August 12, 2017
There were two different kinds of murder, Valerie knew, one engaging, the other dull. The engaging murder was one in which you had to figure out who’d done it. (Fiction didn’t mass-produce “whodunnits” for nothing. They engaged police for the same reason they engaged audiences, the perennial appeal of solving the central mystery of responsibility.) The dull murder, on the other hand, was one in which you already knew who’d done it—but you couldn’t find the fucker. And unfortunately, with every day that passed, it was becoming increasingly obvious that the murder of Adam Grant fell into this second category. The question was migraine-inducingly simple: Where is Dwight Jenner? The answer was migraine-inducingly simple, too: Somewhere in North America. In the twenty-first century, allegedly an age of public passivity in the face of ubiquitous national surveillance, surely it was only a matter of time before your culprit popped up on film? The U.S. had an estimated thirty million CCTV cameras in use, recording four billion hours of footage every week. How hard could it be to find someone?
Quite hard, Valerie imagined herself saying, through gritted teeth. Especially if he knows you’re looking for him.
The traffic cam footage was a washout. Both blind. The entrance camera (as I said, she repeated, mentally, quite hard) simply wasn’t working. It had been out for days. The camera covering the exit road was working—and had allowed the gods to cook up a subtler frustration. Highway maintenance crews were at work just beyond the slip road. Along with the cones and diggers and the high-vis jackets of the beavering crew were half a dozen mounted LED balloon lights, two of which bounced their illumination directly off the windshields of exiting vehicles, nicely obscuring their drivers. Ed was running the number plates through DMV (Valerie hadn’t entirely ruled out the possibility that Kyle Cornell’s Ford would show up) but so far nothing had flagged.
Her desk phone rang. It was coming up on 9:30 A.M.
“Hey,” Nick said. “Want a straw to clutch at?”
“I’ll take a blade of grass. I’ll take a hair.”
“Where’d you go to check out the bike cop’s Jenner sighting?”
“Orland rest stop.”
Nick paused. “Orland … Hold on a second…” She could hear him hitting keys. “Okay. That’s maybe forty miles from what I’m looking at.”
“Which is?”
“Scanned deeds to the Grants’ country place. They’ve got a house just outside Campbellville. You put that with Jenner and Adam Grant’s phone calls…”
“They met.”
“Maybe. Unless you know some other reason Jenner would’ve been in the neighborhood.”
“Christ, maybe it was a three-way with Sophia after all.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m kidding—I think. Wait. You got Adam’s work calendar? Check what he had for July thirty-first.”
It took Nick a few moments, during which Valerie shuffled the facts. Met for what? To negotiate screwing rights? And if Jenner was going to kill him, why not do it there? Why the fuck would he—
“Oh,” Nick said. “Not very cooperative. According to his calendar, Grant was in Los Angeles. Four-day law symposium at UCLA. Keynote speaker on the opening day, in fact.”
“Fuck. Okay. I’ll check.”
Which she did, and got the obstructive confirmation that Adam Grant did in fact speak to at least two hundred people—a mix of professionals and final-year law students—on the afternoon of July 31, commencing at 2 P.M. He stuck around at the drinks reception, then according to his colleague from Willard & Gould (a fellow speaker, who had taken the early-morning flight down with him) retired to the hotel around 5 P.M. They got together for dinner at nine and went for drinks afterward. There was simply no way Adam Grant could have met with Dwight Jenner on the night of the 31st. Credit card transactions proved he stayed in L.A. for the symposium’s duration. He didn’t fly home to San Francisco until the night of August 3.
Two steps forward, three steps back.
Still, Jenner had been forty miles from the Grants’ country house with no good reason for being there. Or no known reason, at least. Valerie called Kyle Cornell.
“Can’t get me out of your mind,” he said. “I know how it is. Don’t feel bad about it.”
Valerie pictured the smile with which this was being delivered.
“Dwight have any business up north?” she asked. “Any buddies? Job interviews? Additional lady friends? Think Orland, Hamilton City, Campbellville. Anything that would take him upstate on the 5.”
“You’ve got a beautiful phone voice. You know that?”
“Please don’t fuck around. Yes or no?”
In the pause that followed, she had a little pang of regret (and guilt) that she’d used the word “fuck.”
“No,” Kyle said. “Nothing I know of. Why?”
“Forget it,” Valerie said, and hung up before she said anything else she’d regret.
She drove to Pacific Heights, mentally grinding the options. Maybe it had been Jenner’s plan to kill Adam Grant at the Campbellville place, assuming he had somehow (via Sophia?) found out about it. Maybe he was casing it. Maybe he just got tired of waiting for Adam to show up there.
She had other, more elaborate theories. Suppose the intention wasn’t murder? Adam Grant had money. By Dwight Jenner’s standards, plenty of money. Put blackmail aside for a moment. How about kidnapping? Could Jenner (and Sophia) have planned to snatch Elspeth—or Rachel? Sophia starts fucking Adam as leverage against him going to the cops when the ransom demand comes in. Keep it out of the press, keep your career, keep your life—just pay up with no shenanigans. Maybe Adam wasn’t supposed to be home that night? Maybe Elspeth wasn’t supposed to be at a friend’s for a sleepover? Jenner gets in, realizes Sophia’s intel’s for shit, panics, ends up with a homicide on his hands. Valerie pictured him going over the Grants’ bedroom balcony in a flurry of adrenaline, thinking fuck … fuck … fuck … Dropping the knife. In the dark. Can’t find it. More panic. Murder. Back to San Q—or the Chair. Get out. Get the fuck out of here now.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. They were all maybes. And none of them explained Jenner’s not bothering with gloves. Kidnapping wasn’t murder, but that was no reason to leave your prints all over the scene.
“You can’t see her,” Tala told Valerie, when Officer Riordan had let her into the Grants’ front hall. “She’s sleeping.”
“I’m afraid I have to,” Valerie said.
“As it is she’s moving around too much. It’s ridiculous.”
“Is she under sedation?”
“No. She is sleeping.”
Emphasized as if to get through to a moron. Valerie was mildly amused. The nurse was so small and neat and had such compressed annoyance. Presumably she wasn’t happy. Presumably Rachel Grant was not proving to be a biddable patient.
“Well, as I said, I’m afraid I have to see her,” she repeated. Then she smiled and bent a little closer toward the nurse’s face. “If she is sleeping I will wake her up.”
For a moment Tala simply stood there, hands in her uniform pockets, tiny nostrils flaring.
“Fine,” she said, turning her back on Valerie and walking away. “Do what you want. It’s on your conscience.”
Rachel and Elspeth were asleep together on the couch, the girl with her head in her mother’s lap. Valerie watched them. Even asleep, Rachel’s face wore its recent trauma like a thin veil. Elspeth looked worse—and on closer inspection was, if REM was an indicator, dreaming. Her lips moved, though they didn’t part, as if a nightmare had them sealed with duct tape.
I was nothing before I had Elspeth. At the time, Valerie hadn’t paid much attention to that, but on reflection it seemed extreme. Rachel Grant didn’t strike her as the type for metaphorical excesses. Still, the woman had been in shock. And in any case these were superfluous preoccupations, derived, Valerie admitted to herself, from the perpetual subsonic noise of her own potential motherhood. Nick hadn’t asked her what time she was likely to be home (for which she would have read: Are we going to have biology?) but he knew her menstrual cycle. Right now she was in the golden zone. She didn’t know which irritated her (irrationally) more, the fact that he was tracking her like the goddamned fertility police or that he was doing such a good job of not mentioning it. She was being, she knew, completely unreasonable. That was what irritated her (rationally) the most.
Elspeth screamed.
Two small whimpers—then a full, piercing, wide-eyed horror-movie scream.
She sat up, shaking, crying, hands over her face.
“Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Rachel said, having been wrenched awake herself. “Baby…? Did you have a—” She saw Valerie in the doorway. Stopped. Frowned. Her face went tight with fury. Valerie held up her hands in silent apology. Backed out of the room. Elspeth hadn’t seen her.
Serves me right for being such a bitch to the nurse, Valerie thought. Shit.
It was almost twenty minutes before Rachel came out of the living room, alone. The TV had been switched on. Shrek. Comfort. Elspeth was being allowed to be a little kid again, to return to a time before anything ugly had happened to her. Since the murder of her father, Valerie guessed, Elspeth was being allowed anything.
“What the hell?” Rachel Grant whispered.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Grant. I just arrived.”
“What is it? You found him?”
“No. But we have something. Jenner was spotted not far from your place in Campbellville on the night of the thirty-first. It’s possible he was watching the house. I’d like to go up there and take a look around.”
Rachel Grant stared at her as if the information had frozen her into incomprehension. She opened her mouth to speak—then shook her head, and waved Valerie toward the kitchen.
“What do you mean?” she said, once they’d switched rooms. “How would he know about the house there?” She was standing against the island worktop, arms wrapped around her middle.
“Well, he knew about this place,” Valerie said. “And as I said before, Adam’s phone records show he spoke with Jenner several times. Obviously, we still don’t know what they talked about.”
“This woman,” she said. “That’s what you think they talked about.”
Not a question.
“We really can’t know,” Valerie answered. The kitchen was benign with sunlight. As it had been (she imagined Rachel Grant thinking) when Adam had photographed Sophia. On the worktop barely ten feet away. Her ass had rested there. Maybe they’d fucked right here, where Rachel Grant was standing. Valerie wondered if Rachel was already thinking of selling the house, getting out, starting over. A forced rebirth. She saw it in survivors, the realization that the life they’d thought established was gone, the future of vague plans and approximate certainties reduced to a blank canvas.
“In any case,” Valerie said, “I need to check it out. Do I have your permission?”
Rachel smiled. The same masochist’s smile Valerie had seen before. “It goes on, doesn’t it?” she said. “Even when there’s nothing left, it goes on.”
Valerie didn’t want to answer, since she had nothing but the truth to offer. But there was a bitter strength to this woman that demanded your honesty.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, it does.”
Rachel stared at her. Then said: “I can’t do this anymore.”
For a moment Valerie thought this was just an admission of exhaustion. Rhetorical, if so, since she knew Rachel would find the strength to keep going—for her daughter’s sake.
But she’d misread it.
“I knew about her,” Rachel said. “I knew about Sophia.”
And here we are, Valerie thought, in the short silence that followed, that point in an investigation when the camera angle shifts and you see a whole different side to the object you thought you knew.
She waited. Assimilated. Put the next question in its simplest form.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Rachel shook her head. Mild self-disbelief. Then self-acceptance. “Because I’m pathetic,” she said. “Because I don’t want Elspeth to know. Because I thought it was dead and buried. Because it still matters to me that people don’t think of him as worse than he was. Take your pick. The real reason is I’m such a fucking narcissistic egomaniac I’m still angry with myself that I forgave him and took him back. I doubt you’ll believe that, though it’s the truth. You can love someone so much it makes you ashamed of yourself. I didn’t tell you because it was an indictment that I wasn’t enough for him, and a double indictment that that wasn’t enough for me to kick him out. Astonishing, isn’t it?”
Again, Valerie assimilated. Astonishing? No, it wasn’t. Nick had taken her back when she’d done exactly the same thing.
“I understand,” she said.
“Sure you do.”
No point pressing that. Just get the facts. Valerie took out her notebook and pen. Carefully. Anything not done carefully might pitch Rachel away from saying anything more. “Tell me,” she said. “Let’s start with her surname.”
Rachel stared at the gleaming floor, arms still wrapped around herself. “I don’t know it,” she said. “I didn’t ask.” Pause. “She was a whore.”
Not figuratively, Valerie decided, but best to make sure. “A prostitute?”
“A dancer. Some strip club in L.A. Where the girls weren’t restricted to dancing, obviously.”
“Do you know the name of the club?”
“No.”
“When did it happen?”
“Two years ago. He was down there for a funeral. I’m sure you can imagine the narrative. Death. Sex. A heightened sense of mortality so you suddenly need to grab life. It would’ve been better for me if I didn’t understand. But that’s the curse of a generous imagination. I did understand.”
“Whose funeral?”
“An old college friend. Massive aneurism, totally unpredicted.” She glanced up and saw Valerie’s pen poised, waiting for the name. “Noah…” She searched, mentally. “Levine. I think the surname’s Levine.”
“You don’t recall the exact date, do you?”
“Summer. Early June.”
“Well, we can get the exact date. Did he go to the club alone?”
“He said he did.”
More CCTV joys. Some strip clubs had them, some didn’t. And how many strip clubs were there in L.A.? “Sophia” most likely a working name. Finding the real one would require a tax-legit establishment. And that was assuming she’d given them her real name to start with. Another needle in another haystack.
“But it wasn’t a one-off, clearly,” Valerie said.
“No. It wasn’t.”
“How did it continue? I’m sorry, I know this is—”
“I only had his word for it, but he said another four or five times. According to him, she moved up here not long after they met.”
“Still dancing?”
“Who knows? There was a limit to the details I wanted. I wasn’t interested in her biography. Just in what she did that I didn’t.”
And what was that? Valerie didn’t ask, since she knew. The photograph of Sophia tied, gagged, blindfolded. The old dreary story: sexual territory a marriage left unmapped. There was a sadness emanating from Rachel now, beyond the grief. Releasing this information had lowered her, with a strange, inevitable gentleness, to a new level of ordinariness. The ordinariness of imperfection. Don’t speak ill of the dead, we were in the habit of saying. But the dead had always been real people, and real people’s imperfections couldn’t be erased, even by death. The world was everything the world contained. Reality had no patience with the need for delicacy.
“How did you find out?” Valerie asked.
“He told me. It’s not as if I caught them in the act. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t have forgiven him. He knew me well enough to know that.”
“How long ago?”
Very wearying to Rachel, Valerie could see, to dredge through the facts, the dates, the logistics. There was a dull horror to it, that these seismic events in the heart were anchored to particular times, places, mundane details. Her husband zipping up his fly, afterward. The dismal plainness of small atrocities.
“He told me in the fall. October, I guess.” A pause. “I didn’t know he ever brought her here. He swore he didn’t.”
So that part of the shock when she’d seen the pictures was real. She hadn’t known the sacrilege had gone so far, into her home, into her bed.
“Maybe he lied,” Rachel said. “Maybe he didn’t end it when he said he did. Maybe I don’t even get that consolation. Maybe I don’t get anything.”
Maybe you don’t, Valerie thought.
“Did you ever see her? In person?”
Rachel paused. Nowhere to go now but back to the truth. “Yes,” she said. “It was before he told me. A total coincidence, as it happens. I was pulling up outside his office and I saw him talking to someone in a car parked half a block down. A glimpse. Nothing, really. Just the blond hair and too much makeup. I suppose if I’d been blond he’d have gone after a redhead.”
Or a brunette, Valerie thought. Like me. Maybe he sensed I didn’t want to be tied up and blindfolded and gagged. Her own guilt bristled anew. How could it not? It could have been her. It had been her, up to a point. And here was the evidence of what that would have done to his wife. The questioning now felt bankrupt. The words were unclean in her mouth.
“By the time I parked she’d gone and he was back in the building,” Rachel continued. “I asked him about her, of course, teased him in that idiotic way, when you make light of something because you can’t let it be anything. He said it was a client. That was all.”
“You weren’t suspicious?”
“Not really. Things were good between us. I had the great reservoir of false confidence.” She smiled again. “And then later you find out, see the dots join with comical obviousness. It’s like your own stupidity’s been with you the whole time, walking right next to you, but you’ve only just turned and noticed it. You think your life’s immune to cliché. Turns out it isn’t.”
“You don’t happen to recall the car she was in, do you?”
“No. Black, I think.”
“Sedan? RV? Compact?”
Rachel fought through tiredness for the memory. “Sedan, I guess. I don’t know.”
Valerie was on the verge of asking if Adam had taken his mistress to the Campbellville house—but she abandoned it. It wouldn’t make any difference. And in any case Adam might have lied.
“Is there anyone else who might have known about the affair? A close friend of Adam’s? A work colleague?”
Rachel shrugged. “He told me no one knew about it,” she said. “But then he told me he never brought her here and that was a lie. His friends were his work colleagues. Maybe he told Dan.”
“Dan Kruger?”
Rachel nodded.
“Is there anything else you can tell me about this woman that might help us find her?”
“Not that I can think of.”
Valerie closed the notebook and put it away.
“I suppose this is all going to come out in court,” Rachel said. “If there’s ever a trial. If you ever get Jenner and…” She left it unfinished, defeated, Valerie thought, by the sheer sordidness: If you ever get Jenner and it turns out he and my husband were fucking the same woman.
“It might not be necessary,” Valerie said, desperate to give her something. “As I said before, the physical evidence is overwhelming. We just have to find him. That’s the only reason Sophia’s material. It’s possible she knows where he is. There’s no reason to think beyond that.”
Bullshit, of course, and Rachel’s face said she knew it.
“It’s for Elspeth’s sake. For myself I’m past caring. As you can probably tell.”
Quite, Valerie thought. Rachel looked as if, for herself, she didn’t care if she lived or died.
“I’ll do everything I can,” Valerie said. “I promise you it’ll be kept out unless it’s crucial to securing a conviction, which at this stage I don’t think it will be. In the meantime, I still need to take a look at the Campbellville house.”
Rachel eased herself away from the island with a wince. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll give you the keys.”