Джонатан Келлерман: Serpentine

I shook my head.

He said, “What?”

“Sword, rock, delusions.”

“Hey,” he said, “you can handle it—and here’s the grub. Time to step into reality.”

CHAPTER 5

We tucked into sand dabs, potatoes, and green beans, topped the meal with lemon meringue pie. It’s not my usual lunch and when we stood, I was fighting torpor.

Milo looked invigorated. He threw cash on the table and we left.

Twelve thirty. Enough time to get me home for my appointments. I said so.

He said, “Oh, that—yeah, sure.”

As we got in the car, he said, “Maybe this is irrelevant but Ellie also seems to have found herself an odd fit with Runner Boy.”

“She’s cheerful, he’s borderline grim?”

“That, too, but I was thinking socioeconomic status. All that money she’s got. I know, a male tycoon with a hard-body girlfriend, I might not notice. So yeah, I’m caught up in convention, but she is serious rich. I found a reference to the sale of her company in Forbes. Quote unquote, ‘less than three hundred million.’ And she’s apologizing about taking Mr. Fitbit away from his nine-to-five. What’s that mean? Low self-esteem?”

“No accounting for love.”

“Yeah, yeah, insufficient data. But the way she plays herself down—working hard not to come across mega-loaded. Couldn’t that mean she feels she doesn’t deserve her good fortune?”

I said, “Or she’s unpretentious.”

“Huh. Okay, I’m meandering into irrelevant stuff.” He started up the Impala and sped out of the lot.

“Something else about her bugs me,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t hate her.”

—

He tuned the radio to citywide police calls and ignored traffic rules. Free of regular police work he had no reason to absorb the never-ending tide of mostly petty crimes other than to block out conversation. Which was fine with me. I was slipping in and out of caloric drowse.

The dominant calls were 415s. Meaning anything the department viewed as a disturbance. Most frittered out to nothing. Two miles in, I turned down the volume. “What’s next?”

“You’ll be in your office healing young minds and I’ll be fruitlessly looking for information on the late Ms. Swoboda. Seeing as it’s Hollywood, I already asked Petra to take a look and see if there’re any records. So far zilch. I was hoping that guy at the archive—Jake Lev—could help, but he left the force and, get this, went back to Harvard where he’d dropped out years ago. Go know, huh? Unfortunately the genius they put in his place isn’t Ivy League material. If nothing shows up by tomorrow, I’m going down myself.”

Checking his Timex. “I’ll get you back easily. Custody cases?”

“Two,” I said.

“Pays the bills,” he said. “But I’m still hoping Ellie’ll come through for you as a patient. Less than three hundred mill?”

“Not going to happen,” I said. “She’s focused on you.”

“Huh. Yeah, I’m feeling that.” He reached up and touched his shoulder. “Like a pile of boulders right here.”

—

He got me back with time to spare so I walked to the service porch door, descended to the garden, stopped by the pond to feed the fish and net out some leaves, continued to the casita that serves as Robin’s studio.

She was working on two projects: rescuing a 1789 Vinaccia mandolin abused by a faculty committee at the U. that had failed to safeguard a donated collection, and tweaking a 1937 Martin D-45 guitar worth 300K for a former folksinger turned property mogul in Connecticut.

The mandolin was all squinty handwork, the guitar past the power-tool stage, so the studio was quiet as she sat assembling specks of inlay.

Painstaking work. I stood back until she put down her tweezers, lifted her magnifying specs, and flashed me a gorgeous smile. Her auburn curls were tied back loosely. Today’s bib overalls were red, over a black tee and jeans. She’s five-two on a good day and special-orders them at a safety-clothes place in Idaho. They’re tough and functional and relent when confronted by her curves.

Blanche remained in place. Long a shop companion, she also knows enough to kick back when the work gets delicate. Once Robin walked toward me, she padded along. The two of them reached me the same time.

“Hi, girls.”

Blanche stood on her hind legs and hugged my knees.

Robin said, “Make your choice and live with the consequences.”

I swooped Blanche into my arms and let her lick my face as I kissed Robin full and long.

When we unclenched, Robin laughed. “Playing both ends, very devious, darling. Ever consider the diplomatic corps?”

“I prefer honest labor.”

“Good point, I prefer you honest. Coffee? It’s half-caf.”

I touched my gut. “No room for anything.”

“How come?”

“Lunched with Big Guy. À la Big Guy.”

“You gave in to temporary loss of control? I like that. Where’d this gluttony go down?”

“Musso.” I gave her the details.

“Sand dabs, I’m jealous. Does that mean a decent dinner’s out of the question? I was planning something nice.”

“Sure, where do you want to go?”

“There.” Pointing at the house. “You cooking.”

“No prob, I’ll put something together.”

“No need to be theoretical,” she said. “I read your mind and bought two steelhead fillets.”

“Mentalism,” I said. “That explains the vibrations here.” Tapping my forehead.

“Does it? What about the throbbing here? And here? And here ?”

I looked over her curls at the shop clock on the far wall. “Appointment in forty-five minutes.”

“That won’t be a problem,” she said. “I’ll see to it.”

CHAPTER 6

By eight thirty p.m., I’d finished two court reports and begun charts on the two kids I’d seen in the afternoon. Robin was back in the studio checking out the mandolin’s progress, Blanche was snoring in her open-door crate. I returned to my computer.

Neither Ellie Barker nor Milo had found a thing on Dorothy Swoboda but I looked anyway. Google pulled up one woman by that name, dead since 1895, gravestone in Missouri.

I switched to a broad-based Nexis periodicals search, found only the Times squib. Switched the subject to Stanley Richard Barker and got three hits.

Two were puff pieces from the East Bay Times. Forty-two years ago, “Dr. Stan” had been lauded for donating eye exams and glasses to underprivileged schoolkids. Not in Danville, the paper was quick to point out. In “less affluent neighboring communities.”

One year later, Barker had attracted similar praise for opening up a second branch of his SEE-RITE optometric shop in Oakland.

The third reference was a nineteen-year-old obituary in The San Francisco Examiner: The body of a Danville man had been discovered by hikers in a gully below a trail in the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness. Stanley R. Barker, sixty-four, a Danville ophthalmologist ( sic ) had been reported missing a week before by an unnamed receptionist.

I looked up the locale, found descriptions on several travel sites specializing in outdoor recreation: five-thousand-plus acres of regional park consisting of two ridges sprawling across Contra Costa and Alameda counties, the nearest city, Danville. Sections had been left wild, others featured marked trails.

Beautiful place according to every source but, with drops approaching a thousand feet, best suited for “highly athletic, experienced hikers under favorable meteorological conditions.”

I rechecked the Examiner piece. July 15, so probably mild weather, unless Barker had gotten lost and ended up stranded in the dark.