ID.
George DeBrissac wasn’t the cause of her disappearance. Somebody else, some other scenario. If I could just pin down the where…
At my car I sat inside long enough to write down the Fury’s license plate number. My memory isn’t what it used to be; I’d repeated the number to myself a dozen times during and after the conversation with DeBrissac, to keep it fresh in my mind, but it wouldn’t stay fresh for long. Write it down or lose it: axiom for your sixties. DeBrissac had no good reason to run again if he’d had nothing to do with Tamara’s disappearance; my sudden arrival and the questions I’d asked shouldn’t be enough to spook him out of what must seem to be a pretty safe harbor. But if he did run, the Fury’s license plate number would make it easy enough to track him down again.
I canvassed the rest of the block, starting at the far end. Three houses were dark, nobody home. Stranger- wary residents of one of the lighted houses wouldn’t answer the bell, and two others who did answer refused to talk to me. The halfdozen people who listened to my questions about Tamara had none of the answers I wanted to hear.
Dead end, at least for now.
After eight by then. How much longer before I heard from Mick Savage?
Might be another hour or two. Dead end, dead time. I could either kill it hanging around the neighborhood, keeping an eye on DeBrissac’s hideout and waiting for the occupants of the dark houses to come home, or I could drive around again hunting for Tamara’s red Toyota. Both seemed like exercises in futility, but driving was better than sitting. At least when you were on the move you had the illusion of time passing more rapidly.
I’d covered a four-block radius earlier in the day, so I doubled that to eight blocks. Trying to locate one dark- colored, common-model parked car at night is about as difficult a job as you can undertake. License plates, even the personalized ones, are hard to read by headlights. Makes and models resemble each other, red colors aren’t easy to differentiate. It was a little easier on brightly lighted thoroughfares like San Pablo Avenue, but there you couldn’t go as slowly or look as carefully because of the traffic. It was an exercise in frustration as well as futility, and it had my nerves frayed raw by the time I swung into a Safeway parking lot on San Pablo, some seven blocks from Willard Street.
And that was where I found the Toyota.
It happens like that sometimes. You give up on a thing, you make a more or less unrelated move, and you get a surprise. Chance, divine guidance-call it what you want. I turned into the lot because the traffic was bunched up and I was ready to head back in the opposite direction and there was a stoplight at the entrance and I could make an easy U-turn in the lot. And while I was making the turn down one of the short aisles of parked cars, my lights picked out one by itself and a pole light nearby gave it added definition.
Red Toyota Camry, Horace’s MR CELLO license plate.
I hit the brakes so hard they almost locked and the tires squealed on the pavement. Inside of ten seconds I was parked and out and pawing at the Toyota’s driver-side door. It wasn’t locked. I sucked in a breath, dragged the door open, bent inside.
The keys were in it. Not in the ignition-tossed on the passenger seat. Another piece of blind luck. If the wrong person had spotted them at any time last night or today, the car wouldn’t be sitting here now.
I pocketed the keys, checked the seats, floorboards, shadowed rear deck for signs of violence. None, thank God. The contents of a trash bag hanging from a radio knob told me nothing. Neither did the usual items in the glove compartment or the armrest box where she kept her CDs. But I did find one other thing when I leaned down and swept a hand underneath the seats-Tamara’s purse, stuffed under the driver’s bucket.
Her wallet was there, but money, credit cards, driver’s license were all missing. I couldn’t tell if anything else had been taken from the jumble of other stuff.
I backed out, taking the purse with me, and made sure all the doors were locked. My hands were shaking a little. Supposed to look like a robbery that had gone down right here in the lot, but not to me. Any thief will steal cash and credit cards, but none will take a photo ID out of its celluloid holder and leave the wallet behind. No, the Toyota had been driven over here and abandoned sometime during the night, the keys left in it in the hope that somebody would steal it. Driven from Willard Street, seven blocks away.
That was the where, all right. I had no doubt of it now.
I was on a dark side street, heading back to Willard Street, when Mick Savage finally called. The dashboard clock, more or less accurate, said it was 9:20. I veered over to the curb before I answered the call.
“Got what you wanted from Tamara’s computer,” he said.
“Go ahead, Mick.”
“New file, untitled, made on Monday. Looks like a preliminary background check on a man named Robert Lemoyne. L-e-m-o-y-n-e. Mixed race, black father, white mother.”
“Address?”
“Eleven-oh-nine Willard Street, San Leandro.”
“That’s it. What else?”
Mick gave me a quick rundown on Lemoyne. Age forty-seven. Construction worker. Twice married, twice divorced. One child, a daughter, custody awarded to the mother four years ago. Evidently lived alone. No criminal record of any kind. No brushes with the law except for a couple of misdemeanors. No apparent history of domestic or substance abuse.
So?
I asked Mick, “Anything in the file about why she was checking up on him?”
“No,” he said. “And no mention of him anywhere else on her hard drive. You think he’s responsible?”
“Somebody on Willard Street is. I just found her car-abandoned in a Safeway parking lot a few blocks away.”
“Oh, man. There wasn’t… I mean…”
“No indications of foul play, no.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Can’t say yet. But this Lemoyne’s house is right near where she was staked out the past two nights.”
“So maybe he spotted her and hit on her or something?”
“That’s one possibility. Is there anything in his background about violence toward women?”
“Not in the file,” Mick said, “but Tamara didn’t go too deep into it. Just preliminary stuff. You want me to do some digging myself, see what else I can find out?”
“Would you? But you must be pretty tired by now…”
“Nah. I’ll work all night if it’ll help find Tamara. I’d rather hack than sleep.”
“Thanks, Mick. Call me if you come up with anything I should know. Otherwise I’ll be in touch.”
I made it fast back to Willard Street. Number 1109 had been one of the dark houses; it was still dark now. I parked down the street, and with the lights off I unclipped the. 38 Colt Bodyguard from under the dash, checked the loads, and slipped the piece into my pocket. Then I went up and leaned on Robert Lemoyne’s doorbell.
Empty echoes, empty house.
I checked the garage, found a window in back I could see through with the aid of my penlight. Empty garage.
Lights behind curtains made saffron squares of the two front windows in Bill Powers’s house down the block. I crossed over there and rang his bell. He was in pajamas and bathrobe, a book in one hand with a finger marking his place, a pair of silver-rimmed reading glasses tilted forward on his nose. He blinked at me from behind the lenses.
“Sorry to bother you again, Mr. Powers,” I said, “but I need to ask a few more questions. About another of your neighbors this time.”
“Sure,” he said. Then he said, “You look grim. Something happen?”
I brushed the question aside. “What can you tell me about the man who lives at eleven-oh-nine, Robert Lemoyne?”
“Bob? Quiet, friendly enough, but mostly keeps to himself.”
“Aggressive? Toward women especially?”
“Not that I’ve heard about. Doesn’t seem to be that type, but then I don’t know him very well. Just to say hello to.”
“Trouble of any kind associated with him?”
