two thousand dollars and help me find my son. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does to me.”
“What can you do? You’re not a detective-” She broke off, blinked, and said, “Or are you?”
“In a way. I work for a big pharmaceutical company in L.A.-assistant to the head of security. That gives me resources. It’s how I found out that no theft charges had been filed.”
“Checking up on me.”
“Does that bother you?”
“No. But… finding people? Do you know how to do that? The police, the FBI couldn’t find Kevin. Neither could the detective I hired.”
“Maybe none of them tried hard enough. Or looked in the right places.” She kept on staring at him. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I’m not used to dealing with somebody like you. Most of the people I’ve known in my life are takers, not givers.”
“Like your ex-husband.”
“Yes. Exactly. Court… you don’t know him. He meant what he said about killing me. He’d kill you too, if you got in his way.”
“I’m not afraid of men like Court Spicer. He may be off the rails, but he’s also a coward. Sending Banning after you proves that.”
“But you’d still be risking your life for a stranger, two strangers. Saint Rick? I don’t believe that.”
“My soon-to-be ex-wife said I used to be a fighter, somebody who welcomed challenges, but that I’m not that way anymore. I think she was wrong.”
“Meaning you want to prove her wrong.”
“It’s not like that.”
“How is it, then?”
“The split wasn’t ugly like yours. I don’t have anything to prove to her.”
“To yourself, then?”
He shrugged. “There are other reasons. Some you’d understand, some you might not.”
“That’s an evasive answer.”
“All right. I’ll tell you the main one.” Fallon opened his wallet, removed the snapshot of Timmy from its glassine pocket, handed it to her. “My son. Timothy James Fallon.”
She said, staring at it, “He… looks like Kevin.”
“He would’ve been the same age.”
“Would’ve been?”
“He died,” Fallon said. “Three years ago.”
He thought he saw the shape of her expression change. She sat motionless, looking at the photo. “How?”
“An accident. A stupid accident. He climbed a tree with some other kids on a dare, lost his balance, hit the ground on the back of his head. Inoperable brain damage. He was in a coma for three weeks before he died.”
“God.”
“I was at work when it happened,” he said. “There wasn’t anything I could do to save him. Maybe there’s something I can do to save your son. Do you want me to try?”
She sat holding the snapshot of Timmy, alternating her gaze between it and Fallon. Making a decision.
“Yes,” she said at length. “I want you to try.”
SIX
WHILE CASEY ATE HER room-service meal, he quizzed her about her ex-husband, her son, and the man who called himself Banning.
Court Spicer first. Fallon asked for his description, since she had no photograph to give him. Average height. Lean and wiry, about 160 pounds. Black curly hair that he wore long, so long the last time she’d seen him that he’d had it in a ponytail. Clean-shaven then. Blue-gray eyes, very intense. Long-fingered hands. Mole on his left cheek, near his mouth. “I used to think he was good-looking. Now,” she said bitterly, “I think I must have been out of my mind.”
Nothing much there, except maybe for the mole. Mr. Average. And weight can be gained, hair cut and dyed, beards or mustaches grown, a man’s appearance changed in a dozen other ways.
“Tell me about your relationship with him,” Fallon said. “Start with how you met.”
Talking about Spicer was difficult for her. She spoke haltingly, her gaze slanted off much of the time in a fixed stare. She’d gone with a friend to a small club in San Diego’s Old Town district, she said, where Spicer had been playing piano. He’d noticed her, kept looking at her and smiling, and on his break he’d gone to their table for introductions, bought a round of drinks. She was flattered by the attention, but not attracted to him enough to say yes when he asked her for a date.
Two days later he’d surprised her with a phone call. She hadn’t given him her home number; he’d gotten it some other way. The persistent type. She was lonely enough to agree then to have drinks with him.
That casual date led to others. He didn’t try to talk her into sleeping with him. Kept it low-key. He could be charming, she said. Amusing, fun to be with. He took her to good restaurants, shows, jazz clubs, and improv sessions where he sat in from time to time-a whole new world for her.
She’d been seeing him off and on for three months when he proposed. She said no, but she kept on dating him, and he kept on asking her, and one night, after too much to drink, she let him take her to bed. The next morning he asked her again and she said yes. They were married in City Hall two weeks later.
“It wasn’t a bad marriage at first,” she said. “He could be moody sometimes, but mostly he was sweet to me. But that all changed when I made a mistake with my birth-control pills and got pregnant.”
“How’d he take the news?”
“He just… blew up. He didn’t want kids, not right away. He was so furious, I thought he was going to hit me. That was the first time I saw the other side of him… the first time I was afraid of him.”
Spicer wanted her to have an abortion. She refused. They fought about it and when she wouldn’t give in, the marriage turned rocky. He joined a trio that played road gigs, keeping him away from home for several weeks at a time. When he came back to San Diego, he spent little time at home with her. He was gone somewhere the night her water broke. She had to call for an EMS ambulance to take her to the hospital.
She’d come close to divorcing him at that point. But when he finally showed up at the hospital he’d been apologetic and full of promises; fawned over his new son. So she’d stayed with him, more for Kevin’s sake than her own.
For six years Spicer more or less lived up to his role as husband, father, and family provider. He worked steadily, mostly in the San Diego area, though the money he made combined with her modest income was barely enough to pay the bills. When Kevin was six months old, Casey had found a woman to take care of him during the day for a reasonable fee and gone back to work for Vernon Young Realty, the sales rep job she’d had when she met Spicer. It was the only way, she said, that they could make ends meet.
What finally sent the marriage skidding downhill was Spicer’s professional failures and frustrations. Better gigs eluded him; every tryout with a topflight band failed. And no one in the profession liked the elaborate piano compositions and band arrangements he wrote. He grew more and more moody and depressed. Lost his temper at the slightest provocation, threw screaming fits. Accused Casey of having affairs with neighbors, coworkers, strangers. Began drinking heavily, staying away from home for days at a time without explanation. Lost or quit one job after another.
Then, three years ago, things had gotten better for a time. Spicer’s whole attitude changed after his return from a road trip, became upbeat, cheerful. Their financial troubles were over, he told her, and proved it by paying off some of their debts and buying her and the boy presents. He claimed to have found a new, well-paying gig at the Beach Club in La Jolla, to have sold one of his jazz compositions to a large recording company. But he wouldn’t let her go with him to La Jolla to hear him play, and he was evasive when she asked who’d bought the composition.
She grew suspicious enough to drive to La Jolla alone one night. He wasn’t at the Beach Club; the management
