The Body in Bodega Bay (28 page)

Toby said, “You'd better call to warn Sophie about this.”

“That's what I'm worried about,” Angie replied. “I just tried the bakery. That's where she'd be at this hour. She'd just be finished baking. But she's not answering. Maybe she doesn't answer till the bakery is open, but I don't remember when that is.”

“Try again,” I urged. We waited the call out, and there was no answer.

“Did you try her apartment?”

“Yes. No answer there either.” Angie stood up. “I'm going over there. I have a bad feeling about this. If anything's happened, it'll be my fault.”

I said to Toby, “We better go with her. If we arrive and everything is okay, we'll figure out a way to tell Sophie about Rose. If not …”

We all piled into Toby's car. There was little traffic on the coastal road at this hour, but early morning mists and drizzle slowed us down. It was almost seven-thirty when we arrived at the Graton Bakery. The front door yielded to a push, but there were no lights on at the counter, and the shelves held no bread or pastries. I took that as a bad sign. But light was shining through the round window in the door to the baking room.

I held up a palm to stop Angie from barging through. I knocked and called Sophie's name. No response. We opened the door and walked into the hot baking room, with its bright lights, large ovens, and long working tables. It took a second's sweep of the eyes to spot Sophie, slumped on the floor, in her baker's whites, with flour spilled all around her. Near her head, the flour was smeared with blood. We started toward her, calling her name, but again I blocked Angie.

“Watch out. There are footprints in the flour on the floor—don't step on them. I'll check if she's alive.” I made my way carefully over to Sophie and reached toward her neck to take a pulse. She stirred and moaned. I didn't see a wound, but the gray hair on the back of her head was darkly matted and there were abrasions on her neck, face, and hands. I knew better than to move her.

“Toby! We need you! Call 911. Then call Dan.”

The ambulance arrived first. By the time Dan pulled up, the paramedics had Sophie on a stretcher, and they were sliding it into the back of the ambulance. She was unconscious but her vital signs were good, one of the paramedics said. She had suffered an obvious blow to the head. If there were other serious injuries, they would be discovered in the emergency room. Angie was tormented by self-blame and insisted on riding along in the ambulance, but that wasn't permitted. Besides, Dan needed to question her.

After checking the scene, he led us back into the front room of the bakery. On the phone, Toby had given Dan only the briefest information. Now we brought him up to date, starting with my discovery of Sophie's icon and ending with the unanswered phone call this morning that had brought us here.

When the ambulance, its blue light twirling and siren sounding, left with Sophie for Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, Angie burst into tears. I put my arm around her shoulders. Dan needed Angie to be lucid. To her credit, she was calm again in a few moments and provided a thorough account of her conversation with Rose, repeating what she'd told us at breakfast, omitting nothing.

“What was the last thing she said to you again?” Dan asked, going over the same ground a second time.

“That she'd get the truth out of Sophie. She sounded pretty mad.”

“What do you think she meant? What truth?”

“Whether Peter Federenco was the father of her baby.”

“And those were her exact words?”

Angie hesitated. Dan waited.

“She said she'd get the truth out of Sophie one way or the other.”

Dan jotted down those words. Angie looked dejected.

“Nora,” Dan said, “you were the first one to find Sophie injured this morning, right?”

“Yes.”

“You didn't move her, did you? Or touch anything?”

“I touched her neck to check her pulse. Otherwise, no one's touched anything. We tried to be pretty careful about that. Like the footprints in the spilled flour. We walked around them.”

“Smart. Put these on now.” He handed each of us a pair of paper shoe covers.

“Those are fairly small shoe prints in there,” Dan said. “They could be a woman's.” I knew they weren't Sophie's, since the footsteps led away from where she was lying on the floor. Sophie was short, so she could easily have been hit from behind by a woman.

“How well do you know Rose Cassini?” Dan asked me.

“We interviewed her just that one time. You've read my notes.”

“Yes.” He thought for a moment. “I'm sending a car out to Cazadero to pick her up.” Dan dialed a number and gave the order over the phone.

“You're not arresting her, are you?” Angie said in consternation.

“I'm bringing her in for questioning. I have to, don't I, based on what you've told me?”

“I suppose so,” Angie conceded in a meek voice.

Dan put his notepad in his shirt pocket and looked around the room. “Is anything missing, do you know?”

We glanced around the bakery shop. Everything looked untouched. The cash register hadn't been opened. Dan gave the buttons a push and found them unresponsive.

“There's probably a key for that,” he said. “We'll check later to make sure the register wasn't tampered with. Step back into the baking room with me, and tell me if you see anything amiss.”

I told him that none of us had been inside it before this morning. “But if you just want other eyes on the room, let's do it. Toby, why don't you wait here?”

“Sure,” he said. “I'll man the shop.”

Angie and I stepped in, just a few feet, so as to leave the site clean. I remarked to Dan that the scene told us something about the timing of the attack. The ovens were on. Bread loaves were cooling on a back shelf. On the counter in front of where Sophie had lain was the mess made when she was disturbed rolling out some pastry, maybe dough for croissants. A bin of flour—probably open for dusting the pastry while rolling it—had overturned and spilled over the counter and onto the floor. The rolling pin still lay on the floor where Sophie had dropped it. With no pastry yet in the oven, Sophie must have been interrupted before 5 a.m.

I looked at the white footprints, which led away from the counter toward the back of the room. Dan's eyes were following mine. The prints pointed in the direction of a stairwell. That must be the inner stairway toward Sophie's apartment.

I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before. “There's nothing of value down here, but what about the icon? Sophie lives upstairs. Her icon was hanging in one of the bedrooms.”

“You better show me,” said Dan. He motioned to Angie and me. We walked awkwardly upstairs, slowed by the paper shoe covers.

When we entered the apartment, everything was orderly. Nothing seemed different from the way it had looked the day before. But above the dresser in the second bedroom where the icon once hung, a naked picture hook on the wall confirmed my fear. “Oh, no,” I cried. “It was here yesterday. We both saw it.”

“Rose must have taken it,” said Angie.

Dan looked at me inquiringly.

“She couldn't have known its value,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn't have put hers up for auction. She still doesn't know what we know about the triptych, unless you told her about it, Angie.”

“You mean about the other painting underneath St. Michael? I never said a word. But that wasn't why she wanted the icon. It was jealousy. She wanted it because Peter gave it to Sophie. She took it from Sophie to get even.”

But Rose wasn't the only person who might have wanted the icon. I now told Dan about the suspicious phone call George Greeley had received from a caller with a Russian accent. “I tried to reach you yesterday to tell you about it.”

“I got your message. I was going to call you today. That changes things,” Dan agreed. “I'll get in touch with Interpol to see what leads they have on other Russian mafia in the United States.”

“But that's not all.” I reported seeing Arnold Kohler with a friend of Tom Keogh's at the Willow Wood Café while Angie and I were talking about Sophie's icon. “They may have overheard us.”

“I'll get on that, as well,” said Dan. “But right now I need a search warrant for Rose Cassini's place.” We stood by while he made the arrangements by phone.

Angie shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, waiting until he finished. “Can we go?” she asked. “I want to get to the hospital.” Dan nodded yes. He stayed behind to wait for his crime scene team to arrive.

We drove to Sebastopol through the rain, which now was coming down in sheets. By the time we made it inside the hospital, we were soaked. We sat in our wet clothes in the waiting room while Angie paced the halls searching for a doctor who could inform us of Sophie's condition. When she finally found one, the news was guarded. Sophie had a concussion, a serious one. She was still unconscious, but her life wasn't in danger, in the young doctor's opinion. At this point no visitors were allowed.

“We can't do much good here right now,” I said to Angie, “so let's go home, dry off, and have some lunch.” She started to protest, but I continued. “Then you can come back in your own car and stay all day if you want. Would that be okay?”

Reluctantly, Angie agreed. The news about Sophie's prognosis had relieved some of her anguish, and keeping vigil at the hospital would give her a purpose.

When we got home, I made lunch and bagged some nuts and raisins for Angie to take with her. “Sophie will pull through,” I said. “She's going to be all right.”

She nodded silently, her chin on her chest.

“Now I understand why you slunk home yesterday like a guilty dog with her tail between her legs.”

“I should have told you about it last night, but I was too ashamed,” she admitted.

“But you told us this morning, and that's what's important. We got there in time to help.”

“I hope so.”

“We did, Angie.”

She managed a weak smile.

After lunch, Angie gathered what she needed for a long stint in the waiting room. She took a thermos, the snacks I'd bagged, a poncho, a blanket, and some magazines. I followed her out to her car. “Are you coming home for dinner, or will you get something in Sebastopol?”

“I guess I'll decide later. I'll call from the hospital.” She gave a distracted wave and drove off.

T
OBY CAME OUT OF THE HOUSE
and walked up beside me as I stood on the curb. “Poor Angie.”

“She'll be okay.”

“Are you still up for our treasure hunt after all that?” He pointed to the gardening tools he'd fetched from the garage this morning and had left leaning against the side of the house.

“I think so. There's no reason to put it off.” The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the sky remained threatening. The ground underfoot was soggy, which might even help with the digging.

“All right, then,” said Toby, “let's go.” We loaded everything into the car—Peter's storyboards, two shovels, a hand fork and spade, and a tarpaulin that Toby had found in the back of the garage. That was optimistic. He was hoping to find the missing panel to wrap up.

This time we drove all the way out to the end of Westshore Road and worked our way back toward the marina, using the storyboards as our guide, searching for just the right cluster of trees. According to what Colleen had told me on the golf course, the Brenner house had stood somewhere near today's entrance to the dormitories for the marine lab employees. It turned out we weren't far from their driveway when we found the most promising area. In fact, we parked right in front of a sign that said “Restricted Access.” That brought up the question of digging on the marine lab's land. This was UC–Davis property. It was something we hadn't considered, but now we realized we'd better ask for permission. We rang Dan again and asked him if he would call the marine lab office and request authorization for us to proceed. He warned us they might require a search warrant, and that could take time. We told him we'd wait to hear back.

Meanwhile, we felt safe enough to scout around with the storyboards in hand. There were clumps of Monterey cypresses at the shoreline just opposite the housing entrance, as well as to the right of the entrance and to its left. The ones on the shore were too close together and too small to match those on the storyboards. The cypresses to the right of the entrance were all in a line, following the contours of a ditch. We needed to concentrate on the grove to the left of the entrance.

A light fence, made of two thin cables stretching between posts, defined the entrance to the housing area and ran the west length of the road for a quarter of a mile or more. The top wire was chest high. As I waited, I saw that we could do some of our analysis from this side of the fence without ducking under the lower wire. There were fifteen to twenty trees in the shallow grove, about half of them very large and obviously old. The grandfather of them, toward the back of the space, had started to fall apart with age. Its trunk was so thick that it might have started with two or three trunks that had grown together. Half of its crown had fallen in some recent storm. It looked like our landmark tree. I pointed that out to Toby.