Tell No Lies Page 25

  He shook his head, his appetite having gone missing since he’d seen the printed face of Francisca Olvera. “You’re more stressed than before?” he asked.

  “Uh, have you watched the news? The Tearmaker: bigger than Bundy. Anderson Cooper and Brian Williams, top billing on Drudge. Jon Stewart even riffed on it.”

  “Where are you with the case?”

  “To start with the physical evidence,” Dooley said, “the shiny new old coins are still baffling. Did he work for the mint? Is he OCD? We’re looking into acids, coin collector’s gear, but we don’t even have a strong working hypothesis.” She spooned some clam chowder into her mouth. “Molly Clarke is stable, moved, and hidden. We’ve tracked down and relocated other workers involved with the medical trial, key hospital staff have raised their security—”

  “The girl,” he prompted.

  “We are looking into everything we can find on that kid. Which ain’t much. O’Malley and Rawlins zeroed in on a couple of clinics that treated her, found the place she died. They’re running down staff from four years ago, but there’s a lot of turnover, and those they’ve found don’t remember particulars. A lot of sick kids between then and now, unfortunately. The father is still unknown, and the mother—Viviana Olvera—fell off the fucking radar, probably to help plan this. But it’s a huge break. Thanks to you. And your wife. How’s she doing in the face of…?”

  The smell of mesquite wafted over from the grill. Daniel said, “She’s been happier.”

  “Because of your mother’s involvement?”

  “And mine. In going to my mother.”

  Dooley stopped chewing. Or at least slowed. “You never told her.”

  “No.”

  After a respectful pause, Dooley tore a hunk of sourdough from the loaf and swiped it through the remnants of clam chowder. “There’s a long list of people we need to protect here. Anyone who had anything to do with Francisca Olvera getting bumped from that study. And your mom? She’s the one who pulled the strings.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Get her out of town. We haven’t received the next death threat yet.” Her gaze was focused, intense. “Could be anyone.”

  “I’ve got group tonight. I’ll check my mailbox.”

  “We already took the liberty. Nothing in there from yesterday or today.”

  He said, “So we wait?”

  “Wait,” she said. “And look over our shoulders.”

  * * *

  The wing chair enfolded Evelyn like a cloak, the library air redolent of leather-bound books and smoldering birch from the fireplace. She glared out at Daniel. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “You made the call, Mom. You got Cris into the study. Which means you’re a potential target, too.”

  A dismissive flare of the hand. “Oh, honey. Getting victimized—that’s for other people.”

  “Mom. I’ve seen this guy. Up close. Believe me: You don’t want to be up here on a cliff in a house with three hundred windows.”

  She studied him for a few moments, then said, “James?”

  An instant later he was in the doorway.

  “Pack us,” she said. “We’re going to the Fairmont.”

  James eased back out of view.

  “Mom, this is serious. You need to leave the city.”

  “What’s the killer gonna do?” she said. “Storm the penthouse at the Fairmont?”

  They argued for a few minutes, but she was resolute as ever, and soon enough Daniel found himself in the quartz driveway leaning against his car, watching James supervise a raft of attendants wielding hatboxes and matching luggage. The town car departed, and James ran back to the garage, and moments later there Evelyn was in the backseat of her ridiculous 1938 Bugatti coupe with its Batmobile aerodynamics and magisterial snail-shell wheel wells. It pulled even with Daniel, reducing the smart car to a tricycle.

  “I’d imagine Chiquita was upset at last night’s nonrevelation,” Evelyn said over a slab of tinted window.

  “Cristina. And yes.”

  “Well. Thank you for seeing me to the room. I’m sure you’d rather not, but your sense of duty is admirable.”

  He followed her across the city to the peak of Nob Hill, where he left his car with the fifty-dollar valet and rushed into the mob of waiting hotel staff. He was recognized by the manager and ushered into the elevator with Evelyn and the penthouse staff, which included a butler, a trio of housekeepers, a massage therapist, and a chef, and then they were riding up to the most expensive hotel suite in the United States.

  Occupying the entire span of the eighth floor, the penthouse featured respective bedrooms in purple, cream, and peach, and a living room so large it dwarfed the grand piano. JFK had stayed here, as had Tony Bennett. Daniel recalled his mother once complaining that she’d been unable to secure a weekend due to a booking by King Hussein of Jordan. Or had it been Gorbachev?

  The staff acquainted Evelyn with recent upgrades, taking notes on clipboards, making wine selections, adjusting thermostats in various rooms. Daniel grew impatient, exhausted by the pomp and spectacle. They passed through the vast dining room with its silver-and-black chinoiserie wall covering, the chandelier and sconces glimmering with thousands of bits of Czech crystal. The lofty rotunda of the library featured gold-leafed constellations against an azure sky, and they’d added a secret passageway behind the books of the second story. No, Mrs. Brasher would not be needing use of the Ferrari California. Yes, roast suckling lamb would be ideal, as long as it was boned, at 8:00 P.M.

  As the butler set out the Tiffany china and the housekeepers arranged fresh-cut flowers in Chinese porcelain vases, Evelyn retired to the nearest bedroom.

  Daniel found her sitting on the bed, framed by an immense David Hockney. Spread on the duvet beside her was a hotel spa robe, Evelyn’s initials freshly stitched at the breast.

  “Well,” he said tightly, “I’m gonna get back to my day, then.”

  “So soon?”

  He paused at the door. Struggled to keep the hostility from his voice. “I’ve got work.”

  “You won’t stay for dinner?”

  “I’m assuming you’ll be well looked after in my absence.”

  “But, honey.” She gave a wry smirk and flung an arm across her forehead in mock Lichtensteinian despair. “It’s all just so inconvenient.”

  Chapter 51

  Cris trudged downstairs, her face drawn and gray. She still wore Daniel’s button-up shirt, but the cuffed sleeves had fallen to cover her hands.

  Leo sat at the counter, gun resting near his hand about three inches from his pinkie, a placement he had calculated punctiliously, no doubt, as the ideal distance for a grab-and-aim.

  She crossed to the sink and vomited neatly two, three times. Leo rose, handed her a dish towel, and returned to his stool. Wiping her mouth, she ran the water and the disposal, then filled a glass and sipped it. She turned to face Leo.

  He said nothing.

  Frustrated, she clicked on the small countertop TV and flipped until a news reporter appeared outside a nondescript house, her dark hair whipped by the wind.

  “—proving baffled by the so-called Tearmaker killer, who has struck seemingly without regard for demographic or geography, including here at the Noe Valley residence of Kyle Lane. An SFPD spokesperson announced that they are working hard to uncover some method to the madness—”

  She pointed the remote again, and the screen blinked to blank. Another sip of water. She looked at Leo.

  Leo looked straight ahead.

  Cris said, “Well?”

  He spread his hands flat on the marble, as if examining a manicure. “When I was a child in the seventies, Syrian army special forces entered my country. They supported Sunni militias. Unleashed them. My entire family was tortured and killed. My mother and sister, raped and murdered. My father, dishonored and shot. Two brothers. Seven cousins. Three aunts, an uncle.”

  Cris’s throat bobbed. She set down the glass. Her hand had move
d instinctively to her belly. After a moment she nodded for him to continue.

  “I’ve done a lot of things for a long time now,” Leo said in his same clipped, even voice. “But I will never for the life of me understand what you rich, safe people fight about.”

  Chapter 52

  The group members were there waiting, arrayed in the chairs as Daniel entered the room. A thin current of air from the cracked window met him in the threshold, cooling the nervous sweat at his hairline and throat. Despite the usual protections in place around Metro South, he was on edge.

  One of these six was likely a relative of a little girl in whose death he’d had a hand.

  He sensed the weight of the stares on him and rehearsed again the opening words he’d planned. Turning, he closed the door behind him.

  That’s when he saw the tin of Skoal dipping tobacco in the trash can in the corner.

  The green circular label—LONG CUT WINTERGREEN—was pronounced against the liner bag. The sight locked him up. Brought him back to the death match in the restaurant storage room, the knife tip inches from his eye, the sickly-sweet tobacco breath pushed through the perforations in the black mask, washing across his face.

  He set a hand against the closed door. His mouth moved before he could consider the words. “Whose Skoal is this?”

  Puzzled silence emanated from behind him.

  He turned. “There’s a tin of dipping tobacco in the trash. Whose is it? Anyone here dip?”

  “No, Dad,” X said, leaning back in her chair nearest the door.

  “We got POs busting into our houses at all hours, searching us in front of our families.” Big Mac shot a glare at Daniel. Was it accusatory? “Now we gotta get cavity-checked for fucking tobacco?”

  “Cavity-checked,” Daniel said, meeting Big Mac’s glare, “might be overstating it.”

  “Why you care anyways?” A-Dre asked.

  “I want to know who’s using stimulants during session.” A feeble explanation, which he regretted the instant it left his lips.

  They all shook their heads or stared at the ceiling, annoyed.

  “Looks like no one,” Martin said.

  “So someone else came in here to … what? Use the trash can?”

  “What’s your problem, Counselor?” Big Mac asked.

  “My problem is that I ask for honesty.” All his pent-up rage steaming out. “And someone in here isn’t being honest with me.”

  The members looked a bit shocked by his quick anger.

  “Honesty,” X repeated, with a pointed glare.

  Excellent. Thirty seconds into session and he’d alienated the room further.

  He made a mental note to ask Dooley to check the tin for fingerprints, collected himself, and took his place on a hard metal chair.

  Before he could say anything, Lil rubbed her bare arms and asked, “Is anyone else cold?” and Fang muttered, “Here we … ah, ah, go again.”

  Daniel blinked a few times, trying to get his head in the game. The face of Francisca Olvera was branded into his brain, and he looked for a match in the features of the members around him. He saw her in every one of their eyes—the pressure of the situation distorting his perspective.

  The expressions ranged from aloof to hostile. Last session had after all featured a fight and the revelation of Daniel’s impending departure. Fighting through distraction, he said, “I owe you an apology.”

  So far, so good.

  He drew out the pause, studying the faces to see if anyone was reading something else into the apology. Something more intense, involving a girl who’d died nearly four years ago. But the reactions were tentative, unreadable.

  Big Mac hunched in the chair opposite, bringing into view a nasty bruise swelling the back of his hand. Another trash-can mash-up? Or an injury sustained in the restaurant brawl? He was wearing a mustard Carhartt jacket and—of course—generic black work boots. Daniel thought about the undercover cops posted around the building, Dooley teed up on CALL on the iPhone in his pocket. How long would it take them to crash the room if the situation combusted?

  He had zoned out, he realized, looking at those boots, and he reeled himself back to the room. “I should have brought up earlier that I’ll be leaving,” he said. “I’m sorry that you found out the way you did. It was unnecessarily jarring, and I should have handled it better. But I will see you through this transition and make myself available to you for no cost at my private practice after I leave.”

  “For how long?” A-Dre said.

  “As long as it takes.”

  Lil nodded first, and then a few of the faces softened.

  But not Big Mac’s. “You got something to answer about,” he said.

  Daniel felt his mouth go dry. “What?”

  The hand strengthener had made a reappearance, Big Mac clutching it in his bruised fist like a security blanket or a badge of honor—clank-clank. “What happened last night?”

  Big Mac’s gaze moved from Daniel to Fang, and Daniel realized he was referring to the episode at the club. Martin must have filled him in. A relieved exhale hissed through Daniel’s teeth.

  Fang crossed his legs, sneaker to knee. A self-conscious twitch of his neck, not quite a shrug. “It was … ah, ah, no big deal. Nothing happened.”

  At Fang’s words Daniel’s thoughts pulled into abrupt focus. The edges of his perception blurred, and all at once there was nothing outside these four walls, no closed trials, no little girl dying of heart cancer, no featureless killer.

  He zeroed in on Fang. “Nothing happened? What are you talking about?”

  Fang stiffened, his forehead wrinkling.

  Daniel ticked the points on his fingers. “You trusted Martin enough to call him. You trusted me. You made a great choice. You didn’t go into the club. You didn’t get drunk. You didn’t get into a fight or blow your sobriety or wind up in trouble with the cops. You didn’t miss your session tonight.” He paused. “Everything happened last night.”

  Fang settled back into himself, blank-faced, but Daniel had learned to read him well enough to see his mind at work. He also knew to move on and give Fang some time with this new interpretation, so he asked Lil to take center chair.

  She settled into the seat and cleared her throat softly. “I went out to a church social,” she said, her hand fluttering around her bangs. “And I put my hair up so I’d look, um, less ugly.”

  “I think you have a pretty face,” Martin said.

  She laughed it off. “Martin, that’s why you have glasses.” She leaned forward, cramping her shoulders inward. “But I wanted to try at least. To see. After, you know, the stuff we talked about last time.”

  Noises of encouragement from Big Mac.

  A-Dre even chimed in. “All right, girl.”

  “No,” she said. “It was awful.” Her eyes started leaking. “Everyone ignored me. And I had a panic attack. I went out to the parking lot and almost passed out. It was … humiliating.”

  X played a tiny violin with her thumb and forefinger, but Lil ignored her.

  “I can’t go back,” she said. “Never. It just proved that I’ll never be happy again.”

  Daniel’s thoughts had once more gravitated back to Francisca Olvera, and there was a tape-delay pause before he forced himself back to the room and prompted Lil. “You’ll never be happy again because…?”

  Lil kicked her feet glumly. “I’ll never find anyone.”

  “And you’ll never find anyone because…?”

  She hugged her stomach, shivering. “No one will want me.”

  “No one will want you because…?”

  “No one will want me because I have nothing to offer, okay? I have nothing to offer someone.”

  A few of the chairs creaked. The wind whistled through the gap in the window.

  “All right,” Daniel said. “I’m going to speak your thoughts back to you. And you just see how they feel and respond as if you’re Xochitl.”

  “Oh, great. That’s great. Compare me to her.�
�� Lil cast her gaze upward. “Can’t you just leave me alone? Just once? After what I went through, do you really have to pry at every inch of everything?”

  “Who are you looking at?” Daniel asked.

  She lowered her gaze quickly. “No one.”

  “You’re looking up. Like you’re a little kid.”

  “Oh. You mean…” She hiccupped in a breath. “I don’t want to talk about my father.”

  “Okay. Then can we try this exercise instead? You’re a grown woman now. You can make grown-woman choices for yourself.”

  She hesitated, then nodded rapidly like a kid.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “No one wants you. You are never gonna be happy.”

  She blinked, and tears fell. Martin started to come to her defense, but Daniel shot him a look and he shrank back in his chair, his round, broad face contorted with empathy. X leaned forward on her chair, rapt.

  “You’re not allowed to be at peace,” Daniel continued. “You’re not allowed to be liked. You’re a failure. No one talked to you at this social, which means no one will talk to you at any social.”

  Lil was sobbing freely now, and Daniel felt a stab of concern that if she didn’t turn the corner, this would all go horribly awry. He was on the verge of pulling back when she said, quietly, “That’s not true.”

  He seized on her words. “Why is it not true?”

  “It’s just one social,” she said in the same tiny voice.

  “What? I can’t hear you when you talk like a little girl. Answer as if you’re Xochitl. You ever hear her talk that way?”

  Lil flashed fierce eye contact. “It’s just one fucking social.”

  The men stirred. Daniel sensed X smile, but he kept his attention on Lil. “But everyone at that social did better than you.”

  “No. They did not. There were thirty woman there, and not all of them got talked to either.” The fear wasn’t gone from Lil’s voice, and she retained a note of pleading, but her back had straightened out and there was more power behind her voice.

  “So what? It’ll go just as shitty next time around.”

  “I can learn! I can learn to do better. I can do whatever I want!” Her eyes aflame, she squeezed her hands together between her knees, drawing ragged breaths, her clavicles pronounced beneath her collar.