The Rivers Run Dry (27 page)

“Yes, they've mentioned it.”

“Everybody assumes she got her brains from Martin.” She laughed mirthlessly. “And I can't correct them.”

She stood, steadier, and crossed the room to throw open the double doors to the closet.

It was larger than my bedroom, and the clothing, just like the clothes at the condominium, was regimented by color and function. All the slacks in one section, then all blue jeans, all the white blouses, yellow dresses, green skirts. With a ferocity that stunned me, Mrs. VanAlstyne reached into the section of shirts and shoved the entire raft down the wooden rod, the hangers screeching.

Several dry cleaning bags hung at the back of the closet, their soft clear plastic shimmering with the sudden movement.

“They're all his,” she said.

“Whose?”

“The birth father, those are his shirts,” she said. “He used to wear them working around the house. If he took one off, Courtney stole it. When I realized what was happening, I worried she was planning to blackmail me. But then one day, years after I broke off the affair, I walked into her bedroom and found her sitting on the bed, wearing one of his shirts. She was sniffing at the fabric. When she moved into the condo in Kirkland she didn't take them with her and I had them all dry-cleaned. If I got rid of his smell, maybe she would throw them out.”

But she hadn't thrown them out.

The mother continued talking about the connection between her daughter and the man who was her birth father, and I stepped forward, lifting the plastic bags. The shirts were identical weaves of wool, all various plaids. Lumberjack shirts. And they were enormous. The tag in the collar read, “Pendleton, XXL.”

“He's a big man,” she said, reading my thoughts. “Tall. Courtney gets her height from both of us. That's the one thing nobody attributes to Martin.”

“Did it end badly?”

“Of course. I led him on for ten years, gave birth to his child, then threw him away when my husband decided to take an inter-est in me. Even worse, my husband claimed his daughter.”

I turned, watching her closely. “How much did you have to pay him?”

She didn't hesitate. “Five hundred thousand dollars.”

I tried not to react. “How long ago was that?”

“Nine years ago.”

“You had the money?”

“My husband keeps a safe in the basement,” she said. “There's always $500,000 in there. It's a compulsion of sorts.”

“Mr. VanAlstyne didn't notice the money was missing?”

She lifted her right hand. Her middle finger held a diamond and emerald ring. My estimate was eight carats for the emeralds circling the ten-carat diamond.

“The best synthetic money can buy,” she said. “I sold the real jewels to replace the cash in the safe. I flew to New York, worried one of the local jewelers would tell Martin.” She sighed. “Now you have all my secrets.”

Almost,
I thought.

“After you paid him, did he ever contact you or Courtney?” I asked.

“He sent her birthday cards until she was fourteen. I always intercepted them. Once or twice, he tried to call. But that was years ago.”

“Do you suspect he had anything to do with your daughter's disappearance?”

“It occurred to me, yes.”

“You don't sound certain.”

“I can't see him hurting her, not like this,” she said. “He and Courtney had a close relationship. They bonded. He . . . he loves her.”

“Were they in contact that you know of?”

She laughed, again without joy. “Welcome to the World Wide Web. I finally realized why he stopped sending cards. They were e-mailing each other. Precocious doesn't begin to describe my daughter. And I was left to hope she would come to see that Martin VanAlstyne was a better man, a better father.” She brushed her hand toward the snowflake portraits. “What man invents a camera for his daughter?”

I turned back to the shirts. I counted nine. And ten hangers.

“Did she take one of the shirts?” I said, pointing to the empty hanger.

“I didn't see her take it.” She stepped closer. “And it's been years since she even touched these things. She had him—she didn't need his shirts anymore.”

There was a knock at the bedroom door; Mrs. VanAlstyne froze. I watched her face compose itself as she stepped from the closet, closing the door behind her, leaving me inside with Courtney's sentimental favorites.

I heard her say, “Yes, Sequoia?”

Then a mumble of words, followed by a response from Mrs. VanAlstyne.

“I'll be down shortly,” she said. “Thank you for telling me.”

When she opened the closet door, Sequoia was gone, the door to the hallway was closed, and her mask had returned. The dead pale mask that was her normal appearance.

“I have some things to attend to,” she said. “Your coworker just arrived. Ms. Lutini. Do you need anything else from me?”

“The name of the birth father.”

“Bill Johansen,” she said. “He's a gambling addict.”

I walked downstairs and outside, the shirts over my forearm, and found Lucia Lutini stepping from her gold Camry, crossing the driveway. As I loaded the shirts into the Barney Mobile, my cell phone rang. I pulled it off my belt clip.

“Harmon,” I said.

“Are you familiar with ESDA?” asked Mary Worobec, calling from the documents department at the state lab.

I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder, securing the shirts to the hook above the car's backseat. I knotted the bottom of the plastic, so the particulate stench in my car wouldn't contaminate the material. “Yes, I'm familiar with ESDA.”

In an ESDA test, the document in question is placed inside a sheet of clear Mylar, set on a Plexiglas plate, and electrostatic toner is sprayed over the plastic. The toner settled into any indentations on the paper, any divots left behind from the page that once rested on top of the questioned document. In the old days, detectives would run a soft pencil over the page, holding the pencil at a particular slant to create lettering in white relief. But that ruined the document itself.

“What amazes me is how many times people will write ransom notes on whatever paper's hanging around,” she said. “But here's another reason I suspect we're looking for a man. A woman would buy a new pad of paper. Something fresh, something special for the brutal occasion. She would want the paper pristine.”

“That's a good theory.”

“I think so,” she said. “And when the ESDA revealed this word, I first thought of the location. I picked up the phone to call you. And . . . your name.”

“My name?”

“Raleigh. That's your name.”

I froze. “Yes?”

“And that's what the ESDA revealed. ‘Raleigh.' Somebody wrote the word ‘Raleigh' on the page directly above this ransom note. Now it could still mean the city in North Carolina, there's always the possibility. But what if it means you?”

chapter twenty-two

I
drove to the Seattle crime lab and waited at the evidence control desk inside, until the metal gate lifted and a young man with a blond goatee handed me a manila envelope from Questioned Documents. Another envelope contained pictures of the brutalized finger.

I took the envelope back to my car, cracked the windows even farther, turned on the dome light, and read the copy of the ESDA, along with Mary Worobec's notes from the examination. My name, written in the same block lettering as the kidnapping note, traveled across the page at an upward angle. Two parallel lines ran beneath it, for emphasis. Like a note. A reminder?

I climbed out of the car and found Tom O'Brien as he was leaving the Trace Evidence lab for the day. I asked to use one of the lab's computers.

“Does this involve forensics?” he asked.

“Not really,” I admitted. “I need some background searches for this kidnapping case. It would save time if I could run the search here, instead of the FBI office.” I also wanted to run a search on Jack Stephanson and didn't want a record of it on my computer. “I'll need access to the state and national records. Do you have those?”

His office was yet another compact room with another white board, this one full of case notes and dates, and at the very bottom right corner, a set of words written so long ago the ink was deteriorating. The handwriting looked childish. It said, “I love you, Daddy.”

O'Brien logged into the system and picked up his briefcase. “When you're done, double-check you're logged off. And lock the door. I don't have to tell you, I know, except the cleaning staff comes in at 11:00 p.m. and the defense attorneys are hovering over us like vultures. If I didn't tell you, some lawyer would smell blood.”

In a city where Scandinavians and Norwegians pervaded the deepest foundations, the name Jack Stephanson didn't bring up much. And when it came to Special Agent Jack Stephanson, there was even less, except laudatory articles in the local press about his work on Violent Crimes.

Similarly, a name like William Johansen was too easy a reach in the Northwest. Several dozen possibilities for Courtney's father popped up in the crime system and it wasn't until I began narrowing the search with certain key words—gambling, construction—that I found three potential William Johansens. One was dead from a defective pneumatic gun that drove a three-penny nail into his brain. The second Bill Johansen also worked as a contractor, but was much too young to have fathered a nineteen-year-old daughter.

The third William Johansen sent me directly back to my car, and then a drive to Queen Anne Hill.

Kit Carson's condominium was guarded by the same woman as before, her short dark hair like an animal pelt, the voice like sand sluicing through an oak barrel.

“You must like coming around here,” she said.

“Not really. I need to speak with Ms. Carson.”

“She's busy at the moment.”

“Make her un-busy. Now.”

She threw me a sullen expression but picked up the black telephone, murmuring into it. Moments later the clattering elevator descended, and the bodyguard held the metal cage for me. The blue tattoo on her arm, I realized, wasn't a cross. It was a sword.

“There a problem?” the bodyguard asked.

I didn't reply, and when the elevator door opened at the penthouse, Kit Carson stood front and center wearing a red silk kimono that stopped six inches above her bare feet. Her painted toes shimmered with oil, and the short hair appeared darker than before, held back by a scarf the color of mercurochrome. She smelled of lavender and cigarillos.

“I was in the middle of my daily massage,” she said. “I get crabby when it's interrupted.”

“I wouldn't have noticed.”

She smiled. “Touché”

“You want to tell me about Bill Johansen?”

“Bill?” Her smile faded. “What about Bill?”

“I asked you about Courtney, that first day I was here. You said, ‘Daddy knows everything.' But you weren't talking about Martin VanAlstyne. You were talking about Johansen. That's who you meant by ‘Daddy.'”

“I left my massage for this?”

“Johansen's her birth father and you knew it.”

She walked over to the Danish modern couch and sat heavily, tugging the silk kimono closed. She blew out a stream of smoke.

“Those icebergs on Mercer Island might want a lid on the truth but if you ever saw those two together, you'd know too. Courtney is Bill's clone. Or was.”

“Was?”

“Drop the suspicion, Agent Harmon. I'm saying Bill let him-self go. The resemblance is gone, and it's his fault.”

“Did he teach you to count cards too?”

“Bill didn't teach Courtney to count cards. Some wonderful gifts get passed along family lines. Counting cards happens to be one of the better inheritances.”

“When he went to prison for you, did you visit him?”

She took a moment, collecting a response. “Bill made a mis-take,” she said finally. “He did his time, he learned his lesson.”

“What lesson was that?”

“Don't get caught—what else?”

“How about, never trust your partner in crime.”

“Men do nothing for me,” she said.

“That one did.”

She tapped the cigarillo against the cut crystal, and I waited. But she was comfortable with interrogative silence and that was one of Kit Carson's greatest gifts: steely self-control. More than thirty years earlier, when a young Kathleen Carson was still learning the game of poker, she had flown to Las Vegas and met up with a man named William Johansen, a local building con-tractor who haunted the Strip at night. Not long after Kathleen Carson arrived in Vegas, a tourist from San Diego lost several hundred thousand dollars in one night at the Sahara. The next day, when he realized what had happened, the tourist filed charges against Bill Johansen and an unnamed woman. He accused them of collusion.

Collusion occurs when two or more players agree to share secret signals, telegraphing an unsuspecting player's cards with words and gestures, leading the mark into ever-increasing bets. The pot grows, the mark gets excited, and then one colluder swoops in for the kill, scoring a “surprise” win. The mark, still pumped with adrenaline, still feeling confident after coming so close to winning, launches into another round at the “lucky” table, and the ruse begins all over again.