Anything for You--A Novel Page 9

  “No escort agencies,” Nick said, unpacking the food. “I went three years back. Zippo. He might have paid an individual girl in cash, but the agencies are PayPal or plastic these days. No reference to Sophia, either.”

  “Yeah,” Valerie said, as her salivary glands discharged at the scent of jalfrezi. “She’s not recognized by any of the outfits Will checked, either. He had a fun day, at least.”

  “You going to tell the wife?”

  “Have to. And I’m going to have to trawl Sophia through Grant’s circle. Someone might ID her. Thank fuck we’ve got the CCTV stills. At least she’s got her clothes on in those.”

  “Does Rachel Grant work?”

  “No. Why?”

  Nick helped himself to tarka dhal and tore off a strip of naan. “The photos,” he said. “Taken at the Grants’ house. Seems reckless, don’t you think? Bringing your mistress into the family home? I mean Grant’s got the means to bang her anywhere he likes. Why run the risk of your wife coming home early from her coffee morning or watercolor class or whatever?”

  “Could have been a one-off,” Valerie said. “Maybe Rachel was on vacation. Maybe he liked fucking his mistress in the marital bed.”

  They both fell silent. When Valerie had cheated on Nick four years ago that was exactly what she’d done. Not out of recklessness. Out of calculation. Because she’d wanted to get caught. She’d been so committed to her own worthlessness, love had felt like a grand injustice. So she’d done everything she could to subtract it from her life.

  All of which passed between her and Nick now, telepathically. They glanced at each other, acknowledged the scar tissue, conceded it was worn more or less smooth.

  “I’d rather wait till she’s out of the hospital at least,” Valerie said. “But unless we get word on Jenner soon I’m not going to have a choice.”

  17

  August 8, 2017

  As it turned out, the gods or the random universe gifted Rachel Grant a stay of execution. The following afternoon Valerie got an APB response call from motorcycle patrol officer Niall Fox up in Hamilton City. Apparently, he’d seen Dwight Jenner less than two weeks ago at a rest stop gas station on I-5, just south of Orland.

  “You sure it was him?” Valerie asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Fox told her. “I’d stopped in at the minimart for coffee. He was the customer behind me in line. I got the vibe.”

  “The vibe?”

  Fox laughed. “The little shift in his, you know, force field when he registered a cop. Ma’am, you know what I mean. We see it every day.”

  Valerie did know. All but the slickest guilty had a sixth sense, alert to police presence. And if you were good police, the sensitivity was mutual. Equipped with thermal imaging goggles you’d be able to see their body temperatures rise.

  “I hear you,” she said. “Was he alone?”

  “He was alone when I saw him,” Fox said. “I got my coffee and went back out to the bike. Watched him come out. Didn’t see what he bought.”

  “Vehicle?”

  “Unknown. There’s a parking lot there but the view’s obscured. There were maybe half a dozen vehicles at the gas pumps, but he didn’t get into any of those. To be honest with you, I was going to check him out, but I got a ten-forty-six southbound.”

  “You got a date for me?” Valerie asked.

  “July thirty-first. I checked with Dispatch. The ten-forty-six came through just after nine forty P.M. And yeah, the minimart has CCTV.”

  “Someone looking at it?”

  “Ma’am, I wish I could tell you they were, but we’re a pretty small shop up here. I’m up to my neck and we’ve got a grand total of two detectives—”

  “No sweat. Give me the number.”

  “I’ve been trying it, but phone-answering isn’t their strong point.”

  After fifteen minutes of listening to hold music courtesy of On-the-Go roadside convenience, Valerie gave up and headed for her car, knowing it was probably a waste of time. Jenner had killed Adam Grant in the early hours of August 5, four whole days after this alleged sighting. Even if Fox’s ID was sound—where did that get her? Nowhere. The good stuff, if there was any, lay in those four days.

  Still, it was better than nothing. Motion was better than rest. Going somewhere was better than admitting you had nowhere to go. Between his last day at Gold Star Valet and the night of Adam Grant’s murder, Dwight Jenner’s movements were wholly unaccounted for. This would, Valerie told herself, put at least one fucking pin in the map.

  Boredom on the road kept her trying the minimart’s number. She’d done a hundred miles before a clerk picked up and transferred her, after what seemed a ludicrous delay and a lot of background yelling, to the manager, who listened, understood, but insisted, in only very slightly accented English, that he would have to see her badge before releasing the material.

  “It’s fine,” Valerie said. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  Pamu Ranasinghe was a weary, ironical Sri Lankan immigrant in his midfifties with a moonish face and hefty mustache. Dark eyes of amused skepticism and a small gap between his front teeth. Having spelled his name for Valerie’s notes he added, “Yes, I’m the Asian socioeconomic cliché made famous by The Simpsons.”

  It took Valerie a moment to make sense of this. Then she did—and making sense of it left her not quite knowing what to say. “It’s been a long time since I saw that show,” she said, with an involuntary tone of apology, though she didn’t know what she was apologizing for, except, vaguely, the racial stereotyping inherent in American popular culture. Ranasinghe studied her, with his head on one side. This was a man, she thought, resigned to being undervalued and misunderstood. It had bred in him a remote, inert superiority. She liked him.

  “So, if you could let me take a—”

  “Yes, I know what you need to see. You gave me the date and time. Come this way.”

  Valerie followed him to the back of the store and through a stockroom to his very small office, a scrupulously tidy place with one barred window of frosted glass.

  “It’s set up ready for you,” Ranasinghe said. “Just hit Play. Since I assumed you’d like a copy on disc,” he tapped a CD case on the desk with his fingernail, “I’ve made one for you.”

  Smart, disappointed, and bored, Valerie revised. There was a copy of The New York Times and the latest edition of The Lancet next to the disc. It made her imagine a professional life before the U.S., before whatever upheaval had driven him here. She groped, mentally, for anything she knew about Sri Lanka. Got the word “Tamil,” along with a vague notion of civil war. Tsunami? How long ago was that? The world gobbled its news too fast. You couldn’t hold on to anything. Like millions of others she harbored the thought that one day—when she had time—she would get a grip on global current events. Her wiser self knew it would never happen. There was only one kind of current event she gave a shit about: whatever homicide had most recently landed on her desk.

  “Thank you very much,” she said. “That’s very helpful.” It sounded patronizing.

  Ranasinghe smiled, manifestly in a way that said he’d found it patronizing too, though the gap in his teeth gave him a look of impish delight. “There is no end to my talents,” he said. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Cappuccino in the making, Valerie examined the footage. There was no doubt it was Jenner. Beyond that it had nothing to offer, except that even through the pixels she could see Fox was right about the vibe. Jenner entered the store with a take-no-shit buoyancy—then checked it when he saw the uniform. For a moment it looked as if he was considering turning on his heel and getting the fuck out of there. But he didn’t. He loosened his shoulders and took his place in line, hands in the pockets of his khaki combat jacket. After the officer paid for his coffee and exited (with a backward glance) Jenner bought a pack of Marlboros, then left.

  Ranasinghe brought her cappuccino. “On the house,” he said, setting it down next to her.

  “Thanks.”<
br />
  “Officer Fox is a regular here. Hospitality by extension.” Then, seeing her look, he added: “Sorry. I was being petulant. You’re welcome.”

  “Do you have external CCTV?”

  The smile reappeared. “You want a vehicle,” he said. “I’m afraid you won’t find anything. But once again, with my remarkable prescience…” He reached past her, selected another video file from the desktop, hit Play. “It’s a single wide-angle,” he said. “You can see here, your suspect exits. He crosses the forecourt, and … Ah. You see?”

  It was as Fox had said: The bulk of the parking lot was obscured by a combination of gas pumps and a few small trees on its border. The camera was positioned to optimize the view of vehicles taking gas. Obviously. For drive-aways without payment.

  “And you’ve never seen this guy before?” Valerie asked.

  “No. And I’ve checked with my team, barring one who’s on vacation. No one recalls seeing him before.”

  “What about…” Valerie took out her phone and pulled up the best still of Sophia. “This lady?”

  Ranasinghe studied the image. “No,” he said. “Not to my recollection. But obviously, given a fallible memory and the vast number of customers, that doesn’t prove anything. Besides, I’m not always on the shop floor. You can, of course, check with my staff, but frankly since they spend most of their time here in what appears to be a catatonic state, I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

  She didn’t hold her breath, but she checked anyway. No joy. She was almost back in the city when Will called to say he’d had a fruitless day of it with the remaining escort agencies. No one recognized Sophia.

  “If she’s a hooker,” he said, “she’s not on anyone’s books in the Bay Area. Now what, Sherlock?”

  Valerie pulled out to pass a station wagon driven by a young black girl singing along to something with complete oblivious conviction. The sun was low and molten on the horizon.

  “We’ll pull the traffic cam footage for the rest stop entrance and exit. Couple of hours either side of Jenner’s sighting. He didn’t walk there.”

  “Fun viewing.”

  “And I think we should try the brother again.”

  “Half brother.”

  “Half brother. He’s not telling us everything.”

  “Maybe you should offer him sex?”

  “You’ve spent too long in the world of prostitution. You at the station?”

  “Will be in about fifteen. Meet you at Cornell’s?”

  “Don’t bother. I can handle it.”

  “I was kidding about offering him sex, you realize?”

  It wasn’t entirely self-serving. Valerie did think Kyle Cornell was holding something back. Mainly though, she hoped an interview with him would take long enough to justify postponing the other interview until tomorrow. The one in which she’d have to break the news to Rachel Grant that her late, murdered husband had been, prior to his brutal departure from this mortal coil, screwing another woman.

  18

  Ed Perez was on surveillance outside Kyle Cornell’s building when Valerie arrived, just after 9 P.M.

  “Nada,” he told her. “Trip to the grocery store this afternoon. Watered his window plants and took out the trash. Girlfriend turned up a couple of hours ago. Guess it’s his day off.”

  “What time’s your relief?”

  “Ray’s on at eleven.” Ed smiled. “Tell me you’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “Go ahead,” Valerie said. “I’ll take it for a couple of hours.”

  “Every time I begin to doubt the existence of God,” Ed said, “he presents me with another small miracle.”

  “Forget God. I want a dozen of Sondra’s empanadas by Friday.”

  “It’s my recipe. She’s not even Mexican.”

  “And some of that mango jalapeño salsa, too.”

  An unfortunate parting exchange, she realized, as Ed pulled away. She was starving. Another consequence of low alcohol consumption: The need to eat actual food regularly had reasserted itself. Now she was stuck with hunger for at least two hours. She should have left Ed in place, gone in and talked to Kyle, then called it a night. But en route she’d changed her mind about a second interview. Partly (she told herself) because she wasn’t convinced mere questioning would get her whatever it was he was hiding, but mainly (she admitted to herself) because she didn’t relish a repeat of the sexual frisson between them. Picking up surveillance at least took care of the duty hours for tonight, providing a rationalization, however feeble, for leaving the bad-news delivery to Rachel Grant until tomorrow.

  So much for surface logic. Beneath it, she knew, was raw instinct’s directive to watch and wait. Kyle’s alleged indifference to his brother’s whereabouts—to his brother’s predicament as a murder suspect—didn’t square with the relationship the two of them apparently shared. By Kyle’s own testimony, they’d always been close. You didn’t give your ex-con half brother a room in your apartment then do nothing more than cross your fingers and hope for his good behavior. The I’m-not-my-brother’s-keeper nonchalance was smoke for the cops. Even if Kyle genuinely didn’t know where Jenner was, it wasn’t credible that he didn’t care.

  Just before 10:45 P.M. Kyle came out of the building. With The Girlfriend, a lithe, pretty white girl in her very early twenties, with long straight dark hair, center parted. Skinny jeans and a tan suede jacket big enough on her that Valerie decided it actually belonged to Kyle. She carried herself haughtily, shoulders back, chin up. Valerie caught a glimpse of a broad silver bracelet with a chunky turquoise stone on her left wrist. She tossed her hair over her shoulders, once. She was proud of the hair, its glossy fall, practically down to her ass. She was altogether proud of herself, in fact. Valerie assumed controlled rebellion against affluent, conservative parents. An interrupted college degree and a flirtation with the wrong side of the tracks. Daddy, in particular, would be grinding his teeth over the half-black boyfriend. Mommy would be saying things like Let her get through this, don’t rise to it, the more you disapprove the farther away you’ll drive her.…

  Ridiculous, Valerie thought, as she turned on the Taurus’s ignition to follow Kyle’s Ford. You can’t know any of that. Still, the movie ran on in her head. Did Kyle Cornell know he was just an instrumental feature of a predictable white family psychodrama? Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t care, as long as the sex was crazy enough. She had an image of the two of them fucking, Kyle on his back, the girl astride him, hair tossed back (naturally, he’d like that) cat eyes fierily focused, ostensibly on him, really on how appalled her mother and father would be, watching their precious little princess …

  For Christ’s sake. Enough. If you want to think about fucking him, have the decency not to use a fantasy proxy. There’s no harm in thinking. It’s not what you think that counts. It’s what you do.

  And no, she told herself, you’re not going to do that.

  She called Rayner Mendelsund and told him she’d picked up the surveillance shift. Then (a little guiltily) she called Nick to tell him not to wait up.

  “Fine,” he said. “But wake me if you want biology.”

  Valerie hadn’t kept her feelings about baby-making sex to herself. “Biology” had become the euphemism. “Wow,” she said. “You’re making me wet.”

  “Yeah, we’re so hot together. How do we stand it?”

  The Ford stopped outside a corniced white four-story apartment block on Twenty-fifth and Sanchez. Noe Valley: She’d been right about the affluence, at any rate. The girl got out and went with regal pertness and jouncing hair up the whitewashed stoop. Waved back at the car from the door, then went in. A moment later, the Ford pulled away.

  Valerie followed.

  North on Castro. Northeast on Market. Right on Fourth Street. East on the 80. He was taking the Bay Bridge.

  There was, of course, no explanation for how mere taillights could testify to a driver’s nefarious intent, but that didn’t stop her reading them that way. Valerie was well awar
e of the long list of legitimate reasons Kyle Cornell might have for leaving the city at this hour, and similarly aware that she’d dismissed all of them. She’d lived too long with the occult intuitions of Being Police to question them now.

  At Emeryville he picked up the 580 and stayed east on it until it joined Highway 99, where he turned south. She checked her fuel gauge. Less than half a tank. The insistent physics of the non-police world. How far was he going?

  Ten miles north of Fresno he took a left toward Fraint. The moon was out, full and cream-yellow. In a minute, she thought, he’s going to pull over, get out, walk up to me, and ask me why I’m following him. She let the tail lengthen, very sincerely hoping all her previously ordered surveillance hadn’t given itself away.

  Smaller roads. Lanes. Millerton Lake to the north, Table Mountain to the east. Scrub gave way to woodland, big conifers that leaned toward each other above her as if trying to embrace. A narrow avenue of sky showed between them. She shouldn’t be doing this by herself.

  She slowed. The bends made keeping her distance—

  Fuck.

  He’d stopped.

  She hit the brakes and killed the lights.

  The Ford was parked fifty yards ahead, half up on a bank at the edge of the trees. Lights off. It looked like the vehicular equivalent of a dog cocking its leg to pee.

  She squinted. The driver’s seat was empty.

  The thing to do, obviously, was call it in. Precious seconds. Maybe a minute, two minutes. Plenty of time for her to lose him—and he already had a head start, in the fucking woods.

  She grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and got out. It was close to midnight.

  19

  Left or right? She was at the parked Ford, flashlight off, eyes still adjusting to the moon’s illumination. The night reprioritized her senses. Listen. She was about to go right—when she heard, unmistakably, the clank of metal. Across the lane. Left.