“Engaged!”
Frank’s frown became a grin. I was grinning, too.
“Yes, well, you weren’t available any longer, so I had to pick someone else.”
“Oh, right. As if you aren’t the most sought-after bachelor I know.”
He laughed. “You’ll like her, Irene. She’s as good for me as Frank is for you.”
“Then she must be perfect for you. And in that case, I’m sure I will like her. Does this perfect woman have a name?”
“Gisella. Gisella Ross.” The way he said her name told me all I needed to know. Max Ducane, who had withstood more matchmaking attempts, more women chasing after him, more flat-out onslaughts on his single status than any man I know, had fallen for someone.
“Is she here with you in Las Piernas?”
“Not right now. She’s going to join me here in a few days. Actually…I was wondering, do you think I could get together with you and Frank sometime before Friday?”
“You want Frank to do a background check on her?”
He laughed. “No. I’ve met her family. Very upper-crust New Englanders.”
“I’ll read up on my Emily Post before we meet. I don’t want to embarrass you.”
“You couldn’t do that. Besides, she’s not as stuffy as her parents are.”
“Hang on,” I said. I talked it over with Frank, then said, “Are you free tomorrow night? Why don’t you come over?”
He agreed to it, and we arranged for him to come by at about seven. I hung up and looked over at Frank. “Wonder what’s on his mind?”
“I don’t know,” he said, gently pulling me closer and nuzzling my ear. “How about if I tell you what’s on mine?”
I have always liked the way Frank’s mind works.
54
A T WORK THE NEXT MORNING, I FORGOT TO USE MY NEW PASSWORD, AND was immediately locked out of my computer. Computer services was tied up on another problem and couldn’t help me right at the moment.
“I thought I was supposed to get three tries before it locked me out.”
“You do,” the technician said. “I’ll check on that when I get a minute.”
I was going to try persuading him to take that minute right now, but one of my outside lines was ringing, so I hung up. It was Frank, calling from LAX.
“Hi, sorry I didn’t call you earlier, but everything has been rushed this morning. I’m flying up to Sacramento.”
“Today? I mean, of course you’re going today, but-”
“I need to talk to Harmon. Just a preliminary interview.”
“Oh.”
“Look, I haven’t forgotten about our dinner plans-I might be able to make it back, since it’s only an hour’s flight, but I might not. So-you and Max go on ahead without me if you haven’t heard from me by six, okay?”
“I can call Max, try to reschedule…”
“No, don’t do that. He’s excited about the engagement, and you’re the one he really wants to talk to, anyway.”
“Frank-”
“You’ll make me feel bad if you cancel. I’ll call you when I leave Folsom to let you know what’s going on.”
Over the next twenty minutes, I reached for the phone several times, thinking I should call Max and reschedule anyway, but ultimately I decided I’d take Frank at his word.
I began reading though a packet of materials that was part of the agenda for the city council meeting next week, circling points I needed to ask questions about, and making notes.
“Computer not working?” Mark Baker asked, seeing that I was doing all of this in longhand.
“No, it’s not.” I told him my password problem. “Someone is supposed to fix it with an override code or something, but there’s some bigger problem with the software that runs the presses, so you know how high I am on the priority list.”
“Just remember that it will never, ever be as bad as it was when we had those first computers.”
“No kidding.” We spent a few minutes recalling hardware and software disasters of the 1980s-whole pages that would have to be reentered, bizarre line justification that produced odd gaps in type, stories lost somewhere in the ether, and worse.
“And all the headaches for the designers-what a mess. I went to bed every night wondering if the paper would get out the next day.”
“Same here,” Mark said. “Say-if you have a few minutes, why don’t you walk with me down to the morgue?”
This is one of the things I like about Mark. He’s one of about a dozen people at the paper who still call the paper’s archives “the morgue,” rather than “the library.”
“You talked to Frank before he left?” I asked as we made our way downstairs.
“Yes. His lieutenant released the story to other media, too, of course, but we’ve got the inside track, anyway-we covered these murders. I’m going to see if I can find the stories the Express ran on the cases. Interesting stuff-the cases go back to 1941 and 1943. The bodies weren’t found until 1950.”
I stopped walking.
He looked at me and said, “You know.”
“O’Connor’s sister. But she disappeared near the end of the war-1945, I think.”
Mark shook his head. “That’s the weird thing. Frank said Harmon didn’t mention her. He said two victims here, and their names are…” He looked at his notes. “Anna Mezire and Lois Arlington. Anna disappeared on April 30,1943. Lois on April 18, 1941.”
“Wait-he’s saying that God inspired him to admit to two murders but not a third? That doesn’t make sense.”
“None whatsoever. But it makes me wonder. If he had something to gain in this lifetime, I’d say he hasn’t told us everything. But no one asked or coerced him to talk about these two-he doesn’t get any better treatment or time off at this point. The only break it’s going to give him is on the other side-when he meets his Maker. So why not make a completely clean breast of it?”
“You’re looking up what we had on it then?”
“Yes. And any background I can find on Harmon.”
“I’ve got some of O’Connor’s old papers. I’ll look through them and see if I can find his notes about his sister’s disappearance. Knowing him, he must have had his own investigation going.”
“Thanks. Listen-I appreciate your help with the story, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh?”
“This computer business makes me wonder about something. This morning, I got here early and caught Ethan snooping around your desk. He claimed he was just looking for a pair of scissors. I told him off, but I wanted you to know about it.”
“Was he trying to log on to my computer?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t actually see that, but…”
“But I think I just figured out why I couldn’t log on this morning. If you log on with the wrong password three times, it shuts the computer down until a system administrator can log you back on, right?”
“Right.”
“Last night, I changed my password. This morning, out of habit, I entered the old password-but I only did that once before I was locked out of the system.”
“So someone else had tried it twice and failed?”
