Justine showed her ticket to the agent and he motioned her on. She moved through the metal detector without setting it off.
I gave the agent a smile. “Saying good-bye to a friend,” I said, and passed through the wooden arch right after she did. She was picking up the pace, anxious to reach the plane.
I was still talking, nearly jogging to keep up with her. “I couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t trying to stop you and then I realized what she must have done—”
“Get away from me. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“She took the money, Justine. There’s probably nothing in that money belt of yours but old papers. She had plenty of time to make the switch while you were getting your hair done.”
“Ha, ha,” she said sarcastically. “Tell me another one.”
I stopped in my tracks. “All right. That’s all I’m gonna say. I just didn’t want you to reach Mexico City and find yourself flat broke.”
“Blow it out your buns,” she hissed. She showed her boarding pass to the woman at the gate and passed on through. I could hear her spike heels tip-tapping out of ear range.
I reversed myself, walked back through the gate area and out to the walled exterior courtyard, where I could see the planes through a windbreak of protective glass. Justine crossed the tarmac to the waiting plane, her shoulders set. I didn’t think she’d heard me, but then I saw her hand stray to her waist. She walked a few more steps and then halted, dumping her belongings in a pile at her feet. She pulled her shirt up and checked the money belt. At that distance, I saw her mouth open, but it took a second for the shrieks of outrage to reach me.
Ah, well, I thought. Sometimes a mother’s love is like a poison that leaves no trace. You bop along through life, thinking you’ve got it made, and next thing you know, you’re dead.
full circle
THE ACCIDENT SEEMED to happen in slow motion—one of those stop-action sequences that seem to go on forever though in truth no more than a few seconds have elapsed. It was Friday afternoon, rush hour, Santa Teresa traffic moving at a lively pace, my little VW holding its own despite the fact that it’s fifteen years out of date. I was feeling good. I’d just wrapped up a case and I had a check in my handbag for four thousand bucks, not bad considering the fact that I’m a female private eye, self-employed, and subject to the feast-or-famine vagaries of any other freelance work.
I glanced to my left as a young woman, driving a white compact, appeared in my driver’s-side mirror. A bright red Porsche was bearing down on her in the fast lane. I adjusted my speed, making room for her, sensing that she meant to cut in front of me. A navy blue pickup truck was coming up on my right, each of us jockeying for position as the late afternoon sun washed down out of a cloudless California spring sky. I had glanced in my rearview mirror, checking traffic behind me, when I heard a loud popping noise. I snapped my attention back to the road in front of me. The white compact veered abruptly back into the fast lane, clipped the rear of the red Porsche, then hit the center divider and careened directly into my path. I slammed on my brakes, adrenaline shooting through me as I fought to control the VW’s fishtailing rear end.
Suddenly, a dark green Mercedes appeared out of nowhere and caught the girl’s car broadside, flipping the vehicle with all the expertise of a movie stunt. Brakes squealed all around me like a chorus of squawking birds and I could hear the successive thumps of colliding cars piling up behind me in a drumroll of destruction. It was over in an instant, a cloud of dust roiling up from the shoulder where the girl’s car had finally come to rest, right-side up, half buried in the shrubbery. She had sheared off one of the support posts for the exit sign, which now leaned crazily across her car roof. The ensuing silence was profound.
I pulled over and was out of my car like a shot, the fellow from the navy blue pickup truck right behind me. There must have been five of us running toward the wreckage. The white car was accordion-folded, the door on the driver’s side jammed shut. Steam billowed out from under the hood with an alarming hiss. The impact had rammed the girl headfirst into the windshield, which had cracked in a starburst effect. She was unconscious, her face bathed in blood. I willed myself to move toward her though my instinct was to turn away in horror.
The guy from the pickup truck nearly wrenched the car door off its hinges in one of those emergency-generated bursts of strength that can’t be duplicated under ordinary circumstances. As he reached for her, I caught his arm.
“Don’t move her,” I said. “Let the paramedics handle this.”
He gave me a startled look, but drew back as he was told. I shed my windbreaker and we used it to form a compress, staunching the flow of blood from the worst of her cuts. The guy was in his twenties, with dark curly hair and dark eyes filled with anxiety. Over my shoulder, someone was asking me if I knew first aid and I realized that others had been hurt in the accident as well. The driver from the green Mercedes was already using the roadside emergency phone, presumably calling police and ambulance. I looked back at the guy from the pickup truck, who was pressing the girl’s neck, looking for a pulse.
“Is she alive?” I asked.
“Looks like it.”
I jerked my head at the people on the berm behind me. “Let me see what I can do down there until the ambulance comes,” I said. “Holler if you need me.”
He nodded in reply.
I left him with the girl and moved along the shoulder toward a writhing man whose leg was visibly broken. A woman was sobbing hysterically somewhere close by and her cries added an eerie counterpoint to the moans of those in pain. The fellow from the red Porsche simply stood there numbly, immobilized by shock.
Meanwhile, traffic had slowed to a crawl and commuters were rubbernecking as if freeway accidents were some sort of spectator sport and this was the main event. Sirens approached. The next hour was a blur of police and emergency vehicles. I spotted my friend John Birkett, a photographer from the local paper, who’d reached the scene moments behind the paramedics. I remember marveling at the speed with which news of the pileup had spread. I watched as the girl was loaded into the ambulance. While flashbulbs went off, several of us gave our accounts of the accident to the highway patrol officer, conferring with one another compulsively as if repetition might relieve us of tension and distress. I didn’t get home until nearly seven and my hands were still shaking. The jumble of images made sleep a torment of sudden awakenings, my foot jerking in a dream sequence as I slammed on my brakes again and again.
When I read in the morning paper that the girl had died, I felt sick with regret. The article was brief. Caroline Spurrier was twenty-two, a senior psychology major at the University of California, Santa Teresa. She was a native of Denver, Colorado, just two months short of graduation at the time of her death. The photograph showed shoulder-length blond hair, bright eyes, and an impish grin. According to the paper, six other people had suffered injuries, none fatal. The weight of the young woman’s death settled in my chest like a cold I couldn’t shake.
My office in town was being repainted, so I worked at home that next week, catching up on reports. On Thursday, when the knock came, I’d just broken for lunch. I opened the door. At first glance, I thought the dead girl was miraculously alive, restored to health and standing on my doorstep with all the solemnity of a ghost. The illusion was dispelled. A close look showed a blond woman in her mid-forties, her face etched with weariness.
“I’m Michelle Spurrier,” she said. “I understand you were a witness to my daughter’s accident. I saw your name and home address on a copy of the police report.”
I stepped back. “Please come in. I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Spurrier. That was terrible.”
She moved past me like a sleepwalker as I closed the door.
“Please sit down. Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head, looking around with bewilderment as if she couldn’t quite remember what had brought her here. She set her purse aside and sank down on my couch, placing her
cupped hands across her nose and mouth like an oxygen mask.
I sat down beside her, watching as she breathed deeply, struggling to speak. “Take your time,” I said.
When the words came, her voice was so low I had to lean close to hear her. “The police examined Caroline’s car at the impound lot and found a bullet hole in the window on the passenger side. My daughter was shot.” She burst into tears.
I sat beside her while she poured out a grief tinged with rage and frustration. I brought her a glass of water and a fistful of tissues, small comfort, but all I could think to do. “What are the police telling you?” I asked when she’d composed herself.
She blew her nose and then took another deep breath. “The case has been transferred from Traffic detail to Homicide. The officer I talked to this morning says it looks like a random freeway shooting, but I don’t believe it.”
“God knows they’ve had enough of those down in Los Angeles,” I remarked.
“Well, I can’t accept that. For one thing, what was she doing speeding down the highway at that hour of the day? She was supposed to be at work, but they tell me she left abruptly without a word to anyone.”
“Where was she employed?”
“A restaurant out in Colgate. She’d been waiting tables there for a year. The shift manager told me a man had been harassing her. He thinks she might have left to try to get away from him.”
“Did he know who the guy was?”
She shook her head. “He wasn’t sure. Some fellow she’d been dating. Apparently, he kept stopping by the restaurant, calling her at all hours, making a terrible pest of himself. Lieutenant Dolan tells me you’re a private detective, which is why I’m here. I want you to find out who’s responsible for this.”
“Mrs. Spurrier, the police here are very competent. I’m sure they’re doing everything possible.”
“Skip the public relations message,” she said with bitterness. “I have to fly back to Denver. Caroline’s stepfather is very ill and I need to get home, but I can’t go unless I know someone here is looking into this. Please.”
I thought about it briefly, but it didn’t take much to persuade me. As a witness to the accident, I felt more than a professional interest in the case. “I’ll need the names of her friends,” I said.
I made a note of Mrs. Spurrier’s address and phone number, along with the name of Caroline’s roommate and the restaurant where she’d worked. I drew up a standard contract, waiving the advance. I’d bill her later for whatever time I put in. Ordinarily I bypass police business in an attempt to stay out of Lieutenant Dolan’s way. As the officer in charge of Homicide, he’s not crazy about private eyes. Though he’s fairly tolerant of me, I couldn’t imagine what she’d had to threaten to warrant the recommendation.
As soon as she left, I grabbed a jacket and my handbag and drove over to the police station, where I paid six dollars for a copy of the police report. Lieutenant Dolan wasn’t in, but I spent a few minutes chatting with Emerald, the clerk in Identification and Records. She’s a heavy black woman in her fifties, usually wary of my questions, but a sucker for gossip.
“I hear Jasper’s wife caught him with Rowena Hairston,” I said, throwing out some bait. Jasper Sax is one of Emerald’s interdepartmental foes.
“Why tell me?” she said. She was pretending uninterest, but I could tell the rumor cheered her. Jasper, from the crime lab, is forever lifting files from Emerald’s desk, which only gets her in trouble when Lieutenant Dolan comes around.
“I was hoping you’d fill me in on the Spurrier accident. I know you’ve memorized all the paperwork.”
She grumbled something about flattery that implied she felt flattered, so I pressed for specifics. “Anybody see where the shot was fired from?” I asked.
“No, ma’am.”
I thought about the fellow in the red Porsche. He’d been in the lane to my left, just a few yards ahead of me when the accident occurred. The man in the pickup might be a help as well. “What about the other witnesses? There must have been half a dozen of us at the scene. Who’s been interviewed?”
Emerald gave me an indignant look. “What’s the matter with you? You know I’m not allowed to give out information like that!”
“Worth a try,” I said equably. “What about the girl’s professors from the university? Has Dolan talked to them?”
“Check it out yourself if you’re so interested,” she snapped.
“Come on, Emerald. Dolan knows I’m doing this. He was the one who told Mrs. Spurrier about me in the first place. I’ll make it easy for you. Just one name.”
She squinted at me suspiciously. “Which one’s that?”
I took a flier, describing the guy in the pickup, figuring she could identify him from the list by age. Grudgingly, she checked the list and her expression changed.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I might know you’d zero in on this one. Fellow in the pickup gave a phony name and address. Benny Seco was the name, but he must have made that up. Telephone was a fake, too. Looks like he took off and nobody’s seen him since. Might have been a warrant out against him he was trying to duck.”
“How about the guy in the Porsche?”
I heard a voice behind me. “Well, well, well. Kinsey Millhone. Hard at work, I see.”
Emerald faded into the background with all the practice of a spy. I turned to find Lieutenant Dolan standing in the hallway in his habitual pose, hands shoved down in his pants pockets, rocking on his heels. He’d recently celebrated a birthday, his baggy face reflecting every one of his sixty years.
I folded the police report and tucked it in my bag. “Mrs. Spurrier got in touch with me and asked me to follow up on this business of her daughter’s death. I feel bad about the girl.”
His manner shifted. “I do, too,” he said.
“What’s the story on the missing witness?”
Dolan shrugged. “He must have had some reason to give out a phony name. Did you talk to him at the scene?”
“Just briefly, but I’d know him if I saw him again. Do you think he could be of help?”
Dolan ran a hand across his balding pate. “I’d sure like to hear what the fellow has to say. Nobody else was aware that the girl was shot. I gather he was close enough to have done it himself.”
“There’s gotta be a way to track him down, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” he said. “No one remembers much about the man except the truck he drove. Toyota, dark blue, maybe four or five years old from what they say.”
“Would you object if I checked back with the other witnesses? I might get more out of them since I was there.”
He studied me for a moment, then reached over to the file and removed the list of witnesses, which he handed to me without a word.
“Don’t you need this?” I said, surprised.
“I have a copy.”
“Thanks. This is great. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Dolan pointed a finger. “Keep in touch with the department. I don’t want you going off half cocked.”
I DROVE OUT TO the campus area to the restaurant where Caroline Spurrier had worked. The place had changed hands recently, the decor downgraded from real plants to fake as the nationality of the food changed from Mexican to Thai. The shift manager, David Cole, was just a kid himself, barely twenty-one, tall, skinny, with a nose that belonged on a much larger face.
I introduced myself and told him I was looking into Caroline’s death.
“Oh yeah, that was awful. I talked to her mom.”
“She says you mentioned some guy who’d been bugging her. What else can you tell me?”
“That’s about all I know. I mean, I never saw the guy myself. She was working nights for the last couple months and just switched back to days to see if she could get away from him.”
“She ever mention his name?”
“Terry something, I think. He used to follow her around in this green van he drove. She really thought the dude was bent.” br />
“Bent?”
“You know . . . twisted.” He twiddled an index finger beside his head to indicate his craziness.
“Why’d she go out with him?”
“She said he seemed like a real nice guy at first, but then he got real possessive, all jealous and like that. In the end, I guess he was totally nuts. He must have showed up on Friday, which is why she took off.”
I quizzed him, but couldn’t glean much more from his account. I thanked him and drove over to the block of university housing where Caroline had lived. The apartment was typical of student digs—faintly shabby, furnished with mismatched items that had probably been languishing in someone’s garage. Her roommate was a young woman named Judy Layton, who chatted despondently as she emptied kitchen cabinets and packed assorted cardboard boxes. I kept the questions light at first, asking her about herself as she wrapped some dinner plates in newspaper, shoving each in a box. She was twenty-three, a senior English major with family living in town.
“How long did you know Caroline?”
“About a year,” she said. “I had another roommate, but Alice graduated last year. Caroline and I connected up through one of those roommate-referral services.”
“How come you’re moving out?”
She shrugged. “Going back to my folks’. It’s too late in the school year to find someone else and I can’t afford this place on my own. My brother’s on his way over to help me move.”
According to her, Caroline was a “party-hearty” who somehow managed to keep her grades up and still have a good time.
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“She dated lots of guys.”
“But no one in particular?”
She shook her head, intent on her work.
I tried again. “She told her mom about some guy harassing her at work. Apparently she’d dated him and they’d just broken up. Do you have any idea who she might have been talking about?”