Hooked (8 page)

19

A
nnie was an experienced sailor—and she wasn’t alone. Five of us had gone out on the boat. Friends of Annie’s I’d come to like, including Sarah, from the night I fell in love at first sound.

It really wasn’t raining that hard. It was a relatively warm day, but the deck was icicle slick. We were a little more than a mile off the coast of Santa Cruz, in Craft Kindle.

Annie went aft. She was tying down a rope when we got hit with a swell. I wasn’t even watching, but I heard her call out my name. When I moved around to the front, we got hit with another wave. I caught her eye, just as she went overboard. At the exact moment, it didn’t seem like a big deal. The waves weren’t that high. It’s not that we were calm, far from it; we just weren’t completely panicked. I grabbed a life preserver and headed to the side, but when I looked over, there was no Annie. I called out. I saw nothing, heard nothing. I dove in.

The waves were ugly but manageable. Where could she have gone? Had she hit her head on the side and gone under? I did circles around the boat—as deep as I could swim. I held tight to a rope I’d been thrown, to keep me from drowning myself.

I almost lost my own life. I swam myself ragged. I had to be pulled from the water, anguished and inconsolable.

We’d dropped the anchor, of course, then an inflatable boat, and spent hours searching, the Coast Guard by our side. Her father hired a veritable army. They searched the water for days.

They found nothing.

20

I
was still lost in the past when Officer Sampson delivered me to the San Francisco Police Department, filled out some paperwork, and set me down on a bench to wait for Lieutenant Aravelo. I tried to avoid eye contact with the passing cops, consumed with the idea that they knew what I’d done to Aravelo’s brother and would relish an obnoxious comment or leer.

What could I hope to get out of this situation? Aravelo would doubtless be in full grill mode. He wasn’t likely to tell
me
a damn thing. Not intentionally. Could he be convinced to trade information?

While waiting, I checked my voice-mail messages. There were two. My editor, Kevin, had called. “Wondering how the story is going,” he said. “Call when you have a sec to chat.” He hung up without saying good-bye. Typical. The other message was from Samantha, who wanted to remind me to visit her the following day for acupuncture. “I sense you need intensive work on your gallbladder meridian.”

Anxious for distraction, I scrolled down the stored numbers file on my phone. I discovered one number I hadn’t called in years. I wondered if it was even still valid. Louise Elpers, licensed marriage and family counselor. In my phone book, she showed up as “braindoc.” I’d talked to her for a few sessions after Annie’s death, and she helped me with the basic approach to processing grief. I remember her saying that I was glorifying Annie, that it was perfectly normal, and that, as she put it, knowing that didn’t help a goddamn bit.

I did manage one reality check in the week just after Annie died. I’d gone to Costco, bought beef jerky in the industrial size, a four-pound bag of peanuts, and a case of Dr Pepper. I just didn’t want to feel obliged to stop. I drove for nine hours due east, away from the ocean. I landed in Litham, somewhere in Nevada, population 814. There was a gas station beside a diner. They were connected, or co-owned, as denoted by the sign, “Gas-n-Steak.”

Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, were flirting, wrestling in a light romantic way. The boy went to his waistband, pulled out a bright green water pistol, aimed, and fired. The girl covered her eyes and squealed with delight. She charged toward the boy and wrapped her arms around him. Started kissing his face. I began to sob, and I didn’t stop even when the gas station attendant asked me to move the car away from the full-service island.

A cop approached me. “Lieutenant Aravelo is ready for you.”

As a journalist, I’d always been in the power position when it came to interviews. I was the one asking the questions. I may not have been equal in wealth or power to the person I was interviewing, but the threat that I might write a story gave me a kind of clout in almost any interview situation. Not with Lieutenant Aravelo.

He was dressed in uniform with his crisp white shirt tucked in smartly. He was asking me to take a seat when a loud buzzing came from what looked to be an alarm clock on his desk. He shut it off, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out a bag of almonds and a banana.

“Small, regular meals,” he declared.

He put a picture on the table. It was grainy, but in color, like it had been taken from a convenience store camera.

“Who is this?” Aravelo asked.

She was blonde, with angular cheekbones and a blouse that came high up onto her neck. I felt a spasm of adrenaline, but I wasn’t sure why.

Lieutenant Aravelo seized instantly on my hesitation.

“What can you tell me about her?” he said. “I want to know everything you know, Dodo.”

Even if I had seen the woman before, it would be tough to recognize from an image of such poor quality. The eyes seemed distant, foggy.

“How about cutting out the offensive and not very clever nickname.”

“Tell me what you know, Mr. Idle.”

“I can’t help you. I have no idea who that is.”

I must have sounded genuine enough. Aravelo paused. He took deliberate bites of his banana, chewing almost comically slowly, like it was part of a regimen.

“How about this one?” The lieutenant held out another photo.

This time my surge of adrenaline was justified. This time, I held it in check. On the table, he set down a photo that I guessed from the relatively smooth skin around the subject’s eyes to be about a decade old.

“She’s Erin Coultran,” Aravelo explained. “Waitress at the Sunshine Café.”

I held my breath.

“I recognize her.”

He sat lightly on the edge of the table and waited. I paused, trying to make it look like I was searching. “The paper said she survived because she was in the bathroom?”

When I looked up, I found the lieutenant searching my face. If he knew that I knew Erin, he wasn’t letting on. Had Weller not told him?

“Did you see her go into the bathroom?”

I shook my head.

“Did you order coffee from her?”

“I had water.”

He wasn’t amused.

“No.”

“Did you remember her from the café?”

“Is she a suspect, Lieutenant?” I asked, trying to sound properly reverent.

Aravelo ignored me. “Tell me about the Saab.”

I remembered what Sergeant Weller had told me earlier. The police had found a red Saab in the water near Half Moon Bay. Maybe this was why I had been on Lieutenant Aravelo’s invite-only list to the police station. They’d found the Saab and wanted more details. After all, I was the one who had given them the tip in the first place. Could I recall anything else?

“Was the woman in the picture the driver of the red Saab?” I said.

“You remember any details?” The lieutenant dismissed my question. “The interior. Was it leather? What about the license plate? What about the frame around the license plate?”

Wouldn’t they have known all this already? Maybe they wanted to verify they had the right car.

What was the harm in answering about the Saab? I mostly already had—the day the café exploded. I did it again. I told him what I’d told him before.

“I wasn’t focused on the car,” I said.

He seemed to consider this, and accept it.

“Why are you asking about the Saab?” I said.

No answer. I upped the ante. “Did you find it?”

Lieutenant Aravelo turned his lips upward into a tight, controlled grin. It could have meant anything. I interpreted it as: You’re a better tactician than I thought.

“How did you know that?” he asked.

It was a fair inquiry. One I was totally unprepared to answer. It would have meant jeopardizing Sergeant Weller and my relationship with him. Maybe Weller and Aravelo were on the same team, maybe not.

Before I’d left Erin, she’d told me I would know what to say when I got into the interrogation room. The realization came upon me slowly, like a wave of nausea.

“The explosion is just the tip of this thing,” I said. “Something went wrong at that café long before it turned into a fireball. You know it.
I
know it. Please stop treating me like a chump.”

I steadied myself for whatever was coming and was still unprepared.

“From now on, I’m calling you Sleeve. Not Steve, Sleeve.”

I squinted.

“Do you know why a woman hates when her man goes to a strip club?” He continued to not make sense. “It’s not about the tits and ass and the lap dances that make weaker men cream their pants. It’s because the men fall in love. For a few minutes, we soak in the belief that we are connecting. We
are
connecting. The best strippers are opening themselves up to us, and we, knowing it’s a finite experience, open up right back. When it works, it’s not about sex. It’s about love.”

He opened the top of a clear plastic container and took a swig of a thick, strawberry-colored juice drink.

“Being a great cop involves reading emotions and being honest about what motivates me and other people. I can see what’s happening inside you right now; you wear your emotions on your sleeve. Your anxiety has a smell, and it’s not just the kind that comes from sitting in the hot room. I can see where the edge is and I can see how close you are to it.”

He clasped his hands.

“What did you have to do with the explosion?” he said.

“Give me a break.”

Aravelo pulled a notebook from his back pocket and flipped it open. He glanced at it while he talked.

“You left the café just before it exploded,” he said.

Then he listed the rest of the circumstantial evidence. I’d known about the red Saab. I knew it had been found, something that hadn’t yet been made public. “Now you’re telling me that there was a previous problem at the café. Would you care to elaborate?”

The way he asked it, I wasn’t sure whether he knew about Andy or Simon Anderson.

“I want to talk to my lawyer.”

When I said it, I was struck by a single thought: Why the hell didn’t I insist on talking to my lawyer earlier? I guess it was because I never thought I was considered a suspect.

“You’re not the only one trying to figure out what is going on here,” I said, standing. “The difference is, maybe I’m doing a hell of a lot better job.”

My frustration, confusion, adrenaline, and yearning boiled over. Aravelo slammed his fist into the table.

“You. Will. Stay. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Investigation!”

I walked out of the building in a rage. I pictured myself slamming a two-by-four into Aravelo, succumbing to a reckless adolescent fantasy.

I hadn’t slept well in two days. My neck balled with tension—a clear demand of the brain by the muscles: Slow down or we will seize up or tear and enforce bed rest. I tapped my head against the side of the building and tried to calm myself by remembering the likely medical causes of my compounding stress. This was all just biochemical. I was experiencing acute stress disorder, the result of a highly traumatic event like confronting death or its prospect. The symptoms were potentially serious—anxiety, detachment, and even dissociative amnesia. Was I even accurately remembering what happened at the café?

I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, just as the phone rang.

“We need to get out of here,” Erin said.

21

E
rin picked me up two blocks away. I noticed the smell. Groceries. The back was packed up with Safeway bags.

“Lieutenant Aravelo is a very dangerous man,” I said.

“I got that feeling.”

“He uses his brain the way his brother uses a flashlight.”

“Which means?”

“As a blunt object.”

“Elaborate, please.” Erin was losing patience. “What did you learn?”

My head pulsed. I rubbed my temples.

“He asked me about you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. Alarm.

“He showed me your picture. He asked if I’d seen you at the café.”

Erin took her hand off the wheel and put it to her mouth. She bit the tip of her thumb.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he tell you why he wanted to know?”

“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” I responded. “He said he was interested in anyone who survived the explosion.”

Even as I said it, I realized the comment would not mollify Erin, and it wasn’t mollifying me. There were a handful of survivors. Why would the cops ask me about one of them?

I learned in medical school that when you perform surgery, you separate the patient’s head from the body with a curtain. In theory, this is supposed to create privacy and protect the patient from seeing anything uncomfortable. The reality is that it protects a surgeon—from whatever case of the nerves might come from realizing that the meat puppet he or she is carving up is attached to a real human being. It lets the doctor be clinical. I felt a momentary urge to be able to look at Erin more clinically, protected by a curtain, and to make a cold assessment. Of her, Aravelo, Danny, the whole ensemble cast.

“I told them everything I knew,” Erin said. “I didn’t see anything.”

“You went to the bathroom.”

“I hate cops,” she said.

The words hung in the air.

“What picture did they have of me?” she asked, sounding calmer.

“A head shot. You looked . . . well, a little younger. Maybe ten years. I think you wore a sweater.”

Erin had a destination in mind. She asked me if I wanted to join her for a night in Santa Rosa. A friend of hers had a secluded house there and she said she needed to get away. She promised she would cook and that I could sleep. It was what the doctor ordered. En route, we stopped by my place so I could feed the cat, pick up a change of clothes, my laptop, and my work papers. I had what I knew would be a vain hope I’d get some work done on my soon-to-be-overdue article.

Erin told me how she’d spent the previous hours. She said she had checked out Andy’s apartment and it was still intact, then called his landlord, who told her he hadn’t ordered any electrical work. But he said the cable company had been doing some work in the building in recent weeks.

As we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I realized I was supposed to meet Sergeant Weller in a few hours. More than that, I needed to meet him. He was a back channel for information and I was ready to demand answers. I started dialing.

“I have an idea,” Erin said. “Why not turn that thing off for an hour.”

I didn’t precisely sleep, but I managed stupor. I tried a relaxation trick Samantha taught me that entailed slacking the jaw, softening the eyes, and focusing entirely on the image in front of you. Hocus-pocus, maybe, but it was the best I could do without Jose Cuervo and lime. I looked at the license plates of cars in front of me. I recited the digits, letting my jaw go slack. Still, I felt my eyelid twitch involuntarily, blepharospasm. My brain channeling its electrical activity. I blinked hard, but I couldn’t zero out, couldn’t rid it of Annie.

In the previous twenty-four hours, I’d learned about Andy and the Andersons, and some blonde in a yellow blouse in a grainy photo, and had been grilled at police headquarters. Underneath them all, there was Annie, her memory blurring with the scenery. Townships passed in a flash, then the hillsides farther north. Green bled into green.

You can have your Swiss Alps, your Italian coast, Aspen. Then bow to Northern California. Go a hundred miles any direction from San Francisco and you’re in bliss. Santa Cruz. Lake Tahoe. Napa Valley. Mountains touching sky. Cliffs overlooking divinely created shores.

“Sarah.”

I yanked out of my stupor.

We had pulled into the right lane. Preparing to exit the highway.

“Explain what that means,” Erin said, “after you hand me a map.”

I rummaged in the glove compartment for a Thomas Guide. Then I skipped ahead—in the story.

“Lieutenant Aravelo showed me a picture of a woman.”

“Another picture?” Erin sounded surprised.

I hadn’t recognized the woman, but I thought of someone who might—an old friend of Annie’s. Her best friend—maybe Sarah could shed some light onto why I had been handed a note in Annie’s script.

As uncomfortable as Sarah made me, I had a soft spot for her, particularly the eulogy she gave at Annie’s funeral. Her opening anecdote revolved around a sizzling August day when Annie was eleven years old. There was a 10K run around the lake. Her father had set Annie up with a tub of strawberry ice cream in a cooler packed with ice, and a sign: “Ice cream scoops $1.”

Annie didn’t want to do it, but her dad insisted it would be a good learning experience. When he returned at midafternoon, the ice cream was all gone, but Annie only had one dollar in sales. He asked what happened. Annie said, “I started a foundation.”

The church crowd had let go of their sadness with a huge laugh. But there was another punch line. Partway through the day, a benevolent passerby had seen her giving away strawberry scoops. He responded in kind. He had come to sell his blond Labrador puppies from a large wicker basket. He gave one of them to Annie.

“Permission to use my mobile phone again,” I said to Erin.

She smiled and shook her head. It struck me as knowing, in a maternal way. “You’ve got a problem with that thing.”

I dialed the number I had for Sarah and left a rambling message, concluding awkwardly that I had a question about our long-gone mutual friend.

Erin put her hand on my knee and smiled. “Put the phone down again—before you hurt someone.”

“Shoes off,” Erin said.

She was carrying a bag of groceries into the kitchen. The gentleman in me should have offered to help. But he was looking at the couch the way my cat, Hippocrates, looks at, well, the couch.

I plopped down. One last thing to do. I’d noticed when I called Sarah that I had two voice-mail messages on my mobile phone. One was from my attorney, Eric Rugger. Good man, smart as hell, huge fan of Bloody Marys. But, as far as I could tell, never during trial. Besides, he was what I could afford.

“Got your e-mail and your phone messages,” he said. “I hadn’t heard about the Aravelo case being reopened. I’ll look into it. But, importantly: Don’t panic. These things are not uncommon. Call me if you have questions, or I’ll get back to you with details.”

The second message was from Mike Thompson. It was classic geek brief. “It’s Mike. Checked out your laptop. Give a call.” Click.

I did, and when I got him on the line he made a techie joke I didn’t understand, prompting him with silence to get to the point.

“I opened the diary, like you asked. Piece of cake. I wasn’t sure what else you wanted me to do. I gave the computer a cursory look. I checked out the operating system and the applications. It seems to be in good working order.”

I put my feet on the wood table.

“Thanks, Mike.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest there wasn’t something unusual.”

I sat up. “Can you say that part again—without the double negatives?”

His response came quickly.

“It’s an encryption scheme.”

“I thought you were able to get into the diary.”

“Not that. Do you know what GNet is?”

I said no.

“It’s an application I’ve never seen before. I found it attached to the operating system.”

“What’s it do?”

“Dunno,” Mike said. “It’s inactive.”

“But it caught your attention.”

“Not really.”

“But you just said that—”

Mike cut me off. “It wasn’t the program that interested me. It’s the fact it’s being guarded by the most sophisticated encryption scheme I’ve ever seen.”