Blood Bond (13 page)

A week before graduation, Aidan and Gail got engaged. Marva's happiness for her sister was marred only by the memories of what Aidan had done that night, but she tried to put it out of her mind. She gave up her apartment and found a job in San Francisco, where Aidan and Gail had decided to move so he could take a job in the prosecutor's office.

But by the end of the summer, Gail had met Bryce. Aidan had potential, but Bryce already had everything Gail wanted—money, prestige, power. When she broke up with Aidan, Marva was the one who picked up the pieces. She felt, in some way, that she owed him. He couldn't seem to wrap his mind around the fact that it was really over with Gail, and Marva invited him over for desultory evenings at her apartment, eating pizza and watching movies, and their friendship was sealed.

But then Gail received a package on the first anniversary of the incident. It contained paper dolls, little girls in dress-up clothes. Given the date, their meaning was clear. Gail showed up at Marva's apartment sobbing, begging her not to tell Bryce. Marva called Aidan for help, and so began the tradition that had lasted a decade, coming to an end only in the last few years when the packages finally stopped. They never found out who was sending them, and over time it almost ceased to matter, because the central truth didn't change: Gail had been responsible for Jess Bartelak's death and had gotten away with it while another girl paid the consequences.

Joe waited until Marva had finished. Her account had jumped around a little as she remembered the details of that night, but she'd taken care not to leave anything out. A few times she closed her eyes or paused, sorting the timeline out in her memory.

Now, finally, she looked at him. “I'm sorry,” she said.

Joe knew what she meant: sorry that she'd lied, sorry that she hadn't told him the truth from the start. But things had changed since then. He saw her dilemma. When it was only Tom who was dead, there could have been dozens of explanations. The fact that it had taken place on the Englers' drive might well have meant nothing, certainly nothing having to do with Gail. So Marva had continued to protect her sister, had to keep her story buried. Now it didn't matter.

“Did you keep any of the packages?”

“Yes.” Marva's eyes clouded. “Some of them. The ones that weren't too . . . hard.”

“What's important now,” Joe said carefully, “is to find out everything we can about whoever was behind sending those packages. Bertrise, can you go with Marva to her house, collect everything you can? I need to make some arrangements.”

Bertrise nodded and closed her notebook, clearing her throat. Joe saw that she was visibly moved by Marva's story.

As he could not afford to be.

LATE IN
the afternoon, in a hurried meeting in his office with Fisch and Bertrise, Joe laid out his plan. With Gail's death coming so soon after the anniversary of the death of Jess Bartelak, it stood to reason that someone might have finally acted on a long-held grudge. Getting approval for the trip to Des Moines to talk to Jess's family wasn't difficult, after Joe ran Fisch through what he'd learned about the hazing incident and the years of anonymous packages.

If that avenue didn't pan out, he'd look into Gail's affairs, beginning with the one she had with Tom. He had a hard time believing that either Bryce or Tom's wife, Elena, had it in them to pull off two killings, several days apart—or that they cared enough, for that matter—but Gail herself had suggested she'd left any number of spurned lovers in her wake.

The hazing death seemed like a more likely motivation. Jess had left a mother and brother behind; they, in turn, had apparently never left their hometown. Joe would pay them a visit and find out how their version of events compared to the official one. Even if neither of them was behind the annual reminders of Jess's death, they might be able to shed some light on who might have harbored a hatred for Gail for all these years.

Meanwhile, Bertrise would pursue other leads: the source of the blood on the Englers' driveway, the environmental protests. Neighbors and friends of the Englers and Tom Bergman who had not yet been interviewed.

“Any of those packages have an Iowa return address?” Fisch asked, idly pushing an elaborate model Aston Martin back and forth a few inches on his desk. The model cars, Fisch's passion, were duplicated in miniature all around his office: on the window ledge, the credenza, on top of the filing cabinets.

“Not that we know of,” Bertrise said. She'd brought a box of things from Marva's—photos and dolls and toys and purses and tubes of Bonne Belle lip gloss wrapped carefully in newspaper. Unfortunately, Marva hadn't kept the packaging, the return address labels and postmarks, so they had to rely on her memory for the source of the packages. “They came from several western states. California about half the time, according to Marva. But as far south as Bakersfield and as far north as the Oregon border. Then there was Colorado, Utah, New Mexico. Washington State. The only outlier was Maine, and Marva thinks that was about six years ago.”

“Easy enough to mail a package while you're traveling,” Bertrise pointed out. She tapped the toe of her high heel impatiently on the floor, and Joe knew she was anxious to head home for dinner with her girls. At least he hoped it was just dinner and not some new crisis they'd invented to torment their mother.

“Or have someone do it for you.” Fisch rubbed a stubby thumb and finger across the bridge of his fleshy nose. In his late fifties, he was a singularly unattractive man; it had been a cruel caprice of fate that had given the man kinky hair and cowlicks, fleshy jowls and eyelids that practically obscured his flashing black eyes. He claimed to be Greek, and Joe had never questioned the assertion, but the pale, liver-spotted flesh of his forearms and short neck made it seem unlikely.

“We need to hit this thing hard,” Fisch continued, unnecessarily. “They're already picking up on it in the San Francisco papers. We don't need that.”

“I wonder if you could look into Aidan McKay,” Joe suggested to Bertrise. “If you have time. It's possible he has some insight into the legal situation. He's been in touch with Gail, socially, at least. Maybe he can fill you in on the will and so forth.”

Bertrise made a note on a yellow pad with a slim mechanical pencil.

“And you might want to sweat him on the sorority death,” he added, apologetically. “I'll leave you my notes; maybe you'll see something I missed.”

“I'll see what I can do about getting my hands on the official paperwork,” Bertrise said. “But thirteen years—”

“Get Odell on that, too,” Fisch offered. “If any of it's digital, he's your man.”

“Right.”

“I'm waiting for a call back from Deanne Mentis,” Joe said. “The girl who took the hit for the death. Got kicked out of school for it, too.”

“Where does she live?” Fisch asked.

“Lodi. She grew up there,” he said, naming an agricultural town an hour and a half east into California's Central Valley.

“So it wouldn't be a stretch for her to be in this area from time to time,” Fisch said.

“Yeah, but not now,” Joe said. “She made it clear she didn't plan to visit just so she could talk to me.”

“Well, well,” Fisch said, standing and cracking his back in several places. “Looks like the fine citizens of Montair are sending you on a two-city tour, my friend.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN
when Joe stood among a dispirited cluster of passengers waiting to board the red-eye out of Oakland, trying to keep his voice down while he talked to Amaris. Joe held on to the conviction that using cell phones in public was unseemly, a further unraveling of society's fragile social fabric, but he'd had to make concessions when he took up the detective's shield. He never knew where he'd be anymore, and it was rarely in private with time to spare.

He'd bolted down a beer in the bar and popped a Sonata. An Ambien would put him out for too long, but the Sonata was supposed to guarantee three or four hours of sleep. Still, Joe took it reluctantly. He didn't like to take much more than aspirin to deal with the rigors of daily life. His father's extended hospital stay, and the garden of pill bottles that had taken up permanent residence in his parents' kitchen, had given him an aversion to all things medicinal.

“It's already Friday,” Amaris said, her voice heavy with irritation. “So you're talking about missing the entire weekend.”

“I know.” Joe started to apologize, then decided against it. After all, how could he be held at fault this time? Nothing about his job adhered to a schedule, and she'd known that from the start.

“And Marc's opening is Sunday.”

“Well, I might be back.”

“But you might not.”

Joe let that hang. Marc was one of her artistic friends; he vaguely remembered Amaris telling him about the event at a local gallery, but he must not have paid attention because he had no idea whether the man dealt in photography or painting or, for that matter, coating himself with cottage cheese and sitting on the floor with a rope separating him from the onlookers and calling it art.

“Just do your work fast,” Amaris said, relenting. “You're smart. And then we can go out for dinner Sunday. I'll get reservations at Busby's.” Naming the latest hot restaurant in Oakland to poach a chef from L.A.

“You know I can't promise—”

“Of course not, I know. But I'll call, just in case.” Now that she thought she had him in the bag, she eased up. It was how she operated. No wonder SpinTalkGo was one of the only new web enterprises to even snag appointments with lenders—she was relentless when she wanted something.

And right now what she wanted was him.

For the first time the thought didn't fill Joe with the red-vision excitement that was pure Amaris. Maybe it was the late hour, maybe it was the sleeping pill going to work. Maybe it was the stress of two murders in one week.

What came out of his mouth, surprising him, was “Busby's a bit of a stretch for a cop's salary.”

The silence that followed was stark. Money was a topic they'd never even passed close to. But in Joe's oddly detached mood, he was interested to see where she'd take it.

“You know I'd—”

“No thanks.” Said it fast and clipped and realized he meant it. No woman was going to pay his way: it flashed through his mind so fast he almost didn't get it, some anachronism from the way he was raised.

“Look, if I get back, why don't we just have a quick bite and catch a movie or something,” he said, backtracking. And knowing the odds were slim. Even if Des Moines proved to be a dead end, there was Lodi, and Deanne Mentis, to think about.

But there wasn't an upside to mentioning that now.

“All right,” Amaris said. “Well, look, I hope you have a good trip. Catch the bad guys and all that. Who was it you're going to see again?”

“No one special,” Joe said. “Just an old lady and her son.”

After he slipped the phone back in his pocket and merged into the boarding queue, he resolved to put Amaris out of his thoughts and concentrated on letting the Sonata shut down his unquiet mind.

MARVA THREW
off the covers in the second twin bed in Lainey's room and sat up. The night light, a pink gingham elephant perched on the glass ball that contained the tiny bulb, gave off enough illumination that she could see around the child's room.

It was nearly midnight, and she couldn't sleep. Isabel had gone to her sister's, where she spent her weekends and days off; they'd decided together that Marva would stay tonight so Isabel could go get what she needed for the uncertain week ahead. Including her black dress, she had said through tears, and it was the first time it occurred to Marva that the woman had her own grief.

There was a guest room, but Marva chose to sleep with Lainey. She kept the door open so she could hear Marshall in his room next door if he woke in the middle of the night. She told herself she was doing it for the kids, but as she looked around the neat room—the white bookshelves with the rows of colorful books and stuffed animals, the basket on the floor with dress-up clothes and tiaras and tiny little dress-up shoes—she admitted to herself it was because she couldn't stand to be alone tonight.

She'd brought along a quilt she had been making for Gail, and fallen asleep clutching it to her cheek. She had started the quilt several years ago and worked on it sometimes between commissions. It was taking forever because Marva was hand-quilting it, beautiful curving motifs of her own design running across the intricate pieced blocks. It was a detail that Gail might never have appreciated, but Marva didn't regret the many quiet hours she'd spent with the tiny needle and the fine thread and the quilt in folds across her lap.

She already knew she would never finish the quilt. Its colors, violets and purples and splashes of yellow and orange, were Gail's colors. Now Gail was gone.

Marva drew the quilt close to her and pressed her face into it and cried, silent heaving sobs so she wouldn't wake Lainey, and felt emptier than she'd ever believed she could.

JOE PICKED
up his rental car and stopped at the first restaurant he saw. It was a Cracker Barrel, a chain restaurant Joe had heard of but never seen in California. Inside there was a gift shop full of ersatz crafts and ceramic knickknacks that he had to make his way around to reach the hostess stand.

Walking through the cloying scent of potpourri and the stands of postcards and plaques with biblical quotes, Joe was aware of every gaze that settled on him. To be fair, not every customer in the place singled him out, but it felt that way, and he hadn't seen any other Asians since he left the airport.

He took a spot at the counter and ordered coffee and toast. While he waited, he flipped through a newspaper someone had left behind, the
Des Moines Register,
scanning an article on the USDA corn harvest forecast. Yields were expected to be seventy-five bushels an acre; Joe realized he had no idea how big a bushel was. He discarded the paper and pulled out his notebook and went over the details he'd been able to pull together before his flight.

Conrad Bartelak, age thirty-four, lived with his mother. That made things easier. Joe hadn't called ahead; there was rarely much to be gained by giving notice in a situation like this. Innocent people, not knowing you were coming, didn't have time to work up much indignation. Guilty people, either, for that matter.

Joe had slept well on the first leg of the trip, all the way from Oakland to Denver. Problem was, that was less than three hours. From Denver to Des Moines, he'd drunk as much coffee as the flight attendant would pour, but he couldn't manage to clear the cobwebs from his brain. He'd tried to focus on Gail, on Tom Bergman and Hatcher Sproul and Bryce, but his mind kept wandering off on unproductive tangents.

It was shortly before the plane began its descent into Des Moines International that a connection came to Joe, the kind of thing so obvious he was surprised he'd missed it.

His thoughts kept returning to Marva, to the tight circle she moved in, with Gail in its center. To the way Gail drew people in with her glossy charisma while Marva, the serious one, was saddled with melancholy and a guardedness that kept her isolated.

Well, there it was.

Like Marva, Joe had grown up in the shadow of a favored sibling. Omar had been cheerful and cooperative as he navigated childhood: he was eager to go to Urdu class. He was happy to eat his
daal chawal
from a Tupperware container in the school cafeteria. He wore his
shalwar kameez
to Share Your Heritage Day in fourth grade.

Joe, on the other hand, wanted nothing more than to fit in with the other kids. The white kids, the black kids—just not the Paki kids. He begged for haircuts like theirs, wore Raiders jerseys, snuck food during the long days of Ramadan. And perhaps worst of all in his parents' eyes, he was an underachiever. “Performs below potential” was marked on most of his grade reports. Joe was always aware that he was a disappointment. Not even his acceptance to Berkeley, to med school—none of it measured up.

Marva and Joe were both outsiders. They shared an onlooker's wistfulness; they understood the cost of loving people who didn't understand them. It wasn't all that drew them together, but it was the thing each first recognized in the other.

Joe finished his toast without noticing the taste. He drank his glass of water and asked for another, then slipped a five-dollar bill under his cup and paid his check at the register. Idly wondering who would buy saltwater taffy from the landlocked center of the country, he headed for the men's room, where he did what he could to erase the damage from the long and uncomfortable night.

The GPS gave him turn-by-turn directions to the Bartelak house. It was only eight thirty and he hoped to catch Conrad Bartelak before he went to work. Bartelak was a vice president for a bank, a regional one with eleven branches in four cities across Iowa. It was hard to imagine why he chose to live at home.

Joe found the house, a seventies-era split-level in a well-maintained suburb beginning to show signs of age. The shrubs were overgrown, trimmed into balls and spires that were so suggestively phallic Joe couldn't suppress a grin. There was a preponderance of big American sedans in the neighborhood driveways.

The Bartelak house wasn't quite keeping up appearances. The lawn was mowed but no one had bothered to weed or fertilize in some time; the flower beds contained a few clumps of dead stalks in the mulch. A section of iron rail on the front porch had rusted through and hung loose, and the stone trim needed to be tuck-pointed. As Joe rang the doorbell he broke the threads of an elaborate spiderweb.

No one came right away. Joe listened carefully and heard movement in the house. As he was about to ring for a second time, the door opened and a compact, broad-shouldered man in his thirties, dressed in an ill-fitting blue suit, glared out at Joe. “Conrad Bartelak?”

“Can I help you?” he asked after a pause that was just slightly too long.

Joe reached for his shield. “I'm Detective Joe Bashir from the Montair, California, police department.” He held up the shield and waited for the man to look it over, which he did with considerable care.

“You're from California, you say?”

“Yes.” That established, Joe folded the case and put it away. “I'd like to talk to you about Gail Engler. Maiden name Groesbeck.”

The opacity that settled into Bartelak's eyes was accompanied by the visible dissolution of his composure. His fullback shoulders sagged and his hands twitched at his sides.

“About . . . who? I don't know that name.”

It was possible that the man was a competent bank manager, but he was a terrible liar.

“She was in your sister's sorority.” Bartelak flinched, but Joe pressed on. “She was there the night Jess died.”

Bartelak licked his lips. “If . . . if you say so. I mean, there were a lot of girls, I didn't know them. I never even went out there before, you know. Before it happened.”

“May I come in?” Joe asked, taking a step forward, practically into the doorway. As he expected, Bartelak stepped back; Joe had guessed correctly that he wasn't the sort of man who would fend off an incursion into his personal space.

“Well, I mean, I have work—”

“I won't take long.” Joe followed him into a living room that smelled faintly of mildew. A coffee table was covered with newspapers, magazines, and remotes for a giant television that teetered precipitously on a stand that barely accommodated it.

“As I say, I have to get to work,” Bartelak said, a little more forcefully. “I'm not sure why you'd want to come all the way out here to talk about someone who's been dead for thirteen years.”

“Gail Engler died yesterday,” Joe said. “She was murdered.”

Bartelak said nothing for a moment. His expression, the doughy features set in a mask of misery, slowly hardened and he blew out a breath. “Murdered? How?”

“So far, it looks like she was struck unconscious, but her body was pushed off a precipice and sustained further injury . . .”

“Who killed her?”

“It's my job to find out. So Mr. Bartelak, when you said you didn't know Gail—”

“Well, yeah, okay. Yeah. I knew who she was. I know she was there that night, that she was . . . she made Jess keep drinking. I mean, it's just—look—what she did, she got away with it. That other girl, Deanne, she took the blame. The wrong person got punished, even if it was just a slap on the wrist. It's just the way things happened. But I let it go a long time ago. I mean, what are you going to do? The world isn't fair, you know?”

“I'm wondering why you didn't just say this in the first place.”

Bartelak closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead. When he looked at Joe again there was a bit more steel in his expression. “Like I said, I let it go. It's not my favorite subject. Sometimes I can go a few days without thinking about it, okay? I'd like to forget everyone from that time. I mean, not Jess, just—the rest of it, I just want to move on. So you come here asking about Gail—yeah, I said I didn't remember her. Wishful thinking, I guess. I mean, Jesus.”