Civil Twilight (17 page)

He looked so smug I had to believe him. And yet . . . “Oh, wait, you piggybacked onto the survey, right? You spotted Sonora—
Sunny
—with this great cover story and you dangled your job, one that someone like her would jump at. You needed her to go out there and investigate it for you. You couldn’t do it yourself. Why? Too hard? Too dangerous?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “So you sent her out and when she didn’t get the goods you sent her off again, right?”

He still didn’t say anything. This time it looked like he couldn’t. His face was flushed and his lips pressed tightly together.

Now I knew how she had gotten away after the killing. How she’d managed to get whatever fake ID she needed and vanish in those twenty-four hours before the sheriff even arrived at the Cesko house. Twenty-four hours! Still, in a high-profile case like this . . . amazing.

But now I also understood why Claire had thrown him out. “You don’t believe Sonora was a killer, do you? At least not in the way everyone thinks.”

“No.”

I looked over just as he turned toward me. Our eyes met, and, for an instant, everything felt right. “I can’t believe it either. Tell me about her. Where she was from. Her parents. School. Everything. What was she like then?”

“Looking back, she was a nice kid. I thought of her as too serious. But that was okay for me. What I needed. She was from one of those suburbs that got gobbled up by San Diego. Father in the Navy. Only child. Mother dead. Sunny hated the military life. She didn’t say much, didn’t need to, not to a guy who’d dropped out of college. Idealistic but not crazy. She could recite the Bill of Rights. From memory. I’ve worked for a lot of lawyers since then and not one has come close. But to her it was like a prayer.”

No wonder I’d thought there was something between her and Gary. “Was she headed to law school?”

“Probably. But she was only a sophomore then. She could just as easily have gone into reporting. She had a gift for chatting people up. At first, though, she seemed flighty, like she’d never stop talking. And I worried I’d made a huge mistake hiring her. I thought she’d never shut up long enough to hear anything.”

Boy, had she changed by the time she became Karen Johnson.

“What hooked her to begin with was the idea of working under a reporter. I listed the notice as an apprenticeship.”

“She must have thought she was the one making the mistake when she saw you,” I told him. He missed the sarcasm, which was okay. “And not just because you were practically a kid yourself.”

“Old enough to be acting on my ideals,” he corrected me. “She was a kid from some plastic subdivision. She wanted that story almost as much as I did. I didn’t have to twist her arm. Maybe she pressed Madelyn Cesko a little too hard about the migrants working here. I knew she was concerned about Claire out there, so isolated. But I don’t know what happened. I didn’t force her out there. She wanted to go back there again to see Claire, too. I figured Claire would help me. I was wrong.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“With Sunny?”

“Yeah, with Sunny?”

“Hell no. She weighed two hundred pounds.”

“God, you are a pig.” And this time I wasn’t being sarcastic.

He looked over at me as if I’d stepped off another planet.

There wasn’t time to deal with his failings; a lifetime probably wouldn’t suffice. All I could think of, anyway, was the fact that his description of Sonora Eades was so different from the Karen Johnson I’d seen; I had to
question once again if they could really be the same person. “So you know how to get to Alaska, right?”

He didn’t answer me. But the set of his face gave him away.

A pig, yes, but he’d pulled off a very tough vanishing act. Still, I wanted to smack him. Instead, I said, “Here’s what I know about Sunny afterwards. She had a backbreaking job carrying fish up a cliff in Alaska. By the time she got through she said she could see the outlines of her muscles like she was an anatomy model—”

“You’re kidding!”

“The day she died in San Francisco, we ran up the hill to Coit Tower. She was beautiful—blonde, slim, expensive clothes, expensive hair and face. Telling me she was here for a divorce. So, Wallinsky, what happened in the middle?”

“Married money!” he said. Did I detect a note of bitterness?

“Doesn’t take a detective to figure that. What else?”

“Won the jackpot?”

“No, that’s exactly what she wouldn’t—couldn’t—do. She couldn’t win a lottery because, Wallinsky, she was a fugitive. You can’t draw attention to yourself like that. So what else? How’d she get to be a beautiful woman in expensive clothes?”

IN THE ZENDO the bell rings into silence.

Behind and to my left, I could hear the door easing closed and footsteps—slow, careful, as if prolonging the walk to a cushion might somehow make a 7:05 A.M. arrival seem less late than it was. Cloth rustled, knees creaked. I waited till the absence of sound expanded and took on its own sounds—of the birds, of breathing, of a bus hauling itself up Columbus Avenue. I struck the bell and listened to the sweet reverberation—as if a peach had become music—spread through the room and mesh with the silence. I hit the bell the second time, and then the third, listening to its sound melting into the room.

Morning zazen varies from day to day. The unformed day can ease into a noting of breath flowing out and refilling, with the note of each new bird a greeting. Thoughts present themselves—but they can wait. Some days, for me, the pull of sleep is strong, drawing me into a dream from which I awake, dream again, wake again to one scene after another equally real, equally illusionary. This morning Karen Johnson/Sonora Eades was just too compelling to push away.

Driving back along I-5, I’d wondered about her life in Alaska. How terrifying it must have been for an earnest twenty-year-old to wake up
every morning as a hunted killer? The crime would have been news nationwide, till the next monstrous thing bumped it from the headlines. Fleeing, she’d had a head start, but not much of one. Then, to have to watch every word you utter, to scan every face for a threatening light of recognition—she must have been wrung out by the end of each day.

Non-attachment is an axiom of Buddhism. Zen students know that attachment is the cause of misery. We see ourselves led by the nose ring of what we want, what we think we need. And yet we still want. Everyone in the zendo would resist giving up all the things they wanted. How much harder for a twenty-year-old girl like Karen Johnson to step off that hundred-foot pole?

However, it had been eighteen years since Madelyn’s death. No one hauls fish up a cliff that long.

So she’d married. Stopped working? Born children? Whatever the state of her marriage, she’d managed a comfortable life. But what had driven her to consider divorce and leave the safety she’d found for herself to return to an existence in which she could never get a driver’s license, hold a job that required a social security number, apply for a passport, or draw attention to herself. What could be that important?

Leo was bowing to his cushion. I hadn’t even heard him come in. Zen practice is about awareness! I focused back on my breath flowing out, being pulled back in. I wondered . . . This time I let the thought go and noticed my exhale. Meditation, Suzuki-roshi said, is coming back to the breath again and again.

At the end of the period, I rang the bell. The door opened and Korematsu stepped in, standing there and watching as the rest of us chanted the Heart Sutra.
Form is no different from emptiness, emptiness no different than form.

When I walked out of the zendo, Korematsu was waiting. “Why didn’t you call me sooner?” he demanded.

I wanted to talk to Gary. He wasn’t at Karen’s apartment. It was obvious he hadn’t been there all day. Chances were he’d left right after I did and I wasn’t going to find him again, damn him.
“I’m giving you Karen Johnson’s real identity. The better response would be ‘thank you.’”

“I’ve got coffee. Thanks enough?”

I nodded, followed him into the courtyard as he handed me a paper cup. Espresso, a double. Maybe a triple. It did make me think better of him. I sipped, realized it was cool enough and took a long swallow, following the heat down my body the way I’d just been doing with my breath. My eyes opened wider, my head cleared and I noticed how good Korematsu looked at this hour of the morning. Korematsu who’d used me to try to see into John’s mind.
Get a grip, Darcy!

“Talk,” he said.

“Karen had a cookbook by Madelyn Cesko—”

“Knife? Murderer vanishes?”

It still shocked me to say it. “Karen Johnson is Sonora Eades.”

A thatch of hair fell over his forehead and he pushed it back. Then he said, “Why do you think our Karen Johnson is Sonora Eades?”

I tried to work out what my reply should be.

“Darcy? You creating an answer?”
Busted!
Quickly, I said, “Sonora Eades’s little finger was twisted so the nail faced out. Ditto Karen Johnson’s.”

“That’s your proof?”

“Well, yeah! Hard to get clearer proof than that. Plus, now that you know she’s Sonora Eades, there’ll be fingerprints from the investigation in the database somewhere.”

He slammed down his cup. The coffee spurted out the lid. “Fingerprints! Darcy, what is it you expect me to judge them against? Her fingertips are shredded like cole slaw. The best expert in the country’s never going to get a match.”

“Well, what about the DNA?”

“I asked you a question.”

I hesitated. Karen’s prints had to be on the desk, the chair, the door of Gary’s office, but furious as I was at his disappearing again, I couldn’t bear to rat him out either. I compromised—a bad compromise, a semi-ratting. It’d lead Korematsu to Gary, but not right away.

“I’ll make you a deal.”

“Police don’t do deals.”

I laughed.

“
I
don’t do deals.”

I raised an eyebrow.

He shook his head. “I’ve already stuck my neck out for John. You may remember, he and I are
not
close! We have history. But I covered, waiting for him to stop hiding out like a little kid.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You should. I didn’t do it for him.”

“Thanks.”

“And it didn’t get me any points with Broder. Your brother—would it have killed him to make one or two friends in the department, long as he’s been there? Did he research every pet peeve of every guy in the chain of command? Or is he just a natural . . .”

Asshole?
I stiffened.

“. . . thorn in the side of the universe?”

“Yeah, well, we all have our skills. And, one thing about my family, we don’t back down. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t know where he is. When
he surfaces, we both know you’re going to have to get in line to chew him out. I want you to have this lead, but . . .” I paused as if I was considering. We both knew otherwise.

He blinked. “But what?”

“You can’t ask me how I got it.”

“Give me a break! We don’t make dumb deals like that.”

“Oh, right.”

“I can cart you down to the station right now!”

“Give me a week.”

“End of the day.”

“Instead of a week? Why would I agree to that?”

“Because you want me to use this info of yours to find out about Karen Johnson.” He turned and waited till I looked up and he was gazing directly at me with those soulful eyes of his. “Because this is Broder’s case and you’re lucky to be dealing with me, not him. And the only way you’ll continue to deal with me is if you trade something worthwhile.”

“Monday.”

“If I could, I would. I’m not gaming you. This is a high-profile case. Broder’s . . . on the prowl. I’d cut you some slack, but . . . I can’t.”

“I believe you. I’m trusting you. But—”

“What?”

“Give!”

“Karen had an apartment in North Beach.”

North Beach was peaceful. Men and women dashing for buses or street cars or to their offices in the financial district beyond the zendo had dashed
and were gone. Those who stayed at home were having their second cup of coffee. They might be working; they might still be contemplating working, but, whichever, they were doing it inside.

Karen’s place was as empty as it had been last night when I’d swung by on my way back into the city. I’d banged on the door and stretched over the railing to peer in the dark window. Now it was Korematsu knocking and calling out. With a glare at me, he kicked the door in. It was a door even
I
could have kicked in.

The place had looked staged two days ago when the only sign of life was Gary sitting in the kitchen with the cookbook. Now it was just empty. The closets were empty, the dresser drawers were bare, there were no pictures on any surfaces. They hadn’t been there before and they weren’t there now. The only item left was a wadded tissue in the kitchen trash. “If she was here,” Korematsu said, “we can get a DNA match. Maybe from that. Or whatever. Not that it’d tell us anything about why she was here or why she got killed. Did she tell you she was leaving?”