I heard her snort.
“Garbage,” she said. “I turned them into confetti and threw them out. After I closed the garbage-can lid, I thought, what are you doing here? This city, everything's nuts. Then the next night, someone broke in and that was it.”
“What an ordeal,” I said.
“Dr. Delaware, I never really knew Nolan but nothing could have prepared me for those pictures. It's just so hard to reconcile, someone you grew up with… Anyway, here I do feel safe. Gary's got forty-five acres with horses, all I see when I look out the window is grass and trees. I know I can't stay here forever, but right now, it's working. No offense, but, at this point, a change of scenery seems a lot more valuable than therapy. Anyway, thanks for calling. I haven't told anyone. Actually, it wasn't bad being able to unload. Knowing it won't go any further.”
“If there's anything else-”
“No.” She laughed. “No, I think this has been quite enough, Dr. Delaware… dear little brother. First he goes and kills himself on me, then he leaves me souvenirs.”
Code 7 for hookers.
A sleaze, but not a killer.
Plenty of reason for guilt.
A bleak situation.
Perhaps Nolan had been found out, referred to Lehmann. Talked it out, got no easy answers. Lehmann letting him know he'd have to leave the force. Nolan opting for final exit.
Now I could understand Lehmann's nervousness.
Confidentiality issues and beyond. He made a living as an LAPD contractor. The last thing he needed was to expose yet another LAPD scandal.
Feeling sad but relieved, I went into my office and thought about being Andrew Desmond.
Place of birth: St. Louis. Suburbia: Creve Coeur.
Self-made father, bourgeois, conservative, looks down on psychology, Andrew's intellectual pretensions.
Mother: Donna Reed with an edge. Civic volunteer, sharp-tongued. Convinced Andrew was precocious, had his IQ tested as a child. Frustrated at the boy's chronic underachievement but explains it away as the school's failure: not stimulating poor Andrew.
For simplicity's sake, no sibs.
Poor Andrew…
Robin came in at six. “What's the matter?”
“Nothing, why?”
“You look… different.”
“Different how?”
“I don't know.” She put her hand on my shoulder, touched my stubbled cheek. “A little down?”
“No, I'm fine.”
The hand moved back to my shoulder. “Alex, you're so tight. How long have you been sitting hunched like that?”
“Couple of hours.”
Spike waddled in. Usually he licks me.
“Hi,” I said.
He cocked his head, stared, left the room.
41
On Tuesday night, at 11:03, Daniel was waiting for retired Captain Eugene Brooker in the parking lot of a bowling alley on Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista. He'd noticed the lot that afternoon, when he'd driven by Wilson Tenney's former apartment- a dismal, earthquake-cracked, ten-unit box bordering an alley.
Wearing a suit and tie, he'd represented himself as an insurance claims adjustor to the old Mexican woman who lived in the manager's unit.
The former park worker, he'd told her, had filed an earthquake claim for damaged personal effects and he wanted to verify Tenney's residence at the address during the Northridge quake.
“Yeah,” she said, and nothing else.
“How long did he live here?”
Shrug. “Couple years.”
“Was he a good tenant?”
“Quiet, paid his rent.”
“So nothing we should worry about?”
“Nope. Tell the truth, I hardly remember him.” The door shut.
His look into Tenney's background had been more of the same. No Medi-Cal records or state hospitalizations, no citations on the Chevrolet van, not a single entry or cross-reference to any crime files.
Tenney hadn't applied for welfare or for a job at any other city, county, or state park within a hundred-mile radius- Daniel had lied creatively for half a day to find out.
So either Tenney had moved, or just disappeared.
Still, Daniel felt something about the guy- an intuition, what else could you call it? So fuzzy he'd never mention it to another detective, but he'd be foolish to ignore it.
The first thing was what he knew about Tenney's personality- a loner who flaunted the rules, reading on the job instead of working, that remark about being a white male. Put it all together and it resonated.
Second: a van. He could not erase the image of Raymond Ortiz being spirited away in a van.
A vehicle that hadn't been seen since Tenney's firing from the park. Shortly after Raymond's abduction.
Bloody shoes…
He'd said nothing about Tenney to Zev Carmeli.
The deputy consul had taken to calling him every day, between 5:00 and 8:00 P.M., getting irritated when Daniel was out, even though he knew Daniel was working on Irit and nothing else.
Tonight, Zev had caught him just as he sat down to a tuna sandwich, the police scanner going in the kitchen. “Are they giving you what you need, Sharavi?”
“They're being cooperative.”
“Well, that's a switch. So… nothing, yet?”
“I'm sorry, no, Zev.”
Silence on the line. Then the same question: “Sturgis. You're sure he knows what he's doing?”
“He seems very good.”
“You don't sound enthusiastic.”
“He's good, Zev. As good as anyone I've ever worked with. He takes the job seriously.”
“Is he taking you seriously?”
About as seriously as could be expected. “Yes. No complaints.”
“And the psychologist?”
“He's doing his best, as well.”
“But no brilliant new psychological analysis.”
“Not yet.”
He didn't mention Petra Connor or Alvarado or any of the other detectives. Why complicate things?
“All right,” Carmeli finally said. “Just keep me fully informed.”
“Of course.”
After Zev hung up, Daniel bolted down the sandwich, said grace after the meal, then the ma'ariv prayers, and resumed reading The Brain Drain. Some of the details flew over his head- graphs, statistics; a very dry book, but maybe that was the point.
Dr. Arthur Haldane trying to obscure facts with verbiage and numbers. But the message came through:
Smart people were superior in every way and should be encouraged to breed. Stupid people were… during good times, a nuisance. During bad times, an unnecessary obstruction.
Dry, but a best-seller. Some people needed others to lose in order to feel like winners.
He'd looked into Haldane's background.
Yet another New Yorker.
The book listed him as a scholar at the Loomis Institute, but Sharavi's Manhattan operative hadn't traced any calls from Haldane to Loomis's office. Haldane's apartment was in Riverdale, in the Bronx.
“Decent place,” the operative had said. “Healthy rent, but nothing that special.”
“Family?”
“He's got a wife and a fourteen-year-old daughter and a dog. A mini Schnauzer. They go out to dinner twice a week, usually Italian. One time they had Chinese. He stays in a lot, doesn't go to church on Sunday.”
“Stays inside,” said Daniel.
“Sometimes for days at a time. Maybe he's working on another book. He doesn't own a car, either. The one phone we know about, we've secured, but he could be using E-mail and we haven't found any password yet. That's it, so far. Nothing more on Sanger and that sour-faced woman, either. Helga Cranepool. They both go to work, they go home. A boring bunch.”
“Boring and smart.”
“So you say.”
“So they say.”
The operative laughed. She was a twenty-eight-year-old Dutch-born woman whose cover job was photographer for The New York Times. No connection to the Israeli government except for the cash that was deposited for her each month in a Cayman Islands bank.