A Grave Talent (27 page)

"Who would you suggest?"

She reeled off half a dozen names. "Those are Bay Area people, of course. There's a man in Los Angeles--"

"No, that'll do. I've seen all of them except for Kohlberg. She's in France." He started to gather the paintings together and wrap them in Becky Jameson's old curtain. Lee watched, and handed him the last one reluctantly.

"What did the experts say?" Kate asked.

"Pretty much the same thing." He tucked the thick bundle under his arm, paused, then shook his head in frustration, and left.

Kate had felt a sudden rush of exhaustion when he had gone, but Lee had seemed in great good spirits, and burst into snatches of song at odd moments during the rest of the day.

She was in the same aggressively cheerful mood now, Kate could tell, from the line of her back and the rapid, dramatic sweeps of the knife on the cutting board. She was using her self-assurance as a weapon, and Hawkin could only sit sourly and wait for his chance. He turned deliberately to Kate, fished a manila envelope from inside his jacket, and handed it to her.

She pressed open the metal wings and slid four glossy black-and-white photographs and three drawings out onto the tablecloth. Hawkin reached over and arranged them in two lines like some arcane variety of solitaire. She picked up the first photograph and looked closely at the young face, its mouth open in a shout. It had obviously been cropped from a group action shot, with a shoulder across one corner and a leg in the foreground wearing tight white leggings and a cleated shoe.

"Coach Shapiro's?" she asked.

"Finally. The photographer did a good job on those."

She concentrated on the other three prints, which showed the same face touched up first to show middle age, then with a moustache added, and finally with a full beard. She puzzled over this last one.

"It doesn't look quite right," she said finally. "I only saw him for a minute, but the nose was different, and the shape of the eyebrows."

"Well done, considering the circumstances. Angie and Tyler agree with you. Susan took the photograph and worked it into the drawing she did last week, and came up with those," he said, pointing. Susan Chin had also done a good job. The drawing with the beard was the man Kate had seen at Vaun's house ten days before. Susan had then removed the beard and left the moustache, using the jawbones of the high school picture, and finally shaven him clean.

"That's him. He must have had a nose job, and something done to his eyebrows."

"We also know who Tony Dodson is. Or was."

"It's not just a false ID then?" She was surprised.

"Apparently not. There was a man named Anthony Dodson who worked with Lewis, and even resembled him quite a bit: same hair color, eyes, height, only fifteen or twenty pounds heavier. Lewis went north after high school, spent some time in Seattle, then got a job in Alaska on the pipeline. He met Dodson there, they became friends, spent several weekends in Anchorage. After a few months the two of them went off for a week in Seattle and didn't show up for work again. Lewis wrote a letter to say they'd both got jobs in New Orleans, they were sick of the cold, that their clothes and equipment should be given away, so long. Nothing more is heard of Andy Lewis--nothing--but Tony Dodson, who was from Montana originally, gets a driver's license in Nevada two months later."

"And the photo?"

"Is the same man who went to high school as Andy Lewis, given that the photograph on the license is lousy, he's ten years older and has had facial surgery."

Food began to move from stove to table to plates-- avocado and mushroom omelet and hot buttery toast and orange juice fresh from the machine on the sink and mugs of thick coffee. Kate took a mouthful of the hot liquid and swirled it around her teeth, feeling the distinctive bite of the Yemen Mocha. She raised a mental eyebrow at this but didn't comment. Lee would not like it pointed out that a special effort was being made at this meal.

The cook sat down with a cup but no plate and picked up the original photograph. Several hundred calories later Kate looked over at her.

"You're not eating?"

"I had something a while ago. I thought I'd wait and keep Vaun company."

"That picture bothers you," Kate noted. Hawkin glanced up sharply and then looked more closely at Lee, whose face revealed nothing other than a slight curiosity.

"It does. I was just wondering if it would bother me if I didn't know who it was. It reminds me of someone I knew when I was in New York. Not one of my clients, though I'd seen him around the clinic. One day he told his therapist that he'd been beating up drunks, just for the fun of it, and one of them had died. She was really upset after he left, but managed to finish out the day. That night he waited for her and followed her home and killed her. He later said he'd decided it was unwise to have told her, but she'd already reported him to the police, and they were waiting for him when he got home. He didn't actually look anything like this," she waved the picture. "Maybe around the eyes." She gazed at it for another long moment, then with a slight shudder put it away from her. When she looked up it was directly into Hawkin's eyes, no swordplay now.

"As a therapist I am required to deny the possibility of such a thing as innate evil. There are reasons why people become twisted. As a human being, however, I recognize its presence. This man Lewis must be stopped. I believe that my being here might help you catch him. If I see that I am in the way, I will leave. Immediately."

It was not put as an offer, a compromise, but Hawkin chose to take it as such. The two women waited as he finished his toast, placed his fork and knife across his plate, took a swallow of coffee. When he spoke it was to Kate.

"All right. I am still very unhappy about having a civilian involved, and if I thought for a minute there was a chance Lewis would get into the house, I'd scrap it now. Yes, it will look more normal to have Lee in the house. Yes, Lee will help with Vaun, and yes, it will, in theory, free up your eyes to have Lee looking after Vaun. I have to trust you on that, that you won't be distracted by Lee. And I have to trust you," he jabbed a finger at Lee, "to watch for that, and get out fast if she's looking out for you instead of Vaun. I don't like trusting too many people at once, but if we go with this it'll be your show," back to Kate, "and your judgment. If you decide to put your friend here at risk, knowing Lewis, then we'll go ahead with it. If not, or if I'm not satisfied with the safeguards, we make other arrangements. Agreed?"

Kate took a deep breath, and committed herself.

"Agreed."

"Fine. We start with this." He took an object from his pocket similar to the button that Kate had given Vaun, and slapped it onto the table in front of Lee. "You will wear this at all times. You push it, and across the street we know something's wrong. If you take it off, I pull Vaun out of the house."

Lee smiled sweetly at him and stood her ground.

"I rather doubt you'd have any legal basis for moving her around the countryside if she preferred to stay with me, but I shall be happy to cooperate with any reasonable request."

Kate busied herself with more coffee while Hawkin glowered and Lee smiled like a steel rose. Finally his lips twitched.

"Dr. Cooper. It would bring me considerable reassurance as to the safety of all in this house if I knew that you were carrying that alarm button with you at all hours of the day and night."

"I do understand, Inspector Hawkin, and I will be most happy to comply. More coffee?"

"Your coffee, my dear young lady, has been one of the few bright spots of the last two weeks, but I think I'll have to refuse a fourth cup and make an appearance at work. I thank you also for breakfast."

He stood up, and Kate followed him to the door.

"Al, I think Vaun was wanting to see you."

"I have to be in San Jose ten minutes ago. I'll stop back this evening."

"Come for dinner."

"Oh, no, I--"

"Please."

"All right, I'd enjoy that. If the traffic's bad it'll be after seven."

"I'll plan for eight. I should warn you, you won't get food like you just had. I'm a lousy cook." He smiled. "Will you see the Donaldsons?"

"I'm afraid so." He sighed. "How many different ways are there to say, 'Trust me, we're working on it,' when she wants to know everything that's going on? I can't blame her, but it doesn't make things any easier."

"Glad it's you and not me," she said frankly, and did the alarm business to let him out. Neither of them looked at the house across and two down, whose upper floor was temporarily occupied by various men and machines. She watched him climb into his car, closed the door, and went to talk to Lee about dinner. As she had expected, Lee insisted on cooking.

That evening Vaun's photograph was on the front page of the paper. Some enterprising amateur with a powerful lens had caught her staring longingly out of her hospital window, looking for all the world like a prisoner in a cell. It was a very clear picture.

Over hot-and-sour soup, beef in black bean sauce, snow peas with shiitake mushrooms, and fried rice, they hammered out the plans for the next few days. Or rather, Hawkin and Kate hammered, Lee commented and made suggestions, and Vaun picked at her food. She kept glancing at the folded newspaper on the side table, with the expression of a person fingering a bruise.

In the end, sitting in front of the fire, they decided that it would have to be Saturday. By then Vaun would be more rested, physically and mentally, Lewis would be feeling safe and anxious to resume, and besides, it would make the Sunday papers.

"I've made preliminary arrangements with a man on the
News
staff, who's willing to go along with it in exchange for an exclusive and an interview with you," he said to Vaun, who winced. "It will, I'm afraid, mean more photographs, and your privacy all shot to hell. I'm sorry."

"After this afternoon's paper, there's not going to be much of it left anyway. It's a miracle I've managed to get away with it as long as I have."

"We may find Lewis before that, remember. Every cop in California has seen his picture by now." His offer of encouragement sounded thin, and Vaun shook her head.

"No, now be honest, Alonzo Hawkin. If you picked him up tonight, what could you possibly charge him with? I'm no expert, but it sounds to me like you have nothing at all that you could take to a jury. Isn't that right?"

"Vaun, that isn't really our responsibility."

"Of course it isn't, but there isn't much point in arresting somebody if you then have to let him go for lack of any evidence. Don't worry, I do understand what I am to do. There's no point in putting out bait if the tiger doesn't come far enough to make his intent clear, isn't that it? I shall sit and wait for him to come for me, don't worry," she repeated, but none of the other three liked what was in her face, and in each of them a special gnaw of concern started up.

"I want your promise..." Hawkin began, and Vaun laughed, a bleak, brittle sound.

"No, I'm not about to 'do something foolish,' as they say. I will cooperate, I will do what you tell me to do. Four lovely little human beings have lost their lives on account of me, on account of this gift of mine. It must come to an end."

There was a cold, dead undertone in her words. Lee started to speak, and stopped. Hawkin cleared his throat.

"So, we're agreed. On Saturday morning you set off for some public place like Golden Gate Park or Fisherman's Wharf, accompanied by these two and a number of other plainclothes along the way. The three of you are photographed by our pet reporter and his cameraman, and you will appear the following morning on the front page of the Sunday paper. We'll give it three or four days, and if he hasn't appeared by then, we'll do it again. You think you'll be up to it? Vaun?"

She pulled herself back from some distant and unpleasant place and focused on Hawkin.

"Yes, yes, whatever you want. I'm sorry, I was just thinking of those three sets of parents. I wonder if they can bring themselves to read the papers anymore. I wonder what impression my smiling face eating a crab cocktail at Fisherman's Wharf will make on them. I would like to speak with them, when this is all over."

"I think it would do them a lot of good," said Lee. "But it might be very hard on you."

"What does that matter, now?"

"Well," Hawkin broke in, "first there's the minor matter of getting this all over. I suggest that a good night's sleep might help. 'Night, all, and thank you, Lee, for yet another ambrosial feast. Are you wearing your button?"

"I am." She pulled it up from inside her shirt, and dropped it back down.

"Good." He caught himself. "Thank you." He touched Vaun's shoulder lightly in passing, though she seemed not to notice or indeed to notice that he was leaving. Kate stood when he left but allowed Lee to run him through the alarms and waited for the thoughts beneath the black curls to surface. It took several minutes, and Lee was standing in the doorway behind Vaun, also waiting, before Vaun finally spoke.

"You saw that last painting I did, didn't you, Kate?"

"The one with the woman and the child?"

"Yes. You saw it in the studio that day. Gerry had someone bring it to the hospital." Its terrible beauty had been gouged and shredded beyond recognition, and Hawkin had personally seen it put into the hospital incinerator. "That was Mrs. Brand, Jemma's mother. Her face stayed with me for eighteen years, how she looked that night when she realized Jemma was dead. I started to dream about her again, last December, and I finally had to paint her. It was one of the most... difficult paintings I ever did," she said with a terrible calm. "Possibly one of the best. And now it's gone."

"Perhaps--" Kate stopped. She heard the thoughtless insult of what she was about to say but plunged on regardless. "Perhaps you'll do the painting again, one day."

"Oh, no," Vaun looked up at them, with the gentle acceptance of finality in her face. "I said it must come to an end, and it shall. I will not paint again."

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It was a terrifying week. Vaun drifted through the house like a lost soul, her hands in her pockets. She slept a great deal during the day, although her light was often on in the night. She watched the television, sitting down to whatever channel it was tuned to, game shows, old movies, British dramas indiscriminately, and would get up and wander off upstairs at times that made it obvious that she was completely unaware of the machinations of the plot. Only a cartoon would hold her interest until it was broken by a commercial.

She did not go into Lee's therapy rooms.

She ate automatically what was put on her plate, took part in conversations when she was addressed directly, seemed relaxed and good-humored about the necessary inconveniences. She even made a shy joke about being held prisoner for her own good.

Lee recognized it as one of the stages her terminally ill patients would go through on the way to the grave, and she grieved and she understood and she fought it with all her determination and skill, to absolutely no effect.

To Kate it was like watching an intelligent wild thing calmly gnaw off a trapped foot.

On Tuesday John Tyler came to the house. Kate was not quite sure how he had talked Hawkin into it, but he came in an unmarked SFPD car in the afternoon, still in ironed jeans and soft shoes but with a linen jacket as his nod to the formality of the city. No tie. His attitude too was more formal, and he drank a cup of coffee with the three women before following Vaun up the stairs to her room. They remained there all afternoon, their voices an occasional rhythm overhead, and when Tyler came down at dusk he was alone. He came to the door of the kitchen where Kate and Lee were talking as Lee stirred a pot. Lee saw him first.

"John, would you like some dinner? Just soup, almost ready."

"I have to go soon. I told Anna I'd be home."

"A glass of wine first?"

"That would be nice, thanks." Kate got up and poured them each a glass.

"I'm glad you came," Lee said. "She's feeling lost, and far from home."

"I don't think that's anything new for Vaun," he said mildly. "She feels far from home in her own house. Vaun is one of the saddest ladies I know, and where she is or who's with her doesn't make much difference."

"Oh, surely not. She has friends."

"Vaun has friends, but as far as I know the only one to really touch her has been Gerry Bruckner, and he's too central to her to be called a mere 'friend.' "

"I met Gerry. I'd like to meet Angie, too. How is she?"

"Angie is the same, only more so. This latest has not helped her self-esteem any, as you can imagine. 'A woman with worn hands and a hopeful heart,' Anna called her in one of her more poetic moods. And she teams up with a woman whose hands are now still and whose heart is without hope. Somebody better kill that bastard," he spat out. "I'd do it myself, I think, given the chance."

"You knew, didn't you?" Kate asked suddenly. "That Vaun was imprisoned for murdering a child?"

"Um. Well, yes, in fact, I did."

"And you allowed her to move in."

"I didn't think she'd done it. No, that's not strong enough: I knew she couldn't have done it."

"And in December, when Tina Merrill was found? Weren't you just the least bit worried that you knew who had killed her, and after her the others?"

"No. I should have told you, that first day you came, but I couldn't bring myself to cause her grief for nothing. And I knew she had not done it. And I was right."

But not about Tony Dodson, Kate thought, and did not say.

"You mustn't tell the press, or anyone else for that matter, that she is completely innocent. Not yet." She tried to sound stern.

"I don't talk about it at all. I find that's usually best."

He stayed another twenty minutes, and left in the police car.

It was, for the women in the house, a truly terrifying week.

Knowing that she was far from the center of action made the week even harder for Kate. It was given out, when anyone asked, that her injuries were keeping her away from duty but in truth she would have preferred to bleed to death rather than miss this part of the case.

For it was now that the solid groundwork for an eventual prosecution was being laid, the jigsaw answers to all the questions locked into a tight, smooth picture for the District Attorney. Who? Andrew C. Lewis, alias Tony Dodson. What? Murder, of a peculiarly coldblooded and thus inexplicable sort, murder not as an end, but as a means of building an elaborate and creative revenge. When? Could he be placed, by witnesses or evidence, near the relevant sites at the right times? Where? Now that was a good one. Where was Lewis on the days in question? Where did he go when he went 'to work'? Where were the clothes and lunchbags and backpacks of the three girls? And most important, where was Lewis now? And finally, how? How did he get to the children, how did he spirit them away, how did he avoid attracting attention?

For all that week Kate had to live with the knowledge that the case was being investigated without her, and that knowledge made it hard to stay cheerful and calm and alert. Vaun drifted; Lee went out to clients in the hospitals or the hospices; Kate fretted and phoned for updates a dozen times a day; and Hawkin and Trujillo set out to get some answers.

For the past week Trujillo, ill-shaven, dressed in grimy black pants, hideous shoes with pointed toes, and a leather jacket that he had come to loathe, sat at the bar of the Golden Grill beneath the glowing skin of the woman on the barbecue and drank himself into an irritated ulcer. He got to know the regulars, he got to know that several of the regulars who were friends with the man they knew as "Tony Andrews" had been very scarce recently, and finally he got to know a flabby, pasty-looking kid with acne who appeared for the first time on Tuesday afternoon and who knew "Tony" well enough to have seen where he lived when he was in town.

The flabby kid knew little more than that. He was a hanger-on and had not actually been to "Tony's" apartment but had only seen him come out of the place one morning, climb into his truck, and drive off. Trujillo invited the kid out of the bar, found the apartment house, and contacted Hawkin, and before too long they moved in with a large, heavily armed escort and a search warrant in Hawkin's jacket pocket.

The apartment was empty. The resident manager produced a key and let them into Andy Lewis's third persona.

It was a large apartment, furnished in tasteless luxury, up to and including a vast round bed with satin sheets and a well-stocked, padded leather wet bar in the living room. The prints of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson/Tony Andrews were all over. Two other prints brought up the names of men with records for narcotics dealing. There was a canister of high-grade marijuana in the closet, a tin of hashish on a shelf, about fifty thousand dollars' worth of heroin tightly packaged for the street in colorful balloons, and all the attendant paraphernalia. Later the lab was to find considerable cocaine dust in the carpets and furniture. There was one loaded shotgun in the coat closet near the door, a second one in the bedroom closet, and two loose forty-five-caliber bullets and traces of gun oil in the drawer of the bedside table.

The clothes in the bedroom's oversized walk-in closet were clothes of two different men, though they were all the same size and all had the same dark hairs and black-brown beard hairs in them. To the left everything was arranged on wooden hangers: silk shirts, wool suits that made Trujillo whistle, a neatly filled stack of shallow shelves holding handmade Italian shoes. The clothing verged on the flashy, and Hawkin reflected that some of them must have looked a bit incongruous on a man with long hair and a full beard. On the right hung his Tyler's Road clothes: old work jeans, worn flannel shirts, and denims, all on metal hangers with the paper of dry cleaners on them. An odd assortment of scuffed and grease-impregnated boots and tennis shoes lay in a tumble on the floor underneath.

There was also a painting.

It protruded slightly from behind the shoe shelves, and the frayed canvas at its back edges caught Hawkin's eye. He pushed past Trujillo (who was still dressed as a bar rat and was fingering lapels enviously) and drew the canvas out to carry it into the light. At the window he turned it around, and there was Andy Lewis, just as Red Jameson had described him, half naked, slightly sweaty, a small sardonic smile on his lips, the narrow back of the chair thrusting up like some phallic structure under his chin, the dragon coiled on his upper arm.

Hawkin's tired blue eyes traveled over the glossy surface, searching for the painting's depths, and because he was looking for them, he found them. Most of Vaun's better paintings had something behind the surface image, a hidden meaning that emerged only for the patient eye, and this was one of her very best. Red had not studied this one, Hawkin mused, had been too put off by the obvious surface meaning, or he would not have worried about his niece.

It was a caricature. Skillful, amazingly subtle for a teenaged artist, but it was a caricature. At first view it was the portrait of a young man with whom the artist was both in love and in lust. Gradually, however, the slight exaggerations asserted themselves, and soon Hawkin knew that she was not painting how she felt looking at Andy Lewis but rather how Andy Lewis imagined women in general felt looking at him. It was dated April.

Trujillo heard him laugh and emerged from the closet to come and look over his shoulder. He made an appreciative noise in his throat.

"Wish some lady would see me that way," he commented.

"Do you?" Hawkin asked. A bustle in the hallway outside indicated the arrival of the prints and photograph crew, and he handed Trujillo the painting. "I want you to study this closely for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think. Be careful of it," he added. "It's worth more than you make in a year."

Ten minutes later he came back and found a confused and troubled Trujillo sitting in a chair staring at the image of the young Lewis. He looked up at Hawkin.

"But, it's... it's cruel, isn't it? She's laughing at him. Making fun of him."

Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?

Suddenly Lee Cooper's words came back to him: Vaun was "more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas..." This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis's methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.

The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man's bass voice said, "Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you're free." There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.

There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler's metal shed.

That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o'clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.

"Good evening, miss," said Hawkin. "I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?"

"I do not know how I would produce my father," she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, "but my mother may be available. May I tell her who's calling?"

Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman's voice from behind her.

"Who is it, Jules?"

The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.

"They claim," she said, "to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification."

"That is a very sensible idea, miss," said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.

Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin's grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Gary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.