Jonathan Kellerman - The Murderer's Daughter

The disposable cell she’d used to call Wayne chirped. His private number. She switched it off and continued to search for info on DRL-Earthmove.

Nothing. Time to switch gears and veer into territory she knew well.

The engineering section of the inter-university peer-review-journal website coughed up three articles authored by Andrew Van Cortlandt during the year of his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. All were math-laden treatises exploring the structural properties of conductor metals under various electrochemical and thermal conditions.

All had been co-authored with Amy Chan, Ph.D., of Caltech.

Backgrounding Chan revealed that she’d served her postdoc at Stanford the same year as Andrew before taking a lectureship in Pasadena. But that position had lasted only two years and now she was an assistant professor of engineering right here at UC Berkeley.

The department’s website offered up a headshot of a pleasant-looking woman who could’ve passed as a high school senior, with a small-boned face surrounded by long black hair trimmed into straightedge bangs. Amy Chan had continued to delve into the world of structural integrity and had received high marks for teaching from undergrads.

Grace knew reading too much into a face — into anything — was foolish. But Chan’s portrait projected diffidence by way of soft eyes and a bashful smile.

Time to take a risk. She phoned Chan’s office extension. If she got a bad feeling, she could hang up and ditch the phone.

A woman with a whispery, slightly tremulous voice picked up.

“Is this Professor Chan?”

A beat. “I’m Amy.” Chan sounded like a high school senior.

Grace said, “My name is Sarah Muller, I’m an ed-psych consultant from L.A. who was friends with Andrew Van Cortlandt.”

“Was?” said Amy Chan. “You’re no longer friends? Or...?”

“It’s complicated, Professor Chan, and I know this sounds strange, but I’m worried about Andrew and if you could find the time, I’d appreciate talking to you.”

“Worried about what?”

Grace waited a second. “I’m concerned for his safety.”

“Something has happened to Andrew? Oh, no.” Words of dismay delivered in an even tone. The tremulousness was gone and Grace’s guard went up but she persisted. “What exactly are you saying?”

“Could we meet to discuss it, Professor?”

“You can’t tell me now?”

“The last time I saw Andrew he seemed troubled. Nervous. He refused to say why and I haven’t heard from him since. He’d mentioned his work with you, so I — Professor, I’d prefer not to get into any more over the phone, but if meeting’s a hassle, I understand—”

“No,” said Amy Chan. “Not a hassle.” The vibrato had returned. “I just finished office hours, have a few other things to do. I suppose I could use a breather.”

“Anywhere you’d like, then.”

“How about up near Lawrence Hall — the science museum? Not inside the building, the front area.”

Grace knew the spot. She’d been to Lawrence during one of her trips with Malcolm, found the museum full of kids. The site was up in the hills, above campus. The open area Chan had requested offered gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline of San Francisco that caused people to linger.

Safe place to meet a stranger. Careful woman but that would work to Grace’s benefit, as well.

She said, “Sure. When?”

Amy Chan said, “How about two p.m.?”

Before Grace could agree, the line went dead.

She returned to the Olds Hotel, encountered the conspicuous aroma of marijuana in the dim hallway. Several steps later, a door to one of the rooms opened and a couple in their forties staggered out. Bumping against each other, they headed her way, the man lean and black, the woman white and heavy. Grace took her time approaching them, one hand in her purse.

When she was a few feet away, the man gave a courtly bow and said, “S’il vous plaît.” The woman giggled, “I second that,” and stepped aside to allow Grace to pass.

Once inside her room, Grace changed into her notion of educational consultant duds: off-white blouse, gray slacks, beige nylon cardigan, brown flats. Off went the stocking cap. On went the brunette hairpiece, which she combed and fluffed to look fuller. The wig cooperated beautifully; paying for real hair had been a good idea.

Next step: true-blue contact lenses that would make her eyes memorable, even behind the nonprescription glasses.

Checking the disposable cell Wayne had just called her on she found no message. Deciding the phone had outlived its usefulness, she lifted a corner of the bed, placed it under a stout metal leg, and sat down hard. The gizmo was a cheapie but tougher than Grace had figured and it took four attempts, using all of her weight, to crack it. But once the initial wound had been inflicted, subsequent stomps reduced the phone to shards, and she finished by disemboweling the little oblong. Removing the three remaining sticks of turkey jerky from their resealable packet, she collected every visible bit of plastic and poured the ruins of the phone inside the bag. She wasn’t really hungry but neither was she stuffed, so she ate the jerky, extricated the second disposable from her luggage, and returned Wayne’s call.

No answer, no voice mail. Deleting any record of the call, she checked her watch. Over two hours until the meeting with Amy Chan. It had been a while since she’d run or done any serious exercise. Time for a brisk walk?

But when she stepped out onto University, the thought of immersing herself in the rhythm of a university town — the youthfulness, the bumper-sticker philosophy, the calculated rebellion — was suddenly more than she could bear.

Returning to her room, she set the alarm on her watch and lay faceup on the sagging bed.

Nothing like solitude for nurturing the soul.

After a week at Harvard, Grace understood the place. Basically, it was Merganfield on steroids. Though, to be clear, the precious little highly gifties at Merganfield were more uniformly smart than the Harvard student body.

From what she’d observed, there were two ways her fellow students dealt with their good fortune at being accepted into the exemplar of Elite American Education. The first was to be honestly obnoxious, dropping the H-word into every conversation, wearing crimson wherever you went. The second was to pretend to be coy. (“I go to school in Boston.”) Either approach spoke of smugness and self-congratulation and Grace had actually passed a group of freshmen and heard a girl say, “Let’s face it, we’re going to run the world. So how about we do it compassionately?”

She decided to adopt a third tack in order to optimize her time in Cambridge: Stick to herself and get out as quickly as possible.

That meant declaring a major early — easy, she’d already decided on psychology because nothing else seemed remotely interesting and Malcolm was a happy man — then getting requirements out of the way by taking on a far heavier load than recommended.

Extra credits could be accumulated easily by filling free time with the Mickey Mouse courses known as “guts.” So-called serious classes turned out to be no big deal, either. The cliché about Harvard turned out to be true: The toughest part was getting in.

But while grades and exams were no issue, the way the university fashioned its social structure was. During your first year, you got assigned to a freshman dorm. After that, it got complicated.

Grace’s dorm was a building called Hurlbut Hall overlooking Crimson Quad, where she lucked into a sizable single room with a tottering old desk, a nice view of lawn, trees, and ivied brick, and a defunct fireplace. Someone had taped the outline of a cop-show corpse to the scarred oak floor and Grace left it in place. Someone else had taken the time to glue hundreds of pennies onto the wall of the corridor just outside her door. What the intended message was, she never learned, but every so often coins went missing.