off and apologized.
“I like music,” he said. “Including the Stones.”
Right, I thought, trying to imagine anyone over forty listening to the Rolling Stones. I left the radio off.
He asked me if I would be willing to stop by the coroner’s office to try to learn when they’d be scheduling the autopsies.
“You want me to take you there now?” I asked.
“No-what I meant was, would you go there alone? Before you head back to the paper? I’d go myself, but I think you’ll have a better chance of getting information out of Woolsey.”
“Because I’m a woman?”
“Because he dislikes me.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, then said, “Maybe it’s the Hannah articles. I’m told he thinks they make his office look bad.”
“Because he fails to come up with an identification once in a while?”
“More than once in a while. He’s especially bothered that I bring up the case of Hannah herself-sees me as the one who brings up an old failure year after year.”
“I love those articles. They’re important-and, I don’t know, something in the way you write them really makes the reader feel for the families.”
He seemed a little uncomfortable with the praise, but he said, “Thanks.”
I handed him the roll of film I had shot. “The first few are of the ceremony, and then there are some of the crew. I know the paper won’t publish the most graphic ones of the car, but I’d like to see prints anyway. They might help me…or someone else…with writing the story.”
“I’ll ask them to get to work on these first thing. With luck, they’ll be printed by the time you get back to the paper, or not long after.”
I began to wonder if he was sending me on an errand to the coroner’s office as a way of helping me save face, so that I wouldn’t have to sit in the newsroom while he wrote the story. I had never written about a murder case, old or new.
When we reached his car, he said, “About this story we’re working on now-what would you like me to do next?”
“What would I…? You’re kidding, right?”
“No. It’s still yours.”
I didn’t answer right away. I had a feeling my answer wouldn’t just determine what happened on this one story. I could have some really fine payback out of this, make him miserable, and test his sincerity about working together. Or I could let him know what I had meant to tell him all along, if we had managed to get off to a better start.
“I want to work together,” I said, “but not as equals.”
“As I said, you’re the boss.”
“No. I mean, work together, but you help me to do this right. I covered crime in Bakersfield, but never a murder-just small-time police blotter stuff. Auto thefts and burglaries. Things like that. Never a high-profile case. And I’ve only been on the job for two years, and you’ve been on it for…”
“I’ve worked for the Express for forty-two years.”
“Forty-two! You aren’t that old!”
He smiled. “I started at eight, as a paperboy.” He glanced down at the box, then gazed out at something beyond the windshield. I looked, but there was no view to speak of, just an empty side street and the cinder-block wall of a suburban housing tract, edging up to the fields that would soon become a shopping mall. I watched his face, saw him wince as if some ache troubled him. He turned toward me again and said, “I was a copyboy after that. I didn’t sell a story until I was fourteen.”
“Gee, so you’ve only been a reporter for a lousy thirty-six years…I’ve been one for two. So for the good of the story, I think we’d be better off if you called the shots.”
“Wrigley wouldn’t hear of it.”
“That’s right, he won’t.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Don’t be afraid to give this a try. I promise I’ll speak my mind if I think you’ve missed something or gone in a wrong direction.”
I glanced at my watch. “We haven’t got time to argue.”
“As a first decision, that’s a good one.”
Have it your way, I thought. “Tell me what’s in the box.”
“Notes and a few photos I took years ago. Nothing that will need to go into the story today, but I’ll go over them with you after we get this first one in.”
“All right. When you get to the paper, talk to Lydia Ames.”
“The food editor?” he asked, raising his brows.
“You know exactly who she is, because you’ve been pumping her for information about me. Wrigley’s wasting her talent in features, but never mind that now. She’s been looking up the history of the ownership of the mall property-the farm. Is the name Griffin Baer familiar to you?”
“No…I don’t think so.”
“Well, maybe she’ll find out that the owner in 1958 was someone else. You’re more likely than I am to recognize that name.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
“The back story on the disappearance of the Ducanes. Can you write about that?”
“Sure.”
He got out of the car, taking his box with him. He closed the door, then leaned his big frame down and spoke through the open window. “Maybe it would be better if I went to the coroner’s office, Irene. It’s not… pleasant.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the dead.”
“You should be. They sometimes cause more trouble than the living,” he said, and walked away.
29
I WAS LOCKING UP THE KARMANN GHIA IN THE CORONER’S OFFICE PARKING lot when my attention was drawn to a long black car. One of the tinted back windows was rolled down a few inches. At first glance, I thought it was a hearse, but hearses don’t pull up to the front parking lot of a coroner’s office, and in general, the occupant of the back half of a hearse doesn’t need fresh air. As I looked closer, I saw that it was a limo. One big enough to spit in the eye of the energy crisis, sitting there with its engine running.
A big, well-dressed man I guessed to be in his late thirties or early forties came out of the coroner’s office and headed for the limo. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his muscular build stretched the fabric of his suit. His eyes were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. He had dark hair except for a white streak near his forehead-not so prominent that he couldn’t have hidden it, but he had apparently parted his hair in such a way as to make sure that it showed.
The tinted window slid down, and a silver-haired man looked out, and they exchanged a few words I couldn’t hear. The tinted window rolled up, and the big man went around to the other side of the car and stepped in. As it drove off, I caught a glimpse of its blue and gold vanity plates: YEAGER.
It dawned on me that the old man must be Kyle’s adoptive father: Mitch Yeager.
I walked into the coroner’s office with a dozen new questions in mind.
The dragon at the front desk did not believe that the Express would hire a woman reporter, even after I produced my press credentials. If Lefebvre hadn’t walked into the building around that time, she might have sold me to a circus before I had a chance to talk to the coroner.
He took in the situation at once and said, “It’s all right. Ms. Kelly can come back with me.”
Something in his voice or demeanor subdued her. Still, she made him wait until she had pinned a visitor’s
