Blood Ties

by Nicholas Guild

  “Okay, you didn’t. But I did. Yesterday I took some hair samples out of your shower drain…”

  “I know.”

  “You know? Well, if you want, you can have my badge for it,” she went on sulkily. Somehow, his knowing took the edge off her anger. “They weren’t a match anyway. But you know who the murderer is, don’t you.”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?”

  “Think about it.” He smiled again, as if she were suggesting the impossible. “If I walked into your office and said I knew who killed Sally Wilkes, but I couldn’t tell you his name or where he was, what would you think? ‘Here’s another crank. Next he’ll confess that he’s the Zodiac.’ I’ve been laughed at before.”

  She could see the logic of it, but she was past logic. She wanted him to stop smiling at her.

  And then she remembered it was a homicide they were talking about, and this man was waiting to reveal to her the murderer’s identity.

  You could see it in his eyes. He might smile, but his eyes were full of anguish. This was a man who labored under a burden.

  And they held her. For Ellen it was one of those rare moments in life when she lost all sense of her own private existence. She could only experience it, helplessly, the way one experiences any mystery. The only thing that was real was the expression in Tregear’s eyes.

  Then Ellen remembered herself and took a tentative step back.

  “We have to talk,” she said, suddenly unable to look at the man.

  Tregear nodded. “We have to talk.”

  They were still just inside the door. He made a gesture toward his front room, but he didn’t follow her immediately. It occurred to Ellen that he was probably giving her some time to compose herself.

  And she needed it. When she sat down on the sofa, she discovered that her hands were shaking.

  When Tregear came in he was carrying two glasses of white wine. He set one down on the table in front of the sofa and then retired to his chair. He was keeping a safe distance.

  “Your partner doesn’t like me,” he said quietly. “Why is that?”

  “Because he thinks you cut up women as a pastime.”

  “And who put that idea into his head?”

  “I did.”

  Tregear actually seemed pleased. He took a sip of his wine and then made a tiny gesture with his head, as if to say, Try it.

  Ellen tasted the wine and discovered it was Pinot Grigio, her absolute preference. Only, this was a label that cost about twenty-five dollars a bottle, and the last time she had splurged on it was the day her transfer to Homicide had been approved.

  Was there anything about her this guy didn’t know?

  “He thinks you’re teasing us,” she went on. “He thinks you want us to know it’s you, even if we can never prove it.”

  “That would put an effective end to my career as a serial killer. But then undoubtedly he also thinks that I’m insane and that therefore my judgment might be a little impaired.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But he’s right about being teased—your killer is a game player.” Tregear set his wineglass down on a small table on the left side of his chair. “So tell me about the semen sample. It’s completely out of character.”

  “You don’t think he fucks his victims?” Ellen asked, in her best ingénue voice. Her use of so crude a word was a small act of revenge that apparently went unnoticed.

  “Beyond murder and torture, I have very little idea what he does with them. But leaving behind that kind of evidence is a mistake he’s never made before.”

  “I don’t think he made a mistake. I think he did it on purpose.”

  And then she told him about the red panties on Sally Wilkes’ corpse and the glass in her kitchen.

  “It probably won’t be on the computer before late today, but I think it’ll turn out to be a match with the semen. I think he wants us to know.”

  For a long moment, Tregear seemed lost inside himself. Then, finally, he looked up at the ceiling and said, just above a whisper, “‘Oh Daddy, Daddy, you’re still number one…’”

  And then, abruptly, he stood up.

  “I’ll only be a few minutes,” he told her, and vanished up the stairs.

  Those “few minutes” were among the hardest of Ellen’s life, as she realized how utterly she had put herself in this man’s power. Tregear could crack open her banking records like a walnut shell. He would find out about the ATM charge for five hundred dollars she had made that morning. One phone call to Internal Affairs and her career in the SFPD would come to an abrupt end.

  And what would prevent him? The fact that they had had a little moment when she had found herself staring into his eyes like a teenager in front of a rock star?

  When he came back, Tregear was holding a sheet of paper in his hand. He laid it faceup on the coffee table—it was about half covered with a double-spaced typeface—then knelt down, took a pen out of his shirt pocket, and wrote his signature.

  “This will cover you,” he said. “It’s a release for DNA testing of a blood sample. Have you got an evidence bag in your pocket?”

  “Yes.” She took it out and showed it to him.

  “Good. Now here comes the hard part.”

  He took a neatly folded white handkerchief out of his trousers pocket and set it on the arm of his chair. Then he sat down and reached back into his shirt pocket to extract a small silver folding knife, the kind gentlemen used to carry to cut the ends off their cigars.

  Before Ellen could say anything, he opened the knife and slit the tip of his right index finger. For almost a full minute he let his finger bleed into the handkerchief. It was a deep cut and there was a lot of blood.

  “That should do it.” He smiled and closed his right hand into a fist. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll just go get a Band-Aid.”

  While he was gone, Ellen put the handkerchief into her evidence bag. She picked it up by one corner. It was really a mess.

  When Tregear returned his finger was wrapped in gauze. He sat down again and dropped his right hand over the arm of his chair, as if trying to keep it out of sight.

  He took a sip of his wine.

  “I hope this will bring about an attitude adjustment in your partner,” he said. “You can tell him I called you on your cell phone and asked you to come alone. You might leave a message on his voicemail, just to cover yourself.”

  He lifted his right hand and looked at it. The gauze had already bled through.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t do a very good job.”

  “Come upstairs to the bathroom and I’ll fix it for you.”

  Tregear smiled. It was the smile of someone who was in on a secret.

  “You mean the bathroom where you feloniously stole my hair samples.”

  “The very place.”

  * * *

  He sat on the toilet seat like a good boy, making no protest while she cleaned out the cut and then coated it with Neosporin. Like every cop, she had had first aid training, so she did a pretty good job.

  “Could you come back and change the dressings for me tomorrow?” he asked, making it sound like a joke.

  “I might.”

  Suddenly Ellen realized that she was happy. It was a relief that this man was not a mass murderer. Actually, he seemed to be a rather nice person about whom it was therefore possible to entertain tender sentiments that had been lurking in the shadows, just out of sight. She found herself wondering if, like Ken the photographer, Stephen Tregear might like to take her to dinner.

  “How did you know about the Pinot Grigio?” she asked, not quite sure why all at once it seemed such an important question.

  “I didn’t. It’s the only wine I keep in the house.”

  What a delightful coincidence. She was so pleased she couldn’t help smiling.

  But apparently it didn’t strike him the same way. The expression on his face was almost grim.

  “Come downstairs,” he said, “
and you can hear the story of my life.”

  10

  After her three years in Juvenile Offenders, Ellen thought that nothing about the little tragedies of domestic life would ever surprise her again. She had seen it all, she thought. Every kind of neglect or abuse. Children clinging to parents who were half-crazed with drugs or alcohol, begging for love—or absolution for their imagined sins.

  For Ellen, the breaking point had been a fourteen-year-old girl arrested in the Tenderloin district at two o’clock in the morning. The charge was prostitution. She was grabbed in a street sweep and taken by paddy wagon with half a dozen other hookers to the closest station house. Because she was obviously underage she was sent to juvie, where Ellen interviewed her the next morning.

  Her name was Julie Pailey, and she was a long way from being a pro. Ellen had searched her purse, in which she found forty-five dollars, a comb, a lipstick and no condoms.

  Forty-five dollars. It must have been a slow night.

  “Do you have any idea the sorts of things that can happen to you out there?” Ellen had asked her. “You could get robbed, which usually involves a black eye or a broken nose, unless the guy gets overzealous and kills you. And the way you’re going you’re almost certain to catch a venereal disease. What in God’s name were you thinking about?”

  This produced no response. She seemed apathetic, her gaze fixed on the top of the interview table, but there weren’t any needle tracks on her arms and she didn’t appear to be on anything. Ellen thought probably she was just frightened.

  “Talk to me, girl.” Ellen reached out and patted the back of the girl’s hand. “Tell me where you live.”

  After a long while, Julie gave an address in the Mission District.

  “How long has it been since you’ve had anything to eat?”

  When she didn’t receive any answer beyond a shake of the head, Ellen sent out for a cheeseburger and fries. Julie devoured them. She just about inhaled them. It was a revelation of sorts—with forty-five dollars in her purse she was almost starving. What could make her so afraid of spending her money?

  After nearly an hour of indirect questions, really just invitations to talk, Julie began to open up. She lived with her pa. She had no idea where Mom was. She hadn’t been to school in a while. This had been only her third night on the streets.

  Fill in the blanks. How could her father not know what she was doing? He knew. How could he countenance such a thing? He wanted the money. For what? It was a safe bet it wasn’t to pay the rent.

  “Tell me about your pa.”

  “He sleeps a lot.”

  “Was it his idea you peddle your tail?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then it was his idea.”

  “No.”

  Abused children became intensely loyal to their parents. What choice did they have? Whether out of fear or a victim’s abject love for her tormenter, Julie wasn’t going to roll over on her old man.

  She was a sweet little thing, and her loyalty to a no doubt undeserving father did her no harm in Ellen’s eyes. Ellen liked her. She wanted to protect her, to give her the life to which every child was entitled—and this one perhaps more than most.

  But it was clear that she was a little girl who would be better off in juvenile hall, where at least nobody could get at her, so Ellen wrote out her recommendations and scheduled a medical exam for later that morning. For the time being, the girl would be safe, and maybe, once Domestic Services had investigated Pa and revealed him as the unsavory bastard he no doubt was, some sort of placement could be found for her and she could get back into what passed for normal life among fourteen-year-old girls.

  Except that, her medical exam complete, some idiot had decided she should be allowed to go home to her family.

  It was after four in the afternoon when Ellen found out. Her shift was nearly over, but she didn’t let that stop her. She clawed through her notes until she found the Mission District address and headed for the underground parking garage, taking the stairway three steps at a time because the elevator was too slow.

  She was at the front door of the apartment building in ten minutes. A check of the mailboxes listed a Pailey in 203, which was up a flight of stairs and at the end of the dingiest corridor Ellen had ever seen.

  She knocked on the door and waited. No answer. The second time she knocked louder, using her fist as a hammer. No answer. “Police,” she shouted. No answer.

  At this point she took out her badge and looped it over the breast pocket of her jacket, stepped back and, in the best tradition of the department, slammed into the door with the full length of her shoe sole.

  The door popped right open.

  There were two bedrooms, in the larger of which she found Pa, stretched out on the bed, alive but unresponsive.

  Good, Ellen thought to herself. Maybe he’ll die of an overdose. Maybe I just won’t be in too much of a hurry to call for an ambulance.

  But in the second, smaller bedroom she found Julie in the closet, hanging from a noose made with clothesline.

  Ellen cut her down, but it was too late. Julie had been dead for probably an hour. Her hands were free and there was a beauty case lying overturned on the other side of the closet, suggesting she had kicked it away. There was even a note sticking out from the right side pocket of her jeans, with the words “I’m sorry” written with red Magic Marker.

  Her face was covered with red patches, which, had she lived a little longer, would have colored into dramatic bruises.

  When Ellen called 911 she was nearly incoherent. She was sitting on the floor with Julie’s head cradled in her lap, sobbing.

  It took the emergency team five minutes and an injection to get any kind of coherent response from Pa.

  After the bodies, both living and dead, had been taken out on stretchers, Ellen was left alone with her futile attempts to imagine what must have happened. There must have been some sort of violent confrontation before Dad retreated into his favored recreational drug and his daughter into death. What he had done to her was obvious, but what had he said to her? What had he threatened her with? Perhaps only the withdrawal of his love.

  And what difference did it make? Whatever he did or said, he as good as killed her. The coroner’s report would list Julie Pailey’s death as a suicide, but in truth she had been murdered.

  At seven that evening, when the evidence people were busy and there was nothing left for her to do, Ellen went home to feed Gwendolyn, drink half a bottle of Pinot Grigio and cry herself to sleep.

  The next morning she put in for a transfer. Enough was enough. It was either transfer or quit. She knew she could never face another case like this one.

  And in its way, Homicide had been a relief. The victims were all dead, and you didn’t have to watch their suffering. It was bad enough, but at least it didn’t break your heart.

  The little tragedies of domestic life did. But none of them could have prepared her for the story Stephen Tregear had to tell.

  11

  His earliest memory, he said, was not of a place but of the journey between places. Riding in a pickup truck between his father and mother, on the move.

  His father was a restless soul, always ready to pack up and leave, always in search of a new town and a fresh start. He was a clever man who could do almost any work. In one place he would be an air-conditioning service man, in another a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter or telephone systems technician. He never had a license for any of these things but never wanted for employment. There were always people ready to hire him and let him work off the books, because he didn’t ask for much money and his knowledge and skill beggared those of men with all the right certifications.

  So the family traveled around, living like gypsies. Young Stephen could remember Lawton, Oklahoma; Crockett, Texas; Jefferson City, Missouri; Mound City, Arkansas; Peoria, Illinois; Scottsdale, Arizona, and a dozen other places, big and small.

  His mother was only a vague smear of recoll
ection, disconnected from specific events or time. A story about a fox and a rabbit, the details of which were as indistinct as a Monet haystack. The pressure of her hand against his cheek. A thin scar on her thumb—whether right or left he could no longer recall.

  He remembered the sound of her voice. “Come on, Stevie Boy. Time for bed. Did you remember to brush your teeth?” Even after twenty-five years he heard it in his dreams. He remembered her face, and the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled.

  The memory of her smile was vivid. She seemed hardly able to look at him without smiling.

  When Stephen was seven, she simply disappeared. His father told him she had left, didn’t love them anymore, had gone away. Her son had cried and cried but, finally, inevitably, had accepted it all as true. He and his father had continued their travels.

  Schools were places you wandered in and out of. Some of them were like concentration camps but, never mind, you would soon be gone and this or that town would fade into memory. Only the road was real.

  They lived in rented houses, usually a mile or so outside of town, sometimes near a wood or surrounded by cornfields. They were lonely places, with no one else nearby.

  And the life father and son lived in those houses was strange and silent—strange perhaps only in memory, but the silence he remembered as something almost tangible. There were no visitors. There were only the two of them, and his father was a difficult man to approach.

  The silence made him miss his mother all the more. It was as if her departure had dropped him into a dark place where he was utterly alone.

  And the houses were always cold, always sunless, even in summer. Was this also just a trick of recollection? Was the cold something to be read on a thermometer, or was it merely a projection of his state of mind? He could no longer be sure.

  What sustained him? His memories of his mother, who had loved him. That love was not a myth he had created for himself. It had been a fact of daily life.

  And because he knew his mother had loved him, he began to suspect his father’s scanty version of her disappearance from their lives.

  “She just took off,” he said. “She packed up her clothes and went. Maybe she got in with some fella she liked better’n us.