The Murderer's Daughter (13 page)

N
othing like success to settle one's stomach. Finally hungry, Grace drove to an Indian place in WeHo that she knew to be busy at lunch but thinly patronized for dinner.

Tonight, the clientele consisted of three tattooed hipsters eating sullenly and an older, well-dressed couple holding hands. The turbaned Sikh owner smiled gently and guided Grace to a quiet corner where she waved off a menu and ordered the shrimp special and chai. Nibbling
namak pare
crackers, she pondered when to favor Henke with her discovery.

Double gift: Not only had she learned where Andrew had stayed, the fact that he'd checked in three days ago could help the detective if she wanted to search travel schedules.

The owner brought her the milky tea along with assurance that her food would follow shortly, everything was prepared fresh.

Should she tell the detective about the hotel? If so, not tonight, maybe tomorrow morning. Late morning because that would imply curiosity but not an obsessive all-nighter quest.

She worked on her story: About to embark on a vacation, she'd been distracted by the horror of Andrew's death, had taken the time to investigate so she could feel she was doing
something.

Too mushy? Should she frame it as intellectual curiosity, softened by empathy? She'd figure it out.

Be grateful, Detective Henke. Show your thanks by forgetting about me.

Then she thought of a possible hitch: Henke was sure to visit the St. Germain, where the grumpy night man would likely tell her about Grace's worried-cousin ruse. Would that retweak the detective's suspicions?

So be up front about it, maybe get Henke to laugh it off as an eccentric therapist playing girl detective—weren't shrinks all a bit off?

Partial honesty's the best policy…Grace's food arrived. Delicious. She seemed to be digesting well. Things were looking up.

She drove back
to her office to pick up the Aston, and as long as she was at it, checked her service because that's what a responsible healer did.

The operator said, “Just one, Dr. Blades. An Elaine Henke. She said phone anytime, she'll be up late.”

Ten thirty-three p.m.
and the woman was still at her desk. “Have you thought of anything else, Dr. Blades?”

“Actually,” said Grace. “I just did something a little different. But it might help you.”

Henke listened, said, “Wow. That's impressive, Doctor. I like the cousin thing, sounds like something I might be able to use one day.”

Grace laughed. “Have a nice night.”

“The St. Germain,” said Henke. “Never heard of it.”

“Same here.”

“Fake name, paying cash, maybe he was shady—you pick that up?”

Grace, feeling oddly defensive about Andrew, said, “Not at all.”

“Guess not after such a brief—oh, I forgot to tell you, Doctor. I came up with something, myself. I was staring at the name, because something about it bothered me, I couldn't figure it out. Then I did. Because luckily I'd written his initial—A—instead of his name. A. Toner. Get it?”

Grace said, “Not really.”

“A. Toner.
Atoner,
Doctor. If that's it, no surprise he doesn't show up under that name.”

“But you said other people in Texas do.”

“True,” said Henke, sounding disappointed. “Maybe you're right…Still, they haven't shown up murdered and he has. Plus you told me about that article he mentioned, maybe having a criminal family. And that out-of-service number looks like it traces to a throwaway—a disposable cell, drug dealers love them. So all in all I'm getting a shady feeling.”

“Sounds like it.”

“It's usually that way, Doctor. People making mistakes, paying for them. Anyway, thanks for finding the hotel, it gives me something to work with.”

“My pleasure.”

“You said he got jumpy and left,” said Henke. “Drugs can make you jumpy. Cocaine, amphetamines. Did you happen to notice his pupils?”

The night before,
I sure did, Elaine. Dilated to the max, ripe with interest.

“I didn't,” said Grace, “but there were no obvious indications of intoxication.”

“And you'd know,” said Henke. “Okay, thanks again, I'll check out that hotel first thing. You earned your vacation, enjoy—decided where to go, yet?”

The lie was easy. “Maybe it will be Hawaii.”

“Back when I was married, my husband and I used to go regularly.”

What was this, girlish chitchat?

Grace said, “Any recommendations?”

“I like the Big Island—oh yeah, one more thing. Did you happen to notice that Mr. Atoner colored his hair?”

“No,” Grace said, with genuine surprise.

“The coroner noticed light roots, confirmed it. His natural color appears to be sandy brown. What do you think of that?”

“Men do it, now.”

“If he was an old guy, covering gray, I'd say sure, vanity. But just darkening the brown, what's the point unless you're trying to disguise yourself? I'm definitely getting a feeling for this guy. Meanwhile, aloha.”

G
race lingered at her desk, thinking about the behaviors that led Henke to see Andrew as suspicious. All of it, she knew, could be taken a whole other way: He'd embarked on a dangerous journey—a quest for atonement—and was trying to protect himself.

In the case of Grace's business card in his shoe, protecting her, as well?

No other reason she could think of.

My hero?

Her eyes began aching, every joint in her body had tightened up. Suddenly, she craved escape—from the office, the city. Her thoughts. Everything.

Maybe she
would
try the Big Island, again. Or Costa Rica, the rain forests sounded interesting.

Locking up, she hurried to the garage and got in the DB7. She'd take Sunset to Malibu, extending the journey a bit, she could use the decompression.

The car treated her like the smooth lover it was, working curves at far too high a speed. Maintaining control as she kept pushing the limits of her skill was first-rate distraction and by the time Grace reached the coast, she'd begun to feel just fine.

It took a while—passing through Las Tunas Beach—before she realized she was being followed.

Grace made a
point of being watchful when driving alone. Tonight she hadn't.

Big-time screwup?

Or was she imagining the intrusion? A pair of bouncing headlights—a vehicle with spongy suspension—for the last few miles?

She worked the rearview mirror. The lights were still there, shimmery amber moons.

Then they diminished as another vehicle slipped between them. And another.

Nothing to that? Or had she just seen what Shoshana Yaroslav had taught her: evasive driving? If the goal was to avoid detection, it accomplished the opposite; now Grace couldn't stop checking.

She sped up; the car with the bouncing lights moved up. Receded. Second time that had happened in five miles. Far too much movement given the sparse nighttime traffic on PCH.

She recalled the boxy sedan she'd spotted the night of Andrew's appointment. Rolling toward her from up the street and setting off her internal alarm, only to reverse direction and slip away. If someone really was following her, had the hunt commenced as she'd left West Hollywood?

Could this be the same car? The span between the headlights fit but that's all she could make out.

She switched to the slow lane.

Ninety seconds later, the bouncing car did the same and now it was unshielded.

Definitely not a compact or a truck, so maybe…Grace lowered her speed abruptly, caught the car unawares, and earned a closer look.

Sedan. Boxy? Probably.

The first time she'd seen it, it had been parked near her office well after Andrew's departure. Sometime that night, Andrew had been stalked, ending up human trash, dumped in a cold, dark place.

The timing didn't work. So maybe she was letting her mind run away with—unless there were two people involved.

One for Andrew, one to clean up Andrew's mess.

If he'd been tracked to her office, finding out why wouldn't be a challenge, her nameplate—small, bronze, discreet—graced the front door.

Talking to a shrink, the ultimate sin? First Andrew had been punished and now Grace needed to be taken care of? The sedan crept up on her, she put on speed, the sedan hung back, too dark to ascertain the make and model…now it had allowed a smaller car to get in front of it.

Grace shifted lanes again.

This time the sedan took its time getting directly behind her, but there it was, following closer than ever. Grace slowed down, forcing it to brake. The sedan recovered, slowing itself, allowing a pickup to cut in front.

For all Grace knew the truck was part of a team.

But she couldn't afford to let fear take hold, so she worked hard at building up anger. The nerve of these bastards…La Costa Beach was approaching, time to think clearly.

Going home was obviously out of the question. Once she entered her front door she'd be as vulnerable as a shooting range target. But the only escapes along PCH were dark, twisting roads snaking to canyons and dead ends.

So only one choice: keep going. But that provided no long-term solution because once she was past the Colony and the rolling hills fronting Pepperdine University, the traffic would thin further and the highway would darken and she'd be vulnerable to a bump or a swipe that ran her off the road.

A weapon aimed out of a window.

Unless she was wrong. She hoped she was but when the sedan moved up on her again and she had to push the Aston way past the speed limit, that hope died.

She knew.

Why had she let her guard down? The reason to consider that question wasn't to beat herself up, it was to prevent recurrence of stupidity.

The obvious answer: what the Brits called brain fag. The motor neurons in her brain had been preoccupied with Andrew. Then thinking about anything
but
Andrew.

All that mental energy had overloaded her circuits and caused her to neglect Shoshana Yaroslav's First Commandment:
I don't care how tough and liberated you think you are, you're a woman, always vulnerable. So pay attention to your surroundings.

Commandment Two was:
Do whatever it takes. Unless you believe in reincarnation and enjoy the thought of coming back as a bug.

No need for eight more.

Shifting slightly to the right so she could catch a better glimpse of the slow lane, Grace found it empty. Suddenly, she pushed the Aston's throttle to the floor, reaching eighty ninety a hundred in seconds. Leaving the pickup and the dancing car and everyone else far behind.

Even at that speed, the DB7 was barely working up RPMs. Power poles zipped by like stripes on a curtain. Twelve cylinders whined in appreciation—
finally you give me some exercise!
—and Grace smiled. This level of speed felt like a natural state and besides, she'd flown this road before with her eyes literally closed, knew the bumps and turns and quirks, and if some highway patrol cruiser blue-lighted her, all the better, she'd be nothing but cooperative, pretend to pay attention to the officer's tight-ass lecture, meanwhile she'd be watching from the shoulder as the bouncing car zipped by.

But as she reached La Costa, the nanosecond blur that was her house, and continued to the Malibu Pier and Surfrider, there wasn't a trace of law enforcement to be found.

And now, by terrible attrition, only one set of headlights was behind her, maybe ten car lengths back. No longer moons, Grace saw them as eyes, now. Twin amber beacons of scrutiny.

She decelerated to
seventy and the sudden bounce of the dancing car's headlights told her it had braked precipitously, again. Pushing the Aston back up to eighty, she used its race-born agility to advantage, calling into service the performance-driving techniques Shoshana had showed her during an exhausting day at the Laguna Seca track in Salinas. Explaining to her that cars don't go out of control, drivers do.

So avoid braking except when necessary because braking and accelerating rocks a car like a cradle and at high speeds that risks serious loss of traction and if you absolutely must brake, do it briefly, at the apex of the curve, then accelerate.

Fun stuff, then. Useful, now. Grace sped through Malibu's western beaches, still hoping for a cop, but pleased as the bouncing headlights vanished.

Then she hit a straightaway near the fenced sprawl of the public beach at Zuma and all of a sudden they were back.

Gaining on her, coming right
at
her.

She veered sharply onto the shoulder, not liking the grinding, gnashing noise that ensued, and praying the Aston's low-slung underbelly hadn't been damaged.

Idling, she switched off her headlights, lifted her foot from the brake pedal to disengage the rear lights, and relied upon the emergency brake to keep the snorting beast at bay. Dark night, black car, she was sure of invisibility.

The Aston continued to fight being caged but remained in place and now she'd be ready when the sedan sped by.

But it didn't. Had it caught on, somehow—picking up a glint of starlit glossy paint or chrome wheels or shining window?

What had given Grace away didn't matter, only the result: Her pursuer was speeding directly at her again.

Releasing the emergency brake, she watched in her rearview, waited, and when the time was right, she turned the wheel sharply and hung a radical U that made the Aston fishtail on squealing tires.

But it righted itself quickly and Grace had barely made it across the center of the highway and into the southbound lanes when a massive shape came barreling down from the north.

During the seconds it took for Grace to speed out of its way, the semi she'd narrowly avoided sounded its Klaxons and roared by, enraged.

Eighteen-wheeler, according to the cheerful sign on its flank, a company hauling restaurant produce. Less than an instant to read all that but somehow she had.

She'd also absorbed details of the dancing car: dark, probably gray, blocky sedan as she'd theorized, maybe a Chrysler 300.

Spinning its wheels in the dirt of the shoulder as it tried to back its nose out of an embankment. Too dark to make out the plate.

Dark windows.

Stock wheels.

The sedan wouldn't budge. The tires stopped spinning. A man got out, bulky, broad.

Clutching something at his side.

Grace raced away.

She adhered to
the speed limit, reached Kanan Dume Road quickly enough, and turned off. That took her over the mountains and into the Valley, where she hooked up with the 101 East. Even at this hour, the freeway provided a fine social circle—a thin but steady stream of fellow motorists and, yes, there it was, law enforcement in the person of a CHP black-and-white in the center lane, trawling for taxpayer money, where the hell were they when you needed them?

A few miles later, she spotted another patrol car lolling in a dark spot on the north shoulder.

Try hassling me now, Sedan Boy.

She continued completely through the Valley, stuck with the 101 as it transitioned to the 134. Crossing into Burbank, she kept going, exiting at Central Avenue in Glendale because she had no connection to that bedroom community. Within moments she spotted a tall stucco-and-green glass building that proclaimed itself to be a new Embassy Suites. Parking in the sub-lot, she took stairs up to the hotel lobby and booked a room with a businesslike desk-woman.

Two rooms; the place was true to its name, with square footage larger than Grace's beach house. Nice sterile hideaway, the welcome smell of chemically cleansed air, an amenities card boasting of high-speed Internet access, a flat-screen LCD TV, and a “cooked to order breakfast in our lush open-air atrium.”

Grace charged up her laptop, stripped down, and got under the covers.

She slept deeply.

Up at six
a.m., alert but not hungry, she used the high-speed Internet access to locate a twenty-four-hour pharmacy 1.2 miles away on Glendale Avenue. A quiet walk was welcome for all sorts of reasons and she kept up a brisk pace, aware of her surroundings despite feeling no threat. Purchasing what she needed, she took a different route back to her hotel suite, did what she needed to do.

At nine a.m., a thin, pretty, deeply tan woman with boyishly short dark-brown hair wearing a bit too much makeup entered the lush, open-air atrium and asked for a corner table that would afford her a wide view of the dining room.

Once settled, she read two newspapers and enjoyed a hearty breakfast.

The only distraction during her DIY hairstyle/dye job had been thoughts of Andrew coloring his thick locks.

Once again they seemed to be linked.

And something else: picturing him with lighter hair tweaked something in her memory. As if she'd seen him before. But of course she hadn't.

The whole point for him—the mess that had started it all—had been about finding a nonjudgmental stranger.