He shook his head no. “I used to be on the police force in Indianapolis, but now I’m just working on behalf of the family to find out what information I can about her.”
His manner was disarming. He didn’t talk like any cop I could remember dealing with. What seemed like aloofness minutes earlier now appeared to be restraint—even gentleness. In another context I might have found him to be charming, but not when there were alarm bells going off in my head. I wanted to find out what he was planning to do about Alexi’s disappearance, but I knew it would be mistake to go into anything like that with him. The minute I showed the slightest interest in what he was saying, I would confirm everything he suspected about my involvement. He was smart enough not to tell me anything unless I asked, and I wasn’t going to tip my hand by asking him. So for a few seconds, we just sat there, watching the Larkspur Ferry pull into the dock and not saying much of anything.
“I really wish you could help, because her mother is frantic to find her.”
He almost got me with that. I knew I had to get up and walk away from that bench before I broke down in front of him.
As I left, he offered me a business card and insisted that I take it. I was certain I hadn’t seen the last of him. I knew I had to tell Sylvia about this encounter immediately, but I didn’t think she would have any better idea of what this guy was up to than I did. She was gearing up for a legal struggle, and this guy seemed to be working an entirely different approach.
I looked at the name on his card: David Fallon.
Davey
Why was she lying?
Every word out of her mouth was some sort of evasion. I’m afraid I can’t help you. There’s nothing I can do for you—did she think she could get away with that?
He’d been watching her for days as she and Alexi wandered around town. She probably thought she would put him off by weaseling around everything. But none of that was going to do her any good. She was lying—but why?
He sat on the bench overlooking the water for a few moments after Gina Perini walked off, trying to figure out what to do next. For the past couple of days, he’d gone back and forth in his mind about how to approach her. When he saw the flyer announcing the mystery panel at the Ferry Building, he thought that was a good opportunity to hear her speak and learn a little more about her. But after listening to her bantering back and forth with the others, he realized she wasn’t at all what he expected.
One surprise was the accent. Given her name, it wouldn’t seem odd that she had an Italian accent. But he’d already discovered that the “Perini” name was fictitious. She’d entered the United States under the name “Gina Bertani,” but that didn’t explain the Italian accent either. The “Bertani” name—and maybe even the “Gina”—could be phony as well. He’d learned as much as he as he could by slogging through the Internet, and he’d confirmed some of what he had found with sources in Homeland Security. But her identity was still a mystery. If he kept digging he might find the real story, but it wasn’t clear what his next step should be. Until he learned more, he had to deal with “Gina” in the latest of her manifestations.
But the accent wasn’t the biggest surprise. The real puzzle was how normal she seemed. There was usually some character flaw in a child molester or kidnapper that marked them as a little strange, but there was nothing like that here. She joked around with her fellow panelists for over an hour and gave no hint of any deep-seated trouble. He couldn’t figure it out. He knew she had just grabbed a minor child and transported her across the country, but she didn’t act like anything had happened.
She defied his expectations in other ways as well. Her stride was a bit ungainly—not that it bothered him, but he’d never seen a woman walk quite like that. The other panelists seem to think she was funny. He probably would have laughed at some of the things she said, if he hadn’t been so focused on trying to figure out what made her tick. Her hands seemed different. They were long, and she used them to gesticulate in midair whenever she talked, but they really seemed to have a life of their own. Her hands and her voice wrapped themselves around words in a way that he’d never seen before. There might yet be an arrest in this case. But given Reverend Wilder’s apparent reluctance to report Alexi’s disappearance to the police, he wasn’t so sure. Even so, the thought of this woman in handcuffs was disturbing.
Her seeming normality was making his job harder. He’d found Alexi—that part of his work was done. She seemed to be in no danger. Maybe he should have been satisfied with that, but he wasn’t. He needed to know why she had been taken. It wasn’t in his nature just to let that part of the investigation go by the boards. There was no obvious motive. Why had this Gina person traveled halfway across the country to pick up a teenage girl and take her to San Francisco? What the hell was she up to?
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He kept Susan apprised of everything from the moment he got there, emailing her often and talking to her by phone. When he called her the first day to tell her he found Alexi, he could hear the relief in her voice. This was the first real assurance she’d had. Even though she’d received another message and picture from Alexi—this one two days after the one from Colorado—she was still relieved to find out that he had actually seen her. It was the high point in a case that didn’t seem to have very many high points.
He asked Susan the question he’d been having so much trouble answering: “Do you have any idea who this woman is and why she may have taken Alexi?”
Susan said she didn’t. Nothing jogged her memory. They’d gone over everything before he left Indiana, and since then he’d sent her a whole series of pictures and videos of Gina from San Francisco. Along with that, he gave her a report of the research he had gathered on her—including her former name, her shaky immigration status, and all the other questions about her background. He hoped something would ring a bell, but nothing did.
Susan’s next question was the one he’d expected. “Can you just pick her up and bring her home?”
“I can’t do this my own. If I tried, I wouldn’t be in any better legal position than this Perini woman. I know you gave me a letter of authority, but it still wouldn’t be a good idea. Gina—or even Alexi—might resist, and the situation could get out of hand.”
“So, do we just do nothing?”
It came back to an issue that had bothered him from the beginning.
“Why hasn’t a missing-person report been filed? If that had been done, it would be a relatively simple matter of contacting the San Francisco police and letting them handle it on your behalf. Have you talked to your husband about it?”
“No.” But before he could ask anything more, she finished the thought. “I haven’t talked to him about that or anything else.”
The bitterness in Susan’s voice had deepened in the last few days.
“You don’t have to wait for him. If you want to report it to the police, I’ll help you do it.”
She hesitated for a second. “I’m not quite ready to talk to the police.”
That was a strange way to put it. He couldn’t decipher what she meant.
The best thing was for her to fly to San Francisco. She needed to talk to her daughter herself. Susan was unsure about doing that, but he convinced her that it was a good idea. Maybe a simple mother-daughter conversation could end the whole thing.
As far as Blaiseck and the Reverend Wilder were concerned, he had decided to stop talking to them altogether. He had sent them the pictures about Alexi’s whereabouts, along with all the background information he had on Gina Perini. He had agreed earlier to do that. And even if he hadn’t, it was probably best to keep them informed so they wouldn’t suddenly change their minds and send the Indianapolis police on a wild goose chase. Neither of them had responded to his last email, but that didn’t make any difference. Either way, he wasn’t talking to them anymore.
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He’d found a café
across the street from Hayes Street Books the first day he was in San Francisco, and he’d been more or less camped out there ever since. There was a miscommunication at first between him and the young woman behind the counter about what type of coffee he wanted from the long menu on the wall, but he finally decided on a café Americano, adding his own milk and sugar, whenever he sat down to watch the bookstore. He thought Alexi might recognize him, so he stayed in the cafe when she was around. A few times when he knew she wasn’t there, he walked across the street and spent some time looking in the window trying to get a feel for the place. He hoped he wasn’t too obvious about it.
He was puzzled by it. Was it really a bookstore, or was it a front for something else? He’d taken several pictures, some with a long-distance lens. There were photos of Alexi reading, Gina standing in the doorway, and Alexi pulling books out of a box. He had a video of Gina and Alexi leaving the store and walking the fifteen feet or so to the doorway of the upstairs flat where Gina lived. It would have been a stretch to say that Alexi was “being held” there. The video showed Gina unlocking the door, as Alexi bounded up the stairway to Gina’s flat without any prodding.
One time, when he was sure Alexi wasn’t around, he crossed the street and went into the store. He stayed in the corner browsing through the bookshelves, but he was really watching Gina out of the corner of his eye as she unpacked boxes. He thought about confronting her right there, but then he saw the flyer about the mystery panel down at the Ferry Building the following day. He decided to wait until after that. He wanted to hear her talk—there had to be something in her voice or mannerisms that would give her away.
But he couldn’t get away from the bookshelves before someone approached him.
“I wrote that.”
He looked up and saw a man a little younger than himself. He was thrown off-kilter for a second, until he realized that the man thought he was looking at the book on the shelf in front of him. He wasn’t doing that at all. He was just staring blankly at the shelf while he eavesdropped.
“You wrote that book?”
“No,” the man laughed. “I wrote the shelf-talker right underneath it, you know, where it says, “Morrie recommends.” He pointed to the little tag pasted on the shelf. “That’s me, Morrie.”
He apologized for his mistake.
“No,” Morrie said. “I wish I had written the book. It’s one you’d enjoy.”
He fumbled an excuse, saying that he was just browsing. He made his way to the door as quickly as he could without arousing suspicion. He’d come closer to blowing his cover than he had anticipated.
Following Gina and Alexi was more strenuous than he had bargained for. The two of them left the store and headed in the direction of downtown. He followed them at a discreet distance, while they window-shopped and visited a couple of dress shops. They reached Market Street and headed down the escalator to the underground train. He picked up his pace a bit, so he could purchase a ticket and follow them though the turnstile. They got off at Powell and headed up toward Union Square, and he followed along behind them, watching as Gina talked and gestured toward the sights around them. The scene started to nag at him. She was looking less and less like a kidnapper and more and more like someone who was showing a visiting guest around town. What was going on?
They turned left on Post Street and went into the Medical-Dental Building. He spent an hour across from the building, cooling his heels until they reemerged, reminding himself of how much he hated doing stakeouts when he was with the police. Then Gina and Alexi stopped at the Café de la Presse on Grant and Bush for lunch, and there was another long wait. The long walk and the standing around were starting to take their toll on him. After they ate, they headed farther across town to the old Barbary Coast area where they walked into an older, expensive-looking brick building. He was dog-tired at that point, but all he could do was sit outside and wait. The brass plaque on the wall of the entrance read “Crichton, Moss, Harris, & Kaplan, attorneys at law.” Lawyers—they must be up to something.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for anymore. After two days following these two women, he’d come up with a big nothing. There was no evidence of foul play or coercion. He kept looking for signs of restraint, but there were none. When Alexi wasn’t with Gina, she’d head off on her own down Hayes Street and window-shopped. No one was tracking her movements—except him.
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After his confrontation with Gina at the Ferry Building, he called Susan again to give her an update. But the minute she came on the line, he knew something had changed. There was a long gap between the time he said hello and when she responded.
“Susan, are you there?”
Another pause. “I’m here.”
“What’s the matter? Has something happened?”
When she finally spoke, she said something that took him by surprise.
“I think you should come home now and just leave things be.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Alexi should probably just stay right there. There’s no life for her here.”
He felt a slight twinge of guilt. Had he gone too far in reassuring her that Alexi was okay? For the past few days he had been telling her that there were no signs of her being held against her will, but had he painted too glowing a picture of her life in San Francisco?
“Susan, I know I told you that Alexi seemed to be okay, but I didn’t mean to suggest that you should just leave her here. She loves you and needs to have you back in her life.”
“No, it’s nothing you said.”
“Then what is it? Something must have changed.”
There was another pause. Susan seemed to be in deep pain.
“I found something, that’s all. It’s just…it’s just that we’ve failed her miserably.”
“What is it? What did you find?”
“I don’t know if I can talk about it.” He heard her taking a deep breath. “I was cleaning her room this morning. I moved the guitar case. There was something in the inside pocket, and…”
He had to draw out the rest of the sentence. “What was it?”
“There were pages from a journal. I didn’t know she’d been writing one.”
“What was in the pages?”
There was another long pause. He had to prompt her again to see if she was still on the phone. Finally, she spoke almost in a whisper.
“I don’t think I can tell you.”
She was crawling deeper and deeper inside her shell. He knew the warning signs of depression, and he thought he was seeing all of them in Susan Wilder. It took all he could do to convince her not to cancel her flight. She agreed reluctantly to keep the ticket she’d bought for San Francisco, as they had planned. When they met face-to-face, he thought, maybe he could find out what was going on.
“We’ve just failed her so much.”
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That night, everything fell apart.
He spent the day across from the bookstore like he’d been doing for the past few days, but now he was doing it by rote. Surveillance was just a way of filling the day and preventing his mind from wandering where it shouldn’t go. But at night, that mental discipline disappeared, and he was left alone with himself.
He watched as the bookstore reached its closing hour. The overhead lights were turned off in sequence until the store was in darkness. The employees left in a small group, heading up to the corner where they all went their separate ways. Gina and Alexi were the last to leave, shutting out the last light near the front of the store and then moving a few steps down the street to the doorway of Gina’s flat. He saw the light go on in the stairway and watched it go off again a few minutes later, giving way to the lights in the apartment. He stared at the upstairs windows until the lamps in those rooms were turned off one by one, leaving just one light, which appeared to be a small lamp in the rear bedroom. Finally, t
hat light went out as well, and Gina and Alexi were locked up for the night in their world. He was locked up in his.
He couldn’t stand the thought of spending another night in the dreary hotel room he had a couple of blocks from the bookstore. The room had a cheap, flimsy feel to it. For the last two nights, he’d sat there with most of the lights off, staring at the oversized television screen on the wall. He never turned it on. It remained a glistening presence with a sleek blackness that seemed to taunt him. Turn me on, it seemed to be saying. Turn me on even though you know there will be nothing you’ll want to watch, and it will leave you more depressed than you already are. For the past two nights, the only thing he had done was go through the methodical process of cleaning his pistol, checking its mechanisms, wondering how long it would be before he would have to use it.
He had to do something with his night hours, but he didn’t know what. He started walking, but he had no idea where he was headed. There were people on the sidewalks, some happily jaywalking from one side to the other. They were in small groups, talking loudly, seemingly heading to a club somewhere, giving the impression that the evening’s fun might just be beginning. But he had lost any sense of how to interact with other people. The last hint he had of human contact was watching the lights going out in Gina’s apartment, as he imagined her long hands reaching up to turn off the switch.
Market Street cut at a broad angle that crossed the other streets. On the other side was a building with a cocktail glass in neon lights. He suddenly felt the need to be inside somewhere, drink in hand, soaking up whatever life he could get from a neighborhood bar. The doorway under the brightly lit Martuni’s sign had been commandeered by smokers who were going through their rituals. The inside was dark and murky with a horseshoe bar that took up most of the main room. There was a smaller room off to the right where a piano was accompanying some off-key patrons who were trying to sing.
What was he doing there? He felt suddenly ancient, realizing that he was probably twenty years older than anyone else in the place. Despite the convivial crowd around him—or maybe because of it—he could feel the walls closing in on him from every direction. That feeling had been building for weeks, and now it was getting worse. His body’s weaknesses were more pronounced. The sleeplessness, the lightheadedness, the recurring pains throughout his back and legs and chest—all of them were pinning him against a wall. And there was no respite from the opposite direction. His isolation from friends, family, and everyone else was pushing at him just as insistently. Illness seemed to have joined hands with loneliness to squeeze the life out of him.
Through the Bookstore Window Page 16