Her body went stiff and then, suddenly, she was shaking.
I backed away from the edge fast. “I’m sorry. Really. Okay, I lied. You’re right. But I didn’t come all this way for curiosity. I knew that girl in the photo, went running with her. Now she’s dead.”
“Karen died?”
Karen!
So this was when Sonora Eades became Karen Johnson. “Karen Johnson”—I waited till she gave a slight nod—“yes. She fell off a building.”
“She killed herself?”
I shrugged and sat down on the grass, motioning her to sit beside me. “Tell me about her. Did Henkley go after her particularly?”
“No,” she said slowly. “Dead? Karen?” She shook her head. “Damn, it shouldn’t . . . things . . . should’ve been better for her.”
“They should have. Definitely.” I took a breath. “But you were saying about Henkley?”
“He barely bothered with her. There was tastier meat around.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t know. She didn’t start hanging out with the rest of us till the season was half over. She was close-mouthed, but, you know, everyone had secrets. You didn’t work here otherwise. But Karen, it wasn’t like she was running from a crazy boyfriend, or like she’d cut out before doing thirty days for shoplifting. None of the common things. It was like she’d climbed the wall from the convent or something deep like that.”
“Had she relaxed more by mid-season? I mean, when she started hanging out?”
“Yeah. Well, in the beginning. It was like, you know, you gauge yourself, figure out how much you can drink and still keep your business to yourself. It’s a stage. Then you figure out Seward’s a good place where people’ll watch out for you. A boyfriend’s not going to come asking questions and beat you to a pulp. Petty crime in Arkansas’s not going to follow you here. It takes a while to find out you’re safe, longer to trust it. Nothing’s total, but still.”
“
In the beginning.
Then what happened?”
“She tightened up again. For a while she stopped hanging out at the bar altogether. Then, it was like she’d decided she couldn’t give up the one release we all had, so she came back. But it didn’t relax her. It made her tense in a different way.”
“How?”
“Like she was choking on something all the time.”
“Anger?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“And then?”
“Nothing.”
“Rikki, Karen’s dead. Don’t leave her with the stigma of killing a man for no reason. What happened?” She hadn’t said Karen killed him, not in words. If I couldn’t get her to admit that, I had nothing.
She crossed her legs, staring down toward the choppy water. Wind-whipped hair covered her face, but I could see the indecision in the movement of her jaw.
“I know Karen,” I insisted. “She had a reason.”
Still she hesitated.
“I liked her, Rikki. She fell onto the freeway.
The freeway!
I saw her body afterwards. The bones in her face were gone. There was just skin. She—”
“Stop! I don’t want to—” She inhaled. “The day before he died, he went after me. But I was tougher than he thought—I took a swing at him. The fish basket swung me around. I was lucky I didn’t go shooting right down. I ended up needing twelve stitches in my face.” She pulled back her hair, so I could see the scar over her eye. “The next day I was so zonked with the painkillers I could barely put one foot in front of the other—”
“He didn’t fire you?”
“Nah. He knew I knew he’d be waiting for his chance to get even. He loved that. He knew I couldn’t tell anyone because . . . well, because.”
I didn’t ask why she’d come back. I knew that answer. “How do I know you didn’t kill him?”
“I would’ve. I really think I would’ve. But by the end of the day I wasn’t here.” She pulled out a dental bridge with four front teeth. “After he got even, he told me to take the rest of the day off. Mr. Magnanimous.”
“How do you know it was Karen?”
“She told me. When she helped me down the path with my mouth bleeding. She told me he’d never do it again. I said yeah, he would, because what else was I going to do? She just repeated that. The way she said it, so matter of fact, it was the calmest I’d ever seen her.”
29
GETTING RIKKI to talk to John took some maneuvering. He might have managed it by heavy-handing her but I couldn’t let that happen. It was the least I could do for her.
I checked in with the stunt coordinator to make sure my gag was still on schedule and there were no last minute changes in equipment or layout. Suddenly, what had been distant was looming. Tomorrow! I’d done fire gags before, but then I’d had time to eyeball everything, check the fuel mix—diesel and unleaded gasoline—and double-check the Nomex suit to make sure there were no tiny holes. But this time we’d be using a gel that was new to me. The gag had been story-boarded a month ago and I’d picked it apart looking for flaws. There was nothing more to do, except the mental run-throughs I knew I’d do over and over on the plane. I trusted Jed Elliot, but still it’d be my skin in the burn.
I got some cold drinks, a couple burgers to go, and ate mine while I waited. I watched the fishing boats waddle in carrying loads a lot bigger than their San Francisco counterparts. And I thought of Karen Johnson, wondered what had gone through her mind as she’d sat here, looking at her beautiful bay of exile.
When John finally pulled open the car door, he greeted me: “What the hell are
you
doing here? You could get yourself killed! It’s not the movies
where you’ve got a catcher net.” He shook his head. “Slide over. I’ll drive,” he instructed.
I laughed. “If you get out now, you’ll be hoofing it back to Anchorage. Here, I got you a burger. Eat and be grateful.” I pulled into traffic. “What’d Rikki say?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Hey, I’m the one—”
“It’s nothing you don’t know. But if there’s an inquiry, you want to be able to say you’re clear.” He pulled something from his shirt pocket.
“You taped her? She agreed to be taped?”
He shrugged and started to unwrap the burger.
“You mean: didn’t know.”
He chewed.
“Dammit John, I just about had to beg her to talk to you. If she’d seen that recorder—”
“She didn’t. Do you think this is the first time I—It’s harder for a man; a woman puts her purse on the table and
voila!
Man’s got to . . .”
“Find a man-bag?”
“Watch the road, will you?”
“That tape’s not going to be admissible.”
He didn’t even bother to answer.
I turned all the way toward him. “So, what’re you going to do on this drive, John, drink water and stare out the sunroof into the dark?”
“Try to have our flights moved up, if you don’t get us killed first.” John, for all his annoying heavy-handedness, was a welcome addition so long as that hand was pressing someone else. Even so, he couldn’t get us a flight till midday, and he spent the next half hour calling motels.
I followed the road out of town onto the highway. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about Karen, not yet. I didn’t know where to begin. Trees
clustered around me, pressing in. They hadn’t done that on the drive down, before I knew Karen Johnson had—”John, I just can’t believe it. Henkley was beyond disgusting. But for her to kill . . . again. I mean, I wanted to believe somehow she didn’t kill Madelyn Cesko, that there’d been homicidal migrant workers like Wallinsky thought. But now—”
“You don’t know what to think.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re trying to find some good reason, some excuse—”
“Such as?”
I’m not a complete moron!
“The thing with you, Darcy, is you can’t bear to see bad in people you like. I’ve pointed this out before. You see what you want to see. If someone’s your friend you don’t want to believe bad’s really bad. If it’s Mike—”
“Give it a rest, John. It’s not like you didn’t spend a fortune on Wallinsky alone. Hunting for Mike where Mike is not and never has been supported Wallinsky for a decade.”
He made a show of eating, like chewing was some new and challenging task.
But I was being forced to believe bad about Karen Johnson now. Like her or not, two people were dead. Wallinsky had questions, but he didn’t know about Harris Henkley. “I wonder, after Madelyn Cesko, was it easier to just push a guy off a cliff? No mess, no bother?”
“Not according to Rikki Jessup. Good burger. That period here before Karen killed him, when she pulled back into herself, Rikki figures she was trying to deal.”
“Trying to decide if she could just move on? Not kill him? Just forget about his constant abuse? You think?”
“Rikki thinks. Murder one.”
“D’you agree?”
“Yeah.” He sounded not as shocked as I was, but as sorry.
“It was a big chance to take.”
“Why? Alone with a guy who’s had a long free ride and wouldn’t see it coming. One shove. Easy pickings.”
“Still, after Madelyn Cesko she was lucky to get away.”
John start to speak, but didn’t. Second-guessing himself wasn’t like him.
“So she wasn’t lucky?”
He cleared his throat. Unconvincingly.
“Oh, wait, she got away—but not by luck, right?” I knew it, myself, but I didn’t know John had suspected Wallinsky. Then the lightbulb went on. “It wasn’t chance that Gary gave me Wallinsky’s name, was it? You’re behind that! You wanted me to check out Wallinsky! How long were you going to wait to ask about him?”
No answer.
“Ah, you want to know, but don’t want it to be known that you know, right? What are you going to do if I start telling you how Wallinsky got her here? Put your hands over your ears and hum loud?”
“Watch the road! You’re almost over the line!”
“Never mind,” I said, suddenly tired of poking at him. Instead I just drove. For the first time since I’d faced my fear of the woods, I let myself play with it. Since the moment I’d gotten control, not a year earlier, I’d steeled myself each time I’d driven through Golden Gate Park or across the bridge to Muir Woods. Now I noted the dark looming shapes, willing the panic to rise in my gut. It was better than dealing with the reality that the woman I’d felt I’d known as Karen Johnson I’d never actually known at all. “She played me.”
“She played us all, kid.” His voice was barely audible. It was clear that the loss that stunned him wasn’t her, but the loss of his trust in his own judgment.
I reached over to touch his arm. How long had it been since he’d call me kid? Since before Mike disappeared.
The headlights showed movement. I hit the brakes. “Moose! John, look! A moose!”
“Where? Oh, that tail?”
“Hey, you gotta be quick.” I speeded up. “The thing is, John, we’re not total dupes. Yeah, I’ve given friends the benefit of the doubt, ones you thought were full of it, and sometimes you were right. You gave your ex-wife more than you should’ve, point of fact. I didn’t say it, but I’d never have trusted her. Look at the big picture—between the two of us we’re not taken in often, so—”
“Why Karen?”
“Because . . . Because, damn it, she came with Gary’s seal of approval! Why shouldn’t we believe the woman he foisted on us?”
He started to say something, but I was on a roll.
“That’s what you were doing, isn’t it? Of course! You had this same question: why’d Gary guarantee her? He vouched for her; you bet your career on her. Now you’re in deep shit with the department.”
He laughed. “I’m always up to the neck there.” I had to laugh, too.
“So, what’d you find out?”
“Nothing till I got here.”
“John!”
“That isn’t what you think. Believe me, I’d be a lot more comfortable telling you I’d uncovered, ferreted out, and deduced all the answers about Karen Johnson. But I didn’t have the Sonora Eades connection until you made it.”
“How’d you find out about Seward?” I didn’t think I’d mentioned her comment about hauling the fish up the cliff. Even if I had, there’s more than one cliff in Alaska.
“Newspaper.”
“The one in her house in Las Vegas? Just what was the chain of information there?”
“Slow down! You’re twelve miles over the limit.”
“Don’t worry, you’re in good hands.” I thought for a minute. “I just can’t believe you’re in contact with Korematsu.”
“Yeah, right, like we’d be having tea.”
“Doesn’t matter. He couldn’t have gotten to Vegas in time. No, oh! Omigod, you’ve got a source in LVPD! That’s right, isn’t it? But why? And how’d he just happen to catch the call on Matt Widley? Oh, wait! Didn’t ‘just happen’ did he? He—”
“Stop! I’ll tell you. But it’s just between us.”
“We’re in the middle of the woods in Alaska.”
“I’m taking that for a promise.”
I rolled my eyes and waited for his explanation.
“You know San Francisco’s a center for human trafficking. Slavery in our own city—it’s disgusting. I came into a piece of information—don’t ask how. The way cops do. It’s not important. The money piece is that I know there’s a switching house in the Mission—”
“The Victorian on Guerrero. Broder’s babe’s place.”
I could have sworn he did a double take, but I was watching the road, mostly. “Yeah. So I needed an airtight—”
“Omigod, you’re setting up a sting
there?
You’re planning to take down Broder? No wonder you went to ground! Omigod!” The audacity . . . the danger! “Jeez, John!” I was stunned, and yet on another level I wasn’t at all. It was just the kind of single-minded, righteous move I knew he was capable of. Like making us mow the lawn and sweep the sidewalks before we could ride our bikes on Saturday. How long have you been planning this?”
“You don’t want to know. No details. Safer.”
“So, it’s just you and the guy in Vegas?”
“Vegas, Miami, a few others.”
“So, your guy in Vegas hears the call for Matt Widley’s because he’s been keeping an eye on him. Why? Is he trafficking? I thought it was Munson.”