Split Second f-15

by Catherine Coulter

  Delion laughed and gave a loving little twist to the ends of his glistening black handlebar mustache. He knew it was magnificent, a work of art. It was polished to a high gloss, nearly as shiny as his bald head.

  “Too bad Poirot’s fiction, and Dame Agatha is dead, or I’ll bet he would,” Delion said with a good deal of satisfaction.

  They all shook hands and sized one another up. Both Coop and Lucy recognized the cop in his eyes, eyes that looked ancient, filled with memories of stuff you really didn’t want to know about, eyes that had seen too much over too many years.

  And both of them wondered if their eyes held that same knowledge. No, not yet. Delion had twenty years on them.

  Once they were seated, a young Latino set a basket of warm tortilla chips in front of them. All hands reached out at the same time, and everyone laughed, including the young guy, Carlos, who was pouring water into their glasses.

  Delion said, “These are the best tortilla chips in town. Eat up, kids, the proud city of San Francisco is picking up the tab. When I told our lieutenant, Linda Bridges, you guys had info on the serial killer, and who you believed she was, she said to take you to my favorite place, on us. Then she told everyone to keep their fricking mouths shut, under pain of dismemberment, which never works but scares the rookies for maybe five minutes.”

  While they stuffed themselves on chips, salsa, and a bowl of guacamole, Delion talked about the case he’d worked with Dane Carver, and moved on to the continuing sorry saga of the 49ers. As he spoke, Lucy found herself thinking about her grandmother’s attic, a massive open room that ran the full length of the house. She’d be busy for a week going through everything up there. Maybe she would start with the attic when she got back home. It beat searching through any more books.

  When she heard Delion and Coop discussing the fate of football since Brett Favre had left the game, Lucy said, “Like Coop, I bow my head and weep when the Redskins lose, Inspector, but I can’t stand it—tell us you’ve found Kirsten Bolger’s mom.”

  Delion toasted her with a tortilla chip. “Yes, I found her. It’s a good news, bad news sort of deal, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Delion didn’t answer her until their waitress, Cindy Lou, the archetypical California girl—blond, tanned, and gorgeous—had served their enchiladas and burritos.

  “Well,” Delion said, forking down a huge bite of beef enchilada, “her name isn’t Bolger any longer, hasn’t been for twelve years now. It’s Lansford, as in Elizabeth Mary Lansford, wife of George Bentley Lansford, a big mover and shaker in Silicon Valley. He owns a big interfacing communications company that’s international now, and he’s using some of his millions to finance his run for Congress. He’s got lots of juice, as you can imagine, lots of people who owe him favors. His rep is that you do not screw around with George Bentley Lansford around here. That’s the bad news—we gotta be real careful when dealing with his family.”

  Lucy looked at the last dollop of guacamole, saw Coop had a chip at the ready, and struck first, saying as she chewed, “You gotta work on your speed, Coop. Inspector, that doesn’t sound like bad news because we’re not from around here and it’ll be a treat to mix it up with him.”

  Delion laughed, scooped up some black beans on a tortilla chip. “When I met you, Lucy, I thought, Now, here’s a nice, quiet, kind of cerebral girl with her French braid and modest little silver earrings. She probably doesn’t like to rock and roll all that much. I should’ve paid more attention to those shit-kicker boots you’re wearing.”

  “Well, I don’t know about all that,” Lucy said, “but this poor boy over here would whimper if he had to face me in the gym.”

  Coop grinned at her. “I saw Sherlock clean up the floor with you, Lucy. As I recall, she had your legs tied behind your elbows.”

  “Sherlock’s tough, I’ll give you that, but Dillon holds back even though I tell him it really pisses me off.”

  “Good thing,” Delion said. “Savich could break your neck while sipping his tea.” Delion frowned. “Savich isn’t a wild man, though. Only thing that would shake him is Sherlock getting herself hurt. I hear she got shot a couple of months ago.”

  Lucy said, “Jack, that’s Agent Jackson Crowne, said when Savich saw her lying on the floor, he nearly lost it. She’s fine now.”

  Delion polished off his enchilada, fastidiously patted his mustache with his napkin, and sat back, hands over his belly. He looked from one to the other. “You kids ready for the good news now? Like I told you, our girl’s mother isn’t Elizabeth Bolger any longer, she’s Elizabeth Mary Lansford. She’s an artist, does a kind of whimsical, fantasy sort of thing—elongated creatures with strange shapes and tentacles, and big eyes, like cartoon characters mixed with science fiction. She runs a local art gallery called Fantasia, over on Post Street. Here’s your dessert—I called the gallery, and she’s there this evening, some sort of showing for a local artist. If you children aren’t too jet-lagged, we can go meet her after dinner.”

  Coop said, “Good news indeed; let’s do it. Anything you can tell us about her?”

  “Not much yet.”

  Lucy said, “Your mustache twitched, Inspector. Come on, what do you know about her?”

  “All I’ll tell you is that she’s a local and she’s never been in jail. As for anything else, I think it’d be good if you guys go in with no preconceptions. Then we’ll compare notes.”

  Lucy said, “What about those unsolved missing persons you’ve been looking into?”

  Delion pulled out his notebook, flipped a couple of pages. “The first two teenage girls simply went missing, both from Mount Elysium High School. We found out today both of them were in some of Kirsten’s classes. The first girl was a junior, sixteen years old. She had biology with Kirsten. One day she’s gone, no sign of her, nothing at all. Good family, reports that she was well adjusted, so probably not a runaway. It drove the police nuts, but there simply weren’t any leads of any kind.

  “Same with the second girl. She went missing a year and a half later, a senior. Here one day, and the next day, simply gone. Same good background, involved parents, no leads at all.” He looked up at them. “She shared an English lit class with Kirsten.

  “We found three other missing young women who knew Kirsten Bolger in some capacity, and they all simply disappeared, one every three years on average. There is another woman we haven’t been able to connect to Kirsten yet, but I’ll get to her in a minute.

  “The last woman disappeared two years ago, a thirty-year-old woman named Elsa Cross who lived in Kirsten’s apartment building on Dolores, south of Market. I started with her since she’s the most recent. After her disappearance every eye was on her ex, but he was alibied up to his tonsils. I called her parents and asked them about a neighbor of their daughter’s—namely, Kirsten Bolger. The mother remembered her daughter saying Kirsten wasn’t very social, and she was always playing strange music in the middle of the night, but as far as she knew, there were no shouting matches, no angry words between the two women, just mutual dislike. At the time, the police spoke to the manager and all the neighbors, and that had to include Kirsten Bolger, but there weren’t any obvious red flags, so all I could find were a few notes about what Kirsten had to say when interviewed.”

  “And she said what?”

  “She said she barely knew Elsa Cross, only said hi to her when their paths crossed, said she seemed nice enough. Nothing else. The case eventually went cold when no new information surfaced.

  “I called the manager this afternoon, asked him what he remembered about Kirsten Bolger. He said she was a loner, always paid her rent on time, and always wore white, never a color for contrast, only white, head to foot. He said he never saw any visitors, guys or gals.”

  Coop said, “Bundy was a charmer, a real favorite at a party, evidently nonthreatening, given the number of women he got to leave willingly with him, yet his daughter is quiet, a loner, acts and dresses weird. But she doesn’t we
ar white anymore; now it’s black.

  “There’s another thing. From what the bartenders in Cleveland and Philadelphia tell us, she can be outgoing, charming, a mirror of her daddy.”

  Delion signaled to Cindy Lou for their check. After he set down his credit card, he said, “I wondered about that. I guess our girl’s adaptable, has some talent.”

  Lucy said, “Sounds to me like she got into it with Elsa Cross, that or something around that time was the trigger that made her change her ways, and eventually set her out on her road trip. I wonder why she killed that first girl; she was only sixteen, you said?”

  Delion nodded.

  Coop said, “Maybe, like Elsa Cross, the girl made the mistake of criticizing her about something, and she found out about it.”

  Delion said, “Yeah, could be, but again, no one remembers any confrontation between the two of them. It was a long time ago, after all.

  “Okay, now there’s another woman—Arnette Carpenter—I went through her book but couldn’t find she knew Kirsten Bolger at all. I’ve assigned a couple of guys to try to find a connection to Kirsten. They’re going to be interviewing everyone involved again, all except for the husband.” Delion gave them a placid smile. “I called Mr. Roy Carpenter. We’ll pay him a visit tomorrow morning ourselves.”

  “You’re good,” Lucy said, and grabbed the last broken tortilla chip before Carlos could take the basket away.

  Delion signed the credit slip, picked up his notebook. “Roy Carpenter was the prime suspect at the time of Arnette’s disappearance, but there was no body, no rumors of marital discord, no other woman lurking in the wings, so he got dropped and the case went cold. This was three years ago last May. He still lives in the same house in the Richmond District.

  “Okay, kids, you ready for some modern art?”

  CHAPTER 16

  Post Street, San Francisco

  Fantasia Gallery

  Since it was a Friday evening and warm, always an unexpected treat in San Francisco, both natives and tourists swarmed the streets. There weren’t as many panhandlers in Union Square anymore, Delion told them, as they made their way out of the underground garage. He missed Old Ducks, though, a Vietnam vet who used to play the harmonica over near Macy’s, always with three blankets around his shoulders, a watering can to collect change from the tourists passing by, and a nice word for everybody. They walked over to Post Street, home to a good dozen art galleries.

  There were more locals than tourists in Fantasia tonight, because the showing was for a local artist. The gallery lights were bright, and the mood was light with laughter, maybe because the paintings in the spotlights were filled with such outrageous colors and shapes, they made you want to smile. Whether or not you’d want to look at a creature with two heads and two matching tails every day of your life on your living-room wall was another matter entirely, Lucy thought. The artist getting all the attention was Exeter Land, a stylishly tall and skinny man, wearing perfectly wrinkled loose linen pants and a matching linen jacket. He held a glass of champagne between his long, thin fingers, and stood chatting in the middle of a group of admirers, flushed and happy.

  They walked around the gallery, looking mostly at the people there, and spotted about a dozen of Mrs. Lansford’s paintings, all hung on one wall and accented with the very best lighting. They were exuberant, Lucy thought, like Mr. Exeter Land’s—in fact, like all the artists she carried, as if they all cheered at the same fantasyland ballpark.

  Delion walked toward a woman who stood at the far wall of the big open gallery floor, leaning against a small dark blue desk with white half-moons painted on it, a bottle of water in her hand. She was in her fifties, trim, with very long dark hair, not even a dash of gray, that she wore straight and pulled back with gold clips behind her ears. Coop could easily picture her younger—she had a bit of the look of Bundy’s onetime fiancée, as well as many of Bundy’s victims. But she was older now, and carried a look of confidence, he thought, in herself, and in the scene unfolding around her. She was watching the crowd carefully, her eyes roving over each of the people in her gallery. Assessing the possible buyers? Surely she had to be pleased at the turnout for her artist.

  Delion nodded to Coop and Lucy. The three of them formed a loose half circle around Mrs. Lansford.

  Delion pulled out his badge, introduced himself, then introduced Agent Lucy Carlyle and Agent Cooper McKnight of the FBI. “We’re here about the murder of five women in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland, Mrs. Lansford.”

  She looked at the three of them in turn, nothing changing on her face, not even a small tic or an eyebrow going up, nothing at all. Her very dark eyes remained calm, only politely interested. “You want to speak to me about some murders? Murders, did you say? How can I possibly help you, Inspector? Agents?”

  Delion brought out the driver’s license photo of Kirsten Bolger, along with the police sketch and a photo of Ted Bundy. He spread them out on the desk behind her.

  She took a quick look at the photos. Again, her expression did not change. “A moment, please. Let’s go to my office.” She said nothing to anyone, simply walked out of the main gallery, up a circular flight of steps, down a lovely rose carpeted hallway with more paintings for sale on the walls, and opened a door. She stepped back and waved them in.

  Her office was a 3-D fantasy, Lucy thought, large and filled with color. The paintings, a sofa, four chairs, and a coffee table—everything was vivid, bold, and whimsical. There were large stuffed animals scattered about the room—a giraffe, a lion, a horse, and an anteater. The wall-to-wall carpeting was red, with big circles of white and yellow. You smiled, couldn’t help yourself.

  “Sit down, won’t you?”

  They didn’t sit. Delion once again spread the photos on the desktop, a shiny black affair with a black computer on top and a black phone.

  “Would you please look at these photos again, Mrs. Lansford.”

  She looked. “Yes?”

  “You recognize your daughter, Kirsten?”

  “Is that Kirsten? That looks like her driver’s license, and the sketch resembles her, to be sure. Why, yes, I do believe it is.”

  “And you recognize your daughter’s father. Ted Bundy?”

  Still, there was no expression at all on her face. She was silent a moment, studying each of the photos now, then she said quietly, “What in the world would make you think such a thing, Inspector?”

  Delion said, “One of the intended victims, a young woman in Philadelphia, scored her fingernails down Kirsten’s face. We typed her DNA from the tissue and matched her to Ted Bundy.”

  “Imagine that. Is there no privacy of any kind anymore? I would very much appreciate it if you did not tell George that his stepdaughter’s father was one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.”

  Lucy said, “You never told him? If he doesn’t know, I imagine he will know very soon now, Mrs. Lansford. Unfortunately, we cannot control leaks, as much as we would want to. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I suggest you warn your husband. And when Kirsten comes to trial, every single thing everyone knows about her will come out.”

  “Well, then, I must trust you either don’t ever catch Kirsten or you kill her.”

  Hmmm. Coop said, “You saw the police sketch in the paper and on TV, didn’t you, Mrs. Lansford? You recognized your daughter, didn’t you?”

  She shrugged. “No, the police sketches weren’t at all like her, and so I dismissed it.”

  “But then other police sketches came out. You recognized those as Kirsten, didn’t you, ma’am?”

  “Perhaps I did notice a resemblance, perhaps it was niggling at the back of my mind, but I have a great talent for shutting out unpleasantness, and, believe me, there couldn’t be anything more unpleasant than this creature murdering five women, let alone thinking that perhaps he was really a she, and that she was really Kirsten. I suppose I was afraid that sooner or later someone might come to see me. But I must admit, yo
u’re here much sooner than I expected. May I ask how you found me?”

  Lucy said, “We had an excellent description and sketch of Kirsten. We narrowed down our search to the San Francisco area where the murders began and found her quickly enough from her senior yearbook photo at Mount Elysium High School.”

  Mrs. Lansford walked over to the giraffe that was nearly as tall as she was, with an eye patch over one eye. Oddly, she lifted the eye patch, looked at the empty eye pit closely, then carefully laid the patch over it again and gave the giraffe an absent pat. “His name is Louie. Ah, so easy, it seems. I’m very glad one of the killer’s victims managed to live through the attack.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you, since I haven’t seen Kirsten in over a year. The last time was on her birthday, when I called to invite her to our house in Atherton to give her a special present.”

  “What was the present?” Lucy asked, seeing for the first time a fat pink hippo sitting beside a bright blue-and-orange chair. It should have been tacky but was, in fact, charming.

  “A Porsche Nine-eleven, black, naturally, since she’d left her white period.”

  “Did her white period include blond hair?”

  Mrs. Lansford nodded.

  Coop said, “Did she favor a different color before then?”

  “Red. That didn’t last long. No, it was white for years. It was very unnerving to see her. And tedious. And weird. I told her so, but she ignored me, as usual.”

  “How does Kirsten earn a living, Mrs. Lansford?”

  “She went to law school—I know, I know, so did Ted Bundy for a while. She stopped going to classes, flunked out, just like her father. Despite all the white, all the bizarre outfits, she is very pretty, and very thin; she modeled for catalogs for a while, but she tired of that quickly enough. She really didn’t need to work, since her stepfather”—she paused for a moment, frowned at a small piece of paper sitting on the hoof of the blue horse, bent over and picked it off, rolled it into a ball, and gently placed it in the bright yellow sunflower wastebasket beside the desk—“since he gave her an allowance of five thousand dollars a month for many years. I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he is a foolishly generous man.”