From my front window I watched the San Leandro cops finally drive away. Once the cruiser had turned the corner, I brought in the trash can liner from my car and crossed the living room to the Great Wall of Cardboard.
Amy’s neat handwriting identified the contents of each box. BOTTLES/NURSING. WINTER COATS. GRAD SCHOOL BOOKS. BOOKS (CLAY). GIRLS CLOTHES 6–12 MO. BABY TOYS. An index to our lives. It made me think about my job: meeting dead people, trying to reconstruct their lives from the way they’d perished and paper trails they’d left. Property records and traffic fines. At that moment the work of ten years seemed as flimsy as inferring an ancient civilization from a few shards of pottery.
I took down a box marked BREAD MACHINE.
A wedding present. Not once had we made bread with it. In our previous home, a tiny mother-in-law cottage, I’d used the machine to store my personal firearm and ammo. Now we had a gun safe in the master bedroom closet.
I sliced open the packing tape. The lid of the bread machine was also taped shut. I peeled it back and put the bin liner, its tampons and toilet paper wads and the bloody Walther PPS, inside the baking chamber. I shut the lid, shut the box, fitted it back in.
Everything looked just like before.
I lay on the sofa in the dark, creating columns in my mind.
Luke left of his own volition.
Luke committed a crime.
Luke is the victim of a crime.
The first column I subdivided into Luke is okay and Luke is not okay.
Okay included a business trip, taking off to clear his head, or an affair.
Not okay included an accident in some far-flung or inaccessible place. Suicide. Relapse, him strung out in some rat-infested shell, hallucinating, eyes dilated and dry as husks. In which case he could resurface tomorrow or in a month or never. I’ve collected the bodies of people like that. I’ve met their families. They’re rarely surprised to get the news.
My brother’s criminal history and the discarded handgun made the second column—Luke committed a crime—hard to ignore. He could have acted alone or with an accomplice: someone to drive him away from the scene, which was why his car was still there. A young man, maybe, with a beard and a white truck.
But it was the third set of realities, that Luke had come to harm by the hand of another, that I found myself dwelling on. In part because Andrea had accused me of bias. In part because of the Camaro; accomplice or no accomplice, a car was a conspicuous piece of evidence to leave behind. But mainly because of the many bad actors my brother had encountered in his time on earth.
Laying out my fears systematically was useful. And soothing. Working a case like any other.
It was also disheartening. I had none of the usual tools a cop takes for granted. Partners to share the burden and reflect ideas. Databases. Support teams.
Not to mention a complete lack of legal authority.
The two people I loved most were hundreds of miles away.
I had never been so alone in my life.
Too keyed up to sleep, I opened the browser on my phone and searched for Luke’s victims. I knew next to nothing about them. Despite my mother’s pleading I hadn’t attended the trial, believing I could exempt myself from the nightmare.
An article from the archives of the Contra Costa Times discussed the crash and included photographs of both victims. Lucy Vernon’s friends had put up a virtual memorial on Myspace. No one had ever taken it down so it persisted, ghost-like. She had dimple piercings and wore dark purple lip liner. She would never be forgotten. Rosa Arias’s obituary called her a beloved wife and mother. She was survived by her husband Ivan and three young children, unnamed.
That was as much as I could find with the resources at hand, though I looked for a while longer. Rosa and Lucy had died right before social media erupted and made everyone’s private lives a matter of public record.
I tried logging into Luke’s Gmail account using the passwords Andrea had given me. None of them worked. Maybe she’d forgotten it. Maybe he’d forgotten it and been forced to change it.
I composed an email to my father. I had a question for him. House-related, I called it. I thought that was the best way to pique his interest while minimizing the chance he’d mention it to my mom. Otherwise she’d insist on getting on the phone.
At four a.m. I used the last two percent of my battery to google Patrick Starks. He’d declared for the NBA draft but was not selected and spent years bouncing around leagues in Italy, China, Australia, and Israel, winding up as head coach of the Division III Susquehanna River Hawks. These days he went by Pat.
Wednesday. Sixty-one hours in the dark.
A new fire had broken out in Napa County, on the western side of Lake Berryessa. Air quality was expected to worsen. Everyone, not just sensitive groups, was urged to remain indoors. To avoid exposure to unhealthy wildfire smoke, a “clean room” should be established. The public safety power outage remained in effect.
I pulled into the bureau beneath a sky peeling like old varnish.
Rory Vandervelde’s autopsy was scheduled for eight a.m. At ten to, the booth officer called the squad room to notify Jed Harkless that Detective Rigo had arrived.
It was all I could do not to jump up. I was desperate for an update. I watched Harkless pour two cups of coffee and disappear down the hall. His keycard beeped.
Fifteen minutes later he returned.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“He have anything interesting to say?”
“Who?”
“Rigo.”
Harkless shrugged. The criminal investigation was no business of his or mine. But he knew my reputation: I was a meddler. “We didn’t really get into it.”
I nodded and he sat behind the cubicle wall.
I decided to give it a few minutes, then saunter downstairs myself. Just to say hi.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Carmen Woolsey was staring at her screen.
Lydia Januchak, staring at hers.
Dani Botero’s chair was unoccupied. She was in the morgue, assisting with the autopsy.
I opened Accurint and typed in Ivan Arias’s name.
The system returned several individuals. The Ivan Arias I wanted was fifty-one years old, with a current address in Concord. He was the property’s sole owner. He owned no watercraft and had no criminal record. Associates included Rosa Arias, deceased; Maxwell Arias, twenty-four; Stephanie Arias, twenty-two; Christian Michael Arias, nineteen.
Either of the sons would seem to qualify as a young man.
I wondered if either of them had a beard or owned a white truck.
My desk phone rang.
“There’s a Sean Vandervelde here for you,” the booth officer said. “Seems kinda mad.”
“Don’t let him in.” I closed the search window. “I’m coming down.”
Through the lobby glass I recognized Sean from his LinkedIn page. He wore a grape-colored polo shirt and jeans and was stalking the narrow landing that connected the building to the visitor lot. Dragging a Rollaboard, as if he’d come straight from the airport.
I came outside. “Mr. Vandervelde. Deputy Edison. We spoke on the phone yesterday.”
“What time are we getting started?”
“Started with what?”
“The autopsy.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, sir, but as I informed you, it isn’t open to the public.”
“I’m not the public.”
The booth officer startled and reached for her radio.
I motioned for her to wait. “I understand that this is stressful, sir, and I want to help.”
“Sure you do.”
“But you need to calm down. Otherwise you’re going to have to leave the premises. Okay?”
The vast majority of bereaved people are polite. If anything, they go out of their way to express their gratitude. Tiny kindnesses feel like saintly acts when we’re at our lowest.
The angry minority—the bellowers, saber-rattlers, danglers of lawsuits—do their worst over the phone. Get them face-to-face and they almost always fold.
Almost always. We still wear bulletproof vests.
Sean Vandervelde glanced at the booth. The guard was waiting on a sign from me.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“Thank you. How about we discuss this in private.”
He nodded, and the guard buzzed us through.
I showed him to the small room reserved for next of kin. The walls are beige. There’s a potted ficus and copies of Real Simple magazine; a bland sofa and matching chairs and a coffee table set with a box of Kleenex. The wastebasket is emptied out after each visit.
Vandervelde dropped his bag and dropped onto the sofa, one knee jogging. He grabbed a tissue and began twisting it into a rope.
I offered him water or coffee. He didn’t answer. I took a chair. “When did you get in?”
“What…? An hour ago.”
“Are you alone?”
He stopped torturing the tissue and stared at me. “What are we doing? What is this?”
“It’s part of my remit to ensure that next of kin are taken care of.”
“You want to take care of something, take care of her.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? That fucking parasite bitch.”
“I take it you mean Nancy Yap,” I said. “Have you been in touch with her?”
“I don’t want to talk to her.”
“I understand she and your father were in a long-term relationship.”
“She was my mom’s oncologist. That tells you what you need to know.”
He slumped, resting his head against the wall, atop a faint grease stain left by thousands of other weary heads. “You can’t let her take his body.”
“I assure you, sir, nothing’s happening until we’ve completed our investigation.”
“She’s going to try. She had his lawyer call and threaten me.”
“With what?”
“She’s the executor. Allegedly.”
“Are you in possession of a copy of his will?”
“There’s no will.”
“Then—”
“I don’t care if she has a piece of paper with his signature on it,” Sean said. “It doesn’t mean a thing if he’s not in his right mind.”
He jackknifed, hurling the shredded tissue at the wastebasket. It missed. “You see what’s happening here, don’t you? It’s his lawyer. Now he’s representing her? That’s not a conflict of interest? Senile old shitbag, I should have him disbarred. A buck gets ten she’s sucking his dick, too.”
He was working himself up again. I said to him the same thing I’ve said to countless others in his position, to refocus them on what matters: “Tell me about your father.”
Sean frowned. “Tell you what?”
“What do you remember about him best?”
“I don’t…” He faltered. “He was my father.”
I nodded.
“He wasn’t a bad father. Don’t think that’s what I’m saying.”
“Not at all.”
“He was involved, he could be a lot of fun. I have good memories. All right? Is that…Have I said whatever it is you want me to say?”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
Silence.
“I was at his house,” I said. “It seems like he had a wide variety of interests.”
Sean snorted. “No shit.”
“Did you share any of that with him?” I paused. “Cars?”
“When I was six, maybe. But come on. Grow up.”
He leaned back again. “People look at him, ‘Oh, here’s this guy, he’s a master of the universe, he must be some sort of genius.’ But the fact of the matter is he was incredibly gullible. He was like a child. He’d be the first to admit that. His own father walked out, his mother was an alcoholic. He was basically dyslexic. Nobody ever set boundaries, nobody told him you couldn’t do certain things. You give a person like that too much money, it’s like giving a gun to a toddler. I graduated law school and he bought me a Maserati. For the life of him, he couldn’t get why that was inappropriate. ‘Why don’t you ever want to enjoy yourself?’ I told him, ‘I can’t show up to work in a car nicer than the partners’.’ The one person he listened to was my mother. She spoiled him, but at least she kept him grounded. She goes and next thing you know, that cunt’s moving in and I’m getting lectured about it’s his life, he gets to decide.”
Easy narrative. Victim; villain. “Sounds tough.”
“It’s not tough, it’s disgusting. They didn’t even wait till my mom was dead. And now this bitch has the balls to sit there and tell me what I’m entitled to? Fuck you. Listen, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I didn’t fly up here in the middle of the workweek to explore my feelings. I need to speak to someone who can move the needle. When’s the detective coming?”
I glanced at the clock. The autopsy was well under way. “Did you call him?”
“He wasn’t interested in what I had to say.”
“Detective Rigo is a thorough investigator,” I said, though I didn’t know that and on some level hoped it wasn’t true.
“He’s shitty at returning phone calls.”
“You can share your concerns with me, and I can relay them to him.”
“My concerns are that she murdered him. That’s my concern. Relay that.”
“You believe Dr. Yap—”
“Don’t call her that. She should lose her license. Don’t call her that.”
“You believe she killed your father.”
“Not on her own. Does she seem like the kind of person to get her hands dirty?”
“I haven’t met her.”
“Trust me. She hired someone to do it. With his money.”
“Do you have cause to suspect that?”
“Are you deaf? She got him to put her in charge of his estate.”
“I’m asking if she’s made threats against him in the past, or if their relationship was violent.”
“How the fuck do I know? I don’t live with them.”
“Besides Ms. Yap can you think of anyone else who might want to hurt your father?”
Sean Vandervelde smiled bitterly. “Besides me, you mean.”
“I mean in general.”
“No. Is the detective coming or not?”
“Hard to say. They don’t always.”
He crossed his arms. “I’ll wait.”
“What time’s your flight home?”
“I don’t have one. I’m not leaving till I’ve sorted this mess out.”
“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”
“Are we friends?”
“I just want to make sure you’re set up. A lot of hotels are closed because of the outage.”
“I’m in the city. Okay?”
“Okay.” I stood. “Anything else I can do for you, sir?”
He shut his eyes. “I’ll take that coffee.”
I brought it to him in a paper cup and went to the morgue viewing station. Cesar Rigo was there observing the autopsy on the flat-screen.
At table four, on the far side of the morgue, Dani Botero was assisting the pathologist, Mahalia Millsap. Rory Vandervelde’s abdominal cavity was butterflied, his organs removed and sampled. His stomach had been opened and its contents decanted into a basin for analysis.
Rigo had on a royal-blue suit, same slim cut, purple tie tightly knotted.
I felt my own throat constrict. “Morning.”
“Good morning, Deputy. I didn’t expect to see you.”
Dani Botero saluted me through the window. I saluted back. Dr. Millsap kept her eyes on the body, narrating over the intercom as she traced the path of the bullets.
“Sean Vandervelde is here,” I said to Rigo.
“Is he?”
“He has a theory he’d like to share with you. He flew in from LA.”
“Is he aware that I am here?”
“No. I have him in a room. I told him you might not come but he seems intent on waiting.”
“What is the theory?”
“Nancy Yap had his father killed.”
“Fascinating. When I spoke to her, she advanced a similar claim about Sean.”
“The will cuts him out and puts her in charge. Either side, there’s motive. She stands to benefit and he’s on the warpath.”
“Thank you, Deputy. I will take it under advisement.”
The shot to Rory Vandervelde’s trapezius was a clean through-and-through. The shot to his neck had chipped the left transverse process of the C5 vertebra. The fatal shot, number three, was an unlucky fluke. The bullet had sneaked between the third and fourth ribs, missing the scapula but tearing open the descending thoracic aorta and causing rapid internal hemorrhage, Vandervelde’s own heart pumping his trunk full of blood.
I spoke into the intercom. “TOD?”
“Late Sunday to early Monday morning,” Dr. Millsap said.
“After the power went out.”
“Probably, although don’t hold me to that.”
“Did you get into his computer?” I asked Rigo. “Anything from the security system?”
“The footage terminates with the outage. The neighbors cannot recall a vehicle entering or exiting the property. One assumes they were preoccupied with their own problems.”
On the screen, Dr. Millsap tweezed out a warped, bloody slug. She held it up to the camera. “Small-to-medium caliber.” She dropped it into a metal pan with a clack.
I asked Rigo if ballistics had recovered intact rounds.
“One. Nine millimeter.”
Same as the Walther PPS.
“Any luck finding the murder weapon?” I asked.
Rigo shook his head. “I informed your colleague that we were able to locate the victim’s phone. A neighbor discovered it while walking her dog. It had been smashed and thrown to the side of the road. Forensics is attempting to recover the data.”
If my brother had a legitimate reason to be at Rory Vandervelde’s house, they had likely communicated prior to the appointment. The fact that the phone was damaged didn’t change much. What was true of Luke’s laptop was true of any connected device: You didn’t need the physical object to access its activity. I assumed Rigo had submitted a subpoena for cellphone records. Landline, too. It’s what I would have done. Depending on Vandervelde’s carrier and the detective’s pushiness, it could take anywhere from a couple of days to weeks for the request to trickle through the layers of compliance.
I had a more immediate concern. “Were you able to pull prints?”
“Unfortunately not. It appears to have been wiped clean.”
“Too bad. What about from the rest of the scene?”
Rigo moved his eyes from the flat-screen to me. I had the disconcerting sensation he could see through my skull. “There is evidence of numerous individuals throughout the house.”
“Right.” Too many questions. I had to stop. But I also had to learn what I could; I had to know. “So what’s the thinking.”
“Pardon?”
“If not Sean or Nancy.” Sweat tickled my breastbone. “Robbery? Business dispute?”
“It’s early to say.”
“You can’t stop Clay,” Dani said through the intercom. “He’s got a thirst for knowledge.”
“I’m just a fan of open communication,” I said.
Rigo smiled and returned to watching the screen.
Dr. Millsap announced that she would commence dissection of the head.
“What do you want me to tell Sean?” I asked Rigo.
“Must we tell him anything?”
“I can’t leave him sitting there all day.”
“From your previous remarks I took that to be a viable option.”
“One thing he said I thought was kind of strange. I asked if he could think of anyone else who might want to hurt his father. He goes, ‘Besides me, you mean.’ ”
“I am making the intermastoid incision,” Dr. Millsap dictated.
She drew a scalpel across the crown of Rory Vandervelde’s head. Sunburnt scalp parted to reveal flat gray bone. Together with Dani she peeled the flesh to the hairline.
“Perhaps I will have a word with the younger Mr. Vandervelde,” Rigo said.
I led him to the next-of-kin room and knocked softly.
The room was deserted, the paper coffee cup sitting on the table.
The booth officer told us that Sean had left a few minutes ago and gotten into an Uber.
“Did he say where he was headed?” I asked her.
“He didn’t say anything.”
“Do you have his number available?” Rigo asked me.
“My phone’s upstairs but I can text it to you.”
“Thank you, Deputy.” With sudden uninvited intimacy he stepped in and squeezed my biceps. His small hand was like a snare. “You’ve been most helpful.”