Blood Bond (7 page)

In addition to looking Marva up online, Joe had checked her address, a detail he had no real need to know. But he'd been flipping through the interview notes and thinking of the way her untamed hair had curled around her face, slightly shiny with sweat from the dishwasher, and he'd found her address. He knew the street—part of a nice development, one- and two-bedroom condos set into a wooded area of the foothills.
Single,
he'd judged. Marva had listed her occupation as “self-employed,” and even before he looked her up on the Internet he'd guessed her job was creative. It wasn't just the clothes, the swirling jewelry; it was the way she looked at him, the—

The way she looked at him?
Joe gave himself a mental shake and looked down at his plate. He was surprised to see that he'd finished his lunch.

He needed to refocus, to stop thinking about Marva except as she related to Tom Bergman's death. Ordinarily, when Joe got involved with a big case, everything else started slipping away. He neglected the pile of books on his bedside table. Didn't follow the Cal teams. Didn't read Omar's emails. Didn't listen to Amaris when she railed about politics. Didn't even call his niece and nephew to see how school was going.

During those times, it was as though layers grew around him to buffer out everything but the case. He slept less. Shaved and dressed mechanically. Never stopped sifting through what he knew, tumbling new information in with everything else, even while he slept. He learned to trust this near-fugue state, the strange combination of veiling and intensifying; eventually, the answers came in fits and starts, slipping almost furtively from his subconscious mind to the part of him that burned for resolution.

But he was having trouble on this case. It wasn't just his attraction to Marva—it was the backdrop against which he'd met her: the canvas of white privilege to which he'd feigned indifference for so long it had almost ceased to bother him. Almost. Until someone like Engler made some offhand remark—
I mean no offense to your, uh, religious beliefs
—that reminded him that when you weren't part of the canvas, the barriers never went away. And if Joe really had been interested in Marva, guys like Engler would consider it their duty to remind him he wasn't welcome.

Joe felt anger simmering dangerously close to the surface, making something far more complicated of his simple attraction to a woman. But emotions had no place in his job. There wasn't room for them. Joe picked up an unused napkin and folded it into smaller and smaller squares, wondering how he'd allowed this breach in his focus, and what to do about it. He'd promised himself he would never give less than all of himself to the job the day he walked away from medical school and into the police station to inquire how he could become a cop. In a decade of police work—the first few years in San Francisco and nearly seven on the Montair force—he'd never broken that promise.

THE SOURCE
of Joe's dramatic change of direction was no mystery. On a sunny autumn day in 2001, his father had been beaten within an inch of his life.

Osman Bashir had gone out in the late afternoon before dinner to buy a simple metal washer. The kitchen sink was leaking, and Joe's mother said she couldn't stand to work in the kitchen with the sound of the dripping water. Osman was a man who liked to try things himself before calling in a professional. With both his sons in graduate school—Omar in the MBA program at UCLA, Joe studying medicine at UCSF—he had begun to allow himself the small indulgences of a man approaching retirement, and puttering around the condo was his favorite hobby. He was even considering turning part of the boys' room into a sort of shop, with a small workbench and a pegboard for his tools.

Osman didn't care for Home Depot. He liked small stores, where he could find his own way through the aisles. He was willing to drive out of his way. Across the Fremont border into Sunol, there was a little hardware store he'd visited before.

Coming out of the store with his small package, the top of the brown bag carefully folded down like a lunch sack, Osman was smiling when a pickup truck with two men in it screeched to a halt in front of him. Osman thought the men wanted directions. It was a matter of pride to him that, having lived in the area since emigrating in 1970, he knew his way around very well.

Afterward he had no memory of the attack, but witnesses—and there were several, since it took place in broad daylight on a busy street—said one of the men used an aluminum baseball bat. It was September 19, 2001.

There followed a long, touch-and-go hospital stay before the many months of physical therapy began. Mumtaz and Omar hovered around the hospital room, their eyes rimmed with red, receiving the many friends Osman had made at the accounting firm, the condo building, the Islamic Center, the municipal pool where he swam twice a week. Joe came every day and stayed as long as he could stand it, which was usually less than half an hour. Seeing his father with tubes taped to his skin, his eyelids seeming to grow more translucent every day, spurred in Joe an urgency to act, to do something, anything, everything. He took a job as a security guard as he waited to enroll in the police academy. He had been studying Bajiquan, a form of martial arts practiced by the Hui minority in China, as a way to blow off steam during the intense hours of studying; now he took it up with a vengeance. He ate little and slept less, but his body grew hard and strong as he filled the hours before work with punishing drills.

He made few friends in his class at the academy, at least at first. He arrived early, opened his notebook, and while he waited for the instructors to say something he could write down, he felt the fury inside him rattling the cage, wanting to be let out. People knew what had happened to his father; there had been no hope of keeping that under wraps. A few of the guys wouldn't sit near him; a few others made awkward attempts to get to know him. But Joe didn't have room for any of that. All there was for him was his battle with his own anger.

Time had helped, of course. Even then, Joe had known that eventually his father would improve, the worst memories would fade, his family would grow strong again the way a tree slowly grows a scar over a lightning strike. Mumtaz arranged Omar's introduction to Sakeena, and Joe felt, at their wedding, a tiny spark of hope when he watched his still-weak father on the dance floor in his wheelchair. He graduated and began working, learned to get along with the people in the department. Eventually he reconnected with old friends, went on dates, babysat his brother's babies, was able to sit with his father watching television without fighting the urge to run out into the streets and keep running until he caught up with that pickup truck and tore it apart with his bare hands.

Joe unfolded the napkin and began again, on the diagonal. He made a faint humming sound in his throat, a small thing he did on those rare occasions when he felt the toxic mixture of anger and anxiety rise up in his gut. In a moment he'd mastered the surge and he could feel the layers scaling over.

He was ready to go back to work.

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

ON THE WAY TO
Hatcher Sproul's, an address back in the far wooded reaches of Orinda, Joe called his parents.

“Hey, Pop. Mom said you wanted me to call.”

“Yes. I was at the pool.”

“Keeping up with the laps. That's good. Dr. Abbott won't have to yell at you.”

“Ah, that Dr. Abbott. You know she is five years younger than you, Jamshed.”

“I know, Pop.” His father mentioned it every time Jane Abbott's name came up, which was often these days, since Osman had suffered a mild stroke six months ago and was doing occupational and physical therapy. Joe trod lightly around the subject; he didn't want to do anything to lessen the old man's enthusiasm for recovery. Neither of his parents had gotten over Joe's decision to give up his medical career, but at least his father had finally accepted it.

“I want you and Omar to come out here on Saturday, Jamshed. These screens I have, there are rips in them. We need to fix them before we store them for the winter.”

“You know, Pop,” Joe said lightly, “there's a service that'll come out and fix your screens on-site. Why don't I give them a call? Omar and I will still come over, but maybe we can watch the game or something.”

“Oh no, that's too expensive. I am sure we can do this.” Osman had not lost his fondness for tinkering, but his weakened left hand made it difficult.

“I'll split it with Omar. Better yet, Omar can pay for it. He's rich.”

“No no, what a waste of money. But all right, fine. We'll take them down and then your brother can drive them to the shop. Then we can take your mother to Shalimar for lunch, okay?”

It was an unwinnable argument, like all of them. Joe relented and hung up; he needed to concentrate on the winding streets anyway.

Fifteen minutes and a couple of wrong turns after leaving the highway, he found the place. Three-bedroom ranch, two-car garage. Neat, fresh-painted fence, climbing roses on the gate. Seven-fifty, eight hundred thousand in this neighborhood. Joe hadn't been able to shake the keen interest he'd developed in real estate prices since he bought his own place. He hadn't hit the exact bottom of the market, but he'd still done well; his own condo in San Ramon, in a slightly shabbier development than the one Marva lived in, was worth quite a bit more than he paid for it.

Sproul met him at the door—a fit man in his late forties wearing athletic shorts and a tight shirt made out of some high-tech material that made him look a little like Captain Kirk.

His handshake was hearty. “Come on in, I've got tea, coffee, whatever.”

On the way to a sunny kitchen, a pretty brunette on the phone in a home office smiled and waved. “My wife; real estate,” Sproul said by way of explanation, a note of pride in his voice.

Once they were settled with fresh coffee, Joe got down to business. Sproul had already heard the basic details of Bergman's death, and he shook his head slowly as they talked, his shock seeming genuine.

“How did you know him?” Joe asked.

“Business. And . . . friendship. We went to college together.”

Interesting, the way he hesitated, the order in which he named the connections. “Why was he calling you last night?”

Sproul considered, crumbled half a muffin into bits with his fingers. “I'm not sure I can answer that,” he finally said.

“Try.”

“Okay, I think he was trying to apologize.” Sproul wiped his fingers on a paper napkin, then crumpled it into a ball. “Though it didn't really work.”

“What did he have to apologize for?”

Sproul looked up, gave Joe a full-bore gaze: “He screwed me. But good.”

“Go on.”

“I left Accenture last year. Finally figured out I wasn't ever going to be partner material.” Sproul made air quotes around the words, his tone more chagrined than bitter. “It was leave or be dumped. And Tom, he and I used to get together for squash; he had this idea we could put together our own strategy consulting gig. He kept his day job, though—the idea was I'd do most of the up-front work, troll for clients, get the office set up, et cetera. Took me most of the last six months.”

“You have any luck?”

“You might say that. A couple of outfits I had some contact with, that weren't covered by a noncompete clause . . . one in particular could have floated us for a couple of years.”

Sproul was silent for a moment, and when he looked up at Joe again he was wearing a faint grin.

“I must be the dumbest fuck in town. I never got around to putting together the partnership docs. I could have. Ought to have made it the first order of business. But you figure . . . you know a guy thirty years, back to when we took Freshman Finance together . . .”

“What did he do, Mr. Sproul?”

“Told me the business couldn't really carry the both of us. Said he thought he'd go it on his own for a while, maybe pick up an associate fresh out of business school this spring. You know, somebody cheap. Paid me a little for the six months . . . see, he was the one who put up all the money up front.”

Joe got the picture. He took a minute to turn it over in his mind, remembering med school, the way everyone appraised each other the first day—one out of three of them wouldn't make it, that's what the dean said by way of welcome. Well, they were right; Joe quit, and there were probably more than a few students happy to see him go.

“Sounds cutthroat.”

“Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's funny; I was saying to Carla, how do you know I wouldn't have done the same thing to Tom, if it was me who had the dough up front?”

“And would you have?” Joe tried Bertrise's trick, projecting I-can-sit-here-all-day-if-that's-what-it-takes.

Sproul didn't seem intimidated. “Carla and me, we have a son. Forrest. He's twelve and he's got leukemia. We have a long road ahead of us. And bills . . . Anyway, it's nice when your wife believes the best of you.”

Joe waited a little longer, but the game wasn't for him. Besides, it was rough about the kid—that's where his thoughts went, and that didn't exactly help him keep up the inquisitor routine. “What did you talk about, if he wasn't apologizing to you?”

“Does it matter? I was pissed. Plenty. I yelled at him. I called him some things I'd been thinking up all week. This was a speech I'd been waiting to make. And damn if he didn't hang up on me.”

“You were angry.”

“Yeah, I was. If he'd been standing in front of me, I might have taken a swing at him. I'm not sure there isn't some sort of divine justice at work here, but I wouldn't kill him.”

Maybe, maybe not—it could have been Carla Sproul who talked to Bergman last night, while Hatcher tailed him to the dinner party.

Maybe Hatcher decided he really, really didn't care for getting screwed over.

JOE WAS
barely out of Sproul's driveway when his phone rang. Joe checked the ID while jamming the Bluetooth in and coasting slowly down the suburban street: Odell.

“You didn't return my call.”

“Sorry, Odell. I had back-to-back interviews and then I came out to Orinda to see Sproul. The guy who Bergman called before he died.”

“Anything?”

“Nah . . . maybe, I don't know. Be kind of tough logistically. And he didn't really strike me as the type. I mean, Bergman screwed him, but I figure him for more of a wall puncher.”

“You never know, though.”

“So true . . .” Joe slowed to let a trio of women his mother's age, dressed in neon running gear, cross the street with vigorous strides, arms pumping energetically.

“Hey, I wanted to give you a heads-up. Last night, Gail Engler went out around two a.m. Said she needed tampons.”

“Really?”

“She was back in the right amount of time. And maybe she had 'em in her purse. But I didn't see anything.”

“She say anything else?”

“Nope. Just good night.”

Joe was silent for a moment, thinking. “Huh. Seems like a very strange time to go on such an errand. Of course, maybe she just needed to think . . . take a drive around, get out of the house. I don't imagine anyone in that house was sleeping very well.”

“Yeah. Just thought you'd like to know.”

Joe hung up. He took the freeway back, and then he did something impulsive: he exited early, at the edge of town where Marva's townhouse nestled in a couple of rows of unassuming cedar-sided buildings just like hers.

On her doorstep, hand raised to knock, he nearly turned back.
But this is all right,
he argued with himself.
I have new information
.

And Gail was the one he should be talking to about it. Not Marva.

He knocked.

She was at the door in seconds, her purse in her hand. When she saw him, her lips parted and her eyes widened.

“Ms. Groesbeck. I'm sorry to interrupt. But I've got one more question for you. Do you have a moment?”

“I was . . .” Marva looked down at the purse in her hand, then behind her. Joe followed her gaze, saw a high-ceilinged room that opened into a small kitchen on one end and a tall bay window on the other. In the distance, he could see the hills of San Ramon.

The room was inviting and lush. One whole wall was taken over by her work: a sewing machine and shelves of fabrics and supplies, a work in progress pinned to the wall. There were couches and chairs in a pale celadon, draped in quilts like underwater kaleidoscopes, an ocean worked in fabric. Joe smelled coffee and spice, an inviting smell. It made him think of his own place, serviceably furnished with leather furniture and bookshelves he'd built with his father two summers after his attack, when Osman was finally feeling well enough.

Joe's place had never felt complete to him. It didn't really bother him, but standing here in Marva's foyer, he understood that she was a woman whose inner landscape flowed out to her surroundings in a way that his own never would. Her quiet nature, her natural reserve, couldn't contain the creativity that defined her.

“I was about to go see a friend,” she finally said. “But I have a few minutes. Come in. I just made coffee if you want some.”

“I'd actually love some.”

She flashed him a tired smile. “I know it's the middle of the afternoon, but I needed something to stay awake. I'll probably be up all night again.”

She led him to a bar stool at the kitchen counter and got two mugs down from a cabinet. Joe watched her move around the tiny space as she got spoons and napkins and a pitcher of cream from the refrigerator. She handed him one of the mugs but didn't come around to sit next to him on the other stool. Maybe she wanted the counter between them, a barrier. He remembered their conversation in the interview room, how easily he'd slipped into talking about personal things, about his own family. A barrier was a good idea.

“I don't have sweetener—”

“I don't use it. Thank you.”

“What was your question?”

Joe regarded her for a moment, wondering why he was doing this. To find out what she knew . . . to warn her . . . to encourage her to distance herself? He'd seen how her sister leaned on her, even while judging her. But that wasn't right, was it? Joe was projecting; he had disappointed his own family, and they kept trying to draw him back, closer to everything they knew, everything they held dear. He was the outsider in his family, and Marva was the outsider in Gail's glittering home. But that didn't give him the right to . . . whatever it was he was doing.

“Your sister left her home in the middle of the night last night,” he said, more brusquely than he'd meant to. “Do you know anything about that?”

Marva blinked. “She came here. To see me. She was upset.”

“And what time was that?”

“It was two thirty. I looked at the clock. She was here around half an hour. We talked.”

That jibed with the time Odell had reported. “You didn't mention that this morning.”

“No. I suppose I didn't. She . . . Look, like I said before, I felt like you got a poor impression of my sister, and I guess I didn't want to make it worse. When she was here last night, she was just a little anxious. Your brother, is he younger, by any chance?”

“He is, actually.” He was surprised she even remembered the conversation about Omar.

“Well, so you know. I'm older than Gail by a year. A year isn't much—it's nothing, now—but when we were growing up I always had to get Gail out of jams. Take care of her. You know. And I guess in times of stress we just revert to those roles.” She regarded him steadily, her slender fingers twisting a long lock of her hair that fell across her cheek.

“And she had nothing further to say about Bergman?”

“Nothing,” Marva said, turning away too quickly for Joe to judge whether she was telling the truth. He'd known her less than twenty-four hours, but Joe got the sense that Marva was learning how to hide from him.

ONCE DETECTIVE
Bashir left, Marva drove straight to Gail's. When she rang the doorbell, it was Bryce who answered. He held the door wide and hinted at a bow. The gesture was overplayed, and Marva had the sense, as she sometimes did, that he was mocking her.

“I thought— It's nice that you're home already,” she stammered. “I thought you'd still be at work.”

“Decided to take the day off. After last night and then having to go down to the police station and talk to that Indian detective again.”

Pakistani,
Marva thought automatically. She knew other Bashirs, the name was common enough. She didn't correct Bryce out loud—ever—and sometimes she wished she could stop noticing when he got things wrong. After all, Gail seemed to manage well enough.

“Were you there long?”

“An hour,” Bryce said, clearly irritated. “Maybe an hour and a half. Gail, too.”