Behind his desk was a walk-in vault, and Hardy waited while Simpson unlocked and opened the desk, pushed a series of buttons inside a drawer, then did the same thing on a panel next to the door to the vault.
‘High-tech,’ Hardy said.
Simpson half turned. ‘Well, we’re in the business. We ought to keep up on state of the art.’
The door opened inward. Hardy had envisioned a bunch of drawers filled with tapes, but again was confronted with an array of buttons and lights – more state of the art. Simpson sat at a console featuring innumerable LEDs and three computer terminals.
‘What’s your number, there, on the left column, for the call you want?’
Hardy, still carrying the thin logbook, opened to the page. He read out the six-digit number and Simpson entered it on the board. There was a brief wait, then a click.
‘You’re lucky,’ Simpson said. This date gets automatically erased in two days.‘
‘You want to override it so it doesn’t do that?’
‘Sure, no sweat.’ He pushed a few buttons. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you ready?’
Hardy was surprised at the sound of Owen Nash’s voice -somehow less authoritarian than Hardy had imagined -raspy but consciously softened, Hardy thought, as though he were speaking to a child.
‘I know you’re unhappy with me,’ he said, ‘but don’t hang up, please.’
A longish pause. The digital sound reproduction was superb – Hardy could hear Celine’s breathing become more rapid.
‘All right,’ she said evenly, ‘I won’t hang up.’
‘We have to see each other,’ Nash said. ‘We need to talk about this.’
‘No. I don’t want to see you about this. I want you back -’
‘It’s happening, Celine. It’s going to happen.’
A breathy silence.
‘It can’t, Daddy, it just can’t. What about me?’
‘You’ll be fine, honey. I still love you.’
‘You don’t.’
Now it was Owen’s turn to take a beat. ‘I’ll always love you, honey. We just can’t go on… the way we have. I’ve changed. It’s different -’
‘Because of her.’
‘No, not just her. Because of me. Maybe she’s made me see it, but the change is mine, it’s my decision -’
‘I won’t let you make it.’
‘Celine…’
‘I won’t, Daddy, she can’t do this, she can’t have you -’
‘It’s not her,’ he repeated, ‘it’s me. And I have made the decision.’
‘I’ll change your mind. I know I can.’ Suddenly there was a deeper, insinuating tone. It was unusual enough that Simpson turned around to look at Hardy. ‘You know I can.’
Nash did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was a whisper, as though wrung from the depths of him. ‘No, you can’t anymore, Celine. That’s done. That’s over. It’s come terribly close to ruining both of our lives. It can’t go on -’
A strident laugh. ‘I suppose you won’t see me, your own daughter.’
‘I’ll always see you, Celine. Whenever you want. Just not, not that way…’
‘I want one chance, Daddy.’
‘Hon -’
Almost screaming now, somehow without raising her voice. Then the throbbing voice again. ‘Please. Please, Daddy, I just need to see you.’
‘It won’t -’ Nash began.
‘If it doesn’t, I’ll leave it. I promise.’
Resigned. ‘When?’
‘Whenever you want. Wherever you want.’
A final pause, then Nash’s voice, thick. ‘I’ll call you.’
Jeff Elliot’s call was on Hardy’s answering machine at his office at home. Celine may have been in Santa Cruz at some point during the weekend, but neither Len nor Karl nor his mother could verify she’d been there on Saturday, since regardless of what they had told or implied to Glitsky, they hadn’t been home themselves.
The assistant district attorney in charge of sexual crimes was a woman named Alyson Skrwlewski. Hardy had barely known her, though he guessed that by now she’d have heard of him.
‘I just have a quick general question if you don’t mind.’
She considered a moment. Like most of the D.A.‘s staff, she wasn’t disposed to do any favors that would hurt a prosecution case. And even if she was inclined to be helpful, the situation – Hardy calling her this way on a Sunday afternoon – made her uncomfortable. ’Let’s hear the question first,‘ she said, ’then I’ll tell you whether I can answer it.‘
‘I guess I want to know is what are the most common manifestations of father-daughter incest?’
‘Well, I guess that’s general enough. I can talk about that. What do you want to know?’
‘Everything I can, but specifically, when the victim grows up, is she likely to do anything differently than other women who haven’t had that experience?’
‘Not when, if she grows up, you mean. Suicide would be high on the list.’ Hardy let her think. ‘Her relationships are going to stink, probably. She’ll be an enabler, maybe let her husband abuse her own daughter. That’s if she wants a husband.’
‘They don’t marry often?’
‘Oh, no, not that so much. I mean, this is almost too general. Every case is different. It’s just such an all-encompassing, terrible situation – they might marry five times, finding the so-called right mix of somebody who abuses them and babies them. It sucks.’
Hardy agreed, but she wasn’t telling him anything that might help him. ‘What about backgrounds?’
‘What about them?’
‘Anything you might expect to see more than in someone else?’
‘You mean with the victim, or the father?’
‘Both, I guess.’
‘Well, there’s some evidence that if the father didn’t interact immediately, normally, with the victim in the first years of her life, he’s more likely to be sexually attracted to her. If he never changed a diaper, never burped her, and so forth, the incest taboo doesn’t kick in.’ She sounded apologetic. ‘Hey, that’s a fairly new theory and pretty unprovable. With the women, at least there’s more data.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Well, a surprising number of them try to burn down their houses. No one really seems to know why, besides some obvious symbolic stuff, but arson is often in the profile.’
Hardy felt the hairs rise on his arms.
Skrwlewski continued. ‘And then, of course, there’s the prostitution, but everyone knows that.’
They all go into prostitution?‘
‘No, no. Not so much go into that life – although, of course, many do – but more have some isolated experiences. Their self-image is so low, they don’t feel attractive, you know. Yet they know men want them, daddy did, and they can take out their hostility by making them pay. It all gets pretty twisted around.’
‘Sounds like it.’
‘I guess some people don’t react as badly. But you’ll almost always get the manipulation, using sex for something else, the love substitute.’
Hardy’s stomach was a knot. He sat at his desk with his arms folded across his chest. Outside his window, the wind had died down and there were a few breaks in the clouds.
He had all the proof he needed for himself. But there was the same problem that had dogged the murder of Owen Nash from the outset – the lack of physical evidence.
Celine’s conversation with her father, provocative and revealing as it had been, never named a date, didn’t so much as mention the Eloise. It also hadn’t mentioned May, but Celine could argue with absolute credibility that she had simply been mistaken as to the day when she’d talked with her father about him meeting May on the boat. She had the one talk with him at his office, then another one later in the week – he said he’d call her, didn’t he? – and she’d gotten the two mixed up.
The Santa Cruz people being away didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t been there. It meant her alibi was weaker – almost undoubtedly false – but by itself it still didn’t put her on the Eloise on Saturday.