CHAPTER 4

“You want a lift, Artie?” Mitch Levin was half in the door of his BMW. “C’mon, I’ll drive you back to the station.”

“Sure, why not.” Artie ran his hand over the paint job before climbing in. Mitch had bought the car a month ago and had immediately driven over to show it off and let Artie drive them to Sonoma and back. Shrinking paid better than Artie thought, though Levin had a reputation for being a damned good psychiatrist.

They had driven in silence for several blocks when Mitch said, “I can’t believe the dogs were feral. One of them was still wearing tags. Nobody abandons a dog with their name and address hanging from a tag around its neck.”

Artie was only half listening. He’d have to call Susan that night and tell her the bad news.

“They tore a man apart, Mitch. They had to have been feral—savage dogs.” As an afterthought he added, “They were probably runaways.”

Mitch shook his head. “My old man used to raise dogs. These weren’t runaways, unless they ran away in the last day or so. All of them looked like they had been groomed sometime within the past week. The cops certainly wouldn’t have touched them—their coats are evidence.”

Artie hadn’t wanted to talk about it, but Mitch had already distanced himself from the tragedy and was looking at it like he had looked at cases in ’Nam. Questions and answers, investigations and interrogations. He’d liked doing it and he’d been good at it.

“I wonder what the hell Larry was doing in the Tenderloin.”

“You can bet dollars to doughnuts Mary was right—somebody sicced the dogs on him.”

Artie had a mental image of muggers with attack dogs. Not a bad idea, but not in this case.

“Trained dogs would be valuable, Mitch. They wouldn’t have been abandoned. And you just said that one of them had a tag.” Some of the day’s depression resurfaced. “If somebody had sicced the dogs on him, why Larry?”

“Chandler probably came close. Larry was a doctor. He had a triplicate prescription pad so he could prescribe Class Two narcotics. I’ve had patients try to blackmail me for prescriptions and one or two who threatened violence.” Mitch looked thoughtful. “I just can’t believe the dogs went after Larry on their own.”

How long had it been since he had been a staff sergeant and Mitch had been a captain in Intelligence? They had been close when they were kids in the Club; they had grown to depend on each other in ’Nam.

Which didn’t mean they were qualified for this one, Artie thought. Stay the hell out of it.

Mitch suddenly pulled over to the curb. From the look on his face, Artie guessed he’d made up his mind. Mitch, Charlie, and Larry had buddied together when they were in the Club, and Mitch and Larry had gone to medical school together. Mitch wasn’t going to let Larry’s death lie, to just let the police handle it.

“Somebody had it in for him, Artie. Larry was in the Tenderloin because somebody wanted him to be there. Either he was decoyed there or chased there and then killed there. Where the dogs fit in I’m not sure, but it wasn’t accidental. The only motive I can think of is that his killers wanted drugs. You’d have to believe in the Easter Bunny to think Larry was involved in any kind of dealing, so they must have been after him for access—his prescription pad.”

Mitch sounded unemotional, but Artie could sense the anger beneath.

“The only things we know for sure are that he never made it to the meeting and that he was killed in a Tenderloin alley. And that nobody knows what the hell he was going to talk about.”

“Mary was right—Larry probably would have rattled on about some wonderful new advancements in medicine,” Artie said quietly. “You know that—that’s what he always talked about.”

Mitch took a deep breath. “Any other ideas?”

“The cops said they contacted Cathy last night and she was going to come in and identify Larry. But she never showed, and when they called this morning, nobody was home. Maybe Cathy and the boys have returned from wherever they went. We could call them … .”

“Come on, Artie—you want to talk to them about Larry over the phone?”

“No, of course not.” And then Artie thought, In for a dime, in for a dollar. “We could drive over there. I could call the station, tell them I won’t be back this afternoon—not much of it left anyway.”

Or better yet, not call in and let Connie stew for a while. Besides, he needed a cooling-off period before seeing her again.

Mitch punched a number on his cellular phone and left a message for his secretary to cancel all appointments. A few minutes later they were on the Oakland Bay Bridge heading into the blanket of winter smog that covered the East Bay. The steel beams of the lower deck flickered past, and Artie found his mind cycling back to the morgue and the bloody ruin that had once been Lawrence Shea. He agreed with Mitch: feral dogs were hard to believe. But why would anybody want to kill Larry? Money? He would have turned over his wallet without a fight. Drugs? Despite what Mitch had said, far-fetched. And why go to the trouble of setting him up in the Tenderloin?

Aside from war and crimes of passion, people were killed for only two reasons: either for what they had or for what they knew. And Artie couldn’t think of anything that Larry had that somebody else might have wanted badly enough to kill for.

Which left the question, What had Larry known that might have made him dangerous to somebody else? Hell, he had been a doctor; medically speaking, he had known a lot about a lot of people.

“You still coming over for Christmas Eve dinner, Mitch?”

“Yeah—wouldn’t miss it.”

“Bring somebody if you like. Just let us know in advance.”

“I’ll do that.”

It had been a standing invitation, but when Mitch came over, he always came by himself.

“We’ve got tickets to A Christmas Carol on the twenty-seventh—Mark doesn’t want to go, and Chandler’s playing the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

“Chandler? Thanks heaps, Artie—but no thanks. He’ll leave the scenery in shreds.”

They were heading into the Oakland hills when Mitch said, “You know, you were really the ringleader.”

Artie looked blank. “What do you mean?”

“The Club. It was your idea.”

“No it wasn’t. It was Dave Chandler’s.”

Mitch shook his head, half smiling. “It was your idea, Artie. You were the one who wanted to call it the Suicide Club.”

Artie was only half listening.

“I thought it was Rob, the guy who ran the coffee shop.”

There was a simpler explanation for Larry’s death. He had wandered innocently into the Tenderloin and three stray dogs had attacked him and killed him in an alley. It came down to a choice between improbabilities. On one hand, motive and purpose. On the other, a sequence of random events—

“You sure, Mitch?”

“Absolutely.”

 

It was almost dusk when Mitch parked half a block away from Shea’s house in the hills, the BMW half hidden by the trees and the curving road. Artie looked at him in surprise. “What’s up?”

“Just cautious. Supposedly the Oakland cops checked it out this morning. Don’t know if they might still be around, so let’s wait a minute.”

Artie peered down at the house. There were no police cars parked in the driveway, no yellow tape was stretched across the entrance warning trespassers away from a crime scene. After a moment, they drove on up. Strings of Christmas-tree lights outlined the garage and the steps that led to the redwood balcony circling the house. The garage was open, Larry’s Chrysler still parked inside. Cathy must have driven Larry to the BART station the previous morning, Artie thought. But her own Honda wasn’t there.

There were no lights on in the house, and Artie figured the outside Christmas lights were on a timer.

“Nobody’s home,” Mitch murmured.

“No surprise. She’s still away with the kids, then.” Artie felt relieved; they’d be spared an hour of tears and reminiscences about Larry.

Mitch was already out of the car. “No sense sitting here freezing. Let’s take a look.”

They walked down the stairs to the porch and rang the buzzer at the side door. There was the sound of chimes on the inside. Mitch waited a moment, then leaned against the buzzer again. Another long moment. No lights came on; there were no sounds of footsteps, no souhds of life.

“The glass doors overlooking the hillside,” Artie muttered. “Larry never locks them.”

They walked around to the front of the house that faced the ravine below. The hill was steep and clogged with brush and eucalyptus trees. Larry had been lucky; the fire of ’91 had spared this particular glen.

There was a two-inch gap between the frame and the leading edge of the glass doors. Artie put his fingers inside and pulled back until one of the doors obligingly rolled open a few feet.

“Cathy? Andy?”

No answer, though Artie hardly expected any. It was twilight now, the moon full, the ravine below thick with shadows. The wind had also picked up, rustling through the eucalyptus leaves.

“Let me find the lights … .”

Artie heard Mitch feeling his way around the wall and then the lights flared on.

The living room was spacious, with the glass doors and huge picture windows fronting on the balcony and overlooking the woods below. A long oak table was flanked by a couch and several black leather recliners, all of them facing the windows. A writing table, chair, and floor lamp were in the far corner. A brick stand-alone fireplace blocked off the kitchen from the living room, while an entertainment center hugged the far wall. Two VCR tapes were on the floor in front of the television set: Men In Black I and The Mask II, the evening’s entertainment for the boys. Bookcases lined the entry hall, and several shelves of CDs were half-hidden behind the large floor-standing speakers.

“Hey, Artie, in the kitchen.”

There was an urgency in Mitch’s voice and Artie turned away from the view and hurried into the large kitchen. Cathy was a gadget nut with the latest in fridges and a glass-topped stove where spills could be wiped off with a damp cloth. Spice racks filled the wall over the prep counter and pots and pans dangled from hooks on an iron wheel suspended from the ceiling.

Mitch was standing by the round kitchen table. It had been set for three. The serving dishes in the middle were still partly filled with food: sweet potatoes, ham, and broccoli with a small wicker basket of what looked like sourdough bread. On all three dinner plates, the ham and the sweet potatoes had been partly eaten; on two of them, the broccoli lay untouched.

Apparently neither Andy nor James cared for broccoli, Artie thought. Mitch lifted a plastic carton of milk from the tabletop, then set it back down.

“Feel it, Artie.”

The carton was warm, room temperature. Then Artie noticed the little things: the chairs that had been shoved away from the table, the container of now-liquid Dreyer’s strawberry ice cream sitting on the counter. Cathy had probably put it out to soften by meal’s end so it would be easier to serve. Susan did it all the time.

“From last night,” he murmured.

Mitch nodded. “Looks like they left in the middle of the meal.”

Artie glanced around the kitchen. No signs of a struggle, no signs of violence, no blood splashed around, all the knives still safely in the knife rack.

“They just got up and left?”

“Apparently,” Mitch said. Almost to himself he muttered, “She must have been terrified.” He picked up the milk carton to put back in the fridge, then paused with the refrigerator door open. “Hey, Artie, take a look.”

On one of the shelves inside, several jars of jam were lying on their sides, leaking their sticky contents onto the shelf below.

Mitch frowned. “Cathy’s too neat—somebody looking for something?”

Artie shrugged. “Probably the kids.” He started down a hallway. “The bedrooms are down here.”

 

The boys’ bedrooms were first, one on either side of the hall. They were typical rooms for ten- or twelve-year-old kids: bookcases cluttered with games and a few comic books, Star Trek posters on the walls, school T-shirts hanging on the inside knobs of the doors. In Andy’s room—he was the oldest—a small Mac sat on a desk with a stack of video games to one side. Andy was a computer nut, junior grade, and a Little Leaguer, major.

Artie opened the closet door. Shirts, pants, jackets, and gym sweats hung haphazardly on hangers; Roller-blades and several pairs of scuffed Reeboks lay on the floor along with two piles of wadded-up underwear. There was a small suitcase in the corner. Artie hefted it. Empty.

Mitch called from James’s room. “They didn’t pack.”

“Yeah, I know,” Artie muttered. They had walked out without taking a damn thing with them.

The far end of the hall was the master bedroom. It was neat, the bed made up, the rug freshly vacuumed. A brief portrait of Cathy surfaced in Artie’s mind. Trim, obsessively neat, compulsively friendly. Adored her kids, was probably more proud of Larry than in love with him. At parties he’d caught her glancing at Larry with a faraway look in her eyes and had wondered who she was thinking of. Not Larry, that was for sure. But she was a dutiful wife and he didn’t want to look behind the curtain to see who might be hiding there. Cathy was Susan’s best friend, and Larry had been one of his and he’d never wanted to know too much.

Artie glanced in the closet. He’d already guessed that Cathy hadn’t packed anything either.

They hesitated a moment outside the closed bathroom door, then Artie turned the knob and abruptly pushed it open. Empty. One of the towels, the one featuring Batman, was bunched up on its rack. Andy’s. Superman, next to it, was neatly hung, the edges carefully lined up. James took after his mother when it came to neatness. He was a skinny kid with thick glasses and his nose constantly in a book, so quiet you seldom knew he was around. When he reached his teens, he’d be another patient for Mitch.

The towels were soiled but dry; nobody had used them recently.

“So what now, Mitch?”

“His office—we probably should have searched it first.”

“Mitch, what the hell are we looking for?”

Levin seemed completely dispassionate now, pure intelligence captain. “Anything and everything, Artie. Try and find out who saw him last.”

The office was off to one side of the kitchen. It was small, no bigger than one of the boys’ bedrooms, with bookcases overflowing with medical books, two four-drawer filing cabinets, a copier and a portable phone, plus an IBM clone and HP printer. And on the edge of the desk, a Rolodex, a leather-bound Daily Reminder, and half a dozen copies of Science, one of them opened to the contents page. Chandler was right—Larry had probably been working on an article.

Artie picked up the Daily Reminder and thumbed through it. Larry had stopped making entries in March. Most likely he kept an appointment calendar in the computer.

Mitch was ahead of him. He was sitting in front of the computer and had already opened the appointment file. He glanced at the screen a moment, then shrugged. “Nothing, didn’t use it. Probably kept everything down at work.”

Artie was watching over his shoulder. “See if he had any research files.”

Mitch clicked the mouse on “Program Manager” and read down the directories, stopping at “Research/December.” He double-clicked on the entry but no filenames appeared on the screen.

Artie looked over the desk, picked up a small box of floppies, flipped through them, and pulled out one with the same directory name. The diskette had a dozen filenames penciled on the label, starting with Austin and ending with Talbot.

He handed it to Mitch. “Try this—probably the backup. See if you can access ‘Talbot.’”

Mitch inserted the diskette in the B drive, then clicked on the name of the directory. The screen read: No files found.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Artie murmured. “He wouldn’t have made a backup if there was nothing to back up.”

“Maybe somebody erased both it and the hard drive.”

“So where does that leave us? We’ve no idea what Larry was working on or who he was seeing or what happened. We’re back to square one.”

Mitch shook his head. “Check out the desk.”

Artie squatted down and inspected the desktop. A small clock radio by some shelving had been moved several inches, and Artie could see a light ridge of dust where it had been. Most likely Cathy and the boys had stayed out of the room and Larry hadn’t been the type to do much in the way of cleaning—the desktop clutter was a sure indication of that. Why would anybody move the radio now? he wondered.

Then he saw the row of small boxes behind it, several of them out of alignment with the others. Somebody had checked out all the boxes of backup floppies, not just the one he’d picked up. They had been neat about it, but not too neat.

There was a lined yellow pad on the desk, a corner of it jutting over the ridge of dust where the radio had been. Somebody had moved it, too. He picked it up and squinted along the edge. The paper was smooth, no impressions at all. But there were sheets missing; he could see where they had been ripped out. Larry had probably written on it, but somebody had taken his notes and the few pages beneath.

Mitch clicked off the computer and leaned back in the chair, his face blank of expression. “You put it together yet?”

“You tell me.”

“Cathy knew what Larry was working on—no way he wouldn’t have talked to her about it. Whatever it was, it worried her. More than that, it frightened her—a lot. When the police called, she grabbed the kids and split. Right in the middle of the meal—no time to pack. She was out of here. Sometime later—maybe within minutes—she had a visitor who was looking for something. The house was empty, so her visitor went right to the office. He knew exactly what to look for, and it wasn’t the family silver.”

“Why a visitor?” Artie asked. “Why not several?”

“Just a hunch. Maybe there were more than one, but nothing indicates it. House is too clean—they would have left more traces.”

“So what do we do now? We’ve no idea what Larry was doing or who he saw or what happened.”

“You’re right. Let’s pack it in.”

Mitch stood up and started for the door, Artie following. Then Artie snapped his fingers and headed back to the kitchen. “If you were married and you were looking for an appointment, you’d know the first place to check is the fridge.”

The yellow Post-it was stuck to the front of the refrigerator, nestled between episodes of Doonesbury torn from the Sunday paper. A brief reminder to see a Dr. Paschelke of East Bay Medical Center, dated the day before the meeting. There were two numbers listed, followed by an H and an O. At the top of the tiny sheet were three red-inked stars. Important.

Mitch studied it for a moment. “You pick it, Artie—home or office?”

Artie glanced at his watch. It was still early in the evening.

“It’s the Christmas season; he’s probably working short hours—try home. Set up an appointment for tomorrow.”

Mitch looked through the windows at the darkening shadows outside. “Whatever’s going on, I have a hunch there’s a time frame involved. Cathy ran the moment the police called her with the bad news. I’d feel better if we could see the doctor tonight, get it over with. He can’t live too far away—the call’s local.”

He had a point, Artie thought. And they’d come this far—wrap it up tonight and he could concentrate on ecology and Connie tomorrow. If he wasn’t home by six, Mark would assume he was working late and defrost a frozen meal for supper. He wouldn’t be too disappointed; he lived on them.

Artie slipped into his coat and buttoned up while Mitch picked up the kitchen phone and started dialing. He was halfway through the entrance to the side door when he saw it. An old raincoat dangling from a hallway hook, flanked by jackets and scarves and several school caps hanging from other hooks.

Artie felt the folds of cloth. Bingo. A three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk in the right-hand pocket. There was no name on it but it was smudged with prints and was obviously a “traveler” diskette. Larry apparently took his homework to the office so he could work on it when he had an occasional few minutes of free time.

Artie slipped it in his coat, then snapped alert when he heard Mitch suddenly say, “Dr. Paschelke?”

Much to Artie’s surprise, the doctor was in.