Catherine Coulter - Split Second

Coop dialed Inspector Vincent Delion’s cell as Lucy tried to understand some of the Russian the taxi driver was speaking on his cell to his wife. Or girlfriend. She’d taken Russian in school, but it sure hadn’t stuck.

“Yo, Delion here. That you, Agent McKnight?”

“That would be me,” Coop said.

“You got an Agent Carlyle with you?”

“Indeed I do.”

Delion said, “I sure hope you guys are hungry. I’ve gotten no calls from the media, which means no leaks yet, and believe me, that’s a real pleasant surprise.”

Thirty minutes later, Lucy and Coop walked into La Barca, a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street, Delion’s favorite Mexican restaurant in the city, he’d told Coop.

Coop recognized Inspector Vincent Delion immediately. He looked exactly how Savich had described him. “Hey,” he said, “very fine mustache. I’ll bet Hercule Poirot sends you hate mail.”

Delion laughed and gave a loving little twist to the ends of his glistening black handlebar mustache. He knew it was magnificent, a work of art. It was polished to a high gloss, nearly as shiny as his bald head.

“Too bad Poirot’s fiction, and Dame Agatha is dead, or I’ll bet he would,” Delion said with a good deal of satisfaction.

They all shook hands and sized one another up. Both Coop and Lucy recognized the cop in his eyes, eyes that looked ancient, filled with memories of stuff you really didn’t want to know about, eyes that had seen too much over too many years.

And both of them wondered if their eyes held that same knowledge. No, not yet. Delion had twenty years on them.

Once they were seated, a young Latino set a basket of warm tortilla chips in front of them. All hands reached out at the same time, and everyone laughed, including the young guy, Carlos, who was pouring water into their glasses.

Delion said, “These are the best tortilla chips in town. Eat up, kids, the proud city of San Francisco is picking up the tab. When I told our lieutenant, Linda Bridges, you guys had info on the serial killer, and who you believed she was, she said to take you to my favorite place, on us. Then she told everyone to keep their fricking mouths shut, under pain of dismemberment, which never works but scares the rookies for maybe five minutes.”

While they stuffed themselves on chips, salsa, and a bowl of guacamole, Delion talked about the case he’d worked with Dane Carver, and moved on to the continuing sorry saga of the 49ers. As he spoke, Lucy found herself thinking about her grandmother’s attic, a massive open room that ran the full length of the house. She’d be busy for a week going through everything up there. Maybe she would start with the attic when she got back home. It beat searching through any more books.

When she heard Delion and Coop discussing the fate of football since Brett Favre had left the game, Lucy said, “Like Coop, I bow my head and weep when the Redskins lose, Inspector, but I can’t stand it—tell us you’ve found Kirsten Bolger’s mom.”

Delion toasted her with a tortilla chip. “Yes, I found her. It’s a good news, bad news sort of deal, though.”

“What do you mean?”

Delion didn’t answer her until their waitress, Cindy Lou, the archetypical California girl—blond, tanned, and gorgeous—had served their enchiladas and burritos.

“Well,” Delion said, forking down a huge bite of beef enchilada, “her name isn’t Bolger any longer, hasn’t been for twelve years now. It’s Lansford, as in Elizabeth Mary Lansford, wife of George Bentley Lansford, a big mover and shaker in Silicon Valley. He owns a big interfacing communications company that’s international now, and he’s using some of his millions to finance his run for Congress. He’s got lots of juice, as you can imagine, lots of people who owe him favors. His rep is that you do not screw around with George Bentley Lansford around here. That’s the bad news—we gotta be real careful when dealing with his family.”

Lucy looked at the last dollop of guacamole, saw Coop had a chip at the ready, and struck first, saying as she chewed, “You gotta work on your speed, Coop. Inspector, that doesn’t sound like bad news because we’re not from around here and it’ll be a treat to mix it up with him.”

Delion laughed, scooped up some black beans on a tortilla chip. “When I met you, Lucy, I thought, Now, here’s a nice, quiet, kind of cerebral girl with her French braid and modest little silver earrings. She probably doesn’t like to rock and roll all that much. I should’ve paid more attention to those shit-kicker boots you’re wearing.”

“Well, I don’t know about all that,” Lucy said, “but this poor boy over here would whimper if he had to face me in the gym.”

Coop grinned at her. “I saw Sherlock clean up the floor with you, Lucy. As I recall, she had your legs tied behind your elbows.”

“Sherlock’s tough, I’ll give you that, but Dillon holds back even though I tell him it really pisses me off.”

“Good thing,” Delion said. “Savich could break your neck while sipping his tea.” Delion frowned. “Savich isn’t a wild man, though. Only thing that would shake him is Sherlock getting herself hurt. I hear she got shot a couple of months ago.”

Lucy said, “Jack, that’s Agent Jackson Crowne, said when Savich saw her lying on the floor, he nearly lost it. She’s fine now.”

Delion polished off his enchilada, fastidiously patted his mustache with his napkin, and sat back, hands over his belly. He looked from one to the other. “You kids ready for the good news now? Like I told you, our girl’s mother isn’t Elizabeth Bolger any longer, she’s Elizabeth Mary Lansford. She’s an artist, does a kind of whimsical, fantasy sort of thing—elongated creatures with strange shapes and tentacles, and big eyes, like cartoon characters mixed with science fiction. She runs a local art gallery called Fantasia, over on Post Street. Here’s your dessert—I called the gallery, and she’s there this evening, some sort of showing for a local artist. If you children aren’t too jet-lagged, we can go meet her after dinner.”

Coop said, “Good news indeed; let’s do it. Anything you can tell us about her?”

“Not much yet.”

Lucy said, “Your mustache twitched, Inspector. Come on, what do you know about her?”

“All I’ll tell you is that she’s a local and she’s never been in jail. As for anything else, I think it’d be good if you guys go in with no preconceptions. Then we’ll compare notes.”

Lucy said, “What about those unsolved missing persons you’ve been looking into?”

Delion pulled out his notebook, flipped a couple of pages. “The first two teenage girls simply went missing, both from Mount Elysium High School. We found out today both of them were in some of Kirsten’s classes. The first girl was a junior, sixteen years old. She had biology with Kirsten. One day she’s gone, no sign of her, nothing at all. Good family, reports that she was well adjusted, so probably not a runaway. It drove the police nuts, but there simply weren’t any leads of any kind.

“Same with the second girl. She went missing a year and a half later, a senior. Here one day, and the next day, simply gone. Same good background, involved parents, no leads at all.” He looked up at them. “She shared an English lit class with Kirsten.

“We found three other missing young women who knew Kirsten Bolger in some capacity, and they all simply disappeared, one every three years on average. There is another woman we haven’t been able to connect to Kirsten yet, but I’ll get to her in a minute.

“The last woman disappeared two years ago, a thirty-year-old woman named Elsa Cross who lived in Kirsten’s apartment building on Dolores, south of Market. I started with her since she’s the most recent. After her disappearance every eye was on her ex, but he was alibied up to his tonsils. I called her parents and asked them about a neighbor of their daughter’s—namely, Kirsten Bolger. The mother remembered her daughter saying Kirsten wasn’t very social, and she was always playing strange music in the middle of the night, but as far as she knew, there were no shouting matches, no angry words between the two women, just mutual dislike. At the time, the police spoke to the manager and all the neighbors, and that had to include Kirsten Bolger, but there weren’t any obvious red flags, so all I could find were a few notes about what Kirsten had to say when interviewed.”