He had Irah’s address from the computer. Time to see what her home told him about her. He headed for the outside wall and through it.
A small voice in him started to murmur about due process and civil rights, but he stamped it into silence. What did a dead man care about those. Besides, he reflected, running up to the roof… if Irah killed Sara and him, she had certainly violated their civil rights.
He sighted west on the Sutro Tower. It stood south of Irah’s Richmond address, but as the highest point in the city, he ought to be able to go line-of-sight almost anywhere from there.
Seconds later, standing on the topmost crossbar of the tower, he contemplated landmarks in the vicinity of her address. Spreckels Lake in Golden Gate Park lay even with avenue numbers in the mid-thirties, which put it just blocks from her. He aimed for the lake. After jogging across its surface dodging boats, then out of the park, he had clear line-of-sight…down along the park on Fulton, then up the avenues.
Like the other houses around it, Irah’s…sunny yellow with darker front door and garage door…consisted of two floors stacked over a garage. A more expensive house than when municipal employees first populated the area, but modest compared to Flaxx’s pile of architecture. The entry hall had a keypad for a top home security system — a result of her burglary, no doubt — but her living and dining rooms looked as though she were as indifferent to her surroundings here as she was at the office. The livingroom had just a small furniture suite by the front windows…no pictures on the walls, no plants, and none of the personal clutter that accumulated in his own livingroom. Not a home, Cole mused, a bivouac. Instead of a table, the dining room had a treadmill and a Bowflex. Dishes in a drainer on the kitchen counter indicated she did use the kitchen. Hoping she did not sleep in a bivouac, too, he headed upstairs.
To his relief, it proved to be where she really lived.
Pulling down walls had turned the entire floor into one large master suite. Hassocks, reading lamps, and big, deep chairs furnished the sitting area up by the front windows. Down one wall, bookshelves flanked both sides of a plasma screen TV/media center. Against the opposite wall sat an antique rolltop desk — closed — and curio cabinet crammed with kitsch. Between them a table held a printer, with a shredder beneath it. Cole peered down past the shredder into the catch-basket. Damn. If only he could pick things up.
To forget that frustration he checked out the bookshelves…and blinked in amazement. He would not have taken her for a reader…and even less as someone likely to choose heavy reading. Aside from some mystery novels, college level texts filled one section of shelves…covering literature, history, psychology, and general science. Judging by the multiple bookmarks sticking out of the tops, she had read at least portions of them all. Making up for not finishing high school, it appeared. A framed G.E.D. certificate stood on one shelf.
Other shelves astonished him even more. The books, video tapes, and DVD’s — both commercially produced and home-recorded — looked straight out of a police library…true-crime studies, profiles of American and British police departments, the California Criminal Code, texts on locksmithing and safes, on security systems, autopsies, firearms and ballistics, crime scene investigation, the art of interrogation, arson investigation. He did not own that much law enforcement related material. Her interest in law enforcement had not stopped with the Citizens’ Academy.
At the bedroom end, the wall opposite her bed had been turned into a photo gallery. The photographs hung above a table displaying a large model of a classic Mustang GT…dark green, like the one Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt. He looked over the photos.
And found a shrine. The “model car” was actually a custom funeral urn…flanked by a memorial book and a framed service program with the name Scott Ledonald Carrasco. Dates on the program cover indicated Carrasco had died eight years ago at age twenty-four.
Which probably explained Irah’s return to San Francisco.
All the photographs featured the man in the surfboard photo. At first glance they appeared to be 8 x 10 enlargements of ordinary snapshots…showing Carrasco standing beside or sitting behind the wheel of various cars, and Carrasco drinking with Irah and buddies in bars or around a fire on the beach. Excitement tingled in Cole. Tattoos on the buddies screamed jailhouse…and the vehicles looked like a shopping list for Gone In Sixty Seconds…a BMW Z8, Mercedes SL, Porsche 911, Lamborghini Diablo, series E Jaguar, Dodge Viper, a Mustang GT.
Cole itched to run Carrasco through the computer. Not that being married to someone with a record and felonious friends made a case for Irah being a killer. He grimaced. Unfortunately nothing he had seen so far indicated anything criminal. Not even her library.
He turned away to check her closet.
Once it had been ordinary sized, he guessed, but taking out the back wall gained access to an adjoining bedroom and gave her a huge walk-in. Clothes racks ran the length of one wall, opposite a bank of drawers and shelves. One shelf had medium and long-hair wigs on mannequin heads. At the far end stood a big armoire and a theater-type makeup table with lights around the mirror.
Looking the two pieces over, he felt that tingle again. Furniture like this usually had rim locks, the kind operated with a skeleton-type key. These had been fitted with cylinder locks. What did she want to protect…or hide?
Closing his eyes, he walked into the armoire. When he opened his eyes again, he stood in the dark and almost up to his knees in the drawer section. Where despite the dark he saw just fine. Not that there was much to see…just a gun safe on the floor at one end and frayed jeans and a battered leather bomber jacket on hangers at the other end, with equally battered work boots sitting under them. What made this worth extra security? True, she had the gun safe, but it had its own lock, operated with a key pad like his at home.
He waded toward the clothing. The jacket hung with a bulkiness that suggested the presence of something under it on the hanger. To check that out, he passed through to the far side.
Opening his eyes again, Cole found himself looking at a faded Kansas City Royals baseball cap hanging on a hook. His scalp prickled. He had seen a cap like that in photographs taken of onlookers at Flaxx fires…and the desk clerk and other guests at the Kijurian’s hotel described him as wearing a Royals cap. A Royals cap, plaid shirt, and…a leather bomber jacket.
Cole spun around to the jacket. A plaid shirt hung draped over the lower bar of the hanger. This had to be the Kijurian costume. Who wore it? Irah had the clothes…but everyone who claimed to have seen Kijurian described him as stocky, which Irah definitely was not. Then he spotted the reason for the jacket’s bulk…body armor hanging under it…not the bullet proof type law enforcement wore but the bulkier protective vest he had seen on bull riders. Like the one Irah wore in her bull-riding photograph. That vest under the jacket could make her appear stocky. What a tidy way for Flaxx to torch his stores…keep it all in the family.
Irah’s face, though, looked nothing like the individual photographed in the fire crowd or that described at the hotel. Even discounting the bristling mustache and eyebrows, the Kijurian face was broad, Slavic, jowly.
Cole backed out of the armoire and eyed the makeup table. What was the movie where bit-part characters came on screen at the end and pulled off false faces to reveal themselves as famous actors? The List of Adrian Messenger. Could Irah create herself a different face like that? Were her supplies what she had carefully locked up?
Too bad he had no true sense of feel that let him reach in the drawers and explore the contents. Then it occurred to him that maybe her could look in the drawers.