A Credible Threat (The Jeri Howard Series Book 6)

by Janet Dawson

  No wonder I hadn’t been able to get anyone on the phone yesterday. Questions boiled into my mind as I digested what Minna had told me. “Did anything happen before this? Anonymous phone calls? Vandalism?”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Minna’s next words confirmed my hunch.

  “How did you know?” She sounded even more worried. “We’ve been getting breather calls for weeks. I told Errol we should change to an unlisted number, but he wants to be accessible. Then a couple of days ago someone chopped down—”

  “A lemon tree,” I interrupted. “It was a lemon tree.”

  “Yes. The one in the corner of the yard. Whoever did it left the top on our front porch.”

  “With the trunk pointing toward the door. I had the same caller, Minna.” And the attack on Errol probably meant that I too should expect another visit. “Keep the cat indoors.” The Sevilles had a large irascible tomcat named Stinkpot. Disagreeable as he was, I knew Minna and Errol would be upset if anything happened to him. “Better yet, board him. Get one of your children down there to stay with you or go stay somewhere else.”

  “Our oldest son’s already here,” she said, sounding alarmed. “And our other son is on his way. Jeri, what’s going on?”

  “All I’ve got so far is a theory,” I told her. “I need to get into Errol’s old files. I know he put them in storage when he retired. Where?”

  The files of the Errol Seville Agency, representing my mentor’s thirty-plus years as a private investigator in the Bay Area, were locked up in a document storage facility in Hayward. Minna told me the younger of the Seville daughters, Patricia, had a key. When I called Patricia at her home in Fremont, south of Oakland, I got a busy signal. As I discovered when I got her on the line five minutes later, she’d been on the phone with Minna, who alerted her to the situation.

  “I’m planning to drive down to Carmel this evening,” Patricia said. “But I’m playing in a tennis tournament this afternoon and I can’t get out of it. I have to be there at two. It’s twelve-fifteen now. How soon can you meet me in Hayward?”

  “I’m on my way,” I told her.

  The storage company was located in a collection of boxy structures on Mission Boulevard, not far from Cal State Hayward. As I looked up the hill at the university’s buildings, clustered on the ridge, I recalled the case I’d been working on a year ago, involving the death of one of Dad’s history department colleagues. During the course of that investigation, my father had been attacked and shoved down some stairs. So I could guess how Errol’s daughter felt.

  “How’s Errol?” I asked.

  Patricia wore tennis whites. She was tall and lean like her father, with short salt and pepper hair and a lot of sun squint lines in her fortyish face. On the passenger seat of her shiny BMW I saw a tennis racket and a canvas bag. Her mouth quirked as she stuck her car keys into the side pocket of her purse. “He’s doing fairly well. Demanding to be let out of the hospital, of course. But the doctors want to keep him for a few more days.”

  “He’s safer there.”

  “Safe.” She frowned as I pulled open one of the double glass doors leading to the storage facility’s main office. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Not entirely,” I admitted.

  Patricia signed us in at the front desk, then an attendant let us through the security door into the storage facility itself. “So this has something to do with one of Dad’s old cases?”

  I nodded. “I think so. A case I worked on. I just wish I’d picked up the signals sooner. If I’m right, this is one very clever criminal.”

  “Evidently one with a grudge,” Patricia said. She led the way down a long hallway lined on either side with doors, stopped at one on the right, and pulled a set of keys and an envelope from her handbag. She handed the envelope to me as she unlocked the door. “That’s the inventory. I guess you know what you’re looking for.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  We walked into the air-conditioned chamber, a square room lined with rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves, each shelf stacked with filed storage boxes, each box labeled with an identifying number. I pulled several sheets of paper from the envelope. The inventory listed the box numbers and contents, the whole of Errol’s career boiled down into a chronology of years. I located the boxes for the year I sought. There was a folded aluminum step stool leaning against one of the shelves. I opened it and braced the legs, then moved it over to the shelf. I pulled out one of the boxes. Patricia helped me convey it to the floor.

  “It was a custody case,” I continued as I pulled the lid off the box and surveyed the neatly labeled file folders. “The Seville Agency got involved about six years ago. But it really began much earlier than that. With a murder.”

  Twenty-four

  THE VICTIM OF THAT MURDER WAS A WOMAN named Stephanie Bradfield.

  She died on a chilly April night, stabbed to death in the bedroom of a house in the Oakland hills. I’d seen the house. It’s an expensive-looking structure, contemporary in design and constructed of stone and redwood, just off Colton Boulevard, which winds through the Montclair district. Isolated from its neighbors by the hilly terrain and a stand of eucalyptus trees, the house crowns the edge of a bluff. The deck at the back and the bedroom windows have a million-dollar view of Oakland, San Francisco, and the bay. On that night, which was clear and unseasonably cold, Stephanie Bradfield and her knife-wielding killer could have seen the lights glittering on the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate.

  How do I know the details? Well, I read about it in the papers, of course. But I knew more about it than the average citizen, because one of the investigators who arrived on the scene that cold clear night was a sergeant who’d just been assigned to Homicide three months before Stephanie Bradfield died. His name was Sid Vernon.

  That was eight years ago. The file is still open. There is no statute of limitations on murder.

  I know that every now and then Sid pulls that file from one of the overcrowded shelves in his office. He sifts through its contents, wondering if there was something else he could have done to close that case, some little scrap of evidence he had overlooked. It still rankles him that the Bradfield homicide has never been solved.

  Officially, that is. Sid and his former partner, Joe Kelso, are quite sure they know who killed Stephanie Bradfield.

  The case file contains a cassette tape of the 911 call eleven-year-old Melissa Bradfield made the night she came home from a school play and discovered her mother, still alive but bleeding to death. Sid played it for me once. It’s not pleasant listening. It makes me cold every time I think of it.

  On the tape, Melissa’s frightened voice veers between anguished sobs and steady calm. She moves back and forth, from the bedroom to the living room, trying to comfort her dying mother as she describes the scene to the emergency operator. Stephanie’s voice quavers in the background, slurred and dying away, as life oozes from her body. The sirens draw closer, too late to save her.

  That tape brings home the ugly reality of murder more than anything I’ve ever encountered, except the actual corpse.

  As far as Sid Vernon and Joe Kelso were concerned, there was only one suspect in the Bradfield murder—Richard Bradfield. He was Stephanie’s estranged husband, Melissa’s emotionally distant father. Stephanie Bradfield had been on the verge of filing for divorce, citing her husband’s emotional and physical abuse. Given the all too familiar pattern of such cases, it was logical for the police to consider Bradfield their prime suspect. But Bradfield had an alibi. He’d been in Pebble Beach with his assistant that evening. Try as he might, Sid couldn’t shake that alibi.

  “He killed her,” Sid told me, more than once. “I know he killed her. But so far I haven’t been able to prove it.”

  I wondered what Richard Bradfield looked like now, as I looked up from the meticulous and extensive file kept by the Errol Seville Agency. I recalled Bradfield as he was then, a well-built man a shade under six feet, with wavy brown hair he kep
t closely trimmed. He had a Roman nose and square face, with a little cleft in the chin. He favored gray pinstriped suits with pale blue shirts and red power ties. His eyes pierced right through people. Especially people he didn’t like.

  By the time the investigation into his wife’s murder was under way, Bradfield certainly didn’t like Sid Vernon or Joe Kelso. By the time the Errol Seville Agency was finished with Bradfield, he liked us even less.

  Richard Bradfield had never been charged with the murder of his wife, but Stephanie Bradfield’s sister had the same conviction Sid Vernon had. As far as Cordelia Ramsey was concerned, her brother-in-law was guilty of murder. And if she couldn’t put him in prison for that crime, she’d take his child. So she sued him for custody of Melissa.

  I leaned back in my chair and picked up the mug of coffee from my desk, staring at my office door, closed and locked. What I saw, however, was that day seven years ago when Cordelia Ramsey walked into Errol’s Oakland office, where Errol and I sat, waiting to hear what this new client had to say.

  Her attorney had set up the meeting, but it was Cordelia I remembered. She was a tall woman in her mid-forties, with a rough kind of beauty and a style all her own, an avenging angel with a hawk’s profile and wings of gray streaking the dark red hair that brushed the collar of her camel-colored suit. The large eyes in her narrow face were a steely gray, full of anger and purpose.

  “I want to know if the bastard jaywalks, spits on the sidewalk, or cheats on his taxes,” she told us in a voice roughened by too many cigarettes. “Every speck of dirt. I don’t care how much it costs. Just do it.”

  We did it.

  We got the goods on Bradfield. None of it proved murder, which I think was Cordelia’s secret hope, but we could and did hang the man for a number of lesser crimes.

  Bradfield may have looked like a blueblood, but he was a slick operator, a streetwise hustler from Orange County. Most people didn’t know he was a greedy predator until they’d been taken in. At great cost to their pocketbooks and life savings.

  Bradfield Investments occupied a plush office on the twelfth floor of the Ordway Building in downtown Oakland, with a view of Lake Merritt. When Errol and I put Bradfield under our relentless microscope, we discovered that what appeared to be a legitimate small investment firm was really a boiler room operation, with Bradfield himself running a penny stock scam.

  He’d found a small, capitalized Los Angeles manufacturing company, barely alive, its stock selling for less than a buck a share. He bought a pile of shares. The company’s president, Sam Kacherian, also owned a pile of shares, and he was greedy, just like Bradfield. Together they manipulated the stock price until they tripled their investment. Then they cashed out, leaving the company sucked dry.

  Bradfield was also playing games with the accounts of several trusting, elderly clients. The practice was called “churning,” which meant Bradfield was constantly buying and selling securities for these accounts, in order to increase his commissions.

  Once we’d uncovered all of this, Errol turned it over to Cordelia’s attorney. The lawyer used the information to his client’s advantage in the custody case. He also brought Bradfield’s crimes to the attention of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the Internal Revenue Service.

  There were lawsuits still pending in various cases of Everyone versus Richard Bradfield and Sam Kacherian, but neither man had any money left. By the time the Internal Revenue Service swooped down on Bradfield for things like “substantial underpayment” and “failure to report income,” he couldn’t have had much more than the price of a burger in the pockets of one of his custom-tailored suits. Everything else he had, including the Colton Avenue house, had been seized by the IRS.

  Public humiliation was hard for such an arrogant, egotistical man. I still remember the cold fury in those blue eyes when the jury foreman at his last trial read the guilty verdict.

  That was the stalking trial.

  Bradfield was under indictment for fraud and tax evasion when Cordelia was awarded custody of Melissa. He was out on bail and awaiting trial when he began stalking his sister-in-law.

  After all, it was her fault. It was Cordelia who hired the Seville Agency and brought Bradfield’s financial house of cards toppling around him. He blamed her for all his problems and he made threatening phone calls saying just that, threatening to kill her. He showed up at the art gallery she owned in Mill Valley, then flattened the tires of her car and another vehicle, owned by Cordelia’s husband, an artist named Colin Derrill. Bradfield’s relentless harassment had probably speeded the breakup of their marriage. That came later in the year, after Bradfield went to prison.

  Bradfield’s arrest on the stalking charge came when he violated a restraining order prohibiting him from going near Cordelia’s gallery or her residence. One day he showed up at her Mill Valley home and decapitated the lemon tree planted in her yard. Then he deposited the severed top on her porch, trunk end pointing at her front door.

  Just as he had three times in the past week.

  The son of a bitch had been leaving his calling card. Sid Vernon didn’t have a lemon tree. But Vicki Vernon did.

  Why had it taken me so long to make the connection?

  I got to my feet and went back to the table where my coffee maker sat, replenishing my mug. Then I resumed my seat. Bradfield was the reason I met Sid. It was early into the Seville Agency’s investigation. I went to the Oakland Police Department to talk with Sid and Joe Kelso, to get some background on Stephanie Bradfield’s murder. Something clicked between Sid and me, and we started dating.

  It was almost a year after Cordelia hired the Seville Agency to get the goods on her brother-in-law that he was convicted, first of fraud, then tax evasion, and finally for stalking Cordelia, the trial when his eyes burned with rage at the guilty verdict. And six years ago, two years after his wife was murdered, Richard Bradfield went away.

  Now he was back.

  Twenty-five

  SID HAD NOT SPENT ALL OF THE LAST EIGHT years in Homicide. His first stint there lasted over three years, then he’d spent a two-year tour in Felony Assault before moving back to Homicide. As I recalled, Kelso had retired about the same time Sid changed jobs. I didn’t know if he’d stayed retired, or if he was still in the Bay Area.

  I picked up the phone and called Wayne Hobart. He was my best starting place.

  “Joe Kelso?” Wayne said. “I hear he went to work as chief of police in some little town up north. Why do you want to find Joe?” I told him. He gave a long low whistle. “You really think Bradfield’s behind all of this? I mean, Macauley looks good for the bombing.”

  “It has to be Bradfield, Wayne. Sid, Errol, and I helped put him away. You said yourself if anyone wanted to push Sid’s buttons, the way to do it would be Vicki. Bradfield’s pushing. See if you can find out when he got out of prison, and where. And I need to talk to Joe Kelso.”

  “I’ll be able to tell you where Kelso is after I talk to one of his old running mates over in Robbery. Bradfield may take a little longer. I’ll get back to you on that as soon as I can.”

  I also needed to find Cordelia Ramsey. It was a good bet she no longer lived in that house hugging one of Mill Valley’s wooded hillsides. At the time, her phone number had been unlisted, for obvious reasons. The number was in Errol’s files, but when I dialed it I got someone who’d had the number for the past four years and had never heard of Cordelia Ramsey.

  Wayne Hobart called just as I was about to leave my office. “Joe Kelso’s chief of police up in Cloverdale,” he said. I knew the town, at the northernmost end of Sonoma County, a couple of hours north of San Francisco on U.S. 101. “He’s been there ever since he retired. Want me to call him?”

  “Yes. Tell him I’ll be in touch. Did you find out anything about Bradfield?”

  “He spent five years at Wasco State prison, down by Bakersfield. Paroled to San Diego a year ago.”

  “Did Cordelia Ramsey file a protest?”
>
  “That information I don’t have. I do have the name of his parole officer, though.” He repeated it and I wrote it down. “The guy I talked to is supposed to be sending some information about Bradfield. When I get it I’ll let you know. Looks like he satisfied the terms of his parole, Jeri. He’s out, free and clear, as of last December.”

  And the harassment of the residents of Sasha Nichols’s house had started in January. Bradfield hadn’t wasted any time.

  Targeting the cop who helped put him in prison was just his style. Given Sid’s age, Bradfield had probably guessed he was still on the Oakland police force. But how had he found Vicki? How did he know where Sid’s daughter lived?

  I looked at the phone number Wayne had given me, with its San Diego area code. That must be the connection, I thought. Bradfield had been paroled to San Diego, and that’s where Vicki Vernon’s mother and stepfather lived. Sometime in that year, his path must have crossed Vicki’s.

  I retrieved my car from the downtown Oakland parking lot and headed across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, then cut through the little village of San Quentin, adjacent to the prison that dominates the peninsula jutting out into the San Francisco Bay. Then I picked up U.S. 101 south to Mill Valley and left the freeway at Highway 1, which ultimately made its way to Muir Woods and Stinson Beach. I followed the winding road west several miles until I found the cutoff that led to Cordelia Ramsey’s house.

  As I’d guessed, she wasn’t there anymore.

  I hadn’t really expected it would be easy to find her. The current residents of the house were a young couple with two children who had no idea where to locate the former owner. They gave me the name of the real estate agent they’d used. I headed back down the hill to Mill Valley, only to discover that particular agent had long since moved to another firm. They must have had an address in a file somewhere, but no one would tell me anything.

  I left the real estate agent’s and drove to Throckmorton Avenue, downtown where Cordelia’s art gallery had been located across from Old Mill Park. The gallery was now a children’s clothing store, featuring exquisite and expensive baby outfits for chic infants and cutting-edge toddlers. The owner was busy with a customer, so I went outside and looked at the shop’s neighbors. I was sure the stationery store had been there when Cordelia operated the gallery. The woman behind the counter fingered my business card. Then she looked up at me with wary eyes.