MY THIRD CUP of coffee was still hot when Yuki walked through the gate in the squad room at nine thirty a.m. and made a beeline to where I sat behind my floral barricade.
“I might have something on Marcus Dowling,” she said.
Conklin got up, gave her his chair, and said, “You have our complete attention.”
Yuki told us in one long run-on sentence that Casey’s school friend, Sue Emdin, had been tailing Dowling for more than a week and had seen him last night in a restaurant made for clandestine meetings, having dinner with a woman who was more friendly than friend.
“Sue followed them from the restaurant, then called to tell me she was staking out Dowling’s house. I went to sit with her.”
“Jesus, Yuki.”
“Just listen, okay? No laws were broken. At about eleven last night, Dowling and this woman came out of the house, falling all over each other. She’s in her late twenties, early thirties, Pilates body, long cover-girl hair. Totally gorgeous.”
“You’re saying, totally his girlfriend,” Conklin said.
“So it would seem. Dowling helps said blonde into his car and then off they go.”
“And you’re following them?” I said.
“Well, yeah.”
“Really, Yuki,” I said, flipping my ballpoint into the air. “That was nuts and dangerous and you know it. Everyone wants to be a cop, but it beats the hell out of me why.”
“It’s a glamour job, right?” Yuki cracked, waving a hand to indicate the splendor of our grimy, gray-on-gray bull pen.
“So you’re outside his house. What happened after that?” I asked.
“Okay, so we followed Dowling’s car to Cow Hollow,” Yuki said. “The car stops, and we have to drive past it, of course. We take a spin around the block, and on the return lap, I see Totally Gorgeous walking by herself to this extremely nice house. Dowling stayed in his car. He didn’t leave until his girlfriend went inside, but the point is, he didn’t walk her to the door. Clearly he didn’t want to be seen.”
Yuki paused for breath, took out a business card, and flipped it over so I could see the address she’d written on the back.
Conklin said, “We have his phone log.”
I typed the address Yuki gave me into the computer and came up with a name and a phone number.
“Graeme Henley,” I said to Conklin, and read him the number.
My partner scrolled down his computer screen. “It’s here. He called that number three or four times a day all last month.”
“Graeme Henley is probably not a woman,” I said.
“So the girlfriend is married,” Yuki said. “That’s why he stayed in the car. Lindsay, Casey thought Marc was seeing someone. If he was, if he was serious, if he couldn’t get rid of Casey… the girlfriend could be a motive.”
“There’s something else,” I told Yuki. “I’ve got a witness who says Casey Dowling was alive when Hello Kitty left the Dowling house.”
“You’ve got a signed statement?”
“It’s an anonymous source but credible.”
“Huh,” said Yuki. “You have an anonymous but credible source who says Casey was alive when Kitty left the Dowling house. Who could that be? Oh my
“Uh-huh, and she told me things only Kitty could know. Have we got probable cause for a wiretap warrant?”
“It’s a stretch,” Yuki told us. “I’ll go to work on Parisi. I’m not promising, but I’ll give it everything I’ve got.”
Chapter 77
YUKI GOT IT done.
A signed warrant for a wiretap was in my hands by lunch the next day, and within hours there was a tap on a phone circuit a couple of blocks from Dowling’s house. Effective three o’clock in the afternoon, Dowling’s phone calls were being routed through a small, windowless room on the fourth floor of the Hall.
The room was empty but for two Salvation Army-quality desks and chairs, a bank of file cabinets, and an outdated telephone book.
Conklin and I brought coffee and settled in behind a locked door. I was keyed up and bordering on optimistic. The odds that Dowling would say something incriminating were a long shot-but a shot we actually had.
For the next five hours, my partner and I monitored Dowling’s incoming and outgoing calls. He was a busy lad, having scripts overnighted from Hollywood, schmoozing with his agent, his lawyer, his banker, his manager, his PR person, his broker, and-finally-his girlfriend.
The conversation with Caroline Henley was laced with “darlings” and “sweethearts” from both ends of the line. They made a plan to have dinner together the next week, when Graeme Henley was on a business trip in New York.
Then, when I was sure the conversation was over, it got interesting.
“You don’t know what this is like, Marc. Graeme knows something’s wrong, and now he wants us to go into counseling.”
“I understand completely, Caroline. You have to stall him. We’ve waited for two long years, darling. Another few months won’t matter in the big picture.”
“You’ve been saying that forever.”
“Three or four more months, that’s all,” Dowling said. “Be patient. I told you it will work out, and it will. We need the public to get bored with the story, and then we’ll be fine.”
Conklin broke into a grin. “Two years. He’s been seeing her for two years. It’s not a smoking gun, but it’s something.”
Chapter 78
I CALLED JACOBI from Yuki’s office and told him that Marcus Dowling had been having an ongoing relationship with a woman, not his wife, for two years.
“Go get ’em,” Jacobi said.
Conklin and I drove to Caroline Henley’s place, a modern two-story house only blocks from the Presidio.
Mrs. Henley came to the door wearing her blond hair in one long braid, black tights under a blue-striped man’s shirt, a big diamond ring next to her wedding band. A couple of little boys were playing with trucks in the living room behind her.
I introduced myself and my partner and asked Mrs. Henley if we could come in to talk, and she opened the door wide.
Conklin has consistently proved that he can get any woman to spill her guts, so once we were ensconced in overstuffed furniture, I turned the floor over to him.
“Marcus Dowling says you two are very good friends.”
