Sudden Exposure Read online

  “It was a master work,” I said twenty minutes later as my three colleagues opened the white containers on Howard’s dining room table. The one thing I’d been dead sure of after Bryn Wiley’s rally was that Murakawa, Pereira, and Leonard would need a banquet. I owed them. I handled banquet preparations Berkeley style, or at least my style. I called To Go Getters to deliver a feast gathered from four local restaurants that would accommodate Leonard’s ulcer, Paul Murakawa’s vegetarianism, and Pereira’s insistence on meat, spices, and a wide variety of tastes—all in finger food form so she could filch from carton after carton. And of course, my own Howard-enforced proscription against junk food.

  If Howard had been home, he would have built a fire worthy of Celtic kings in the living room’s huge hearth. It would have crackled and snapped and sent smoke across the room. As it was, the air was clear and the normal eau de mold hidden under garlic, onion, chili, and curry. Sixteen white cardboard and plastic containers (Styrofoam is outlawed in Berkeley) sat on the big, well-scratched mahogany dining room table that had probably come new to this house in the thirties. The chairs around it had obviously dribbled in singly like the tenants and were about as compatible. In uniform, her blond hair permed but still shiny, a touch of eye shadow and mascara visible to the discerning eye, Connie Pereira looked entirely too professional to be sitting on a half-runged ladderback chair—too professional to be reaching greasy pincer fingers. Leonard, on the other hand, looked like he usually wasn’t allowed in the house.

  “Bryn Wiley,” he grumbled, yanking a captain’s chair in closer to the table, “what the hell did she do a fool thing like that for?”

  Pereira snared a plump lamb samosa, surveyed the other boxes, and shifted her shoulders preparatory to a cross-table lunge at the pot stickers. Inconsiderate criminals could end a code seven meal anytime; our most important dining skill was speed. “You got anything on the nudist?”

  “Nothing,” I said in disgust. “But I’ll keep on it. Leonard’s putting out the word on the Avenue.”

  Leonard, midway through a slice of polenta with sour cream, nodded. No fool, he carried a cloth napkin to tuck under his chin. Patrol officers pay for their own dry cleaning.

  Murakawa was gnawing on a gray thing I took to be a vegetarian drumstick. It even had a faux bone in the middle and ersatz “skin” that made the whole concoction resemble something left in the morgue for a decade. Everything in his boxes looked like the last stop before composter.”

  “What about the nudist, Smith? He your Bare Buns?” Pereira asked.

  “If there are two bald nudists covered with poison oak, I may have a question. If not, it’s Bryn Wiley who’s got the problem—he rubbed his hand down her arm.”

  “The gift that keeps giving, huh?” Pereira laughed.

  “No,” Murakawa said.

  “No, what?”

  “Poison oak isn’t spread from person to person. You have to get it directly from the plant or, if the plant burns, from the smoke.”

  “Surely, Sam Johnson would know—”

  “Yeah, Smith, sure as you did.” Pereira laughed.

  “Dogs,” Leonard barked. “Two weeks I was scratching, all because I rubbed a dog in Tilden Park.”

  “Well there, of course,” Murakawa admitted, “the sap was still wet on the dog’s fur.”

  “So if the nudist had a handful of sap?”

  “Then, Jill,” Leonard said, “Sam Johnson’s got himself one helluva committed nudist. Or a guy who’s got no more sense than he has clothes. He’s already covered with itch and he’s going back for more.”

  We looked at Murakawa for the nudist’s prognosis, but he was busy forking in nut and bean salad. Pereira had predicted that his calorie intake from any of these meals would be minus and eventually his teeth would be worn down to the gum. Then, she’d added, he could move to a diet of bean paste and tofu. When he finished chewing, Murakawa looked up and asked, “What about the food truck in the park?”

  “Gone before we could get the crowd under control,” Leonard said.

  “Didn’t you even get the license?”

  “No. Don’t matter. We could bust our butts running it down, but I’ll tell you what we’ll find: rented with phony papers. You been around the Avenue as long as I have—since the trolleys ran to Oakland and they still had the telegraph lines, in case you’re asking, Murakawa …”

  Murakawa, the last person to ask an intrusive question of a colleague, smiled uncomfortably, and helped himself to more fried gluten balls. Pereira shook her head.

  “We all know who’s behind it,” Leonard said.

  I nodded. Sam Johnson had done a great job of manipulation all the way around. When the late night news came, it would have discreet shots of the rash-red running nudist carrying his banner. As for Bryn Wiley, she would be just a comical footnote. I put down my fishburger with fried onions and mushrooms. “So, Leonard, where do you see this going from here?”

  “Where could it?” Pereira demanded. “Johnson’s won.”

  “Yeah, but Wiley was handing the press something afterward,” Murakawa said.

  “Press release. By that time it was already outdated.” Pereira had already eyed my burger, and recognizing it as a lost cause, she shifted her eyes quickly over the gluten balls to Leonard’s remaining meat loaf.

  Leonard pulled his plate in closer, looking every bit the shaggy carnivore. “If you’d asked me a couple years ago, I’da said Johnson’s one of the ‘think first’ rads. Not in it to spite his parents, if you know what I mean. He really cared about justice, or justice as he saw it, and a fair share for at least the people he was focusing on.”

  “But?” I prompted.

  “But since he got married, he’s changed. Maybe he’s just worn down with losing, maybe he’s sick of mediating the squabbles of the kids who are in the movement to spite their parents, maybe he’s sick of seeing them waste their energy to make a point no one cares about.”

  “Like his own traffic clog at San Pablo and Uni?”

  “Yeah. Great tactic, but the movement came out of it looking like spoiled brats, and you can believe no one caught in that traffic jam was rushing to contribute the next time Johnson needed cash or lawyers. Yeah, maybe that’s exactly what Johnson’s had enough of. You know, Smith, old rads either plug on against injustice until they drop, just doing it to do it, or they become old Republicans, or some—and I figured Johnson would be one—become statesmen. And some snap from the frustration.”

  Pereira’s plate was empty. She surveyed the empty containers. “Dessert?”

  “Next month,” I said.

  “Some hostess you are. There’s nothing worse than dinner with no dessert.”

  I was just about to agree wholeheartedly.

  But of course, there was something worse. The radio crackled. “Six Adam nineteen and six Adam one.”

  “Nineteen. We’re both here.”

  “You’ve got a nine-one-one call on Tamalpais. Possible one eighty-seven.”

  “Do you have a street number for that?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “I’ll check.”

  It was Bryn Wiley’s address.

  One eighty-seven is homicide.

  Chapter 8

  I RAN FOR THE car, hit the lights and siren, and got the dispatcher back before I was out of the driveway. “The one eighty-seven, who’s the victim?”

  “Caller didn’t say. Call came via CHP.”

  Cellular phone 911 calls go to the Highway Patrol. “Any other victims?”

  “No.”

  “Suspect?”

  “Guy who called said: ‘A woman’s been shot,’ gave the address, and hung up.”

  But CHP would have recorded the phone number. “Who’s the phone listed to?”

  “A Bryn Wiley.”

  “Bryn Wiley! He called on her own phone? And then hung up? How’d he sound: angry, scared?”

  “He called CHP.”

  “Get ’em back and find out for me. Thanks.
And this scene, on Tamalpais, it’s a hillside with a lot of underbrush. I’m going to need every backup unit available.” I wove the car through the two-lane traffic on College Avenue until I could cut up to Piedmont Avenue—Fraternity Row. Two lanes there, too, but grassy islands between them. Lights and sirens should clear a street. They don’t. Drivers freeze in indecision; pedestrians stop mid-crosswalk to gawk, as if the patrol car’s in a movie and they’re the audience. I yanked the wheel right, around a Suzuki Samurai, left to skirt a clutch of students, right, onto the grass and past three double-parked vans.

  Like strikes of lightning Bryn Wiley pierced my mind: Bryn holding a press conference on Sam Johnson’s turf. So stupid. But so in-your-face gutsy. And she’d come within a hair of winning the crowd. No wonder she was revered by scores of Berkeleyans—our own secular Joan of Arc.

  But when she’d gotten home from the People’s Park debacle, humiliated, and had imagined Sam Johnson chortling with his friends as I had, did she crumble? Did she stand quivering as she had by the Volvo, or did she snap back with a fury ten times greater than she’d aimed at me? I had no idea what was beneath those reactions. And my guess was that she didn’t either. Maybe she was too scared to look. Maybe her campaigns were more necessary to her than she was to them. Maybe she couldn’t give them up.

  I got lucky on the road behind campus, and cut below the Ngingma Institute, Berkeley’s bit of Tibet.

  If Bryn had been shot in the park, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But in her own driveway …

  Maybe the victim wasn’t Bryn. My stomach clutched. It could be Ellen. God, I didn’t want it to be Ellen.

  I picked up the mike. “Adam nineteen. Control, put me priority for the ID tech.”

  “Done, nineteen. Ambulance rolled from Kensington. It’s already at the scene.”

  Ambulances usually wait till they’re sure of cover. Why hadn’t this one? “Any word on suspects?” Could they be behind the redwoods or on the hillside behind Bryn’s, ready to pick off the medics, or us? “Who’s supervising the scene?”

  “Let me see. Grayson’s out at the Telegraph scene. Lieutenant’s … you are Smith, until Grayson gets there. On suspects, nothing.”

  “Give me a radio channel and get everyone on it.”

  “Channel four.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ten-four.”

  I pulled up on Tamalpais Road just before Acosta. The street was dark, those tree-muted streetlights merely blurs two stories up. Cars hugged the curb, parked two wheels on the sidewalk. I gazed ahead at that sharp elbow curve. Bryn’s driveway was just past the midpoint. But the redwoods across the street blocked it out.

  “This is Adam nineteen. On Tamalpais half block below the curve,” I said into the mike as I pulled to the curb. “We don’t know what we’ve got here. The responsible could be anywhere. There could be more than one. Acosta and I’ll do the scope from this end.” Acosta pulled up behind me. On the radio, officers were checking in. Murakawa and Kendall would come down from the top of Tamalpais.

  I moved in at a run, keeping close to the trees. I was nearly into the curve when I spotted the ambulance, its spinning roof light turning the sheet on the gurney red, the dark blue Volvo wagon in the driveway black, the ground around it a bloodier brown.

  Behind me, brakes screeched, one after another. Ahead, a couple in bathrobes stood in a yard. Acosta sprinted to them; he’d ask about suspects. I checked the redwood stand, flashing my light into the shades of black. Pereira was coming up behind me now, checking yards, behind cars. In a dark, wooded area like this only a fool would be spotted. Any suspect with a dime of sense would be long gone. I ran on toward the ambulance.

  Holding the IV, one medic was climbing into the back of the ambulance after the gurney. My chest went stiff as the protective vest. I was expecting to find Bryn dead. She wasn’t … yet. I peered up into the ambulance and saw enough of the blood-covered face to know I didn’t want to see more. Her honey-colored hair was so clean, so shiny. Every time I looked at death, it was always the same; the edge never wore off. I grabbed the second medic.

  “ID?”

  “Full pocketbook. Driver’s license, credit cards, the lot. Name’s Bryn Wiley.”

  Bryn, not Ellen. A wave of relief washed over me, then a second wave—guilt. “She alive?” I forced out through my clenched throat. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “Barely.”

  I followed him around to the cab. “She conscious?”

  “Hardly.”

  “Any sign of suspects?”

  “No.”

  “The victim, where did you find her?”

  “In the driver’s seat, the Volvo.” He climbed in, hit the lights and siren.

  An officer had to accompany her in the ambulance, for that one-in-a-million chance she would regain consciousness and make a dying declaration about her killer. Even then, for it to be accepted as evidence in court she had to have known that she was dying. I was real glad to be in charge of the scene; I didn’t want to ride across town looking at what was left of her face. Acosta was three feet away. “You ride with the victim. Sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Her purse is in there,” I said, shutting the door after him as the ambulance pulled away. I didn’t tell him to go through the purse, he’d do that. The medics had been first at the scene, first to see the body. “Get the medics’ statements at the hospital.” He’d call me as soon as he knew anything. Chances were, the first thing he’d have to report would be the time of death.

  I watched the red lights waver and die behind the curtain of redwoods. Now, in the emptiness, my stomach lurched. But I didn’t throw up. I don’t.

  Pushing away the picture of her bloody face, I called the dispatcher for time and case number. Taking out my notebook, I concentrated on noting the medics’ names and observations, the time the ambulance left, and Acosta’s presence in it. I could feel myself go numb making the shift into “all business.” I surveyed the Volvo. The driver’s window was two-thirds gone, but what was left held a bullet hole. Irrationally, I thought how furious Bryn would be that she’d wasted the time to get the window replaced—when she couldn’t even have delegated the job to Ellen because Ellen didn’t drive.

  Inside, shards of glass lay everywhere except on the driver’s seat. The backseat was covered with one of the comforters from the house, the black and white one.

  Headlights glowed white from both ends of the street. There was a squeal of brakes. Patrol officers from other beats. I had Leonard freeze the scene. “Run the cordon fifteen to twenty feet around the car. Wide as you can. Into the street. Include the house.”

  He nodded, got the yellow crime-scene tape out of his trunk, and began stringing it between two trees at the end of the driveway, around to the railing by the house steps, and on to three more trees before it made a circle of sorts. The sureness of each move reminded me how deceptive was his shambling appearance. “Scene frozen by 24—his badge number—17:24,” I added to the record.

  On the radio, patrol officers vied for the dispatcher’s attention. House lights came on in upstairs windows across the street: Doors banged shut. I handed out assignments: Sapolu, containment; Murakawa and Pereira, crowd interviews (technically everyone there was suspect; they’d all have to be interviewed, later taken to the station for statements); two officers to go door-to-door uphill, another pair downhill. And Bryn’s house, we needed to get in there. The situation that ended with Bryn in the driver’s seat, shot, could have started in the house. The suspect could have run back inside. Ellen could be there, dead or dying—or she could be the suspect.

  “Heling,” I called as she loped up. “Take MacElroy and Zonis. Go through the house. Could be one or more responsibles inside, could be another victim.” The trio would clear one room after another, keeping together, protecting each other.

  “Officer, what’s going on?” demanded a woman in a raincoat. She was leaning over the cordon, almost falling forward.
/>
  “There’s been an injury. Step back away from the scene, please.”

  “Injury to who?”

  “Step back, please.”

  “I live here, I’ve got a right to know.”

  “Step back, please. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.” Grudgingly, she stood upright and moved onto the street, muttering. Her only audible word was “rude.”

  I wrote down the last of the assignments and times. Sapolu, on contain, was moving like a terrier, barking at one incursion after another. Barking politely. The biggest problem with a homicide scene is keeping the extraneous sworn officers from tromping all over it. “Any of our friends want a look,” I said, “tell them you’re documenting everyone who comes on the scene, and we’ll take elimination prints from them. And, of course, they’ll be subpoenaed when the case hits court.”

  Inside Bryn Wiley’s house, lights went on in the living room. Good sign. I waited till the bedroom light shone, and called to Leonard. “Spray your light on the ground on the driver’s side of the car. See if there’s a casing there.”

  “Right.”

  Tanner, from beat 18, ran toward the scene just ahead of a student with a notebook, a reporter for The Daily Californian. In another ten minutes everyone with a police scanner and an inadequate social life would be at the scene. Before the Cal guy could speak, I said, “Much too soon. You’re looking at a couple hours before we have anything worth your time. Go to dinner and come back; you won’t miss anything.”

  I noted down Tanner’s arrival and the time, and that of the Cal reporter just for good measure. “Tanner, sketch the scene.”

  “Smith!” It was Leonard.

  “Got something?”

  “You bet. Number one.” He flashed the light three feet inside the cordon. It shone on a bullet casing.

  “Number two.” He moved the light six inches to the right. “Number three.” The beam shifted two feet forward. “Number four. A thirty oh six, don’t you think? Take down game bigger than you, Smith.”

  I glanced at Tanner to make sure he was noting the casings, then asked Leonard, “Nothing beyond there?”