Facsimiles of my own business card, like the one she'd given to Clive Benjamin. They'd obviously been printed from a negative shot off the one I gave her at the conclusion of our interview. The box had probably held 250 cards when full. I couldn't bear to think where and to whom she'd passed out the rest.
The last item in the box was a ring holding what looked like extra car and house keys. I pocketed them, too, and was about to box up the rest when something wedged between the overlapping flaps at the bottom of the carton caught my eye. I poked at it with my fingernail and pried loose a rectangular piece of black plastic the size of a credit card; when I held it to the light, iridescent threads of color appeared: blue, silver, pink, purple, green. I turned it over, saw the back side was blank except for a magnetic strip.
Mitch stuck his head through the door. “You want to go grab a bite to eat?”
“Uh, sure, in a few minutes. Does this mean anything to you?”
He squinted at it, shook his head. “A lot of our systems make use of key cards, including the one here in the office. We change them weekly, make them up in the copy room. But none look like that.”
“Something I forgot to ask you earlier: is Vintage Lofts one of your clients?”
“Sure. Developer's a golf partner of mine.”
“And D’Silva was a technician on that job?”
“One of them. Why?”
“Just guessing, from what I know of her.”
Mitch let it go at that and told me he'd meet me downstairs in ten minutes. The man might be good at what he did, but given his lack of an inquiring mind, he'd never have made it as an investigator.
The gray clapboard house on Potrero Hill's Mariposa Street was in poor repair, its paint like peeling skin; the windows of the upper and lower flats reminded me of dark eyes staring reproachfully at the rain. A realty sign hanging crooked above the ground-floor bay window completed the forlorn picture. In Spanish
mariposa
means butterfly, but had any frequented these parts, they'd long since moved on to more hospitable climes.
After lunch I'd driven directly to the address given by Lee D’Silva on her job application. A quick look around assured me that no one was home at either flat, but I decided not to use the spare keys I'd removed from her personal effects just yet. Instead I returned to the pier and set Mick to work getting the make and plate number of her car, as well as the multiple listing on the property.
Two-unit Victorian house, bay view from top flat, potential for third unit. Tenants: Misty Tyree (lower), Lee D’Silva (upper). Monthly rental income: $1,000 (lower); $1,300 (upper). The phone number for D’Silva matched that on her application. Under remarks, the agent described the building as having “two charming units, with a sunny private front garden.”
As I stood before it now I shook my head. The front garden was merely a terraced slope overrun by weeds that threatened to claim the steps and tiny porch. As I went up to the door, blackberry vines reached hungrily for my ankles. The wooden steps were rotted, the doors warped. And for this they wanted over half a million dollars?
I rang the bell for the lower flat and received no answer. Rang D’Silva's flat, waited, rang twice more. Then I used her key to let myself inside. A steep, narrow staircase lay straight ahead, the walls to either side painted a harsh burnt orange. As I climbed, a familiar nobody-lives-here-anymore feeling stole over me.
The staircase ended in a hallway that branched to the front and back of the house. More burnt orange, trimmed in lemon yellow. I went toward the front, into a white-walled living room whose only furnishings were a salmon-colored couch, black iron floor lamps, and an unfinished mission-style coffee table. In the center of the table sat a white figure of a nude woman on a pedestal, her chest cut away to expose ribs and organs—
Autopsy,
the piece stolen from Clive Benjamin's apartment.
“Hard evidence,” I said softly. Evidence, and a nightmare waiting to disturb one's dreams.
I took a quick turn around the room, then followed the hallway to the next door. A bedroom, with plain pine flooring and white walls like the living room. The low platform bed was covered by a goose-down comforter, and in one corner under a skylight, an old claw-footed bathtub sat, a thick woven rug spread next to it. When I went over there I saw that it had been retrofitted as a Jacuzzi. Fairly expensive improvements for a woman on a security technician's salary. I crossed to a pine armoire and opened its doors, immediately smelled the familiar scent of Dark Secrets perfume. Most of the garments had been removed, but one item hung in the exact center: a teal-blue outfit, soft and silky.
And spooky. Definitely spooky.
Eager now to see what else she had left for me, I went on to the last room. It was large, its walls sky blue, with a minuscule kitchen tucked behind a bar at one side. An overhead grid supported a variety of spotlights; I flicked the switch by the door and my breath caught.
Before me half a dozen chrome-and-leather sling-back chairs mingled with at least nine chrome-and-glass tables. And on each table lay an artfully arranged and lighted display. I began to move about the room, taking in each object.
Guns: revolvers, automatics, rifles, shotguns. The light caressed their well-oiled surfaces.
Badges, antique and recent: sheriff's departments, police, security firms, U.S. Marshals Service, even FBI. They shimmered and glinted.
An SFPD officer's visored hat, displayed on a wig stand.
Handcuffs, nightsticks, walkie-talkies, and all sorts of other law-enforcement paraphernalia.
And a final object, all by itself and intensely lighted: Lee D’Silva's diploma from Butte College, where she'd majored in police science.
I kept moving among the tables, trying to make sense of it all. Bizarre, but less so if you understood the collector's mentality. I don't have that instinct myself; I'm always trying to get rid of unnecessary possessions. But Hy is an avid collector of western novels and Americana, and I appreciate the compulsion that drives him.
But this collection was no normal one; it bordered on the monomaniacal. Nothing else in the flat spoke of another passion or interest—
Motion at the far end of the room. I whirled, going into a crouch, reaching for my .357.
No one. A sliding door to a small balcony had been left open a crack. The wind had shifted, blowing the curtain aside and twirling around an object suspended from the lighting grid in front of the glass. It was a model airplane. A white high-winged Citabria with a blue gull silhouetted on its tail section. A Citabria bearing the identification number 77289.
I felt a moan of protest moving up my throat. Quickly I forced it down and studied the model. It was faithful to Hy's plane in every detail—the product of a skilled and expensive craftsperson. Minutes passed as I contemplated it, the seconds ticking in counterpoint to the elevated beat of my pulse. Finally I continued through the room, ending up in the galley kitchen. A corkscrew and a single glass sat on the countertop next to the refrigerator; I opened the refrigerator door.
Its only occupant was a bottle of Deer Hill Chardonnay.
More showing off, bragging to me of how accurately she could anticipate my moves. But now I was beginning to understand how she did that: she'd been keeping me under partial surveillance, followed me to Carver Security, and realized I was on to her. So she'd cleared out of the apartment, leaving her Sharon McCone outfit and this gift.
I shut the fridge door and went to the center of the room, where I assumed the acoustics were best. Said, “Thanks for the wine, Lee, but no thanks. I hate to tell you, but you've made a big mistake. I don't have to explain what; you know how my mind works. Or do you? Let's see which of us can be the better McCone.”
The flat lay in silence, but somewhere, I knew, a recorder was taping my words.
I'd been parked across from the Mariposa Street house for close to two hours before anything happened. Two long hours, which I mainly spent on the phone. Calls to RKI's La Jolla headquarters went unreturned by either Gage Renshaw or the third partner, Dan Kessell. There were no messages from Hy at the office or on my home machine. As early rain-soaked darkness closed in, I began to feel isolated and depressed. Warm lights glowed on in the nearby houses; people hurried to home and hearth. I wondered, as I often did on surveillances, why I'd chosen such a solitary occupation. Wondered why I'd been drawn to a man whose lifestyle demanded long and frequent separations.
Easy answers, of course: Hy and I were perfectly suited to our vocations, were perfectly suited to one another.
The phone buzzed: a friend of Hy's who worked for the FAA at their Oakland Airport office, returning my earlier call. I'd asked him if he could find out whether Lee D’Silva had gotten her pilot's license.
“She's got it. High marks on the written test two months ago. Passed her check ride on the fifteenth.”
The day after she'd stared angrily at me in the bar at Palomino—and one of the few good-weather days we'd had recently.
Across the street an old VW bug pulled into D’Silva's driveway, and a woman got out and hurried through the rain to the door of the lower flat. She juggled purse, umbrella, and keys, then let herself inside. Light flared in the bay window.
“Sharon?”
“I'm here. Sorry. Can you give me the license number and examiner's name?”
He gave me the number, said he'd get back to me about the examiner. After I ended the call, I scrambled from the MG and hurried across the street.
The woman who came to the door of the lower flat wore a pink uniform with a prim white collar and cuffs, and her feet were swaddled in fluffy blue bunny-rabbit slippers. Her face was plain to the point of being homely, and her upper teeth protruded slightly, but her hair was a luminous pale blond, arranged in an intricate braided style. She stared at me, said, “Oh, you're early,” and glanced down at the bunnies with apparent embarrassment.
“I'm not the person you're expecting.” I handed her one of my cards.
“Oh, jeez, I thought you were my six o'clock appointment. I try to look professional for the clients, and these stupid rabbits, they aren't gonna do it.”
“They look comfortable, though. What kind of clients?”
“I'm a hairstylist; I work downtown at Finesse, but I take on private clients here at home as well.” Now she was eyeing my rain-wet hair, probably thinking that I could do with her services.
“You're Misty Tyree?”
“Yes. And you …” She looked at my card again. “You're Lee's boss.”
A drop of water from the eaves landed on my forehead and dribbled down my nose. As I wiped it away, Misty Tyree said, “Oh, Lord, I'm sorry! Come inside, please.”
I stepped into the hallway, and she relieved me of my damp coat, hanging it on a peg near the door. “Let's sit in the living room,” she told me. “I've got the fire on.”
I followed her to a comfortable room furnished in what looked to be good secondhand pieces and, at her urging, took the chair closest to the small gas-log fireplace. Tyree went to the window, pulled the draperies shut against the gathering gloom.
“I've got to tell you,” she said, “Lee is really jazzed on working for you. I've never seen her so up before.”
“She's not usually?”
“She hated that job with the security people, just
hated
it. Not that she didn't give it a hundred and ten percent effort. Lee always gives a hundred and ten percent. But, then, you must know that.”
“… Uh, yes. Tell me, when was the last time you saw her?”
Tyree paused in the process of sitting down opposite me. “Why … it's been a few days now. Is something wrong?”
“She's out on an assignment, and we've lost contact with her.”
Her face creased with such genuine concern that I felt bad about lying to her. “Jeez, let me think. I guess it's since Tuesday morning that I heard her up there. And now it's Thursday. So three days. But I haven't been home much, so she could've come and gone and I wouldn't’ve known it.”
“Can you think of someplace else she might be staying? With a friend, perhaps?”
Her forthright gaze wavered. “Well, it isn't unusual…”
“Yes?”
“This is … I'm not sure I should be mentioning it to you, is the problem. You being her boss and all.”
“Something about her private life?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Please, don't worry. At my agency we respect each other's right to privacy. I would never let anything you might tell me color my feelings toward her as an employee.”
She nodded, fingers pleating the hem of her uniform where it lay across her knees, obviously still uncomfortable.
“What concerns me more than anything,” I added, “is that she may be in danger.”
“… In that case, well, okay. Lee gets around. She hits the club scene pretty heavy, and she's into the art circuit—galleries, showings, stuff like that—too. Any kind of event where she might meet—”
“Where she might meet men.”
“Uh-huh. And she meets them, by the dozens. Stays out a lot of nights. I asked her once, wasn't she worried about all the stuff out there—AIDS, weirdos, you know. She just laughed, said she could take care of herself.” Tyree wouldn't meet my eyes now; I could see it distressed her to reveal such intimate matters about a friend.
I moved to put her at her ease. “Lee's guilty of bad judgment, but she's got to be the one to realize that and change her behavior.”
Tyree looked up at last. “You won't tell her what I said?”
“It's not my place to. These clubs she goes to—any specific ones?”
“Well, the usual, in SoMa and North Beach. Even the Mission—and that's strictly a bridge-and-tunnel crowd.”
Meaning D’Silva had probably picked up suburbanites. “Sharon McCone's” sleazy reputation could easily have spread throughout the Bay Area!
Tyree was looking away from me again. I followed her line of sight, saw she had focused on the flames licking at the gas log.
“Ms. Tyree—what is it?”
“Something worse.”
“Than … ?”
“Than what I just told you.” She took a deep breath. “Lee's mentioned a place called Club Turk a number of times. And a man, Russ Auerbach.”