“Well, watch your back. Belinda Drake said I shouldn’t trust anyone.”
Herb made sure they had the museum hall to themselves. “That sounds like good advice. You said some of your colleagues in the police department may already know what’s going on. Do you still believe that?”
“I do,” Frost said.
“Then listen to your gut,” Herb replied. “I talked to a homeless man who haunts the Mission Bay neighborhood. He sees most of what comes and goes around there, including the cops.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He wouldn’t share anything on the network. He would only talk in person, and even then, he refused to give me any details about Lombard. He simply wanted to alert me to the rumors that were going around about my past. But he told me something else, too, and he was most emphatic about it.”
Frost frowned. “What did he say?”
“He said whatever I do, I shouldn’t say a word about any of this to the police. Apparently, Lombard has spies at Mission Bay.”
14
When Frost returned to police headquarters, he found that Denny Clark’s bank, credit card, and cell phone records had all been delivered to his computer. He began diving into his old friend’s secrets.
Denny had never been good with money, and he still wasn’t. He was leveraged up to his eyeballs, including a high six-figure loan on the Roughing It with a spotty repayment record. Comparing his friend’s debts to his modest bank accounts, Denny had a negative net worth. If someone had pushed him to do something illegal for a lucrative payoff, Denny was in no position to say no.
When Frost checked the phone records, the first thing he noticed was that Denny hadn’t made any outgoing calls on his cell phone since Tuesday evening. That was unusual because Denny was otherwise on his phone multiple times a day. He also saw that none of the incoming calls had reached Denny, because he didn’t see a call length longer than one minute.
After the cruise on Tuesday, Denny had stopped using his phone. Why?
Frost began using his own phone to dial the numbers in Denny’s call log one by one. It was slow going and began to eat up most of the afternoon. The majority of calls involved upcoming charters; some of the customers hadn’t heard about Denny’s death and began peppering Frost with questions he couldn’t answer. Other calls were inconsequential, involving everything from pizza deliveries to Giants season tickets.
He found several calls to Carla. When he dialed her number, he recognized her voice on the prerecorded message. There was nothing unusual about what she said — “This is Carla, tell me what you want, and maybe I’ll call you back” — but he hadn’t heard her deep, trauma-soaked voice in more than a decade. She sounded the same. Listening to her, he could picture everything about her again, how she looked, how she walked, how she held a cigarette, how she made you feel guilty if you didn’t treat her like the center of the universe. He could picture her wild eyes that practically screamed that she had never been happy for a day of her life. Carla had always wanted what she couldn’t have, and she despised what she could.
Frost was no genius about women, but he’d been smart enough to know that a relationship with Carla would have destroyed him. He would have spent his life trying to fix someone who could never be fixed.
Instead, that hopeless job went to Denny.
He shrugged off the past and kept dialing phone numbers. Among the routine calls, he found a few numbers that left him with questions. The first was a call that Denny had made to someone named Fawn. There was just one call the previous Sunday, two days before the mystery cruise. Frost dialed the number and listened to the message, and when he was done, he called back and listened to it again.
“Hi. If you want Fawn, you’ve got her. You can enter your code now. If you don’t have a code, well, honey, hang up and don’t call me back until you do.”
The voice had the sultry, inviting feel of someone who made a living dealing with men. It had a hint of a foreign accent. The condescending little intonation as she said “honey” told him that she was smart and self-confident. Based on the message, he guessed that Fawn was an escort, and if so, she was one of the elite girls who charged sky-high prices. Nobody left cash on the nightstand with someone like her or quibbled about the hourly rate. The customer called a prearranged number and handled payment in advance by credit card and then got an approval code to use in scheduling an appointment.
One thing was certain. Denny couldn’t afford a girl like Fawn. So why was he calling her?
Frost dialed Fawn’s number a third time, and this time he left a message. “Fawn, this is Homicide Inspector Frost Easton of the San Francisco police. You’re not in any trouble, but I’d like to talk to you about Denny Clark.”
He didn’t expect a call back.
The next phone number that he flagged for follow-up belonged to someone else from his own past. Frost had gone to high school with Chester Bagley, and Chester had always been one of Denny’s close friends. A couple of times during the year that Frost and Denny had spent living on the boat, they’d used Chester as a freelance bartender, and he’d poured some of the best, strongest drinks Frost had ever tasted. He was good-looking and gay, and he probably made more money on customer tips than Frost did on his police salary.
Frost wondered if Denny was still using Chester as a bartender for his charters on the Roughing It. He left a message.
“Chester? Frost Easton. I’m sure you heard the bad news about Denny. I’ve got some questions for you. Give me a call, okay?”
He kept dialing more numbers.
Denny got and made a lot of calls, and the individual numbers in the phone records began to blur. With most of the calls, Frost got a message rather than a live person, and he rattled off his name and contact information the same way every time as he asked for a call back. He worked his way backward in the records day by day, until he was at a point three weeks prior to Denny’s murder. Several hours had already gone by as he sat at his desk.
He dialed. Left a message.
Dialed. Left a message.
Dialed. Left a message.
And then a live voice answered, startling him. What made it so strange was that the voice was in stereo. He heard it over the phone, and he heard it across the busy floor of detectives around him.
“Trent Gorham.”
Frost said nothing at first. He looked up from his desk and stared across the room and saw Gorham with his phone in his hand. When the dead air stretched out, the other detective said again, “Trent Gorham. Hello?”
Finally, Frost spoke softly into the phone. “Hello, Trent.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Frost Easton.”
Gorham’s head swiveled slowly. Their eyes met from one desk to the other. Dozens of police officers passed in and out of their line of sight, but for now, they were like the only two people in the room. Frost felt tension seeping through the phone and across the floor.
“Easton,” the other cop murmured in reply. “I figured you’d be calling me sooner or later.”
“You want to explain?” Frost asked.
Gorham didn’t even blink as he stared back. His bland, blond face was devoid of expression. He leaned back in his chair and casually propped one arm behind his head. “You mean, why I called Denny Clark?”
“That’s right. And why you didn’t tell me that you knew him.”