Every Move She Makes (30 page)

he said quickly. I should have kicked him harder. There was a Henry
Weinhard clock on the wall almost eye level with the bartender's face.

"Yeah. Henry. How's he doing, anyway?"

"Not bad. Wife and kids are doing pretty good, too." The bartender still
watching, I gave my best Mona Lisa smile.

"Maybe I remember something' after all," Joe said.

"You'll have to give me a minute. A lot happened that night, what with
my bartender skippin'out for some family emergency. Left me stranded on
a Friday night. I was busier than hell." Funny how some details such as
a murder got pushed to the wayside while the fact he had to work a
little harder on a particular day of the week was still at the forefront
of his memory. "Really?" I queried. I loved that word. People usual iv
felt compelled to comment. "Yeah. I just haven't thought about it since
then," he added, as though he realized what his earlier remark had
sounded like. "My waitress, Trish, she quit that night," he said,
picking up a bottle of maraschino cherries. He twisted off the top, then
dumped them into a small container next to the green olives. The
sweet-smelling syrup splashed onto the counter, but he didn't seem to
notice. "Anyway, I was pissed. It's after nine, and we're busier than
hell. Trish comes waltzin' into my storeroom, and announces she's
leaving as soon as her ride gets there. I'm tryin' to talk her out of
it, but she don't listen. Out she goes, tellin' me if I want to know
what's going' on, I should ask my bartender. Then, 'bout two hours
later, some idiot from this band I hired gets in a fight with someone
else. C-rot caught screwin' some guy's chick, and gets his nose
rearranged with one of my tables. I call the cops, and my bartender
announces he's takin' off for some freakin' family emergency. In the
meantime, my bouncer's missin' in action, and I have to haul these two
goons out by myself, and nearly get run over by Trish's Volkswagen
that's screechin' from the parkin' lot like a rat after cheese.

Probably why the engine died."

"Pardon?"

"The way she took off. Car started sputtering 'bout a
block down the road. Watched her coast for another block after that." I
thought of the proximity of the phone booths to the other murders.

Wondered if anyone checked the car angle. Car tampered with, breaks
down, victim calls for help. "Did you see who was driving it?"

"I figured Trish was."

"But didn't she say she had called for a ride home?" He paused. "Yeah.

She did. But it was definitely her car."

"You know her roonnnate at all? The girl that got killed?"

"Met her once or twice. Trish mentioned something' about her datin' that
drummer. The one who got his nose broke."

"Was Christy there that night?"

"Christy?" "Trish's roommate. She might have gone by tanya.'" He wiped
the cherry juice from the counter. "Like I said, my bartender, Eric
Lange, up and left me that night right after Trish left, and I wasn't
exactly worried about who the hell was drivin' the car. I suppose it
could've been her, but truthfully, I was too pissed to care." The bar
owner left us to ourselves once he finished his Ttale, saying he didn't
remember much else. But at least his story seemed to coincide with that
of the rocker boyfriend and the neighbor. I was curious about the
bartender that night, the one who left on a family emergency. Trish had
gone to the trouble of mentioning him to the owner when she quit. It
couldn't hurt to talk to him as well, and I wondered if Zim had
mentioned him in the report. I didn't recall seeing his name. "You think
Scolari ever intended to show?" Torrance asked outside the bar. Light
emanating from the neon Gold Ox sign did little to penetrate the thick
gray mist that had smothered the street now that the sun was gone. "Not
a chance. Scolari would know I'd never come alone. My guess is that he's
trying to prove he's not the Slasher by getting me to solve the case."

"Where to now?"

"Grab a bite, then home, James." I had no desire to return to the Hall
and look at dead bodies that could wait until tomorrow, and so we went
to dinner at a Greek restaurant not too far from the Hall. Torrance
apparently was a regular there. After dinner the owner's wife brought
him a plate of still-warm baklava.

"For you, Mike," she said in a thick Greek accent. She
leaned down and whispered a little too loud, "It's about time you bring
a beautiful woman in here with you." I pretended not to hear, but after
she returned to the kitchen, I could no longer hide my amusement. "Come
here often, do you?" He was clearly embarrassed, which I found
endearing, because it was so at odds with the man I thought I knew. He
left a generous tip, and we were soon on our way back to Berkeley. At my
apartment, however, I had forgotten that Torrance was insistent on
playing bodyguard. Apparently, Linda Perkins had errands to ran and
couldn't stay in his stead, and he didn't believe me when I told him
that I hadn't felt the least bit dizzy since we left the hospital. Even
after I mentioned that my health was perfect, he pointed out that there
were the death threats, and Scolari was still at large. Great. I locked
the door behind Linda, listening to her footfall as she descended the
wooden stairs outside. After the last creak of the last step, I knew she
had rounded the corner and was now headed down the moss-covered brick
walkway. Suddenly I was very much aware of the man standing in my
apartment, and the fact that we were alone.

We stared at each other for several moments.

I knew what I wanted him to do, what I wanted to do.

"Sheets?" he asked.

"Sheets?" I shook myself. Moved past him to get the sheets from my room.

When I handed them over, our fingers touched. My pulse raced.

He stood stock-still, his gaze held mine.

"Need ... anything else?" I finally asked.

"Yes."

I waited. The refrigerator hummed. The clock ticked on the wall.

"Go to bed, Gillespie." It wasn't until I got into my room and shut the
door that I realized it was only eight-thirty. I rarely went to bed
before ten or eleven, but there was no way on earth I was leaving this
room. Taking rejection well was not one of my stronger attributes, and
at the moment, I liked that we parted on the ambiguity of it being
bedtime, no matter that he was the one who did the dismissing, so to
speak. It wasn't rejection. He'd told me once before that he had a job
to do, and couldn't do it if we were in bed together.

Not rejection at all.

It Worked for me. I took stock of my bedroom. Everything was in its place.

I started wondering who had searched through my things earlier. I could
certainly go out and ask Torrance his opinion. Good excuse. But I was
too chicken. I didn't want him to think I was looking for a reason to
speak with him. Not that I needed a reason. But who had searched my
room? Scolari? He'd broken in once before. But what could he possibly
have been searching for? Mathis? I suppose he could have done it before
we returned to the apartment the night we all went to dinner. Perhaps I
didn't notice right off. Reid? He'd come in to use the bathroom. I could
well imagine him looking for some clue that I was dating another man. I
could handle that-didn't like it, but at least he was a known entity.

The only other possibility was Torrance. He'd been in here ostensibly to
speak on the phone in private. Yet I clearly recalled seeing him later
that night using his cell phone in the kitchen. Had he truly wanted
privacy, he would've taken his phone onto the porch, closed the door. I
sank to my bed. Eight thirty-five. Sleep eluded me-no surprise there-and
I looked around for something to occupy the next few hours. Cleaning was
out. My eye caught on several magazines stacked by my nightstand.

Picking one at random, Nezvs-zveek, I opened it, flipping through the
pages. A photograph of a shriveled corpse, very brown, preserved, caught
my eye. Homicide being my business, I was instantly intrigued.

Apparently, the man had been an ancient traveler found frozen in the
Swiss Alps. Switzerland and Italy both claimed the corpse, and the
relics with it, including a pouch of seeds. They surmised the ancient
guy was a hunter-gatherer, on his way to who knew where. Probably on his
way to get to the other side of the mountain. The article was
fascinating and even ironic in the similarity to my current John Doe,
the Ice Man. Two dead men, one centuries old, one modern. Both frozen
solid. Both alone, unidentified. Both with seeds, I realized, although
the ancient guy had several hundred as opposed to my John Doe, who had
seven tucked-hidden?-in his ring. I wondered if there was any way to
tell exactly how long my Ice Man had been dead. A month? More? At least
they had that. My John Doe was still nameless, no known occupation, and
I seriously doubted he was on his way to plant those seeds anywhere. Why
would someone kill for them? What was so important about pokeweed seeds?

Did Scolari's wife discover something when she did the autopsy on the
Ice Man? Had she told Scolaii? Was it possible those seven tiny seeds
were the connection to each of the other murders? The doctor's, Martin's
and Smith's ... and my attempted poisoning. I took out a pen and piece
of stationery from the nightstand. In the center I sketched a coin-sized
circle, and wrote SEEDS in the middle. From there I drew lines radiating
out from the circle, like spider legs. At the end of each line I drew
another circle for each of the victims. The drawin, looked more like a
rendering of Itsv Bitsy Spider with shoes, but then, art was never my
specialty.

Brainstorming murders was.

In the first circle, I wrote "Ice Man," the first known victim that
started this. In the next circle, I wrote "Doctor." Martiii and Smith
followed. And finally myself-so my spider was missing a couple of legs.

The seeds seemed to have a connection to everything. I needed to find
out why.

And how?

Okay. That was temporarily out. Look at suspects. I wrote Scolari's name
on the left. He was in his wife's car the night she was murdered. He was
seen down in Property. Rhetorically speaking, bodies littered his trail.

The only homicide I couldn't place him as a suspect at was that of the
Ice Man. I tapped my pen on the Ice Man circle, drew a line from there
and wrote "Paolini." Then I wrote "Hilliard Rx" and drew another line
from there to Ice Man. Hilliard rented the facility to Paolini, which
earned them a connecting line to each other, forming a triangle. I drew
a line from Paolini to Martin and Smith. Paoliiii's evidence was at
stake. What I couldn't do was connect him to Doctor Mead-Scolari's
murder. But she knew about the seeds, even if she didn't know what they
were. The seeds were in Hilliard's building and she knew that, therefore
a line connecting Hilliard to the doctor's death.

Hilliard.

Paolini.

Scolari.

My drawing was starting to look like some complex chemical solution in a
chemistry book. Atoms linked to each other.

Link. Missing link.

MO of the doctor's death. The Slasher victims were not linked in any way
to any of these deaths but Patricia's. Her killer had copied the MO.

Why? Obvious. Whoever killed her wanted us to think it was the Slasher.

I'd figured this out from the entrance and exit wounds on the autopsy
photos. Scolari paging me to go to the Gold Ox had distracted me. I had
yet to tell Torrance what I'd discovered. I fell back onto my pillow. I
didn't really know what part Scolari played in all this. He was adamant
that he wasn't the Soma Slasher. I knew he wasn't. But had he killed his
wife? Did he know something about those seeds that I was missing? I lay
there several more minutes, contemplating any other possibilities
regarding the doctor's murder. Nothing came to mind, and I knew I needed
to tell Torrance about the autopsy photos. My aunt always said while
doing a jigsaw puzzle when you couldn't find the pivotal piece, "A fresh
eye always helps." Torrance would be my fresh eye. I got up, padded to
the door. My hand on the knob, I opened it, paused on the threshold at
the sight of Torrance in the kitchen speaking softly to Mathis. I wasn't
aware Mathis had arrived, and as I watched, I saw Torrance grab his
jacket and exit the kitchen door, leaving Mathis behind.