To The Bone

Chapter 30

Outside the windows of Larrabee's office, the sky was starting to lighten into dawn. Guido Franchi, Larrabee's detective friend from the SFPD, was sitting at the kitchen table across from Monks. Franchi was a big black-haired man with a drooping mustache, a heavily lined face, and skeptical eyes that were bleary from his being called out at five o'clock on a Saturday morning. They watched Monks steadily.

"So, let me make sure I got this right," Franchi said. "You left there naked, after having sex with this lady? Your clothes are still there?"

Monks had his hands pressed against his face, forefingers massaging his temples.

"I know how it sounds," he said.

"You admit you could have imagined the part about her trying to drown you? What with the drug, and all?"

"I don't think so. But it's possible."

Franchi leaned back in his chair, turning his mug of coffee in both hands, as if trying to warm it through friction.

'That doesn't give me much to work with," he said. "Right off, there's a jurisdiction problem. If she's still up in Marin, it's their case. If she came back to the city, I could pick her up for attempted murder. But how the fuck am I supposed to do that, when my only witness admits he was stoned out of his skull?"

Monks was still shaky, and he felt like there was grit floating around in his brain, but the drug seemed to be gone from his system now.

"I don't have any measure of how far gone I was," he said. "Either of you ever tried it? Ecstasy?"

Franchi shook his head. "Too New Age for me."

"Iris brought some home a couple times," Larrabee said. "It's great for in the sack, but it does twist your head around. What I'm wondering about, Carroll, how could she have known about the scarf? Or Martine?"

Monks had been wondering that, too. More and more, he was fearing that he had hallucinated the whole thing.

"Sorry," he said. "I feel like an asshole, believe me."

"I'm not worried about you feeling like an asshole," Franchi said. "I'm worried about me fucking around with a guy like D' Anton, and coming up empty." He stood and poured more coffee. "You got anything to eat?" he asked Larrabee. "Sweet roll, something like that?"

"Bagels."

"Terrific. My stomach starts acting up if I don't get something in it. Any advice, Doc?"

"Go easy on the coffee. Try Tagamet."

"Yeah, that's pretty much what my doctor said. But I keep forgetting." Franchi stepped to a window and stared out, scowling.

"If it's true, that Katie Bensen was killed, and Roberta Massey almost was," Franchi said, "was Ms. Bricknell the one who did that, too?"

Monks shook his head. "I can believe she slipped something in my drink," he said. "Tried to drown me. Maybe even poisoned Eden. But not that she cut the skin off a woman's face."

But he knew he could be wrong.

"What about that nurse she pointed out? Who's so jealous of D'Anton?" Larrabee asked.

"She'd have the skills," Monks said. "So would D'Anton, or other clinic people."

"All right, we'll run NCIC checks on all those employees," Franchi said, turning back to the room. "Eden's boyfriend, too. Somebody might have a sheet. Let's locate D'Anton, and let's pick up Gwen. You said she's got an apartment here?"

"That's what she told me," Monks said. "I don't know the address. She might have stayed in Marin, too."

"You call her there," Franchi said. "Don't say the cops are in this yet; that might spook her. If she's gone, try and find out where she is. If she's there, play it like she was right, you lost your head, you want to come talk to her, some bullshit like that."

"Tell her you want your clothes back," Larrabee said. Both detectives looked amused. Monks was not.

The directions Gwen had given him to the party, with the house's phone number, were still in the Bronco. He went down to get them, hobbling on his scratched and bruised feet.

When he came back, Larrabee had popped bagels out of a toaster oven and put them on a plate.

"There's cream cheese," he said. "Sorry, no lox."

"I'll make the call first," Monks said.

Larrabee turned the telephone's speaker on. The two detectives stood listening, chewing quietly, while Monks punched the number.

It rang several times before a woman's voice answered. She was very irritable, and she was not Gwen.

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" she snapped. "Who is this?"

"It's Dr. Monks. Mrs. D'Anton? Julia?"

"Yes?" Her tone made it clear that identifying himself had not gained him any points.

Franchi made a cutting motion across his throat with his forefinger. They did not want Julia D' Anton to know that she was on the suspect list, too.

Monks nodded. "I need to find Gwen," he said.

'Then I suggest you call someplace she is, instead of someplace she's not."

"Where's that?" Monks said quickly, worried that she would hang up.

"How should I know? You were her date."

"Her apartment in San Francisco?"

"I'd say that's likely," Julia said. "Although maybe with somebody else. Did you disappoint her?"

"How about your husband? Do you know where he is?"

"Probably in the city, too, at our house there. That's where he stays most of the time."

"I need both those addresses and phones. Cells, too."

"Dr. Monks, what exactly is your interest in us?" Julia said scathingly. "First, Gwen tells me you suspect that Eden was murdered. Next thing I know, you're socializing at our house, staggering around like a drunk teenager. Now you're tracking us. Are we under suspicion? Or are you just trying to screw my cousin?"

Monks looked for help to Franchi, and got none. The cop's big, weary face stayed impassive.

"I wasn't drunk, Julia," Monks said. "Somebody drugged me. This has taken a very serious turn."

Long seconds of silence passed. Monks felt himself being weighed. When she spoke again, her tone was still haughty, but a note of uncertainty had crept in.

"I'll have to get my address book. I don't remember the cell numbers."

She returned to the phone a few moments later. Monks wrote down the information and gave her Larrabee's office number.

"If anybody comes back there, don't say anything about this," he said. "Get someplace private and call me."

He clicked the phone off and looked at his judges, wondering if he had given too much away. But Franchi did not seem displeased.

"Okay," Franchi said. "Let's get after it."

Monks picked at a bagel and listened while Franchi dispatched unmarked cars to Gwen Bricknell's apartment building, a Nob Hill high-rise, and to D'Anton's Pacific Heights home. While they waited, Franchi called downtown to start National Crime Information Center checks on the suspects.

It only took a few minutes to find out that nobody answered the phones, or the doors, at either Gwen's apartment or D'Anton's house. Both their vehicles were gone.

"You could try the clinic," Monks said. "Sometimes she goes there on weekends to catch up on work."

'The morning after she tried to off you?" Franchi said sourly.

Monks winced.

"Well, what the hell," Franchi said. "Can't hurt to look."

He called the cars in the field again. The three men waited.

This time, when Franchi's phone rang back, he started to look animated.

"Get some backup, make sure nobody gets out of there," he said into the phone. "Then see if she'll come to the door. If she does, hold her till I get there. Again, that name's Gwen Bricknell. Very good-looking babe, dark hair, about forty." He glanced at Monks, eyebrows raised, for corroboration. Monks nodded.

"And keep this off the radio," Franchi ordered. "I don't want every fucking unit in the Taraval coming in spikes high."

"Her car's there," he told Monks and Larrabee. "Let's hope she lets them in. We can't just go kicking the door down."

More minutes passed, with Franchi talking tersely to the officers on the scene. Monks could not understand all of the clipped, coded copspeak, but it did not sound promising.

Finally, Franchi confirmed that. "Nobody answers the phone inside. They've banged on the doors and windows. Nothing. I'll have to go downtown, try to get a warrant to break in. This is really hanging my ass out." He was looking bleary again, but now pissed off, too. Monks was aware that police tended not to like it when technicalities got in the way, especially in the way of taking down someone genuinely dangerous.

"You want to ride along?" Franchi asked Larrabee. "Catch up on what you've been missing all these years?" Larrabee nodded. To Monks, Franchi said, "I think you ought to stay here, Doctor. If she is in there, it might not be a good idea for her to see you. You could probably use some sleep. Just keep that phone close by, in case the doctor's wife calls."

Monks was a little hurt, like a child who had been ditched by older boys going off on an adventure too rough for him.

He finished the bagel he had been working on, then went into Larrabee's living room and stretched out on the couch. Sleep was out of the question. But it started to come home to him that he was in a warm, safe place.

That was something he had not appreciated nearly enough in his life.