Chapter 33

Cole put his arm around Jessica as they walked out of the Campton Place Hotel. He listened to her explain what her mother had said as they walked up to Sutter and over to Powell to catch the cable car. One advantage of where they lived was the cable car went right by.

Jessica’s mother was dying. Honest to God, she couldn’t get a break. First, Zoe and now this. And Jess had to know that it wouldn’t be long before she lost her father as well.

“All these years my father’s been lying to me. He knew exactly why Mother left.”

Cole had to admit it was a pretty bizarre story. “It would have been difficult to explain the situation to a young child.”

“True, but I grew up and he never told me. Just a few weeks ago, I took him to Sausalito for lunch. We talked about her. He still didn’t tell me.”

They waited on the corner as the cable car crawled up the hill from Union Square, clanging its bell. They climbed on, and Cole noticed there wasn’t a woman on board by herself, thanks to the Final Call Killer.

“You know,” Cole said, careful to keep his voice low, “it may have been difficult for your father to admit that he’d been left for a woman.”

“I’m his daughter. He could have told me. No one else had to know.”

Cole noticed some of her anger toward her mother was now directed at her father. Not that he blamed her. But seeing her mother and hearing the story had softened her a bit.

“Look. Your father never bothered to get a divorce. He never dated. This was a real blow to him. He couldn’t deal with it.”

“Still …”

The conductor came by and Cole paid him.

“I understand your father’s motivation much better than I do your mother’s. How could she let your father and what’s-her-name—”

“Alex.”

“How could she let them talk her into giving you up? If you ask me, that’s harder to comprehend.”

“From what Mother said, it was a traumatic time in her life. When she made the decision to leave, she knew Father wouldn’t let me go, and she knew Alex really wanted her own child. It was easier to give in rather than fight both of them.”

Aw, hell. Cole still thought the woman should have stood up for herself. Something could have been worked out.

“My mother probably has more self-confidence now—because of her success at sculpting—than she had back then. I remember thinking as a child that my father had all the answers. Mother would have ideas about going some place or doing something. He would override her, and she would give in.”

“Sounds like Alex might be the same type of person.”

“Probably.”

They hopped off the cable car at the corner of Taylor and Clay. The night was cool, the scent of rain was in the air. Another storm was heading this way. The last two years in sunny San Diego had spoiled him.

“I guess I’m lucky,” Jessica said. “I have more of my father’s personality than I do my mother’s. Father can be overbearing at times. He would have pushed me around, if I’d let him.”

Cole had no doubt this was true. Dick Crawford had been a great help to him, but Cole had been around him enough to see how opinionated he could be.

“He took me back to visit Columbia University where he’d gone to school. He was determined that I become an investigative reporter, and their school of journalism is the best. There’s an excellent journalism department at UC Berkley, but my father insisted I should go to his alma mater.

“I didn’t know what career would be good for me. I wanted to go to UCLA. We had some real fights over it, but in the end, he gave in. Of course, I did tell him I would drop out of school entirely if I couldn’t go to the college I’d selected. It took that much to convince him.”

“Are you going to talk to your father tonight?”

Jess shook her head. “No. I’ve had all the fun I can have for one evening. I’ll see him tomorrow night. That’ll give me some time to think how to explain that I have a half brother.”

“Is he still living in Sedona?”

“No. He’s a SEAL who lives in San Diego. He has a wife and an eighteen-month-old boy. Dillon’s deployed overseas now.”

“Are you going to contact him?”

“Yes, after Mother tells him about me.”

Swell. Her mother never mentioned Jessica. He didn’t think he was going to like this woman very much.

Grant Bennett stood in the foyer of the Pacific Union Club. He’d had dinner with several old friends in the exclusive club where they gathered once a month. He’d been coming to the brownstone mansion for over thirty years, and he enjoyed the clubby atmosphere even if women weren’t allowed except for special functions.

Tonight he’d been distracted. He’d kept thinking about Jessica. He didn’t want her angry with him.

“Grant, good thing I ran into you.”

He turned and saw Albrion Wellsley III—Albie to his friends, Three-peat to those who’d crossed the real estate tycoon—coming toward him. Grant didn’t particularly care for the man, but the advertisements his company placed in the Herald produced enormous revenue.

“How’ve you been?” Grant asked.

“Same ole, same ole.” Albie flashed his Cheshire cat grin. “Business is booming. It’s Sadie that’s driving me crazy. You know how wives are.”

Grant nodded. He hadn’t a clue. He’d looked for the right woman, but she never happened along.

“Sadie’s doing this big-fund raiser, and she wanted me to talk to my friends.”

Grant half listened, his mind still on Jessica, as Albie rattled on about the event Sadie was chairing. He agreed to take a table and bring his key people. Mort would write the whole thing off as a business expense.

The promise got rid of Albie, who trotted off to find another sucker. Grant walked out into the night air and checked his cell phone for messages. The Pacific Union Club was rigidly traditional. Jackets, ties, and no cell phones.

He pressed the button to check his voice mail. Since he was married to the Herald, he was the person the night shift called when there was a problem. He recognized the voice immediately.

Allison Crawford. Now Allison Wells.

Walking along California, he passed Huntington Park as he dialed Campton Place. He asked for Allison’s room and stopped in front of Grace Cathedral. The neo-Gothic structure’s spectacular stained glass windows were lit. From inside the building, he heard the boys’ choir practicing.

Allison came on the line, and he said, “It’s Grant. You called?”

“Jessica came to see me.”

“Great!” Maybe not Allison had always been hard to read. He couldn’t tell from her voice how the meeting went. “How did it go?”

“I’m not sure. She’s angry. She doesn’t understand.”

Grant couldn’t blame Jessica. Abandoning your child was difficult to explain. He’d always thought Allison should have stood up to Dick and Alex, but she hadn’t. Would she have come back now, if she hadn’t been dying?

He asked, “Are you going to see her again?”

“I asked her to meet me for lunch. She said she would think it over and let me know.”

Grant could picture the tilt of Jessica’s chin as she said those words. She was Dick Crawford’s daughter—no question about it.

“You’ll see her again.”

“I hope so. She’s so … so beautiful, so talented. Everything I never was at her age.”

“Well …” He remembered Allison Hartley when she’d worked as a secretary in the advertising department of the Herald. She was stunningly beautiful, but shy and unsure of herself. Every heterosexual male in the building had wanted to get in her pants. Dick Crawford had succeeded.

And paid for it the rest of his life.

“I watched her leave. A handsome man was waiting for her in the lobby.”

“That’s Cole Rawlings. He’s our ace investigative reporter.”

“Like Dick.”

“Like Dick,” he said before he realized what she was thinking. “Don’t get me wrong. Cole’s a top-notch reporter, but no one is pushing your daughter around.”

“I didn’t think so, but I remember myself at that age.”

Grant refused to dwell on the past. He’d helped Allison keep track of Jessica because he felt sorry for her, but he was loyal to Dick. Even though he was lonely at times, he was glad he hadn’t found the “right” woman only to lose her.

“Did you tell Jessica about Dillon?”

“Yes. I could tell it hurt her.”

Small wonder. The child left behind. What did Allison expect?

“Now, I’m going to have to tell Dillon that he has a half sister.”

Grant couldn’t help her there. When people kept secrets, it only complicated their lives, and in the end, those secrets came back to haunt them. Grant assumed not mentioning Jessica had been Alex’s idea.

He’d met the artist only once, when she’d come to San Francisco with Allison. Charismatic and domineering had been his impression of the woman. Allison had traded one overbearing person for another. They’d seemed happy, though, so who was he to question?

“When are you going back?” he asked.

“In a month. I’m here for an exhibition of my work at the Miranda Gallery. I’m doing a couple of appearances to raise funds for cancer research.”

It would be her last exhibition, he decided. How tragic. Allison had come into her own during the last ten years. She should have longer to enjoy it.

“You know, I think I should tell Dick that you’re in town.” And that you’re dying.

He heard her sigh softly. “All right. Don’t tell him where I’m staying.”

“Rawlings here.”

“I just thought I would let you know we’ve moved Warren Jacobs’s case to the inactive file.”

This from a source Cole had cultivated himself in the Oakland Police Department. Cole looked up from his desk and gazed across the office to where Jessica was working at her computer. After meeting with her mother last night, Jessica had hardly slept.

“Thanks for letting me know.”

Cole hung up, wondering if this was a lost cause. The only evidence they had that Jacobs had been murdered were trace amounts of succinyl chlorine and pictures of what might be needle marks between his toes. Someone was going to get away with murder.

Where was that cold-blooded killer? What was he thinking? The psycho had been strangely inactive, considering the profiler thought he was accelerating his kill rate.

Typical police thinking would be the guy had been arrested and was in prison. That’s what they’d believed when other serial killers had unexpectedly stopped. In most of the serial killing cases that had been solved, this had been the case.

What was going on here? Cole had the unsettling feeling that this monster was among them. Watching. Waiting.

His next victim would be someone at the Herald. That was Cole’s gut instinct. Why the Herald?

The killer hadn’t communicated with anyone—as far as they knew—until the Herald had given him a name. That had to be the link, he decided.

The psycho called himself Lady Killer. Why? Jessica’s article had been dead on. The man had no respect for women. The way he displayed their bodies after he’d killed them clearly demonstrated this.

Zoe Litchfield’s clothes had been removed after she’d been strangled. Postmortem her body had been positioned so that anyone coming through the door would see a humiliating crotch shot.

Cole needed to write another column about the killer, but he was out of angles. Until something came through on the fabric sample or the orthopedic shoe, he didn’t have a damn thing to write about. He went on line to see if someone in the blog-o-sphere could give him a spark of inspiration.

Web logs known as blogs were interactive newsletters that were updated daily by individuals across the country. The best blogs had distinctive voices that leaped off the page and provided an alternative to the establishment tone of newspaper journalism, known in the quirky blog world as dead-tree pieces. They were the on line equivalent of talk shows.

The traditional media had their own blogs and had staff journalists whose sole job was to update the blog several times a day. Cole thought MSNBC was the best. Naturally, Mort was too cheap to have even a simple blog.

On 9/11 media Web sites either crashed or failed to provide timely updates. Bloggers posted minute-by-minute first person accounts that were surprisingly accurate. In the following days, these sites received hundreds of thousands of hits. The blog phenomenon had taken off.

Now, they were an accepted part of the alternative media. Journalism schools across the country began teaching about Web logs. The graduate school of journalism across the bay at Berkley had a course. Cole intended to take it once the serial killer was caught.

Cole surfed to www.crimezRus.com. He was fairly sure this guy had law enforcement experience. His posts were too professional for a lay person, and the way he answered incoming posts—squashing outrageous rumors that gave many blogs a bad name—indicated he was very intelligent. From his posts, Cole knew this blogger lived in the Bay Area.

The interactive site was full of rehashed theories about the serial killer. Nothing new. Even the bloggers were stumped.

“Got a minute?”

Cole expelled a long breath, logged off, and slowly turned to face Duff. The guy was lonely, Cole reminded himself.

Cole asked, “What’s up?”

Duff leaned one shoulder against the Plexiglas enclosure surrounding Cole’s office. “I’m considering writing an article on … ah … a real problem, especially for men.”

What had he done to deserve this?

“Just what problem is that?”

“Anal fissures.”

Don’t go there. “Is it a big problem?”

Duff nodded solemnly. “Huge. People just don’t talk about it.”

Cole didn’t want to talk about it either, but he knew he didn’t have any choice short of being rude.

“Explain what you mean and maybe I can help you find an angle,” he said.

“Many people experience excruciatingly painful bowel movements. That’s the only time they have the pain. It comes from unusually large or very hard stools.”

Okay. This was a tough shit story. “What causes it?”

“Not enough fiber and water in the diet. The soft tissue gets torn and that causes pain every time the person needs to eliminate.”

“Is that what they mean by a pain in the ass?”

Duff gaped at him for a moment, then tried for a laugh. “Sorta.”

“Okay, here’s your angle. ‘A Pain in the Rear.’ That will get everyone’s attention.”

“I don’t know, that’s a little—”

“Duff, trust me on this. Grab those headlines when you can.”

“Manny would never go for a head like that.”

“Try him. You might be surprised.” Cole thought for a moment. “Is there a way to prevent an anal fissure?”

“Sure. Fiber in the diet and eight full glasses of water a day.”

“What should you do if you get it?”

“Use cocoa-butter suppositories. They—”

“Now, I’ve got your head. Prevent Pain in the Rear.”

“Hey, guys!”

Hank Newman had come up beside Duff. “Check your e-mail. It’s another command performance.”

“Meaning?” Cole asked.

“Meaning Grant or Mort wants us to do something,” replied Duff. “We have to be there. There isn’t an option.”

“This time it’s some fund-raiser. They want the key people to attend.”

“When is it?” Cole asked Hank.

“The end of the month.”

Cole supposed this came with the territory. People liked to see who was writing the articles they read. He wondered if he could dodge this bullet, then decided it might be fun.

Hank said there would be dinner and a silent auction, after they watched a short play. Going with Jessica would be a kick. It might get her mind off her troubles at least for one evening.