Spook

13

I was out of the office most of Thursday. After Tamara and I wrapped up the report for McCone Investigations, I took it over to Pier 24-½ and hand-delivered it to Ted Smalley. Then I spent an hour and a half with a Maritime Plaza attorney who specialized in felony appeals cases and who was looking to hire a small agency on a retainer basis to do his investigative work. I thought the interview went pretty well, but with lawyers you can never be sure of anything. Early afternoon I played hooky again and finished my Christmas shopping at Union Square. Nokia cell phone for Emily, four-ounce bottle of expensive French perfume for Kerry, a couple of multicolored silk scarves for Tamara, and another overload of crowd-and-Christmas commercialism for me.

It was nearly five when I got back to O’Farrell Street, just missing Jake Runyon. He’d found and had some trouble with Big Dog, Tamara informed me; he’d also uncovered a lead on Spook’s background. She filled me in before she handed over the heavily creased page of photos.

“Runyon okay?” I asked.

“Lump on his head and a sore ear. Tough dude.”

“And a good investigator.”

“Man knows judo, you believe it?”

“Good for him. So you like him better now?”

“I always liked him. You the one didn’t want to hire him.”

“Well, you didn’t seem to like either of us much, earlier in the week.”

“Already said I was sorry. My bad, and I’m keeping it out the office from now on.”

True enough. She’d settled down quite a bit since Monday, lost some of her edge and got her frustrations under control. But the Horace situation was still eating her up inside. And she was still living at her sister’s.

I said, “So Big Dog figures to be blackmailing whoever shot Spook.”

“How it looks.”

“Dangerous game when the mark’s already killed once.”

“Dude’s got two brain cells, Runyon says.”

“Two questions come to mind. Does Big Dog know the motive? Does he know Spook’s real identity?”

“Make it three,” she said. “How’d he ID the shooter?”

“Make it four. How’d he get hold of Spook’s stash?”

“Make it five. Anything in the stash that wasn’t with the rest of the stuff in the knapsack?”

“Might be the answer to number three, if there was. Something that named or pointed to the shooter. What’s Runyon’s take on all this?”

“He’s not guessing.”

I looked over the sheet of photographs, studied the one of the girl named Dorothy Lightfoot encased in the penciled heart. “High school yearbook. Graduating class, you think?”

“Hard to tell. Nothing to ID the school or location.”

“Could be Mono County, if there’s any connection to the phone call to Human Services.”

“I can find out. Be easier if we knew the time frame.”

“Hairstyles ought to give some idea.”

“White kids, all of ’em,” Tamara said. “I never did pay much attention to white kids’ do’s. Before my time, anyway. Got to be pretty old, mat page.

“Twenty years, at least. Maybe twenty-five or thirty.”

“Doesn’t narrow it down much.”

“No, but I think I can get it narrowed down.”

“Yeah? How?”

“Kerry. Advertising people get paid to notice hairstyles, clothes, things like that, past as well as present.” I folded and pocketed the sheet. “Either you or Runyon contact SFPD with all this?”

“He did,” she said. “Stopped to see Jack Logan on his way back here. Only thing he held out was the page of photos... same as you’d’ve done.”

“In my younger days, anyhow.”

“One other thing he gave the lieutenant, also same as you would’ve — that envelope of kiddie porn. No more raw meat for Pablo. He’s gonna be spoiled meat pretty soon.”

Right. The two types of felons cops hate more than any other are child molesters and kiddie-porn vendors. They’d put Pablo out of commission fast. Big Dog, too, but only if finding him proved easy. Otherwise, even with the new reforms in the department, they’d let the case slide again in favor of higher priority squeals.

I said as much to Tamara. She said, “Runyon’s take, too. Big Dog’s still loose by this time tomorrow, he wants to go back out on the streets and see if maybe he can help put a leash on him.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Okay with me, but I’d check with you.”

“Iffy.”

“Runyon said he’d do the job on his own time.”

“The hell he did.”

“Man’s a workaholic. Sound familiar?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Only difference is, you got a life and he doesn’t. Nobody to go home to and a grown son who hates his guts, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“Sounds like compassion.”

“Well, I been thinking about the man. About a lot of things. I got bad, but I also got people who care — family, friends. Folks like Runyon, they got all the bad and none of the good. I figure the least we can do is give him anything reasonable he asks for.”

“Be his friends as well as his employers.”

“Yeah, well, why not?”

I felt paternal as hell toward her in that moment. Tamara Corbin — from hostile streetwise college kid to mature businesswoman in less than five years. I’d had a small hand in it and it made me feel proud, the way her real father must feel about her.

On impulse I went over and put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

“Hey, why’d you do that?”

I grinned and said, “Why not?”

“Nineteen seventy-seven,” Kerry said.

“Come on. The exact year?”

“Want to make a little bet?”

“You only looked at the photos for about two minutes.”

“I don’t need any more time. I could give you a four- or five-year window — late seventies to early eighties — but ’seventy-seven seems right. The photos were probably taken in the late fall of ’seventy-six, a few months before the yearbook was released.”

“Now you’re really guessing.”

“Want to make a bet?” she asked again.

“No way I’d ever bet against that smug look of yours.”

“I don’t have a smug look.”

“Go look in the mirror. All right, tell me why you’re so sure. Dazzle me with your deductive powers.”

“I should’ve been a detective, huh? Stolen some of your thunder?”

“God forbid. Come on, give.”

“I worked on my high school yearbook,” she said. “Photos are usually taken in the fall of the year before the book comes out. Three or four months’ lead time, to allow for layout, proofreading, printing. Capito?”

“Capito. But that doesn’t explain how you can pinpoint an exact year.”

“ ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ for one thing.”

“Who?”

“Number one rated TV show in the late seventies. Three beautiful women private eyes who worked for a mysterious boss named Charlie.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You’re kidding. Famous jiggle show.”

“What’s a jiggle show?”

“Now I know you’ve heard that term before.”

“If I have, I didn’t internalize it.”

“They didn’t wear bras, bounced when they moved. Jiggle show.”

“Oh. Sexy stuff.”

“You sure you never watched the show?”

“You know I don’t watch episodic TV.”

One of her analytical looks. “Sometimes I could swear you’re putting me on. You can’t be that far out of the mainstream, can you?”

“Why can’t I? The only things on the tube that interest me are sports and old movies. And I like my sex up close and personal, not bouncing and jiggling on a screen.”

“That much I know isn’t a put on.”

“So what about this ‘Charlie’s Angels’ show?”

“Well, one of the actresses was Farrah Fawcett. Blonde, wore her hair in a long, distinctive style. Waves, feathers... never mind.” Kerry poked the grubby page under my nose and tapped one of the photos. “This style. It was all the rage back then. Three of the girls here have the Farrah look.”

“Okay, I get it now. That explains the window but not the specific year.”

“ ‘Charlie’s Angels’ first aired in the fall of ’seventy-six,” she said patiently, although the patience seemed to be wearing a little thin. “A lot of girls adopted the Farrah look right away — more then than later, when the novelty began to wear off.”

“That’s not conclusive evidence.”

“Not conclusive, no, but—”

“So admit it, you’re just guessing.”

“I am not guessing!”

“Then give me conclusive proof the year is nineteen seventy-seven.”

“The pin,” she said.

“What pin?”

“One of the girls is wearing a pin. Didn’t you notice it?”

“No. Which girl?”

The page came at me again; she almost banged me on the nose with it. A finger came around and jabbed a photo near the bottom. “This girl. This pin.”

I squinted. Pin, all right, on a chubby girl’s black sweater. Up close, now that I was focused on it, it looked vaguely familiar.

“Looks vaguely familiar,” I said.

Kerry said, not quite in one of her exasperated growls, “Nineteen seventy-six. What does that mean to you?”

“Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Don’t start that again.”

“Don’t start what again?”

“The year nineteen seventy-six,” she said in one of her exasperated growls, “what happened that year, why is it historically important, what did it represent?”

“Oh,” I said. “Bicentennial.”

“The light dawns. That’s right, it was the Bicentennial. And a lot of people, especially in small towns, young people all over the country, celebrated by wearing Bicentennial pins. The girl in this photo is wearing a Bicentennial pin. After nineteen seventy-six, when the Bicentennial ended, hardly anybody wore the pins because there was no longer any reason to. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Q.E.D.”

“Huh?”

“Gahh,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

She folded the sheet carefully, tucked it into my shirt pocket, glared at me, said, “You can be a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?” and walked out of the room.

I sat down in my chair and tried to figure out what I’d done to set her off like that. Nothing, I decided. Chalk it up to the fact that women are emotional creatures. Emotional and volatile and unpredictable and often unreadable, not anything like men.

Give Tamara enough of a starting point, she can find out just about anything in what she calls cyberspace. Fast, a lot faster than by dint of the creaky old methods I’d relied on for so many years. First thing Friday morning she took the three slim leads we had — Mono County, the page from what Kerry insisted was a 1977 high school yearbook, and the only Dorothy on the two-sided page of photos — and by early afternoon she had made connections and pulled up facts that answered some questions and opened up a potential can of worms.

The page of photos was from the High Desert Municipal High School yearbook in Aspen Creek, a town of 2,500 residents not far from Mono Lake in Mono County. And Kerry had been right, by God, about the date being 1977. Dorothy Lightfoot had graduated that year, with honors.

Tamara checked public records on file in Bridgeport, the Mono County seat. No birth certificate for Dorothy Lightfoot, but a marriage license had been issued to her and a man named Anthony Colton in the spring of 1979. If the union had produced any offspring, the birth had taken place elsewhere.

There was another certificate on file in Mono, one that was a little surprising. On August 19, 1985, Dorothy Lightfoot Colton had died in Aspen Creek. The death certificate did not list the cause.

“Twenty-five years, six months,” Tamara said. “Dag, that’s my age, almost exactly. Twenty-five’s too young to die.”

“Any age is too young to die,” I said.

“I guess. But twenty-five...”

“Accident, maybe.”

“Let’s see if there’s an obit anywhere online.”

There wasn’t. Aspen Creek was too small to have a newspaper, and none of the other Mono sheets had the staff, time, or money to put their back issue files on the Internet.

I said, “Find out if Anthony Colton still lives in Aspen Creek or anywhere else in the county.”

He didn’t. Nor did anybody else named Colton.

“Try the Lightfoot name.”

While she was doing that, Runyon came in. We’d had him out doing legwork on the engineering employee case. He gave me a quick report on his findings, then I filled him in on what Tamara had learned so far.

He asked, “Big Dog picked up yet?”

“I checked in with Logan a little while ago. Still at large.”

“So it’s okay if I see what I can do?”

“Go ahead.”

Pretty soon Tamara said, “Two hits on Lightfoot, neither one in Aspen Creek. Robert in Bridgeport, George in Lee Vining.” She’d been using Big Hugs for that search, a website that had been created to help trace adoptive parents and then expanded into other search areas. Through a subscription to that site, you can find out, among other things, the addresses of ninety percent of the U.S. population.

Runyon said, “How about checking the Snow name?”

“Good idea.”

Very good idea, as it turned out. It produced a second surprise.

One Vernon Snow, age 64, had died in Aspen Creek on August 19, 1985 — the same day as Dorothy Lightfoot Colton.

“Dot and Mr. Snow,” Tamara said. “We got us a connection, for sure.”

“What we need now is the cause of both deaths,” I said. “One of the papers up there must have something on file — obits, a news story if the deaths were related or anything other than natural.”

“After three Friday afternoon. Not much chance of getting anybody to check files for us in a hurry.”

“With the weekend, it might take days.” Small-town newspaper offices were generally closed on weekends, and always seemed to be understaffed and too busy to respond quickly to out-of-town requests. The same was true of small-town, rural county libraries; their hours were shorter, their staffs even smaller.

Tamara ran a “death sweep” on Anthony Colton. That’s another of Big Hugs’ online search services: you can find out the date and place of death of ninety percent of American citizens deceased during the past fifty years or more, using the individual’s birth date and place of birth as a starting point. Anthony Colton of Mono County, CA, wasn’t one of them, however. Either he was still alive or among the ten percent whose deaths, for one reason or another, had gone unrecorded.

Running a criminal background check on the four names would’ve been easy enough if Tamara’s friend Felicia had been on duty in SFPD’s communications department. But she wasn’t. Civilians, in which class private detectives fall, can’t access National Crime Information Center computer files, and without specific details Tamara couldn’t pull up the information on her own without doing some illegal hacking. The check would have to wait until Monday morning, when Felicia was due back on the job.

Runyon said, “I could drive up to Mono County, see what I can find out over the weekend.”

Tamara and I both gave him a look. “Mono’s way up along the Nevada line,” I said. “Six or seven hundred miles, round trip. Three or four days altogether.”

“I wouldn’t mind, if you don’t need me on Monday.”

I considered it. “Well... it might save us some time, at that. Always easier to dig out details in person. But the client might not want to authorize the extra expense.”

“I could call him,” Tamara said.

“What’s the schedule look like first of next week?”

“Christmas week. Not much happening.

“All right. Call Steve Taradash, see what he says.”

Taradash said okay. So we said the same to Runyon. If the workaholic wanted to feed his habit with a twelve-hundred mile roundtrip drive, might as well let him do it. God knew I’d done enough of that kind of feeding myself over the long haul.