Through an all-enveloping numbness, he finished scanning the report, turning up no new information.
Kindell would have had no reason to deceive his public defender, nor his public defender to lie in his confidential record-keeping. Unless the case binder revealed additional facts-perhaps buried in the public defender’s investigator reports-then Tim had been off the mark all along. Gutierez, Harrison, Delaney, his father-they’d been right.
Tim’s conviction about an accomplice had grown into an addiction that had shielded him from the full brunt of Ginny’s death. If Kindell had in fact been Ginny’s only murderer, then Tim’s options were concrete, as finite as the sagging walls of Kindell’s shack. There was little left for him to do but confront Kindell however he decided and face the reality of his child’s death.
Dray had gone to sleep-the answering machine picked up on a half ring-and he left her the news, coding it in case Mac happened to be around.
Held in the trance of a sudden exhaustion, he drove home and fell into a blissful, dreamless block of sleep. He lay on the mattress for a few minutes upon awakening, watching the motes swirl and drift in the slant of morning light from the window, his mind returning obsessively to the last black binder awaiting him in Rayner’s safe.
If it didn’t miraculously yield compelling evidence for an accomplice, he realized with some satisfaction, then he’d deal with Kindell soon enough.
He just had to get to Bowrick first.
He showered, dressed, and headed out for a cup of coffee. He sat in a corner booth at a dive of a breakfast joint one block down, flipping through the L.A. Times. The Debuffier execution had grabbed the headline again, but the story contained little about the actual investigation. Man on the Street reared his ugly head again, claiming, “You don’t need the law to tell you right from wrong. The law told that voodoo bastard he was in the right, but he wasn’t. Now he’s dead, and the law says that’s wrong. I say it’s justice.” Tim noted with some alarm how clearly Man on the Street was articulating his own supposed position.
Another article announced that a moral-watchdog group was protesting a vigilante game Taketa FunSystems had put into development called Death Knoll. The player had a choice of automatic weapons with which to outfit his video-screen counterpart before setting him out on the streets. It featured tomato-burst head shots and limb-severing explosions. A rapist got you five points, a murderer ten.
A back-page story about two immigrants shot in robberies took the edge off some of Tim’s hypocritical indignation.
He returned to his apartment and sat in his single chair, feet on the windowsill, phone in his lap. For reference he’d smuggled out three pages of notes he’d taken from Bowrick’s file. For inspiration he logged on to the Internet and found the L.A. Times photograph of the coach clutching his dead daughter outside Warren High School. For a long time he looked at the man’s face, twisted with anguish and a sort of shocked disbelief. Tim was struck, now, with the heightened empathy that fear fulfilled provides.
And he was struck also with the alarming needlessness of it all.
He rubbed his hands, studied his three pages of notes, and formulated a strategy. Bowrick had skillfully arranged his own relocation to duck threats and possible attempts on his life; he was going to be hidden smart and well. Normally Tim’s tracking resources were virtually unlimited. Each government agency, from the Treasury Department, to Immigration, to Customs, controlled an acronymous computer database or eight-EPIC, TECS, NADDIS, MIRAC, OASIS, NCIC-but they were all inaccessible now. To obtain information about Bowrick, Tim couldn’t call his rabbis at other agencies, his CIs, or his contacts inside companies. He couldn’t talk to anyone in person, nose around any locations, or leverage any snitches. He’d have to street-smart his way through, like a criminal, which he supposed he was.
He started with Bowrick’s last-known, reached the apartment manager, and pretended to be a bill collector. A long shot, but Tim knew to start with the ground-ballers. No forwarding information. But he did get the date Bowrick moved out: January 15.
Posing as a postal inspector investigating mail fraud, he called the gas, power, water, and cable companies and presented a gruff voice and a false badge number. He was amazed-as always-at how easy it was to elicit confidential information. Unfortunately, all Bowrick’s listings were for addresses prior to January 15; he had been smart and registered everything under his new name, whatever that was. Telephone was usually the most current listing, but the address Pac Bell had was for his last-known, and the number had long been disconnected.
Giving Ted Maybeck’s name and badge number-he figured Ted owed him one for throwing the infamous high five-Tim tried to talk his way through the DMV bureaucracy but got nowhere. DMV staff was either incompetent or tough; those displaying the latter trait were also well schooled on privacy policies. According to the case binder, Bowrick had no car of his own-his mother used to drop him off at school, which, Tim recalled, had made him the object of derision among other seniors. In fact, the majority of the student character testimonies had been scathing-all except for that of one girl, an Erika Heinrich, who’d pointed out the vicious bullying that Bowrick and the now-deceased gunmen had received at the hands of the basketball team.
Dead ends all around. Tim had fallen into the pursuit as if he were working up a warrant, and the sudden halt brought him quickly to frustration. He slid open the window and leaned into the slight breeze. He hadn’t realized how stifling the room had grown with the rising sun and his own body heat. He closed his eyes and thought about the police report, waiting for a piece of information to rise out of place and trip his thoughts. None did.
Tim thought of the slump of Bowrick’s shoulders, his caged-rat unappeal. He tried to imagine having a child capable of such destruction. Could even a parent love someone so cruel and odious? Could anyone?
Tim sensed a shift in instinct, a puzzle piece sliding and dropping into place. The jagged half-coin pendant that he’d seen in Bowrick’s booking photo-a lover’s necklace. Each party wore one piece of the same coin. Erika Heinrich’s character testimony suddenly stood out all the more. The one sympathetic account. The girlfriend.
Tim logged on and entered Erika Heinrich into Yahoo People Search and got two hits-a seventeen-year-old in Los Angeles and a seventy-two-year-old in Fredericksburg, Texas. The grandmother? One of Tim’s former saw gunners in the Rangers was from Fredericksburg, so Tim knew it was a predominantly German community-maybe that explained the k in the first name.
He located the more eligible Erika’s phone number on the screen and dialed. When a woman answered, he tried his best salesman voice, and it came out surprisingly well. “Is this Erika Heinrich?”
A voice edged with irritation. “This is her mother, Kirsten. Why, what’d she do now?”
“I’m sorry, we must have the names crossed in our database. I’m calling from Contact Telecommunications to let you know you’re eligible for-”
“Not interested.”
“Well, if you have family out of state, our rates are extremely competitive. Two cents a minute state-to-state, and just ten cents a minute to Europe.”
A weighted pause, broken only by mouth breathing. “Two cents a minute long-distance? What’s the catch?”
“No catch. Can I ask who you’re with now?”
“MCI.”
“And for local?”
“Verizon.”
“Well, we beat both MCI and Verizon by nearly four hundred percent. There’s simply a once-a-month twenty-dollar charge for-”
“Twenty-dollar charge? See, I knew you guys were all full of shit.” She hung up.
Tim had no phone book in his apartment, Joshua was out, and the corner telephone booth’s had been ripped from its cord. Two blocks down he located another booth, this one with the book intact. He flipped through and found the nearest Kinko’s, then picked another a bit farther away from his apartment. He called and got their number for incoming faxes, a service they provided for people without fax machines willing to abide the buck-a-page fee.