Mind-Altering Murder

Chapter Thirty-two

This was her punishment, self-imposed and self-administered. Detective Juliet O’Hara had spent every night for the last weeks canvassing the homeless population of Santa Barbara’s main business street, trying to get even one of them to say he’d seen a pedestrian knocked down by a speeding car.

This was a nothing case, she knew. Walon O’Malley, the victim, hadn’t been anyone important, just an older retiree who had stepped out of his adult living community late one night to grab a pack of smokes. His wife had died years ago, they’d never had any children, and if he’d had any friends in or outside of the home where he lived, none had materialized. He was apparently an unhappy old grouch, passing his final days waiting for the Reaper to swing his scythe.

The department would never let her waste this much time on the case; there was no question of that. So she didn’t ask them and she didn’t use their time. She put in a full day at work, clocked out, and then hit the streets. No one had to know until she got results, and even then she wouldn’t put in for the overtime. This was her own personal mission. Her penance.

Even as she walked down State Street she knew she was wasting her time. She had talked to every homeless person on the street who was ever going to talk to her. At first she tried to tell herself the reason she kept going back was so that the street people would get used to her presence there and finally begin to trust her. She even started bringing them the occasional cup of coffee or box of cookies.

Now most of them knew her by sight, and she was greeted as a friend almost every night. Which isn’t all bad, she thought to herself as she set off for one more pointless patrol. Maybe one of them would see evidence in some other crime someday. At the very least she’d always have a place to go if she lost her job, her apartment, her savings, and her ability to function in society.

But as the hit-and-run receded further into the past, she knew it was increasingly unlikely she’d find anyone here who had seen it or who would remember if they had. A couple more nights, she thought, and I can give this up for good.

Of course she could have given up on it anytime in the past weeks. The case was technically still open, but no one in the department expected it to be solved, and realistically no one cared. There were bigger cases with more important victims. There were missing children and murdered wives and stolen life savings; there were people hurting whose pain could only be salved once the ones who had injured them were behind bars. There was no one pushing the chief to solve Walon O’Malley’s killing; there were no anguished calls to members of the city council, no angry letters in the Santa Barbara Times. Even the homeless coalition people had moved on to more pressing issues. There was simply no reason for her to keep pursuing it.

And so she hadn’t. Not when it might have mattered; not back when it was still fresh. It was almost certainly true that it wouldn’t have made any difference then, either, but that wasn’t the point.

She hadn’t been focused on Walon O’Malley’s case. She’d put in the hours, but her heart and mind were still with Mandy Jansen. She’d been convinced that the former cheerleader had been murdered and could not let that go. So she put in her obligatory hours on the hit-and-run, but she was always aware she was only going through the motions.

Not that her focus on Mandy Jansen had done any good for that case. It was still sitting open on her desk, but she had given up any hopes of finding more evidence unless Mandy herself clawed her way out of the grave and explained exactly what had happened to her. The only reason O’Hara had left the case open was that there was no more pressure on her to do anything else with it. Mandy’s mother had taken a serious turn for the worse in the last few weeks, and now she was in the hospital, slipping in and out of consciousness. O’Hara had been to visit Mrs. Jansen once, and the poor woman had thought she was Mandy and kept talking about how beautiful she looked in her cheerleader’s outfit, as if she were still in high school.

At least she’d been spared the Macklin Tanner case. That was the department’s big black eye and everyone who’d touched it walked away badly burned. The detectives originally assigned to the case, Bookins and Danner, had been sure Tanner was a walk-away, and closed the case early on despite Brenda Varda’s entreaties for them to keep looking. After the clue O’Hara and Shawn had found in the game led them to the abandoned barn and the chopped-up remains of Tanner’s car, the case had been reopened. Chief Vick had threatened to put O’Hara and Lassiter on it, but Mickey Bookins begged her to give him and his partner a chance to redeem themselves, and she consented.

Since then the detectives had come up with precisely nothing. They’d traced the ownership of the blacksmith workshop to some division of VirtuActive Software, as she and Shawn had done before, but the financial trails were so complicated and the holding companies so gnarled that even the forensic accountant the department hired from outside couldn’t say with any certainty who had been responsible for the purchase, or even who might have known about it.

Bookins and Danner had spent a week investigating Brenda Varda, who was not only Tanner’s colleague and ex-wife, but also his primary beneficiary. They had a theory that she killed him but did too good a job of hiding the body and then couldn’t collect her inheritance. That was why she’d been nagging the police to find him; if he was believed to be alive the company would never be hers.

O’Hara never believed that for a second. She’d met Brenda Varda and seen that she was honestly worried about her ex-husband. And just to prove she hadn’t lost all her instincts, she checked Varda’s financials and confirmed that even with Tanner alive she had enough money to buy most of Central California. Bookins and Danner should have been able to figure that out, too, but they were blinded by the hope that the woman who’d made their professional lives hell would turn out to be a bad guy.

Now the case was toxic. Bookins and Danner had been assigned to desk duty pending review and the FBI was investigating what everyone finally had to admit was a kidnapping. O’Hara had originally hoped that the department would bring Shawn in as a consultant on this one, since it was his clue that had provided the only break in the case. But Shawn had disappeared shortly after they’d found the remains of the Impala. He hadn’t shown up at the station, hinting around for the gig, and he hadn’t even responded to any of her voice mails.

As she got closer to the doorway she could see that her regular was there as usual. Frank was what he called himself, and over the weeks he’d let a few bits of information about his previous life slip out. None of it was unique or surprising: the standard story of youthful promise disappointed, middle-aged disappointment drowned in drink or drugs, drink or drugs destroying careers and relationships, and finally a home on the streets. But he still managed a twinkle in his eye and he seemed to enjoy the semblance of a life he’d made for himself on the streets. And, as Frank liked to say, if you had to be homeless Santa Barbara was where you wanted to be.

Frank sat up in his sleeping bag as she got close. “Got a nip for old Frank, Detective?” he said with a gap-toothed smile.

“If by nip you mean a doughnut, help yourself,” she said, holding out a box.

“Wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” Frank said, helping himself to a glazed old-fashioned, “but it’ll do. How’s the patrolling going?”

Since the first time they met Frank had thought of O’Hara as an officer walking her beat. The first time he’d made this mistake she pointed out that Santa Barbara didn’t have beat cops, and even if they did, she wasn’t wearing a blue uniform. But apparently in his mind she was, down to the nightstick on the Sam Browne she hadn’t worn since her earliest days as a rookie in Florida. Since he seemed to like the idea that the local force was out looking after people like him, she stopped arguing early on.

“Pretty quiet tonight,” she said truthfully. “So I’ve got some time to look into that hit-and-run that happened here a few weeks back.”

“Seem to recall somebody talking about that just yesterday,” Frank said, screwing up his eyes as he struggled to squeeze the memory out of his brain.

O’Hara offered him the doughnut box again, and this time he plucked out a glazed jelly. “Do you remember who it was? Or what they said?” She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice.

He thought this over as he bit into the doughnut. He didn’t seem to notice the jelly squirting out over his graying beard. “It was a woman,” he said finally. “Yeah, a pretty blonde.”

“Can you remember anything else about her?” O’Hara asked impatiently. This was the first lead she’d had in all the nights she’d spent down here.

“She was maybe around thirty,” he said. “Like I said, real pretty. I couldn’t figure out why such a nice girl would be asking so many questions about such a dismal subject.”

“What kind of questions?” O’Hara said. Who was this woman and what could she have been looking for? Was somebody else trying to find the driver-or to see if anyone had spotted her leaving the scene?

“She kept asking if I’d seen anything or if I’d talked to anyone else who might have seen something,” Frank said. “And then she gave me a cookie.”

O’Hara felt any trace of excitement vanish. “That was me, Frank,” she said.

He squinted up at her, unsure. “It was?”

“Oatmeal raisin, with a hint of cinnamon, right?” she said.

He broke into a broad smile at the memory. “Could have done without the walnut pieces, personally, but on the whole a damn fine cookie,” he said. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

She nodded wearily and held out the doughnut box again. At this rate she’d run out before she made it down one block, but she was having a hard time caring about that. She’d been down this street too many times, asked the same people the same questions and gotten the same non-answers over and over again. Maybe this was finally the sign she should stop.

“I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything else since last night,” she said without any real hope.

“Not me,” Frank said.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “Thanks for trying, anyway.”

“The other guy might have, though,” Frank said.

“The other guy?” This time she wouldn’t let herself get her hopes up. “Do I know him?”

“Don’t think so.” Frank chuckled to himself. “Takes off like a startled rat every time you come around here. I always tell him he should stick around, at least on brownie night. But he just takes off like a startled rat scurrying for the sewers.”

“You’ve never mentioned this man before, have you?” she said.

“Haven’t I?” Frank said. “I don’t know.”

“And you think he saw the hit-and-run?” she said, fighting against the excitement that was building inside her.

“Can’t say for sure he did or didn’t,” Frank said. “All I know, when I mentioned there was a police officer asking questions about some car thing and paying for answers with treats, he ran away. And then whenever you started coming down this way he just took off like-”

“A startled rat, right,” she said. “Can you describe him for me?”

“He’s got beady little eyes, white whiskers sticking out this way from his face,” Frank said, making sure she was writing all this down. “And don’t forget about that long tail.”

She slapped her notebook shut, disappointed. “Frank, that’s a description of the startled rat, isn’t it?”

He just chuckled in response.

“There is no other man, is there?”

“Oh, but there is,” he said. “I was just having some fun with you. This guy’s about six feet tall, maybe thirty years old. His hair’s about your color, and he’s got a month or two’s worth of beard. Don’t think he’s been on the streets long.”

“Why’s that?” she said. This was sounding promising, the first possible break they’d had in the case yet.

“His face doesn’t have these wrinkles you get from living out under the sun all day,” Frank said, pointing to his own. “And his hands are too soft.”

“Do you know where he is now?” O’Hara asked, scanning the street for any sight of the new man. This could be the break she’d been searching for. At the very least he was a witness. But the way he was so terrified of being asked about the accident suggested he might be much more.

“Hiding where any startled rat’s going to hide,” Frank said. “Someplace you’re not going to be able to find him.”

That’s what he thinks, O’Hara said to herself. There is nothing that’s going to stop me from finding this guy if I have to talk the chief into putting every officer in the force on State Street every night for a week.

“Do me a favor, Frank,” she said. She wrote her name and cell phone number on the pink cardboard of the doughnut box and handed it to him. “When he comes back, give him these for me. Tell him to call me, day or night. There’s a lot more than doughnuts waiting for him if he does.”