father had served his time and been released from prison for his mother’s murder months before Dan graduated from the eighth grade.
Growing up, he often thought about going back to California to confront his father. By the time he was in high school, he had been convinced that, in a physical matchup, his karate training would give him an edge. During his class’s senior trip to Disneyland, Dan went so far as to find Adam Pardee’s name, address, and phone number in the phone book. He had made tentative arrangements to ditch the group the next day and go do just that, but one of the other kids, Frank Warren, had squealed on him, and it didn’t happen. Not then.
But by the time Dan returned home from Iraq, he was ready to see his father. He still had his karate training, but his years in the army had toughened him both mentally and physically far beyond what he’d been as a high school senior.
Because his deployment ended at almost the same time as his second enlistment, he told his grandfather that he’d be staying on in California for a few days with some buddies from L.A. Not that there were any buddies in L.A. He left the airport in a rented red Taurus and drove to the same address he had found ten years earlier, which turned out to be a down-at-the-heels bungalow in a not-so-nice neighborhood in South Pasadena.
It was apparent that in recent years both the neighborhood and the house had fallen on tough times. Knocked-over garbage cans and graffiti-covered fences and walls said that this area was fast becoming a no-man’s- land. Squaring his shoulders, Dan stepped out of the car and walked up the cracked and crumbling sidewalk. The wooden steps creaked under his weight.
If the house is that bad, Dan surmised, then things aren’t going that well for Adam, either.
Dan paused for a moment before he rang the bell, reciting the words he had prepared to say in greeting: “Hello, Adam. I’m Dan, your son. And here’s a little something for killing my mother.” After which he intended to plant his fist in the older man’s face.
Except the person who answered the door wasn’t Adam Pardee. A sallow-faced woman cracked open the door and peered out at him. Her lower lip was split. Her right eye was swollen shut. She was holding an ice pack to a bruise on her battered cheek. Clearly Adam was up to his old tricks.
“Yes?” she said. “Who are you? What do you want?”
The sight of her face hit Dan like a blow. If his mother had lived, this might have been her future and his. Yes, Rebecca had asked her parents for help, but would she have been strong enough to walk away? A lot of domestic- violence victims never did. In fact, maybe that was what had provoked that final confrontation-maybe she had told Adam that she was taking Dan and leaving.
But this woman, this sad-faced woman who was standing in the doorway of Adam’s house, wasn’t responsible for what had happened years in the past. Even if Dan called his father out and beat him to a bloody pulp, Dan knew what would happen eventually. Adam Pardee was a coward and a bully. Once he was able to do so, he would go back to beating the current woman in his life-his wife, girlfriend, whatever. All Dan could do for her was to refuse to be a party to it. In all likelihood she’d be beaten again-that was a given-but it wouldn’t be Dan Pardee’s fault.
“I was looking for an old buddy of mine,” he mumbled quickly, making up the story as he went along. “His name’s John-John Grady.”
“You’re mistaken,” she said. “There’s no one here by that name.”
“Who is it?” an irate male voice shouted from somewhere inside the house. “What do they want?”
Dan recognized the voice and the tone. Both had haunted his dreams for years. “Sorry,” he said to the woman as he backed away from the door. “I must have written the address down wrong.”
She closed the door and latched it. Hearing the sound of his father’s angry voice shouting through another closed door and across the intervening years made Dan’s heart hurt, but he understood that what Adam Pardee did or didn’t do, now or ever, was no longer Dan’s problem. With Micah Duarte’s words about knowing when to walk away echoing in his head, Dan returned to his waiting Taurus. He drove back to LAX, where he caught the first available flight back to Phoenix.
His grandfather picked him up at Sky Harbor. “I thought you were staying in L.A. for a couple of days.”
“I was,” Dan said, “but I changed my mind.”
“And the dog?”
“Bozo’s still in quarantine. Once he clears that, they’ll fly him to Sky Harbor, too.”
“Okay then,” Micah Duarte said. “Let’s go home.”
San Diego, California
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 9:02 p.m.
59? Fahrenheit
“N ine-one-one Emergency. What are you reporting?”
The woman on the other end of the line sounded nervous and uncertain. Louise Maynard was accustomed to that. Ten years into doing the job, Louise was used to prying the necessary information out of whomever was calling.
“It’s my sister,” the woman said shakily.
“Name?” Louise asked.
“My name or my sister’s?” the woman asked.
“Both,” Louise told her.
“My name is Corrine Lapin,” she said. “My sister’s name is Esther, Esther Southard. She lives in Thousand Oaks.”
The caller couldn’t see it, but by then Louise was shaking her head in frustration. “Excuse me, ma’am, but you’ve called the emergency communications center in San Diego.”
“I know,” Corrine said. “That’s because I’m in San Diego. Yesterday was my birthday, and Esther didn’t call. She always calls on my birthday. I’m probably just being silly, but I’m worried that something is wrong.”
As far as Louise was concerned, calling because someone has missed your birthday wasn’t exactly like calling 911 to report that your fries at McDonald’s were served cold, but it was close.
“This line is for emergency calls only.”
“But it is an emergency,” Corrine insisted. “I was afraid if I tried calling the Thousand Oaks Police Department that they’d just blow me off.”
Louise understood that Corrine might well be right. After all, all 911 operators weren’t created equal.
“So what’s going on?” Louise asked.
“There’s no answer at Esther’s house,” Corrine said hurriedly. “And I’ve tried calling her cell, too. At first the calls kept going directly to her voice mail. Now it says that her mailbox is full, and she hasn’t called me back.”
“Maybe she’s just busy,” Louise suggested.
The caller immediately rejected that idea. “She sent me a text message on Monday saying that she and her husband were taking the kids and going away for a few days. She said they’d be driving up through Yosemite, but I’m worried something has happened to them. Maybe they’re lying in a ditch somewhere. Esther is like superglued to her iPhone. She doesn’t go anywhere without it.”
Louise had heard lots of wild things in her years as an emergency operator, and she had developed an instinct for what was bogus and what wasn’t. This sounded real.
“Give me your sister’s address,” she said now. “I’ll contact Thousand Oaks PD and have them look into it.”
“Thank you,” Corrine said. “I’m sure everything is fine. Esther will probably be mad at me for pushing panic buttons, but things have been so tough for them lately. Her husband, Jon, lost his job. She was afraid the bank was going to foreclose on their house.”
Nodding, Louise typed that information into her computer as well. The story was sounding more and more plausible by the moment.
“Why don’t you give me your contact information,” she said pleasantly to Corrine. “Just in case the responding officers need to get back in touch with you.”
When Corrine hung up a minute or so later, Louise could hear the relief in her voice, but Louise had a bad feeling about that. She suspected that Corrine Lapin’s relief wouldn’t last very long. Job losses and home foreclosures were up all over California. So were cases of murder and suicide.
With a click of her mouse, Louise passed Corrine’s information along to her 911 counterparts in Thousand Oaks. That done, she knew the situation was out of her hands. Unless a case made it into the local media, Louise never knew about what happened later, and that was just as well.
Not knowing all the gory details was what made it possible for her to do her job. Otherwise she would have
