Authors: Neil McMahon
“I wish I was.”
She stood, came to the counter and examined Alison’s ID.
“You’re on Three-Psych, huh?”
“Yes.”
“How long you want here?”
“Two hours?”
“You’re going to do sixty-eight files in two hours? I thought it’s the patients supposed to be crazy over there.” She sniffed in exasperation. “Come on.”
Lugging briefcase and purse, Allison followed Ms. Willis through the racks into the hospital’s memory. They passed a few others, pallid shapes moving like spectral souls in a purgatory of weary search for information, endlessly removing and replacing files for their own obscure purposes. Which included the illegal sale of confidential material, such as bungled medical procedures, to lawyers, who would then contact the victims to instigate malpractice suits.
She settled her things in a carel, then stood before the section of shelves marked DR. JEPHSON AUDIT. It was several feet wide and reached from her waist to above her head: the files of sixty-eight NGIs, killers, rapists, child molesters, men like John James Garlick who were murderous bombs primed to go off at the next chance. Some of the files were inches thick.
If Naia was a released NGI, it was just possible
that somewhere, in one of them, there would be a hint: mention of a lost girl. Of belated mastery; a trauma victim seeking to relive the experience again and again, until he or she felt control had been gained. Of cobras—which, the dictionary had confirmed, were of the genus
Naia.
Alison scanned as fast as she could, skipping the thousands of pages of medical records and psychiatric evaluations, concentrating on criminal histories and interviews—especially interviews with Dr. Francis Jephson, who was emerging in her mind as the primary candidate for Naia.
The man she had been working for, harboring this secret. Someplace short of outright psychosis, a no man’s land of compartmentalization: one aspect moral, the other deadly, and the two able to exist side by side without apparent conflict. Last night’s conversation couched in symbols, hiding behind another form of mask. The den, a secret storehouse of violence. The lost girl, innocence or restraint. Naia, the cobra, the personality that acted out. Underneath a placid exterior life, the intense superiority of being the only one who knew the truth.
Perhaps even a darker heart: the savage thrill of releasing killers among the unsuspecting—and then killing the killers.
She turns them on each other and harvests the victors.
Her search turned up nothing. Except that
toward the end, head aching from small print and fluorescent lights, she discovered that the file of one Thomas David Springkell, released 3/14/88, was missing.
Stover Larrabee sipped black coffee, grimacing. They were at a Zim’s on Nineteenth Avenue, an old-fashioned diner busy with customers who looked like they spent a lot of time there. It was a few minutes before 10
A.M.
Monks said, “Sorry to get you up so early.”
“I’ll get over it. Naia, huh?” Monks detected a note of admiration. “Sounds like she ought to be on the SFPD payroll.”
“Smart enough to set up a man like Caymas Schulte,” Monks said. “Strong enough to take him out. God knows what else.”
“What seems clear is that Dr. Chapley has attracted the attention of a highly dangerous individual. She should leave the area immediately. Contact the FBI. Consider assuming a new identity until Naia is apprehended.”
“She’s unwilling to do that. She’s convinced she’s not in danger, that there’s a trust being extended. If she violates it, that might anger Naia. I’ve thought about approaching the police on my own.”
“Except she might be right?”
Monks exhaled. “It’s not my decision to make. Yet.”
Larrabee said, “Have you considered the possibility
that Dr. Chapley is somehow involved in this?”
“She likes to play games, Stover. I can’t believe she’d pull something that would scare a teenage kid. But I can sure believe she’d flirt with trouble, past the point of sense.”
Monks studied the several photos of Francis Jephson that Larrabee had downloaded from computer sources. He was built slightly, with a fine-boned handsome face: a distance runner, Alison had said.
“You think Naia could be a man? Jephson, cross-dressing?”
“He might have fooled a kid like Tanager,” Monks said. “It’s tougher to believe he could give a blow job to somebody he’d been doing therapy with and not have the guy recognize him.”
“Not that tough.”
Monks smiled. “What do you think about having him picked up?”
“What you’ve got on him now isn’t going to keep him in jail. It
would
wave a red flag. Put Dr. Chapley right where she’s afraid of being.”
Monks said, “What do you suggest?”
“Keep gathering information and try to get something solid linking Jephson to a murder. If it doesn’t happen quick, I think Dr. Chapley’s going to have to go into hiding, whether she wants to or not.” Larrabee finished his coffee and stood. “We’ve got two hours. Wonder what Bernard Capaldi’s doing this morning?”
Bernard Capaldi; friend and attorney to the Vandenards. Almost certainly the man who had arranged for Robby literally to get away with murder once. Maybe twice.
“Dennis seemed to think he was dying,” Monks said.
“He might have us thrown down the stairs. On the other hand, there’s nothing like a ticking clock to make a guilty man talkative.”
As they walked to the car, Larrabee said, “You ever been around that? Somebody who comes across as normal, and then in an eyeblink turns into a batshit killer?”
“Plenty of marines.”
“If we do meet Naia and you figure it out, try not to let her know it,” Larrabee said. “Although she will.”
The man who answered the door at Bernard Capaldi’s Pacific Heights home looked more like an ex-boxer than a butler. Monks and Larrabee waited in a tiled foyer while he stepped into a side room to announce the visitors. The rooms partially open door gave a glimpse of video monitors from surveillance cameras around the property.
He came back out and faced them, neither polite nor rude. “Mr. Capaldi will be down in a few minutes. You gentlemen care for something to drink?”
They declined. He led them into a drawing room with ocean-facing windows that reached
from the floor almost to the twelve-foot ceiling, and a central curving staircase with ornate balustrades. A Steinway grand piano occupied one corner. The woodwork glowed with the sheen of generations of care.
Monks had seen photographs of Bernard Capaldi in his glory days. He was a commanding presence, tall and spare, with the arched nose and ascetic features of a Renaissance-era Italian cardinal.
It was the same man who came toward them now, pushed in a wheelchair by a pretty nurse, but he had shrunken into himself. His face was gaunt, his hair a silver mist, and his skin had a yellowish waxy quality that Monks recognized, of someone nearing death. But the presence remained.
Capaldi smiled faintly. “A physician and a private detective. I think I can assume this is not a social call.” He patted the nurse’s hand. She tucked the blanket around his lap and left.
“Mr. Capaldi,” Larrabee said. “We know you don’t need to cooperate with us. But we believe there’s a tangible danger to our client.”
“Are you Larrabee?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Larrabee who shot that Fisherman’s Wharf mugger, back—when was it, ’86?”
“Yeah.”
Monks turned to him, astonished. He had not known.
Capaldi said, “And got suspended?”
Larrabee nodded, tightlipped.
“Is that why you left the police force?”
“It figured in.”
“Not very fond of lawyers, I’d guess?”
“Some more than others.”
Capaldi laughed, a ghostly hacking sound. “Are you taping this?”
“No.”
“I hardly need to point out that it would be a waste of time to try to depose me.”
Monks said, “Osteosarcoma?”
Capaldi’s gaze sharpened. “Correct.”
“I’m told it’s hellish.”
“If you can imagine having your bones chewed out from the inside.”
“I’m sorry,” Monks said, feeling the inadequacy of the words.
“I’m eighty-four, Doctor. I have no complaints. But I tire quickly.” His eyebrows rose in query.
Larrabee said, “We’re representing a client who’s looking into the past of Dr. Francis Jephson.”
“Jephson,” Capaldi said musingly. “Haven’t heard that name in years.”
“It’s come clear that Robby Vandenard was in a position to compromise Jephson. Ruin him, even send him to prison. Was there any suspicion that Robby was murdered?”
Capaldi considered for half a minute.
“The answer is no, there was no such suspicion. A shotgun that had belonged to his father was still in his hand.”
Monks recalled the deserted Napa mansion, with its neglected vineyards and the ominous doors closing off the site of Katherine Vandenard’s murder. And nearby, the place Robby had chosen to take his own life.
“Would we he justified in suspecting that strings were pulled in getting Robby into Jephson’s program at Clevinger Hospital?”
He deliberated again. “I’ll allow your suspicion to rest unchallenged.”
“Do you think Robby killed his sister?”
“Yes.”
Larrabee turned away, hand going to his hair.
“Are you shocked, Mr. Larrabee? The rights and wrongs of it were cloudy. It was not a crime of hatred: the opposite. Robby knew what he was, early on in his life. Knew the world would see him as ugly and twisted. He saw Katherine as his other half. Beautiful, desirable. But she grew up ahead of him and began to reject him. The pivotal incident seemed to be that he spied on her having sex with a boyfriend. It came home to him that he was losing her, and that, he could not bear.”
“So you hired Jephson to cover for him.”
“Again, it wasn’t that simple. I was loyal to the family. I acted in what I believed to be their best interests. There seemed no point in destroying
another child’s life. But by the time it was all over—” Capaldi waved a hand in eloquent weariness. “I regretted bitterly the part I’d played.”
Monks said, “What made you choose Jephson? He must have been just out of residency.”
“I didn’t choose him. Robby did. He had seen several other psychiatrists in the years before Katherine’s death. Hadn’t gotten along with any of them. But there was a chemistry between him and Jephson. Robby would ask to see him. They’d go for walks together. When the murder occurred, he was the obvious choice.”
“Did it ever occur to you that Jephson might have condoned it? Even planted the idea?”
Capaldi was silent. His gaze appeared to be fixed on the windows. Finally he said, “That’s territory I don’t dare enter.”
“And yet you hired him again, when Robby killed Merle Lutey.”
Capaldi turned back to them, looking frailer. “Gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m wearing out.”
“Mr. Capaldi, does the name Naia mean anything to you?”
“No.”
A thin finger pressed a button on the wheelchair. The nurse walked briskly back into the room. As she wheeled him away, he waved an impatient hand at their murmured thanks.
“The guy was a vicious fuck,” Larrabee said. “Pistol-whipping women
after
he got their
purses. That kind of shit.” He gunned his Taurus through a yellow light on Geary, heading back toward Mercy Hospital. “It was night. I chased him three blocks. The cocksucker got rid of his gun somehow, it was never found. The defense established reasonable doubt that he was the same guy.”
“Kill him?”
“I wish to Christ I had. Blew out his spleen. The city paid alt his medical bills, gave him a fat settlement, and suspended me.”
“Did they ever convict him?”
“Nope. But the muggings stopped.”
Monks and Larrabee followed Roman Kasmarek into his glassed-in office in the morgue.
“San Jose and Mendocino were busts,” Roman said. “No reports on Kenneth Foote or Caymas Schulte. I’ve got a call into Napa for Vandenard.”
Monks said, “Capaldi seemed convinced that Robby was a clear-cut suicide.”
“Capaldi’s been wiping those people’s asses for fifty years,” Larrabee said. “Let’s see what Dr. Kasmarek has to say.”
“I got luckier close to home,” Roman said. “Walter Bruggeman, in Mann, remembered the Brad Kurlin case quite well. He died in a fire, apparently one he set.”
Brad Kurlin, known killer of six by arson. Released as rehabilitated by Dr. Francis Jephson.
“There were a couple of things Walter wasn’t
entirely comfortable with. But nobody wanted to take it any further, even the family.”
“Things such as?”
“The body was badly charred. But the way Kurlin had fallen, the right side was more protected. There were bits of a foreign substance in the heel of that hand; DE, diatomaceous earth. It’s composed largely of tiny shell fragments, so it survived the fire.
“In itself, the DE’s not much help. It’s widely used, industrial filters, swimming pools, things like that. Kurlin could have picked it up anywhere. It would have to have been imbedded forcefully—say, he slipped and fell.
“But there was another thing that didn’t make it onto the report. A possibility that the tendons behind the right knee were severed.”
Monks said slowly, “You’re suggesting he’d been hamstrung?”
“To cut those tendons accidentally, you’d have to be thrashing around pretty hard. Of course if you’re being burned alive, you probably are. The off-the-record take was, the fire moved a lot faster than he thought. It blocked whatever exit he’d figured on. He tried to kick out a window, the flames exploded, he tore himself up on the glass. Fell back inside and smoke got him.”
“Does that work for you?”
Roman shrugged. “The ME’s job is to establish a cause of death. From there it’s up to law enforcement to worry about the why’s.
“But this gets more interesting. I hit the long shot. Prokuta.” Roman spread out a faxed document, from the coroner’s office of Solano County.
They leaned over the report: dated 4/9/91, for Wayne Prokuta, bludgeoner of an elderly woman. Spring floods had washed up his body in the morass-like delta of the Sacramento River, into which he had presumably thrown himself several months earlier. The cause of death was listed as suicide by drowning. Prokuta had still been wearing the remnants of a coat with heavy barbell weights in the pockets.