21
WEDNESDAY MORNING, AFTER he dropped his kids at school, Abe Glitsky decided to try to clear up as many of the outstanding uncertainties about Katie’s disappearance as he could. As his first stop, he drove out and parked by the Highway Patrol station on the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Over the course of his career, he’d been out here dozens of times, but the familiarity of the place did little to erase the negative energy he attached to it. Getting out of his car, even wearing his heavy leather fighter jacket, he felt the cold wind cut through him. He found it hard to believe that people chose to come out here by the hundreds, if not thousands, for recreation; even as he wondered about it, a trickle of people was passing him on all sides, wrapped up for the weather, enchanted by the view. Before they got on the bridge proper, all of them had to pass the sign over the telephone hotline that read CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL.
There might be hope, Glitsky thought, but not enough of it to go around. Although no accurate figure was possible because so many suicides off the bridge went unnoticed, it was generally accepted to be among the most popular places on the planet for people to take their own lives. In spite of the Highway Patrol’s success in talking down perhaps eighty percent of the potential jumpers they encountered, the known or suspected suicide rate every year held steady at around thirty, or about one every two weeks.
Glitsky put his hands in his pockets and, into the wind, made his way across the small lot. If he’d learned anything over the past couple of days, it was that his name still carried some weight in legal circles. Sure enough, when he dropped it at the back door, they knew who he was, or used to be, and let him in.
A Highway Patrol officer led him back to a small and crowded room with desks that could sit a total of eight, each with a computer. At the moment, five other Highway Patrol officers filled the space. One glass wall faced the recently redundant tollbooths; another faced video screens showing different live shots of segments of the bridge—people on the walkway, cars in the road going both directions, overhead distance shots from up in the cables, pretty much the entire bridge on videotape all the time.
The sergeant running the operation of the office today was Ted Robbins, from the looks of him an all-business career officer in his mid-forties. If a detective from Homicide was here, there would be only one reason for it, to Robbins’s mind, and he got right to it. “You’re looking for a jumper.”
Glitsky nodded. “A mother of two named Katie Chase. She went missing last Wednesday.” He started to give more details but hadn’t gotten too far before Robbins was shaking his head, and Glitsky stopped. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You’re saying she was at her home at seven o’clock last Wednesday?”
“Right.”
“We don’t let pedestrians out after dark.”
Though this statement contained the potentially good news that Katie was not dead from suicide off the bridge, it also closed off at least one possibility that would have left Hal Chase in the clear for her murder. Glitsky bit at his cheek in some frustration. “You actually close the gates?”
“That’s right.”
“And when do you open them again?”
“Basically, first light. I could check the exact time for any given day, but you don’t think she waited out here all night and then went out in the morning, do you?”
“No. I don’t really see that. Any other way she could have gotten on the bridge without being seen?”
Robbins considered. “Do you think there’s a chance she rode out here on a bicycle?”
“What difference would that make?”
“It might not, but bicyclists are allowed after dark. They buzz at the gate, and we get them on the security camera and open up for them.”
“Bicyclists are allowed and walkers aren’t?” Glitsky asked. “What’s that about?”
“You got me,” Robbins said. “I don’t make the rules. But bikes are allowed.”
Glitsky asked, “Would it be all right if I looked at some tapes?”
“DVDs. We back everything up nowadays. You could look, but what would you be hoping to find?”
“Some bicyclist buzzes and you open the gate. It’s open for a few seconds behind the biker, isn’t it? If people are waiting, they could stroll right through, couldn’t they?”
“In theory, it could happen. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“I wouldn’t, either, but I’m here, and it couldn’t hurt to make sure.”