Sudden Exposure (2 page)

“Stay where you are! Don’t move!” the backup, Leonard, yelled.

Bulldog didn’t stay. He leapt at me, grabbed my hair, and spun me around.

When I got my feet under me, he was halfway up the path. I glanced at Howard and Leonard and the suspects. Howard was back on his feet. “I’ll take him!” I yelled. It sounded like a statement but Howard had the final say.

Howard hesitated just a moment—an eternity in this situation. There was amused disbelief in his voice when he yelled, “Right. Go get him. I’ll get you backup.”

Did Howard think I couldn’t handle this? Howard, the man with whom I swam every morning, and shared a bed—not unathletically—at night? He could explain later. I wasn’t about to let this kid tell his friends how he’d grabbed a cop by her ponytail, spun her around, and then left her in the dust—not and hear it from Howard, and Leonard, and everyone else. I ran after the kid, up onto Rose Street, a steep, narrow, patch-paved lane, sided on the south by a wall, on the north by houses hanging down the hillside. It ends abruptly at the base of a cement overhang of La Loma Street that now swings out over the top of Rose.

But it does have streetlights. And in the glow, halfway up, I could see the nudist huffing hurriedly up the steep street, the globes of the streetlights shining on the globes of his buttocks and his head. The guy was entirely bald.

I followed, huffing a lot harder than him. “Police!” I yelled, “Stop where you are!”

He stopped, looked around, and resumed pace.

It was a real low-speed chase, this. The night was clear but cold. The cold wouldn’t bother him now. There are detriments to being naked, but by the time I was halfway up the street I envied him.
He
wasn’t sweating under a wool uniform.
He
wasn’t carrying half the hardware in Berkeley on a belt, or a radio on his shoulder spitting out calls too soft to hear. I pushed off harder with each step; my legs were moving like lead. Sweat dripped over my eyes. I wiped it away and looked ahead.

The nudist was gone!

He couldn’t have gotten up over the railing onto La Loma; there hadn’t been time. Hiding under the roadway, that’s where he had to be. I pulled my flashlight free. The railing up above would come in handy to anchor the cuffs. I could hear sirens coming up La Loma. I shone the light under the overhang and shouted, “Come … out … now. Hands where … I can see them.

But he wasn’t there.

I stood staring, the sweat running down my spine and pasting my hair to my neck.

“Adam nineteen, do you need more backup?”

“No,” I said in disgust. Not when I’d lost the suspect.

“Ten-four.” The radio growled and went silent. Leaves rustled.

But it wasn’t
rustling
, exactly. It wasn’t leaves; and it wasn’t overhead. I fanned the light before me, on the steep hillside. The nudist stood out in a thicket of ivy, like the only ornament on the Christmas tree, a hundred feet down, two thirds of the way through a steep slide to Shasta Road below.

“Oh, shit!” I pushed the mike button. “Adam nineteen. Top of Rose by La Loma. Suspect going down through the ivy to Shasta. Send me backup.” I didn’t wait for a reply. I hit the ivy feet first, half running, half sliding, on the muddy ground and wet leaves. Like surfing or skiing, or one of those cold, slippery sports in which your best hope is you don’t break some body part you might want to use again. A thick live oak branch came at me—or me at it. I ducked, too late. It scraped my head, caught at my hair. Twigs poked up from the ivy, catching on my pants, snapping the baton against my leg. And poison oak, it was all around. I had envied the unencumbered nudist as he sprinted up Rose Street. No more. By the time he got down to Shasta Road, his legs would look like they’d been graffitied. And in another day or two he’d have good reason to be nude.

The slope eased. He was off to my right, disappearing behind thick trunks of redwoods and reappearing in open patches, the full moon his spotlight. He was fifty yards ahead now, but I was closing on him. My thighs ached, but my breath was coming easier now. I longed to reach the street and run. I could almost feel my arm stretching out, my hand grabbing his scalp and smacking him to the ground.

He was almost at the street. I slowed, watching as he leapt from atop the railroad ties that blocked the end of the path. I’d driven Shasta Road on patrol:
I
knew the ties were there: and so had the suspect.

“Northbound on Shasta,” I gasped into the mike.

I leapt off from the ties onto Shasta, and chased north after him. Damn it, where was the backup unit? The suspect was running like a satyr. He reached the fork at Tamalpais and, without a break in stride, headed down.

“Tam … al … pie … is,” I panted.

Now that he was on the macadam, it was a different story. Berkeley, the Preserver of Potholes, was hard on bare feet. In another hundred yards I’d have him—
if
he didn’t disappear in the peninsula of redwoods eighty yards ahead where the street looped back on itself. Or in the wooded backyards across the street. Or worst of all, on Tamalpais Path, a long, steep, very dark staircase that would toss him out in the wooded back of one of the city’s biggest parks. Not only would
I
not find him down there; the entire force could be looking and miss him.

I had to get him before that. My legs ached, my lungs burned. I was closing in. In another fifty yards—

His right side gleamed red.

Taillights, gleaming off him.

Van backing out.

The van was going to hit him. Or he’d smack into it.

“Watch out, you fool!” I yelled.

The van accelerated, coming at him. He skirted right. Brakes screeched. The horn blew. Kept blowing.

The driver must have smacked forward into the steering wheel.

“Oh … shit!” I skidded to a stop at the passenger side. The noise stopped. The driver was sitting up now.

The nudist looked back once, the streetlight shone off his face veiled by shadow, and disappeared into the dark.

I hesitated, knowing I had no choice but unwilling to admit it. Losing a suspect is hardly a headline event. But it galled me to lose this one when I was so close. Particularly him. I’d hear about this plenty when I got back to the station. Guys on patrol would be lined up with comments. My ribs would be sore from the poking.

But I couldn’t ignore a possibly injured citizen in the van. I sighed, coming around to the driver’s side of the van. “Are you okay?”

“No I am not okay! What the hell do you think you’re doing, banging into me!” She was out of the van and glaring at me before she seemed to notice my uniform. “Oh, you’re the cop. Well, it’s damned well about time you got here.”

Bryn Wiley, our own prima donna athlete!

“Wait a minute here!” I snapped at her. “You almost killed a man just now. You backed into the middle of a police chase—”

“Look, I’m Bryn Wiley and—”

“Right. And I’d expect more awareness from a woman used to diving off the high board.” But I wouldn’t expect a bit more from
you
, I could have added. “The guy you almost hit, you saw him in your mirror, right? Did you recognize him?”

“What? Are you crazy?”

“Answer the question, please.”

Her sharp features were drawn into a fist of a face. It was the expression she’d had when I’d finished taking her statement four days earlier. But now her blue eyes flickered with amusement. “The guy behind my van,” she said, grinning, “was he
au naturel
?”

I shrugged, vainly trying to cover all those emotions a police officer is not supposed to show when dealing with one of the city’s prominent citizens. Motioning Bryn Wiley to pull her van back in the driveway, I called the dispatcher with the disposition on my chase, made sure there was no need to rush back to Rose Walk or the station, and arranged for Patrol to bring my car here. Already two backup cars were converging from the ends of Tamalpais. As I waved them off, I could hear the dispatcher notifying the others they could disregard her initial call.

The nudist, of course, was long gone. No point grumbling about him, or the whole burlesque of a chase. Not when I had a real problem: Bryn Wiley.

She was going to be trouble. The only question was how much.

B
RYN
W
ILEY WAS AS
close to a hero as you get in Berkeley. Normally we shepherd our passions into justice, the environment, and politically abstruse causes. Sports random is a quirk at best tolerated by your friends. You can get away with attending the occasional Warriors or A’s game, or your first love, the Cal Bears. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, or are sheepish about your déclassé obsession.

But with Bryn Wiley all rules had been broken. The days she had dived in the Olympics twelve years ago, the police could have put an OUT TO LUNCH sign on the station door. No one in town was far enough from their televisions to assault, batter, or break and enter. Bryn Wiley was an Olympian, Berkeley-style. She had come within an inch of being tossed out of Cal for leading demonstrations against sexual inequity in funding college sports. She was hardly a favorite with the Olympic Committee; by the time she reached the Games, they’d already given her two warnings. But when she heard the announcer mention the
men’s
team and the
girls’
team, she headed straight for a microphone and became the focus of every reporter there. She shrugged off those warnings; she never minced her words or worried about their fallout.

They don’t call them men’s teams and girls’ teams anymore.

Bryn Wiley didn’t bring back a medal, but more endearing in Berkeley, she came home with her principles unfurled.

Back in the Olympics she hadn’t been one of the well-tanned Californians whose skin boasts of hours spent in the pool year-round. Her hair was not blond but chestnut brown, her face almost delicate, and her body lean rather than muscular, and there was always an air of potential fragility about her. It may have come from her scoliosis, as the commentators suggested every time she climbed to the diving platform. The curvature of the spine was in her lower back, almost invisible even to the cameras that focused on her buttocks at every opportunity. “Up-nostril Close and too damned Personal,” Bryn had commented afterward. But she hadn’t denied the accompanying story of an early coach of hers who had insisted on a regimen of breaststroke and jogging that overstressed her back and sacroiliac joint and laid her up for a year. Sheepishly she had admitted how hard it had been at fourteen not to know if the spikes of pain down her leg or the numbness in her foot would ever heal, and then to worry that every training lap she’d run, every dive, would bring them back. She had never been to a high school dance or football game; she had only studied and trained. And still it had been a miracle, the commentators concluded, that she had made it to the Olympics.

When the interviews were over, she had walked to the end of the high platform, turned, and balanced on her toes with her heels poised in air frighteningly far above the water. Without pause she had dived back, creating a stunning arch of somersaults and twists, then snapped her body blade-straight and cut into the water without a splash. She’d climbed out of the water, her face aglow with triumph. A photographer had captured her expression an instant later, revealing how very much she had been willing to risk for her principles.

Later, she had lent her fame to the quest for safe exercise, insisting that no one should have to go through what she did. She was always, in the news, volunteering at swimming programs, pushing for water therapy classes and subsidized access of the poor to municipal pools, focusing on, as she put it, the “fitness of body, fitness of life.” Or as others put it, promoting her own fitness center: The Girls’ Team.

In the twelve years since the Olympics, her chestnut hair and startlingly blue eyes had become a familiar sight on television and at city events. I’d admired the smooth, confident way she moved. I wondered if all those years of training had given her such control over her body that no movement was random. Cloaked in her commitment, bejeweled by her fame, she faced the cameras with aplomb.

But tonight the woman who stood at the door was no exemplar of poise. She paused, hands on hips, and glared at me. “I called you two hours ago!”

“Forty-five minutes at most. But let’s not take any more of your time than we have to now.”

Ignoring my comment, she insisted, “I’ve been cooling my heels for a hundred and twenty minutes.”

I only wished I’d been cooling anything. Sweat was still running down my forehead. My undershirt was soaked through and the protective vest had created its own private steam room around my breasts. I made a show of opening my notebook. “About your vehicle …?”

“
Vehicles. Plural.
First my van, now my car windows! I expect you to—Look here.” She strode over to her blue Volvo wagon.

I walked down to the dirt driveway and around the damaged car. There were three holes in the driver’s window and two in what was left in the passenger’s. Shattered glass lay on the floor and the seat, and on the ground beyond the passenger side, decorating the gray-brown leaves like Christmas tinsel. I pulled my flashlight free and shone the light around the floor, between the seats, inside the other door. No bullet. I checked the ground outside. No bullet or casing; but in such a woodsy area they could be anywhere. “Did you hear shots? Anything that could have been shots? When did you last see the car intact?”

She stared mutely at the bullet holes. Her jaw quivered and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But the tough don’t cry; they bark. When she turned back to me, it was with fangs bared. “Last time, with the van, you did this same thing—a cursory glance, a couple useless questions. If you’d had your lab analyze the brick, you could have—”

“This isn’t the O. J. trial.” Bricks are too porous for prints.

“Is lab service in Berkeley reserved for the rich?”

“Rich?” I said, glancing pointedly at her house here in the hills. In Berkeley, wealth is not so much a sign of accomplishment as a suggestion you’ve sold out—politically or spiritually.