“… Is that some kind of joke?”
“Yeah,” she said. “On me.”
Young people nowadays. Sometimes they seem to speak a language that sounds like English but makes no more sense to people of my generation than Urdu or Sanskrit.
We talked some, comprehensibly, about Troxell’s suicide and Jake Runyon’s unofficial investigation into the rape-murder of Erin Dumont, his call this morning with the baseball hunch. Tamara hadn’t been able to track down a current address for Sean Ostrow yet, but she would. There was damn little information she couldn’t dig up sooner or later; it was a matter of professional pride with her, in spite of all that office-drudge nonsense she’d given me.
“Sounds like Jake is convinced Ostrow is the perp,” I said.
“Leaning heavy that way,” she agreed. “Once he knows where to find Ostrow, he’s gonna want to get in the man’s face. You think we should let him go ahead? Or tell him to back off?”
“He’s got good instincts. My inclination is to let him stay with it.”
“We’re off the hook now. Might put us right back on.”
“I know it.”
“But sometimes you have to keep pushing, right?”
“Sometimes your conscience won’t let you do anything else.”
“Just don’t push too hard.”
“That’s the tricky part,” I said. “Knowing how hard to push and when to stop before it becomes a shove.”
I went into my office and put in a call to the Troxell home. Answering machine. I identified myself, but if anybody was monitoring calls, they didn’t pick up. I left an “if there’s anything I can do” message and let it go at that for now.
For a time I tried to do some routine work, but my head wasn’t into it. Shortly before three o’clock I packed it in and went to tell Tamara that I was through for the day.
“Going home?” she asked.
“Not right away. Couple of things I need to do first.”
“Business?”
“Pushing,” I said.
26
JAKE RUNYON
Midafternoon traffic in Marin and Sonoma counties was heavy enough to cause slowdowns. The temperature was fifteen degrees warmer up there, summer-hot in the vicinity of Santa Rosa. The Ford’s air-conditioning was busted, so Runyon drove with the window down. Windless heat mixed with exhaust fumes crawled through the car, sweating him and making him aware of how tired he felt. Lack of sleep seldom bothered him; all he’d ever needed was four or five hours a night. He remembered one hot summer in Seattle, when he was working vice. A string of violent assaults on prostitutes had everybody on the squad pulling extra duty, and he’d gone sixty-seven hours straight without closing his eyes and been as alert and functional when they finally cornered the perp in an abandoned building as if he’d just gotten out of bed.
Stop and go, stop and go. He kept trying to shut himself down in order to make the drive easier, but he was having trouble doing it today. The missed sleep, maybe. Memories kept intruding unbidden, like feelers probing through his mind and then expanding into sharp images.
That same summer he’d gone the sixty-seven hours without sleep. A few weeks later, early August, the much-needed vacation. Colleen had talked him into driving up to the Cascades, going camping in the national forest. He was an urbanite, he didn’t know anything about wilderness camping, but he’d done it to please Colleen. And the experience hadn’t been bad at all. All those giant trees, all that empty virgin quiet-peaceful and stimulating at the same time. Both of them enjoying themselves, frisking around in the woods like a couple of kids, Colleen playful and horny that one warm afternoon in the little meadow where they stopped to make camp. So there they were, going at it in the grass under towering redwoods, her on top and making more noise than she usually did, and then all of a sudden she’d let out a shriek that had nothing to do with their lovemaking and froze, pointed, and yelled, “Jake, look!” And he’d twisted around and looked, and damn if a bear hadn’t been standing at the edge of the glade, watching them.
Small brown bear, but it looked big as hell from down on the ground. They’d shoved apart and he’d jumped for his. 357 Magnum, but he didn’t need it. The bear had already taken off running by the time he got it out of his pack. And there they stood, buck naked, him armed and loaded for bear, listening to a real bear crashing away through the woods. Then Colleen started to laugh. “We scared him more than he scared us,” she said. “I’ll bet that poor peeping bruin doesn’t stop running for hours.” Her words got him laughing and they couldn’t stop. They must’ve laughed for ten minutes, hanging on to each other and whooping it up like a couple of crazy people.
Their private joke for years afterward. All he had to do was wink and say “Peeping bruin,” and Colleen would break up. That fine, rich, bawdy laugh of hers… he’d loved that laugh, nothing made him feel better than hearing her laugh A horn blared behind him, snapped him out of it. Cars were moving up ahead and he was still sitting there dead stopped. Christ. He accelerated to rejoin the flow, rubbing off sweat with his free hand. Freeway noise poured in through the open window, but he could still hear Colleen’s laughter echoing inside his head. Echoing and then fading. And gone.
He paid attention to the highway, only the highway the rest of the way into Santa Rosa. It was just four o’clock when he rolled into the parking garage behind the downtown Macy’s.
Arlene Burke wasn’t on the checkout desk or the floor in the housewares department. One of the other clerks said she was working in the stockroom and went to fetch her. She had the photograph in her hand when she came out. She gave Runyon a wan smile, said, “We can talk back there,” and led him to a corner near the stockroom door. The whole time she held her body turned a quarter to the left, to keep the right side of her face out of his line of vision. But he’d already seen the bruise along the cheekbone that a heavy application of makeup hadn’t quite covered. He didn’t say anything about it. She had enough hurt in her life as it was.
The photograph was a five-by-seven candid color shot taken at some sort of small dinner party by someone without much camera skill. It was more or less in focus, but off-center so that Sean Ostrow’s right arm was missing from the frame. The rest of him was there from the waist up. Over six feet tall and suety fat-three discernible chins, bulging belly that seemed to start under his collarbone and showed beneath the hem of a tentlike blue T-shirt. Sandy hair pulled back tight on his massive skull, part of the ponytail visible behind one shoulder. Irritated frown on the thick-lipped mouth, as if he hadn’t wanted his picture taken. Pretty much the image Runyon had expected to see, but that wasn’t why Ostrow seemed vaguely familiar.
“You said this is a good likeness of your brother, Mrs. Burke?”
“As he looked back then,” she said. “That was taken, oh, it must be four years ago.”
“He’s changed since?”
“Lord, yes. I almost didn’t recognize him when he moved down from Sacramento.”
“Why is that?”
“I’d never seen him that thin before.”
“Thin? You mean he’d lost weight?”
“You didn’t know about that? I thought you did, or I’d’ve said something on Saturday.”
His fault, dammit. He hadn’t asked the right questions. “How much weight did he lose?”
“Sixty pounds by then.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“He said he was sick and tired of being fat. I thought he looked good at about two-fifty, but he wasn’t satisfied.”
“Kept on losing?”
“Oh, yes. It was like he was obsessed with being thin. Or on a mission to change his life. He hardly ate anything, twelve hundred calories a day, never any more. He always hated exercise before, but he’d started jogging
