Rundown (6 page)

I said that I would be happy to help.

Chapter 10

It was an unmarked car, coffee-ice-cream brown, a whiplash antenna above the gas cap.

Detective Ronert sat in the back seat, busy with a ballpoint pen and a clipboard. He said good morning and asked me how I was doing.

I told him I was okay, and he looked at me searchingly, as though he hoped this was true. I kept looking back at him, asking him about the paperwork he had to do, even though it gave me a crick in my neck. He explained that detecting crime was all record keeping. “If we draw our weapons we have to account for each shot.”

“What happens if there's a shoot-out?” I asked.

He said, “We have to draw a yellow circle around every little hole.”

“Seat belt,” said Detective Margate.

I worked at getting the buckle to fasten, and at last Margate had to reach over and do it for me, smelling faintly of soap.

She drove about fifteen miles an hour, eyeing a dog-minder across the street, a muscular man walking four dogs at once, the little dust mop planting a turd in the gutter. Our new neighborhood was replete with child-care experts pushing strollers jammed with four toddlers at once, not to mention the corps of tree surgeons and gardeners who started bright and early, nipping and tucking.

Detective Margate took a great deal of interest in the way the dog-man pulled on an oversize plastic glove and knelt, gathering the poop into a Baggie.

“I guess he likes animals,” I said.

“Or else he really needs a job.” Detective Margate sped up. “It reminds me of what
we
do,” she said.

I thought that she meant all of us living creatures, excreting solid waste.

“Police, I mean,” she said. “Detectives.”

“Ask her about the drag and drop,” said Ronert.

“We need to find out how far the attacker dragged you,” she said. “And where he let you go.”

“He didn't drag me anywhere.”

“Not even a couple of meters?” she asked.

Meters, I noted, not yards. I told her I didn't think so.

“The FBI might still be interested,” said Ronert from the back seat. “If it's anything like attempted kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping,” said Detective Margate, with gently mocking good humor. “Detective Ronert toured the FBI when he was a kid.”

“It's only a little farther,” I cautioned her, as the detective whisked through an intersection.

She pulled over to the curb under a eucalyptus that was tagged with a bright green sticker. The roots had buckled the sidewalk, sections of concrete sticking up like playing cards. Someone had probably stumbled and sued the city. The tree was marked for destruction.

“When you were jogging last evening,” the detective began. “Before the attack—” She set the parking brake and eased the gears into neutral. I had done well in driver's education, but my favorite part of any driving experience was turning off the ignition and getting out of the car. Dad said I'd get a Fiat when I graduated.

“I was running,” I corrected her. I run or I walk; jogging is for people who lack determination.

“When you were running you might have seen a car parked, up by the botanical gardens.”

“Maybe,” I said, meaning: maybe not.

“Because the perp must have driven up the canyon and pulled off the road.”

“Okay,” I said, meaning: I'm listening.

“It's all no parking. Unless you saw a car with its hazard lights on, someone with a flat tire or a stall.”

“I didn't.”

“You sound sure,” said the voice from the back seat.

I craned my neck to look at Detective Ronert, his sympathetic face stuck in the farthest possible corner of the back.

I said, “I can't remember a particular vehicle.”

“That late in the day all the botanical garden staff is gone,” she said. “So any car in the parking lot—” She glanced into her side mirror, and a bicyclist flashed by, pumping hard down College Avenue.

“So,” she continued, after watching the cyclist's butt disappear down the street. “Were there any cars parked there?”

“There could have been,” I said.

“But you can't remember?” she asked.

I made an I'm-trying frown.

“Because failure to recall the run-up to a crime is very common, and these back-canceled impressions are what we need to uncover.”

What
would
I have been able to recall, I asked myself.

“The point is—we have some tire tread,” the detective was saying. “There was a car that parked just beyond the gardens, up behind a pine tree, like someone trying to hide. If you saw a vehicle secluded during your run—”

“You can match the tread to the car,” I prompted, like the smartest kid in class.

“We did already, it was a Volvo, not new. They're very easy to identify, all those European tires. But the car could have parked there any time within the last couple of days. We can't search for all the ten-year-old Volvos.”

“Ten-year-old tires would be pretty worn out.”

“They were.”

I made myself look like someone searching her memory. Then I offered a helpless smile.

“All the other attacks have been in more urban areas. San Jose State University, the Hayward BART station, the old Montgomery Ward building.” She left some silence between statements, like someone who never had to rush. “How far up the canyon did you jog, Jennifer?”

“All the way up to the Lawrence Hall of Science.” This was untrue, but my voice betrayed nothing. Besides, I could run tougher hills than that.

“So you passed that funny-looking pine tree, with the twisted branches.”

“I can't remember a particular tree.” But then, like a poker player turning over a card, I saw it clearly in my mind, the tree she was talking about. I had seen it as I surveyed the canyon in recent weeks, a stunted Monterey pine. “The one like this, arms all over the place.”

Detective Margate made a smile by pressing her lips together. “We can forget about the Volvo, right?”

I made the kind of exaggerated sigh Dad gives when Cass drives him crazy.

Detective Margate took her time, shifting into drive, releasing the parking brake. “We need you to help us, Jennifer. And we need your parents to consent.”

“I'd love to help. The trouble is, Mom hates police shrinks.”

The car accelerated, and we began passing cars in the slow lane. “I was in Strawberry Canyon until well after midnight last night and studied that path up and down the slope. I just don't see our perpetrator hiding in the poison oak.”

“You're going to send me to a doctor who'll get me to remember.” I watched the store fronts drift by.

“It'll help us immeasurably,” she said.

“He'll stick a needle into me.”

“That's not how Dr. Pierce works,” she said, in a tone of great kindness, like the world's best nurse. “He uses memory regression. The other victims have cooperated. If nothing else works, he uses hypnosis.”

I stared at her profile.

She asked, “Where do you work?”

Chapter 11

At first Animal Heaven looks like just another pet store, cheese-flavored chew toys for the family Rottweiler dangling next to a display of choke collars.

Mr. DaGama, the owner, spoke English with a Cuban accent and could soothe even the most high-strung whippet with a touch. Marta had found me the job, three or four half days a week during the summer, tending the boarded animals in the back room.

The aviaries behind the main shop were a wonderful secret, zebra finches, lovebirds, conures, cockatiels, parakeets, and at one end of the room the royalty of the kingdom, macaws and cockatoos, all of them prized by their traveling owners and left with us because the animals thrived here.

Cass says “Animal Heaven” sounds like a pet cemetery. Cass used to skip up and down the sidewalk, killing ants. Dad always said we traveled too much to take care of a dog, and Mom said cats could not be trusted.

I loved the pet store. Droopy, eighty-year-old Amazons perked up under our heat lamps, and egg-bound canary hens laid their eggs after all, singing their happily tuneless female-finch song.

I slung my leather purse/backpack into a corner. I felt light-headed, and colors were garish, the display of dog dishes, unbreakable, gleaming, primary colors, made me feel like throwing up.

Mr. DaGama followed me into the back room, a newspaper folded in his hand. “You're okay,” he said, a tone of surprise.

Marta, or Marta's mom, must have called him. I asked how Byron was doing.

“Byron lives,” he said. Sometimes he ladled out his accent, not trying to speak normal English.
Bee-roan leaves
. He shook open the
Tribune. Suspect New Attack in Serial Terror
. I sat down on a big paper bag of sunflower seeds as I scanned the column for my name. I couldn't find it.

“Marta's coming in soon,” said Mr. DaGama.

“The African gray is saying something,” I said, to change the subject.

The gray parrot hadn't been a talker when his new owners left him here five days before, heading for a camping trip, hiking Molokai to the historical leper colony. The new parrot words did not sound like much, but they had the shape and intonation of human speech.

“Jennifer,” Mr. DaGama was saying, “this country is too gentle with wicked people.” The way he said my name made it sound exotic, the
J
given just a curl of his tongue. “A man like this should be horsewhipped in the town square.”

A headache started up, a thrum as steady and ugly as a motor inside my brain. “I can take care of myself.” This was new for me, a flickering aluminum flame at the edge of my vision.

“I bet you anything this criminal just got out of prison. I expect he is at liberty not one or two weeks. And he begins his old ways.”

“No harm was done,” I said. Something about Mr. DaGama's careful, correct English made me speak similar sentences.

“Jennifer, I think that harm was done,” he said.

Byron was a sulfur-crested cockatoo with the chalky, gnarled beak of a very old bird. He sat in his food dish, and as I approached, the crest fanned upward on his head, erect in greeting. Byron's owner was a professor, away in England lecturing on how planets are born. Byron had started sneezing late last week, bubbles of snot crusting his nostrils, and, as I watched, Mr. DaGama put a heavy dose of avian antibiotic into his water dish.

Marta flings herself into a room, but she never knocks so much as a chew toy off the display table, or slips on a wet floor.

Mr. DaGama was cleaning up after an elderly teacup pug had peed a tiny bit, excited at his new rubber chew-bone, “flavored with real beef.” Marta hurried into the back room. If she had theme music it would be drums and cymbals.

“I called Quinn,” said Marta, first thing, before she bothered with “good morning.”

This startled me. “You didn't.”

“I called him and talked to his dad, and then I talked to him in person.” Marta is mouse-blond, but the sun bleaches her gold. Like me, she's got shoulders and hips, and she stands about my height. In volleyball, she can spike the ball better than anyone, but my serves drop in.

I thought of crashing the parakeet cage over her head, but parakeets can be startled to death very easily. Quinn had moved to Reno with his family, and I had almost completely trained myself not to think about him.

“I knew you'd want him to know,” she said. “That you'd want him to hear the news, but that you couldn't, probably, bring yourself to tell him yourself.”

Usually when people talk about what you would have wanted, you're a corpse and unable to overhear. My dad has headaches like this, migraines that send him to the medicine cabinet. I had never experienced anything like it.

“Quinn was very upset,” Marta was saying. She reached into a conure's cage and looped a squabbling, half-wild bird onto her finger. The scarlet and azure bird had bit everyone, even Mr. DaGama, until this moment. “Quinn was really worried about it and wanted to know how you were doing. He thought you'd be in a hospital, and I said you were at home.”

Marta drove me home in her Toyota, a car with stuffing bursting out of the upholstery. Marta was definite that she wanted to be a veterinarian, but with a specialty in either tropical fish or birds of the rain forest. She was fascinated by any living creature with symptoms of illness, got wide-eyed with concern, and needed a running account on any symptom. Including me.

“You don't have any diarrhea, though,” said Marta. “Do you? Loose stools are a key in diagnosing illness. In any animal. And that includes humans.”

Sometimes when Marta starts to talk she never stops. I said, “Stop the car.”

But diving or driving, Marta is deft. She had the car at the curb in a wink, and I opened the passenger door and deposited the contents of my stomach into the gutter.

Bernice has a brace of corporals and sergeants. They creep, snipping the privet bush in the garden, dusting the bottom rungs of the dining room chairs. A dust expert knelt on the stairs, spraying a substance onto his yellow cloth, applying it to the bare wood on either side of the Turkish carpet.

Slung low to the ground, feeling like a rhino, I stumbled past this dust engineer. I found myself in Dad's bathroom looking hard into my reflection, brown hair, brown eyes. I don't use a conditioner on my hair, just baby shampoo, brush it. When Cass is around sometimes she braids it for me.

Dad's new medicine cabinet was replete with Demerol and Tylenol with codeine. He had Percodan, generic oxycodone, and painkiller suppositories, in case he became too nauseated to swallow. But he hoards old pills, in case he needs them. The capsules outlast their sell-by dates, some of the prescription labels still sporting Dr. Rigby's name, an internist who retired a year ago.

I slept, huddled in my bed in my shadowy cavern, and as I drowsed I heard voices. I sat up at one point, sure that I heard Detective Margate downstairs. I strained my ears, but then I decided the muffled voice belonged to Mom.