Francine, out.
Another face-up with Robert Darby wouldn’t get him anywhere, either. Just be another exercise in futility. The man was too deep in love and denial to listen to reason until the truth was shoved in his face. And then it might be too late.
Darby, out.
What did that leave him? Not much. Another go at Bobby, if he could manage it. The boy had opened up to him a little on Saturday; maybe there was a way to gain enough of his trust to counteract Francine’s hold on him. Talk again to Gwen Whalen, Tracy Holland, the ex-husband, try to convince at least one of them to come forward. See if he could track down the man Francine had lived with before moving in with Charlene Kepler, David or Darren something.
But the first person he wanted to see tonight was Bryn.
He drove back into the city on 280. It was a couple of minutes shy of four o’clock and he was on Nineteenth Avenue, waiting at one of the stoplights fronting the S.F. State campus, when his cell phone vibrated.
He checked the screen. Bryn. He clicked on, saying, “I was just thinking about you-”
“Jake,” she said, and he knew instantly that something was wrong. Her voice had a clotted sound, as if her throat was full of phlegm. When she spoke again, he could hear the kind of ragged breathing that comes with near hysteria. “Jake, I need you… I don’t know what to do…”
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“Can’t, I can’t… not on the phone. Can you come here… now, right away?”
“Where are you? Home?”
“No. Robert’s flat in the Marina.”
Jesus. “Is Bobby all right?”
“Yes… yes. Hurry, Jake. Please hurry.”
“On my way. Twenty minutes.”
Heavy traffic on Nineteenth Avenue made it twenty-five minutes. Runyon didn’t let himself think on the way. You got an emergency call, you waited until you arrived at the scene and assessed the situation before you opened up your mind.
Avila was a short, slanting street off busy Marina Boulevard, Robert Darby’s address within shouting distance of the Marina Green and the city’s West Harbor yacht clubs beyond. Runyon parked illegally at the corner, the hell with it, and ran to the brown stucco building mid-block and leaned on Darby’s bell in the tiny foyer. The answering buzz came almost immediately. Inside, up a flight of carpeted stairs. Bryn was waiting for him in an open doorway at the top.
She’d composed herself in the time it had taken him to get there, evident in the way she stood with her back straight and her arms down at her sides. But it was a brittle kind of calm; the aftereffects of shock and near panic showed in her eyes, in the paleness of the undamaged side of her face. But what caught his attention first, before any of that, was the drying smear of blood across the front of her blouse.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“The blood-Bobby’s?”
Bryn shook her head, but Runyon couldn’t tell if it was a negative or reflex.
“Where is he?”
“In his bedroom. I washed the blood off his face, made him lie down with an ice pack…”
“You said he was all right.”
“He is now. She hit him in the face, there was blood all over him when I got here. From his nose, from a ring cut on his cheek. His nose isn’t broken, thank God.”
“Francine. Where is she?”
“The kitchen. She… oh, God, Jake…”
Bryn turned away from him, walked to the middle of the room. Steadily, if rigidly, her arms still hanging down and pressed close to her body. Runyon eased the door shut, went to stand close in front of her. Peripherally he was aware that the living room had too much furniture, that the decor was done in a confused jumble of colors-blue, green, orange, brown. But the only color he had eyes for was the crimson on her blouse.
“You’d better sit down,” he said.
“No. I can’t sit still.”
“Where’s the kitchen?”
“I don’t want to go in there again.”
“You don’t have to. Just point me to it.”
“Through the swing door over there.”
He left her, pushed through the swing door. The kitchen, big, lit by track lighting between a pair of skylights, was at an angle beyond a formal dining room. One step into it, he pulled up short.
Bad, all right. As bad as it gets.
Francine Whalen lay on the floor between an island stove and a dinette table, twisted onto her back with her skirt hiked up over her thighs, eyes open with that milk-glass cloudiness he’d seen too many times before. Blood all over her blouse, too, and on the floor around her. The knife in her chest had a curved bone handle stained with bloody fingermarks. The lingering aroma of something she’d been baking contrasted sickeningly with the carnage.
Runyon backed up, turned, returned to the living room. Bryn was pacing in slow, restless steps; she stopped and stood still again when she saw him. A little color had come back into the right side of her face. The paisley scarf over the crippled side hung askew; he rearranged it so the stroke-frozen flesh was completely covered. She didn’t move or speak until he finished.
“I did it,” she said then. “I didn’t mean to, but I killed Francine.”
“What happened, Bryn?”
“She showed up at my home last night, threatened me in a cold-blooded, vicious way… I was afraid she might do something else to Bobby just to spite me. I shouldn’t have come here today, I know that, but I couldn’t help it, I had to make sure he was all right.” Flat voice, without inflection, but Runyon could hear the undercurrent of emotions like a distant sea whisper. “She didn’t want to let me in. I knew something was wrong by the way she acted. I pushed past her, and when I saw Bobby, all the blood, what she’d just done to him, I… went a little crazy. I screamed at her and she screamed back. Then she tried to claw my face. I slapped her, she slapped me and ran into the kitchen, I ran after her. What happened after that… it’s not very clear. We were struggling and the next thing I knew she had that knife in her hand. I grabbed her arm, twisted it, tried to make her drop the knife, but instead she… somehow it got between us and… the next thing I knew I was standing over her with blood on my hands.”
Her hands were clean now. She saw Runyon looking at them, at the fresh-looking Band-Aid on one finger, and said, “I washed it off in the bathroom. Some of it was mine… she must have cut my finger in the struggle.”
“Did Bobby see it happen?”
“No. God, no. He never came out of his bedroom.”
“Sure of that?”
“Yes. I’m sure. He doesn’t know Francine’s dead.”
“Did you call anybody besides me?”
“No.”
Runyon glanced at his watch. Four forty. “What time does Darby usually get home?”
“I don’t know…”
“When you were married to him-what time then?”
“No set time. He usually called if he was going to be later than six. Oh, God, I don’t want to be here when he comes.” She gripped Runyon’s arm. “Jake, do we have to call the police? Can’t you just take Bobby and me away from here?”
He could, sure. Leave the door open, let Darby find Francine’s body. Call the law from Bryn’s house, or not call them at all, on the slim hope Darby and the police would assume an intruder had killed Francine. But running out, pretending, lying, were always bad ideas. Always ended up making a bad situation even worse.
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“Just Bobby, then. I don’t care what happens to me…”
“But I do. There’s no place to take him and even if there was-”
“His doctor. His nose should be looked at, he could have other injuries.”
“You said he was all right.”