Tell No Lies Page 6

  “Nah. Nothing so lofty. It’s just what makes me happy. I like a challenge. And I like underdogs. That’s who I want to help. The guy who’s gotten kicked around. The woman who doesn’t think she can have the life she wants.”

  “How do you relate to that?” Something shifted in her face, recognition dawning. “Right,” she said. “Growing up under the heel of the infamous Evelyn Brasher.”

  Daniel gave a one-shoulder shrug, a tell he immediately regretted. “I had it easy by most standards,” he said.

  But Theresa was already blazing forward. “So that’s what they do in your rehabilitation class? Talk about their abusive childhoods?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes. Okay. Let’s talk about ‘usually.’ Usually piece-of-shit criminals are just flat-out broken. You can’t get through to them. You can’t fix them. And yet you try.”

  “With varying success.”

  “So tonight? When you see Marisol Vargas laid out, sliced and diced, you want to … what? Cure the guy who did it?”

  He wasn’t sure when the conversation had turned, but they were on the far side of the bend, staring at a different view. He felt a pulse beating in his temple, a sure sign to keep his mouth closed.

  “What’s the difference between this motherfucker and the patients in those little groups you run?” Theresa said. “That tonight you had to actually see what they do before you decide to treat them for it?” She pointed at the poster of the police badge, the department motto written in Spanish. “‘Oro en paz, fierro en guerra,’” she read in a crisp accent. “Gold in peace, iron in war.” Her nostrils flared. “What happened to Jack Holley? What happened tonight? It calls for iron.”

  His forearm was no longer twitching. “I was the one with the butcher knife in my hand tonight. So stow the dated ‘I’m from the streets’ class bullshit and either focus and do your job or let me go home to my wife.”

  Theresa rose sharply and pounded her hands on her desk, elbows locked. Her face as hard as carved stone, but he could see the emotion moving beneath it now. His words had jarred loose whatever logjam she’d been hammering at.

  He pulled back and out of the confrontation, saw them as if from across the room—a cop and an eyewitness, both on no sleep, trying to stay afloat in the aftermath of a gruesome, soul-crushing night. The skin at the side of her neck fluttered. The thin line between rage and grief.

  And then he understood.

  He took a moment to choose his words. “It’s not your fault you didn’t check the rest of the mail earlier,” he said. “I didn’t think of it either.”

  Dooley’s mouth wobbled a bit, and then she pinched her lower lip in her teeth and bit down. Her eyes had gone glassy, and she blinked a few times quickly, discouraging any rising tears. She sat down again. Breathed hard for a minute or two.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was being an asshole. It’s the only thing I’ve been any good at this week.”

  “I get it. Don’t worry.”

  She swiveled over and rested her feet on that windowsill that housed no plants or family photos or anything aside from a film of dust. Chewing her cheek, she stared through the bleary glass.

  O’Malley swung back through the door, interrupting the heavy silence. He said, “The reason we’ve got no confirmation from Lyle Kane of 316 Bay Street is there is no 316 Bay Street. And? There’s no Lyle Kane either. Not in San Francisco.”

  Dooley gave no indication she’d heard him. Silence pervaded the room. Down the hall someone shouted about replacing the fucking paper in the fax machine.

  Dooley put her feet down again. Rotated back to her desk. Rubbed her face with both palms.

  O’Malley said, “Sorry. The guy doesn’t exist. We got a letter from a ghost to a ghost.”

  Visible over his shoulder at the end of the hall, there was a stir of movement. Cris appeared through the windowed security door, her hands gesticulating as she spoke to the PSA behind the Plexiglas. She was still wearing the ridiculously oversize Giants shirt.

  Daniel found his feet. O’Malley stepped aside, clearing the view, and Cris stopped midsentence and looked up. Her shoulders shuddered in relief at the sight of him. Instinct made him start for her, but then he remembered where he was and shot an inquisitive look across at the desk.

  “Go back to your life.” Dooley waved a hand at him. “Alarm on, eyes open, we’ll send a patrol car by every few hours.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?” She mustered a laugh. “Me and O’Malley, we’ll be here chasing ghosts.”

  Chapter 11

  “Wonderful views of the Transamerica Pyramid.” The Realtor’s pencil skirt constrained her steps into short, deliberate thrusts. She eased up beside Daniel, and they stood side by side, admiring the city panorama like two villainous politicians in an action movie. A sweep of her manicured hand. “As you can see.”

  He could see. In fact, the Transamerica building was hard to miss.

  It was a gloomy morning, the sun no more than a yellow smudge through churning clouds. Here on the twenty-third floor, they were eye level with Muriel Castanis’s “corporate goddesses” who crowned Philip Johnson’s postmodern high-rise across the street like ancient Greek gargoyles, three to a side. Ruffled white gowns shrouded the twelve-foot statues, pronounced against obsidian black windows. City residents had long debated the eerie caryatids with their hood-covered heads. Were they angels of capitalism? Prophets warning against greed and privilege?

  “You’re a therapist, right?”

  “Counselor.” He didn’t realize that he was more comfortable with his current job title until the response was out of his mouth. Another adjustment he’d have to make.

  The fawn walls smelled of fresh paint, the clouded glass wall sconces looked brand-new, and the bathroom door had been left strategically ajar to show off the curved slate counter and recessed double sinks. A world away from the rust-stained urinals and powder soap of Metro South.

  “How long have you been in private practice?”

  “Oh, I’d be starting. Here.” He shifted, the carpet sinking pleasingly beneath his loafers. “Transitioning from another job.”

  “Why the change?”

  “My current job’s pretty exhausting. I was hoping for something a little…”

  “Easier?”

  The answer, he realized, unsettled him.

  “Well,” she continued, “I certainly have some friends I could refer to you.” A behind-the-hand stage whisper. “Not to mention my mother.” Up close, her perfume was overpowering. “This is the first time in seven years that this space has been available. So what a great opportunity to enter a two-year lease…”

  He tuned her out. He’d made it home from the police station last night—no, early this morning—and managed a few fitful hours of sleep with Cris cuddled into him. After she’d rolled out of bed groggily and headed for work, he’d sat leadenly at the kitchen counter in his boxers, drinking cup after cup of coffee, trying to get his head to change lanes. But no, it was the same film reel of images. A red front door, already cracked. Crimson stalactites hanging from the lower lids of Marisol’s eyes. A bulky figure turning around in the foyer, that featureless mask finding Daniel where he hid. And the gloved hand lifting the digital camera, snapping a parting shot.

  An image of Daniel preserved in that camera. Right now. Somewhere in the city stretched out before him.

  Again he found his gaze arrested by the wraithlike statues across the street. Faceless. Nothing more than shadowed recesses beneath the cowls. A drift in the clouds cast the carved figures in a different light, and again he was yanked back to Marisol Vargas’s dining room, frozen in the darkness, trying to vanish into the wall as the killer’s broad shoulders pivoted, bringing that ghastly smooth face into view.

  Phantom sounds replayed in Daniel’s head. The blade across Marisol’s throat. Blood pattering on the kitchen tile.

  He should’ve gone through that front door quicker. He shouldn’t
have paused outside the kitchen before rushing the killer. One second. One second earlier might’ve saved her life.

  A bead of sweat tickled his cheek. He averted his eyes to the Embarcadero and beyond, where the Bay Bridge forged across to Oakland, but still he could see the white smudges in his peripheral vision, the goddesses beckoning like sirens.

  The chirpy voice phased back in. “… and you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump to Chinatown.”

  “Right,” he said. “I used to work right there.” He pointed past the reddish gleam of the Bank of America building to the penthouse office where he and the team used to shuffle Evelyn’s assets around on various monitors. “Different building, same view.”

  He remembered the grind of that old life, the days blurring together as he made money make money, something at which he was genetically proficient. His lunch breaks he used to take in the very courtyard they were looking down on. Sipping coffee on a bench, dwarfed by the centerpiece, a two-hundred-ton sleek black granite sculpture titled Transcendence but cynically known the Financial District over as “Banker’s Heart.” And hemming in the whole affair, trim boxes of topiary, as constrained as he felt in his overpriced suit. A landscape of the mind if ever there was one.

  And then meeting Cris, which he would like to say changed his life.

  But it didn’t. Not really.

  What had changed his life was thinking he was going to lose her.

  That moment of reckoning, seared into his brain.

  * * *

  They sit, practically levitating above their chairs with anticipation. The words come in jagged and hard, separate pieces of some indigestible whole. When it’s over, they blink dumbly at the doctor.

  “I didn’t even know you could get heart cancer,” Cris finally says.

  The doctor looks unusually nervous for someone who does this for a living. Perhaps because Brasher money paid for half of the oncology wing when some great-great-uncle had prostate cancer and the UCSF Medical Center was still fledgling. Or more likely because this is serious fucking business. “A left-atrium myxoma,” he says across the desk. “We generally see it on the right side—”

  “Well,” Cris says, “at least I’m special.”

  Her heart, assailed. The thought leaves Daniel breathless.

  He pushes words through the fog that has enveloped him. “So what next? Surgery? I mean…?”

  “For surgery we remove the tumor along with five or so surrounding millimeters of the atrial septum. But the margins of Cristina’s tumor are poorly circumscribed, merged with the surrounding tissue. We don’t want to cut that much healthy tissue.”

  Side by side in their chairs, Daniel and Cristina by some unspoken agreement do not make eye contact, but their hands have found each other and they clutch, hard, sweating.

  “So?”

  “We’ll get her on the heart-transplant list immediately and hope for a match.”

  The rest is gone. Noise and wind in his ears, an arctic whiteout.

  Later, at home, in a frenzy of anxiety, he makes the mistake of consulting the Internet. Fever. Air hunger. Bloodstained sputum. People gurgling to asphyxiation, drowning in their own fluids.

  Waiting is an impossibility. Cris retreats into herself, but he does what he does best, which is tackle an insurmountable problem head-on. Sublimating all his rage and terror into seventy-two hours of phone calls and referrals, he manages to get her into a closed trial at UCSF, phase one of an experimental brachytherapy where radiation seeds are implanted inside the tumor to shrink it. Combined with high-dose rate and external-beam radiation therapy, it’s still a Hail Mary pass, but it’s the fourth quarter, the clock is running, and they have no time-outs left.

  At the intake session before the trial begins, they find themselves alone in the CT scan room for a few austere moments. The tech has left to make adjustments to his adjustments, and Cris lies on the floating table, her skin papery, her lips chapped, the scanner looming over her like a giant Life Saver.

  Her eyes flash up, showing a lot of white, to take in the imposing machine. “My own proscenium arch.” She does jazz hands out to a top-hat-waggling ta-da. The comic effect, horizontal, is compounded.

  He rests a hand on her arm. “Ready for the coming attraction?”

  “It feels like I’m already in the morgue,” she says, and tears spill sideways down her temples.

  He smooths her hair back from her forehead, kisses her dry lips. They have been together less than two years, and maybe this is what they will have.

  She is crying freely, finally, reality dawning. “I’m only thirty-three,” she says. “That’s not even supposed to be half a life.”

  He is regretting every lost moment, every cross word, every stupid argument. And then he hears himself saying, “When we’re through this, we’ll do it all differently. Not a second taken for granted. We’ll only do things that matter, that we love doing.”

  She squeezes his hand, presses it to her besieged heart. “I hope we get to,” she says.

  Her words almost buckle the knees right out from under him. When he finds his voice, a request springs out. “Marry me.”

  A sea change comes over her. She laughs, bites her lip, swimming in delight. “When?”

  “Tonight. In the hospital chapel.”

  “You’re crazy.” Her grin turns sly. “Evelyn will lose her mind.”

  When he calls his mother two hours later outside the tiny chapel, she abstains. “I am not going to come to a wedding at a hospital.”

  The next day, sitting on the same pair of chairs in a different office, they feel the pinch of metal around their ring fingers when they hold hands. They glance at each other, share a private smile.

  “… minimally invasive,” the cardiac surgeon is saying. “The seeds will be implanted through hollow needles. You can expect some soreness, and the radiation will carry its own side effects. Nausea, fatigue, weight loss, and…” A glance at her file and a flicker passes across his face.

  Cris is still smiling across at Daniel, but he notes the doctor’s expression and stiffens in his chair. “What?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll lose the baby.”

  Cris’s eyes go shiny—an instant gloss of tears. She blinks, and they spill.

  “What baby?” she says.

  * * *

  “And we are open to a carpet allowance should you decide to change the color.”

  Daniel came back to himself there on the twenty-third floor in the empty office. The Realtor, it seemed, had not stopped for breath. He takes a moment to shed the memory, to let her words register.

  “A … carpet allowance?” After contending with paper-clip shortages and expense-clearance forms for photocopies, the notion seemed extraterrestrial. He couldn’t deny the pang of uncertainty. He’d lived this cushioned life before and found it wanting. He’d worked in a space like this, looking out on the same majestic view until it had ceased being majestic. Just how much would he miss the grit and pressure of the group, the room, the broken souls in their combatants’ ring? All the guts and shame and ugliness of hard living, and yet all the grace and courage, too. Those moments when a ray of hope broke through, illuminating a hidden path.

  And yet the air up here was intoxicating.

  “This is a highly coveted space, as you can imagine. If you decide to jump on this opportunity, we can have the contract drawn up in—”

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  Her brain seemed not to register this for a second or two of blissful silence. “Superb. You’ll have an excellent new start here.”

  Before leaving, he cast a final glance at the ghostly forms of the statues across from them, indistinct in their robes, featureless and yet looking on, like the Grim Reaper, like Marisol Vargas’s killer, like his conscience.

  Chapter 12

  After securing his future office space, Daniel intended to drive home but found himself steering the opposite way. It was Tuesday—no group—and yet some compulsion drew him, the
impulse quickening until he descended into the dim parking lot of Metro South. He detoured, slowing as he passed the narrow spaces on the far wall, a vast array of motorcycles lined up—from Harleys to Japanese rockets, from gleaming chrome to rusted heaps. Dooley’s sneer came back to him: Felons with choppers. That should be a short list.

  After circling the level, he parked in his usual space and climbed out, inhaling the moist garage air. Fragments of the prior night pricked at his nerves, burrowed beneath his skin. He shook off the sensation and started for the elevator when the doors opened and a man stepped out, the shadowed figure slowly resolving.

  Daniel halted sharply there before his car, struck by A-Dre’s form and bearing. Not dissimilar to those of Marisol’s killer.

  Okay. The killer had been wearing loose-fitting black sweats. All Daniel could tell was that he’d been tall and well built. Like all the men in group. And like many of the men who rotated through the building.

  And yet Daniel’s flesh tingled from an adrenaline charge. A little stab of PTSD, nothing more.

  A-Dre spotted him and halted.

  “Why are you here today?” Daniel asked. He’d intended the question to come across as conversational, but there was too much pressure behind it. What did he expect the guy to say? Oh, just dropping off some more death threats in the mail room.

  A-Dre cocked his head, and Daniel flashed again on that motorcycle mask, tilting to take him in across the length of Marisol Vargas’s foyer.

  A-Dre approached slowly. “I’m not supposed to be here?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  A-Dre turned away with disgust, taking a few steps toward the far wall against which the motorcycles were slotted. When he stopped to look back, Daniel realized that he had remained in place, pinned to the concrete in front of his car. Waiting to see if A-Dre climbed onto one of those motorcycles.

  “You gonna watch me?”

  “Is there some reason you don’t want to be watched?”