Rogue Wave

by Susan Dunlap

  “Look, I heard all that. The little whiner could have gotten you killed. Dumb enough you couldn’t resist housebreaking …” He was waving the knife like a baton.

  “Tchernak, I’m not about to give up the case. I’m too close. Jessica Leporek could clear up the whole thing. But,” she said looking at the eager Tchernak, “we can’t both leave here. We can’t abandon Olsen, because we can’t trust him.”

  36

  KIERNAN HURRIED INTO the “Yes on 37” office. The storefront was mobbed; phones rang cacophonously. Groups of volunteers huddled in every corner, clipboards in hand. At one side of the room a copy machine hummed and spat out papers. The whole place reeked of copier fumes and bad coffee. Kiernan smiled at the sandy-haired boy behind the desk and hurried through the cup-and-paper-strewn back room to Jessica’s office. Jessica Leporek’s appearance gave new meaning to the phrase “three days before the election.” Her red hair was scraped back in a rubber band; it appeared to have been finger-combed. If she’d started the day with makeup, she’d rubbed it off. She was brushing papers from the top of a pile with her right hand, clutching the phone with her left. “Don’t tell me offshore drilling will reduce the need for tankers! Do you think the oil companies are going to allot every drop they drill out there to gas stations along the coast? Of course not. They’re going to transport that oil. How are they going to move it? Tankers, right? The cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles won’t allow pipelines through their waters. Any platforms there have to load tankers. Up here we’ve already got more than a thousand tankers a year coming through the Golden Gate. Just one of average size carries sixty percent more oil than the Exxon Valdez spilled. That’s over seventeen million gallons a ship. Do you know what the cleanup capability for this area is? I’ll tell you. Eight hundred forty thousand gallons. You got those figures? Good, well, print that!” She put down the receiver, clearly restraining the urge to slam it. Glancing up at Kiernan, she squinted. “You’re the detective, right? Look, I answered your questions, gave you time I couldn’t afford. You want to ask me more, you’ll have to wait till after the election. Then I’ll have forever. If I live so long.”

  Kiernan moved a pile of papers, sat on the corner of Leporek’s desk and said, “I’ll be brief. Robin—”

  “I told you I’m sorry if the woman is dead, but—”

  “You’re not, of course. But that’s beside the point. The point is you had an argument with her two days before she disappeared. It’s not your fault, doubtless it wasn’t your intention, but whatever you said to Robin pushed her over the edge.”

  Jessica laughed. “Robin Matucci is not the type of woman to be pushed over the edge. And certainly not by mere words.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing that would cause her to take her boat out in a deadly storm.” She turned her attention back to the most precarious pile, batting ineffectually at the edges.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Look, I don’t need to talk to you.”

  Kiernan lowered her voice. “Jessica, I’m going to reveal to you something I’ve discovered in my investigation. Robin Matucci is definitely alive.”

  Jessica stopped abruptly. “Are you sure?”

  “What did you and Robin argue about? The memo that was stolen from Dwyer Cummings?”

  She turned back to the pile, tapping the edges frenetically.

  “Jessica, I’m good at my job. I found out about Robin. I’ll discover the rest, but you can save me a lot of time. I’d appreciate that.”

  Jessica’s hands slowed, then stopped. “Okay, okay. Here is the whole, full, entire story. Three years ago at the gallery opening Garrett Brant told me he had a memo that would skewer the oil industry. He said he’d give it to me.”

  “How did he get this memo? And why was he so willing to part with it?”

  “I didn’t ask. I figured I’d get the memo first and ask questions after I had it in my hand. He’d promised it to a woman charter captain—”

  “Robin. Why would he give it to her?”

  “Money. I got the impression she offered him plenty. But between then and the time he talked to me, he found out he was a finalist for the Arts of the Land prize. Even if he didn’t win—he expected he would, Garrett wasn’t modest about his work—even as a runner-up, he knew he’d get enough press and shows and sales so that he wouldn’t need the money, wouldn’t need to sell his principles. He really did care about the environment; his canvases show that. And”—Jessica laughed—“he’d been working as a janitor for the oil companies for months. He loved the idea of getting back at them. So he was willing to give the memo to me.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “He said he needed to tell his boat captain first. That was a principle, too. He was going to see her the next day.” She turned and looked directly at Kiernan. “The next day he was hit by a car. He never got his memory back. I never got the memo.”

  “And that’s why you kept after Robin Matucci, because you figured she might have it?” Kiernan began to feel the excitement she always found when the pieces came together.

  “Right. She denied even seeing Garrett. There was no proof.”

  “What exactly was in the memo?”

  With an irritated sigh, Jessica slammed back against the chair. “I told you: I don’t know. If I knew—if it’s as important as I think it is—I’ve have it in every ad in the campaign.”

  “Surely you asked Garrett.”

  “Of course I asked. But Garrett was a tease and he loved having a secret.”

  “Still he had to have told you some fact. You wouldn’t have coveted this memo for years because an artist you just met thought it was important.”

  Jessica grabbed a pencil in her fist. “Garrett worked maintenance for the oil companies. He knew some of the scuttlebutt.” She stabbed the eraser into the desk. “Look, I told you, the election is three days away. If I had even a clue about what was in that memo, I’d leak it to the press and pray something turned up.”

  “Do you think Robin had the memo?”

  From the front room came a wave of unintelligible words, as if every phone canvasser had hit the apex of his pitch simultaneously. Taking the pencil in both hands, Jessica said, “No, I’m sure she didn’t. She was too accommodating to me. If she’d had the memo, she would have used it. She wouldn’t have put up with me. But she was playing the same game I was, hoping to find out something, to get an edge, to get it.”

  “So if Robin didn’t have it, then it’s still with Garrett Brant.”

  “Wherever he is.”

  “Haven’t you been in contact with him since his accident?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not for lack of trying. I tracked him down to San Francisco General just as they were about to transfer him to a rehab hospital. They wouldn’t say which one, or even if it was in the city. It took me two weeks to ferret out where he was, and when I went there they wouldn’t let me in. The closest I could get was the nurses’ desk. Garrett’s wife was running interference. How did I find him? she asked. What did I want? He’d lost his memory, she told me. Even when I explained that he’d offered me the memo, and how important it was, she didn’t believe me. She didn’t care about the coastline; she didn’t care about the memo. All she could think about was that he had promised to drive from wherever it was they lived—she wasn’t about to tell me where that was—to San Francisco to see me. As if it were for some kind of assignation.”

  “Her husband had been virtually killed, her life was on hold, she probably wasn’t as tactful as she might have been another time.”

  “You think that didn’t occur to me? I’m not that insensitive,” Jessica said, pressing her thumbs into the pencil.

  “And the memo never surfaced?”

  “Not unless Maureen sold it to someone with an oil company and they burned it.”

  “Jessica,” Kiernan said slowly, “the day of Garrett Brant’s accident, he drove into the city to meet Robin. It wa
s Robin Matucci who hit him. Hit-and-run.”

  The pencil dropped and rolled under the edges of a pile of papers. “I can’t believe it. I mean, I can; it’s logical. Robin Matucci is as ambitious a woman as I’ve met. But still it’s incomprehensible that a woman I know would do that.”

  Kiernan held up a palm. “But now that you know that, do you still think she didn’t get the memo from him?”

  A green-clad form rushed past the door in the next room. Metal clattered and the smell of bitter coffee cut the stale air. Jessica said, “She didn’t get it. Look, the last time I saw her, she’d had enough of me. That was when we had the argument. If she hadn’t thought before then that I’d something she wanted, she’d have given me the boot.”

  Kiernan slid off the desk. “One more thing. My original question. What was it you and Robin argued about two days before she sunk?”

  “Nothing to do with this.”

  “Just tell me, and I’ll leave.”

  She started to hunt around for the pencil, but gave up. She looked at Kiernan, then shrugged. “It came out of nowhere. I just asked her deckhand out for a drink. It was a long shot. I thought maybe he’d have some idea, maybe he’d heard something that didn’t seem important to him, but would be a lead to the memo. I didn’t know Garrett had it then, you see. Robin heard me ask Delaney. She sent him off for something and then she lit into me like a high school girl who’s worried about her boyfriend. Maybe she was involved in a great romance. Who knows? But you don’t sink your boat because a woman asks your guy out.”

  But you do to keep an investigator like Delaney from cozying up to a rival, pooling her info with his, and realizing that the hit-and-run was not an accident between strangers but an event that occurred on the day the victim refused to give her the vital memo. The statute of limitations might have run out for the hit-and-run, but it was still in effect for attempted murder.

  37

  KIERNAN HAD JUST STARTED the engine when the phone rang. “Kiernan, it’s Maureen. God, I’m glad to get you.” She was panting. “Garrett’s acting terribly nervous. He was bad yesterday, but today he’s scaring me. Kiernan, something’s going on. I’m really worried.”

  Kiernan shifted into first but kept the clutch in. Both her feet were tense on the pedals. “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody outside the studio, maybe? I just don’t know. Kiernan, I’m scared.”

  “Do you want me to come down there?”

  “Well, I hate to have you come all this way, but …” Maureen’s voice sounded hopeful.

  “Don’t worry, it’s part of my job. I’ll see you in three and a half or four hours.”

  “Oh, Jeez, thanks. God, I feel relieved. Oh, Kiernan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you stop here at the store on your way? The delivery truck broke down today and the stuff I need isn’t in. I’ve been so upset I’ve barely got any food in the house. I’ll pay for it, Jannie will have the bag ready. All you need to do is stick it in your Jeep.”

  Kiernan sighed. Grocery delivery was not in the job specs. “Well, if you’re not worried about being alone that much longer.”

  “We should be okay till dark. I’ve got a gun.” She paused. “And Kiernan, thanks.”

  She called Olsen’s and left a message for Tchernak. Then she drove under the freeway—one of the sections that the last earthquake hadn’t damaged—to the on ramp and headed south to Route 280 along the San Andreas Reservoir, on the edge of the Fault. Driving on the hillside of death had usually added a pleasant soupçon of danger to taking this road. But now the thought of Maureen and Garrett alone in their cabin provided ample tension.

  At San Jose she turned west on Route 17 through the redwoods and pines to Santa Cruz, south to Monterey and stopped there for a sandwich and a Coke to fend off the exhaustion from having been up most of the night.

  By the time she reached Big Sur, the ocean was pushing a wall of fog toward the cliffs. The few times Kiernan could take her eyes off the narrow, winding road long enough to look beyond its edge, she could see the breakers two hundred feet straight down. In another hour or so, all she’d be able to see would be heavy gray cloud. An hour after that, the ocean would thrust the fog up over the roadway, masking the hairpin curves. By nightfall, the visibility would be down to ten feet. But the drop off the edge would still be two hundred.

  It was after five by the time she reached the grocery near Big Sur. Other than three teenage boys and a silver Alfa Romeo Spider, the parking lot was empty. And the store was closed. A note on the door said: Back in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes could mean half an hour. Groceries could wait. Better Maureen and Garrett eat beans and stay alive.

  She turned inland and followed the narrow road. Knives of sunlight cut between the redwood branches, momentarily blinding her. In the distance she could hear the grind and sigh of an engine. She was glad it was behind her; this was not a road on which to pass another car. The pavement ended; she braced herself, bouncing along in rhythm with the Jeep. In twenty minutes she pulled up behind Maureen’s car, and glanced at the seven redwoods topping the bluff. They seemed to be teasing her city eyes, daring her to look high enough to see to the tops of their centuries-old trunks.

  Kiernan started up the stone path, past the abandoned swimming pool. Four days ago she had sensed an air of fey neglect about it, the leaf-filled pool of an artist whose reality was in his imagination. But now the broken cement slabs on the bottom seemed to thrust up their jagged edges in defiance. She quickened her pace till she was running, and pounded on the faded red door.

  There was no corresponding clatter of feet rushing across the hardwood floor inside. Just the afternoon breeze hissing between the branches of the redwoods making the fallen cones and leaves rustle against the cement, and the low rumble of a car on the road.

  “Maureen! It’s Kiernan! Open the door!”

  No response. She should have come earlier. She shouldn’t have left them alone … She ran around the side of the house, leaped over a clump of dead rosebushes. The door to Garrett’s studio was just shutting. “Maureen! Garrett! It’s Kiernan!” she yelled, remembering as she did so that her name would mean nothing to Garrett Brant.

  The door opened a crack, Maureen peered out, her pale face flushed. “Kiernan!” she said in surprise. “Oh, I’m so relieved it’s you.”

  “Who did you think it was?” Garrett’s voice asked from inside the studio. His tone held no urgency, merely a hint of amusement, as if his wife had heard the mailbox clatter when she had expected the milkman. The blandness of his tone highlighted the tension in his wife’s voice. “Who is Karen?”

  “Kiernan, Garrett. She came a few days ago. Maybe you didn’t see her.”

  “Well, I guess not.” In that same vague way, he said, “Are you going to let her in?”

  “Oh.” Maureen pulled the door back.

  The studio was the same as it had been four days ago. Dark walls, open beams, the big window overlooking the redwoods. The photo of the Alaskan mud flats curled away from the wall. On the easel the painting that had been just lines when she first saw it now held a peninsula of browns and blacks and greens in the lower right corner. The rest was still white, with only a line or two sketched in to suggest the shoreline or the deceptively clear sky. Would Garrett have it finished in a week or two? And the day after would a fresh canvas be up there and this one secreted in a closet?

  Shaking off that thought, she said to Maureen, “Are you all right?”

  Maureen nodded. “I think so. I mean we are. It’s my car that’s got the problem now. It won’t start. Probably the battery.”

  “You should have told me,” Garrett said, grabbing a denim jacket. “I’ll go and have a look at it.” He hesitated at the door as if half-expecting something he couldn’t name, a validation of his action, perhaps a contradiction. Then he rushed out.

  “You don’t worry about him going that far?” Kiernan asked.

  “Not much.
He’ll never lift the hood. He won’t remember why he went, not that long. If he’d taken a tool, he’d be able to reason out where he was headed …” She dropped into a canvas chair. “It’s too late in the day for him to wander off. He’ll see the shadows and know it’s almost dinnertime. Did you bring the groceries?”

  “I stopped but the store was closed. Surely, you can—”

  “Closed? You got out and checked the door?”

  She put a hand on Maureen’s arm. “Trust me. I’m an investigator; I can tell when a grocery store isn’t open.”

  Maureen shrugged. “Sorry, I guess the tension’s getting to me. We’re hardly going to starve.”

  Looking down at Maureen’s lank blond hair, those stooped shoulders, the taut face that made her seem ten years older than her husband, she was surprised. She would have expected Maureen to look even more haggard than she had before the tension of the last four days. But the gray was gone from her skin, replaced by the ruddy flush of nervousness. Sitting on the other canvas chair, she said, “What do you do when the car won’t start?”

  “It doesn’t happen so often that I have a routine for it, thank God. If I had to I could walk to the store. It’s only five miles. But,” she said, catching Kiernan’s eye, “I didn’t want to be gone that long right now. Maybe you could call triple A when you leave.”

  “I can call them now.”

  “No!” She jerked forward as if to get up. With a sigh, she leaned back and said, “There’s no rush. Besides, I don’t want strange men coming out here. Not with Garrett as jumpy as he’s been.”

  Sitting in the chair opposite her, Kiernan said, “Frankly, Maureen, you seem a lot edgier than he does.”

  Maureen shrugged. “Chronic.”

  “What’s gotten to him?”

  “I don’t know.” She was nibbling her hand again. The raw spot Kiernan had noticed Monday was larger, redder, painful to see. “I left Garrett in his studio working when I went to do the shopping yesterday. When I got back he was very jittery. Today I started out, then came back—I’d forgotten to bring cash. When I got here he was worse. Garrett runs a constant very low-grade anxiety, as if he were playing in a game and hasn’t been told one of the rules. But he’s never noticeably agitated unless something attacks right then, like I did the first time you were here.”