16th Seduction Read online

  “Really?” I said, my enthusiasm warming up a touch. “You know the name of this aide?”

  “Doreen something.”

  “What does Doreen look like?”

  Kelly said, “About my height, blond, hippy.”

  We had been looking for a man, but could the woman Kelly described have passed as a “weird-looking” dude?

  She said, “Doreen works at the Loony Bin. That’s the psych ward? It’s across Hyde and around the corner on Bush. Redbrick compound with a wrought-iron fence out front? There’s a shortcut to the Bin through our basement, you know?”

  “Didn’t know,” Conklin said. “That’s very interesting, Kelly.”

  “Yeah, this corridor goes directly to Hyde Street Psychiatric,” she said, pointing over my shoulder. “Psych patients are transported from the hospital to the Bin and vice versa. Like, Doreen could have come from the Bin to the furnace and no one would know. Ready to go back upstairs?” she asked.

  Conklin said, “I think we’ll take the Hyde Street detour. Thanks for your help. We appreciate it.”

  As my partner and I struck out along the underground route to the psychiatric hospital, the little voice in my head was pleading, Doreen Something, are you our killer? Please, God. Give us a sign.

  CHAPTER 77

  I HAD BEEN feeling that we were playing beat the clock with the Stealth Killer, that this maniac could be winding up for another random hit. Was it possible that he was close by, that he worked at the Hyde Street Psychiatric Center?

  Conklin and I found Dr. Terry Hoover in the common room of the Center’s North Ward. He was tall and bespectacled, wore his tie loosely knotted and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows. He waved us into his glass-walled office, which had a 360-degree view of the busy corridor that ran past Ward Six and the nurses’ station. He kept his eyes on all 360 degrees as we spoke with him.

  I downplayed our reason for this sudden visit by the SFPD, telling Dr. Hoover that Conklin and I were investigating illegal use of succinylcholine, that an empty vial of sux found near a murder scene had led us to Saint Vartan’s.

  I explained that the vial had come from an expired lot that had been marked for destruction in the hospital furnace.

  “While we were at Saint Vartan’s we were told that one of your nurse’s aides had been seen poking around their drug incinerator.”

  “One of our aides? I don’t understand. Wait, this isn’t about those murders I read about?

  “We just have to check it out,” I said to the doctor. “What can you tell us about a nurse’s aide, first name Doreen?”

  “Doreen Collins. She’s been with us for about four years. A very kind woman. I can’t imagine why she would be anywhere near the furnace,” said Hoover. “Does she need a lawyer?”

  “No, no,” said Conklin. “We just want to ask her a few questions.”

  “Let me talk to her,” said Hoover.

  Conklin and I went with the doctor down the long hallway to a busy ward where Doreen Collins was massaging a patient’s hands. She looked to be about thirty, wide through the hips, not more than five two, with short, choppy blond hair.

  Hoover said to the patient, “I’m sorry, Mr. Fritz. I need a few words with Doreen.”

  The nurse’s aide came over to us and she looked terrified. Why? Hoover asked, “Doreen, these are police officers, looking into missing succinylcholine. Do you know anything about that?”

  She shook her head vigorously and said, “No, I don’t know anything. Why would anyone want sux? Why are you asking me?”

  Hoover said, “Apparently, someone saw you hanging around the furnace in the basement.”

  The woman’s hands went to her face and she dissolved straight into tears.

  “I’m diabetic,” she said. “I’m sorry, Dr. Hoover. I was looking for insulin. The door was locked. I punched in my code, and when it didn’t work I left. I didn’t take anything.”

  “Please don’t do that again, Doreen. Stealing drugs will get you fired. Expired insulin could get you killed. Do you understand?”

  Hoover took his eyes off Ms. Collins, flicked them past the crowd of patients and staff who were slow-walking past the doorway.

  He said, “Sergeant, Doreen is, in fact, diabetic. She has a perfect performance record at Hyde Street Psych. Is she a suspect?.”

  Doreen said, “I only did this once,” she said. “I swear to God, I didn’t take anything. I swear to God.”

  CHAPTER 78

  CONKLIN AND I questioned Ms. Collins in an exam room down the corridor from Dr. Hoover’s office. She accounted for her whereabouts at the time Mr. Beardsley was killed. She said she had been here at Hyde Street Psychiatric, had reported to the nurses’ station at four in the afternoon, and had worked with patients and other staff members, not leaving the center until midnight, when she punched out. She took us to her locker, opened her handbag, and showed us her time card. And while we were there, she gave us a go-ahead to search her bag and and her locker.

  In short, she had a solid alibi for the time of Beardsley’s death. I took her contact info, as well as that of her mother and roommate, gave her my card, and asked her to call us if she had any ideas that might help the SFPD.

  Conklin and I returned to Dr. Hoover’s office. He was distracted, and after we gave him our cards, he was done.

  “I don’t see how I can help you further,” he said with finality.

  We left Hoover in his office and edged through a swarm of milling patients in the common room, one of whom came up to us. His hair was silver-shot blond. I made him to be five four, 130, and possibly in his fifties. He had an awkward stance, proportionately short arms, and an overall gnomelike appearance.

  “I’m Neddie,” he said in a high-pitched, cartoonish voice. He grinned at me. “I’m good. Are you good?”

  I smiled back at him and said, “Hi, Neddie. Everyone is good.”

  I looked around at the other patients in Dr. Hoover’s ward and saw people with obvious challenges and others who looked as normal as anyone in any crowd. Some of the patients wandered, some played games, one sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” while lying in the intersection of two corridors. Another group watched Dr. Phil on TV.

  There was noise all around, but my internal alarms were quiet. What I now knew about Saint Vartan’s and this psych center led me to conclude that we had both too many suspects and none whatsoever.

  Conklin and I made our way out of the labyrinthine Hyde Street Psychiatric Center. Out on the street I said to my partner, “I hate square one.”

  “Let’s grab lunch,” Conklin said. “I think better when I’m not half starving.”

  “Copy that.”

  CHAPTER 79

  NEDDIE WATCHED THE two cops talking to Doreen Collins and heard her crying, “I’m diabetic. I’m sorry, Dr. Hoover. I was looking for insulin.”

  Neddie was paralyzed by panic. Cops were here. Right here.

  He didn’t get it at all.

  What had brought them to the Bin, and why were they were grilling Doreen?

  The vial of sux he’d stupidly dropped. That was coded. They’d traced it to the hospital. And the rest of it came together in a horrible, stinking flash.

  He’d been seen, either when he stuck the woman outside the Admiral Dewey—or maybe when he stuck the footballplayer dude. He had gotten careless. Someone had seen him and described him to the cops.

  This was bad.

  He’d known Doreen casually for four years, but now he saw that they resembled each other in the grossest, most general way. Both of them were short and blondish.

  But Neddie was pretty sure that once the cops talked to Doreen, they’d know how stupid she was, too thick to pull off murder under any circumstances. And elegant murders? Never.

  Another thought struck him.

  Mikey had told Hoover about his night flights. Would Hoover tell the cops that he disappeared sometimes all night long?

  He went cold and numb just thinking about that.<
br />
  Hoover was very smart, but he was arrogant. Neddie had been the perfect idiot for so long, would Hoover even consider that Neddie was a killer? No. No, no, no. Never.

  Or was this his own arrogance speaking?

  He had to check on this to be sure. He wanted to see Hoover’s expression. He wanted to see the cops’ eyes when they looked at him. It was compulsive, he knew, but he’d learned many lessons during his lifetime in lockup. One of those lessons was how to read faces.

  He would know if he was a suspect when he looked into the eyes of those cops.

  Neddie cut through the little gang of gawkers outside Hoover’s office and approached the two cops, a man and a woman who could have been the two cops who had stopped him on the patio outside the Waterside Restaurant.

  “I’m Neddie,” he said in squeak mode. “I’m good. Are you good?”

  Hoover’s voice boomed. “Neddie, Carlos, Tommy, please clear the hallway. Thank you.”

  The tall, blond woman cop looked Neddie in the eyes, checking him out, maybe asking herself, Is this one a killer? Then she smiled at him, dismissing Neddie as everyone always did.

  “Hi, Neddie. Everyone is good,” she said.

  Could he count on that?

  He still had his spare keys. They hadn’t found the sux he’d plucked from the cart in the electroconvulsive unit at the end of the hall. The cops had nothing on him.

  He could run.

  Where would he go?

  CHAPTER 80

  CONNOR GRANT HUMMED and sang along with Pavarotti over his sound system as he packed for his liftoff to obscurity.

  His ribs ached. The right side of his jaw was still shades of green and blue, but his week-old beard disguised the remains of the beatdown, and he was moving around just fine.

  He came down from his bedroom with the bag that he had packed with a few basics—enough for about four days—which he would ditch as soon as he got overseas.

  Inside his office, with the tenor keeping him company, he swung open the hinged bookcase and tapped the digital code into the wall safe behind it. He removed a banded stack of currency, a half dozen credit cards embossed with assorted names, several passports, and a one-way first-class plane ticket to Zurich. He slipped the ticket and chosen passport into the inside breast pocket of his “cheerful” blue jacket.

  The small fireplace was working on some notebooks he’d piled in pyramid fashion, and the blaze was at a nice steady burn. He grabbed a few files from his desk drawers and fed them to the flames. It was time to get rid of all his souvenirs, the clippings of the original fire back in Maynard, Wisconsin. His memories were vivid enough. He’d started a grass fire that had traveled across the small yard, lighting up a propane tank, which blew up the small wood-frame house, killing everyone inside: mother, father, and little brother Lane Kingsley.

  Ninth grader Adam Kingsley had set the fire. He watched the shattering of glass and the explosion and the inferno that burned until nothing was left. Even the human remains were unidentifiable. He’d never cared for his family, and they hadn’t cared for him, either. As a breeze blew across the cinders and ash, he saw an opportunity to become someone else. Someone better.

  He hitched to Michigan, took on a new name, dummied up a birth certificate, and convinced Ann Arbor Senior High to let him into the eleventh grade. The next year he got a driver’s license at the DMV. He started college that year, and four years later, when a car bomb killed three kids in the senior class and he was presumed to be a fourth person in that car, he took on a new identity in a new town.

  By the time he graduated from the University of Miami School of Law as Sam Marx, he had perfected his methods of switching lives: missing persons, dead babies, unidentifiable victims of fires and explosions that he’d set—all became his cash flow and the framework for new lives.

  When his pièce de résistance, the Sci-Tron explosion, sucked up all the available fire and rescue manpower in San Francisco, no one thought about the apartment fire in Nob Hill that burned up the remains of a bachelor, Jonathan Bishop, as well as several other people living in that building.

  The real Jonathan Bishop had been an investment banker, and although his body was ashes now, his life story would carry on. “Connor Grant” gathered up his folder containing documents of Jonathan Bishop’s life and dropped them into his bag.

  Jonathan Bishop’s history was filling his mind, his career path and family history, the well-planned and fortunate life of an elite one percenter in America.

  And so, what to do with his own remains?

  Grant crossed the small room to the photo gallery over the credenza. He lifted the few framed photos down from the wall: pictures of himself as a child; the seductive shot of his third ex-wife, RIP; the only picture he had of the Kingsleys; and in the back of the frame, behind the cardboard, was Sam Marx’s diploma from the University of Miami.

  They had to go.

  He removed the photos and the diploma from their frames, then put them into the fire. Jonathan Bishop wouldn’t need them in Zurich.

  Grant stirred the fire with a poker. Then he took all his backup CDs and broke them up. He had already wiped his hard drive; it was sparkling clean and would come with him overseas.

  Bye-bye, Connor Grant.

  He was panting a little, sweating from the heat of the fire, when he made iced tea. He took the glass back to the easy chair in his living room and sipped tea until the guttering flames died.

  As an afterthought he pulled a book on international banking from the bookshelf and tossed that into the bag and zipped it up.

  The man still known as Connor Grant was elated to be leaving town. But he wouldn’t ship out without giving San Francisco a great big kiss good-bye.

  CHAPTER 81

  GRANT LEFT HIS blue-and-white little granny house through the kitchen door and stepped out into the driveway. His large canvas duffel bag was where he had left it on a luggage trolley beside his old Hyundai.

  He tossed his travel bag into the front seat, carefully loaded the duffel into the trunk, and folded up the trolley, which he fit into the trunk on top of the duffel.

  Reaching behind him, he took his semiauto handgun out of his waistband and secured it under the driver’s seat.

  Done, done, and done.

  He walked over the gravel drive and out to the front yard.

  The uniformed officers were parked in their patrol car at the curb, coffee containers in hand, car radio on full blast. Officer Brad Jamison was a rookie. His partner, Ray Baxter, was an old-timer. The two of them together didn’t have the brainpower of a mosquito. This was San Francisco PD’s idea of protection.

  “Officers,” he said. “I’m taking Sergeant Boxer’s advice. Leaving my house and checking into a hotel for a while. My insurance company is paying for it.”

  “Well, that’s fine, Mr. Grant. You should let Sergeant Boxer know where you’re off to.”

  “Already did it,” said Grant.

  “You need any help with your luggage or anything?” Officer Baxter asked.

  “No, no thanks.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “Not we. Just little old me. Like I told the sergeant, I won’t be needing protection for a couple of weeks. I’ll stay at the Marriott while I look for a new place.”

  Jamison said, “Okeydoke. You should also fill out a form at the post office so they hold your mail.”

  “Good idea. So thanks for—uh, thanks.”

  It was noon when Grant turned out of his driveway and headed toward Bayshore Boulevard. He drove carefully. No mistakes now. No traffic stops. No license checks. No ironic moments. He was on track with his well-wrought plan for a carefully executed and beautiful metamorphosis.

  Soon he would be in another country, playing an even greater role on an even grander stage. And the memories of all his past roles would continue on inside him.

  God, he loved his life.

  CHAPTER 82

  CONKLIN AND I were parked in front
of the redbrick Hyde Street Psychiatric Center, lunching on egg salad sandwiches.

  “It was always a long shot,” my partner said to me. “All we had was a label this big with no trace, no nothing on it.”

  “You know what I hate?” I asked him.

  “Yep, I do. You hate square one and egg salad with pieces of shell—”

  “I hate waiting now for another murder so we can hope for another chance at this—”

  “Look,” Conklin said, pointing past my nose and out the side window.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “That guy. He’s a patient. What’s he doing outside?”

  I saw him now. His name was Neddie. He was coming out of an alley that ran between the brick face of the psych center and a blank concrete side of the Walgreens. His hands were in his pockets, eyes down, and his posture and gait were purposeful, entirely different from the awkward movements he’d exhibited just a half hour ago.

  My partner and I exited the car and began following Neddie from a distance. I wasn’t ready to question him until I knew what he was up to.

  He was directly ahead of us when he took a right turn onto Jones Street. We were so close to him that I was shocked when we turned the corner and he was just not where I thought he should be. In fact, I didn’t see him anywhere. Not in the shade of the smoke shop awning, not buying a paper from the newsstand, not crossing the street. It was as if he’d stepped through a portal into a fourth dimension.

  “Oh, come onnnn. Rich, where’d he go?”

  “He wasn’t carrying a knapsack, right? Didn’t have a bag?” Conklin asked.

  “No. Hands in pockets. Nothing on his shoulders or in his hands, I’m sure of it,” I said.

  “Then he’ll be back.”

  My mind was doing flip-flops. Even if we hadn’t lost Neddie, what could we charge him with? Leaving the psych center? Maybe he was allowed to go to the post office or whatever. Were we making shit up out of pure desperation?