Split Second

by Catherine Coulter

  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, you’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.”

  Lucy said, “Mrs. Lansford, when did you tell your daughter her father was Ted Bundy?”

  Elizabeth Mary Lansford laughed. “What mother would ever want to tell her daughter something like that? I never told her. But she found out, I have no idea how, and she wouldn’t tell me how she knew. It was when she was twenty-five. She walked unexpectedly into the gallery, looked at the painting I had finished that morning, and she sneered—she always sneered at my work—and she said, calm as you please, ‘I know you hate me, Mother, like you hated my father. I could have visited my father in prison in Florida, met him before he died, but you never even told me who he was. You kept him from me; you stole my father from me. You’re a bitch, a gold-plated bitch, and I wish he’d killed you.’

  “Perhaps you wonder how I can remember her words so exactly, but I suspect Inspector Delion knows. You have children, do you not?”

  Delion nodded. “I would remember, too, if one of them said that to me. What happened then, Mrs. Lansford?”

  “She stalked out with me calling after her to wait, to let me explain, but she didn’t even slow down. Of course, I couldn’t say anything to George. The next time I saw her was on her birthday last year, when I think my husband tried to bribe her back with the gift of the black Porsche.”

  Coop said, “So you didn’t even see your daughter or hear from her for—what? Six, seven years?”

  “That’s right, until her thirty-second birthday. She has since turned thirty-three.”

  “And you don’t know how she found out about her father?”

  “No. I asked her, but she refused to tell me.”

  Coop said, “How did she act at her birthday party?”

  “It marked the one and only time Kirsten went out of her way to charm her stepfather. Because he gave her the Porsche first thing, I imagine. I listened to her laugh, watched her excitement when she saw the Porsche with a big red bow sitting squarely on the hood. George beamed at her, and she played up to him, still charming as could be, whooping and laughing with pleasure, flirting with him, truth be told. But before she drove off, she made sure to look at me, and there was such cold hatred in her eyes I wanted to cry. I knew I hadn’t been forgiven for keeping the truth about her father from her, and I never would be.” She turned away from them and walked to a window that gave onto the warm night and tourists and locals still thick on the street. When she turned back, her face was perfectly blank. “About six months ago someone broke into my studio at home and destroyed every painting I had there. It was Kirsten, of course. I—I never told George, merely locked the room until I coul
d clean it out.”

  “Sentra! What are you doing here? Felipe told me you’d come into my office with three people; he didn’t know who they were. What is going on here?”

  Delion, Lucy, and Coop turned to the woman standing in the office doorway, the image of Mrs. Lansford, who was still leaning against the desk, only this woman was wearing a long bright yellow gown with diamonds at her neck, her thick black hair swept up in a French twist.

  Sentra?

  “Who are you, ma’am?” Delion asked, stepping toward her.

  “Why, I’m Elizabeth Lansford, of course. This is my sister, Sentra Bolger. For heaven’s sake, Sentra, have you been pretending to be me again?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Coop said, “I know, it’s nearly one a.m. I was prowling around, saw the light under your door. You can’t sleep either?”

  Coop stood in Lucy’s hotel-room doorway wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and boots. For an instant she didn’t recognize him, since she was so used to seeing him in a suit, or a white shirt, the sleeves usually rolled up. Well, she wasn’t in a suit, either, so who cared? She cleared her throat. “Good look—like a cat burglar,” she said, and stepped back. “I did try to get some sleep, but it wasn’t happening. I’ve been staring out toward the bay. You want a beer? We can play a game of Who’s the Real Mother?”

  Coop walked into a room the mirror image of his. “Sounds good.” He sprawled on the sofa, accepted the beer, and clicked his can to hers.

  “Hey, I like your sleep shirt. Red’s a good color on you.”

  “Ah, but that’s not the best part.” Lucy turned around. GIVE ME A REASON was written across the back, and beneath there was a squirrel on his hind legs, aiming a rifle outward.

  He laughed, settled back. “I don’t think Delion has ever been shut down so fast as we were by Mrs. Lansford. She practically shoved us out the door,” he said, and sat forward again, staring down at the nondescript beige carpet beneath his booted feet. “So, let’s play your game. Who do you think is Kirsten’s mother, Sentra or her twin sister, Elizabeth?”

  “My gut veers toward one, then the other. I thought Vincent was going to shoot both of them there for a while, what with that smug smile on Sentra’s face, and Mrs. Lansford—that lady was extraordinarily pissed off. At us? Or at her sister?”

  Coop said, “All of us. I Googled Sentra Bolger, found no mention at all of a twin sister, only that Sentra’s an interior decorator, works out of her home on Russian Hill. There was a lot of stuff about her husband, Clifford Childs, and his family. You’d think there’d be more, but there wasn’t.

  “Elizabeth Mary Lansford has hundreds of links, of info about her husband and her artwork, her gallery, and her charities—but not a word about a twin sister. I did find a mention of Kirsten, but only as a daughter.”

  Lucy laughed as she set down her beer can. “I did the same thing. I bet Vincent is so hyped he’s still up working on this.”

  Coop said, “He’s a little like Savich, happiest when he’s got a trail to follow. A big trail is that new Porsche Mr. Lansford gave her for her birthday, and, of course, the usual financial records and cell phone accounts. If she hasn’t ditched them all, they could lead us to her.”

  Lucy said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirsten finds out we were here in San Francisco, that we know now who she is. If she does, she could disappear again.” She frowned for a moment, then walked to the window and stared out again at the small chunk of San Francisco Bay she could see between two buildings opposite her room. She looked down onto Bay Street, two floors below. There were few streetlights, and no people about. The entire wharf area seemed quiet as a tomb.

  “I wonder who named this hotel Edelweiss?”

  He grinned at her back. “Hey, Shirley gave it an eight on our short FBI-approved list of hotels, so what’s in a name?” It was late, and Coop was tired; he lost focus for a moment and found himself looking at her bare legs—nice, long legs, actually—and at the silver bracelet with a small dangling palm tree hanging from one of her ankles. He was smiling until she turned around and he saw misery in her eyes. She blanked it out in an instant and said, “When I look back on the interview, I can remember thinking some of the things she said were more than a bit odd. I wonder how much of it was true. Did you see her pull that piece of paper from the blue horse’s hoof—she stared at it for the longest time. What was that all about?”

  Coop said, “But the real question is: why was she pretending to be her sister?”

  “The word nuts springs to mind. Maybe it was a game they played when they were younger, but—”

  “Yeah, but this was nothing to joke about. Maybe Sentra Bolger was going for exactly the shock and rage we were treated to from her sister.”

  Lucy thought about that. “So, Coop, what do you think? Who is Kirsten’s mother, Sentra or Mrs. Lansford?”

  Coop sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “I’m thinking if Sentra is Kirsten’s mom, the women had to switch identities at the very beginning, even before Kirsten’s birth, since there was never any question raised about maternity.”

  Lucy said, “It would be nice to have a DNA sample from one of them to really nail down Kirsten as the Black Beret, though I don’t think these ladies are going to line up to give us one. But I wonder why Sentra would give her baby to her sister? It’s true she appears to be several slices short of a loaf, and that throws even more doubt on Kirsten’s mental health. Was she born crazy, a loaded gun?”

  “No,” Coop said slowly, “not crazy. I think Bundy was pure evil.”

  Was he evil? What did that make her grandmother, killing her own husband? She closed it off. “It’s a pity Mrs. Lansford refused to talk to us at all.”

  Coop set his beer can down on the coffee table next to Lucy’s. “It was more than anger. When she realized what it was about, she had to have time to think it over and talk with her husband, decide what to tell us.”

  Lucy nodded. “But if she’d had a gun, I do believe she’d have shot the lot of us, her sister first off. Her husband’s going to go ballistic about what this is going to do to his run for Congress.”

  He nodded. “No way around it, he’s screwed. When I called Savich before to tell him what happened, he was surprised, a hard thing to manage at the best of times, but the twin story did it. He said, ‘Well, life never ceases to amaze, does it, Coop?’ Then I heard him tell Sean not to feed Astro his apple pie; it was the last piece, and his mama wanted it if he didn’t.”

  She gave a smile, a small one, but it still counted. Coop rose, pulled out a small bottle from his jeans pocket. “I brought some melatonin with me—it helps turn my brain off for a while. Want some?”

  They washed down the tablets with the rest of the beer.

  “Give it twenty minutes.”

  When she walked him to the door, he turned and looked at her. “Lucy, what are you up to at your grandmother’s house?”

  The smile fell away. For an instant, he would swear she looked panicked before she shook her head and said in a rock-hard voice, “Nothing, Coop. Forget it, okay? Breakfast is coming soon, so let’s hope the melatonin does the trick.”

  He wanted to see her smile again. “What do you think of our pre-honeymoon so far?”

  “I understand sleep deprivation is a common side effect of a pre-honeymoon. If you don’t leave, we’re going to qualify for that.” She looked him up and down. “You might be an arrogant skirt-chaser, but again, you might not, so I’ll ask it. Tell me, Coop, would you marry me if I had a kid whose father was Ted Bundy?”

  “Not in a million years.”

  “Me, either.”

  “Good night, Lucy. I really do like your palm tree,” he said as she closed the door. “See you in the coffee shop at eight a.m. sharp.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Richmond District, San Francisco

  Saturday morning

  “It’s the duplex on the right,” Delion said, pointing, and pulled his Crown Vic into t
he only free spot on Clinton Street, a good half block away. “We’re only a few blocks from the Golden Gate. If you guys like, I’ll drive you through the park when we’re done here. We can commune with the buffalo.”

  Delion had called ahead, and so he wasn’t surprised when the door was opened immediately by a slight man with a receding hairline, stooped shoulders, and bright red sneakers on his feet.

  “Mr. Carpenter? Roy Carpenter?”

  The man nodded. “Inspector Delion?”

  After introductions, Mr. Carpenter showed them into a long, narrow living room, the front window looking out over the cars on the other side of the street. Toys were scattered everywhere on small, colorful rugs. Lucy felt a lick of sadness. She hadn’t known he had a child.

  Mr. Carpenter said, “Forgive the mess. My sister and my nephew Kyle are living with me at the moment. She, ah, left her abusive husband last week, finally. She’s staying with me until—well, I don’t know how long. Please sit down. Coffee?”

  Since the three of them were floating in Starbucks coffee, they turned it down. When they were all seated side by side on a nubby gold sofa, Mr. Carpenter said, “You’re here about Arnette.” He tried to keep his voice flat, devoid of hope, to prevent disappointment, Coop knew. It was hard, so very hard, since he knew, all of them knew, that even after three-plus years, a victim’s family still held out hope that the missing loved one would once again, somehow, walk through the door and explain it all.

  Delion pulled a small recorder from his jacket pocket. “Do you mind if we record this?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “We believe we know what happened to your wife, Mr. Carpenter.”

  He jerked forward on his chair, and the naked hope in his voice was enough to break your heart. “You’ve found her? You know who took Arnette, what they did to her? Is she alive?”

  “Mr. Carpenter, I’m sorry, sir, but we believe your wife was murdered. We also believe the person who killed her was named Kirsten Bolger. Do you know anyone by that name?”