until he reached the produce section.
He saw the woman first. Basket looped over one arm, feeling up tomatoes and paying no mind to the little girl. She was running circles around a bin of corn, pigtails flying, playing some kind of game like Angie used to do. He walked by, slow and close. She looked up and saw him. Put on the brakes, gave him a gap-toothed smile that lit up that sweet face like a jacko’-lantern, then started running again. His throat tightened, his mouth tasted brassy.
Angie, he thought.
He went on up to the express checkout, bought a couple of packs of Marlboros and the bottled water. Outside, the cold air hit him with a rush and made him realize he was sweating. He opened one of the bottles, took a long swig. Once the brassy taste was gone and the sweat quit oozing out, he was all right again. The ache behind his eyes was starting to ease some, too. That was a good sign. He might be able to sleep tonight, might not even dream.
In the Suburban he lit a cigarette, sipped water between drags. Waiting the way a cat waits-waiting for the good thing to happen. Who was it had said that to him about the way cats waited? Mia? He couldn’t stand cats, but Mia’d always liked them. He remembered one time when the three of them… when he and Angie and Mia…
It was another five minutes before they came out, the woman carrying two plastic grocery sacks, the little girl running and skipping ahead. Their car, some kind of old four-door sedan, was in the first row. The woman hesitated when they got there, as if maybe she’d forgotten something. “Go back inside,” he said out loud, “leave Angie in the car.”
But she didn’t. It wasn’t going to be that easy. She was just fumbling for the keys. She found them, unlocked the car, and both of them got in and stayed in. The sedan’s engine started, the lights came on. He had the Suburban clear of the space and easing forward before she finished backing up, and he was right behind her when she pulled out of the lot.
No problem following the sedan. She drove as slow as she moved. And it wasn’t far to go-less than half a mile through a bunch of residential streets to a single-family home within spitting distance of a neighborhood park. The sedan stopped in the driveway, the woman and the little girl got out and went into the house. He didn’t need the number; he’d recognize the place when he came back, couldn’t miss that tree with the tree-house in it over in the side yard. All he’d need was the name of this street and the cross street up ahead where the park was.
Tomorrow he’d come back, daytime and after dark both. And as many days and nights after that as it took to find out who else lived in the house, how often the girl was alone in the yard or in the park or on her way to and from school. Pick his spot, wait for just the right time. He had a feeling it wouldn’t take long.
When the time came, he hoped she wouldn’t make too much of a fuss.
1
I couldn’t seem to get used to the location of the new offices. The first week after we moved in, I found myself twice on successive mornings heading toward O’Farrell Street instead of south of Market. Automatic pilot. I’d occupied the old space for a lot of years, dating back to my partnership with Eberhardt. A lot of years and a lot of memories, some bad-like the events of last Christmas that had been the catalyst for the move-but most of them fairly good. Funny, but I was having more difficulty letting go of the musty, crusty O’Farrell loft than I’d had giving up the Pacific Heights flat I’d leased for three decades. No regrets or backward looks there, after I handed over the key on January first.
There was nothing wrong with the new digs. They were at least a couple of steps upscale, in fact. Larger than the loft by half, three good-sized, newly renovated, partly furnished rooms plus private bathroom on the second floor of an old, three-storied, salmon-colored building on South Park. Above us we had an art studio, below us we had a firm of architects, and outside the front windows we had a view of the little tree-shaded park and the architectural mixed bag that housed private residences, cafes, and small businesses like ours. We also had a five- year lease at a surprisingly reasonable monthly nut. Ever since the dot-com industry collapse, prime office space in the city had gone begging and real estate firms and holding companies were only too glad to cut a deal in order to fill a vacancy long-term. An even better deal had been offered to us in Multimedia Gulch, the section between Potrero Hill and the Mission that had been a dot-com haven during the short-lived boom and was now something of a business ghost town, but neither Tamara nor I had much cared for the location. Too far from downtown, for one thing; and there was a small but persistent stigma attached to the area that extended to new firms moving in, as if a Gulch address were a brand of eventual failure.
South Park, on the other hand, was a well-regarded, ellipzoidal chunk of Bohemian-era San Francisco tucked between Second and Third, Brannan and Bryant. In the 1860s it had been the center of the Rincon Hill residential district, home of the city’s wealthiest families. After the seat of wealth and fashion shifted to Nob Hill, South Park had had an up-and-down history-mostly down until the 1970s, when urban renewal created SoMa and South Beach and turned South Park back into a desirable high spot. From a business point of view it had a couple of downsides: It was near the Bay Bridge approach and inclined to be noisy, and street parking was at a premium and garage facilities neither in close proximity nor reasonably priced. But those were minor compared to the upsides of location, size, and cheap rent. The new offices were only half a dozen blocks from the financial district, another half dozen from the Ferry Building and the waterfront and the bridge.
Tamara was the one who had orchestrated the move. Haggled with the real estate agent, arranged the transfer of the few furnishings and other equipment worth salvaging from O’Farrell Street, set up the new offices. All Jake Runyon, the agency’s new field operative, and I did was some donkey work and arranging of personal space. That was fine with me. Tamara was good at handling details, and she had a long-range vision as to what the agency could and should be if it was going to continue to grow. South Park had been her idea; so had an aggressive advertising campaign to go along with the usual change-of-address notification sent out to our client list.
I suppose that was the underlying reason why, after three months, I still couldn’t quite adapt to the new digs. On O’Farrell Street and in the offices prior, the agency had been mine alone-I was the sole proprietor for most of the thirty-plus years I’d been in the detective business. Here on South Park, the agency was Tamara’s. New surroundings, new direction. The passing of the baton, the old and settled giving way to the young and ambitious. Fundamentally I had no problem with that; hell, if I had I wouldn’t have decided to semiretire and make her a full partner. I was still one of the bosses, nothing of importance was done without my input, and yet I couldn’t help a certain feeling of displacement, of being left behind. Made me feel sad now and then. Maybe it was just a function of incipient old age and a lifelong resistance to change. Kerry thought so, and she’s a lot smarter than I am.
In any event, there was no question that Tamara knew what she was doing. At the ripe old age of twenty-six she’s also smarter than I am. The move and the advertising had paid off much more quickly than I’d expected. Now, in early April, business was booming to the point where we were probably going to have to hire yet another operative to help handle the caseload. As it was, I was working four days and sometimes a full week-nearly twice the number of hours I’d promised Kerry, Emily, and myself when I semiretired. Runyon was putting in sixty-hour weeks, but he was a recent widower, estranged from his son by his also-deceased first wife, and a workaholic. Tamara logged in even more time than that. Now that her cellist boyfriend, Horace, had moved to Philadelphia, and she was living alone, she’d taken to compensating in the same workaholic fashion as Runyon. She’d even begun to do a little of the fieldwork, after hours, ostensibly because she wanted to learn more about that end of the business, but mainly, I suspected, because it helped keep loneliness at bay.
So here I was at South Park bright and early on Monday morning, ready to tackle another full day’s workload. The desk in the big anteroom was empty; that was the one Runyon used when he was in, which wasn’t often. Right now he was in L.A., on a skip trace connected to a homicide trial for a prominent local defense attorney. The room was big, sunny on sunny days like this one, the walls dove-gray with what Kerry called “black accents,” the new furniture stylish black leather-and-chrome. One of these days, if Tamara had her way, there’d be another desk and a secretary/receptionist behind it. I had no doubt that it would happen in the foreseeable future. Nor any doubt that under her guidance the agency would one day be as large or larger than McCone Investigations, down on the Embarcadero-maybe spawn a couple of satellites in other cities. She was not only a smart businesswoman, she had ambition and an entrepreneurial turn of mind.
The two private offices at the rear were side by side, the one on the west a little larger-the bathroom had
