Blood Bond (4 page)

“But Gail, even if it was them, why would they want to hurt Tom? He doesn't have anything to do with the project.”

“I don't know, maybe that part was an accident.”

Marva thought of something else. “How did you happen to hear all this?” she demanded. “About the blood?”

“I said I had to check on the kids. I opened the window in the guest room over the driveway. I could hear everything they were saying.”

“You eavesdropped on the
cops
?”

“Come on. You would have done the same thing.”

Marva stared at her sister, then shook her head once. No: she wouldn't have, and they both knew it.

She picked up the wineglass and drained it, then got to her feet, her back sore from napping on the couch, and picked up the bottle. Set it on the counter, a hint for Gail that it was time to go.

She knew her sister was upset, but she was just so tired. And tomorrow was going to be a long day. She was teaching at a shop in Walnut Creek, an advanced class on machine quilting techniques. Plus the commission piece was due at the end of the week. She needed to try to get some sleep before she was due at the police station.

She wished she hadn't gone to the dinner tonight. But she couldn't skip it; it was the one day of the year she had to be extra vigilant with Gail. This year she thought she might actually be able to get through the whole day without either of them acknowledging it, and everything that had happened that evening had almost made her forget once or twice. But watching her sister fumble while picking up her car keys from the glass table, her fingers trembling, she knew she had to at least mention it.

“So . . . we never talked about what day it is,” she said gently.

Gail's expression twitched so slightly that most people wouldn't notice. She backed toward the door, clutching her purse to her chest. “Not after all this, okay? I just can't. Maybe tomorrow. Definitely tomorrow. Thanks for the wine.” And she was gone.

Exhausted as she was, Marva stared at the door long after Gail left, wondering whether her sister meant to keep even half of the promises she made.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

BERTRISE LOOKED UP FROM
her tidy desk, sliding her mug a fraction of an inch to the right. Fragrant steam rose from her tea—jasmine, orange blossom, something herbal anyway.

“Mrs. Bergman's in Two. She seems pretty out of it. The Englers are in reception.” She cleared her throat. “Mrs. Engler is making quite an impression.”

Joe could only imagine—Montair was full of trophy wives, but Gail was exceptional, and the station's open plan ensured that everyone would have a clear view of her. There would be talk later, much of it crude. “Okay, thanks. I'll head down in a minute.”

“I have a little present for you.” Bertrise sounded pleased with herself. “Gervais called half an hour ago and you didn't pick up.”

Joe rolled his eyes. “I was here, I was just talking to my mother.”

“Oh.” Everyone knew about Mumtaz Bashir. His mother called several times a week. Joe had long since given up on asking her not to. “How is she?”

“Fine. So what did Gervais want?”

“They went back out this morning when it got light and searched again—they found Tom Bergman's cell phone. It was in a flower bed. Maybe he dropped it and it slid across the pavement.”

“Still working?”

“Yes. It figures, doesn't it? Camille drops hers at the mall and the screen cracks, and we have another year to go on her plan so I have to buy a new one full price.” Bertrise grimaced. Now sixteen and seventeen, her girls had both run wild in Oakland for a while after their father took off. The move to Montair was an effort to start fresh, for all of them. Money was tight, but otherwise they seemed to be settling in well. “Bergman's phone probably went flying, with him taking a hit like that. The corner is clipped a little, but it's fine. And he didn't password-protect it so I got his data before they took it for prints.”

“Great. What did you get?”

Bertrise picked a piece of paper from a neat stack with a flourish. “He was on the phone, it looks like—or just got done with a call. Hard to say, because they also found a cigarette butt and it wasn't smoked all the way down. Maybe he ended the call and stayed out to finish it—”

“So who'd he call?” Joe didn't mean to be rude, but Bertrise, circumspect with everyone else, was sometimes voluble with him.

She checked the sheet. “Hatcher Sproul. He was in Bergman's contacts, phone number, address, everything's here. I gave him a buzz—he's waiting on you to call him.”

“You didn't have to do that.”

“Well.” She blinked and looked away.

“I mean it, Bertrise, I know you're busy.”

“Not that busy, Joe.” She didn't look at him. At times like this, Joe heard the faint echo of the accent she'd worked so hard to get rid of. “It's no big deal.”

“Well, thank you. I appreciate it.”

“The sister is coming in later. I thought she was the caterer, the way she stayed out of the way.”

“I did too, at first,” Joe confessed. “Almost a Cinderella relationship they have, right? One sister out in the limelight, the other one working like a scullery maid in the kitchen.”

“They were stepsisters in that story, not sisters,” Bertrise corrected him. “And the evil one got hers in the end and Cinderella got the prince. Sometimes it pays to keep your head down and wait for karma to catch up.”

MARVA GOT
up late after finally falling asleep for a few restless hours as dawn approached. She knew from experience that with too little sleep, the day disintegrated from within, a thousand little discomforts: the dry red eyes, the dizzy sensation when she stood up too fast, the irritation at the smallest request. Sometimes crying.

She'd always slept well until Harmon left. She had hoped the insomnia was temporary, but maybe it wasn't. Like the purple smudges under her eyes, or the ache in her jaw from grinding her teeth at night—these were the things she got to keep when Harmon left her.

Or rather, when he asked her to leave. He kept the house, the Range Rover, the few friends they'd made during their short marriage.

She made coffee and toasted an English muffin, left it on the plate untouched. Picked up the phone and dialed from memory.

“Aidan McKay, attorney's office,” the toneless female voice answered.

“This is Marva Groesbeck. I wonder if I could speak with Mr. McKay.” Marva smiled thinly at the pointless exchange—so Aidan still kept up the receptionist, probably another girl from St. Mary's College. She would sit in the office poring over her textbooks, peeved when she had to answer the phone. Still, a relatively small expense, and who was Marva to judge?

“If you could hold please, I'll check.” Music following the subtle click—chamber music, heavy on the cello. Aidan came on within seconds.

“Marva!”

“Hello, Aidan. How are you?”

“I'm fine. Uh, mostly.” Marva remembered their pact: telling only truth. It had once been necessary. “Got a case that has me taking depositions downstate so I've been traveling quite a bit. I'm trying to keep the road rash at bay, you know . . .”

Aidan had been beset by the predictable demons since his own marriage broke up, the second for him. Marva saw it on him when they occasionally met—too much to drink, indifferent nutrition, a lack of structure from the bachelor lifestyle he never seemed to adjust to.

“I'm sorry,” was all she could think to say. If she'd ever felt entitled to pass judgment, that time was gone. Now they were both part of the same club: the left behind, the cast off.

“Actually, I'm the one who should be apologizing. About, you know, yesterday. I didn't forget what day it was. The thirteenth anniversary, right?”

Marva winced. “The thirteenth,” she agreed.

“Anything this year?” There was hollow trepidation in his voice. He
should
be worried, Marva thought. They were in this together, all three of them, and he should have called days ago, the way he used to. He and Marva used to plot and plan together, how they would keep beautiful, fragile Gail from crashing for one more year, how they could make her forget the day when it came.

But the last two years had come and gone without a letter or a package. Nothing.

Marva had never dared to hope it could be over. But evidently Aidan had. Men were stronger that way. Or weaker, depending how you looked at it.

She sighed. There was no point in trying to make Aidan feel worse. His burden was constant, and guilt was a critical part of the mix. Guilt and betrayal and heartbreak and jealousy, and if it had ground him down from the golden boy he'd once been to the glorified ambulance chaser he was now, she wouldn't punish him further.

“Nothing. She never even mentioned it. In fact she had a dinner party and—oh, Aidan, the reason I'm calling! One of the guests, nobody you would know, he died last night.”

There was a silence, and Marva could imagine Aidan collecting himself the way he always did, straightening his lanky frame and drawing up the slack in his expression as though he were a marionette whose strings had been tugged.

“What happened? Heart attack?”

“No. They think it was a murder. He—outside, in the driveway. He got hit on the head, or hit his head on something, or—” To Marva's surprise, tears burned her eyes and her breath came short. “Oh God . . .”

“You can't think it's because of—”

“No, no, I don't think so. I actually think it might have been an accident. Remember those protestors that came to the house back in July?”

“How could I forget? With you out of town, I had to deal with her all by myself.”

“Well, I'm wondering if they might have had something to do with it.” Though now, saying it out loud in the daylight, she realized how absurd the notion sounded. “I don't know, Aidan. But I'm worried about her. She kept it together when the cops came, but . . . she came to see me later, and I think she's falling apart. She didn't admit it but I know she's always thought they would come after her someday, and with this happening on the anniversary . . . I don't know, maybe it's
not
a coincidence. I just don't know what to think.”

“Come to the office, Marva.” Aidan was suddenly calm. “Get in the car and come.”

“I'm supposed to go to the police station to talk about what I saw—”

“It'll be okay if you're a little late.”

“Should I call Gail?”

A brief silence. “No, just come. We'll call her from here.”

JOE WAITED
impatiently for the coffeemaker to beep. It was closer to lunch than breakfast, and he'd already had several cups, but he needed the extra caffeine today.

The pot sat on a tall filing cabinet near his desk. He wiped it down every day and washed his cup in the break room. There were things in the world worth a measure of inconvenience. Decent coffee was one of them.

Waiting provided a break between interviews. So far, they'd yielded nothing useful. Harold and Sheree Gillette were slick, well dressed, and tightly wound, but they had little to offer. Sheree's comment was “I don't know why he looked so
short,
lying there on the driveway.”

The nanny, who slept through everything, was anxious to get home to the kids.

Elena Bergman was groggy, no doubt the result of some strong sleep aids. She almost seemed not to know where she was. Her brother and sister-in-law wanted to come into the interview, argued halfheartedly when they were refused. No matter: Elena had no idea who would want to kill her husband. Of course she knew Hatcher Sproul, she said; Hatcher and Tom went back to college days. They were talking about going into business together. When Joe pressed for details, she confessed that she didn't know exactly what they did for their clients. Or what they might have been talking about late at night. “Maybe this whole thing was just a terrible accident,” she snuffled hopefully.

As though he hadn't ended up in a lake of blood. Which reminded Joe to call the lab.

Gervais picked up on the second ring. “Sheep,” he said, instead of hello.

“What?”

“Sheep's blood.”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, it's a little complicated to make it comprehensible to a layperson such as yourself. Radically different proteins, is the short answer.”

“You know, I
did
take a few biology classes, Ed,” Joe said. “What with the whole, you know, med school thing.” He'd actually been a year into UCSF medical school when he quit to go to the police academy.

“Yeah, well, sorry. Didn't mean to patronize. I guess you're a blood spatter expert, too, so I won't—”

“Come on, Ed,” Joe cajoled. Gervais's ego required a fair amount of stroking. “Don't be so sensitive. You're the man, I don't make a move without consulting you first. Tell me what you figured out. How much blood was there? How many sheep gave their lives?”

“Now you're just mocking me.” Gervais sighed. Eventually Joe managed to get out of him that there had been several liters of blood, spilled from a height of a few feet.

“So—our guy comes along, carrying his sheep blood in a bucket, milk jugs, whatever. Probably going to be a two-handed job, that amount of liquid. He stops and sets it down, leaving his hands free to kill our victim by knocking his head on the retaining wall. Or gives him a shove or trips him or whatever, he goes down, same result. Then he picks up the blood and dumps it on him?” Joe mused. “I don't think so.”

“Why not?”

“Well, it just seems . . . I don't know, inelegant.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Just—if you're the kind of guy who brings props to a murder, you probably have a little more of a sense of theater. You don't just bean the guy and dump the blood on him, you take the time to send a message.”

“I thought the blood
was
the message.”

“Yeah. But it's awfully ambiguous, right? I'm thinking our guy had something more elaborate in mind, but he got interrupted. He didn't expect to find a dead guy. He either tripped and dropped the blood, or he panicked and dumped it and ran.”

“Rather than using it to write a message on the garage door, or something.”

“Or something,” Joe agreed, ignoring Gervais's skepticism.

As he was ringing off, the pot beeped. He poured his cup, then considered and poured a second. He stopped by the kitchen and added milk to both, and made his way to the interview room.

Gail Engler was even more composed today. She'd traded last evening's iridescent draped blouse for a simple gray sweater and black pants. The V neckline stopped short of revealing any cleavage, but the outline of her breasts was visible under the soft knit. Silver and indigo beads twisted around her neck, and her hair, a smooth curtain of pale blond, ended in a slight curve just above her collarbones.

“Detective Bashir,” she said calmly, extending a hand. Instead of shaking his, she merely grasped his fingers with her own. They were soft and warm, the touch somehow more intimate than he anticipated.

Joe sat opposite, and set the mugs down. “I don't know if you want sugar—I didn't add any.”

“Black is fine.”

“But I added milk.”

“Milk is fine.”

Joe didn't bother to conceal his scrutiny. Gail practically invited it, meeting his gaze head-on. She lifted the cup to her lips and sipped slowly, watching him over the cup. She was the sort of woman for whom sensual invitation was elemental to her resting state. Different from Amaris, who liked to provoke, Gail's style was more detached. She liked to be admired. No:
needed
to be admired.

And at the base of that sort of need was always insecurity, in Joe's experience. A need for reassurance was the flip side of fear; Gail's need for male attention indicated a fear that she would lose it. Was she afraid of losing her husband? Unlikely; she'd barely glanced in Bryce's direction the other night. Her beauty? Perhaps. She was that age—mid-thirties—when women were just coming into the full bloom of their beauty, in Joe's opinion, but he knew plenty of women saw every sign of age as a diminution of their attractiveness.