Dead Midnight (17 page)

I smiled wryly in remembrance of the old days. The investigation that had brought Willie and me together seemed simple next to the tangle of facts and questions I faced today. More and more I found myself relying on sophisticated equipment, technical assistance, and experts of all sorts. Fortunately, I knew an expert who would work on Sunday for the price of a meal.

Mick and Charlotte’s condo, which he had purchased last fall with the help of his father, was small, starkly white, and would have been characterless at the hands of many people. But they’d each put their individual stamp on it. A specially constructed hall tree held Charlotte’s collection of fancy evening bags and sequined baseball caps—my favorite was a black one with silver stars. Mick’s motorcycle memorabilia—logos, scale models, framed advertisements—lined up on a plate rail that he’d installed at eye level. The furnishings were mainly Ikea, and carefully chosen.

When I arrived there around four-thirty, they were enjoying a glass of wine in the living room. The balcony door was open and the rumble of traffic on the Embarcadero was deafening, even in the last hour of a Sunday afternoon. Mick closed it, Charlotte brought me a glass of Chardonnay, and I got down to business.

“You hear about J.D.?”

Their faces turned somber. “Yeah,” Mick said. “Must’ve been tough for you, finding him. A couple of reporters called here, wanting to know if we knew where you were. They got Dad and Rae’s unlisted number, bothered them too. I said I hadn’t heard from you; Dad wasn’t as polite.”

I nodded. My former brother-in-law could be prickly when anything penetrated his shield of privacy. “Well, I’m staying someplace where no reporter can get to me.”

“RKI’s building.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Nope, you didn’t. Right, Sweet Charlotte?”

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

Mick asked, “So what’s happening? This isn’t a social call.”

“No. I’d like to trade you a dinner in exchange for letting me run some things by you on your day off.”

“Cool. There’s a new place we’ve been wanting to try, but money’s tight this month.”

Actually the promise of a dinner on the agency wasn’t necessary. As I outlined certain details of the case, both of their expressions became focused and fascinated. They were natural investigators and enjoyed a challenge. When I finished, I asked, “Anything come to mind?”

Charlotte said, “Roger wrote in his journal that he’d deleted all his files and destroyed everything he didn’t want anyone to see?”

“Right.”

“But he didn’t destroy the journal full of very personal stuff.”

“No.”

“That makes me think that he wanted someone to see it, someone who knew he kept it.”

“Maybe, but it was hidden in a very unlikely place.”

“A place that maybe the person he wanted to read it knew about.”

“Of course—Jody Houston. When she saw I’d been reading it she recognized it and said he’d kept it hidden. And she tried to get it away from me.”

Mick said, “That last journal entry, where he said he’d left an insurance policy for Houston, it sounds like a message to me.”

“Could be. But insurance against what?”

“Hard to say, but if I were you I’d want to take a good look at the files he deleted.”

“How? They’re gone.”

“Not really. It’s very difficult to completely delete anything. And if you have the proper skills, you can retrieve most files.”

“I don’t understand.”

He glanced at Charlotte. “You explain it. You’re better at putting stuff in layman’s language.”

“Okay,” she said. “Take my personal computer.” She motioned at a workstation in the corner. “A Windows PC. I receive or send an e-mail, hit the Delete key, and the mail’s stored in the recycle bin. I empty the bin, and it’s gone— right?”

“Right.”

“Wrong. It may be gone from the bin, but somewhere in the machine’s memory it still exists. It’s just not easy to get at. There are a number of firms whose sole business is to go into the offices of clients and retrieve deleted files from their employees’ computers, in order to investigate possible improprieties. The service is called computer forensics and, believe me, there’s a growing demand for it.”

Mick said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about offering it as an agency service. Most of the work has to be done after business hours when the employees have gone home, but you can charge substantial fees—”

“Get me something in writing,” I said. “An actual description, including initial outlay, operating expenses, and a fee structure. Then we’ll discuss it. Is it common knowledge that you can do this?”

“Not really. If more people knew, they wouldn’t say the things they do in their e-mail.”

“Do either of you have the skills to copy what might still be in Roger’s machine’s memory?”

They grinned at each other.

Mick said, “The head of our new computer forensics programs would have such skills. Yes, indeed.”

The flat on Brannan Street seemed even colder tonight. The refrigerator still made its ominous gurgling sounds, and more plaster had fallen from the ceiling around the skylight. Mick and Charlotte were oblivious of the chill; they carried a portable computer into the front room, set it up at the workstation, and began tinkering.

“This’ll take about half an hour,” he told me. “Go watch TV or something. You’re hovering like a great big buzzard, and it’s distracting me.”

Dismissed, I wandered through the living room and, after a couple of turns around the dining area, sat down at the table.

A great big buzzard.

What did you have to do to command the respect of your employees? Not hire relatives, I supposed. Mick had been on to me since age seven, when he figured out that I really wouldn’t kill him as I’d threatened to when he wouldn’t pick up his toys.

Now they were laughing in there. I strained to hear.

He: “… bitchy lately.”

She: “Yeah, Hy’s definitely been gone too long.”

He: “Better not come home jet-lagged, because she’s gonna jump his bones—”

Me: “Not everything’s about sex, you know!”

Silence. Then suppressed giggles.

Me: “Go ahead, laugh! You’ll laugh even harder when you find out your free dinner is at an In-N-Out Burger.”

But, God, they were right. I missed Hy in more ways than one.

I got up and went into the kitchen. Opened the door to the pantry and peered inside. The pancake-syrup bottle was still married to the tomato-juice can. The oily substance still lurked on the floor. I closed the door, went to the fridge, studied the jars of pickles in cloudy brine, the bottles of salad dressing. Opened the freezer and reinventoried its contents. Torn bag of lima beans, spilled and stuck to the shelf. Blue ice, container cracked and staining the frost beneath it. Regular ice, shrinking in its trays. Baggie full of mystery meat.

I slammed the freezer door shut, looked around the stark white room. The only spot of color was the red pottery bowl that matched the table base and chairs. Inside it was a jumble of keys: a set similar to the ones to this building that Glenn had given me; spares for the Toyota Roger had left with its flashers going on the bridge when he jumped; a standard dead-bolt type with a purple rubber band twined through the holes at its top; another larger key on a chain with a plastic tag, nothing written on the tag to identify it.

I picked up the two loose keys and examined them. Turned them over and over in my hands. Keys which, like the others, Roger had left behind because he knew he’d have no further use for them. No further use for anything anymore.

Back at RKI’s apartment. A stack of hard copy of the more interesting files we’d found on Roger’s machine on the refectory table. Half-eaten mediocre Chinese takeout beside it. Headache flaring up as I tried to separate the important from the unimportant. Most seemed to be in the latter category, but how could I be sure?

I reached into my jeans pocket, took out the two keys that I’d impulsively removed from Roger’s flat. Fingered them, set them down. Went to the kitchen, removed one of the bottles of wine from the fridge. Opened it, poured myself a generous glass that I carried back to the living room. I needed to relax for a while; maybe later my thoughts would flow more freely.

I dialed my home phone, listened to my messages. Nearly everyone I knew, it seemed, wished to be briefed on the recent events. I wrote down names and numbers and contemplated the list: two calls were mandatory, in order to allay maternal anxiety.

Which call to make first, though? Which mother? My adoptive mother sounded frantic: “Sharon, you’re all over the news! Another one of your horrible murders!”
My
horrible murders, Ma? You make it sound like I commit them. My birth mother sounded her usual levelheaded self: “Sharon, it’s Kia. I’ve seen the report on CNN. Do you need legal advice?”

I opted for Saskia Blackhawk, attorney-at-law.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Holding my own. And you?”

“Holding.”

“Robin and Darcy?” My half sister and brother.

“Robin’s working her tail off this first semester in law school, loving every minute of it. Darcy’s … well, Darcy.” My half brother had purple hair, multiple piercings, and a drug dependency. Not unlike Joey, except he had artistic talent and was gainfully employed by a Boise TV station.

As if she knew I was thinking of him, Saskia said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

“How did you hear?” She’d been traveling, and we hadn’t spoken for weeks.

“Elwood told me.”

“You’re back in touch with him?”

“We talk, yes.”

“Does this mean … ?”

“No. Elwood’s too traditional for me.” Meaning in the old Shoshone ways. “Too withdrawn from the real world. Tom Blackhawk was a man of passion and conviction; if I ever have another romantic relationship, it’ll be with someone like him. About Joey … How are you dealing with the loss?”

“Well, at first I was really angry. I’d lie awake in the middle of the night and feel the rage building. I’d think of every nasty, shitty thing he ever did to me.”

“Such as?”

“You really want to know?”

“If you care to tell me. I’m interested in what happened all those years we were separated.”

“Okay, then. These are only a few examples. He hung my favorite stuffed animal—a kangaroo named Roo-Roo— from a tree in the canyon behind our house. I can still see him doing it, his rotten face pinched with meanness. The day I first wore my training bra, he announced at the dinner table, ‘Shar’s got her big chest on.’ He went out with my best girlfriend in high school and told everybody she’d given him head. And you know what he said to me about not attending this big party we threw for Ma and Pa’s wedding anniversary a few years back? ‘Blood’s not thicker than water, Shar. It’s just a different color.’ ”

“And after you thought of all those things?”

“I felt better. But then to make up for dwelling on them, I started to feel guilty because I’d failed him for not finding him on time. That passed, too. Now other memories’re filtering in.”

“And they are?”

“You sound like I’m on the witness stand.”

“Sorry, unfortunate habit. Robin and Darcy hate it too.”

“I don’t hate it, exactly. It’s just that … Well, you sound like I do a lot of the time.”

Saskia laughed—amusement tinged with relief. She and I were continually struggling to find common ground that would help us define our relationship.

“Okay,” I said, “the other memories. The gentle way he picked me up and made me stop crying after I fell off the monkey bars in the park and skinned both knees. One Christmas—his eyes were so wide and anxious while he watched Ma unwrap this
hideous
cookie jar that he’d spent a month’s paper-route money on. And I mean hideous. A donkey in a sombrero and chaps playing the guitar. She pretended to like it, and he was so happy. There was this fat, ugly kid in the neighborhood that the bullies were always picking on. One day they held him down and tried to make him eat a slug. Joey tore over there and took them all on, and after his wounds healed, he kind of looked out for the kid. He called me the night before I graduated from Berkeley, loaded and proud that I was the first in the family to get a college degree, and informing the whole bar about it. He must’ve put half the other drunks on the phone to congratulate me before I convinced him to stop running up a big bill. And his postcards to Ma never said much, but he always signed them ‘I love you.’ ”

“In the balance, positive memories, then.”

“Yes.” I was surprised to realize that my eyes were moist. “I guess it means I’m coming to terms with him dying, but I still don’t understand why he killed himself.”

“Maybe you never will.”

“I’m not a person who deals well with not knowing.”

“Neither am I, but sometimes you have to accept that you won’t. And speaking of not knowing, tell me exactly what happened in Oregon.”

After spending ten minutes bringing Saskia up to date on my investigation, I checked my watch. After eleven. Late to be calling Ma, but I knew she wouldn’t rest till she heard from me, so I dialed her number in the adult community of Rancho Bernardo, north of San Diego.

“Thank God!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been so worried! First your brother, and now you.”

“Ma, I wasn’t the victim. I only found him.”

“I know that! But when I heard, I was afraid … This family, we’re so snake-bit.”

Snake-bit.
An old western phrase that Ma had used her whole life till she remarried and decided to become a lady who lunched and joined book-discussion groups. Maybe she was beginning to reconcile the former Katie McCone with the present Kay Hunt.

“Why’re we snake-bit?”

“Your father died—”

“Pa had a heart attack. He was in his seventies. It happens.”

“Charlene and Ricky divorced—”

“And are both happy with their new spouses. As you are.”

“Well, yes. But little Kimmie died, and then John and Karen divorced, and he’s never remarried.”

She was into ancient history now. “A lot of marriages don’t survive the death of a child. And as far as I know, John has a great life and an excellent relationship with Karen and the boys.”