Girl With a Past (20 page)

“Voicemail,” I answered.

Steven took his phone out of his pocket.
“I’ll call the SFPD detective who’s looking for Mom. Schmidt should
want to help us.” Steven wandered into the hall at the top of the
stairs, speaking into his phone.

“So Derek, were you your father’s only
heir?”

“As a matter of fact, no,” he shook his
head. “My cousin Harold, that is Harry, occasionally stayed in my
Dad’s house in Vallejo while I was gone.”

“Where’s your cousin now?”

“Maybe traveling?” He sat down in the desk
chair. “I don’t know. We aren’t close. After we sold Dad’s house
and divvied up the estate, we haven’t really seen much of each
other.”

“Shit.” I plopped in the guest chair across
the writing table. “Well, the police ought to be able to track him
down.”

“What for?” Derek asked.

Steven came back into the room and sat in
the other guest chair. “The detective’s on his way over here.”

“I guess he was interested?” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Steven answered, “very.”

“Where did we meet before?” Derek asked
me.

I shrugged my shoulders, I really didn’t
feel up to explaining that the last time we met, we’d fucked, and
then his father killed me.

I wasn’t too sure of the reaction I would
get. From him, or Steven. I decided keeping some of what I knew, or
how I knew it, to myself, had advantages . . . like people wouldn’t
decide I was nuts.

“When does your wife get home?” I asked.

Derek gave me a puzzled look. “My wife?”

“Lynn?” I answered. “On your voicemail, it
says you and Lynn are not available.”

“Lian is my son. My wife died ten years
ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I hesitated. I seemed to have
developed a knack for putting my foot in it. “Where’s your
son?”

“At school. Basketball practice.” Derek
pressed his palms against the desktop. “He’ll be home soon.”

A glance at his hands stirred feelings I
didn’t want. I fought the urge to reach across the desk, to place
my palm on his.

The doorbell rang. Derek and Steven went
downstairs to answer it. I took advantage of the opportunity to
look through the writing desk drawers. I was curious about the
newspaper clippings I saw when Derek pulled out the box of hair. I
found a thick file of newspaper articles. I recognized some of the
same ones I’d seen in Dad’s file. And a whole bunch more from
various newspapers around the country.

Everything else looked like the usual desk
shit. I heard the three men on the stairs, replaced the file,
closed the drawer, and sat back down in the chair.

“Al, you know Detective Schmidt.”

I stood and shook his outstretched hand.

“You look a little better than the last time
I saw you, miss.” Detective Schmidt looked to be somewhere in his
fifties, with close-cut gray hair, a clean-shaven face, and twenty
extra pounds.

“I guess that must’ve been in the hospital.”
I smiled at him.

Derek pointed out the box of hair. The
detective called for lab technicians to deal with it and then asked
Derek enough questions to get him talking. Derek told the detective
pretty much the same story he’d told us.

I waited for him to mention the file of
newspaper clippings, but he didn’t.

So I did. It was pretty much an admission
that I’d been digging in his desk, but nobody seemed to notice, or
at least to comment.

Derek looked startled. Perhaps he’d
forgotten the clippings were in the desk.

Detective Schmidt and Derek re-hashed the
whole story. I figured the detective was listening for
discrepancies in Derek’s explanations, but I knew any differences
found would be meaningless. Derek had not shot Lexi.

When the detective continued to ask Derek
questions that I failed to see would help with finding Mom. I
wandered down the hall that ran the length of the oval stairwell. A
master suite was straight ahead. To the right was a room lined with
shelves full of video games, shiny unused sports helmets, candles,
a few books about vampires, CD’s, a couple of basketball trophies,
a photo or two, and a few wood boxes. Black curtains that matched a
black comforter on the bed covered the window wall.

I opened one wood box. Trinkets. String. A
ring. A harmonica.

I looked at the drawers under the bed and
nudged one open.

A voice from the bottom of the stairs called
out, “Hey Dad, wassup here?”

I shoved the drawer closed and hurried to
step into the hall.

A familiar looking, tall, dark-haired,
skinny young man with teenage acne and Derek’s light blue eyes ran
up the stairs, and threw a backpack on the sofa.

“This is my son, Lian.” Derek introduced
Steven, Detective Schmidt, and me. And then explained to Lian that
we were interested in the evidence of his grandfather being the
Zodiac killer. Lian shrugged it off as though it was an old story,
history of little interest to him.

But his eyes hovered on the news clipping in
Schmidt’s hand for a few extra seconds.

“Gotta meet a dude at the library.” Lian
headed to the kitchen. “Gonna grab a sandwich.”

I wondered if going to the library was still
code for “I’m gonna hang with friends tonight.” It sure had been in
each teen hood I could recall. The vacant look in Lian’s eyes
indicated a stronger interest in drugs than libraries.

I stared after Lian, trying to catch the
thought the sight of him had sparked. He was a skinnier version of
young Derek. Lian. Was he the kid on the bike? Yes. The kid from
last summer, the one in Pacific Heights. No wonder my heart
fluttered at the sight of him, my déjà vu recognition triggering
nightmares.

Derek caught me staring after Lian. “He’s
had a rough time since my wife died.”

I nodded, wondering how many pharmaceuticals
Lian was on. They might explain his nobody-home-look.

I followed Lian down the curved stairs where
a skateboard rested against the frosted glass window in the entry
hall. I stepped into the kitchen where he was spreading peanut
butter on bread.

“I’ve seen you riding a bike around the
neighborhood. My aunt lives nearby here,” I explained. My attempts
to start up a conversation were met with grunts.

“That was awhile back. Guess you’re into
skateboarding now?”

He nodded while he crammed the sandwich into
his mouth. Before the last morsel disappeared, he picked up his
board and hurried out the front door.

The lab guys showed up to bag the hair, the
box, the hood, and the articles. Then Detective Schmidt asked Derek
what else he had.

He opened a sliding door to a large
compartment in the paneled wall. A wall mounted gun rack held two
rifles and two pistols. “Those were my Dad’s. My cousin Harry has
the other half of his collection.”

Detective Schmidt looked very interested. I
couldn’t help but wonder why the Berkeley police had been so
uninterested years ago.

39

It was almost midnight before Steven and I
started home. “Are you going to stay here tonight?” I asked my
brother.

“Who else is going to keep an eye on you?”
He smiled and pulled into the driveway. “Besides getting a good
night’s rest, what are we going to do next?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll think of
something.”

“Why were you asking about heirs?” Steven
asked.

“I was wondering if anybody else had access
to the guns and the hood.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Steven gave me a quizzical
look. “So you think Derek has taken his father’s place?”

“Or Harold.” I hadn’t been thinking Derek
but why didn’t he tell the detective about the newspaper clippings?
Did the collection of clippings belong to Lian?

“So what are we going to do next?” Steven
asked.

“There’s that whole list of people to
question.”

“Why didn’t you give the list to the police?
To Schmidt?”

“I don’t know how to explain the list, or
why to question them. Not to mention, all of them being pillars of
the community, the police are not likely to see them as suspects. I
just have a feeling that at least one of them knows something," I
paused. Maybe all of them. Crooks stick together, right?”

“What? The old birds-of-a-feather theory of
crime?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I yawned and waved
goodnight as I watched him close my door. I peeled off my clothes
and fell into bed.

Sleep came easier than I expected,
considering the way my heart raced every time I thought of my
missing mother.

40

I woke up with the sun, feeling guilty for
sleeping while Mom was still missing. I hurried into my clothes,
woke up Steven, and crammed down toast as I located the list of
addresses map questing a couple.

“We can use the GPS,” Steven said over the
top of his coffee mug.

“Yeah, yeah, I just want to be efficient,
not zigzagging from one end of the Bay Area to the next.”

We caught Dad’s oldest friend, Uncle Dave,
at breakfast in his Victorian paneled dining room. I recognized the
dining table as one mother and I had bought for him at a London
auction on Lots Road. We sipped the coffee his housekeeper Maria
served.

Steven managed to eat a second breakfast,
filching bacon and muffins off our “Uncle’s” neglected plate while
I distracted him with questions.

“Remember the night that Lexi was killed?” I
asked.

“Sure, one of those moments you never
forget.” He gave me a glance then drank from his porcelain coffee
cup.

“Moments?”

“Yeah, you know like where you were when you
heard Kennedy was killed? Well actually you wouldn’t remember that,
but . . .”

You might be surprised Uncle. I kept that to
myself.

He tried again. “Like the moment you first
heard about September 11.”

“We get it.” I nodded. “So?”

“I woke up in the middle of the night to the
doorbell ringing. I heard Carol screaming, ‘No-o-o,' and crying.
Commotion, lots of people in the hall.” He put the cup down in its
saucer and fiddled with a piece of toast. His eyes studied his
plate.

Was he hiding emotions? I tried to remember
if I’d ever seen Dave truly emotional.

My Uncle Dave had a pervasive hollowness to
his character. Like he had a shell that on the surface looked good,
but on the inside he was missing a heart. He seemed to have no
ability to sympathize. Or empathize. Like other people were not
quite real to him. He said and did all the right things in a
practiced manner, but his act never came off as quite real to
me.

I wondered if other people felt the same way
about him. My sympathetic mom, of course, said he was hiding a soft
heart and a lack of self-esteem behind that hard shell.

“What then?” If he had more feeling than
showed, I was torturing him.

“Police got us all up, herded us into the
living room, and questioned us. We were all in shock. I don’t think
we were much use.” He stared out the window, searching the blue sky
for memories.

“Who was there?”

“Your mom and dad, of course Carol, Ron,
Suzy, Tom, Jamie, Elliott.” Uncle Dave fiddled with his monogrammed
cuff, checked the distance the shirtsleeve stuck out past his
jacket. Was he looking everywhere but my eyes hoping I wouldn’t see
his pain? Or what was he hiding?

He must have a thing about his neck because
he always wore either a turtleneck or a cravat. Did I mention Uncle
Dave is known among his friends for his fastidious, obsessive
compulsions?

“No wait, I don’t know that he was there, in
fact we wondered where Elliott was.” Dave said after some
hesitation.

“Anyone else?”

“No. I don’t think so.” He looked maybe
actually sad now. “No.”

“Who was usually at the house?”

“Well, Jeff, Lexi, and I lived there
officially. Our names were on the lease.” Uncle Dave hesitated.
“Carol had moved in a few weeks before. She shared a room with
Lexi. And Jamie, Tom, and Elliott hung out there a lot. Ron too,
but he actually spent most of his time at Jamie’s ranch.”

“Did they usually sleep there?”

“Only if they were too stoned or drunk to
get home.” His smile was actually sad.

“Where did they live?”

“On a ranch in Novato that Jamie’s family
owned.”

“With Jamie’s parents?”

“No-o . . . the parents didn’t live there.
They were separated or something. The mom lived in New York. I
don’t remember the dad.” He seemed to have recovered some of his
appetite. He readjusted the napkin in his collar and took a bite of
his egg white omelette.

“Why did the guys live there?”

He swallowed. “They were kinda taking a gap
year between undergrad and law school.”

“What about you?”

“I couldn’t afford a gap year, or grad
school, I worked here, in the city, but I was mostly around on the
weekends. I commuted from Berkeley.” He wiped his mouth with his
napkin and pushed back his chair.

“What did they do with themselves?” I wasn’t
through.

“Drugs, sex and rock’n roll––all in an upper
middle class verging on intellectual sort of way.”

“And what way would that be?” Steven
asked.

“They tried to be considerate of the
caretaking couple at the ranch. The housekeeper saw to it that they
were cleaned up after, especially after one of their cook-a-thons.
Hell, they were among the original foodies, now that I think of it.
Drugs were mild, just marijuana and some hallucinogens. Sex was
definitely all heterosexual, mostly monogamous if serial. And
private. Orgies were not part of the scene.”

“Is the caretaking couple still there?”

“I doubt it. That land has to have been sold
off and developed years ago.” He stood, rearranged his slacks,
straightened the crease, and plucked off a piece of lint.