Monks said, "Why didn't you go to the police, Roberta?"
She lowered her eyes again.
"I was – you know. In trouble, drugs, mostly. On probation. I figured, if they found me in a wrecked car, fucked up – forgive me, Lord – I was done for. I'd already spent ten days in county. Those dykes in there-" She shivered again. "No way was I going back."
"But you decided to file an insurance complaint?"
"That was Jerry's idea. I didn't want him to do it, but he talked Mom into it because maybe we could get some money. He knew this lawyer and got him to go to the insurance company and threaten to sue Dr. D' Anton.
"Next thing we know, this big black shiny Mercedes pulls up outside, and this man gets out wearing, like, a three-piece suit. He told us he was Dr. D'Anton's lawyer. He looked at the place like he'd just stepped on a turd – wouldn't sit down or even come in. Just stood there in the doorway and talked for about ten minutes, telling us how he was going to bust our balls. It was like listening to the devil, man – he was so smooth, absolutely sure of himself. He said the lawyer we'd used wasn't really a lawyer; he'd lost his license. He said I was a known criminal and a druggie, and I was making up a filthy lie to get money out of this famous doctor, and I was going to go to prison, like, for twenty years.
'Then he says to Jerry, 'Attempted fraud, in partnership with a disbarred attorney, would be a rather serious violation of your parole, wouldn't it?' I still remember that exactly." She mimicked a cold, contemptuous voice. "'A rather serious violation.' Jerry was out of here pretty quick after that."
Monks's restless gaze scanned the room. A shelf of photos included a couple of a pretty, slender girl in her teens. There was no doubt that she was Roberta. She looked saucy, wearing low-cut blouses that thrust her young breasts forward proudly – ready for the world.
'That doctor who sewed you up," Monks said.
"Did he say anything about the cut looking unusual?"
She shook her head, surprised. "Why?"
Because lacerations from a broken windshield typically consisted of many shallow V-grooves, and a precise surgical incision that long would almost certainly have caught the attention of any emergency physician.
"Just curious," Monks said. "Did Dr. D'Anton say anything to you when you were in the operating room?"
"Nooo?" she said, drawing it into a question. Her eyes were starting to get wary.
"The more specific the things you can remember, the more weight it all carries," Monks said soothingly.
"I remember those hands," she said, and added, with unveiled sarcasm, "real specifically."
"What about his face, Roberta? What kind of expression did he have?"
"I didn't see his face."
Monks blinked. "Not at all?"
"Just his hands."
She did not seem to realize that this weakened her story even more. Monks decided not to point it out. He asked a few more questions, then thanked her, and promised her he would be in touch with her soon.
Roberta walked out the door with him. "It's not easy, living here," she said. 'There's a lot of sin around. I pray hard to keep from falling back in."
Monks glanced at the surrounding trailers, quiet, but brimming with the sense of secretive and illicit goings-on.
"I don't have any trouble believing that," he said.
"I pray for Dr. D'Anton, too. I haven't just forgiven him. I thank him for bringing me to Jesus."
"That takes a big soul, Roberta," Monks said.
Bigger than his, that was for sure.
Monks found his way back out through the trailer court's shabby maze to the endless strip of El Camino Real, then took Woodside Road toward Interstate 280, pondering this new pool of information.
He could accept that Roberta had not gone to the police because, in her world, they were even more frightening than someone who had tried to kill her. That nightmare was over. Being under the heavy boot of the law, unfairly or not, could last years, even the rest of her life.
But her story would still be worthless in court. Any decent defense attorney could convince a jury of exactly what D'Anton's lawyer had said – that Roberta had been drunk and drugged, had piled up her car, and had made up the incident in an attempt to get money. She didn't know where it had taken place. She hadn't even seen her attacker's face. The physician who treated her hadn't commented on the nature of the cut. And why had D' Anton let her live? He would have had to stage the accident, roughen the scalpel incision with glass. Had he abducted her in a moment of impulse, then come to his senses and realized she would be traced to the party? Regained a touch of humanity at her screams, or just lost his nerve?
Monks believed that Roberta thought she was telling the truth. He speculated about recovered memory – the kind of fantasy that abuse victims sometimes constructed, out of guilt, fear, the need to block out traumatic events. Surely she was familiar with rumors about girls who disappeared. Could she have incorporated that, in a drug-induced psychosis, into a rationalization for the accident and her behavior leading to it? Her religious conversion, soon afterward, indicated that guilt feelings were already present in her.
But it was so damned outlandish and, at the same time, grounded in real possibility. This was not about sex experiments on alien spacecraft, or human sacrifice at Satanic rituals. Even her admission of not seeing D' Anton's face added the ring of truth.
And then there was Katie Bensen. Who had been a patient of D'Anton's, and had modeled for Julia D'Anton. Who was also an attractive young woman of about Roberta's age, and also a free spirit who liked drugs and parties.
Who also had vanished, and D' Anton had been upset enough to get rid of the nurse who knew.
Interstate 280 was a pretty road along this stretch, if you ignored the fact that it ran right on top of the San Andreas fault. The area was hilly and wooded, with a miles-long wildlife refuge on the coastal side. Traffic was relatively light going north, with the thickening commuter momentum from San Francisco coming the other way.
Monks reached Burlingame within a few minutes, and then he did something he had promised himself he would not. He took the Trousdale exit toward Martine Rostanov's house. He wanted badly to see her, to be in her presence – to inhale the warmth from her skin and help take away the chill that had settled under his own.
He approached her driveway slowly and started to turn in. Then he stopped. Another car was parked in the drive behind hers – a handsome black Saab.
Monks drove on past and went back to the freeway, berating himself. He should have called first. He was acting like a teenager. It was insane to assume that the Saab might belong to a lover, and he had no right to expect otherwise, anyway.
The urge was upon him to pick up where he had left off last night – to check into one of the Union Square hotels near John's Grill, with its great portrait of Dashiell Hammett, and spend the evening at that fine bar. It was another thing he had not done in a long time.
But he kept the Bronco pointed north, up Nineteenth Avenue, through the greenery-laced Presidio, into the mist that had settled over the Golden Gate Bridge. The party that he was invited to tonight was at D' Anton's Marin County house – the same house where Roberta claimed to have been abducted. It would be good to get the feel of the place.
Monks started to realize that something in his mind was calling attention to itself – something Roberta had said that he hadn't paid much attention to at the time.
She had not been able to describe the person who had led her to the couch where she passed out. But she was certain that it had been a woman.
Chapter 26
Monks arrived at D'Anton's Marin County house – the event site – just at dusk. He had driven the last few miles on a narrow asphalt road in the coastal mountains, north of Mount Tamalpais. The road followed a ravine, a creek bed that was dry like most this time of year, until it opened into a small secluded valley. He stopped at the top of the rise.