Vixen Read online

“You said he drives a van. Make, model, color?”

  “A Dodge Ram, dark blue. The right rear panel has a dent and a long scrape—a parking lot accident.”

  “Can you give me the license number?”

  She could, and I wrote it down.

  “Anything else you can tell me that might help me find him? Friends in the area, someone he might turn to for help?”

  “There’s no one like that. He doesn’t make friends easily.” Cory Beckett shifted position in the chair, recrossed her legs the other way. Gnawed on her lip a little before she said, “Do you honestly think you can find him?”

  “Sure he can,” Melikian said. “He’s the best, him and his people.”

  She said, “I don’t care what you have to do or what it costs.”

  Abe winced at that, but he didn’t say anything.

  “No guarantees, of course,” I said. “But if you’re right that your brother is still somewhere in this general area and working around boats, the chances are reasonably good.”

  “The one thing I ask,” she said, “is that you let me know the minute you locate him. Don’t try to talk him into coming back, don’t talk to him at all if it can be avoided. Let me do it—I’m the only one he’ll listen to.”

  “Fair enough. You understand, though, that if he refuses to return voluntarily, there’s nothing we can do to force him.”

  Melikian said, “She understands. I explained it to her.”

  “And that if he does refuse, we’re bound to report his whereabouts to the authorities.”

  Cory Beckett nodded, and Abe said, “Do it myself, in that case,” without looking at her. He wouldn’t sacrifice even a small portion of fifty thousand to keep his own mother out of jail.

  “One more question,” I said. “If we find him and bring him back, how do you intend to keep him from running away again?”

  “You needn’t concern yourself with that. I guarantee he won’t miss the trial.” She added, not so reassuringly given the fact that he’d already skipped on her, “Kenny and I are very close.”

  I asked her for a photograph of her brother, and she produced a five-by-seven color snapshot from a big leather purse: Kenneth Beckett standing alone in front of a sleek oceangoing yacht. You could tell he and Cory were siblings—same black hair, though his was lank; same facial bone structure and wiry build—but where she was somebody you’d notice in a crowd, he was the polar opposite. Presentable enough, but there was nothing memorable about him. Just a kid in his early twenties, like thousands of others. The kind of individual you could spend an afternoon with, and five minutes after parting you’d have already forgotten what he looked like.

  We got the paperwork out of the way, and Cory Beckett wrote me a check for her half of the retainer; we’d bill Melikian for his half. The check had her address and phone number on it. The apartment she shared with her brother was on Nob Hill, a very expensive neighborhood. Melikian had mentioned at the start of our conversation that she worked as a model. One of the more successful variety, apparently.

  We shook hands—hers lingered in mine a little too long, I thought—and she favored me with another of her concerned little smiles while Melikian patted her shoulder and chewed on her with his eyes. And that was that. Routine interview. Routine if slightly unusual skip-trace. Nothing special at all, except that for a change the client was a piece of eye candy.

  Just goes to show how wrong first impressions can be.

  2

  From Bryant Street I drove to the agency offices in South Park. It was almost five by then, but Tamara, a workaholic like Jake Runyon was and I used to be, would probably stay until seven or so. Unless she had a date tonight. She’d taken up again with her old boyfriend, Horace Fields, who had moved back to the city from Philadelphia after losing both his cellist’s chair with the philharmonic there and the wife he’d dumped Tamara for. The reconciliation was a mistake, as far as I was concerned—she didn’t seem as happy as she should have been if it was working out well—but she hadn’t asked for my opinion and I hadn’t offered it. The Dear Abby syndrome is not one of my shortcomings.

  I gave her a capsule report on the interview, then put the notes I’d made in order and gave them to her to transcribe into a casefile. Tamara does most of the agency’s computer work—I’ve learned to operate one of the things, but with limited skills and a certain reluctance—and she is about as expert as they come. She also coordinates the various investigations, handles the billing and financial matters. Tamara Corbin, twenty-eight-year-old desk jockey dynamo who had tripled our business since I’d made the wise, very wise, decision to make her a full partner.

  She set to work on the preliminaries. Skip-traces are an essential part of the agency’s business, along with insurance-related investigations and employee and personal background checks, and most can be dealt with by relying on the various real-time and other search engines we subscribe to. The Beckett case didn’t seem to be one of those because of the circumstances and particulars, but you never know what might turn up on an Internet search.

  She suggested I hang around while she ran the initial checks—she’s fast as well as expert—and I did that. Kerry wouldn’t be home much before seven and Emily would get dinner started; singing was her primary passion, but she also loved to cook. Very good at both, too.

  I was in my office, going over the file on a new, and routine, employee background check, when Tamara came in through the open connecting door carrying a printout in one purple-nailed hand. The purple polish didn’t go very well with her dark brown skin, or at least I didn’t think it did, but I wouldn’t say anything to her about that, either. Who was I to criticize the fashion trends of a woman young enough to be my granddaughter?

  “Nothing much on Kenneth Beckett,” she said. “No record prior to the grand theft charge, just a couple of minor moving violations and a bunch of parking tickets, most of them in the L.A. area. Worked at two yacht harbors down there, Marina del Rey and Newport Beach. Good employment records in both places, left both jobs voluntarily for unspecified reasons. Worked on Andrew Vorhees’ yacht for six months before his arrest—no problems there, either. Parents both dead, no family except for the sister. No traceable contacts with anybody else down south or up here.”

  “Pretty much confirms what Cory Beckett told me about him.”

  “Yeah. But I’ll bet she didn’t tell you anything about her background.” Tamara waggled an eyebrow. “Juicy stuff.”

  “What, you checking up on our clients now?”

  “After that fiasco with Verity Daniels, you bet I am.”

  The Daniels tangle was a sore subject with me, too. It had landed Jake Runyon in jail on a bogus attempted rape charge, almost gotten the agency sued for malfeasance, and its finish was the source of my promise to Kerry to keep myself out of harm’s way.

  “Besides,” Tamara went on, “her background and her brother’s are pretty closely linked. Kenny may be a nerd, but she’s anything but. Some real interesting facts here.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one, she’s not a model. Not now, not ever.”

  “No? Then what does she do for a living?”

  “Marries rich dudes. Two of ’em so far.”

  Well, that wasn’t much of a surprise. “Married now? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”

  “Nope. First husband divorced her after eight months. She got enough of a settlement to set her up real sweet for a while. Number two, rich dude named Lassiter, lasted a little over a year. No divorce there, though.”

  “No?”

  “Guy offed himself.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Financial setbacks, according to the note he left,” Tamara said. “But there’s more to it than that. Two grown sons from a previous marriage claimed Cory was responsible for Lassiter’s suicide.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “Several. Two substantiated affairs during the year of marriage. Quote, bizarre sexual practices detrimental to h
is mental health, unquote.”

  “Bizarre in what way?”

  “Not a matter of public record. Could be anything from orgies to goats to whips and chains.”

  “Goats?”

  Tamara chuckled. One of her less-than-endearing traits is an off-the-wall sense of humor that she sometimes uses to shock my old-fashioned sensibilities. “Sons also claimed she mishandled finances, and coerced their father into making a new will that cut them out of the estate and left everything to her. They sued and had enough legal chops to get a favorable ruling. They got the big slice, she got a little one. Case brought her some negative publicity—probably one of the reasons she moved up here.”

  “So she’s a promiscuous gold digger. What does that have to do with her missing brother?”

  “Nothing, maybe. Except that both her exes owned yachts berthed at local marinas, the first one in Marina del Rey, the second in Newport Beach—the same places Kenny worked.”

  I chewed on that for a bit. “So maybe it was the husbands who got him his jobs there.”

  “Uh-uh. He was working at both marinas before she hooked up with either guy.”

  “Well? Maybe she likes boats, too, hangs around where her brother works, and that’s how she met the future husbands.”

  “Or Kenny set up the meetings for her.”

  “What’re you suggesting? The two of them working a scam to find her eligible marriage partners?”

  “Could be. He trolls around, finds a likely prospect, baits the hook, and she does the rest.”

  “Immoral, if so, but not illegal.”

  “No, but if that’s the game, neither one of ’em’s as innocent as she pretended to you.”

  “Clients have lied to us before,” I said. “We don’t have to like them or believe them as long as the lies have no bearing on the job we’re hired to do. You know that. Besides, Abe Melikian’s footing half the bill, and we know he’s all right.”

  Tamara said cynically, “Good thing for him he’s not a rich yachtsman,” and retreated into her office.

  * * *

  Since the Beckett case was essentially mine, I was back at the agency again the next morning for the follow-through. Tamara had compiled a list of all the yacht harbors and marinas in the greater Bay Area—quite a few, large and small, within a seventy-five-mile radius—and she and I called the ones large enough to have full-time staff members who could check their records for recent hires. No Kenneth Beckett or anyone answering his description at any of them. Finding him wasn’t going to be that easy. If he was working at all, it could be for a private party rather than as an employee of a marina, boatyard, or boat owner. Or at a marina or boatyard outside the seventy-five-mile radius. And in any event, he might well be using a name other than his own. It would take legwork, possibly a lot of it, to track him down.

  In the old days I handled most of the field jobs myself, until it got to be too much effort for even a fairly robust man in his sixties. Now and then I make an exception and climb back into the field harness, but hunting for Kenneth Beckett wouldn’t be one of those times. Likely the search would require piling up a considerable number of highway miles, showing Beckett’s photograph and asking the same questions over and over again—pretty dull and time-consuming work.

  Not for Jake Runyon, though. He thrived on that kind of assignment. Liked being out on the road, moving from place to place. Worked best when he could set his own schedule, his own pace. And there was enough gap time in his caseload to allow him to take on the Beckett hunt.

  Good man, Jake, a former Seattle cop and former investigator for one of the larger private agencies in the Pacific Northwest. Big, slab-faced, hammer-jawed. Smart, tough, loyal, and honest as they come. He’d moved to San Francisco after the cancer death of his second wife, to try to reestablish a bond with an estranged gay son from his first marriage, the only family he had left. The restoration attempt hadn’t worked out; he and Joshua were still estranged and would likely remain so.

  Runyon had been something of a reticent loner, still grieving for his dead wife, the first year or so he was with us. He’d come out of his shell somewhat after his hookup with Bryn Darby, but now that the relationship might be ending, he’d begun to drift back into his loner mode. A hard man to get close to in any case. My connection with him was mainly professional; we didn’t socialize, probably never would. But we got along well, and more importantly, we had each other’s backs. I’d trust him in any crisis and with my life—had done both, in fact, on more than one occasion.

  Tamara and I were just finishing up when Runyon stopped in to deliver some material he’d dug up on a consumer fraud case. We briefed him on the Beckett investigation, and after he’d looked over the casefile he asked, “Priority job?”

  “Medium to start,” I said. “Beckett’s trial is three weeks off, but it might take a while to find him.”

  “Okay. I’ll get moving on it right away.”

  3

  JAKE RUNYON

  It looked like a fairly routine case to him, too, at first. He’d handled dozens like it over the years—skip-traces, bail jumpers, missing persons—and with less information than he had to go on here. Assuming the sister was right about Kenneth Beckett’s habit patterns, the odds were pretty good that he could be found before the trial date. Beckett didn’t seem to be either mature or bright, which made him a poor candidate for grounding himself without leaving a trackable trail. The one potentially tricky part, once he was located, was convincing him to come back to the city to stand trial.

  There were more than two hundred marinas and boatyards on Tamara’s list. But Runyon figured he could eliminate the ones in close proximity to the city—Oakland, Alameda, Sausalito, Pacifica, the near end of the Peninsula. Even a half-smart, short-tether runaway who didn’t like to travel would choose a hiding place at some distance from his home turf. The remaining possibilities within a seventy-five-mile radius could be covered by one man in the allotted time frame, though if Runyon couldn’t get a line on the subject in a week or so, Tamara had said she’d assign Alex Chavez or part-timer Deron Stewart to help out.

  Runyon started in Half Moon Bay, moved from there to the mid-Peninsula area, then down to San Jose and the rest of the South Bay. No luck.

  Stockton, Antioch, Rio Vista, Martinez, Suisun City, Vallejo. No luck.

  The North Bay next, beginning with Sausalito, even though it was just across the Golden Gate Bridge, because of the town’s large number of boating facilities. Another blank there.

  And one more in San Rafael.

  On up to Port Sonoma. And that was where, on the morning of the fifth day, he finally got his fix on the subject’s whereabouts.

  The Port Sonoma marina was located in a wetlands area along the Petaluma River near where it emptied into San Pablo Bay. Good-sized place with a ferry landing, a fuel dock and pump-out station, bait shop on one of the floats, and several rows of boat slips. The craft berthed in the slips were all sailboats and small inboards—no big yachts.

  The day, a Saturday, was warmish for late November, and the marina was doing a moderately brisk business—individuals and groups getting their craft ready to join those that already dotted the bay and the winding upland course of the river. Runyon went first to the bait shop, but nobody there recognized the photo of Kenneth Beckett. Same at the fuel dock. He walked down through an open gate to the slips. The first half-dozen people he buttonholed had nothing to tell him; the seventh, a lean, sun-bleached man in his mid-fifties working on the deck of a Sea Ray Sundancer, was the one who did.

  The boat owner took a long look at the photo before he said, “Yeah, I’ve seen this kid. How come you’re looking for him? He do something he shouldn’t have?”

  “Yes, and he’ll be in more trouble if I don’t locate him soon. When did you see him?”

  “Last weekend. No, Friday, actually—week ago yesterday.”

  “Here?”

  “Right. Looking for work, he said. Seemed to know boats pretty
well. But nobody’s hiring, so I told him to check up at Belardi’s.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Upriver six or seven miles.”

  “What kind of place?”

  “Wide spot on the river—sandwich and bait shop, a few slips, some old fishing shacks. I heard the owner, old man Belardi, was looking for a handyman to fix up the rundown pier they got there.”

  “How do I get to Belardi’s by car?”

  “Easily. Go east on the highway, turn left at the first stoplight—Lakeville Highway. Six or seven miles, like I said. Can’t miss their sign.”

  * * *

  Belardi’s turned out to be one of those little enclaves that look as though they’ve been bypassed by time and progress. The restaurant and bait shop, the pier and sagging boathouse, the handful of slips, the scattering of small houses and even smaller fishing shacks nearby all had a weathered, colorless look, like buildings in a black-and-white fifties movie. The Petaluma River—a saltwater estuary, Runyon had heard somewhere, that had been granted river status so federal funds could be used to keep it dredged for boat traffic—was a couple of hundred yards wide at this point, its far shore a long, wide stretch of tule marsh threaded with narrow waterways. More tule grass choked the muddy shoreline on this side.

  Several cars were parked in the gravel lot in front, none of them a dark blue Dodge van. Runyon crossed past the restaurant to a set of rickety stairs that led down to another gravel area, this one used as a combination boat repair and storage yard. From the stairs he could see that some recent work had been done on the short, shaky-looking pier that extended out to the slips. Two men were on board an old sportfisherman, one of five boats moored there; another man was just climbing up onto the pier from the float between the slips. None was Kenneth Beckett.

  Runyon braced the man on the pier first, got a couple of negative grunts for the effort. The two on the sportfisherman didn’t recognize the subject’s photo, either, but one of them said, “Talk to old man Belardi inside. Maybe he can help you.”

  Old man Belardi was an overweight seventy or so, cheerful until Runyon showed him the snapshot; then his round face turned mournful. “Don’t tell me you’re a cop.”