“Did Bobby tell you I was hurting him?”
Bryn didn’t answer. Rage was like a probe moving through her; the dead side of her face burned as if it were on fire. She locked her fingers together at her waist to keep them still, keep herself under control.
“Well? Did he?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“I’ll bet he’s never said a bad word about me.”
“He hates you. He said that much.”
“Natural in a boy his age to have some hostile feelings toward the woman who replaces his mother in his father’s affection. Particularly when the mother reinforces it, stuffs his head with lies.”
“I’ve never lied to my son and I never will.”
“Bullshit.” The word sounded twice as ugly coming out of that angelic mouth. “You’ve done your damnedest to poison my relationship with Bobby. You’d better stop, Bryn, I’m warning you. I won’t stand for any more of it and neither will Robert.”
“And I’m warning you-hurt him again and you’ll be sorry.”
“Oh, really? And how are you going to make me sorry?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“No, you won’t. You’re as helpless as a baby. Not to mention paranoid and delusional-the stroke crippled your mind as well as your face. Robert says so; that’s why he left you. I say so, too.”
“And you’re a cold, sadistic cunt.”
“Call me any names you like to my face, but don’t put them in Bobby’s head anymore. If you do, Robert and I will see to it that you don’t have any more time with him.” The smile flashed on again, tight-lipped and humorless. “We can do that-Robert can-and I promise you, we will.”
An image flared up behind Bryn’s eyes: herself leaping forward, hands unclenching and hooking into claws that ripped furrows down the sides of that smug, smirking face. She struggled against the urge, fought it down. Felt herself shaking visibly now. The hot taste of bile filled her throat; the question she managed to push through it had a liquidy sound.
“Did Robert send you to tell me that?”
“No. He doesn’t know I’m here and I’ll deny it if you tell him. This is between you and me, Bryn. Robert’s mine now and so is Bobby. I took them away from you and I’m going to keep them and you’d better resign yourself to the fact and quit trying to cause trouble for us. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Bryn’s throat muscles worked, but she couldn’t get any more words out.
“I think you do. Good,” Francine said. And what she did then was so shocking Bryn was incapable of any reaction: she reached out, almost casually, and yanked the scarf off and dropped it fluttering to the floor. “I’ve always wanted to see what that side of your face looks like. My God, you’re even uglier than I thought. No wonder Robert couldn’t stand the sight of you.”
Francine opened the door, turned long enough to smile her poison-sweet smile again, and then vanished into the darkness.
11
I’d been at the agency just long enough on Thursday morning to pour a cup of coffee from the pot on the anteroom hot plate when Tamara came out of her office. “The call that just came in on line one,” she said, “I think you’d better pick up.”
“Who is it?”
“Judith LoPresti. David Virden’s fiancee.”
“What does she want?”
“She’ll tell you. I’ll listen in.”
I carried the coffee into my office. We still hadn’t heard from Virden and I figured he was nursing his grudge and wanted nothing more to do with us. But he hadn’t put stop payments on the two checks he’d written to the agency; Tamara had contacted the bank yesterday afternoon, late, and both of them had gone through.
Judith LoPresti had a low, well-rounded voice-an intelligent voice. It was also a worried voice, with an undertone of scare in it. “Have you seen or heard from David since Tuesday?”
“No, we haven’t. He was here about one o’clock to pick up our report and the Church papers.”
“Yes, I know about that. The last time I talked to him, he told me you’d found Roxanne McManus.”
“Well, there seems to be some question about that,” I said.
“Question?”
Tamara was still on the line. She said, “He called me later that afternoon, Ms. LoPresti, upset because he said the woman we located wasn’t his ex-wife.”
“… I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we. Everything we found out says that she is.”
I said, “I left a couple of messages for him later that day, but he hasn’t returned the calls.”
“He’s missing,” Judith LoPresti said.
“Missing?”
“Since sometime Tuesday. He didn’t show up to meet me that evening as we’d arranged. He hasn’t been to his office-he missed an important conference yesterday. He hasn’t been home, either. I went to his apartment last night-the mail and newspapers hadn’t been picked up.” The scare in her voice had become a little more pronounced. “It’s not like him to just go off somewhere without a word to me or anyone else. Frankly, I’m afraid something may have happened to him.”
“Did you check the local hospitals?”
“Every one in the city, on the Peninsula, here in the South Bay. He wasn’t in an accident or anything like that.”
Not necessarily true, but I kept the thought to myself. “What kind of car does he drive?”
“A black Porsche Cayman. I bought it for him for his birthday.”
Some birthday present. More to the point, brand-new Porsches can be targets for carjackers and their drivers targets for violent muggers. Dogpatch’s crime rate wasn’t the worst in the city by any stretch, but there were other neighborhoods not far away that had more than their share of gangs and street thugs who didn’t always confine commission of felonies to their own turf.
“Would you happen to know the license number?”
“As a matter of fact I would. It’s a vanity plate-VRDNEXEC.”
Short for “Virden Executive.” The man thought a lot of himself, all right.
“Is the Porsche the only vehicle he owns?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been to the police, Ms. LoPresti?”
“Last night, after I left David’s apartment. But they said I’d have to wait until today to file a missing-person report… something about a mandatory seventy-two-hour waiting period. The officer I spoke to wasn’t very helpful; he seemed to think I was overreacting. I wasn’t and I’m not. If David was all right, he’d have contacted me by now.”
“Since this is the last place he was seen, you might want to file a report with the San Francisco police.”
“They must get dozens of missing-person reports. Will they do something right away to find David? I don’t believe they will.”
I let that pass without comment. She was closer to being right than wrong.
She said then, “Is there anything you can do?”
“Well…”
Tamara said, “We can try, if you’d like to hire us.”
“Yes.” Immediate answer; Ms. LoPresti had already made that decision. “Yes, I would.”
“We’ll need your signature on a contract, and a retainer check.”
“I can leave now and be in the city in an hour and a half.”
“Be expecting you.”
End of conversation, without another word from me. So be it. Tamara was in charge now, and she’d never been bashful when it came to drumming up business. I don’t necessarily approve of the kind of direct approach she’d used on Judith LoPresti, but then the agency wasn’t half as successful when I was running it on solo power and antiquated methods. Once, years back, Tamara had called me a dinosaur. Right. Edging up on extinction like the rest of those lumbering creatures.
She came into my office as I was taking a swig of some of the now lukewarm coffee. “R. L. McManus,” she said.
“What about her?”
“Turns out not to be Virden’s wife and now Virden’s gone missing. Pretty funny coincidence.”
“Hold on,” I said. “He called you after he left Canine Customers.”
“He could’ve gone back.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Try to find out who the woman really is.”
“And then what? You think she did something to him?”