Two

The detectives and I walked through the door at the end of the corridor. It led to another hallway. Several members of my family waited there, stress and anxiety etching lines on their faces and circles under their eyes. They looked up as I approached them, their faces full of questions and fear.

“It’s not Brian,” I said.

“Oh, thank God.” My mother, seated on a nearby bench, slumped over, her hands clasped tightly together on her lap. My father sat beside her. Now he covered his face with his hands. Then he straightened and put his arm around my mother’s ­shoulder.

My brother’s wife, Sheila, stood next to the bench, her face stricken. She didn’t speak. Then she turned away and leaned against the wall, her palms and forehead against the painted surface. Aunt Caro, my father’s younger sister, had been standing on the other side of the bench. Now she walked to where my sister-in-law stood and put her hand on Sheila’s arm.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Then I could figure out what to do next.

Mother got to her feet and reached for Dad’s hand as he, too, rose. Together, hand-in-hand, they walked slowly toward the front door of the Sonoma County Coroner’s Office. Caro and Sheila followed. I told Griffin and Harris I’d be in touch. Then I walked out into the midday sunshine.

In the parking lot, my parents were climbing into Dad’s car. Caro had her arm around Sheila, who was standing at the open door of her Honda Civic hatchback.

“I have to go back to Petaluma. I left the kids with a neighbor.” Sheila glanced at me and Caro, as though expecting us to argue with her. Then she tossed her shoulder bag onto the passenger seat, slid into the driver’s seat, and fastened the lap belt and shoulder harness.

“I’ll talk with you later,” I said.

Sheila didn’t acknowledge my words. She started the car, backed the Honda out of the space, and drove out of the parking lot.

“Something’s going on there,” Caro said. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. “Yes. Not sure what it is. But I’ll figure it out.”

“I’m sure you will. I’ll see you back at the house.” Caro embraced me. Then she walked to Dad’s car and got in. As soon as they drove away, I reached for my cell phone and called my friend, Dan Westbrook.

“It’s not my brother,” I told him. “Yes, I’m relieved. But I still don’t know where Brian is. Thanks. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’ll talk with you later, when I know more.”

I disconnected the call, got into my Toyota, and drove toward the parking lot exit. The coroner’s office is on Chanate Road, in the northwest part of Santa Rosa. As I headed into town, I recalled that quick exchange of looks between the two detectives.

I knew what they were thinking. If Brian wasn’t their corpse and his MedicAlert bracelet was at the crime scene, these two detectives had reached what was for them the next logical step.

My kid brother was a person of interest, maybe even a suspect, in a homicide.

——

My brother, Brian, had disappeared a few days earlier. I wasn’t even certain when he’d gone missing, and until yesterday, I hadn’t known he was gone. I didn’t have any idea where he was or why he’d left. Or why his MedicAlert bracelet had been found with an unidentified body on a burned boat at a marina in rural Sonoma County.

I reviewed what I did know.

Brian called my cell phone on Friday morning. But he didn’t leave a message. I returned the call later in the day. His phone went straight to voice mail, so I left a message for him. He didn’t call back.

I’m a private investigator, working out of Oakland. A couple of weeks earlier, I had finished up a big case that resulted in a big check deposited in my business account. I’d cleared up several small cases as well. I decided to take advantage of my light workload and take some time off. So I rescheduled several appointments, cleared a week in my calendar—this week—and arranged for my tenant to feed my cats, water the plants, indoor and out, and take in the mail. I was going to take a vacation, time away from the day-to-day routine, and quality time with Dan, since our friendship had evolved over this summer into something more than just a friendship.

On Saturday, Dan and I drove up to Lassen Volcanic National Park. The park is located in the northeast part of the state. The annual snowfall at Lassen is usually the heaviest in California. There are permanent snow patches on Lassen Peak. We planned to spend the week hiking, relaxing, exploring the park and the surrounding area.

Things didn’t work out that way.

Yesterday—Monday—we hiked the trail up Lassen Peak. It’s the southernmost active volcano in the Cascade Range. The mountain had rumbled frequently between 1914 and 1917. A powerful eruption on May 22, 1915 spewed boulders that were too hot to touch for days afterward. The cloud of ash produced by the volcano drifted as far as 200 miles.

Lassen Peak is likely to erupt again, one of these years. I was reminded of this frequently during the hike, since the area has constant geothermal activity, with boiling springs, mudpots and fumaroles.

The trail Dan and I hiked was a five-mile round trip with an elevation gain of two thousand feet, and we were on the mountain most of the day. Though it was early August, we encountered snow on the ground at the higher elevations.

It was nearly five when we got back to the cabin where we were staying, at the Mill Creek Resort, not far from the park’s southwest entrance. We stripped off our hiking clothes and headed for the bathroom. The hot shower felt good on my aching muscles, and so did Dan’s shoulder massage. We dressed and made plans for dinner.

Only then did I look at my cell phone. I had four missed calls and two voice mails from my sister-in-law. I listened to the voice mails, with growing alarm. In the first message, Sheila sounded concerned. In the second, worried. She wanted to know if I knew where Brian was.

I called Sheila. “No, I don’t know where he is. What’s going on?”

Sheila told me, her voice trembling, that she and the children had left Brian at home in Petaluma twelve days earlier. She had driven to Firebaugh, in the southern part of the Central Valley, to visit her parents. When she returned from her trip on Sunday afternoon, Brian was gone. He’d left a note saying he was going away for a couple of days. He didn’t say where he was going, just that he would be back on Sunday.

He never showed up.

Sunday night gave way to Monday morning. Still no Brian. He wasn’t answering his cell phone. Calls went straight to voice mail. Text messages went into the ether.

I asked for more details, firing questions at my sister-in-law. She told me she had talked with Brian several times while she was in Firebaugh, most recently on Monday of last week. She hadn’t spoken with him since then, although he’d called two days later. He’d disconnected when the call went to Sheila’s voice mail. But the missed call showed on her phone’s list of recent calls.

Usually when Sheila and Brian were apart, they talked with each other more frequently. If that routine had been broken, something was amiss. I pressed Sheila for answers, sensing that she was leaving something out. She seemed reluctant to answer my questions. Finally, she told me she and Brian had had a fight, a big one, during that phone conversation a week ago. But she didn’t want to discuss that over the phone.

Fine, I thought. But we will discuss it, in person.

I told Sheila to file a missing persons report with the Petaluma police. Then Dan and I packed our gear into his Subaru wagon and checked out of our cabin, heading west out of the mountains to the town of Red Bluff, where we had a quick dinner before driving south on Interstate 5. From there it was another three hours, or more, driving time to Oakland. Dan was at the wheel, pushing the upper limits of speed. I called Sheila several times during the drive, hoping for news. But Brian hadn’t called, nor had he come home.

Sheila hadn’t contacted my parents. I had to make those calls, letting them know that their only son was missing.

The first call was to Castro Valley, where my father lives. Tim Howard is a retired professor who’d taught history at California State University in Hayward, now known as Cal State East Bay. Dad was at home. He told me he’d drive up to Sonoma County first thing in the morning. He said he’d call his sister in Santa Rosa, so we could use Aunt Caro’s place as a rendezvous.

My mother was where she usually was in the evenings, at her restaurant, Café Marie, in her hometown of Monterey. She, too, made plans to leave things in the hands of her capable staff and drive north.

It was after ten o’clock that night when Dan dropped me off at my home in the Rockridge section of Oakland, on Chabot Road, just off College Avenue. My cats, Abigail and Black Bart, meowed at me indignantly, acting as though I’d been gone for weeks instead of days. They had received food, water, litter box care and lots of attention from Darcy, my tenant, who lived in the studio above the garage. Regardless of how long I’d been away, they still needed reassurance that I loved them. They also wanted feeding again, just because. I fell into bed, stroking furry cats who snuggled close to me in bed. I worried about my brother until I drifted into an uneasy sleep.

I got up at six-thirty on Tuesday morning, fed the cats again, and sent a text message to Darcy to let her know I was home. I was on my second cup of coffee when the phone rang.

It was Sheila, nearly hysterical. She was calling to tell me that Brian’s MedicAlert bracelet had been found with a corpse.

After finding the bracelet, Detectives Griffin and Harris had notified the MedicAlert Foundation to find out if the registry had contact information for Brian Howard. Then they saw the missing persons report Sheila had filed on Monday with the Petaluma police. That report had mentioned the bracelet, which Brian always wore since the family had discovered his penicillin allergy, back when he was a kid. The detectives had then contacted the Petaluma Police Department. The detective in charge of that case had called Sheila, asking if she or a member of the family could come to the morgue to look at the body. Neither my sister-in-law, my mother, or my father could face the prospect of identifying my brother’s body. It was left to me.

But the man in the morgue wasn’t Brian. Now I had lots of questions and no answers. And I was following a trail that was already several days cold.