Chapter 20

Paramedics swept in with their gear and went straight to work on Kevin. One of them pulled me aside, looked deep into my eyes and asked, “Are you injured?”

“No.” I was covered with blood, as were Max and Jean-Paul. Pointing to Duc, I said, “I think that one is beyond your help, but the rest of us are fine.”

He bent over Duc, put a stethoscope to his chest, felt his wrist for a pulse and shone a light into his eyes. The sergeant in charge checked on Kevin first before he asked about Duc.

“Goner,” the paramedic said, draping his stethoscope around his neck as he got to his feet. “Call the coroner, have him send the meat wagon.”

Within a surprisingly short time, Kevin was on a gurney with an IV in his arm, a blood pressure cuff and a heart monitor attached, and a wide pressure bandage around his chest. Everyone inside the house stopped what they were doing and made way for the paramedics to wheel Kevin out. Jean-Paul and I followed them as far as the front door.

“Is that Kevin?” Chuck Riley, out on the lawn with a clutch of other neighbors, rushed toward the gurney but was pushed back by an officer wearing riot gear. “Is that Kevin? How can that be Kevin?” He appealed to the cop to let him through. “Hey man, that’s my boy. Let me—please let me—”

The cop didn’t seem moved by Chuck’s plight. But Chuck kept at it until the ambulance doors slammed behind Kevin’s gurney and lights and sirens started up again. As the ambulance drove off into the night, Chuck seemed near collapse.

The sergeant let out an ear-splitting whistle to get the crowd’s ­attention.

“There’s nothing to see here, folks,” he yelled out. “Please go back to your homes and let us do our work.”

The neighbors, roused from their beds, some still in pajamas and slippers, drifted off home. Chuck stubbornly stayed behind. He took a step toward the front porch, saw me in the bloody shirt, froze for a moment, and then screamed out, “What did you do to Kevin?”

The sergeant stopped him cold, got in his face and ordered him to go home or he’d be arrested for interfering with an official investigation. I was curious to see what Chuck would do next, but after hearing murmurs riffle through the crowd: “Maggie’s covered in blood”, “I heard Kevin’s practically living here now”, “Is Lacy out of rehab?” I took Jean-Paul’s arm and stepped back inside.

Most of the policemen took off when the ambulance pulled out. Two stayed to watch the front of the house, and four more, counting the sergeant, were inside protecting the crime scene. After all the chaos of the last half hour, the house settled into an eerie silence. There was nothing to be done until the scientific teams and the detectives showed up, except wait. Staying at a distance, I looked around at the rubble the paramedics left behind: the clothes they cut off Kevin, a heap of bloody bath towels and used dressings, and the disposable wrappings torn from various medical paraphernalia. Amid the mess, I saw the butt of a gun, one of the Colts. I leaned close to Jean-Paul, nodded toward the gun, and asked, “Is that Duc’s or Dad’s?”

“Duc’s,” he said.

I went up to the sergeant and asked, “You’re in charge here?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You’re the resident, right? We’ll get to you when we can.”

“I thought you’d like to know that the shooter’s gun is there on the floor.” I pointed at it.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“And I would like to know, what the hell kept you? For nearly ­fifteen minutes you had an officer down and bleeding. Where the hell were you?”

He blushed a furious red. “We got swatted.”

Jean-Paul came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “What is ‘swatted’?”

“It’s been going around and I guess it was our turn,” the sergeant said. “We got a couple of calls that there was an active shooter at the Marina, hostages taken. There was a big party down there earlier tonight, the Chamber of Commerce, so all the bigwigs in town were there. We called up SWAT, paramedics, fire, put the hospitals on alert, and...” He didn’t finish the list. “It was all a prank. Probably some fraternity guys having a kegger.”

I nodded toward the still uncovered corpse of Khanh Duc. “You might want to check that man’s phone records.”

“You think he made those calls?”

“All I know is, in the middle of the night, a man dressed in black and carrying a gun crawled under my house to get inside. And you guys were busy somewhere else when he did it.”

“Do you know him?”

“I met him once,” I said. “His name is Khanh Duc. He grows roses.”

“Sir, if you please.” Jean-Paul opened his arms wide to show his blood-saturated front. “May we clean up a bit?”

Max, listening in, scowled but didn’t say anything.

The sergeant looked at the three of us and at the bloody bath towels and the rolled up duvet. “You get all that on you taking care of Halloran?”

“For fifteen minutes,” Max said crossly.

I leaned closer to the sergeant and said, “There are a lot of men here. I’d like to put more clothes on.”

He shrugged. “Go ahead. We’re setting up the crime scene now so it would be better for you to be somewhere else. The detectives will be here soon to talk to you, so don’t be too long. And don’t wash the clothes, okay?”

“Fine,” I said, taking Jean-Paul by the hand. “Thank you.”

We wasted no time getting upstairs. Uncle Max followed us into our room.

“You know the sarge is going to take a hit for letting us wash,” he said. “He should have waited until we’d been checked for gunshot residue first.”

“Oui,” Jean-Paul said, slipping his arm around my waist. “But I prefer not to start a diplomatic firestorm. Maggie, will you join me in the shower?”

I smiled at him and said, “Oui.”

“See you downstairs,” Max said, retreating.

“Max?” I called after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned to me. “You never said why Kevin was here?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “We need to get cleaned up before the detectives get here and stop us.”

Max was already downstairs when Jean-Paul and I went back down. The big man himself, the police chief, had arrived, and he didn’t look at all happy. I heard Max tell him, “Don’t be too hard on the sergeant for letting us clean up. I didn’t fire a gun, neither did my niece. And the boyfriend has diplomatic immunity so you can’t talk to him unless there are representatives from our State Department and his government present.”

Jean-Paul squeezed my hand. I leaned close to him and whispered, “Is that true?”

“Not exactly, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?”

The three of us were taken into separate rooms, Max and I for questioning and Jean-Paul to be out of earshot so that what we told the detectives about the events of the evening wouldn’t taint his own account, if the legalities of that ever happening could be sorted out. Jean-Paul volunteered to be sequestered in the kitchen so that he could start a pot of coffee; the chief thought that was just a dandy idea.

The chief, Tony Wasick, a good-looking man in his fifties, conducted my interview himself, in the dining room with the big doors closed.

“Miss MacGowen, what the hell has been going on here?” he asked, clearly piqued. “The body count from this address alone over the last two days has doubled my murder rate for the year so far. Throw in the burglary call overnight Thursday, and that makes your house the scene of the biggest crime wave we’ve had in Berkeley since I became chief five years ago. I know who you are and I know what you do. Have you pissed off some mobster with one of your TV shows and he’s come gunning for you? Are you up here hiding out, making life tough for me and my guys?”

“I’m sorry, but no,” I said. “My mom moved into a smaller place, and I’m only here to clear out the family house for her. Whatever is behind all the mayhem belongs entirely to you.”

“To me?” Like the rest of us, Wasick had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and he looked like it. The first whiff of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen distracted him for a moment. He turned his attention back to me. “You want to explain that?”

“I can only speculate,” I said. “There seems to be something in this house that someone wants very badly. And I believe it has something to do with the murder of Trinh Bartolini over thirty years ago.”

“The Bartolini case. Jesus.” He let out an exasperated breath, paced off a tight half circle. “When I heard Kevin was shot at your house, and that his father-in-law was out front getting froggy, hell, I figured it was a personal thing. Never occurred to me that it could have anything to do with the Bartolini case. Talk about lost causes.”

“Kevin?”

“No, the Bartolini case,” he said. “There’s just not enough evidence left from the original investigation to work with. But Kevin won’t let it go.”

“Kevin has new evidence,” I said. “Your crime lab found DNA from three people on Mrs. B’s shirt,” I said. “That’s major evidence.”

“Sure.” Wasick did not sound convinced. Or maybe he was just tired. “And thirty years later, what are the odds we’ll find those three people?”

“The odds aren’t bad,” I said. “The victim’s son will give you a sample so you can segregate her DNA. For the other two, you might begin with the man who broke into my house tonight.”

He thought that over before he wrote something in his notebook. “The coroner will get a sample from the guy.”

“Chief Wasick?”

He cocked his head, looked up.

“What do you know about Chuck Riley?”

“That knucklehead?” He lifted a shoulder. “Not a lot. I know he was on the force for a while, but that was before my time. Now he works security at a bank in town.”

“You know he was the original detective on the Bartolini case,” I said. “If the Bartolini case is, as you said, a lost cause, is it because Chuck Riley botched the investigation?”

He smiled. “Who’s asking the questions here?”

A uniformed officer came through the kitchen door carrying two mugs of coffee. Grateful, Wasick wrapped his hands around a mug and blew on it until it was cool enough to drink. Revived a bit, he spent the next hour having me tell him, and retell him, about the shooting and the break-in and anything I knew about Larry Nordquist and Khanh Duc.

“Are you making a film about the Bartolini case?” he asked.

“No, absolutely not.”

“But you’ve been going around town asking questions about her,” he said. “If you’re not making a film, why would you do that?”

“Because that’s who I am,” I said. “And that’s what I do.”

“Too bad about the film.” He managed a little smile as he closed his notebook. “That was my only shot at being a movie star. And now you tell me it’s pfft. Gone.”

“You never know, Chief,” I said. “Are we finished?”

“For now.” He picked up his empty cup and headed toward the kitchen for a refill. With one hand on the door, he paused. “There will be more questions later. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you let us handle the media swarm gathering on your front lawn. We’ve had enough excitement for a while; let’s not invite a circus.”

“Suits me,” I said.

He saluted me with his cup as he pushed through the swing door and went into the kitchen.

I opened the dining room’s big double doors and looked out. Duc’s body still lay in the hall outside the door to Dad’s den, but someone had covered him with a yellow plastic sheet; his feet in black sneakers stuck out of the end. While I was with Chief Wasick, the crime scene technicians had arrived and gone right to work. I looked at their handi­work with dismay. Wherever bullets had lodged in the old lath-and-plaster walls, there were now foot-square gaps. Two big pools of blood, taped off, were soaking into the bare oak floor, the one under Duc still slowly oozing outward. Forget the simple house cleaning scheduled for later that morning. Now I needed to find bio-cleanup specialists to take care of the blood and a handyman to repair the walls. More time, more money, I thought, feeling guilty for even considering the practicalities of the aftermath created by that horrific night. I was sorry about Duc, though what happened to him was his own damn fault. I was deeply sorry for Kevin’s pain, but I’d had a message that he was out of surgery and was listed as stable so I could crawl safely away from the edge of panic and give in to the inevitable letdown.

A young woman technician swept past me, headed for the heater access hatch in the far corner of the dining room. She knelt on the floor and began dusting the hatch and the area around it for fingerprints. Duc wore gloves when he came in. But had the intruder Thursday night? Was Duc the intruder?

The tech caught me watching her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

She was right, I was in the way. It would have been nice to be able to go upstairs and take a nap, but the stairway was blocked off by crime scene tape because Jean-Paul had fired down at Duc from the top step. So I collected my computer from the kitchen counter where I had left it charging the night before and went out to the front porch and curled up in one of the big wicker rockers. There were four uniformed officers in the yard, so I felt safe.

When Chief Wasick asked me the inevitable question about making a film about Mrs. B’s murder, I’d almost said, “My dad already made all the film that needs to be made on that subject.” But it would have been a flip comment from an exhausted interviewee, so I kept the thought to myself.

Eight months ago, when I found out about Isabelle, I said that I would never make a film about discovering the truth about my parentage. Too close, too personal, potentially too hurtful to people I love. But, in two weeks I was leaving for France to make a film about Isabelle’s family and their farm estate in Normandy. It won’t be a film about discovering Isabelle, but she, and my dear dad’s infidelity with her, cannot be ignored. Given time, I might find an angle to the Bartolini case that would make a good film subject. I wasn’t taking bets on that film ever happening, but I began to think about the little collection of Super 8 movies I found locked in Dad’s desk just the same.

There were twelve film reels hidden in Dad’s desk. ­Because they were locked in a strongbox, out of curiosity on the after­noon I found them, I went straight to the local network affiliate’s studio and spent a few hours converting the Super 8 reels to digital format. I’d wanted to know why these few, out of the hundreds of reels Dad shot over the years, were hidden away. More secret mischief, Dad? I wondered when I began screening them. The first time I spotted Isabelle, I knew Dad was recording Isabelle’s violations of the restraining order against her.

I had been shown photographs of Isabelle and had met her once, briefly, but I was fascinated when I first saw her on film and was able to see the way she walked and gestured and canted her head to one side coquettishly whenever she caught sight of Dad. After that first glimpse of her, I had fast-forwarded through all the other parts of all the films looking only for her. But when I came across the fight between our little neighborhood gang and Larry Nordquist and his toughs, I stopped scanning for Isabelle and bore down on that scene, that day. The fight was a like a crease in the map of time, a demarcation between life before, and life after, Beto’s mother died. I pushed Isabelle aside and studied that reel frame by frame. For the last few days, I’d intended to go back through the other reels to see what I might have missed, but there had been so little time and so few private hours.

Up at the top of the street, above Grizzly Peak, the sky was beginning to brighten. Full of expectation, cocooned in my corner of the porch, I opened the computer and began watching the old home movies, one at a time. The dates on the reel headers were the dates the films originally were processed, not the dates they were shot. Estimating time frame by my hair, clothes, and body development, I didn’t bother watching films that were dated more than a year before or a year after Mrs. B died. That left me with four reels. Of the four, the third reel was the closest to the day Mrs. Bartolini died.

I’m standing on the sidewalk with Sunny Loper. Dad is obviously inside the house, shooting through the window on the front door. The two girls who live up the hill come into the frame, and we join them. I’m wearing the same red high-tops I wore in the fight reel, but they are not yet as scuffed as they were on that day. How long do a kid’s canvas shoes last? Considering all the walking we did and the way we played, they probably wouldn’t last more than a few months.

Dad scans potential hiding places for Isabelle before he catches up to us again. When he does, there are seven of us. The Bay Laundry and Dry Cleaners van stops in front of the Miller house, so it’s probably Thursday, the regular delivery day for our neighborhood. A white-haired driver hops out carrying a blue-paper-wrapped bundle and hangers with plastic-sheathed dress shirts. He knocks on the front door, hands off his cleaning, and is back in his van headed up the street in the time it takes Evie Miller to come down her front steps, cross the street and join us. Around the curve, Mrs. B waits in front of her house with Beto. She’s wearing a pink pullover and a gray pleated skirt. Mr. Loper drives past in his green Volvo and waves. Lacy and Dorrie Riley come out their front door, turn and speak to someone inside, the door closes. They cross the street, greet Beto and his mom, and wait for us.

Dad steps into someone’s yard and films us through a gap in some kind of foliage. Mrs. B clings to Beto a bit longer than usual before she kisses him and releases him when the rest of us arrive. She stands on her driveway, watching us walk away. The camera jerks to the right, catches Larry Nordquist following us at a distance. Larry passes Mrs. B without greeting her; she is intent on our retreating backs.

The image becomes a slurry of blurred colors as Dad runs while the camera continues filming. When the focus is steady again, Dad has crossed the street. When he walks past the Bartolinis’ driveway, Mrs. B is gone. Isabelle, back toward the camera, emerges from behind a hedge and sets off in our direction. Suddenly she stops, turns, pauses for only a moment, and then she begins to run away. Dad follows her until she turns up a side street, no longer following us. The camera is still running when Dad takes it down from his eye. The neighborhood is now upside down as Mrs. B walks up a neighbor’s front steps. The door opens and she goes inside.

“Bastard,” I said. I reversed the film to the frame just before the door opens and flipped it right side up. I enlarged the image of the door as much as I could without losing the integrity of the image, and ran the sequence forward in slow motion. The door opens, someone can be seen standing there. I froze the image of the figure in the door, brightened it, enlarged it one more click, captured it and sent it to Guido with a request to enhance the image as much as he could and send it back.

I looked up when I heard the Lopers’ back door open, the soft clang of a trashcan lid, and the door close again.

“I think, from the look on your face, chérie, that something is up.” Jean-Paul was perched on the porch rail, watching me. “Should I worry?”

“Possibly.” I gestured for him to come closer. “Look at this.”

I ran the film sequence again. When he saw Mrs. B go into the house, he nodded.

“I see,” he said. “You think she is not going in for a visit and coffee, yes?”

“Yes.” I turned off the computer. “Do you think it’s too early to call on the neighbors?”

“In what time zone are these neighbors?”

I pointed to the Loper house next door. He smiled his upside-down smile and held out his hand to help me up. Before we went next door, we went inside to tell Chief Wasick why I wanted to go see the Lopers. I started at the beginning, with Dad’s film, and told him about Larry’s history of spying on the neighbors and his recent mission to make amends, the extortion of Trinh Bartolini for both money and sex and that Larry saw her with another man. He winced when I brought up Lacy Riley Halloran shooting at us on the freeway Saturday.

“You think all of that—any of that—has some bearing on what happened here last night?”

“I do. Let me show you something.” I opened my computer to the sequence I had shown Jean-Paul. As Mrs. B walks across the street, I froze the image and asked him, “Do you know who that is?”

He took a close look and shook his head. “Should I?”

“That’s Trinh Bartolini.”

“I only know the case in broad outlines,” he said. “Kevin’s been working on it, but I’m not up to speed on the details. That’s her, huh?”

“Yes.” I restarted the sequence. When the neighbor’s front door opens, I froze and enlarged the frame. “Now, do you recognize him?”

His interest perked. “You said she was being extorted for sex, and that Nordquist saw her with someone. You saying it’s that knucklehead?”

I closed the computer. “We may know more when Kevin gets the report on the DNA found on Mrs. Bartolini’s shirt. But until then, a good place to start is next door.”

Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he wanted to get us out from underfoot, but with some caveats he agreed that we could go.

“Hello, neighbor.” George Loper, clearly surprised to find us knocking on his back door at the crack of dawn, pushed open the screen and welcomed us into his kitchen. He wore shorty pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, his sparse white hair standing up in random spikes. There were dark circles under his eyes; he, too, had been robbed of peaceful slumber. “Come in, come in. Glad you’ve come over, Maggie, Jean-Paul. Gladder yet to see you’re okay. Karen and I were just real worried when the paramedics showed up last night; no one would tell us a damn thing about what happened. We headed over to check on you, honey, but the cops told us to go home in no uncertain terms. We’re getting pretty used to the police being over there regularly, but seeing the paramedics, well... Just glad you’re okay. Karen was so upset she had to take a sleeping pill. Sit down, coffee’s fresh. Whatever happened?”

“Another break-in,” I said, pulling out a kitchen chair.

He paused, holding mugs in both hands. “For cryin’ out loud, what is this neighborhood coming to? Who got hurt?”

“The intruder,” Jean-Paul told him, which was true enough for the moment.

Before George could launch into the inevitable barrage of follow-up questions, I asked him, “Those guns you said you got from Chuck, did he give them to you?”

“Give, as in give for free?” He chuckled at that as he poured coffee. “You know Chuck, always working a deal. No, we paid for the guns. Less than sticker, but we paid for them. Why do you ask?”

“You told me he showed you four guns,” I said. “But I was wondering how many he had to sell.”

“You’d have to ask Chuck.” After he said that, a sudden thought seemed to jolt him wider awake. “What happened over there last night have something to do with those damn guns?”

“Perhaps.” Jean-Paul took the mugs from George’s shaking hands before he could spill coffee all over. “The man who broke into the house last night had a Colt from the same armory shipment as Maggie’s father’s, and perhaps your own.”

“I’ll be damned.” George had to sit down. “I’ll be goddamned.”

“When was the last time you saw your gun?” I asked him.

The question seemed to baffle him, but after a moment he pointed toward the ceiling. “I keep it where I can put my hands on it quick if I need to. I checked it when I heard the sirens, just in case, you know. It’s where it’s supposed to be. You weren’t thinking my gun—”

“Just making sure,” I said.

“Is that what Chuck was yelling about out there earlier, someone ask him about his gun?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I could’ve gone out and shot him myself when he started in. I’d just got Karen calmed down—you know how Karen likes to keep up on her neighborhood and she was not one bit happy that the cops sent her home—but as soon as we heard him, she wanted to go out there and get into the middle of things, probably make a nuisance of herself. I know my dear wife rubs some people the wrong way, Maggie, and a lot of folks think she’s just plain nosy. But Chuck, he tells her what’s going on and lets her talk his ear off. The comings and goings at your house the last couple of days have kept their jaws pretty busy.”

“I can only imagine,” I said.

“You gotta give Chuck credit though. He’s been keeping an eye on your place all summer. Says he’s worried about squatters. Vacant house, you know, can be a magnet for mischief. And he wasn’t wrong. That Nordquist character was hanging around, and no one wanted that, least of all Chuck. You know, because of the boy’s criminal background.”

“Did Chuck ever confront Larry?”

“Funny thing,” George said, shaking his head about something he obviously did not find funny. “But it happened the other way ’round. They had a pretty good shouting match out here one day, but it was Nordquist who confronted Chuck. Chuck told Karen the guy was just venting an old grievance about an arrest Chuck made years ago when Nordquist was still in high school. Happens to cops all the time; some people just can’t seem to let go of bad feelings, you know.”

Under the table, Jean-Paul squeezed my knee. Larry had apologized to me, but he also wanted me to make amends for pain I caused him. Did he ask Chuck for an apology? Or did our Peeping Tom have something else on his mind to discuss with Chuck? I covered Jean-Paul’s hand with mine and smiled at George; Karen wasn’t the only Loper who could talk your ear off. I did not interrupt his flow.

George reached around for the coffeepot and topped off our mugs. “Chuck told me that the other day when he was on duty at the bank he spotted Nordquist hanging around Bartolini’s deli. He said he went over and told Nordquist to scat, but Beto came out and said it was okay, said the guy was waiting for you. Well, that made Chuck nervous, thinking about what the con would want with you. So when you showed up he caught Nordquist’s eye and made like he was going for his gun and the guy took off running. Chuck got a kick out of that.”

“I wondered why Larry ran away,” I said, remembering Larry lurking along Shattuck behind me; he was dodging Chuck, not me. I had a hunch Chuck was more worried about what Larry might say to me than he was concerned for my safety.

“Did Chuck ask you to keep Larry away from me?” I ask.

“Well, sure, honey. We look after our neighbors, you know. There was no reason for you to be bothered by that overgrown delinquent. I can’t tell you how many times I had to shoo him off the property.”

It was so easy to get information out of George that I almost felt guilty—almost—when I fed him another question.

“Your roses are beautiful this summer,” I said. “Did you ever meet Dad’s friend Khanh Duc?”

He furrowed his brow, shook his head, and then the light dawned. “Duc? The guy with the big wholesale nursery?”

“Yes, Duc.”

“Sure.” He nodded with some enthusiasm. “Whenever I want anything for the garden, Chuck takes me down to Duc’s nursery, gets me a good price. Have you seen his place, south of San Jose? It’s huge, covers lots of prime real estate. That Duc’s a real enterprising guy, gotta give him credit for putting together something like that. The specialty there is roses, but he carries just about everything you can imagine. If you need some plants to fix the mess all those people trampling in the yard made of your Dad’s flower borders, you go ask Chuck to hook you up with Duc.”

“Chuck and Duc are good friends?”

“I wouldn’t say they’re good friends exactly,” George said. “Not backyard-barbecue good friends, anyway. Chuck told me he was an early investor in Duc’s business and he didn’t mind letting Duc show his gratitude from time to time. But friends? No.”

“Interesting,” I said, squeezing Jean-Paul’s hand. “Very interesting.”

From somewhere above us, Karen called out, “George?”

“You’ll have to excuse me, folks,” George said, pushing himself back from the table. “I better go see what the wife wants. When she takes a sleeping pill she wakes up a little disoriented. Don’t want her to fall again.”

We thanked him for the coffee, apologized for dropping by unannounced at such an early hour, and saw ourselves out the back door.

“So?” Jean-Paul asked when we were outside, headed home.

“Now we know where Duc got that gun,” I said. “We keep tripping over Chuck Riley, don’t we?”

“He seems a bit of a bungler, but I think he is an adept manipulator of people,” Jean-Paul said. “Perhaps dangerously so, yes?”

“Yes.” I held my phone on my open palm; the connection to Chief Wasick’s phone was still open, still on speaker, as it had been during the entire conversation with George. “Chief, you there?”

“I am.”

“Did you get it?”

“The whole confab,” he said. “Interesting.”

“Where is Chuck Riley?” I asked.

“I heard enough to send a squad to pick him up.”

Happy to hear that Chuck wouldn’t be out loose for a while, I closed the connection and slipped the phone into my pocket. Our front door opened just as we reached the porch and crime scene technicians, apparently finished, filed out past us carrying their gear and bagged evidence. With no fanfare, Duc’s body, zipped into a green plastic body bag, was wheeled out among them and deposited into the coroner’s unmarked white van. Almost as reflex, Jean-Paul and I both turned to see if anyone was watching from the Loper house, but saw no one.

The last man out handed me a certificate releasing the scene and a card with the numbers of local crime scene cleaners. I dialed the first number on the card and arranged with the dispatcher for a crew to come as soon as possible. For a small additional payment, I was told, a crew could be at the house in an hour. I said, fine, whatever, peachy, just come. Now would be good.

Chief Wasick, standing in the open front door, eavesdropped on the transaction.

“Any word on Kevin?” I asked as we walked up the steps.

“Doc says he should be okay.” Wasick crossed his arms over his chest and sagged against the doorjamb, weary, ashen-faced, as he watched the coroner’s van pull away from the curb. “Until we bring in Riley, I’ve posted men at the ICU.”

“Until you bring Chuck in?” I said, thinking that Chuck should be in custody by now. “He lives just down the street.”

“Yeah, but he seems to have stepped out. The wife said she doesn’t know where he went. The logical place for him to go is the hospital to check on Kevin, but he hasn’t turned up there, yet.”

“When you find him,” I said, “might be wise not to tell him right away that Duc is dead. Let him worry that Duc is talking.”

He smiled grimly, “Hey, who’s the cop here, you or me?”

“You sound like Kevin,” I said.

“I’ll take that as a compliment; Kevin is our best investigator.” His voice cracked when he said Kevin’s name. “I should have paid more attention when he told me he was reopening the Bartolini murder. A favor for a friend, he said. There was so little to go on—a thirty-year-old case—that I never thought he’d get anywhere with it. Poke around, make his friend happy. But now, Jesus.” He canted his head toward the bloody mess visible through the open door; I dreaded going back inside. “What did he set in motion?”

I said, “Ask the original investigator.”

“Yeah, Riley.” Wasick went over and sat on the porch rail, gazed out across the long shadows of early morning stretching across the lawn. “For all of his problems, Riley had a good record as an investigator. But he sure did a piss-poor job on that one. I thought maybe he was off his game because he was too close to the case, lived across the street from the victim. But now...”

He shifted his focus to me. “Was Riley covering his own butt? Did he shoot that woman?”

“I don’t know if he pulled the trigger,” I said. “But I’m very sure he had a hand in it. Trinh Bartolini was being extorted for sex and Larry Nordquist, the neighborhood Peeping Tom, knew who the guy was. Riley didn’t want Larry to talk to me. And now Larry’s dead.”

“What was Riley’s hold on her?”

“Fear for her sister’s safety,” I said. “Wouldn’t you expect that if a woman were murdered not long after she and her husband went to the police to report that they were being extorted by the local agent for the people holding their relative for ransom in Vietnam, the homicide detective assigned to her case would pursue that lead?”

“Sure.”

“There’s not one word in Trinh Bartolini’s murder book about the ransom demands or a police inquiry about it.”

He scowled. “Kevin told you that?”

“I saw it for myself,” I said.

“I’ll have a word later with Kevin about showing you the murder book, but it is interesting. You think Riley was in league with the extortionist’s local agent?”

“Maybe not in the beginning, but from the time the police were brought in, yes. Old Chuck Riley, always on the lookout for a little spare cash, extorted the extortionist who, unless I am mistaken, is now zipped inside a green body bag on his way to the morgue.”

“So far, that’s a lot of speculation,” Wasick said. “Have any solid evidence?”

“That’s your department,” I said. “It’s your case. I have faith you’ll turn up something. Duc came out of Vietnam with nothing, but managed to turn that nothing into a very substantial business. It’s worth looking into.”

Jean-Paul, who had been quietly listening in, said, “If you don’t mind, Chief, I will make a call or two. Records of Duc’s land purchases will not be difficult for you to find, but international bank transactions, especially very old ones, will require help of a certain sort. Maggie, shall I inquire whether the FBI has records of your parents’ report and any follow-up investigation?”

“Can you do that?” I asked. A little Gallic shrug was the response. Jean-Paul was already punching numbers into his phone when he turned to go into the house; the man was full of surprises.

Wasick seemed puzzled. “He said what?”

“Jean-Paul has resources,” I said.

“Who are you people?”

I tried to imitate Jean-Paul’s shrug. “When Kevin gets the DNA report from Mrs. B’s shirt, with luck you’ll have your solid evidence.”

“The DNA report came in from the lab yesterday,” Wasick said. “Whatever Kevin saw in it upset him enough that he ran out to talk to his priest.”

“He ran out to get drunk with my uncle,” I said, turning to go inside. “Please excuse me.”

The blood on the entry hall floor was congealing and beginning to smell. Taking shallow breaths, giving the mess a wide berth and keeping my eyes averted, I went looking for my uncle. I found him in the living room, asleep on a sofa.

“Uncle Max.” When I shook his foot he opened one eye. “Kevin got the DNA profile from Trinh Bartolini’s shirt?”

“He wanted to talk to you about it. That’s why he came home with me last night. That, and he didn’t have enough for cab fare; we put away a tidy bit of scotch after dinner.”

“How did you get home?” I asked. I hadn’t seen the rented Caddy out front.

“In a cab.” He yawned. “I offered to lend Kevin some money, but he said something about wanting a farewell tour on a leather sofa. He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense by then.”

“What did he say about the DNA?”

Max propped himself up on his elbows and yawned again. “He said he was an idiot and that you were right.”

“About?”

“Hell if I know. Maybe in vino veritas, but in scotch there’s just a lot of slurred words after a while.”

Chief Wasick had followed me in.

“Chief,” I said, “we need to see the DNA report. Where is it?”

He addressed Max. “She’s kind of bossy, isn’t she?”

“She can be,” Max said, smiling at me fondly. “And she can be a force of nature when she is on to something. I believe it would be wise if you produced that report.”

“The report is at the station.” The chief bowed from the waist as he swept an arm toward the exit. “Shall we?”

“As soon as the house cleaners come,” I said, turning Max’s wrist to see his watch. “About half an hour.”

“Maggie?” Max managed to pull himself upright. “Lana called. The network funded your account at start of business this morning, New York time.”

“So, that’s done,” I said. We were staying with the network for the Normandy project, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. There was relief that the project would go forward, of course, but also some disappointment that we were still entangled with the old network—a problem child—instead of making a fresh start with a new backer.

“To tell you the truth,” Max said, “I was surprised that the network came through. Apparently the push happened when someone on the New York goon squad picked your name off the morning news feed. He immediately sent in the order to fund.”

“Saw my name?” I said, puzzled.

“Actually, this.” He took out his phone and flipped through his files until he found what he wanted, a photograph. He handed the phone to me. “Lana says it’s gone viral. I hope Jean-Paul doesn’t take any flak because of it.”

“Holy crap,” was all I could think to say when I saw the image. There we were, Jean-Paul and I, standing shoulder to shoulder at the open front door, barely dressed and covered in blood watching paramedics wheel Kevin to an ambulance.

Jean-Paul heard me and came in from the dining room to look over my shoulder. He muttered, “Merde,” and went back to his call.