Blood Ties (11 page)

“Sneaky girl,” he said, without anger, in a voice that was just audible. “Now why did you do that?”

The obvious answer had of course occurred to him, but he almost dismissed it out of hand as too wildly improbable. What could she possibly want with a few strands of his hair except a DNA sample? But, once she had it, it would be useless unless she had another sample, taken from a crime scene, to which she could match it.

There had been no suspect DNA recovered from the bathroom at the Marriott and none from the car trunk in which Kathy Hudson had been found. So far, the autopsy findings on Sally Wilkes hadn't been posted, but Tregear would have been prepared to bet very serious money none had been found there either.

He wondered if she had any plans to tell her partner about the hair samples.

Of course both of them thought that he was their killer, an idea he had made no attempt to discourage, but they had nothing tangible that connected him with any of these murders. They had only the information he had given them and Inspector Ridley's tenuous hunch.

Tregear was in love with Inspector Ridley's hunches. The instant he first saw her, up on Skyline Boulevard when she got that photographer to film him, he had sensed that she was not a by-the-book type.

In the slightly more than twenty-four hours since she had pulled up his DMV records, Tregear had learned a good deal about her, and a streak of rebellion ran through the details of her life like a flaw through a diamond. The child of money, she was a working cop who gave every indication of living on her police salary. The performance records written by her immediate superiors were generally glowing, shadowed only here and there with oblique references to a less than perfect respect for authority and proper procedure: “Patrolwoman Ridley certainly merits promotion to Assistant Inspector, where her independence of mind will find more scope.” “Inspector Ridley's first year in Juvenile Offenders has been generally satisfactory, even exemplary. Like so many of our better officers at the beginning of their careers, she has at times exhibited an understandable degree of impatience with the workings of the juvenile justice system.” There was even a complaint, which the judge had dismissed out of hand, from a drug-addicted father whom she had threatened with mayhem if he didn't stop abusing his daughter.

Alas, so things went. There was justice, which dwelt in Heaven, and then there was the law, in this case represented by the San Francisco Police Department. And Inspector Ellen Ridley seemed to feel the tension between them as a kind of private travail. Thus, impatient of constraint, she had ignored the rules and followed her nose to Fisherman's Wharf, hoping to pick up the scent of a murderer.

Well, good for her.

But could it be that now, as she and Inspector Sergeant Tyler drove away together, perhaps she was just a shade less confident? Tregear was not much given to vanity about his effect on women, but he was observant—he could read the signs. And he had detected a chord of sympathy in Ellen Ridley which, under happier circumstances, might have emboldened him to ask her if she might care to share a few glasses of wine with him.

At least, he felt permitted to suspect, she would not be utterly crushed to discover that Sally Wilkes had been murdered by somebody else.

And that, probably, was the best he could hope for.

Still, she was a pretty woman—prettier at close range than she had appeared to be up on the coast road—and it was a pleasure to remember her. He liked her hair. It was an unusual color, a mix of red and brown which couldn't possibly have come out of a bottle. It was almost a pity she wore it so short, but it framed her face and somehow emphasized the delicacy of her features. She had beautiful, clear skin and a mouth that just hinted at a streak of sensuality in her nature. And her eyes, large and light brown, were lovely.

But today was probably as close to her as he would ever manage.

As he sat alone in his living room, holding an empty teacup, Tregear was forced to admit to himself that there were times when he found the circumstances of his life utterly depressing.

 

8

Ellen soothed her conscience with the reflection that she couldn't have told Sam anyway. Sam had his pension to think about. She had illegally gathered evidence, and she had no business involving him in that.

Besides, he was obsessive about proper procedure. Yesterday she had followed Tregear along a couple of blocks of public sidewalk, and Sam had given her one of his copyrighted lectures. What would he have said if he knew she was carrying strands of Tregear's hair around in her coat pocket? He wouldn't have understood.

And, truth to tell, she wasn't sure she understood herself. The hair samples would not be admissible evidence and, if it ever got out how she had obtained them, any subsequent case against Tregear stood a good chance of being thrown out. Ellen was perfectly aware that during the last twenty-four or so hours she had not been behaving like a model detective.

Their shift was nearly over. They drove back to the station and Ellen found two manila folders on her desk. The first was thicker and contained about twenty high-definition photographs of the crowd at Sally Wilkes' discovery site. The detail was much better than in the video. Ellen was at last able to determine that the trousers Tregear had been wearing were olive green.

In five of the photos his face was particularly clear, and one of them Ellen would have liked to pin up on her refrigerator. Probably it had been taken before he noticed the camera, and his expression reflected an anguish Ellen had sensed in him but never actually seen. It was impossible to look at that face and believe Stephen Tregear was a murderer.

He was something, this guy. He wasn't amazingly handsome, but he made your average heartthrob movie star look like a troglodyte. His face radiated intelligence, as if no secret could be hidden from him, and somehow that was way sexier than sculpted eyebrows.

After about five minutes, she put the photos back in their envelope. After all, this was a murder investigation.

The other envelope contained, providentially, the DNA report on the semen recovered at autopsy from Sally Wilkes.

While Sam was in the men's room, she took the report over to the Xerox machine and copied it, all five pages.

When Sam came back, he threw himself into his chair and lit a cigarette.

“Girl, I don't know what you've got in mind for the contents of that envelope, but just don't sell it to
The National Enquirer
.”

Then he laughed.

After Sam had driven her home, and she was alone in her apartment, she threw a frozen lasagna into the microwave, poured herself a glass of Pinot Grigio, and sat down to read the report. For all that she was able to understand it, it might as well have been written in cuneiform.

With some obscure idea of eventually going to law school, Ellen had majored in philosophy. The physical sciences were not among her strengths and the report, with its references to VNTR assays and SNPs, was completely unintelligible to her. Even the graphs, which looked like finger paint smears, meant nothing.

Okay. In any case, she could hardly turn her purloined hair samples over to the police lab; she would need an outside expert.

And that meant she would have to beg a favor from Daddy.

Fortunately, tomorrow was her day off; she could postpone her visit home for another twelve or thirteen hours.

*   *   *

The next morning Ellen was up at five. Her father's office hours didn't start until ten, and so he never left the house before nine-forty. She could be in Atherton by seven, which would give her plenty of time to work on him.

The section of Atherton where her parents lived was enclosed by a brick wall and was home to some of the wealthiest people in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both her mother and father had inherited money, and her father had a lucrative practice—many of his patients were the children of neighbors—but even between them they didn't have quite enough money to really fit in. Thus, their social position was ambiguous. They were popular, particularly Ellen's father, but Dr. Ridley was someone you hired by the hour. It was all very distressing.

Ellen had gone to private schools, and her grades and SAT scores would easily have qualified her for Stanford, but she chose instead to attend the University of California at Berkeley. Over the summers she worked at a Dairy Queen in Redwood City. To her mother, all of this was incomprehensible.

The truth was that, somewhere in her middle teens, Ellen had discovered she found her parents' world claustrophobic. The ideal was to go to the right college so you could graduate into the right sort of job and live in a seven-bedroom house in the right sort of neighborhood. Life was supposed to be an orderly progression from success to success, without risk or uncertainty. It was a prison without the bars.

Escape had become her dream, her one consolation for all the proms and tea parties and weekends at Big Sur she had been forced to endure. She hated the boys she met in Atherton because all they could think about was getting into her pants and where they would go to college. It was an atmosphere as pointlessly competitive as a dog race.

And then, four weeks after graduation from college, she told her parents she had applied to the police academy in San Francisco. For the better part of a month her mother couldn't look at her daughter without dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. Even to this day, their relationship was only a kind of armistice.

Her father was more tolerant.

“Daddy, I just want a success that hasn't been handed to me. Is that so difficult to understand?”

Then he said something for which she would always love him.

“I'm proud of the ambition, if nothing else,” he told her. “If this is what you want, then fine.” And then he glanced away for a few seconds before going on. “I've never regretted the way my own life has worked out, but once or twice it has occurred to me that perhaps it was all just a little too inevitable. All of us wonder where some other path might have taken us.”

“Except Mommy.”

This made him smile. “Yes, except perhaps Mommy.”

Mommy, they both understood, had no doubts, and her disappointment was not very well concealed. She probably wondered if perhaps her daughter wasn't a lesbian.

It sometimes occurred to Ellen that her mother might have made an easier adjustment if she had had other children, but Ellen's had been a difficult birth and afterward Mrs. Ridley had been advised not to risk any further pregnancies, with the result that all of her aspirations and fears had settled upon her daughter.

Thus Ellen always dreaded coming home. And this morning, at seven-fifteen, while she parked her four-year-old Toyota in the driveway, she couldn't quite stifle an irrational terror that she might never escape again.

They were still at breakfast. Preston Ridley, MD, was dressed in a pair of tobacco-colored corduroys and a blue broadcloth shirt. His wife, Tracy, was wearing a housecoat. Underneath there was a bra, panties and a slip, and her makeup was perfect and her blond hair exquisitely highlighted. The housecoat would be replaced by a dress around noon, when she would meet one of her friends for lunch and then go shopping.

Her mother, even in her early fifties, was a stunningly attractive woman, but Ellen had always been grateful that she took more after her father—in appearance and in other things.

Preston and Tracy. One could imagine their parents searching the
Social Register
for those names. It had been an act of mercy for them to name their daughter and only child Ellen.

“Ellen—this is a surprise.”

Her father, from the fact that he always sat facing the kitchen door, was the first to see her. He actually got out of his chair and came over to give her a kiss. Her mother merely turned her head and her eyes took on that wide, moist look that was the hallmark of her dread.

That's what it was, Ellen had finally decided. Her mother was profoundly afraid of the world outside her cocoon of wealth, and this was precisely the world her daughter had embraced. God alone knew what horrors she imagined threatening her child.

“Daddy, I need to talk to you.”

Without a word, he put his arm across her shoulders and guided her out through the dining room, then through the living room, then up the stairs of his study.

What does he expect?
she found herself wondering.
That I'm in debt? That I'm pregnant?

The study walls were lined with books—most of which, to his credit, Dr. Ridley had actually read. He sat down behind his desk, which meant that the interview was being regarded as an official act. Suddenly she felt like one of his patients.

There was only one other chair in the room, reserved for penitents. Ellen had no choice but to occupy it.

“What's the problem?” he asked, looking grave. Yes, this was exactly how he talked to the twelve-year-old boys who had been caught peeking at their sisters.

On a certain level, Ellen was looking forward to his disappointment.

“I need a DNA test run, Daddy. I need it off the books, like it never happened, and I need it fast. It's about a case, but I can't take it to the police lab.”

“Is it illegal?”

“No.”

And that was the truth. Perhaps—probably—it had been illegal for her to scoop out the hair in Stephen Tregear's drain, but there was nothing illegal about some lab technician running a test on samples about which he was blissfully ignorant.

“You have friends at Stanford Medical, Daddy. I need this.”

“I'll make a call.” He took a long look at his watch, not to determine the time but to call attention to it. “But it's a little early.” And then, “Is everything okay with you? You seem a trifle harried.”

Ellen sighed, without meaning to. “It's this job. Did you read about the woman found along the coast road? I'm the case officer.”