birthday, when I called to invite her to our house in Atherton to give her a special present.”
“What was the present?” Lucy asked, seeing for the first time a fat pink hippo sitting beside a bright blue- and-orange chair. It should have been tacky but was, in fact, charming.
“A Porsche Nine-eleven, black, naturally, since she’d left her white period.”
“Did her white period include blond hair?”
Mrs. Lansford nodded.
Coop said, “Did she favor a different color before then?”
“Red. That didn’t last long. No, it was white for years. It was very unnerving to see her. And tedious. And weird. I told her so, but she ignored me, as usual.”
“How does Kirsten earn a living, Mrs. Lansford?”
“She went to law school—I know, I know, so did Ted Bundy for a while. She stopped going to classes, flunked out, just like her father. Despite all the white, all the bizarre outfits, she is very pretty, and very thin; she modeled for catalogs for a while, but she tired of that quickly enough. She really didn’t need to work, since her stepfather”— she paused for a moment, frowned at a small piece of paper sitting on the hoof of the blue horse, bent over and picked it off, rolled it into a ball, and gently placed it in the bright yellow sunflower wastebasket beside the desk —“since he gave her an allowance of five thousand dollars a month for many years. I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he is a foolishly generous man.”
Lucy said, “Mrs. Lansford, when did you tell your daughter her father was Ted Bundy?”
Elizabeth Mary Lansford laughed. “What mother would ever want to tell her daughter something like that? I never told her. But she found out, I have no idea how, and she wouldn’t tell me how she knew. It was when she was twenty-five. She walked unexpectedly into the gallery, looked at the painting I had finished that morning, and she sneered—she always sneered at my work—and she said, calm as you please, ‘I know you hate me, Mother, like you hated my father. I could have visited my father in prison in Florida, met him before he died, but you never even told me who he was. You kept him from me; you
“Perhaps you wonder how I can remember her words so exactly, but I suspect Inspector Delion knows. You have children, do you not?”
Delion nodded. “I would remember, too, if one of them said that to me. What happened then, Mrs. Lansford?”
“She stalked out with me calling after her to wait, to let me explain, but she didn’t even slow down. Of course, I couldn’t say anything to George. The next time I saw her was on her birthday last year, when I think my husband tried to bribe her back with the gift of the black Porsche.”
Coop said, “So you didn’t even see your daughter or hear from her for—what? Six, seven years?”
“That’s right, until her thirty-second birthday. She has since turned thirty-three.”
“And you don’t know how she found out about her father?”
“No. I asked her, but she refused to tell me.”
Coop said, “How did she act at her birthday party?”
“It marked the one and only time Kirsten went out of her way to charm her stepfather. Because he gave her the Porsche first thing, I imagine. I listened to her laugh, watched her excitement when she saw the Porsche with a big red bow sitting squarely on the hood. George beamed at her, and she played up to him, still charming as could be, whooping and laughing with pleasure, flirting with him, truth be told. But before she drove off, she made sure to look at me, and there was such cold hatred in her eyes I wanted to cry. I knew I hadn’t been forgiven for keeping the truth about her father from her, and I never would be.” She turned away from them and walked to a window that gave onto the warm night and tourists and locals still thick on the street. When she turned back, her face was perfectly blank. “About six months ago someone broke into my studio at home and destroyed every painting I had there. It was Kirsten, of course. I—I never told George, merely locked the room until I could clean it out.”
“
Delion, Lucy, and Coop turned to the woman standing in the office doorway, the image of Mrs. Lansford, who was still leaning against the desk, only this woman was wearing a long bright yellow gown with diamonds at her neck, her thick black hair swept up in a French twist.
“Who are you, ma’am?” Delion asked, stepping toward her.
“Why, I’m Elizabeth Lansford, of course. This is my sister, Sentra Bolger. For heaven’s sake, Sentra, have you been pretending to be me again?”
CHAPTER 17
Coop said, “I know, it’s nearly one a.m. I was prowling around, saw the light under your door. You can’t sleep either?”
Coop stood in Lucy’s hotel-room doorway wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, and boots. For an instant she didn’t recognize him, since she was so used to seeing him in a suit, or a white shirt, the sleeves usually rolled up. Well, she wasn’t in a suit, either, so who cared? She cleared her throat. “Good look—like a cat burglar,” she said, and stepped back. “I did try to get some sleep, but it wasn’t happening. I’ve been staring out toward the bay. You want a beer? We can play a game of Who’s the Real Mother?”
Coop walked into a room the mirror image of his. “Sounds good.” He sprawled on the sofa, accepted the beer, and clicked his can to hers.
“Hey, I like your sleep shirt. Red’s a good color on you.”
“Ah, but that’s not the best part.” Lucy turned around. GIVE ME A REASON was written across the back, and beneath there was a squirrel on his hind legs, aiming a rifle outward.
He laughed, settled back. “I don’t think Delion has ever been shut down so fast as we were by Mrs. Lansford. She practically shoved us out the door,” he said, and sat forward again, staring down at the nondescript beige carpet beneath his booted feet. “So, let’s play your game. Who do you think is Kirsten’s mother, Sentra or her twin sister, Elizabeth?”
“My gut veers toward one, then the other. I thought Vincent was going to shoot both of them there for a while, what with that smug smile on Sentra’s face, and Mrs. Lansford—that lady was extraordinarily pissed off. At us? Or at her sister?”
Coop said, “All of us. I Googled Sentra Bolger, found no mention at all of a twin sister, only that Sentra’s an interior decorator, works out of her home on Russian Hill. There was a lot of stuff about her husband, Clifford Childs, and his family. You’d think there’d be more, but there wasn’t.
“Elizabeth Mary Lansford has hundreds of links, of info about her husband and her artwork, her gallery, and her charities—but not a word about a twin sister. I did find a mention of Kirsten, but only as a daughter.”
Lucy laughed as she set down her beer can. “I did the same thing. I bet Vincent is so hyped he’s still up working on this.”
Coop said, “He’s a little like Savich, happiest when he’s got a trail to follow. A big trail is that new Porsche Mr. Lansford gave her for her birthday, and, of course, the usual financial records and cell phone accounts. If she hasn’t ditched them all, they could lead us to her.”
Lucy said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirsten finds out we were here in San Francisco, that we know now who she is. If she does, she could disappear again.” She frowned for a moment, then walked to the window and stared out again at the small chunk of San Francisco Bay she could see between two buildings opposite her room. She looked down onto Bay Street, two floors below. There were few streetlights, and no people about. The entire wharf area seemed quiet as a tomb.
“I wonder who named this hotel Edelweiss?”
He grinned at her back. “Hey, Shirley gave it an eight on our short FBI-approved list of hotels, so what’s in a name?” It was late, and Coop was tired; he lost focus for a moment and found himself looking at her bare legs—
