To The Bone

Chapter 16

Monks drove to North Beach, following Stover Larrabee's directions to a meeting place. Today, that place was a beat-up blue van with on the spot plumbing lettered on the side, parked on Stockton, a couple of blocks north of Columbus. Several lengths of copper and PVC pipes were strapped to the rack on the van's top. The back was filled with scarred toolboxes and bins of fittings. A couple of pairs of greasy Carhartt overalls hung from hooks.

That was all cover. The van was also outfitted with camcorders, telephoto equipment, a parabolic microphone, bugs and sweepers, and a full set of lock picks.

Larrabee was hunched forward with his forearms over the steering wheel when Monks got in. He had a pair of Leica binoculars in his lap. A small TV set with the sound off was playing the Today show. A couple of crossword puzzle books and paperbacks lay on the floor, along with a thermos of coffee and a trucker's jug to urinate into. The van was positioned to give a good view downhill.

'Tucking surveillance," Larrabee said. "Every time I take one on, I swear, never again."

It was only midmorning, but the streets were already happening, with crowds cruising the cafes and souvenir stores. With the warm weather, there was much flesh on display. Obvious tourists tended toward shorts and tank tops or T-shirts of the I'm with Stupid variety. Local skin was likely to be pierced or tattooed, and topped by hair of colors not found in nature. It occurred to Monks that this was an alternative plastic surgery, for those on tight budgets or who wanted to make a more radical statement.

"What's the venue?" Monks said.

"This guy comes to me. Ernesto, he's Panamanian, a little hotheaded. He's got some bucks, and a good-looking wife. But he goes to a business convention, and meets another babe he decides is the love of his life. Comes back home and tells his wife he's leaving her. This all happens within a week, now.

"So needless to say, his wife, she's Latina, too, she goes ballistic, and she goes out and picks up a musician, a guy who lives down there" – Larrabee pointed at a row of apartment buildings downhill – "and fucks him. He's ten years younger than her, but it seems to actually take – it's been going on a couple months now.

"Meantime, the husband starts to realize that maybe the new babe isn't it after all. He decides he wants his wife back, but she tells him to piss up a rope. On top of that, he figures he's going to lose his ass in the divorce. So he hires me to follow her and photograph her with her guy. That way, he can claim she's the one who broke up the marriage."

"He can?"

"If he can get divorced in Panama, which is what he's planning, maybe," Larrabee said. "I don't particularly care. He's paying me a thousand bucks a day plus expenses. But sometimes, I get involved in this kind of idiot shit, I think of a lot of other ways I could have made a living." Larrabee shook his head, face wry. "So? What's going on with you?"

Monks brought him up to date. When he finished, Larrabee turned off the TV. He put the binoculars to his eyes and focused on the building where Ernesto hoped to catch his wife and her paramour in flagrante delicto.

"Has it crossed your mind that this might not have been an accident?" Larrabee asked.

Monks blinked. "You mean murder? No. Not really."

"I'm just putting together what you've told me," Larrabee said, still scanning through the glasses. "She was a healthy young woman; she shouldn't have died. The DIC thing is very mysterious. Dr. Kasmarek thinks it could have been caused by a toxic substance, but it would have to be an unusual one – like, somebody deliberately chose it so it wouldn't be identified. She was alone the last several hours, and dopey, so it would have been easy to slip it to her."

He lowered the binoculars again and slouched back in his seat.

"And it sounds like those women at the clinic know more than they're telling," he said.

"It's still a long way from there to murder."

"This girl was not exactly Suzy Creamcheese," Larrabee said. "Not criminal, but money trouble. I ran quickie background checks on her and Dreyer. Bad credit reports, and they ran out on their rent in a couple of places down in LA. I keep wondering where she was getting all that money. Paying cash for the city's most expensive plastic surgeon."

"You think she could have been blackmailing somebody?"

"All I think so far is that there's several things that are off," Larrabee said. "What do you say we go take a look around her apartment?"

"A look for what?"

"Just a look. I doubt we'll find anything. It's a place to start, is all."

"Her fiancé said there were no chemicals – nothing like that."

"You can't take that guy's word for anything. Remember, he was the last one with her."

"It doesn't make sense that he'd have wanted to hurt her," Monks said. "He talked about her like she was his bank account. He was outraged that he'd been ripped off."

"You never know. Could be he's smarter than you're giving him credit for, and that's what he wants everybody to think. Maybe she was cheating on him, or costing him money some way he couldn't get out from under."

"You're not figuring on breaking in, are you?" Monks said warily. He had helped Larrabee do so in the past, and it had scared the shit out of him.

Larrabee grinned. "Relax. Her boyfriend said the building had a super, right? For a doctor and a private investigator – I'm betting he'd open it up."

"What about the lady you're supposed to be surveilling?"

"I've already got several photos of her and this guy together on the street. I was hoping maybe they'd get frisky this morning and leave the shade up, but there's nothing happening in there." Larrabee shrugged. "Ernesto wants more, that's another thousand bucks."

They drove to Eden Hale's apartment, on Twenty-fifth Avenue, near Irving Street.

The building was not luxurious, but it was nice – several stories of whitish concrete, post-war, with a glass-doored lobby and small but – well kept grounds. Most of the apartments had a view, with the north-facing ones overlooking Golden Gate Park.

"What do you figure these go for?" Larrabee said. "Couple grand a month, minimum?"

Monks nodded. Minimum.

They rang the outside bell for the superintendent. He appeared after a minute, an earnest-looking Hispanic man who could have been forty or sixty. Monks and Larrabee showed him their respective licenses, while Larrabee explained that they would like to look around Ms. Hale's apartment for just a few minutes. A twenty-dollar bill was artfully presented, and accepted, in the process.

The super took them up to the third floor and down a quiet hallway. "Her mother and father came here yesterday," he said, taking out keys. "They took some things, her personal stuff, you know. They gonna send a mover for the furniture." His serious brown eyes looked from one to the other of them. "There some kind of trouble here?"

"No," Larrabee said. "Just some questions we're trying to clear up. Wait, if you want. We won't take long."

The apartment was a one-bedroom, beige – carpeted, with a couch, coffee table, dining set, and a few other pieces of furniture. There was a home entertainment center, with TV, VCR, and stereo, and two cordless phones, one in the front room and one by the bed. It was all good quality, and new. But it was oddly impersonal, giving the feel of a waiting room rather than a place where someone actually lived.

If there had been any photographs or other personal touches, they had been removed. The queen-sized bed had been stripped and the bathroom and medicine cabinet cleared. Monks kept an eye out for bloodstains, in case the paramedics had underreported her blood loss, and the salmonella had been more advanced than it had seemed. But there was nothing he could see on the carpet, and the couple of faint small stains on the mattress had the look of dried menstrual bleeding.

There was nothing under the sink but dish soap, a couple of sponges, and a spray bottle of 409. The refrigerator was empty, and the plastic trash can contained only a few crumpled, makeup-smeared tissues. Monks suspected that these had come from Eden's distraught mother. Whatever Eden might have eaten to give her the salmonella was gone.

Only two things remained that gave a sense of Eden herself. One was her reading material – dozens of issues of Cosmopolitan, other women's magazines, and fashion catalogs, stacked on tables or just lying around. The other was her clothes. One closet was stuffed, bristling with outfits that looked wild, sexy – on the cutting edge of fashion, he supposed, for the circle she had moved in. At least twenty pairs of shoes spilled out of a basket and littered the floor, with spike heels and boots predominant. Her lingerie drawer was another echo, packed with bras and panties that tended toward the colorfully skimpy.

But the other closet was a surprise. It had only a dozen outfits, dresses and blouse-skirt combinations, neatly hung. These were much more conservative, the sort of things professional women picked out carefully at exclusive shops. They looked mostly unworn, with the tags still on.

Larrabee looked at this closet longer than he had the other one. Then he turned back to the super, who was waiting politely in the doorway.

"Has anybody else been here?" Larrabee asked. "Besides her parents?"

The super shook his head. "Just the ambulance guys."

"How about her boyfriend? He said he talked to you that morning."

"Yeah, but I just told him what happened and he went straight to the hospital."

"You're sure he hasn't been back since?" Larrabee said.

"He don't have keys."

Larrabee stared. "No kidding? The guy she was going to marry?"

"She didn't want him coming around all the time. She told me. I think they fought about it, you know?"

"I guess they would," Larrabee said. "How long did she live here?"

The super thought about it. "Maybe four months."

"Any other regular visitors?"

"It didn't seem like it. I'm not here all the time, you know. But I don't think she had, like, girlfriends or anything."

"Do you know where she worked?"

"She told me she's a model. But it seemed like mostly when she went out, she went shopping. Or at night."

"With her boyfriend?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes alone."

"No other men friends?"

"Nobody I saw."

Larrabee nodded, apparently satisfied with what he had gotten. "Okay. We may be back." Another twenty-dollar bill appeared and disappeared. "Thanks again."

"Nada," the super said.

Outside in the van, Larrabee started the engine. "Looks to me like she was trying to change her life," he said. "Going from a bad girl to a good one. A new, upscale wardrobe. And no key for the old boyfriend."

Dreyer had used the term fiancé, but that could mean a lot of things, and it was looking like it had meant something different to him than to her. Or he might just have been lying. It seemed clear that she had been distancing herself from him.

"I got that, too," Monks said. "But not much else."

"Yeah, but there's something that wasn't there. An answering machine."

"Her parents could have taken it," Monks said. But he remembered that the phones themselves were still there. It seemed odd that they would take just the machine.

"Maybe," Larrabee said. "Or she had one of those voice-mail services. But if she did have a machine, especially if it was digital, which just about all of them are these days, the messages are likely to be recoverable, even if they've been erased."

"What are you saying?"

"Just my evil mind at work. Wondering if somebody else snagged it – afraid their voice might get identified."

"Dreyer?"

"Maybe there was something on there he got worried about. Like they'd argued, and he threatened her. He could have taken it that night, while she was knocked out. Or made copies of her keys, and come back when the super wasn't around. You got his address?"

Monks checked in his shirt pocket and pulled out the slip of paper he had copied from the Emergency Room.

"Haver Street. Looks like a few blocks west of Van Ness."

Larrabee leaned out the window to check the side mirror, then pulled into traffic.

"I can't wait to meet him," Larrabee said.