The choppy ocean waves outside Mendocino seemed more desolate than those just a couple of hours south in San Francisco. Driving north along Highway 1, past the old lighthouse and the picturesque nineteenth-century village built out on the bluff during the logging boom, Colleen saw a different world than the one she’d left behind that morning. It was one separated by windblown trees and rural cattle ranches stretching out to the rugged, foggy coast.
Last she knew, her daughter, Pamela, still lived not far from here, in a commune near Point Arena, in an old farmhouse that looked idyllic but was quite the opposite. Colleen had been turned away with more than just a cold shoulder—a restraining order, to be exact. To stay away from her own daughter. None of that would’ve mattered so much had Pamela not ultimately spurned her as well. Didn’t want to know her own mother. The fact that Pamela was brainwashed by religious extremists with shaved heads and orange robes didn’t placate Colleen. She’d seen the rage in her daughter’s otherwise vacant stare. Much of it was directed at the world at large, but much of it was reserved just for Colleen. And had been for years.
When Colleen had killed her ex all those years ago—in her own fit of rage—it was because of what Pamela’s father had done to their daughter when Pamela was a child. But Pamela never saw it that way. Denial? Colleen’s selfish, angry reaction over Pamela’s needs? Was Pamela angry at the fact that Colleen never saw the abuse until the day she stabbed her ex? There was a year, when Pamela was seven, when she was quiet, moody. Sullen. Colleen had initially read that as Pamela being old enough to sense her parents’ dead marriage. More than dead, a sham, forced on them when Colleen got pregnant at seventeen. Neither one of them wanted each other after a few meaningless minutes in the back of Roger’s Camaro. But he was determined to do the right thing, like the martyr he was, and insisted they get married. And made sure everyone knew of his sacrifice.
They all suffered for it—when Colleen thought Pamela was somehow exempt. Fool. As it turned out, Pamela paid the highest price. The chasm between Colleen and her ex, silent and mutual, where they were more than willing to ignore each other, allowed his sick behavior to go undetected. How Colleen wished she had gone it alone, raised Pamela solo. Wallowing in her own misery, she never saw what was happening right under her nose to her own daughter. And, as a mother, she should have.
And now, Colleen had to accept it.
So she was anxious to see if Pamela was still living at the Moon Ranch commune, if nothing else. But checking meant violating the restraining order and thus the terms of her probation.
A decade in prison had forced her to learn patience. She would have to wait until an opportunity appeared, and then she’d move to reunite with Pamela. She would look for one when she was done with Margaret Copeland.
Just north of Mendocino, the low Torino crawled up a rocky dirt road past towering redwoods where Colleen found an old Victorian overlooking the Pacific. Built nearly a century ago, its dilapidated charm was slowly being restored by its new owner, Millard Drake—the man who had written Margaret Copeland’s autopsy report.
Colleen pulled over next to a weather-beaten Jeep Wagoneer, its faux wood paneling turning white with salt air. She shut the engine off and heard the whish of the wind through the trees and, behind her, the distant boom of the ocean. And then from inside the house, the pounding of a hammer. She got out of the car. In her skirt suit, the air was chill. A sizable German Shepherd bolted off the wraparound covered porch and charged at her, barking like a fiend.
Colleen jumped. “Nice doggie,” she said, as calmly as possible.
The dog stayed, but blocked her path to the house, growling in a way that made her spine tremble.
A screen door slammed and an older woman emerged, wearing a tool belt slung over baggy overalls. Her gray hair was pulled back and, despite her advanced years, she moved as someone who was fit. The dog kept snarling.
“Good boy, Roscoe,” she said. “Go to your place now.”
Roscoe immediately terminated his snarling assault, turned around like a lamb, and trotted back up the old wooden stairs to the porch where he lay down and watched Colleen with his head on his front paws.
“How can I help you?” the woman said in a cool tone. She had an educated East Coast accent.
Colleen had a business card ready. “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Drake. I’m researching a case he worked on many years ago.”
The woman took Colleen’s card in her rough hand. A Band-Aid wrapped one thumb. She read the card, looked up. “You drove up from San Francisco? You didn’t think to call first?”
“I thought about it, Ms.…”
“Drake,” the woman said as if Colleen might be slow.
“… Ms. Drake, but, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to be turned away. It’s that important to the family I’m helping.” She could say helping, because, as of today, she wasn’t getting paid to work the case anymore. And it sounded better.
“This wouldn’t be about the Copeland case, would it?” Ms. Drake asked, raising her eyebrows.
“It is,” Colleen said. “As you may be aware, the case was never solved. Mr. Copeland is terminally ill. It would mean a great deal to him and his daughter to gain any fresh insight into the murder in order to put the matter behind them before he passes.”
Mrs. Drake tapped Colleen’s business card on a knuckle, frowning. She shook her head, handed the card back. She turned, headed back to the house.
“There would be a reward leading to any new information,” Colleen said. There was no such thing, but Colleen could figure out something.
Mrs. Drake stopped, turned back around.
“We are not interested.” She marched to the house.
“Can you please tell me why?” Colleen called after her.
Mrs. Drake stepped up on the porch.
“Anything you tell me would be kept in complete confidence,” Colleen said.
There was a pause before Mrs. Drake went inside. The door closed behind her. The lock snapped shut. Head on paws, Roscoe watched Colleen from the porch.
Damn.
Colleen checked her watch. It was a good thing she’d had a big breakfast. She might miss lunch. She went to the Torino, got in, rolled down the window, lit a Virginia Slim. She’d wait them out.
By the time she was finished with the cigarette, she saw a curtain move. A figure, eyeing her. If the Drakes called the police or the sheriff, she’d have some explaining to do.
Colleen turned on the AM radio. CBS news talk crackled with static. She punched the other chrome presets. Same story. Poor reception up here. She turned the radio off and sat back.
If the cops came along, she’d leave. But she was running out of options. Or, rather, Edward Copeland was.
Half an hour later, the curtain shifted again. Mrs. Drake’s silhouette. The curtain fell back into place. A moment later, the front door opened.
Mrs. Drake appeared, stood on the porch, hands on hips.
“Make it quick,” she said, turning around without waiting for an answer, heading back inside the house.
Colleen found Mr. Drake, a stick of a man, also in his later years, sitting at a workbench, studying architectural plans. The interior of the house was down to the studs in places and in others showed the faded opulence of what it once was, with ornately trimmed woodwork and Victorian ceiling stencils. It looked to be a labor of love to bring this structure back to its former condition but that seemed to be what Mr. Drake and his wife were doing with their retirement.
Mr. Drake turned in his chair with what appeared to be an effort to examine Colleen as she entered the half-finished back room facing a hillside of pines and tall redwoods. His features were gaunt and his skin an unhealthy white, although his pale blue eyes were steely behind gold-rimmed grannie glasses. He wore a roomy plaid shirt and a New England Patriots ball cap. If he weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds, Colleen would have been surprised. She suspected some illness had the better of him. Perhaps that was why the Drakes had relented on seeing her—sympathy for the dying Mr. Copeland. The airy room wasn’t warm at all.
“My wife tells me you want to talk about the Copeland case, Ms. Hayes?” He had the same refined accent his wife did but not as pronounced.
“Yes,” Colleen said. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me.”
“I haven’t promised anything yet,” he said.
“As I told your wife, anything you tell me will be kept in the strictest confidence.”
“Good, because if anything comes of this discussion, I’m denying it. I will not testify in any court, either. Eleven years ago, I was instructed not to discuss the case.”
Interesting. “Understood,” she said. “You signed the autopsy paperwork.”
“I did.” His eyes were momentarily drawn to hers. “Where are my manners?” Bracing himself with a hand on the back of his chair he stood up and tottered over to an old wooden ladder-back chair with a skill-saw on it. He soon had the saw off and the seat dusted with a rag. Millard Drake’s legs were as thin as posts. Colleen headed over to help him bring the chair back to the workbench, but he stopped her, dragging the chair by himself across the rough wooden floor and maneuvering it into place for her.
“Thank you,” she said, sitting down.
He raised his head and shouted past Colleen’s shoulder. “Alice? Are you thinking of putting the kettle on?”
“No, please,” Colleen said. “I don’t want to trouble you.”
After a lengthy pause, Alice Drake shouted from another part of the house, “Tea or coffee?” as if she might be busy putting out a fire.
Millard Drake gave Colleen an inquisitive look.
“Coffee, if I have a choice,” Colleen said.
“Coffee!”
“Just a moment!” his wife snapped.
Soon they were drinking mugs of rich coffee loaded with cream and sugar, and Alice Drake had left the room as icily as she had entered it.
Colleen set her cup down on the workbench and got her file folder out of her shoulder bag. The file was growing thicker, more recently with her hastily scribbled notes from that morning’s visit to the evidence facility. She got out the copy of the autopsy report Mr. Drake had written eleven years before.
“No need for that, Ms. Hayes. Margaret Copeland was one of the more memorable cases.”
She shut the file, rested her hands on top of it. “It seems very thorough.”
“I miss my work.”
“There’s no semen.”
“I beg your pardon?” He blinked in surprise.
“In your report, I mean,” she said. “Every other bodily fluid is listed. Locations, color, volume, state—except for semen. Kind of a given for a rape, no?”
“Perceptive.” Millard Drake took a sip of coffee, cradled his cup. “That’s because there wasn’t any.”
“You don’t think that’s odd? In a case where a man—it was a man who killed Margaret Copeland, I assume.”
“It had to be. The physical strength alone shown during the beating, even with the fact that he subdued her with chloroform—oh yes. It was a man.”
“Was he wearing a condom? There’s no mention of any of the lubricants sometimes found in them.”
Millard Drake shook his head. “If there had been, it would have been in the report.”
“And wouldn’t it be odd for him to wear a condom in the first place? Somebody who exhibited such a wild, uncontrolled temper?”
Millard Drake gave an approving nod. “Exactly.”
“So, I guess I don’t understand.”
“Margaret Copeland’s murderer wasn’t wearing a condom. Or, if he was, it had absolutely nothing to do with what he did to her. Because, although he violated her in the most depraved and psychologically sick manner possible, he never consummated their union sexually. He couldn’t, most likely.”
Colleen considered that. “Impotent?”
“Perhaps. But more likely inhibited. So much so he couldn’t follow through. Repressed rage. Something of that nature. Happens all the time with that kind of crime. Rape is never about sex. But it is always about control. And anger. And murder is the only way some men—thankfully very, very few—can reach any sort of a fulfillment. In this case, this was one enraged killer.”
“You think he might have been stalking her?”
Millard Drake lifted his cup to his lips with both hands, drank. “Perhaps. Although there was no evidence of what is called regret. No covering up of the body after the act, no cushioning or hiding of the limbs or head—all the things one sees when a victim is well known to the killer. Although he did pose her right leg in a manner that highlighted her humiliation. If he knew her, he probably didn’t know her well. As I say, anger was driving him.”
Colleen recalled the hideous positioning of Margaret Copeland’s leg with a slight shudder. “If he didn’t know her well, why so much anger?”
“Anger at someone else. Misdirected.” Mr. Drake gave a thoughtful frown. “Anger at a parent is very common.”
Colleen nodded as she considered that. “SFPD have suggested Margaret Copeland was a Zodiac victim.”
Mr. Drake sipped coffee and shook his head. “The signature of this killing doesn’t support that. A completely different ritual. The plastic bag over the head—rare. The use of chloroform. The Zodiac tended to simply shoot his victims. Or stab them. Nothing elaborate, really. And take the cocked leg—very unusual. In all my years, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. And haven’t since. It makes me think the murder was a one-off.”
Colleen took that in. “Your analysis is so insightful. I can’t help but wonder why it wasn’t written up.”
“Oh, but it was.”
“It was?”
He nodded toward the other part of the house where his wife was banging a pot on a stove with gusto. “Doctor Alice Drake, former Chief Forensic Psychiatrist at Atascadero State Mental Hospital—where Margaret Copeland’s killer should have been. She wrote it up as a research paper but SFPD weren’t interested.”
Colleen couldn’t do anything but frown.
“Alice was quite unhappy about it,” Millard Drake said. “There was plenty of evidence, especially with Detective Davis’s report, and with the psychiatric profile Alice worked up, the case could’ve been solved. Should have been.”
Colleen just came out with it. “It’s as if SFPD didn’t want to hear about it.”
“I can’t say—except that the investigation was dropped quickly, then thrown into the Zodiac file.” He gave her a wry squint that told her he was being diplomatic at best.
“Time for your medication, Millard!” Alice Drake shouted from the kitchen.
Colleen had to take a chance.
“I won’t keep you,” she said, “but I do have one last question.” She reached into the pocket of her blue suit jacket and came out with the small round pill case she had picked up in a drugstore after she’d left the evidence facility. She held it out, flipped the lid, showed Millard Drake the plastic fragment.
He looked at it, his eyes bulging behind the round lenses.
“Where on earth did you get that?” He eyed Colleen suspiciously. “That’s evidence!”
“I’m trusting you not to tell. I plan to return it when I’m done.”
He took a deep breath, pulled his hat off, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, put his hat back on.
“Well,” he said, “it has been sitting around for eleven years, I suppose.”
“That’s what I thought. What do you think it is?”
“No idea,” he said. “Except that it must have been important to Margaret Copeland. She swallowed it shortly before she died.”
“How do you know that? That she swallowed it shortly before she died?”
“It was in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten in almost a day. It would’ve been in one of the intestines if she’d swallowed it much earlier. But there was another piece, too, correct?”
“One is all I managed to get hold of. Why do you think Margaret swallowed it?”
“One moment.” He sat up in his chair. Again, he shouted over Colleen’s shoulder. “Alice—would you mind coming in here for a moment?”
Impatient footsteps thumped into the room. Alice Drake stood there with a floral apron on over her overalls. Her fists rested on her hips. Not a patient woman.
“Ms. Hayes here was asking about the plastic fragments found in Margaret Copeland’s stomach,” Millard Drake said.
“What about them?” Alice Drake said.
“Why you think she might have swallowed them?”
“It’s all in my paper,” she said. “Although as hypothesis, admittedly.” Her voice softened. She looked at Colleen. “Considering the emotional and mental state Margaret Copeland must have been in during that hellish experience, and the fact that she was out of her mind on LSD—not to mention chloroform—it made total sense that she would’ve grabbed whatever little scrap of normalcy lay around her and that it would somehow find its way into her system. She was trying to take a pill, if you like—to make her nightmare go away.”
Colleen pondered that for a moment. And didn’t quite buy it. But she wasn’t a pathologist or psychiatrist. She had an Associate’s degree in English she’d earned in prison.
“Thank you,” she said. “This is all very helpful. The Copelands will be most grateful.”
“You’re welcome,” Alice Drake said in a cold tone, then left the room.
Colleen closed her pill case, put it back in her pocket, put her file back in her shoulder bag. She stood up, extended her hand to Millard Drake. They shook.
“I’ll be more than glad to tell you whatever I find out,” she said. “If you want to know.”
“Of course, I want to know.”
“I only ask that you not talk to anybody about this until I’m ready?”
“Nobody’s wanted to talk about this for eleven years, Ms. Hayes. A little longer isn’t going to make any difference.”