I raised a hand to Haruto as I walked past the doorway to Aromas and kept going until I got to The Coffee. Without asking, Nat made me an Earl Grey latte (which, with the addition of almond syrup, he’d named the San Francisco Fog on his menu board), and I said, “I might have wanted something different.”
He shrugged. “Do you?”
“Well, no.”
He snorted. “One thing I’ve already noticed, people like ridin’ on familiar trails. I don’t know all the names yet, but I can tell you their coffee order. Maybe it’s mostly too early in the mornin’ for them to be thinkin’ of options.” He nodded at a woman walking past the front window carrying a yoga mat. “She’s a vanilla latte, low fat; she comes in with a guy who’s an Americano, triple shot—which I’d know anyway from his shakin’ fingers.”
He handed me my tea and smiled at a woman approaching the counter. “House blend, large, room for cream?”
She smiled and nodded at him, looking pleased.
He winked at me. It reminded me of Faye-Bella putting out my favorite chocolate. He was right, people really did prefer to ride familiar trails. My smile faded. What else did that remind me of?
I walked slowly back to Aromas. The street was still quieter than usual on a midweek afternoon, and Nat was probably right, people were finding two corpses a little hard to ignore. I sat in my office and tried to add together the few random facts at my disposal. Grandfather and Davo were still in Lichlyter’s sights, and I hadn’t found anything to help them get out from under the weight of her suspicions. I hadn’t found the mysterious Pavel. Was the orphanage an elaborate charade, existing only on paper and for the brief moments of Gavin’s visits? He’d said he didn’t know much about Catholic nuns, so he wouldn’t know they were wearing the wrong outfits. Katrina had been uncharacteristically reticent about trumpeting her philanthropic efforts, but, if Amos Noble were typical, she had solicited significant donations. Haruto said $200,000 a year moved through St. Olga’s. Had Katrina laundered those donations through the phony orphanage? Did Sergei discover the fraud through his priest friend in Kiev and come here to confront Katrina, only to find that she’d been killed? But if the orphanage was an elaborate charade, it had to be built by someone with the technical expertise to set up the web-based shadow accounts, and the contacts to have a priest killed in Kiev.
I looked at my list of suspects and crossed off the South American drug smugglers. I had no way of finding out if they were involved, and Lichlyter was welcome to them. People Katrina had bested, in court or out, were obviously still possibilities, and that included Amos Noble. I reluctantly crossed off Angela Lacerda, who seemed to use her lawyers to fight her battles rather than taking direct action.
I started a new list with Amos Noble at the top, well aware that I wanted him to be guilty so the others on my list were off the hook. He’d lied when he said the loss of the Fabian Gardens project was unimportant; he needed that project to keep his company afloat. And he’d lied about not being angry with Katrina over her defection, because as soon as he found out, he fired her over it. What if Katrina had backed away from his company because she’d discovered he was involved in something illicit? That would explain the “criminal fraud” accusation she was hurling during the phone call I overheard the day before she was killed. But he didn’t have a motive to kill Sergei, unless Sergei was a witness to Katrina’s murder. If Sergei was hanging around Polk Street waiting for me to lead him to my grandfather, maybe he was nearby when Katrina was killed. And Matthew might simply have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, seen something he wasn’t supposed to, and paid the price. No, that practically required stadium seating for the crowd observing Katrina’s murder. I had no idea if Noble was involved in anything crooked, or how to find out, although the lies I knew about were real enough. I had to leave him to Lichlyter, too. I’d tell her what I knew about the end of his relationship with Katrina, but investigating his business took resources I didn’t have.
Unhappily, because I had liked her, I was back to Valentina and I reluctantly put her down next. If she wasn’t a computer expert herself, she must surely know of at least one in the shadowy world she had inhabited. Still inhabited, if I was any judge. With an expert on tap, she could have organized the building of the online presence and financial background of the nonexistent orphanage. It was easy to see her reacting quickly to kill Katrina once the lawyer discovered the scam that had cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sergei’s sudden appearance on Polk Street twenty years after the death of her husband and child must have been a terrible shock and then an opportunity too good to be missed. It explained why his body was found nearby. It had nothing to do with Fabian Gardens; he just happened to be here when she killed him. It even explained the grisly fingers in Nat’s microwave. She as good as told me he should never have been accepted into the priesthood after his bloody and murderous past; they were the symbolic removal of his ordination.
Even if I stopped assuming a theoretical computer hacker on her payroll, it still seemed all too possible. For all I knew, she had an advanced degree in computer programming. But could Grandfather be so wrong about her? He was aware of her past, and it hadn’t apparently occurred to him that she might be guilty. Or maybe it had, and he hadn’t shared that with me. Or he was investigating her. Or he was more attached than I realized and simply couldn’t see her guilt. In which case, exposing her was likely to cause him some genuine pain, and I’d do almost anything to avoid that. Anything except let her get away with murder.
I tried Kurt (and Sabina, I supposed) on for size, but I didn’t want either of them to be guilty, either. Kurt’s deal with Katrina might not pass an ethics test—not that I was throwing stones, considering my visit to Katrina’s offices—but nothing I knew about it made me think he would benefit by killing her. Although he had come out the other side of their partnership on his feet—or at least he seemed content to let things lie. And I could think of no possible reason for him to kill Sergei or Matthew except for the stadium-seating thing. I put his name at the bottom of my list.
I could also build a strong case against someone else I’d come to like. Gavin had the best opportunity to set up St. Olga’s as a scam. The only thing mitigating that was his lack of computer knowledge—he could barely cope with his laptop presentation at Katrina’s memorial—and Haruto said it would take serious hacker-level skills to do what had been done to hide St. Olga’s finances. Otherwise, Gavin fit the frame nicely. Katrina had somehow discovered what he’d done; she’d threatened him, and so he’d killed her. Sergei’s murder could be explained by two possible scenarios: Sergei was a witness to Katrina’s murder, and/or he had found out about the orphanage scam. That fit. Weighing against that was the fact that he wasn’t living above his means. Somebody was siphoning off $200,000 a year from the orphanage accounts, which would seem capable of providing a better lifestyle than a studio apartment and a job as a barista. He was also kind and seemed too gentle, somehow, to be a cold-blooded killer. I’d seen him with Matthew that day, and he’d been sensitive to Matthew’s foibles and brought him coffee. “Black, no sugar,” as Matthew would say to me. I smiled. Actually, that’s what he said to everyone. Except, I thought, still trying to make everything fit, he didn’t say that to everyone. Not everyone. Maybe that’s what Nat’s “familiar trails” had been trying to remind me of.
Feeling suddenly chilled, I thought of something else, picked up my phone, and texted Ben. We talked every night but had mostly stayed away from discussing the murders. His response came within a couple of minutes. ETH stood for Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. I looked it up on line. ETH produced some of the world’s best computer scientists, programmers, and engineers. And I knew someone in our little group who had earned a degree there.