He returned to the bedroom, stood looking down at what was left of Brian Youngblood. He could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Chronicle: BIZARRE TRANSVESTITE MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, the media would love this. Even in San Francisco, where bizarre happenings were part of the norm, it was just kinky enough to warrant a big play-the kind that provokes smarmy comments and sick jokes.
Brian doesn’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do. I’ll pray for him.
It’d tear his mother up. Her only child, all she’d had in a life barren other than her religion. His death, even the money troubles and the collusion in Myers’s embezzlement-with the help of her pastor, she’d learn to live with that. But the rest of it…
He kept staring at the body lying there in the ice-blue dress and the black net stockings. Lipstick, eyeshadow-you could scrub that off. The bloody dress and the stockings and woman’s underwear and wig could be disposed of easily enough. Not so all those clothes in the closet, bottles of makeup on the dresser-but he could’ve been living with a woman, it could look that way in the preliminary stages.
Only one person besides him knew the truth about Brian Youngblood now, and Ginny Lawson wasn’t talking to anyone about Brandy. Might come out later that Brian had been a cross-dresser, but by then it wouldn’t have any media appeal. It was what he was wearing when he died, and the dual-personality angle, and Myers’s suicide note that made it sleazy media fodder. One click of the delete button would erase the suicide note. With men’s clothing on the body instead of the dress and underwear, with some of the details left out or glossed over …
Tampering with evidence.
Thirteen years as a police officer, another seven as a private investigator, and this was the first time he’d ever for one second thought of crossing the line.
Did it make any real difference to the law if the details of a conclusive murder-suicide were altered slightly? No. Would it make a difference to a bereaved mother and her memories of her son? Definitely. Strong arguments in favor.
But not strong enough.
He wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t capable of doing it, for Rose Youngblood, for Aaron Myers’s sister and her two kids in Pacifica, for anyone. Not because he might get caught, but because it would destroy one of the last things he had left that mattered to him: his self-respect.
He opened his cell phone and tapped out 911.
24
On the way into the Oakland Hills I tried to find a possible fit for Rebecca Weaver in the Krochek disappearance. Hard to do without more facts and the answers to a bunch of questions. And there might not be a fit. An affair six months old was a pretty cold dish to go digging around in.
Unless Mitchell Krochek had started sleeping with her again, or had been sleeping with her the entire time he’d been bedding Deanne Goldman. From what I’d learned about him, he was the type of man capable of maintaining two concurrent affairs, particularly when one of the women lived right next door.
Krochek had told me he’d talked to his neighbors after the disappearance, but he hadn’t been specific about which ones. One of them must have been Weaver, given her proximity, and there was no reason for her not to have been candid with him if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. Ms. Goldman had no idea one way or the other; he hadn’t mentioned the woman’s name recently. How did Weaver and Janice Krochek get along? She didn’t know, she said, but if there’d been any problems Mitch would have told her, he told her everything about his private life. Sure he did. She also claimed not to know anything about Weaver other than what she’d confided to me about the brief affair.
I’d’ve preferred to talk to Krochek before I interviewed Rebecca Weaver, but when I called his cell all I got was voice mail, and his secretary at Five States Engineering told me he was on a job site and incommunicado for the day. So I’d just have to wing it with Ms. Weaver-assuming she was home and willing to talk to me.
When I drove into Fox Canyon Circle, the three houses grouped around the cul-de-sac had an external look of desertion. No people, no cars, not even a sprinkler working in one of the front gardens. The whole area had a two-dimensional look under a high, fragmented overcast; the pale sun seemed caught in the gray-white like something in a web, its light silvery and shadowless. Despite a strong wind and the absence of humidity, it was the kind of day that makes me think of earthquakes. The sky had looked a lot like this when the Loma Prieta quake created several hundred square miles of havoc from Santa Cruz north to Sonoma County in ’89.
I parked between the Krochek house and the one belonging to Rebecca Weaver. The wind bent and swayed limbs in the trees along the canyon rim, and you could hear it thrumming in the telephone wires. It was like a hand on my back as I walked up the front walk to the Weaver house.
When I pressed the doorbell, a few chords of some vaguely familiar song echoed inside. Cute. Like the song snatches that the cell phone companies used in place of a good old-fashioned ring.
Two minutes, and the door stayed shut.
I let the bell play its tune again. Same result.
Well, hell.
There was a flagstone path that wound through the fronting cactus garden. I went along there onto the Krocheks’ property, following the route Rebecca Weaver had taken the day I’d met her. The front gate was closed but not locked. I went across the inner patio and pushed the bell there. Normal chimes, and as expected, no response.
It took me about fifteen seconds to decide to exercise a certain tacit right accorded me as Mitchell Krochek’s representative. The Krocheks’ spare key was still under the decorative urn at the front wall; I dug it out and used it on the door.
The coolness inside was faintly musty, the way houses get when they haven’t been aired out in a while. All the drapes were closed tight, making it too dim to find my way around without turning on some lights. The telephone and answering machine were in an arched alcove off the formal living room. The blinking light on the machine indicated that there were two messages. The first was from one of the friends Krochek had contacted about his wife, asking if everything was okay; the second was a familiar male voice saying curtly, “Carl Lassiter, Mrs. Krochek. Call me.” That one had come in at 2:45 yesterday afternoon, before my meeting with him.
I went into the kitchen. The dried blood smears were still there on the tile; Krochek had followed my advice on that score, at least. He hadn’t touched anything else in there, either; the dirty dishes still jammed the sink, giving off the sour odor of decay.
Nothing had changed in the rest of the house, as far as I could tell. The empty Scotch bottle and overflowing ashtray and strewn clothing still cluttered the spare bedroom. The bed in there was unmade, the sheet pulled loose at the bottom corners-testimony to a couple of long, sleepless nights for Krochek before he moved in with Deanne Goldman.
Back to the kitchen and into the laundry room. A quick look around there told me nothing. I turned the deadbolt on the outside door and stepped into the backyard.
The narrow half-moon gouge in the lawn caught my eye again. I got down on one knee to look at it this time. Half-inch or so deep, which meant that it had been made by something heavy; the grass that hadn’t been ground down into the dirt was brown and dead.
Wheelbarrow?
Could be. The width of the furrow was the right size for a barrow tire. And a wheelbarrow was a convenient way to move a body from one point to another. To a car, say, backed into the garage or up close to the garage door.
There was no sign of a wheelbarrow out here, but I thought I remembered seeing one among the other garden implements when I’d looked into the garage last time. I headed over that way. What stopped me before I’d taken a dozen steps was a smell carried on a gust of the cold wind. Rank, noxious-