Panther's Prey (11 page)

“If what you're telling me about these security patrols is true, it's a real scandal. Before it can reach that level, however, we're going to need proof. Witnesses who are willing to talk.”

“A defense lawyer like yourself ought to know better. Ain't no witnesses in Alice Griffith.”

“Not even for something like this? Get me a cell phone video. I have connections at the newspaper. My boss is on good terms with the DA.”

I held back from mentioning my suspicion that the senseless violence he'd described might be connected somehow with Jordan's death.

As if sensing my concealed self-interest, Hayes now—for the first time—alluded to my recent troubles. “From what I hear, your connections aren't doing you much good lately. But maybe you could pass the word to some of your attorney friends at the PD's office.”

I agreed to do as he'd asked, telling myself there was nothing personal in his rebuff. We shook hands, and I climbed on my bike and rode home.

I phoned Benton's office. To my surprise, his secretary forwarded the call to his cell, apparently according to his instructions. He immediately answered, saying that if I wanted to talk, I should be at the Sausalito sailing docks in half an hour. He'd been planning to go out single-handed this afternoon, but the gusting winds were more than he cared to handle alone. He'd resigned himself to an afternoon of dock work, but if I could listen and follow directions maybe the day wasn't lost after all.

I'd experienced it as a warm day so far, but on the bay the cold wind cut right through the thin jacket I was wearing. I would have been freezing even without the spray that kept flinging itself in fine needles over the bow. With the marina behind us, Benton cut the motor and raised the sail, nodding for me to haul on the rope that controlled the front sail.

Without the engine noise, the boat suddenly became a living creature, like a powerful, leashed animal as opposed to the dead, clumsy weight it had seemed when the outboard was rocking us
out of the harbor. A thrumming vibration came from below, and the boat leaned over farther—alarmingly so.

“It's all right,” Benton assured me. “We've got a two-ton keel. It'd take a lot more wind than this to turtle her. Besides, if that rail ever does go under, the boat just swings into the wind and stops dead. A built-in braking mechanism. Now that we can hear one another, I'm ready to listen to you.”

He'd been unreadable when I arrived, not looking me in the eye. Now, at the tiller, he was alert and precise. He wore nylon shorts, an ancient windbreaker, and a baseball hat with a marine-supplies store logo. He sat erect and peered forward as he tugged on the line to adjust the sail. With his other hand he steered, speaking only to instruct me to crank in the jib or let it out.

“Jordan mentioned she used to go sailing with you,” I said. Benton had taken all the associates together, I knew, but she'd also gone with him alone at other times. When I'd come on board, I'd noticed a spacious cabin below decks. “She told me how much she loved it.”

“Tacking,” he said. And when I gave him a questioning look he said, “Uncleat it. Let go that end of the line and cross over. Watch the boom. Go.” He pushed the tiller hard, making the bow swing as I ducked just in time, the metal bar at the bottom of the sail suddenly cleaving through the air like a club swung at my head. I fell with the roll of the deck, rose to my knees, and grabbed the jib as the big sail caught the wind again, tilting the cockpit the other way. The boat surged through the waves at the opposite angle into the wind with barely a hitch in its forward momentum.

A shadow fell across us, and then the Golden Gate Bridge was up above, the traffic sounds eerily remote. The bow began to plunge and surge as we entered the ocean swell.

“Not seasick, are you?” Benton asked.

I wasn't sure. It was glorious to see the coastline stretching away in both directions, the waves smashing into foam on the rocks, but as always the open ocean filled me with foreboding.

“I hear you're friends with Rachel Stone,” I tried out.

“Friends? No one who wrote what she wrote about Jordan would still be a friend of mine. We were never ‘friends,' in any case. It was both more and less than that.”

He'd let the tiller swing around so we were heading north, following the coast but slanting out to sea, the bow pointing toward where Point Reyes was just visible in the haze. I felt we were leaving safety behind.

“What part of what she wrote bothered you?” I asked. “The part where it seemed Jordan deserved what she got?”

At first, he seemed not to want to answer. Finally, he said, “I didn't think she had any right to editorialize. She didn't know Jordan. She was using her death to make a point. And, also, to settle old accounts with me. Though I shouldn't blame her for that part of it, I guess.”

“I'm bothered by the first piece, but of course even more by the last,” I said. “The first, because Jordan was only doing her job, and doing it well. But Stone prefers to paint her as naïve, as a ‘true believer.' That's crap. She was a lawyer, and a damn good one.”

“And she was just getting started,” Benton said. The two of us could find common ground here. Although I knew he was in his late fifties, his persona seemed to project boundless youth.

“The middle story was the only one Jordan would have wanted her to write.”

“Exciting stuff. Killer stalking the city. But you don't really believe that, do you?”

“No, I guess I don't.”

“Good. Because this girl from Friday night is lying. From what I've heard, she broke down and admitted it in the third round of questioning. There was no rape, which means there is no Panther.”

“The press hasn't reported that yet.” I didn't say I'd heard it from Rachel Stone.

“I have high-level contacts in the DA's office. They consider it a delicate situation. No one seems to know quite how to handle this mess.”

“Nothing's what it seems in this case, is it? On the one hand, there's Rodriguez, who seems addicted to confessing. On the other, we've got media hysteria and, if what you say is true, this woman inventing a claim of rape for the same reasons Rodriguez confessed. To get attention.”

“Makes you wonder what the world's coming to, doesn't it?”

I kept waiting for him to turn the boat around, but his eyes remained fixed ahead, as if he were set on leaving the city behind and taking me with him, never once looking back or adjusting course. We weren't heading for the land, I saw, but past it, on a point that would carry us offshore from Point Reyes and on into the vast unknown. “So, what did you want to talk to me about?” Benton said.

“Jordan was planning to go back to your firm. She told me so the night she died.”

“I didn't know that.” He paused as if mistrusting himself to go on. When he did, his tone was rough. “She hadn't said anything to me about coming back. We'd always talked about the stint at the PD's office as if it were temporary. But that was just talk. Of course, I'd have welcomed her back in a second. Most associates, we wouldn't have dreamed of leaving things so open-ended, but Jordan was different.” He paused again. “As you know.”

“She seemed unhappy about the decision to go back, talking about commitments she couldn't walk away from. I asked her what she meant, but she wouldn't say.”

“We have civil cases that last for years. Maybe one of those was what she was referring to.”

“Why'd she leave?” It was the question I'd come here intending to ask him.

“I don't know. She wanted to spend time just trying cases, is what she told me. She was tired of being bogged down with document
review, letters between attorneys confirming this or that understanding of what was discussed on such and such a call. You can spend a whole career in civil litigation and never set foot in the courtroom. For a good many attorneys, that's a relief. For others, it's a necessary evil, a compromise they accept in exchange for the privilege of billing six hundred an hour.” He took a deep breath. “The thing is, Jordan was hungry for experience. I admired her tremendously for that. I still do.”

“Then why on earth would she be intending to return to civil practice?”

“I don't know. Maybe she decided money was a necessary evil. Making it can be quite an experience in itself, if you do it right. And with the skills she possessed, Jordan could have made a boatload. Even in civil litigation, there are always cases to try for those who know how to win. And Jordan did. She knew because I taught her.”

“Is that so?”

“I'm not being arrogant. Or at least not
only
arrogant. She found the right teacher, but she was an exceptional student, picking up in about two years the skills it had taken me two decades to master, stuff most of these fatuous assholes with bar cards never figure out.”

“I think we both recognize that money had nothing to do with her going back.”

“Or maybe she felt she owed me something. It was abrupt, her leaving. At first, I didn't take it well. I felt like she'd pulled the rug out from under my feet, and I told her so. I reminded her of all the opportunities I'd given her, all she had to look forward to. She swore she'd come back after her volunteer stint was over. I knew better. I said I thought she was throwing away her career.” Benton shrugged, eyes fixed on the horizon, where a line of fog was discernible. “She was loyal. Maybe she just wanted to keep her word.”

“Some people looking at the situation might guess she left because you were sleeping together.”

“Some people meaning
you.”
We stared at each other, our personal agendas now between us like a wall. “Jordan never told you that,” he said calmly. “So you're guessing. Based on what? Jealousy? Or what Rachel Stone told you?”

“No one told me. It just felt like there was someone else.” I held his gaze, more certain than ever he'd been the one. “Let me guess. She was sleeping with the boss and she didn't like it. It wasn't how she wanted to advance her career. Her idea was that she'd leave for a while, cool off at the PD's office. You two'd stop seeing each other, then it would be over for good and she could come back.”

I was aware, of course, that such a scenario would cast my relationship with Jordan in an unfavorable light. It turned me simply into the man she'd chosen to rebound with.

His gaze had hardened, his attention drawn to something behind me. “Grab that line, will you?” he said, pointing to a trailing rope dancing in the wind just over my head, threatening to catch in the waves. I stood and reached for it, leaning out while keeping one hand on the lifeline wire that ran between metal posts. At the exact moment that my fingertips brushed the rope, the deck pitched beneath me, launching me over the lifeline into the sea.

I plunged deep. The cold stabbed like a thousand knives in my chest, and I made a great surprised gasp, my lungs expanding against the rigid muscles of my chest and back, filling with frigid seawater. My body stiffened, a spasm like an electric shock spreading from between my shoulder blades. I fought for the surface and burst into the trough of a wave, where I coughed again and again without effect, struggling to keep my head above water. The horizon briefly appeared, then my clothes were dragging me down, the pain of the cold already fading as numbness set in.

A speck in the enormity of the Pacific Ocean, I turned and turned, catching glimpses of land between the swells, and was finally rewarded with a brief vision of the sailboat idling into the wind a hundred yards off. Benton was standing in the cockpit hauling
down great armfuls of sail. Then I heard the marine engine kick to life.

He had a long, hooklike device on an aluminum handle that he threw to me as he went past. One end of it was tied to a rope. It floated, and I was able to grab it, still coughing so hard it felt like my chest would split. He killed the engine, and as the boat swayed, the mast tip tracing crazy figure eights against the clouds, he hauled me to the ladder at the back of the boat. Then, with a strong grip under my arms, he heaved me into the cockpit.

“Three points of contact,” he said. “That's the golden rule, and you broke it.”

The shivering had begun. I sat on the fiberglass bench, trying not to move inside the cement weight of my clothes. “No one told me that rule.” My teeth chattered so violently I could hardly get the words out.

Benton stood watching me with a frown of satisfaction. “That's life, isn't it? You don't know the rules until you break them. And sometimes you don't get a second chance.”

“You asked me to fetch the rope, then jerked the tiller as I was reaching for it.”

“Would I have dumped you into the water just to swing around and pick you up?” He seemed less sure of himself now, though, as if it'd hit home to him what he'd done. “Come on. Let's get you below. I have some foul-weather gear and a sweatshirt you can borrow.”

The cabin was roomy, with a couch and banquette table on one side and a galley kitchen on the other, most of the bow taken up by a large, apparently custom-made bed. Watery light was coming through its portholes. “My home away from home,” Benton told me.

He found me clothes and I put them on. I was still shivering and didn't want to go back up. I realized Benton was waiting for me, that he didn't want to leave me down here alone. I wondered how far from shore we were, where the boat was drifting. Even as
my anxiety increased, I sensed something was down here below decks that he didn't want me to see.

On impulse I stepped through the narrow door into the cabin at the bow. First I grabbed one pillow, then the other. Beneath the second I found a set of women's pajamas, neatly folded.

I didn't need to say a word, just looked at Benton, who'd come to stand beside me. Even if I'd wanted to speak, I couldn't have. There was no way to know if they were Jordan's. She'd never left pajamas under
my
pillow, and I'd never seen her in sleeping garb. But I was certain these were hers.

Benton came forward, carefully took the pillow from me, set it on the pajamas, and closed the door. “That's a private place,” he said with surprising kindness. “These are private things.”

The swell seemed to be increasing, the boat seesawing wildly from side to side, gathering greater momentum with each swing. Still neither of us moved to mount the steps to the deck. My companion was watching me as if waiting to see what I'd do, as if he were expecting violence and was fatalistically prepared to meet it with the same.

“You planning to let us wash onto the rocks?” I asked.

He seemed to consider the idea, then slowly shook his head. He motioned toward the ladder, and we went back up. The boat was startlingly close to shore, the waves breaking just a hundred yards away, yet he seemed unconcerned. He started the engine, motored the boat into the wind, and pulled the mainsail back up. In a few more minutes, we were tacking back south toward the Golden Gate as the fog pressed in.