawer to blot the spill. “Have a seat. Please.”
“Thank you. I will.”
Bob asked me how I was getting along in Half Moon Bay, and I told him I was managing to keep busy.
“I was just reading about you, Lieutenant,” he said, mopping the front page of the paper with a wad of napkins.
“There are no secrets in a nanosecond world,” I said with a smile. Then I told Bob that I’d become interested in the homicides that were going on a few miles from my door and wondered what he could tell me.
“I knew Lorelei O’Malley,” he said. “Represented her on a case. Got her off with a wrist slap,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “I know Ben only slightly. People are saying he must have had something to do with Lorelei’s death, but I can’t see him killing Caitlin’s stepmother. The child was so traumatized by her real mother’s suicide.”
“Cops always look at the spouse first.”
“Sure. I know. I’ve got friends on the force. I grew up in Half Moon Bay,” he explained, “and I started practicing here right after law school. I like being a small fish in a small pond.”
“You’re too modest, Bob.” I waved my hand, indicating the photos hanging on the walls of Bob shaking hands with the governor and other dignitaries. There were also some neatly framed parchment awards.
“Oh, those,” Bob said, shrugging again. “Well, I do some pro bono work as a guardian ad litem for abused or neglected kids. You know, representing them in court, making sure that their rights are protected.”
“Very commendable,” I said. I was starting to warm up to this very likable guy, and I noticed that he was getting more comfortable with me. He hadn’t stuttered since the coffee incident.
Bob leaned back in his chair and pointed to a photo of an award ceremony in the town hall. Bob shaking hands with someone who was handing him a plaque.
“See this guy?” he asked, indicating a dapper man sitting with a line of others on the stage. “Ray Whittaker. He and his wife, Molly, lived in LA, but they summered here. Murdered in their beds a couple of years ago. Lindsay, do you know that all these people were whipped and slashed to death?”
“I’d heard,” I said. I zoned out for a minute as my brain grappled with the fact of yet another set of murders a couple years ago. What did the whippings mean? How long had the killer been working?
When I tuned back in, Bob was still talking about the Whittakers.
“. . . folksy, real nice people. He was a photographer and she was a bit player in Hollywood. It makes no sense. These were all good people, and it’s tragic that the kids end up in foster homes or with relatives they hardly know. I worry about the kids.” He shook his head and sighed. “I try to leave this kind of stuff at the office at the end of the day, but it never really works.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “If you’ve got a few minutes, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve been bringing home from the office for the past ten years.”
Chapter 55
BOB GOT UP AND walked over to a Mr. Coffee sitting on a filing cabinet. He poured us each a cup of coffee.
“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said. “I don’t like Starbucks prices.” He smiled over at me. “Or that whole yuppie-on-the-go scene.”
Over tepid coffee with powdered milk, I told Bob about my first homicide case.
“We found him in a squalid hotel in the Mission District. I’d seen corpses before, but I was unprepared for this, Bob. He was young—somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one—and when I walked into the room I found him lying spread-eagled on his back, decomposing in a congealed pool of his own blood. Flies were all over him. A shimmering blanket of flies.”
My throat closed up as the image came flooding back; it was as clear as if I were standing in that hotel room right now, thinking, Oh, God, get me out of here. I sipped at the terrible coffee until I could speak again.
“He was wearing only two items of clothing: an ordinary Hanes tube sock, which was identical to hundreds of thousands that were sold all across the country that year, and a T-shirt from the Distillery. You know the place?”
Bob nodded. “I’ll bet every tourist passing through Half Moon Bay since 1930 has eaten there.”
“Yeah. Hell of a clue.”
“How did he die?”
“Throat slashed with a knife. And there were stripes, like lash marks, across his buttocks. Sound familiar?”
Bob nodded again. He was listening intently, so I continued. I told him that we’d canvassed the city and Half Moon Bay for weeks.
“No one knew the victim, Bob. His prints weren’t on file, and the room he died in was so dirty, it was a classic case of instant cross-contamination. We were utterly clueless.
“No one ever came forward to claim the body. It’s not so uncommon; we already had twenty-three unclaimed John Does that year. But I still remember the innocence of his young face. He had blue eyes,” I said. “Light red hair. And now, all these years later, more murders with the same sig
nature.”
“You know what feels really weird, Lindsay? To think that this killer could be someone who lives in this town —”
The phone rang, cutting Bob off midsentence.
“Robert Hinton,” he said.
In the next instant, the color drained from his face. There was silence, punctuated by Bob saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Then he said, “Thanks for letting me know,” and hung up.
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