To The Bone

Chapter 25

The trailer court where Roberta Massey lived with her mother was at the eastern edge of Redwood City, squeezed up next to the area's salt evaporators, huge greenish-brown fields of stagnant water that extended out into the Bay. It was hot here, almost treeless, with the sea air gummy and smelling faintly of processed sewage.

Monks was alone. He and Larrabee had decided that the two of them together might be intimidating to a reluctant witness – that a doctor, with a personal grievance against D' Anton, would have a better chance to win Roberta's sympathy.

The mobile homes were decrepit and crammed close together, and the maze of sticky streets was lined with junker cars. He felt himself being watched through dirty curtained windows as he cruised, looking for the address. He decided that if he left the Bronco here overnight, it would be gone by dawn – although treated with respect, becoming the personal ride of some biker.

1632 Paloma Court was a corrugated aluminum single-wide that had once been aquamarine. Time and the salt air had reduced it to a dull flaky green. It was set back only about ten feet from the street, and surrounded by sparse grass struggling up through the sandy soil. A small dog inside started yapping when Monks climbed the rickety wooden steps.

The woman who came to the door was wearing a calf-length blue denim dress and a silver cross around her neck. Her dark hair was long and straight, with bangs over her forehead. She wasn't wearing much, if any, makeup, or other jewelry besides the cross. He guessed that she was about thirty, maybe younger, but with the unhurried movements of someone who had settled into an older pace. She was thick-bodied, pale-skinned, pretty in a puffy sort of way.

"Are you the doctor?" she asked through the screen.

"Yes. Roberta?"

She nodded shyly.

"Thanks for seeing me," Monks said.

Mom's gone next door, but she'll be back."

Monks wondered if that was a warning, in case he intended to try something. Letting people know they were being watched might be standard procedure around here.

She unhooked the door and opened it. The dog, a little dust mop with feet, jumped up on his shins and wagged its tail furiously, but then nipped his fingers when he bent to pet it. He stepped into a space that was clean but claustrophobic, heavy with the pall of cigarette smoke, and beneath that the less definable spoor of people who had been living close together for a long time. A large TV faced a much-used couch. The walls were hung with crosses and cheap reproductions of religious paintings, including a suspiciously handsome Christ.

"Mom told me what you said, about how I might be able to keep him from hurting somebody else," Roberta said.

"I'm glad you see it that way, Roberta. I know this is difficult for you. Will you tell me what happened?"

She bent her head down, as if she were praying, and swept the bangs back off her forehead.

Monks saw the scar, just at the hairline, going from the far right of her forehead to the center. His hand moved to touch it, his forefinger tracing the hard ridge of flesh.

"Dr. D'Anton did this to you?" he said in disbelief.

She nodded, her eyes still cast down. Then she turned away, bending over and hugging herself, with sudden wrenching sobs shaking her body. Monks put his arm around her shoulders. She turned again, toward him, and wept against his chest.

A few minutes later, calmer but with her voice still trembling, Roberta told Monks her horror story, in halting words that were a strange mixture of pious platitudes and street talk.

It had happened in the summer of 1998, starting when she went to a party in San Francisco. She was looking for drugs, preferably narcotics. She had no luck at first, but she met another young woman there who wanted the same thing. The second girl knew about another party, that same night – at D' Anton's house, in Marin County. She had been there once before, with friends. She hadn't been invited this time, but she thought that a couple of attractive young women might be allowed to crash. Things could get pretty wild, she said, and there had been plenty of dope around. But she needed a ride, and Roberta had a car.

They drove to D'Anton's house and blended timidly into the party. Many of the guests were older and obviously had money. Roberta felt very much out of place with them. But there were other young people, too, and no one asked her to leave.

And there were drugs – pot and cocaine being used openly, with plenty of liquor and good wine.

The two girls wandered apart. Someone gave Roberta a Vicodin. She started to get very high.

At some point, an older man spoke to her. She knew that this was the host, Dr. D'Anton – he had been pointed out to her – and she got nervous again. But he seemed interested in her and asked her about herself. He told her she was pretty, and then he did something that stayed in her mind – he reached up and spanned her forehead between thumb and forefinger, as if measuring it with calipers, then traced his fingertips across the frontal ridge above her eyebrows.

Her forehead was a little protuberant, Monks noticed, marring her attractiveness with a slightly beetle-browed look.

She only spoke with D'Anton for a minute. She kept partying, drinking too much. She got woozy. Things became unclear. She remembered trying to apologize to a woman who helped her to a couch in a quiet room. Then she passed out.

When she came to, she was on an operating table.

"I saw this light that came to warn me," she told Monks. Her voice was softly reverent. She was sitting beside him on the couch, her hands nervously petting the little mutt in her lap. "I was unconscious, my eyes were still closed, and it appeared in my mind. It was like a flame, like the pillar of fire the Lord sent to lead the Israelites. I started to wake up. And felt-" She shivered. "Felt something burning across here." Her finger touched the hairline scar.

"He was cutting your skin?" Monks said.

She nodded, swallowing dryly. "And then he started pulling it down. Ripping it right off my face. I opened my eyes. There was blood running into them, but I could see those hands, with rubber gloves, and the knife he was holding. I screamed and started thrashing around. It must have freaked him out, because then he was gone."

She was starting to cry again. Monks patted her wrist. The dog growled protectively.

"Did you think he was going to kill you, Roberta?"

"I don't know. Maybe he was trying to fix what he'd looked at before, my forehead. But he's crazy, I know that."

Monks stood and put his hands in his pockets, listening as she talked on in her shaking voice, coaxing her to continue when she broke down.

Roberta had managed to get up off the operating table. She could feel the fold of loose skin flapping down her forehead, and she could hardly see through the blood running into her eyes. She found a towel, wiped her eyes and pressed it against her forehead to stem the blood, then stumbled through the darkened building, trying to find her way outside. She had no idea where she was; it might or might not have been D'Anton's clinic. She came to a door, but it was locked.

She was frantically trying to open it when someone slipped an arm around her from behind, pinning her own arms, and jabbed a needle into her shoulder.

She tried to plead, but she lost consciousness within seconds. Her last thought was that she was going to die.

But she awoke, slowly, groggy and in pain. It took her some time to realize that she was in the driver's seat of her own car – slammed into a highway underpass bridge abutment. The windshield above the steering wheel was spiderwebbed, as if her head had hit it. The dashboard and hood were littered with shards of glass. Her face was sticky with congealed blood.

But except for the laceration on her forehead, she was unhurt.

It was still night, and deserted. She recognized the place as a wooded area of San Francisco near China Beach. She had no memory of the accident – no memory of having driven at all, since arriving at D' Anton's house.

What Roberta did next, Monks thought, defined a fundamental difference between the culture that she had grown up in and the one that he had. She had found her way to a pay phone – but instead of calling the police, she called her mother. Then she hid until Mrs. Massey and her boyfriend – an ex-con named Jerry – came to pick her up.

They went to the hospital in Redwood City. No one said anything about D'Anton – only that Roberta had been in a wreck. Her mother stayed with her, while Jerry called the police and reported the car as stolen.

A young ER doc stitched up Roberta's cut, warning her that this was only a temporary fix, to stop the bleeding. The scar would need to be repaired by a plastic surgeon, the sooner the better.

But that had never been done. In the months that followed, Roberta thought more and more about the light that had appeared to her and saved her life. She began to understand that it had been a call from Jesus. She had gotten involved with a local church that was active with the poor, and now she worked there part-time. She embraced her disfigurement as a sort of stigmata – deliverance from the vanity of physical beauty.

"It was a gift from Christ to signify my salvation," she said. 'To share in His sufferings." She watched Monks, her face hopeful, as if pleading silently for absolution.

Monks said, "Why didn't you go to the police, Roberta?"

She lowered her eyes again.

"I was – you know. In trouble, drugs, mostly. On probation. I figured, if they found me in a wrecked car, fucked up – forgive me, Lord – I was done for. I'd already spent ten days in county. Those dykes in there-" She shivered again. "No way was I going back."

"But you decided to file an insurance complaint?"

"That was Jerry's idea. I didn't want him to do it, but he talked Mom into it because maybe we could get some money. He knew this lawyer and got him to go to the insurance company and threaten to sue Dr. D' Anton.

"Next thing we know, this big black shiny Mercedes pulls up outside, and this man gets out wearing, like, a three-piece suit. He told us he was Dr. D'Anton's lawyer. He looked at the place like he'd just stepped on a turd – wouldn't sit down or even come in. Just stood there in the doorway and talked for about ten minutes, telling us how he was going to bust our balls. It was like listening to the devil, man – he was so smooth, absolutely sure of himself. He said the lawyer we'd used wasn't really a lawyer; he'd lost his license. He said I was a known criminal and a druggie, and I was making up a filthy lie to get money out of this famous doctor, and I was going to go to prison, like, for twenty years.

'Then he says to Jerry, 'Attempted fraud, in partnership with a disbarred attorney, would be a rather serious violation of your parole, wouldn't it?' I still remember that exactly." She mimicked a cold, contemptuous voice. "'A rather serious violation.' Jerry was out of here pretty quick after that."

Monks's restless gaze scanned the room. A shelf of photos included a couple of a pretty, slender girl in her teens. There was no doubt that she was Roberta. She looked saucy, wearing low-cut blouses that thrust her young breasts forward proudly – ready for the world.

'That doctor who sewed you up," Monks said.

"Did he say anything about the cut looking unusual?"

She shook her head, surprised. "Why?"

Because lacerations from a broken windshield typically consisted of many shallow V-grooves, and a precise surgical incision that long would almost certainly have caught the attention of any emergency physician.

"Just curious," Monks said. "Did Dr. D'Anton say anything to you when you were in the operating room?"

"Nooo?" she said, drawing it into a question. Her eyes were starting to get wary.

"The more specific the things you can remember, the more weight it all carries," Monks said soothingly.

"I remember those hands," she said, and added, with unveiled sarcasm, "real specifically."

"What about his face, Roberta? What kind of expression did he have?"

"I didn't see his face."

Monks blinked. "Not at all?"

"Just his hands."

She did not seem to realize that this weakened her story even more. Monks decided not to point it out. He asked a few more questions, then thanked her, and promised her he would be in touch with her soon.

Roberta walked out the door with him. "It's not easy, living here," she said. 'There's a lot of sin around. I pray hard to keep from falling back in."

Monks glanced at the surrounding trailers, quiet, but brimming with the sense of secretive and illicit goings-on.

"I don't have any trouble believing that," he said.

"I pray for Dr. D'Anton, too. I haven't just forgiven him. I thank him for bringing me to Jesus."

"That takes a big soul, Roberta," Monks said.

Bigger than his, that was for sure.

Monks found his way back out through the trailer court's shabby maze to the endless strip of El Camino Real, then took Woodside Road toward Interstate 280, pondering this new pool of information.

He could accept that Roberta had not gone to the police because, in her world, they were even more frightening than someone who had tried to kill her. That nightmare was over. Being under the heavy boot of the law, unfairly or not, could last years, even the rest of her life.

But her story would still be worthless in court. Any decent defense attorney could convince a jury of exactly what D'Anton's lawyer had said – that Roberta had been drunk and drugged, had piled up her car, and had made up the incident in an attempt to get money. She didn't know where it had taken place. She hadn't even seen her attacker's face. The physician who treated her hadn't commented on the nature of the cut. And why had D' Anton let her live? He would have had to stage the accident, roughen the scalpel incision with glass. Had he abducted her in a moment of impulse, then come to his senses and realized she would be traced to the party? Regained a touch of humanity at her screams, or just lost his nerve?

Monks believed that Roberta thought she was telling the truth. He speculated about recovered memory – the kind of fantasy that abuse victims sometimes constructed, out of guilt, fear, the need to block out traumatic events. Surely she was familiar with rumors about girls who disappeared. Could she have incorporated that, in a drug-induced psychosis, into a rationalization for the accident and her behavior leading to it? Her religious conversion, soon afterward, indicated that guilt feelings were already present in her.

But it was so damned outlandish and, at the same time, grounded in real possibility. This was not about sex experiments on alien spacecraft, or human sacrifice at Satanic rituals. Even her admission of not seeing D' Anton's face added the ring of truth.

And then there was Katie Bensen. Who had been a patient of D'Anton's, and had modeled for Julia D'Anton. Who was also an attractive young woman of about Roberta's age, and also a free spirit who liked drugs and parties.

Who also had vanished, and D' Anton had been upset enough to get rid of the nurse who knew.

Interstate 280 was a pretty road along this stretch, if you ignored the fact that it ran right on top of the San Andreas fault. The area was hilly and wooded, with a miles-long wildlife refuge on the coastal side. Traffic was relatively light going north, with the thickening commuter momentum from San Francisco coming the other way.

Monks reached Burlingame within a few minutes, and then he did something he had promised himself he would not. He took the Trousdale exit toward Martine Rostanov's house. He wanted badly to see her, to be in her presence – to inhale the warmth from her skin and help take away the chill that had settled under his own.

He approached her driveway slowly and started to turn in. Then he stopped. Another car was parked in the drive behind hers – a handsome black Saab.

Monks drove on past and went back to the freeway, berating himself. He should have called first. He was acting like a teenager. It was insane to assume that the Saab might belong to a lover, and he had no right to expect otherwise, anyway.

The urge was upon him to pick up where he had left off last night – to check into one of the Union Square hotels near John's Grill, with its great portrait of Dashiell Hammett, and spend the evening at that fine bar. It was another thing he had not done in a long time.

But he kept the Bronco pointed north, up Nineteenth Avenue, through the greenery-laced Presidio, into the mist that had settled over the Golden Gate Bridge. The party that he was invited to tonight was at D' Anton's Marin County house – the same house where Roberta claimed to have been abducted. It would be good to get the feel of the place.

Monks started to realize that something in his mind was calling attention to itself – something Roberta had said that he hadn't paid much attention to at the time.

She had not been able to describe the person who had led her to the couch where she passed out. But she was certain that it had been a woman.