Split Second

CHAPTER 16

Post Street, San Francisco

Fantasia Gallery

Since it was a Friday evening and warm, always an unexpected treat in San Francisco, both natives and tourists swarmed the streets. There weren’t as many panhandlers in Union Square anymore, Delion told them, as they made their way out of the underground garage. He missed Old Ducks, though, a Vietnam vet who used to play the harmonica over near Macy’s, always with three blankets around his shoulders, a watering can to collect change from the tourists passing by, and a nice word for everybody. They walked over to Post Street, home to a good dozen art galleries.

There were more locals than tourists in Fantasia tonight, because the showing was for a local artist. The gallery lights were bright, and the mood was light with laughter, maybe because the paintings in the spotlights were filled with such outrageous colors and shapes, they made you want to smile. Whether or not you’d want to look at a creature with two heads and two matching tails every day of your life on your living-room wall was another matter entirely, Lucy thought. The artist getting all the attention was Exeter Land, a stylishly tall and skinny man, wearing perfectly wrinkled loose linen pants and a matching linen jacket. He held a glass of champagne between his long, thin fingers, and stood chatting in the middle of a group of admirers, flushed and happy.

They walked around the gallery, looking mostly at the people there, and spotted about a dozen of Mrs. Lansford’s paintings, all hung on one wall and accented with the very best lighting. They were exuberant, Lucy thought, like Mr. Exeter Land’s—in fact, like all the artists she carried, as if they all cheered at the same fantasyland ballpark.

Delion walked toward a woman who stood at the far wall of the big open gallery floor, leaning against a small dark blue desk with white half-moons painted on it, a bottle of water in her hand. She was in her fifties, trim, with very long dark hair, not even a dash of gray, that she wore straight and pulled back with gold clips behind her ears. Coop could easily picture her younger—she had a bit of the look of Bundy’s onetime fiancée, as well as many of Bundy’s victims. But she was older now, and carried a look of confidence, he thought, in herself, and in the scene unfolding around her. She was watching the crowd carefully, her eyes roving over each of the people in her gallery. Assessing the possible buyers? Surely she had to be pleased at the turnout for her artist.

Delion nodded to Coop and Lucy. The three of them formed a loose half circle around Mrs. Lansford.

Delion pulled out his badge, introduced himself, then introduced Agent Lucy Carlyle and Agent Cooper McKnight of the FBI. “We’re here about the murder of five women in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cleveland, Mrs. Lansford.”

She looked at the three of them in turn, nothing changing on her face, not even a small tic or an eyebrow going up, nothing at all. Her very dark eyes remained calm, only politely interested. “You want to speak to me about some murders? Murders, did you say? How can I possibly help you, Inspector? Agents?”

Delion brought out the driver’s license photo of Kirsten Bolger, along with the police sketch and a photo of Ted Bundy. He spread them out on the desk behind her.

She took a quick look at the photos. Again, her expression did not change. “A moment, please. Let’s go to my office.” She said nothing to anyone, simply walked out of the main gallery, up a circular flight of steps, down a lovely rose carpeted hallway with more paintings for sale on the walls, and opened a door. She stepped back and waved them in.

Her office was a 3-D fantasy, Lucy thought, large and filled with color. The paintings, a sofa, four chairs, and a coffee table—everything was vivid, bold, and whimsical. There were large stuffed animals scattered about the room—a giraffe, a lion, a horse, and an anteater. The wall-to-wall carpeting was red, with big circles of white and yellow. You smiled, couldn’t help yourself.

“Sit down, won’t you?”

They didn’t sit. Delion once again spread the photos on the desktop, a shiny black affair with a black computer on top and a black phone.

“Would you please look at these photos again, Mrs. Lansford.”

She looked. “Yes?”

“You recognize your daughter, Kirsten?”

“Is that Kirsten? That looks like her driver’s license, and the sketch resembles her, to be sure. Why, yes, I do believe it is.”

“And you recognize your daughter’s father. Ted Bundy?”

Still, there was no expression at all on her face. She was silent a moment, studying each of the photos now, then she said quietly, “What in the world would make you think such a thing, Inspector?”

Delion said, “One of the intended victims, a young woman in Philadelphia, scored her fingernails down Kirsten’s face. We typed her DNA from the tissue and matched her to Ted Bundy.”

“Imagine that. Is there no privacy of any kind anymore? I would very much appreciate it if you did not tell George that his stepdaughter’s father was one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.”

Lucy said, “You never told him? If he doesn’t know, I imagine he will know very soon now, Mrs. Lansford. Unfortunately, we cannot control leaks, as much as we would want to. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I suggest you warn your husband. And when Kirsten comes to trial, every single thing everyone knows about her will come out.”

“Well, then, I must trust you either don’t ever catch Kirsten or you kill her.”

Hmmm. Coop said, “You saw the police sketch in the paper and on TV, didn’t you, Mrs. Lansford? You recognized your daughter, didn’t you?”

She shrugged. “No, the police sketches weren’t at all like her, and so I dismissed it.”

“But then other police sketches came out. You recognized those as Kirsten, didn’t you, ma’am?”

“Perhaps I did notice a resemblance, perhaps it was niggling at the back of my mind, but I have a great talent for shutting out unpleasantness, and, believe me, there couldn’t be anything more unpleasant than this creature murdering five women, let alone thinking that perhaps he was really a she, and that she was really Kirsten. I suppose I was afraid that sooner or later someone might come to see me. But I must admit, you’re here much sooner than I expected. May I ask how you found me?”

Lucy said, “We had an excellent description and sketch of Kirsten. We narrowed down our search to the San Francisco area where the murders began and found her quickly enough from her senior yearbook photo at Mount Elysium High School.”

Mrs. Lansford walked over to the giraffe that was nearly as tall as she was, with an eye patch over one eye. Oddly, she lifted the eye patch, looked at the empty eye pit closely, then carefully laid the patch over it again and gave the giraffe an absent pat. “His name is Louie. Ah, so easy, it seems. I’m very glad one of the killer’s victims managed to live through the attack.

“I don’t know what I can tell you, since I haven’t seen Kirsten in over a year. The last time was on her birthday, when I called to invite her to our house in Atherton to give her a special present.”

“What was the present?” Lucy asked, seeing for the first time a fat pink hippo sitting beside a bright blue-and-orange chair. It should have been tacky but was, in fact, charming.

“A Porsche Nine-eleven, black, naturally, since she’d left her white period.”

“Did her white period include blond hair?”

Mrs. Lansford nodded.

Coop said, “Did she favor a different color before then?”

“Red. That didn’t last long. No, it was white for years. It was very unnerving to see her. And tedious. And weird. I told her so, but she ignored me, as usual.”

“How does Kirsten earn a living, Mrs. Lansford?”

“She went to law school—I know, I know, so did Ted Bundy for a while. She stopped going to classes, flunked out, just like her father. Despite all the white, all the bizarre outfits, she is very pretty, and very thin; she modeled for catalogs for a while, but she tired of that quickly enough. She really didn’t need to work, since her stepfather”—she paused for a moment, frowned at a small piece of paper sitting on the hoof of the blue horse, bent over and picked it off, rolled it into a ball, and gently placed it in the bright yellow sunflower wastebasket beside the desk—“since he gave her an allowance of five thousand dollars a month for many years. I told him he didn’t need to do that, but he is a foolishly generous man.”

Lucy said, “Mrs. Lansford, when did you tell your daughter her father was Ted Bundy?”

Elizabeth Mary Lansford laughed. “What mother would ever want to tell her daughter something like that? I never told her. But she found out, I have no idea how, and she wouldn’t tell me how she knew. It was when she was twenty-five. She walked unexpectedly into the gallery, looked at the painting I had finished that morning, and she sneered—she always sneered at my work—and she said, calm as you please, ‘I know you hate me, Mother, like you hated my father. I could have visited my father in prison in Florida, met him before he died, but you never even told me who he was. You kept him from me; you stole my father from me. You’re a bitch, a gold-plated bitch, and I wish he’d killed you.’

“Perhaps you wonder how I can remember her words so exactly, but I suspect Inspector Delion knows. You have children, do you not?”

Delion nodded. “I would remember, too, if one of them said that to me. What happened then, Mrs. Lansford?”

“She stalked out with me calling after her to wait, to let me explain, but she didn’t even slow down. Of course, I couldn’t say anything to George. The next time I saw her was on her birthday last year, when I think my husband tried to bribe her back with the gift of the black Porsche.”

Coop said, “So you didn’t even see your daughter or hear from her for—what? Six, seven years?”

“That’s right, until her thirty-second birthday. She has since turned thirty-three.”

“And you don’t know how she found out about her father?”

“No. I asked her, but she refused to tell me.”

Coop said, “How did she act at her birthday party?”

“It marked the one and only time Kirsten went out of her way to charm her stepfather. Because he gave her the Porsche first thing, I imagine. I listened to her laugh, watched her excitement when she saw the Porsche with a big red bow sitting squarely on the hood. George beamed at her, and she played up to him, still charming as could be, whooping and laughing with pleasure, flirting with him, truth be told. But before she drove off, she made sure to look at me, and there was such cold hatred in her eyes I wanted to cry. I knew I hadn’t been forgiven for keeping the truth about her father from her, and I never would be.” She turned away from them and walked to a window that gave onto the warm night and tourists and locals still thick on the street. When she turned back, her face was perfectly blank. “About six months ago someone broke into my studio at home and destroyed every painting I had there. It was Kirsten, of course. I—I never told George, merely locked the room until I could clean it out.”

“Sentra! What are you doing here? Felipe told me you’d come into my office with three people; he didn’t know who they were. What is going on here?”

Delion, Lucy, and Coop turned to the woman standing in the office doorway, the image of Mrs. Lansford, who was still leaning against the desk, only this woman was wearing a long bright yellow gown with diamonds at her neck, her thick black hair swept up in a French twist.

Sentra?

“Who are you, ma’am?” Delion asked, stepping toward her.

“Why, I’m Elizabeth Lansford, of course. This is my sister, Sentra Bolger. For heaven’s sake, Sentra, have you been pretending to be me again?”