Blood Ties (30 page)

Even his son he would brush away like a shadow.

But he was a gifted actor and could play any part. When Harriet came home at fifteen minutes after five, he listened to her history of the day and appeared to enter into all her griefs. He consoled her and caressed her, and made her feel that no one had ever understood her the way he did.

And then he made her a cocktail, his own approximation of a Pink Lady, but with a little something added that would be sure to put her out for about an hour. He wouldn't need any more time than that.

*   *   *

It was about six-thirty when Harriet began to stir. By then Walter had stripped off her clothes and covered her mouth with about three layers of duct tape—first one straight across and then another that came down at an angle from the side of her nose, looped under her chin and then came back up to the other side. More duct tape secured her hands behind her back, and yet more bound her legs at the ankle so that her left foot was over her right and her knees were apart.

She was lying faceup in the tub, in the bathroom her son probably used when he was home, her head away from the tap end. Walter would have preferred to have had the toilet seat under him rather than having to kneel, but this was the most convenient position. Besides, for the close work he had in mind it would have been a bit of a reach from the toilet.

Finally she became what probably would pass for conscious, except that she seemed to have no idea where she was or that there was anything odd about being in a bathtub with her mouth taped shut.

But in a few minutes, fear would come of its own. Walter was prepared to be patient.

When she seemed to recognize him, he smiled at her and began to stroke her hair. Even then she didn't seem to be at all alarmed.

“Possibly you're beginning to wonder what you're doing here,” he said, his voice silky and intimate. “Can you imagine why you woke up in the bathtub, with your hands and feet tied and a gag over your mouth? No? Then let me show you something.”

Harriet, to her credit, seemed to be genuinely interested in cooking, and her cutlery was all first rate. Walter held up for her inspection a small knife he had taken out of the block on her kitchen counter. It was all one piece of sterling steel with a needle-sharp point and of a German brand that wouldn't have been available at Walmart. Harriet recognized it and her eyes went wide with terror.

That was more like it.

“It's time for you to die, Harriet, and it's God's will that you suffer first. You won't have an easy death, but then hardly anybody does.”

He rested the point of the blade on a spot just to the outside of her left eye, and then he pressed the heel of his right hand against her chin so she couldn't move her head. After a few seconds to let the suspense build, he pressed down until the knife had cut all the way to the bone and then started dragging the point across to the angle of her jaw.

Harriet tried to scream, but it came out as more of a grunt. And by the time he was finished she was trembling uncontrollably. Among other injuries he had severed her trigeminal nerve, probably in two places, and there was no pain like that.

There was a lot of blood, so Walter, who was a fastidious man, stood up to rinse off his hands in the bathroom sink. He left the knife resting on the rim of the tub.

While he was drying off with a face towel, he looked at Harriet and smiled. She was still trembling and her eyes were wet with tears.

“That's just a taste,” he said kindly, as if he were explaining something to a child. “I'm afraid your cleaning woman is going to have her work cut out for her. And then, later on, when we've finished here, perhaps we'll take a drive in your car.”

 

23

In the days following the discovery of Walter's house, Tregear had watched the evidence accumulate. He read the reports and assessments, examined the photographs and listened to the recordings of interviews. Ellen told him the chatter that never found its way into the police computers. He knew everything, and nothing.

His working assumption was that Walter would now vanish and then, after a month or two, resurface in some other place. But two facts kept nagging at him. There was the semen sample, the first DNA evidence Walter had ever left, which seemed to reflect a deliberate choice. And there was the murder of the doctor in San Mateo and the presumed theft of the medical records.

Why had he wanted his DNA found and why had he killed the doctor? Neither made any apparent sense. If Walter ever came to trial the DNA would guarantee conviction, so why was he signing his work? And what could possibly have been in Dr. Fairburn's memory or records that he wanted so badly to hide?

The two acts seemed to contradict each other. One was virtually an admission of guilt and the other was a completely unnecessary concealment.

Walter had almost come to grief from falling into a habit. Two of his victims were women he encountered in his work, and he had thus left a thread that could be followed back to him. Most murderers were caught because they were careless, and Walter had grown careless. And now the police had his fingerprints and his likeness and sufficient physical evidence to convince any jury. Walter had made a mistake, but anyone could make a mistake. Mistakes didn't really demand explanation.

But the semen and the doctor's murder demanded explanations, and Tregear didn't have any.

“Maybe he wants to get caught,” Ellen had suggested. “Lots of murderers want to get caught. You should listen to their confessions. They can't stop telling you how guilty they are. They just want it to be over.”

They were eating dinner, Chinese takeout, at the kitchen table. Ellen kept sliding her foot up Tregear's trouser leg, but she wasn't getting much of a reaction. Tregear was somewhere else.

“The semen sample wouldn't get him caught,” he answered, glumly. “Semen doesn't come with a return address.”

“Well, I'm grateful to Walter because his semen got you off the suspect list.”

It was an attempt at humor, just a little banter to get poor old Steve to stop obsessing. But it didn't work. She could tell that from the way his head slid over a little to one side. He was thinking. He was back in that dark place he shared with his father.

“Maybe that was the idea—not to exonerate me but to get you to pay attention to me.”

The Chinese dinner lay on the table between them, forgotten. All Ellen could see was the expression on her lover's face, and for the first time it occurred to her that his mind might be spinning out of control.

“Why would he want to do that? He didn't even know you were here. He probably still doesn't.”

“He knows. He's known since Maryland that I was tracking him. The few times I've been able to get someone to listen, he probably had enough of a scare to remind him. I'm sure he can almost feel my breath on his neck.

“Maybe he spotted me at one of the crime scenes.”

Suddenly he became very still.

“Yes. Now it makes perfect sense. Kathy Hudson in the trunk of somebody else's car—you remembered me from there. He must have been around somewhere. You'd never catch him at it, but he's probably got a shortwave radio and it's the kind of circus he'd enjoy.

“And since I'm not an established member of the… What does Sam call it?”

“The Fan Club.”

“Right.” Tregear nodded, as if the term itself held some sort of importance. “Since I'm not a member, Walter would assume you would regard me at least potentially as a suspect.”

“And he guessed right about that.”

But Tregear might not even have heard.

“So he'd want you to know that I wasn't your killer but at the same time that I had special knowledge. He'd want you to know I wasn't just another nut.”

“But why?”

Ellen reached across the table to touch his hand. It all made a screwy kind of sense, the way so many neurotic fantasies seemed to make sense. But she just couldn't bring herself to believe it.

“Why would he want us to take you seriously when you know so much about him?”

“Perhaps to flush me out. To get you to involve me in the investigation. The way you did when you called me in to walk the house with you. I wonder if he was watching.”

“That's paranoid.” She shook her head. “I think you need a vacation. Let's go up to Yosemite for a week and admire the wildflowers.”

All at once he looked up and smiled.

“That sounds lovely,” he said. “When this is over—if I'm still alive—let's do that.”

*   *   *

Suddenly, for no reason he could identify, Tregear found himself broad awake. He raised his head a little, enough to see the LCD display on the clock on his dresser, and determined that it was two-fifteen in the morning. For perhaps five minutes he lay quite still, listening. He heard nothing but the occasional sound of a car on North Point Street—that and Ellen's slow, steady breathing as she lay asleep beside him.

Dear God, how he loved her. It was all he could do to keep himself from touching her. Let her sleep, he thought. He hoped her sleep was dreamless.

It was the wrong time to fall in love. But would there ever be any right time? Love just made everything harder because now he had so much more to lose than just his life.

In all the time since he had found that woman's corpse in his father's van, how many years had he had in which to feel something like normal? Four years with his grandparents, and then Walter had come back and killed them. Then maybe six years in the Navy. But even then he had felt as if he needed eyes in the back of his head. Did he even know what “normal” felt like?

How many years since he had been on the hunt? Maybe twelve. And it had led him to San Francisco, with Walter going berserk.

And here he had met Ellen, who now slept beside him—who had shown him, by her mere presence in it, how inhumanly strange his life had become.

He was so tired. So very, very tired.

What had she said? Something about admiring the wildflowers. What a wonderful idea.

He stared up at the ceiling, which was just a black space that might as well have been open to the vast emptiness of oblivion. Sometimes Tregear felt that, with just a little effort, he could step off the edge and disappear forever.

But not now, not yet. Walter was still out there.

Gradually, Tregear drifted back to sleep.

*   *   *

Around 3:00
A.M
. that same morning, Officer Jim Lawell was coming out the front door of a diner on Sloat Boulevard. There was a brown paper bag in his right hand. He was holding it by the bottom because one of the paper coffee cups inside seemed to be leaking and he didn't want the bag to tear.

His partner, Herb Balmis, was behind the wheel of the patrol car. Herb always got hungry about this hour, so there was a chocolate-covered doughnut, wrapped in wax paper, resting on the lids of the coffee cups.

Jim got in on the passenger side and handed Herb one of the coffees and the doughnut. Herb opened the wax paper, being careful to peel it from the doughnut's chocolate coating, then shook his head in apparent disbelief.

“This thing looks like it was made yesterday morning,” he said. “It looks embalmed, and probably tastes like it.”

“That won't stop you from eating it.”

“No.” Herb had to laugh. “No, it won't.”

In about two minutes the doughnut was gone, along with about half of Herb's coffee, which was still scalding hot. He put the rest in the left cup holder on the dash and said, “Let's roll,” as he eased the car into reverse. He always said that.

They traveled west on Sloat and then south down Skyline Boulevard. They usually followed Skyline down to John Muir Drive and then back north along Lake Merced, but not tonight. Tonight they found a car parked just at the mouth of Harding Park Road. It was a white compact and its flashers were going. They parked parallel to it, on the other side of the road.

“Go have a look,” Herb said. “I'm still digesting.”

Officer Lawell got out of the patrol car and clicked on his flashlight, passing the beam slowly back and forth over a Chevy Camaro, about three years old. There appeared to be no one inside.

He approached the front of the vehicle and touched the hood with his fingertips to discover that it was still warm. Probably just engine trouble, he thought

Then he raised his light to the windshield and saw something that made him change his mind.

It was a handprint. It was on the driver's side, and Lawell could see the steering wheel beneath it. The strange thing was that it looked red.

He moved closer and could see why. The handprint was on the inside of the windshield and was in blood. Up close, he could see drip lines coming down from it.

He went back to the patrol car and told Herb about it.

“I'll phone it in,” Herb said. “It's out of our league.”

“Okay.”

Lawell went back for another look. This time he walked all the way around the Chevy until he came to the trunk, where he found the words “OPEN ME” written in blood on the lid, in four-inch capitals.

The book said you should detain any witnesses, preserve the scene and not touch anything. Well, there weren't any witnesses, and Officer Lawell was happy to preserve the scene and not touch anything. Above all, he was happy not to open that trunk.

*   *   *

The inspector who got the call had just been posted to Homicide. His name was Donald Krodel. He had had his gold shield for four years and was considered a comer.

Hence the early assignment to the Land of the Blessed.

He was on his way back from a slam dunk domestic murder, where the guy had shot his wife three times while she was lying asleep in bed and then gone to the refrigerator to get himself a beer. When the police arrived he had surrendered quite meekly. Krodel wasn't the primary on the case. He had been called in only as backup, in case there was trouble. There hadn't been any trouble. He was going home.