Blood Ties (20 page)

“And, by the way, what in blazes are you doing here? It's your day off.”

“Tregear won't complain anymore,” Ellen said. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the evidence bag with Tregear's blood-soaked handkerchief inside. She dropped it on the desk.

Sam stared at it as if it were a dead cat.

“What is this?”

“A very large sample of Stephen Tregear's DNA. I also have his signed release.”

“And with your very own eyes you saw this stuff coming out of his veins?”

“Yes, sir.”

And how did you manage that?”

“Didn't you know, Sam? Men are like putty in my hands.”

Sam looked back down at the evidence bag and actually sighed, a sound filled with the most terrible resignation.

“I think you better tell me about this.”

*   *   *

“He phoned me, Sam.”

They were driving back toward Fisherman's Wharf. Sam had had some very unkind things to say about his partner's police techniques, and Ellen hoped this would be the last lie she would have to tell him.

“He's willing to cooperate. He's innocent. The killer is his father and he's been tracking the bastard for years. He's prepared to give us everything he knows.”

“He's not innocent until the DNA report says he's innocent.”

“Oh, come on! Then why would he have given us all that nice blood, except to prove he's not Our Boy. Do you think he's going to just hand us something that can put him on death row?”

Sam didn't answer. In truth, there was no answer.

“Okay, so he's innocent.” Sam glowered at the traffic. “But he still sounds like a crazy. That story of his is like something out of the funny papers.”

Ellen experienced a quick flash of anger. Stephen Tregear wasn't crazy—it was cruel and bitterly unfair to dismiss him like that.

But the anger passed as quickly as it had come. What did she expect? What would have been her reaction if someone had told her the same story?
It's like something out of the funny papers.
Sam hadn't seen the look in the man's eyes.

“You've got to talk to the guy, Sam.”

“That's just exactly what I'm gonna do.”

After he had finished listening to Ellen's story, he had picked up the phone and called Stephen Tregear. He realized it was late in the day, he said, but would Mr. Tregear consent to see them? The extremity of his politeness was itself a bad sign.

“And after we finish with this nut job,” he said to Ellen, setting the receiver carefully back in its cradle, “I'm going home to Daly City and my wife's pot roast.”

Tregear met them at his front door. They all took their previous positions in his living room. It was like a class reunion.

“My partner has told me quite a story,” Sam began. He smiled pleasantly, which meant that he was really seething. “I'm just not sure how much of it I can believe.”

Tregear reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out a small black object, which he set on the coffee table in front of Sam.

“That's a thumb drive,” he said. “It holds thirty-two gigabytes and it's just about full. Almost everything I know about the man who at one time called himself Walter Rayne is on there.”

“
Almost
everything?”

Tregear smiled, perhaps a little wistfully. “He's my father. Not everything is reducible to words and pictures.”

“How do you feel about him?”

To Ellen, who knew him, it seemed that Sam took a certain cruel pleasure in the question, but Tregear appeared not to notice.

“How do I feel? Is that important?”

“Maybe.”

“He murdered my mother and my grandparents. He'll murder me if he gets the chance. How would you imagine I feel about him?”

But how could anyone imagine? Even Sam, who had seen everything, could not have imagined. And Tregear knew that. Ellen could see it in his eyes.

“Do you hate him?” Sam asked—implying that so complicated a relationship could be boiled down to a single emotion.

“No. But I'm afraid of him, so it comes to much the same thing.”

Tregear stared off into empty space for a moment and then glanced at Ellen and smiled, as if at some missed opportunity.

“But I'm forgetting my manners,” he continued. “Can I offer either of you anything?”

The answer was a curt “No, thanks.”

They talked for perhaps half an hour, during which Sam never asked why Tregear was so sure Sally Wilkes' murderer was the man who, for the sake of convenience, they referred to as Walter Rayne. He seemed little interested in the evidence. What seemed to engross his attention were the psychology and motives of Stephen Tregear.

At one point he picked up the thumb drive and held it in his open hand, staring at it as if by itself it might be the answer to some riddle.

“You've given this a good share of your life,” he said, not even looking at Tregear. He made it sound like an accusation.

“For the last ten or so years, it almost has been my life.”

“Why?”

“That seems an odd question from a homicide detective.” Tregear smiled and moved his shoulders in a vague shrug, perhaps implying an apology or perhaps not. “For years women have been dying lonely, unspeakable deaths—my mother was almost certainly one of them. By now my father's victims must number in the hundreds. It's difficult to ignore.”

Sam appeared to consider the answer, giving no hint about his conclusions. The thumb drive disappeared into his jacket pocket.

After a while Sam climbed to his feet. The interview seemed to be over.

When they got to their car, Sam dropped the thumb drive in Ellen's lap.

“I'll leave you at the department,” he said. He was inflicting a punishment. “You can start printing out whatever's on this thing. Like I said, I'm going home.”

“Okay, boss.”

*   *   *

When Tregear closed the door on his two guests it felt almost as if the apartment had been hermetically sealed. He could not remember a time when he had felt so cut off from the human race, not since boyhood.

Would they come back? Or, more important, would
she
come back? Or would they simply write him off as another nut case? By now, perhaps, the very weight of the evidence he had collected might tell against him.

This time she had said hardly a word—she had let her partner do all the talking, and it was clear that her partner didn't much like him. But all he had to do was close his eyes and remember what she had been like only a few hours ago.

Could you come back and change the dressings for me tomorrow?

I might.

It was wonderful to see the way she smiled when she said it. It was wonderful to have a woman flirt with you like that.

Tregear had been so long alone that it was difficult to imagine being with someone. Aside from the briefest encounters, he had stayed away from women. He had no right to put them in the line of fire.

But Ellen Ridley was already there. She was a cop working a homicide case, and Tregear's father was Suspect Number One. She was in it, with both feet, and it had nothing to do with him.

It was almost a relief.

Of course, their little moment of connection had occurred before he told her about Life with Walter. Maybe now she shared her partner's distaste. Maybe that was why she had stayed so quiet. Maybe now she saw him as some sort of freak, almost an accomplice in his father's crimes.

Maybe he even was.

The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons.

In a sense, perhaps my grandparents' blood—and all the blood since—is on my head because all I could think to do was run away and save my own life.

You were twelve years old.

Was that exoneration enough?

Tregear had read enough about the tendency of abused children to assume the guilt for their parents' failures, but it had never seemed to him to apply to his own case. That night, when he had found the dead woman in his father's van, he had run away. It had never even occurred to him to do anything else. He had been twelve years old and afraid for his own life. And his father was his father. All of his excuses seemed a little beside the point.

The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons. There seemed a certain justice in that.

And maybe, upon reflection, Ellen Ridley had come to agree.

Or maybe not.

Tregear regarded himself as having few enough claims on the world's forgiveness, but perhaps, just this once …

He knew he would never be able to forgive himself if he didn't at least ask.

*   *   *

When she was at her desk, Ellen stuck the thumb drive into a USB port, waited for the ancient computer to recognize it and then started calling files up on screen for a look.

It quickly became apparent that Tregear's data was vast. It would take days to print it out and boxes and boxes of paper. Budget would have a fit.

Within five minutes she was reading Walter Rayne's dossier. It was pretty thin.

Tregear knew more about Walter Rayne than anyone on earth, and even he didn't know much. The one exception was his list of known aliases, and that was impressive. Walter Bauer, Walter Brown, Walter Carter, Walter Ellis—there was even a Walter Scott.

And under any and all of these names, the man had no IRS history, no social security account, no banking history, no credit history. He had lived his whole life under the radar. Officially, he didn't exist. They didn't exist.

Which led inevitably to the conclusion that he was not Walter Rayne, that Walter Rayne was just another invention and that whoever he really was had disappeared a long time ago. His life before his son's memories of him was therefore probably unrecoverable.

Unless, of course, they caught him. It would be interesting in that case to run his fingerprints and find out if anyone, anywhere, had a match.

And if not, he would remain forever an enigma, a man who had conjured himself out of thin air.

The file on his work habits was much more rewarding. His son was right—the man seemed to know how to do everything.

Tregear's personal recollections attested to the father's knowledge of the building trades. Walter Rayne had worked as a carpenter, electrician, roofer, plumber, tile layer, plasterer and painter. He knew heating and air-conditioning, security systems, sprinkler systems, telephone systems and insulation. He knew explosives.

His patterns of employment were a matter of inference and conjecture. There was a ten-year blank following the twelve-year-old Stephen's flight from Mound City, Arkansas, but from the age of twenty-two, from his vantage in the Navy, Tregear had been tracking his father.

The material on the thumb drive was extensively cross-referenced. The work history file contained pointers to a list of homicides committed over the last twelve years. There were hundreds of them, from all over the country. All of the victims were women. Each entry included the victim's name, her date of death and the location. Many of them contained pointers to case histories and all of them were color coded: black for “confirmed not,” yellow for “possible,” blue for “probable” and red for “highly probable.”

The case histories contained detailed summaries, in which Tregear began to emerge as a critic and connoisseur of the homicidal arts. He discussed motive and psychology—interestingly, as separate categories—method, patterns of victim selection and refinement of cruelty. He even tried to articulate an impression of victim response, discussing them as the first audience of their murderer's performance.

With each succeeding year, the black and yellow cases became fewer and fewer and the blue and red cases increased. This resulted, no doubt, from Tregear's accumulated understanding of his father's patterns.

A close study of the “probable” killings revealed that both father and son were rapidly sharpening their skills.

*   *   *

At six-thirty Ellen remembered that she had a ferret and a college roommate to feed and reluctantly shut down her computer. It was time to go home and be something else besides a cop.

From the beginning, from the discovery of Rita Blandish in a hotel bathtub, this case had ceased to engage her merely as a homicide detective. And now it had acquired yet another dimension. It was no longer about just another sociopath who went around murdering women who were no more real to him than the bad guys in a video game. It was that, but it was also about his son's obsessive quest to find and stop him. Now, for Ellen, once she had heard his story and had sifted through even a small fraction of the data he had so painstakingly accumulated, it was as much about Stephen Tregear as it was about Walter.

Ellen, a homicide detective and the daughter of a psychiatrist, knew that violent criminals were frequently the abused children of violent parents, and that the degree of inheritability was higher in men than in women. She kept reminding herself that, beyond the obvious, she knew very little about Stephen Tregear. He was intellectually brilliant and personally charming, but so had been Gilles de Rais and Ted Bundy.

Do you hate him?
Sam had asked.

No. But I'm afraid of him, so it comes to much the same thing.

But did it? Ellen suspected the truth couldn't be captured in so neat an equation.

Did some part of him still love his father? Or was he enough like his father that he was incapable of love?

Ellen didn't believe that, but she also recognized that she didn't want to believe it.

I've often wondered if the police might have believed me back in Arkansas.… In a sense, perhaps my grandparents' blood—and all the blood since—is on my head because all I could think to do was run away and save my own life.

You were twelve years old.

There is that.