"I'd have thought you wanted to be there."
"I did. She took my interest into consideration."
Another half block. A restaurant with happy early TGIF revelers. A body repair shop. A tattoo parlor. Four homeless people.
"Gets home from where?" Jenkins asked.
"Wherever they wind up going."
"They?"
"Him and the butler. They left at around ten thirty. We got him tagged with the GPS when he stopped at his bank about ten minutes later."
"So where'd they go after that?"
"San Bruno for a half hour or so, and finally Sunnyvale now for a while. I checked just before you came in. He was still there."
"What's down there?"
"I don't know. Some lunch place, maybe. A whorehouse. I…"
Glitsky came to a standstill, put his hand on Jenkins' arm.
"What? Abe?"
"I just had a horrible thought," he said. "I could be wrong. I'm probably wrong."
"What?"
Glitsky was already turned around, starting back toward the hall. "We've got to get back and find out for sure," he said.
"Abe? What?" she asked again.
"Not what, who," he said. "Gloria Gonzalvez." Gloria built her work schedule so she would get the maximum time with her children. There was no avoiding leaving her baby, three-year-old Bettina, every day with Angela, who was a find, at eighteen really more like an older sister than a babysitter. But with the boys, Ramon and her six-year-old, Geraldo, both of them finally spending their full days in school, she could leave home just after they caught the bus at eight, clean her five or six houses-only four on Friday!-and still be home by the time they got there at three thirty or thereabouts.
Today she'd finished a little bit earlier than usual, dropped off her two helpers at their apartments, then did a little grocery shopping for dinner and the weekend before stopping by Angela's to pick up Bettina. Now she had an hour or so before the boys got home as she turned into her block, enough time to get dinner started and play with her baby alone, which was such a rare and special treat that they both loved. Her street, down in the flats just to the west of the freeway, was wearing its shabby winter coat today, the trees bare, the small, stand-alone houses in dull and faded pastels, what lawns there were as gray as the leaden sky above.
This was a neighborhood of working people, and the line of cars that sometimes made parking at the curb so challenging at night and on the weekends was missing, making the street feel all the more deserted. Gloria thought it was a little odd to notice a brand-new white SUV parked a couple of houses down from hers. People on this block didn't buy showroom-quality Toyotas or Lexuses or whatever the car was. It was out of place enough that she glanced over as she drove by and was reassured by the Latino driver-well dressed but clearly one of them, someone who belonged here. Maybe someone's cousin, she thought. Or new boyfriend.
She pulled her own rust-stained green midnineties Honda into her driveway and pulled all the way in so that she could enter by the back door directly into the kitchen. She had Bettina buckled behind her in her backward-facing baby seat, and she went around to the car's back door, opened it, leaned over, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek-"Momento, chica." Then she opened the car's front passenger door to get out her two grocery bags and closed that door when she had them both.
With a bag in each hand, she turned and went up the three steps on her back stoop. Putting the bags down, she fished for a second in her purse for her keys, then found them, and opened the back door. Picking up the bags again, she brought them inside the house, put them on the counter, and then remembered that she'd bought some Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche ice cream, Roberto's favorite. She didn't want to let that get warm and start to melt, so she dug down in the bag for it and crossed the kitchen to put the carton in the freezer.
All the while, she'd been softly humming to herself, as she did when she was happy, and suddenly she thought she heard something. Closing up the freezer, she stopped and listened intently, her head cocked to one side.
What had that sounded like?
The answer came to her in a flash-a car door opening!-just as she turned and bolted for the back door and out onto the stoop.
And there was a man already halfway out of her car on Bettina's side, the close side to her, straightening up and turning around, holding her baby in his arms.
She stopped, her eyes wide with terror, frozen.
Ro Curtlee was holding her baby.
"Hey, Gloria," he said with his terrible smile. "All these years and you're still a damn fine-looking woman." Glitsky placed a cell phone call to the Sunnyvale Police Department while he was jogging back to the Hall of Justice. Since he hadn't placed it as a 911 call, the dispatcher down there put him on hold before he could get a chance to state his business. Two blocks later, as he was getting to the steps of the Hall, he gave up, hung up, and tried 911, which was busy.
Inside the building, he lost his signal altogether.
He ran down the internal hallway that led him to Southern Station, the police precinct located on the ground floor within the Hall of Justice where a sergeant named Mildred Bornhorst was monitoring the GPS results. Here Glitsky learned that Ro's car was still parked down in Sunnyvale, where it had been for more than an hour. Glitsky got the relevant information, such as it was, to give to the emergency operator, but again he couldn't get past the busy signal.
It was not until he was in his office again-the clogged river of humanity in the lobby, the long ride up in the world's slowest elevator-that he could punch up the emergency numbers again on a landline. This time through a disturbance in the Force he got through and in another two minutes was talking to a Sergeant Bransen at the Sunnyvale Police Department.
"The suspect is Ro Curtlee," Glitsky was explaining. He spelled out the name. "He's out on bail on a rape/murder charge…"
"There's no bail on a rape/murder charge," the sergeant said.
"Don't ask," Glitsky snapped. "In any event, he's armed and dangerous. He's due to get indicted on multiple murder within the next couple of hours, so if you can get in his face any way you can, we'd appreciate it more than I can tell you."
"Get in his face? What's that mean? Is he indicted or isn't he?"
"He should be by the time you find him."
"What if he isn't?"
"Then you can at least slow him down."
Another hesitation, then Glitsky heard, "And what's he doing again?"
"I think he's threatening or harming one of the witnesses who's going to testify against him."
"Who's that?"
"Gloria Gonzalvez, although that might not be her name anymore. She might have gotten married or just changed it."
"All right. So Gloria somebody."
"Right."
"And where does the GPS put him?"
Glitsky had written down this information, and now he consulted his notepad and said, "It looks like the nine hundred block of Dennis Drive, between Burnham and Agnes."
"Okay. What's the address they're in front of?"
"I don't know exactly."
"License number of the car?"
Glitsky gave it to him.
"Okay. And where the woman lives? Her address?"
"I don't know that, either."
A slight hesitation on the other end, perhaps a sigh of impatience.
Glitsky's blood pounded from his temples to the center of his forehead. "Look, the guy is serious as a heart attack and he's down there now. He's probably stalking this Gloria woman. You need to just send some units down and check it out. Be a presence. You see a guy who looks like he doesn't belong, get his ID. If it's Curtlee, hold him or if the indictment's come down, take him in."
"You suggest we go door to door?"
"Yeah. Absolutely. If you have to."
"Can I get the spelling of your name again?"
"Sure." Glitsky blew out heavily to release some of his own frustration, then spelled it out for him. "I'm head of San Francisco homicide."
"All right. I hear you. I'll send a unit over."