Beginnings: A Kate Martinelli novella

by King, Laurie R.

  XVI

  Lee’s eyebrows rose at the name. “You don’t mean…?”

  “Yes. The Mark Fields.” Software billionaire, man-about-town on the San Francisco Peninsula, owner of one of the biggest homes in the big-home territory of Woodside, Mr. Philanthropy when it came to Bay Area schools.

  Meaning that Patty’s Leather Jacket admirer in 1983, and my letterman-jacket assailant from 1981, had been one and the same.

  “But why? What was that about ruining his life?”

  “Ah. Yes. About that.”

  I gave her the condensed version of my history with the boy: would-be Lothario; dark alley; galvanized pipe. She had more of a reaction than Al had, though she found it easier to agree that, as a sixteen-year-old, he might have been after domination, rather than outright sex. What concerned her more was my willingness to let shame sweep away my childhood. It took a while to get her therapist mind off that and back to my proposed explanation.

  “So, what do you think? Is that version of the accident possible? Yes,” I said to hold off her automatic response, “you’re going to say that anything human is possible, but what I want to know is, am I off in the high weeds here? Joining the tin-hat brigade?”

  “What’s his history? For example, does he have a police record from when he was young?”

  “He does have a juvenile record, but it’s closed, so I can’t see what he was picked up for.”

  “And since then?”

  “He’s never been processed as an adult—in fact, he’s not in AFIS at all, which means he’s never served in the military, hasn’t been arrested, and never had to go through a background check. Though that seems unlikely, for someone who runs a software company.”

  “How old was he at the time of the accident?”

  “Not quite eighteen. And clean since then—though reading about him online, he seems to have a reputation for being in-your-face with people who piss him off. A bar fight. Two or three women claiming he shoved them around before they went silent.”

  “Let me guess: all of them bought off?”

  “Like I say, rumors are. And he’s a philanthropist, but he didn’t start up his nonprofit until he was a billionaire several times over and people were commenting on how little he gave back. So he donates now, mostly to schools—and mostly places willing to stick his name up on a building.”

  “Married? Kids?”

  “He’s been married three times, has four kids, all of them stayed with their mothers after the divorces.”

  “I don’t have to ask whether he takes physical risks, because even I have seen that picture of him hanging off Half Dome. And being a hugely successful entrepreneur, we can take it as given that he hits the ‘deception’ and ‘self-centered’ boxes on the sociopathy check-list.”

  “So that’s a yes?”

  “Is Mark Fields a sociopath? He could be—some degree of sociopathy is common enough among self-made kajillionaires. Could he have crossed the line into outright psychopathy? That’s a diagnosis I couldn’t begin to make without a detailed look at his history. Yes, a juvenile record is definitely a sign, since antisocial behavior manifests early, but in itself it doesn’t mean anything. Does he have any close bonds, with family or friends? Has he shown any indications of real empathy or remorse, or are those superficial—apologies that open the door to some gain? How extreme is his risk-taking, and does he pull others along with him?”

  A mental bell went off, and I reached for the heap of printouts I’d compiled. It took me a minute to find the page I was after.

  “This was taken two years ago. He and some friends were at a ski resort where he’d booked the entire run for himself, and they triggered an avalanche. One of the friends was killed. This one is going to the hospital.”

  She studied the photograph. A crew of paramedics and mountain rescue personnel, a figure on a stretcher with neck brace and splinted leg—and beside him, one hand resting on the man’s chest, Mark Fields.

  Laughing.

  Lee chewed her lip.

  “I know,” I said. “It could be what the caption says, relief at the rescue. But…”

  “So you think he was driving the car when your sister died. And that he hid his involvement afterward. Panicky kid, running away from an accident—after thirty years, would anyone prosecute him for it?”

  “Exactly what Al and I wondered. Technically, leaving the scene itself counts as a hit-and-run—a felony. He could be charged with involuntary manslaughter. But a rich kid with influential parents? I doubt Diamond Lake would’ve gone after him even at the time. And now? A good lawyer and a public apology read from a sheet of paper would make it disappear.”

  “There’s a ‘but’ in your voice.”

  “There is. Because if he was in the process of committing a serious crime when she died, that’s a whole different matter. That could make it felony murder.”

  “What kind of serious crime?”

  “Felony drunk driving, say, or fleeing a robbery. Or kidnaping.”

  “That’s why your scenario has him abducting her.”

  “It would explain some things. Al and I both think it’s worth looking at.”

  “I take it you don’t have any evidence? You’d have mentioned it.”

  “Nothing direct, you’re right. What we do know is that he’s bright. And though yes, even bright kids can panic, I’d have thought that a rich kid’s automatic reaction would be, ‘Oh crap, drunk driving—well, Mom and Dad will get me off.’ And not being eighteen would have made things easier. Plus that, it’s pretty clear Patty was already sleeping with him—which in the Eighties, especially considering how she tended to dress, would have made any rape accusation go away. So if their relationship was consensual, how could anyone accuse him of kidnaping?

  “Unless there was something else—some reason to scare him into wiping his prints and getting as far away as he could. Such as, something he’d planned that would both punish me and restore him in the eyes of his buddies? Using the way he’d tried before, but had it go wrong on him.”

  “Conspiracy to assault.”

  “At this point, it’s purely speculation. But we do know there was a boy that age who spent the night in his car, out at the end of Pipeline Road. And I personally can testify that Mark Fields had a history of leading his friends in an assault on a girl. When it comes to why he would be so eager to distance himself from the accident, an intention to set up my sister for a gang rape would explain it.”

  Lee studied the handsome, laughing face: perfect teeth, money in all directions, utter confidence. Then she looked up at me. My wife, the love of my life, who had paid the price of a bullet when my job followed me home—this woman looked across at me and said, “If that’s the case, why has he left you alone for all these years?”

  The room seemed to drop away from under me. My breath stopped—possibly my heart.

  Good God. I’d been so focused, so wrapped up in finding a villain to my sister’s story, that I hadn’t paused to study the larger pattern.

  I took a breath. “Aversion therapy, maybe?”

  “I’m not joking, Kate.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean… Look, if anything about our theory is correct, then the fact that I scrambled his brains had to’ve made a deep impression on—God, again, sorry. But wouldn’t you say that even a predator can learn by aversion? He made two runs at the Martinellis, both of which went catastrophically wrong. Somewhere in his mind must be the feeling that he should steer clear of me. And anyway, Diamond Lake was small stuff to him. He’s a multi-billionaire now. Why would he even think about it?”

  “Unless you remind him.”

  The long, long day washed over me. I sat back in the chair, closing my burning eyes. “You think I should drop it?” I asked after a while.

  “I think you need to be really, really careful. And I think that, going forward, you need to stay well back from any prominent role. Make it look like something the machine kicked up, investigating an old ca
se. Don’t make it feel like you coming after him.”

  I nodded. “I’ll talk to Al. See what we can do.”

  “Make sure Al understands the danger.”

  “But you think that story I told you does fit his profile?”

  “Kate, you don’t need me to tell you that.”

  No. I did not. After a while, Lee took my hand and we went to bed.

  I can’t say I actually slept, in the few hours before the sun rose.

  XVII

  “Cold Case, Garcia speaking.” Garcia was one of Al’s colleagues, a young cop who’d lost part of a foot to a shooting.

  “Hi Max, is Al in?”

  “He said he’d be working from home for a couple of days. Try his cell?”

  “I did, just thought I’d check there.”

  “Good luck,” he said cheerfully, and hung up.

  I closed down the phone and thumbed in a text to Al.

  Need to talk.

  But in the end, I couldn’t wait. Instead, I crossed the hallway to stick my head in the captain’s office. “You busy?”

  “Never not, but I can give you a minute. What’s up?”

  “It’s going to take more than a minute.”

  He gestured to the chair. I shut the door and sat down.

  “I need to talk to you about a shit-storm I may be stirring up.”

  “This your cold case?”

  “It’s getting warmer.”

  He nodded; I talked. When his phone rang five minutes in, he shut it off. When his secretary tapped on the door ten minutes after that, he didn’t even look up from my sheaf of printouts, just raised his voice to say that he’d be a while.

  Half an hour after I’d shut the door, he gathered the pages, tapped them into order, closed the folder, and rubbed his face.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “No. I’m just thinking how to get at this. That box from Diamond Lake is in our evidence locker?”

  “Everything but the film. And the only name connected to that is mine.”

  “And as far as you know, Diamond Lake never processed the rest of the evidence?”

  “As I understand it, the officer in charge back in 1983—Belmonte—lifted a bunch of prints and was going through them, but once the department told him to call it an accident, he put the rest away without analysis.”

  “Then that’s the first step.”

  “Okay, but Fields’ prints aren’t on any database I can get at.”

  “Have you two talked with Diamond Lake yet about jurisdiction?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So there’s nothing on record so far.”

  “There wasn’t when I last talked with Al, which was yesterday.”

  “Then let’s keep things under wraps. You hand-deliver the print cards to the lab, and tell whoever takes them that if a match comes up, I don’t want it in the system. They can give it to you, me, or Al, period.”

  “They’re going to think it’s to do with Homeland Security.”

  “Let them think it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any other evidence waiting around? I suppose the car itself is long gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “DNA?”

  “Belmonte sent her underwear off to be tested a few years ago, but there wasn’t anything. Basically, all the box had was photographs, the print cards, a handful of broken window-glass, and a bag of stuff that looked like they’d swept it off the floor of the car. There’s a few cigarette butts we could try, but I can’t vouch for where the box was kept all these years.” It didn’t take much heat to degrade the DNA in saliva.

  “Okay, put those in as well, with the same no-name order.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  “And if nothing comes back—if there’s no evidence to tie your sister’s death in to Mark Fields—then we drop it. Yes?”

  “Absolutely.”

  * *

  To be honest, I couldn’t have said which I wanted: to find someone responsible for the loss of my sister, and risk waking up demons from the past, or to put it down as an unsolved cold case and keep my family in the dark.

  Both Lee and the Captain were right. We had to pick our way through this potential mine-field, and not set a foot down until we were sure of our ground.

  When Al finally phoned, I asked him where on earth he’d been.

  “At my new club.”

  “You have a club?”

  “Working out, you know?”

  “Um, good for you.”

  “What’s up?”

  I told him about my conversation with the Captain. He listened, grunting occasionally, when I described what the Captain had said about secrecy.

  “You taking the stuff to the lab today?”

  “I thought I would. Why?”

  “You know your sister’s letter and that Polaroid you told me about? The one with the boy’s ass? I think you should put those into evidence as well.”

  “What, you think we’ll need it for a lineup?” I had to laugh at the idea of putting together an ID line of tattooed asses.

  “Would be one for the records,” he agreed mildly.

  “Okay, I’ll do it today.”

  But as I hung up, I wondered about that club. My partner had never been one for fitness, and yet the other day he’d eaten a salad, and now he was working out. Sure, we were all getting older, but—was there something he and Jani weren’t telling us?

  XVIII

  The fingerprint results came back fairly rapidly—such as they were. Conveniently, Belmonte had gone so far as to assemble print cards that would eliminate the car’s actual owner, Tony Cardone, and Patty herself. Most of the latents belonged to Cardone. Patty’s, as I’d known early on, were exclusively from her left hand, and almost all in areas that were remarkably clean of other prints.

  That left half a dozen unmatched prints from the car’s driver side. Two of those the lab had identified as a man who ran a Diamond Lake garage back in the seventies and eighties, who had died of natural causes in 2001. Another print was from the car’s previous owner, who had sold the car when he went into the Army. Three prints were not in the system: a partial from the gear shift that was probably too small to use; one from the brake release, fairly clear and nearly complete; and a partial that was clear but small, from the window crank handle.

  I phoned Al, and yet again was shunted to voice mail. This time he called back in just a few minutes, from some place with a lot of background noise.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I got the results of—Al? Can you hear me?” Loud male voices tumbled out of the phone, drowning out anything he might be saying.

  “Hold on.” The voices faded, cut off. “You still there?”

  “Where are you?”

  “My club.”

  “Again? Al, what on earth—”

  “Busy here, Kate, what do you need?”

  “I—Al, never mind, give me a ring when you have a few minutes to spare.”

  The phone went dead. I pulled it away from my ear and stared at its number pad. What the hell was the man up to?

  But instead of phoning, twenty minutes later, he sent a text—an address down in Palo Alto, with the words:

  Come get me.

  Before I could text back to say that a trip down the peninsula wasn’t really convenient, a second message arrived.

  Now.

  Pls.

  So I sent back:

  Be at least 45 minutes.

  And received:

  Fine .

  What could I do except get in the car and drive down to Palo Alto?

  * *

  The address was a coffee house. Al came out before I could park, a paper bag in one hand, a to-go coffee in the other, and an old sports bag slung over his shoulder.

  He rested the coffee on the roof while he opened the back door, dropping the gym bag on the floor but placing the paper sack with care on the seat. He retrieved the coffee and got in front, handing me the cup.
It was almost warm.

  “I guess that isn’t a pastry for me?” I asked, pointedly glancing at the backseat.

  “Oh, it’s for you, but it’s not a pastry. I brought you a water bottle. An empty one. Complete with both saliva and fingerprints.”

  I stared at him. His blue eyes were beaming with pleasure.

  “You got Mark Fields’ water bottle?”

  He ducked his head to look through the windshield, nodding across the street at a sleek building with a lot of sleek people going through its doors. A building that housed a sports club so exclusive, the sign could barely be read from the street.

  “Let me guess: your new club.”

  “Which has some interesting members.” He dug into a pocket for his phone, unlocked it, and handed it to me.

  It took a moment to make sense of the image: a wall covered by wooden doors with padlocks—an upscale locker room. With people—the figure on the right, blurred with motion, was fully dressed, but the other person, the man holding the towel…

  I expanded the image, and grinned at the male buttocks, slightly pixilated but clearly emblazoned with the Gothic words KISS and MY, on either side of the crack.

  “Al, you’re a damn genius.”

  XIX

  At a certain point in any case, investigators begin to weigh their bits and pieces of evidence, trying to decide if there’s enough to justify a warrant, and eventually an arrest. A good defense lawyer—and the one on this case was sure to be the best—would argue every step of the way. The discarded bottle, the circumstantial evidence, the personal involvement of one of the investigating officers, on and on.

  Say there was something in the evidence box that pointed at Fields. The thing had knocked around a rural police station for thirty years. Anyone could have put it there. And that faded Polaroid of a tattoo that bore a resemblance to one worn by Mark Fields? Who was to say that half the boys in his high school hadn’t lined up for that same tattoo? Indeed, was there any reason to think Mr. Fields even knew Patricia Martinelli beyond passing her in the halls of the high school?

  Your honor, we move to dismiss.

  But it’s not a cop’s job to try the case. A cop’s job is to put together enough evidence to make a prosecutor happy. For that decision, we needed to go back to our Captain.