Tell No Lies (38 page)

“Why’d you lie?” Dooley pressed Angelberto. “About Martin’s alibi? You told Daniel you were with Martin and his broken-down car at midnight. No—you said at
least
until midnight. Which is a little tricky, since at that time he was across town cutting Marisol Vargas’s throat.”

Wearing his loose-fitting overalls, Angelberto sat on the bare wooden bench before his open locker, blinking down at the oil-stained floor. Terrified. “I did not lie. I did not.” He pointed at a plain-faced clock nailed to the wall above his locker. “It was midnight. I remember I came back upset that it was so—” His long eyelashes fluttered, and he pressed his hand to his chest, as if on the verge of heaving. “Oh,
por Dios.
”

“What?” Dooley said.

“Es noviembre.”

“Yeah. It’s November. Speak English, hombre.”

“The first Sunday. It was—¿
cómo se dice
?—the clock change?”

It seemed impossible after the last two hours that anything would catch Daniel off guard, but there it was, another jolt. “The end of daylight saving time,” he said.

Angelberto’s bare arms were coated with sweat. “I change the clock late.”

“So it wasn’t midnight like you thought,” Daniel said. “It was eleven
P.M.
”

Dooley smacked the doorframe with her palm. “Which left Martin plenty of time to get to 1737 Chestnut Street.”

Angelberto looked grief-stricken. “I am sorry. So sorry for what I have done.”

Dooley’s cell phone shrilled, and she answered and uh-huhed a few times, gesturing Daniel a step into the hall. She hung up and said, “Looks like they located Martin’s girlfriend, Viviana Olvera. Let’s go.”

Daniel cast a glance back, wanting to offer some piece of comfort, but Dooley was already blazing away past the uniformed cops toward the garage.

He left Angelberto there on the bench with his shoulders slumped and the wall clock looking on.

*   *   *

On summer mornings when the coastal fog blows in to shroud the land, Sutro Tower is the only piece of the skyline that rises into visibility, beaming TV reception into the folds and divots of the city. When the wind around Mount Sutro has its back up, it can knock a grown man over, and it staggered Daniel now, causing him to take a quick step off the curb behind the police barricade.

They were up past Gardenside Drive on an impossibly steep street, embedded in the fog belt that claimed the hill. As if the incline, smothered visibility, and wind weren’t disorienting enough, the Muni line ran right past them, buses heralding their approach with strained rumbling before sailing out of the mist like ghost ships. The medicinal taste of eucalyptus suffused the air, and through breaks in the soup, Daniel could make out patches of green below and the vague outline of the buildings of the UCSF Medical Center, a bulwark to the forest.

SWAT had geared up and filed into the apartment building a few minutes earlier. Dooley paced behind the sawhorses impatiently, radio at the ready. “The hell’s taking them so long? I thought the landlord confirmed a sighting.”

“Maybe she’s not there anymore,” O’Malley said. “Remember, that apartment’s been checked a handful of times. Nobody saw anyone but Martin.”

“That’s because no one was looking for anyone
but
Martin.” Tapping the radio to her lips, she stared at the building’s exterior. The place was Section 8, voucher-subsidized for low-income tenants, and it looked it. A stained concrete rectangle, like a domino set on its side, standing out in the otherwise well-tended neighborhood.

An eerie screech reached them from above, the banshee howl of the wind whipping through the tower, raising goose bumps on Daniel’s arms.

*   *   *

Viviana heard the quiet scraping of boots in the corridor outside, and she knew. Tears rose to her eyes instantly. It was over, Martin either dead or captured. Even in this box of an apartment, she felt suddenly dwarfed, as if the walls were rising all around her, the ceiling growing ever distant.

She’d prepared for this aloneness, this end, but
knowing
it, feeling it roost inside her chest was nothing she could have prepared for.

First Francisca. Now Martin.

She could sense them out there, countless men with guns and gear, readying, doing their best to be silent, invisible. All this, for her.

She pictured Martin’s face, so clearly she could have reached out and touched it. He’d never given up. Not once.

She rushed to the worn mattress and flung it up, exposing an open hatch in the floor that led down into the crawl space. A few cockroaches scuttled among pipes and rebar. Nestled to one side was their stash of folders. The secret plan.

She dropped in, letting the mattress fall just as she heard the boom of a boot or a battering ram meet the front door. Darkness claimed her. Bodies stormed the room overhead. Men shouted. She was on her knees and elbows, breathing dust, doing her best to flatten her body and squirm forward. The folders slipped beneath her, tearing, their contents scattering—maps and hospital files, schedules and reports. In the darkness she felt a glossy photo bow under the heel of her hand, a prized death snapshot of One of the Responsible crying blood, either Marisol Vargas or Jack Holley.

From above she heard someone shout,
“The mattress—check beneath the mattress!”

She scrabbled forward even harder, but the papers slipped beneath her hands, her feet, giving her little traction.

All at once the world yawned open again, light blazing down on her from the hatch.

“Here! Here! We got her!”

She lurched for the darkness ahead, but gloved hands seized her around her ankles. As she was torn backward, bellowing, her arms slid across photos of the dead, crumpling them into the grime.

*   *   *

Outside, Daniel’s unease had reached a fever pitch when Dooley’s radio squawked. She ducked from the gale, shielding herself behind the thick gray trunk of a Monterey cypress rising up out of the sidewalk. Radio at her cheek, she plugged the opposite ear and looked up into the jagged crown of leaves. She made a fist, pumped it, stepped back into range.

“Found her in the crawl space beneath the apartment. They’d widened out a vent so she could slip down there during searches.”

The two of them waited tensely, watching the building. From the heavens came another moan as wind moved through the prongs of the tower.

Finally the glass lobby door opened, Viviana stepping forth sandwiched between two SWAT officers, her hands cuffed before her at her waist. They led her down the stairs onto the sidewalk and toward the sawhorse en route to the caged squad car.

Daniel steeled himself.

Something was wrong with her face. As she neared, he saw that it was a patchwork of swells and bruises, the skin stretched shiny tight across one cheek, her lip dotted with a broken scab. He didn’t want to confront her but didn’t want to step away either, and as she passed right before him, she pulled to a halt.

Her head rotated toward him. She wore torn sweats and a ragged T-shirt, and he could smell the grime of the crawl space on her. Behind him he heard the roar of a Muni bus laboring up the hill. He thought she might spit in his face, but no, she just stared into him, wearing an expression that bordered on smug.

The ground shook with the approaching Muni bus, so her words were lost, but he read her battered lips. They said,
You’ll see.

The Muni bus emerged from the fog.

With a violent shake of her shoulders, she twisted free of the SWAT officers and lunged off the curb. There were shouts and commotion, but already she’d scampered out of reach. For a moment Daniel thought she was making a futile escape attempt, but she halted in the middle of the street. Then she pivoted back to face them.

She kept her eyes on Daniel, the faintest smile haunting her lips as the bus grille wiped her from sight.

Chapter 65

Daniel and Cris stood on their square of front lawn the next day, seeing Leo off. He had nothing with him, no overnight bag, no toothbrush in his pocket, as remarkably self-contained a person as Daniel had ever encountered.

“Sorry I mistook you for a murdering psychopath,” Daniel said.

Leo’s mouth shifted a little in amusement. He offered his hand, big enough for a man twice his size, and Daniel shook it.

“Thank you for everything you did for us,” Daniel said. “I’m not sure how to repay you.”

“I was already paid,” Leo said.

“I didn’t mean like that.”

Leo said nothing. This was clearly not a language he was comfortable speaking.

Cris moved to hug him, and he went board straight, his shoulders up around his ears, his arms half raised, held out to the sides but not settling on her. She released him, tapped his vast chest with her palm. “Don’t go getting all sentimental on us now.”

Leo headed off toward the street. His Bronco was nowhere in sight; he generally parked a few blocks away.

Daniel said, “See you.”

Without turning, Leo said, “Hope you won’t need to.”

As he vanished around the corner hedge, Cris started inside. Daniel had just reached the porch behind her when a Subaru Outback pulled up next door, wearing an upside-down kayak on the roof like a Robin Hood hat. Ted Shea climbed out and began fussing with straps. He caught sight of Daniel, and Daniel lifted an arm in greeting.

Ted slid the kayak off the car and moved up the walk, slamming the front door behind him.

Daniel thought,
Win some, lose some.

He found Cristina upstairs cooking pumpkin pancakes, though it was midday. After Viviana Olvera’s suicide last night, Dooley had asked him back to 850 Bryant to cross every last
t
on the mounting crime-scene reports. By the time he’d driven home, the dew-wet street had already picked up the faintest gleam of the sun, barely tucked behind the eastern horizon. He and Cris had slept an unbroken sleep for the first time in recent memory and woke up late enough that pancakes at 2:00
P.M.
made sense.

He came up behind her, embraced her around the waist, and she spun in his arms, mixing spoon in hand. “Three things you’re grateful for,” she said.

He placed his hand on her shirt, above the small grouping of radiation tattoos. “You’re alive,” he said. “I’m alive.” He slid his hand down to her stomach, noticing for the first time the tiny bulge. “And this.”

The house phone rang. Still holding her, he reached across to answer.

The familiar voice, sharpened with anxiety. “Daniel. I need to see you. I need you here.”

“Mom, can’t we just—”

“
Immediately,
Daniel. I’m still at the Fairmont.”

The line clicked. Troubled, he set down the receiver. Cris looked up at him inquisitively.

“It’s Evelyn,” he said. “Something’s wrong with her.”

“More wrong than usual?” Cris asked.

“She sounded really upset.” He searched for his car keys. “Want to come with me?”

Cris turned back to the pancake mix. “Not particularly,” she said.

*   *   *

A slew of reporters waited outside the Fairmont, jockeying for position. After valeting, Daniel slipped through a side door to the lobby and found the concierge. “This about the Tearmaker case?”

The concierge’s lips flattened. “No, Mr. Brasher.”

“What’s going on?”

“Perhaps you’d best talk to your mother.”

He rode up to the penthouse, his concern rising steadily with the altitude, and stepped into the vast embrace of the living room. Evelyn sat centered on a banana-curved couch longer than a stretch limo, the scale of the piece and the vaulted ceiling diminishing her. No one else was present—no James, no butler, no housekeeper—which only amped up Daniel’s worry all the more. Her ring-intensive fingers were wrapped around a glass, and as he drew nearer, he caught a waft of scotch.

Her hands jiggled the glass, the ice cubes musical against the crystal. “Celestina couldn’t be bothered to come?”

“Cristina. Been a long week.”

“I suppose I haven’t generated much goodwill there.”

“No, Mom. Not really.”

She took a few unladylike gulps. “I heard the news. That’s why my not-so-secret service detail is gone. It’s all over the TV, the papers. You were instrumental.”

“Inspector Dooley told me they’d keep me out of it as long as they could,” Daniel said. “How’d you find out?”

“The president of the police commission phoned this morning.”

“Ah, yes. Your inside track.”

“Not for long.” Her eyes shifted about, returned to the glass.

He watched her watch the scotch for a moment, then said, “Want to tell me what this is about?”

“It’s gone, Daniel.”

“What is?”

“All of it.”

The meaning dawned, slowly. The family fortune, gone. That’s what all those panicked phone calls to Evelyn from the office had been about.

“Leveraged currency bets,” Daniel said. “Vimal.”

“That’s right. Though they were my call. He tried to advise me to pull back.” She took a sip from the glass, her hands trembling. “Let it never be said I didn’t make my own bed. And so now…”

He realized he was still standing but felt no urge to sit down. It seemed the kind of news better handled on his feet. “Now what?”

“The Sea Cliff house will be gone. I owe the note on the villa still, so that’s…” She waved the glass, another residence gone. “We’ve been feeling it the past few months already. Cash-flow problems, I believe they call it. The interior decorator who redid the master suite is suing. Can you imagine? A Brasher, sued by an
interior decorator
?”

“So everything…”

“Gone. The properties, the holdings, the stocks. I’ll be down to those dreary retirement accounts your father insisted on funding dozens of years ago. Those can’t be touched in … bankruptcy.” Her mouth puckered at the word.

“How much in the retirement accounts?”

Her hair was mussed slightly in the back, the departure from her usual impeccable appearance making her seem somehow frail. “Not enough.”

“How
much,
Mom?”