“All right,” he said.
An hour later I was finishing breakfast in Terry Ormes’ kitchen. She cooked well for a cop, I thought as I swallowed a forkful of scrambled eggs. It occurred to me that I could not remember when I had eaten last. The eggs were good — she put tarragon in them. She was talking on the phone, explaining to someone why she would be late for work. I got up and cleared the table, rinsing dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher. Her kitchen was long, sunny and narrow. Everything was in its place but this bespoke an orderly presence rather than a fussy one. She finished her call and came back into the kitchen carrying a manila folder. She sat down at the kitchen table. I joined her there.
“More coffee?” she asked, pouring herself a cup.
“Sure,” I said, noticing for the first time that the backs of her hands were covered with faint freckles.
“How long have you been a cop?” I asked, continuing our earlier conversation.
“Seven years, going on twenty.”
“Tough life?”
“It’s what I always wanted. My dad was a cop. He got as high up as captain before he retired.”
“Did he want you to join the force?”
“He never came out and said it, but he was happy that I did.”
“And your mother?”
“She’d have been happier if I’d gone into something more feminine. Schoolteaching, for instance, like my brother.” She sipped her coffee. “What about you? Was your dad a lawyer?”
“No, he was foreman of the night crew at a cannery in Marysville. I’m the only lawyer in my family.”
“The scuttlebutt around the station is that you’re good.”
“I am,” I said.
“But you’re not a great cop,” she said, “judging from what happened to you last night. The first thing we learn is not to take unnecessary risks.”
“And how do you know when a risk is unnecessary? I was playing a hunch going to see Abrams. I didn’t think much would come from it. I was wrong.”
“I’ll say. Why don’t you run your next scheme by me and let me decide if it’s an unnecessary risk?”
I laughed. “Are you my partner or my mother?”
“I guess that depends on what you need most,” Terry said. “Let’s get to work.”
She opened the manila folder and handed me a thin sheaf of papers.
“What’s this?”
“Hugh Paris,” she said. “Everything I could get on him.”
“Doesn’t seem like much.”
“It isn’t. He didn’t have a California driver’s license so I ran his name with DMV and came back with nothing. The only criminal record he has was his arrest in July. No credit cards, no known bank accounts. He leased his house from something called the Pegasus Corporation, one of those companies that owns companies.”
I’d been going through the papers as I listened to her. “These are his phone bills?”
“For the last six months. Service was in his name. An unlisted number.”
A fair number of the calls were to Portola Valley — the judge
— and even a couple to my apartment. It was odd to see my phone number there and I wondered if anyone else had obtained these records. And then I noticed a number of calls made to Napa. I asked Terry about them.
“They were made to a private mental institution called Silverwood. You know anything about that?”
“His father is a patient there,” I replied, writing the number down. I came to the last page. “I thought there’d be more.”
“So did I. I get the feeling he was deliberately lying low.” I nodded agreement. She took out a bundle of papers from the folder and pushed them across to me. “I had better luck with the grandmother and uncle,” she said. I had asked her to find out what she could about the car crash which had killed Hugh’s grandmother, Christina, and his uncle, Jeremy, twenty years earlier. Hugh had maintained that his grandfather was responsible for those deaths.
Terry had obtained copies of the accident report prepared by the CHP, written within a couple of hours of the collision. She had also gotten the coroner’s findings based on an inquest held in San Francisco three days after the accident.
The CHP concluded that the car, driven by Jeremy Paris, had been headed east into Nevada on highway 80 at the time of the crash. It was dusk, a few days before Thanksgiving, the road was icy, traffic was light and there had been a snowstorm earlier in the week. The Paris car had been in the far left lane, nearest the center divider, a metal railing about four feet high. There was reason to believe that Jeremy Paris had been speeding.
About twenty miles outside of Truckee, disaster overcame the Parises. Their car suddenly went through the center divider, skidded off the side of the road across four lanes of westbound traffic, nearly hit a westbound car, and plunged off the road where its fall was broken by a stand of trees. Within a matter of moments, the car burst into flames. Christina Paris was dead when the police got to her, having been summoned by the driver of the car who had narrowly avoided being struck by the Paris car. Jeremy Paris died in the ambulance.
The driver of the other car, Warren Hansen, was the only witness and had provided details of the accident to the police. Hansen had been returning home to Sacramento from a week’s skiing. He, the report noted in cop talk, was HBD — had been drinking, shorthand for drunk. Hansen claimed that the Paris car was going too fast for the road and that it appeared to be followed by another car, tailing it from the next lane over. He remembered that the second car was dark and its lights were off. He said that just before the accident the dark car had been striking against the back bumper of the Paris car.
All these statements were duly noted by the cop who took the report. They were then dismissed by the sergeant who signed off on the report and who remarked that Hansen was drunk and further disoriented by the shock of nearly having been in a serious collision. The sergeant concluded that Jeremy Paris had simply lost control of his car as he sped down the icy roads at dusk, the most treacherous hour for motorists. It was plausible. I could almost hear the sergeant sighing with relief as he filed the report; another mess averted.
I turned to the coroner’s report. Sitting without a jury, he accepted the findings of the CHP as to the circumstances of the accident, based upon the brief testimony of a single witness, the sergeant. He added some information from the autopsies; charred meat is essentially all that had been left of Christina and Jeremy Paris. Finally, he fixed the times of their deaths. According to the coroner, given the circumstances of the accident and the conditions of the bodies, the deaths could be characterized as essentially simultaneous. When I came upon that phrase, simultaneous death, something clicked in the back of my mind.
I went on to the next page. It was a death certificate, made out for Warren Hansen who died on April 27, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Six months after the accident. I looked up at Terry.
“Up to this,” I said, holding the death certificate, “I could almost believe it was just an accident.”
“Me, too,” she said. “But as soon as I got it, all the loose ends unraveled again.” She explained that it made no sense to hold the inquest without calling the only eye-witness to the accident, or the paramedics who brought the bodies up from the crash and who could have testified to the times of death. “But then,” she continued, “it dawned on me that that was the whole reason for the inquest. To set the times of death. There’s no other reason to hold a coroner’s inquest for a simple car accident. They don’t usually call the coroner unless there’s some question about the deaths.”
“But there wasn’t any question here,” I said. “And certainly no reason to hold the inquest hundreds of miles from where the accident occurred and three days afterwards. The only difference between the police report and the coroner’s inquest were the times of death. Someone wasn’t happy with the fact that Jeremy Paris was still alive when they pulled him from the car.”
“Naturally,” she said, “I thought it was the judge who requested the coroner but I was wrong. It was John Smith, Christina’s brother, who arranged it.”
I thought for a moment. “Well, maybe he suspected,” I replied, “and wanted a coroner’s independent examination of the accident.”
