12th of Never

Chapter 85

YUKI SAT IN the passenger seat beside Brady, who was driving the squad car, responding to radio calls, and taking quick glances in the rearview mirror at the cop cars behind him, bumping up the narrow dirt road that ran out from the town toward the far-flung farmlands beyond it.

They were just outside Bolinas, a town of 1,600 people about thirty miles north on the coast, known for its remote location and reclusive townspeople, who habitually removed highway signs to keep strangers out.

Thickets of trees lined the road, and behind the trees were private properties, separated from each other by fences and high hedges. Brady nodded his head toward a driveway coming up on the left, marked by a couple of garbage cans and a dinged-up mailbox.

He said to Yuki, “That’s it.” Then he took the mike and told the cars behind him to slow and prepare to turn.

Yuki leaned forward and gripped the armrest. She had never been as humiliated as when her case against Keith Herman had blown up in her face. Far worse, the charges against him had been dropped, and now Keith Herman, presumed innocent, was as free as thought.

Yuki didn’t know what Keith Herman had to do with hiding his daughter, but she had an idea. Maybe Lily had witnessed or heard something that would prove her father had killed his wife. With luck, the Kohls would fill in the blanks.

Brady turned up the overgrown driveway and drove uphill to a clearing, where an old wood-shingled house clung to the side of the hill.

He said to Yuki, “Stay here.”

She said, “Oh, yeah, right.”

“I mean it, Yuki. I don’t know what we’re going to find.”

She got out of the car.

“Watch me. Stay with me,” Brady said.

Yuki said, “Okay,” and trudged behind Brady and four cops up the weedy lawn and broken walkway to the front door.

Brady knocked and announced, repeated both actions, and then footfalls could be heard coming toward them. The door creaked open and a good-looking man of fifty said, “What do you want?”

“Alan Kohl, we have a warrant to search your premises. Is anyone else at home?” Brady asked.

“My wife, Marcia. She’s in the kitchen. What’s this about?”

“It’s about Lily Herman,” Brady said.

“Lily who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

Yuki handed the warrant to Kohl. Then she and the cops entered the house.

“Don’t touch anything. Don’t mess the place up,” Alan Kohl said. “You need something, just ask me.”

The old two-bedroom house smelled of mold and was almost pathologically neat. Boxes and cartons were stacked against the walls, counters were clean, and closets were filled with folded linens and properly hung clothing. Yuki stayed with Brady until he went upstairs, but then, following a hunch, she went down a flight of wooden steps to a half basement that ran under the back of the house.