Blood Bond (17 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SHE MET AIDAN AT
the front door and let him hold her, his arms and chest sinewy and hard with muscle—nothing like Harmon. Harmon had been doughy and his flesh yielding, but she had gotten accustomed to that, the way his body gave way for her to mold against him.

Her thoughts went unaccountably to the few lovers she'd had since the divorce. With a strange and unexpected clarity she remembered that there had been no moments of embrace like this, no holding, no resting in each other's arms. But it wasn't their fault. It was her. She'd rushed through the lovemaking, pretending to be as ardent as they were, heaving and breathing heavily and then when it was over she always made excuses to go, to leave them lying in their beds relieved or puzzled or indifferent as she gathered her things and left, lonelier than before.

Aidan was a comfort. Aidan was familiar. She clung to him a little longer, inhaling that old-school scent, then pulled back and looked at him carefully. The skin around his eyes was red and taut; his cheeks looked dry and raw. The lines around his lips were more pronounced.

She'd spoken to him only briefly in the last days. After the morgue, she dialed Aidan's number with trembling fingers. She had no memory of what he'd said—she remembered only saying “Gail's been killed, Gail's dead,” and then listening to the echo of her own words.

“I had to walk,” he said now. “I woke up, and for a minute I was fine, and then I remembered. I didn't know what else to do.”

Marva nodded. “I came home . . . Mother was there . . . I didn't know whether to stay. Bryce—” Another emotion, not a new one, but suddenly unbearable. “Bryce is horrible,” she said, surprising herself. “He was actually checking his email today. He wouldn't help me with the kids, kept saying he would be there in a minute. Isabel had Lainey in the bathtub and Marshall was screaming. And Mother—I don't know, maybe she's in shock or something.”

Aidan nodded and took her elbow, guiding her back to her couch, which was still warm from her body heat. Marva had waited, sitting there, for him to come—maybe she'd just sit on that couch forever.

He took off his coat, folding it carefully and draping it over the arm of the couch, then pulled something from his pocket before he sat beside her.

“These—” he said, holding out his hand, and Marva saw the flash of red and black and turned away, her stomach seizing.

Aidan closed his fist on the thing. “I'll get the ones from outside. And the packaging. They'll need it, I imagine.”

“They—the cops, they?”

“Yes. I'll call now, if you haven't . . .”

“I thought—I'm just surprised, you didn't want to get them involved.”

Aidan was silent a moment. Then: “But now Gail's gone. None of it matters anymore, does it? I mean, there's nothing to protect.”

Marva tried to think about that. It sounded right enough. There was nothing anyone could do to her sister now.

“But why—now, coming after me and you like this, threatening us?”

Aidan placed a hand over hers. It was warm and heavy. “I think we have to assume . . . someone is trying to get their own kind of justice. Someone blames us. Could be Jess's family, could be Deanne's, hell, I don't know.”

Us—Marva's mind caught when Aidan said
us,
and she realized that despite the awful twining guilt she had felt over the years, as heavy her burden of culpability, she had never thought of them as equally responsible.
Aidan
made it happen. He thought the plan into life and executed it with a speed and skill that, as far as she knew, had evaded him in his professional life ever since. Only when it was past the point of no return had he pressed her into service.

And she hadn't hesitated. No, she'd gone willingly, but surely if there was blame to lay, she deserved the lesser share. And yet—the package came to her, the same that went to Aidan.

“So . . .” She pulled away from him. “Do you think we're in danger?”

Aidan looked away, gazing across her worktable out the window, into the stand of birches separating her building from the next. “Well, I think it would be naïve not to be worried,” he said. His careful, professional voice. “I think we need to hear what the detectives have to say.”

She gave him the phone number and allowed him to cover her lap with a quilt, accepted a cup of tea, and watched him make the calls. All the while, though, the panties were in her thoughts, the lurid red, the unexpected block lettering, and there was something wrong with the image, something that didn't fit, some nagging doubt that eluded her and she went with it and was grateful for something to concentrate on besides the fact that Gail was dead.

JOE CALLED
Amaris from the car on his way home from Lodi, but she didn't pick up. How long had it been since he'd heard the message, her breathless voice advising the caller to leave a message, she'd call right back? Not since early in their courtship.

He stared at the phone for a moment before putting it back in his pocket. He wasn't worried, exactly, or even particularly disappointed. But it
was
unlike her, since Amaris was never without her phone, not even at the gym. She took it into the bathroom when she showered and slept with it charging on her bedside table.

If Amaris missed a call, it was because she wanted to miss a call.

Bertrise called seconds after he hung up to tell him about the packages that had been delivered to Aidan and Marva, so he drove straight to the station. He would far have preferred to get a change of clothes and something to eat. It was the third day for his charcoal trousers and sport coat, and he'd had only the rubbery omelet on the plane, the cold stale Danish.

He could hear Bertrise's voice as he came down the hall to the conference room. Inside, he saw Aidan and Marva seated on one side of the table, Bertrise on the other, and Paulette Huang standing over what he assumed were the panties, putting them into plastic evidence bags with gloved hands.

“Ah, here's Detective Bashir at last,” Bertrise said, giving him a brief flash of a smile. “Back from his travels.”

Joe murmured a greeting and shook Aidan's hand, which was narrow but strong. He turned to Marva, and hesitated at the way she looked at him, the way the gray in her eyes made a subtle starburst with the blue. Her lips were parted slightly and in his mind she said his name, but in reality she said nothing at all.

He wanted to ask her how she was doing, if she'd slept. He wanted to tell her what he'd thought about on the plane, the parts of himself he saw reflected in her. He wanted to be alone with her so she could stop trying to be so brave for even a moment but this, most of all, he knew could not happen.

“Ms. Groesbeck,” he said formally. “Again, I'm terribly sorry for your loss.” Then he took a seat, not looking at her, and spent a few minutes looking at the evidence bags. Paulette, only a year out of San Francisco State with a degree in criminal justice, shook out one of the pairs of panties. He nodded curtly and she put them away. He glanced at the curls of torn paper packaging: plain white paper label, Times Roman, nothing special.

“What did you find out from the Bartelaks?” Aidan asked. “You went to Iowa, right?”

“I'm afraid I can't comment on that,” Joe said. “But we appreciate you coming in so quickly with this.”

“What assurance can you offer us of our safety?” Aidan pressed.

“Mr. McKay,” Bertrise began, but Joe held up a hand to stop her.

“You feel you're in danger?” he asked. He didn't like Aidan but was trying to temper his reaction, since it might be nothing more than the proprietary way the man inserted himself between Joe and Marva, leaning aggressively forward over the table.

“Well, hell yes.” Aidan was indignant. “Gail's dead, some innocent guy's dead because he got in the way, and that makes me think whoever it is won't hesitate if he thinks we're responsible, too.”

“We have still not officially connected Mr. Bergman's death with Mrs. Engler's,” Bertrise interjected.

Aidan waved an impatient hand. “We're not talking officially here, Detective Wellington. I'm an attorney, I know the difference. Right now I'm basically concerned, I'll admit it, that this guy's going to come after me. Or Marva.”

Joe looked carefully at Marva. She was staring into space, her eyes unfocused, and there were conflicting emotions at play on her face, but he'd be willing to bet that fear wasn't one of them. Grief, guilt, terrible sadness even, but not fear.

Not that it changed what needed to happen.

“I'll arrange some coverage for you,” he said. “I can get it set up now; give me a little time to make some calls. You'll both be staying at your residences?”

“Yes.” It was the first time Marva spoke, and she was emphatic. “I'll be at my sister's house during the day. But I'm going home at night.”

“Me, too,” Aidan said after a beat. “I'm not sure of my schedule for tomorrow. I understand the services for Gail will be on Wednesday. I'll be there, of course.”

Joe nodded. “We can work out the details as we go. For now, I'll get someone posted tonight.”

Bertrise shared a glance with him, then stood. “Mr. McKay, Ms. Engler, thank you for coming to us. We'll be in touch.”

Joe stood, too, and watched as Aidan helped Marva out of her chair. He wanted to say something more to her, but instead he merely watched them leave, Marva leaning on Aidan for support.

CONNOR DYBCK,
in a stroke of good fortune, had a day job, or more accurately, a nights and weekends job: he worked at a cell phone store in a mall fifteen minutes away in Walnut Creek. As Joe circled the massive parking lot, which he hadn't visited since his frantic Christmas Eve trip to find gifts for Bertrise's girls last year, he considered the irony of the man's employment, and regretted that pointing it out to Dybck probably wouldn't serve the investigation. Child labor in developing countries, discarded chips leeching heavy metals into landfills—Joe figured Dybck could probably find plenty to protest in his own place of employment.

He finally found a space near a Cheesecake Factory and plowed through the cloud of perfume that trailed a clutch of matronly shoppers, into the mall and down the corridor to the cell phone store. A quick word with the supervisor netted him an audience on a bench outside a Victoria's Secret with Dybck, who was more or less what Joe expected: thirtyish, thin, with hipster glasses and clever facial hair and a habit of preceding his sentences with a series of rapid blinking.

“Don't worry, I didn't tell your supervisor anything,” Joe reassured Dybck after returning his shield to his pocket. “I said you'd been helping us with a string of robberies in your building.”

“Shit, I live with my parents, man,” Dybck said. “Not cool.”

Joe let that pass. “I take it they don't know about your, ah, activism.”

“It's not like I'm ashamed of it,” Dybck said indignantly.

“Okay, well, then, maybe you won't mind telling me a little about your involvement with the Sycamore Estates project.”

“That project's in clear violation of Montair's own ridgeline ordinance. It should never have been passed in the first place.”

“So you want to single-handedly bring it down. Or, sorry, you and your band of merry tricksters. We know about your visit to the Englers' house on July first. Pretty brave, scaring a housewife with a couple of little kids.”

Dybck shrugged. “I got no problem with them. But EUI consistently disregards—”

Joe held up a hand to stop him.

“Save your speeches. I'm actually only interested in what you might have been up to last Sunday night. Say, between seven and midnight.”

Dybck frowned. “Well, I worked here until eight. Then I went over to my friend's house and hung out.”

“This friend have a name?”

“Yeah. Sure. Slade.”

“Slade what?”

Dybck blinked several times. “Slade . . . I don't know, man. I think it might be his last name.”

“So, not a
good
friend, then.”

“No, no, he's solid.”

Joe sighed and took out his notebook. “We're going to need a little more than you vouching for Mr. Slade, unfortunately. I wonder if you'd mind giving me his phone number and address. How late did you stay at his house Sunday night?”

“What's this all about, anyway?”

“Well, Mr. Engler had a very bad evening. One of his dinner guests took a bad fall and died.” Joe watched Dybck carefully for a reaction, but all he got was a finger snap and a finger pointed in his face.

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that in the paper. Thought the address looked familiar. So just because it happened there, you think of
me
?” Dybck managed to sound wounded.

There was the blood, of course, but Fisch had managed to keep that out of the papers. “Just write,” Joe said, handing over his pen and notebook. While he waited for Dybck to copy down Slade's info—which was stored on his phone, naturally—he glanced idly around the mall, wondering what could possibly drive people to spend their Saturday night in such a place.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

JOE WATCHED WITH WONDER
as Odell finished the last bite of his cheeseburger and moved on to the Polish sausage. More than a few curly fries had made their way down the hatch as well.

Burney's was a San Ramon gem, tucked into a down-at-the-heels strip mall and in danger of being pushed out by posher tenants. Odell was perhaps its most loyal customer; he ate there several days a week rather than cook for himself. Joe used that knowledge to his advantage today. Odell had been complaining about taking time away from his own caseload to help Joe, but the offer of a free lunch did the trick. Odell agreed to meet him right after church, which he'd been attending with increased dedication ever since he found out that a particular redhead in the choir had separated from her husband.

“Man, you should have seen what she was wearing today,” Odell said, licking mustard off his fingers. “Little gray number, high-neck top up to here”—he pointed at his Adam's apple—“but that skirt was some kind of short, I'll tell you what. You know, like a naughty librarian or something.”

Joe raised an eyebrow. “
That's
what you think about during church?”

“Hell, only during the sermon. Mind wanders.”

Joe nodded and pushed a fry around on his plate; figured it was time to get down to business. He'd already filled Odell in on the trips to Des Moines and Lodi, the visit to see Dybck, and the packages sent to Marva and Aidan. Odell had perked up at the mention of panties, but then their food came and he'd gotten distracted.

“So tell me about the call that came in yesterday,” Joe prompted.

“Oh, that Ellis woman? Donnis something-or-other?”

“Dilys.”

“Dilys. What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Welsh, I believe,” Joe said. Pitied the poor woman; being stuck with “Jamshed” until he went off to college and could pick his own nickname, he knew what it was like to have to repeat your name over and over to disbelieving strangers.

“Yeah, I talked to her. Told her you'd want to hear it straight from her but that didn't stop her from giving me an earful. According to her, Marva was just about to smack her sister upside the head she was so pissed off, yelling at the top of her lungs in the middle of Domenico's. Said she was just
scandalized
.” Odell produced a falsetto voice for the last few syllables.

“All right. I'm seeing her in a couple of hours. Thanks for the heads-up. So what have you got on Bryce Engler?”

“Nothing you couldn't have found yourself.”

“Yes, but you're so much faster,” Joe wheedled.

“I ought to charge you. Christ, y'all are like a bunch of damn preschoolers on the computers.”

“Preschoolers would probably outperform me,” Joe admitted.

Mollified by Joe's show of humility, Odell set the remainder of his sandwich down and took a long swig of root beer. “Ah, now there's something worth talking about.” He patted his lips almost daintily with the napkin he'd placed in his lap, and settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “Okay. So EUI stands for Engler Utilities and Infrastructure, and it was his daddy's business but Bryce has been running it for about ten years. Long enough, turns out, for him to run it down from an eleven million valuation in oh-one down to less than half that now—and that doesn't even count all the double-dealing accounting that doesn't make it on the books.”

“No kidding. How'd he do that?”

Odell spread his hands wide and shrugged. “Capital costs, my friend—it's all in the capital. Remember long about ninety, ninety-two it looked like real estate didn't have anywhere to go but up?”

“Yes. Wish I'd bought my condo then.”

“You were just a kid back then; me too. Still, we did okay, didn't we—you been in your place a couple years, right? And I got mine at the bottom.”

“Indeed.”

“So in the good years, Engler and his buddies built up this entire valley. Hell, twenty years ago it wasn't anything but one horse ranch after another. You wanted to get from one end to another, you'd be off-roading. Now you can't go ten yards without landing in your neighbor's lap. All new development, am I right? And what has to happen before the developers come in and do one lick of work?”

Joe adapted to Odell's conversational style, which was definitely participatory. The man couldn't bear to part with a fact without making you work for it.

“Uh—utilities? Infrastructure?”

“You bet your sweet dimpled ass. You got your sewer, your drainage structures, your riprap. Curb and gutter and all that. And EUI had a corner on the market.”

“Not a lot of competition?”

“Not a lot of
local
competition,” Odell clarified, wagging a finger sagely. “There's some boys up in Concord, out Livermore way, like that. But Paul Engler lived here thirty years before he died, and he was tight with just about everyone.”

Joe was anxious to move the conversation along, but once Odell did research, he felt cheated if he couldn't share every last bit. “So anyway, what kind of shape is EUI in now?”

“Well, isn't that an interesting question,” Odell said. “Shitty shape, as it turns out. Got some unhappy creditors making noise. Supply inventory taking up space. Sold off some equipment at a fire sale just to raise cash. They don't sell some work, they're gonna have to cut head count.”

“So that's why Engler's running on that growth platform,” Joe said. “To drum up business.”

“Yeah, he couldn't have much more motivation to plug up the rest of the land around here with shitboxes—takes a heck of a lot of concrete to build a suburb.”

“So, I'm right back where I was with Dybck. I have to tell you, Odell, that doesn't look very promising.”

“Well, maybe you should be asking yourself what Engler's Plan B is.”

“You mean, if he doesn't get elected?”

“That, too, but I meant if he can't make payroll.”

“He's that bad off?”

“Not now . . . but the writing's on the wall. Another year into the real estate downturn, and there's going to be a lot of sidelined equipment over there at EUI. And creditors still wanting payment on all those dump trucks even if they're just parked.”

“Okay. So, what's the Plan B?”

“Well.” Odell fished around in the messenger bag and drew out another, thinner stack of papers from another pocket. “Turns out Mrs. Engler just made him a wealthy man.”

“Gail? She left him money?”

“Yes, sir, she did. Not enough to live on forever, maybe, but how does three and a half million sound to you?”

“Three and a half
million
? Where did she get that?”

“Start with half a million in insurance, and the rest from her old man. When he died eight years ago he left the money to each of his daughters. And they get the rest when the old lady kicks.”

Joe whistled, but he was thinking that meant Marva had inherited, too. He thought of her bland imported sedan, her wardrobe of understated, simple clothes. The cozy but unremarkable condo. If there was money there, Marva certainly hid it well. But it fit; he would have been more surprised if she'd flaunted her wealth. Everything about Marva was carefully contained, the intensity of her inner life all the more marked in contrast to her unremarkable surroundings.

“Was Gail's money still all there?” he asked. “I mean, did they dip into it to buy the house or make investments, anything like that?”

“Nah. I talked to their financial advisor. It's all there. You ask me, she was the type who didn't like to part with any of it. You know, what's hers is hers and what's his is also hers, that kind of thing.”

“He say that?”

“Not in so many words. You know, he went all prissy about client confidentiality and all, but you get a sense of a guy, talking to the folks he keeps on his payroll—I don't think there's all that much love lost there. Anyway, I did get copies of the will and the insurance and all that, and the money goes straight to Engler.”

“Not the kids?”

“There's a provision in there, on Engler's death it's handed down.”

“Well, well.” Joe had disliked Bryce Engler from the first handshake, but until now he'd had no reason to suspect him in his wife's murder. “So if he'd been thinking about ways to divest himself of his wife . . .”

“Bergman's death mighta been his lucky break. Long as people figure the two are related.”

“Yes, but that's a stretch. We can't find anything linking the deaths. Not one thing.”

Odell raised his eyebrows. “So? You know what the odds are of two murders occurring two days apart like that, with all those common connections, and them
not
being related?”

“What?”

“Hell, I don't know, but it's got to be some crazy odds. I mean think about it, Joe, we got what, two murders last year and three the year before that. Now we got us a damn epidemic in one week.”

“Two's not an epidemic,” Joe said, “but I see your point.”

Odell cast a longing-filled gaze at the refrigerator case, where entire pies waited to be sliced. “We'll nail it; it's just a matter of time.”

BUT JOE
was feeling a little discouraged as he climbed the slate steps up to Dilys Ellis's looming hillside home. A quick trip to check Dybck's story had been a dead end: Slade's real name turned out to be Gary Slater Jr., and he lived with his parents and worked at an Auntie Anne's pretzel outlet in the same wing of the mall as the cell phone store. But he'd vouched for Dybck, and even offered a dubious alibi: Dybck had hit the high score on Call of Duty: Black Ops—and it was time-stamped with his initials by Slade's computer at nine o'clock on the night in question.

Only a few houses were built as high up the mountain as the Ellises', thanks to the ridgeline ordinance. The Ellises had built before it was enacted, and made the best of their early advantage; their house was a glass and stucco structure that looked as out of place on the oak-dotted golden slope as a gob of Play-Doh stuck to a Michelangelo.

The girl who answered the door did not fit her surroundings. She had piercings in a cheek, an eyebrow, and her lower lip, and a complicated, spiked tattoo was inked across her collarbones. She gave him a brief glance and then stalked back into the house, leaving the door open and yelling “Mom, your cop's here.”

Dilys Ellis came to the door a moment later, not hurrying, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Please come in,” she said. “I'm making profiteroles, and I've just put the puff pastry in to chill. Fresh pastry's so much better than prepared.”

She led Joe out the back sliding door onto a patio shaded with a vine-covered pergola and offered him a chair at a glass-topped iron table.

“I'm sorry to ask you to repeat your conversation,” Joe said. “But I'd like to hear it from you.”

Mrs. Ellis shrugged. “I should have reported it right away, once I heard about Gail's death. But you know how it is, you hate to believe the worst, and it wasn't common knowledge that circumstances were so . . .”

“You saw Gail Engler and Marva Groesbeck arguing at Domenico's restaurant on Tuesday afternoon,” Joe said. “What time was that?”

Mrs. Ellis raised her eyebrows, barely causing a ripple on her smooth brow; Botox, Joe figured. “One o'clock, or maybe one thirty. I was having a late lunch because—”

“You were sitting down at a table?”

“Yes, I was having just the soup and a hard roll—”

“And they were seated as well?”

“Yes, they were sitting about two or three tables away. There were only a few other people in the restaurant, a couple of men on their lunch hour, you know. And another lady by herself.”

“Did you hear Gail and Marva's entire conversation?”

“Why, no. I stopped by their table when I saw them and we chatted for a few minutes. I'd met Marva at Gail's house once before—I think it was at the Village of Hope luncheon last year—and I recognized her. Those eyes, you know, they're quite distinctive.”

More euphemisms, Joe thought. Marva's eyes
were
startling. But he'd take her frank, unsettling gaze over a cosmetically modified Barbie stare any day.

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, you know, this and that.”

Joe waited patiently for Mrs. Ellis to divulge more. It didn't take long.

“Well, I asked Gail about the kids. My daughter Ramona's done some babysitting for them, though Gail hadn't called lately.”

Wonder why,
Joe thought—he wasn't sure he'd want the petulant, pierced young woman around his own niece and nephew.

“Gail was talking about Thanksgiving, how she and Bryce were thinking of getting one of those smokers, or converting their grill or something—I didn't entirely follow.”

“So, you didn't talk about Bergman's murder? It had taken place two days earlier, in her driveway; weren't you just a bit curious?”

At this a purplish bruise-like color crept over Mrs. Ellis's face from the temples down. “I didn't bring it up,” she said coldly.

“Does that mean you didn't talk about it? Or you did? I'm confused.”

“We may have exchanged a few words—nothing in depth, I assure you. I believe I expressed my condolences on the loss of her friend. I didn't know him myself.”

“Didn't ask her to describe the scene? The body?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Ellis snapped.

“And she didn't volunteer? Neither she nor Marva said anything about the circumstances of the death? Or the investigation afterward?”

“No.”

“Could you describe the argument, Mrs. Ellis?” Joe asked, in a gentler tone.

“Well, it was absolutely awful. I didn't hear how it started; I was just sitting there having my lunch and reading a magazine.
Sunset
magazine. And then I heard Gail's sister say something like ‘Why do you always have to be this way?' in what I would describe as an angry voice.”