Catherine Coulter - Split Second

Lucy said, “You never told him? If he doesn’t know, I imagine he will know very soon now, Mrs. Lansford. Unfortunately, we cannot control leaks, as much as we would want to. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I suggest you warn your husband. And when Kirsten comes to trial, every single thing everyone knows about her will come out.”

“Well, then, I must trust you either don’t ever catch Kirsten or you kill her.”

Hmmm. Coop said, “You saw the police sketch in the paper and on TV, didn’t you, Mrs. Lansford? You recognized your daughter, didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “No, the police sketches weren’t at all like her, and so I dismissed it.”

“But then other police sketches came out. You recognized those as Kirsten, didn’t you, ma’am?”

“Perhaps I did notice a resemblance, perhaps it was niggling at the back of my mind, but I have a great talent for shutting out unpleasantness, and, believe me, there couldn’t be anything more unpleasant than this creature murdering five women, let alone thinking that perhaps he was really a she, and that she was really Kirsten. I suppose I was afraid that sooner or later someone might come to see me. But I must admit, you’re here much sooner than I expected. May I ask how you found me?”

Lucy said, “We had an excellent description and sketch of Kirsten. We narrowed down our search to the San Francisco area where the murders began and found her quickly enough from her senior yearbook photo at Mount Elysium High School.”

Mrs. Lansford walked over to the giraffe that was nearly as tall as she was, with an eye patch over one eye. Oddly, she lifted the eye patch, looked at the empty eye pit closely, then carefully laid the patch over it again and gave the giraffe an absent pat. “His name is Louie. Ah, so easy, it seems. I’m very glad one of the killer’s victims managed to live through the attack.

“I don’t know what I can tell you, since I haven’t seen Kirsten in over a year. The last time was on her birthday, when I called to invite her to our house in Atherton to give her a special present.”

“What was the present?” Lucy asked, seeing for the first time a fat pink hippo sitting beside a bright blue-and-orange chair. It should have been tacky but was, in fact, charming.

“A Porsche Nine-eleven, black, naturally, since she’d left her white period.”

“Did her white period include blond hair?”

Mrs. Lansford nodded.

Coop said, “Did she favor a different color before then?”

“Red. That didn’t last long. No, it was white for years. It was very unnerving to see her. And tedious. And weird. I told her so, but she ignored me, as usual.”

“How does Kirsten earn a living, Mrs. Lansford?”

“She went to law school—I know, I know, so did Ted Bundy for a while. She stopped going to classes, flunked out, just like her father. Despite all the white, all the bizarre outfits, she is very pretty, and very thin; she modeled for catalogs for a while, but she tired of that quickly enough. She really didn’t need to work, since her stepfather”—she paused for a moment, frowned at a small piece of paper sitting on the hoof of the blue horse, bent over and picked it off, rolled it into a ball, and gently placed it in the bright yellow sunflower wastebasket beside the desk—“since he gave her an allowance of five thousand dollars a month for many years. I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he is a foolishly generous man.”

Lucy said, “Mrs. Lansford, when did you tell your daughter her father was Ted Bundy?”

Elizabeth Mary Lansford laughed. “What mother would ever want to tell her daughter something like that? I never told her. But she found out, I have no idea how, and she wouldn’t tell me how she knew. It was when she was twenty-five. She walked unexpectedly into the gallery, looked at the painting I had finished that morning, and she sneered—she always sneered at my work—and she said, calm as you please, ‘I know you hate me, Mother, like you hated my father. I could have visited my father in prison in Florida, met him before he died, but you never even told me who he was. You kept him from me; you stole my father from me. You’re a bitch, a gold-plated bitch, and I wish he’d killed you.’

“Perhaps you wonder how I can remember her words so exactly, but I suspect Inspector Delion knows. You have children, do you not?”

Delion nodded. “I would remember, too, if one of them said that to me. What happened then, Mrs. Lansford?”

“She stalked out with me calling after her to wait, to let me explain, but she didn’t even slow down. Of course, I couldn’t say anything to George. The next time I saw her was on her birthday last year, when I think my husband tried to bribe her back with the gift of the black Porsche.”

Coop said, “So you didn’t even see your daughter or hear from her for—what? Six, seven years?”

“That’s right, until her thirty-second birthday. She has since turned thirty-three.”

“And you don’t know how she found out about her father?”

“No. I asked her, but she refused to tell me.”

Coop said, “How did she act at her birthday party?”

“It marked the one and only time Kirsten went out of her way to charm her stepfather. Because he gave her the Porsche first thing, I imagine. I listened to her laugh, watched her excitement when she saw the Porsche with a big red bow sitting squarely on the hood. George beamed at her, and she played up to him, still charming as could be, whooping and laughing with pleasure, flirting with him, truth be told. But before she drove off, she made sure to look at me, and there was such cold hatred in her eyes I wanted to cry. I knew I hadn’t been forgiven for keeping the truth about her father from her, and I never would be.” She turned away from them and walked to a window that gave onto the warm night and tourists and locals still thick on the street. When she turned back, her face was perfectly blank. “About six months ago someone broke into my studio at home and destroyed every painting I had there. It was Kirsten, of course. I—I never told George, merely locked the room until I could clean it out.”

“ Sentra! What are you doing here? Felipe told me you’d come into my office with three people; he didn’t know who they were. What is going on here?”

Delion, Lucy, and Coop turned to the woman standing in the office doorway, the image of Mrs. Lansford, who was still leaning against the desk, only this woman was wearing a long bright yellow gown with diamonds at her neck, her thick black hair swept up in a French twist.

Sentra?

“Who are you, ma’am?” Delion asked, stepping toward her.

“Why, I’m Elizabeth Lansford, of course. This is my sister, Sentra Bolger. For heaven’s sake, Sentra, have you been pretending to be me again?”

Coop said, “I know, it’s nearly one a.m. I was prowling around, saw the light under your door. You can’t sleep either?”

Coop stood in Lucy’s hotel-room doorway wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and boots. For an instant she didn’t recognize him, since she was so used to seeing him in a suit, or a white shirt, the sleeves usually rolled up. Well, she wasn’t in a suit, either, so who cared? She cleared her throat. “Good look—like a cat burglar,” she said, and stepped back. “I did try to get some sleep, but it wasn’t happening. I’ve been staring out toward the bay. You want a beer? We can play a game of Who’s the Real Mother?”

Coop walked into a room the mirror image of his. “Sounds good.” He sprawled on the sofa, accepted the beer, and clicked his can to hers.

“Hey, I like your sleep shirt. Red’s a good color on you.”