Red Light (40 page)

No
QK.

She tried using the
letters before K and Q, thinking that Bailey might have just added one before
she wrote.

The
time cards again, but no JP.

She tried using the
letters
after
K and Q, thinking that Bailey might have just subtracted
one letter before she wrote.

LR.

Back to the time
cards. Bingo. She found a deputy Lee Ripley who happened to be working the
night shift on August 4. She checked the assignment roster and discovered that
Ripley had worked patrol that night. Interesting. She'd assumed a whore killer
wouldn't be working the night he killed, but why? On patrol he'd have
opportunity. He could have met her at eleven, just like her date book said. He
was out, free, working without a partner like they used to in the old days.

Merci
had never heard of him.

So she tried the code
against days when Bailey met known subjects—Ralph Meeks and Bill Owen.

No
RM. No BO. Wrong code.

Frustrated and not a
little angry, she stood, walked around the table three times, then sat back
down again. The coffee was hot and horrible but she drank it anyway.

She looked down at
the calendared entries, trying to imagine a simple way to disguise the
initials. Something a loaded hooker could remember and use without thinking
about it too hard. Merci noted the rare letter Q repeated in the Owen date and
the murder date, but the first initials weren't the same. She walked around the
table again three times in the opposite direction, on the vague notion that
you always retraced your steps if you were lost. She sat down again, lost as
ever. Vague indeed, she thought. She hooked her thumbs into her pants pockets,
slumped back in the chair and looked down at the dizzying codes again.

And she began to
admit that maybe this
wasn't
code at all, that maybe Meeks and Owens
were off the books and KQ had nothing at to do with the Sheriff Department.

But she tried
reversing the initials, then adding and subtracting letters. Using this formula
she got neither BO nor RM, and it was so difficult she was almost furious by
the time she got the last combination scrambled.

Merci thought: What a
bunch of shit. Then she took a deep breath and murmured the hackneyed phrase
about when the going gets tough

So she tried
subtracting
one
letter from the first initial and
two
letters
from the last. One from the first, two from the second—easy to remember.

She
liked what she saw. She checked it, then rechecked it.

Under this code, CQ
became BO—Bill Owen, visited by Bailey 3
p.m
. on July 25.
Confirmed by Bailey herself, in the tape recording she made.

The letters SO became
RM—Ralph Meeks, visited by Bailey 5
p.m
. July 9. Confirmed by Bailey again,
on the same tape.

The letters KQ became
JO. And the Sheriff Department had employed a man with just those initials.

With her head
clearing and her heart speeding up, Merci opened the Bailey file and flipped
through to the Coroner's Final Report. Bailey had died between 9
p.m
.
and one in the morning.

Next, she pulled the
time cards for August 4, 1969. A total of ninety-three sworn Sheriff Department
deputies worked that day: forty-one day shift, twenty-nine on swing,
twenty-three on night.

There
he was.

Jim O'Brien had
worked swing shift. He'd clocked in at five-ten and back out at one-sixteen the
following morning.

Checking back to June
and forward to September, Merci found that Jim O'Brien had worked day shifts
every week except for one—the week that Bailey died.

It took her another
two hours to do it, but she managed to trace the odd shift patterns of two
other deputies on duty the night Bailey died. Partners Rayborn and McNally had
pulled swing shifts that week also. For the rest of the year in both
directions, they had worked days.

A week of swings, and
hell broke loose.

When the door opened
she flinched. She turned, hoping nobody had seen her jerk like that.

Evan O'Brien stood there.
"We're done with most of the McNally stuff. I can't tell you how it went,
but I can smile."

He did. Then the smile
disappeared.

"You okay?"
"I'm fine," she said.

"I'll bet the press conference was a lot of
fun."

"No."

"All right. I'll
leave you alone. But Lynda and Gilliam and I are going to have a drink after
work at Sal's. You're invited. Gilliam ordered me to tell you that."

Merci hesitated. Her
thoughts flapped and hovered but they wouldn't land.

O'Brien waited, then spoke. "I'll drive us over
if you want."

"No. But I do want to talk to you."

"Then come have a drink. We're just crime lab
people, not lepers."

"I've got an errand to run. Will you come with
me?"

He looked at her. "Sure. What's the
errand?"

"I need to feed the dogs. At Mike's."

The look O'Brien gave
her was like nothing she'd ever seen: It was hard to get such confusion out of
a wiseass like Evan.

"I'll explain on the
way there."

• • •

Merci gunned the Impala up
Modjeska Canyon, tires chirping on the curves. The night was cold so she had
the windbreaker buttoned all the way up and a pair of thin leather gloves on.

O'Brien
wore a tan duster, his hands jammed deep into the pockets. He swayed when Merci
took the turns and she realized he was small compared to the other men she'd
driven in this car. Hess. Mike. Brighton. Clark.

"So,
Sergeant, what did you want to talk about?"

"I
think your father was with Patti Bailey the night she was killed

O'Brien glanced
across at her. "What do you mean,
with?
And how do you know?"

"As a customer.
It's in her appointment book. Eleven that night. She died sometime between nine
and one."

"A
date and a murder are two different things."

"That's
not what I said."

"It's
what you meant."

She made a right
turn, took it a little fast, saw O'Brien brace himself on the dash.

"Bailey made a
tape," said Merci. "She had a county supervisor as a customer, she
had Bill Owen, too—the old sheriff. She was going blackmail them with it."

"Don't
try to tell me my father is on that tape."

"She left the
recorder running the night she was shot. There's a long conversation with the
man who did it."

She saw O'Brien look
at her again, then back to the road. Merci slowed as she approached Mike's
turnoff.

"Well, okay,
Merci. You've got a tape of a murder, and I've got a deceased father you think
did it. What am I supposed to do? Raise him from the dead for a voice
comparison?"

"Do
you have his voice on tape? A video, maybe?"

"Of course I do.
He was my father. But the voice on mine won’t match the voice on yours. I can
guarantee that."

"How?"

She
pulled into Mike's driveway.

"Because
he was a
good man."

Merci
pulled out the keys and looked at him.

"I'd
appreciate a copy of that video, Evan."

He sighed and shook
his head, then looked out at Mike's house. The dogs had started howling and
again Merci thought she heard something plaintive in their voices.

"Looks
like a miserable little place," he said, looking out the window.

"It's
not that bad."

She still felt
obliged to defend Mike, and she wondered why.

She let herself in
and turned on the living-room lights. The house was even colder now. The fire
had gone out and no one was there to start it up again.

"I
didn't know he was a gun nut," said O'Brien, looking at the gun case by
the kitchen.

"They're
just guns, Evan. They don't make him a nut."

She
went into the kitchen. Looking at the rinsed dishes in the rack, it felt like
the old days with Mike. She would stand in this kitchen and assess the dinner
damage and they would talk. She would wash and Mike would dry the pans, rack
the dishes. Tim would be in his portable crib, or maybe on a blanket before
he'd learned to crawl. The after-dinner part of the night was a good part, she
thought now, when they yakked and cleaned things up and maybe had a drink.

Standing
there now with a man close by reminded her of those past nights in a way that
made her heart sink.

"I'll
feed the dogs and we'll get out of here."

O'Brien
looked at her with something like earnestness. "You know, Merci, just
because a hooker's book says she was with a certain guy on a certain night,
that doesn't mean she's telling the truth. What if he didn't show. What if she
didn't? One thing that murdered people don't do too well is show up on time for
appointments."

"I
know. That's why I want the video."

"Then
what? I mean, when the voices don't match, where do you go from there?"

A
moment of silence, filled only with the jingle of big dogs against chain link.

"I
don't know."

"Did
you think that maybe he wanted to see Bailey for other reasons? Just because
he was in her book doesn't make him a customer. Like, well, Mike and the
Whittaker girl."

"Possible.
The guy on the tape was a customer. There's no doubt about that."

She
lugged the kibble bag out of the pantry, carried it to the kitchen slider and
let O'Brien get the door for her. She hit the outdoor light and walked into the
cold night. Then the deja vu tickled her again, as she looked down at the down
at the dogs and realized that she'd forgotten the key.

"Damn,
I forgot the kennel key."

A
wicked little chill ran up her back, because that was exactly what she'd said
to Mike one night when she was feeding the dogs with him.
Those exact words.
She was standing then where she stood now, speaking: in the same tone of voice.
Mike had been standing where Evan now stood.

To
be in Mike's home while he was in jail, asking another man fetch the key, felt
to her like a betrayal worse than anything she'd done so far. The dogs were
holy, if you were Mike. Mike's dogs. It was like she'd rewritten history—erased
Mike, wrote in someone else.

Damn, I forgot the kennel key.
A moment later Mike was back w it. A moment later, O'Brien was back with it.

"You
okay?" he asked, handing it to her.

"Perfect.
I love doing this."

She
let the dogs out of their runs and collected their bowls, let them follow her
to the feeding table, where she measured out extra big portions. Dolly, Molly
and Polly all tried to butt each other out of the way, knocking into Merci and
almost buckling her knees.

She
laughed and tried to push them away, knowing she wasn't strong enough to budge
the hundred-pound dogs with her knees, but it reminded her of the scores of
times she'd tried, the scores of times she'd looked down at their dolorous
faces with the hanging ears and mournful eyes and seen that spark of play, and
it made her laugh. Because the laughter felt so foreign, the causes of it
seemed so long ago and ruined, it broke her heart to do all this again without
Mike, with Mike in jail for murder, with Mike very likely never to do this
again so long as he should live,

Dolly,
Molly and Polly had no idea.

She
felt something hot on her cheek, silently cursed her weakness, made sure her
back was to O'Brien, whom she suddenly regretted bringing into Mike's home.

"You
used to do this a lot," said Evan.

"Yeah."

"Did
you love him?"

"I
tried to."

"Well,
these dogs love you."

"Yeah,
that's right."

"Sometimes
things are better when you remember them. You make them better than they
were."

"I'm
doing that right now."

O'Brien said nothing
then, and Merci finished filling the bowls. She carried them one at a time into
the correct kennels, using the sit and stay commands that the girls were so
eager to obey whenever food was involved. She shut them in, waved O'Brien
through the gate ahead of her and set the food bag back on the pantry floor.

O'Brien
looked at her.

"Shit, lady. All
I wanted to do was have a drink with someone I kind of like, and next thing I
know, she's accusing my father of murder and making me feed her boyfriend's
dogs."

"You're
a sport. Thanks."

"Don't
get sincere on me. I wouldn't know how to take it."