Mannix was saying something to him. He blinked, focused again. “What’d you say?”
“I asked you who she is.”
“Paralegal who worked in Rakubian’s office. Valerie Burke.”
“So that’s it. The connection to Angela.”
“Yes.”
“But why would she have it in for you and Cassie?”
He thought he knew the answer to that, too, now, but he did not want to talk about it in front of Gloria. Or with Gabe, for that matter.
He wagged his head, turned to ask Gloria, “Where’re the San Francisco phone directories?”
“Same place they’ve always been, on the bottom shelf with the other directories. Jack, what’s this all about?”
“I’ll explain later. Gabe can tell you some of it.”
“But if I see that woman again, what should I do? Call the cops?”
“No. No police. Don’t do anything.” He started across to the row of wall shelves, stopped and swung around again. “You didn’t happen to see what kind of car she’s driving? On Sunday?”
“No, I didn’t pay any attention.”
“Well, if she shows up around here again, try to find out. The license number, too.”
Mannix asked, “What’re you going to do?”
“I’m not sure yet. Something.”
“You want my help?”
“Thanks, but no. We have to handle this ourselves, Cassie and me.”
He shut himself inside his cubicle, opened the San Francisco white pages to the Bs. No residence listing for Valerie Burke, but there was one for a V. Burke: 9871 Parnassus. That had to be her. Make sure, though. Call Macatee, give him an excuse, ask him to check his files.
He put through a call to the Hall of Justice, spoke to a man in Missing Persons whose name didn’t register. Macatee wasn’t in. Wouldn’t be until later in the day. He tried to talk the phone voice into giving him the information about Burke, but all it got him was a refusal and a hang-up.
Hollis put the receiver down, jerked it up again, and rang Animal Care. The first thing Cassie said when he finished relating the news was “We can’t keep this from Angela. Not now.”
“I know it. You’d better be the one to tell her. I’m too wound up. Ask her if she’s had any personal contact, any trouble with Valerie Burke. And what she knows about the woman.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Try to find Burke. There’s one listing in the S.F. phone book that may be her. I tried to get hold of Macatee to confirm, but he’s not on duty.”
“Confront her, try to frighten her off?”
“Yes.”
“If she’s as far gone as we think, it won’t do any good.”
“We have to try. We don’t have any other choice.”
“The police.”
“No, not yet. Not without some kind of proof. The cops are our last resort.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Call Angela,” he said. “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
Cassie was pale and tense when she got into the Lexus. He tried to find reassuring words; his mind was blank. At length he said, “Angela?”
“I talked to her. Now all three of us are shook up.”
“What did she say about Burke?”
“Not much. She hardly knows her—saw her a few times at Rakubian’s office, never socially. But she had the feeling the woman didn’t like her, resented her for some reason.”
“They have words or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Does she know anything about Burke’s personal life?”
“Nothing at all, and no idea where she lives.”
Dead air hung thick in the car until they were on 101 headed south. Traffic was moderately heavy; it became a constant struggle not to keep changing lanes, to stay within the speed limit.
When the silence grew oppressive, he broke it by voicing his earlier thoughts—that Valerie Burke was someone Rakubian felt he could dominate. Cassie had been staring straight ahead; she roused herself, shifted position so that she was facing him.
“Vulnerable and unstable,” she said. “Love can turn to hate pretty quickly in that kind of personality.”
“He was so arrogant and self-involved, he probably didn’t even notice.”
“Or care if he did. I wonder what put her over the edge that afternoon at his house. Did she go there to kill him? Plead with him to take her back? Or did it have something to do with Angela?”
Something to do with Angela. Hollis remembered his visit to Rakubian’s law offices the day before, Friday. It was possible Burke had eavesdropped, heard some or all of what was said, the lie that Angela was ready to reconcile with Rakubian. Brooded about it that night, and showed up at his home on Saturday in a desperate attempt to talk him out of keeping the appointment in Tomales Bay. He wouldn’t have liked that; he’d have berated her, scorned her, maybe threatened to force her out of his life entirely by firing her. And when she couldn’t stand any more abuse, up went the statuette and down went Rakubian.
It could have happened that way. If so, would Burke say something about Tomales Bay in front of Cassie? He’d have to lie again then, much as he’d hate doing it—pass it off as the ravings of a deranged mind. Cassie must never know how close he’d come to committing murder.
He changed the subject. “Must’ve been a terrific shock for her when she found out his body was gone.”
“Yes, but how did she guess you were responsible?”
She’d eavesdropped, all right: Knew about the appointment, guessed that Hollis must have gone to the house to find out why Rakubian didn’t keep it, and worked out his motive for the cleanup and removal of the corpse.
“Whatever the explanation,” he said, “she knows it was me and she hates me for it. First Angela took him away from her—her interpretation—and then I took away and hid what was left of him. She couldn’t bury him herself, tell him she was sorry, say good-bye.”
“She might even blame us for his murder. You know, ‘I didn’t want to hurt him, I loved him, they made me do it and it’s all their fault.’ But why did she wait so long? Two months is a long time to be plotting revenge.”
“Has to be another reason, something specific to explain the timing.”
After a pause Cassie said, “Angela.”
“What about Angela?”
“She’s the reason. She took Kenny to Utah two days after the murder. Burke didn’t know where she’d gone, had no way of finding out.”
“That must be it. She was waiting for Angela to resurface, come back home. The first note arrived less than a week after the kids returned. If she’d begun stalking us before then, we might’ve told Angela to stay where she was. Burke wanted us to think we were safe—and for all of us to be together again where she could get at us.”
“It wouldn’t have been hard for her to monitor the situation,” Cassie said. “Drive to Los Alegres once or twice a week, check our house, your workplace and mine, ask discreet questions here and there. She’d’ve known within a few days that they were home.”
She shivered as if with a sudden chill. “It gives me the creeps, thinking of her spying on us, stalking us all that time.”
“She’s gotten bolder, too. As if …”
He let the rest of it slide, but Cassie was thinking along the same lines. She said, “As if she doesn’t care anymore if we know it’s her. That really scares me. That, and what we found at Rakubian’s house yesterday. God only knows what she’ll do next if we don’t find a way to stop her.”
The Parnassus Street address was a four-story brick-and-stone- faced apartment building two blocks from the University of California Medical Center. A bank of mailboxes climbed one wall of the entranceway, each labeled with the tenants’ names. Neither Valerie Burke nor V. Burke was among them.
Hollis rang the bell on the box that bore the words “Bldg Mgr.” A young woman cradling an infant told them that yes, Valerie Burke had been a resid
ent here, but she’d given up her apartment and moved out at the end of June. No, she hadn’t left a forwarding address or said where she was going. No, the woman had no idea where Burke worked or anything else about her; she’d kept to herself and besides, people in this building minded their own business. That last with an edge to it, as if she were making an accusation.
In the car Cassie said, “Now what?”
“I don’t know, let me think.… South Beach. The converted warehouse where Rakubian had his offices. Maybe somebody there knows where we can find her.”
Another dead end.
There were half a dozen small law firms in the building on Harrison Street; they asked in all of them, and the answer in each was the same. No one knew what had happened to Valerie Burke—or to the secretary, Janet Yee, after Rakubian’s offices were vacated. The building manager there couldn’t tell them anything, either.
Frustration ate at Hollis like acid. “We could try to find Janet Yee,” he said, “but there’s not much chance she’d know Burke’s current address.”
“Is there a professional organization for paralegals? If there is and she’s a member, they might know.”
“They might, but I doubt it. The state she’s been in the past two months, the trips to Los Alegres … I don’t see her notifying a professional organization of her whereabouts or even holding down another job.”
“Then what has she been living on?”
“I don’t know—savings, a loan from somebody.”
“We’re just running around in circles,” Cassie said, “asking a lot of questions we can’t answer. We can’t do this by ourselves. Like it or not, we need help. Professional help.”
“You think we should keep the appointment at McCone Investigations?”
“It’s less than an hour from now. And we’re practically within walking distance of the pier. A private investigator has the resources to find someone much faster than amateurs like us.”
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll talk to her, see what she has to say.”
Thursday Afternoon
Pier 24½ was next door to the SFFD fireboat station, its cavernous interior renovated into office space for a variety of different businesses. Hollis wasn’t sure what to expect of a detective agency located in such surroundings, though McCone Investigations had to be reasonably successful; a prime waterfront location would not come cheap. Their suite of offices impressed him, and so did Sharon McCone. She kept them waiting less than five minutes, and when she appeared she was as crisply businesslike as she’d been on the phone. She was about forty, dark-haired, attractive in a striking way. More than that, she radiated competence and inspired confidence in return.
The private office she ushered them into had windows that extended to the pier’s sloping roofline, providing a broad view of the bay and the East Bay hills. The only negative thing about it was that it was noisy; the span of the Bay Bridge was directly overhead, the throb and hum of traffic muted but constant. When the fire sirens went off next door, he thought, it would probably make people here jump out of their seats.
They sat in comfortable chairs arranged before a functional desk. McCone asked if they minded having their conversation taped; Hollis gave permission. With a small recorder whirring, she asked a few preliminary questions and then requested that they outline their problem in detail. Hollis told most of it, as much as he felt she needed to know. They had no clear idea, he said, of why Burke was stalking them, unless it was because she blamed them somehow for Rakubian’s disappearance.
McCone didn’t interrupt, also took a few written notes. When he was finished she said, “One stalker in a lifetime is bad enough, but two within a few months is as bad as it gets. I sympathize, believe me. And I understand why you’re reluctant to involve the police. There isn’t much that can be done officially based on what’s happened so far.”
Cassie said, “It sounds as though you’ve had experience with stalking cases.”
“Oh, yes.” At least one unpleasant experience, judging from the faintly rueful quirking of McCone’s mouth. “I won’t pretend they’re not hard to handle for all concerned, because they are. There’re as many different breeds of stalker as there are people, each one predictable in some ways, unpredictable in others. On the surface it seems David Rakubian was the more dangerous of your two. What Valerie Burke has done to you so far—the anonymous notes, the vandalism—are childishly vicious acts. She may intend to continue in that vein, but she may also be planning something more overt. We don’t know enough about her yet to make an accurate assessment.”
“You’re not telling us anything we don’t already know,” Hollis said.
“I realize that, Mr. Hollis. But I believe in maximum communication with my clients, in making sure we understand each other and the situation we’re dealing with. Sometimes that requires stating the obvious, covering familiar ground.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’d be pretty distraught myself in your position. Another thing. Most of Valerie Burke’s actions so far have been directed at the two of you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll remain her primary targets. The note to your daughter indicates she could also be in danger.”
He nodded. “What can you do to help us?”
“The most important thing right now,” McCone said, “is to locate Burke. If she has a fixed new residence in or out of the city, we ought to be able to find it pretty quickly. If she’s living with a friend or in a hotel or motel somewhere, that’ll take longer. I’ll put David Rakubian’s home under immediate surveillance; if she shows up there, the operative will be instructed to follow her wherever she goes when she leaves. We’ll run a DMV check to determine what kind of car she’s driving and the license number—assuming she has and is using a legitimately registered vehicle. We’ll also make a thorough background check on her—build a personal, professional, and psychological profile. The more you know about any individual, a stalker in particular, the better your chances of gauging what they might do next.”
“How long will that take?”
“The background check? It depends on how much of Burke’s life is a matter of public record. We ought to have some information for you—the DMV material, at the very least—by close of business today. Additional information, possibly a useful profile, by close of business tomorrow. Of course, I can’t make any definite promises, but what I will do is to mark your case priority with my staff.”
It sounded straightforward enough to Hollis. He asked, “What do you advise we do in the meantime?”
“Be cautious and vigilant,” McCone said. “Specifically, convince your daughter to move herself and your grandson back in with you until the matter is resolved. Don’t go anywhere alone after dark if you can avoid it. Alert your friends and neighbors and ask them to contact you immediately if they see a woman answering Burke’s description. Make certain your property is as secure as possible night and day. That includes your cars—parking facilities at home, at work, in public places.”
Cassie asked, “Would you recommend putting one of your people on watch at our home?”
“No, I wouldn’t. It isn’t likely Burke will try to break in again or even turn up in your neighborhood. She knows you’ll be wary, and stalkers are nothing if not sly. Whatever she intends to do next, it probably won’t be either repetitive or obvious. There’s another reason I wouldn’t recommend home surveillance at this point. One operative couldn’t stand a twenty-four-hour watch; it would take a team of three. And a much larger team to maintain regular surveillance on your entire family, day and night. The cost would be prohibitive over a period of time, and there’s no telling how long it will be before Burke is located. Also, there’d be no guarantee my people would be able to catch her at anything overt enough to put her in jail. We may believe she’s a dangerous stalker, but there’s no proof of it, remember.”
There was more give-and-take before they moved on to financial matters. The fees McCone
quoted were about what Hollis had expected—substantial, in keeping with the size and location of her operation, but a long way from exorbitant. They signed a standard contract and he wrote a check to cover the retainer fee; five minutes later they were on their way out of the pier building with McCone’s assurance that she would contact them as soon as there was anything definite to report.
Outside, Cassie said, “I feel a little better now. I think we did the right thing.”
“So do I.”
She smiled up at him; he answered with a smile of his own. Thin mouth-stretchings, both, meant to be bolstering but gone in an instant, like scraps whipped away by the chill Bay wind.
23
ON the drive to Los Alegres, Cassie phoned Angela again and spent fifteen minutes trying to convince her to move back home. Angela kept saying she didn’t think it was necessary. Stubborn, prone to wearing blinders—just like her old man. She finally agreed to talk it over with Pierce. If he thought it was a good idea, she said, then maybe she’d change her mind.
Tom Finchley and his helper were just finishing up when they reached the house. The living room had been emptied completely, the one wall painted over to erase the remains of Burke’s message. It was just a room now, like any other empty room awaiting a personal stamp. Yet the aura of violation still lingered.
Hollis called the office, spoke briefly to Gloria and then to Mannix. There had been no sign of Burke at River House or anywhere else in the vicinity today.
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