Nemesis (16 page)

There was another possibility, too, that I didn't want to pursue at the moment. I'd advised Tamara a few dozen times not to indulge in idle speculation, and here I was doing just that and giving myself a headache in the process. Save it until I was able to talk to Jake. Whenever that would be.

Pretty soon, as it turned out. Kayabalian called back a few minutes later to say that he'd arranged a 1:00
P.M.
visit for me. “Ten minutes, that's all I could get you,” he said, and I said, “That's ten minutes more than they'd give me this morning.” I didn't ask him how he'd managed it; he wouldn't have told me if I had. Lawyers have their ways and means, and like the rest of us involved in one way or another with the law, they don't much like sharing them.

*   *   *

Runyon had already been brought into the main jail visitors' room when one of the guards escorted me in. Even through the thick Plexiglas wall that bisected the room, I could see how heavily this second unjust arrest and incarceration had worn on him. Beard stubble bristled on his cheeks and chin; his face was set in such tight, stony lines that knots and ridges of muscles were visible all along the jaw lines.

I sat down and picked up the communicating phone, watched him do the same on his side. “I tried to get in to see you this morning,” I said, “but they wouldn't allow it.”

“AdSeg'd me.” His mouth sketched a grim smile. “Funny, isn't it. Wasn't long ago that Bryn was in here, AdSeg'd for a crime she didn't commit, and I was on the other side of the glass.”

I didn't say anything. He didn't expect an answer.

“How'd you manage the visit?” he asked. “Dragovich?”

“No, he's in court today. Kayabalian. All we've got is ten minutes.”

“Yeah, they told me.”

“Wanted you to know that I'm on it, Jake. Tamara, too. With or without police cooperation, for as long as it takes.”

“Kerry…?”

“Not a problem. She's okay with it.”

He nodded.

“Daniels,” I said. “Any idea who killed her, and why?”

“Somebody from her past, that's all I can figure. She didn't seem to have much of a present.”

“Pretty secretive, though, wasn't she? And an adept liar. She could've been involved with somebody—a married man, say—and kept it on the QT.”

“Yeah, possible.”

“She drop any names to you besides the ones in your report? Even just a first name?”

“Not that I remember. No.”

“Have to ask you this, Jake: Any chance she was telling the truth about the extortion attempt? That she really was being pressured by an anonymous caller?”

“I thought of that, too. No. It was a hoax, all right.” One corner of his mouth bent upward, not so much a humorless smile this time as half a rictus. “That's about the only thing I'm sure of right now.”

“So it's odds against her murder being connected to the hoax, or the phony assault charge and the lawsuits.”

“Except in the minds of the cops.”

“Which leaves fear, revenge, greed.”

“Fear or revenge, if it's somebody from her past. Lot of people had cause to hate her.”

“But why now? Something had to trigger it.”

“Could be me showing up, asking questions, delivering information,” Runyon said. “Her ex-husband didn't know about her inheritance. Neither did Hank Avery.”

“Either of them give you a hard time?”

“No.”

“The insurance man, Canaday?”

“No.”

“What I can't figure is the frame,” I said. “Why would anybody from Daniels's past or present want to implicate you? Can't see it as a grudge. Just a convenient fall guy?”

“Has to be. That damn button … Daniels must've ripped it off my coat in that little skirmish we had.”

“You didn't notice it was missing?”

“No. Old suit I don't wear much, blood on the collar where she scratched me—I noticed that—so I just dropped it on the pile for the cleaners and forgot about it.”

“Daniels must have found the button,” I said, “but not until after she'd made the phony assault charge. Otherwise she'd have turned it over. Question is, why did she keep it? Souvenir?”

“More likely to give it to her lawyer, have him use it against me in the court cases.”

“Another question: how did the killer get hold of it? Any reason you can think of why she'd give it to anybody? Or even tell anybody she had it?”

“No.”

I glanced at my watch; not much time left. “The police give you any idea when she was last seen?”

“One of the security men saw her leave the Bayfront Towers garage at four-thirty Saturday afternoon. He was the last so far.”

“What about her car? You know if it's been found?”

“No. They wouldn't tell me.”

“When you were out driving on Saturday, where'd you go?”

“North. Napa County, Lake Berryessa. Nothing else to do, I take long drives.”

“Stop anywhere? Talk to anyone?”

“For gas in Napa. And when I got back to the city, a Chinese restaurant on Clement for takeout.”

“What time was that?”

“Six-thirty, seven. No help there. She wasn't killed until around ten—one of the homicide inspectors told me that. I was home by then, no visitors, no calls. And I didn't go out again.”

“Nothing incriminating in your car and your apartment, they know that by now. The only real evidence against you is that button.”

“Found clenched in her dead hand. Enough to keep me locked up and enough for a conviction, we both know that.”

The guard on Runyon's side of the Plexiglas came walking over to call time. Fast ten minutes. I said, “I'll be in touch, Jake, in person or through Dragovich.” I wanted to say more, something reassuring, but he'd already put the phone down. Just as well, I thought as the guard led him away. Anything I might have said would've sounded just like what it was: cold comfort.

 

17

The rest of Monday was a scramble. From the Hall of Justice I drove to Bayfront Towers to see if I could find out anything from the day-shift security staff about Daniels's movements and recent visitors. Then I went to the agency to confer with Tamara and look over the additional information she'd dug up on Scott Ostrander, Vincent Canaday, and the Averys. Then I spent half an hour with Thomas Dragovich after his court day ended and he returned to his Grove Street offices. Then, with Dragovich running interference, I spent a few minutes back at the Hall talking to Figone and Samuels, the homicide inspectors working the Daniels investigation, before they went off shift. And then I went back to Bayfront Towers to talk to the evening-shift security people.

There was very little of a positive nature in any of it. None of the four security guards I spoke with had been working on Saturday and refused to give specific answers to my questions about Verity Daniels's recent activities. “We already told the police everything we know,” one of them, George Haxner, said. “You're just wasting your time, anyway. Ms. Daniels told me how your man Runyon tried to rape her. You ask me, he's guilty as hell.”

One thing the three East Bay possibles had in common besides apparent animosity toward the dead woman was that they were all in financial difficulty to one degree or another. Ostrander was on the cusp of losing his nursery, like so many other small business owners in this recessive, if not depressive, economy; money borrowed from his brother-in-law, the Danville urologist, was all that was keeping him from a probable Chapter 11. Hank Avery was mired in debt because of his low-paying job and the percentage of his mother's medical bills not covered by Medicare. Canaday's insurance agency was struggling along, but he had a history of taking risky fliers in the stock market and his most recent gamble, just before the market began to nosedive, had resulted in losses he hadn't been able to recoup. It was at least conceivable that one of the three had approached Daniels to beg for a loan, been rebuffed in her typically nasty fashion, and had killed her in retaliation. An angle worth considering, anyway, along with the revenge motive.

Dragovich was candid: unless the police turned up evidence to cast doubt on their case against Runyon, it was unlikely that he'd be able to get the judge at Jake's preliminary hearing to grant bail. And even if he could, the amount would be well up in six figures—prohibitively high even with Abe Melikian as the bondsman. Melikian would be forced to ask for the kind of collateral neither Runyon nor Tamara and I were in a position to supply. So Jake would be bound over for trial, and if it came down to that, his chances were as thin as the threads that had bound that button to the sleeve of his suit coat.

Figone and Samuels seemed open-minded, even willing to lean a little in favor Runyon's innocence—no cop likes to see a former brother officer, particularly one with a record as clean as Jake's, go down for a major crime. They had no objection to my conducting an investigation of my own, as long as I didn't step on their toes and agreed to immediately let them know of anything relevant that I might uncover. But they weren't too sanguine about my chances. Their investigation thus far, which included searches of Runyon's apartment and car, had turned up no additional evidence against him, but they'd also found nothing to refute what they already had: the button; his strength of motive; his lack of an alibi.

The inspectors were willing to share a few details. Verity Daniels had facial contusions and had also been struck with an unidentified object that caused blunt force trauma to her skull. The blow hadn't been fatal; strangulation was the official cause of death. The body had been stripped of clothing, and of the platinum gold wristwatch and blood-ruby ring Runyon had described and any other jewelry she might have been wearing, then wrapped in a sheet of plastic—the common kind painters use as dropcloths—and bound with duct tape. Daniels's BMW had been found in a parking area on Lake Merced Boulevard, on the opposite side of the lake from where her body had been dumped. No signs of violence inside or out, no fingerprints other than hers, no clues of any kind. Figone obliged when I asked for the exact discovery location of the body; that was the only other piece of information I got from them.

I didn't mention Ostrander, Canaday, and Hank Avery. Premature. I had no reason to believe any of the three was guilty, and cops don't appreciate private citizens trying to influence or muddy up their investigations. Besides which, Figone and Samuels had requested a copy of Runyon's report on the alleged extortion. The three names were right there; it was their business, at least for the time being, whether or not they followed up on any of them.

On my way home from the second futile trip to Bayfront Towers, I took a long detour over to Lake Merced. No particular reason, but it wasn't curiosity, either. The more detailed knowledge you have, the better you're able to do your job.

The lake, big and spring-fed, is in the southwestern corner of the city near the Daly City line. Six-hundred-and-fifty surface acres surrounded by a narrow fringe of parkland and bounded by three golf courses, residential areas, S.F. State University, Fort Funston, and the ocean to the west. SFPD's firearms range is located there, as is a skeet shooting club and a sports center and boat house, and the National Guard Armory is close by. You can fish in it, row or canoe on it, drive or walk or bicycle around it. Off John Muir Drive at the southern end, where it narrows into the area known as Impound Lake, there's a small parking lot and a concrete footbridge that connects with the opposite shore, and not much else. Tule grass and other vegetation hug the shoreline along there. That was where Verity Daniels had been found, down among the tules at the edge of the lot near the bridge.

I parked near the approximate spot, walked over for a closer look. This area is pretty much deserted late at night, and when heavy fogbanks roll in off the Pacific, as they had on Saturday night, visibility gets cut down toward zero. Easy enough for Daniels's murderer to have driven her BMW in here, cut his lights, hauled the body out, and dumped it over a low pipe-rail fence into the tules. Even if another car had passed by during that time, the driver wouldn't have been able to see anything through the fog. Two minutes, three at the most—

No, more than that. He'd have wanted to make certain Jake's coat button stayed clenched in her hand, didn't somehow get lost in the lake; that was why he'd wrapped the body in the plastic sheeting. He'd have lowered rather than dropped her into the tules so there'd be less chance of the plastic coming loose.

The logistics told me a couple of other things. First, the perp had wanted the body found and found quickly; joggers, walkers, fishermen were all over this section of the lake in the morning hours. And second, he knew the area. This was not the kind of place you'd pick at random to either commit murder or dispose of a corpse after murder had been done. Did any of the East Bay suspects know Lake Merced that well? Maybe have lived in the city at one time? Something for Tamara to check on.

I drove around the lake and up Lake Merced Boulevard past where Daniels's BMW had been abandoned. There wasn't much along there except the golf club on one side and the lake and parkland on the other—a section that also would have been deserted late on a foggy night. The location raised questions, the same ones that would occur to Figone and Samuels. Had the perp driven the BMW here after dumping the body? Or had he used his own vehicle, then switched it for the BMW at some other place? In that case, what was his reason or reasons for choosing this particular spot? One possibility was that he'd needed a way out of the area and it was easy walking distance to public transportation on 19th Avenue. Unless he'd had an accomplice who'd followed him and picked him up.…

Speculating again, giving too much free rein to my imagination. Wasted effort without more facts.