12th of Never wmc-12 Read online

  Lynnette looked wild. Her hair was flat, her nails were bitten off, and the residue of the eye makeup she’d been wearing two days ago ringed her eyes.

  “Hi, Lynnette. Bubbleen,” Yuki said to the guard, “could you please remove Ms. Lagrande’s handcuffs?”

  “I don’t advise it, Yuki. She’s taken a few pokes at people.” Yuki said, “Okay. I hear you. Lynnette, have a seat. How are you doing?”

  “I’m just fine,” Lynnette said. “I’m rooming with three crack whores and a baby killer. I’m teaching them how to insult each other using proper grammar.”

  The guard left the room and Lynnette Lagrande sat down. She said to Yuki, “Who do I have to blow to get out of here?”

  Chapter 83

  YUKI SAID, “A woman like you really shouldn’t be here, Lynnette. You need help and so do I. Tell me about Jennifer Herman’s murder. And I need to know where Lily Herman has been living for the last year.”

  “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “I’m asking you to tell me the truth.”

  “If I know something and didn’t tell the police about it, does that make me an accessory?”

  “Maybe, but you’ve got me in your corner. I’d be willing to help you if you help me.”

  “Could you possibly be more vague?”

  “Could you?”

  “Okay, listen, Yuki. I had nothing to do with Jennifer’s death. Actually, I liked her.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Lynnette sighed. “I met Jennifer a couple of times when she came to school to talk about Lily. Lily was a mess. Withdrawn. Evasive. We never really got into it. Jennifer was reluctant to talk about her husband, and I didn’t want to talk about him, either. I liked him a lot.”

  She shook her head, as if it hurt to remember.

  “Talk about a colossal error in judgment. But anyway. Whatever Floyd Meserve tells you, I didn’t kill Jennifer. I’ve never killed anything or anybody.”

  “Floyd will testify under oath that you set up the meeting with him and Keith.”

  “I made the introduction, but for God’s sake, I knew Floyd was a cop! Keith was always talking about making Jennifer disappear. So I told Keith a story. That I knew this fixer. Blah, blah. And I’m saying to Keith, ‘Can you imagine?’ And Keith said, ‘Give me the guy’s name. Hook us up.’

  “I told Floyd about Keith, and Floyd said, ‘I could play the part of a hit man. I know enough of them.’ I thought Floyd would lock Keith up and Jennifer would be fine. Get it? And then Jennifer could parent her daughter without Keith around terrorizing them.

  “So I gave Floyd’s number to Keith and at the same time I told Keith I was done with him. He’s a scary man, Yuki. Even scarier when he’s frustrated. So like I said, I went up to my cottage to be alone. When I heard that Jennifer and Lily were missing, I thought Floyd actually took the job from Keith. Or if Floyd didn’t do it, maybe Keith did it himself. I was afraid for my own life.”

  “And where was Lily at this time? Do you know?”

  “Oh, I know where Lily was. That’s what I’m going to trade for getting these stupid charges against me dismissed.”

  Yuki thought about what Lynnette had said. It sounded true, and it wasn’t even at odds, really, with Floyd Meserve’s statement.

  “Hey,” Lynnette said. “I’m talking to you, you little gook bitch. I can help you nail Keith Herman. Have we got a deal?”

  Chapter 84

  YUKI SAID, “WHAT did you say?”

  Yuki had never been called a gook in her life. Her mother was Japanese but had been an American citizen for twenty-five years before her death. Her father had been Italian American, US Army, a veteran. Yuki was born in San Francisco.

  She was astonished by this new version of Lynnette Lagrande, who was not only a changeling but an ugly person through and through.

  Lynnette said, “I said, pay attention, Yuki.”

  Yuki considered launching a couple of stinging come-backs, but decided to take the high road. She ignored the insult and again asked Lynnette Lagrande to tell her what she knew about Lily’s disappearance and whereabouts between the first of March the previous year and last week.

  Lynnette spoke with her trademark good diction and grammar, and she named names. Yuki put her notebook away and slammed the lid on her briefcase. She said, “I’ll get back to you.”

  “When? How long do I have to stay here?” Lynnette called after Yuki as she exited the interrogation room.

  Yuki went out into the hallway, found people stacked three deep at the elevator bank, and headed down the fire stairs. When she got to the third floor, she opened the door leading to the homicide squad room.

  Brenda greeted her with a smile and said, “The boss is in.”

  Yuki thanked Brenda, breezed through the gate, and crossed the bull pen to the corner office. She knocked on the glass door and Lieutenant Jackson Brady got to his feet, opened the door, and asked Yuki to come in.

  “Are you okay?”

  Yuki took the seat across from Brady and said, “You’ve got to hear this.”

  Brady punched all his phone lines so that no calls could come through.

  “You’ve got my full attention,” he said.

  “Lynnette Lagrande just told me who was keeping Lily Herman for the last year, and I’ve got their full names. Marcia Kohl, née Kransky, and Alan Kohl.”

  Brady typed the names into a known-criminals law enforcement database.

  “They’re low-level jerkoffs. Insurance fraud. Petty theft. Last known address was Bolinas,” he said.

  “Right. Well, according to Lynnette, they did some insurance schemes with Keith Herman. They slipped in restaurants. Fell down in front of expensive cars that were slowing for traffic lights. Herman went after the insurance companies, split the take with the Kohls.”

  “Okay, here we go,” said Brady. “Alan Kohl, insurance fraud, charges dismissed August 2007. Attorney, Keith Herman.”

  “That was Keith Herman working his way up to full-blown dirtbag criminal defense attorney,” Yuki said.

  “So how does Lily Herman fit into this?”

  “Lynnette says she overheard Keith talking to the Kohls about babysitting Lily. She presumes he wanted to get the child out of the house and away from Jennifer. Then Jennifer turned up in garbage bags and Keith was arrested. Lynnette thinks the Kohls continued to babysit and charge Keith for their services.”

  Brady printed out the Kohls’ address, then said to Yuki, “We’ve got probable cause.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Want to ask Arthur Nussbaum for a search warrant?”

  Chapter 85

  YUKI SAT IN the passenger seat beside Brady, who was driving the squad car, responding to radio calls, and taking quick glances in the rearview mirror at the cop cars behind him, bumping up the narrow dirt road that ran out from the town toward the far-flung farmlands beyond it.

  They were just outside Bolinas, a town of 1,600 people about thirty miles north on the coast, known for its remote location and reclusive townspeople, who habitually removed highway signs to keep strangers out.

  Thickets of trees lined the road, and behind the trees were private properties, separated from each other by fences and high hedges. Brady nodded his head toward a driveway coming up on the left, marked by a couple of garbage cans and a dinged-up mailbox.

  He said to Yuki, “That’s it.” Then he took the mike and told the cars behind him to slow and prepare to turn.

  Yuki leaned forward and gripped the armrest. She had never been as humiliated as when her case against Keith Herman had blown up in her face. Far worse, the charges against him had been dropped, and now Keith Herman, presumed innocent, was as free as thought.

  Yuki didn’t know what Keith Herman had to do with hiding his daughter, but she had an idea. Maybe Lily had witnessed or heard something that would prove her father had killed his wife. With luck, the Kohls would fill in the blanks.

  Brady turned up the overgrow
n driveway and drove uphill to a clearing, where an old wood-shingled house clung to the side of the hill.

  He said to Yuki, “Stay here.”

  She said, “Oh, yeah, right.”

  “I mean it, Yuki. I don’t know what we’re going to find.”

  She got out of the car.

  “Watch me. Stay with me,” Brady said.

  Yuki said, “Okay,” and trudged behind Brady and four cops up the weedy lawn and broken walkway to the front door.

  Brady knocked and announced, repeated both actions, and then footfalls could be heard coming toward them. The door creaked open and a good-looking man of fifty said, “What do you want?”

  “Alan Kohl, we have a warrant to search your premises. Is anyone else at home?” Brady asked.

  “My wife, Marcia. She’s in the kitchen. What’s this about?”

  “It’s about Lily Herman,” Brady said.

  “Lily who? I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  Yuki handed the warrant to Kohl. Then she and the cops entered the house.

  “Don’t touch anything. Don’t mess the place up,” Alan Kohl said. “You need something, just ask me.”

  The old two-bedroom house smelled of mold and was almost pathologically neat. Boxes and cartons were stacked against the walls, counters were clean, and closets were filled with folded linens and properly hung clothing. Yuki stayed with Brady until he went upstairs, but then, following a hunch, she went down a flight of wooden steps to a half basement that ran under the back of the house.

  Chapter 86

  THE DARK HALF BASEMENT had a low ceiling, a dirt floor, three walls lined with shelves, and a two-door metal utility cabinet backed up against the fourth wall.

  Yuki opened the cabinet doors expecting to see neat shelves of tools, but the cabinet was empty. The back of the cabinet had been replaced with a rectangle of painted plywood fitted with a hook on one side and hinges on the other. Yuki unhooked the plywood board and swung it open.

  There was nothing behind the board—truly nothing but air. Yuki reached into her jacket pocket and took out her keys. She had a flashlight on her key chain, a small one with a pretty bright LED beam. She flashed the light into the back of the closet and saw a tunnel, seemingly endless, that was cut into the hill.

  Yuki took out her phone and called Brady.

  “Come to the basement,” she said. “I think I found something.”

  The opening was four feet high by three feet wide by too deep for the flashlight to find the end of it. Yuki stooped, pulled her elbows in tight to her sides, and stepped into the rabbit hole.

  She followed her flashlight’s beam, and after about twelve feet the tunnel took a soft turn to the left and joined a concrete conduit—it looked like a drainage pipe. Yuki aimed her light and saw that down at the end of the conduit was a metal door.

  Her phone rang. Jackson.

  “I’m in the basement. Where are you?” he said, sounding both annoyed and worried.

  “There’s a tunnel, Jackson. Open the utility cabinet.”

  Yuki knew she should wait for him, but she had to keep going. The door at the end of the conduit had a latch with an open padlock dangling from it. She lifted the padlock, put it on the floor, and opened the metal portal.

  There was an immediate rush of air from a vent overhead. Yuki put her hand on the wall and flipped a switch. Light flooded the tiny room from an overhead fixture, illuminating every square inch of it.

  The cell was six feet by six feet, five feet high, with cement walls. There was a rough wool blanket and a thin uncovered pillow on a narrow cot up against the wall. Yuki saw a bucket in one corner with a toilet seat on it, a small flat-screen TV on a wooden crate, and a hook on the wall with a rag of a nightgown hanging from it. Her eyes went to a child’s crayon drawing of a kitten on the opposite wall, which bore the words POKEY BY LILY.

  Yuki turned. Brady stood bent in the doorway. He peered into the cell.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  Yuki felt shock and disbelief. “Lily lived here. This was where she lived for a year.”

  Chapter 87

  MARCIA KOHL WAS in her forties but seemed older. It looked to Yuki as though she was both beaten down and beaten up. She wouldn’t make eye contact. She had a fat lower lip and a fading yellow bruise under her left eye. She didn’t ask for a lawyer, but she refused to speak to the police without her husband present. She was being seen by a psychiatrist as Brady interviewed Alan Kohl.

  Alan Kohl hadn’t asked for a lawyer, either.

  Yuki stood behind the one-way glass and watched Brady conduct the interview with Kohl. It had been going on for an hour. Kohl was very sure of himself, overconfident, and appeared to think that if he continued to maintain that he was innocent he would leave the police station a free man.

  Brady was patient and Yuki knew he didn’t care how long it took. Kohl wasn’t getting out of the interrogation room until he lawyered up or Brady had gotten what he wanted.

  Brady’s tone was casual, even friendly. He was saying to Alan Kohl, “I just want to understand why you kidnapped Lily Herman. I know you must have cared for her, but why did you take her?”

  “We didn’t kidnap anyone,” said Alan Kohl. “And you can’t prove otherwise.”

  “But you admit you kept Lily Herman in your house. There in the room at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Okay, yes, she was a guest in our home.”

  “Guest? So your guest room is a six-foot-square underground box? It was okay to keep a little girl in there?”

  “She was happy, didn’t she tell you? She had everything she wanted.”

  “I don’t think a jury is going to go for that, Alan.”

  “I have copies of checks from Keith Herman. Three hundred dollars a week.”

  “What does that prove?” Brady said.

  “Are you trying to trick me, Lieutenant? Or are you playing stupid? Keith Herman was paying us to keep his kid safe. She’s safe, right?”

  “I’m wondering if those were payments for keeping Lily safe or if you kidnapped Lily and were extorting her father. As long as he paid you and he didn’t call the police, Lily was safe. You understand, there’s a big difference between minding the child and kidnapping her. Kidnapping is a felony. Comes with a death penalty.”

  Kohl smiled at Brady.

  “Is this what you think, or are you still fishing around? I told you. Keith Herman paid us to keep his daughter safe.”

  “Okay, Alan. I don’t believe you. You’re under arrest for kidnapping Lily Herman.”

  “Wait. I’ve got copies of the checks from Keith Herman.”

  Brady said, “You want to get anywhere with me, I need evidence that Keith Herman killed his wife.”

  “Why didn’t you just say so?” said Alan Kohl. “Sit down. Keep the cameras rolling. I’ll tell you where you might find your so-called evidence, but Marcia and I had nothing to do with any murder. I swear to God.”

  Kohl talked to Brady for about fifteen minutes, told him a lot of stuff, and when he was done, Brady said, “Stand up, Alan. Put your hands behind your back.”

  “What? Wait a minute. What the hell are you doing?”

  Brady pulled Alan Kohl to his feet, spun him around, and snapped cuffs around his wrists.

  “Alan Kohl, you’re under arrest for felony kidnapping and endangerment of a minor.”

  “You said you only wanted evidence of what Herman did to his wife. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Get a lawyer, Alan. Go crazy and hire the best one you can afford.”

  Chapter 88

  YUKI AND BRADY were back in Bolinas, a thirty-mile drive that took more than an hour because the roads were so twisting and narrow and difficult to navigate in the dark.

  Yuki had a search warrant in her briefcase, the second one of the day. Some kind of record, she thought, but Judge Nussbaum had signed it quickly, no questions asked. He was as eager to right the disaster of Keith Herman’s trial as she
was.

  Yuki said, “I’m afraid to get my hopes up—”

  “Don’t jinx it, darlin’.”

  Yuki had one hand on Brady’s thigh, the other hand on the dash as Brady wrenched the wheel and turned the squad car up the Kohls’ driveway. Branches and brush slapped at the headlights as the car climbed the overgrown, rutted path. They passed the ramshackle house and kept climbing another three or four hundred yards until they reached the end of the drive.

  Brady braked the car and looked up the hill. He could just make out a lean-to with a corrugated tin roof, camouflaged by weeds and overgrown with kudzu.

  Brady said to Yuki, “You’re not going to be able to walk around here in those shoes.”

  “Give me a second,” she said.

  She opened the door, took off first one shoe and then the other, and beat them against the lower part of the door frame until the heels popped off.

  She put on her newly flat shoes.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Brady reached over, pulled her toward him, kissed her. They looked at each other for a few moments, both of them smiling, then they set out, wading through the weeds.

  The car was under the lean-to, covered with a tarp. Brady pulled on the cloth, let it drop to the ground.

  Yuki said, “Oh, my God. Black is dark.”

  It was the Lexus that Keith Herman’s neighbor Graham Durden had seen parked at the curb outside Herman’s house. Durden had witnessed Keith bringing Lily Herman’s lifeless body out of the house and putting her in the backseat.

  Lily hadn’t been lifeless. She’d been drugged.

  “It was Keith who brought Lily here,” Yuki said to Brady. “It’s going to be hard to call it kidnapping.”

  “Hang on. I’ll be right back.”

  Yuki walked around the car and was still peering into the windows when Brady came back. He had a Slim Jim in his gloved hand. He slid the tool down into the window of the driver’s-side door and unlocked it.