Girl With a Past (19 page)

I continued to read, Steven searched. Twenty
minutes later he said, “Got it. Shi-it, I’m good. There are several
possibilities, but based on age and education, here’s the most
likely.” Steven showed me a phone number and an address.

He lived in San Francisco. In the same city
I grew-up in. I could have run into him at any point in my life.
“Let’s go.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

Steven, dramatic? Wow.

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“Okay, hand me the phone.” I took the phone,
dialed the first number on the list of possibilities. Straight to
voicemail: “You’ve reached Derek and Lynn. We aren’t available at
the moment. Please leave your name and number, and we’ll get back
to you.”

Whoa, he’s married. Why was I surprised? Did
I actually think that ever since our one-night stand he’d been
pining away for me? “My name is Alexandra Nichols. Derek, please
give me a call." I left my number and hung up. Why would he call me
back? I wouldn’t call me back, or somebody I didn’t know from Adam.
I needed to go see him.

“Steven, I’m going to give you a note.
You’re gonna drop it off at his house.” I thought for a minute. “If
he’s not there, see if anyone knows when he will be."

“Whatever you say.” Steven went to get a
jacket, returned to take my note, and closed my bedroom door behind
him.

I tried to read the printouts. We had a
number of addresses and a few phones numbers. I tried a second
phone number for Derek, another voicemail. I didn’t leave a
message.

We would have to go to the addresses. I
didn’t see how we could possibly do any good other than in person.
I would have to see him to know if it was the right Derek. When
Steven got back, I would have him drive me.

It was only midday, but I already felt so
tired. I dozed.

I awoke with a start. It was dark in the
room. The sky outside my window was black. Damn. I had only meant
to nap.

Oh shit, was Steven okay? Why the hell had I
sent him off by himself? I fumbled for the phone, punched numbers
with a shaking hand.

“Where are you?” I asked without
preamble.

“Right here,” Steven said as he walked
through the doorway of my room, his phone at his ear. “Just waiting
for you to wake up and give me my next instructions.”

“Why’d you let me sleep?”

“You needed to rest?” He twisted his head,
raising an eyebrow at me.

“What happened at Derek’s?”

“Nice place.” Steven flashed a
thumbs-up.

“I don’t need an
Architectural Digest
report.” God, I had to stop being a douche.

“He wasn’t there. His neighbor says he
usually comes home around five or six.”

“What time is it now?” I hopped up from my
bed and immediately regretted it. I reached for a bedpost to steady
myself.

“Hey, you okay?” Steven caught my arm.

“I’m fine.” I shook off his hold.
“Time?”

“Almost Six.”

I grabbed clean clothes as I went through my
closet to the bathroom. “Be ready to leave in five.”

“I don’t think you should be going
anywhere,” he said. “Let’s have the investigators check it
out.”

I splashed a lot of cold water on my face,
tied a scarf around my head, hippie style, covering the bandage and
missing hair, and threw on jeans, a turtleneck, and boots.

“Let’s go.” I stepped into the bedroom where
Steven sat in front of the computer.

“I don’t think––”

“Don’t think! Let’s go.” I walked to the
doorway. “Or should I drive myself?”

Steven groaned, but stood and grabbed a
jacket from the entry hall on the way out to his jeep.

I waved to the startled security guards as I
walked to Steven’s car. One of them pulled Steven aside and they
spoke briefly.

“I told them to follow us.” Steven said to
me as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

37

Derek’s house
was
a nice place. Built
in the 1960’s version of modernistic International Style, it was
tucked into the traditional Pacific Heights neighborhood. Lots of
steel and glass faced the bay with an entrance courtyard surrounded
by a low concrete wall.

We rang the bell. A thin slit of glass
beside the door showed a slender figure walking to answer.

“Yes?” Derek stood in the doorway
impatiently waiting for us to speak.

I stared, speechless.

Seeing him, decades later, with touches of
gray at the temples of his dark hair, blue eyes still startling in
his tan face, still as attractive, no––more attractive. And he
wasn’t a figment of my imagination. My dreams, my nightmares in the
hospital were based on actual occurrences. He was living proof that
my dreams had been real. Holy shit!

But wait, he had no idea who I was. And in
my rush to get here, I’d given absolutely no thought to what I was
going to say to the man.

I looked into those amazing blue eyes. “Hi.”
I smiled.

He stared at the young woman on his
doorstep. No sign of recognition. Duh.

Steven spoke, “Sorry to disturb you sir. We
think you know our parents from Cal.”

“Who are your parents?”

“Jeff and Lauren Nichols.”

Derek knit his brow, shook his head, and
moved the door towards closing.

"Lexi,” I said. “You do remember her,
right?”

Alarm spread across his face. “What do you
want?” The door moved closer to the frame.

“Look, we’re desperately trying to find our
mother. She’s disappeared. We think you might be able to help,” I
said.

“What makes you think that?” He looked each
of us in the eye. “I know nothing about your mother.

“Please, please talk to us. We won’t take
much of your time.” I wanted to put my foot in the door, but
thought better of it. Wrong message. “If you could just tell us
what happened the night Lexi was murdered.”

“I’ve talked to the police about this. Ask
them.” The door inched closer to shut.

“But their reports say you disappeared that
night. Where did you go?”

“What?” Derek stared, shook his head. “Who
are you again?”

“My . . . our parents were friends of
Lexi’s. I was named for her. My name is Alexandra Nichols. This is
my brother Steven.”

Derek searched my face, hesitated. Did he
feel it too? The attraction like some giant magnetic force
stretched between us. After several moments, he opened the door and
waved us in to the entry hall. “We can talk in here.”

We followed him into a dramatic high
ceilinged living room two walls of which were glass overlooking the
city and the bay. He motioned to a sofa.

We sat. He took a chair from nearby and
pulled it closer to us.

“You’re Jeff’s kids?”

We nodded.

“And Lauren’s,” I said. “Remember her?”

A shadow of sad crossed his face, turning
his eyes a deeper shade of blue. He nodded, turned his head away to
look out at the bay. He stood and walked to the wall of window.
Brushing his hand over a life-sized sculpture, he began to speak in
a soft monotone.

“I was kidnapped the night Lexi was
murdered. Held captive for a matter of weeks. I was drugged and
woke up to find myself in Florence.”

“Italy?” Steven asked.

Derek gave him nod, turned back to the
window and continued. “I found a note that said if I ever wanted to
see my father again to keep my mouth shut and stay away from the
police. In the end, I went to the polizia, but my Italian sucked
and so did their English. I think they thought I was some crazy
American student with a scheme to have some one else pay for a trip
back home.”

“How did you get home?” I asked.

Derek studied my face for a few moments as
if deciding how much to tell us. Or maybe something about me
reminded him of someone else. “I didn’t for years. I went to the
American embassy. They also thought I was up to no good, but did
eventually help me get a passport. It took several months just to
get papers. Meanwhile, I lived and worked at a restaurant washing
dishes, sleeping in the basement. I even wrote to the Berkeley PD
with no response.”

“What about your father? Couldn’t he help
you?”

“I tried to call him, collect of course, but
he didn’t accept the charges. I figured at the time that he thought
it was a prank call or something. I mean why would he think his son
would be calling him from Italy?”

Steven and I nodded our understanding.

“What about your mother?” I asked, realizing
I knew next to nothing about this man with whom I, that is Lexi,
had shared an intimate moment. And he still awakened my lustful
urges.

“She left us many years before this
happened, and as far as I know, she’s dead.”

“What about your father? Did he ever come
through for you?” Steven asked.

“I wrote him, and my daily routine was to
visit the American Express office looking for either a letter or
money from him. Never happened.”

“What was his reaction when you turned up
again?” Steven asked.

“He died before I got back.”

“Oh . . . sorry,” I said.

Derek shrugged.

“How long were you gone?” I asked.

“Three years.”

“Wow!”

“I met an artist who took me under his wing.
He taught me to sculpt. Turned out I liked it. A lot. So I stayed
to work with him.”

That explained the unusual sculptures of
metal and plaster that lined two walls of the room. I thought I
recognized one or two of them as having been exhibited and featured
on art book covers. Looking at the house, I’d guess sculpture
worked out well.

“I finally came back to the Bay Area to find
my father. I intended to confront him, to find out why he didn’t
respond to my letters. But he’d died in a car accident three months
earlier.”

“So you never found out why he didn’t answer
your letters?”

“Well. Yeah, I did. Sorta.”

We waited.

“I found my letters in his safe when I had a
locksmith open it.”

“But why didn’t he answer them?” Steven
asked.

“Why lock them up?” I asked.

“It was the other items I found in the safe
that gave me the answer.” He stood. “Here, come with me, I’ll show
you.” We followed him up floating curved staircase to a duplicate
window walled room above the living room. He walked to a large
writing table and opened a drawer. He pulled out a wooden box and
set it on the table.

Inside the box were locks of hair of many
different colors, blonde, brunette, auburn, platinum, light brown,
strawberry blonde, some quite faded. At the bottom of the hair and
a few aged pieces of paper, was a black hood with two holes cut out
for eyes.

I sucked in a deep breath and held a hand to
my head. I stared at the contents before I spoke. “Your father . .
. was the Zodiac?”

“That’s what I think. And that’s what I told
the police. But they weren’t interested.”

“Why?” Steven asked.

“They were convinced the Zodiac was this
Allen guy. Didn’t care about a box of hair . . . even though they
did admit that the Zodiac had taken hair from some of his victims.
DNA wasn’t really a thing then or they would probably’ve been more
interested.”

“How very strange.” I studied Derek’s
face.

Could this be true? I wondered. Aloud, I
said, “That’s why you weren’t in the file I saw. Because you turned
up three years later, and they didn’t believe you.”

“And the Zodiac had been inactive for
awhile. I gathered the press on the killer had whipped public
opinion into such a fevered pitch that the police were being
pressured beyond belief, yet they couldn’t come up with enough
evidence to indict their best suspect. Bottom line, the police did
not want to get the whole thing heated up again. They hoped the bad
publicity and the killer would just quietly fade away and out of
the public eye.”

“I don’t get it,” Steven said. “Why didn’t
your father answer your letters if he got them and he wasn’t dead
yet?”

I got it. “Because his father was the one
who kidnapped him,” I said.

Derek returned my look and nodded. “That’s
what I figured.”

“That’s why you were one of the two people
he moved. Because he didn’t want to kill you, but he needed you out
of the way. As your father he could take you on an airplane in a
semi-drugged state. He probably made up some story about taking you
to a medical specialist or something.”

Derek continued to nod.

“There was one woman, a Jane Doe, whose body
turned up around the same time, and maybe was a Zodiac victim. Her
body had been moved after she died. Did you know her?”

“No,” Derek said, “and there’s no evidence
that she was definitely one of his victims. He didn’t usually move
their bodies. In fact, from the research I’ve done, she’s the only
body that was moved.”

“Aside from you, that is.” I pointed at the
creepy box of hair. “Would you be willing to give these to the San
Francisco PD now?”

“Sure . . . if they were interested.”

“Let’s ask them.” I punched numbers on my
cell. “If they’re not, I’ll have the DNA tests done.”

“We’ll need to have evidence samples for
comparison.” Derek pointed out.

“We’ll get them. Some evidence from bodies
of victims must’ve been saved.” I frowned while I listened to Dad’s
voicemail. “There’s one big problem with this theory.”

Derek and Steven both looked at me.

“If your father was the Zodiac, and he’s
dead, who wanted the papers in Dad’s file? Who the hell shot at me?
And who has our mother?”

38

“Good question.” Derek answered while he
rubbed his hand over his chin. “I’m afraid I may not be that much
help to you.”

Steven looked at me. “Did you call Dad?”