7
Tess lived in Westwood, not far from UCLA, in a Tudor house set back from a quiet street. She led me to a guest room and left me alone to shower, but I couldn’t wait to turn on CNN, to find out what the rest of the world thought it knew about me.
The police officer’s name was Greg Stepakoff. His murder wasn’t fresh news this Saturday night; a line-of-duty death had first been reported in a San Francisco Police Department press release on Friday night, in time for the late news broadcasts. Stepakoff had been thirty-five, with a wife and daughter, and he hadn’t shown up for his midwatch shift as scheduled at four P.M. Friday. His colleagues had been concerned, as Stepakoff was responsible and punctual. Several hours later, responding to a citizen’s phone tip, officers had gone to a St. Francis Wood address, where they’d found Stepakoff’s car in the driveway and the officer dead in the house, shot twice in the chest. An ambulance had been called to transport a second person to the hospital. Pressed for details, the SFPD press liaison would say only that the second victim was a civilian, not an officer. This sparked early reports of a double shooting, which were erroneous.
By Saturday morning the second victim had been identified, and in turn that identification made the story catch fire in the national media. The second victim, who had died late Friday night at UCSF Medical Center, was Violet Eastman, heiress to the Eastman distillery fortune and—under the pen name V. K. Eastman—a science-fiction writer of some note from the 1970s and ’80s. She hadn’t been shot but had died of dehydration, and her tox screen showed high levels of an unnamed sedative.
At a five P.M. news conference, the assembled reporters and the SFPD had different agendas. The SFPD press liaison mostly wanted to stress how much manpower was going into the investigation and to talk about plans for a Stepakoff memorial. The reporters’ questions were much more pointed.
They wanted to know whether Eastman’s death was being investigated as an illness or a poisoning. They also pointed out that the first sign that Stepakoff was missing had been when he’d failed to clock in and that it was apparently his personal car that was found in Eastman’s driveway. In light of that, they asked, could he really be considered to have been killed in the line of duty? And if Eastman had lived alone and had been comatose, how had Stepakoff accessed the house? Had he gone in without a warrant?
And of course they wanted to know about the rumors of a young live-in caretaker at the Eastman house who now couldn’t be located.
The press liaison said simply that the case would be treated as a line-of-duty death until further notice and that they didn’t know how Stepakoff had accessed the house, but “we have no indication that he acted other than professionally.” About the rumors of a young tenant/caregiver, she said again that “leads are being developed, and to comment further would be to jeopardize our investigation.”
That didn’t work as well as the department hoped. An hour later a radio station had reported the tenant/caretaker’s name as Hailey Cain. Neighbors had seen her coming and going from the house, but only at a distance. A few had heard Eastman mention her by name. But no one had seen the young woman since all the official vehicles had convened in Eastman’s driveway, the evening the cop was shot and Eastman was carried out on a stretcher.
The SFPD, apparently deciding that the door had been opened and that it was better to have the eyes and ears of the public working for them, had faxed another news release to the media confirming the tenant’s name and adding a detailed description. That had been the source of the news report that Serena had seen. Now, at eleven, a reporter doing a stand-up outside the Eastman house was telling the world that I was to be considered armed and dangerous and that I was possibly driving a 1999 Mazda Miata.
I’ve never been in a goddamn Miata in my life.
More than anything it was the Miata—evidence of someone else’s taste—that made this situation fully real. Since Serena had called me, I’d been thinking about this mess only as, Hey, it wasn’t me. Now it was sinking in that a real, three-dimensional person had deliberately put on my identity like an article of clothing and presented herself to the world as me.
Everything about it spoke of premeditation. People had seen the birthmark, which meant she’d re-created it with stage makeup. Maybe she’d bleached her hair, too, or gotten brown contact lenses. She’d moved in with Violet Eastman, lived with her. This was no short con. It was a long-term plan, working toward a big score.
And despite the fact that I’d lived in San Francisco last year, this woman didn’t seem to have been afraid of our crossing paths. That was very interesting. Did she know I was in Los Angeles? She couldn’t have found out through public records, since there was no paper trail of my life in Los Angeles. If she knew where I was, that suggested a personal connection. Someone had told her. Someone who knew me had helped her. Maybe not maliciously, but unwittingly.
The hell of it was, I’d also unwittingly helped this unknown girl, the other “Hailey.” Because while I hadn’t died down in Mexico like I was supposed to, I’d gone home to Los Angeles and built a life so far underground it was suspect in itself. Who did I have to witness that I’d been in L.A. the past four months? Gangbangers and petty criminals, who could barely prove their own whereabouts on a regular basis. The hours just after Stepakoff and Eastman had been killed, I’d been in the desert, robbing a pair of trucks. What a great alibi that would make.
I’d thought I was so cool, dropping thoroughly off the grid, turning my back on the system with all its electronic trails and prying eyes. Now how screwed was I? Because just as I’d decided to shed my public self, someone else in San Francisco had been stepping into it.
From the doorway Tess cleared her throat, and I looked up. She’d changed into a fisherman’s sweater and moleskin trousers, her feet bare. She was holding a bottle in one hand and two glasses in the other.
“I thought you could probably use a drink,” she said.
“Yeah, I could,” I said, muting the noise of the television.
She took a seat in a wing chair, setting the glasses on the nightstand and pouring us each about three fingers.
I took the square, heavy-based glass from her, tipped my nose down, and sniffed. “Gin?”
“Genever,” she said. “A Dutch import.”
“Wasted on me,” I said. “I would have been happy with Coors Light.”
I don’t know what there was about her that made me want to play the working-class rube. Maybe because I could never have matched her sophistication had I tried. Everything around us spoke of her good taste. The room we were in was mostly Victorian in its furnishings; in addition to the bed and the wing chair, there was a writing desk and a lamp of delicately scrolled brass with a frosted-glass shade. The room’s colors were light as a watercolor painting, touches of mauve and gold and mossy green against the off-white walls and carpeting. On the floor the scuffed black boots I’d shed looked like the corpses of crows in an English garden.
She glanced at the silent TV screen and said, “You haven’t told me yet what you think is going on. Do you have any theories?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, this woman’s motives, when they come out, will be financial,” Tess said. It wasn’t a question. Tess’s businesses had always been legal, but she knew plenty of people who didn’t operate aboveboard, starting with her biological father. “Within a day or two, the papers will be reporting financial irregularities in Eastman’s accounts, check forgeries or large-amount withdrawals.”
“That’d be my guess,” I said.
“Hmmm.” Tess tucked one leg up underneath her. “It isn’t hard to see why she’d target Violet Eastman. She had money, lived alone, and was vulnerable. The question is, why you? How did she choose you to impersonate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think this girl is somebody you know?”
Like an old high-school classmate? I considered that. “I doubt it,” I said. “I haven’t kept in touch with anybody from the old days. The connection might be looser than that. I was thinking earlier that this girl must know somebody I know.”
“Why?”
“Because she seems to have inside information. She knows I wasn’t living in or near San Francisco. It seems like she knew I was in L.A. or …”
“Or what?”
“Wait.” I held up a hand. An idea was tickling the edges of my mind. Slowly I began to put it into words: “Or she thought I was dead.”
Tess grimaced. “Why would she think that?”
“Because there were several guys in particular who last year believed that I was dead. The tunnel rats.”
“Who?”
“Your father’s guys,” I explained. “That’s what I called the guys he sent to Mexico to get Nidia Hernandez. They shot me in the tunnel, assumed I was dead, dragged me off the road, and cleaned up the scene. One of them could easily have set aside my driver’s license and passport. Guys like that would know how valuable genuine identity documents are on the black market and how to find a buyer.”
It was just a theory, but it was coming together fast, making a lot of sense. I’d thought of last year’s ambush in the tunnel primarily as an attempted murder (mine) and a kidnapping (Nidia’s), not a robbery. When I’d woken up in a Mexican hospital without any ID, I’d just assumed that my driver’s license and passport were rotting in a swamp, along with my duffel bag and clothing and everything else Nidia and I had carried with us.
“Plus,” I added, “whoever sold this girl my ID, he could have assured her that the real Hailey Cain wouldn’t raise an alarm about identity theft, because she was a Jane Doe in the Third World morgue. At least that’s what he thought at the time. It’d be a great selling point.”
“Dead girls don’t check their credit scores.”
“Right. And that’s only the half of it. In Mexico I was traveling with a gun. He had that to sell, too.”
“Would she need to buy that from him? Guns are a lot easier to get a hold of than good ID documents. The gun might have come from elsewhere.”
“Might have but didn’t,” I said, giving her a humorless smile. “I loaded that gun myself. That’s how my thumbprint got on one of the casings, which is now being interpreted as ironclad evidence that I was the shooter.”
“God,” Tess said. “It’s almost perfect. I mean … sorry.”
I waved off her apology, thinking. I never learned the names of all seven guys from the tunnel. In fact, I just knew two: Joseph Laska, their leader, whom I’d thought of as “Babyface” for his soft, mastiff features, and a guy named Quentin, younger than Laska, with a live-wire energy and a foul mouth, and a sexual appetite that—
There really wasn’t any point in dwelling on last December and the events of the projection booth.
Speaking of which, there’d been a third guy in on that little interrogation session, a man named Will, but I’d never been sure he’d been one of the tunnel crew. That gave me seven to eight suspects, only one identified by first and last name. Not good odds.
Tess straightened out the leg she’d had tucked under her. She said, “You know, the woman who committed these crimes would have to look enough like you to pass for you.”
“I know,” I said. “But my looks aren’t unusual. Except for the birthmark, which she probably did with some kind of makeup.”
“But your general profile—white, female, early twenties—isn’t one that I’d associate with a well-planned financial crime. Or with murder, either.” She drank again, then said, “This might not be funny to you, but if anyone asked me if I knew any woman in her early twenties with the nerve and initiative to carry out these crimes, I’d have said I know only one. You.”
“You’re right. Not funny.”
“Sorry,” Tess said. “But if there’s a bright side to what I’m saying, it’s that if this woman has arrests for similar crimes, she’ll be in the system.”
“That doesn’t help unless someone looks for her, and the police won’t. I’m their suspect. They don’t need two.”
Tess inhaled deeply and said, “They would look for her if you gave them reason to.”
She seemed ill at ease. I said, “What kind of a reason?”
Her glass empty, Tess rolled it in her hand. She wasn’t looking at me when she said, “I think you should get ahead of this and turn yourself in.” She looked up and added, quickly, “I’ll go with you. You’d be safe with a respectable businesswoman at your side.”
“For a minute or two,” I said. “But once they arrest me and take me behind closed doors, what happens, happens.”
“Hailey—”
I raised a hand, stopping her. “The real problem is that I can’t prove my innocence yet. And if no one else does, I could get tried, convicted, put to death.”
“You’ve been living in Los Angeles for these last four months, haven’t you?” Tess said. “Surely there are plenty of witnesses to that. I could mention seeing you socially, twice, since you’ve moved back here.”
“That’s two days out of more than a hundred and twenty.”
Tess raised an eyebrow, but she said, “Hailey, they can’t possibly find your fingerprints or DNA in that house. That’s got to count for something.”
“Maybe,” I said.
She went on, “In the morning maybe I can make some phone calls for you. I still have contacts up in San Francisco, people who might have known Eastman socially. I’ll just ask what they’ve heard, for things that haven’t been released on the news. I won’t say, ‘Hailey Cain’s right here sitting next to me.’ ”
“I know you wouldn’t,” I said. “But be careful, anyway. The last thing you need is police in Kevlar kicking down your door because someone tipped them that you might be harboring a fugitive cop killer.”