Boobytrap Read online

Felicia was Felicia Jackson, a friend of Tamara’s who worked in the SFPD’s communications department. Tamara never ceased to amaze me, not only with her computer skills but in other ways; in a few short months she’d made personal contacts in strategic places that it would’ve taken me years to establish.

  “Any news,” I said, “even if it’s unconfirmed.”

  “You got it.”

  Into Quincy, out of it again rolling southeast on Highway 70. Traffic was fairly light; I let the speedometer needle ease up over seventy and hang there. My instinct was to bear down even harder, but I was afraid to run the risk of accident or attracting the attention of the Highway Patrol. There were quite a few HP patrols in the Sierras during summer months and they weren’t inclined to be forgiving of speeders.

  Marian still had nothing to say. I glanced over at her now and then and her position didn’t change; she seemed almost catatonic, lost deep inside herself. The inside of my head was not a good place to be right now; the inside of her head, I thought, must be three times as bleak and haunted.

  We were coming up on a wide place in the road called Cromberg when the phone buzzed. I yanked the receiver out of its cradle, almost dropped it in my haste to get the line open.

  Cantrell. And a static-free connection. I heard him loud and clear when he said, “You’re out of luck.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “No rentals in the Half Moon Bay area by Donald Latimer or Jacob Strayhorn.”

  “Your office is sure of that?”

  “Positive. I even had my girl check back two full months, just in case.”

  “How wide an area did she cover?”

  “All of San Mateo County.”

  “All right. Listen, call her back and have her check Santa Cruz County rentals. And if that’s a dead end... a list of all the rentals by a single male in the Half Moon Bay area over the past six weeks. He could’ve used another name.”

  “You don’t want much for your hundred bucks.”

  “I thought you weren’t doing this for the money. Or the publicity.”

  “... Okay, right. But what good’s a list going to do you? Rental could be in a man’s name only, but he’s taking the place for his family, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. Bound to be a lot of names in any case, this time of year.”

  “We can narrow it down. Chances are he wouldn’t have much money to spend, and he’d have to pay in cash. And his references would be shaky at best.”

  “Have to be a low-end property,” Cantrell said musingly. “A dog listing that some agent’d be so anxious to unload, he wouldn’t bother to check references. I don’t operate that way, but there’re some in the business who do.”

  Oh, sure, you’re not one of them. I said, “Anything that looks promising, have your office person call the agent and find out if the renter’s description matches Latimer’s.”

  “Fat chance. He looks like half the white guys on the street these days. Besides, that’s liable to take all afternoon.”

  “You planning on going anywhere?”

  “No, but I’m tired of sitting around, away from all the action.”

  “I feel for you. But not half as much as I feel for the Dixons.”

  “Yeah, all right, I hear you. But this is the end of it.”

  “One way or the other,” I said.

  If he heard that, he didn’t respond to it. Noise had started up in the background, voices chattering words I couldn’t make out. After about fifteen seconds, Cantrell said, “Mack just came in. Looks like the bomb squad’s finally finished and on their way out of here. Bomb didn’t blow up, at least there wasn’t any big boom, but something must’ve happened. Mack said an ambulance just went tearing out that way.”

  I let all of that pass. “Call your office. Don’t let us down, Cantrell.”

  “Count on me, don’t worry.”

  Yeah. The lid was coming off the shotgun slaying of Lieutenant Dewers; once it was all the way off, the excitement level at Deep Mountain Lake would climb again. That and the impending media swarm would lure Cantrell like flame lures bugs. If his “girl” had gotten back to him before then, I’d get another call from him. If not, I’d just had my last conversation with the caring, reliable, and humanitarian Hal Cantrell.

  Marian roused herself as I slid the phone receiver back into its cradle. She’d been listening to my end of the exchange, had figured out from that what I had Cantrell doing. She wanted to know how I knew Latimer had been living in the Half Moon Bay area. I told her about Nils Ostergaard’s suspicions, the Safeway receipt I’d found in his truck.

  “Latimer killed Nils, didn’t he. It wasn’t an accident.”

  “It looks that way. I think he caught Nils snooping around his cottage Sunday night and killed him there and then moved the body later.”

  “Poor Nils. My God.” Then she asked, “Do you think it’s possible Latimer took Chuck to Half Moon Bay?”

  “Possible, yes.”

  “But not likely.”

  “As likely as any other possibility right now.”

  She didn’t believe it. She fell silent again.

  All right, I thought, so it’s a long shot. What else do we have except long shots?

  The miles rolled away and we were in Truckee shortly before three o’clock. I stopped on the outskirts for gas and something to put in my stomach. No food since last night and the tension had created a sour, burning pain under my breastbone. While the tank was filling I bought three packaged sandwiches and a couple of sodas in the station’s convenience store. We were back on the road again in ten minutes, heading south on Interstate 80 five minutes after that.

  Marian refused the sandwich I offered and I couldn’t coax her into it. She did take one of the sodas. I washed a tasteless ham-and-cheese down, made myself eat a second sandwich, some kind of stale meat, on the theory that I needed to keep my own fuel level up; the food lay in my stomach in a hard glutinous mass and the carbonation in the soda gave me gas that I had difficulty controlling. Not that Marian would have noticed if I’d belched like a foghorn. She sat over tight against the passenger door, her head tilted back and her eyes closed, but she wasn’t resting. The tension level in the car was as heavy as dead air in a vacuum.

  Up and over Donner Summit, down past Emigrant Gap. I kept glancing at her, at the equally silent car phone. I wanted the thing to ring—and I didn’t want it to ring. If it did and it was Tamara, it would probably be bad news.

  Baxter, Colfax, Bowman, down toward Auburn. Running into more traffic now. And my gut was hurting again; the damn sandwiches seemed to have solidified down there, resisting all internal efforts at digestion.

  Nothing from Tamara.

  Nothing from Cantrell.

  Auburn. Newcastle. Rocklin.

  The dashboard clock: 4:05. My wristwatch: 4:08.

  Roseville. Sacramento next.

  And the phone went off.

  Marian jumped, made a sound in her throat. I grabbed up the receiver, and Tamara’s voice said, “Felicia be just calling. There’s news.

  My breathing went a little funny. “Yes?”

  “State cops found Latimer’s car, the Chrysler.”

  “Where?”

  “In some trees just outside the Truckee-Tahoe airport.”

  “You mean abandoned?”

  “Since just after eight this morning,” Tamara said. “No sign of him or the boy. What he did, they think, he parked the car there and walked into the airport and rented himself a car under his own name, then drove it back and picked up the kid and whatever else was in the Chrysler. Cleaned out when it be found. The man’s got stones, you gotta give him that.”

  I was breathing all right again now. “What kind of car’d he rent?”

  “New Toyota wagon. Dark blue. You want the license?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She read off the number. Easy one; I wouldn’t forget it.

  “Not half as bad as it could be, right?” she said. “At least they didn’t find
any bodies.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Tamara.”

  “Just be hoping I don’t have to call you again.”

  Marian was a bent wall of stone beside me, her eyes like cave openings in its pale face. She said “Chuck?” as I replaced the handset, in the same fearful way she’d spoken his name on the Judsons’ dock earlier.

  “No word yet. Latimer switched cars at Truckee.”

  “Damn him.” Savage whisper. “Goddamn him.”

  I had nothing to say to that. We were both out of words again; the silence rebuilt, heavier than before. It was like something else in the car with us, an unclean thing crouched so close I could almost feel its prickly touch against my skin.

  Rush-hour slowdown getting through Sacramento: more nerve-strain, more frustration. We finally broke loose on the western outskirts and I opened her up to near eighty, not much of a risk because the average traffic-flow speed on the long stretch between Sacramento and Fairfield is upward of seventy.

  Five-twenty by the dashboard clock, and we were approaching the Carquinez Bridge, when the phone buzzed again.

  Cantrell this time, to my relief. “I’d just about given up on you,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you’re lucky I’m a man of my word. Some party going on up here.”

  And he’d already joined it, judging from the faint slur to his words. “I don’t care about that. What’ve you got for me?”

  “Four names, three towns on the coast—all low-end, short-term rentals. Took the girl until a few minutes ago to narrow it down that far. The original list—”

  “Latimer’s description match any of them?”

  “No. She talked to three of the agents, they see dozens of people every day, none of ‘em could remember back as far as a month, two months. Except one woman thought her client, the one in Montero Beach, was a fat guy in his sixties, but I know the agent, she drinks like a fish and you can’t—”

  “Names and addresses, Cantrell. Slowly.”

  Marian was alert beside me, and when she heard me say that she opened her purse, rummaged up a notebook and pencil. By then, Cantrell had run through the list once. I had him do it again, repeating everything aloud so Marian could write it down. Two of the names I asked him to spell so I could be certain we had them right.

  Adam Greenspan, 21178 Coast Highway, Montero Beach.

  Frank R. Slaydon, 1817 Seal Rock Road, Half Moon Bay.

  K. M. Dusay, 850 Bluffside Drive, Half Moon Bay.

  Howard Underwood, 1077 Cypress Hill, Pescadero.

  “Any of the names mean anything to you?” Cantrell asked.

  “No.”

  “Slaydon’s a little like Strayhorn, huh?”

  “A little. Okay, Cantrell. Thanks—we appreciate all your help.”

  “Don’t forget where you got it,” he said, and we both disconnected at the same time. For the last time.

  Marian said, “If any of these men is Latimer ... which one?”

  “No idea yet, but if he was running true to form at the time, maybe we can find out.”

  I still had the receiver in my hand; I tapped the memory key for my office number. When Tamara came on, I said, “Now I’ve got something—computer work for you to do. Call up everything you can locate on the Latimer case five years ago, see if any of the four names I’m going to give you is connected in any way. This is urgent, Tamara.”

  “Be on it soon as we hang up. Names?” And when she had them, “You must be close to home by now. Where?”

  “About fifteen minutes from the Bay Bridge,” I said. “We should be at the Dixon home before six-thirty if the traffic cooperates. If you can’t reach me on the car phone, try the number there.” I asked Marian for it, rather than trust my memory, and relayed it to Tamara.

  During the evening rush most of the bridge traffic is eastbound, out of the city; since we were westbound we got across without much slowdown. 101 South was congested as usual. I stood it as long as I could, got off and did some maneuvering on side streets that brought us up into Monterey Heights almost as fast as a more direct route would have. It was 6:25—and Tamara hadn’t called back—when I pulled up in front of the Dixons’ Spanish-style house.

  “I don’t see Pat’s car,” Marian said.

  “He’d have it in the garage if he’s been holed up all day.”

  “Oh God, please let him be here.”

  She wasn’t talking to me, so I didn’t answer. She was out of the car before I was; I took her arm to steady her as we climbed the front steps, both of us stiff and sweaty and drawn to the snapping point.

  The front door was locked; Marian used her key. And we went in to find out if God was going to answer her prayer, give us at least a partial reprieve.

  Tues., July 2—6:30 P.M.

  Everything is ready.

  All I have to do now is call Dixon. Not just yet, though, let the bastard sweat a while longer. I’m in no hurry, I don’t want to be out of here and on the road to Indiana until after dark. Relax. Finish this entry, have a beer and the last can of chili. No hurry at all.

  I just went in to check on the kid. He’s quiet, but what else could he be, gagged and blindfolded and tied so tight to the bed he can’t even move a finger? Pretty good kid, didn’t give me any trouble all day. Too bad about him. But he’s a Dixon, his old man’s blood runs in his veins, so he won’t be any great loss. Besides, there’ll be a second or two when Mr. Prosecutor realizes too late what’s about to happen to both him and his son, and I’d do anything for that second or two. Sweet! Sweeter than the original Plan, even if I don’t get to see the big finish. Almost makes all the crap I had to go through at the lake worthwhile.

  The one thing that would make it sweeter still was if fat old Mike Hammer was trussed up in there next to the kid. Bothers me he’s still alive. Shotgun surprise got somebody else instead, that’s what the radio said a few minutes ago, some Plumas County cop. One less cop in the world, that’s fine with me, but it should’ve been fatso. Well, I can fix him when I come back from Indiana.

  If I come back from Indiana. If I even make it to Lawler Bluffs.

  Every law enforcement agency in the country is looking for me by now and they’ll double their efforts after tonight. Public Enemy No. 1. Hah! I really don’t give a shit if they get me eventually, I’ve pretty much known all along I’m living on borrowed time and I’m resigned to it now. Rip Kathryn apart with marbles and bones before that happens and I’ll die satisfied and happy. But even if I can’t give her what she deserves, I’ll have made sure Cotter and Turnbull and Dixon got theirs. I’ll see the three of them in hell, at least.

  I wonder if this is the way Bonnie and Clyde felt on their bank-robbing spree? My old pal, the Unabomber, on his way to the post office with another surprise package? The guy who took out all the lawyers with the assault rifle?

  Steady, heady, ready. Happy as a lark.

  Man, I feel good!

  SEVENTEEN

  DIXON WAS THERE.

  He heard us coming into the vestibule; footsteps made sharp clicking sounds on the tile floor, and there he was in the archway to a darkened living room, staring at us out of eyes that even at a distance looked like those of a hunted wolf’s. His lean face was haggard, showing beard shadow. The white shirt and slacks he wore were both rumpled, pulled out of shape, as if he’d been sleeping in them.

  Marian said “Pat!” in a choked voice and ran to him. He folded her against him, held her, but he was looking at me over her shoulder. An angry, desperate look.

  After a few seconds he eased her back and to one side, with his arm still draped around her shoulders, and said to me in a scratchy voice, “What the hell’s the matter with you? I told you to take her to the Doyles’.”

  “You told me some other things, too,” I said. “That you were going to notify the state and federal agencies about the kidnapping, for one.”

  “Listen ...”

  “No, you listen. Marian and I have a pretty good idea what’s going on in that head
of yours and we’re going to sit down and talk about it, the three of us, while there’s still time.”

  “What do you think you know?”

  “Pat, for Christ’s sake, sacrificing yourself won’t bring Chuck back. And even if it could, you can’t make that decision alone. You can’t go through with it alone.”

  “He’s right, darling,” Marian said. “It’s my choice, too. I won’t let you shut me out.”

  He glared at me a little longer, but the glare lacked heat now. He stroked Marian’s hair, then turned away from her and went back into the living room.

  She followed him and I followed her. Big, stucco-walled room furnished in a Spanish motif—wall hangings, tiles, pottery jars. Heavy drapes were drawn across the front window. Dixon sank onto a massive leather couch; Marian sat beside him and took his hand. I moved over to stand facing them in front of a tile-trimmed fireplace.

  Nobody said anything. Up to me, I thought. Get him to admit it, that’s the first step.

  “What time did Latimer call you, Pat?”

  His head jerked up. But he lost the rigid posture almost immediately; his shoulders slumped and he used his free hand to maul his head in that way he had. His jaw, though, retained its stubborn jut.

  “What time, Pat?”

  “Tell him,” Marian said, “for heaven’s sake!”

  “Few minutes before nine,” he said, as if the words were being ripped out of his throat. “Not long before you called from Judson’s.”

  “Did he give you any idea where he was?”

  “No. In transit, he said.”

  “He let you talk to Chuck?”

  “Briefly.”

  Marian’s fingers dug at him. “He was all right?”

  “Scared, that’s all.”

  “What’d Latimer say to you?” I asked.

  “He said if I wanted to see my son alive again, I’d do exactly what he told me. Exactly. He stressed the word more than once.”

  “Go on. What else?”

  “Don’t tell anyone that he had Chuck—no one, even Marian. Don’t talk to anyone in my office, or to the police or the FBI. Don’t leave the house until I heard from him again, some time after five o’clock. He wouldn’t call again before that.”