by Jodi Compton
The blinds were down on the window, so I couldn’t peek in. But this made as good a place as any for my covert entry. I reached into the pack for my tools.
Serena had taught me lock picking earlier this year, after I’d had to do an artless pry job on a door as part of a break-in I’d considered merited, if not legal.
Last year a man I’d trusted, if not considered a friend, had sold me to Skouras for fifteen thousand dollars. I’d nearly died as a result of his betrayal. For that reason, I’d had no remorse about the mess I’d made of his back door, nor about taking the remainder of the fifteen grand that he’d hidden in his kitchen.
This time I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that someone had broken in, and thanks to Serena’s teaching, I now had the skills to finesse the lock. It was mostly a matter of dexterity, one hand putting torque on the cylinder with a screwdriver while the other hand, wielding the safety pin, found and teased up the pins. Steady hands helped. Many people, in this situation, would be nervous. I wasn’t.
The lock gave way, the cylinder rolling obediently under the pressure of my left hand. I straightened up and went in, closed the door quietly behind me, took out my flashlight, and looked around.
I was in a generously sized, clean bedroom with a standard setup: double bed in the center of the room, head against the wall, two night tables, a bureau with a large mirror perched on it and one framed photo, bookshelves, and a dog bed on the floor.
This wasn’t where the renter had lived; this was Violet’s bedroom. Two things told me that. First was the dog bed. An aged dog would want to sleep with its mistress, and vice versa. Second, the photo on the dresser was of Eastman and her husband. They were clearly traveling somewhere, standing in front of an open-air fruit market. She was maybe in her late forties or around fifty, hair pulled back under a straw sun hat. He was hatless, white-haired and lean-faced, and they were linking arms. They were, if not young, at least not yet touched by the depredations of old age. They looked good, straight-backed and serene, and I knew that the young grifter, no matter how stunted her conscience, wouldn’t have wanted to look at that photo on the dresser. It would have indicted her every day.
There was a faint chemical scent in the air: The forensics guys had been here, dusting for fingerprints, though I couldn’t see obvious signs that anything had been removed or rearranged.
Further inspection of the room bore out that it was Violet’s: There was a pair of reading glasses on one night table, some large-print books on the bookshelf, and a faded yellow robe hanging on a hook on the back of the door. But beyond that I was surprised at how few markers of age there were in this room. There were no prescription bottles by the bed, nor over-the-counter meds. Other than the one photo, there was no clutter of memorabilia in the room, no framed pulp-magazine covers to attest to Eastman’s writing career, no old photographs to remind her of her youth and onetime beauty. A vase held several wilting stalks that had once been bright sunflowers. The books on the shelf were a mix of nonfiction and fiction, but all of quality: no diet books written by celebrities.
Seen in daylight, without the scent of fingerprint dust and with the sunflowers in bright bloom, this would have been a pleasant place, entirely plausible as the room of a much younger woman. There was an ageless quality about it, or at least a sense of old age faced unsentimentally.
I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There were no prescription bottles inside. That made sense. Eastman had been fatally sedated. Probably the police had taken all her medications into evidence, in case one of them was the drug that had put her into a coma.
I walked out into the living room, where it became clear that the forensics people had been through. Here the chemical scent was stronger, and there were patches cut out of the light brown carpeting in the center of the room.
This was where it had happened. There were patches of carpet taken up because Stepakoff had bled and died here. This was where the grifter had found him, or he’d found her.
At least that was my assumption, that she’d been surprised by the young cop. I’d always heard that con artists tried to avoid violence, as did female criminals, and this woman was both. If she’d fired on Stepakoff, she’d felt she had no other choice.
That was interesting. If V. K. Eastman hadn’t been able to open the door, and “Hailey” wouldn’t have, had Stepakoff entered the house illegally, as the press had suggested? Maybe Stepakoff had been a bit of a hot dog, and he’d gone in through a window after seeing Eastman nonresponsive on the couch. San Francisco, like Los Angeles, had been in the throes of an early-spring heat wave the past week, so it was very plausible that a window had been open; many San Francisco homes, even expensive ones, didn’t have air-conditioning, because intolerable heat was so rare.
I went around raising the blinds on all the windows, and when I had, the bright moonlight that had made me a little wary on the street now flowed through the windows and made my flashlight unnecessary; I switched it off.
Stepakoff going through a window was the answer that allowed for the renter taking him by surprise, which seemed certain. He’d made no call for backup, and his gun had been in its holster. He’d been shot without warning. And he’d died right here.
The living room was also where Eastman had spent her final hours, lying on this velvety, dun-colored couch. I saw a freestanding metal object by the sofa. Under closer inspection it turned out to be a quad cane, a cane with a more stable four-toed foot. So Eastman hadn’t been very mobile. That was probably why she’d taken the downstairs apartment as her bedroom: no stairs to climb.
This all made sense. I could see how Eastman had ended up dying on the couch, not on her bed. She’d had some health problems, but she wasn’t bedridden, and “Hailey” had been a personal assistant but not a nursemaid who brought meals to her bedroom. At least that was how the media reports had made it seem. So it was likely the first dose of sedatives had probably been administered in the living room, under the guise of a friendly drink together: Why don’t I make us some tea? Then, after Eastman had succumbed to the first drugging, “Hailey” probably hadn’t had the strength to carry her from the couch to her bedroom. Follow-up dosing had been done here.
I went into the kitchen and, still touching everything obliquely and never directly by the handle, found what you’d expect: plates and glasses and silverware, food in the cupboards. For a moment it seemed odd to me that so many everyday things remained here, but then the forensics techs who had gone through the place weren’t a cleanup crew. Taking away the clothing and the canned foods and the books, that would fall to Eastman’s heirs or friends.
There was no second bedroom downstairs, meaning the grifter had lived on the second floor.
The first room upstairs was a home office: a heavy, old-fashioned banker’s desk and a metal filing cabinet. The cover to the rolltop desk was up, but little remained on it: pens and pencils, a notebook, a dictionary. I picked up the notebook and opened it, but it was blank. That didn’t surprise me. Likewise, if there were manila folders left in the filing cabinet, they’d be empty, unused spares. Whatever the young grifter hadn’t taken in her predatory searches of Eastman’s office, the police would have taken as evidence. It would do me little good to poke around in here.
Yet I couldn’t help but think, before I left, Why did Eastman trust her so much? It seemed that Violet’s tenant had had easy access to this office, and thus to everything—applications for savings and brokerage accounts, with Eastman’s Social Security number on them, bank statements with balances, stock certificates, the title to the car.… If Eastman couldn’t climb the stairs, the grifter wouldn’t even have had to worry about getting caught looking for these things. She could have done it at her leisure.
Maybe Violet had trusted the young woman simply because she’d had to, because she was ill and too low on energy to do a thorough background check. Old age was frightening, the vulnerabilities it brought.
I crossed the hall
to the other bedroom. It was on the backyard side of the house and didn’t get the same generous moonlight as the front, so I switched on the flashlight once again.
The room was big, obviously once the master bedroom. What caught my eye was not the bed but the piano. That took me by surprise. I hadn’t even known that Eastman could play. She must have been good. Nobody pays movers to bring a piano up to the second floor without a serious commitment to the instrument.
Beyond that, the room was furnished in Twenty-first Century Girl: cream and pale blue, with several fat scented candles on the dresser, as well as a wicker basket full of small seashells. This was where she’d lived, the other “Hailey.”
Please let there be something personal. Clothes, shoes, anything.
The ceiling was high in here, as in the rest of the house, and a shelf ran over the door, but its individual cubbies had been cleaned out. The closet was a walk-in with no door on it, and it took me only a glance in that direction to realize there was nothing in it but hangers and an ironing board leaning against the back wall. The drawers of the bureau were empty.
Either she’d taken her things with her—the likeliest scenario—or the police had taken what she’d left as evidence. I felt deflated. If nothing else, I’d hoped to get a sense of her height and weight compared to mine. I already knew she was Caucasian and close enough in age to me to pass as me. I sat down on the bed, thinking. Surely there had to be something else here I could learn from.
That was when somebody shut the front door downstairs. Not covertly, like I’d pulled the door to V.K.’s bedroom softly closed behind me after breaking in. This was a declarative, I-belong-here sound. That meant a cop.
I clicked off the flashlight immediately, then got silently to my feet and stood in the bedroom doorway, listening. The downstairs footsteps were as confident-sounding as the door’s closing—unhurried but not tiptoeing. Then I heard him climbing the stairs. Dammit, this was happening too fast. Why couldn’t he have needed something from Violet’s bedroom or the living room, where most of the forensic work had been done?
The bedroom window was a single pane of glass; it didn’t open. The closet offered no refuge. It didn’t have a door, and there was nothing inside it to hide behind or under.
The footsteps were still coming.
I studied the sturdy-looking shelf that ran over the door. It was wide enough for me to crouch on, if I put my hands against the ceiling for balance.
I took my gun from my runner’s pack, checked the safety, and tucked it into my jeans at the small of my back. Then I carefully got up on the dresser, braced one foot on the doorway’s edge, and pulled myself up. Easy, easy, okay, good. I got my legs under me properly, crouching, both hands braced against the ceiling, because there wasn’t any place in front of me to put them for balance. It wasn’t a comfortable position, but I wouldn’t be here long.
I had one thing on my side: I could hear only one set of footsteps, and no voices. That meant a lone policeman, not a pair.
Why the hell was a cop here alone, though, and at one in the morning?
I didn’t have any more time to consider that. The overhead light came to life, and then he walked in, a tall young cop with his handcuffs looped over his belt in back, the tan leather straps of a shoulder holster coming together between the shoulder blades, a utility bag like a photographer’s over the left shoulder. As he passed right under me, I could have reached down and touched that familiar curling red hair, worn today in a neat ponytail at the nape of the neck.
“Joel,” I said lightly, and before he’d even fully turned around, I jumped.
He took it better than most people could have. We went to the floor hard, but it didn’t knock the wind out of him. I stuck the muzzle of the Browning against his jawline and clicked off the safety.
“Hailey?” he said, seeing past the new brown hair.
“Be smart,” I said. “I’m going to take your piece now. Let me.” Without lifting my body weight up off him, I reached for his gun, eased it out of the holster, and tucked it into the place where the Browning had just been.
“Hailey, think about what you’re doing.”
I ignored that. “Do you carry a backup weapon?”
“I’ve got a knife in my boot.”
“Which boot?”
“The right.”
To reach it I’d have to turn facing away from him and reach down, which would put me off balance. I didn’t like that. “Okay, we’ll let that go for a moment,” I said. “Don’t make any sudden moves. It’s not my intention to hurt you, but remember you’re dealing with a very nervous wanted criminal who’s facing death row.”
At his size he would win a wrestling match, so I didn’t want him to try.
I sat up to a straddling position on his hips and pushed the bag he’d been carrying out of his reach. Then I said, “Arch your back a little bit, I’m going to reach under you for the cuffs.”
His jaw tensed, but he cooperated. I leaned forward slightly and slipped my free hand under his lower back until I felt metal. I pulled the handcuffs free.
“Where’s the key?”
He didn’t answer, but I saw his eyes go to the bag. I pulled it to me, keeping the gun on him with my other hand.
He said, “I don’t think you want to do this. You’ve already committed assault on a sheriff’s deputy. If you handcuff me, legally that carries the weight of kidnapping, which—”
“Stop,” I said. “I’ve already got two murder charges on the books against me. I’m through sweating the details.” I felt a round nub of metal under my rummaging fingers and pulled out the handcuff key.
“Okay,” I said, “very slowly, you’re going to sit up—not stand—and slide backward until you’re sitting against the leg of the piano. My gun’s going to be on you the whole time.”
I climbed off him into a crouching position, holding the gun in front of me, still pointed at him.
Joel obeyed me, easing himself slowly backward, but as he did, he said, “Magnus believes your story. So do I.”
“Put your arms back so that one hand is on either side of the piano leg.”
“Please let me take you in. Magnus has some weight. He can run some interference for you in the system.”
“That much? I doubt it. I’m a suspected cop killer. Put your hands where I said.”
He lowered his face as he did so, nearly closing his eyes. I knew what he must have been feeling, but I couldn’t afford the distraction of empathy. I moved behind him and locked the handcuffs around his wrists. Then I leaned back a little and put my hand on his leg. “Relax,” I said, slid my hand inside his right boot, and took out the knife he’d said would be there. I flicked it open.
“Pretty,” I said, examining the curved blade. “Most cops would prefer a gun as a backup piece, a little .380 with an ankle holster.”
“I’ve always liked edged weapons.”
“Really? Magnus told me you were a real marksman. ‘Kid could hit the ten ring standing on a water-bed mattress’ was his exact expression.”
“He said that?” For a second, Joel seemed pleased, but then his expression darkened again. I knew why. Whatever respect he’d won from the veteran Ford, it was lost now, after he’d let a fugitive get the drop on him and chain him up with his own handcuffs.
I stood up and surveyed him thoughtfully. “You may be a lights-out shooter, but you’ve got some things to learn about being on the other end of a gun,” I said. “Like, a gun’s not dangerous at all if the person holding it isn’t willing to pull the trigger.”
“You’re saying you weren’t?”
“I had my finger outside the trigger guard, that’s how worried I was about accidentally shooting you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
I turned my attention back to the bag he’d been carrying, opening it again to examine the contents. Among them: a digital camera, a sketch pad, a narrow notebook like the kind reporters use.
I said, “Magnus sent you to
get some photos and drawings of the scene? To make some notes?”
“Yeah.”
So he was here to do essentially what I was here to do. Interesting.
He said, “You could’ve broken my neck, jumping on me like that.”
“But I didn’t.”
“I could’ve shot you.”
“But you didn’t. These kinds of conversations bore me. They’re pointless.” I started pacing. “Listen, we’re both a little jammed up here,” I said. “I can certainly call someone and tell them you’re here, but you’re way out of your jurisdiction, and I’m guessing you didn’t give SFPD a courtesy call about your visit.”
His guilty, irritated expression told me I was right.
“When Magnus Ford hears about this, I don’t think he’s going to be happy. And me, once your colleagues hear about this, I’m facing those added assault and kidnapping charges you mentioned.”
Joel said nothing, but his expression was dark.
“But I think there might be a way out for both of us.” I reached inside my pack and dug out the aspirin bottle, with Serena’s pills inside. Shaking out a handful, I separated several small white tablets and scooped the rest back into the bottle. Then I sat on my heels in front of Joel and showed him.
“Ambien,” I said. “Two of these should put a guy your size under.”
“No way,” he said. “I’m not letting you drug me. I don’t use. I hardly even drink.”
“Hear me out,” I said. “You take the pills, you fall asleep, I take the cuffs off and leave. You wake up, grab your weapons and cuffs, and go. Ford never knows what happened here tonight. I’m certainly not going to tell him.”
There was conflict on his young, open face. He saw the merits of it, but at the same time he hated the idea. Cops, soldiers, firefighters … they trust their bodies, rely on them. They hate to lose control of them, even temporarily.
He said, “I’ve never seen Ambien before. How do I know—”